Then, in the clarity of the dream that bathed me, like a fantastic beast, the donkey laden with pottery—my donkey—slowly traversed the square covered with graves, sniffed the threshold of the church momentarily, and disappeared through the open portal.
I bounded to my feet. Without my being able to explain why, the passage of that donkey had just reawakened a hidden force within me. I perceived at an infinite distance the clamor of a trumpet that resonated in the silence of the sunrise. I started running toward the château as fast as my legs would carry me.
The surroundings were absolutely deserted. I went in, listening to a dull sound that was coming from underground. I went down a tortuous stairway, precipitately, and found myself in the presence of the Jew Nathan. He was directing the labor of a few men who were in the process of demolishing the masonry of the subterranean vault in order to block its orifice.
“One minute more and it would have been too late,” he told me, shaking his head as if it were a matter of scant importance.
I launched myself into the tunnel. The beams sustaining the sides had been wrenched away over a length of at least a hundred meters. Lanterns had been placed at intervals. The crowd that had passed through had left a frightful odor. In certain places water was oozing from the low ceiling. I had never thought that the light of the sun was so desirable and necessary to life.
When I had walked for a long time I found myself in the presence of a stone staircase of interminable length. The steps were often missing and it was necessary to aid myself with my hands. It seemed to me that that lasted for hours, and I thought that the stairway, in order to be so long, must be built within the flanks of a mountain. Suddenly, a pink light vibrated around me. The stairway turned abruptly. I had arrived. I was about to let myself fall to the ground, but I straightened up, brushing away with an instinctive gesture the earth that various collisions had mingled with my hair.
Three women of a resplendent beauty were standing at the entrance to the tunnel, making me a gesture of welcome.
VI
In truth, I had heard talk of them a long time ago. The reputation of their beauty had spread through the army of the crusaders. On evening, on the bank of the Rhône, the deformed knights of Burgundy, along with Hairy Bretons, had spoken freely about them. They had even gambled for their future possession, as if goddesses were not always sheltered from the desire of goats and wild boar.
They were three, in Carbardez of the three towers, which bore their names. Brunissende was the daughter of Pierre de Cabaret, Nova was the daughter of his first marriage and Stéphania had married his eldest son, who had died on the morning of his wedding. Brunissende had hair as dark as the slopes of the Black Mountain in the evening. Nova had the gilded color of heather in the sunlight. Stéphania, the smiling, resembled a fragment of amber sculpted by a sculptor of genius. All three dressed similarly in immaculate linen robes. The rumor was that in the ardor of their Cathar mysticism they had made vows of chastity.
The inhabitants of Carcassonne were dispersed through the vast land of Languedoc. Pierre de Cabaret had only kept a few families in his château and the combatants necessary for the defense of that inaccessible place, which enclosed the torrents of the Orbiel. Naturally, I was one of those.
When one has marched through a desolate region, one suddenly finds behind a crag a cheerful little village with fountains and inns. Thus, in course of my warrior destiny, I encountered a beautiful image by which I was permanently dazzled.
The room in which I spent the nights, which I shared with a few knights of Carcassonne, was situated near the steam-baths. One morning I came across the three marvelous creatures. They had the languid quality of women who have just emerged from the bath and their wet hair was dangling almost to their feet. Brunissende’s lips were tightly closed. Nova’s eyelids were fluttering. Stéphania had difficulty not smiling. They passed by. But the sign of amorous predestination had appeared for us. I loved all three of them from that day on, identifying them mysteriously. In my dreams I no longer any but a single face, and by a bizarre illusion it had the features of Esclarmonde de Foix. I carried henceforth in my heart the veneration of a unique beauty that was clad in three human aspects.
I taught peasants how to hurl stones with a sling or to handle a crossbow. With a few men-at-arms I sometimes went as far as a farm in the vicinity and I escorted a cart laden with grains and forage. If I turned round I almost always saw, at the window of a tower or the round-path of a rampart, a form in a linen robe following me with her gaze. I did not know whether it was Brunissende, Nova or Stéphania. I was penetrated by the delight that the prescience of love gives.
Everyone at the Château de Cabardez professed the Albigensian heresy. A beam had been nailed over the château’s chapel to forbid entry. That chapel was adjacent to a small platform that overlooked the countryside. I walked there every evening, amusing myself watching the nocturnal birds circle, and listening to the noise of the waters of the Orbiel at the bottom of sheer slopes.
When everything was silent in the château, a white-haired old soldier who had accompanied Pierre de Cabaret in the Orient came to kneel before the chapel door. As immobile as a statue, he prayed for a long time and then withdrew as he had come.
After their evening meal, the three beauties of Cabardez made a tour of the château’s walls. Once, they were late, and when they went past the chapel they saw, at the same time, the old soldier kneeling, and me leaning on the balustrade.
They stopped, but without anything appearing of the sentiments that might have been agitating them. I saw them confer for a few seconds. Then, in a voice from which emotion was carefully banished, Brunissende called to me and asked me to help her to remove the beam that barred the door of the chapel. It was poorly fitted and I contrived to dislodge it without too much difficulty. Then they invited the old man to go in, telling him to pray entirely at his ease if such was his faith. I even heard Brunissende add that there, where the Albigensians were the masters, everyone had the right to believe in accordance with his soul, without fear of persecution.
They remained outside the door, similar in their white simarres to angels making a nocturnal round. I experienced a great disturbance and I sensed that it was shared. Then I said to them, purely for the sake of breaking the silence, that I desired to be better instructed in the new religion, for when I was in their presence there were certain things of it that I could no longer reasonably accept. The cheerful Stéphania asked me what those things were.
“I cannot believe,” I said, “that life is evil and diabolical, as the pure Albigensians teach, and that it is necessary to detach oneself from it, when I gaze at certain human faces so filled with beauty that they give the desire to live in order to contemplate it.” And I stared at them, in order that it should be evident that I was talking about them.
They started to laugh with a great simplicity, and Brunissende told me that there was someone in the château who could explain the mysteries of the truth to me better than them. She assured me that she would ask that exceedingly wise man to speak to me the next day, and all three drew away, continuing to laugh, doubtless to put on a show and to disguise their emotion.
I knew that an Albigensian perfectus of reputedly great sanctity lived in a little chamber in a tower and remained there, plunged in perpetual meditation. It was said that he saw future events by gazing into a mirror of a singular form, as, it appears, certain Arab magicians do. I did not think that Brunissende had taken my words literally, but the next day, at the same hour, finding myself near the chapel in the hope of making the same encounter as the day before, I saw a man of short stature coming toward me, of indeterminate age, whose face was so pale that it seemed transparent, and I was tempted at first to look through his body at the objects that were behind him.
He approached me and said to me in a soft voice, calling me his brother, that if I had a question to ask him, he would gladly reply to me.
I was stammering a few words,
pierced by my disappointment at encountering him instead of the admirable creatures I was expecting, when his eyes, posed on mine, became troubled and it seemed to me that with the flutter of his eyelids he mastered the moist mist that precedes tears.
“It is not necessary for you to know more, for the moment,” he said, appearing to reflect profoundly. “A man kills and is killed in his turn. He forges for himself a chain of evil that has no end, but all of whose knots it will be necessary for him to undo—and with what difficulty! It is vain to enlighten too soon the man who ought not to see yet. Follow your path, which is the longest and hardest, and be content to make an effort to forgive others, and yourself.”
He looked at me with an immense pity, and I could not help find that amusing, considering how paltry his form was and the wan pallor of his complexion. I quit him, very disappointed.
Winter was beginning to blow through the cypresses clinging to the slopes of the Château de Cabardez when Jordette Altaripa died in a strange fashion.
She was the daughter of a consul of Carcassonne and she loved Vicomte Roger Trencavel tenderly. After having dragged her away almost by force, Pierre de Cabaret had installed her in the finest room in the Château de Cabardez. She did not leave it, and every day she stood at the window watching the road to Carcassonne to see whether some peasant or merchant might be coming bearing news.
In the course of the autumn we had learned about the events that had unfurled among the crusaders. Comte Raymond had returned to Toulouse with his knights, and I knew his sentiments well enough to think that he must be filled with remorse. After the pillaging of Carcassonne and the acquisition of the houses by many thieving foreign hands, the papal legate and the Christian barons had proclaimed Simon de Montfort seigneur of all the lands conquered by the crusaders. The true master of those lands, Roger Trencavel, was locked in the prison of his own château.
Was he bemoaning bitterly his excessive confidence? Did he desire death? Did he converse during his final hours with his beloved Jordette Altaripa, as she believed? No one will ever know.
As Christmas approached, Jordette Altaripa never ceased to moan softly and to hold out her arms toward an absent companion. Extending her arms like those of a cross on the crimson brocade of her bed, she gave the impression of a crucified dove in a pool of blood. She wanted the window no longer to let in any light, in order to suffer the compact darkness by which the man she loved was enveloped. Sometimes, she asked him a question, as if he were present, and she seemed to hear a response that was not formulated. Her questions often implied responses that could easily be imagined. She asked: Will you love me forever? Will you not consent to have me by your side? But it was sometimes a matter of more precise things, such as the place where he was imprisoned, the possibility of corrupting the guards and the treatment to which he was subjected. And the words devoid of resonance that she perceived cast her into an ever more profound desolation.
A moment came when she refused to take any nourishment; she even broke the goblet and the jug that were presented to her, saying that the man she loved no longer received anything to eat or drink in the dungeon to which no one any longer descended.
One evening, at sunset, the women keeping vigil over her in the dark heard her utter a faint cry. She was found dead, her arms making the gesture of hugging an invisible creature.
We learned the next day at Cabardez that Simon de Montfort had just let it be known in Carcassonne that Roger Trencavel was dead, without further explanation. He had him buried in the Church of Saint Nazaire with a certain pomp. No one doubted that he had caused the legitimate possessor of the lands of Béziers and Carcassonne to die of starvation in his prison.15
VII
All the souls in the Château de Cabardez were troubled. Chagrin had a curious influence on Pierre de Cabaret. He dressed from head to foot in the Arab manner and acquired the habit, while supervising the measures of defense or exercises in arms, of uttering oaths in the Syrian language, which no one but him understood.
Brunissende, Nova and Stéphania did not allow any sadness to show. Death is a blessing, they said, since it permits us to attain a purified state, more fortunate than that of life. When those we love are deprived of their form, we ought to rejoice for them. And they affected a certain delight.
But I was not sure that it was an affectation. I was even tempted secretly to believe that the delight in question had a more human cause. I scarcely dared admit it to myself. Perhaps it was because of me that there was a nascent flame of amour in the eyes of the three young women. Invisible smiles when I encountered them, and scarcely perceptible movements of the head, were certain proofs of it. But what would come of it? They were three, and the greatest affection united them. Was I about to cause their division? In any case, how could I distinguish myself the one that I loved?
One morning, I heard the resonation of the enormous timpani and buccinas that Pierre de Cabaret had installed in the southern tower. They were bizarre instruments with joyful sounds, which he had brought back from the Orient. It was agreed that they would resound when an advance guard of crusaders appeared on the horizon. That music ought to symbolize, according to him, the pleasure that he would have in combating the Northern barbarians. I was in the large courtyard, and I was about to hasten to my post in the western tower, the Albigensian perfectus with whom I had had an incomprehensible conversation outside the chapel emerged from a low room. He made me a sign with his hand and he said to me softly: “Dalmas Rochemaure, it is necessary to leave.”
And he drew away.
Why did he say that to me? Why did I have to leave at the moment when the château needed all its defenders?
As I was asking myself that question, Pierre de Cabaret came out of the same low room. He had just been in conference there with the Seigneur de Peixiora and the Seigneur de Brani, who had arrived from their châteaux and whose horses were steaming in the courtyard. He was holding a sealed letter in his hand, and on seeing me he uttered an Arabic oath to express his satisfaction.
Without losing a moment, before the place was invested and the roads cut off, I had to go to Toulouse across the Black Mountain and the plains of Lauraguais. No one was better qualified than me to talk to Comte Raymond, to tell him what had happened and to demonstrate what an interest he had in helping his besieged vassals. But the helmets of the crusaders were glinting in almost all directions. A rapid horse and a valiant man were necessary.
Certainly, I was that. The drawbridge was lowered and, to the din of trumpets in the sky, I raced down the unique path that clung to the flanks of Cabardez. At the bottom of that path, where cypresses stood watch at intervals, there was a crossroads with other cypresses around it, and a rock in the form of a dog. It was there that I risked being captured or killed and having the blue waters of the Orbiel as a shroud. I thought that, out of regard for the messenger, they might have decided the message a little sooner.
But I traversed the crossroads without being attacked, either because there was no one behind the cypresses or because those who were there preferred to lie low on seeing with what enemy they had to deal.
Then I was suddenly illuminated by a certainty. I was loved by Brunissende, Nova and Stéphania. Each of them had confided in the Albigensian sage, and the latter, in his wisdom, having foresight of the troubles and rivalries that amour engenders, had said to me in a peremptory tone: “Dalmas Rochemaure, it is necessary to leave.” Certainly, I might have thought that the Albigensian sage, having taken part in Pierre de Cabaret’s deliberation with the Seigneur de Peixiora and the Seigneur de Bram, knew the order that would be given to me and was notifying me of it, but I rejected that hypothesis as the less plausible.
I turned round. Far away, on the highest tower, to the dying song of the trumpets, I saw, or thought I saw, three white forms. But I had no need to turn round to see them. I distinguished them more clearly before me, when I closed my mind, and all three of them had Esclarmonde’s face.
Preceded
by that unique image of ideal feminine beauty, I flew along the roads all day toward my new destiny, far from the Château de Cabardez, whose three marvelous chatelaines I was never to see again.16
VIII
I have seen the man known as the Antichrist in the lands of Toulouse, Albi and Foix. I have seen Pope Innocent III. He was not born in the tribe of Dan as the prophecies had announced. He did not cure paralytics and he did not have demons as servants. His face was not hideously ugly, as I naively believed. I was even amazed to see that the man who knowingly unleashed the calamities of the war had intelligent eyes, the forehead of a sage and the handsome and noble features that are seen in certain Roman Emperors on old medals.
When I arrived in Toulouse my horse was steaming so forcefully that I found myself in the thick vapor, and the men at the gate of the Château Narbonnais could not distinguish at first who I was. I was immediately introduced to the presence of Comte Raymond. He was pacing back and forth and finishing dictating his testament to the notary Pierre Arnaud, who was sitting at a marble table with his nose over his parchment because of his myopia.
“A man who is going to Rome ought to make his testament,” he was saying, sadly, at the moment when I entered.
He considered Pierre de Cabaret’s message as if it were utterly devoid of importance. He even crumpled it casually, while he looked at me with satisfaction and a smile illuminated his thin face. My return was visibly an event of a joyous order for him.
“Everyone thought that you had died at Béziers.”
The Blood of Toulouse Page 13