by Robert Merle
“No one makes casks of oak any more,” replied Faujanet. “The wine growers won’t have ’em. They claim oak gives the wine a bad taste.”
Sauveterre stood for a long while contemplating Faujanet, who held his breath and swallowed hard given the gravity of the moment. He had been out of work for two months and had had nothing to eat since the night before, and only a bowl of oily soup and a fistful of beans the night before that, thanks to the charity of the town. But he had been told that this was an act of generosity that would not be repeated, and that his entry permit to Sarlat would expire the next day, Sunday, at noon.
Slowly, carefully, Sauveterre examined the cooper, his build, his arms, his face, his robust neck and his honest expression. “Let me see your discharge,” he requested. Faujanet fumbled through his box and held out the paper with a trembling hand. Sauveterre unfolded it and read it, one eyebrow registering his concentration. “Faujanet, have you received any aid from the Sarlat consuls?”
“To be sure, my captain, the day before yesterday when I showed them my discharge slip.”
“And from the diocese?”
“Not a crumb.”
“Well, you know the proverb,” replied Sauveterre, lowering his voice somewhat, “monks and lice are never satisfied. To them everything tastes good, even crumbs.”
“Right you are,” agreed Faujanet. “Those people do more damage with their mouths than with their swords.”
Sauveterre, laughing, handed Faujanet his paper and Faujanet began to feel that things might just be going his way. As his heart leapt, it brought with it the reminder of acute hunger.
“My chestnut trees are still standing, Faujanet,” cautioned Sauveterre. “Can you play both lumberjack and sawmiller?”
“With help, yes I can.”
“We’ll give you a try for three months with room and board. After that, three sols a day. Agreed?”
“Agreed, Captain!”
“Cabusse!” called Sauveterre, and Cabusse came running, tall and brawny, his ruddy face barred with a formidable moustache. “Cabusse, this is Faujanet, a veteran of the legion of Guyenne. He’s to be our cooper. Take him over to our wagon and wait for me there.”
Cabusse, who stood a head taller than Faujanet, watched him limp along at his side pushing through the market-day crowds.
“That will make two with a limp at Mespech,” he remarked. “Two peg legs and an iron arm.”
“An iron arm?”
“Coulondre. He has a hook in place of his left hand. It’s Siorac who had it made for him.”
He relieved Faujanet of his box and had him clamber up beside him on the wagon. Once seated, Cabusse took from his sack a piece of bread and an onion and, knife in hand, began to eat deliberately, mute, his eyes glued to the horses’ ears. Faujanet tried to keep from drooling. After a moment of feeling Faujanet’s eyes on him, Cabusse turned to look at his companion. “Are you hungry?”
“Lord, yes!”
“The Lord gave you a tongue, soldier! You should have said so!”
Cabusse cut his bread and his onion and held out half of each to Faujanet. This latter took them so avidly that he neglected to thank his new friend.
“Don’t gorge on an empty stomach,” warned Cabusse, “lest it swell and burst your liver.”
“You’re right!” agreed Faujanet, but could scarce slow his pace or reduce the size of his mouthfuls. When he had finished, Cabusse offered him a gourd.
“You’ve stoked up too fast. Now you need to let the bottle keep you from your feed or you’ll die from the blockage of your bowels.”
Faujanet drank as fast as he had eaten, then sat up straight, squared his shoulders, threw out his chest and, from his perch atop the wagon, surveyed the market crowds below, like a swimmer who has just been pulled from the sea where he was drowning. Opening his big eyes wide, he took in the horse, his robust croup, Cabusse and his hefty trunk, the solid, new, handsome wagon on which he sat, and then looked proudly around him. He now belonged to the world of happy people: those who eat.
“How is the master?” he asked Cabusse in hushed tones.
“We have no master,” replied Cabusse. “We have two captains. We: that’s Coulondre, called Iron-arm, Cockeyed Marsal and me. We’re all veterans of the Norman legion.”
“So how are the captains?” repeated Faujanet. Cabusse gave a quick glance around.
“They don’t pay better than the going wage,” he said. “And as for the work, they’re hard on themselves and hard on their people. But it’s not a house in which the master eats good wheat bread and the servants eat rotten, pasty barley bread. We eat the same food and at the same table as the captains.”
“This is a good thing,” said Faujanet licking his lips.
“It’s good for the paunch,” rejoined Cabusse, “but not so good for your freedoms. You can’t say anything you want at the captains’ table, nor can you do anything you please. The captains have no truck with lechery.”
“Oh well, as for that, you can taste beauty but you can’t eat it,” said Faujanet.
“Hunger doesn’t just strike your stomach,” replied Cabusse. “There’s the other kind. And the poor beast can have too much bridle. Not so much as a gallant word to the chambermaid, nor a pinch either, and if you stumble on the wet nurse you’ll be out of a job! Yet you surely wouldn’t hurt yourself falling on her. Alas, they may well say ‘A mouse without hole is soon caught,’ but at Mespech it’s not so,” he smiled.
“And how is the other captain?” asked Faujanet, abstaining from any comment and not even daring to smile in response to this proverb.
“One is as good as the other when it comes to work. But as to the other matter, the second one would be more easy-going. He is married and has three children. No, four,” he said, correcting himself with a smile and a wink.
So well made were Faujanet’s barrels that five years later you could find his work throughout the Sarlat region and as far away as Périgueux. To their noble friends, who raised an eyebrow over this commerce, the Brethren pointed out that it was better to grow rich by selling casks and cut stone than by thievery and highway robbery as some barons did. Moreover, the captains avoided frequenting the expensive festivities given at the other chateaux, using Sauveterre’s injury as their excuse, but, in reality, with an eye to the expense that would inevitably come from reciprocating such invitations. They did invite their friends, but always in small groups and for dinner only—no dancing, singing, games or wasted candles, a parsimony which annoyed my mother no little bit since she would have preferred more pomp and gaiety.
And yet, despite their prosperity, the Brethren had little reason to rejoice. Henri II’s persecution of the reformers had not abated, quite the contrary. On his orders, many notable people were attacked who had until now been spared. For most of the Périgordians, the king was a distant character whom no one, except perhaps a few noblemen, would ever see, and who counted little in their daily lives, except when royal officers came collecting tithes. But for the reformers, whom he crushed mercilessly, Henri II was as real as the thongs, the gibbet, the stake, the flames that leapt from the pyre or the smoke that choked the cities with the awful smell of their burning flesh.
I see in the Book of Reason that the reformers or those who hid their Protestantism wondered much about Henri’s character. But in truth, those who had approached him concluded that there was nothing to understand. As affectionate as a young dog, very attached to Diane and to Montmorency, to his children and even to his wife, at the age of thirty-eight Henri II was but a bearded and large-jawed boy, whose vacant eyes gaped stupidly at the world around him. He was cruel only through lack of imagination. Ten years of reigning had left him virtually unchanged from the lad who had been pulled in tears from the arms of his dying father. He excelled at tennis, hunting and jousting, but his mind had never been awakened and he depended on others for his ideas—even the simplest ones.
The king considered the Reformation like the “sicknes
s of the plague”. But even this metaphor wasn’t his; he’d had to be prompted. He said as well that he wanted “to see his people cleaned and spared such a dangerous plague and vermin as these heresies”. But this was the language of the priests and preachers he had heard thousands of times and which consequently he believed to be true. Fearing that this “sickness”, or “vermin”, or “plague” might spread throughout the kingdom and endanger the royal power, he sought to root it out by edicts, torture chambers, imprisonment, inquisition and fire. As books coming from abroad might also carry this contagion, they were burnt. The tongues of the most resolute Protestant martyrs had to be cut lest, from atop their funeral pyres, their professions of faith contaminate the populace. The king could not understand how this “sickness”, despite all such remedies, continued to spread and find purchase among the royal officers, the nobles, the great lords and even in the parliaments which were supposed to combat it.
Ten years of persecution had taught the king nothing about those he persecuted. Lacking reflection or dignity, he lived dully in the rut of his habits, between his wife, Catherine de’ Medici, and Diane de Poitiers, now fifty-nine years old. The two women, each fearful of the other, had decided to make their peace and to share the king amicably. When Henri forgot about Catherine on Diane’s lap, dazzled as if for the first time by her sexagenarian breasts, Diane would firmly remind him of his conjugal duties and push him into bed with his wife.
As for politics, unable to decide anything alone, the king lent one ear to Montmorency and the other to the Duc de Guise. He preferred the constable, probably because he instinctively felt him to be as artless as himself. But Guise often prevailed. The king followed one or the other depending on the season, and since their designs were contradictory, his policies were inevitably confused.
My father notes in his Book of Reason that Henri had no real reason to break the Peace of Vaucelles in 1557, since it guaranteed his conquest of the house of Austria. Yet Guise, who had distinguished himself by defending Metz against Charles V, dreamt of refurbishing his honour by undoing Felipe II of Spain. He had defeated the father and now needed to defeat the son. Guise, in his nonchalance, forgot one new element: Felipe II was consort to the queen of England, Mary Tudor—France would have to face two powerful kingdoms and to wage war on all of its frontiers.
Yet the king was inclined to follow Guise because, as a great jouster, he loved war, which his feeble imagination reduced to a superb tourney between two sovereigns in which each must, by a deft stroke of the lance, knock the other out of his stirrups. My father observed that during his previous war against Charles V, the king had no idea how to use his army of 50,000 men, except to line them up and march them in full parade dress with banners and fanfare in front of the emperor’s camp at Valenciennes. Since Charles’s army never broke ranks, the king thought the emperor must consider himself defeated according to the rules of chivalry. Consequently, without having fired a single shot, the king beat a retreat, ravaging the countryside in his path, friend and foe alike.
In this year of 1557, the Brethren feared the worst for the kingdom, and the worst, indeed, occurred when Henri, unprovokedly tearing up the Treaty of Vaucelles, declared war on Spain on 31st January and when Mary Tudor, in turn, declared war on Henri on 7th June of the same year.
The kingdom was invaded from the north. A powerful army, assembled in the Low Countries, besieged Saint-Quentin, while Guise struggled unsuccessfully against Felipe II’s soldiers in Italy. Saint-Quentin was marvellously defended by Coligny with but a handful of men, but Montmorency, coming to his rescue with the royal army, managed stupidly and disastrously to have it crushed trying to cross the river Somme. The kingdom fell into great peril. The route to Paris was opened and the Parisians began packing their bags.
However, Coligny, at a thousand to one, held out in Saint-Quentin, and his stout resistance gave Henri time to call Guise back from Italy and to conscript an army from among his nobles. Meanwhile, anxious to seek an alliance with the Lutheran princes of Germany, Henri gave in to their request, and moderated (without altogether suspending them) his executions of the reformers. The Huguenots were not fooled by this semi-clemency. They knew that, once the war was over, the executions would start up immediately no matter how great their contributions to the war effort. But their travails had deepened their thinking on the matter, and they were more acutely aware than the majority of their countrymen that there was a difference between king and kingdom. They might hate the king, despise his cruelty and long for his death, yet the kingdom must be defended at all costs against foreign tyranny.
Périgord was fifteen to twenty days’ ride from Paris, and many, even the most noble, loathed the idea of leaving their splendid chateaux—especially given the risks to their possessions engendered by a long absence—to seek, so far away to the north, wounds and suffering. Others, however, younger and poor as beggars in their dilapidated manor houses, followed their aspirations to adventure, glory, booty and joyful raping in the sacked villages.
Out of resentment against François I, who had banished his father, Bertrand de Fontenac, then twenty-seven years old, let it be known that his health was too delicate to permit him to follow Henri’s call to arms. But few noble Huguenots—including those who barely hid their affiliation—avoided the call. Jean de Siorac, with the support of his beloved brother, and despite their mutual despair at the idea of this first separation in twenty-one years, made up his mind to arm himself for war and to set out with Cabusse, Marsal and Coulondre. Sauveterre, whose old injury kept him at Mespech, agreed in his brother’s absence to take over command of the household, and the defence of their lands.
3
I WAS SIX YEARS OLD when my father left Mespech for the war. On the eve of his departure, as night fell in the courtyard of the chateau, the three soldiers loaded the wagon they would take with them. As long as it was merely oats for the horses, flour, salt, cured pork and nuts that were being stowed, we children could be content just to watch. But when they brought out the arms and cuirasses, our interest was sparked.
“What’s that helmet with blinders?” asked my elder brother François.
“A burgonet,” answered Cabusse.
“And this helmet with raised sides?”
“A morion.”
Of the three soldiers, as I have mentioned, Cabusse was the only talker. But there were two reasons for this: Coulondre Iron-arm was economical in everything, even his words; Cockeyed Marsal stuttered.
“And what’s that?” I demanded.
“Little idiot,” said François, “that’s a coat of chain mail.”
“And that?” asked my half-brother Samson.
“A cuirass,” answered François.
“Not at all,” corrected Cabusse. “It’s a corselet. It only protects the torso and the back.”
“Cabusse,” I said, “will the corselet protect you from being shot at?”
“A… a… a… las,” said Marsal, looking at me sadly through crossed eyes.
“My little men,” said Cabusse, “if I tell you all the names of the firearms, will you then be off to bed?” We all looked at each other, vexed by this manoeuvre; then François, always on his best behaviour, replied with great importance:
“Agreed, Cabusse.”
“Well then,” continued Cabusse, “this…”
“Is an arquebus,” said François.
“Fuse or flint?” asked Cabusse, smoothing his moustache.
“Flint.”
“No, Monsieur,” corrected Cabusse, “fuse. But the fuse is missing. Here’s a pistol. This is a small arquebus. Its advantage is that you can shoot it with one hand. Here’s a pistolette—a small pistol. This is a gun you hold against your chest rather than your shoulder.”
“These are proud weapons!” I exclaimed. “They’ll kill lots of enemies.”
“The enemy’s got the same ones,” replied Coulondre. He seemed, as usual, quite lugubrious, unlike Cabusse, who whistled as he worked, q
uite cheerful, it appeared, at the thought of leaving home and cutting loose.
Barberine called us all within, soldiers included, and, with Samson and me at the head of the pack, we raced to the great hall, where my father and Sauveterre were standing, backs to the fireplace, looking very serious. My mother sat at the far end of the table, between her chambermaid, Cathau, and Barberine, who held my two-year-old sister in her arms. Between these two groups, the three soldiers took their places and, opposite them, my two cousins from Taniès and the stonecutter Jonas, the three of whom would be staying to man the defence of Mespech during my father’s absence.
To my father’s right stood a little man dressed all in black save for an enormous white ruff that seemed to make his head smaller, like that of a plucked bird, his thin, arched, beak-like nose emphasizing this avian comparison and his jet-black, round eyes fixed on my father. This man stood absolutely silent, and since he gave us no command, we children slipped as best we could into the spaces left by the adults at the table: François on Sauveterre’s right, Samson on Jonas’s left and I on my father’s right.
François and Geoffroy de Caumont finally arrived and, a few minutes later, Faujanet, who had tethered their horses after lowering the drawbridges for them. The Brethren and the new arrivals embraced each other with a gravity that made a deep impression on me. I noticed that Geoffroy de Caumont was content to wave to his cousin Isabelle from across the room rather than going around the table to greet her.
“Maître Ricou,” said Jean de Siorac, addressing the little bird-beaked notary, “since we are dealing with a matter of the utmost importance requiring the presence of François and Geoffroy de Caumont, my wife Isabelle, my children, my cousins and all my servants, I took the liberty of troubling you to come all the way to Mespech, and I promise to have my men accompany you back to Sarlat.” He paused to glance around at the assembled group. “Maître Ricou,” he continued, “will read you the codicil that Sauveterre and I have decided to add to our act of brotherhood. Each of you should pay close attention to this reading, for any one of you may at some future date be required to testify as to its contents. Maître Ricou, please proceed.”
