Authors: Robert Merle
“It’s in the south, my friend, below the Loire.”
“I could tell from your accent it’s in the south. So, good Monsieur, you’re coming to the wedding?”
“I am!”
“I hope you enjoy it after all the expense that’s been lavished on it! These royal weddings are such a splash! Kings don’t fornicate any better than we do, and the husband can’t piss straighter than my late husband, I can tell you! And so, pretty man, what are you? Rome or Geneva?”
I hesitated a bit before answering: “I’m of the same religion as the king.”
“Nay!” said she with a wry smile, having seen me hesitate. “The king? Which king is that? The king of France or the king of Navarre? They don’t have the same one. One goes to his service, the other to his Mass, even though one’s marrying the sister of the other. There, there,” she added, hearing no response, “it doesn’t matter to me! It’s for the nobles to fight over Churches. As for me, what my priest tells me goes in one ear and out the other, so that in these matters I have as much brain as a sucked egg.”
“Oh, good woman,” I laughed, “I don’t believe you. There’s nothing wrong with your brain!”
“Nor with yours! Though you speak French like a southerner. Oh, oh! I’ve upset you, Monsieur! No offence, I beg you!”
“I took none, I assure you!”
“Are you married?”
“My friend,” I laughed, “if I’m not, will you have me?”
“Oh, no!” she giggled. “Widow I am and man will I have none! I’m better off since my late husband died. Marriage is a nasty business. Look at Navarre and Margot. He won’t get a virgin for a wife. She was too taken with Guise. And she won’t have him for herself: he’s too fond of the petticoat. This wedding is a bad bargain.”
“Ah, my friend, you have a lively tongue, I see.”
But before she could answer, we were so pressed from the horsemen behind us, with imprecations that would make a bull blush, I had to spur on Pompée, and lost the milkmaid from view. I was surprised, however, how openly she dared gossip about the royal family, and with such impertinence. “Well,” I thought, “if two leagues from Paris people are already so mutinous and rebellious, what will it be like in the capital?”
The five horsemen who had so bumped us from behind, and with such foul language and mean aspect, finally passed us, madly whipping on their malnourished mounts with sharp crops.
“I despise these profane and pitiless rascals,” snarled Giacomi, who was usually so serene, “and if I hadn’t restrained myself, I would have had at them with my sword.” Hardly had he said this when these impatient ruffians, finding a horseman clothed all in black blocking their way, hurled a torrent of insults at him, and one of them knocked his hat off with his crop.
“
Bestia feroce!
”
‡
cried Giacomi. “My brother, shall we have at them?”
“By all means!” I agreed, drawing my sword.
But when these scoundrels saw the four of us bearing down on them, swords flashing, they gave full rein and we were unable to give them more than a couple of sword swipes before they’d galloped away.
“Miroul,” I said, “pick up that gentlemen’s hat and dust if off for him.”
“I thank God and I thank you,” said the stranger, who had the appearance of a legal man, and he immediately asked my name, and told me his, which struck me as most poetic, for he was called Pierre de L’Étoile—though he did not look like a poet, neither in his dress nor in his appearance, nor yet in his speech, which seemed moralistic
and morose and very bitter about the morality of our times. The rampant immorality surrounding us, he said with great indignation, surpassed anything he’d known in his youth, the population having been corrupted by the bad example set by the royal family, the civil wars, the fanaticism of the preachers and its own stupidity!
“The people of Paris,” he complained, “are more ignorant and gullible than any other in the world, and insolent in proportion to their ignorance:
quo quisque stultior, eo magis insolescit
.”
§
I looked at him as he rode by my side, all the while exhaling his angry wisdom. He had a long nose, lips curled in anger, and a deeply furrowed brow, and yet, when he turned towards me, his lively eyes sparkled with some beneficence in spite of his bile. I sensed in him a man of unshakeable honesty and character—and, as events were to prove, I was not wrong about this. I guessed as well from the rigour of his aspect and speech that he was a Huguenot, but he disabused me of this idea as soon as I told him I was for reform.
“Oh, Monsieur,” he gasped, looking around with a terrified look, as if, despite the din of the wagons and horses on the stones of the road, someone might overhear us, “you mustn’t talk so openly here, trusting the first person you meet. There is great peril in Paris not just in saying who you are, but in being what I am. I’m of the Roman Church to be sure, but not so fanatical that I prefer a Spanish Catholic to a French Huguenot. I suspect that who’s really in charge of the kingdom now,” he added, gnashing his teeth, “is a cabal of Catherine, who is Florentine, Guise, who is from Lorraine, the papal nuncio, who is Roman, and Felipe II, who is Iberian. By God, I hate it that foreigners have come to Paris to rule us and put knives in our hands to dispatch the Huguenots, who are, after all, our compatriots!
Nefas nocere vel malo fratri puta
.”
¶
“So,” I thought to myself, “if even for this good fellow I’m a ‘bad’ brother, I shudder to think what I will be for the Parisians!”
Meanwhile, Pierre de L’Étoile fell silent, struggling to regain control of his mood, which, without doubt, was bilious and sad, but isn’t it a sign of good health to express one’s anger this way? Isn’t it better to drain the pus from an infection than to leave it under that skin to poison the blood?
“Monsieur de Siorac,” he continued after catching his breath, and finding a more civil tone, “have you reserved a room in an inn in Paris?”
“I’m afraid not. We’re trusting to good fortune.”
“Which,” said Pierre de L’Étoile, “will not smile on you. There isn’t at present a single room, no matter how small or paltry—and I include the most piss-stained and infested in the city—that isn’t so full you couldn’t lodge a single cockroach.”
“So what should be done?” I asked, very upset by this news.
“You must stay at the home of some worker or inhabitant of the city, which, in any case, would be much better for you.”
“And why so?”
“Because,” said Pierre, “all the innkeepers have been told by the provost of the Grand Châtelet to report all the names and origins of their guests, as well as a list of their horses and arms.”
“Their arms!” I said quietly. “I don’t like that one bit!”
“Nor do I!” agreed Pierre. “This Spanish Inquisition stinks!”
“But I don’t know a living soul in Paris!”
“Monsieur de Siorac,” said Pierre de L’Étoile, “I owe you a debt of gratitude for having chased off those insolent rascals whom, if I could, I would have gladly sent to the gallows.” (And he grew angry all over again as he said this.) “And if you are willing, I will take you to the rue de la Ferronnerie, to the home of a dressmaker who, because I have somewhat straightened out his affairs, would gladly lodge
you. His name is Maître Recroche, and he’s more miserly than any Norman of Normandy, though he was born in Paris, as I was, and, like me, has never budged from here—except that I sometimes visit my land in Perche, whence I’m returning now. But Maître Recroche is a good enough fellow, though he likes money too well. And he won’t report your names to the provost as long as you attend Mass, as I would advise you to do.”
“Ah, Monsieur! I must go to Mass!”
“You must,” said Pierre de L’Étoile. “It’s the rule of rules, and one that must be obeyed here.”
Whether it was the “rule of rules” I doubted, and still do. Some people say that disguising what one believes in the face of persecution is wisdom. Others call it cowardice. Who can decide in such grave circumstances? There’s no doubt that rushing to offer yourself to the gibbet and disembowelment is madness. But if we never confess what we believe in this world, what kind of world would we have?
And so we went along, saddle to saddle, talking, Samson and Giacomi following us and trailing behind them, Miroul skilfully leading our packhorse. We could not proceed faster than a walk since the approach to Paris was now so encumbered by wagons that we occasionally had to stop altogether and wait for the tangle of horses to get sorted out. Ah, how interminable these last few leagues seemed in my fever to lay my eyes on this city I’d heard so much about and that Cossolat had execrated as entirely as Monsieur de Montaigne had lauded it to the skies.
We crossed the Seine at a little village called Saint-Cloud, and since the bridge was so narrow, and though it further slowed our progress, I had time to admire the sailboats taking advantage of a favourable wind to move upstream against the current. There were many of them, and large enough to carry various goods, some straw, others hay, since, as Pierre de L’Étoile told me, there were 100,000 horses in
Paris. Which, when you calculate it, makes one horse for every three inhabitants! Is that not amazing! I imagined that the carting of hay and straw must have been much less dear by river than by road. And yet, I also imagined from what I saw, that sailing required patience and allowance for delays when the wind refused to cooperate, especially given the many curves in the river. As for me, I found the sight of all of these sails quite beautiful, some coloured red, others blue, slipping languidly along the surface; and, in the opposite direction, a series of barges followed the rapid current with nothing but their oars to guide them.
Once past the pleasant little village of Saint-Cloud, on either side of the road the fields and pastures opened up again, and nested here and there in this verdure were little villages, whose labourers crowded on both sides of the road, selling their produce, which only added to the confusion of the traffic of carts and wagons. But what I found quite beautiful in the midst of all this confusion were the many windmills set up on the hills in the distance to the right and left of the road, their turning blades catching the last rays of the setting sun. I thought to myself that these mills had better not stop turning day or night if they wanted to grind enough flour to feed the vast population of this city.
Towards nightfall, we reached the Faubourg Saint-Germain, which didn’t appeal to me in the least, being poor and run-down, its streets unpaved and the shadowy figures that haunted them dirty, clothed in rags and mean-looking, walking slowly in front of our horses and darting nasty looks at us as if they wanted to rob or kill us if they could.
We passed by the rich abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, whose walls rose to impressive heights, as if the monks within had wanted to protect their treasures from the covetousness of the villains who swarmed at their feet. The entire abbey struck me as a city within a city, since it was surrounded on every side by so many beautiful buildings. Pierre de L’Étoile explained to me that on the other side of the
abbey lay the clerks’ meadow, which had been the cause of endless disputes between the monks and the students at the university who had disputed the ownership of these fields from time immemorial. If it hadn’t been after six, he would have made a detour to show them to us, since it was in this meadow that the reformers in Paris had first gathered to sing their Psalms, a sign of the frightful persecutions they were later to endure.
Pierre de L’Étoile became so angrily indignant when he talked about these inquisitions that I began to think, despite what he had said earlier, that he harboured secret sympathies for the reformers. I found this very moving and it increased my affection for him more than anything he’d said or done up to that point.
As we talked, and Monsieur de L’Étoile pointed out various outlying sections of the city he loved so much—even as he repeatedly pointed out its “warts and blemishes” (though I understood later that such a querulous love is shared by most Parisians)—we finally reached the city walls, which, to my great surprise, I found mediocre, paltry, dilapidated and badly maintained.
“Tell me, Monsieur,” I gasped, “are these the walls of the greatest city in the kingdom? What a pity to see them in such disrepair! Carcassonne, by contrast, has superlative defences and Montpellier is also well protected by its common wall.”
“God bless us! Monsieur de Siorac,” hissed Pierre de L’Étoile, suddenly angry again, “you don’t know how right you are! For this section of the wall, which runs from the Buccy gate to the Saint-Germain gate, isn’t even the worst of it, as bad as it looks! If you only knew what a pitiful state the wall in the Saint-Martin section is, you’d blush, as I do, for the sorry state of the kingdom. Rabelais said of that part of the wall, that if a cow farted nearby, she would demolish an entire section of it! But do you think any effort was made since the divine Rabelais’s death to restore this paltry mess? Not a bit of
it! We spend much more on the foppish finery of our princes than on the security of their capital!”
We passed the drawbridge at the Buccy gate in a great press of carts and wagons and were obliged to present our safe-conduct passes, which, luckily, Cossolat had delivered to us in Montpellier before our departure from that city, for we had none from Sarlat since Monsieur de La Porte, who was the only one authorized to dispense them, was supposed to be hunting us to throw us in jail.
But the sergeant hardly even looked at them, doubtless because he was so exhausted from the press of humanity that had passed by him, hurrying like madmen to get into the city before they closed these gates for the night.
Oh, reader, what a disappointment! For even though the street we took once we passed through the Buccy gate was straight enough, the houses on either side were so high, so badly aligned, the paving stones so littered with garbage, filth and sewage water, and the air so putrid and dense, that I thought I’d entered a cesspool instead of a great capital.
But I kept my feelings to myself so as to avoid causing pain to my choleric companion, and, on the contrary, as we were passing the church of Saint-André-des-Arts I expressed my admiration for this structure, to which he replied sullenly, as if he were ashamed of the mud our horses were slogging through: