The Friar of Carcassonne (19 page)

Lack of information shrouds the start of Patrice's career as a political figure and the question of whether he rose to prominence independent of the scheming of the powerful Franciscan. The muddiness dissipates in the years 1303–5, however, for unquestionably the two men acted in concert, their aims identical. Henceforth Bernard had a useful partner, able to mobilize his muscular followers. Taken along with Jean de Picquigny, the king's plenipotentiary in Languedoc and Bernard's pliable ally, Hélie Patrice made the friar's position one of great promise.

Picquigny lit the fuse. By midsummer 1303, he saw—or perhaps was told by Bernard—that tempers were running abnormally high in Carcassonne. The rumor mill churned incessantly and the atmosphere in the Bourg bordered on the febrile. The very real prospect of revolt alarmed Picquigny, so much so that he called a meeting to see if he could defuse the situation. The secret accord of 1299, the subject of all conversations, had to reveal its secrets.

The meeting took place some time at the beginning of August 1303. Picquigny summoned his guests to the house of Raimond Costa, the absentee troublemaker turned bishop in the Kingdom of Majorca. No fewer than thirty royal officials were present, as were representatives of the deposed consular elite and Patrice's coterie. Although it was August, the room must have felt chilly. As requested, the former consul Gui Sicre extracted the accord from the strongbox in his home and presented it to Picquigny at the Costa townhouse.

The king's inspector and his lawyers bent over the parchment studiously. So much had been whispered, insinuated, claimed about this agreement that a close reading of it was essential. Jean de Picquigny finally looked up at Gui Sicre. As the latter testified years later at Bernard's trial, Picquigny handed him back the parchment, saying, “My good fellow, here is your agreement. I would have drawn it up the same way had I been there, given the nature of relations between the Bourg and the inquisitor.” The ex-consuls breathed a sigh of relief, as this reaction signaled royal satisfaction with them.

Bernard Délicieux then entered the house, approached Sicre, and asked him for the document. Sicre, undoubtedly buoyed by Picquigny's endorsement, handed it over. All eyes watched as Brother Bernard scanned the document. The friar did not hand the parchment back to Sicre. Instead he crossed the room and laid it out again before Picquigny. There were, indeed, objectionable elements in the accord, Bernard explained. What on first reading seemed innocuous turned out to be pernicious, even treacherous. Bernard insisted on having a copy of it and asked Picquigny to withhold judgment until it had been rigorously scrutinized.

Whether Picquigny agreed with Délicieux's analysis is unknown, but the king's man, fatefully, acceded to the friar's request. The meeting, like most meetings, was adjourned without anything having been decided one way or the other. In 1299 the consuls had either acted honorably or betrayed their fellow townsmen. Four years on, it was up to public opinion to judge.

Picquigny must have felt confident that the unanswered question no longer stung so acutely as to spark revolt. Progress had been made toward a resolution of the matter, which no doubt the good people of Carcassonne would appreciate. He left town soon afterward to attend to business in the westernmost reaches of Languedoc.

Similarly, the inquisitor of Carcassonne, Geoffroy d'Ablis, decamped to Toulouse on church business. Whether he was exercising the better part of valor or was truly unconcerned about the situation in the streets did not matter. In practical terms, the senior royal official and inquisitor had quit Carcassonne at the same time, leaving the town to Bernard Délicieux and Hélie Patrice.

Patrice and his men took advantage of the situation to stoke the flames of indignation with tales of covert betrayal and secret plotting, bringing the Bourg to a fever pitch. The head of Bernard's convent and several civic officials appealed to Délicieux to use his great talents to calm the people. His superiors decided that he would preach a sermon the following Sunday, August 4, 1303, in the church of the Franciscan convent. Each household of the town was instructed to have one or two members present to hear what Brother Bernard had to say. An arsonist had been asked to put out a fire.

On that Sunday morning seven centuries ago, the tabula rasa—the long-vanished Franciscan convent in Carcassonne—received its liveliest inscription. When Brother Bernard mounted the pulpit, few in the packed church would have known what to expect. The former consuls no doubt hoped his would be a message of respect and reconciliation. Hélie Patrice and his partisans hoped otherwise. For the majority in the church, belonging to neither faction, there was only fear and foreboding, the alarums of future danger more credible now that the accord had been seen by their leaders.

For Bernard, the congregation was not an audience of one, as at Senlis, but an assembly for which he had been trained in the art of preaching. His listeners were medieval men and women, prone to outbursts of emotion and sudden accesses of depair or joy, fervent believers in the marvelous, profoundly superstitious, spiritual, swayed by eloquent conviction, edified by fable and parable. They were his contemporaries.

The Scripture reading earlier in the service had been taken from the nineteenth chapter of Luke. Disconsolate over the misfortunes that are to befall Jerusalem in the years to come, Jesus tells the city, “For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will build an embankment about you and surround you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you.”

Bernard took a breath and looked out at the sea of expectant faces. “As He approached Jerusalem and saw the city,” the friar read in a whisper, “Jesus wept.” A tear welled up, then slowly rolled down his cheek. He remained silent. Then another teardrop, and another. Soon he was crying, his shoulders shuddering beneath his simple brown tunic. His anguished sobs filled the sanctuary, his head bowed down in grief. The congregation watched, amazed, as their guide wept openly for minutes on end.

At last he recovered, wiped the tears away. Eyes glistening, he raised his head and managed to croak, “I am . . . Jesus Christ.”

In any era, this would be an astounding thing to say. His listeners must have leaned forward, not believing their ears. He was Jesus, Bernard intoned, his voice rising, because he had been sent to save the people of Carcassonne. Old Jerusalem had not listened to the prophecy of Jesus, and the pagan armies of Rome had destroyed it, stone by stone. Outsiders had come and demolished it.

Carcassonne was Jerusalem, Bernard proclaimed. Men had come intent on its destruction. Outsiders. Evildoers. Dominicans. They would not be satisfied until the city lay in ruins, its people in chains. He begged the people of Carcassonne to heed him and resist the traitors who aided and abetted the inquisitors in their dark designs.

He then proceeded to give the bleakest possible interpretation of the accord of 1299, claiming that the city now lay at the mercy of the Dominicans. In the agreement, the consuls had abjured heresy in the name of the entire town, an admission of guilt that applied to everyone. One slip, one untoward word, he warned the assemblage, and they would be wrongly declared a relapsed heretic, to be bundled off to the bonfire. Their families would be shunned for generations, as all would fear association with them. There was no hope for anyone in Carcassonne in the wake of this betrayal, for no drop of mercy had ever been shown by the inquisition.

Bernard had confirmed the worst of all the rumors. Anyone at any time could be hauled off to the Wall by the inquisitors who, the friar continued, had the gall to call themselves men of the Lord. But, in truth, they were wolves in sheep's clothing. If this sounded familiar to his listeners, there was a reason: Bernard had turned the standard trope of the
sermo generalis
, the sentencing sermon of the inquisitor, on its head, using the Dominicans' rhetorical weapons against them. What they said about heretics now applied to them. They were the ones who preached peace yet sowed discord, endangered souls by encouraging deceit and betrayal. In this, Bernard's argument would not have been much of a stretch for the assembled faithful: for generations in Languedoc, the Dominicans had descended on heretofore peaceable towns and claimed that spirtual outsiders—heretics—disrupted the well-being of the community, though plainly it was the inquisitor, not some long-dead Cathar grandmother, who was causing all the trouble. Even inquisitor manuals acknowledged the difficulty in making the counterinuitive claim that the intrusive nature of inquisition somehow represented the normal, and that the normal tenor of village life constituted the exceptional. For an orator of Bernard's caliber, upending this difficult Dominican argument would have been child's play.

More childlike was the close of the Franciscan's address. As was customary in medieval sermonizing, an exemplum, an illustrative parable or fable, was used to drive home an argument to the unlettered. Bernard chose his story from the time, long ago, when animals had the gift of speech.

A group of rams, he recounted, inhabited a verdant meadow, at peace with each other and enjoying God's good earth. Yet every now and then, one of their number disappeared, abducted by two butchers and led to the slaughter. As time went on, the flock became depleted, morose, endangered. The meadow overlooked the river Aude, Bernard's listeners understood. The rams were the people of the Bourg; the two butchers, the inquisitors at Carcassonne and at Toulouse.

At last the rams could take no more. They huddled together, each one fearful lest he be the next to feel the dread cleaver. One ram then asked, “Have we not horns?” Could they not band together and defend themselves? And this they did: the next time the two butchers came on their hideous errand, the rams attacked, driving them out of the meadow and far, far away. The butchers never came back. The nightmare was over.

The congregation filed out of the church, thoughtful and subdued. A man of God had vilified his fellow friars. Their fellow townsmen, the former consuls, had betrayed them. Like the rams, they would have to defend themselves.

Gui Sicre and two confederates from the town jumped on their horses and galloped to Toulouse, to inform Geoffroy d'Ablis of the extraordinary sermon the people of Carcassonne had just heard. Two Franciscan friars hitched up their mules, their destination the Agenais, in western Languedoc, to catch up with Jean de Picquigny and entreat him to return before a catastrophe unfolded. As in
Romeo and Juliet
, the humble mounts of the friars were outpaced by the swift steeds of the townsmen. The following day, the inquisitor Geoffroy d'Ablis rushed back to Carcassonne.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE INQUISITOR GIVES A READING

T
HE WEEK FOLLOWING BERNARD'S SERMON
was unlike any other in the life of Carcassonne. As the inquisitor prepared his rebuttal, a symposium of sedition took place on the streets of the Bourg. Like a speaker at Hyde Park, Bernard harangued his rapt audiences, who stopped their workaday activities to listen to his exhortations. He related more parables, telling of the necessity for the people of Carcassonne to tend to their garden and pull out the bad weeds by the roots. The inquisitors and their accomplices were clearly just such weeds.
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Bernard then began repeating a strange story of an extraordinarily unflappable fellow, a man able to withstand insult and calumny without flinching or losing his self-control. He told the story everywhere, including at the foot of the pulpit. Less an exemplum than a call to action, the tale stuck fast in the memory of the Carcassonnais—so much so that the story was retold several times at his trial. One of the better versions was given by Guillaume Rabaud, a man of the Bourg:

“Once there was a town in which there lived a good man, of whom it was said that nothing could anger him or make him angry. So some wiseacres and knaves said to themselves, ‘Let's make this fine fellow lose his temper.' They came up to him and said, ‘You are a killer!' He answered, ‘May God forgive you.' They tried again. ‘You're a thief, you're an adulterer, you're a murderer!' Whatever the insult, he never lost his temper and always responded, ‘May God forgive you.' At last someone said that he could make the fellow angry, and he went up to him and said, ‘You're a heretic!' The good man would not put up with this, and he shouted back in anger that the other was lying through his teeth, and then he punched him in the face.” And Brother Bernard, having finished his story, said, “Draw your own conclusions.”

Giraud de Meaux, a royal sergeant of Carcassonne, remembered the story of the unflappable man in more or less the same detail. However, his version of how Brother Bernard concluded his edifying tale differs somewhat:

After that, Brother Bernard explained his words, by saying to the people, “Good people, if anyone calls you a heretic, defend yourself as best you can, because you have the right to defend yourself.”