I could meet with Ugolini. He knows who I am. They all do, since the pope greeted me publicly. All I have to do is send Thierry around with a note asking for an audience.
At once he began trying to persuade himself to forget the idea. How could he talk a cardinal into changing his mind about such a great matter? Ridiculous! What could he possibly do or say? And what if this cardinal were one who knew of the shame of the house of Gobignon?
Seize any opportunity.
Cardinal Ugolini shrugged with his bushy gray eyebrows as well as with his shoulders. "The question had been thoroughly discussed, Count. Now it is up to His Holiness. I am delighted to meet you, but what have you and I to say to each other?"
The solar, the large-windowed room on the third floor of the cardinal's palace, was bright with light that streamed in through white glass. The floor was covered with a thick red and black rug, the walls decorated with frescoes of angels and saints lavishly bedecked with gold leaf. Simon's eye kept returning to a voluptuous Eve, no part of her nude body hidden by the leaves or branches artists usually deployed for modesty's sake. She was handing a golden fruit—it might have been an orange or a lemon rather than an apple—to a muscular and also fully displayed Adam. Simon found them disturbingly sensual though they dealt with a religious subject, and he was surprised that a cardinal should have such pictures on his walls.
Ugolini's small, elaborately carved oak table, set beside a window, was polished and quite bare. There were no books or parchments anywhere in the large room. Simon suspected that the cardinal used this room to receive visitors but did little work in it. A five-pointed star was carved in the back of the cardinal's chair above his head. Simon sat in a small, armless chair made somewhat comfortable by the cushion on its seat.
"I have come in the hope of presenting to you our French point of view on this proposed alliance," said Simon. That sounded impressive enough.
"And do you speak for France, young man?"
"Not officially, Your Eminence," said Simon, flustered. "I mean only that I am French, and that both King Louis and his brother Count Charles d'Anjou have deigned to share their views with me."