Two of them are sent away to a less congenial tower, the Chateau Gaillard. In any case all three of the King’s daughters-in-law, (Marguerite, Blanche, and Jeanne of Burgundy) have their locks shorn. ( Refer to Alexandre Dumas’ stage hit.) The details are less lurid in Druon: there’s only your regular extra-marital fling, and nobody gets dropped from the top of the tower. The “curse” takes obvious the form in the scandal of the Tower of Nesle.

Substitute “curse” for “nightmare” : both are nigh inescapable. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” goes the James Joyce quote from “Ulysses”. Of course, unfortunate events define the history of ANY country over ANY century.

While burning brightly, Molay issues one of those trans-generational Biblical curses to King Philip, and there’s the conceit of Druon’s “Les Rois Maudits” (“The Accursed Kings”), a cycle of seven historical novels tracking the series of unfortunate events that defined the French monarchy during the 1300s. More like Mo HAY, amirite? ‘Cuz they burned him on a stack of hay, see. Under duress, Molay confesses to assorted deviations, from sodomizing young recruits to ritually spitting on the Holy Cross. Now Philip has ordered the capture and torture of the last Templar Grand-Master, Jacques Molay. King Philip IV, ever the acquisitional entrepreneur, has appropriated most of their riches, as he had previously done with the riches of the Jewish population of France AND, in a visionary display of equal-opportunity thievery, with the properties of the Catholic Church. In 1314, as Maurice Druon’s “The Iron King” opens, they’re a scattered, humiliated has-been quasi-cult. The Knight Templars weren’t always some Holy-Grail-Guarding Super-Army.

The Iron King by Maurice Druon