by Robert Merle
“That’s right,” said Sauveterre, “and the kingdom of France is a very great kingdom. Even changing horses every day, it would take a rider more than thirty days to gallop from Marseilles” (and here he tapped the port on the map with his index finger) “to Calais” (he indicated Calais with the flat of his hand).
“Thirty days!” gasped Barberine. “In other words a whole month! God preserve the king of France who must watch over such a vast kingdom.”
“But where is the diocese of Sarlat?” asked Isabelle de Siorac.
“Here’s Sarlat,” answered Sauveterre, who didn’t care for the term “diocese”.
“And the Dordogne?” said François to show that he was eldest.
Sauveterre followed with his index finger the sinuous line of the river.
“God keep me from his devils and his sorcerers,” breathed la Maligou. “But this Dordogne doesn’t flow.”
“Silly fool!” cried Jonas. “Do you want to feel the snow on the mountains as well? The great waters of the seas? And the winds and squalls that buffet the kingdom?” He appeared to be quite indignant about la Maligou’s superstitions and stupidities, yet all the while he was taking advantage of the crowd around the table to press up against Barberine a bit more than he should have, Sauveterre lacking eyes in the back of his head.
“What about Taniès?” one of the Siorac twins asked suddenly, though for the life of me I could not tell which one.
“Yes, where is Taniès?” repeated the brother of the other one.
“It is not marked on this map,” Sauveterre announced patiently.
“And why not?” asked one of the Sioracs, clearly offended by this omission.
“Listen, my poor friends,” broke in Faujanet, “I’ve travelled this country over during my ten years in the legion of Guyenne, and I can tell you that there are so many thousands of villages in the kingdom that they can’t all fit on this map.”
Sauveterre raised his hand: “Well said, Faujanet. I’ll simply add that Périgord is but one of the provinces of France. And Sarlat is only one among dozens of cities in France.” And he continued, “Here is Paris, the capital of the kingdom, where the king lives in his Louvre. And here to the north-west is a little sleeve of water, at its narrowest only two leagues wide, called La Manche. On the other side of La Manche lies Dover, which belongs to England. And on this side is Calais which used to belong to the kingdom of France.”
Sauveterre tapped his hand on the map and said in a trembling voice: “The English took Calais from us in 1347, exactly 200 years ago.”
“What evil men these English are,” said Faujanet. “But I thought Joan of Arc kicked them out.”
“Not from everywhere,” replied Sauveterre. “They hung on to this little piece of France in the north country, like ticks on the ear of a dog.”
“Two hundred years!” said François, able to do his sums, to be sure, but whose imagination was surpassed by a figure so much greater than the ten years of his life.
“I am fifty-two years old,” announced Sauveterre. “Two hundred years is about four times my age.”
I looked at Sauveterre with his greying beard, his scarred and wrinkled face and his hands covered by large blue veins. Four times the age of Uncle de Sauveterre was an immensity. “But if God didn’t give us back Calais after all this time,” argued la Maligou, “it’s because God didn’t want to.”
“Silly imbecile!” rejoined Jonas, who in his indignation leant even more heavily on Barberine. “If God had wanted the English to have Calais, He would have put it on the other side of La Manche, next to Dover.”
“Ay, that’s true enough!” said Barberine, struck by the evidence of this reasoning, simultaneously aiming a kick at little Hélix, whom she caught in the act of pinching me. As for what was happening immediately behind her enormous backside, she seemed entirely oblivious.
“Did the English take Calais by treachery?” François asked.
“Not at all,” said Sauveterre, “but by loyal combat after their stunning victory over our poor King Philippe VI at Crécy.”
During the summer, Samson and I had memorized the interminable list of French kings and I was terrified for a moment that Sauveterre, who was in the habit of asking such questions, might examine me as to Philippe VI’s succession. But instead he continued, “At Crécy, it was the English, the best archers the world has ever known, who earned the victory.”
“Excuse me, Captain,” broke in Jonas, appearing to be deeply wounded, “but it’s the English bow and not the English archer that is the best. You see, the bow is made of a wood that grows only on their soil.”
“Right you are, Jonas. And if there had been 2,000 like you at Crécy, the battle would have turned out differently.”
“Thank you, Captain,” murmured Jonas, blushing with pride at the thought of the exploits he might have accomplished at Crécy 200 years earlier.
“How was Calais taken?” asked François, who knew how much his uncle loved such questions. Like my father, and like so many Huguenot noblemen and burghers, Sauveterre had enormous respect for knowledge, which extended to teaching the servants how to read so that they would have access to the Scriptures.
“Calais,” he explained, “was taken after a year of terrible hunger, the English fleet having blockaded the port and Philippe VI unable to reach them from the land side. They had eaten everything: dogs, cats, and even horses, to the point that the valiant captain of the defence, Jean de Vienne, feared that the poor citizens of Calais would be reduced to eating human flesh.”
“Horrors!” cried Barberine, who, because she herself was so white and succulent, had always nourished a secret fear of being roasted during a siege. “It’s a capital sin to eat the flesh of a Christian.”
“Christian or not,” returned Faujanet, “hunger brings the wolf out of the wood, and human or not, a starving man becomes a wolf. In my ten years of service in the Guyenne legion, I saw things I couldn’t tell you about.”
“And ’tis well,” said Sauveterre, showing no impatience. “In these extreme conditions and with no help in sight, Jean de Vienne capitulated. He asked Edward III to allow the people to leave the garrison. ‘Nay, nay!’ replied Edward. ‘They have killed too many of my good Englishmen. Every one of them must die!’”
“The wicked man!” said Barberine.
“Not at all,” corrected Faujanet. “It was his right.”
“A barbarous right,” said Sauveterre. “And the proof is that the English barons begged him a thousand times to temper his hatred. Well, Edward finally agreed that the people and garrison should be spared, but on one condition: that six burghers of Calais should surrender to him barefoot, bareheaded and wearing a rope about their necks, bringing him the keys to the city. And on these men,” said Sauveterre, his brow furrowing sadly, “Edward would take his vengeance.”
“And the people of Calais had to choose those six men,” Jonas recalled. “I’ll wager that it was not an easy task. Ordinarily, the burghers of these cities are well fed, crimson-faced and cleave as much to their skins as they do to their purses.”
“They chose themselves,” said Sauveterre, who did not much like Jonas’s way of speaking. “And the first to volunteer was the richest of them all. He was called Eustache de Saint-Pierre.”
“So he already had a saint’s name,” said la Maligou, but Sauveterre gave her such an angry look that she fell silent. “His name has nothing to do with it,” he said severely. “Eustache de Saint-Pierre was a good Christian, who despite his riches aspired to eternal happiness in the sight of God. And in volunteering for the rope, he said this: ‘If I die to save this people, I have every hope of obtaining the grace and pardon of Our Lord.’ Of course,” added Sauveterre, “Eustache was mistaken in this hope, for grace is not given for works alone.” (How many times had I heard this Calvinist credo from his lips or those of my father!) “But his thought was no less noble or pious, since he sacrificed his life for his people and his city.”
“But there were no doublets back then,” said François, a remark that seemed to me both pedantic and heartless given the great peril Eustache had accepted.
“He did not die,” explained Sauveterre. “Nor did his five companions, all honourable burghers and well off in goods, one of whom had two beautiful and gracious daughters to marry off.”
“Alas!” said Cathau, who was sensitive enough, but tried to appear even more so and lisped a bit according to the custom. “Such poor girls who, instead of finding a husband, lost their father to the stake.” Cathau had already been my mother’s chambermaid at Caumont, and put on a few airs among us, finding our nobility scarcely ancient enough to suit her. She was a sweet girl nonetheless, with bright black eyes, rosy cheeks and full red lips. Her one thought was to marry Cabusse someday. Ever since he had left, she had wept day and night, constantly broke into sighs and wore out her bed at night with all her tossing and turning.
“But he was not hanged,” repeated Sauveterre. “Neither Eustache nor any of the others. ‘Cut off their heads!’ ordered Edward III.”
“Sweet Jesus,” cried Barberine.
“Nor were they beheaded,” said Sauveterre. “For the gentle queen of England, though very pregnant, threw herself at the king’s feet and said, ‘Good sire, ever since I crossed the sea from Dover to Calais in great peril to join you, I have asked no favour of you. But today I ask you, for the love of Christ, to have mercy on these six men!’ And the king, relenting, gave them over to her care and she treated them worthily.”
The women all sighed with relief at these words. In truth, as I discovered later, Sauveterre had changed somewhat the queen’s words, for in her plea to her king she had said “For the love of the son of Holy Mary”, a version that in Sauveterre’s Huguenot mind had become “For the love of Christ”.
“Nevertheless,” said Sauveterre, “all the Frenchmen of Calais, nobles, burghers and artisans, were dispossessed of their goods and ordered to leave the city within the hour. Edward III replaced them with as many Englishmen of various estates. And so it is that the English cuckoo, throwing out the French eggs, laid its own in our nest and made of it a haven for himself and his people for the next 210 years!” He broke off and frowned. “But I hear our dogs barking furiously. Jonas, go see what has upset them.”
Jonas left the room with his usual giant’s gait. A few minutes passed before we heard the sound of someone running, and Jonas burst into the great hall crying with a trembling voice,
“The Gypsies are attacking!”
4
THESE GYPSIES, so feared throughout the countryside, were really beggars who had been chased out of Spain and who were dying of hunger by the roadsides. A clever leader, taking advantage of the hard times, had armed them and organized them into gangs. They had sprung up like scum on a wave, and were to disappear just as quickly once peace returned to the land, their bands cut to pieces and their captain sent trussed up to be burnt at the stake.
In his heart, the leader knew very well how things would eventually turn out, which had the effect of lending a mad audacity to his desperate acts.
Sauveterre had predicted that their attack would take place at night, and he had taken the precaution of reinforcing the enclosure around our moat with numerous bear traps, solid enough so that our three newly acquired mastiffs would not spring them as they patrolled the grounds day and night, bristling with such ferocity that even Faujanet had trouble getting near them at feeding time.
On each of Mespech’s four walls, Sauveterre had ensconced torches in the joints of the stones near each crenellation. Instead of an immediate call to arms after Jonas’s announcement, his first thought was to light each of these torches, which gave the chateau and the moat a fairy-tale quality that enchanted Samson and me.
But the torchlight also revealed that the Gypsies had already occupied our island. A menacing silence had succeeded the furious barking of the dogs, and as soon as the south facade of the chateau was illuminated the Gypsies took cover in the recesses of the sheds that sheltered our ploughs and harrows.
Sauveterre, still clad in his doublet, not having had time to put on a corselet or a helmet, distributed blunderbusses to everyone, including François and the women, and ordered our torches to be directed towards the interior of the sheds. But we were so much higher up that the torches left large zones of shadow and our shots merely ricocheted off the roofing stones. To get a better angle on our adversaries we would have had to occupy the little round tower joining the bridges between Mespech and the island, but this would have required lowering one of the drawbridges.
Sauveterre felt that we were too few to send a detachment out to this advance post, which, though originally conceived for our defence, ended up serving the advantage of neither adversary.
From the cover of the island sheds, our assailants rained continuous fire on our crenellations, but this tactic was so ineffective that it seemed destined more to divert us than to engage us in battle. Indeed Sauveterre suddenly realized that, having drawn our attention and our fire to the island, the Gypsies must be preparing a rearguard action, and sent Faujanet and Jonas to patrol the ramparts.
It was a good thing he did, for when they got to the north wall Jonas saw a Gypsy pull himself up through one of the crenellations with the agility of a cat and land on the stones of the battlement walk a scant eight toises away. Our stonecutter froze in his tracks, then, calmly bending his bow, sent an arrow through the invader’s heart. Clutching his hands to his chest, the man fell without so much as a whimper. Jonas made a sign to Faujanet to stay where he was, and crept ahead on all fours. He found eight scaling hooks fixed in the crenellations and, peering down, saw the Gypsies climbing their ropes, oblivious to the torchlight, using their bare feet to scale the facade. Stunned by their mad courage, Jonas withdrew a few paces into the shadows and sent Faujanet to fetch Sauveterre.
The captain came running, followed by the Siorac brothers and Faujanet, arriving just as Jonas dropped a second Gypsy in his tracks, just as silently as the first. Sauveterre positioned his three men behind Jonas and whispered, “Let the stonecutter do his worst. Don’t shoot until I give the order.”
One more Gypsy was hit, and then a fourth emerged, who, hit in a less vital spot by Jonas’s arrow, gave a piercing cry and pitched backwards into the moat. Sauveterre then heard a series of splashes indicating that the other assailants had abandoned their ropes. Stationing his men at each embrasure he ordered them to fire at anything that moved. He himself stuck his head far enough out to see that the Gypsies had made a raft. Those in the water quickly rallied the raft and, swimming behind it, disappeared into the darkness.
Since the torchlight barely carried as far as the other bank, we could but dimly make out a group of men in flight, who must have come up in support of the first group after pulling the raft across the moat with the tie rope. The idea of a raft was most ingenious, for a swimmer would never have been able to toss a grappling hook high enough, but a man standing would have easily had the balance and strength to accomplish this task.
Sauveterre examined the three men killed by Jonas. Each was dressed entirely in black, wore a heavy cutlass at his belt and a pistol under his hooded cape. They were dripping with water, which indicated that they must have swum over, pushing the raft, and that only the band’s most experienced thrower must have stood on the raft to launch the grappling hooks.
Sauveterre realized his palms were dripping with sweat. Ten men, alighting on the north battlement walk without being seen, falling on Mespech’s defenders from behind while they were firing at the island, would have massacred every last one of us.
The grappling hooks and ropes were removed, and, leaving Jonas and Faujanet to continue their rounds,
Sauveterre and the twins rejoined the group of women. On the island, there was now some movement in the sheds, produced no doubt by the arrival of the fugitives from the north wall, but we couldn’t see anyone and their firing had stopped. Sauveterre said nothing to the women and gave no orders to fire. And, as my mother asked him, a little nervously, what had happened, he replied quietly: “It’s all over, I think, but the Gypsies will have to show themselves to get away.”
No one on the ramparts was more disappointed than Samson and I were, for, even to us, it was becoming evident that we were not to have a chance to cast stones down on the heads of our assailants. I am ashamed to report that, as a result, we lost interest in the whole affair, and that our heads, weighted down by the heavy helmets Barberine had placed on them, fell onto our munitions. And on this bed, though hardly a soft one, sleep overtook us.
The ringing voice of Jonas woke us with a start. “Captain of the Gypsies!” he shouted. “Come out of your hiding place. Show yourselves! We’ll do you no harm. Captain de Sauveterre wants to speak to you.”
I opened my eyes with a start, and the moon blinded me. Its brightness, though nothing like broad daylight, would have been enough to read by. I stuck my nose into a crack in the crenellation and spied a tall, handsome fellow wearing neither helmet nor cuirass emerge from the shadow of one of our sheds and advance proudly as far as the large tether pole that the Brethren had set in the middle of the island.
“Monsieur,” said Sauveterre, “your villainous attack on Mespech has failed. You have nothing to gain by pursuing it. To put an end to all of this, I offer you an honourable escape without being shot or pursued.”
The Gypsy captain burst out laughing loudly enough to be heard on the ramparts. “As for pursuing us, Captain,” he countered in a Provençal accent tainted with Catalan and carefully choosing his words, “you couldn’t even if you wanted to. Your little garrison has only five men including yourself, four women and some children. They’re hardly enough to cut a hundred well-armed men down to size!” Having launched this bon mot, the Gypsy burst out laughing. He had beautiful teeth that shone, even at this distance, in the extraordinary moonlight.