Heretic Dawn

by Robert Merle

  Remembering my unfortunate Fontanette gave me such heartache that it brought tears to my eyes, and I felt a new and more intimate concern for Alizon, as if the two wenches were but two opposite faces of the same misfortune, one selling her body in the baths to nourish her child and the other hanged for having killed hers on orders from the knave who’d fathered it. Oh, heaven! What a deep sleep she fell into in her dark and smooth nudity, abandoned against my side, the thorns and arrows of her hard life momentarily forgotten in the merciful night, but not the great love she bore her little Henriot, if I could trust the half-smile that remained in the fold of her tender lips for having been able to talk about him.

  On this last thought, being, myself, thoroughly exhausted from this long day, during which I’d seen and experienced so much, I felt myself slipping into sleep as if into a warm bath, laughing gently at myself for being so happy, for once, to be chaste, and to have paid six sols to remain so.

  * “To the city and to the world.”

  † “If it’s not true, it’s well made.”

  ‡ “Emissaries of the Lord.”

  6

  WHAT A STRANGE AWAKENING I had the next morning in the little chamber-ette where I’d fallen asleep next to Alizon.

  Of Alizon, however, I saw not the least trace as I blinked, trying to clear my eyes. Her clothing had disappeared as well, my sweet little fly having fled at dawn to reach Recroche’s atelier and start her twelve-hour day. But I realized I wasn’t alone, and when my eyes had cleared, I saw a fellow dressed entirely in black standing in my room, his back turned to me and his left hand on his hip as he gazed out of the little window at the garden. He was tall and gaunt, and looked very elegant as he stood there on one leg like a heron. I couldn’t believe my eyes and quickly combed my hair with my fingers and sat up, and was about to speak to this Gautier and ask him what he was doing when, hearing me sit up, he turned round.

  “’Sblood! Fogacer!” I cried in amazement, jumping up and running, naked as I was, to embrace him. “This is magic! How did you find me?”

  It was a moment before he answered, returning my embrace with some embarrassment (remembering no doubt his craziness at the carnival in Montpellier), something that I secretly thought was funny, and, releasing him at last, I began immediately to get dressed.

  “Well,” Fogacer began, catching his breath and regaining his composure, “I know a pretty little cleric at Notre-Dame de Paris, who is as beautiful as any of God’s angels.”

  “Except that God’s angels don’t have any genitals,” I smiled. “But go on, Fogacer, doesn’t this angel offer tours of the towers of Notre-Dame to curious visitors?”

  “That’s the very one, Siorac. Aymotin told me the what, the who and the lodgings.”

  “And from the lodgings, who brought you here?”

  “Miroul. He secretly followed you yesterday evening to make sure you were safe, and when he learnt from the mistress of the baths that you were spending the night he was reassured and went home to bed. I saw him this morning at Recroche’s place.”

  “He’s the angel!” I said, very touched by the care my good valet had taken of my life.

  “But this angel takes very poor care of your feeble flesh,” returned Fogacer, spreading his spidery arms wide (as if to make fun of himself and of me). “For if I’m to believe what I heard, you didn’t spend the night alone. Oh, Siorac, at the baths! Is this prudent? Don’t you know that the Naples disease and the wenches in the baths have a natural affinity for each other?”

  “Fogacer,” I said, smiling somewhat bitterly, “Heaven is my witness that I’m leaving these baths as healthy as when I came in.”

  “May Heaven hear you!” cried Fogacer, who believed in neither God nor the Devil, as perhaps the reader will remember.

  There was a knock at the door and Babette came in. “Monsieur, the milkmaid just came by. Would you and your friend like a bowl of milk, some good white Parisian bread and some fresh butter from our villages?”

  “’Sblood, Babette!” I cried. “Not another word! I’m drooling at the very idea! Fogacer, a bowl of milk?”

  “Wholeheartedly, but boiled, if you please.”

  And while our pretty blonde set off to fetch our breakfast, she was followed by two sets of eyes: one happily attracted, the other coldly suspicious.

  “Is she one of the bawds of the baths?” said Fogacer disdainfully.

  “Not at all!” I assured him. “She’s a virgin and all locked tight for her future husband. Fogacer, you don’t know everything. In the great book of nature, you skipped the feminine pages.”

  “It’s good I did!” he said. “If my appetites didn’t tend in the direction you know, I wouldn’t have had to flee Montpellier in great danger of being burnt alive. And if I hadn’t fled, I wouldn’t have found refuge in Paris, and I wouldn’t today be aide and assistant to the venerable Dr Miron, physician to His Royal Highness the Duc d’Anjou.”

  “What!” I cried. “Why, Fogacer, that’s marvellous! You’ve already reached such heights in Paris? I’ve heard much good of the famous Miron.”

  “And they’re mistaken. He’s an ass in a skirt. And the most miserly man alive! I’m lucky to collect a few crumbs from his banquets of money.” At this he laughed out loud, arching his satanic eyebrows. “What’s more,” he continued, “I work hard to hide from Miron that I know more than he does, for in truth, if he were a humble man and had any conscience whatsoever, he could say what St Augustine said to the Lord: scientia nostra, scientiae tuae comparata, ignorantia est.”*

  “Well, Fogacer,” I said, “aren’t you being a bit too proud yourself?”

  “Not at all! I’m so humble I make nuns ashamed! Of the sixty-two doctors who exercise their talents in this murderous city, there are not more than five or six, including me, who understand how little they really know. The others, Miron included, are nothing but charlatans who foist their fraudulent, outmoded ideas, deceptions and fallacies on their patients, and parade their bad Latin about, deifying their nasty drugs like monks their saints’ relics.”

  “Well, Fogacer,” I laughed, “I see that you don’t respect yourself enough! You’re not in the least ignorant, since you laboured so diligently during all those long years of study in Montpellier!”

  “But all I do is recite in a drone what I have to read,” confessed Fogacer. “What do we really know about the geography of the human body? What do you know, Siorac?”

  “The ABC.”

  “And who taught you?”

  “Servetus, Vesalius, Ambroise Paré.”

  “Servetus,” replied Fogacer with his long, sardonic smile, “was burnt by your Calvin in Geneva. Vesalius was condemned to death by the Inquisition of his king. And Ambroise Paré, the only one still alive, is rejected and despised by the professors in Paris because he’s a surgeon and not a professor of their silly ancient medicine, which is empty meat, inane superstition and worn-out tradition…”

  Babette returned at this point, carrying a tray with our hot breakfast.

  “Well, here at least,” I laughed, “is more substantial food! Eat, Fogacer, eat! Vita brevis est† and our art takes so long to learn!”

  And although we were both appalled by the way our own medical art seemed to flounder in the mire of ignorance, of verbal and scholastic disputations, we nevertheless downed our breakfast very happily and Fogacer told me all the details of his flight from Montpellier. When he’d done, I recounted to him the story of my duel with Fontenac, the nasty legal proceedings that ensued and the quest that brought me to Paris to seek the king’s pardon and the whereabouts of my Angelina.

  “So what are your impressions of this great Paris where you’ve been thrown?” asked Fogacer.

  “Its beauties are numberless, its garbage infinite!”

  “Well,” laughed Fogacer as he stood up, stretching his long arms, which suddenly seemed to fill the whole micro-chamber, “you’ve still got a way with words, I see! Assuredly you can live better elsewhere, bu
t in Paris you meet so many people with talent and there’s so much diversity in complexion and behaviour, so many riches and so much art as well. Have you seen the nymphs that Jean Goujon made for the Fontaine des Innocents?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Ah, Siorac, you who are so infatuated with women’s bodies, you must see them! You’ll be very happy you did. Even I, who see only their beautiful movements caught in stone, am moved.”

  But then, looking at me with his sharp and cunning hazel eyes set under those arching eyebrows, he chuckled, and, putting his foot on the stool as if he were a dancer testing the suppleness of his calf muscles, added in a suddenly serious voice, “Siorac, I have to go. Dr Miron is expecting me at the Louvre and I don’t want him, in his incredible stupidity, to kill the Duc d’Anjou with his drugs in absentia mea, because, to tell the truth, I’m mad about His Highness…”

  “What!” I gasped. “You value the life of the Duc d’Anjou? This monster who ordered Montesquiou to kill Condé when he was his prisoner?”

  “Oh, you Huguenot!” laughed Fogacer. “You’re not going to cry about that little muddle-headed Condé! Didn’t he dare to take up arms against his king? Your Coligny—who would hang any soldier who disobeyed him—what would he do to a rebel subject if he were king? What haven’t both sides done during those troubled times? Do I have to remind you of the Michelade?”

  “I was there, alas!”

  “In reality,” Fogacer continued with a heat quite removed from his usual sarcasm, “Henri d’Anjou is a man of real intelligence: he excels in intrigue; he is firm in his endeavours, supple in their execution and, what’s more, a good general.”

  “Well, as for that,” I interrupted, “it was Tavannes who won those battles for him at Jarnac and Moncontour!”

  “At least Henri d’Anjou had the finesse to listen to his wise counsel, which Charles IX, who’s so impatient and childish, would doubtless have failed to do.”

  “’Sblood, Fogacer!” I cried. “If he’s such a good friend of yours, why don’t you recommend me to Anjou for the favour I’m seeking from his brother!”

  “This recommendation would kill you, Siorac! The king hates his brother.”

  “He hates him?”

  “He hates him from the depths of his guts. Other than God, the king loves no one as much as his mother, who doesn’t love him, but loves Henri d’Anjou instead, whom she’s been mad about from his earliest childhood. She’s the one who arranged for him to have so much power in matters of state, and who’s raised him to be practically the equal of the king, who is insanely jealous of him, both as his brother and as a duc, and can’t bear to have him around the throne. He’d love to see him leagues away. Outside of France, if he could! Married to Elizabeth of England, or, if that didn’t work out, at least elected king of Poland and exiled to Warsaw, surrounded by soldiers and his mouth frozen by their winters. ’Sblood! You know that Charles is working as hard as he can to distance Anjou from the Louvre? He’s fed up with this vice-kingdom the queen mother has carved out for Anjou within his own. If he dared, he’d stab his too-brilliant brother with his own hand. But being as pious as he is limited, he’d fear losing his soul by being the Cain of this Abel!”

  “This Abel!” I smiled. “Aren’t you making Anjou a bit too angelic?”

  “But don’t we know that there are very different kinds of angel in this vale of tears?”

  “Oh, heaven,” I thought to myself, turning slightly away, “are these white sheep from the same pasture? Cooing doves from the same dovecote? Puppies from the same litter? What am I hearing? The Duc d’Anjou as well? This subtle fraternity extends right into the Louvre?”

  “Fogacer,” I said, gulping down the last mouthful of this good white Parisian bread, which is the best anywhere in the world, “since you work in the Louvre, enlighten me and remove my doubts. What’s the rhyme and reason of this marriage between Margot and our Navarre?”

  “The rhyme or the reason?” replied Fogacer, arching his diabolical eyebrow.

  “Both.”

  “The rhyme is to have their wedding bells sound the arrival of fraternity between Huguenots and papists by reconciling them in a princely marriage, joining Navarre and France.”

  “And the reason?”

  “You’d have to discover it from our Machiavelli in black skirts, whom you call Jezebel. She’s the one who wanted this marriage, and she will see it celebrated, come hell or high water, no matter what the objections, even from the Pope.”

  “And what are her reasons?”

  “The state. Coligny is austere, but old and infirm. Navarre is young, insouciant, apparently crazy, a tepid Huguenot, chasing petticoats as if they were deer. If Coligny were to die for whatever reason, Navarre would become head of the reform party, but the queen mother hopes that, if he were coaxed at court by her, by Margot, his wife, and by the other ladies around him, and being the de facto hostage of his brother-in-law the king, he would convert to Catholicism; if not, your party would simply be decapitated.”

  “Very nicely calculated,” I conceded. “And what do you think?”

  “That this is very short-sighted and hasn’t been properly thought through. For if Jezebel had a sharper nose, she’d have smelt in Navarre a man of infinite finesse. And finally, I think that Navarre, as the head of the reform party, would very much need its body to stay alive, and would not cut himself off from it until his power were sufficiently established in the kingdom.”

  “So Navarre is more Machiavellian than Jezebel?”

  “Assuredly so! Navarre is deep enough to play the fool and to disarm the king by his apparent heedlessness, and to charm the court by a ‘cordiality that makes people think he has heart’. So says the great tennis master and ball-maker Delay.”

  “Ah, you know him?”

  “I know the universe!” replied Fogacer with a kind of false gravity. “Which is to say everyone who enters or leaves the Louvre, from the greatest to the smallest, who isn’t really all that small.”

  “This ‘smallest’ one would be you, I would bet,” I smiled, “since you’ve always been so attentive to what’s going on around you.”

  “I’ve had to be,” sighed Fogacer, “since I grew up using ruses and finesse, having been ever since my childhood in danger of being burnt for not being like other people. I must go, Siorac; I’m very sorry not to be able to help you with the favour you’ve asked of me. On the other hand…”

  “On the other hand?”

  But instead of finishing his sentence, he smiled with that slow, sardonic, sinuous smile, and, his hazel eyes looking at me maliciously, he took my right hand in his fine, firm long hands and said: “I’ll do better, Siorac. Since I know, as I said, the universe, I’ll help you find, in this immense Paris, Angelina de Montcalm.”

  “Do you know where she lives?” I cried, almost floating on air at his words.

  “I’ll find out.”

  “Fogacer!” I cried.

  But without another word, and dropping my right hand, he turned on his heels like a ballerina and was already out of the room with his lively gait, looking so tall and gaunt in his black robes.

  Behind her counter, presiding immutably in her fleshy mass, the mistress of the baths, when I’d paid for our breakfast, asked me if I’d been happy with the bath, the room she’d assigned me, the barber who’d shaved me and my companion for the night.

  “Yes indeed!” I proclaimed. “Like a rat in straw!”

  “So you’ll be returning to see us?” asked this mountain of a woman, her breath coming in short gasps between each word.

  “Assuredly, good woman.”

  “In that case, Monsieur,” she wheezed, “may I ask you not to give Babeau a sol for her gratuity or that amount to Babette?”

  “Why ever not?” I asked in surprise.

  “Because,” she panted, “you’re spoiling the both of them, giving them for scarcely an hour’s work half of what I give them for an entire day.”

  “I’ll
think about it,” I replied coldly, and immediately turned on my heels and walked away, disgusted with this miserly gorgon.

  I have to admit that the grand’rue Saint-Honoré, which was my route, was much cleaner than many others in the capital, because it was lined with so many grand mansions belonging to the nobility, the Louvre being so close by, so that the paving stones tend to be relatively free of refuse. As I left the baths that morning, the air had something very piquant and exhilarating about it that I’ve never breathed anywhere else but in Paris, and which made you feel as though you had wings on your feet. Which is why, I imagine, the inhabitants of the city speak so abruptly and are so lively in their affairs and so heated in their passions, as if they were inebriated by the air they breathe into their lungs. And what’s more, despite the fact that at noon the air in the city could be as stifling as it was in Montpellier, the morning air was so cool and healing that you just wanted to warble like a bird, spread your wings and launch yourself into the silvery, misty light of the break of day, bursting with hope and as though drunk with life.

  And so it was with me that morning, walking along the pavement with a spring in my step, forgetting for the moment my despicable doublet, which, like the poisonous tunic of Nessus, prevented any access to the king to ask his pardon. It’s true that in my mind, ever since Fogacer (who was so good and beneficent in the teeth of his impieties) had promised to find my Angelina, I saw her as if in a daydream, walking beside me with her languorous step, and turning her long elegant neck to look at me with her beautiful doe’s eyes, which nothing could ever equal in their tenderness.