Heretic Dawn

by Robert Merle

  He responded immediately in a muffled voice as though musing to himself, “Ah! What about my war in Flanders? Can I abandon it?” Certainly, he could claim it as his war! For no one else at court had any appetite for it, except, fitfully, the king, who at one moment was persuaded to it by Coligny, and the next moment was convinced by the queen mother to abandon it.

  Assuredly, it was a serious and grand project to redirect all the rebellious feeling of the Huguenots towards an external conflict—lining them up side by side with the papists—instead of allowing them to continue cutting each other’s throats. But on the other hand, wasn’t it an empty dream to attempt to persuade the court to take up arms against Felipe II of Spain (the most solid rampart of the papacy) to protect the Protestant farmers of Flanders? And wasn’t it even more unrealistic to believe that one could separate this weak and flighty king from his mother, to whose skirts he’d been attached since childhood, both by her and by the counsellors with whom she’d surrounded him?

  Coligny continued to lie their silently, and I understood completely that, for him, leaving Paris meant confronting the king, thereby losing his favour and forever forgoing his greatest plan: to reconcile the subjects of the kingdom in a war that would bring down Felipe II. But I nevertheless impressed on him the dangers that were accumulating over our heads, the trap that was now set for us in this great city whose jaws were already closing on us, and the possibility that we could lose everything—not just our cause, but our very lives—if we remained here. What a temptation for our enemies! All of our leaders found themselves conveniently imprisoned within the walls of the capital and could be taken by surprise without any serious resistance, and slaughtered.

  “I’m well aware of all that you say,” Coligny replied. “Let everyone leave who wishes to ensure his safety. As for me, I’m ready to leave this life. I’ve lived long enough.”

  Looking at him, I realized that a man should never consent in advance to his own death, whether because of setbacks or sickness. At length, he added, to emphasize his repugnance at the solution that Monsieur de Ferrières was proposing:

  “My friend, I cannot leave Paris without reigniting the civil war, and I’d rather die than do that. But I am certain of one thing: I will not be betrayed. I have confidence in my king.”

  Noble words, assuredly, but ones in which I found—God forgive me!—a grain of absurdity, since it was obvious to anyone with a head for politics that the murder of the admiral and his cohort would not extinguish the civil war but, on the contrary, provide a new match with which to ignite it and cause the kingdom to burn like a bonfire in its flames. And as for Charles, how could a man of Admiral de Coligny’s honesty and character possibly understand the complexion of this wriggling earthworm?

  I understood, as I returned to deliver his message to the council being held downstairs, that this man of religion sought comfort in a quasi-religious faith in the word of the king. The crown concealed the man, who was so childish, inconstant and unstable that you could no more place your trust in him than you could in quicksand. He was a top, as Delay had said, a mere form of a man without content or will; he was an empty goblet that could equally well be filled with any wine—the best or the worst, or a weathercock spinning this way and that, according to the direction the wind was blowing.

  Monsieur de Ferrières and the others who shared his views, even if they dared not say so out loud, were extremely disappointed by Coligny’s decision, even though they expected it, knowing him as well as they did. And yet, even though the admiral had given them leave to quit Paris, I could see that they were ashamed to choose this option, so strong were their scruples about abandoning their leader in the middle of these perils to assure their own safety. As for Monsieur de Téligny, whose advice had been accepted, he had little cause for joy, since, no matter what we’d chosen, things looked exceedingly dark and stormy. I also noticed that Navarre, who now took his leave, agreed with the decision, though he had little to fear, being the brother-in-law of the king and under the protection of Margot, despite her little regard for him. In short, we dispersed without having resolved anything, except to remain in the capital.

  The next morning, which was Saturday, 23rd August, I was very surprised, as I came downstairs from my tiny room, to see that the atelier was empty and that the heavy oak shutters hadn’t been taken down from the windows. There was no trace of Alizon, Baragran or Coquillon. In attempting to leave the house, I found the door bolted and barred. With Miroul at my heels, we headed over to Maître Recroche’s wing of the house and found him in his kitchen, sitting down, not to enjoy a meal, but instead with several weapons, which he was polishing with an old rag.

  “Good day, Maître Recroche,” I greeted him. “What’s this? Are the helmet and halberd yours? Are you leaving for war?”

  “No,” he growled. He refused to rise to greet us or look us in the eye, but stared straight ahead, although he kept us in the corner of his right eye, like a vulture. “No,” he repeated, “but you have to polish things up when they get dirty.”

  “And how does it happen,” I asked, doubting as I did the veracity of his explanation, “that you’re not working today?”

  “Don’t you know?” he snarled coldly. “Tomorrow is St Bartholomew’s day, and when a saint’s day falls on a Sunday, we get the day before off.”

  “Yes, you have the afternoon off,” I agreed, “but not the morning, if I’m to believe what Alizon told me.”

  “Alizon is a silly idiot,” shot back Recroche, “who talks too much about what she doesn’t know. She’s the most unpleasant wench in creation.”

  “Ah, but she must be a good worker, Maître Recroche,” I parried, “otherwise you wouldn’t employ her. Are these weapons yours?”

  “Most assuredly so!” said Recroche proudly. “I’m a Parisian bourgeois,” he said with as much vanity as if he were announcing that he was a duc, “and every bourgeois in Paris must be armed and ready to defend his city and his king against his enemies.”

  “Ah, so you believe that your city and your king are going to be attacked?” I said, feigning surprise.

  “They already have been,” he said curtly, alluding, I surmised, to the siege of Paris by our party five years previously.

  After this, he said no more, but, studiously ignoring my presence in his kitchen, began to whistle and returned to his polishing. I was flabbergasted by his impertinence, even given how used I’d become to his usual incivility. The Parisians, when their backs are up, can be so disdainful of the aristocracy, especially if they’re from the provinces.

  “Maître Recroche,” I said archly but remaining calm, “I request that you open the door of the atelier so that I can remove my belongings.”

  “Nay, not so fast!” countered Recroche. “You must pay me for the water you’ve used.”

  “Now?” I said. “But I’m not leaving today.”

  “How do you know?” grinned Recroche with the utmost insolence. “Sometimes a man leaves sooner than he wants to. What’s more, I need my two rooms vacated by noon tomorrow.”

  “What?” I cried. “You rented them to us for the month!”

  “I changed my mind,” said Recroche stiffly.

  “Thief!” shouted Miroul, grabbing his halberd. “Do I need to run the handle of my spoon through your ribs to teach you to be civil with my master?”

  At this, Maître Recroche rose to his feet, very pale, and, his hands trembling at the end of his long arms, suddenly changed his tune and said:

  “I meant no offence, Monsieur. I’m only requesting my due.”

  “Your due!” I cried. “I paid you 180 écus for these two tiny rooms!”

  “Whether you remain till the end of the month or not,” he said, his eyes icy, “you must remember our little agreements.”

  “Certainly,” I said, “if we’d left willingly. But it’s just the opposite.”

  “Monsieur,” said Recroche, little by little regaining his colour, as Miroul lowered the halberd,
“do you really want to go to court for thirty sols that you owe me? Isn’t that a lot of bother for a man in your predicament? You have the king’s pardon in your pocket. Why don’t you take your rings and packages, including your Bible, and get out of here while you can? I will be in grave danger of being killed and pillaged if you remain here.”

  “Well,” I thought as I looked him in the eye, “my goodness! My Bible! The man knows who and what I am and now he wants to squeeze thirty sols out of me before throwing me out in the street and slamming the door behind me. He must feel pretty certain that Paris has turned against us and that everywhere people are polishing their weapons to cut our throats today! Otherwise he never would have treated me with such scorn.” If I were bloodthirsty enough I would have laid the scoundrel out at my feet, but given my father and my upbringing at Mespech I drank too deeply of the milk of human kindness to desire the death of a man, even such a wicked one as this, except when in mortal danger myself.

  “Monsieur,” I said calmly and coldly, throwing thirty sols on the table, “here’s your money. Open the doors. We’ll be gone tomorrow.”

  Recroche was very happy to pocket my money, and breathed a sigh of relief when Miroul placed the halberd on the table; and, taking his keys from a chain on his belt, he went to unbolt and unbar the door, just as Giacomi, whom I hadn’t wanted to waken, came downstairs and accompanied us into the street, intending to head to the Louvre.

  Having agreed to meet the maestro at noon at Guillaume Gautier’s tavern, I took my leave of him and set off to see Alizon in her tiny lodgings in the rue Tirechappe. As we walked through the streets, my good Miroul on my left, I noticed that, though it was a Saturday morning, all the shops were closed, their oak shutters firmly in place. I couldn’t help imagining that all the shopkeepers behind these locked and bolted doors were, like Maître Recroche, ferociously polishing their armour and weapons, in anticipation of a murderous attack on the Huguenots and the juicy pillaging of their goods, their jewels, their clothes and their horses, for many of our party had not come to the royal marriage without their finery and accoutrements, wishing thereby to honour the king and display their rank and status to all. “Ah,” I thought, “what a godsend, when pillaging and murder become—thanks to the papist preachers—shining badges guaranteeing one’s entry into heaven!”

  “Monsieur,” observed Miroul, who’d been watching my eyes and guessed my thoughts, “it looks like everything is being readied for the slaughter! We have to sound the retreat! It would be madness and pure stupidity to remain here with the entire city at our heels!”

  “Miroul,” I answered quietly, “Ambroise Paré is counting on me to watch over the admiral tonight. But tomorrow at daybreak, we’ll shake the dust from our shoes onto this atrocious city!”

  “Tomorrow!” said Miroul, his eyes full of fear. “Tomorrow? Put off our departure till tomorrow? When I can see the storm so near!”

  But we’d arrived, and I told him to wait outside while I went up to see Alizon, who, when she saw me, threw her arms around my neck with a little cry, closing the door behind me with a kick, and kissed my face repeatedly, pressing me to her. I felt so comforted by her feminine sweetness in the misfortune I was facing! After we’d taken our pleasure in each other, I recounted my conversation with Maître Recroche.

  “Me, talk about what I don’t know? That’s a lie! On the eve of a saint’s day that falls on a Sunday, we get the afternoon off, not the morning. If the merchants refused to open their shops at dawn this morning it’s because they fear a popular uprising and the looting that always follows it. Which is why the miser Recroche kicked you out on the street: he believes you’re heretics and fears they’ll murder you in his house and then loot the place, taking his things with yours.”

  “My sweet,” I said, frowning, “do you believe the uprising is going to break out today?”

  “Who doesn’t think so?” she answered. Then, leaning on her elbow, the better to look at me in a mixture of tenderness and derision, she continued in her brisk and abrupt Parisian accent, “Oh, Pierre, I’m amazed at your simplicity! You may be a nobleman and a venerable doctor, but you don’t understand this city. Here, at the slightest provocation, the paving stones jump out of the streets by themselves, given how rebellious and mutinous the Parisians are whenever anyone tries to make them eat soup they don’t like. Now, listen to me! This is not a breeze, it’s a tempest. Our good priests have been telling us since yesterday: these heretic dogs want to take out their revenge for Coligny’s wounds on the house of Guise, whom we love and venerate because he, and he alone, is the only sure bastion of Christendom. And this is why everyone in the city is preparing to arm themselves to defend Guise and chase down these demons! Blessed Virgin! When the clock strikes one, we’re going to crush this vermin!”

  “What? Even the peaceable workers and inhabitants of the city?”

  “Them too! They’re vipers, even if all they do is walk down the streets with their noses in their coats.”

  “What, your neighbours as well?”

  “Our neighbours?” she cried, shuddering as if to shake them off her like fleas. “Who would want such vipers for neighbours? Do you know, Pierre, I just saw something that made me very happy. About six o’clock, as I was running through the streets looking for my milk vendor, I saw the coal vendor marking with a white cross the doors of certain houses in the rue Tirechappe where these fiends live. The dizeniers were reading the numbers from a piece of paper.”

  “Dizeniers?” I asked to hide my terror. “What’s that? What sort of jargon is that?”

  “Silly boy!” she laughed as if it were a wonderful jest. “Don’t you have them in the provinces? They’re the officers of the city. The quarteniers command the quartiers, the districts—of which there are sixteen in Paris. Each quartier is divided into ten dizaines, whose commanders are called dizeniers, and in each dizaine there are fifty streets and alleyways, each one commanded by a cinquantenier. In this way we have our leaders who will call us together and give orders when we take up arms.”

  “And all this without orders from the king?”

  “Well,” said Alizon, smiling slyly, “this time we’ll have to do without him, if this little shit of a kinglet insists on supporting the admiral.”

  I felt such alarm at hearing this that, fearing that it might show on my face, I began laughing to hide my terror.

  “My sweet, if this is the situation, how does it happen that Maître Recroche has become so valiant as to be taking up arms with the rest?”

  “Valiant? That little hypocrite?” Alizon hissed with an air of profound contempt. “He’s only getting ready for the looting! He was never seen during the siege when there was fighting to do! And you can be sure of this, my Pierre: if there’s a general uprising today or tomorrow, he’ll fill his pockets and won’t strike a blow! Except against the women and children of these Huguenot dogs.”

  “What?” I cried, shaken by what I’d just heard. And getting up from the bed, my face so contorted with disgust that I could hardly speak (and my throat so constricted it hurt), I stammered, “Alizon, I can’t believe you’re saying this. Women? Children? Are they going to be massacred as well? Is that not infamous and pitiless?”

  “I would have thought so, too,” she admitted, not without some shame, “but the good priest Maillard said no, and that it would be cruel under the circumstances not to be inhuman, because God Himself has commanded us to wipe this wicked brood from the face of the earth once and for all, bitches and puppies along with them.”

  “Oh, Alizon!” I burst out, giving full vent to my indignation. “These bitches are women like you, and their puppies, as you call them, are just like your little Henriot, except that he happens to be a Catholic by accident of birth and the other little infants happen, by another accident of birth, to be Huguenots. If they have to be murdered on that account, then the Bible is wrong and Herod was right to commit the massacre of the innocents!”

  “But Pierre,” A
lizon cried, clearly very upset to have ignited such an outburst of anger and chagrin over something she doubtless repeated daily with all her neighbours without ever thinking about it, “if we don’t kill them, they’ll kill us!”

  “Really? How could they, you silly goose, when there are so few of them? And when the king is against them and all the king’s regiments? And the great majority of the people?”

  “But that’s exactly what they’re doing to our children in the provinces! They kill them when they’re the stronger party!”

  “Oh, Alizon,” I sighed, “maybe a ferocious animal like the Baron des Adrets could commit such horrors, but I don’t believe they were very widespread, given what I witnessed at the Michelade in Nîmes; and though they cruelly shed a lot of Catholic blood, they at least spared the women and children!”

  “What?” hissed Alizon indignantly. “You’re not defending these wicked heretics now, are you Pierre?”

  “I have very good reasons for doing so!” I cried, my anger becoming suddenly so intense that I completely lost control of myself. “I’ve hidden this from you till now, Alizon, so as not to interfere with your zeal, but, if you must know, I am one of these dogs you’ve been talking about, and you must have suspected as much, given how dog-like I’ve behaved with you and your little Henriot. You should know that my mother raised me as a Catholic until I was ten but that my father ordered me to convert to his faith or be banished for ever from his house. So this is why I must now appear to you to be a heretical dog, a demon from hell, a viper, butcher’s meat, and I don’t know what else!”

  “Ah, Pierre,” she cried, “don’t shout so loud! The walls have ears, and if anyone heard you, you’d be immediately torn to pieces by the neighbours!”

  “Why don’t you do it yourself?” I rasped hoarsely, now completely beside myself with grief and anger, and, pulling my dagger, I offered it to her. “What are you waiting for? It’ll just be one less heretical dog and you’d go straight to heaven for this single blow without passing through Purgatory, like your priest Maillard told you in his sermon!”