In Minerve, when the place was taken by assault, I was one of the twenty-four combatants, almost all nobles and knights, whom Simon de Montfort ordered to be hanged in order that they might suffer in death an ultimate humiliation. I stood among the brave men of Minerve, hands bound, before twenty-four hastily-erected scaffolds. Those to my rights and left, all being wounded more or less seriously, never ceased groaning or abusing the crusaders. For myself, I tried to resuscitate in my soul the features of Esclarmonde de Foix in order to die with that image.
Suddenly, I emitted a loud burst of laughter. Accompanied by a troop of German soldiers, Simon de Montfort’s wife had recently joined her husband and was sharing his warrior life. She had just appeared facing us, on a little mound, in order to enjoy the hanging of the twenty-four vanquished of Minerve. She was frightfully yellow in the complexion, the color of the oil of the banks of the Rhône. Devotions had mummified her skin and lack of care had decomposed her teeth. She was so prudish that she punished her maidservants when their unknowingly lifted dresses allowed glimpses of their ankle-bones. Leaning on the arm of an infamous scribe named Pierre de Vaux-Cernay,19 notorious throughout Christendom for his lies and the villainy of his writings, she directed eyes filled with hatred toward those who were about to die.
And I, at the limit of joy, laughed so loudly that the good Seigneur de Mercoriole, who had just been seized in order to be the first to be hanged, thought that I had lost my reason. It was simply that I had heard many times that Simon de Montfort, although he delivered beautiful female prisoners to his knights, did not personally pose any risk to their honor because of the fidelity sworn to his wife and his respect for the sanctity of marriage. I thought then that he had beside him every evening in his tent that sort of withered vulture, that hateful face, which resembled an incarnation of hypocrisy. I pictured the pious embrace of the warrior and that larva desiccated by interior malignity, and I burst into loud laughter. I also praised God for his skill in punishing without appearing to do so and for rendering my death joyful by the knowledge of that punishment.
Now, the Seigneur de Mercoriole was very fat and his weight broke the gibbet that had been prepared for him. It was perceived that none of the gibbets was solid. Dusk was falling and word was sent to Simon de Montfort, whose wife was becoming impatient. Someone was already whispering that the execution would be postponed until the next day when Simon de Montfort sent the order to massacre immediately, by means of swords and spears, those who could not be hanged.
A certain confusion ensued. A seigneur with an honest face was in command of the execution, but he was doing so in a detached manner and I noticed that his gaze was attached to mine with an unexpected sympathy. Was it because I had laughed and gaiety reaches certain hearts? He made a sign to a soldier to untie me, and, not without having darted a glance at Montfort’s horrible spouse, he shoved me toward the open country.
At Lavaur I witnessed the torture of Guiraude de Laurac. Wounded, I had gone to seek refuge with her and had been cured by the Arab physician Mohammed who was part of her court of scholars and poets. I fought by the side of the warrior chatelaine during the thirty-three days of the siege, and on the thirty-third day, as the crusaders were about to attack, the beautiful Guiraude, raising her crossbow toward the sky, said something ambiguous about her and me, the interpretation of which threw me into great disturbance, but I was never able to penetrate its meaning.
The city and the château were taken by assault and I only owed my salvation to the Arab physician, in whom I had inspired amity. In order to care for his wounded Montfort had none but ignorant northerners who, with their plasters and their balms, killed their patients with certainty. Mohammed’s reputation must have gone before him, for he gave the order to save his life and put a guard around his person and his remedies. The excellent Mohammed, at the moment of the combatants’ debacle, dressed me in an Arab robe and swore that I was his aide, as expert as him in the art of medicine.
We were dragged outside the city into a field to which the crusaders who had fallen during the assault were transported. From there, while I pretended to obey Mohammed, I saw the immense pyre built on to which three hundred perfecti were thrown and burned alive.20
I saw from a distance Simon de Montfort beside the young Alix, his wife. His enormous stature and the mass of his head deprived of eyes gave the impression of an extra-human force unleashed in order to destroy and cause suffering. I had just drawn water from a well in order to moisten a plaster of herbs when I saw the crusaders’ leader make imperious signs toward the well.
Two men dragged the chatelaine of Lavaur, whose hair was loose and whose face was divided by a trickle of blood. She straightened up for some supplication, or perhaps malediction, and her palpitating bosom showed outside her robe, ripped by a dagger. Alix de Monfort made a gesture of disgust in order not to see that flesh soiled by sin and not to hear a scandalous speech. Then the men holding the rope let the chatelaine of Lavaur down into the well. For a long time I heard them throwing stones and pebbles into it. No cry reached me, but only a dull sound mingled with splashing, and that eventually died away.21
I have seen other scenes as frightful, and witnessed other battles. I have often been courageous, sometimes cowardly and I am astonished by the immense love of life by which creatures are possessed.
I have traversed villages from which all the inhabitants had fed. I have passed over the drawbridges of silent châteaux where my footfalls made the empty rooms resonate and where the fear that had opened the doors still vibrated.
But one thing remained mysterious to me. Simon de Montfort was always victorious. That constant victory might be explicable by his personal courage, by luck, by the number of his soldiers and the terror he inspired, but I discerned another element. His victory seemed to me to have a hidden cause in the very root of destiny. It was inscribed in a book in ineluctable characters. At that time, on the excessively beautiful land divided by the Garonne and its cerulean waters, evil had to triumph. Evil was incarnate in that pitiless man. It was written that everywhere that his shadow extended in the region where the philosophical poplar and the poetic fig-tree grew, the taste for beautiful things, and the love of songs that come from the heart, youth and intelligence were extinguished. For ends that I do not understand, my homeland, perfumed by the amber of the Orient, had to be ravaged by hatred, and accursed.
Now, the mosaics of the beautiful fountains are broken, the marble statues no longer ornament the thresholds of dwellings, the part-Arabic and part-Roman cities have lost the turban of their turrets and the toga of their ramparts. But glory to the unknown force by which the proprieties of the soul are condensed, and which permits them to lie dormant in a silent crucible in order to awaken later! Thus, like stratified plants that commence to live again at the stroke of the wand of a geomantic magician, with their petals in flower and their stamens living, the Occitan soul will one day be resuscitated.
PART THREE
I
My sister Aude had become the most charming young woman in Toulouse. Her beauty was not obvious; it was necessary to look attentively to perceive it, just as, when one has before one’s eyes a landscape in which there is a delicate measure of colors, it requires a mental effort to conceive its poetry.
It was a great joy for me to find her again when I returned to Toulouse after years of absence. Comte Raymond had spent that time in vain negotiations and petitions to legates. He had been humiliated and deceived. He had finally decided to break with the Church and with Simon de Montfort and I had come to resume my service with him.
I had the gift of making my sister Aude laugh. Many very ordinary things took on a comical reach for her in my mouth. But that hilarity was not mockery; it was a manner of manifesting her affection. Thus certain domesticated birds sing when one approaches them. There was, moreover, a rather mysterious relationship between my sister Aude and the inhabitants of the air. She walked so lightly that she often appeared to be flying. And
sometimes, leaning on her window-sill, from which Saint Sernin was visible, she repeated the same sound indefinitely, giving it sweet or heart-rending modulations until she had fallen into a kind of ecstasy. I noticed that her eyes then took on a color that I have only ever seen once, in a lake lost in the Pyrenees, which is a blue approaching violet.
Aude had been instructed in the Albigensian religion and she was able to discourse on the philosophy of that religion. She sometimes tried to explain it to me and what she said was always very beautiful, but sometimes incomprehensible. She told me everything that happened to creatures after death, entering into the most minute detail, and I wondered how things that are completely unknown to the vulgar could have come to her knowledge. I learned from her that all the evil that one does to others returns to you, via a bizarre curve, and strikes you in exactly the same fashion. The curve is sometimes very long and when it cannot attain you in this life it attains you in a subsequent life. Aude assured me that I had lived before and that I would live again, in order to receive the good and evil that I had done.
I asked her whether a man who had traversed the breast of another with a thrust of a lance, after having meditated that action all night, would surely receive a thrust of a lance in the same place of his own breast. She laughed, as was her habit, not knowing that I was talking about myself. Then she said that the man in question would assuredly die a violent death if he were devoid of intelligence and love, but that there were means and practices to avoid renaissances with their harsh regulations of account. It was not given to everyone to understand such practices, however, and they required a perfect purity of heart of which very few were capable.
At first I was proud of the love that Aude had for me, but I perceived that she loved with an extraordinary love not only her father and her mother, but her friends, her dog, the austere Albigensians with whom she conversed, the people that she encountered, those who passed by in the street, and those she did not know. When someone said to her “It’s cold,” she began to weep, because of all the animals that were going to die in the fields. When the sun was hot, red patches were visible on her face because of the mosquitoes she refused to swat. She did not admit it for fear of being mocked, but when we went for a walk I saw that she made it a scruple not to trample any blade of grass on the path.
Aude was often sad and I asked her the reason.
“I would like to accomplish a truly good deed,” she told me, “and I can’t succeed in that.”
I made the remark that she gave all her savings to the poor and devoted herself to them. The day before, the executioner Tancrède, the most evil man in the city, had been attacked in a side street near our house. All the doors were immediately closed, everyone hoping for his death. Only Aude had run to bandage his wound. She had moreover, received nothing but imprecations by way of thanks.
“All good deeds give joy when one accomplishes them,” she replied, “and because of that, they are not so desirable. It is only in suffering that one becomes purer. I would like to accomplish a good dead that only procures me pain.”
With a vine branch in hand, the runner was announcing the arrival of fresh wine in a tavern near the Basacle Gate when I encountered the monk Petrus. We immediately went to sit down together under an arbor.
“You’ve become a filthy heretic dog,” he told me, amicably.
Such words, which can be pronounced by companions that one sees every day, irritated me on the part of a friend that I had quit such a long time ago. I no longer know what reply I made to him, which was insulting with regard to Bishop Foulque, whose fanatical servant he had become. Under his orders, he organized bands that were known as the Whites because their members recognized one another by means of white jackets, and who pillaged the houses of heretics. I had projected since my arrival organizing a rival troop that would be called the Blacks and would rally to my black leather surcoat.
I saw hatred emerge from his person and it seemed to me for an instant that a furious black dog was circling around us. He lowered his voice and he said to me, like a confidence that he could only make to a friend: “Toulouse is accursed. But its destruction is now decided. It can no longer escape.”
I asked him, with the mildness that Aude incessantly incited me to observe, who had decided that destruction.
He wanted to intimidate me and he pointed to a place next to me on the bench on the bench on which I was sitting.
“Look at that peasant,” he said.
There was no one beside me.
“Well?” I said.
“It’s Jesus Christ,” he murmured, with a false respect. “He appears to me now almost every day. It’s him who has informed me of the destruction of Toulouse.”
I drew my sword with the calm proscribed by Aude, and, with the blade, I traced a sign of the cross on the spot where the peasant ought to be. Then, with a shrug of the shoulders I made Petrus understand that I was not his dupe. He clenched his teeth. His fists were closed.
He said to me: “It’s Bishop Foulque who has decided thus. The Whites I command have divided up the city by quarters. When the moment comes, they’ll set fire to it.”
I invoked God internally in order to be able to control myself, and I succeeded. I promised myself to recount that victory over my natural violence to Aude. My smile brought Petrus’ exasperation to a peak. In his rage he sniggered.
“Your house will be burned too,” he said. “You’ll be spared because you’re my friend, but as for your sister Aude, we’ve promised her to ourselves for a long time. We’ve drawn lots, and it’s me who won her...”
The universe was tinted red around me and as the last syllable of that speech was still resonating, I struck Petrus in the face with my dagger over the table. I wonder how he did not die from such a blow. Doubtless a movement that he made saved his life. He got up, crying out. Blood was running from his left eye, which I had punctured. I heard him call for any Whites that were in the vicinity. I felt that I was ready to take on an army. I had tipped the table over to make a barricade. But no one came. Thus, friendships end in the times in which we live.
That evening, without any other explanation, I asked Aude whether someone who punctures his friend’s eye in a moment of violence during an argument had his own eye put out in a future life. She was content to reply: “Wouldn’t that be justice?”
I replied that it would indeed be justice. I thought then about the arrows I had launched after having taken careful aim, the blows that I had delivered in battle, and it seemed to me that the surface of a man’s body would be insufficient to bear wounds as numerous as those I had inflicted. And I felt pity for the creature who would be me, whose martyrdom I was preparing.
II
The battle of Muret had been lost.22 The King of Aragon was dead and his army dispersed. Simon de Montfort might force the gates of Toulouse at any moment. A breath of catastrophe blew over the city, all the more intense because the annual plague was making greater ravages in the poor quarters because of a recent heat wave.
I exhorted my parents to leave and go to a little estate that one of my uncles had near Rabastens. My father refused. In any case, Aude was incapable of attempting the shortest journey. Since there had been fighting around Toulouse she had become extremely weak. Her body was incessantly agitated by tremors, as if she experienced all the blows that were delivered. She never ceased praying.
Comte Raymond made the decision to quit the city before Montfort’s troops occupied the roads to the north. A large number of cavaliers were to accompany him.
The baggage and the horses were already waiting at the Matabiau Gate. The moon rose over the brick roofs and the Saracen turrets. I joined the Comte in the garden of his house. As I advanced along the principal pathway I was enveloped by a whirlwind of wings. All the aviaries were open, but the birds, instead of taking advantage of their liberty, were perching on the low branches of the trees and appeared to be waiting. The Comte was immobile alongside his favorite stork and from a dis
tance, in the moonlight, with his stout belly and the wings of his cloak, he gave the impression of being the bizarre and desperate seigneur of an avian people.
He did not know what to do. The stork that he loved did not want to be separated from him. Doubtless it had understood the gravity of events, for it refused to allow itself to be seized, but attached itself to his footsteps. He dreaded abandoning it, but he could not travel at the head of an army with a stork in his arms. He added that he would rather know that it was dead than abandon it, and gave me the order to kill it as rapidly as I could.
But I did not have to carry out that disagreeable order. Scarcely had I taken a step toward the stork than, by virtue of a singular coincidence or a mysterious comprehension, it flew up above the garden and over the houses, God knows where. The Comte made me a sign to follow him.
We traversed streets through which silent cavaliers were passing, heading for the Matabiau Gate. We crossed the bridge over the Garonne and reached the Saint Cyprien quarter, the one most tested by the plague. Many house seemed abandoned and the two or three glimmers we perceived in windows were those of candles keeping vigil over the dead. In a street bordered by walls we stopped in front of the door of a convent. I knew that it was a convent of women.
There were two litters outside the door. I recognized by the golden cross on the black key that the first litter belonged to the Comte de Toulouse. Four of his guards were sitting a little further away. The Comte considered the second litter with surprise and his expression darkened.
He knocked on the door of the convent. It took a long time for anyone to open it. A toothless old woman holding a tallow candle in her hand uttered a cry and nearly fell over when she saw us. She explained things that were difficult to understand because of the faults of articulation caused by the absence of teeth. I thought I grasped that the plague had claimed several victims in the convent and that all the nuns had abandoned it. Someone had to remain, however, for the old woman made us a sign to follow her and started walking along a gallery with stone walls. The Comte followed her without hesitation, as if the route were familiar to him.
The Blood of Toulouse Page 15