The Brethren (32 page)

“Do you have wife or children?”

“No! I could never afford ’em.”

“Well, then, friend, I wish you prosperity and a long life!”

“Prosperity I’ve got. But as for a long life, I don’t believe in it,” laughed the crow. “But every day that comes along is a boon as long as my stomach stays full.”

Whereupon, whipping his team vigorously, he drove the wagon on into the field.

“Isn’t it amazing that he’s so happy?” I mused as I watched him go.

My father shook his head. “Poor folk have a kind of brutal and careless courage they get from their condition. Surely they need it more than others do, for it’s not true as some have said that the plague strikes rich and poor alike. At the first sign of the plague your rich bourgeois can afford to apply Galen’s precept, ‘Go quickly, stay far away and come back slowly.’ But the poor are stuck where there’s infection, with no means of escape and no place to go. And because of the filth fate has bestowed on them, undernourished, all thrown on top of each other, the malady wipes them all out.”

Having arrived at the la Lendrevie gate, my father called to the watchman and asked him to alert the commissionaires that we were bringing meat for Monsieur de La Porte and the consuls. Then, asking the Siorac twins to wait for us, he rode on into the middle of la Lendrevie with Samson and me. To purify the air, great resinous fires burned on the pavement at every crossroads, making the terrible heat of the sun even more unbearable. Not a soul was in the street, save for the invisible ones of the dead. And though there were always droves of them in Sarlat, not a dog, a cat or a pigeon. They’d been slaughtered en masse as potential carriers at the outset of the epidemic. Here and there I noticed more than one boarded window, from which you could hear the moans of the sequestered. Their doorways were draped with a black crêpe ribbon, indicating that it was a mortal offence to go in or out, or even approach.

My father drew rein on a square or rather a little squarelet, at the far end of which stood an old corbelled dwelling. I knew it well and realized then and there that the side of beef destined for La Porte and the consuls was not the only goal of our expedition.

Although armed for war, Jean de Siorac dismounted easily from his horse in his usual way, ordered Samson and me to do the same and to tether our steeds to the iron rings in the paving stones. This we did. We were then about a dozen steps from the infected house. My father, casting a quick glance around us to be sure he wouldn’t be seen, crossed this distance and pulled on a basket hanging by a rope from the attic window. I heard the tinkle of a bell, and a head appeared in the dormer window. It was Franchou, her face drawn but good colour in her cheeks.

“Sweet Jesus!” she cried leaning halfway out the window, revealing two beautiful breasts barely contained in her bodice. “It’s you, My Lord! You haven’t abandoned your servant!”

“Shhh, Franchou! They’ll hear us! Are you sick?”

“Only from fear and hunger. But otherwise I’m well. Since my mistress’s death I haven’t left this lodging.”

“I’m going to get you out. Do you think you can climb out of that window? You’re not a slim girl!”

“Of course!” Franchou replied. “I’ve got flesh enough, especially on my backside. But I’ll wriggle through as best I can. Fat mice have to get out of their holes.”

“Very good, I’ll go and fetch what we need.”

And leaving Samson to stand guard over the horses, my father led me through some neighbouring streets, searching in courtyards and sheds for a ladder. When he found one, which took some time because we needed one long enough to reach the attic window, we each took an end, and sweating heavily (for it was quite heavy and the heat overpowering) we came back to the house, greatly troubled by loud cries coming from that place.

“What’s this commotion?” frowned my father, quickening his pace. When we burst into the little square in front of Madame de La Valade’s house, we dropped the ladder in astonishment. Samson, whirling his white horse, pistol in hand, was holding at bay a band of thirty or so beggars, armed with pikes, cutlasses, scythes and iron bars, and two even carried blunderbusses. They surrounded him and our two tethered horses, yelling and growling, though no one had yet dared strike the first blow. Samson had not fired either (as I might have in his place). His angelic face betrayed neither fear nor anger and, with his reddish-blond hair flaming in the sun, he stared at this mob with his blue eyes wide in surprise, and repeated with his charming lisp, “Whath thith? Whath thith?”

“What’s this?” scolded my father in echo. “What do these people want? Be brave, Pierre and have at them!” So saying, and unsheathing his sword—I behind him brandishing my own—he strode into the crowd, distributing blows with the flat of his sabre, careful not
to wound anyone, and opened a path to the horses, untied them, threw me the reins and leapt into his saddle. “Turn your horses’ backs to the wall so they can’t get behind us,” he whispered to me. And turning his gelding, which made some space around us, he backed him towards the La Valade house. My black jennet wasn’t as well trained, but I eventually got myself into position on his right with Samson on his left.

At this point, with our reins on the pommels of our saddles, all three of us held our pistols in both hands with our swords dangling at the ready from our right wrists. My father would have attacked straightaway had he had a couple of his veteran soldiers instead of his two sons at his sides. But he didn’t want to risk the lives of his rascals in a street fight. He preferred to talk his way out, all the more so since the populace, though armed, seemed more weak and hungry than truly menacing. “So, my friends!” he cried, rising in his stirrups, in a stentorian yet gay and military voice. “What’s all this fuss? Is this the way you greet visitors to la Lendrevie? Why are you rushing at us like this?”

“To kill you, Baron, you and your two sons!” shouted a large fat man standing at the front of the crowd, whom I recognized by his bulging black eyes, his clothing, his fat paunch and the large knife in his belt as Forcalquier, the butcher of la Lendrevie.

“These are nasty spiteful words!” laughed my father, all the while scanning the crowd and especially the two armed with blunderbusses with a vigilant eye. “Kill me, Maître Forcalquier! You want to try what the English couldn’t do! But supposing you try, those I don’t kill by my hand will die by the rope for this murder!”

“And who’ll hang ’em?” rasped Forcalquier. “La Porte?” (Hoots from the crowd greeted this name.) “That little turd of a police lieutenant is barricaded in his house! He’s scarcely got enough soldiers to guard his doors. And if he had enough to catch us, who’d
judge us? The Présidial judges? They’ve fled!” (The jeers increased.) “Baron, figure it out for yourself. There are no more royal officers, bourgeois, judges or lords here. We’re the masters now.”

“And you’re the leader?”

“I am. I, Forcalquier have named myself Baron de La Lendrevie, and high commissioner of justice in these parts. You shall die, then. And your lads with you. Thus has my justice decided the case.” To this affront there was much laughter and applause, but if Forcalquier appeared resolute, those around him seemed to be much more inclined to enjoy his insolent threats than to enact them.

My father, feeling this mood in the crowd, continued his role in this dangerous game without changing tone: “Butcher-baron of la Lendrevie,” he said, reprising the tone of heady humour that had prevailed, “you’re very quick in your work, for never did judge render so hasty a decision! But pray, what may be the motive for your judgement: for what crimes are we to be punished?”

“For having approached an infected house and tried to remove the wench closed up in it. That’s a capital crime as you know quite well.”

“But this wench is healthy, I guarantee it and I’m a doctor! Her only malady is hunger!”

“We’re sick with hunger too!” cried a strident voice from the crowd, and this cry was immediately echoed from all corners of the square in a chant that was fed by lamentation and protest.

“All right, Baron! Enough talk!” shouted Forcalquier. “You hear my subjects! You must die!”

So saying, he pulled his knife from his great belt. Whether this man was brave or simply foolhardy, I cannot tell, for the cannon of one of my father’s pistols was trained directly at his heart. But my father did not fire. “Take care, Master Forcalquier!” he counselled gravely. “After the plague, you’ll be questioned, you and your subjects, about this commotion!”

“After the plague!” cried Forcalquier. “There won’t be an ‘after the plague’!” he pronounced with a great sweeping gesture of his knife as if he were beheading every person in the town. “I have it on divine authority,” he added, his bulging black eyes fixed on my father’s face. “The Virgin Mary appeared to me in a dream and told me, on the faith of her divine Son, that there won’t be man, woman nor child who survives the epidemic in la Lendrevie. Baron, you’ll be preceding us by a very little bit into the kingdom of death. The plague isn’t going to spare anyone here, Heaven has told me.” And he gave a quick slash with his knife in the air. “We’re all going to die!” he cried, raising his voice.

“All! All!” cried the crowd in a lugubrious echo.

And I could see by my father’s expression that he was beginning to fear the worst from these desperate peasants. And yet, when he spoke again, it was with the same jocular and friendly tone: “Good people, if we must die, what will my death profit you?”

“We can eat your horses!” cried one.

“So, my good friends,” my father answered with admirable repartee, “now I understand you and am reassured. It’s not wickedness that drives you, but hunger! And if that’s how it is, then I propose a ransom for our lives and for the freedom of this poor wench: a beautiful fresh side of beef slaughtered just yesterday! I said,” he continued, raising himself in his stirrups, “a beautiful fresh side of beef! My son Pierre will go and fetch it at the town gates. Fresh meat, my friends! You’re going to eat meat!”

I immediately spurred my black jennet through the crowd and valiantly took off like an arrow. The Siorac brothers were preparing to sell the last quarter of beef at the town’s meat counter when I got there. Shouting and waving, I told them to leave off and to follow me. And soon, the wagon lumbered after me with an infernal racket onto the square where my father was still holding
sway over the crowd and preventing Forcalquier from getting a word in.

Sweat dripping from his forehead and his eyes, my father heaved a great sigh of relief seeing us arrive, all the more since the Siorac twins, armed for battle, their blunderbusses at the ready, scattered the crowd to either side—though not Forcalquier, who stood his ground, open-mouthed but still clenching his knife.

Immediately reholstering his pistols in his belt and leaping directly from his horse to the wagon without touching foot to ground, my father—I cannot imagine where he found the superhuman strength to do this—raised the entire quarter of beef over his head, and standing thus, his feverish eyes on the crowd, shouted: “Hey there, Butcher-baron of la Lendrevie, cut up this portion for you and your subjects!”

And suddenly, from up there on the wagon, he hurled the slab of beef with all his might right down in the butcher’s face. So struck, Forcalquier staggered and fell backwards, hitting his head on the paving stones, and lay there unconscious. In a flash, the entire pack of beggars swarmed over him, dropping their arms and rushing like mad dogs at the meat, tearing it to pieces, some with their knives and others with their very teeth.

My father, seeing them occupied thus, leant the ladder against the infected house, and Franchou edged out of the window, feet first, then ankles, and thighs, but alas, being too wide in the middle, she stuck fast in the window frame at mid buttocks. “Ah, my sweet!” cried my father, “you’re too much of a good thing! Push, I beg you, push! Our lives depend on it!”

Twisting, trembling and pushing as hard as she could, Franchou, making plaintive little cries and a rosary’s worth of Sweet Jesuses, finally squeezed through, slid more than she climbed down the ladder and fell into my father’s arms, who, brandishing her as he
had brandished the slab of beef, literally tossed her onto the bed of the cart.

In the wink of an eye, he leapt into his saddle and, all of us giving spur, whip and voice and shouting wild cries in our relief to get away, we galloped our five horses out of the square, their shoes raising a hail of sparks on the cursed paving stones of the town.

T
HE MOST PAINFUL PART
of the trip to Sarlat for Samson and me was not the adventure in la Lendrevie, but the twenty days of quarantine that we had to spend in the north-east tower upon our return to Mespech. Michel and Benoît Siorac were no better pleased by their enforced reclusion in the room beneath ours. Through the spaces between the floorboards we could hear them take turns—but could never tell which one was talking since they sounded just alike—complaining the whole day long. And long it was: this period was punctuated only by the three meals brought each day by Escorgol. At least these were hearty enough, since my father wanted to fortify our veins and arteries against the entry of the fatal vapours.

My father had chosen Escorgol as messenger since he had survived the plague two years earlier in Nîmes. He had reason to believe that, having once triumphed over the venom, his body would chase it away again if attacked. Having received this assignment—as well as that of maintaining a hearty fire in each of our fireplaces—Escorgol was relieved of his duties as watchman at the gatehouse and replaced there by my father, who spent the term of his quarantine on the ground floor and Franchou hers on the first. It was my father who decided on this distribution, and I note from a brief but bitter allusion in the
Book of Reason
that Sauveterre would, had he been consulted, have made a different arrangement.

From the second day of our captivity onwards, Uncle de Sauveterre, fearing the effects of laziness, had us brought our Titus Livius and Latin dictionaries, as well as
The History of Our Kings
(which he had copied for us by hand), with instructions to translate one page of the first and to learn two pages of the second each day. Lastly, we were brought the Bible, with orders to read marked passages out loud thrice daily.

In his written instructions, Sauveterre exacted from me a promise not to help Samson with his Latin, but, in my written reply, I respectfully declined to make such a promise, since, as I argued, if Samson were deprived of Sauveterre’s usual help, he ought at least to have mine, without which he might quickly become despondent, since he took his studies so much to heart. And, after some reflection, Sauveterre consented on condition that I underline those passages I’d helped him with. Not that Samson was so bad in Latin, but he was weak in French, and it was precisely into French and not into
langue d’oc
that we had to translate our Latin. I was pretty fluent in the language of the north, since, while she was alive, my mother exhibited the elegant affectation of speaking only in French when addressing me or my father, who, for his part, also resorted to this tongue when talking about medicine. But poor Samson had had none of these advantages and was the sorrier for it.

I made other written requests to Sauveterre that met with varied responses: 1. “May I ask Escorgol to bring us two swords and two breastplates?”—“Granted. But take care in your enthusiasm not to poke his eyes out.” 2. “May I send Escorgol to fetch my cup-and-ball game?”—“Refused. You are no longer of an age, my nephew, to be wasting your time on such frivolous enjoyments.” 3. “May I correspond with my father about the plague?”—“Granted.” 4. “May I write to Catherine and to little Hélix?”—“Refused. You have nothing to say to these girls of the least consequence, either for them or for yourself.”

This was hardly my view of things, nor little Hélix’s, as the short note she succeeded in slipping under our bolted door one morning proved so well:

I too, locked away in the north-east tower, had “thauts about little Hélix all da longe”, especially in the evening, when I’d blown out my lamp, and was alone in my bed with no one to snuggle up against. How sweet was my sleep after we’d tired ourselves out with our little games and I could rest my head on her sweet breasts, my left arm under her waist and my right leg draped between hers. Alas, poor little Hélix, where are you as I write this? In hell, or in Paradise? Even today I cannot think it such a great sin to have enjoyed such happiness, peace and quiet in your silky arms, nor such an iniquity that you fluttered around me with your happy chirping to entice me into your nest.

The room where we were sequestered was quite large, airy and wonderfully aromatic, for it served as our apple cellar with all our apples set out on screens, wrinkled, rumpled and shrivelled like a baby’s skin, but not rotten, though it was already July. Added to their delicious smell was the odour of the aromatics which burned day and night in the fireplace along with resins, which crackled in the flames. With this fire inside and the fire of the July sun outside, we toasted in an oven despite the open windows. It was even worse during our fencing practice, our torsos sweltering under the heavy breastplates. Our swordplay done, our sabres in place against the
wall and our armour removed, we threw ourselves naked on our beds, panting, gasping for breath, our bodies bathed in sweat.

“Sweat,” wrote my father in answer to my anxious questions about prevention of the plague, “is one of the best remedies against contagion. That’s why Gilbert Erouard, a medical doctor at Montpellier (I hope, my son, that someday you shall study under him, for he is a very wise man), recommends the pestiferous to swallow a large glass of pickled anchovies every morning. This strong drink provokes abundant sweating and can produce a cure. Also, according to Erouard, salt—which we use as you know to preserve pork—consumes the unspeakable putrefactions that the venom introduces into the sick person’s body.

“Some doctors greatly value scorpion oil. They marinate 100 scorpions in a litre of walnut oil and administer this remedy, mixed with an equal amount of white wine. The drug provokes violent vomiting and thus, according to these doctors, attracts the venom and succeeds in evacuating it.

“I am not sure what to think of so brutal a cure,” wrote my father, “since the plague victim shows a great inclination to vomit anyway, and I do not see the need to add to it.

“I cannot see what advantage is to be gained by purging him, since he suffers already from a continual dysentery. Also, in my view, bleeding can only further debilitate the patient, when he is still so weak. And the same would be true of dieting.

“I have seen surgeons—oh what an ignorant race of men!—cauterize plague victims’ buboes with red-hot irons, and others attempt to cut them away with knives. But those practices are as barbarous as they are useless. The bubo needs to drain without any intervention other than removing the pus, for if it evacuates it’s a sign that the venom seeks issue from the body. We must therefore allow it to egress.

“I administered theriacal water to Diane de Fontenac, which I’d confected from a number of different herbs and spices crushed in white wine: angelica, myrtle, scabious, juniper, saffron and cloves. I limited my care to this sole remedy, all the while making sure to feed the patient, to have her drink plenteously, and to keep her clean. I also worked to keep her fever down, and minimize her fears of death with words of hope. All else is prayer.”

This letter, which I’ve kept along with all the others my father wrote me, is proof enough, if such proof were lacking, that my father was, as Monsieur de Lascaux (who, great doctor though he was, had fled Sarlat at the first alarms of the plague) put it, “a heretic in medicine as in religion”. For, other than the theriacal water, he seemed to place no trust in the majority of the most celebrated remedies for the plague, including the pickled anchovies and the scorpion oil, which, years later, I still heard discussed by the doctors at Montpellier.

Oh, how slowly the time dragged by for me during my quarantine! Every day seemed a month—a month of very long days… And how great my languor and mournful indolence would have been—despite Titus Livius, the Bible and our kings—if I hadn’t had Samson’s company. What a godsend he was! To live twenty days, nay twenty times twenty-four hours, locked in close quarters with your brother, without the slightest cloud, nor the least hint of a quarrel or squabble, and end up loving him even more than before (if that’s possible), shows of what pure metal this brother was made, for, as for me, I know all too well of what imperfect stuff I am devised.

I’ve already described him, no doubt, but I want to recall his portrait once again: Samson was, first of all, handsome, of such a beauty to light up the darkness; his hair was strawberry blond, capping his robust appearance; his eyes of an azure blue; his skin as pale as his features were harmonious. I do not even speak of his
face nor of his body, which were to become with the years worthy of a statue in their virile symmetry. But his great beauty, his grace and his infinite charms were but the outward and visible symbols of the soul that inhabited this envelope.

Cabusse claimed that Samson was a numskull because he was slow to parry a blow and slow to force his advantage. Cabusse was wrong: it was scarcely a deficiency of mind, but rather an excess of virtue. Samson loved his fellow adversary so much that he couldn’t believe he could be wounded by him, nor wish to wound him in return. Wickedness, even that which we feign in sport, was unintelligible to him. I have thousands upon thousands of proofs of it. And the ultimate proof is this image, which I’ll always remember, of Samson on his white horse, face to face with the mob in la Lendrevie, his wide blue eyes fixed in amazement on the furious crowd, repeating with his customary lisp, “Whath thith? Whath thith?”

Even with the most generous people on earth, there comes a time when egotism raises its ugly head. But this moment never came with Samson. Without ever a second thought, nor any attempt to turn things to his own advantage, Samson always thought of others first. He wept when my mother died. And yet, for his whole life, my mother never said a word to him, nor ever looked his way. How did he manage to love her, and what could he have seen in her—he who was invisible to her? I cannot guess. For he spoke little, inept at expressing the love he carried within. But of this immeasurable love which shone on all of us like the sun, he gave me yet another, most touching, proof during our quarantine, as I shall have occasion to relate further on.

My father took advantage of the leisure hours of his quarantine to address a letter to Monsieur de La Porte, recounting the commotion at la Lendrevie. He had it brought thither by Escorgol with orders to hand this sealed missive to La Porte’s soldiers at the end of
a long stick, split at one end. Escorgol was also to collect the money due us for the slabs of beef we had sold them, but there again his orders were quite strict: the coins which we suspected of carrying the infection since they’d passed through so many hands at Sarlat were to be handed over in a pipkin filled with vinegar. Guillaume de La Porte had his response brought to Mespech by a messenger two days later, but to this man my father spoke only through a mask soaked in vinegar and from a window of the gatehouse, accepting the letter he was carrying by means of a long stick similar to the one Escorgol had used. Having thrown aromatics on his fire, my father disinfected the letter by holding it over the beneficent steam emanating from the fireplace. Then he opened it, but wore gloves for this purpose, and read it holding it as far from his face as possible. He later recounted these precautions, holding them up as exemplary.

The police lieutenant wrote that he was not unaware of Forcalquier’s villainies, but, just as Forcalquier himself had said, La Porte had only enough soldiers to guard the town gates. He lost one or two each day, and though he was willing to pay handsomely, he could find no replacements. Worse, the survivors would scarcely obey his orders, so sure were they of dying just like Forcalquier’s mob. In truth, anarchy reigned, and corrupted the people like leprosy. One of the two consuls (though I shall not disclose which one), having lost a chambermaid to the plague and having himself been threatened with being boarded up in his own house, had fled during the night of 9th July, paying off the soldiers standing guard at one of the town gates. La Porte never did discover which one, but even if he had, he never could have punished the corrupted man, for he no longer possessed the means to do so. The executioner and his aides had died, along with the two jailers in the city prison.

Things had got so bad that, far from being punished, those who had been locked up were now set free, since they could be neither
imprisoned nor fed, since municipal revenues were drying up and the city’s expenses exorbitant. Besides the crows and the soldiers, the first receiving twenty and the second twenty-five livres a month, wages had to be paid to the disinfectors, who collected thirty livres a house to go in and burn flowers of sulphur inside. The four surgeons who had agreed to stay in Sarlat each received 200 livres a month. And their aides had also to be paid, along with the guides who preceded them into the infected houses, a torch of flaming wax in hand to chase away the venom.

The remaining consul and Monsieur de La Porte asked the Brethren if they would consent to loan the city 2,000 livres at fifteen per cent for a year, offering as security some land purchased from Temniac by the city when the Church properties were being auctioned off. La Porte stressed that the security had a value much greater than the amount of the loan but that the consul and he had made the arrangement fearing that the city would never be able to repay the monies, threatened as it was with extinction by the loss of all its inhabitants. Already, in the terrible plague of 1521, Sarlat had lost 3,500 of its 5,000 inhabitants. If the epidemic raged at this same rate for another few months, death would ravish everyone.

My father told me that when he read this despairing letter, he had wept and immediately sent a note to Sauveterre urging him to agree to the loan. Which Sauveterre, equally troubled by the letter, had done within the hour, though not without remarking that the security offered was of but little interest to Mespech, being situated much too far from the chateau to be farmed except by renting it out, which ate up all the profits, as his brother well knew.