Fournier’s Register was unearthed in the Vatican archives in the late nineteenth century, but it was not until the 1970s that French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie sifted the trove. His book, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, became an international bestseller. And its huge popularity had little to do with Le Roy Ladurie’s abstract theorizing on social history. What amazed modern readers was the cinematic vision of medieval sex. Montaillou in the early 1300s had a compelling cast of characters—horny farmers, adulterous damsels, lecherous priests, and lovesick shepherds—and was as promiscuous as any California commune. What’s more, the evidence suggested that Montaillou was essentially no different from hundreds of other rural villages in medieval Europe, for Catharism was, in theory, more austere than Catholicism. The holy men preached that this world was the creation of the devil, the human body was polluted, and all forms of sex were sinful, even between married couples—a verdict that villagers roundly ignored, as premarital sex, adultery, fornication, and pederasty flourished. They paid lip service to the repressed official culture but did whatever they wanted.
Part of the “Cathar Trail” once used by heretic holy men above Montaillou.
I’d heard that the village of Montaillou still existed, somewhere in the Pyrenees Mountains near the French-Spanish border. What’s more, the current mayor, Jean Clergue, proudly traces his lineage back to the most licentious character in the fourteenth-century transcripts, a playboy priest named Pierre Clergue. The outpost isn’t exactly a tourist attraction today. After all the hype about Le Roy Ladurie’s book calmed down, it had drifted back into obscurity. I couldn’t even find Montaillou on the road map—I needed a detailed French hiking chart. Overlooking the wild frontier with Andorra, it could only be reached on a winding drive that connects a string of ruined Cathar castles.
A few history buffs have excavated parts of the medieval village, although I had no idea how many landmarks from the Fournier Register still existed. A more direct link to the past, I speculated, might be the thirty or so permanent residents. It seemed unlikely they were holding key parties in the mountains these days, but I still wanted to meet them. After all, nobody had expected their ancestors to be a wild bunch, either.
THE LOST WORLD
The heat wave penetrated the eerie medieval gloom of the Pyrenees, so like good penitent souls we purified ourselves in the first river we found, slipping like eels beneath the golden arches of a Roman aqueduct while French families basked on the rocks around us. Languedoc felt like a different dimension of France. Provence had been for wealthy Parisians and high-strung expats. This was where the humbler Gallic classes escaped to the country. Friends gathered at the same holiday units every summer as they had for decades, and we relaxed with them in makeshift garden enclosures, drinking cheap rosé and playing boules while the kids ran riot.
Always taunting us on the horizon was the Mediterranean Sea, sparkling with the promise of crystal waters and seafood bouillabaisse. Les and the boys would press their noses to the car window as we drove past one turnoff after another to the beach.
We were going somewhere much more interesting, I assured them. Into the very bowels of the Dark Ages.
“Heretics!” I enthused. “Knights and witches, gore and blood, mud and filth.”
I left out the bit about wife swapping.
To whet the gang’s appetite, I steered us toward the city of Carcassonne, medieval history’s answer to EuroDisney. With its restored double ramparts and witch-hat turrets, the place has a fairy-tale quality—from a safe distance. Crossing the crowded drawbridge is more like entering Dulac, the “perfect” medieval town in Shrek. Falconers in period dress saunter about with hunting birds on their arms, minstrels serenade café crowds, and souvenir shops sell every form of reproduction sword, helmet, and halberd like a vast Halloween store. The boys got into the spirit, vying to test one murderous-looking weapon after the next. The shopkeeper looked at me in horror when she realized I was considering a hunting dagger for Henry. “These are not toys, you realize! The children will lose fingers, eyes!” Apparently they were for serious boar hunters who must be mingling in the crowds. With his new weapon safely sheathed, Henry was the happiest kid at the jousting show, another classy Medieval Times event with knights thundering about on horseback and wenches baring cleavage.
Over further objections from Les, I took Henry to the Museum of Torture. What demographic this institution pitches for is hard to guess. We nearly tripped over a gaggle of four-year-olds scampering around a mannequin of a comely blonde about to burned at the stake, her tunic torn open to the waist. A pair of vicious-looking priests attended to another half-naked damsel on a rack. Among the displays was a rusty chastity belt, with a drawing of how it might be worn. It was an unconvincing-looking item, two bands of metal and a cheap lock. Henry shrugged, more interested in the thumbscrews.
This vision of the Middle Ages as a barbarous fantasia was first concocted in the Renaissance, but it was the Victorians who really refined the sexual element, reveling in macabre tales of diseased prostitutes, incest, rape, necrophilia, and coprophilia. Myths like the droit de seigneur—the feudal lord’s “right of the first night” over newlywed peasant virgins—were a nineteenth-century invention and became part of tourist lore repeated in castles across Europe. For Victorian sightseers, there was soon a brisk souvenir trade in medieval torture implements, which were passed off as authentic but were almost all fabricated in modern workshops. Some Parisian brothels even offered them for role-playing games. No. 9 Rue Navarin in Paris had its own Chambre Medievale for S&m fans; the torture chamber offered everything the amateur bondage and discipline fan might require, including iron shackles, a rack, a St. Andrew’s cross—where the victim’s four limbs can be secured—and for the committed fetishist, a hangman’s scaffold.
Perhaps the most symbolic favorite was the chastity belt, la ceinture de chasteté, which epitomized, for repressed Victorians, the Middle Ages’ secretly compelling misogyny. In the late nineteenth century, two of these artifacts were actually displayed in the esteemed Cluny Abbey of medieval art on the Left Bank of Paris, where they were almost as popular with tourists as the Cathedral of Notre Dame. While staying in Paris, I had made a detour to the museum to see if they were still in the collection. There was no sign among the exhibits, so I asked at the information booth and was handed, with some irritation, a printout from the Conservation Department in three languages:
For the attention of those who ask for information on
CHASTITY BELTS
The two chastity belts in the museum (famous in the XIXth century) are not shown for two reasons:
—on the one hand, these things were only used in the West between the XVIth century and about the middle of the XVIIIth century (and then only in exceptional cases) and did not exist in the middle ages. Therefore they do not enter the period the museum covers.
—on the other hand, the two examples in the museum formerly attributed;
• one to the XVIth century then to the XVIIth or XVIIIth centuries
• the other to the XVIth century
ARE BOTH NINETEENTH CENTURY FAKES
The meaning was a little obscure, so I decided I should inspect them for myself. After some cajoling, the guards reluctantly ushered me up a stone turret, where a mousy, bespectacled curator in a black turtleneck sweater, Elizabeth Taburet-Delahaye, led me up to the storage facilities in the abbey’s attic, now filled with enormous archival drawers requiring special weights and pulleys to open. With a fetching blush, she unwrapped the two objects in question. They were tiny, as if made for size 0 models, and meticulously crafted. Their designs were very different. One was a large iron ring lined in decaying velvet, with a smooth ivory “eagle’s beak” that was supposed to clamp over a woman’s nether-regions. The other belt was a more advanced open-jaw system, with two hinged metal pieces that would go between a woman’s legs and then be secured to a metal band around her waist. Two small barbed openings were provid
ed for sanitary purposes. This one was ornately engraved, with an image of the chaste Adam and Eve holding hands.
They were undeniably creepy, even more so knowing that they were the product of male fantasy. In 1931, a broad-minded British Museum curator named E. J. Dingwall published the first real study on the subject, The Girdle of Chastity, which became an underground classic. It established that the earliest chastity belts were actually made not in medieval France but in Renaissance Italy. The first reference to them in any text is a 1403 Venetian tract on military hardware. Even then, they were almost certainly never used, but simply shown off as conversation pieces.
No matter. Today, chastity belts fit our image of the medieval world too perfectly not to remain a fixture of its mythology.
And in the Torture Museum gift shop, business was still brisk.
South of Carcassonne, roads curled like mule tracks into the Pyrenees mountains. The skies turned a brooding gray. The villages became lonelier, the people more reserved, their accents thicker. Culturally speaking, this border region has more in common with Catalonia than France, and the traditional tongue of Occitan, wherein, for example, oc is said instead of oui, is almost unchanged since the Middle Ages. (In other words, Les explained to Henry, these were The knights who say Oc!) The descendents of the Cathars, we soon discovered, are still resistance fighters—only these days, they battle the growing tide of tourists lured to the majestic castles. With heretical obstinacy, they refuse to change their ways to cater to outsiders. Signs are nonexistent, services have erratic hours. We walked into one restaurant, and the owner pointed angrily at his watch. “We close at two p.m.! Go away!” (It was 2:05.) The only other eatery for miles around was a decrepit gas station. Soon enough, there weren’t even any decrepit gas stations, just cliffs and dark forests. As the jagged Pyrenees protruded over the horizon ahead, it was easy to imagine the Cathar holy men were still hiding out here. This was French Deliverance country, where you didn’t want to turn down the wrong dirt lane.
Three examples of chastity belt design, shown off in 19th century museums as examples of “medieval” barbarity. A: from the Doges Palace in Venice, dating from the Renaissance. B: from the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris, a 19th century fake. C: from the British Museum, once kept in the Secretum, another Victorian-era forgery. (© Lesley Thelander)
Memorial to the Cathars on the road to Montaillou.
We finally spotted Montaillou near the River Ariège, its few dwellings clinging to the sides of a grass hill, which was crowned by a poetic tower of golden stone. Turning the car engine off in the empty plaza, we were enveloped by an eerie stillness. The only sound was the tinkling of a dripping pipe into a stone water trough. From somewhere in the distance came the music of cowbells. It was as if the residents had all been carried off by the plague. The main thoroughfare for the past thousand years led to an austere little church and shabby café, but both of their doors were firmly shut. There was one modern element—a trailer from which the local amateur Radio Montaillou would broadcast—but it, too, was silent. And the mayor’s office? A handwritten sign on the door said it was open on Thursday mornings. The only sign of life was a lone black dog that followed us from the shadows.
“Can we go back to Lacoste?” Henry asked. He missed the swizzle sticks at the Café de Sade.
“No, to Paris!” Sam said, jumping on the bandwagon.
Then we found a small store where an elderly woman, Michelle Derine, sat half asleep behind the counter. The boys looked with mortification at the wares, hand-knitted mittens and doll’s dresses for sale, convinced more than ever that they should escape.
“Things were even worse here in the 1980s!” Madame explained. “Montaillou almost didn’t exist. There were only a dozen inhabitants, all older than I am now.”
I asked how many lived here today. She hailed a farmer who was passing by with a rake over his shoulder.
“There are thirty in the village, no?” she said.
“Wait, there is that new family. With two children, no?”
“True. Thirty-four people then!”
“It’s a renaissance!” the farmer chuckled. It was obviously an ongoing joke.
There was no hotel, needless to say. Madame suggested we talk to the church caretaker, Georges. We found him opening up the belfry, a rotund figure with pink cheeks and a white beard—Papa Noël wearing summer shorts and flip-flops. He proceeded to ring the bells by hand, swinging up and down on two ropes with the vigor of Quasimodo. He then showed us a Spartan room in his house that he rented out, with a balcony that looked over the pastures. The hills of the Ariège hadn’t changed since the 1300s, with their network of shepherds’ trails connecting the nearby villages. I recalled that they were used by some to reach local prostitutes and by lovers escaping on summer trysts.
Now all we had to do was drive fifty miles back along winding roads to buy supplies. My famished progeny glared at me angrily as we climbed back into the car.
That night, an icy stillness fell over Montaillou. The few inhabitants retreated to their houses and barred the doors. From the balcony, we watched the gibbous moon emerge over the black hills, where you could imagine the werewolves were prowling. I turned on Radio Montaillou to brighten things up. Tom Jones covers in French, Brazil 66, obscure rock from the seventies. In between every song came the jingle: “Radio Montaill-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-ou.” It barely dented the gloom. We closed the shutters and double-locked the doors, then fell into a sleep made fitful by the altitude and dreams.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF BODY LICE
The next morning, the sun miraculously bathed the earth with crystal light. These mountains were schizophrenic, I realized—bleak and melancholy when it was overcast, Shangri-La on a fine day. The boys could spend hours fishing tadpoles from the water trough. Les had her watercolors out. I was free to follow the Montaillou soap opera.
Archaeologists have uncovered the outlines of the original village square, surrounded by the foundations of about forty houses. The population back in the early 1300s was about 250, and thanks to the details of the Fournier Register, we know who lived where and can make virtual house calls on the Savenacs, the Maurys, the Belots, and the Clergues, picturing their mud-and-thatch manses, roamed by chickens and goats, with small pens outside for the pigs. I climbed up the overgrown hillside to the crumbling tower, which was once a fortified residence. It was here, in 1291, that the village châtelain brought his attractive seventeen-year-old bride, the woman who would become the pivotal figure in Montaillou’s erotic legend—Béatrice de Planisoles.
Remains of the 14th century village and tower.
The free-spirited Béatrice is such a striking character that historians seem to lose their objectivity when dealing with her. Le Roy Ladurie compares her to one of the passionate heroines of troubadour songs who always “follows her heart.” Other historians moon over her beauty, her directness, her sexual openness. Even her name is “euphonious,” sighs René Weis in his excellent The Yellow Cross. (At one point, he notes longingly, “Béatrice was always having sex.”) It’s clear that she exerted the same hypnotic effect on the men of Montaillou. For the next seven years, she was eyed with admiration by the male population, young and old, and a parade of would-be paramours tried to lure her into adultery. Even her husband’s steward fell in love with her and one night hid under her bed, hoping in vain to seduce her. Then, in 1298, when Béatrice was twenty-four, her husband died and she was forced to move to a more modest village house.
It wasn’t long before she received the attentions of the alpha male of Montaillou, the young village priest—and obsessive Lothario—Pierre Clergue.
According to the testimony of Béatrice and other villagers, it all began in the ancient Chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Carnesses, which still exists today. I strolled down to the bottom of the village to the squat structure of bone-white stone. There have been some alterations in the last seven hundred years, but the nave and apse are original, as is the rude stone altar.
Outside, two footprints in the rocks showed where the Virgin Mary revealed herself to some shepherds. I peered behind the altar to the very spot where Pierre first propositioned Béatrice. As she kneeled before him in confession, the priest suddenly leaned forward and kissed her, whispering, “There is no other woman in the world I admire as much as you”—one of his favored lines, as a half dozen of his other lovers would later attest. Béatrice ran from the chapel but may have been flattered.
It was the unlikely start to a romance that would shape the fate of Montaillou. It may not quite reach the exalted heights of Dante and his Béatrice, but I believe it is all the more intriguing because it is imbued by the messiness of real life.
Pierre is the most enigmatic figure in the Montaillou story, a man whose later life would take some unfortunate, even treacherous turns. He was at his most appealing in his mid-twenties, when he first courted Béatrice. Although he wasn’t tall or particularly handsome, he was notoriously charming and had a rare smattering of education. Most important, Pierre was from the village’s most wealthy and influential Cathar family. He had been anointed into the Catholic priesthood as a cover, but he showed little interest in a spiritual calling of any kind. According to the villagers themselves, Pierre pursued every woman he met with relentless energy and considerable success, although there was one woman who resisted: the feisty Raymonde Faure, who held out even though her husband was widely known to be impotent. Other village girls did not put up as much of a fight. When Pierre deflowered fourteen-year-old Grazide Rives in a sun-filled barnyard, no theology was needed. According to her testimony, the exchange went thus:
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