Heretic Dawn

by Robert Merle

  “Well then, Monsieur,” interjected Dame Béqueret, who was, like her husband, dark-haired, with a pleasant face, though it was somewhat more pinched looking than his, “why not leave us your amiable colleague?”

  “Oh, Madame! Samson, here for a whole month! It would be too great an expense for you, I fear!”

  “Not at all!” said the lady. “No expense whatsoever, by my Norman faith!” (For she was from that province.) “Your brother would provide great help and service in my husband’s shop, especially at a time when he’s so overwhelmed by the demand, since there are so many people in Montfort this August.”

  Samson’s eyes lit up, but how could I have consented to his holing himself up among these phials when Fortune had provided him a chance to visit the most beautiful city in the kingdom, or perhaps of the whole world, according to what Monsieur de Montaigne had said? And although my host was now as reluctant to see us leave as he had been but minutes before to provide us lodging, I decided that we would all leave the next morning. Hearing this, Miroul, who was helping their chambermaid to serve our table—a sweet and frisky little mare with whom he’d been flirting throughout our dinner—said, “But Monsieur, we can’t do that! Your Pompée has lost both shoes on her forefeet! You can’t possibly ride her until we get her shod!”

  “Well, we’ll take care of it tomorrow!” I answered with some annoyance.

  “But we can’t,” he reminded me, with another amorous glace at the wench. “Tomorrow is Sunday. The smithy won’t be available.”

  “What’s more,” said Maître Béqueret, “with all the gentlemen stopping here on their way to the wedding, he’s got more business already than he can handle. I’d be surprised if he could shoe your horse before Wednesday!” At this, of course, Miroul’s brown eye glowed with pleasure.

  “Three nights we have to wait here,” I groaned inwardly, “when Paris is so close!” And angered by this turn of events, I gave Miroul and then the maid each a nasty look, as if this whole delay were a ruse meant to accommodate them. But my valet, seeing this frown and realizing that, indeed, his own interests were secured in any case, gave me a big smile, and said in Italian, “Il saggio sopporta pazientemente il suo dolore.”*

  “È vero dio!”† cried Maître Béqueret, who was proud of his Italian, which was now in vogue in Paris ever since the Florentine queen had taken the reins of the kingdom.

  The next morning, as I was standing shirtless in my room, there was a knock at the door and Maître Béqueret entered, bowed politely and said, “Ah, Monsieur de Siorac, how comforted I am to see the medallion of the Blessed Virgin you are wearing! From certain signs I thought I detected yesterday, I was convinced you were Huguenots, and didn’t know how to go about inviting you to join me at Mass this morning—it would be very dangerous for me and my family in Montfort were I to give shelter to heretics, since here, as in Paris, they are so furiously hated.”

  “Venerable Maître,” I said, “you were right in your first guess: with the exception of Giacomi, we three, masters and valet, are of the reformed religion. And as for me, I wear this medallion only because it was my mother’s dying request that I do so till the end of my life. However, Maître Béqueret, you have been so welcoming and so gracious that I would not wish to compromise or endanger your house, and so I will agree to accompany you to Mass.”

  “I thank God and you!” sighed Maître Béqueret. “This is a great weight off my chest! Although I am a sincere Catholic, I am not so zealous as to dream, like some in my religion, of disembowelling and burning those of the new religion. But you’ll see, alas! in Paris, that there are many, many fanatics, and I’m very sorry to see you and your brother have to go and get embroiled in such hatred. You’re risking your lives!”

  “But venerable Maître, is it not true that our leader, Coligny, enjoys the king’s favour at the moment?”

  At this, Maître Béqueret frowned. “Yes, of course! But some people think that the king has only embraced Coligny the better to smother him, and with him all the Protestant nobles who have come to Paris for the wedding.”

  With this observation, which, the more I thought about it, weighed heavily on my heart, my host departed, very gratified by my compliance with his wishes. And since I was much less assured of Samson’s compliance, I went immediately to his room to tell him of Maître Béqueret’s invitation.

  He had just awoken, and was so handsome and so vigorous, his visage so innocent, his eyes so azure, that I felt an immense joy just looking at him stretching lazily in his bed, running his fingers through his copper-coloured hair. But his eyes darkened when I told him about the invitation to Mass.

  “I won’t go!” he said emphatically.

  “Samson,” I explained, “we cannot put our gracious and welcoming host in such discomfort and danger.”

  “I won’t go,” he said, more rigid than Calvin himself.

  I was suddenly so angry I could not restrain myself from shouting, “You will go! I command it!”

  “Well,” Samson said, visibly troubled and hurt, “so you’re scolding me! Would you dare speak to me this way, Pierre, if I were not a bastard?”

  “Samson,” I moaned, taking him forcefully in my arms, and showering his cheeks with kisses, “that’s crazy! Who’s talking about birth here? Do we not have the same father? And as for the shepherdess who bore you, she must have been a worthy, good and beautiful wench, since you resemble her!”

  Hearing me speak with such respect about the mother he’d never known, the poor girl having died of the plague when he was still in his infancy, my beloved brother burst into tears, and seeing him crying, I hugged him to me and again kissed his freckled face, saying, “I order you by the authority I have as your older brother, none other.”

  “Older brother? Whath thith?” he lisped charmingly. “Weren’t we born in the thame month and year?”

  “Yes, but I was a week earlier than you.” At this he laughed through his tears, and seeing him brush them away with the back of his hand, and the sun coming out again after such a storm, I said, “Samson, our father gave you authority over our purse, and to me he gave the command of our little troop since I’m better at negotiating our worldly paths. You must come, I beg this of you.”

  “Then I shall,” he said, lowering his head like a ram, “but it does not please God that I shall be praying among all these idolaters.”

  “Well,” I thought to myself, “what a noble zeal that leads to abstaining from prayer!”

  “You must trust your conscience,” I counselled him. “But just remember that the papists worship the same God that we do.”

  “But not in the same way!”

  “Samson,” I asked, “is it the way we pray that matters, or the love we owe to our Creator?”

  To which, though not persuaded, he at least found no answer and so fell silent. And since this silence continued, I asked him if he would prefer to remain in the apothecary shop of Maître Béqueret for the month of August, as I’d been asked, and he answered yes with a huge sigh, since, as he explained, he loved his work so much that he was besotted with it and yet he understood that it was not his duty or even reasonable to do so. And then, as I was heading for the door, he said, very awkwardly and blushing to the roots of his copper-coloured hair:

  “Did you know that Dame Béqueret is Norman and from the same village as Dame Gertrude du Luc? Do you think she knows her?”

  “Oh, Samson,” I thought, “so you’re not implacable in everything!”

  “Why don’t you ask her?” I said, smiling to myself.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t dare!”

  “Then perhaps you think I might dare?”

  “Yes,” he mumbled, lowering his eyes.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, enjoying this little game. “In the meantime, Samson, you should get dressed. Mass is at ten!”

  *

  As soon as he saw that he couldn’t keep either me or Samson in Montfort-l’Amaury, Maître Béqueret put in a word for us wit
h the farrier and the good smithy promised that my Pompée would be shod by dawn on Monday.

  We thought that at this hour we’d be alone on the road, but as we approached the capital, we were amazed by the number of travellers: gentlemen on horseback or in carriages, innumerable carts loaded with hay, wood, milk, fresh meat, vegetables, barrels of wine or basketfuls of eggs that came from the villages surrounding Paris, to feed the Pantagruelian hunger of a city whose workers and inhabitants number more than 300,000, from what I’d been told—an immense and incredible number, I concede, but one which was confirmed by reliable sources.

  As all of these good folk from the flat countryside moved very slowly, some pulled by workhorses, others by mules and others still even by oxen, we couldn’t help passing them as we trotted along, looking at them and being looked at in return with astonishing effrontery, and yelled at in an amusing and often derisive way in French, which greatly surprised us since this language is entirely foreign to the peasants in Provence, and used only by well-educated people.

  As I came alongside one of these open carts, full of jugs of milk and baskets of eggs, a comely milkmaid, a pretty bonnet on her head and her scarf revealing more than a little of her full bosom, round as the eggs in her baskets and whiter than the milk in her jugs, observed my hungry looks and cried out with a laugh:

  “Handsome fellow, pretty eyes! So you like my wares?”

  “Alas, my friend,” I replied with a wink, “as the Périgordian proverb says, you can lick beauty, but you can’t eat it!”

  “Well, that’s already a lot that you can lick it,” replied the maid with a belly laugh, “whether you’re in Paris or Périgord, if Périgord exists, for the Devil if I know where that place lies.”

  “It’s in the south, my friend, below the Loire.”

  “I could tell from your accent it’s in the south. So, good Monsieur, you’re coming to the wedding?”

  “I am!”

  “I hope you enjoy it after all the expense that’s been lavished on it! These royal weddings are such a splash! Kings don’t fornicate any better than we do, and the husband can’t piss straighter than my late husband, I can tell you! And so, pretty man, what are you? Rome or Geneva?”

  I hesitated a bit before answering: “I’m of the same religion as the king.”

  “Nay!” said she with a wry smile, having seen me hesitate. “The king? Which king is that? The king of France or the king of Navarre? They don’t have the same one. One goes to his service, the other to his Mass, even though one’s marrying the sister of the other. There, there,” she added, hearing no response, “it doesn’t matter to me! It’s for the nobles to fight over Churches. As for me, what my priest tells me goes in one ear and out the other, so that in these matters I have as much brain as a sucked egg.”

  “Oh, good woman,” I laughed, “I don’t believe you. There’s nothing wrong with your brain!”

  “Nor with yours! Though you speak French like a southerner. Oh, oh! I’ve upset you, Monsieur! No offence, I beg you!”

  “I took none, I assure you!”

  “Are you married?”

  “My friend,” I laughed, “if I’m not, will you have me?”

  “Oh, no!” she giggled. “Widow I am and man will I have none! I’m better off since my late husband died. Marriage is a nasty business. Look at Navarre and Margot. He won’t get a virgin for a wife. She was too taken with Guise. And she won’t have him for herself: he’s too fond of the petticoat. This wedding is a bad bargain.”

  “Ah, my friend, you have a lively tongue, I see.”

  But before she could answer, we were so pressed from the horsemen behind us, with imprecations that would make a bull blush, I had to spur on Pompée, and lost the milkmaid from view. I was surprised, however, how openly she dared gossip about the royal family, and with such impertinence. “Well,” I thought, “if two leagues from Paris people are already so mutinous and rebellious, what will it be like in the capital?”

  The five horsemen who had so bumped us from behind, and with such foul language and mean aspect, finally passed us, madly whipping on their malnourished mounts with sharp crops.

  “I despise these profane and pitiless rascals,” snarled Giacomi, who was usually so serene, “and if I hadn’t restrained myself, I would have had at them with my sword.” Hardly had he said this when these impatient ruffians, finding a horseman clothed all in black blocking their way, hurled a torrent of insults at him, and one of them knocked his hat off with his crop.

  “Bestia feroce!”‡ cried Giacomi. “My brother, shall we have at them?”

  “By all means!” I agreed, drawing my sword.

  But when these scoundrels saw the four of us bearing down on them, swords flashing, they gave full rein and we were unable to give them more than a couple of sword swipes before they’d galloped away.

  “Miroul,” I said, “pick up that gentlemen’s hat and dust if off for him.”

  “I thank God and I thank you,” said the stranger, who had the appearance of a legal man, and he immediately asked my name, and told me his, which struck me as most poetic, for he was called Pierre de L’Étoile—though he did not look like a poet, neither in his dress nor in his appearance, nor yet in his speech, which seemed moralistic and morose and very bitter about the morality of our times. The rampant immorality surrounding us, he said with great indignation, surpassed anything he’d known in his youth, the population having been corrupted by the bad example set by the royal family, the civil wars, the fanaticism of the preachers and its own stupidity!

  “The people of Paris,” he complained, “are more ignorant and gullible than any other in the world, and insolent in proportion to their ignorance: quo quisque stultior, eo magis insolescit.”§

  I looked at him as he rode by my side, all the while exhaling his angry wisdom. He had a long nose, lips curled in anger, and a deeply furrowed brow, and yet, when he turned towards me, his lively eyes sparkled with some beneficence in spite of his bile. I sensed in him a man of unshakeable honesty and character—and, as events were to prove, I was not wrong about this. I guessed as well from the rigour of his aspect and speech that he was a Huguenot, but he disabused me of this idea as soon as I told him I was for reform.

  “Oh, Monsieur,” he gasped, looking around with a terrified look, as if, despite the din of the wagons and horses on the stones of the road, someone might overhear us, “you mustn’t talk so openly here, trusting the first person you meet. There is great peril in Paris not just in saying who you are, but in being what I am. I’m of the Roman Church to be sure, but not so fanatical that I prefer a Spanish Catholic to a French Huguenot. I suspect that who’s really in charge of the kingdom now,” he added, gnashing his teeth, “is a cabal of Catherine, who is Florentine, Guise, who is from Lorraine, the papal nuncio, who is Roman, and Felipe II, who is Iberian. By God, I hate it that foreigners have come to Paris to rule us and put knives in our hands to dispatch the Huguenots, who are, after all, our compatriots! Nefas nocere vel malo fratri puta.”¶

  “So,” I thought to myself, “if even for this good fellow I’m a ‘bad’ brother, I shudder to think what I will be for the Parisians!”

  Meanwhile, Pierre de L’Étoile fell silent, struggling to regain control of his mood, which, without doubt, was bilious and sad, but isn’t it a sign of good health to express one’s anger this way? Isn’t it better to drain the pus from an infection than to leave it under that skin to poison the blood?

  “Monsieur de Siorac,” he continued after catching his breath, and finding a more civil tone, “have you reserved a room in an inn in Paris?”

  “I’m afraid not. We’re trusting to good fortune.”

  “Which,” said Pierre de L’Étoile, “will not smile on you. There isn’t at present a single room, no matter how small or paltry—and I include the most piss-stained and infested in the city—that isn’t so full you couldn’t lodge a single cockroach.”

  “So what should be done?” I asked, very ups
et by this news.

  “You must stay at the home of some worker or inhabitant of the city, which, in any case, would be much better for you.”

  “And why so?”

  “Because,” said Pierre, “all the innkeepers have been told by the provost of the Grand Châtelet to report all the names and origins of their guests, as well as a list of their horses and arms.”

  “Their arms!” I said quietly. “I don’t like that one bit!”

  “Nor do I!” agreed Pierre. “This Spanish Inquisition stinks!”

  “But I don’t know a living soul in Paris!”

  “Monsieur de Siorac,” said Pierre de L’Étoile, “I owe you a debt of gratitude for having chased off those insolent rascals whom, if I could, I would have gladly sent to the gallows.” (And he grew angry all over again as he said this.) “And if you are willing, I will take you to the rue de la Ferronnerie, to the home of a dressmaker who, because I have somewhat straightened out his affairs, would gladly lodge you. His name is Maître Recroche, and he’s more miserly than any Norman of Normandy, though he was born in Paris, as I was, and, like me, has never budged from here—except that I sometimes visit my land in Perche, whence I’m returning now. But Maître Recroche is a good enough fellow, though he likes money too well. And he won’t report your names to the provost as long as you attend Mass, as I would advise you to do.”

  “Ah, Monsieur! I must go to Mass!”

  “You must,” said Pierre de L’Étoile. “It’s the rule of rules, and one that must be obeyed here.”