The Blood of Toulouse

by Maurice Magre

  But light is the radiant beauty of the world that no one can resign himself to forget. When after hours, the blocks could no longer be heard accumulating and the work of the masons ceased, despair raised the breasts of the immured. Cries resounded. Men who had been placid and resigned until then became furious. A few, deprived of reason, ran hither and yon, bumping their heads into walls. Others, whom rage rendered more insensate, tipped over the precious lamp-oil.

  Pierre Pagès and the sagest made their way as best they could from group to group, trying to attenuate the dolor with their words without being able to remedy the darkness. They spoke about the spiritual sun that everyone bears within the soul, the marvelous sun of the Holy Spirit. Everyone tried to create internally the source of light forever lost. But in the damp air, the mysterious circle of the cupola extended so heavily above us that hope could not create daylight, and there was nothing but crepuscular phantoms of the sun that dissipated as soon as they were born.

  “I want to see! Take me to the place where we can see!” repeated a little child to his mother with an unsuspected force of breath. That cry, which formulated the common desire, multiplied the anguish so much that some people proposed expelling the mother and child to a distant corridor in order that the voice would not reach us.

  I thought I remarked that Pierre Pagès breast was emitting a confused light as he walked. I asked him for an explanation. He was carrying on him the emerald wrapped in animal hide in the middle of which I had seen a few red droplets trembling.

  “It’s the blood of Jesus Christ,” he told me, “which was conserved in Caesarea and transported to Genoa. Faithful Albigensians received it as evidence of the truth of which they are the depositaries. When you sense your strength decreasing and death coming, fix your eyes on this stone, and your soul will be lightened.”

  I cannot evaluate the time that elapsed, or how life diminished in us. I know that many died quickly solely by virtue of the deprivation of the sun. In the beginning, we carried their bodies far away, into the depths of a tunnel, and we left a small lamp beside them. It burned for a while and then went out. But our strength must have diminished. We did not take the dead as far, and they were left without light.

  A few perfecti were charged with the distribution of nourishment. At first they did it with economy and sagacity. Then a lassitude took possession of them and they ceased to supervise a just division. There were some who thought of hastening death and did not eat, others who wanted to obtain the same result by eating too much. There were some who grabbed everything they could and placed it in reserve in places that they were unable to find again.

  We went to fetch water from the lake and brought it back in ewers. It was icy and had a calcareous taste. That water, drunk in abundance, was perhaps the cause of a poisoning of which some people died. The shores of the lake were impressive. It must have reposed on translucent rocks, because it gave off a vague green-tinted light, as if a subterranean planet were bathing it with its dead reverberation. People were afraid of being in proximity to those waters and only went down there in numbers, talking loudly.

  A courageous hermit clinging to the asperities of the walls had succeeded in reaching the opposite shore of the lake. He was seen in the attitude of prayer that he had adopted in order to await death. He signaled to us with his hand from a distance, but he ceased making those signals. He was a man slightly above average height. His distant silhouette took on something grotesque and menacing. Some of my companions claimed that it was longer every time they saw it. That improbable elongation of the dead hermit increased the terror that the lake inspired.

  A languor took possession of those buried alive at Ornolac. Two or three young men who had departed through the dark tunnels came back and assured us that if one walked for a long time in a northerly direction one found a narrow corridor whose distant extremity was illuminated by daylight. They had taken reference points and offered to guide those who wanted to follow them. No one got up. Life had become impossible on earth for those who wanted to keep their faith. In addition, the lassitude was too great. It was better to die in the absence of effort. Everyone had abdicated the hope of seeing the sun again.

  It was also necessary to renounce the modest light of the oil. The little lamps went out, one after another. As the light of the last grew fainter I considered the faces of the creatures leaning over the heart of clay where the protective wick was expiring.

  Among those faces I recognized that of Esclarmonde d’Alion. It had deteriorated, and was slightly puffy. The sufferings of an unhappy life had hardened the gaze and deformed the oval of the features. The former suavity of the expression still floated there, but as a mist floats that will soon vanish. The form in which I had thought I saw the incarnation of perfection had lost its purity; and that was the last image that it was given to me to contemplate before being enveloped by darkness.

  There was a dull moan when the last glimmer of the lamp rose up toward the stalactites of the ceiling and illuminated the vastness of our tomb. I sat there, prey to a greater distress than the apprehension of death.

  Later, someone called to me through the darkness. I groped my way, stumbling over recumbent bodies, touching stiff limbs and marble faces. The small number of us who were still alive had resolved to form a circle around Pierre Pagès and to die holding hands. I took my place in that chain and heard, as a kind of chant, the prayers that my companions were transmitting to one another. I did not understand their meaning, and they died upon my closed heart.

  Later—perhaps an hour later, perhaps a day—in the semi-slumber in which I was plunged, images began to appear and to file before me. At first there were pleasant scenes that had made me smile in my childhood; then people that I had known, and must be somewhere, in Toulouse or elsewhere, and others who probably belonged to the realm of the dead that I was about to enter. But I could have pronounced the names of all of them, as if they bore them written on their foreheads. They were moving in a circle and their hub was the confused gleam that emerged from the clotted blood of Jesus Christ on Pierre Pagès’ breast.

  That light fascinated me. It became an increasingly phosphorescent green; it was miraculous, ineffable. And I marveled that a man as ordinary as I had been in my life, with passions so vulgar, had been chosen to save that divine blood and to carry it underground, into the midst of the elect of its faithful. I had always shown a very mediocre intelligence. I had never understood the elevated conversations that the wise men had in my presence, and now a belated regret came to me for having been so little developed in the spiritual order.

  But at the same time as that regret, like a sort of recompense for having experienced it, it seemed to me that my comprehension increased and that an opaque veil placed over my intelligence had just torn. Words heard previously and not understood were suddenly revealed to me charged with meaning. Certain obscure theories unfurled with clarity. I was filled with gratitude for certain individuals because I understood their role. And at the moment when I thought of them, I saw them again. I saw the philosophers who had sought the meaning of the world. I saw Basilides, I saw Valentine, and all the gnostics with their luminous abstractions. The Alexandrians exposed the philosophy of divine emanations. I understood why Bartholomew had kept his teaching secret, why Mani had been flayed, why Hypatia had been stoned. I understood the meaning of the voyages of Nicetas and why he had thought that Toulouse ought to be the point on earth from which the truth would radiate. I loved Nicetas for that legitimate choice. I understood what I had never understood before: the Holy Spirit, the union of human being with the infinite intelligence.

  I was plunged in an incomparable delight in having become intelligent after a long life of stupidity when an individual in a white robe appeared who dissipated all the other images. I recognized Pope Innocent, dead for a long time. He was marching at a rapid pace, his eyes fixed upon me, such as I had once seen him in the Church of Saint John. I experienced the same surprise mingled with terror. Sudd
enly, he bent down, and with an extraordinarily easy gesture, he stole Pierre Pagès’ emerald.

  “All relics belong to the Church,” he said to me.

  His visage was resplendent with intelligence and something that was above the cunning and skill of taking advantage of events. He agitated his tiara of symbolic peacock plumes and shoed me those plumes with his finger, saying: “I can see with all these eyes. I see all the heretics that appear on earth and I stifle them immediately.”

  As if to illustrate those words, to the right and the left of him, I saw once again Basilides, Valentine, Mani and Nicetas. They carried little lights in their hand. But Innocent blew on them and they all went out. Around me, the dead Albigensians got up, effortfully, and held out clay lamps in which the parsimoniously distributed oil, reanimated, spread a droplet of clarity. Protecting it with their hand, they tried to raise that flame. But Innocent shook his robe and that wind caused the lamps to die.

  And I heard his severe voice addressed to me.

  “Do you finally understand, Dalmas Rochemaure? I extinguish all spiritual enlightenment that does not come from the Church. No one has the right to think about God by himself. I even forbid the reading of the scriptures, because people can debate them while reading them. My power is one of fixation, of coagulation, of turning to stone. And woe betide those who rebel! I am always victorious, and I bury them alive in my subterranean cathedral.”

  Yes, I understood. Everything was clear. I was, indeed, in the monstrous cathedral of darkness. It was haunted by the phantoms of heretics, those who had disputed the dogma and attempted to light the lamp of their own truth. And, careless of those vague shades and of me, Pope Innocent now celebrated an inconceivable mass. The basilica was as vast as the planet. The altar, the extinct candles, and the symbols of the religion, were all carved in a species of obscure porphyry. Marmoreal cardinals with eyes of mica emerged from all the corridors. I saw the solid back of the pontiff, from which emanated his love for that which is hard, unchangeable and inert. He elevated in the darkness a mineral host.

  But I was suddenly gripped by an appetite for aerial, subtle things devoid of weight. I had a desire to bathe in clouds, to flat in imponderable ethers. To my right and my left, the dead were holding my hand. I broke that funereal chain. I stood up silently, with a thousand precautions, in order not to interrupt the inanimate mass. My desire to escape the terrestrial condensation was so great that I launched myself forward to take light. I fell, to get up immediately.

  Around me, I had the sensation that the walls of the grotto had solidified in elements denser than those the earth knew. The pillars of the stalactites shrank. I perceived petrifactions of rock in the cupola that were descending to crush me. Everything was in motion. Liquids were stirring in mud. The mud hardened. I felt currents of inferior attraction. Nature was going backwards. And in the accumulation of that cathedral of matter, Innocent III, arms open, was fused with the substance, having become a pope of stone.

  But I fled, lightly. The spirit breathed within me and it lent me a power stranger than death. I recalled that the young men had mentioned a tunnel open to the solar air. It was in a northerly direction. I had no difficult heading in that direction. I had the habit of noting every evening, no matter where I was, the direction of Toulouse, That city of favorable attraction lay to the north in relation to the grotto of Ornolac, and it was toward her that I had turned my face when I had lain down to die.

  I leapt over recumbent bodies and my first bounds took me as far as the lake. I went along the waters, remarking that the hermit had collapsed. That did not appear to me to be important. I was uplifted by a force that had its source in the utmost depths of my being. Everything that I had accomplished in my life had only been a game, a series of insignificant actions. I had devoted myself to my race, and had done nothing for it. It was now that my mission was about to commence.

  I had just received a mysterious investment. A gift of speech possessed me, so great that I had a desire to orate while running. An unexpected intelligence had descended upon me, as if those who had disappeared had bequeathed me parcels of their thought. I was proud of that heritage, but it was necessary to make it fructify. I had to recount to people the story of my brothers, the story of the truth buried and resuscitated, and that message was as precious as the blood of Jesus Christ recovered in Caesarea.

  I did not have the sentiment of walking for very long. At an intersection where the corridors became narrower a snake, slithering underfoot, indicated the right path to me. I glimpsed in the far distance the inimitable clarity that daylight produces.

  But the corridor was obstructed by rubble. It was a fissure where the clay resisted, where there was a reflux of matter endowed with a sort of activity. It was necessary to lie face down. I crept like the snake; I hung on to stones; I struggled against the living molecules of the primordial substance, which conspired against me in order to stifle me.

  Finally, I felt plants on my hands and bats fluttered around me. I had escaped the embrace of matter.

  The Ariège was flowing at my feet. The sun was radiant in the infinite azure. I fell to my knees and extended my arms toward it. It seemed to me that I was the symbol of my race. The wicked had tried to bury it alive, but it would hold out its arms eternally toward the sun of the spirit.

  Glory to the winged speech that resuscitates the dead and gives youth to the living in evoking the visages of their forefathers! Glory to the magical speech that, in launching the deeds of men through memories, causes them to fall into balances more impeccable than those of three judges seated in the Hell of the ancients! Glory to the archangelic speech that tears the shadows of forgetfulness!

  Silence is the most powerful weapon of evil. Evil has passed over my homeland and has left behind silence, with its companion, fear. Half a century has sufficed for the men of the Midi who suffered in their flesh and in their belief to have almost forgotten the history of their dolor.

  Leaning on a staff, with my cranium on which my hair is dead and my beard immeasurably elongated, I go from village to village. It is believed that I beg, but in reality, it is me who gives. I give memory.

  By virtue of a singular curve I have rediscovered the folly of my youth. It is thanks to that that I can live. The priors of the abbeys have changed. There are new magistrates everywhere and seneschals arrived from France. No important man knows me. Who would think of imprisoning as a heretic an old man who dances without reason when he encounters a small child and prostrates himself in a grotesque fashion when an Inquisitor goes past? Every time I see a pot of milk outside a door beside a sleeping man, I empty the pot over the man. When I go past a bell I launch myself upon the rope in order to pull it and make it resonate.

  I search in every village for the man who is susceptible of hearing me out. I do not address myself to those who have children. The state of father of a family renders a man hostile to anyone opposed to the social order and the established religion. Nor do I address myself to the most learned. I choose for preference a stupid man with wonderstruck eyes, for the stupid have more faith than the intelligent. I tell him how beautiful and flourishing the soil of the Midi was when the men of France had not yet come, how the literate were honored, how thought was reflected in matter, becoming beauty naturally. I recount the death of Béziers, that of Carcassonne and that of Toulouse; I show him by what mystery a city can perish and nevertheless retain its palaces and bell-towers. I explain to him that an injustice remains alive and gives birth incessantly to the effects of injustice, until it is, not repaired, material reparation being unimportant, but understood by those who have committed it and pardoned by those who have suffered it.

  It is the pardon that is the most difficult to understand. The beauty of vengeance is so easily accessible! It seems to have a sort of courageous nobility. Vengeance is the first thought that occurs to the stupid man full of faith who listens to me. He immediately talks about killing. I have a great deal of difficulty explaining to hi
m that one death is linked to another death with more force than a sin to his father, and that all deaths form a chain that will never end unless it is broken by some action as surprising as forgiveness. While speaking, I rebel myself, not understanding very well the forgiveness that Albigensian wisdom prescribes to me. But what does it matter if I understand the message poorly? It is sufficient that the message be transmitted.

  I shall transmit it eternally. As Bertrand Martin announced to me, my imperfection will oblige me to return often to the earth to inhabit new human forms. In every one I shall recall the terrible forgotten history. All the books have been burned, all the texts of prayer, all the evidence of Albigensian thought. The calcined towers have been reconstructed, new columns added to the monuments, sculpted with caricatures of saints instead of Greek goddesses. But I shall not weary of tearing the silence of evil. I shall evoke the defunct towers, the old house of the Toulousan chapter, with its Capitouls with ivory wands, the cemetery of Saint Sernin where the dynasty of Raymond Saint-Gilles reposes. I shall make the dead live again, for as long as they are not in peace.

  In order for them to rest in peace, forgetful of past evils, and for their animating force to be emitted with serenity by their bones, I shall resume my Toulousan body with every wave of incarnation. And my effort will be constant, my sincerity will be luminous and my love for my brethren ever-increasing.

  May my future form become increasingly clairvoyant and sage, being molded of a more purified matter, like the wine of the hills of Pech David, which divest themselves with the years! May the sword of the word launch a brighter flash every time! May my words, animated by life, fall more perfect and more veridical! In order that I might gaze once, my heart liberated from all evil, upon Toulouse, without distinguishing the blood of the Albigensians in the red color of its bricks! In order that injustice might be effaced from the hearts of the unjust! In order that forgiveness might be understood by those who give it!