All this was hard to contradict, other than by saying I felt I had no choice.
‘It is something I have to do. Being a believer is no longer enough, particularly when our faith is under attack throughout the Languedoc.’
In the end, after talking long into the night, Alazais realised she was arguing not with me, but with the Holy Spirit, and she gave me her affectionate, if reluctant, blessing. I would not see her again for over two years.
My brother and I were in Lombardy for eighteen months in a Cathar seminary with others like us. There we began not only to understand the detailed doctrines of our faith, but to practise the severe rules by which we would be bound forever. We no longer ate meat, animal fats, eggs, cheese or drank milk. We fasted on bread and water for three days in every week and kept three Lents in every year. We did not kill. We did not lie. We did not touch women. We did not swear oaths.
This was a gruelling regime both mentally and physically, and after the powerful revelation that had brought us to Lombardy began to wear thin, we were both occasionally tempted to give up and return home. But we were sustained by each other, and by those simple words that had changed our lives. Several others fell by the wayside. Of the fourteen that arrived at the beginning of the year only six received the Consolamentum and became Perfects. Pierre and I were of that number.
The final ceremony was moving in its simplicity, in marked contrast to the elaborate rituals that accompanied any Catholic ordination. It took place in the room where we gathered every day to pray. The whitewashed walls were bare, and the only furniture was the dozen benches and a table at the far end of the room, on this occasion covered in a white cloth. The room was illuminated by dozens of white candles symbolising the tongues of flame of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
On the table was the Gospel of St John whose words had brought us there, and a basin of water in which the officiating minister washed his hands before reading from the text. He was a famous Perfect, Bishop Bertrand Marty, whom I was to meet several times afterwards, and who died in the Field of the Burned at Montségur. He was a good Christian, a good man in every sense of the word. To be in his presence was to feel strengthened and purified.
Bishop Bertrand recited the Lord’s Prayer, the six of us repeating the words after him, and then we abjured the Catholic faith. We asked permission to enter the True Church, swore to give ourselves to God and the Gospel, and promised never to renounce our faith through fear of death by fire or any other torture. Finally Bishop Bertrand put his hand on each head in succession, asking God to receive us and send His Holy Spirit upon us. When I received the kiss of peace from Bertrand I became a new man at that moment, born of the spirit.
The following day Pierre and I began our journey back to the Languedoc. We travelled through the plains of Lombardy and the rivers and woods of our own Languedoc, seeing the countryside through the eyes of the Perfects that we had so recently become. And the name itself, Perfect, which we had hitherto understood as a label attached to only a few men and women of our acquaintance, had now acquired a new and weighty meaning. I told Pierre that I found it difficult to dismiss our surroundings as the work of the Devil, and he laughed.
‘I have the same problem. My conclusion is simple; we can enjoy and even admire the Devil’s handiwork, as long as we realise its temporary nature.’ Pierre could always find a sensible solution to my overanxious questioning, and it was exchanges like this that made me realise how much I would miss him. We had become very close during our time in Lombardy, our bond of blood strengthened by our new faith and its strenuous discipline. We embraced for a long moment when we finally parted, a parting made more poignant by the realisation that we would never be as close again.
Thereafter I led a nomadic life, sustained by my faith and by the hospitality and prayers of the Cathar believers. In those early days there were many believers, from the great men and women in their castles to the humble shepherds and in the pastures and in the villages. I passed myself off as a travelling pedlar when challenged, and I had a basket of ironmongery which I managed never to sell.
We were wanted men, sought out by the Catholic Church and the Inquisition with ever-increasing ferocity and success. Once captured there was only one end for a Perfect: the stake. Unless he abjured, and in thirty years there were only three who saved their mortal bodies by recanting.
As the power of the Inquisition and its informers grew I became more careful. I rarely wore my green robe, I never risked staying longer than two or three nights in any house or castle, and from time to time would move, guided by shepherds who were Cathar to a man, over the Pyrenees to Aragon, where there were many hospitable Cathars. I preached wherever I could, I blessed those believers who sought me out and I administered the Consolamentum to the dying.
In those early days I enjoyed outwitting those who wished to capture and imprison me, enjoyed practising our Cathar faith under the noses of the well-financed, bureaucratic and stupid Catholic Church. I was less careful then about those whose lives were endangered by my presence in their houses. It was only later that the pressure of being always on the run, of being a danger to others, became a burden that I found harder and harder to bear.
Insofar as I had a base, it was in Montaillou, where both the chatelaine of the castle and the priest were Cathar. I was also welcomed many times at the house of Arnaud Issaurat in Larnat. He had a small room used for storing farm implements, on the same level as his cattle byre, and he made a comfortable bed in one corner that was shielded from view by a small handcart.
The Issaurat family nursed me there for six days when I became sick after climbing the pass from Aragon back into the Languedoc. They were brave and generous hosts and indulged my weakness for good bread and honey.
I was able to see my family very rarely. I met my love child, my daughter by Monete, only once, but was able to bless her during a brief walk in the dusk at Larnat. She of all my children seemed to understand best the path that I had taken.
My wife came, at considerable risk to herself, to the wedding of Bernard Belot and Dominique Benet in Montaillou. I stayed in the Belots’ house, officiated at the wedding (it was the last occasion on which I was able to wear my green cloak) and spent the night in a comfortable bed, complete with a silk cushion, in the loft. My beloved Alazais lay beside me. We used this precious time to talk about the children, Alazais urging me to take particular care to avoid betrayal.
‘Even in Montaillou, even in Larnat, there are now those who would give you up to the Inquisition,’ she said. ‘The new Inquisitor has promised eternal and worldly rewards to anyone denouncing a Perfect.’
‘But for Arnaud Lizier I could move freely in the square at Montaillou. I have nothing to fear from the Clergues.’
‘Not from the Clergues, perhaps. But there are others who could be tempted by the reward.’
I promised I would be careful. And when Alazais reached across the bed to embrace me I didn’t have the heart, or the resolve, to push her away.
Alazais was right about the danger.
To my great sorrow she and three of my children were arrested later that year. They were interrogated in Carcassonne, and after several months’ imprisonment were sentenced to the yellow crosses before being allowed to return to Ax. I had crossed into Catalonia and spent three months in friendly houses there before it felt safe to return to the Languedoc. The number of houses prepared to shelter Perfects rapidly dwindled.
Early in the following year I learned that my brother Pierre had been arrested and burned, together with many others of our number. The lightning bolt had struck me and my brother at the same moment: we had been in Lombardy together for a year and a half and were almost as one during that period of trial, instruction and prayer. Ironically, our ways parted almost immediately thereafter, and we were to meet again only twice, briefly and furtively, in the years that followed, although he was always in my thoughts and in my prayers.
He was burned in front of the Cathedral of
St-Etienne in Toulouse. I was told that his last words to the Inquisitors were that if he could preach to the people he would convert them all. He was the most eloquent of all the Perfects; needless to say he was not allowed to speak. I hope and pray his death was easy.
His death and that of so many other good souls was hard to accept. If God was on our side, if we were indeed the only Good Christians, how was the devilish work of the Inquisition allowed to triumph? And how, if there were no more Perfects left alive, could our Cathar faith continue? It seemed that I was about to become the last Perfect, and might not survive much longer.
15
In Montaillou
Francois
ARNAUD THE SHEPHERD sent us on our way to Montaillou after a breakfast feast of sheep’s cheese, bread and milk. Guillaume Authie didn’t stay in the village, but went on to Ax after giving me a final blessing.
‘Ask for Pierre Clergue when you get to Montaillou. He’ll find you something to do,’ Arnaud had said to me. ‘Something to do’ turned out to be joining the little group of enforcers that guaranteed Clergue’s rule over Montaillou. Montaillou was a small village of perhaps two hundred souls, with a castle at one end and a church at the other. A double row of houses ran down the main street, which was roughly paved with cobblestones. Around the village were well-watered fields which produced enough fodder for the cold winter months. Montaillou was prosperous thanks to its sheep; almost everybody owned sheep or worked with them, from the hired shepherds, the crop-watchers and the owners with two or three hundred animals. There were a few cows, oxen for ploughing and most families kept a pig and some hens.
Montaillou was dominated by its castle and by the Clergue brothers, Pierre the priest and his brother Bernard the magistrate. Pierre was a powerful man, dark, burly, a head shorter than me, black eyes set deep in their sockets and a squashed nose that looked as though it was still recovering from a brawl. He had a neatly trimmed beard and a mouth full of bad teeth.
Pierre was both priest and Cathar, as was clear from his sermons, although not from his conduct. He was some considerable distance from being a Perfect. It suited him to allow the Cathars to exist in his village in an atmosphere of secrecy, as the fear of denunciation was one of his weapons, although it would have been hard for him to use it without implicating himself. So there were regular visits to certain houses by Guillaume Authie and other Perfects, and Pierre Clergue and his brother would often attend their ceremonies.
He used his position to obtain sexual favours. It was rumoured that he slept regularly with at least three of the wives in Montaillou and had a child by one of these women.
He ensured that everyone attended his church at the bottom of the village and also that every household paid tithes, some of which, enough to keep everyone happy, he sent to the treasurer of the Church in Carcassonne. He explained to his flock that this was the price of being left alone. And as priest Pierre heard everyone’s Confession, and knew the intimate details of every inhabitant of Montaillou.
His brother Bernard, the magistrate, dispensed rough justice from which there was no appeal. His powers rested on a document from the Comte de Foix that he would occasionally produce and read out; in practice it was their enforcers who guaranteed the Clergues’ position. Two years before my arrival Bernard had cut out the tongue of Mengarde Maurs for spreading rumours about the heretical youth of the Clergue brothers. It was a brutal and effective way of reducing dissent to whispers, winks and nods.
All this I learned later. I sought Pierre Clergue out on my arrival; his house was the biggest in the village with perhaps half a dozen rooms on the first and second floors and a large byre beneath where he kept sheep in the winter. The first question he asked me was ‘Are you Cathar?’
‘I am.’
‘Then why were you on pilgrimage?’
I explained, but the explanation wasn’t necessary. He knew exactly who I was, why I had only one eye and one arm, and that I had been sentenced after the fall of Montségur to go to Compostela.
‘Have you proof that you completed the journey?’
I produced the battered, stamped document that I kept inside my cloak.
‘Let me read it,’ Clergue said, glancing at it for a second, then putting it down on his table.
‘It will be safe with me,’ he said. ‘What are you good for? Not fighting, with only one arm and one eye.’
‘Try me with a sword against any man,’ I said, anger overcoming common sense. Because Clergue knew exactly what I could do.
‘That won’t be necessary. You can work for me. Food, clothes and lodging.’
I accepted. I had no choice other than to starve. There were four of us in Clergue’s little band, the other three all Cathar, former men-at-arms who had learned their trade fighting for little lords elsewhere in the region, or for mercenary bands, or for the crusaders, or in one case for all three. They accepted me soon enough after the inevitable jokes about a one-armed, one-eyed soldier knight being next to useless. We duelled now and again with wooden swords and I was easily able to defeat each of them, for which I thanked the days of practice with my father and at Roqueville.
As it turned out, working for Pierre Clergue involved no fighting. Our principle task was collecting tithes, and the four of us were sufficiently formidable to overcome the doubts of even the most devout Cathar.
‘Sending tithes keeps Carcassonne and the Inquisition off our backs,’ Clergue would remind the village. ‘It’s a price worth paying, as is Confession.’ He was right. Montaillou was left to its own devices, far enough from Carcassonne for any rumours of heresy to have been watered down to gossip by the time they reached the ears of the authorities.
After two years my way of life in Montaillou changed. Arnaud, who had guided me to Montaillou, was one of three shepherds in the village, all men of substance. He asked me to help him with his flock of sheep, now over two hundred strong, in the move up to the mountain pastures.
‘It’s too much for one man,’ he said, ‘I’m feeling my age. And there are more wolves than ever.’
I was bored with tithe-collecting, and told Pierre Clergue I planned to help Arnaud.
He looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, ‘Very well. You’ll have to find somewhere else to live. And he can’t afford to pay you.’
‘Neither can you,’ I said. ‘With Arnaud I’ll learn something useful.’
‘I dare say you’ve learned something working for me. You go with my blessing.’
‘I’d like to take a crossbow with me. And my pilgrim’s certificate.’
‘Take the crossbow. The certificate is safe with me.’
I didn’t argue, as the certificate seemed a reasonable surety for the return of the crossbow. At that time there were only two crossbows in the village armoury, and both belonged to Clergue. I told Arnaud I came with Clergue’s blessing and a crossbow; we agreed that for every wolf I killed I would get a carrying ewe to call my own. He gave me a small room in his house at the bottom of the village.
Pierre Clergue was able to replace me easily enough with one of his cousins, Arnaud Sicre, who had been until that moment a shoemaker in Ax. He had no friends in Montaillou, and collected tithes with a zeal that made him many enemies, although the Clergues were pleased with the increased income. Whenever we met Pierre was careful to tell me how much better Sicre was at the job. I told him I was happy for him, and that I was much better suited to the life of a shepherd.
The flocks wintered in the valley, when we fed them with hay from the meadows, then moved up to the rich mountain grassland once the snow had melted. The journey to the upland pastures was an annual ritual; the three Montaillou shepherds took their flocks to the mountains in a fixed order. Arnaud was last.
Managing the migration of two hundred sheep, including lambs and four rams, was a slow business, even though Arnaud had three fierce dogs to help him. Their instinct was to attack any stranger, and I was careful to earn their affection with titbits and their respect with a b
low from my staff if they tried, as they did at first, to bite.
It took three days to reach the grassy plateau where Arnaud grazed his sheep. Spring had begun in earnest; the grass was rich and the pastures were cut with little rivulets that would dry up in the summer but were full of snowmelt in the spring. Mountain flowers – violets, harebells, gentians – were everywhere, the trees beginning to break into leaf. I felt like them, breaking out into a new life.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said to Arnaud, who only grunted in reply. Our first job was to repair the corral where the sheep were kept at night; luckily it had suffered little damage in the winter. Then we set about rebuilding Arnaud’s cabin, doubling it in size. The four posts at the corners were made from young birch trees, and we cut hazel to weave the walls. We needed a fire only in the first month, and there was wood left over from the previous year.
I dug a pit thirty paces away for our latrine. Arnaud thought this unnecessary, but I pointed out there were now two of us, and once it was built he was happy enough to use it for his daily business. I hammered four strong forked posts into the ground by the lip of the pit, each with a sturdy crossbar, the lower to sit on, the higher for a handhold. This meant Arnaud could sit rather than squat, which at his age he was finding difficult.
Once we had finished building my job was to kill wolves. This, I soon discovered, was not easy. Wolves would regularly take a lamb from the edge of the flock, drag it some distance away to the edge of the woods that bordered our pastures and eat as much as they could before dawn. If I touched the carcase, or went near it, the wolf would not return.
So I built half a dozen high seats in trees that bordered the pasture and sat up over the lamb after each kill, hoping the wolf would reappear at dawn or at dusk. I was often disappointed: by a breeze carrying my scent the wrong way (I didn’t bathe often in the mountains), or by one of Arnaud’s dogs scenting the wolf and barking. They wouldn’t attack a wolf, having learned from painful experience that they were outmatched.
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