The Blood of Toulouse

by Maurice Magre

  Montfort’s knights dreamed of the three young women contained in the château with three towers. What a recompense for the victors! They were an aliment for heir lustful imaginations during the long evenings of the siege before their tents. There must have been quarrels, choices and divisions. Brunissande was reputed to have refused herself to her husband by virtue of the mystical chastity of a Cathar perfectus, and that was one attraction more. There was also an attraction in the virginal youth of Nova, and the savage warriors, habituated to rapes in the cities they had just captured, must have pictured their entry into the Château de Cabardez as the entry to a paradise of carnal pleasure.

  But the paradise of stone that dominated the rocks and the trees remained closed behind its portcullises and drawbridges. The crusaders were obliged to lift the siege and return in long columns toward the fields of Carcassonne, without having glimpsed more than a white robe on a rampart, or a helmet of hair between helmets of steel, leaving behind them the three inviolate young women, like the symbol of the pure beauty of the spirit that, for the vulgar man, remains eternally inaccessible.

  The Comte de Toulouse had implored the King of France, the King of England and the Emperor of Germany in vain, and had gone in vain to prostrate himself, weeping, at the feet of the Pope. He had acquired in the company of women an astonishing facility in weeping and falling to his knees. He finally understood that no baseness would save him. Heresy was only a pretext; it was his lands and his cities that they wanted. He finally decided to resist. It was too late. His Barons were decimated. He had delivered the best of his partisans to Montfort himself.

  In Toulouse, Bishop Foulque had put to death ten thousand people accused of heresy. He was a former troubadour, an adventurer devoid of belief, who had found it sage on growing old to embrace the career in which one became rich most rapidly. He was so devoured by envy that it was said that he was even jealous of Christ when he saw an altar overloaded with gold. He left Toulouse, excommunicating for the tenth time in a few years the city, its Comte, its Capitouls and its people.

  Toulouse was not taken by Simon de Montfort, thanks to the heroism of its inhabitants. Twice, the army of crusaders broke before its ramparts. “O Toulouse! O nest of heretics! O tabernacle of thieves!” cried Pierre de Vaux de Cernay, indignant at that resistance of a city that did not want to die. But the crusaders quit the impregnable city to go and ravage Albi, Quercy, Lauragais and the comté de Foix. Time passed. Reinforcements were still arriving from the north. Once, it was ten thousand armed pilgrims from Germany, another time it was the Comte de Bar and his battle-hardened troops. From Hautpout in the Black Mountains, to Lavelanet in the Ariège, Simon de Montfort, traveled untiringly, followed by a cortege of bishops and prelates, destroying amorously, patiently and methodically, as if they were obedient to a mysterious ideal of death.

  A great battle takes place at Muret, where the King of Aragon has come with an immense army to defend the Comte de Toulouse. The Midi wakes up and hopes. The King of Aragon is a great captain and victory seems assured. But Montfort wins again. He is protected by the god of armies. He always wins the material conflict, for he is a man of the matter that, at this time and in this place, must vanquish the spirit.

  Finally, under the walls of Toulouse, which he besieges again and where the old men, the women and even the children have been armed, the invincible falls. A stone launched by a catapult manipulated by a young woman shatters the skull of the soldier of iron, the man devoid of pity. A painting in a room in the Capitol of Toulouse represents her launching the liberating stone. Her face, whose anonymity destiny wanted to maintain, cannot be seen, but one can sense in the bracing of the arm and the neck, the sheaf of plaited hair and the movement of the upper body, the qualities of courage, mysticism and the independence of the southern race so unjustly crushed in the thirteenth century.

  The body of Simon de Montfort was piously brought back by his son and brother through the region of Toulouse and Albi, the Black Mountains and Quercy. From abbey to abbey and church to church the funeral cortege traveled through silent villages on roads from which the peasants fled on recognizing the banner with the accursed arms. Sometimes, in a defile, a stone thrown from a height fell on the coffin like the testimony of popular malediction. In the evening, in the monasteries where the dead man was welcomed, candles were lit and funeral hymns sung. But all around, in the houses, the lights were extinguished.

  Finally, Simon de Montfort left the land of which he had been the scourge. The terrible paladin of the Pope was taken to Montfort d’Amaury, to the cloister of High Heather, and the symbolic lion, the beast that crawls and devours, was sculpted on his sepulcher, with the inscription: Glorious Martyr of Jesus Christ.

  Six centuries later, the Revolution broke the sarcophagus and the sculpted lion in order that the wind could carry the dust away all the way to the Pyrenees.

  The Two Esclarmondes

  The movements of the spirit are almost always incarnate in the beauty of a woman, who becomes its living statue. The heroine of the Midi, the symbolic chatelaine of the Pyrenean mountain where the last refuge took refuge and died, was named Esclarmonde. And as the resistance was long and staged over half a century, as the death was slow, there were two Esclarmondes. There was Esclarmonde de Foix the chaste, she of the châteaux. who became a sort of female pope of Catharism, and there was Esclarmonde d’Alion the amorous bastard, she of the forests, of the mountain of Capsir, who wandered with the hunted Albigensians, fighting like a man, loved like a woman, and died with those she loved.54

  Esclarmonde de Foix had made a gift of herself to Cathar purity as soon as she reached adolescence. She had worm to consecrate herself to the spirit. That was in her twelfth year. In the château of her father, Roger Bernard de Foix, she had seen the Bulgar Nicetas, who was wandering through the Midi bringing the teaching of the Orient. She had not had the possibility of hearing him. He had only darted one glance at her, and on perceiving her he had made a slight sign with his hand. Had he recognized in the silent child someone who was made to understand and defend the truth? Esclarmonde was to live with the flame of the gaze that Nicetas sent her.

  But before being the apostle, the organizer and the soul of Catharism, a long martyrdom was reserved for her. Her father made use of his daughters as a commercial means of aggrandizing his seigneurial house. He gave Esclarmonde to Jordan, Vicomte de Gimoez, a brutal warrior who laughed at the new mysticism and took possession of the platonic adolescent in order that she would be the obedient instrument of his pleasures after his hunting and horse races. Esclarmonde submitted to the quotidian rape that sanctifies for men the sacrament of marriage, and it was only on the death of her husband that she commenced an apostolate that was to last thirty years. She converted to Catharism in an ostentatious fashion, in order to set an example to her people. She allied all the seigneurs of the Pyrenees against the authority of Roman pontiffs and the local tyranny of abbeys. She spoke, she applied the religion of the Spirit and she became the learned Esclarmonde.

  Legend took possession of her and people who did not know her created her with the richness of the soul, for it is necessary that a high ideal taken a physical form, and becomes alive and active among humans. The Albigensian martyrs of Avignonnet, Lavaur and Pamiers, when they mounted the pyre and felt the flames lick their feet, were glad to think that somewhere, in a distant fortress of the Pyrenees, on the tower of Montségur, in the midst of the clouds, there was a beautiful chatelaine clad in white, who was raising her arms toward the sun and who incarnated the perfect purity of their faith.

  Glimpsing the future and the defeat of the Midi, the sage Esclarmonde had the impregnable château of Montségur built as a supreme refuge of the Cathars in flight, between Lavelanet and Quillan, above valleys of stone, silver torrents and mountains of firs. It was toward Montségur that all those who did not want to deny their faith, those who escaped the massacres of the pious soldiers of the Church, the denunciations of monks and the su
bterranean prisons of the Inquisition made their way by night by roundabout paths.

  For the stone of justice that had broken the skull of Montfort had only rendered Toulouse to its Capitouls and it seigneur for a while. The day of the municipal liberty of the cities of the south was over. The Kings of France stole the Languedoc from the Comtes de Toulouse; the Pope’s bishops returned on their caparisoned horses with their corteges of Roman prelates to their fortified bishoprics. The tribunal of the Inquisition, created expressly to discover hidden heresy and composed of pitiless Dominicans, began functioning in all the cities.

  The history becomes incredible, so terrible is it, and the forgetfulness into which it has fallen is inexplicable. The fearful great seigneurs returned to Catholicism, to the religion that does not pardon the slightest parcel of difference with the intangible dogma, and delivered their subjects to the church themselves.

  The Comte de Toulouse goes to flagellate himself at Note Dame to demonstrate his fidelity to the Church and the King. But that is not enough. Cardinal de Saint-Ange, the legate of Rome and the lover of Queen Blanche of Castille, drags him behind him to Toulouse in order that he can bow down at his feet in a ceremony of humiliation on the parvis of the Toulousan cathedral. At the same time he brings a legion of professors in order to reorganize the excessively independent university and inform the Toulousans of the theocratic law, the harsh Roman theology and the bitter Picard and Beauceron patois then spoken in Paris instead of the bright language of the troubadours.55 It was not enough to take the fields of maize, the blue vines and the beautiful houses of Saracen architecture; it was necessary to modify the brains of those rebellious people, to conform their thoughts to the icy bronze of Roman thought.

  In Toulouse, the profane symbols that ornamented the facades of dwellings were destroyed by hammer blows and on the site of the house where Saint Dominic had resided, facing the Château Narbonnais, the palace of the Inquisition was built. A miraculous fig-tree that the saint had planted redoubled the ardor of the Inquisitors by its presence. The portal of the palace still exists; on its fronton a bucolic sculptor, doubtless arrived from Italy in the wake of the legates traced in stone gracious bouquets of lilies and a dove carrying an olive branch.

  For having eaten the fruit of the sanctified fig-tree the Inquisitors of Toulouse work marvels. The existing prisons are insufficient and it is necessary to undertake major works to construct new ones in haste in every quarter. On the Place du Peyrou and the Place d’Arnaud Bernard gibbets are set up every day, and as the executioners are ignorant and too few in number more are brought from Paris. Sometimes a citizen disappears and is never seen again; he has been immured. People are imprisoned on the slightest suspicion of heresy. All denunciations, even those that are baseless, are treated as veritable. The clergy make use of that means to confiscate the property of the richest citizens.

  There is no longer any security in any city in the south. Denunciation lurks behind every door. It is the moment when torture is introduced into the procedure as a legal means to obtain confessions. That innovation causes a breath of fear to pass over the peaceful people of the Languedoc, but the result is extraordinary. Confessions multiply in proportions that surpass the hopes of the judges. Everyone is a heretic. It is sufficient to have listened once in the previous thirty years to a sermon by an Albigensian preacher to be arrested and obliged, if necessary by torture, to search the depths of your memory for the names of the people who listened to the sermon with you thirty years ago.

  Human cowardice multiplies treasons and denunciations. An Albigensian perfectus is seen to denounce all those who have sheltered him during his flight between Toulouse and Marseille, and the stages have been numerous and the hosts have been welcoming and filled with love. Men traverse cities on their knees in order to beg forgiveness in front of the house of the Inquisition for a heresy to which they have never adhered, in order to put an end to the terror of being suspected. The dead can be suspected and judged. They are solemnly disinterred and the property of their children and grandchildren, even if they are good Catholics, is confiscated because they have no right to anything acquired by a heretic.

  The time when the greatest number of pyres blaze and the greatest number of the immured disappear is when the marriage of Saint Louis, the model of kings, is celebrated in Paris. Terror puts an end to commercial transactions, marriages and relationships of amity. In Albi and Castelnaudary people are imprisoned because their faces are too pale and are suspected in consequence of practicing the Cathar asceticism that proscribes wine and meat. In order to avoid suspicion some no longer go out without make-up, and feign drunkenness.

  And as the bourgeois of cities sent a complaint to the Pope in 1245, the bishops of the Languedoc, in order to counterbalance the effect of the complaint or by virtue of a ferocious humor, complained in their turn about the extreme indulgence of the Inquisitors, whose weakness, they said, was aggravating the heresy.

  Despair took possession of souls. For those who had conserved the Albigensian faith in the depths of their hearts, there was nothing more to expect from humans. Henceforth, there was only hope in God. But God was about to betray the purest and most disinterested of those who turned to him.

  Montségur

  In the clouds of the mountains of the Ariège, like a celestial fortress, the Château de Montségur, built with care by the sage Esclarmonde de Foix, remained impregnable to the armies of the Pope and the King. The treasure of Catharism, its bishops and its perfecti, had taken refuge there. In the distance, in the mountains, seigneurs and peasants who had remained faithful to the pure doctrine had gathered in armed bands and lived nomadically with the complicity of the peasants. The villages had been rallied to Catholicism by fear, but every inhabitant knew in the secrecy of his heart that the truth was up above, with the last of its faithful, and in the depths of grottoes, along the emerald-colored torrents and on the slopes where the snows commenced.

  Two generations had passed and Catharism still resisted. It clung on his habitations suspended above precipices, hid in profound forests, lit fires by night on the heights like fraternal lights responding to the fires of the towers of Montségur. There were epic battles in the mountains, unknown heroisms, martyrs whose names will never be known.

  It is the time when the solitary Saurimonde, the inspired sibyl of the region of Mazamet, walks naked as in the days of the world’s birth, because her soul is as bright as he sun she invokes. It is the time when, at Hautpoul, the highest peak, Guilhem d’Airens cures the wounds of Cathars merely by extending his hand over them, which has magical virtues.

  It is the time when Guilhabert de Castres, the saint, transports himself with inexplicable velocity to give the consolamentum, the extreme unction of the Cathar religion. He appears everywhere when a devotee of the faith of the spirit is about to die. Sometimes dressed as a beggar, sometimes as a pilgrim, he looms up on the threshold of grottoes or his footsteps resonate in the streets of cities as the death-throes begin, in spite of the Inquisitorial guards and the watchmen at the gates of ramparts. When the pyres blaze it is sufficient for the burned individual to glimpse, lost in the crowd, a perfectus making the mysterious sign of salvation for him to die consoled and without suffering. For the love exchanged between the two saves the soul and projects it into its veritable abode. And the ungraspable Guilhabert de Castres is always before the pyres to make the sign and give the love.

  He died very old and the greatest miracle was that he escaped the pyre himself. Death, which was for him only the road that leads to a better estate, attained him at Montségur and his bones were laid in crypts so profound that they could never be discovered, and the Inquisitors were unable to disinter them in order to throw the heretic ashes to the wind.

  Next to him reposed Esclarmonde de Foix. She had become a legendary enchantress, a female pope with silver hair. Her face had as many wrinkles as Catharism had martyrs. Her body was so desiccated that it seemed incorruptible. She resembled the divi
ne wisdom that only traverses the human envelope in order to purify itself and raise itself in the scale of divine wisdoms.

  It is then that the second Esclarmonde, the niece of the first, Esclarmonde d’Alion the bastard, appears. She was the daughter of Roger Ramon. One evening, Roger Ramon, who was a bold hunter, became lost in the Ariégeois valleys pursuing a wolf. He reached the wolf, cut of its head, and as he was seeking shelter or the night he perceived the door of an abbey of nuns hidden in the fig-trees, myrtles and wild vines. He nailed the head of the wolf to the door, went in, supped, and as the abbess was young, noble and beautiful he spent the night with her. In the morning, he left The abbess gave birth to twins, Loup de Foix, thus named because of his father’s exploit on the eve of his conception, and Esclarmonde, who was to become by her brother’s side the heroine of the last Albigensians.

  Around Montségur, at So, Tarascon and Lavelanet, the supreme effort of the resistance is groped. Esclarmonde is twenty years old. Before dying, her father married her to Bernard d’Alion, the seigneur of a petty Pyrenean principality. She makes her château a refuge of Cathars and orders the drawbridge to be raised when royal troops pass by. Her brother, Loup, commands the insurgents in the mountains; she goes to join him on horseback, clad in a man’s armor. She fights in the defiles; she supplies food to besieged Montségur; she lights the nocturnal signals that enable the Albigensian groups to communicate with one another; with shepherds she pushes the rocks that crush the King’s soldiers in the depths of gorges. More than one knight dreams, in the evening, of the face of that ardent young woman, her eyes the color of a torrent, and, as she is overflowing with passion, she gives herself to more than one in the shade of firs, in the midst of Pyrenean ferns, beside her horse, beside her sword.