We stopped before a door that stood ajar, within which a faint light was shining. The woman pushed the batten with her outstretched hand and immediately stood aside. Four candles illuminated the room, indicating by their geometry that the creature around whom they were flickering was dead.
I saw a meager silhouette and a face that had conserved an atrocious laugh beneath tangled white hair. Dementia, more powerful than death, still marked he tormented features. A man was on his knees in a corner of the room. Without getting up he looked in our direction and his gaze met that of the Comte, who knelt down beside him. I recognized Arnaud Bernard.
I was witness to the final scene of the drama that had agitated Toulouse thirty years before. Alix Bernard had loved Comte Raymond, she had gone mad, and she had been kept since then in this convent in Saint Cyprien. Now, the two men who had shared her love unequally were kneeling beside her form, all of whose beauty had fled. They had come in the danger that Toulouse was running to attempt to save the still-living symbol of their youth. The two faithful old men were side by side, united in the same prayer. But Arnaud Bernard would have his belated revenge. It was to him that the responsibility for the sepulcher belonged, the final adieu next to the coffin. The Comte doubtless understood that. He got up, suddenly timid, and went out backwards, his head bowed.
When we were in the street, he asked me whether I knew what became of the souls of the insane after death, and whether they recovered their reason. I replied that I did not know, but that I would not fail to interrogate my sister on that subject.
III
Men-at-arms, bearers of a square head with features of a frightful ugliness had assembled around the capitulary house. I occasionally lifted up the monk’s hood that I had allowed to fall over my face in order not to be recognized, and it seemed to me that I was living a nightmare. The people of Toulouse were assembled and waiting.
Facing me, in the middle of the crowd, I saw Petrus surrounded by a troop of armed Whites. His unique eye was shining like a terrible lamp.
There was suddenly a great rumor, followed by an abrupt and crushing silence. A magnificently dressed individual appeared on the threshold of the capitulary house. He was holding a large parchment from with rutilant seals hung, and he darted an anxious eye over the windows opposite. I recognized him as a cowardly cleric. He unrolled the parchment with a trembling hand and he began to read in a toneless voice, uniquely preoccupied with the reckoning arrow that might spring from a window. What he read, in a stony silence, began thus:
“Philippe, by the grace of God, King of France, to all his friends and vassals, to which these present belong, greetings and dilection. Know that we have received for our liege-man, our dear and loyal Simon de Montfort, the Duché de Narbonne, the Comté de Toulouse...”23
That was all I heard. The rest was only a sequence of those official and incomprehensible formulae by means of which the great have the habit of expressing themselves in parchments. My master Raymond VI had been despoiled of his city and his Estates. When the cleric had concluded, the spoliator emerged from the capitulary house and stopped momentarily in the steps. The block of his cranium sketched a sign of respect before Bishop Foulque, who came out behind him. Foulque seemed prodigiously fat and I thought that it was because of his coats of mail, which he had tripled beneath his sacerdotal vestments. He raised his hands to his face, making a semblance of hiding his tears. I knew from Sézelia that they were produced by the pepper introduced into his fingernails. Behind him came Guy de Montfort, Simon’s brother, the horrible Alix, in a robe streaming with stolen jewels, other spoliators and other bishops.
The Capitouls appeared last. They seemed to have difficulty breathing, doubtless because of the burn they must have on their tongue for the oath of obedience given to their new seigneur. And I thought I distinguished that their right hand was hurting because of the signature that had confirmed their oath. Bernard de Colomiès was no longer wearing jewelry. Étienne Carabordes, the fruit and vegetable merchant, had become thin. Pons Barbadal, the wine merchant, had lost his colored complexion. And while the accursed troop marched in the midst of soldiers I recalled what Petrus had said to me and what Sézelia had told me before. The destruction of Toulouse was imminent. The man barded in iron and the man bearing the miter were the incarnations of evil announced by Marie the illuminate. It was because of the prophetic words of that seer that the third person of that infernal trinity had had the dust of her body thrown to the wind. And the prophecy had been realized.
On the evening of that day I barricaded the door of my house and disposed a ready-primed crossbow at every window. Several times, as I looked out into the Rue du Taur, I seemed to see Petrus’ eye shining.
I had made Aude party to my fears and she had said that the greatest evils can sometimes be deflected by prayer, like a storm by the crown of a tree, if the person praying consents to attract the evil to themselves. And that night, through the partition that separated our rooms, I heard her repeating:
“Let all the suffering of Toulouse come into my body and my soul.”
I did not believe that such an attraction was possible, but I thought it imprudent to attempt it. I often begged my sister to stop, but it was always in vain.
The destruction of Toulouse had commenced. Many palaces in the city’s interior were fortified. Simon de Montfort prescribed that their towers, which might serve as refuges in case of riot, must be dismantled. The chains of the streets were suppressed in order that his German cavaliers could sweep them without obstacle. Finally, hundreds of workmen were attacking the ramparts. But those ramparts, constructed in part thanks to Arnaud Bernard’s science of stones, were a prodigious, cyclopean monument. It was necessary to be content to make breaches in them.
I perceived with horror that Aude’s continual prayer had a commencement of efficacy. A mysterious link was established between her and the Toulousan city. When the tower of the Palais de Commenges was attacked, a sort of wound appeared on her shoulder. And when the crown of rose granite was removed from the queen of towers whose stump still dominates the Sardane Gate, a bloody crown formed around her forehead.
Sometimes, at daybreak, she called to me. She had been informed by a pain in her body that a new destruction was beginning somewhere. All that was done to the tower of Mascaron had an echo in her throat. The fall of the doors of the fortress of Basacle was inscribed in the palms of her hands. She felt in her heart the fall of the tower of Saint Rhemesy. I ended up having the certainty that the life of my sister Aude was linked to that of Toulouse. And when I begged her to interrupt the prayer that she was continuing internally, she replied: “The sacrifice I’m making isn’t a true sacrifice, since I’m glad to make it.”
I shall not recount the terrible years that followed. My mother died. My father was one of the eighty hostages that Simon de Montfort demanded of the Toulousans after their first revolt, and whom he had massacred under a false pretext. With Arnaud Bernard and a few valiant men I went begging from door to door to obtain the thirty thousand silver marcs that Simon de Montfort demanded after the second revolt, which saved the city from pillage.
I was favored by luck on the night when Petrus, with two of his companions, leapt into my garden with the aim of taking possession of Aude. I killed all three of them before they had time to cry out and I buried them at the foot of a laurel. I do not know whether they rest in peace. The laurel has continued to grow.
Fate was against me when, lying prone on a roof, I fired an arrow at Simon de Montfort as he emerged from Saint Étienne, when he was standing under the porch. Scarcely fifty meters separated me from him; I was sure of my shot. A hidden force deflected the arrow, for the time had not yet come.
When it was necessary for every inhabitant, on pain of death, to deposit outside his door all the weapons he possessed, I organized workshops in cellars where new swords were forged and wood was shaped into lances. At the time of the third riot, I was with the men who drove Simon de Montfort and his
men back into the Château Narbonnais. I was one of the seven delegates who went to humiliate themselves before him.
We were on our knees and we heard Bishop Foulque beg Montfort to put us to death. His face was not clad in any hypocritical mask and his fingernails must not have contained any lachrymatory pepper. He let his sincere hatred show. The seven men on their knees were, however, a very little thing for him. What he wanted was the death of the heretic city. He demonstrated the necessity of it with eloquence. He swore that God wanted that sacrifice and inspired it.24
And while he spoke I heard a slight vibration in the air, a sound that did not seem to be produced by anything, and which was the mysterious note modulated on certain evenings by Aude when she fell into ecstasy. Was it her prayer that, by a magical secret, penetrated into the souls of the evil and influenced them without them knowing it? The troops massed in the squares and at the intersections of the streets, awaiting the order to precipitate themselves into the houses, were abruptly sent back outside the city. The seven Toulousan ambassadors emerged from the Château Narbonnais, amazed to be alive.
There were nights on which Aude had no more breath and when I believed that she was about to expire. Then I looked out of the window to see whether the light of the conflagration that the Whites were charged with consummating was visible. Once I stabbed a man who had piled bundles of dry wood again the door of the Roaix house and approached a lighted taper to it. On another occasion, in the cemetery of the Place Saint-Sernin, I heard noises coming from underground, and was never able to determine whether it was the dead who were walking or miners sent by Foulque to undermine the church.
However, Aude recovered her health and Toulouse survived. Simon de Montfort left the city with his cavaliers to make war on the banks of the Rhône. The monuments sunk their foundations into the ground with more solidity. It seemed that the dismantled towers put down roots. I was able to remark that what remained of the ramparts swelled and enlarged naturally. The bell-tower of La Dalbade gained a good few meters in height.
And one sunny day in September, for the first time in a very long time, my sister Aude went down into the garden and made a bouquet. Immediately afterwards, there was a prodigy of sorts. A thick fog, such as never happened in that season, fell upon the city in order to hide what was about to happen to Montfort’s soldiers and the traitors.
That fog extended a denser veil over the part of the Garonne that flows at the extremity of Toulouse, especially over the Basacle ford. It was via that ford that, at five o’clock in the evening, Comte Raymond VI, still Seigneur of Toulouse in the heart of Toulousans, crossed the Garonne, with Roger Bernard de Foix to his right and Bernard de Comminges to his left, and valiant and invincible men behind him.
It was me who, going into the water up to my knees, first grasped the bridle of his horse and said the necessary words, while Étienne Carabordes and Pons Barbadal wept with emotion and Pierre de Roaix uttered inarticulate cries, for his tongue had been cut out at the Château Narbonnais because he had spoken ill of God. It was me who, when the Basacle Gate was taken, as if in play, seized the annunciatory trumpet and made it resound with a formidable blast. At its resonance, the two hundred thousand inhabitants of Toulouse appeared at their windows in the same second, while the foundations of their houses trembled beneath them, rediscovering the immortality of their stones.
At its resonance, Alix de Montfort took refuge precipitately in the Château Narbonnais with the few soldiers who escaped the Toulousan fury and had the four drawbridges raised, her teeth chattering with terror.25
And that evening, when I walked through the city, I heard that there was no topic of conversation on the thresholds and among the hilarious groups at the street corners but Alix de Montfort’s nose. It was long and unsightly. Everyone claimed to have seen it at a window in the Eagle Tower, enormously elongated.
IV
Delga du Lauragais was at the Baziège Gate. He claimed that he fought better because he could see, on clear days, the village where he was born. The brave Palauqui de Foix had chosen his post at Saint Cyprien because it was the part of Toulouse closest to the Pyrenees, from which, he said, the breath of their forests reached him. The Seigneur de Montaut was in command at Bazacle, the Seigneur de Pailhas at the Sardane Gate. Arnaud Bernard was at the Villeneuve Gate because that was where the largest breach in the ramparts was, and it was the most dangerous post.
The scholar Émeric de Rocanaga was at the Gaillarde Gate. A servant followed him incessantly, charged with his books of philosophy. He had very poor eyesight and it was necessary that someone read to him even when he was on the rampart in the midst of a rain of arrows. He claimed that reading Plato was like a marvelous shield. The lector cleric did not share that opinion, for his voice sometimes failed. One manuscript was pierced clean through. The Seigneur de Rocanaga took great satisfaction from that, because it proved him right, Aristotle having replaced Plato that day.
At the barbican of the Old Bridge the astrologer Sicard de Puylaurens was in command. He knew by virtue of his studies of the stars the date of everyone’s death, but he refrained from revealing it, saying that such knowledge is dangerous. He was extremely prudent, in spite of the fact that he knew by means of astrology that his life would be prolonged for another forty years. Doubtless he had committed some error of calculation because he drowned in the Garonne after wanting to bathe there in the moonlight.
Dor de Barsac the Child-like and Guillaume de Balafar the Experienced rendered the Barbican of Pertus impregnable by their presence. Bertrand de Pestillac the Magnificent was at the Montolieu Gate. He wore a cassock embroidered with pearls over his armor, and was so covered in jewelry, plumes and ornaments that he resembled one of those Spanish saints that buckle on their pedestals under the wealth of ex-votos.
I was at the Matabiau Gate with Frédéric de Frezols the Pious. His prayer was so profound that no bell or alarm trumpet could extract him from it; he said that God was on watch then. He had enjoined me to take command every time he knelt down, because God might keep a poor watch, favoring the party of the bishops.
At all the gates, at every hour, there were admirable man careless of their lives. But it was near Saint Sernin, in the Rue du Taur, that the heart of Toulouse beat with the heart of my sister Aude.
For nine months Simon de Montfort attacked the city from all sides at once. He had received immense reinforcements from France. He had had an immense war machine constructed that we called “the Gate”26 and he dominated all our towers with that mobile monster. The terror that he inspired was augmented by the prospect of the repressions that would not fail to be carried out if he became master of the city again. At that same time as that terror, the desire grew to be delivered of it, and that desire took body in the person of Comte Raymond.
Throughout his life the Comte had given proof of a certain timidity in battle and his lack of heroism was well known. Without any reason, the people considered him on his return to be the most valiant warrior in Christendom. That faith had spread spontaneously and had gained the heart of the Comte himself. It was now necessary to beg him not to expose himself. He wanted to challenge Simon de Montfort to a single combat to take place between the two camps, and he did not doubt the outcome of that insane combat. That conception of his valor, which everyone shared, had rejuvenated him. He held himself straighter. He charged me with buying him cosmetics for his moustache. For many years people had been calling him Raymond the Old. He confided to me that it was his enemies who had given him that ridiculous nickname. He felt younger than his son. He had noticed that his strength was increasing every day. He was thinking of remarrying for the sixth time. He nearly wept with joy when an old woman, on seeing him pass in the street, cried: “There goes the Archangel Michael!”
A renewal of youth circulated in reality in Toulouse, as if the liberty of the city were causing the blood of men to flow more freely. Pierre Carabordes, in spite of his obesity, practiced running in order to be able to pursu
e the enemy when he participated in a sortie. He was seen passing along the round-path of the ramparts, naked to the waist, streaming with sweat, waving his black Capitoul’s wand. Pons Barbadal claimed that song has a considerable effect on courage, and in front of the Church of Saint Étienne he taught choirs of the militiamen that he commanded.
The quadrilateral of Arnaud Bernard’s face rounded out because of the joy he experienced in considering the re-edified towers and ramparts. He had put a strange coquetry into leaving open the Villeneuve Gate, of which he was in charge. His soldiers were arranged in six rows of helmeted and armored men, the foremost of which were on their knees firing crossbows and the last of which dominated the others by virtue of their taller stature. That phalanx was as broad as the Villeneuve Gate and the length of the spears was proportionate to the position of the combatants. It advanced or retreated at a signal, but never surpassed the city boundary. It was like a living gate, bristling with iron, against which hundreds of horses and soldiers came to die, but which remained more inexorably closed than bronze or stone.
However, when the tenth month of the siege arrived, it appeared to the most judicious minds that the situation was desperate. The circle of the city was so vast that the combatants could not be transported rapidly enough to the sides under attack. Simon de Montfort was now multiplying surprise attacks and throwing all his war machines and cavaliers at the same point. The food supplies that the Comte de Foix and the Comte de Comminges sent by boat along the Garonne had been cut off by chains extended across the river. The Bordelais archers that Arcis de Montesquieu had introduced were beginning to get discouraged.
The Blood of Toulouse Page 16