The Wife of Martin Guerre

by Janet Lewis

  The hot mineral baths in the valley of Luchon, it is true, were on one of the direct routes from Spain into France, and it is said that the soldiers of Caesar stopped there to soak their battle-weary limbs in the muddy sulphur pools, but the court of Navarre neglected Luchon. The Marguerite of Princesses took her entourage to Cauterets, nearer Pau. Neither was Artigues upon the direct way through the valley of Luchon to the valley of the Garonne. It stood nearer to a small tributary to the Neste in a higher fold of the mountains. It was on the way to no other village. No one visited Artigues who had not business there. And so from generation to generation, while the lowland villages were plundered and burned and their fields laid waste by the religious wars which swept southern France through the thirteenth century and down to the middle of the sixteenth, Artigues enjoyed its isolation and its lack of fame, and actual gold accumulated in the coffers of its more prosperous families. The feudal feeling maintained its value also, as strong as in the earlier centuries, although Francis the First had been for twenty-one years upon the throne of France and although Languedoc had belonged to the French crown almost three hundred years.

  When she was fourteen years of age, perhaps a little earlier than might have been the case had it not been for the death of her own mother, Bertrande de Rols went to live finally with the house of Guerre. One deceptively warm autumn forenoon, attended by the servant who had brought the réveillon to the young bridal couple, she crossed the courtyard, barefoot, dressed quite simply in her usual workaday clothes, and found herself on the threshold of the big kitchen. Her mother-in-law kissed her on both cheeks, and led her to the hearth. The wooden coffers which contained her personal effects and the linen and silver of her dowry were carried in and set against the wall, her mother-in-law indicated to her the large bed with the curtains of yellow serge which was to be hers and Martin’s, and, without too great haste, she was set to grinding meal in a big stone mortar. Martin and his father were in the fields. Her own father had ridden off to oversee the vintaging. None of the field-workers returned until nightfall. But meanwhile she had time to become familiar with the kitchen, with Martin’s four sisters and the servants, with the dogs and cats and with the feathered inhabitants of the basse-cour. She had not visited the house since the day of her wedding, but the scene was much as she had remembered it. The big table on trestles had been removed; there remained only a square table near the hearth, for the family, and a long one beside it for the workers. The floor was strewn only with dried grass, and the walls were not garnished with evergreen; but festoons of garlic and onions, the long stems braided together, hung from the rafters, together with bunches of dried elder blossoms and linden flowers. Bunches of dried rosemary, mountain thyme, and parsley were there also; and, in the hood of the chimney, meats and sausages were freshly hung to benefit from the resinous smoke.

  Not again for a long time did Bertrande enjoy as much of her mother-in-law’s attention as she did that afternoon, but the leisured kindness and interest which Madame Guerre bestowed upon her son’s young wife threw a long warm shadow which extended forward for many days. She showed Bertrande the farm in detail, the stables, the granary, low stone buildings roofed with tile, like the house, set to the right and left of the courtyard before the house; showed her the room used for the dairy, the storerooms with their pots of honey and baskets of fruit, baskets of chestnuts, stone crocks of goose and chicken preserved in oil, eggs buried in bran, cheeses of goat’s milk and of cow’s milk, wine, oil. In the Chamber she showed her wool and flax for the distaff, the loom on which the clothing for the household would be woven. She showed her the garden, now being set in order for the early frost, the straw-thatched beehives, the sheepfold of mud and wattles, and last of all, returning to the Chamber in which the marriage bed had been dressed, Madame Guerre opened certain chests filled with bran and showed the young girl the coats of mail of the ancestors, thus preserved from rust. She did all this, as Bertrande well knew, that the young wife might understand the household which she would one day be called upon to direct. At no season of the year could she have summarized more happily all that the labors of the spring and summer were working to achieve.

  The dusk came early with a chill that presaged winter. It was fully dark before the men began to assemble from the fields and pastures. The tables were set, and fresh bundles of vine trimmings were flung on the fire. The cattle were driven home and stabled, as was necessary every night in the year because of the depredations of bears. The sheep came next, their voices filling the courtyard with a high prolonged babble. The shepherd and the cowherd, entering the kitchen, brought the smell of the beasts into the room. The swineherd came next, and the men who were, turn and turn about, waggoners, vine dressers, or harvesters of grain. Last of all came the head of the family, Martin’s father, squired by his son. His wife met him on the threshold with a cup of warmed wine, which he drank before he entered the house. He removed his cape and gave it to one of his daughters. He seated himself at the head of the table. The eldest daughter brought him a bowl of water and a napkin. He washed and wiped his hands, and then, searching the room with his eyes, found Martin’s wife and signaled her to approach.

  “Sit here, my daughter,” he said, indicating a place beside him. “Tonight you shall be waited on. Tomorrow you shall have your own share of the labors of the house.”

  He did not smile, but the deed and the voice were kind. Bertrande, gazing cautiously into his face as his attention was directed elsewhere, now to the conversation of the shepherd, now toward the blazing hearth, remembered the severe paternal countenance as she had seen it by torchlight from the high pillow of the marriage bed, and she thought that the torchlight had changed it. Here, in the more even glow of the fire, the face of her new father held nothing terrifying. Seamed, coarsened by exposure to rough weather, the darkened skin caught the gold reflections squarely, without compromise or evasion, admitting all the engravures of time. The beard was short, rough and grizzled, parted to show a cleft in the long chin. The mouth, not smiling, but just, had a heavy lower lip which could admit of anger. The nose was short and flattened, the cheek bones were high, the forehead was high and wide, the eyes, now gray, now black, as the light changed, were calmly interested, calm in the assurance of authority. He sat at ease in the stiff-backed rush-bottomed chair, his dark jerkin laced to the throat, his right hand resting on the edge of the table, vigilantly surveying his household, like some Homeric king, some ruler of an island commonwealth who could both plow and fight, and the hand which rested on the table was scarred as from some defensive struggle in years long gone by. Without bearing any outward symbol of his power, he was in his own person both authority and security. He ruled, as the contemporary records say, using the verb which belongs to royalty, and the young girl seated beside him, in feeling this, felt also the great peace which his authority created for his household. It was the first of many evenings in which his presence should testify for her that the beasts were safe, that the grain was safe, that neither the wolves, whose voices could be heard on winter nights, nor marauding bands of mercenaries such as the current hearsay from the larger valleys sometimes reported, could do anything to harm the hearth beside which this man was seated. Because of him the farm was safe, and therefore Artigues, and therefore Languedoc, and therefore France, and therefore the whole world was safe and as it should be.

  Martin was sufficiently kind to her, in spite of her apprehensions. He treated her with rather more affection than he did his sisters, bullying her occasionally, as he never bullied them, leaving her for the most part to her own affairs. At night they slept together in their own bed, shoulders turned away from each other, the tired young heads buried deep in the feather-stuffed pillows. Bertrande continued, day by day, her long apprenticeship for the position which she was destined to fill, that of mistress of the farm.

  A year went by, during which Bertrande was aware of no other sentiment for her husband than a mild gratitude for his leaving her alone. Then, i
n the early autumn, Martin went bear-hunting. A cordon had been organized in the parish, according to custom, in order to check to some extent the increasing boldness of those animals which not only destroyed the young barley in the spring but also attacked cattle and sheep. It was generally maintained that there were two species of bear in the Pyrenees, those which were vegetarians strictly and those which were carnivorous. The latter were a far greater menace than the wolves, which were not seen in summer and which were dangerous only in the winter months when stock was likely to be safe in stable or fold. Martin had heard of the cordon, and, without saying anything to anyone, had risen early and gone off to join the hunters. He was not seen all that day. When evening came, the workers returned to the farm, shepherd, swineherd, carter, vintager, but no Martin. Monsieur Guerre inquired for his son, but no one had any information to offer. According to custom, the farm workers and the household servants sat down with their master while Madame Guerre and Bertrande waited upon them. The usual talk of the day’s work went on, the meal was finished, the tables were cleared away, and the hour for prayers drew near, before the door burst open and Martin entered, staggering under a load of bearmeat done up in the yet bloody hide of the bear. He was exultant. But when he saw his father’s expectant eyes, his exuberance died away, and, depositing his booty before his father, he made his excuses for being absent from the farm labor, and recounted, more briefly than he had intended, the adventures of his day. His father watched him quietly. When the boy had finished, his father said,

  “That is all you have to say?”

  “Yes, my father.”

  “Very well. Kneel.”

  Martin dropped on his knees, and his father, leaning forward, struck him with the knuckles of his right hand full upon the left side of his jaw. Martin said nothing. Madame Guerre caught her breath but made no outcry. In a moment Martin stood up and went to spit blood into the fire.

  “Prayers, my children,” said the father.

  The household, upon its knees, with bowed heads, attended to the prayers which the father repeated, and then, dispersing, went off to bed. Several hours later that evening when the house was quiet and only a small gleam of firelight shone through the folds of serge which enclosed their bed, Bertrande said to Martin:

  “Are you awake?”

  “Certainly. My jaw aches. He has broken me two teeth.”

  “It was not just,” she whispered with indignation.

  “Certainly it was just. I didn’t ask him if I might go. I was afraid that he might refuse me. But it was well done, was it not, to kill a bear?”

  “Oh, yes,” she replied fervently. “Martin, you are brave.”

  He said nothing to that, agreeing in his heart, but as he fell asleep, later, his arm rested on her shoulder. She had sided with him against the paternal authority, however just that authority might be. They were two, a camp within a camp. As for Bertrande, to her own surprise she began to understand that Martin belonged to her and that her affection for him was even greater than her respect and admiration for his father.

  In the morning Madame Guerre, examining the damage done to her son’s teeth, wept, but did not protest against her husband’s severity.

  “You understand, my son, it is necessary,” she said. “If you have no obedience for your father, your son will have none for you, and then what will become of the family? Ruin. Despair.”

  “Yes, my mother, I understand,” said Martin.

  No one but Bertrande had hinted that the punishment was arbitrary and severe, and nothing further was said by anyone about the matter.

  But gradually Bertrande’s affection for her husband became a deep and joyous passion, growing slowly and naturally as her body grew. All about her, life flourished and increased itself, in field, in fold, in the rose-flushed bramble stems of spring before the green leaf unfurled, and in the vine leaves of autumn that lay like fire along the corded branches. She felt this passion within herself like the wine they drank in the early days of spring, light, tart, heady, and having a special fragrance, and her delight illuminated her love like the May sunshine pouring downward into the cupped wine. Early in her twentieth year she gave birth to a son, and her happiness seemed crowned and sanctified beyond anything she had ever dreamed. They called the boy Sanxi. His grandfather, receiving him in his arms a few minutes after his birth, rubbed his lips with garlic and touched them with a few sour drops of the wine of the country, welcoming him as a true Gascon. The boy thrived, and his mother thrived with him, as if they lent each other well-being.

  Being the mother of an heir, Bertrande now received from her parents-in-law a new esteem which was manifest in little favors. This filled her with pride and contributed in no small measure to the grace with which she carried her dark head. More than ever she understood her position in the household, part of a structure that reached backward in time towards ancestors of whose renown one was proud and forward to a future in which Sanxi was a young man, in which Sanxi’s children were to grow tall and maintain, as she and Martin now helped to maintain, the prosperity and honor of the family.

  Martin had been placed in full charge of certain labors of the farm, and more especially in charge of certain fields. He was responsible to his father for all he did, but the method and the details were in his own hands. It was a part of his progress toward the assumption of the full authority of the farm, which could not come to him until after his father’s death, but for which he must be early prepared.

  His situation was moreover curious in this respect; for the extent of his father’s lifetime Martin would remain legally a minor. He might grow old, Sanxi might marry and have sons, but as long as the elder Guerre survived, so long was he absolute head of the house, and such liberty as Martin might enjoy was to be enjoyed only under his father’s rule. This was so well understood together with the necessity for the law, that it never occurred to Martin to suppose it might be otherwise. It was known throughout Languedoc that a father owned the privilege of freeing his son, if he chose, from the parental authority, but this could only be done through a deliberate and formal ceremony; and although there were fathers who sometimes so liberated their sons, if anyone had asked Martin Guerre what he thought of such a procedure, he would almost certainly have replied that he thought ill. All such authority as belonged to the cap d’hostal Martin Guerre wished to retain, however much he might personally suffer for the time being under such authority. After the lapse of years he expected himself to be cap d’hostal, and when that responsibility should rest upon him he would have need of all the accumulated authority of antiquity, even as his father had need of it now.

  Martin resembled his father greatly, both physically and in disposition. Bertrande, who sometimes observed his smothered resentment, or impatience at his inferior position, understood both the impatience and the attitude which kept it in control, the acceptance of things as they were, and said quietly to herself:

  “In his day he will make a protector for this family as like his own father as two men well may be, and for that thanks to God.”

  Outwardly, Martin had the swarthy skin, the high forehead, the gray eyes, the flat, short nose, the lips, the high cleft chin of his father, and something of his father’s build. Too early labor at the plow had rounded his shoulders. Nevertheless he was a skillful swordsman and boxer, agile, tall, and well-developed for his years. “Not a pretty man,” as the servant had said, “but a very distinguished man.” His ugliness was ancestral, and that in itself was good.

  People so reasonable, so devoted, so strongly loving and hard working should have been exempt, one feels, from the vagaries of a malicious fate. Nevertheless, the very virtues of their way of life gave rise to a small incident, and from that incident developed the whole train of misfortune which singled out Bertrande de Rols from the peace and obscurity of her tradition.

  It was a day in autumn. The vintage was done and the winter wheat was being put in the ground. Since the men were not expected to return to the farm a
t noon, Bertrande had taken Martin’s lunch to him, and while he ate, she sat beside him on the sun-warmed, roughened earth at the edge of the field. She was bare-footed and bare-headed, the bodice of her gown open a little at the throat because of the noonday heat. The flesh at the edge of the gown was creamy, and the color deepened upward into a warm tan, growing richer and brighter on the rounded cheeks; and at the edge of the hair, in the shadow of the thick dark locks, the creamy color showed again, now moist from the sheltered heat. She watched her husband with tender, happy eyes. Before them, the cultivated ground slanted downward to a hazel copse. They could hear above them the murmur of the stream, reduced from its full summer flow, where it ran under the chestnut trees, before it circled the field, running below them through the copse and on into the narrowing valley. Across the valley and on the higher slopes, the beech and oak woods were tinged with gold and russet, and higher still a blue haze seemed to be gathering, like threads of smoke. Leaf, earth, and wine in the still sunlight gave forth the odors of their substances; the air was full of autumn fragrance. Martin, when he had finished his lunch, wrapped the fragments of bread and cheese and put them in his wallet. He returned the earthen wine jug to the hands of his wife and said:

  “I am going away for a little while.”

  Bertrande made an exclamation of surprise.

  “You may well be astonished,” replied Martin. “This is the way of it. This morning I took from my father’s granary enough seed wheat to plant the half of this field.”

  “You did not ask him for it?” cried Bertrande in alarm.

  “Certainly, no. He would have denied it to me because it is his notion that I should put aside whatever grain I need from my own harvesting. But this year I have more land under cultivation than I had hoped to have. Should I let it go to waste? He has finished his planting; the wheat remains unused. So I took it, and I have planted it. Was it not well done?”