Authors: Robert Merle
“What?” I replied, as we emerged onto the rue de la Ferronnerie. “Are Parisian women so nasty?”
“It’s not just Paris, it’s everywhere in the kingdom!” sneered Monsieur de L’Étoile. “There’s no more malicious animal in the world than woman and no animal more lubricious than man.”
“Ha! Ha!” I laughed. “Can you prove it?”
“A thousand times over!” said L’Étoile, shaking his head. “Listen to this! Monsieur de Neuville, a councillor in the parliament here, a confused young man, with little learning and less wisdom, so small a brain that he probably couldn’t cook a roast, goes around bragging about the size of his member. Now, in an alley opposite his house, there lives a merchant, whose beautiful wife can often be seen at her window. So he decided this August to go parading naked at his window, trying to show off his advantages, and the lady, getting an eyeful of these, went to tell her husband about it. The husband then hid in his window with a small crossbow, and shot a tiny dart at this proud target, so wounding it that the councillor had to take to his bed. This happened yesterday, Siorac, in this very street where we’re walking.”
“Ah, that’s marvellous, my dear L’Étoile! How did you hear of it?”
“Well, I have a reputation for knowing everything,” said L’Étoile, “so that an egg doesn’t get laid in Paris without some vain Gautier rushing to tell me about it, asking me if I know about it.”
I noticed, as we neared the church of Saint-Eustache, that a great crowd of people was arriving from all of the surrounding streets. “Is this Maillard so learned?”
“Not at all. He’s just one of the thousands of priests and monks who shape the opinions of the Parisians.”
“Thousands?” I asked, amazed. “Are there really that many?”
“Ah, Siorac,” whispered L’Étoile, “the place is crawling with them. There are at least ten in every street, and there are 413 streets in the capital. Siorac, be very careful not to smile or laugh at what Maillard says in Saint-Eustache, no matter how absurd: his parishioners would tear you to pieces.”
“Trust me,” I replied, elbowing him playfully, “I shall be as prayerful and humble as the Devil himself!”
Oh reader! You should have seen Maillard when he appeared in the pulpit! What a low and ugly face he had, with his large and oily
nose, big, bloodthirsty mouth, blazing eyes, shaggy eyebrows, reddish and pimply skin, and butcher’s hands more suited to cutting throats in an abattoir than to making the sign of the cross in absolution.
“Today,” he said, eyes lowered in feigned humility and speaking quietly in his deep voice, which would follow a steady crescendo throughout his sermon and ultimately explode like thunder, “I’m going to speak about women and heretics.”
Having said this, he paused and appeared to be praying, and though the church was full of people there was such silence you could have heard a nun breaking wind.
“Oh, you women! Oh, you girls! Oh, you maidens!” said Maillard, hammering his lectern with his fist. “You who live in vanity and lubricity, take heed! You who know only how to lead men into temptation! You who make up your faces to attract your customers! You who cover your heads with vainglorious wigs and hairpieces whose blonde hair waves over your pearled foreheads! Oh, you women! What are you doing? The Lord gave you a face and you invent another one! He gave you a body and you invent another one! You squeeze and press your breasts into close bodices! You swell your thighs with hoop skirts! You increase your backsides with false arses! You raise yourselves on high heels! You pout! You flirt! You give inviting glances! You sway when you walk and one has only to look at you to know you’re deep in sin!”
And here Maillard closed his eyes and moved his lips as though he were praying again, while his congregation, awaiting his next words, held their breath.
“Oh, you women! Oh, you girls! Oh, you maidens!” continued Maillard in a menacing voice, banging his enormous fists on his lectern again. “Do you ever think about what you’re doing? You who claim to be so modest that you don’t even show yourselves naked to your husbands, but shamelessly parade your bodies in the street, have
you thought about what’s going to happen when you stand before the Lord’s tribunal after you die?”
And, after another pause, Maillard continued in a thunderous voice:
“Well, I’ll tell you here and now! As punishment for your vanities and excesses, the devils in hell will strip you naked; these devils will drag you thousands of times across the entire length of hell, not before one man, but before 100,000 men, who will shout at you and laugh at you, seeing your shame and degradation. And how embarrassed you’ll be then, when you’re dragged naked before men, showing them all your shameful places, dragged throughout hell a thousand thousand times in a great fanfare of trumpets, with devils laughing and mocking you and shouting, ‘Look! Look! See this whore! Look at this lewd bawd! This is Mademoiselle so-and-so who lives in such and such a street in Paris!’—naming you and naming your street—‘who has so often lain with such and such a man and so many others!’
“And then 100,000 and another 100,000 people who, during your life, you women, you’ve know well, your dead parents, your friends, your neighbours, all furious with you, vowing mortal hatred, will run up to make fun of you, saying to each other, ‘There she is, naked! The bawd! There she is, the fat bitch! After her, devils! Attack her, you demons! Get her, you furies! All together, now, leap on these shameless whores!’ And they will give you back double in torments and torture all the pleasures you stole in this life!”
Having screamed these words at the top of his lungs, Maillard fell silent again, his face crimson, his fists clenched on his lectern, his eyes half-closed, watching his flock as if spying on them to see the effects of his words, which, as far as I could tell, appealed much more to the men than to the women, for, to hear him, you’d think it was only the latter who were sinners and not the former. And as I looked around, I observed among the women signs of both fear and anger, and sensed that it was dawning on them how unjust he’d
been to them, a feeling they could express only through the furtive looks they exchanged. Whether Maillard could feel these mutinous reactions, or whether he was carried away by the voluptuousness of his images of hell, I know not, but, regaining his breath and his voice, he launched again into descriptions of the tortures and torments the devils would inflict on these naked women, and in such horrible and repulsive detail that I could not possibly repeat them here without offending my readers.
In any case, he succeeded in casting such fear into the hearts of these women for the crime of being women that it seemed to me that he was seeking revenge on them for his having been denied access to their bodies by his vows.
What’s more, this sermon, for all its mad cruelty, struck me as particularly useless, because I don’t believe the terrors of the afterlife have ever prevailed in men’s hearts over the pleasures of the moment, especially since, in the papist religion, it was enough for these sinning women to go to have their confession heard to wash them of all their sins and wipe their slates clean. The most one could hope to gain from such depraved eloquence was that it might increase the number of penitents and the sums of money they’d have to pay the priests for their absolution.
But when Maillard had finally reached the end of his list of the frightful torments awaiting the sweeter half of humanity when they arrived in hell, in retribution for the activities they’d carried on with the other half, he again fell silent and prayed for a long time, and then started up again in a hushed voice:
“However great the excesses of you women and however just the punishments that will be visited upon you in hell, these are nothing in comparison with the frightful and ongoing crimes against our Holy Mother the Church, against the Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, against all our saints, against God Himself, by the bloodthirsty
adherents of the so-called reformed religion. Oh, my brothers! For a month, we’ve seen these damned Huguenots flood by the hundreds and hundreds into our city of Paris, laughing and sneering like devils hiding in adulterous alcoves, to attend the infamous wedding—and I say
infamous
wedding!—that is to unite (God Himself has veiled His eyes) a great Catholic princesse, the sister of our sovereign, with the false and sly reformed fox, Navarre. Oh, heaven! Can one really unite fire and water in an unnatural, and, I dare to say, prostituted union? Will they be able to find a single renegade bishop in this entire kingdom willing to celebrate this union, when our Holy Father the Pope opposes it with all his might? And if misfortune should prevail and this marriage take place in the teeth of his opposition, will it not be the work and fruit of Satan, who allowed the sinister leader of the Huguenots to get the ear of our poor king, who has been incited by this perfidious and corrupting counsellor to send help to the outlawed Huguenots in Flanders against the armies of the Rex Catholicissimus, Felipe II of Spain, who today stands on the ramparts of our Roman faith in Christianity?… Oh, my brothers! Will we continue to tolerate being poisoned in our city by these undesirable guests, who, swarming like maggots in a corpse, have infiltrated our houses to corrupt our beliefs and, failing that, dream only of destroying us completely, body and soul? Oh, my brothers! Believe me! All we need is a little heart and a little courage to rid ourselves for ever of this swarm of vermin and set about the holy extermination that has been recommended by our Holy Father, and that will forever assure your safety and your repose—yours, your wives’ and your children’s. Oh, my beloved brothers! If you will join in this good work, that of seizing the most sacred of swords, to extirpate the human roots of this evil heresy, condemned by God, then, I tell you, in the name of God the Father, Christ and the Holy Ghost, your salvation shall be assured and you will enter directly into Paradise with His most happy saints,
and not pass through Purgatory. The blood of a single heretic, I mean a single one, will purify you of all the sins you’ve ever committed.
“Yes, my beloved brothers, verily I say unto you, had you committed up to this very minute the most heinous crimes, offences, lewdness or atrocities, even had you killed your father, mother, brother, sister and cousin, all these sins would be forgiven when you arm yourself to avenge God of these miscreants and save the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church from these stinking heretics who are trying to destroy her.”
Having bellowed these hideous words, while hammering away at the lectern with his fists, Maillard fell silent again for a few moments, before continuing in a smoother, more soft-spoken manner:
“This is the most profound grace, my brothers, that I could ever wish for you here, and now bid you pray to God that in His bountiful mercy, He assist you in the success of the just and laudable enterprise that I’ve just explained. My brothers, let us commune in the edifying and comforting thought that we will soon have extirpated all heresy in this kingdom
ad maximam Dei gloriam,
††
and recite together a paternoster and an Ave.”
“For the love of Heaven, Siorac,” L’Étoile whispered, “stop shaking like a decapitated duck and, for goodness’ sake, pray! Pray out loud! Everyone in here is spying on everyone else, and it would be your death, and mine as well, if anyone suspected that you oppose what you just heard.”
Casting a quick glance around me at all the eyes burning with zeal, anger and hatred, I hastened to obey the good L’Étoile, and, my heart breaking, I joined my voice to those around me who were devoutly invoking God’s help in giving them the courage to kill a significant swath of Christendom. And so I managed to recite the prayer out loud, though with some difficulties here and there in remembering the Ave
Maria, despite the fact that Barberine had taught it to me as a child, and that I’d all the more happily recited it twice a day since I mixed together the Virgin Mary and Barberine in my childish imagination.
It would have been mere lip service to recite it now, among these misguided souls, had I not given it a particular inflection, praying instead for the fraternal reconciliation between the papists and ourselves so that neither of these parties should ever repeat on one another the massacre of the Michelade, which had marked my youth with such unforgettable horror.
“Siorac,” hissed L’Étoile as we finally left Saint-Eustache, “not a word, I beg you, until we reach your lodgings: someone might overhear.”
And so I had to hold myself back and swallow my anger until we were back in Maître Recroche’s atelier, which was empty, since all work was forbidden on Sundays and saints’ days, these latter having become way too numerous to suit Maître Recroche, who had little love for priests, because, he said, “every time they preach, they invent another saint and we lose another day of work: a benefit for the collection box and a disaster for us artisans”.
“My dear L’Étoile,” I said, my throat all knotted up from what I’d just heard, “are they preaching this infernal message in all the churches, chapels and abbeys of Paris?”
“The truth is that there are priests who are less rabid than Maillard, but there are also some who are worse.”
“Well,” I said, full of fear and confusion, “my good, honest friend, what was that? What was that if not an incitement to massacre?”
“Clear and obvious. The reason you’re surprised is that in the provinces you don’t go to hear Mass. But I hear this kind of language every Sunday, and if it appals me each time, it hardly surprises me any more. Oh, my dear Siorac, believe me! Don’t remain here a minute longer than you need to for your petition. Leave as soon as you can! You’d be safer in the hands of the Grand Turk than in Paris as it is now!”
As he was speaking, there came a knock on the door, and since there was no one else at home at this hour, I went to open it and, distracted as I was by the sad conversation we’d been having, I saw in front of me a tall, well-dressed woman, whom I should have recognized despite her mask, but I greeted her with reserve and asked quite coldly who it was she wished to see in our lodgings.