City of Wisdom and Blood

by Robert Merle

  “Wherever Samson is,” said Maître Sanche after a short pause, “I hope he’s happy, since he has such great merit. Besides having much to his advantage physically—a blessing not only for him but for those who are close to him—Samson has a great appetite for goodness; his heart is as pure as the most azure sky, and he feels a great tenderness for his fellow man. As for me, I am excessively touched by his ravishing beauty and his rare virtue. Gratior et pulchro veniens in corpore virtus.”*

  I must confess that this adulation of my beloved Samson, which I hadn’t expected, moved me to tears.

  “And yet,” continued the master, eyeing me with a look that was half serious, half jocular, “Samson doesn’t have a brain or a tongue as agile as some people I could mention. Being more at home in heaven, he sometimes has trouble living in the mire in which we live, and he badly needs a more worldly brother to help him find his way—frater qui arranti comiter monstrat viam.”†

  I lowered my eyes and silently ate my soup, not sure whether this praise of the more worldly brother was pure gold or gold-painted lead, or intended to let me know that our illustrious master knew all. But perhaps there was some of each in these words of Maître Sanche, who, despite his posturing and Latin pompousness, was more subtle than I would have thought. What added to my confusion was that the sibylline words of the chemist had made me the focus of everyone’s attention, and I felt quite uneasy being put on the spot, feeling Fogacer’s stare from under his satanic eyebrows on my right and Typhème’s more furtive glance between two blinks of her eyelashes on my left.

  “My nephew,” Maître Sanche continued, lapping and slurping his soup, with sucking noises that the Vicomte de Joyeuse would have found most unappealing, “Fogacer will tell you, as he told me himself, that your gentle brother Samson is not getting the hang of logic and philosophy (in which, our Fogacer believes, you will someday shine, since in you the vital spirits pass more subtly from the blood to the nerves and from the nerves to ideas and from ideas to words). Alas, Samson is slow, having a mind little given to conceptual thought, a tongue little given to the ready word and not much facility for argumentation. He prefers to these abstract ideas things he can see, touch and smell. But if Samson has little appetite for the subtleties of the logicians, how will he ever defend himself against the chicanery of the lawyers or, given his purity, against the corruption of the judges? Maître François Rabelais said, justly, that ‘the law is only a beautiful robe embroidered with shit’.

  “This is all the more a problem since the Saint-Benoît college of law in Montpellier has no reputation for brilliance. All they’ve got there are three lice and a bunch of mean-spirited, senile lawyers, papist zealots all, who have no love of Huguenot students and will prove it to Samson in refusing his admission. Which is why, considering the extraordinary fascination your brother has displayed for the apothecary sciences, my advice and counsel is that he be urged to follow this path, which, if my memory serves me correctly, was also that of your grandfather, Charles, in Rouen. And, God willing, may your father give his blessing to this plan, so that someday we can say to Samson what will be said of me: scire potestates herbarum usumque medendi maluit, et mutas agitare inglorius artes.”‡

  Whether our most illustrious master had dedicated himself humbly (inglorius) to this peaceable art (mutas artes) is not a matter I would venture a firm opinion on, but I felt a rush of gratitude for his fatherly interest and all the more so since the students of the apothecary sciences, while not authorized to be called scholars, were nevertheless able to take courses at the Royal College of Medecine, but did not have the same rigorous requirements as the future doctors. So if this arrangement were approved, I’d have Samson near me, and would enjoy his radiant presence and the opportunity to “to help him find his way”, as Maître Sanche put it.

  And so I happily agreed to the proposal, and, with many thanks for his solicitude, I told the apothecary that I would go straightaway and write to my father. But the master, stroking his long grey beard, in which, to be honest, you could see bits and relics of his soup, turned to Fogacer and began questioning him about Rondelet’s patients, asking for details that, had medicine not been my future art, I would have found disgusting. “And the pus, Fogacer? How was the pus? Liquid? Unctuous? Yellowish? Bloody?” But before Fogacer could answer, he turned to me and said, “My pretty nephew, I’m going to put you to the test about these matters. Take heart. Urine, faeces, pus and the humours are the focus of our profession. And when the lawyers of Montpellier affect superior airs with us and have the gall to say: ‘Stercus et urina medici sunt prandia prima,’§ we never fail to reply, as Maître François Rabelais once did, ‘Nobis sunt signa. Vobis sunt prandia digna.’”¶

  We all laughed uproariously at this excellent repartee. And, at that, Fogacer began his daily report on his patients, using the crudest terms to answer his master’s questions. I noticed that Typhème herself, taking dainty spoonfuls of soup, didn’t bat an eyelid at these disgusting terms, being, I imagined, quite used to such language, but remained calmly seated on her stool in her Moorish beauty, her head held high, looking at her father with infinite respect as if he were Moses coming down from Mount Sinai. As for Luc, like everyone else at this table, more accustomed to listening than to being heard, he also sat silently, but was listening avidly to their discussion, gleaning whatever he could from it. As ugly as his sister was beautiful, he looked uncannily like his father, but without the latter’s squint or hunched back. Meanwhile, inside this carnal envelope there burned the same inextinguishable fire, having no other ambition than to become a learned man like his father.

  That was a Friday, so I spent the afternoon in my room, reading Aristotle’s Organon, a treatise on logic, and since my reading was so dry, I snuck down to the kitchen several times to beg a glass of cool water from the Sephardic cook, Concepcion, a big, fat, resentful woman, who grudgingly provided me water as though it were costing her personally to do so. I was surprised, each time I went downstairs, by the busy goings-on in the house that day: the laboratory assistants were going back and forth with a great clatter of pails, throwing water on the kitchen tiles and scrubbing them with large brooms. As for Fontanette, I saw her in passing through the common room, her cheeks red, working feverishly to iron all the shirts and blouses for the men and women of the house and then taking them up to each of their rooms.

  Taking up the Organon again, I thought ruefully that my beloved Samson was better occupied than I, as I wandered through the arid parched deserts of syllogisms, the first and second premisses, the great and medium terms, when there was a tap at my door and in came Fontanette, still red from pressing clothes, and whose arrival was like an oasis in my desert.

  “Oh, Fontanette,” I greeted her, “I’m so happy to see you looking so fresh and trim, your cheeks like cherries and a gleam in your eye.”

  “Ha, Monsieur! The gleam in my eyes is not as saucy as yours, however blue they may be. I feel all naked when you look at me like that.”

  “’Sblood! If my gaze had that power, I’d look at you all day long! But come over here, Fontanette, that I may greet you properly.”

  “No, no, my noble friend, I’m not coming anywhere near you!” (But as she said this she took two steps towards me.) “You’re the only one in the house who gives me kisses, and, however much I may like that, I don’t think it’s right. Monsieur,” she continued, “might I ask you to carry your table into your brother’s room so you can work undisturbed tomorrow?”

  I looked at her wide-eyed with surprise.

  “But, Fontanette, can’t I work in here tomorrow?”

  “Ah, no, Monsieur, you can’t! You’d be cooked like a crayfish in a kettle! Every Saturday I have to keep a fire going in your room.”

  “By the belly of St Anthony! A fire in my room? In June? In this suffocating heat? Fontanette, what’s all this about? Have they lost their minds?”

  “I know not, Monsieur,” she replied naively, “but the illustrious maste
r has ordered that there be a fire every Saturday in your room, in summer as in winter. And it’s my duty to light it and keep it going, and no one else.”

  “What? All day long?”

  “Morning, noon and evening.”

  “This is most strange, my brave girl,” I replied. “But tell me why is there such a bustle about the house this morning?”

  “That’s the way it is on Fridays,” she explained as she took two or three steps towards me. Seeing that she was now quite close to me—whatever she might have said about this—her hip pressed against the table where I was seated, a bloom in her cheeks that was not due to the effort of pressing clothes, her breath coming in short gasps and her bodice unlaced, as she should have noticed before knocking on my door, I put my arms around her waist, pulled her towards me and, with my face now pressed against her breasts, feeling again the terrible thirst I’d felt the first time I saw her, kissed them avidly. As dry and meagre as Aristotle’s logic seemed, so now did the wench seem to be full and refreshing as she sank into my arms, melting like butter in the sun. But alas, this pleasure was short-lived, for, suddenly stiffening and pushing me away, Fontanette pulled free of my embrace.

  “Oh, Monsieur!” she cried, terrified by a tardy scruple that had her retying her bodice in haste. “Sweet Jesus, if Dame Rachel caught me at this she’d dismiss me forthwith!”

  “And that’s why you’re not allowed to touch me? You’d lose your place here? For a couple of kisses? Fontanette, do you really expect me to believe that?”

  “Indeed I do, Monsieur! You must believe it, it’s the truth. Dame Rachel doesn’t like me. She tells me I’m rebellious and stubborn and, what’s more, I’m not a Sephardic like the rest of the servants, save one.”

  “So why does she keep you on?”

  “The most illustrious master has a weakness for me.”

  I laughed at this and asked, “A weakness that goes how far?”

  “Not as far as you’d like to go, my noble friend,” she said with a little bow, before rushing away with a teasing laugh, leaving my room full of the sadness of her absence. And so, reluctantly, I returned to Aristotle, who seemed quite vapid after such passion. “By the belly of St Anthony,” I mused as I progressed from the “major premiss” to the minor one and on to a conclusion, “why do we need a syllogism to discover that ‘Socrates is mortal’? Didn’t we know this before beginning to reason it out?”

  The dinner bell freed me from the Organon, and, little nourished by this empty meat, I hurried downstairs, little concerned about Samson, who hadn’t yet returned, knowing how easy it is to forget the passing of time when you’re enjoying the pleasures he was. Imagine my surprise when, reaching the bottom of the staircase, I discovered the house brightly lit by new candles, which had replaced the old ones, which, as I’d observed the night before, were far from burnt down. But I didn’t want to ask my host the reasons for this prodigal illumination, any more than I dared enquire about the other strange customs I’d noticed here since my arrival—not to mention Fontanette’s disclosure about the fire that, despite the June heat, she would light in my room the next day. Nevertheless, after the meagre repast, having climbed up to the terrace with Fogacer to enjoy the evening breeze, I shared my astonishment with my tutor.

  “Ah, Siorac!” he explained. “It’s time you knew, living as we do in this house, that these Sephardics are turtles.”

  “Turtles? What do you mean?”

  “Turtles whose shell is the Holy Roman Apostolic Catholic Church, which was previously in Portugal and Spain their great and cruel persecutor. Having been forced to adopt the religion of the tyrants who were oppressing them, they’ve made of it a shield to protect them from further persecution. But beneath this carapace that weighs on their backs, but protects them, beat their turtles’ hearts. And those hearts have remained Hebrew and piously faithful to their former religion. And that’s the explanation for all the strange goings-on that have confused you since your arrival. Tomorrow, Saturday, is, for Maître Sanche, the true Sabbath, and the reason for all this bustle you’ve witnessed today: the house cleaning, the change of linen, the lighting of the candles.”

  “But why the fire in my room tomorrow?”

  “Ah well, that’s more subtle and Ulysses couldn’t have imagined a better scheme. As you know, no Hebrew is allowed to touch fire on the Sabbath and the fireplace in Concepcion’s kitchen must remain unused for the entire day, so that we’ll be eating cold meats. But there’s a great peril in this for our Sephardics. For some of the neighbours who are jealous of Maître Sanche’s fortune might get suspicious that there is never smoke coming from his chimney on Saturdays and share their suspicions with their priests—who would immediately stir up trouble. So, here’s the trick: the flue of the fireplace in your room joins the one from the kitchen, and Fontanette, who is not of their religion, can tend the fire and thus produce enough smoke at the right times to allay the suspicions of our evangelical neighbours.”

  “Ah, I like this trick! And all the more since I hate the papist repressions.”

  “Would to God,” replied Fogacer arching his black eyebrow, “that you hated the Huguenot version of repression in those areas where you are stronger.”

  “I hate that every bit as much. I am not a zealot.”

  “As I have observed,” conceded Fogacer.

  “But,” I added after a moment’s thought, “this pork that is so abhorred by the Hebrews, despite its succulence, is there not some danger in never buying it? What will the neighbours say to that?”

  “Which is why the houseboy, Jean, who is no more a Sephardic than Fontanette, goes to buy pork at the butcher’s every Thursday.”

  “What? They allow pork in this house? Is it possible?”

  “It’s never served at our table, since Concepcion won’t touch it. Jean cooks it up with the dogs’ food and serves it to them.”

  “What a pity!”

  “Truly a great and horrible pity. You know how much I love pork!”

  “But,” I said, “how does Maître Sanche manage to spend all of Saturday not working, since the laboratory is open to his customers?”

  “Every Saturday at dawn, Maître Sanche, his assistants and Balsa head to Montolivet on horseback under the pretext of working in the vineyards there. He doesn’t return until evening.”

  “And what about the laboratory? Who does the work there?”

  “Jean, the houseboy, and I. That makes two and,” he added laughing, “there will be three of us when Samson becomes my apprentice!”

  I laughed with him, but perhaps not as heartily, and not bitterly either, for I realized that Maître Sanche’s interest in Samson happened to coincide with his own needs, a detail which escaped me when the master made his “beneficent” offer.

  “And what about Sundays?”

  “Ah!” replied Fogacer. “It’s a sad and painful day for these Sephardics who must sacrifice their shell! With the exception of Luc, who goes off to the reformed temple where you will meet him, Maître Sanche and his entire household go with great pomp to Notre-Dame des Tables, where an entire pew is reserved for him. And there, holding the Roman missal, whose abominations must burn his fingers, his eyes lowered so as to avoid looking at the idols, the crucifix, the paintings, the stained-glass windows and other damnable idols, he prays secretly to the God of Moses to pardon him for being there.”

  As I remained silent, stuck by this sad tableau, Fogacer added, “So what do you think? Do you blame the Sephardics for these dissimulations?”

  “Not at all!” I replied. “They are daughters of constraint and tyranny.”

  For I well remembered the clandestine cult to Mary that Barberine and la Maligou practised in the loft of our Huguenot enclave at Mespech: proof that conversion through fear and threats is merely an affront to conscience and of no profit to anyone. I added, “If I were threatened with the scaffold, I’d do the same.”

  Fogacer smiled.

  “As for me,” he said, rai
sing that diabolical left eyebrow, “the conditional is unnecessary. I do the same. And it costs me very little. Listen, Siorac, here’s how I’ve limited my practice: I confess and take Communion once a year. I go to Mass on Sundays. I cross myself at crossroads in front of the crucifix. I take my hat off when processions are passing. And if required, I’ll kneel. In short, I have my carapace too. Where I differ from the Sephardics…”

  And since, smiling his sinuous smile, he left his sentence in suspense, I said:

  “Well?”

  “Is that under my shell, there is nothing.”

  ’Twas thus that I discovered that Fogacer was a sceptic in theology as in philosophy, and believed only in medicine, and even there, only, as I had observed, with a very limited degree of faith and only in certain of its practices.

  Remembering suddenly that I was supposed to go and fetch Samson, I took my leave of him and he said, “Take Miroul, arm yourselves, and walk with your swords unsheathed in the middle of the street, a pistol in your belt.”

  Then, taking my arm and squeezing it, he whispered:

  “Thomassina bona mulier est, et formosa et sana. Bene, bene.”||

  “Well, well,” I thought, “the whole city knows about it! But ’sblood! What do I care?” And dragging Miroul along, I ran through the streets and alleys like a stallion in his pasture, so anxious was I to see my beautiful hostess. And although, as I write this in Paris many years later, I am still as healthy and vigorous as my father was at my age, I doubt I could now run through the town for as long or as fast as I did that night in the bloom of my fifteen years, sword in hand, in the cool of the evening, feeling invincible. Oh, my beloved Provence, which I miss so much in my golden exile! Oh, the sweetness of life in Montpellier. Oh, Thomassine!