by Robert Merle
“Ah, Cabusse!” I cried, rediscovering my words, which the sight of my father had momentarily taken from me. “What are you doing here without Coulondre?”
“He had to stay behind in his mill, there’s no lack of work!”
“And your Cathau?”
“She’s expecting!” said Cabusse in a very heroic tone, his strong hands pulling at his moustache. He was so faithful to the image I’d always had of him, I gave him a huge embrace.
“May I, Monsieur?” asked the Herculean Jonas, who, not being a veteran of the Brethren, didn’t have the same familiarity with us as the others.
“Oh, Jonas! You have to ask? How is Sarrazine?”
“She’s expecting,” blushed Jonas, looking down.
“You seem unhappy…”
“Oh, Monsieur, there are so many wenches who die in childbirth, my heart fails at the thought.”
“Then don’t think about it!” said my father, who nevertheless thought about how my mother had died that way, and suddenly looked sad.
Meanwhile, Monsieur de Montcalm, alerted by his valet, was coming across the lawn of the chateau to greet the new arrivals, his hands extended.
“Ah, Monsieur!” he said, “I’m so honoured to have as my guest the hero of Ceresole and Calais!”
“Monsieur de Montcalm,” said my father in his jocular way, always a little self-effacing, “the only heroism seems to have been to survive… The rest is the luck of war. Besides, I only had to deal with men, whereas your ancestor, Dieudonné de Gozon, had to kill a dragon all by himself!”
“I’m not sure I’m very worthy of him,” replied Monsieur de Montcalm, delighted that my father, far away in Périgord, knew about his illustrious lineage. “But, as you know, I’ve abandoned the practice of arms for the position of royal official.”
“Cedant arma togae,”* said my father, tasting a bit of his Latin the way one might taste the new wine in a good year.
“But in your case,” said Monsieur de Montcalm, looking very pleased with himself, “cedant arma aratro.”† Whereupon both smiled, for each had rendered homage, one to the other’s bravery, one to the other’s ancestry, and had exhibited his prowess in Latin, which each was rather proud of, and I was quite sure that they were going to become good friends, since both were great hunters and, what’s more, adept at chasing skirts—and still managed to outrun more than a few, since neither seemed to be ageing much in this respect.
“You have a beautiful chateau here,” added my father, continuing the compliment. “And, I see, with excellent ramparts.”
“But I would have lost it without your sons,” said Monsieur de Montcalm, “who are as handsome as they are courageous.”
This moved my father so much that not only did he blush, but he was unable to speak, and so made no answer, but contented himself with a bow to his host. Seeing this, Monsieur de Montcalm, whose great chagrin was to have lost two sons, understood how deep my father’s love was for us, and, trembling suddenly at the idea that he should ever lose us, put his hand on my father’s arm and said, “Madame de Montcalm and my daughter are very anxious to meet you.”
“It will be an enormous pleasure!” said my father. “But here I am, all booted and armed for war, and covered by the dust of our journey. I hope you will allow me to clean myself up a bit before daring to appear before such elegant ladies.”
Monsieur de Montcalm, Samson and I waited together for the Baron de Mespech in the great hall of the chateau, while, up in his room, he dressed for the occasion. And I hope that I will not be considered too frivolous if I confess that I hoped my father would not reappear dressed in black, since the Huguenots, disdaining ostentation, preferred this colour, as everyone knows. But I hadn’t counted on the finesse of my father, who, before leaving Sarlat, had allowed himself a few expenses in order to appear to his advantage and to that of his sons, which purchases, I’ll wager, did not exactly fit Uncle de Sauveterre’s economical standards. In any case, when he appeared, I was very happy to see him wearing a light-green satin doublet—green, as I have mentioned, being my late mother’s favourite colour—and decked out in an elegant knurled ruff instead of the little Huguenot ruff that Madame de Joyeuse considered so paltry. Monsieur de Montcalm was very satisfied with his guest’s appearance, as were to an even greater extent Madame de Montcalm and her daughter, who entered the hall at the same time he did, dressed in all their finery and their beautiful jewellery. Angelina was all smiles, and Madame de Montcalm quite civil, but somewhat reticent, secretly curious about my father, who, from her perspective, had but recently emerged from the estate of the commons. My father, sensing this nuance, deployed all of his charm and immediately enveloped his hostess with his full arsenal of graces and conquered her in a trice.
Oh, I so admired my father and wanted to be him! And so I followed with much appreciation his assault, the way his eyes twinkled, ever slightly jocular and smiling, yet proud, knowing when to be silent, when to speak, his back so straight and his movements so lively. He behaved so well in this first encounter with them, that his hosts, who had been deprived of their house in the city, and who’d had quite enough of country living, were so delighted with him that they would have kept him for a month! But, while lavishing a thousand compliments on Monsieur and Madame de Montcalm with his Périgordian ease, the Baron de Mespech would agree only to spend “a short week”. And short it seemed, indeed! For as happy as I was to see my father again, I was immeasurably sad to take my leave of Angelina, and found myself in the same position as Gargantua, who, when his son Pantagruel was born, and his wife had died in childbirth, didn’t know whether he should weep at the death of his wife or laugh for joy at the birth of his son.
On the eve of the day we were to depart, Angelina, walking with me around the parapet of Barbentane, stopped and, fixing her marvellous eyes on me, took from her middle finger a little ring adorned with a blue gem.
“My Pierre,” she said gravely, “this is a ring that I inherited. If it fits on your little finger, I would like to give it to you.”
I tried it on and it fit perfectly. Angelina seemed delighted, seeing this as a good omen, and added, “Don’t wear it until you’ve left Barbentane. But always wear it and no other.”
“I give you my oath,” I said, joyfully, understanding that with this gift she was engaging her faith and mine. “But, alas, I have nothing to offer you in return, since the only jewel I wear is my mother’s medallion to Mary, which she gave me on her deathbed and which I’ve never removed.”
“And it’s a good thing you haven’t,” said Angelina.
Her beautiful lips arched in a smile, she said, “I have a favour to ask of you. Let’s go into this turret and I’ll tell it you.”
This turret was a little, round, walled extension of the tower of the chateau and was decorated with a series of loopholes.
“I brought you in here so no one would see us, for I want to cut a lock of your hair. May I, Pierre?”
I agreed and she pulled from her brocaded purse a small pair of silver scissors, and told me to lower my head. But I didn’t have to lower it very far, since, when she stood on tiptoe, she was as tall as I was. And when she had made her little harvest of my hair—a very little one—and tucked it away in her purse with the scissors, I said, smiling, my smile being the only way I could hide my emotion: “You didn’t make a very large harvest, so I won’t lose all of my strength.”
And since she opened her eyes wide at this and didn’t seem to want to leave the turret, but remain there longer with me, I told her the story of Samson and Delilah, which she had never heard, being a papist.
“Alas,” she said, saddening suddenly, “we’re not of the same religion. It may be a great obstacle, I fear, to our projects.”
“I, too, fear this,” I said, embarrassed to tell her how I had learnt this. She fell silent then, not wanting to say any more, but opened her lips slightly and seemed to be breathing more rapidly. The turret was so small that we were forced to st
and quite close to one another, as the defenders of the castle would have, had they been firing through the loopholes at their assailants. And, though neither Angelina nor I, as we stood in this turret, had any assailants to repulse, we were, in a sense, besieged by opposing forces in our young lives.
“My nurse often told me,” said Angelina, “that if a wench gives a ring to a man to wear on his little finger, he’ll want her whole arm.”
“It seems to me,” I said, as I felt my heart beating furiously, and my voice nearly strangled, “that it depends on the man. And it isn’t true if he respects you.”
“Is this true, Pierre?” Then, after hesitating a moment, she added, “And if I give you a kiss, would you demand another?”
“Angelina,” I replied with great seriousness, “I want only what you want, nothing more.”
And so she put both her hands on my shoulders and, keeping her arms half extended, and without touching me in any part of my body, she placed a kiss on my lips. And certainly this was a very small, very short and very light kiss, in comparison to all of the ones I’d received up until then. And isn’t it a marvel that it had such an effect on me that, to this day, I can still remember it as well as if I were still standing there with Angelina, in that turret on a balmy autumn afternoon, her hands on my shoulders?
“My Pierre,” she said, “this is our last meeting, and I wouldn’t want you to look at me, when you’re leaving tomorrow, in front of all the people gathered there, as you’ve often done, with looks that are too expressive.”
“Ah!” I said. “So what should I do? Turn away?”
“No, no! I want us to look each other in the eyes one last time.”
But no matter how careful I was, in our adieux, to obey Angelina, my father didn’t fail to notice my feelings, or perhaps he had already discerned them. For as we were passing through the Barbentane woods, he noticed how more dreamy and sad I looked the farther we got from the Montcalms’ chateau, and ordered me to gallop ahead of the others for a moment to scout out the road.
And so I obeyed him. But after a few minutes, I heard hoof beats behind me, and saw my father approach and pull even with me.
“My son,” he said in his usual jocular way, his blue eyes searching mine, “I see you have a beautiful ring on your finger, which I didn’t see yesterday. Have you plighted your troth to some lady?”
“Yes, father, with your permission.”
“Ha!” said Jean de Siorac, half jokingly. “My permission! It seems to me you’re asking for it a bit after the fact!”
“Monsieur,” I confessed, “I beg you to excuse me. You weren’t there. The event was pressing.”
“I understand, of course. But you’re still young. You’re a younger brother. You’ve got no money.”
“We’ll wait till I’ve made my fortune.”
“And do you think Monsieur and Madame de Montcalm will agree?”
“As to that, I don’t know,” I said, not wishing to confess the great doubts that beset me.
At this, his countenance, though always expressing some amusement (but perhaps that was a mask to cover the awkwardness he felt at this conversation), became more serious, as if he were gauging and weighing the matter in his scales.
“Well,” he said, “as far as I can tell, they seem to respect your father in this family, and Samson, and you. And they are very grateful to you, which is rare. And though papist, they don’t express their emotions too freely. They are clearly not vainglorious. They have heart. In a word, they are good people and have good connections throughout Provence, and are rich enough, though their lands are not managed well, and their only fault seems to be that they’re a bit too proud of their lineage. But after all, that’s a small sin. Who knows what your grandchildren will say about Calais? To hear them, I managed to take the city single-handedly!”
Here he stopped, and throwing his head back began to laugh uproariously. Oh, how I loved him then! Both for his way of laughing at himself and for what he had said of the Montcalm family, which gave me some hope.
“As for your chances,” he continued, turning serious again, “they seem to me, to tell you frankly, to vary a good deal. As far as I could tell, the girl is entirely devoted to you. The mother is half for you, the father half against.”
“And what about you, father?”
“Distinguo between the person and the religion. As for the person, you couldn’t do better. She is very beautiful, my Pierre. But as important as this commodity is in a woman, it’s nothing compared to heart, and Angelina has an excellent heart, as I have observed every day I’ve been here. It’s a pity she’s a papist.”
“Father!” I blurted out, suddenly afraid. “Didn’t you marry a papist?”
“Yes, of course,” said Jean de Siorac, growing sombre. “And it was my life’s cross to bear.”
And after saying this, he fell silent, and I as well. And yet, after a moment, my heart was beating so hard, and, fearing that my father might line himself up with the “noes”, as, no doubt, Uncle de Sauveterre would, I said with little self-assurance, “Father, if mother came back to life, wouldn’t you be very happy?”
“Oh, yes of course! Of course!” said Jean de Siorac, his voice catching in his throat.
And, seizing me by the left hand, he leant over, looked me in the eyes and said, “Have no fear, my son! I’m not such a zealot. And even if I were, out of love for your dead mother, I would put no obstacles in your way. The ones you already have are sufficiently big already! I don’t need to add any of my own.”
I thanked him as best I could, being scarcely able to say a word I was so overcome with gratitude.
“Let’s gallop on, father!” I cried, trying to hide the tumult that was inside me.
And I sat up straight in my saddle, my chest raised and my nostrils open wide.
“Gallop on!” shouted Jean de Siorac, smiling, because he so well understood what I was feeling.
And off we went, side by side, my father, still so young and vigorous, loving me more than his barony, and I, full of the great love that I felt for him. The earth flew by under our horses’ hooves. And, my head full of thoughts of Angelina, it seemed to me as I leant over my steed, that I was riding not my valiant mare, but the years of the beautiful future that awaited me.
* “Arms bow before the toga.”
† “Arms bow before the plough.”
Next in the Fortunes of France series
About the Author
Born in 1908, ROBERT MERLE was originally an English teacher before serving as an interpreter with the British army during the Second World War, which led to his capture by the German army at Dunkirk. He published his hugely popular Fortunes of France series over four decades, from 1977 to 2003, the final instalment appearing just a year before his death in 2004. The Brethren is the first book in the series, followed by City of Wisdom and Blood and Heretic Dawn.
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