The Sinner's Grand Tour

by Tony Perrottet

  “Allow me,” (Pierre) said, “to know you carnally.”

  And I said: “All right.”

  In 1298, Béatrice was slightly more hesitant. But the priest was nothing if not persistent, twisting Cathar theology in his attempts to lure her into bed. When she protested that a woman who has slept with a priest “can never see the face of God,” Pierre was quick to reply: “All sex is sinful even between married people, so it is no more evil in God’s eyes for a woman to commit adultery, incest, or sleep with a priest. Anyway, it doesn’t matter in the end, since all sins can be forgiven on your deathbed. Why not just give in to your urges?”

  Montaillou under the summer sun.

  She did give in, the next summer, and thanks to the Inquisition’s prying questions, we can follow their romantic arrangements. Pierre spent half the week at her small abode, for which he now paid the rent. Béatrice spent the other half at his house, sleeping in his room upstairs from his parents, to the sullen envy of Pierre’s brothers, who apparently overheard their gasps of passion. Historians, at this point, feel the urge to assess the pair’s lovemaking in terms of contemporary sensibilities. Le Roy Ladurie declares that Pierre “seems … to have been gentle, kind, comparatively cultivated, sensitive, affectionate and ardent in pleasure and love.” René Weis adds: “There can be little doubt that [Pierre] cared for [Béatrice], and that she enjoyed sex with him.…”

  Gamely, Béatrice did try to oblige her lover’s irreverent sexual tastes. He was particularly fond of making love during Lent and on Sundays, when he would even spring fresh from her arms to offer Mass at the chapel without going to confession. The pair also made love one Christmas Eve, the most forbidden pleasure of all.

  Their most intimate moments were spent sitting in bed in front of the fireplace, delousing one another. In an environment that was hopping with vermin, this was a ritual of affection for all the villagers of Montaillou, the pastime of friends, spouses, and flirting couples, during which they could quietly gossip or, in the case of Béatrice and Pierre, debate religious ideas. Le Roy Ladurie is, as ever, unflinching in supplying historical detail. He deduces from casual references made during the court interviews that the villagers usually slept naked and that they never washed their private parts. The stench of body odor, he extrapolates, was overpowering, especially from farmhands back from the fields. Other data are more surprising. We learn that Pierre advocated a distinctive type of contraception—a magical necklace, with a small linen packet of herbs attached, that had to be hung between Béatrice’s breasts and down to her belly button while they made love. (It was not exactly a triumph of women’s liberation: He refused to leave the necklace with her, because she might use it with another man.) In fact, the bedroom was quite the place for “witchcraft,” the inquisitor would discover. Village girls collected their first menstrual blood to make love potions—any man who drank it was believed to lose his heart—and women of all ages plied their lovers with arugula juice, an ancient recipe to enhance the quantity of sperm and the vigor of their lovemaking. They were the sort of folkloric concoctions that were popular all over rural Europe until the nineteenth century.

  THE TWO CLERGUES

  In the morning, a yellow van zoomed through the village delivering fresh bread. By noon, a couple of passing hikers turned up, and the only restaurant finally opened its doors, with a few tables on a grassy terrace. I was delighted to find that a whiff of the medieval still lingers in Montaillou. On our first visit, we were intercepted by the owner, a stooped woman with a cratered complexion and the pageboy haircut of a warrior monk.

  “Where are you going to sit?” she growled.

  We pondered the splintered outdoor seats for a second too long.

  “Make up your mind!” she snapped, storming off.

  “Sheesh,” Les muttered. “What’s Occitan for ‘Lighten up’?”

  And in Montaillou, medieval gruel is still on the menu. A couple of French tourist diners were staring at their plates in confusion, wondering how their coq au vin could drown in a glutinous brown sauce. But in this respect, even the Cathars would have been mortified. While they regarded this world as a creation of the devil himself, this didn’t mean that they couldn’t appreciate good cuisine. René Weis tells of two Cathar holy men, the upper crust Authiés brothers, who, even while fleeing from the Inquisition’s agents, demanded fresh spices, local honeys, prepared foods like fish terrines, and especially “good wine.” One of their hosts, who was hiding them in his home, felt obliged to venture out “in search of a better and more renowned wine than the one he kept in his own residence,” at some risk to his neck. This was still the Mediterranean, after all. Nor were the Cathar Perfects immune to other worldly temptations. Guillaume Bélibaste was caught with his pants down—or rather, tunic up—with his pretty host, Raymonde Marty-Piquier. Raymonde’s sister Blanche stumbled upon the pair in flagrante and cried out in shock, “Oh madam-the-misbegotten-bitch, you have compromised the entire cause of our holy church.” (“Guillaume was in a missionary position,” adds Weis helpfully, “but not the one Blanche had in mind.”)

  Shrine to the Virgin Mary, who revealed herself to Montaillou’s shepherds.

  During our own visits, dairy farmers gathered at dusk every evening to enjoy an aperitif of Pernod and chilled mountain water from the centuries-old water trough. I gathered that politics has replaced sex in the Montaillou soap opera; there may be only thirty-four residents, but the village still managed to be torn by factions and scandals. They loved talking about the mayor, Jean Clergue. He was a wealthy businessman who had spent much of his life away from Montaillou, and they denounced his tailored suits, his hauteur, his penchant for luxury cars. “The incredible thing is how history is repeating itself here,” one elderly firebrand railed. “The Clergues still run this village, just as they did seven hundred years ago!” Nobody ever admitted to voting for him, which led to whispers that he had rigged the elections. After all, the ballot box was just sitting in his office.…

  “Montaillou is an unlucky village,” the firebrand mourned. “Most villages in Languedoc have a small hotel, a decent restaurant.… Here there’s nothing!”

  The farmers were just as bitter about the mayor’s ancestor, the medieval priest Pierre Clergue, talking about him as if he was still walking the streets and seducing their wives. He had hovered over Old Montaillou “like a spider,” they said darkly, and his family, the Clergues, was no better than a mafia clan, using violence and intimidation to maintain control. I had to admit that, reading the Fournier Registry, Pierre the priest remained an enigmatic figure. His own testimony to the Inquisition, if there was any, has not survived. Our image of him, vivid although it is, has been entirely constructed from others’ words. So I decided to get the verdict from the ancestral well, so to speak.

  The mayor was a busy man. Whenever I called him on his cell phone, he was in the middle of a business meeting in Toulouse or driving his car to Pamiers or at a working lunch in Andorra. He always politely asked that I call back. But whenever I did, I just got the voice message. I was beginning to suspect Monsieur Clergue might be avoiding me, when I received a communiqué to meet him in the mayor’s office.

  On arrival, I found him barking furiously into the telephone. Tall and powerfully built, in his early fifties, he had exchanged his business suit for an oilskin jacket and jeans, and outside, instead of a BMW, there was a practical little Renault with the Radio Montaillou logo. (“It’s the mayor’s new look,” scoffed one of the detractors later, as I hung out at the water trough. “He’s no longer the Sun King. He’s a gentleman farmer now!”) Clergue exuded a sense of distracted urgency. His desk was covered with papers in barely contained chaos. As soon as one telephone call ended, another began. Cell phones rang in his drawer. He wanted to give me a business card but couldn’t find one, searching manically through his desk before giving up.

  Finally the mayor calmed down long enough to tell me how Montaillou had clawed its way back from the brink of ob
livion.

  He had been raised in a dying village, he said, and like every other intelligent young person, he left for Toulouse and Paris in the 1970s. “Le Roy Ladurie’s book had come out, so whenever I said I was from Montaillou, people would go, ah! Everyone had heard of it! And yet, when I returned here, it was like a ghost town. So in 1992, I met some friends, and we decided, ‘We have to do something about this village or it’s going to vanish!’ ” Clergue and several others formed a group called Castellet to salvage the crumbling fortress on the hilltop. They secured its walls and invited archaeologists to excavate. In 1997 they started a historical festival, with actors in Cathar dress, sword-fighting, and reenactments. Le Roy Ladurie himself arrived to host academic seminars.

  But now things were sliding. Archaeologists stopped coming a few years ago—there was no funding. The historical festival had been canceled this summer because the provincial authorities had withdrawn support. The momentum was being lost.

  Yes, he suspected that a lot of people blamed him. They said that he was too obsessed with Radio Montaillou, which he’d begun in 2004 and which was now broadcasting all over the mountains. But he said many villagers actually disliked all the attention from the outside world and the occasional summer tourists. “In the Middle Ages, Montaillou was a village of resistance. Even today, it’s not like anywhere else in France. It’s independent!” He spoke about his thirty-four-person redoubt as if it were a sprawling republic.

  We strolled out of the office and found the site where the Clergue family’s medieval mansion had once stood. The mayor grew pensive. “I know the villagers still argue about my ancestors,” he muttered. “Seven hundred years is nothing out here.”

  SUGAR AND BLOOD

  In January 1301, Béatrice suddenly ended her eighteen-month relationship with Pierre, moving out of Montaillou to Prades, a village two miles away, and remarrying. We don’t know exactly why. Perhaps she saw little future as the mistress of a priest, even one as charming as Pierre. But the encounters continued. One night in October, Pierre walked to Prades while her new husband was away, and they made love in the cellar while her maid kept guard. Their last meeting took place three years after that first stolen kiss in the chapel. Béatrice was worried that another liaison in her house would be too noisy for the neighbors, so Pierre devised a romantic plan. His assistant arrived after dark and led her through the “very black night” to the church of Saint-Pierre, where he had made up a luxuriant bed in front of the altar.

  “Really!” she exclaimed (or at least, that’s what she told the inquisitor many years later). “How can we do such a thing …?”

  Pierre laughed sarcastically: “Oh, it will do the saint such grievous harm!”

  And so, I followed the same foot trail to Prades through grassy fields still trodden by cows. There wasn’t another soul about. Just me, a few fat bees buzzing among the grass, and clouds of tiny gnats cascading like silver flakes in the air. Prades, if possible, was even more desolate than Montaillou. In the empty plaza was a faded sign explaining that the “celebrated heretic” Béatrice de Planisoles had once lived here. I found the caretaker to the church of Saint-Pierre, who handed me the keys.

  “You won’t get lost. It’s not exactly the Champs-Élysées,” he cackled. “And what a church! Not quite Notre Dame de Paris!”

  The building had certainly seen better days. The sharp scent of cat’s urine wafted from under the door. Inside, shafts of fragmented light burst down through empty windows, its stained glass shattered by vandals. Even the altar had been knocked from its foundation. Still, even though the church had been rebuilt after a seventeenth-century fire, there were the same medieval stones in the floor.

  Back in 1301, Pierre escorted his married lover back to her house before dawn. It was their last liaison. Beatrice would go on to have many life adventures. Fifteen years later, in 1316, when she was again a widow, in her early forties with four daughters, she took up with another priest, the handsome Barthélemy Amilhac, two decades her junior. “I loved him to distraction,” she admitted to Fournier, also explaining that in her experience, “priests desire women more than other men.”

  Pierre, however, would spiral into a long and rather sinister middle age.

  The farmers I spoke to had mocked the mayor for tracing his lineage so proudly back to the medieval priest, Pierre. There had been a number of wings of the Clergue family in the 1300s, and the lines were confused. “Why, I could just as easily say I am a descendent of the priest,” one scoffed. “But I wouldn’t want to. He was a traitor!”

  I had to admit that Pierre seemed an unusual choice of role model. Sure, he comes off as rather raffish in his youth, but he was also a medieval double agent, playing the Cathars off against the Catholics. The Clergue family had long made its fortune by skimming Church tithes and running protection rackets for heretics, and Pierre became increasingly Machiavellian after Béatrice broke off their affair. When the Inquisition raided Montaillou in 1308, Pierre almost certainly provided a list of whom to interrogate, fingering enemies of his family. His brother Bernard was the village bailiff—magistrate and police officer in one—so he was able to seize the property of those the Inquisition imprisoned. Pierre justified his actions by saying that he had sacrificed a handful of vulnerable individuals in order to protect the larger Cathar community. But he became increasingly ruthless. One man who threatened to expose the Clergues’ heretical sympathies to Church bounty hunters had his tongue cut out. Another was hacked to death and his corpse left by the fortress as a warning to others. Pierre’s physical needs also became less charmant. He took to stalking the bathhouses of Aix-les-Thermes and telling women he would denounce them to the Inquisition if they didn’t sleep with him.

  So when I ran into the mayor again outside the Radio Montaillou offices, I steered the conversation around to his ancestor’s dubious reputation. Monsieur le maire took a more forgiving view.

  “In effect, Pierre Clergue was an excellent politician,” he explained. “Yes, it’s true, he changed sides often. But remember, life was very hard in Montaillou in the Middle Ages—we can hardly imagine. He wanted to protect his family. That was his first priority. Who are we to judge how a man behaves under such stress?” As Don Corleone, or Anthony Soprano might put it, the family is always first.

  The mayor also held no hard feelings against the crusading Bishop Fournier who shattered the village. “He was a real detective!” he said. “Very thorough.”

  “So where is Jean Clergue buried?” I asked. “Is it possible to visit his tomb?”

  The mayor flinched.

  “But I …” he protested. “I’m not dead yet!”

  I quickly apologized. It was an easy mistake, I said, with all those Clergues. I meant Pierre Clergue, of course, the lecherous priest.

  “Nowhere,” Jean said. “His body was burned.”

  Eventually, the Inquisition had closed in on Pierre Clergue. His defenses began to unravel in 1320, when Béatrice was arrested and interrogated by Bishop Fournier for several days. Some of her testimony incriminated her former lover. Béatrice herself spent two years in the dungeons of Allemans, and on her release was forced to wear the yellow cross to indicate that she was a former heretic. We do not know when she died, but her health had suffered in prison and it cannot have been long after her release.

  In 1323, Pierre was finally summoned by Bishop Fournier for interrogation and placed in “luxury detention” in a monastery. (The worst torment here, Weis speculates, was probably the enforced “life without women.”) He was in his late forties, and he died before his court date, presumably of natural causes. If he was indeed interrogated, the transcript was lost, so the logic behind his double dealings—and his true religious convictions, if any—remain a puzzle. Although he had betrayed many Cathars within Montaillou over the years, he refused the Catholic sacraments on his deathbed. Pierre was posthumously condemned as a heretic and his remains were burned and scattered.

  The end of the story
is cheerless, more in keeping with our traditional impression of the Middle Ages. But thanks to Béatrice’s story, as recorded by the Inquisition, there is a small burst of free-spirited rebellion within the medieval gloom.

  The skies over Montaillou had turned gray again, so we decided to leave the haunted village once and for all in favor of the warmer lowlands. In a grassy meadow south of Pamiers, we all got out of the car and wandered in the blazing sun.

  When Béatrice first received her summons from the Inquisition in 1320, she made a typically impetuous decision: She convinced her second priest lover to flee with her on horseback. On the run from agents of the Church, the pair actually managed to snatch one last moment of pleasure together in a shady vineyard near the hamlet of Bénagues. The historian Weis, ever intrepid, even identifies the spot where they rested as Les Vignasses, a field directly south of the modern village where grapes were grown until recently. There, like a fourteenth-century Bonnie and Clyde, the fugitives laid out a blanket beneath the vines and made love for the last time, all the time guarded by Béatrice’s eagle-eyed servant.

  Chapter Five

  WILD AND CRAZY SWISS

  Sex and Drugs and Lyric Poetry

  In Europe, you can unearth a history of debauchery in the most overlooked places. Take Switzerland. That money-worshipping republic is seldom thought of as a lusty outpost of bohemian creativity. But in the early 1800s, the world’s most flamboyant young artists sought out the fleshpots of Lake Geneva, where an underground party scene flourished amid the sublime alpine landscapes. A volatile mix of freethinkers, sexual adventurers, philosophers, and exiles flourished in the all-night salons, trailed by a wave of Grand Tourists who hoped to glimpse the renegade celebrities at play. Like Prohibition in New York or the cold war in Berlin in the 1980s, Switzerland’s dour Calvinist facade only seemed to provoke a more extreme level of misbehavior.