The Blood of Toulouse

by Maurice Magre

  Suddenly, a voice rang out: a peremptory voice, that of someone who knew.

  “It’s the Seigneur d’Ussat’s soldiers.”

  The Seigneur d’Ussat, a violent man and a convert to the heresy,5 had had long quarrels with the jurists of Mercus, and he had recently threatened the abbey with pillage. Now, he had a habit of keeping his promises. A clink of weapons followed. Somewhere, monks were doubtless arming themselves. But those who were distributed in the courtyard and along the cloister believed that Ussat’s soldiers had forced the doors.

  I was still ringing. And then, far away to the north, a bell responded to mine, and then another to the south, and gradually, I heard them from all sides of the horizon. They were all sounding the tocsin, and their repercussion was profound and infinite, crossing the valleys and the mountains.

  I quickly realized, however, that those bells were not sounding in reality. I knew to which crenellated tower and which church belfry they belonged. One was ringing in the tower of San Salvi in Albi, another in the advanced barbican in an easterly direction, on the ramparts of Carcassonne, another was the bell of the church of Saint-Nazaire in Béziers. There were more distant ones, those of Maguelonne, those of Beaucaire, others that were agitating in towers made of marine stone and had broken Saracen arrows. All of them had a desperate tone, announcing calamities, the sorrow of peoples, and the death of beauty.

  Thus, the tocsin that I had set in motion without knowing why was a kind of signal, awakening in all the bells of the south a mysterious life of bronze, whose music was in my heart.

  I did not have time to be astonished or sad. I felt myself seized violently around the body and a face almost stuck itself against mine. I respired a noxious odor, by means of which I recognized the brother responsible for ringing the bell. He had a frightful habit, by virtue of malignity or unconsciousness, of exhaling his bad breath in your face at close range.

  “Why are you ringing? Who ordered you to ring?”

  There was indignation in his voice because of his usurped function. I shoved him away with all my strength, and doubtless something in my gaze frightened him, for he ran down the stairs uttering cries.

  I went down behind him, lending an ear to bells that were fading away over silent rivers and unknown landscapes. At the foot of the tower was a group of monks who must have interrogated the ringer and were waiting for an explanation. On seeing me they all cried out together, wanting to know what the danger was that was threatening the convent.

  “Why? What’s happened?” they said, surrounding me.

  Then I started howling: “God has withdrawn from you! God has withdrawn from you!” And at the same time, I wrenched myself out of their hands.

  It only took a second for their terror to change into anger and a desire for vengeance. While I ran hither and yon, trying to escape those monks seized by rage, a hundred voices cried that Brother Dalmas had gone mad and that it was necessary to seize him. My loss of reason was announced from cell to cell and proclaimed from the windows, and one monk, who had hoisted himself up as far as the steeple of the chapel in order to escape the peril, even announced that the stars had begun to pale in the sky.

  I bumped into Brother Robert’s belly and, seizing the cross that he was holding, I threw it at the legs of those who were pursuing me. I launched myself into a corridor, closing the door behind me, traversed the deserted refectory at a run and emerged into the kitchen garden. I suddenly remembered that there was a ladder at the back, standing against the wall.

  I scaled it and let myself down gently on to the body of the odorous, vast and indulgent earth. In the distance, in the clover and in the vines, matinal crickets were responding to one another. I saw the Roc de Sédour outlined to my right in the pallor of the dawn. I knew that by following the Ariège I would find a little higher up a fordable place, and would then have only a few steps to take to plunge into the forest, where it would be impossible to catch me. I started to run.

  As I ran, I bumped into a hillock that I had not perceived and fell on the ground. My open arms embraced a sort of mound covered with earth, at the summit of which was a little stone cross. Lord! I pressed against myself the clay soil beneath which Martial had wanted to repose without a coffin, in order to become stems, roots and the juice of sap more rapidly.

  And during the second in which I made an effort with my hands and knees to get up again, I heard his voice, which said to me:

  “Go, my child, into the forest, where you will no longer hear human speech vibrate. Instruct yourself with the howling of wolves, the creaking of branches, the sound of water running over pebbles. For the living speech is born of human silence. Those who, like you, are marked for the perpetuation of the truth with the aid of fleeting words must prepare in solitude the nascence of the Word.”

  I resumed my course, but I had a power of delight that lifted me up. I knew from then on what my law was.

  II

  I lived in the mountains like the wild beasts. During the day I watched squirrels leaping from branch to branch, lizards gliding over stones, grasshoppers bounding in the grass like diurnal stars. In the evening I went down toward the farms in the valley and women sometimes gave me a bowl full of soup made of detritus, like that given to dogs. I heard men growling inside the houses and I glimpsed their angry gazes, for almost everyone in the vicinity of Foix had converted to the new heresy and hated all those who wore the robe and the tonsure.

  Only one, an old man with a goiter, the master of a sheepfold that belonged to the Seigneurs de Lavelanet, took me in amity and made sure that I had my quotidian nourishment. But my destiny was always interrupted by some eccentricity of the course of favorable things. One evening I found the old man with the goiter asleep outside his door, alongside a jug of milk that someone had just extracted and which was fuming. A share of that appetizing milk was probably destined for me. I picked up the jug and poured its contents slowly over the goiter of the master of the sheepfold. He woke up and uttered screams, as if the milk had been his blood flowing. All sorts of rustic creatures emerged from nearby animal sheds, and I only just had time to flee in order to escape their pitchforks.

  Without being aware of it, I was drawn to Toulouse as if by a magnet and I left the mountain region for that of the plateaux. It was mid-August. I picked grapes from the vines. I spent the night in barns. Sometimes I bathed, shortly before dawn, in one of those great stone baths like a Roman tomb, which I encountered in the middle of a silent village.

  But I was not happy. My tonsure had disappeared under the growth of my hair. My beard had sprung forth on my chin. I sensed a sort of animality twisting my limbs, rendering them more shapeless and more vigorous. I was only clad in rags. An ugliness invaded me, of which I could not render an exact account, but which I sensed to be alive as I passed my hands over my face. I remembered my reading of Plato, the apparitions promised by Petrus, and, confusing them in my mind, I regretted books of philosophy and the presence of Jesus.

  One morning, from the top of a hill, I recognized a village near Pamiers that I had once visited in childhood; I had accompanied my father, who had been summoned to repair the church. I went down the slope and headed for the village. It was Sunday, and people were coming out of the mass. I saw, from a distance, peasants who were considering me attentively. They were speaking to one another, and I heard someone say: “That must be the mad monk who escaped from Mercus Abbey.”

  Immediately, they made a forward movement, and I distinguished on a few faces the glad and savage expression of men about to track a dangerous animal.

  My errant life had developed my running speed singularly. In a matter of minutes I was separated from them by ditches, briars and heaths. I kept moving for a long time, knowing the sagacity of which men are capable when pursuing men. I encountered a river that I assumed to be the Ers. I was out of breath and my body was fuming. I threw myself face down on the bank in order to drink. I noticed, to my great surprise, that for the first time I had been te
mpted, instead of taking water in my hand, to lap it in the fashion of four-footed animals.

  When I had satisfied my thirst and rested, I felt full of a wellbeing that was not localized anywhere and with which a confused desire was mingled. I had a desire to sing, to exteriorize my strength in action, and, like a dormant larva beginning to awake, carnal temptation agitated in the mystery of my flesh.

  There was a path that followed the river between tall poplars and leafy hazel-trees. I started to follow it. Frogs that were resting in the grass made leaps toward me. I amused myself by crushing them, in spite of the love that I had always testified for those aquatic beings, and the soft sound them made as they burst under my feet procured me a bizarre satisfaction.

  Suddenly, I stopped still. The path I was following was obstructed by broom, laurels and the low branches of the hazel-trees. A little further in, however, a luminous bank ended, where the widened Ers formed a calm pool, like a sunlit mirror in a frame of golden sand. And there, at the water’s edge, protected by a circular wall of trees inclined around her, a woman was lying.

  She had just been bathing, and she must have wrapped herself hastily in the sheet of supple linen embroidered with silver by which her body was enveloped. Droplets of water were still sparkling on her bare arms and at the birth of the shoulder, indolently protruding from the sheet. The oval of her lowered face, the features of which I could not distinguish between the hair knotted in three braids, was supported by a hand so small that I almost started to laugh. The other hand was pressing the linen sheet to her body in order to dry it, and designed a slender and perfect body. The sun gave the golden sand around her a red tint and made her shadow violet. The immobility of the poplars, the silent flight of the water, and the beauty of the light bathed that woman in a mystery of tales of enchantment.

  And although I could not see her inclined face, I knew immediately, because of the three braids, who she was. The Chateau de Belpech must raise its unique octagonal tower behind the trees to the right. It was there that the infanta of Foix, the beautiful Esclarmonde, had obtained permission from her father to come to satisfy her eccentric love of solitude.

  Esclarmonde! For any good Christian her name was synonymous with malediction. She wandered alone through the woods in order to find certain fallen deities of paganism whose language she knew and which descended from their mountains for her. She did not fear men because the demon that inhabited her body drove her to give herself to them. Her father, Comte Roger, uniquely possessed by the love of riches, sometimes came to reside in the Castellar of Pamiers in order to extort money by force from the monks of Saint Antonin. The insensate! He then confided Esclarmonde to his steward Roaix and allowed her to reside alone in the little tower of Belpech. It was the aged Roaix, from a Toulousan family, who had converted her to the Albigensian heresy in her early childhood. Nicetas, the man from the Orient who was known as the accursed pope, had even come in secret to Belpech to accomplish there some unknown magical ceremony whose execrable rite enchained the young woman forever to the new church.

  That is what I had heard reported by the talkative monks of Mercus, especially by Brother Robert. I did not know yet that almost all the words of a fat man are dictated by evil thoughts. Brother Robert was a slanderous man of base soul, who was reputed to know everything and who pretended, when he could not support what he said with evidence, to know it by virtue of direct divine communication. When he talked about Esclarmonde he crossed himself and made a semblance of fearing certain evil spells because of what he had said. I remembered clearly what he claimed to have seen.

  Returning to the Abbey of Saint Antonin one night, to which he had been sent from Mercus to carry a precious pyx, he had heard strange noises. In the middle of the immense avenue between oaks that ends at the porch of Saint Antonin, a naked young woman with a miter on her head and three golden braids along her shoulders was playing the harp. Beside her stood a bearded old man wearing a turban in a Persian or Egyptian costume. Behind them, in a long file, all the wolves of the forest were marching slowly, as if for a ceremony. Their blazing eyes emitted little flames that lit up and were extinguished by turns. And there were serpents slithering, toads hopping bizarrely and birds flying overhead whose heads had a vaguely human expression in spite of their beak and plumage. Brother Robert added that he only owed his salvation to the presence of a host that was still stuck to the bottom of the pyx.

  I had only added a dubious credence to such stories at the time. I had even laughed often with monks saner than me—who were, in truth, quite numerous at Mercus. But the name of Esclarmonde retained a mysterious resonance. I only had to pronounce it to evoke images of sin and magic. And now the sorceress with the beautiful face, aureoled by the legend of her damnation, was lying before me on a bed of sand, illuminated by the reflection of the sun and the water, in the voluptuousness of midday!

  I ought to have fled out of natural shame. It is a sin to look in the face those who have vowed their souls to evil. Fear ought to have made my teeth chatter. But blood flowed to my temples and an unknown force warmed by blood. I knew little about women. Before my novitiate, I had sometimes gone to prowl the back streets of Toulouse that extend from Saint Sernin to the ramparts. In the evening they were full of songs and the music of the instruments know as darbukas, which come to us from the Arabs and are so melancholy when they play for joy. There were the street of the Jews and the street of the Moors. It was a Mooress that I had pleased. I had heard mention of amour in a low-ceilinged ground floor room where there was nothing but a sordid mat, a chest for clothes and an earthenware vase for ablutions. I heard rustling behind the wall, the cries of women fighting one another and drunken soldiers hammering with their fists in the streets shouting that it was their turn. I had conserved therefrom the memory of a tenebrous voyage on a ship of perdition, amid waves of stone, in a tempest of ignominy.

  And now memories returned to me of guitars and ballads sung by winy voices; I respired a carnal warmth and there was the music of a darbuka somewhere, as sad as the prescience of an evil deed that one is on the point of accomplishing.

  I parted the branches of wild laurels cautiously and I sensed a bestial expression invade the features of my face as I advanced.

  The young woman did not see me. She was motionless, and that immobility stopped me. But she made a movement of her head and a kind of undulation departed from her milky neck, which slid over her shoulder and was lost in the linen creases, like a living radiation of flesh.

  Then I launched myself forward. A blind beast trampled branches, caused the sand to creak and threw itself on the extended prey. She was light and devoid of strength. I seized her around the loins and I started running straight ahead, moved by the instinct that drives a savage beast to seek an isolated spot.

  I had heard a feeble groan and delicate arms had attempted to repel me, but that movement of a body against mine redoubled my furious intoxication. I bounded amid the cracking of wood and the fluttering of foliage. I only slowed down for a second in order to prevent the marvelous tresses from being caught by bushes. When the path turned and quit the river, I perceived some way ahead of me the profound mass of a forest looming up with its shade and its propitious solitude.

  Had some servant raced forward too late to help his mistress? Had the villagers who were pursuing me picked up my trail? It seemed to me that I heard clamors resounding behind me and that there was the whistle of an arrow in the air, but I was already respiring the freshness of tall trees close at hand, the breath of the abode of wolves and birds of prey.

  Suddenly, lowering my head, I perceived for the first time the face of the woman I was carrying. The open mouth allowed the gleam of the teeth to be seen. The features had an almost infantile youth, but they did not express the bewildered terror I might have expected. My hirsute and sweating face and my human breath did not overwhelm the young woman in her light linen veil with horror. While running, I was struck with astonishment. I leaned over her further.
Then I perceived a singular geometry in the regular oval of her face, in the correspondence of the raised eyebrows with the hairline and the creases of the mouth, a superior calculation whose total escaped fear and desire.

  To the metaphysical problem posed by the contours of that flesh, which I sensed to be above my intelligence, I sought a solution in her gaze, but that gaze was blue and immense, like those avenues one sees in dreams bordered with hieroglyphic columns, the indefinite perspective of which ends at the phantom of a temple. It was a gaze as devoid of hatred as it was of forgiveness, as cold as the sword of the Last Judgment.

  A new sensation took possession of me with an imperious violence. I was a man who was running, carrying not a woman but the tabernacle of the spirit. I had stolen the Holy of Holies of an unknown religion. I could not measure the mysterious extent of my sacrilege, its consequences in the realm of the angels, the penalties that had fallen to me. The spiritual light had made the election of a creature, it had chosen the most perfect in which to become incarnate, and immediately, the beast had pounced in order to satisfy the primordial law of pollution. And that symbolic beast was me. I was bearing the primitive powers to their culmination. I represented the extreme point of materiality. I was contamination avid to communicate itself, a living leprosy, a bounding lesion.