City of Wisdom and Blood

by Robert Merle

  “Siorac,” Merdanson said one evening as were sitting with Carajac at the Three Kings, “I can’t accept this cutback. What was the point of Rondelet’s founding the shitty anatomical theatre in Montpellier if we are only going to practise three dissections a year? Three! That foetus Bazin promised four! Three is a joke! How can we improve our knowledge of the human body if all we do is parrot in 1567 what Galen and Hippocrates wrote several centuries before Christ?”

  “I think I know a way we could make up this lack,” said Carajac, lowering his voice.

  The surgical apprentice sitting next to Merdanson looked, despite his broad shoulders, somewhat frail, and was so brown-skinned that he looked like a Turk, which is not so surprising given all the incursions these pagans had made over the last fifty years in Aigues-Mortes, his birthplace, which he bragged about whenever he opened his mouth, which he rarely did. He mostly sat silently by, large as a kitchen cabinet, moving neither head nor hand, his eyelids drooping lazily over his pupils.

  “So what’s your plan?” asked Merdanson.

  “Do you know Cabassus?”

  “Isn’t he the abbot they made an effigy of at carnival, claiming he’s an atheist?” I asked.

  “The same. He’s abbot of the parish of Saint-Denis in Montpellier, which has a cemetery within its walls from which the papists derive a huge profit, since they charge a lot of money for every inhumation.”

  Carajac took a deep breath as if he were astonished to have been speaking so much. “I’m thinking we should empty our flagon and go over there and take a look.”

  “What for?” asked Merdanson.

  But since Carajac had used up his provision of words for the day, he made a nod that signified he’d said enough and just sat there silently. His taciturnity was so powerful, however, that without any further questions I called our hostess and paid her. She refused to smile however—she had given me the cold shoulder ever since the business with Caudebec and the plague victim.

  Night was falling when we arrived at Cabassus’s lodgings, which were situated at some distance from the parish houses. The priests lived together in a sort of community, like monks.

  Carajac tapped at the door and identified himself in a hushed voice. The door opened halfway, then the rest of the way, and in the shabby room before us, whose ceiling was so low Carajac’s head actually touched it, we could see a very hairy, unnaturally thin little man, whose eyes, in the light of a candle set on the miserable table near him, looked a little crazy, they were so brilliant and so active—and in that respect imitated his arms and legs, which seemed to dance, shake and jump without respite, and without any apparent reason, for Cabassus was merely occupied in cooking his dinner (which smelt like chicken boiled in cabbage) in an old cracked pot over the paltry flame in his hearth.

  “My brothers,” he said in a falsetto voice, “my brothers—not in God, who doesn’t exist—but in our common species: humanity. You are welcome in my humble abode and at my table. Come on over, my brothers, and smell this bird! There’s no mystery of the Holy Trinity, but there is this chicken! I stole it yesterday from the henhouse of a rich merchant. I’ve got to live in this poor body, don’t I, since I don’t believe there’s any chance my soul will survive, contrary to the teachings of the Holy Church. The cabbage, on the other hand, is mine, comes right out of my garden, which is next to the cemetery, so it’s fat and well nourished. Cabbage and chicken are together going to tease our gullets along with a flagon of good wine, if Carajac kept his promise.”

  “He’s kept it,” said Carajac, taking a bottle from under his coat and handing it to our host. Cabassus grabbed hold of it, his whole body shaking and his eyes rolling in their sockets. Then, with extraordinary dexterity, he uncorked it and filled four goblets.

  “Let’s drink,” he proposed, “to the nonexistence of God.”

  “I’ll drink to the existence of God,” I answered, “in whom I believe.”

  “Me too,” affirmed Merdanson.

  “Me as well,” echoed Carajac.

  “My brothers,” said Cabassus after downing in one gulp the contents of his goblet, “I love you out of love for humanity, but you’re plunged into a mortal error. What credence can we give to the confused, contradictory spoken reports of four credulous and popular Hebrews, artisans who, knowing nothing, believed in everything like the poor labourer in our villages who believes in the miracles of his saint? And how does my Church respond to my assertions? With flames at the stake. The brutal weakness of the answer demonstrates all by itself the irrefutable force of interrogation. My brothers,” he continued, placing his hand on a roll of manuscript pages, “I’ve written a Latin treatise on the nonexistence of God and on the non-immorality of the soul, which I’ve entitled Nego,† a treatise I expect will illuminate the ignorant minds of our time, if I can find someone willing to publish it. But no one dares. My Nego will perish with me.”

  “Father,” asked Carajac, “you also deny the immortality of the soul?”

  “Of course I deny it!” replied Cabassus, rolling his eyes. “I’ve never met a soul that was distinct from the body it lived in. And you, surgeon Carajac, you who have seen many dissections and only want to see more, has any surgeon who’s cutting up a cadaver ever discovered a soul under his scalpel?”

  “It’s impossible,” I observed, “the soul is impalpable.”

  “If it’s impalpable,” Cabassus shot back, shaking on his stool, and pulling a chicken wing out of his mouth, “then how do you know it’s there?”

  “Because tradition teaches it,” said Merdanson.

  “Aha!” said Cabassus. “You Huguenots have rejected, in the name of freedom of thought, a good number of articles of faith that tradition taught. But your thinking wasn’t free enough. You stopped in mid journey, as if terrified of your own audacity. By going further, as I did, you would have denied everything!”

  At this he plunged the chicken wing back into his mouth and chewed it up, bones and all, with crushing noises that left us all aghast.

  As the fire was dying out in the hearth, the little vaulted room seemed as dark as the gates of hell, lit only by the single candle that Cabassus had placed on the back of a cauldron in the middle of the worm-eaten table. I didn’t know what to think of Cabassus. No doubt his face, his shaking, his eye-rolling and his other weirdnesses gave him the look of a madman. But when this madman began to reason, despite the fact that everything he said was horrible to contemplate, we all felt less wise and less sure of ourselves than before.

  As much as the feeble light of the candle permitted, I looked at Carajac and Merdanson by turns. Neither one seemed to want to argue with Cabassus, the first because of his natural taciturnity, and the second, like me, because he was afraid of losing the argument. Moreover, although we’d begun to understand why we’d come, neither Carajac nor Merdanson had breathed a word about it.

  “Nor do I believe in the Last Judgement,” continued Cabassus, “or in the resurrection of the dead. For me, I think the dead remain for ever where we’ve buried them, their flesh eaten by worms, leaving only their skeleton, and the skeleton turning to dust in its turn. Nothing emanates from these ‘glorious bodies’, as the Church likes to call them. But this language is nothing more than illusion, foolery and fallacy. Dust is nothing but dust. And so I believe that it’s perfectly legal for the advancement of our knowledge to open bodies to learn their geography, as you doctors seem to want to do.”

  “Monsieur,” said Merdanson, “what will that cost us?”

  “No more than the chicken we just devoured,” answered Cabassus with authority. “Not a sol. My brothers in humanity,” he continued, rising, “tomorrow afternoon, the parish is opening a grave on the cheap for a whore and an orphan. Which is another way of saying the graves won’t be deep. Come back tomorrow night with a couple of long, solid staves, some rope, some flasks, some candles, your scalpels and enough vinegar for disinfectant. I’ll provide the shovels. Don’t forget, however, that if you’re caug
ht, your crime is called ‘profanation of a grave’ and is punishable by torture or by being shipped out as a galley slave.”

  “By St Vitus’s belly,” cried Merdanson, “will your brothers in Christ be armed?”

  “They have a crossbow.”

  “A crossbow!” I cried. “An ancient but very lethal weapon!”

  “It’ll be pitch dark,” said Cabassus, “and the cemetery is never guarded. Rumours have been going round that witches have been celebrating their Sabbath here at night. That’s enough to keep most thieves away.”

  With no further ceremony, and being a man of few words except when denying the existence of God, Cabassus pushed us out of the door, and we headed back through the winding streets of this suburb of Montpellier, having a lot to think about. Before passing through the city gate, which opened only upon request, Carajac stopped short and said in a hushed voice, “Friends, what are we doing? There’s terrible danger in this adventure.”

  “Terrible and very evident,” agreed Merdanson, “but I’m in if Siorac is. By the foetus Bazin’s excrement, I think I’m as brave as Siorac, but he’s better at getting out of a jam.”

  Both Carajac and Merdanson stood looking at me, and though I could scarcely see their faces in the darkness, I could tell that they were expecting me to make the decision. And to confess the truth, dear reader, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to do this. To dig up a dead person, open her up and all of this in profanation of the divine laws; to expose ourselves to a crossbow quarrel, or worse, to dishonour on the public scaffold—there was a lot to think about. Not to mention that cemeteries are places that we loathe, vague borders between heaven and hell, closer to the latter, being overrun by wandering souls, the succubi that pursue them, will-o’-the-wisps, fatal sulphur vapours, mandrakes born of the seed of hanged men, poisons and venoms of the rotting bodies—haunted, if you believe the reputation of the Saint-Denis cemetery, by the witches and their fiends who dance on their graves and consort with the Devil by the light of the moon.

  And I have to add that that I didn’t relish any kind of complicity with this crazy abbot, with his rolling eyes, his body inhabited by God knows which demon and his demented negation of the existence of God, which seemed to be calling vociferously for the hangman.

  “Ah,” I began, at first in a hushed voice that got louder and louder as I grew more exalted, “what an arduous challenge Fortune has thrown down to us! My friends, let us meet this challenge! Let’s pick up her glove! This is a rare opportunity: we have to seize our advantage! We’re always sitting behind doctors and older students during the dissections in the anatomical theatre, so what do we really see? All we do is listen to the royal professor’s comments about what the prosector has done. Gestures, but nothing more. Can we actually distinguish any part of the human geography from any other? Do we really know what a vein looks like? A nerve? A ligament? Have we palpated organs? Do we know anything about the volume, weight or consistency of an organ, or the ramifications of these aspects? My friends, if we only dare, tomorrow night we will be able to open up, touch and observe two bodies, one male and one female. This is miraculous! Two bodies and an entire night without a teacher or professor to block our view, the body in our hands, under our eyes, open to our scalpels! In this one night we may advance our medical knowledge more than in an entire year of study!”

  Thus roused, Carajac and Merdanson acquiesced and shook on it: I had persuaded them, and by a common and unspoken agreement, I became the leader of the enterprise and began to organize the details.

  Oh, dear reader! If anyone had seen us the next night as the darkness fell, all three dressed and masked in black, hair under close-fitting caps, pistols and daggers in our belts, laden with candles and ropes, stakes and blankets, Merdanson carrying an as yet unlit lantern, all three walking at several paces from each other on padded feet, they assuredly would not have thought we were going to do some pious work.

  It was a long walk from Montpellier to the Saint-Denis parish. At the town gates, the guard, who must have been well in his cups, scarcely looked at us and waved us by. At Carajac’s tap on his door and murmur of his name, Cabassus opened his door and closed it after us, then said in his falsetto voice, his eyes nearly orbiting out of their sockets:

  “My brothers, sit down and eat some of this rabbit: it’s not so bad. My neighbour’s hutch has offered it to us for free. You can’t go off on the work you’re about to do on an empty stomach! Carajac, I’m going to open your flagon. Eat and drink up, my brothers! This is not my flesh, and this good Corbières wine is certainly not my blood. It’s all matter, thank God—if I’m allowed to thank a nonexistent being! Matter is but matter. It is; that’s all we can say about it. As Maître Heraclitus taught us, the world is one, and no God created it.”

  Since no one wanted to argue this point, no one answered. The rabbit, although it was savoury enough, upset our stomachs. Our hearts were in our teeth and even the wine had no effect on us. In this shabby room, so low and dark that it seemed already to be a tomb, we ate sparingly of this sad, mortuary meal which the grating and continuous blasphemies of our host did not render more digestible.

  “Your Huguenots,” Cabassus continued in his shrill and piercing voice that was a veritable torture to our ears, “got rid of the Virgin and wiped the slate clean of the saints! Well done, to be sure. But while they were at it, why didn’t they reduce Jesus to his human stature? Jesus was a Hebrew. Like all of his people, he liked to prophesy, and since he was celibate, the habitual compression of his animal tendencies made him eloquent. His disciples convinced him that he could make miracles; he did so, but miracles were abundant in those credulous times! There were everywhere attestations of such wonders! What’s more, Jesus said odious things about the high priests and so they had him crucified. If they hadn’t, no one today would believe he was divine. So I, Cabassus, as I have written in my Nego, find it funny that all it took to make Jesus Christ into a God was four nails and two planks. Et si faret in terris Heraclitus, tanquam rideret.”‡

  “Oh, Cabassus,” I gasped, my throat knotting up, “please, out of respect for your guests, spare us this atrocious talk. I can hardly swallow your rabbit I’m so upset!”

  “Also, would you please explain,” said Merdanson, “how a shitty atheist became a priest?”

  “Shitty believer,” rejoined Cabassus, “you’re putting the cart before the horse! I became a priest out of my great taste for learning. But having some instruction, I lost my beautiful faith.”

  “And it went to the Devil,” added Carajac, who seemed to have paled considerably at hearing such thoughts.

  But here, Cabassus just shrugged his shoulders, and, rolling his eyes, he raised both hands in the air and cried in a strident voice, “Error! Error! To the Devil? I don’t believe in him any more than I believe in God!”

  “Neither God nor the Devil!” I cried. “The world would no longer have meaning!”

  “Oh yes it would—and does!” answered Cabassus. “It is.”

  But this seemed to me so obscure that I no longer felt like arguing any more, and, rising from my stool, said, “My friends, it’s dark out. Let’s get our masks on and get going.”

  Merdanson lit his dark lantern, and Cabassus preceded us through a back door that opened onto his garden, which, as he’d said, abutted the cemetery, and was separated from it by a low hedge of rosemary, which we could easily step over. This was, for us, a very lucky circumstance since the cemetery was otherwise entirely enclosed by the priests’ dwellings, or by a very high stone wall that was full of traps set to catch grave-robbers.

  “Here’s a piece of chalk,” whispered Cabassus. “Mark the tomb-stones each time you make a turn. That way you’ll find your way back here when you’re done.”

  “You’re not coming along to help us?” I whispered.

  “Not on your life! I hate cemeteries, they stink of human vanity. The rich are all strutting about in their marble tombs. When I’m burnt alive, my ashes will be scat
tered. This is as it should be. Nothing returns to nothingness. Here it is, my brother. Under this mound of earth lies a beautiful courtesan who gave pleasure to many people. And over there, an orphan, only eight years old, who spent his entire life crying. Get to work! I’ll wait for you in my lodgings.”

  “Ah!” breathed Merdanson when Cabassus had disappeared. “Thank God! He’s left! This shitty atheist makes my blood boil. May God pardon me for listening to his abominations! By Jesus Christ and His holy wounds, I believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit! And if it’s a sin, as I believe, to open these graves, I humbly beg pardon of my Creator.”

  “Amen!” I said.

  “Amen!” said Carajac. “But you know Cabassus, as completely mad as he is, is not malicious. He gives everything he has to the poor.”

  “My friends,” I said, “enough talk! Let’s get to work!”

  Merdanson placed the dark lantern on a neighbouring tombstone and each of us, shovel in hand, began to unearth the whore’s coffin. Since my hands had gone soft for not having worked in the fields so long, I put on gloves so that I wouldn’t hurt my palms on the rough handle of the shovel. We had a thumbnail moon overhead that was frequently covered by clouds, and even though our eyes got used to the darkness, we could see nothing more around us than the white crosses and the tombstones. I would have shivered from the fear and sadness that this sinister place gave me if the effort of shovelling hadn’t put me in a sweat. Cabassus had said that since it was a cheap grave the gravedigger wouldn’t have gone very deep. But for us, who had to redig it, it seemed like an endless job. We’d been shovelling for about half an hour when Merdanson walked over to me and whispered, “Someone’s watching us.”