The Wife of Martin Guerre

by Janet Lewis

  It was now late in the afternoon. The day’s heat seemed to have accumulated in the crowded room along with the testimony of the witnesses, and the place was stifling. The light which entered through the high windows struck almost levelly upon the wall opposite, above the heads of the judges. The scribe laid down his pen, and the judges leaned forward to confer with each other. The examination was over, and it remained only to interpret the information. Those who had most to lose or gain by the decision had been dismissed to an inner room, but the courtroom was still packed.

  It was neither reasonable nor just, the court argued first of all, to permit the bad reputation of the rogue Arnaud du Tilh to affect the fate of the prisoner if he was indeed Martin Guerre. Secondly, the judges argued, if it were so easy for the wife of Martin Guerre to mistake Arnaud for her husband, even if only for a short time, it would have been just as easy for the soldier from Rochefort to mistake Arnaud for Martin; there was no way of proving that the man who lost a leg at the battle of St. Laurent before St. Quentin was Martin Guerre rather than Arnaud du Tilh. Thirdly, they argued, it was beyond human ingenuity for any man to impersonate so well, to know so many intimate details of the life of another man, and to exhibit so close a physical resemblance to another man as the accused. Last of all, the court considered that the confusion of Bertrande at the sight of the accused, together with the report of her outcry in the court of Rieux when the sentence of death had been pronounced against the prisoner, testified badly for her case. Therefore the judges decided, and doubtless to their own relief, for they had been sadly puzzled, that the prisoner must be in truth none other than Martin Guerre, as he himself affirmed. The populace seemed pleased with the decision, and the clerk of the court prepared to put the verdict down in writing.

  As this individual drew up his inkpot and sharpened his pen, and as the judges of Toulouse relaxed in their chairs and mopped their foreheads, conversing among themselves, and not, shrewdly, overlooking the smiles which overspread the courtroom, a commotion was heard at the outer door in which could be distinguished a great deal of stamping and of beating on the stone floor with the butt of a halberd, and a vigorous exposition of an undeterminable nature in an unmistakably Gascon voice. The court sent to inquire; the messenger returned with news of some importance, for, as the audience twisted about and necks were craned in curiosity, a way was cleared through the crowd so that a Gascon soldier in travel-stained garments was permitted to walk directly up to the seats of the justices.

  The halberds of the attendants sounded on the floor as the men halted, one on each side of the soldier; but there also sounded, during the entrance of the group, what resembled the butt of a third halberd, but which was, remarkably enough, a wooden leg worn by the Gascon soldier.

  The judges surveyed the newcomer. He was sunburned, and bearded, but through the beard the shape of the high, cleft chin was easily discernible. His left eyebrow was scarred; and there was a trace of an old ulcer on one cheek. He returned the scrutiny of the judges of Toulouse with eyes which were arrogant, gray and cold.

  “Body of God,” said one of the justices, sinking back in his seat in something not unlike despair, “this is either Martin Guerre or the devil,” and he gave an order to the attendants to put the newcomer under arrest.

  After brief deliberation among the judges, the order was also given to remove the accused man to an adjoining chamber and to close the doors against further entrance. This done, the weary justices proceeded to examine the soldier with the wooden leg.

  “I am without any doubt Martin Guerre,” said the soldier. “I lost my leg before St. Quentin in the year fifty-seven. I am the father of Sanxi Guerre, and of no other children.”

  To all the questions which had previously been put to the accused man, the soldier was able to reply with reasonable accuracy. Once or twice his answers were at variance with those of Bertrande to the same question, now and again he hesitated before answering, but in the main he showed a knowledge of the affairs of Martin Guerre which might well have justified his claim to be that man. He also manifested an unusual knowledge of the career of Arnaud du Tilh. This was interesting, for the accused man had known nothing at all of the affairs of du Tilh; he had heard rumors of his existence—that was all. But the newcomer seemed no better informed concerning the affairs of Martin Guerre than the accused had seemed. At the end of an hour the judges were no nearer a decision than they had been early that morning.

  There remained a final test, however. The prisoner was summoned and made to stand face to face with the one-legged soldier. Then, one by one, the relatives of the two men were called, and asked to make their choice.

  Carbon Bareau, the first of the relatives of du Tilh to be called, stared for a moment with great surprise at the soldier, then, turning without any hesitation at all, laid his hand on the shoulder of the prisoner and said:

  “Gentlemen, this is my nephew.”

  The brothers of Arnaud, confronted by the two men so extraordinarily similar, hesitated, and then, turning from the prisoner as from the soldier, besought the court to excuse them from bearing witness. The court, with a humanity rare in that century, dismissed them. They had in their request testified more than they realized.

  When the youngest sister of Martin Guerre was admitted, she lifted her hands to her forehead in a gesture full of amazement and distress, and then, without hesitation, flung herself upon the breast of the soldier with the wooden leg and burst into tears. One by one the other relatives of Martin Guerre, being admitted, stared with surprise from the soldier to the prisoner and back again, and confessed with many apologies and protestations of sorrow at their mistake that the soldier with one leg was undeniably Martin Guerre, who had been so long away.

  It was remarkable that while Martin Guerre received this succession of tearful recognitions with a consistent, stern reserve, Arnaud du Tilh the prisoner, although growing perceptibly graver, lost none of his calm air of assurance and none of his dignity.

  Meanwhile the judges, seeing which way the case had turned, sent to their hotel for Pierre Guerre and Bertrande de Rols. The day had been long. For these two lonely defenders of a cause it had seemed longer than a century. When the messenger came for them, they left the confinement of the inn and followed him through the still-confining streets with the intense fatalism of the defeated. The messenger had been instructed to tell them nothing, but rumor had preceded the messenger with the advice that the case had been decided against them. Pierre Guerre was admitted alone, and Bertrande, left in an ante-chamber with a guard, was clearly and sharply aware for the first time in that exhausting day of one thing, and that was that she could not return to Artigues as the wife of Arnaud du Tilh.

  After a time the door to the courtroom opened, and she was admitted. She made her way through the crowd toward the space before the judges. Without looking up to see it, she yet felt the intense curiosity of all these unfamiliar faces bent upon her like a physical force. In the silence of the room the insatiable interest of the crowd beat upon her like a sultry wave. She reached the open space, and stopped. There she lifted her eyes at last and saw, standing beside Arnaud du Tilh the man whom she had loved and mourned as dead. She uttered a great cry and turned very pale. The pupils of her parti-colored eyes, the lucky eyes, expanded until the iris was almost lost. Then, reaching out her hands to Martin Guerre, she sank slowly to her knees before him. He did not make any motion toward her, so that, after a little time, she clasped her hands together and drew them toward her breast, and, recovering herself somewhat, said in a low voice:

  “My dear lord and husband, at last you are returned. Pity me and forgive me, for my sin was occasioned only by my great desire for your presence, and surely, from the hour wherein I knew I was deceived, I have labored with all the strength of my soul to rid myself of the destroyer of my honor and my peace.”

  The tears began to run quietly down her face.

  Martin Guerre did not reply immediately, and in the pause which f
ollowed, one of the justices, leaning forward, said to Bertrande:

  “Madame, we have all been very happily delivered from a great error. Pray accept the profound apologies of this court which did not earlier sufficiently credit your story and your grief.”

  But Martin Guerre, when the justice had finished speaking, said to his wife with perfect coldness:

  “Dry your tears, Madame. They cannot, and they ought not, move my pity. The example of my sisters and my uncle can be no excuse for you, Madame, who knew me better than any living soul. The error into which you plunged could only have been caused by willful blindness. You, and you only, Madame, are answerable for the dishonor which has befallen me.”

  Bertrande did not protest. Rising to her feet, she gazed steadily into the face of her husband and seemed there to see the countenance of the old Monsieur, the patriarch whose authority had been absolute over her youth and over that of the boy who had been her young husband. She recoiled from him a step or two in unconscious self-defense, and the movement brought her near to the author of her misfortunes, the actual Arnaud du Tilh.

  In the silence which filled the courtroom at Martin’s unexpected severity, a familiar voice close to her elbow pronounced gently:

  “Madame, you wondered at the change which time and experience had worked in Martin Guerre, who from such sternness as this became the most indulgent of husbands. Can you not marvel now that the rogue, Arnaud du Tilh, for your beauty and grace, became for three long years an honest man?”

  “Sirrah,” answered Bertrande, “I marvel that you should speak to me, whose devotion has deprived me even of the pity of my husband. I once seemed to love you, it is true. I cannot now hate you sufficiently.”

  “I had thought to ask you to intercede for mercy for me,” said Arnaud du Tilh.

  “You had no mercy upon me, either upon body or upon soul,” replied Bertrande.

  “Then, Madame,” said du Tilh, and there was at last neither arrogance nor levity in his voice, “I can but die by way of atonement.”

  Bertrande had turned to look at him as he spoke. She turned now from him towards her husband, and then, without speaking, moved slowly toward the door. The court did not detain her, and the crowd, in some awe, drew aside enough to let her pass without interruption. Bertrande did not see the crowd. Leaving the love which she had rejected because it was forbidden, and the love which had rejected her, she walked through a great emptiness to the door, and so on into the streets of Toulouse, knowing that the return of Martin Guerre would in no measure compensate for the death of Arnaud, but knowing herself at last free, in her bitter, solitary justice, of both passions and of both men.

  Arnaud du Tilh, being confined in the prison at Artigues in the days which followed immediately upon the hearing at Toulouse, made a confession in which he stated that he had been tempted to the imposture by the frequency with which he had been mistaken for Martin Guerre. All that he knew of Martin’s life and habits he had gleaned from Martin’s friends, from his servants and from members of his family. He added that he had not originally intended to take Martin’s place in his household, but had intended to stay only long enough to pick up a little silver or gold.

  The court decreed that he had been convicted of the several crimes of imposture, falsehood, substitution of name and person, adultery, rape, sacrilege, plagiat, which is the detention of a person who properly belongs to another, and of larceny; and the court condemned him to do penance before the church of Artigues on his knees, in his shirt, with head and feet bare, a halter around his neck and a burning taper in his hand, asking pardon of God and of the king, of Martin Guerre and of Bertrande de Rols, his wife; the court then condemned him to be handed over to the common executioner, who should conduct him by the most public ways to the house of Martin Guerre, in front of which, upon a scaffold previously prepared, he should be hanged and his body burned. All his effects were forfeit to the crown. And this decree bears the date of September the twelfth, in the year 1560, in the city of Toulouse.

  Of Martin Guerre nothing more is recorded, whether he returned to the wars or remained in Artigues, nor is there further record of Bertrande de Rols, his wife. But when hate and love have together exhausted the soul, the body seldom endures for long.

  Afterword: The Return of Janet Lewis

  Larry McMurtry

  (From The New York Review of Books, June 11, 1998)

  1.

  In 1922 the printer-typographer Monroe Wheeler, who would go on to have a long and distinguished career with MoMA, set off to be a young-man-about-Europe. He was determined to publish poetry and publish it elegantly, to which end he established (first in Germany) an imprint called Manikin, under which he issued three booklets of verse. The first, The Indians in the Woods, was by a young Midwestern poet named Janet Lewis; William Carlos Williams’s Go Go was the second; the third and last was Marriage, by Marianne Moore.

  Not long before he left Illinois, Wheeler had got his feet wet typographically, so to speak, by publishing two books of verse now not easily secured: The Bitterns, by his friend Glenway Westcott, and The Immobile Wind, by a young teacher of languages named Arthur Yvor Winters, who had, not long before, been released from the Sunmount Sanatorium in Santa Fe, where he recovered from a serious bout with tuberculosis. Young Winters was soon to go off to Moscow, Idaho, to take the only teaching job he could get, but, on a trip to Chicago, he met Janet Lewis. Monroe Wheeler was one link, poetry a second, and tuberculosis a third, for Janet Lewis too was soon forced to go off to Sunmount, where—after nearly five years—she also recovered. Hers was a close call. The two married in 1926—Janet Lewis was still in Sunmount and Yvor Winters still teaching in Idaho, from whence he carried on an intense correspondence, largely about poetics, with Hart Crane, Allen Tate, and others. Once Janet Lewis was well, the young couple moved to California and Winters took up the professorship at Stanford that he was to hold for the rest of his life.

  Together the two writers raised children (two), Airedales and goats (many), and—one might say—poets: ranks upon ranks of poets who came to learn from Winters; in their memoirs he is still legend. He wrote his books, Janet wrote hers. To his enemies in criticism—at various times they included the Agrarians (particularly John Crowe Ransom), Eliot, Pound, R. P. Blackmur, and many others—Yvor Winters was a bruiser, a kind of absolutist gladiator who struck often and with considerable accuracy at flaws in a poem or a critical system. To poets—from Hart Crane on to J.V. Cunningham, Donald Justice, Donald Hall, Thom Gunn, Ann Stanford, Robert Haas, and many others—he was a kind of Apostle, though of course they felt varying degrees of allegiance to his beliefs about poetry and of attachment to the man himself; but to Janet Lewis he was, for forty-two years, a much-treasured husband, as she makes clear in an audiotape made twenty years after his death. The cut of that grief went very deep; his name, A. Yvor Winters, is still on the mailbox of their modest house in Los Altos.

  Of all the above mentioned, Wheeler and Westcott, Crane, Tate, Williams, Marianne Moore, and Yvor Winters are gone, but Janet Lewis lives on, for the most part happily, in Los Altos; her sight has weakened but not her spirit. She has published poetry in every decade of this century except the first, poetry that has never lacked for champions. One of the most ardent, at present, is Thom Gunn, who had this to say about her most recent collection, The Dear Past (1994):

  I think she should be getting the closest attention. In this collection of old age, almost incredibly, she is simultaneously as stringent and sweet-natured, as sharp and generous as she was throughout the Collected Poems. She is as ever deceptively simple. That is, hers is the best kind of simplicity, because it contains an implied complexity. . . .

  The Dear Past reprints poems published between 1918 and 1991, a wingspan all but incredible, and made the more so by the clarity and authority of a voice she has sustained for so long: a voice that is considered, lucid, spare, and tough on itself in a high Midwestern way. Though perhaps less imperatively than her husband,
she too has touched many poets, from the time of Hart Crane to the time of Robert Haas. Of her verse she has kept and reprinted only about a poem a year, taking her time and finishing her work; luckily she has been granted a great deal of time to take.

  In addition to the poetry Janet Lewis has written two children’s books, six books of prose, four libretti, and a number of chorales. Though I am mainly concerned in this essay to applaud and perhaps bring new readers to the three remarkable historical novels she published between 1941 and 1959, I do think that Janet Lewis’s more than eighty years of vigorous, variegated, and steady devotion to literature deserves a salute. She is a striking example of a quiet talent working quietly through almost the entirety of a noisy, celebrity-heavy century.

  From so much attention one would expect a masterpiece, and it too is there, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), the story of an artifice so skillful, so confusing to its victims, that simple honesty is defeated and a good woman brought to ruin.1 It’s a short novel that can run with Billy Budd, The Spoils of Poynton, Seize the Day, or any other of the thoroughbred novellas that might be brought to the gate.

  In a statement given to Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft for the 1955 edition of that still-invaluable reference work Twentieth Century Authors, Janet Lewis made a couple of intriguing statements. She mentions her husband’s standing as a breeder of Airedales, but says nothing about his fame as a literary critic, encouraging us to suspect that the much-feared Yvor Winters, one of the hardest hitters of the bare-knucklers who slugged it out in the bloody pit of criticism as it was in the Thirties and Forties, may really have put more of his heart into his dogs. About herself she has this to say:

  I have lived a life rather lacking in “events” but with a rich and in the main very happy background. This sort of life does not provide a very interesting brief biography. The interest is chiefly in the background, which can’t be treated briefly and still be interesting.