The Blood of Toulouse

by Maurice Magre

  I remember that there was such a delicate tint of orange in the sky that morning, which Aude pointed out to me with the tip of her little finger, making the remark that it was the same shade as her robe.

  As I went out to go to the Saint Sernin Gate, my sister followed me. She had an air of resolution and she told me that she had reflected and that she too wanted to participate by action in the defense of the city.

  Almost all of the women of Toulouse, under the direction of the Dame de Roaix, spent all day on the ramparts, repairing weapons, bringing arrows and stones and caring for the wounded. The Dame de Roaix wore a breastplate and a sword and participated in the sorties.

  I tried to dissuade Aude from accompanying me. She had been known to lose consciousness after touching the blade of a sword. She was too frail even to hand someone a crossbow. She could not render any service.

  But Aude shook her head and I saw her marching by my side with a firm step, in her dress the color of the sky. She went more rapidly than me, and I remarked that there was something strange about her.

  Perhaps, I thought, she had had a presentment of my death the night before. I remembered having had a dream that could be interpreted in that sense.

  That was it! She wanted to be present in my last moments.

  I was touched by the effort she was making, but I felt pity for myself. Around Saint Sernin, armed men were passing at a run. They were shouting that the Montolieu Gate was under attack. I recognized Ratier de Caussade the Rapid, who was in charge of grouping the available soldiers and taking them to the point attacked.

  I had been instructed not to quit the Saint Sernin Gate whatever happened. I was satisfied. The place where my sister was would be exempt from attack since the fighting that day was at the Montolieu Gate. I guided her up an improvised stairway to the roof of the former Saint Sernin cloister. It was partly demolished, but the section of the roof that remained was higher than the ramparts and all kinds of catapults had been installed there, several of which, invented by Bernard Paraire, could hurl large blocks of stone. There were usually women whom Aude knew there. I laughed as I went up the stairway, and said to myself: Dreams and presentiments are vain fictions.

  From the roof of the cloister one overlooked the devastated countryside. Frédéric de Frezols, who was in command of the Saint Sernin Gate, was on watch there all night, and went to sleep when I arrived, but that morning, he had not waited for me. He was on his knees, his hands joined, and the fervor of his prayer had thrown him into a profound trance.

  As I looked into the distance I saw that the horizon was abnormally barred by a hill of dust. The air around me was motionless. What was that abrupt wind, which was not making itself felt in Toulouse? I heard the dull sound of an enormous number of hoofbeats. Almost at the same instant a trumpet burst forth beneath me. Voices cried: “There they are!” The Seigneur de Frezols woke up and started running, giving incoherent orders. Then I suddenly remembered that I had put on, without thinking about it, a helmet devoid on a metal visor. It was too late to go and change it. Death would strike me in the face, doubtless by the intermediary of an arrow.

  The entire countryside was now covered with cavaliers. They had slowed their march, but their horses could be heard whinnying and their arms could be seen glinting. And their number was immense. The attack on Montolieu was a feint. The entire army was about to mount a mass attack the foot of Saint Sernin.

  I shouted that it was necessary to maneuver all the catapults and attempt to stop the enemy under an avalanche of stones. By my count, there were no more than fifty archers on that section of the ramparts.

  The cries stopped momentarily. All eyes turned toward the enemy. Simon de Montfort had just detached himself from the line of his cavaliers. He knew the effect of terror that the sight of him produced and he always strove to appear theatrically. The solar light made his helmet, shield and even his spurs radiant, so that he gave the impression of being molded in light from head to foot. His raised sword was like a supernatural ray that communicated with the sun.

  As if in a dream, I saw men jostling one another in order to obey my voice. Two men came to set themselves at the tourniquet of the largest of the catapults. A dwarf, shouting in order to manifest his zeal, was hauling a basket overflowing with stones. I recognized that the stones were fragments of broken statues. The previous year, Bishop Foulque had had all the pagan statues that were in the houses smashed. He had exorcized the fragments solemnly in the Place Saint-Sernin, and those fragments had remained heaped up in a corner of the cemetery. We had been making use of them for days to load the catapults. I recognized in the basket a head of Minerva that seemed to be looking at me. That face resembled, in a marvelous fashion, Esclarmonde de Foix. Esclarmonde de Foix, decapitated, reposed in the dwarf’s basket.

  A symbol of the times! I thought.

  All of that only lasted a few seconds. The dwarf took the head of Minerva and placed it in the leather pocket of the nearest of his catapults. The cord was taut, but even though the catapult was very small it was very resistant. The dwarf made a futile effort to trigger it, and as the thoughts precipitated in my mind with the same ardor as the Toulousans during the assault on a tower, I thought of Ulysses and his divine bow. But the dwarf uttered a howl. An arrow had just traversed his ear and entered his neck at an angle. He fell, and remained sitting down in a stream of blood.

  Then my sister Aude, who had remained motionless, took a step forward, seized the cord of the catapult, triggered it with a single easy movement of her arm, and sent the head of Minerva, the head of Esclarmonde, soaring through sunlit space.

  I did not see the curve of that predestined stone. An immense clamor told me toward whom a sage and inexorable destiny had carried it. In the midst of the splash of radiance, the luminous knight, the conductor of the evil, the chief, his body henceforth headless, remained upright on his horse for one more second. Then he collapsed at a stroke on the Toulousan soil that he hated, and in which he had sown so much suffering.27

  “Simon de Montfort is dead!” clamored a voice that seemed to emerge from the Basilica of Saint Sernin.

  “He is dead!” cried the ramparts.

  “He is dead!” cried the city.

  Through several gates, the Toulousans emerged and surged forward. An enchantment was terminated, a diabolical magic had just come to an end by the play of a stone launched by an innocent hand. It appears that the force of evil, when it is struck at its source, collapses suddenly, seems to dissolve, as if it were made of nothingness. The immense army that enveloped Toulouse was obliged to flee precipitately. In the direction of the gallows, the monks and the priests were heard for a long time singing funerary hymns around the body of the headless warrior.

  In the evening, exhausted by a day of combat but satisfied that no arrow had struck me in the face, I returned to the Saint Sernin Gate and I climbed up to the roof of the abbey. Tents were still burning in the distance, casting an uncertain glow.

  To my right, the skeleton of “the Gate” was smoking and falling apart. The dead formed small tranquil hillocks. A crazed horse was spinning round and sometimes rearing up on its front feet. A breastplate glistened like a forgotten sun. In a charred wheat-field, a tall thin man was running. His hands were tied behind his back and he had a sword embedded in his chest. Doubtless one of Montfort’s soldiers had struck that prisoner before fleeing. He was running with what remained of his strength to die among his brothers, a symbol of the martyrized city, eternally alive in spite of the wound in the heart of its stones.

  V

  Aude died. At least, she died according to the conception that humans have of death. One day, the movement of the blood stopped, the breath ceased to exhale. There was an increasing deterioration of the flesh beneath the apparent immobility of the physical form. Next to her, I understood for the first time that such a phenomenon is wrongly called death.

  Aude had been unable to console herself for having launched the liberating stone.


  “I’ve finally accomplished a good deed that is making me suffer,” she said, with a sad smile.

  She became silent, attentive to voices and signs that she alone could comprehend. She grew weak. When she had the certainty that life was about to withdraw from her body she displayed an altogether unhabitual joy. Her final days were passed in expectation of the light realm to which she was about to go. It made me think of the period of my childhood when I was waiting to be taken to the country to the home of my uncle de Rabastens. I was the only one to hear her final words, for Aude did not want to be assisted by anyone.

  “May he pardon me for having taken his life, as all those he has caused to die will one day pardon him.”

  An improbable wish, I thought, through my tears.

  I was tempted to follow my sister into that world, the desirability of which she had praised to me, and which drew its beauty from the absence of any sensible form. But life was solidly attached to my body by carnal roots. I resolved to study the Albigensian religion and to strive to become pure, as she prescribed. I went to find Frédéric de Roaix, the Capitoul’s brother, who had once taken me to a heretical gathering where I had heard mention of the Holy Spirit. I said to him that I wanted a higher knowledge than that possessed by ordinary men, and I added that I believed that I had become more intelligent than I had been in the past.

  At first he did not seem to believe me; then he told me that I was a worthy man full of courage and that it was necessary for me not to worry about anything. I persisted, and he decided to give me the instruction that I requested of him.

  Like all persons who deal with subtle things, he did so in a deliberately complicated language and with which he strove to mingle words little used in ordinary parlance. I asked him several times whether he could not explain himself more clearly. He smiled benevolently then and I understood that he was making an effort not to send away the imbecile that I was. I remain convinced, however, that it ought to be possible to say everything in clear language.

  I understood that there had been a primitive teaching reported by Bartholomew, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ who had been sent to evangelize Persia and India. In distant India Bartholomew had been instructed instead than instructing. He had returned to Hieropolis in Phrygia, and there, while continuing to preach the gospel, he had given orally an instruction that was different in many points from that of Jesus.28

  His disciples, struck by the radiant force of the truth, had collected his words and had transmitted them in a secret manner, for they enclosed a substance contrary to all human society.

  Life is evil in its essence and it is necessary to destroy the desire that everyone bears within him, and which is the cause of all evil. The force of that desire precipitates us after death into a new terrestrial incarnation and that course through human forms is endless if we do not discover the secret by means of which one attains the bliss of perfect intelligence. That secret is revealed to the person who attains the Holy Spirit, the divine wisdom. Then, the course is terminated, and the human being reenters via love into the serenity of God.

  I was touched by the verity of those things, but I could not forbid myself a great sadness because of that condemnation of life. The splendor of the sun, feminine forms and the stones of Toulouse continued to enchant me. Sitting in my garden, meditating on the Sophia of the Perfecti, I watched a bee settle on a fruit, a branch agitate, or the shadow of a bird pass over a flower-bed, and I felt remorse in finding the charm of perishable beauty in those images. I was only able to understand much later that the bee, the shadow of the bird, and the moving branch, are all the more beautiful when one has arrived by detachment in the plenitude of love.

  One evening, at about five o’clock, a messenger summoned me on behalf of the Comte. He had made me a knight and now treated me as an equal. Almost every evening I went to converse with him in the home of a certain Hugues Jean, whom he liked because of his great simplicity and who lived in a house in the outlying district behind Saint Sernin. I put a certain malice into not hurrying.

  The Comte must have been waiting for me with a certain impatience, for I perceived him making signs at me from a first floor window. Now, it happened that while I was climbing the staircase, the Comte suffered one of those internal shocks that are sometimes produced in old men. As he opened the door, he let himself fall into an armchair.

  “You’ve taken your time,” Hugues Jean said to me. “The Comte de Toulouse has been waiting for you to make us both a communication of great importance.”

  I understood, in looking at the Comte, that he was about to die. He did, in fact, have something to say, but he had just been struck by a paralytic immobility that only permitted him to emit inarticulate sounds. Only his feet were stirring. Eventually, they stopped. His gaze expressed a formidable desire. Hugues Jean and I were of the same opinion. That desire concerned religious assistance. But which? Doubtless he wanted to confess. But to whom?

  For years the Comte de Toulouse had been accompanied everywhere by the Albigensian perfectus Bertrand Martin. He had often said to his intimates that he adhered fundamentally to the new religion. When he felt ill he said: “Quickly, go fetch Bertrand Martin.” On the other hand, he had recently confessed to Catholic priests, and he had secretly taken communion at the Church of La Daurade. Numerous excommunications weighed upon him, but the priests had turned a blind eye.

  A few months before, Bishop Foulque had returned to Toulouse and the Comte had been obliged to treat him kindly. The Bishop had hastened to remind the clergy that the major excommunication that weighed upon the Comte could only be lifted by the Pope. He had promised to write in his favor, but time had passed and the Comte had summoned Bertrand Martin again. Who was he asking for now with his twisted and silent lips?

  “It doesn’t matter; it’s the same God,” Hugues Jean said to me in a low voice, a man of good sense, but a trifle vulgar.

  I laid my master down on a bed that was at the back of the room. The imploring and terrified expression of his gaze overwhelmed me with pity. I regretted not being a priest in order to give him the absolution and peace for which he was asking. I even deliberated as to whether I ought not swear to him by Jesus Christ that I had become a perfectus without telling him and make a simulacrum of a consolamentum.

  I did not have time. There was a racket in the house. The door opened noisily. I saw the Abbot of Saint Sernin appear. He was followed by several of his canons, whose file I saw filling the staircase. The Abbot, recently returned to Toulouse with Foulque, was a hard-hearted man with an ill-omened visage. Doubtless some servant had informed him prematurely of the Comte’s death. I assume that the latter’s immobility confirmed that death for him, although he scarcely darted a glance at him. He said in a severe voice: “The body of the Comte de Toulouse belongs to the Abbey of Saint Sernin.

  I leaned toward him swiftly and said in a low voice: “But, thank God, our Seigneur the Comte is not dead. He is only paralyzed.”

  From the corner of my eye I could see that on his bed, my master was making an enormous effort to recover the power of speech.

  Instead of verifying what I said, the Abbot of Saint Sernin recoiled in disgust and said, turning to his canons: “Throw this disgusting heretic out. His presence is a pollution next to the body of our Seigneur Raymond.”

  I had neither the time, nor the desire, to express the comicality of inviting the canons to throw me out.

  “The Comte is alive,” I said, turning toward those faces of stone.

  Then the stairway filled with tumult and, jostling the canons, who were trying to prevent them from passing, several Knights Hospitaller of Saint John of Jerusalem irrupted into the room.

  “The Comte’s body belongs to the Abbey,” proclaimed the Abbot de Saint Sernin in a peremptory tone.

  “It belongs to the Hospitallers,” replied the prior of the Hospitallers, in a thunderous voice.

  Comte Raymond was narrowly linked to the Knights Hospitaller. He gav
e them alms. He had confided his testament to them. He had probably asked them to bury him. That privilege involved precious prerogatives. The community to which it belonged received offerings of all kinds for three days.

  “The Comte isn’t dead!” I shouted with all my might.

  But the tumult drowned out my voice. The prior of the Hospitallers, depriving himself abruptly of his white cloak ornamented with a golden cross, threw it over the bed as a sign of possession. The Abbot de Saint Sernin tried to tear him away. The prior struck him on the shoulder with the palm of his open hand. The Abbot uttered a strident cry and attempted to claw the prior. Coming to grips, the Hospitallers and the canons tried to throw one another out of the room.

  I precipitated myself toward my master and succeeded in casting the cloak aside. But now the Comte was gasping. The horror of the scene unfolding around him or the terror of not receiving absolution had hastened the advent of the power that takes human souls elsewhere. His eyes were no longer soliciting any pardon. When Hugues Jean and I leaned over their extinct flame, they no longer reflected anything but a void.

  VI

  The Comte de Toulouse was not yet buried.29 The Hospitallers carried him away by force and placed him in an open coffin before which the Toulousans came to weep. But Bishop Foulque gave them an order not to deposit the excommunicate in holy ground. To the lamentations of the people, he replied that it was necessary to await the decision of the Pope. It never came. The coffin was closed and it passed from the Hospitallers’ reception room to a corner of their chapel, and then to a more obscure corner of a small lumber room, in which gardening tools were stored.

  In that epoch, I meditated a great deal on the manner in which events are connected and the destiny that had presided over all my actions. As Marie the draper had once prophesied, evil, in order to make my homeland suffer, had incarnated itself in three men, the one clad in red, the one barded in iron and the one who wore a miter. I had pierced the heart of the first with my own hand. My sister Aude had killed the second by throwing a stone. It was up to me to cause the death of the third, who was the most evil.