Here is the taciturn Roger de Mirepoix, who is charged with commanding the combatants. Dispossessed of his château, where Simon de Montfort put his companion Guy de Lévis, he set forth with a few cavaliers on a moonless night to attempt to take it by force. He has renounced it now and his face is as redoubtably closed as the gate of his lost fortress. Here are Palauqui de Foix, Delga du Lauragais and Louis du Gers, by whose side I fought in Toulouse. They are valiant. Were they the same age as me before? They are now much older. The problem of time is a mystery.
Here are Loup de Foix the Intrepid, and Jean Cambitor, the warrior magician whose buckler has two sides; the face protects from swords, the reverse is a mirror in which, with the point of his dagger, he makes phantoms appear. Here is Roger de Massabrac, who has the evil eye. He turns away as he speaks to his friends and widens his eyes in the presence of his enemies, because, he says, he can fell them with his stare. Here is Amaury Nebulat, the crank; every day, at noon, he throws his helmet on the ground and tears off his clothes; he swears that he will live naked henceforth, in order to rediscover the veritable purity that can only be obtained in the state of simplicity of the first man.
Suddenly, my eyes widen and I start trembling. A woman on horseback, whom one might take for an adolescent, advances toward the gate of Montségur. She wears a sword, she has a silver helmet and is armored like a knight. I recognize the oval of her face and the profundity of her eyes. It is Esclarmonde de Foix, in whom the ideal of my youth is incarnate. I was not dreaming when I saw her on the water’s edge. The pure spirit has been obliged to take up the sword and don iron because of the harshness of the times. But here it is, alive, climbing toward Montségur.
The young woman leaps down from her horse slightly. She addresses a few words to Raymond de Pérelha and immediately seems to be looking for someone. I had noted with surprise that men of some importance who were entering did not fail to salute respectfully a little, insignificant old woman who was sitting under a fig-tree on the threshold of the interior courtyard. I had scarcely glanced at her. There are two men clad in black by her sides. She is extraordinarily wrinkled and her dress is so simple that one might take her for a servant. It is her for whom the young woman is searching. Scarcely has she seen her than she runs forward, falls to her knees and kisses hr hands.
Before whom can Esclarmonde the eternal be prostrating herself thus? I lean toward one of the innumerable Canastbru sons, who is standing beside me, and I interrogate him about the wrinkled old lady. He considers me with a dolorous amazement, as one might consider someone insensate or sacrilegious. He asks whether I am joking about that which is sacred. Then, seeing my innocence, he says: “But that’s Esclarmonde de Foix, Vicomtesse de Gimoez, who has come down for the first time today in order to greet her niece, Esclarmonde d’Alion.”
And he moves aside swiftly, for all the Canastbrus pride themselves on intelligence, and that one must blush to be near a man as ignorant as me.
But I stand aside even more swiftly. I have just felt the pain of a lacerating wound. I need to walk, to run, to exteriorize my disappointment. Woe betide the man who believes in a miracle, even a miracle of the spirit. Nature is atrociously deprived of them. The laws of the flesh are inexorable. No divine force can install itself in a form that does not perish, in order to make beauty radiate.
Old age is stronger than the spirit. My ideal chimera has faded since the time when I created it.
O Lord, if nothing endures, no living forms, nor monuments, nor the images of gods, no expression of perfection, it is because life, as my brothers the Albigensians say, is only an evil illusion, a succession of dolors that it is necessary to reject as quickly as possible, in order to attain the realm of the true life in which everything is stable perfection and immutable amour!
VIII
In the leaden circle of mountains, between the ferruginous streams and the mute firs, Montségur with the hermetic towers gives the impression of a tomb looming up against the autumn sky. Pierre des Arcis’ army slowly envelops the plateau bordered with precipices at the summit of which the château stands.
On the stone esplanade that overlooks the Ers, we gaze at the floating banners and hovering crosses, and we count the machines of war. We laugh at their pettiness. Night falls. The stars light up. The valleys fill with fires. I am now almost alone in front of the château. There is a twisted oak that deploys its branches over the abyss. A stone bench has been built beside it, on which I am sitting. But this place, at the same hour, ought to be occupied by a person of importance, for I have scarcely sat down when someone runs forward and touches me on the shoulder with a hand. I barely have time to stand up and move aside in the shadow, and I see Esclarmonde de Foix advancing.
The rumor has been running round the château for several days that she is going to die. For me, that is a statement that has no meaning. The Esclarmonde who lived in me died when I saw her again and wept. But she has resuscitated slowly, a little more every day, and I am beginning to understand that the only ideal creatures are those that are deprived of faces and bodies and are above death.
I watch the chatelaine of Montségur walk slowly under the oak. I had thought her small. She appears to me to be tall. I cannot distinguish her wrinkles. She gives the impression of being carved in transparent ivory. The old Seigneur de Pérelha has approached her and he tries to console her for some dolor of which I am ignorant. Both of them lean forward, and scrutinize the darkness. I hear a term that returns to their lips: the Holy Spirit, the spirit...
And suddenly I hear Esclarmonde say, wringing her hands and raising her head, as if to take the stars as her witness: “My God! With an entire life of efforts, I have not been able to do anything for the truth, I have not served the spirit.”
Close at hand, a trumpet sounds. Six horsemen appear on the sheer road that leads to the château. They must be expected because the watchmen utter joyful appeals, waving torches. The gate opens. I see, under the helmets, six male adolescent faces. They are the six children that Esclarmonde de Foix has had by the Vicomte de Gimoez.
The Seigneur de Pérelha murmurs, while she goes toward them: “Look, life has taken charge of responding to you.”
The siege of Montségur had endured for a month and I could not contrive to understand the mysterious intoxication that reigned in the château. I thought at first that it was the joy that war causes, but the joy in question was very different from the one that I had been able to see in the course of my life among combatants. It was a joy without exterior manifestation, a pure joy of the soul. It began to spread on the third day of the siege, when the rumor ran around that Esclarmonde de Foix was dead. That news was whispered from one to another, without comment. It caused no apparent affliction. There was no collective prayer. No one knew where on the mountain her remains had been deposited. Even in Montségur, the Cathar rite of secret burial was practiced, which had been in usage for a long time because of the folly that the bishops had of violating the tombs of heretics in order to rob them of the repose of death.
From that moment on, however, everyone had more feverish gestures and a bizarre glimmer of delight in the gaze. I could not understand that astonishing joy at all. It is true that the fortress seemed impregnable. The triangular mountain of Montségur was so vast, so bristling with precipices, that the royal troops would never be numerous enough to encircle it completely. But those considerations did not appear to me to be sufficient to explain the reigning state of mind.
It was the joyful Arnaud Boubila who enlightened me. He was a simple man who had a slight paunch and who slept in the cell next to mine. He was so cheerful that I often heard him laughing on his own behind the partition that separated me from him. He had been a shepherd in his youth and, in memory of the past, he nourished a goat-kid of which he was very fond and allowed to sleep in his arms. He glorified himself for having been with d’Alfaro at the Avignonnet affair. Several Inquisitors had been massacred there.35 He showed me proudly the staff with whi
ch, on the celebrated night, he had broken the skull of Raymond de Costiran, nicknamed the Writer because he drew up lists of heretics for burning so long that no parchment could contain them. Arnaud Boubila’s great anxiety was not being able to take that staff with him when he died, in order to present it to the Holy Spirit. Taking pity on such a simple man, I assured him that the phantom of the staff would not fail to accompany him, with its murderous virtue.
One night, I heard Arnaud Boubila singing for longer than usual. When his kid bleated plaintively and fell silent. I was woken up by something moist on my hands. By the light of a candle I saw that blood had flowed under the planks of my cell. I got up and went into the next cell. Arnaud Boubila had killed his kid, and then had opened his veins. His staff was placed against his heart.
“He’s given himself Endura,” said the man in the next cell along, simply when I woke him up and showed me Boubila’s body. “He’s happy now, with his kid and his staff.”
And I understood by the attention with which he studied the cut wrists that he envied his fate and was thinking about the most practical way to imitate him.
What the Albigensians called Endura was the natural consequence of their philosophy. Life being evil, death is the fortunate deliverance therefrom.36 When the soul is deprived of remorse, disengaged from the passions, it is permissible to anticipate the play of nature and deliver oneself from the chain of the body. That permission, in verity, was only granted to perfecti, but many simple believers, either to escape great dolors or to enjoy more rapidly the bliss of the formless world, deliberately gave themselves death.
The disappearance of Esclarmonde had given a mysterious signal. Several Albigensians put an end to their lives in the same fashion as my neighbor Boubila. It had been hoped in the first days of the siege that the crusaders would grow weary and depart. The rumor had gone around that the Albigensians of Toulouse and Albi would send an army of rescue. Then discouragement had come. Death, the marvelous death that opens the door of the world of light, appeared imminent and inevitable. Everyone extended his arms toward it, and summoned it with an ardent wish.
Holding hands one evening, at sunset, Jean de Cassanel and his two sisters threw themselves into the precipice of the Ers. The sage Bernard Ortolanus put on a white robe and sat down in the midst of his children, in order, he said, to give them a noble and useful example, and pierced his heart with his dagger.
“He was wrong,” said the sage Philippe Pellipar. “It is necessary not to offer oneself as a spectacle. One lends reality to death by making it visible. The man who wants to die ought to disappear.”
And that same evening, he disappeared.
Others believed that it was necessary to respect destiny, that everyone had his marked hour. But it was not forbidden to hasten that hour by magical practices, by burning herbs and intoning chants. In the subterranean galleries, on the towers and even when sorties were made, the Albigensians waited for death with delight. One did not know in the evening whether someone was leaving in order to go to sleep or to open his veins during the night.
An immense appeal emerged from the cells, galleries and towers. The watchmen on the elevated towers were those who gave themselves Endura most easily because the purer air and the clouds that brushed them brought them, with the suavity of the mist, a foretaste of what they imagined the afterlife to be. Montségur was the château of death.
IX
Pierre Roger de Mirepoix hated me, with an incomprehensible hatred, and he had made Jordan d’Elcongost, who was second-in-command of the besieged, share it.
I had always thought that it was because I showed a valor at least equal to theirs when we descended the slopes from the château and attacked the crusaders unexpectedly. Certainly, I did not desire death, but I fought with a tranquil indifference, a valorous serenity that had to inspire envy in those agitated and violent men. I was always sent to the most dangerous posts, charged with missions that comported the sacrifice of life. A quotidian miracle preserved me. My companions felt sorry for me, and said that I truly had no luck in escaping beneficent death so frequently. I did not share their opinion. I had not extirpated within me the root that is the appetite for living, and every day I rejoiced secretly in seeing the light of the sun.
All the war machines that the crusaders had brought with them were too short. We saw woodcutters on the slopes of Serrelongue felling fir trees in order to construct taller ones. Slowly, an enormous wooden tower rose up facing us. When its giant scaffolding was completely erected, the tower commenced the ascent of the sheer slopes to the château. It was hooked on to stones, wedged against folds in the terrain, and rose up for five months until the moment when its platforms, laden with stones and catapults, were level with our towers. With the winter snows a rain of arrows and an avalanche of rocks fell upon us incessantly. The crenellations were splintered. The breached barbicans trembled on their foundations. Gaping holes opened up in the walls. The dead—the fortunate dead—became more numerous.
Help came to us from several châteaux.
When the nights were dark, a resolute troop conducted by a reliable guide sometimes managed to pierce the crusaders’ line and reach Montségur. Once, it was the architect Bertrand de la Baccalaria, with Toulousan volunteers. He had the chimerical optimism of my compatriots. He walked in the midst of punctured towers and crumbled walls and rubbed his hands, saying that all that was nothing and could be easily reconstituted. We had faith in his genius as a builder. We set to work. But the château must have been possessed, like its defenders, by the love of death. There must have been a desire or ruination in the stones. We only succeeded in rebuilding the appearance of walls, towers that fell down again of their own accord. Without anyone being able to explain why, the wood that was to serve to build machines proved to be rotten.
Another time, it was Esclarmonde d’Alion, with a few Aragonese mercenaries. They had left eighty strong and only a dozen came back. Esclarmonde d’Alion came to embrace her lover, Jordan d’Elcongost. In the Château de Montségur all unions were mystical, there were only ideal embraces. That amour was an exception to the rule. While the battens of the great door were slamming shut again, by the light of a torch. I saw Jordan’s lips met those of Esclarmonde, and in the pure air of Montségur, that kiss caught fire and cast a more vivid light than that of the torch.
The assaults became increasingly frequent and no one slept any longer. The women and children ran to the most exposed places in the hope of being struck by a liberating stone or arrow. The perfecti remained close to the combatants in order to give the consolamentum to those who were dying with a gesture of the hand and the light of the gaze. Thus they were delivered from the chain of reincarnations. But the majority had no need of the magic practiced by a perfectus. They had already broken the final thread that retained them to the earth and they died with the certainty of being liberated.
It was at the moment when the situation was at its most desperate that Bertrand de La Baccalaria’s optimism gained the majority of minds. A flame appeared one night at the summit of the Bidorte. Everyone thought immediately that it was a signal from the King of Aragon who had sent a rescuing army. As the sun rose on one spring morning, a watcher at the height of the northern tower came down shouting that he had just seen an immense army advancing from the direction of Toulouse. He had recognized the banner of Raymond VII. At the same moment Raymond VII was prostrating himself at the feet of the Pope, as his father had once done in my company. He had no army. The watchman had been the victim of an illusion.
Many people were tormented by apparitions. They saw the companions they had lost, those that had been carried away by the waves of the Ers, and those who reposed in subterranean tombs. They lived with those shades in a strange familiarity. Nora de Marcilhac incessantly questioned an invisible creature, her sister India, who had died at the beginning of the siege. They had jumped into a precipice together but Nora had been retained by her robe; she had seen that as a sign from destiny tha
t obliged her to live. Since then, her sister’s phantom was always by her side, and her sole dread was that of distinguishing, on the part of the phantom, a slight impatience because she was lingering in life.
The Albigensian who had taken the place of Arnaud Boubila only occupied half the cell. He claimed that Arnaud Boubila was still in the other half. At night he heard the bleating of the kid and the tap of the staff that had broken the skull of the Inquisitor of Avignonnet.
The dead were not plaintive or dolorous. They did not ask to be avenged. They urged their brethren to rid themselves of substance in order to enjoy with them the estate of amour, of fraternity without separation. I could not succeed, in spite of the keenness of my hearing, in hearing their whispers. In spite of the excellence of my eyesight, I could not distinguish their contours. But the others saw and heard and I was sure that they were not deceiving me. There were dead men sitting under all the porches, wandering in all the corridors. The field of daisies was full of them. A large number were under Pelegrina de Bruniquel’s rose bushes. The physicians obtained secrets from them for the fabrication of their medicines. Children made them play their games.
There was one point in the gorge of the Ers guarded by soldiers from Mirepoix who had remained devoted to their former seigneur. A perfectus entered into communication with them and it was agreed that they would let a few men and horses pass one night.
It was necessary to save the treasure of Montségur. It was immense. It had been accumulated in several rooms. There were the riches, in solid gold and precious objects, of many of the Albigensian châteaux whose seigneurs had fled before Simon de Montfort. There were ancient manuscripts brought from the Orient, notably a book written in the Zend language that was in the hand of Mani himself. There were the teachings of Nicetas and all the writings to which the perfecti had consigned the methods permitting humans to obtain perfection rapidly.
The Blood of Toulouse Page 19
