Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [47]
Molay was still asking to be heard by the pope. Clement had convened a council in Vienne in 1311, but Molay had not been invited. The suppression of the order is ratified and its property turned over to the Hospitalers, though temporarily it is to be administered by the king.
Another three years go by, and finally an agreement is reached with the pope. On March 19, 1314, in front of Notre-Dame, Molay is sentenced to life imprisonment. He reacts with a surge of dignity. He had expected the pope to allow him to exculpate himself; he now feels betrayed. He knows that if he retracts yet again he will be condemned as a recidivist and perjurer. What does he feel in his heart as he stands there after almost seven years awaiting judgment? Does he regain the courage of his forebears? Or does he simply decide that, ruined as he now is, condemned to end his days in dishonor, buried alive, he might as well die a decent death? Because he protests in a loud voice that he and his brothers are innocent. The Templars, he says, committed one crime and one crime only: out of cowardice they betrayed the Temple. He will dp so no longer.
Nogaret is overjoyed. A public crime requires public condemnation, definitive, immediate. Geoffroy de Charnay, the Templar preceptor of Normandy, follows Molay’s example. The king makes his decision that very day: a pyre is erected at the tip of the lie de la Cite’. At sundown, Molay and Charnay are burned at the stake.
Tradition has it that before his death the grand master prophesied the ruin of his persecutors. And, indeed, the pope, the king, and Nogaret all die before the year is out. Once the king is gone, Marigny comes under suspicion of embezzlement. His enemies accuse him of witchcraft and have him hanged. Many begin to think of Molay as a martyr. Dante himself voices widespread indignation at the persecution of the Templars.
And that is where history ends and legend begins. One part of the legend insists that when Louis XVI was guillotined, an unknown man climbed onto the block and shouted: “Jacques de Molay, you are avenged!”
That was more or less the story I told that night at Pilade’s, with constant interruptions.
Belbo, for instance, would ask: “Are you sure you didn’t read this in Orwell or Koestler?” Or: “Wait a minute, this is just what happened to what’s-his-name, that guy in the Cultural Revolution.” And Diotallevi kept interjecting, sententiously: “His-toria magistra vitae.” To which Belbo responded: “Come on, cabalists don’t believe in history.” And Diotallevi invariably answered: “That’s just the point. Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn’t exist. It’s the permutations that matter.”
“We still haven’t answered the real question,” Belbo finally said. “Who were the Templars? At first you made them sound like sergeants in a John Ford movie, then like a bunch of bums, then like knights in an illuminated miniature, then like bankers of God carrying on their dirty deals, then like a routed army, then like devotees of a satanic sect, and finally like martyrs tt free thought. What were they in the end?”
“Probably they were all those things. ‘What was the Catholic Church?’ a Martian historian in the year 3000 might ask. ‘The people who got themselves thrown to the lions or the ones who killed heretics?’ All of the above.”
“But did they do those horrible things or didn’t they?”
“The funny thing is that their followers—the neo-Templars of various epochs—say they did. And they offer justifications. For instance, it was like fraternity hazing. You want to be a Templar? Okay,