The Brethren, Page 30

  Cabusse claimed that Samson was a numskull because he was slow to parry a blow and slow to force his advantage. Cabusse was wrong: it was scarcely a deficiency of mind, but rather an excess of virtue. Samson loved his fellow adversary so much that he couldn’t believe he could be wounded by him, nor wish to wound him in return. Wickedness, even that which we feign in sport, was unintelligible to him. I have thousands upon thousands of proofs of it. And the ultimate proof is this image, which I’ll always remember, of Samson on his white horse, face to face with the mob in la Lendrevie, his wide blue eyes fixed in amazement on the furious crowd, repeating with his customary lisp, “Whath thith? Whath thith?”

  Even with the most generous people on earth, there comes a time when egotism raises its ugly head. But this moment never came with Samson. Without ever a second thought, nor any attempt to turn things to his own advantage, Samson always thought of others first. He wept when my mother died. And yet, for his whole life, my mother never said a word to him, nor ever looked his way. How did he manage to love her, and what could he have seen in her—he who was invisible to her? I cannot guess. For he spoke little, inept at expressing the love he carried within. But of this immeasurable love which shone on all of us like the sun, he gave me yet another, most touching, proof during our quarantine, as I shall have occasion to relate further on.

  My father took advantage of the leisure hours of his quarantine to address a letter to Monsieur de La Porte, recounting the commotion at la Lendrevie. He had it brought thither by Escorgol with orders to hand this sealed missive to La Porte’s soldiers at the end of a long stick, split at one end. Escorgol was also to collect the money due us for the slabs of beef we had sold them, but there again his orders were quite strict: the coins which we suspected of carrying the infection since they’d passed through so many hands at Sarlat were to be handed over in a pipkin filled with vinegar. Guillaume de La Porte had his response brought to Mespech by a messenger two days later, but to this man my father spoke only through a mask soaked in vinegar and from a window of the gatehouse, accepting the letter he was carrying by means of a long stick similar to the one Escorgol had used. Having thrown aromatics on his fire, my father disinfected the letter by holding it over the beneficent steam emanating from the fireplace. Then he opened it, but wore gloves for this purpose, and read it holding it as far from his face as possible. He later recounted these precautions, holding them up as exemplary.

  The police lieutenant wrote that he was not unaware of Forcalquier’s villainies, but, just as Forcalquier himself had said, La Porte had only enough soldiers to guard the town gates. He lost one or two each day, and though he was willing to pay handsomely, he could find no replacements. Worse, the survivors would scarcely obey his orders, so sure were they of dying just like Forcalquier’s mob. In truth, anarchy reigned, and corrupted the people like leprosy. One of the two consuls (though I shall not disclose which one), having lost a chambermaid to the plague and having himself been threatened with being boarded up in his own house, had fled during the night of 9th July, paying off the soldiers standing guard at one of the town gates. La Porte never did discover which one, but even if he had, he never could have punished the corrupted man, for he no longer possessed the means to do so. The executioner and his aides had died, along with the two jailers in the city prison.

  Things had got so bad that, far from being punished, those who had been locked up were now set free, since they could be neither imprisoned nor fed, since municipal revenues were drying up and the city’s expenses exorbitant. Besides the crows and the soldiers, the first receiving twenty and the second twenty-five livres a month, wages had to be paid to the disinfectors, who collected thirty livres a house to go in and burn flowers of sulphur inside. The four surgeons who had agreed to stay in Sarlat each received 200 livres a month. And their aides had also to be paid, along with the guides who preceded them into the infected houses, a torch of flaming wax in hand to chase away the venom.

  The remaining consul and Monsieur de La Porte asked the Brethren if they would consent to loan the city 2,000 livres at fifteen per cent for a year, offering as security some land purchased from Temniac by the city when the Church properties were being auctioned off. La Porte stressed that the security had a value much greater than the amount of the loan but that the consul and he had made the arrangement fearing that the city would never be able to repay the monies, threatened as it was with extinction by the loss of all its inhabitants. Already, in the terrible plague of 1521, Sarlat had lost 3,500 of its 5,000 inhabitants. If the epidemic raged at this same rate for another few months, death would ravish everyone.

  My father told me that when he read this despairing letter, he had wept and immediately sent a note to Sauveterre urging him to agree to the loan. Which Sauveterre, equally troubled by the letter, had done within the hour, though not without remarking that the security offered was of but little interest to Mespech, being situated much too far from the chateau to be farmed except by renting it out, which ate up all the profits, as his brother well knew.

  My father wrote to Samson and me every day since, in his own idleness, he’d obtained permission from Sauveterre to correct our Latin translations, which he did to perfection, his own French being more refined and more elegant than his brother’s. To these corrections, he would add on my copy excellent lessons on the treatment and cure of blunderbuss wounds, according to Ambroise Paré’s book, as well as knowledge he himself had obtained during his nine years in the Norman legion. Later I learnt that he had also received permission to correct Catherine’s, little Hélix’s and Little Sissy’s lessons, which were normally handed to Alazaïs, whom the Brethren had promoted to this task when my mother died.

  The care given to the education of the girls at Mespech might cause some surprise, yet mistresses and servingwomen alike had to learn to read, in order to gain access to the Bible for themselves and later for their sons and daughters. Religion, the Brethren reasoned, had to be transmitted like language itself, justly called the mother tongue, passing from mother to baby from the tenderest age. Thus, Little Sissy and little Hélix, thanks to our Huguenot zeal, knew more at their age than many young Catholic noblewomen, who could scarcely sign their names. It is true that Alazaïs, having her own system of spelling, passed it on to her students, but my father took no notice of this imperfection, replying with laughter to Sauveterre, who had criticized it, that Catherine de’ Medici could write no more correctly than little Hélix, though she was queen of France.

  Three days before the end of our quarantine, I received a second letter from little Hélix, dusted with the same flour as the first, my correspondent having “thauts about me all da longe”. But I was angered to learn that tongues were wagging in the kitchen between la Maligou and Barberine about Franchou. I hesitated to inform my father of these scullery rumours, but knew that I couldn’t manage it without appearing to be involved in such matters or else betraying Hélix. So I said nothing, not even to Samson, about this second letter and immediately threw it in the fire.

  As the end of my quarantine approached, I excitedly fixed my heart on the morning when I would be able to leave this room where Samson and I had been sequestered for three long weeks. And yet when that day dawned for me, it brought nothing but sadness and heartbreak.

  It had been agreed in letters exchanged with my father to wait for freedom until he himself came to deliver us. While we waited for the heavy key to turn in the lock of our great wooden door, Samson and I had decided on one last fencing match, which we fought, nearly suffocating under our breastplates. Once these were unlaced and removed, our swords in their scabbards, we each threw ourselves on our beds, naked as the day we were born.

  Then, hearing the long awaited grinding of the lock, I sat up on my bed and saw my father come in all smiles and eyes flashing happily. Samson and I both got up and ran to him from our respective corners, happily anticipating the fulsome abandon of his welcoming hug. But suddenly my father stared at me, grew de
athly pale and, changing without warning from the liveliest joy to a cold anger, he cried in a terrible voice: “My son, have you become an idolater?”

  “Me, an idolater?” I stammered, confused by the shock of this incredible accusation and brought up short in my rush to meet him, whilst Samson, too, froze in his tracks, his wide-eyed look fixed on my father and me.

  “Isn’t that a medallion of the Virgin Mary you’re wearing around your neck?” asked my father, pointing a trembling finger at it, his eyes blazing.

  “You know it well,” I choked. “It is my mother’s medallion.”

  “So what?” screamed my father violently, taking a step towards me as if to rip it from my neck. “Never mind where you got it. Or who you got it from! You’re wearing the damnable thing!”

  “Monsieur my father,” I said, collecting myself and speaking more firmly, for I was deeply wounded by his “So what?”, “my mother gave it to me on her deathbed and made me promise to wear it all my life.”

  “And you promised!”

  “She was dying. What else could I do?”

  “Tell me about it!” cried my father, his eyes bulging out. “Tell me about it at once! I would have released you from this monstrous promise! Instead of which, you preferred to hide it from me like a thief, and wear this idol stealthily, betraying your faith!”

  “I’ve betrayed nothing, and I’ve stolen nothing!” I replied, my anger getting the better of me now, and drawn up like a cock I stared outraged at my father.

  “Yes you have! You’ve stolen my tenderness, which, from this day forth you no longer deserve, having hidden your stinking idolatry from me all these months!”

  “But I’m not an idolater!” I shouted, my eyes ablaze, nearly defying him, so indignant was I at his injustice. “I never pray to Mary! I pray to Christ or the Lord without any intercession whatever from Mary or the saints! This medallion’s no idol for me! It’s an object sacred to the memory of my mother.”

  “No object is sacred!” answered my father with vehemence and a violent gesture of his hand. “To believe the contrary is precisely idolatry! No, Monsieur,” he continued loudly, “however much you twist your logic, you cannot claim to wear this medallion innocently, if only because you could not have misunderstood your mother’s purpose in giving it to you. At your birth she named you Pierre, and you know very well why! Nor can you be ignorant of the reason she gave you this medallion!”

  “No, I’m well aware of her purpose,” I said defiantly and heatedly, “but that doesn’t mean I’m corrupted by it. Being named Pierre doesn’t make me a papist. And this medallion hasn’t changed my faith.”

  “You may think so,” sneered my father, “but the Devil has more than one way of insinuating his poison into your heart, and more than one mask for approaching you, including the mask of filial love.”

  “Monsieur my father,” I answered, “I cannot believe that the Devil can have any place in a mother’s love for her son, nor a son’s for his mother.”

  “It must be so!” raged my father with such ferocious resentment that I was frozen to the spot. And he repeated: “It must be so since he counselled you to hide from me that you were wearing this thing. When I woke you on the 7th to go to Sarlat, you were naked as now and yet you were not wearing this idol. Where was it?”

  “Under my mattress. I don’t wear it at night, it hangs too heavy on me.”

  “It hangs too heavy on you, indeed, from dissimulation, from ruse and deception! Untie it from your neck and give it to me!”

  At this, Samson took a step forward, and joining his two hands, looked into my father’s angry eyes and begged with a sweet, entreating tone: “Oh no! I beg you, my father!”

  It was so out of character for Samson, always so discreet and modest, to intervene in a quarrel he was not involved in, that my father stared at him for a full second, his eyebrows raised in surprise at this “Oh no!” Then his face grew dark again and I thought for a minute that he was going to unleash his anger on Samson, but he turned again to me, his eyes full of wrath, and said in a clipped tone: “Well! I gave you an order!”

  I knew in that instant that my whole life, or, what amounts to the same thing, the idea I had of myself, was going to be made or undone by my response. I stiffened and speaking coldly, but with a strange assurance: “Monsieur my father, it cannot be. I made an oath to my mother. I cannot break this oath.”

  “I will dispense you from it!” he cried, beside himself with rage.

  “But you don’t have the power,” I replied. “Only my mother would, if she were living.”

  “What? You defy me!” cried my father. “You dare to oppose me!” He stared at me as if he were about to hurl himself at me, but thinking better of it, began pacing rapidly about the room, biting his lips, his eyes ablaze, cheeks and forehead scarlet. “Monsieur,” he said, positioning himself in front of me, hands on hips and his chin jutting out, “either you give me this medallion as I’ve ordered you, or else I shall within the hour cut you off from my family like a gangrened limb and throw you out of Mespech.”

  I felt myself grow pale. Sweat streamed down my back and my legs began to shake as if an abyss had opened up before me. I could likewise not coax a single strangled word from my lips.

  “Well?” my father said.

  “Monsieur my father,” I said finally, tearing my words one by one from the knot in my throat, and barely controlling my anger, “I am in despair to have to displease you. But I cannot without dishonour do what you ask of me, and rather than do it, I’d rather be driven away, even if unjustly.”

  “Well then, you shall, Monsieur!” replied my father in a leaden voice. And he added, shouting, “With an oath which I too shall keep, never to see you again!”

  A long silence followed these words. The world fell away before my eyes and it seemed as though I’d ceased to exist. There I stood before my father, stiff as a block of stone, deprived of speech and very nearly of feeling, though I fumed with a terrible anger.

  It was at this point that Samson intervened a second time. Although I recall this as through a mist, it seemed to me that tears were streaming down his cheeks, which surprised me since my father and I, though each animated by a like anger, were dry-eyed, whatever the inner feelings that may have tormented us. Samson, on the other hand, was weeping. Meanwhile, without ever deviating from his usual sweetness, nor seeming to take sides, he flew to my defence. Coming up close to me, he placed his left arm on my shoulder, and his upturned face had the effect of a great light shining in the darkness. He lisped simply, “Pierre, I’ll not abandon you. If you leave, I’ll come with you.”

  Lightning from Sinai striking at my father’s feet could not have produced a greater effect. He stared at Samson as if he were trying to summon up against him all the fury which tore at his heart, but Samson wept, not for himself, but for me and for my father, sensing all the ravages this great quarrel had made between us. And my father, who had managed to hate me for daring to defy him, was unable, try though he might, to harden himself to Samson or even to look at him angrily or utter a single word against him. Feeling his powerlessness, trembling with rage and half-crazed, as I was, with grief, he decided his only course of action was turn on his heels and storm out of the room. He was so blinded by his emotions that he crashed into the door frame and left the door gaping behind him.

  I fell into Samson’s arms and, suddenly letting go, cried hot and bitter tears against his cheek, and shook with great sobs I was powerless to control. I was ashamed to be thirteen, only two years from adulthood, yet weeping like a baby. After a moment, Samson pulled away from me and counselled me gently but firmly to get dressed. My duty, he argued, before leaving Mespech for ever, was to ask my father to pardon me for this fidelity to my mother which had led me to defy him. This advice seemed good to me for I was sorry to have stood up so firmly against my father, even if in my heart I believed I was right. I dressed, strapped on my short sword as proof of my intention to leave Mespech, and w
ith a firm step that belied the heartbeats that shook my ribs from within, my head swimming in confusion from the shock I’d suffered, I headed for the library. But, as I neared the door, I was brought up short by the sound of a violent argument concerning me coming from within. And as I hesitated, not knowing whether to knock or withdraw, daring neither to break in on this new quarrel nor withdraw and risk not having the courage to return, I listened, stunned and mute, my breath cut short, to the words which flew in rage between my father and Sauveterre.

  “There are,” cried Sauveterre in a violent and accusatory tone I’d never heard him use before, “there are greater sins than wearing a medallion to the Virgin around your neck!”

  “And just what do you mean!” replied my father, furious.

  “Just what I say!” stormed Sauveterre. “And you understand me perfectly! You go from folly to folly, my brother, I’m telling you exactly what I think. And first among them was to risk the lives of your younger sons and your cousins in that harebrained expedition to a plague-infested town!”

  “We had to deliver that side of beef, you know,” protested my father.

  “And carry off Franchou! Do you think it was an accident that La Porte went on about the maid in his first letter to you? He knew all too well how to set his mirrors to catch his lark. Beef for him! Franchou for you!”

  “My brother, I demand you retract these damnable words!” cried my father. “There is nothing between that poor wench and me! I only did my duty as a Christian to her!”

  “So, find her a position somewhere! And far away! At la Volperie, for example, where, having lost Sarrazine and Jacotte, they need somebody!”