City of Wisdom and Blood

by Robert Merle

  * “Virtue is only more agreeable when present in a beautiful body.”

  † “A brother who graciously shows the way to him who has lost his way.”

  ‡ “He preferred to know the virtues of plants and their medicinal uses, and dedicated himself humbly to this peaceable art” (Virgil).

  § “Excrement and urine are the appetizers of medicine.”

  ¶ “For us these are symptoms, for you they’re your dinner.”

  || “Thomassine is a good woman, both beautiful and healthy. Good, good!”

  6

  FONTANETTE WAS RIGHT: I couldn’t work on Aristotle’s Organon all day Saturday, because the heat was so intense, even with the window wide open, that I simply couldn’t think. Luckily, Samson was harnessed all day by the tender arms of you-know-who, and I was able to use the little room next to mine, visited at least once an hour by Fontanette, who flitted around me like a butterfly to a candle flame. With a gleam in her black eyes, she kept asking whether I was all right or whether I needed anything. “But it’s you I need, Fontanette!” I’d reply. “For shame, Monsieur! Watch your evil tongue!” she would retort, but she would have been disappointed if I’d said anything else. Sometimes as she passed she’d permit me a few kisses, but then, pulling away, she would refuse them according to whether her inclination or her will was stronger, but the latter certainly seemed to me to be weakening.

  Samson didn’t return until evening, dreamy and dazzled and with an uncertain step, as if, on leaving his paradise, he was scarcely able to get a proper foothold on our sad earth. He hardly touched his meal, which consisted of cold meats since it was the Hebrew Sabbath. But Thomassine, I’ll warrant, in the generosity of her heart, had seen to his appetite every time the two lovers caught their breath.

  My honest Samson was very closely—if surreptitiously—watched by Typhème, who batted her eyelids at him quite liberally in the absence of her father, who was retained at Montolivet by the enforced idleness that the law of Moses imposed on him. Watching my beautiful brother, and, in turn, watched by me, our beautiful table mate’s cheeks were deeply flushed and her breath was so short it was almost a sigh. But however obvious her emotion was to me, Samson remained entirely oblivious to his effect on her, ensconced as he was in his delirium like a snail in its shell. Scarcely had he downed his dinner (without the slightest idea of what he’d eaten) before he was off to his room, staggering from fatigue and so tired he could barely undress before he fell into his bed.

  I could only extract him from his slumbers by force the next morning and drag him to the former Bailiff’s residence where our fellow religionaries in Montpellier worshipped. Luc and Miroul joined us, and despite the branches shading the freshly watered paving stones of the streets, the sun shone so ardently that you could have fried an egg on them. While the four of us walked along, my brother’s face, ordinarily so serene, was darkened by worry. Psalter in hand, he was heading to the temple as though to hear himself condemned to eternal damnation for his fornication, for he followed the Ten Commandments very literally. Since I could find no remedy for the rigour of his beliefs, I turned to Luc, as we walked along, and begged him to explain to me how, from his original papist faith, he’d come to embrace the Reformation. But, heavens! What had I said? Paling visibly, he cast a terrified look around him and begged me in Latin, in a trembling voice, not to ask such questions of this kind coram populo.* Clearly, Maître Sanche’s heir was extremely prudent despite being in the bloom of his youth.

  I was very happy to discover that there were so many people in our cult, and of such different social backgrounds and professions: weavers, shoemakers, shopkeepers, but also doctors, schoolmasters, rich merchants and noblemen—whom I recognized by the swords they wore at their sides—as Samson and I did. What a difference from Sarlat, where, after the failure of the siege by Duras, which I have recounted elsewhere, the Huguenots didn’t dare show their faces, let alone gather to celebrate their cult, even secretly. Here, our people seemed to have the advantage, and were very vocal about it, showering the papists with insults. My brother and I, well before we arrived in Montpellier, were already well known for our exploits at the Corbières, so that, after the service, when we were greeting the deans, elders and minister of the temple, the latter, Abraham de Gasc, a candle merchant from Lyons, introduced us to each of the members of his congregation. We were very warmly greeted, and in response to each of the compliments we received, I responded in Provençal, with my habitual Périgordian openness, as much for myself as for my brother. Samson, of course, stood silently by in his remarkable and luminous beauty and couldn’t have failed to trouble more than one young woman’s heart. Indeed, there were several of these present, and, being from Montpellier, they couldn’t help but be beautiful, though because of the gravity of the place and the circumstances I kept myself from eyeing them too obviously, but managed a quick, hypocritical glance at a couple of the comeliest.

  Throughout these introductions, Luc watched us benevolently and evidently not without some sense of pride and possessiveness, as if he were happy to have such heroes as his guests. He took me by the arm as we left the temple and asked whether, after our midday meal, we could repair to the rooftop terrace to be able to talk at our leisure without being overheard. Once there, we sat on the stone bench protected from the noonday sun by the shadow of the stairwell entry. We sat in silence for a moment and I had the opportunity of looking closely at him for the first time—since so much of my attention had been directed to his sister, whose Sephardic beauty had completely captivated me, even though I knew I had no chance of ever marrying her, since I was neither rich nor Sephardic myself. I was now surprised to discover that Luc, despite his long angular nose, had beautiful, luminous eyes, whose long dark lashes reminded me of Typhème’s, a resemblance I found quite moving.

  He himself seemed quite distraught. He was of a sickly and fragile constitution, since he’d never been trained to bear arms, and so, his whole frame trembling with emotion, and in a very low and uncertain voice—though in beautiful and rich language, mixing French and Latin—he began speaking. “Monsieur de Siorac,” he said, but I immediately broke in, saying warmly,

  “No, no! If your very illustrious father calls me his nephew, then you are my cousin. And to you I am Pierre, pure and simple.”

  He reddened at this as if he were a girl, with his sensitive and timid complexion. “Pierre,” he said, “I offer you a thousand thanks for your gracious generosity. There is no one my age I admire more than you, and, to be honest with you, I’d like to be the way you are.”

  “Oh, Luc! Your humility has blinded you! You speak Spanish and Portuguese. You know Greek, which I only have a smattering of, and Hebrew, which I don’t speak a word of.”

  “But that’s not the way I see things,” returned Luc. “You not only have all the gifts of intelligence, but you have so much to be proud of in the flesh. You are agile, strong, an excellent soldier and horseman, and, according to Fogacer, a superb tennis player. What’s more, he added, lowering his long dark lashes, they say women find you irresistible.”

  I was deeply touched by his words, but also embarrassed by them, fearing that Luc, who was very perceptive, had discovered my little games with Fontanette.

  “Oh, Luc!” I said, affecting an offhand and jocular manner. “Enough of this. A man’s virtue is in his mind, not in his body, which he has in common with other mammals. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you then,” said Luc with a sigh, as if it were difficult to put an end to singing my praises. “I know, from Fogacer, that, the day before yesterday, you were astonished by the strange goings-on in our house.”

  “I was astonished, yes, but not offended. We Huguenots also have to dissimulate at times.”

  “If you know that, then you know that the secret of the mysteries you’ve observed here can be summed up in one sentence: Marrani novi Christiani appelantur, sed in facto judii occulti sunt.”†

  �
��That’s exactly how I understand it.”

  “But, Pierre,” moaned Luc, looking at me with an air of extreme anxiety, “do you think such duplicity can be justified before God?”

  “Speaking frankly, I don’t know. But if it is, why do we then venerate the martyrs?”

  “Pierre! Pierre!” cried Luc with great vehemence. “It is written in the Scriptures that it is lawful, in the greatest extremity, to give in to tyranny and to save one’s life by any means possible, with the exception of murder, incest or idolatry.”

  Hearing this, I realized that to embrace Catholicism, even for appearances’ sake, meant accepting some sort of idolatry, but I restrained myself and said not a word, not wishing to add to the infinite distress I observed in my companion. Moreover, since Luc was of the reformed religion and, from all appearances, with great sincerity, he didn’t have to dissimulate so much, so that I guessed that it was his father and Sephardic brothers that he was trying to exculpate.

  “Pierre,” he continued, his voice full of emotion, “we received yesterday from one of our friends who stayed behind in Spain a letter in which he tells us what happened to a Sephardic woman from Toledo, Doña Elvira del Campo. This lady, a very rich and beautiful person, was arrested last month by the Inquisition as her neighbours and the butchers of her city accused her of never purchasing or eating pork. For this crime, she was hauled before the Grand Inquisitor. There she was stripped naked, and while her judges, hiding their hypocrisy beneath their robes, enjoyed her nudity, two executioners tied her hands behind her and passed a rope around her arms. At a sign from the judge, they give the rope a twist, then another, and another until the rope broke… I have the letter here, Pierre,” he said pulling it from his doublet, “it’s in Spanish, but I can translate it for you. This is the interrogation to which Doña Elvira submitted:

  “‘Why don’t you eat pork?’

  “‘Señor, pork makes me ill. Please, señor, have pity! Ah, these men are killing me!’

  “‘Why don’t you eat pork?’

  “‘Because I don’t like it… Oh, señor, stop these men! I’ll tell you anything you want to hear!’

  “‘Why don’t you eat pork?’

  “‘I don’t know… Oh, you’re killing me! You’re killing me!’

  “‘Why don’t you eat pork?’

  “‘Because I don’t want to eat it… Oh, señor! Oh! I’m dying! Tell them to loosen the rope! Señor, I’ve already said that I don’t eat pork!’

  “‘Why don’t you want to eat it?’

  “‘For the reason I told you! Ah, señor! What do I have to say? Tell me what to say and I’ll say it! Oh, I’m dying, I’m dying! Have you no pity on me?’”

  Here Luc stopped reading, tears streaming from his eyes, and I put my arm around his neck and hugged him to me, kissing his cheek, which was as soft and smooth as a girl’s since he had no beard. He collapsed into my arms and remained there, pressed against me, crying for a long time, but happy in the embrace of my arms, his sobs preventing him from saying anything more.

  “Oh, Pierre,” he said, finally, as he pulled himself away, and with those eyes that looked so much like Typhème’s he threw me a look of immense gratitude, “even at times when the Inquisition sleeps, you can never believe the injuries our people suffer in Spain. Did you know that the word ‘marrane’, which we use in Provençal as a sign of nobility, was originally an insult that derives from the Spanish word for pork? And did you know that sometimes our torturers make fun of us by calling us ‘Los Alboraycos’, from the name of Muhammad’s famous steed that was neither male nor female, insinuating that we are neither fish nor fowl, neither Christians nor Jews? Pierre, our Hebrew brothers who have succeeded in maintaining their religion in the ghettos of France call us in our language anusim: the forced ones. And indeed we were forced, and by what atrocious means! Pierre! Pierre! Is it not the worst of atrocities to be obliged to live a lie and see yourselves reproached for it by the very people who constrained you to it?”

  “Certainly it is an abomination that cries out for vengeance and I firmly believe that the monsters who treated you this way will be punished, if not in this world, alas! then in the next. But Luc, you haven’t told me the hows and whys of your own conversion.”

  At this, throwing me a searching look, he fell silent. And as if I were continuing to press him, suddenly he blurted out:

  “If I hesitate to confide in you it’s because I’m terribly afraid of offending you.”

  “Luc, there is no way you could offend me. There is no offence without evil intent. And of that intent you are innocent. Please, continue.”

  “Well then,” said Luc with a sigh and a very sad face, “I will beg your pardon in advance in case I offend you. But here goes: certain of our Sephardic women, secretly despising the religion they profess publicly, not only do not admit the divinity of Christ, but go so far as to make fun of Him in the privacy of their homes, calling Him derisively ‘the little hanged man’, or else they draw a cross on their stools so they can say they’ve sat on it: nasty and offensive practices that my father condemns. But he doesn’t make the sign of the cross and, at the end of the benedicite, omits the name of the Son.”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed he forgets to say ‘the Son’.”

  “He doesn’t forget. Pierre, if I tell you this it’s so you’ll understand that I’ve been raised in this stubbornly tacit refusal, which is sometimes injurious to Christ. In this house, you’ll never see a crucifix in the common room except when we have papist guests. Ordinarily, it sleeps at the bottom of a chest, on the pretext (which only Fontanette is silly enough to believe) that, being made of precious ivory, it would yellow in the air we breathe. So, Pierre, here’s what happened. When I outgrew my little boy’s dresses, I heard the Gospels, but I really listened to them, and in their core and substance, I couldn’t help being struck by their beautiful nobility of spirit, whose morality seemed to me something new and beautiful, more attuned to human tenderness than anything I’d see described in the Old Testament, in such rough and primitive colours. I couldn’t doubt, then, that the Old Testament had been corrected by the New according to God’s specific will and decree. Consequently, not only the teachings of Christ, but Christ Himself must be considered divine.”

  “But how did it happen that, believing in Christ, you didn’t become a Catholic in your heart, since you were already one in appearance?”

  “I simply couldn’t!” Luc said, his teeth clenched and his eyes suddenly very bright. “For I couldn’t accept the ignorance of the Bible in which the faithful were kept by the priests, nor the idolatries that they imposed on the word of Christ. And even less could I pardon the atrocious persecutions that they wreaked on my ancestors. But, once I’d studied the reformed religion, and finding none of these grievous faults in it, I decided to embrace it.”

  Having said this, he fell silent, wiping the tears from his cheeks and a bit ashamed, I think, for having shed them. And, silent at his side, I held his right hand between mine to comfort him as best I could, remembering that having been raised by my mother in the Catholic religion, I had been converted by the imperious order of my father. And I recalled that he’d been so spiteful and angry when he discovered the medallion of Mary that his late wife had hung around my neck that he had nearly cast me out of Mespech. And as I recalled these memories that were so painful (precisely because I loved my father with all my heart and because he was my guide and example in all things), Luc and I looked at each other, and I was impressed that he’d had the liberty to choose that which had been refused to me.

  “But, Luc,” I asked, “what did the most illustrious master say about your conversion?”

  “Ah!” cried Luc. “My father is the best father in the world. How could I ever praise his goodness, and benign tolerance sufficiently? He didn’t consider his own feelings or advantages in the matter, but bent his authority generously to my own free will. ‘My son,’ he told me, ‘I respect Christ, but I do not consider him
divine. But if you do, and believe in the Reformation, go your own way. Your way will have the advantage over mine of matching your beliefs to your outward practice. For I tell you, it’s a strange faith that believes what it believes only because it doesn’t have the courage not to believe it. But I beg you, always be extremely prudent in your conduct. When the papists get zealous, they are a terrifying bunch. Think about this: whether you’re burnt as a Jew or burnt as a heretic, it’s the same fire and the same death.’”

  Then, remembering that I wanted to see my beloved Samson before he left to visit Dame Gertrude in the early afternoon, I took my leave of Luc sooner than I would have liked, but not without embracing him and kissing him on both cheeks, moved as I was by his combination of moral rectitude and bodily weakness. As I left, I pledged him my friendship. From the confession he’d made to me, I couldn’t doubt that, in his weakness, he sought my protection at the moment he was to enter the Royal College of Medicine, whose older, rougher students could be very hard on the new arrivals.

  As for his conversion to the reformed religion, I was now wholly convinced of the solidity of Luc’s faith, contrary to Fogacer, who joked about his “Calvinist coat”, which was as hypocritical as Maître Sanche’s “papist coat”. And the more time I spent in Montpellier, the more I became convinced that age had a great deal to do with this question—fathers were anchored through fear and habit in the papist traditions, whereas sons, attracted by the audacity of the Reformation, found that it matched the spirit of the wonderful renewal in the arts that the sixteenth century had ushered in.

  I found Samson clad only in his shirt, his copper-coloured curly locks all a-tangle, sitting dreamily on his stool, his azure eyes clouded by tears. His normal vigour and virile symmetry were now sapped by sadness and despair, his face more lined with worry than an apple in winter.

  “So, my brother, what are you doing here undressed? Have you forgotten your rendezvous with Dame Gertrude?”