The Blood of Toulouse

by Maurice Magre

  Marie had been reputed during her lifetime to be a saint. All day long she ironed doublets in her father’s little shop in the Rue Saint-Rome, murmuring prayers. Sometimes, she put down her iron and invited a spirit invisible to everyone else, which she had perceived in the street, to come in, or she announced an impending event that never failed to come to pass. My mother, who liked her a lot, had taken me to see her. I remembered her icy hands on my forehead and the shiver of fear she had experienced on touching me. Under the influence of Pierre Maurand, she had converted to the Albigensian heresy.

  The last of her prophecies, which had been the most widely reported, had announced that the spirit of evil would be manifest in Toulouse by three detestable creatures: a man who would wear a miter, a man who would be dressed in red, and another barded in armor. Bishop Foulque had been designated as the first, the legate Pierre de Castelnau was the second; the advent of the third was dreaded. When Marie the draper had died, at the age of twenty-five, she had asked to be buried in the cemetery of the plague-victims. An immense crowd had accompanied her there, singing canticles.

  Now her coffin was broken by the executioner with blows of a pickax. Thus Pope Innocent had ordered.8 The bodies of heretics had no right to repose in the earth, in the same way that their souls were condemned to eternal suffering. The judgment dated from the previous day. The ashes of Marie the draper were to be thrown to the wind. But it is not ashes that are found in the coffin in which a dead woman has reposed for more than a year. The rumor was going around that when the planks were opened a sweet odor would spread around, and Marie would be perceived, her eyes closed and her face calm, as at the moment of her death.

  I was in the front rank of the audience. The coffin was upright when the lid was detached. I saw an almost black mummy to which the absence of a gaze and singularly long and apparent teeth gave an atrocious aspect. The body could not be seen under the putrescence of the garments and I firmly believe that it no longer existed.

  Pierre de Castelnau had unrolled a parchment and he read the sentence of the ecclesiastical tribunal to the phantasmal head. A wretchedly-clad old man tugged my arm then. I recognized Pierre Maurand. He drew me outside the cemetery wall. He seemed neither indignant nor saddened. I only understood much later what he said to me.

  “As long as the body subsists, it draws the spirit by its attraction. Fortunate are those whose rapid dissolution permits the soul to launch itself toward the superior regions where one is no longer separated by form. It might be that Marie was still retained to the earth by the link of a memory or an image, perhaps by love of her smoothing-iron. The blows of the executioner’s pickax have just liberated her forever.”

  On the day before Good Friday I accompanied my friend Samuel Manasses to a meeting of notable Jews where he was to replace his father, summoned to a patient in Saint Cyprien. While I waited I paced back and forth outside the door of the rabbi in whose home the meeting was taking place. I noticed when he came out that he was even paler than usual. I asked him the reason.

  An old custom dictated that on Good Friday a Jew presented himself during mass at the door of Saint Étienne’s Cathedral. He had to knock on the door three times. A priest opened the door to him and asked his name. He replied: “I am a member of the race that crucified Jesus.” Then the priest slapped him and the people assembled in the square accompanied the Jew back to his hose, booing him.

  Thanks to the enlightened authority of the Comtes of Toulouse, that custom had fallen into desuetude. The priest touched the Jew’s cheek lightly and the crowd did not make any demonstration. The day before, the members of the Jewish community met in the rabbi’s house and drew lots to determine the name of the man who would knock on the door of Saint Étienne.

  “It’s my father who has been designated,” Manasses told me, with trembling lips.

  I replied that I did not see any reason for distress in that.

  “My father has none of the faults habitual to men and I often think that God wanted to make him a model of perfection. However, he has allowed himself to become proud. Oh, very rarely, and he repents immediately. I think that he will be humiliated to have to fulfill this mission tomorrow, and I’m suffering for the undeserved punishment that he’ll experience.”

  Isaac Manasses had returned when we arrived at his house. It was agreed that Samuel would read me certain passages from a manuscript of Maimonides that he had received recently. As he took the manuscript from the casket in which it reposed the old physician asked which of his coreligionists had been designated at the rabbi’s house. And I heard Samuel reply that it was Lévy, the money-changer of the Rue des Nobles. Then, in a voice that had become calm again, he read me pages of an elevated philosophy, of which I did not understand a word, but which I admired unreservedly in order to give him pleasure.

  The following morning, at the hour of the mass, I went to the Place Saint-Étienne. There was an unusual crowd. I asked the reason, and a few bourgeois told me that they had come because of the novelty of what was about to happen. Pierre de Castelnau no longer wanted a priest to soil his hand on Good Friday by touching a Jew. The slap was a punishment that was the prerogative of the executioner.

  I leapt on to the rim of the fountain in the middle of the square in order to se, over he heads, what was happening at the door of the church. The door opened slowly and in its frame there was the violet cape and black hat by which notable Jews were recognized. But the cape seemed too large, the hat too low. The silhouette was very paltry. It was suddenly dominated by the broad and beaming face of the executioner. I saw an iron-gloved fist like a thinking mallet rise and fall upon the Jew, who fell to the ground.

  When he got up, I recognized Samuel Manasses. The waxen whiteness of his skin was stained by two trickles of blood. He remained unsteady, and for a few seconds I perceived behind him in a stone corridor Christians inclined beneath the capitals of the great nave, candles sparkling like souls in torment, and the Christ of the altar more distant than one of the phantoms glimpsed in the perspectives of dreams.

  The door closed behind Samuel and in front of him the ebbing crowd made a space. Within living memory, that Toulousan crowd had never shown hatred for the Jews. In the presence of the livid and bleeding young man, it uttered a clamor of malediction and bristled with extended fists. But the poor fellow did not have to cross the terrible void that separated him from a wall of furious men. He looked in all directions as if in search of a support, to escape the universe of violence into which he had suddenly been projected, and he fell flat on the ground. He was dead.

  It was at that moment that I began to be haunted by a obsessive image. I perceived it for the first time at the burial of Samuel Manasses. Jews could only be buried after sunset and their cemetery was in a remote corner of Saint Cyprien. Night was falling when the cortege went along the quays of the Garonne. Four young men were carrying the coffin, in which Isaac Manasses had insisted on placing on his son’s breast the incomprehensible manuscript of Maimonides. I was the only Christian there and I was bringing up the rear.

  Such as I had seen him pass along the same quay a few days before, Pierre Castelnau went past me on horseback, with his bulging eyes and the red patches on his cheeks. I felt the swish of his cloak, and I saw him, in the crepuscular shadows, place himself at the head of the procession and precede it proudly.

  Without reflecting that the horse had made no sound on the paving stones and that no one seemed astonished by the inconceivable impudence of the legate, I ran forward and overtook the cortege in order to seize the silent horseman’s bridle and drag him forcibly away from the dead man’s route. But I did not find him.

  As a door was open near the bridge I thought that he had disappeared through it. Then I perceived him a little further away and I retraced my steps, having thought that I had distinguished that he was now following the cortege instead of preceding it. But beneath their violet capes ad the shadows of their hats, the Jews did not seem scandalized by the presence
of the horseman. They followed me with their eyes in consternation, wondering what that Christian, an old friend of the dead man, was doing, gesticulating and running to the right and left, for no reason.

  VI

  My father thought about establishing me brilliantly and he succeeded in it. One morning, he made me put on my best clothes and announced to me that we were expected at the Château Narbonnais. He was going to introduce me to the Comte de Toulouse, who would do something for me in recognition of the services that he had rendered him.

  I was very emotional. I knew, however, that Comte Raymond was a man of perfect simplicity. It was not the effective importance of the great man that impressed me; I was emotional in approaching the man most celebrated in Christendom for his goodness. I believed then, naively, that virtues were manifest physically by some sign and I would not have been surprised, finding myself in the Comte’s presence, if I had seen an aureole around his head.

  When we were introduced, he was sitting like a schoolboy before a long marble table on which his arms, a golden cross over a black key, were represented in mosaic. He was drinking white wine that had just been brought to him from Guyenne. Without paying any heed to my salutations and neglecting any formula of welcome, he declared to us that the wine was a little too sweet for his taste and he was particularly insistent that we take account of it. He had goblets brought for us.

  He was only satisfied when my father and I had declared that the wine was, indeed, too sweet. He rubbed his hands, fixed me with the little eyes of an amicable wolf, and then gave me a tap on the shoulder, uttering a loud bust of laughter, saying: “It was you who sounded the tocsin in the abbey of Mercus on the day when the...”

  He did not pronounce the legate’s name.

  “You’re the sort of courageous fellow I need. I’ll take you as a squire. You’ll start today. I like prompt decisions.”

  The incapacity to make decisions was almost a malady in him. For small matters he strove to accomplish abrupt actions, thus convincing himself that he was a resolute man.

  “Thibaut here,” he added, “will teach you your métier.” He designated the squire who had poured the wine and gave the impression of being a wily fellow with the appearance of a dullard, of whom there are so many in our country.

  “And you’ll drink very dry Comminges wine.”

  I was to remain associated in his mind with a pleasantry relating to wine. For he often call out to me subsequently, winking and repeating: “The poor people of Guyenne, eh? They drink sweet wine!”

  In his fortress of the Château Narbonnais, the Comte de Toulouse had his magistrate, his knights and his men-at-arms, but he lived in the Rue des Nobles, in a newly-constructed house surrounded by a vast garden. That house had its legend and its mystery. Many beautiful Toulousan women had come to find him there after curfew. It was said that the King of Aragon, in order to win his amity, had made him a present of Arab captives of a marvelous beauty and that he had a harem modeled on that King’s. Songs were heard in the evenings and lights were seen under the trees.

  Married five times, Comte Raymond retained amour for all his wives, even those he had repudiated, and even the one who was dead. He wept when the name of Jeanne d’Angleterre was pronounced, because that queen had been so jealous of him that she could not be in Paradise. He sent messages to Comtesse Béatrix, who—on his orders—was imprisoned in a cloister in Béziers. Every liaison, even temporary, with a great lady or a poor girl, procured him anxieties and chagrins. He only consoled himself then in the midst of bizarre animals brought together in the garden in the Rue des Nobles.

  It was there that Thibaut took me.

  I learned from him that, although newly arrived, I had the full confidence of my seigneur, because I had been at the Saint Sernin affair and I had set fire to the oak. Thibaut was taciturn but he knew how to listen, and I rapidly inspired a great admiration in him by means of my discourse. He completed my education in the handling of weapons, taught me the science of armories, and informed me as to how one tames and unleashes falcons.

  I saw Comte Raymond every day, and he seemed increasingly worried. His little eyes only recovered an expression of joy when he went past his aviaries in the midst of the fluttering of wings. The peacocks displayed their tails around him, a yellow and blue macaw perched on his shoulder; his tame stork, to which he referred as the twenty-fifth Capitoul, followed him clicking its beak.

  “Do you know,” he said to me, one day, “that the Albigensian heretics forbid themselves to kill the smallest animal, even a fly? It’s because they profess that respect for living things that I protect them and I love them.”

  A turtle-dove had come to settle on his hand. He raised it gently in the direction of the sun.

  “See how cleverly God has colored that plumage, how he has made it pass from white to iron gray and then to a blue that is not found in any sky. It’s certainly a great sin to shed blood.”

  I knew that the Comte de Toulouse had ceased to go hunting the previous year. Without addressing himself directly to me, he went on: “The heretics are right on many points. But then, what of papal infallibility? There is, however, one thing about them that I don’t understand...”

  He looked at me and a smile expanded his face.

  “No, I can’t understand that perfection is in chastity.”

  I was not to see that smile again for a very long time.

  It was on the evening of that same day that the rumor spread in Toulouse that Comte Raymond had just been excommunicated. The ceremony had taken place in Saint Étienne’s Cathedral, but only in the presence of a few priests. It was said that when the legate had thrown the candle to the ground and trampled it underfoot, the hem of his robe had caught fire. No one had been found to carry, as was customary, an open coffin to the house of the excommunicate, and the legate and the bishop, fearing the indignation of the Toulousan people, had renounced it.

  It was learned at the same time that the legate had left Toulouse and had departed for Rome. That departure, singularly, did not attenuate the sentiment of his occult presence around me. In fact, as he drew away along the roads, the obsession with him that I had became more precise and more frequent. It was multiplied by the similar obsession whose phantom I read in Comte’s Raymond’s gaze.

  At the beginning of the century, in Toulouse, excommunication was not such a terrible thing as it is today. For a great number of people, the Church was synonymous with debauchery and simony. The rumor was accredited that in the time of the first Christians, the mysteries had been lost, error had taken possession of the clergy and, as a poison slowly ravages an organism, it had changed the living flesh into putrescence. Wealth and enjoyment had replaced the vow of poverty. Satan now inhabited the cathedrals, flowed in the water of baptism and was condensed in the bread of the eucharist; priests officiated in his name. Distant Rome was like a Babel in which was enthroned, beneath the accursed cross, an Antichrist with a heart of stone.

  On the first day, the Comte refused to see anyone. He stayed with his birds. Thibaut and I frequently heard him talking to his favorite stork, as the only confidant capable of giving him useful advice. On the second day he summoned his constable, his magistrate and the Capitoul Arnaud Bernard, renowned for his wisdom and his courage. They remained enclosed together for a long time. Then he gave Thibaut the order to prepare his arms and his fastest horse. We knew that all the armed men in the Château Narbonnais were on foot and ready to leave.

  In the vestibule of his house, swinging his baldric in his right hand, he marched back and forth, questioning me directly:

  “If I refused to recognize the Pope’s orders henceforth, if I sent the legate’s severed head to Rome in a casket sealed with my arms, would the whole Midi not be behind me? That’s what Arnaud Bernard advises me to do, and he’s right. But why does he advise me to do it so forcefully? Who knows? Who knows? In spite of his years, perhaps he hasn’t forgotten the story of his wife.”

  Arnaud Bernaud’s w
ife, who was now old, was said to have loved the Comte in her youth, and to have told him so.

  The next day, at first light, were took the road to Carcassonne. The Comte had resolved to take possession of the legate and to keep him as a hostage until the excommunication was lifted. He had only taken fifty cavaliers with him, but a small army, under the orders of the constable, was to join us if the legate took refuge in Montpellier or some fortified abbey.

  As the towers of Carcassonne were outlined before us, the Comte called an abrupt halt. His face had brightened. A messenger returned in all haste in the direction of Toulouse. The army was unnecessary. The constable could go back, with his soldiers.

  “There’s only one way to act,” the Comte repeated. “Conciliation, promises, cunning.”

  But it was better to catch up with the Comte before he quit the Comte’s Estates.

  We stayed overnight in Carcassonne, only to depart again immediately. We learned in Béziers that he had stopped for a day to confer with the bishop of the city. Perhaps he was meditating having the ceremony of excommunication repeated in all the cathedrals of the Midi. In Montpellier he had left the city two hours before, but he had talked to the bishop for a long time.

  My horse, faster than the others, had carried me on ahead. I had the sensation of realizing a dream, of pursuing an obsession that my brain had created long before.

  Finally, we arrived in Saint Gilles on the bank of the Rhône, where we were told that the legate had just gone into the abbey to spend the night.9