Bishop Foulque feared the anger of the Toulousans and only came to the city for religious ceremonies. He lived in the Château de Verfeil, which Simon de Montfort had given to him. Isarn Nébulat, the seigneur dispossessed of that town had taken refuge in Toulouse and was secretly recruiting partisans in order to take back his château and domains by armed might.
I went to find him. He was a grim and wily old wolf. With simplicity, I made him party to my resolution. He sniggered and said: “It all depends on the sum you’re asking.”
I replied that my name was Dalmas Rochemaure.
He asked me again to name a figure.
I renounced chastising such a stupid man and decided to act on my own.
I went to install myself in Verfeil under a false name. After a few days I knew the Bishop’s habits. He never went out without several men-at-arms. On a slope of his château there was a garden in the Arab mode, uniquely planted with very old and very dense box-trees. Now, Foulque had a passion: he liked snails. He slept very little and got up before sunrise. The box-trees contained snails by the thousand. Equipped with a basket, at daybreak, when the snails were enjoying the humidity of the dew, he went through the narrow pathways. When he had filled his basket he came back to the terrace of the château, spread the snails over the stones and played a mysterious game with them. Doubtless he ate them afterwards for breakfast.
My plan was rapidly settled. I had rented a room from a blacksmith from which I could get out without being seen. When the stars paled, having put on a green doublet and equipped with a pointed dagger, I climbed over the wall of the Episcopal garden. The box-trees were higher than a man and they were hick and leafy. I plunged between their branches toward the central pathway. It had rained a few hours before. Thousand of snails were moving around me.
The perfume of box is melancholy and penetrating. Perhaps it contains a magic. After half an hour, I was soaked to the skin, and singular images were presented to my eyes.
I never thought about Pierre de Castelnau, not even to rejoice in having expelled him from the earth. From one end of Christendom to the other, priests had put around the rumor that in expiring on the gilded beach of the Rhône he had only pronounced words to forgive his murderer. I had never believed it. I had contemplated him on the sand and I had had the sentiment that he had died in silence. Now, in the midst of those wet box-trees, with snails climbing over my shoes, I saw Pierre de Castelnau again, in the same morning freshness, lying with his chest opened. Someone had leaned over him immediately. A vague memory came to me of his arm lifting to seize his companion by the neck. Perhaps he had whispered, hastily, words of pardon.
A rosy radiance began to bathe the pathway while, involuntarily, I posed myself all the elements of that bizarre problem. So what? What if it were true? Perhaps the evil were not so inexorably separated from the good. They followed different paths but forgiveness remained the supreme ideal in which all took refuge at the moment of dying.
A small sound was audible, doubtless the crack of a snail-shell underfoot. In the light air, in the increasingly roseate light, I distinguished he silhouette of Bishop Foulque. He was advancing slowly, examining the ground attentively. I drew my dagger while reflecting on forgiveness and I put my finger on the tip in order to assure myself that it was not blunt.
Forgiveness was impossible for me. It was an abdication of the human, a cowardly consent to evil. But what if Pierre de Castelnau really had pardoned?
Very close to me, Bishop Foulque bent down, with great difficulty. He had shrunk. How old he was! His face was a jaundiced mask in which bile flowed just beneath the skin. However, the love of snails gave his gaze an unexpected flame. That face became brighter, for he had just perceived a snail larger than the rest, whose minuscule horns were extended toward the sky and which was situated on a branch at the height of my face. He reached out to grasp it, and he perceived me.
He saw through the foliage a man ready to pounce, but whose face reflected perplexity. The naked dagger left no doubt as to his intention.
We were close enough to touch one another. My mind was singularly active. I noticed how hideous the Bishop’s face was. His sterile cranium was bare. His nose was swollen. His cheeks were slack. He had the inhuman, extraterrestrial expression that the absolute love of money gives.30 I read as in a book the thoughts that were agitating him: what he had dreaded so much had arrived. An assassin had reached him. Crying out would be futile. Ought he to flee or to deposit in the basket the snail that he was holding and pretend not to have seen anything?
Had Pierre de Castelnau really forgiven? That problem was above all the others. I sensed that it was insoluble. I formed the unrealizable project of finding in Rome the man who was supposed to have heard that pardon whispered. Oh, why had I not jumped from my horse after having delivered the thrust of the lance and leaned over the stricken legate, close enough for him to bite me and for me to carry away the certainty of his hatred in the mark of his teeth?
Bishop Foulque, quivering with terror, had taken a few steps along the path, simulating calm. Then he threw down his basket and started to run. And I, a prisoner of the funerary enchantment that came from the box-trees and memory, watched him draw away. I had not a minute of pity for that old man whose lifted robe allowed the sight of his legs, ridiculous and deformed, as if his executioner Tancrède had exercised his instruments on them. Not for one minute did I think of forgiving him for the torture of my city and that of my race. And yet I remained immobile, because the man that had been his other self, his brother in evil, might perhaps have forgiven me before dying.
The first cry for help that he uttered woke me up. I launched myself along the narrow pathways, under the shadow on the box-trees. When I reached the breach in the wall through which I had entered, no head had yet appeared at any window in the château.
Thoughts change like the images of life. My mind, while I fled, was entirely occupied by the representation of the instrument of torture of which Tancrède flattered himself with being the inventor. That instrument, in order to hasten the confessions of the patient, broke the arms and legs at the same time. It gave me wings through the forest of Verfeil; it enabled me to traverse the Tarn like a fish when its waters barred my way.
While I swam against the current, I saw a white bird above my head. It was flying in the same direction as me. But I did not know to which species it belonged. I thought of the dove of the Holy Spirit. When I arrived at the opposite bank, I observed sadly that my dagger had slipped from its sheath and had fallen into the water.31
VII
Now, enveloped in a shepherd’s cloak and mounted on a mule, I am quitting Toulouse definitively. It is dark. The autumn wind is blowing over the banks of the Garonne. A man has just lit the two lanterns of the drawbridge. I hear him singing in the language of my ancestors. Thank God! He is a Toulousan; I have nothing to fear from him. The guard at the Narbonnais Gate is a little further away. I distinguish the stature of men of the North carved on a template of ridiculous size. I see their frightful blond beards, their bellies swollen by beer, their strange halberds. In their midst a Dominican friar is sitting, a subaltern of the Inquisition, watching those who are entering and leaving.32 He gazes at me with the eyes of a pious cat. He does not recognize me. He is deceived by the empty jars that are hanging from the flanks of my mule. He thinks: It’s a poor man going back to his village. He is only partly mistaken; it is a poor man, who is quitting the beloved city of his birth forever.
I plunge into the tenebrous route, where the nascent moonlight outlines the silhouettes of poplars. How fortunate those trees are to be solidly attached to this earth by roots and to be able to respire with their leaves the air that has passed over Toulouse! I hear the waters of the Garonne along the slopes of Pech David. I draw further away. And suddenly, I turn round. I see La Daurade, I see La Dalbade, I see Saint Sernin.
O Toulouse, what has been done to you? There are your houses, your lamps, and your towers, but you are no lo
nger the same. Your soul has been changed.
A Seneschal of the King of France now has more authority than your Capitouls. Raymond VII has been deprived of the city of his ancestors.33 It is the terrible sect of Dominicans that renders justice.
There are so many people accused of heresy that the house of the Inquisition is overflowing and the neighboring streets are filled with captives awaiting their turn to be judged. The judges are exhausted by dint of condemnations, but they condemn untiringly. Night and day, groans rise up from the subterrains of the Château Narbonnais. Dark Auvergnats who resemble tree-trumps, and fat Normans with cunning faces, are installed in the palaces of literate and delicate Toulousans. Young men dare not sing free songs in the evening under the fig-tree in the Place des Carmes. Young women attenuate the Saracen colors of their robes and adopt French fashions. The Baths have been closed because it is a sin to care for one’s body. The manuscripts in the Bibliothèque du Taur have been burned because they contain mysterious characters that might express an impious wisdom. Where now are the philosophers from Granada with their beards and turbans, who once chatted among the tombstones under the cypresses of Saint Sernin? Where are the Moorish musicians who made the sand of Asiatic deserts vibrate in their darbukas? Not a single Roman statue remains on its pedestal. No one dares recite a page of Plato aloud.
O Toulouse, I bid you adieu! I shall no longer hear the crier announcing that the fresh wine has arrived. I shall no longer laugh with the children as the Matrons of Expertise go past.34 I shall no longer see the bread being weighed in front of the capitular house. I sense, at the moment of losing them, how great those petty pleasures were.
I resume my route. The foothills of the Pyrenees are nearer. I have reached Ariège. I can no longer distinguish in the distance the contours of your eternal mass. The poplars already have another language. If I picked a fig, it would have a different taste. How could the air is when one draws away from Toulouse!
I am the guest of Montségur. From all the persecuted towns, the heretics who do not want to renounce their faith have come to take refuge in Montségur. On a mountain in the region of Foix, encircled by the gorges of the Ers and the Lectorier, deafened by rocky precipices, Esclarmonde, Vicomtesse de Gimoez, has had an impregnable fortress constructed. I find there all the faithful of the religion of the Holy Spirit. The Canastbrus are there with their fathers, their grandfathers, their sons and their grandsons, who are all animated by an excessive liking for generation. The Malhorgas, who are hairy and have blue eyes. The Nolascos are there, who are musicians and make the tower they inhabit vibrate with the perpetual sound of instruments. The western barbican is full of orphan children. The soldiers camp in the courtyard, under tents. The perfecti are in the eastern tower, and when they march at its summit, meditating in the starlight, the radiation of their thought is so powerful that the tower gives the impression of being surrounded by a blue-tinted aureole. There is a field of daisies planted by the beautiful Alix d’Escaronia, and the beautiful Pélégrina de Bruniquel can be seen with a watering-can in her hand, lavishing her cares upon a rose-bush with white flowers.
But the life of Montségur is extended underground in the forty-eight floors that are hollowed out in the mountain. Along stone galleries, subterranean rooms are superimposed that overlook the gorges of the Ers through narrow loopholes. Down below are the baths, the reserves of salt and wheat, the jars of oil, everything that Esclarmonde’s foresight has accumulated in view of a siege. There are the libraries of all the châteaux of the Midi, which, menaced with burning, have been transported one by one. There are stables, workshops for the armorers and grottos for those who, making progress toward perfection, attain it by mans of immobility and prayer. There are cells for deaconesses and rooms where they gather in order to form the mystical chain.
The deaconesses are all women who have taken a vow of chastity. When they emerge in the evening in white robes and make a tour of the château I recognize among them prostitutes from Toulouse alongside chatelaines with illustrious names. Somewhere—but no one knows where—the one whom no one must know, the invisible Pope, elected by the Synod of the Perfecti, is meditating. On the highest tower, the one turned toward the Orient, it is said, Esclarmonde de Foix is lodged. When the nights are clear, her silhouette can be seen outlined against the sky. An astrologer and a geomancer are incessantly by her side; both are seeking, in the study of the stars and the analysis of the earth, the enigma of life and death.
For a long time I have believed that I am not growing old. My strength has scarcely diminished. I have neither the time nor the possibility to count my hairs, but I am sure that they are as numerous as of old. Only their whitening betrays the presence of the years. There are the mountains where I wandered when I fled Mercus, there are the torrents where I drank, and there are the trees under which I went to sleep. Then, I came to ring the tocsin without knowing that that prophetic bell was announcing the thousand tocsins that would ring in the bewildered towns from the Rhône to Toulouse. I was young and joyful then. Now, I am aging and full of experience.
On the narrow road that I am on, there are almond branches that I move aside with my hand. It is hot; it is midday. I look between the trees and I see a stream flowing. I am going along the banks of the Ers. I remember that I once went along that river under an analogous sun. Was it the same place? No, undoubtedly, but the vegetation is the same. At the noise I make, frogs jump to the right and left, and I take care not to crush them, for parcels of the divine soul are enclosed beneath the envelope of those creatures. It was on the bank of the Ers that extended over a little beach of gilded sand that I saw the miraculous form of Esclarmonde de Foix for the first time, asleep.
What is the aspect of that form now? As the spirit of Esclarmonde has become more perfect, the flesh that was the expression of it must have withered and lost its beauty. No one can see her at Montségur. She never descends from the tower where she resides. Perhaps old age has exerted ravages on her more terrible that on other women. Perhaps she no longer has any but astrological preoccupations. How sad the law is that dictates that beauty bears the principle of its death hidden in its substance! But might she not be an exception?
Branches obstruct the path in front of me. I move them aside and am about to advance when I have difficulty retaining a cry. On a strip of sand bathed by the Ers, a woman’s form is extended beneath a veil that is partly unwound. It is evident, by the evaporation of water on her flesh, that she has just been bathing. She has three tresses, like the other. I see her face and I recognize her. It is Esclarmonde de Foix! But how is that possible? She seems younger than before.
Doubtless the sound of the shifted branches wakes her up momentarily. I distinguish beneath her eyes the metallic flash that struck my eyes when I carried her in my arms and I had, for the first time, the revelation of the mystery of the spirit. Am I not the victim of a magic spell? No, magic spells do not exist. In that case, Esclarmonde possesses the unique secret, the secret of eternal youth.
A gust of wind, come from I know not where, passes over me. And suddenly, I take a step backwards and recoil through time. I become a hirsute young man again, clad in rags, the soles of whose feet are horny by dint of having walked. I feel a desire to laugh, to run, to sound the tocsin without reason, as before. I sense that if I were thirsty I would lap instead of taking water in my hand.
Obscure larvae have taken possession of my flesh and they are stirring there in darkness. I feel a desire to pounce and seize in my arms the woman who, throughout my life, has symbolized spiritual perfection. To hold the tabernacle and profane it! An odor of oleander, an odor of sap, rises around me. The earth encourages me.
I am about to launch myself forward. I chance to look at the sky and I see a white bird flying above my head. Is it a miracle? Is it the dove of the Holy Spirit? The bird descends to the height of the treetops and then draws away. But I have received its message. I turn round on the path. In a matter of seconds I traverse the years o
f my life. My hair, which had blackened, becomes white; my feet are no longer horny; if I wanted to lap up water, I could not.
I return at a slow pace toward Montségur, toward its knights, toward its deaconesses, toward its subterranean city, wondering whether I have contemplated a reality or a dream, and meditating on the eternal youth of Esclarmonde.
Men posted on the heights signal with flames by night and the sound of trumpets by day. Cavaliers are incessantly running along the road to Lavelanet. The people arriving from Foix and Toulouse bring bad news. Pierre des Arcis, the Seneschal of the King of France in Carcassonne, and the Bishop of Albi, have gathered an army that is now within the walls of Toulouse. They have resolved to destroy Montségur, the hearth of heretics who, from the height of her rock, defy the Pope and France. As was done thirty years ago, they have promised indulgences and they have put crosses on the breasts of knights to stimulate their ardor.
From all the Pyrenean châteaux where there are Albigensians, voluntary defenders come running. They are seen on the narrow path that snakes in zigzags and climbs to the gate of the château turned toward Lavelanet. There are peasants carrying their entire fortune, sacks of flour, or vegetables on their back, and knights that only come with their sword and lance. Old Raymond de Pérelha, who is the titular Seigneur de Montségur, stands on the threshold to welcome them. I have been there for a long time like an idler, and I marvel that such a great quantity of men, mules and horses can find places in the subterranean galleries of Montségur.
The Blood of Toulouse Page 18
