by Robert Merle
Seeing me caught between these two Furies, my father rose and came to the rescue, ordering Catherine to withdraw to her room and Little Sissy to the scullery. Which they did, grinding their teeth, their eyes shooting daggers at each other.
“Pierre! What on earth,” my father queried, once they’d left the hall with a furious flouncing of their skirts, “was the reason for this caterwauling?”
As I quietly explained what had happened, my father walked back and forth before me with his impatient step, incapable as ever of remaining at rest, but, despite his greying hair, alert and always at the ready: carriage straight, hands on hips, strong of leg. To honour our lady visitors he was decked out in a velvet doublet of a handsome pale green—a tribute to my mother, for green had been her colour. In all, the Baron de Mespech cut a handsome and alluring figure.
“Well, Pierre!” he laughed, glancing at me from the corner of his eye. “It doesn’t seem, as Quéribus would say, that there’ll ever be a lack of wenches around you, but rather an overabundance of ’em, since you’re so excessively generous and soft: a combination to which even your sister is sensitive, who is never without the gold necklace you gave her—even at night. As for Little Sissy, though I don’t like a pregnant woman to be struck in my house, I sense that she deserved these slaps, since she’s insufferably cheeky with everyone here. Casual love,” he continued, taking my arm and pulling me close to him, “always seems easily won, but there are always dangers there, because we too often forget that our good chambermaids are women every bit as much as the gallant ladies—they are always trying to slip a halter around our necks as soon as they get their hands on us.”
He sighed—a sigh that led me to believe that Franchou was giving him a hard time because Zara had been hunting on her territory.
“As for Catherine,” he continued, “she’s so much like your late mother: very affectionate with those she loves, but haughty by nature and deprecating towards everyone else, suffering neither reins nor bridle, always riding hell for leather and impossibly indomitable. So, my son,” he laughed, “which will it be, Catherine or Little Sissy, whom you’ll take to Bordeaux?”
“I’d never thought about it till now,” I confessed, “but now I’ll have to consider it. I understand that Catherine is not very happy in the countryside, since she can’t find a suitor here, so of course she’d love to live in a big city, hoping for a miracle there. But I’d never dream,” I added after mulling it over a bit, “of depriving you of her radiant smile.”
“Which isn’t very radiant when you and Samson are gone,” he lamented. “Catherine yearns for younger stallions than we’ve got within our old walls. If you think she’d do, Pierre, take her with you without a second thought for me.”
“Ah, but do I want her? I just don’t know,” I mused. “No doubt I love her, with a great and fraternal love, and yet…”
“And yet?” continued my father with a laugh. “Don’t finish that sentence until you’ve thought about it some more. There’ll be plenty of time to make up your mind before Samson leaves on the fifteenth.”
The next morning, the snow continued to fall in flakes so thick that, from the window of the fencing room, I could hardly distinguish the church tower in Marcuays on the other side of the meadow, as if a white tapestry had fallen from the sky, partially obscuring the horizon and so muffling all the normal sounds that, though I heard our cocks crow, I couldn’t hear the cocks from the neighbouring farms answer them. Worse still, even the noises from Samson’s fencing lesson with Giacomi seemed muted to my numbed, lazy ears.
Miroul and big Fröhlich, seated beside me, were rendered speechless by the sight of Giacomi, with an almost imperceptible movement of his wrist, parrying my brother’s blade and touching his own to my brother’s chest as quickly and effortlessly as a bird flits through the air.
“Well, now, Samson!” cried Giacomi, with that wonderful Italian lisp that gave his speech such grace. “Were you backing away? Pure heresy. It’s the blade’s business to deflect the blade. Not the torso’s job to sound the retreat!”
“I’ll remember,” promised Samson, who, of the three of us, was the most docile, and, as a consequence, hardly the best swordsman, being slow to understand and late in learning.
Giacomi seemed almost preternaturally quick by comparison, his flesh so thinly spread on his bones, long arms and legs, and his movements so economical and well executed that it was a marvel to watch him achieve so much with so little effort! And how I loved to watch his oval, tanned face, all of whose features seemed joyously to pull upwards: the corners of his eyelids and his lips, even his turned-up nose. He was a person of great quality, the mirror of courtesy, a man of good and rare mettle, who, though a papist, had risked his life to help me navigate a safe route out of Paris during the St Bartholomew’s day massacre.
“Giacomi,” I said, pulling him over to the window embrasure once his assault was ended, “I’m ashamed to watch you exercise your art with such insignificant folk as ourselves, you who were Silvie’s assistant in the Louvre and the teacher of such great and important noblemen. And as much as I would love to keep you here, and my father as well, I wouldn’t wish to shackle your fortunes for anything—”
“What are you saying?” interrupted Giacomi, raising his eyebrows.
“That if you’d prefer to leave on the fifteenth with Quéribus and his escort—”
“What, my brother!” he cried, feigning anger. “Have I displeased you? Are you annoyed with me? Have I been banished to the borderlands of your affection?”
From this speech, couched in such gaily humorous terms, I knew that Giacomi would be staying with me. I laughed from the comfort I felt, but with my heart beating and my throat all knotted up, I gushed:
“Ah, Giacomi! You know that my heart is forever attached to yours by hooks of steel—ever since St Bartholomew’s eve!”
“My brother,” answered Giacomi, “let’s not get too emotional about what each of us owes the other, and start crying like fountains over our blessings. Friendship is like a viol whose strings mustn’t be tightened all the way to tears!”
These very poetic Italian thoughts were spoken with a gracious gesture of his left hand, and, as he walked away, he said over his shoulder:
“But what about you, Pierre?” And glancing at the snow, he added, “Do you plan to stay the winter at Mespech?”
“Absolutely not! After the departure of our ladies, I plan to set up my medical practice in Bordeaux, which is a beautiful, large city that prospers from its maritime trade.”
“Well then,” smiled Giacomi, “if you want me to accompany you, Pierre, I’ll follow, along with the arms and baggage. I have no doubt I can find as many fencing students there as you will patients.”
I looked over at Fröhlich and saw that he was looking very sullen, since he had little love for the farm work he’d been doing at Mespech, but didn’t dare ask me to take him with me to Bordeaux, knowing full well that I already had Miroul in my service and was doubtless not rich enough to support two valets.
But I didn’t have time to comfort my good Swiss Guard: Escorgol stuck his enormous nose and even larger stomach through the door and announced breathlessly that a horseman, followed by a page, was outside requesting entry to Mespech and claiming to be my friend.
Our Escorgol had the peculiarity of possessing a very large nose but a weak sense of smell, and tiny ears but the finest sense of hearing in the whole region. He could, it was said, hear a child walking barefoot along the grassy road to Mespech fifty toises away. Which is why we employed him as our porter. He also had very keen vision, though it was hard to see his eyes through all the folds of his eyelids.
“Did he tell you his name, Escorgol?”
“He flatly refused, Monsieur, arguing that he would reveal his name only to you.”
“Did you recognize his voice?”
“No, and even less his accent, which is definitely not from here.”
“And his face?”
“I couldn’t see it. The fellow is covered up to his eyebrows by a great cloak, which itself is covered with snow.”
“’Sblood!” I cried. “Let’s solve this mystery!” And off I ran, with Escorgol, Miroul, Giacomi and Fröhlich at my heels, leaving Samson frozen in place, magnetized suddenly by a more attractive metal, for Gertrude had just entered the room from the opposite door.
After crossing the two drawbridges of the little island in our moat, I ran to open the peephole in the main gate and spied a large fellow on horseback, whose cloak was so closely drawn over his face that you could hardly see his eyes. Indeed, the brown mantle covering him was completely blanketed with snow, and his horse was only black on his underside, but our visitor seemed less bothered by it that his pretty little page, who was blowing on his fingers to try to warm them.
“Who are you, my snowy companion?” I shouted through the peephole.
“Is that really Pierre de Siorac who’s speaking to me through the iron grid there?” said the fellow, whose voice had a familiar ring to it.
“’Tis really I.”
“Well, if that’s really the case, then I curse the treacherous peephole that’s preventing me from seeing your handsome face!”
“And who are you to speak thus?”
“A man who loves you. But tell me—relieve me of my doubts: is this really the venerable Dr Pierre de Siorac, younger son of the Baron de Mespech, who’s speaking to me?”
“Didn’t you hear me? ’Tis I!”
“And you don’t recognize me, Pierre de Siorac?”
“Not all cloaked up like that, no.”
“Nor my voice?”
“Not yet.”
“Well!” laughed the fellow. “It is the voice of blood.”
“The voice of blood?”
“Or rather, if you prefer, the murmur of milk: I was your nurse, Pierre.”
“My nurse, a man?”
“Am I a man?” mused the fellow sardonically. “Sometimes I wonder. But never mind. I was not your wet nurse Pierre, as Barberine was, but the nursemaid to your mind.”
“To my mind?”
“Indeed! I nourished you in Montpellier at the teats of logic and philosophy that hang from that cow Aristotle.”
“What?” I cried, unable to believe my ears and throwing open the door in my joy. “Fogacer! Is it really you?”
“Ipse, mi fili,”†† he said, lowering his cape. And smiling, his head now slowly covering with snow, he looked at me with those dark eyes, and arched his diabolical eyebrow.
* “Free, for the love of God.”
† “The nobles of the gown” (the judicial and administrative class of nobility); “the nobles of the sword” (the feudal, knightly class of nobility).
‡ “When winter’s cold and clothed in white, you’ve got to keep your arse squeezed tight!”
§ “Year of snow, by my faith as a gentleman, year of plenty!”
¶ “You won’t find me defending immorality” (Ovid).
|| “There are almost no cases where a woman hasn’t been the cause of a quarrel.”
** “Odour of woman.”
†† “Myself, my son.”
2
MY FATHER WAS delighted to meet Fogacer, having heard so much about him, though I’d omitted certain particulars about his habits, which no doubt would have been difficult for him to swallow given how foreign they were to his own temperament and since they were so vilified by our religion. And Fogacer, for his part, accustomed as he was to the persecution of persons of his stripe, had learnt so well how to disguise his voice, gestures and behaviour that the Baron de Mespech was a thousand leagues from suspecting anything, even when Fogacer requested that his young page not be bedded down in Miroul’s room, but in his own, since the poor lad suffered from suffocation fits in the night that only his master could calm by massaging his epigastrium.
Fogacer made this request without batting an eyelid, and my father was entirely persuaded by the reason, since, as you will remember, he’d studied medicine in Montpellier himself before choosing a career as a soldier. As for Sauveterre, convinced as he was that all evil in this world derived from womankind, he had no particular sensitivity about such “devilishness and other detestable enormities”, as Calvin labelled them—both he and the Pope condemning the practitioners of this vice to the scaffold, doubtless the only subject on which they’d found reconciliation.
I chose for their lodgings the room at the top of the north tower, since it was the most isolated of all of our living spaces and would afford them the privacy they’d need.
“Mi fili,” said Fogacer when we were able to sit down alone together, “please allow me to stretch out on the cot here. I’ve been on horseback for three solid days, and almost haven’t dismounted since Périgueux—and though I prefer the present discomfort to the flames that were intended for my derrière in that town, the inflammation is nevertheless quite painful!”
“Does that mean, Fogacer, that you were threatened with being burnt at the stake in Périgueux? Who or what got you into such a mess?”
“My virtue,” replied Fogacer, arching his eyebrows.
“Your virtue,” I observed, seating myself on a stool beside his cot, while his valet—or, as Fogacer termed him, his page—squatted on the floor nearby, and never took his eyes off his master, as though he feared that the man might evaporate into thin air if he turned his back for a quarter of a second, “your virtue, Fogacer, was already under some debate back in Montpellier, if I remember correctly.”
“And yet,” replied Fogacer with that slow, sinuous smile of his, “wouldn’t it be cowardly to cease to be what I am, just because who I am doesn’t please those who construct gallows, build pyres and christen my virtue a crime, in the name of obscure precepts that have come to us all dusty from the dark night of belief?”
“Crime or virtue, my friend, what did you do in Périgueux that got you condemned to be burnt alive?”
“I loved,” lamented Fogacer gravely and, this time, without a trace of a smile, “in the only way I know how, and the only object that I deem lovable. But though my love was noble and, in my heart, pure, it was suddenly labelled ‘abominable and diabolical’ by the powers that be, who are governed by certain narrow-minded, weak, hypocritical and zealous persons. And so suddenly I found myself in desperate flight, galloping furiously over hill and dale, fearing for my life—and fearing for his especially,” placing his hand on the blond curls of his page, who immediately took it and covered it with kisses of infinite gratitude.
“This little fellow,” Fogacer continued, taking his hand from the boy’s, and with more feeling than I’d ever witnessed in him, “was in the employ of an acrobat in Paris, who was teaching him his tricks and had him working long hours under perilous conditions for a pittance. What’s more, he would beat him mercilessly and shower him frequently with a thousand insults. But it happened that our impresario, having been caught in some villainy in Paris, had to flee the capital with his band and travel from town to town, earning his bread by his antics and acrobatics. So what could I do but follow them across France, wholly captivated as I was by the charms of my pretty Silvio, and caring for the injured and sick in the troupe without receiving a sol for my services?”
“Oh, Fogacer! To think that you were one of the doctors of the Duc d’Anjou! Fallen so low and prey to these vagabonds!”
“Trahit sua quemque voluptas!”* mused Fogacer with a wistful sigh. “But allow me to continue. When we reached Périgueux, I decided to take this little angel—who’s as angelic in his heart as he is in his bodily beauty—and flee our tyrannical impresario. But the villain, who’d turned a blind eye to my passion as long as it served his interests, ‘realized’ at my departure that his Christian conscience was outraged by our love and ran to denounce us to the bishop of Périgueux”—and here Fogacer lowered his voice—“as a monster and an atheist, since he’d also observed that I only rarely and without interest heard Mass. At this
, the bishop sent a cleric to my inn to conduct an inquiry, but I bribed him to let us go. Which we did that same day, smelling fire and brimstone all around us, and knowing that the damned can expect no justice in this kingdom.”
“The damned, Fogacer?”
“The Huguenots, the Jews, the atheists and the sodomites. And since I belong to the last two categories, I was in great danger of being burnt twice! Ah, what a cruel world, my Pierre. So many try to please God by zealously killing their fellow men.”
He laughed at this, but with the face of one who’s decided to laugh to avoid crying.
“Did you know I was here in Mespech?” I asked after a moment of silence.
“Not before arriving in Sarlat, where, to my intense relief, I heard that you’d escaped safe and sound from the St Bartholomew’s day massacre. May I have your permission, Pierre,” he said, sitting up on his cot, “to remain at Mespech long enough for this clerical vigilance to calm down? My idea is to go from here to Bordeaux, and from there to La Rochelle, where, from what I’ve heard, my master has decided to massacre the Huguenots who have occupied that city.”
“My dear damned friend,” I said with a smile, “does it make any sense to help Anjou slaughter other damned people?”
“Not in the least, mi fili,” replied Fogacer. “The point is not to help him in this effort, but to try to cure his ills. The only blood I’ll draw when I’m there will be his, and since it’s blue, I’ll be protected from persecution.”
I laughed at this, of course, and assured Fogacer that he could stay at Mespech as long as he liked, my father being indebted to him for having saved my life in Montpellier when the judges tried to send me to the scaffold for the “murder” I’d committed as well as for my amorous activities on a tomb with a diabolical petticoat.
The snow continued to fall so hard and unremittingly over the next several days that it threatened to close the road from Sarlat, cutting us off from the seat of the seneschalty there—something the elders of our villages hadn’t seen in Périgord for sixty-seven years. In consequence, the Brethren consulted with their neighbours and decided to send all of their labourers to clear the roads of snow at least as far as Marcuays. This was a Sisyphean task for the poor folk, who suffered in the bitter cold, shovelling the snow to the sides of the road, knowing they’d only have to start all over again the next morning—an exhausting task, one that they performed for their lords and that they accepted very begrudgingly since they earned no salary for doing it. Mespech was the only chateau to serve them some hot soup at noon, the only meal they had throughout their interminable day.
