The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  “My whole philosophy is this: that people who give one too much trouble should be arrested and turned into soap.” (Toby. The last words roared out and punctuated by a bang on the table with fatuous fist.)

  As for Trash, her terracotta beauty was proof of the pudding; the plum-tones softly dusted by her powder – a Greek vase dusted with bonemeal. In the morning, naked, she did what she called her personal Intonement. The text went as follows, rising on toes, hands and arms spread out to heaven:

  Who’s the Bestest?

  Who’s the Mostest?

  Who’s the particularly particular?

  Who’s the specially special?

  All together: “Why, Trash of course!”

  The little lap-dog with its coat of scarlet velvet was named after Pia. It walked on its hindlegs with enthusiasm. When she showed it the whip it immediately got an erection. Afterwards when it died they buried it by moonlight, in tears, with loosened sphincters. Ah, the sweet mooncraft of the dark lady of the soblets!

  Trying to explain to Piers that the stream of consciousness is composed of all too painfully conscious bits with the links suppressed; free association does the hop skip and jump along these points, behaving like quanta. He will not believe that the art form of the age is not the diary any more but the case-history. Anyway stream of consciousness is a misnomer, suggesting something flowing between banks. Milky Way would be more accurate. Consciousness is a smear. Come Trash my love, throw them coal black haunches over the moon! Pia’s love will do you good, it will cure both your pretty dimples.

  At night poor Robin’s slanguage fails;

  He feels his mind go off the rails.

  Out there on the plateaus of his loneliness he feels the freezing pelagic spray drying on his cheeks. He stares and stares into the eye of the blizzard but all is wiped away by the softly falling snow. “Toby the minute you start to have opinions about day-to-day matters you cease to be an artist and start to be a citizen. Choose.” But I was angry with myself for getting lost in the shallow meshes of such an argument. One should never explain, merely hint. Bruce said: “When we were younger we were actually and physically moved by books. Seraphita so disturbed Piers that he threw it aside and rushed into the open air; feeling suffocated at being found out. He writhed on the grass like a dog to drive away the vision it raised of a perfected love between himself and his sister.” Yes, when one was young – poetry with requisite built-in shiver. Then later one finds oneself facing love affairs as full of bones as any fish – beauty bold and sweet or full of peace and weariness like Pia,

  en pente douce

  au bout portant

  glisse glisse chérie pourtant

  vers bonheur bechamel

  love, the surprise parcel

  will never treat you well.

  A kiss like an interval between points in mathematics, like a cigarette-end burning in the dark. I asked her once when we had been drinking a very human wine to tell me what it felt like with Trash. She coloured deeply and was silent for a long while, her eyes all the time fixed truthfully on my own, a little wrinkle of thought on her brow. Then: “Trash’s body smells of wedding-cake.”

  FOUR

  Life with Toby

  WITHOUT THE COMPANY OF TOBY I SHOULD NEVER HAVE had the courage to return to the chateau; and the fact that he began so earnestly to work gave a high seriousness to our new life there. While he laboured in the old muniments room on the medieval deposits of several generations of Nogarets, I sifted softly through the archives of a more recent time – Sutcliffe’s papers, his letters from Pia; from the Duchess, and from other people in his life. I occupied Piers’ old studio and Toby the three guest rooms – this purely for company. So, like a couple of retired bachelors we put up a common front against the gnawings of solitude. Once or twice the lawyer came up to Verfeuille on some business connected with Piers’ affairs, and once I glimpsed the Abbé in the grounds though he did not greet me, and did not actually enter the chateau. He had a long talk with one of the older servants and then sent to demand permission to visit the vaults where the family had for generations buried its dead. This was at once granted. He disappeared into the wood for an hour or two and then returned, once more to the servants’ quarters, to give back the keys. Summer came and we went for long walks in the heat, in the perfumed dust of the Provençal countryside. Toby’s great study, entitled The Secret of the Templars, was well on the way to being finished; it had taken him a number of years as far as the execution was concerned, but of course many more if one counted the length of time he had actually spent reflecting upon the subject and reading round it. It was a lifework, and his reputation as a historian would stand or fall by it. It was a strange period for me. We spoke little about the tragedy of Piers, and once a week we rode down to Montfavet to spend a few quiet hours with Sylvie. But for the most part it was long walks and early rising. I felt less of an orphan.

  It was during this period that Toby decided to read me a few of the opening passages from his book in a suitable décor for it – a deserted Templar fortress which stood on the dry flanks of the steep ravines beyond the Pont du Gard – that bronze masterpiece of Roman plumbing, constructed apparently of a stone like honey-cake and set in its steep context of rock over the slow Gardon. We slept in the fort, and that night a bronze moon rose over it like an echo. The situation was suitably romantic for the reading of a work which was designed to surpass Gibbon in style and mellifluousness.… At least these were the pretensions of the author expressed for the most part when he was slightly flown with wine. Appropriate too was the great fire of thorns and furze which he had stacked against the walls of the inner bastion. This huge fire bristled and roared up into the calm sky making the gloomy precincts as bright as noon – and enticing the lizards and snakes out of the rock to bask in the glare. Our blankets we had spread in a sheltered corner. Toby, placing his gold-rimmed spectacles on his nose, set our dinner to simmer and uncorked a demijohn of the old Verfeuille red which glowed in our glasses with the embers of old recollections of half-forgotten journeys and excursions of our youth by the light of the moon. Then he seated himself on a stone and took up the thick manuscript, a whole life.

  “Even after six centuries of silence the name echoes on, troubling and mysterious, vibrating in our memories with a kind of tragic uncertainty, tragic doubt. The Templars! What was their sin, what caused their sudden, almost inexplicable destruction? The dust lies thick upon the manuscripts which should provide an answer to such a query, but which in fact only seem to accentuate the mystery by their extraordinary ambiguities, their improbabilities. The more one studies the evidence the less convinced one becomes that the truth has not been tampered with: that the secret has been deliberately hidden, that the so-called facts lie, that the existing evidence darkens judgement. Is there, then, no answer to the secret of their strange fate-or must we rest our case for ever upon surmises and evidence as baffling as it is circumstantial?

  “Across the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, from the fogs and rains of the north to the sunshine and orange – lands of Syria, Portugal, Morocco, are spread the sad relics of this order – abandoned castles and keeps which still insist, by their malefic silence and desuetude, that something momentous and tragic came to pass on that faraway Friday the thirteenth in 1307. On that date one of the most powerful religious orders the world has ever known was struck down overnight, to founder and disintegrate without defence in the fires of the Inquisition at the instigation of a weak Pope and a criminal French king. Fantastic accusations were formulated which stupefied the finest minds and hearts of this order, so long renowned for its piety, self-abnegation, and devotion to duty. The Templars were the foremost fighting arm of the day, in terms of military strength quite capable, one might have thought, of conquering the whole of Europe; moreover, from a political point of view, the knights were the bankers who handled the gold of the Kings …..

  “Yet at dawn on Friday the thirteenth in 1307, in conformity
with the lettres de cachet sent out by King Philippe Le Bel to all the seneschals of France – (orders they were forbidden to open and read before the twelfth of October) – the 5,000 field officers of the Templar order, from the least important up to the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, together with his personal bodyguard of sixty armed knights, were arrested at the instigation of the Chancellor of France, Guillaume de Nogaret. They were taken up in one night like rabbits. There is no record of a protest of any kind nor of any resistance. The main attack was launched at the world headquarters of the order, the Paris Temple. Why?

  “The accusations formulated against them seem, even in retrospect, astonishing in their extravagance; one has the impression that the knights themselves were dumbfounded by them, rendered incapable of reacting out of sheer astonishment. A religious order world-renowned for its frugality and chastity was suddenly accused of heresy, sodomy, secret practices, and religious beliefs hostile to the Christianity of the day. The suddenness of the blow, the perfect timing of the attack, and the devastating nature of the charges left no time for thought, no time to prepare a defence against such outrageous suppositions. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the whole of Europe was struck dumb also with surprise; and then became scared and uneasy about the gravity of the charges and the increasing flimsiness of the evidence brought against the knights. The long sad trials began which were to drag on and on into what must have seemed an infinity of cruelty. The less the Inquisitors found, the more summary their judgements, the higher burned the pyres on which the bodies of the Templars smoked. Nobody was convinced: yet everybody was silent.

  “But the silence of bewilderment or outright disdain could do nothing to help the knights in their fearful religious dilemma. They wondered, they hesitated, they compromised. Could the King be serious? Or was this a vulgar attempt by a spendthrift always in need of cash to wrest the Templar riches from them? If so, what a dangerous way of achieving his ends – for the order had a fully armed fighting force of 15,000 knights in the field: perhaps the only fully equipped and mature military order then in Europe. They did nothing. The long dreary Inquisitions into their heresies, which today cover a mountain of parchment in Toulouse, Avignon and elsewhere are extraordinarily disappointing in their lack of coherence, their ambiguities. Yet the basic fact remains that in one night, over an area of roughly 150,000 square miles a total of 15,000 persons were taken up by the authorities. There was no struggle recorded anywhere. What could have caused every single preceptory to surrender so completely? A consciousness of the innocence of the knights? A belief that an inquiry would vindicate the Order. Surprise? Yet the Templars would seem to have held every trick in their hand had they wished to resist. Their chain of fortresses, like mastodons, was impregnable, their armies were crack fighting ones. Afterwards the King, Philippe, tried to shift the responsibility to the Inquisition, saying that he had acted on their advice. But this was not true, for they were informed after the event, though they were invited to join forces with him and handle the trials in the best religious style. Nogaret had sent twelve spies into the various chapters to collect evidence against the knights. It is worth remembering that his parents had been burned at the stake as cathars by the very Templars whom he helped destroy. At any rate he ignited the pyre, so to speak, at the instigation of the King. But though the flames burned high and long there remains something mysterious and unrealised about the whole business. The truth eludes one. For example, of all the thousands of Templar knights tortured and interrogated over a seven-year span, only three confessed to homosexual acts …

  “But the traditional view of the matter should be set out clearly since it is the view which holds the academic field today, and there is no inherent improbability about it. It runs as follows, and the chief proponent of it is Professor Basil Babcock of Oxford:

  “‘The real sin of the Templars is far from mysterious – though it is never mentioned in the long list of 127 questions addressed to each of the knights by the Inquisition. The sin was the sin of usury, and the only rational explanation of their sudden and catastrophic fall turns upon it and upon nothing else. They were, we must remember, the most powerful and widely extended money-lenders and bankers of the Middle Ages, and their enormous wealth first grew from the fact that they financed the crusades as well as taking an active part in the fighting in order to safeguard and watch over their investments. The Temple in Paris was the focus and centre of the world gold market. The Popes and the Kings were encouraged to deposit their wealth with the Temples for safety – wealth which was not locked away in the vaults but reinvested under guarantees and at a lively percentage. In sixty years of studious banking backed up by the might of the sword and the chain of fortresses stretching across the civilised world the wealth of the Templars cast a shade over the riches of Kings and Popes alike. It exercised a strange hold on the economic pattern of Europe’s life. With riches comes cupidity, and with power insolence. So the stage was set for the downfall of the Order.’ “It is the purpose of this detailed study to suggest that there was in fact a Templar heresy, contracted perhaps in the Orient which, on religious grounds, and from the narrowest Christian viewpoint, justified their total destruction. While they were outremer in the service of the Cross they became contaminated with the secret gnostic beliefs which coloured their notions of good and evil and which qualified their allegiance to the Pope and Christendom. They became secret dissenters, and in the technical sense, or purely theological sense, supporters of the Anti-Christ of the day. At first sight this explanation of the mystery might seem somewhat bold and perhaps even rash. But there is enough evidence to support it, and we hope to show by a painstaking examination of available records that this is, in fact, what happened, though of course not all the knights were necessarily in the know. The Order transformed itself from within and disseminated knowledge at different levels – a sort of freemasonry in structure grew up; and naturally enough, because just to think such things, which threw the whole of Christianity into question, was extremely dangerous. They lost their gamble, and were rooted out, extirpated to the last man. Issues may have become confused, evidence tangled and muddled. But reason there was, and the present writer hopes to show it.”

  Toby threw down his manuscript and tossed some more wood on to the fire. I was silent. Despite the rather heavy rhetorical flourishes it was not bad as an introduction to his book. It was at least a direct challenge to the prevailing authorities. I watched him pacing up and down, organising the dinner, with the light glinting on the gold rims of his spectacles. Memory seized me as I lay, sunk in a composed drowse, before the vast fire. Our shadows danced upon the walls and I thought of Plato, and then of Akkad. I thought of our lives, our travels, which now had diminished and faded into a kind of limbo where we had nothing much more to expect of the world. The fire burned, the whole of Provence (our own land) slumbered around us in the light of the dying moon. Toby was going grey at the temples, so was I. And the dead? They slumbered peacefully, waiting for us to join them. We ate in silence and happiness – the silence of deep thought: for the threads of everything Toby had written led us directly back to our own youth, and to Akkad and the adventures of the deserts which ringed Alexandria. I saw how the theme went now, and I could see that if Toby handled his materials with circumspection he would have a book which would not be easily superseded in its domain. He sat and riffled through it by the fire, and began to talk and expound, no longer content to read the prose in his somewhat stentorian voice.

  I lay and drowsed. Some of these things I knew, and some not. I had entered, thanks to the wine, into a state of warm bemusement hovering on the borders of sleep. Yes, Avignon became Rome in 1309, just at the time of the Templar trials; Toby said: “Of course all of this I owe to that chance remark of Rob’s, and the letter from Akkad. Do you recall?” Drifting through my mind came sadder fragments from the Sutcliffe papers which I had been trying to arrange in chronological order. “Honey, Robin is all heaped up with sadness.
His roses don’t sing no more. He’s all cased up in sorrow, poor Robin. He’s gone silent, he needs subtitles, honey.” Trash, with her “pretty hobbling French”…

  “To get to the bottom of the matter,” Toby was saying as he scanned his huge typescript, “one must try to see what was behind the questions posed by the Inquisition. For example, those concerned with sodomy. For while sodomy was not more rare in the Middle Ages than it is today, no stigma of effeminacy attached to it. Many Crusaders must have been of that persuasion, and of course the popular revulsion to unnatural practices went deep. Indeed the penalties were hard, though almost never invoked. The charge was punishable by being burned alive or buried alive at this time. But this was only what appeared on the statute books. Yet the Jews, for example, were never charged with sexual aberrations by their medieval persecutors. One wonders why. Even the charge of ritual murder seemed to lack any specifically sexual tinge. In the case of the godless Moslems they were merely criticised for a superlative incontinence. But – and here is a fact of great significance – homosexuality was thoroughly identified with religious dissent of the gravest kind – so much so that Bulgar, that is to say Bogomil, remained always by connotation a religio-sexual charge – whence later bougre and bugger evolved from it. … You see?”