Cathar

by Christopher Bland

  ‘You’d better not die before we get there,’ I said unkindly. ‘You don’t look that healthy to me.’

  He did have a red complexion and a prominent belly that he hadn’t managed to walk off.

  ‘I’ll take my chance on that. I’ll tell you what you missed in the morning.’

  And so he did, evidently pleased with himself and his encounter, until I strode on ahead of his conversation.

  At Lavacolla in the wooded country two miles from Compostela, we took off our clothes and bathed in the river. I avoided looking at the Parisian merchant as we washed ourselves. We spent the night before we reached Compostela in an open field. This was Brother Simon’s idea. It was late spring, and warm enough to sleep outside. He told for the last time the story of St James and his miracles; by now I was beginning to believe in the stone boat that floated. We lay on our backs and looked up at the Milky Way – Compostela means the Field of Stars – and it was easy to believe in an all-powerful God, hard to believe that such beauty was the work of the Devil.

  The end of our journey was something of an anticlimax. The church and its nine towers were magnificent, a manifestation in stone of the power of the Catholic Church and the Kings of León. Outside the North Door, where Brother Simon told us French pilgrims normally enter, there was a splendid fountain, a huge circular stone basin with a bronze column in its centre topped with four lions out of whose mouths flowed a steady stream of the purest drinking water.

  But in the main square we were surrounded by beggars and pickpockets in a noisy, sweaty confusion, stalls selling wineskins, shoes, purses, belts, all kinds of medicinal herbs (I saw the Parisian merchant making a thoughtful purchase). And moneychangers and whores.

  By the South Door, next to the Temptation of Christ, one of the many guides was careful to point out to us the depiction of a woman holding in her hands the stinking head of her seducer, cut off by her own husband, which, compelled by him, she had to kiss twice every day. I could not believe we had come so far just to see this.

  Brother Simon was oblivious to such contradictions, ignored the commerce and was in a state of near-ecstasy. Tears streamed down his face as he touched the pillar just inside the doorway of the church; a deep groove had been worn in the stone.

  We were able to get close enough to kiss the foot of the statue of St James, see the marble tomb that held what was left of his body, and then our pilgrimage was over.

  Simon came with me to get the certificate that showed I had completed the journey. I needed this as proof that I had served my sentence if I ever returned to Carcassonne, and he vouched for the gaps where my document had not been properly stamped on the way, looking so horrified at the suggestion of a little extra payment that the clerk quickly abandoned the idea.

  Once this was done, we embraced. Then he set off on his long journey back to Lyon, while I took a room in an inn not far from the church where I could think about where to go and what to do with the remainder of my life.

  The pilgrimage to Compostela, although I had undertaken it under compulsion, changed me. I was a Catholic only because of the threat of the stake – the abduction of Blanche by the so-called holy men reinforced all I had experienced at the hands of the Catholic and Apostolic Church. And the greed along our route and in the square outside the cathedral suggested that Christ might have expelled the moneychangers from the temple, but they hadn’t moved far away.

  It was the simple and determined faith of Brother Simon, a man as good in his own way as Guillaume Authie, that made me realise there were many roads to salvation. Or, if not salvation in the next world, at least peace of mind in this.

  Once my pilgrimage was over I was left suddenly without a purpose. For several weeks, weeks interrupted by the arrival and then the kidnapping of Blanche, I had been a pilgrim with Compostela as my destination. Now I was a free man, but with no clear idea of where to go or what to do.

  I still had some money left, and used this to travel slowly and cheaply across Spain, augmenting my slender capital by buying, training and reselling horses. There were skirmishes and little wars between the endlessly squabbling feudal lords everywhere along my route, and this created a regular demand for sturdy, well-trained chargers that would carry a man in full armour.

  I never spent more than three or four months in any of the towns and villages on my way back to the Languedoc. That was normally long enough to find a half-trained horse, bring it on and resell it for a modest profit. But I felt no desire to settle; the pull of the Languedoc was powerful. In my heart I believed that was where I belonged, and I still felt Cathar.

  In Aragon, where there were many Cathars living half openly in villages and towns close to the mountains, I had been given the name of several towns and villages in the foothills on the other side of the Pyrenees that would be likely to provide me with shelter and possibly even a living. Of these Montaillou appeared the most promising, but by the time I arrived there I was penniless.

  I had been robbed, something that had happened several times before, in spite of my pilgrim’s scallop shell, but previously they found and took only the half-dozen small coins I kept in my purse as, I thought, an adequate robbers’ offering.

  This time it was my own fault. The inn, just below the peak on the Aragon side of the mountain, was crowded. Instead of going outside into the cold to find the coins for my supper I reached, cautiously I thought, inside my cloak and took the money from my money belt.

  Not cautiously enough. I was followed by three men the next morning as I climbed up to the summit of the pass, and they were not happy with small coins. They pushed me to the ground, fumbled inside my cloak, found the belt and took it, along with the dagger that had been my reassuring companion ever since I looted it from the body of a dead soldier in a ditch not far from Montségur. I couldn’t understand their dialect, but they seemed to debate among themselves whether they would kill me, decided I wasn’t worth the effort and left me penniless with only my staff, looking down on my old homeland of the Languedoc.

  Later that day I was overtaken by a fellow traveller who turned out to be Guillaume Authie, one of the few surviving Perfects, whom I had last seen just before the fall of Montségur. I recognised him at once; he asked me if I was still Cathar, and blessed me when I replied that I was, in spite of the pilgrimage to Compostela.

  We continued together down the mountain to his first destination, the hut of one of the shepherds who had just moved his flock up to the mountain pastures. The shepherd, a weather-beaten man of perhaps fifty whose name was Arnaud, had spent all his life with his sheep, half the time in the valley, half the time in the mountains, building up his flock from almost nothing to two hundred ewes and five rams.

  Guillaume Authie and I spent the night in the shepherd’s shelter. I used the opportunity to ask Guillaume how he had become a Perfect; I had heard that he had been a lawyer in a previous life, which turned out to be true. His was an extraordinary story, and the way in which he described his calling made me understand, once again, the difference between the simplicity of the Cathar faith and the elaborate and corrupt nature of the Catholic Church. That Church was determined to make Cathars and Catharism extinct.

  13

  Returned to Mathieu

  Blanche

  MY CAPTORS WERE taciturn; when I asked them where they were taking me they said, ‘To Carcassonne,’ and nothing more. I pointed out that they were kidnapping me, that I had been on pilgrimage, that they had stolen Francois’s horse, and got only grunts in reply. It took me a day to realise that they had not been sent to kill me.

  They were monks only in name, each of them strong, burly men armed with a short sword and a dagger. They were not from our region and spoke a guttural northern patois that I could not understand. Although I was not ill-treated, I was always only a pace or two away from the nearest guard. It was a long and dismal journey.

  When we reached Carcassonne I was taken not to the little house in the square but to the room in the Inquisi
tor’s lodgings – I was no longer thinking of him as Mathieu – where he had first imprisoned and forced himself upon me. His clerk brought me my old smock, which I refused to wear, although my clothes were dirty and needed laundering. He was no more forthcoming than the monks; he brought me food and water, and not much of either, keeping me locked in the room. I was allowed out for only an hour a day, closely guarded by one of the soldier monks.

  After ten days of solitary confinement I was brought before Mathieu in the room where I had first been tried. He looked stern sitting on his throne-like chair, and it was clear he wanted to emphasise he was again my judge. On this occasion his clerk was in the room, taking only occasional notes.

  ‘Why did you escape from custody and leave Carcassonne? You were sentenced to house arrest after you publicly recanted. Your breach could result in a further trial and much more severe punishment.’

  ‘I was not aware that the house in the Place des Pénitents was my prison. Nor that I could be punished for going on a pilgrimage to Compostela.’

  ‘You were consorting with a former Cathar, a knight with a known history of rebellion and violence against the Church.’

  ‘He, like me, had been forced to see the error of his ways. He was a friend of my son-in-law and my daughter, and we had known each other since before your so-called crusaders ruined Roqueville. Which, by the way, I claim as mine. Whoever holds it does so against the law.’

  Mathieu was both surprised and discomfited by my defence. He clearly expected me, after the kidnapping, the long journey and ten days’ solitary confinement on inadequate rations, to be both frightened and penitent. I was neither.

  After a long pause he asked me, ‘Have you become Cathar again?’

  I replied, ‘You took me away from a pilgrimage to one of the holiest shrines in Christendom.’ It was a clear sign of his uncertainty that he didn’t follow up my oblique reply with an insistence that I answer yes or no.

  ‘Very well. I shall adjourn these proceedings and consider whether you should be handed over to the secular authorities for sentencing.’

  This was a clear threat that I could face years of imprisonment or even the fire. As he finished speaking I held his eyes in mine for almost a minute until he looked away, rummaging among his papers as I left the room. I was led back to my cell by the clerk.

  As soon as I was alone I sat down on my chair and cried. I had left Mathieu, lost the companionship of Francois, and my daughter and Etienne regarded me as an outcast. I had put on a bold front in the courtroom, but I had no friends in the city, and probably none in the whole of the Languedoc. There was no one to whom I could turn, no one who knew where I was. I was frightened by the civil courts, whose arbitrary and savage sentences – they had walled up an elderly Cathar noblewoman, Adelais de Ventenac, only two years ago – were well known. I knelt down and prayed, to which God didn’t seem to matter, remembering some Latin words from the days when I was a genuine Catholic:

  ‘De profundis clamavi ad te Domine,

  Domine, exaudi vocem meam.’

  I was indeed in the depths.

  *

  Mathieu

  I WAS UNABLE TO deny the pleasure I felt on seeing Blanche again, although I was careful to conceal this from Blanche and my clerk. I reminded myself of her betrayal; she had given me no indication that she wanted to leave, and had waited until I was away in Toulouse for a week, leaving an ambiguous note that made me believe at first she had gone to Barraigne.

  And I was intensely jealous, an emotion I had never before experienced. I had seen Francois de Beaufort several times, saving one of his eyes on the first occasion, although only because that suited the Church. He was ten years younger than me, undeniably handsome and brave enough to survive at Roqueville and Montségur treatment that would have destroyed a lesser man.

  They were together, in close proximity, for six weeks on the road to Compostela. I did not believe she would have resisted his advances; after all, she had sought him out. I had feverish, disgraceful dreams of the two of them together, from which I awoke sweating and miserable, wishing I had ordered Francois’ death, wishing I had never seen Blanche. I had no clear idea of what to do next.

  *

  Blanche

  AFTER I HAD spent a further week in my cell Mathieu came to see me in the evening. He began as the Inquisitor, upbraiding me for abandoning our life together. He accused me of sleeping with Francois, that the attraction of a younger man was the reason I had left him.

  He asked me the direct question.

  ‘Did you fuck him?’ The coarse word, a word that I had never before heard him utter, surprised me.

  ‘That is none of your business. I thought about it.’

  ‘Did you fuck him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How can I believe you?’

  ‘I am still enough of a Cathar to tell the truth. I haven’t yet learned to lie in the Catholic way.’

  The look of relief that crossed his face made me realise that simple, powerful sexual jealousy was behind his words and actions. I smiled.

  He saw the smile, misinterpreted it and threatened me again. I was confident enough to resist.

  ‘You have no right to hold me here. If you send me to the secular arm the true facts of our relationship will come out.’

  ‘That sounds like blackmail. You won’t be heard, only sentenced. My clerk is loyal.’

  ‘Francois and Etienne and Stephanie and Guillemette knew. And who is your confessor? The Bishop?’

  This struck home, and he looked at me with despair, turned to leave the room, turned back, knelt in front of me and buried his head in my lap.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a minute. ‘Those were all empty threats. I missed you while you were away, I need you, I want you to return to our house, I want to live together again.’

  ‘As your prisoner?’

  ‘No. As my…’ He couldn’t find the right word and began to weep silently, burying his head in my lap again. I said nothing, but held his head between my hands for several minutes. It seemed I was renewing the bargain between us, but on better terms.

  *

  The Bishop

  MATHIEU WAS MISERABLE after he had lost his woman. I suggested other ways of compensating for her loss, but he would have none of them. He disappeared for a couple of weeks on a retreat to his former abbey at Flaran, but was no less miserable on his return. He began to delegate his duties to men ill-equipped for the task and I told him so.

  ‘For God’s sake, get her back,’ I told him one evening over supper.

  ‘She won’t come.’

  ‘She’s a fugitive. She’s broken house arrest. Send some of your tough monks to bring her back to Carcassonne. And they can deal with her one-armed fancy man while they’re at it.’

  My crude reference to Francois de Beaufort distressed him, and he got up and left the room. Nevertheless, after two days he took my advice, and many weeks later Blanche de Roqueville was back in Carcassonne.

  ‘Take care how you handle her,’ I told him. ‘You’re on shaky legal grounds even by Inquisition standards.’

  I enjoyed my new relationship with Mathieu. I had become his counsellor. Now he sought my advice and acted on it. And soon, without any public scandal, all between Mathieu and Blanche was, more or less, as before.

  14

  The Last Perfects

  Guillaume Authie

  MY BROTHER AND I and were prosperous notaries. We were comfortably off, well known and sought after for advice ever since we negotiated on behalf of Roger Bernard, Comte de Foix, over his castles in the Sarbarthés. This was a long and complicated dispute, eventually resolved in Roger Bernard’s favour after several years of argument. This success established our reputation throughout the Languedoc.

  I was married to Alazais, by whom I had seven children. I loved her dearly, although after our last child we rarely, if ever, made love. And I also, to my subsequent shame, had a mistress, Monete Rouzy. She was the widow of a
colleague and bore me a daughter. Our family and that of my brother Pierre were quiet Cathars, not eager to draw the attention of the church and the Inquisition to our heresy.

  All this changed when, on a sunny spring afternoon in Ax, I was reading to my brother from St John’s Gospel. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…’ it began. It was a passage later on that struck home: ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit.’

  As I read, it seemed to me in a flash of revelation, painful in its intensity, that if these words and the words that followed were divinely inspired we had no choice but to follow them. I said as much to my brother, and he replied, ‘I feel that we have lost our souls. Our lives are empty, an emptiness that we cannot any longer fill with material possessions or by the pleasures of sex and food and wine.’

  We talked late into the night; we had always been close, and it was not surprising, to me at least, that we should have arrived at this turning point in our lives at the same moment. It was clear that we needed to look for salvation together. We decided to go to Lombardy where our faith was still alive, and where we could learn, with God’s grace, enough to become Perfects ourselves. We planned to return to the Languedoc, where the Word was threatened but not yet extinguished.

  Our families found it difficult to understand what inspired us to leave. Pierre and I had all heard and read this passage from St John many times before, and it was hard to explain why, in middle age, we had both been struck by the same lightning bolt. I told my wife that recognising that these words were more than rhetoric, were an imperative, had overcome us both with a near-physical force. It was impossible to ignore the words, but it was difficult to convince her or my children of what had happened.

  Alazais was angry. ‘Your life will be in danger, you’ll end up tortured and then burned. You’ll never see me or the children again. And we will no longer be safe.’