The Priest's Madonna

by Hassinger, Amy

  Michelle regarded this as further evidence of Mme Laporte’s exotic character. What had she been doing out there so early, alone and undressed? Praying? She had appeared to be in a contemplative state, but we had never seen her in church, which made us wonder if perhaps she was a Protestant, or, even more tantalizing, a Jew. The mayor was at church every Sunday, and though it didn’t seem to matter to him that he was unaccompanied, it struck us as strange, even scandalous. Also, Mme Laporte was childless. Without children, and with a maid and a cook responsible for the housework, what did she find to do all day long?

  “I’ll thank you not to waste your time dwelling on the misfortunes of others,” my mother snapped when we asked her why she thought the Laporte family had no children. The word misfortune only tantalized us further. Mme Laporte grew into a tragic figure, a woman tortured by grief for the lives of the children she would never bear. Michelle began to speak about her with a knowing tone, as if she alone, having lost both of her parents, understood the woman’s sorrow. At first I deferred, but I soon tired of my sister’s claims on Mme Laporte and her pain, and resolved to speak directly with her to find out more for myself.

  We took to lingering in the square, hoping to catch Mme Laporte coming out of her house. We had practiced ways to initiate conversation: It’s such an impressive castle, could you give us a tour? and We know of a Mademoiselle Laporte in Espéraza—is she a relation of yours? (We knew no such person, but were prepared to present her address, a description of her appearance, and her father’s occupation, if pressed.) She disappointed us. If anyone emerged from the château, it was the cook or the maid. Neither Michelle nor I had enough temerity to knock on the castle door, so our hopes of conversing with her quickly withered.

  We turned our attention instead to the château itself. The only impressive thing about it was the extent to which it had eroded. Half of the roof had fallen in, and the clay tiles that remained were chipped and dirty. Vines crawled over the windowsills and clung to the ruined stone walls like matted locks of hair. The grounds were modest and consisted mainly of overgrown grasses and brush, sloping precipitously downward on the east side. There was a small garden against the south wall. Several of the doors were gone, so we could sneak in and wander through the abandoned half, where the still intact arches of the interior gave onto empty cavities of ancient rooms and floors dusty with limestone silt.

  We had heard legends of a secret network of caves in our area that refugees had used as a passageway long ago. Supposedly, one could gain access to the caves on the castle grounds and follow the tunnels to their end, which was said to be Blanchefort, a nearby hill where the ruins of another ancient castle stood. The stories of those underground tunnels captivated me. I dreamt of them snaking beneath the village like a trapped myth. Largely through my instigation, Michelle and I grew bolder in our explorations in and around the ruins of the castle, looking for these subterranean corridors. We tapped on doors, moved aside rusting plows, and even went so far as to begin digging a hole where the earth seemed loose and perhaps more recently disturbed.

  I don’t know why we should have been so surprised when Mme Laporte finally came upon us one afternoon. We were trespassing, after all, and openly at that. But when she did find us, we were so frightened and ashamed that we cringed like schoolchildren.

  “Have you found anything yet?” she said kindly. She sat on a half-crumbled wall near us and removed her hat—straw, with a torn crown. Her coarse hair was streaked with gray and swept into a messy twist. “I never could,” she continued, “though it hasn’t been for lack of trying. I’m beginning to think it’s just a legend.” She sighed.

  This was too much for me; I found my voice. “What legend?”

  “Why, the underground passage. The escape route of the Visigoths and the Cathars. The buried treasure. Isn’t that what you’ve been looking for?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “But we didn’t know about any treasure. Or the Visigoths or anyone else.”

  “We’re sorry for trespassing,” Michelle said. “We were wrong, and we won’t do it again.” She recited this apology as if it were a spell to fend off whatever terrible punishment Mme Laporte might have in store. Madame had by this time risen to the status of sorceress in Michelle’s imagination.

  “It may have been walled up,” Madame continued, “though whoever filled it in did a very thorough job. There’s not a trace of it left. I have found a pair of ancient graves and a flint spear tip.”

  “Where?” I was amazed.

  She gestured vaguely. “Nothing as exciting as buried treasure. Though I must admit, I tend to be skeptical of such things.”

  “Who were the Cathars?” I asked.

  “Oh, but don’t you know of them? I had thought all the children in the village learned about them in school.”

  I shook my head, embarrassed.

  “The Albigensians? They’re also called by that name.”

  “Oh, them,” I said hastily. “They were heretics.”

  Mme Laporte’s face registered no surprise or scorn at my provinciality, only that gentle regard.

  “Yes, according to the Church. They were Manicheans, dualists. Purists, in many ways. Peaceful people. They lived here, all over this region. This hilltop is supposed to have been one of their strongholds. The story goes that they fled the crusaders through the underground passageway, escaping over the Pyrenees to Spain.” When she spoke, she looked toward the middle distance, forming her sentences as if she were reading aloud. “They were said to have been the keepers of a great treasure, housed at Montségur—a ruined castle not far from here. But when the crusaders vanquished the castle, they found nothing. Only, I imagine, the heaps of bodies of those who had starved or died of dysentery during the siege.”

  Michelle shuddered. She kept looking at me, trying, I suppose, to communicate that she wanted to leave, but I ignored her.

  “Just before the castle surrendered and those hundreds of perfecti were burned, a few believers escaped down the sheer slope of the mountain, which was unguarded. Where they ended up is anyone’s guess. They could have come here, treasure in tow. It would have been only a day’s journey by horse. Though why a people whose belief system spurned the corruption of the Church would put so much stock in a material treasure, I’ve never been able to figure out.”

  “Where—How do you know all that?” I asked stupidly.

  She smiled—an absent, melancholy smile—and stood, shaking her skirt to free any clinging dust. “Follow me.”

  Michelle prodded me in the ribs and when I turned, she whispered loudly, “We should go,” but I widened my eyes at her reproachfully. This was what we had been hoping for: a chance to talk with the mysterious Mme Laporte. And how fascinating she was proving to be! I was not about to give up now. Michelle, bless her, would not leave me alone with such a strange and potentially dangerous woman.

  Madame led us back outside, around the perimeter of the castle, and then through a side door that opened into the kitchen. She nodded at Mme Siau, the cook, who narrowed her eyes at us as we entered (she had also undoubtedly observed us sneaking around the grounds). We passed through the kitchen—which was not so very different from our own, only bigger and better stocked—and then through the dining room, which boasted a long mahogany table, empty except for a three-pronged candelabra that held the dribbling stumps of unlit tapers, four dining chairs, and a plain mahogany sideboard. I was surprised at the modest décor. I had expected the windows to be draped sumptuously in velvet, the floors carpeted in Oriental rugs, the shelves adorned with silver urns and blown-glass vases. But the rooms, though high-ceilinged, were drab and dark, the air chilly, even though it was midsummer and the temperature outside was hot and dry. There were very few objets d’art, and those that were displayed on the mantel above the cold hearth appeared to be of sentimental value only: a pewter cat, settled on its haunches; a framed embroidery of two figures holding hands and the lettering “Simone and Philippe Laporte, 1869.”
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  Mme Laporte led us up a broad staircase and down a hall into her library. And oh, the books! I had never seen so many. Five or six floor-to-ceiling bookshelves spanned the walls, each of them filled to their limit. Stacks of books grew up from the floor as well, like boxy stalagmites in a dry, commodious cave. A fire crackled in this hearth, and there was a real cat—gray, not the black we might have expected—curled up on the seat of a tattered rose fauteuil. Mme Laporte gestured for us to sit down, but as the fauteuil was already occupied and the other choice was a chair whose caning appeared untrustworthy, we remained standing. Madame had pulled the only other chair in the room—a sturdy plank chair that had been sitting behind the desk—up to one of the shelves and, standing on it, began passing her fingers over titles. Her willowy frame and her height appeared even more marked as she stood several feet off the floor.

  “The best place to start, I always think, is with the original documents themselves. Of course, you could begin with La Chanson de la Croisade contre les Albigeois, which is probably the most well-known tale of the crusade, but it’s really a romance rather than history. Mind you, the documents themselves aren’t perfect either, since they were written mainly by the crusaders and the church authorities, so their argumentation and observations are hardly objective. Still, they’re useful, if you can keep in mind the point of view.” She spoke quickly, almost to herself, and I struggled to follow.

  Finally, her fingers lit upon the title she was looking for, and she slipped it out from its place and flipped through it, pausing to smooth some of the pages. Satisfied, she turned to us, smiling apologetically. “History often resembles nothing more than a collection of other people’s prejudices and opinions. But, so it is.”

  Grasping the arm of the chair, she stepped to the floor, then came around the desk to hand us the book. Michelle stepped backward; I took it.

  “Come back when you’re finished with that one. I’ve several you might find interesting.”

  “Thank you, madame,” said Michelle, and curtsied.

  On the way home, Michelle insisted that we shouldn’t return. She would have nothing to do with the book. I hid it beneath the tinderbox and took it out when no one else was around.

  It made difficult reading, and I struggled through it, skipping long passages and skimming the rest, for the language was antiquated and formal, and I could not focus my attention on it for very long. It consisted of a collection of writings by twelfth- and thirteenth-century clerics, all criticizing the group of people that Mme Laporte had called the Cathars, and who, in the book, were more often referred to as heretics and blasphemers, liars, sodomites, savage beasts, loathsome reptiles, and angels of Satan’s light. What had prompted these vicious epithets, I could not tell.

  I knew, though, as I tried to extract some meaning from the words, that I was right to hide the book, for it was obvious that neither my mother nor M. le curé would have allowed me to read it. It sent a frisson through me each time I opened it, and I half-expected the pages to writhe with snakes. At first I wondered if Michelle was right, if Mme Laporte was a witch, but I couldn’t reconcile the idea with her kindness and her gentle demeanor.

  That book and my decision to read it marked a divergence in the path that, until that summer, Michelle and I had been walking together. I had not yet considered that Michelle and I would lead different lives. We had always talked of our futures as if they were one and the same: we was the pronoun we used, rarely I. In our afternoons on the hillside, we talked of traveling—to Paris, perhaps, as I had suggested one day, fresh from some small disagreement with my mother. “We’ll work as chambermaids,” I said. “Lots of girls do. You can make good money. Enough to be able to buy what we need and to go to the cabarets at night.”

  “Cabarets!” She laughed.

  Other days, we spoke of moving back to Espéraza together, finding two brothers to marry. “They’ll be handsome and rich. And we’ll all live together in the same house,” I planned.

  “And have babies at the same time.”

  “We’ll push their prams through the marketplace, side by side.”

  Michelle laced her arm around my waist, leaned her head on my shoulder. “We’ll be together, always.”

  That same summer, Gérard Verdié began to take an interest in Michelle. Gérard was very handsome—tall and muscular, dark curls, ruddy cheeks, and an extravagant smile. He lived in the village and worked in his father’s vineyard just outside of town. He began to walk by our door on his way home from the fields. If we happened to be outside, he would stop to chat, and though he never had very much to say—he would inevitably remark on the weather, or on how well the eggplants seemed to be growing—Michelle smiled warmly and returned his remarks with statements that made it seem as though he’d made the most astute of observations.

  Michelle began to insist on feeding the chickens and gathering the eggs at just the time when Gérard was due to pass by on his way home. Her trips to the chicken coop grew longer and longer, until on one occasion she had not returned for half an hour. This time, Mother noticed, and asked me to go find her, as the table needed to be laid.

  Michelle was not at the chicken coop, nor in the garden. I called her name softly, not wanting to draw attention to her absence, but got no response. The chickens clucked and bunched at my feet; they had not been fed. I saw to that, then ducked into the coop, gathering the eggs in my skirt, all the while wondering where Michelle was and what I was going to tell Mother. As I turned toward the house, I noticed the cellar door was ajar. I nudged it open with my foot. “Michelle?” I ventured, then descended the dark staircase.

  There was a sudden animal motion and a very male grunt. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw a horrified Michelle, her hands pressed to her bare breasts, her hair slipping from its pins. Behind her, Gérard struggled to extricate his torso from the potato bin. I clapped my hands (which had been holding the edges of my skirt) to my mouth, causing the eggs to break in dull wet sounds against the dirt floor. Then I fled up the stairs, my heart pounding, blood rushing to my face, and, without thinking, ran into the house, shutting the door behind me. Mother stood at the kitchen threshold, a dripping spoon in her hand.

  “What happened?” she said.

  I stared at her, unable to think what to say. “Michelle—” I began. “Michelle.”

  “What, Marie? Is she all right? What is it?”

  I felt the door pressing against my back and moved aside to let Michelle in. She appeared normal—her hair back in place, her blouse buttoned and straightened. Her face, however, was blanched and her eyes were fierce. She looked at me, trying to discern what I’d said, if anything, to Mother, and then turned to Mother and apologized with all the grace she could muster: “Forgive me, maman. I was distracted by a rainbow, and I walked to the hill to see it better. I know I’ve neglected my chores. Forgive me.” And she bent her head, as if in penance—a touch I thought a bit excessive.

  “And where are the eggs?” asked Mother.

  Michelle glanced at me, and then responded quickly. “I dropped them. I’m sorry.”

  Mother became incensed. No eggs to put in the soup? She had been counting on them. And what would M. le curé think of an egg-less aigo bouido? She made Michelle apologize to him at dinner.

  Michelle and I did not talk about the scene in the cellar that night, nor the next. Embarrassed, we avoided each other: we went directly to sleep rather than whispering, as we normally did, and we did not sit together on the hill. She disappeared shortly after we had finished our chores and, finding myself alone, I slid my forbidden book from beneath the tinderbox and read at the table.

  A few days later, when I went to collect the eggs, I was surprised to find Michelle sitting against the cellar door, weeping. I knelt beside her.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Oh, Marie,” she said, and then began to weep again, as if I’d reminded her of whatever was giving her pain. I knelt beside her for some time, scratching a
design in the dirt while I waited for her sobbing to subside. Michelle had lately acquired a taste for drama, so I was not too concerned at her profusion of tears.

  “It’s too awful,” Michelle said, and then began a whole new round of weeping.

  “Just give me a hint. Is it about Gérard?”

  “Sort of,” she said.

  “Did you have a fight?”

  She shook her head. “You won’t guess,” she said.

  “Did he—withdraw his affection?”

  She looked at me and burst out laughing.

  “What?” I asked, offended. “What’s so funny?”

  “You sound so prim,” she said.

  “Well, I don’t know what to say. You won’t tell me what the problem is.” I stood up and brushed the dirt from my skirt.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “I have to get the eggs.”

  “I’ll tell you. Just sit down.”

  I squatted: a compromise.

  “Monsieur Marcel came today to talk to Mother. Did you see him?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you know what he was here for?”

  “No, Michelle! Why must you have me guessing all the time?”

  “He was here to ask for my hand. In marriage.”

  I stood up so quickly that I stumbled and almost fell face forward into the grass. “Marriage? But you hardly know him!”

  “We’ve spoken several times. At market. He’s very kind.” She had recovered from her weeping fit remarkably well, and was now speaking with almost complete equilibrium.