How to make a coherent tale among all these complications? Weld it into a love story.
This is not to romanticize the times. The years 1242 to 1244, the years in which Blue Flame and its two sequels are set, were not only ones of Catholic inquisitors, Cathar stubbornness, fearsome tortures, and funeral pyres. They were also years of knights and chivalry, of decorated psalters and beautifully bound Bibles, of village gossip, and seasonal festivals. As in so much of the medieval period, horror ran in tandem with beauty and I like to remember that amid the hatred and crude butchery, the main construction work on Rheims Cathedral was completed and Notre Dame was rising through the builders’ dust. Love, too, was always present, sung of in every great hall, around every campfire, in every lady’s chamber. Raimon and Yolanda’s tale is thus both very specific and completely universal.
Regarding the history, let me make an admission at the outset. Although I have used actual historical events in Blue Flame, for example, the murder of the inquisitors at Avignonet, which occurs in our story on the evening of Yolanda’s birthday, and used many historical figures, for example, Louis IX, Count Raymond of Toulouse, and Sir Hugh des Arcis, I have also taken liberties. For instance, although there was a Cathar perfectus, as the Cathar priests were known, called the White Wolf, I doubt that he was quite as dogmatic as the White Wolf I have created. Nevertheless, there will certainly have been at least one perfectus who was less the brave resistance hero of Occitanian ballad and more the fanatic with whom we are so depressingly reacquainted today. The White Wolf, with all the fanatic’s warped sense of absolute righteousness, provides a “perfect” reflection of Yolanda’s inquisitor uncle, Girald. No one side in a religious war has a monopoly on cruelty.
As for the Blue Flame itself, this is as fictional as the Amouroix, but it provoked in me, and therefore in Raimon, Yolanda, and Parsifal—the old knight who brings the Flame to Castelneuf—a serious question that must be answered: to whom does the Flame of the Occitan belong when all the paths of righteousness have been sullied? It is a question not just for the thirteenth century but for the twenty-first century, too.
I have been hugely indebted for both facts and inspiration to other writers, most particularly to Zoé Oldenbourg with her Massacre at Montségur, the classic study of the whole period, and to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s brilliant exposition of the Ariège village of Montaillou. John Cummins’s book The Hound and the Hawk: The Art of Medieval Hunting kept me gripped long after I’d read all I needed to pursue the bear in Chapter 11. It struck me again and again as I wrote Blue Flame that the historian does all the work so that the novelist can have all the fun. A good division of labor if you’re on my side of the fence.
Some Key Dates for the Historical Placing of Blue Flame
1002
Executions of first Cathars in France
1180
Papal legate preaches crusade against Cathars
1199
Richard the Lionheart killed at Chalus Chabrol
1208
Papal legate murdered
1209
Towns in Languedoc (another name for Occitania) captured and burned
Heretics captured and burned—as happens almost every year
1221
Death of Saint Dominic (founder of the Dominicans, from whose ranks many inquisitors were selected)
1226
King Louis IX succeeds Louis VIII Death of Saint Francis of Assisi
1241
Count Raymond VII of Toulouse promises King Louis IX to destroy fortress of Montségur
1242
Count Raymond’s rebellion Massacre of inquisitors at Avignonet
1243
Opening of the siege of Montségur
1244
Montségur capitulates on March fourteenth Massacre of Montségur on March sixteenth
Also by K. M. Grant
The de Granville Trilogy
Blood Red Horse
Green Jasper
Blaze of Silver
How the Hangman Lost His Heart
Copyright © 2008 by K. M. Grant
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
First published in the United Kingdom in 2008 by Quercus Publishing, Plc.
Published in the United States of America in 2008 by Walker Publishing Company, Inc.
Electronic edition published in October 2012
www.bloomsburykids.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grant, K. M. (Katie M.)
Blue flame / K. M. Grant.
p. cm.—(Perfect fire trilogy; bk. 1)
Summary: In 1242 in the restive Languedoc region of France, Parsifal, having been charged as a child to guard an important religious relic, has lived in hiding for much of his life until he befriends a young couple on opposite sides of the escalating conflict between the Catholics and the Cathars.
ISBN- 13: 978-0-8027-9694-3 • ISBN- 10: 0- 8027- 9694- X
[1. Knights and knighthood—Fiction. 2. Albigenses—Fiction. 3. Languedoc
(France)—History—13th century—Fiction. 4. France—History—Louis IX,
1226–1270—Fiction. 5. Middle Ages—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.G7667755Blu 2008 [Fic]—dc22 2007051384
ISBN 978-0-8027-2808-1 (e-book)