by Robert Merle
“But these are real demons, your saints, my poor Maligou,” laughed my father.
“No, My Lord, not at all,” rejoined la Maligou. “And if you want the blessed water of a saint to heal you, you must throw sols in his fountain.”
“Such miserly saints!” said my father with a smile. “And what are they doing up there in Paradise with all this money?”
“I know not. But the sols don’t stay in the fountains very long.”
“I thought not,” mused my father.
“To give you an example,” continued la Maligou, “poor Petremol, who died two years ago—”
“On 1st January,” broke in Barberine.
“Right, on 1st January. Well, as you know, St Avit had twisted him and knotted him up with terrible rheumatisms for two years. And a month before he died, he went to St Avit, had a Mass said to the saint, and right there in the middle of winter, stripped naked as a baby, rubbed his whole body with the icy water of the saint and was cured.”
“So he was cured!” replied my father. “Cured so well that a month later he died of pneumonia.”
“Ah, but he was cured of the rheumatisms, My Lord.”
“To be sure, where he has gone, I grant you, he no longer suffers from rheumatism. So St Avit gives rheumatisms and takes them away. This is wonderful!”
“Is it not right that he should undo what he has done, My Lord?” asked la Maligou. “Likewise the saint of Sarazac twists up the legs of infants, but can also straighten them again.”
“For a Mass and a few sols.”
“Well, but also you have to rub them with the water of his fountain.”
“Which is the same water as our well,” said my father. “My friends,” he continued, rising, and taking a more serious tack, “you have now heard la Maligou. And what man, on hearing this poor hen, would not admire the ingeniousness of the priests in exploiting the credulity of the poor people? And so, instead of honouring the saints for the Christian virtues exemplified in their lives, they make them into little gods and demons just like the pagan ones. For the Romans also had their saints. In their lakes there were naiads who aided their fishing, and instead of loose change, they threw them vases, bracelets and flowers.” My father paused and glared severely at la Maligou. “Oh, Maligou,” he said, “we could write a fat book full of all your beliefs which have no other existence than in the folds of your small mind… Including your claim that Little Sissy is the daughter of a Gypsy, which is untrue.”
La Maligou’s mouth fell open at this unexpected piece of news, and Little Sissy opened wide her beautiful almond-shaped black liquid eyes and gazed at my father, but said nothing.
“It is wicked heresy,” continued my father heatedly, “to attribute to our saints the power of healing. It is stinking idolatry to make idols of them and to worship them. There is only one God and He alone can heal soul and body. And it is to Him and to Him alone that you must pray.”
La Maligou, still stung by my father’s statement about Little Sissy’s birth (for her rape by the Gypsy captain in the barn was the glory and crowning jewel of her life), sat tight-lipped, her eyes cast down and her thick greasy body hunched over.
Now that she had fallen silent, no one dared utter a peep. In truth, I do not believe that my father succeeded, in these few short minutes, in rooting out heresy and superstitious beliefs. But our people were too accustomed to obeying religious authority not to give way to that of my father, Sauveterre and Duroy, all learned and serious men who read books and knew things—especially my father, who was a great doctor and who cared for the common people without charging them a sol.
“Well then,” said my father. “You have heard enough to know which abuses and errors we intend to correct. Will you follow your masters in the reformed religion?”
As no one wanted to be first to reply, a prolonged silence followed, and the longer it continued the more thoroughly embarrassed the Brethren became. Luckily, Annet, whom little Hélix was cradling in her arms and who had been quiet until that moment, suddenly burst out crying to wake the dead. Little Hélix passed him to Barberine who, unlacing her red bodice, brought out a large, firm and sumptuous breast, which the little bawler quickly latched onto. His little hands clutching her white flesh, he closed his eyes and quieted down into his happy lot. This was a spectacle which normally I could not get enough of, and I noticed that I was not alone in this pleasure: Barberine’s swollen, snow-white breast attracted everyone’s attention, even my father’s, who smiled as he gazed at it. Only Sauveterre and the Reverend Duroy averted their eyes and conversed quietly with each other. Now that I was a strapping lad I would have blushed to catch myself dreaming of taking the suckling babe’s place at Barberine’s breast, and yet I could almost taste the sweet warm milk flow into my throat, and I envied little Annet his freedom to caress that beautiful round, full breast; for I had discovered this pleasure during my intimate nights with little Hélix, whose advantages unfortunately could not be compared to her mother’s.
Reflecting back on this moment, I felt quite confused to have evoked such sins in my own mind before such an assembly, a thing I had never yet managed to do in confession to Father Pincers, fearing that he would tell my mother, who would put an end to the sleeping arrangements that made them possible. Thank God, now that I was a Huguenot I would not have to go to confession any more, which lifted an immense weight from my chest, so abject was my fear of my sessions with the insatiably curious Pincers.
I am certain that none among those assembled dared think that the scene of Barberine nursing her baby could have served as a model for a statue of the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus, but that’s exactly what was going through my head, however Huguenot I had become. But I didn’t breathe a word of it, for I wouldn’t have wanted to vex my father, who, waiting patiently for the nursing to end to rephrase his solemn question, said to Barberine, half joking, half serious: “My dear Barberine, I am sorely tempted to take away your agate necklace just to prove to you that it has no effect on your milk.”
“Ah, My Lord,” wailed Barberine, who in the face of this threat felt her milk practically recede towards its source, “you wouldn’t do that to me! You’d dry me right up! And my little Annet would waste away!”
“No, no,” laughed my father, “I won’t do it, my poor woman. Keep your agates, they’re so pretty on your white skin!” (Here Sauveterre frowned, of course.) “And who knows whether your imagination wouldn’t be enough, with the agates gone, to dry up your milk! A good nurse shouldn’t be vexed, anyone can tell you that.”
As he spoke, little Annet suddenly let go his prey, and, satiated, fell asleep. Barberine placed him back in little Hélix’s arms and her breast back in her blouse, which seemed to have the effect of casting a pall over the assembly.
“Well, my good people,” said my father, restoring the gravity of the situation, “back to business. Who among you will stand for the reform? Speak, Michel Siorac!”
“I will,” said Michel and Benoît Siorac in one voice.
“Cabusse?”
“I will!”
“Coulondre?”
“I will!”
“Marsal?”
“I will!”
“Jonas?”
“I will!”
“Faujanet?”
“I will!”
My father then turned to the women, whose “I wills” were spoken with much less assurance—at least those of Barberine, Cathau and la Maligou, for in the eyes of little Hélix (thirteen and a half) and Little Sissy (six) it was only a good joke on Pincers.
Little Sissy having declared her faith, my father realized that he had not asked Catherine, who, as his daughter, should have come first, even before the Siorac twins. Catherine had noticed this omission and, believing herself banished from her father’s love, pale and her blue eyes brimming with tears, she hung her head, her golden locks hanging mournfully about her cheeks. “Well Catherine, my girl,” said my father with a big smile, “I seem to have forgo
tten you. But you heard my question: will you embrace the reformed religion of your father?”
“I will,” sobbed Catherine in a trembling voice, and burst into tears.
My father, who was not unaware that these tears had something to do with my mother, grew sombre, and, getting up, said abruptly: “Barberine, it’s bedtime for these children. They’ve been kept up too late.”
As Barberine rose to gather up her brood, Coulondre opened his mouth like a fish. That usually meant that he was about to speak: an activity so unusual for him that it required a good deal of preparation, for from his open mouth no sound was emitted at first. Yet no one was fooled: Coulondre was going to speak his mind, an event so rare that all eyes turned to him. Despite the orders she’d received, Barberine made not a move.
Coulondre had placed his arm—or rather his iron hook—on the table to ease the burden on his shoulder. At forty his hair was already turning white, and his entire face, long as Lent, seemed to be turned downward: the corners of his eyes, of his mouth, the tilt of his nose. He had a way of closing his eyes during dinner which scarcely inspired conversation from his neighbours. Added to which, no one would have been much interested in hearing his opinion. For whenever Coulondre chose to emit real words instead of his usual grunts, it was to voice sad and calamitous thoughts. On the eve of my father’s departure for the war, as Cabusse was showing us the firearms, I remember that when I cried, “These are proud weapons! They’ll kill lots of enemies,” Coulondre had merely said, “The enemy’s got the same ones,” with a look and a tone that implied that not one of them, my father included, would survive the conflict.
Such were Coulondre’s tendencies and talents: he stripped the future bare of any vestige of hope. So at Mespech not only the servants but even the Brethren had ended up fearing Coulondre’s least words, for they were always sulphurous vapours, heartbreaking observations, crushing truths—so immense was his instinct for sniffing out and revealing the worst side of things.
“My Lord,” he rasped with the voice of the taciturn, “I would like to ask a question.”
“Ask away, my brave Coulondre,” said my father with his usual good humour, tempered now with a touch of uneasiness, a feeling we all shared faced with the prospect of this great mute’s speech.
“My Lord,” continued Coulondre, “will we continue to celebrate saints’ days at Mespech as we used to?”
We all looked at each other and, as my father hesitated, Sauveterre interjected drily: “There’s no reason to celebrate saints’ days any more since in the reformed religion we don’t worship the saints.”
“I thought as much,” mumbled Coulondre in a funereal voice, and he closed his eyes.
Everyone stared at him and a mournful silence fell over the table. There was such consternation among our people and such astonishment that they no longer knew—dare I say—which saint to turn to. It had just dawned on them that in one short evening they had lost fifty holidays a year.
It was on the afternoon of Monday 23rd December (as reported in extenso in the Book of Reason) that Baron de Siorac, Monsieur de Sauveterre, the Reverend Duroy and the four Caumont brothers, the eldest of whom, François, was the lord of Milandes and of Castelnau, convened in my father’s library to instruct the Baronne de Siorac in the ways of the reformed religion and to invite her conversion. As good captains, Siorac and Sauveterre had wrapped up a successful campaign in their conversion of Mespech. With that same brilliant tactical sense Guise had shown at Calais, they had vanquished one by one each of the strongholds defending the city before bringing their entire forces to bear on the citadel itself. But if they had hoped to benefit from the same effect of surprise that Guise had enjoyed, they were sadly mistaken. For, through Franchou, whom Barberine had kept hourly informed of the conversion’s progress within our walls, Isabelle knew exactly how her husband, her sons, her daughter, the Siorac twins, Cabusse and Cathau and all the servants, men and women alike, had been won over.
Isolated and as though surrounded on all sides by the “heresy”, Isabelle wasn’t about to let herself be taken—quite the contrary. With her pride as stiffened and reddened as a cockscomb, she appeared in the library in all her finery, superbly decked out, her beautiful golden locks adorned with her set of ancestral pearls (my father certainly too chary of the Brethren’s resources to think of wasting them on such frivolity). And it was she who attacked before my father could even open his mouth: “Messieurs,” she said in a declamatory tone, “why are so many of you gathered here? Are you in league against me? Are you my judges? Do you plan to torture me when you have done here? Is it for this that you have convoked my four cousins? Seven men against one unfortunate woman, and she attended by no one! Do you feel strong enough to defeat me?”
“Madame,” said my father, greatly taken aback by her hardy overture, “your speech lacks reason or justification. No one here wishes your demise, quite the contrary. We all wish, from the bottom of our hearts, that you will be saved. If you see your cousins gathered here, it is because they are all that remain of your illustrious family, and having for some time now embraced the reformed religion, they desired to be a witness to our call to join our ranks. As for Monsieur Duroy, whom you see here—”
“I do not know this knave,” said my mother in her most disdainful manner, “nor will I listen to him.”
“Knave, Madame?” gasped my father with a start. “Monsieur Duroy is the minister of our religion, a man of passing knowledge and rare virtue. You owe him your respect.”
“Monsieur my husband,” replied Isabelle, “I owe my respect to the priests and prelates of the Holy Church in which I was raised, along with all of my ancestors, as well as the king of France, Charles IX, our sovereign lord, to whom I dedicate my allegiance to my dying breath. As for your pestiferous heretics, I want nothing to do with them!”
This was spoken with such forceful disdain that it reduced them all to silence. Sauveterre, Duroy and the Caumonts appeared to be turned to stone. As for my father, he rose and took several steps across the room, his fists clenched, drunk with inarticulate rage. “Isabelle,” he said, turning to her, his voice muted by anger, “take care! All of us are, as you put it, ‘pestiferous heretics’, and if you wish to have nothing to do with us, we must understand that you are renouncing your entire family.”
At this rejoinder, Isabelle realized that she had gone too far, and fell silent, yet remained standing stiffly, head held high, her manner bespeaking her rebellious intent. Nevertheless, her silence allowed my father to regain control of his feelings, to sit down and resume the conversation, though with a voice strained by the effort of controlling his anger: “Madame, I bid you sit down beside me in this chair and listen to what the Reverend Duroy is going to tell you about our religion.”
“No, Monsieur, I shall remain standing,” replied Isabelle in a softer yet equally resolute tone. “I shall not heed these dangerous novelties which you yourselves and your friends are trying to insinuate into the faith of our fathers!”
“But my cousin,” said Sauveterre indignantly, “it is precisely in this that you are mortally mistaken, and your error is based only on your wilful ignorance. This ‘novelty’ is not on our side, for we are but trying to rediscover the pure and clear source of Christianity, which the Roman Church has covered with mud, soiling it with customs, idolatries, monstrosities and, as you call them, novelties. Our hope lies in adhering strictly to the Word of God as it is revealed to us in the Old and New Testaments. That is the pure source, from which any, provided he can read, may drink.”
“And cast for himself his own little religion, according to the feeble lights of his own good sense,” retorted Isabelle sarcastically. “No, my cousin, the Church rightly considers as a pestilential invention this translation your Huguenots have made of the Old and New Testaments into a vulgar tongue, spreading them, as you have done, among gentlemen, burghers and the common people, at the risk of corrupting the precepts of the Christian religion from top to bottom.
”
“What?” cried my father. “It is we who corrupt the Christian religion? When all we want is to reclaim the original purity of its source in offering the world the Word of God! This Word which your prelates and your Pope have nearly snuffed out beneath their interpretations, superstitions and extravagances!”
“Monsieur,” replied Isabelle, “do not speak this way of the Holy Father or I shall withdraw immediately.”
“Madame,” said the Reverend Duroy in his soft bass voice, “if you wished to practise Christian humility, you would seek the Word of God not from the mouths of men, but from His own, in His Holy Scriptures. And you would not then call the Pope ‘the Holy Father’.”
“And why not, if you please?” sniffed my mother, affecting disdain, yet struck by the venerable appearance of the minister.
“Because Christ said in Matthew 23: ‘Do not call any man your father, for you have but one father and He is in heaven.’”
It would have been a gross misjudgement of my mother to expect that she should be overwhelmed, or even shaken by such an objection.
“My own humility,” she said, raising her head, “consists in not trusting to the weakness of my own lights, in not interpreting according to my own whim the holy canon, but to rely for such interpretation on the Church Fathers and holy prelates who, for centuries, have defined our dogmas and our rites.”
“And,” rejoined the minister, “multiplied falsehoods, corrupted and twisted the Holy Word and made cheap commerce of the rites.”
“Monsieur, I shall not listen to you,” said Isabelle.
“It suits you ill to speak, then, of humility, Madame!” said my father vehemently. “You who from the outset of this interview have opposed your family and your husband with a diabolical pride; you have ears yet hear not the truth, and eyes but see it not; you whom I love and for whom I’ve prayed—more than a thousand times, oft on bended knee, on nights when the unbearable thought of your damnation kept me fast awake—to but read, to consent to read just once the Old and New Testaments.”
