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Fortunes of France: City of Wisdom and Blood

Steerforth Press

Certainly, I was thrilled to be galloping along on this beautiful June day with my gentle brother Samson and our valet Miroul, traversing the highways and byways of France, and yet I kept feeling sudden waves of regret at leaving the barony of Mespech behind. As I rode along, tears filled my eyes every time I thought of the great crenellated nest where I'd hatched and got my first feathers, protected from the upheavals of our times by its ramparts, of course, but even more so by the bravery of my father, my Uncle de Sauveterre and our soldiers, in accordance with the Périgordian proverb: "The only sure walls are good men."

But it was no good crying. Now that we had reached the age of fifteen, with our heads full of Latin (vying for space in our brains with French and Provencal), our valour well tested in the la Lendrevie fighting, it was time to emerge from Barberine's sweet coverlet, and to quit, as I liked to say, our swaddling clothes. As younger brothers (and as my beloved Samson was a bastard to boot) we had to take up our studies in Montpellier, where my father had decided to send us.

It was in this good city that my father himself had studied in the flower of his youth. He loved this place and he claimed that his college of medicine, where Rabelais had defended his thesis, surpassed all others, even Paris, by the audacity, the variety and the novelties of its teaching, whose brilliance, he claimed, outshone even that of the school of Salerno in the previous century.

But we had a long and perilous journey to go from Sarlat to Montpellier, especially for three Huguenots who couldn't count fifty years among them yet had to travel in these times troubled by the recent wars, in which our people and the Catholics had so cruelly torn each other apart. To be sure, there reigned an uneasy peace between the two sides, but many grumblings and resentments could be heard. The uneasiness on our side had flared up again in 1565 during the Meeting of Bayonne, at which Catherine de' Medici had secretly met with the Duque de Alba, and during which the queen was rumoured to have proposed a marriage between her daughter Margot and Don Juan of Spain in return for a Spanish attack on the French Protestants. But Felipe II had ultimately disdained this renewed attempt to ally the French throne with the royal blood of Spain. Worse still, the following year, the Rex Catholicissimus became so irritated with the French for having settled so close to his own possessions in the Americas that he forgot his Catholic precepts in his wrath and ordered a surprise attack on our Breton colonists in Florida, massacring the lot. This, of course, had so greatly angered Catherine de' Medici that the Spaniard had lost much credit with the French court and no longer dared to exercise his papist zeal in the assassination of our Protestant leaders and the slaughter or exile of the masses of our brothers.

These bloody projects discarded, at least for the time being, Fortune seemed to smile once again on France. Peace seemed to be gaining some ground and the most rabid papists among the king's subjects seemed momentarily to lose heart at Spain's refusal to support them. The more moderate Catholics renewed their hope of reconciliation between the two faiths. Despite these more reassuring developments, we still had to contend, as we galloped across the French countryside, with the bands of rogues who, during the recent disorders of the civil war, had fled into the forests, setting up roadblocks at many crossroads and bridges to collect ransom from travellers and often, not content with mere robbery, inflicted the most horrible atrocities on their victims.

For our part, however, since we had learnt the arts of warfare from an early age — the last gulp of milk from Barberine's fulsome breasts having barely passed our gullets — and since we were armed to the teeth, well helmeted, breastplates firmly attached, swords at our sides, daggers hanging from our belts, pistols emerging from the holsters in our saddles and our arquebuses prominently displayed on the packhorses Miroul was leading behind him, Samson and I felt we had little to fear from these villains. But Miroul, young though he was, had already suffered from the assaults of the highwaymen and reminded us, as my father had done, that our safety lay not in combat where there was nothing to be gained by victory if one of us were wounded, but in flight, where the greater speed of our horses guaranteed our advantage. This was weighty counsel, for Miroul's prudence was hardly the result of cowardice. Slight of build, but agile to the point of being able to climb a wall like a fly, able to throw a pike with the speed and accuracy of a crossbow, he was worth three of the enemy all by himself. And don't accuse me of Gascon exaggeration! I'm telling the plain truth, as events would soon prove.

As for the timing of our departure, we had set out for Montpellier unusually early, given that courses wouldn't begin until mid October, but I well understood my father's intentions in sending us off a month beforehand. He knew I needed time to recover from the profound melancholy I'd fallen into after the death of little Hélix, my milk sibling. After terrible suffering, she had gone to her last sleep in the arms of the Lord the month before, in the flower of her nineteenth year. I had felt the deepest friendship for her despite the modesty of her birth and the evident disapproval of my older brother, François, who had stayed behind, in the safety of our walls, waiting for his turn to become Baron de Mespech when the Creator should call my father into his arms. And wait he would, and for many years to come, thank God, for my father, though well past his fiftieth year, was still lively and vigorous enough to have carried off Franchou, the chambermaid of his late wife, a year previously. Swords in hand, he, Samson and I had fended off a crowd of bloodthirsty vagabonds in Sarlat, and escorted her out of that plague-infested city.

To be sure, I was a Huguenot, but less fervently than my brother, Samson, who'd been raised from birth in the reformed religion. My own mother had insisted on raising me according to Catholic doctrine. On her deathbed — despite my having been converted to the new beliefs at the age of ten under heavy pressure from my father — my mother had given me a medallion of the Virgin Mary and conjured me to wear it as long as I lived. Thus it was that, while professing the reformed religion, I faithfully bore around my neck the symbol of the Catholic faith.

Might that have been the reason that the sweet intimacies little Helix had shared with me during our sweet nights together seemed much less sinful than they would have to my half-brother Samson, whose great beauty was matched only by his ferocious virtue? Of course, the irony of his puritanical ways was that he was conceived outside of marriage — my father's Huguenot fervour not having deterred him from departing from the straight and narrow path, without, however, incurring the anger the Lord might have visited on the fruits of this sinful act, or, for that matter, on the sinner himself, since Mespech had continued to accumulate wealth and prosperity from the fruits of the Huguenot economy and agronomy practised there.

My father had advised us not to pass through the mountains to get to Montpellier since we would have been easily ambushed by the brigands there. He told us to take the road to Toulouse, after Cahors and Montauban, and then proceed through Carcassonne to Béziers, where the road cut through the plains and hence, though much longer, was also much safer because of the heavy traffic of horsemen and carts. However, at roughly the midpoint of our journey, as we arrived at the Two Angels inn on the outskirts of Toulouse, our hostess (a lively widow) informed us that just two weeks previously a merchants' convoy had been pillaged and massacred between Carcassonne and Narbonne by a large band of men who were hiding out in the Corbières hills.

This unpleasant news gave us a lot to think about, and in the room at the Two Angels, where Samson and I were lodged (with Miroul in a small anteroom next to us) we discussed our situation, sitting in a circle, with Miroul slightly farther away, holding his viol, from which he drew, from time to time, some lugubrious sounds to accompany our distress. We simply didn't know which saint, devil, incubus or succubus to invoke, not daring to continue our journey in the face of such imminent peril, and fearing to write of it to our father, whose answer would take at least two weeks to reach us.

"A fortnight at this inn!" cried Samson, shaking his handsome, copper-coloured locks. "'T'would be our financial ruin, a very blameable recreation and an invitation to sin."

Whereupon Miroul, with a knowing look in my direction, plucked three notes on his viol to accentuate the triple danger that lurked in these quarters threatening our youthful innocence. Indeed, I was astonished that it hadn't escaped our pure Samson's notice that the buxom chambermaids who attended to our every need in this place were not the type to model their behaviour after the Two Angels who decorated the hotel's sign — who themselves suggested less than heavenly virtues, being cut out of iron.

I was about to respond to Samson's remark when, as Miroul plucked the third note on his viol, a huge tumult of horses' hooves, curses and cries could be heard below in the rue de la Mazelerie.

I rushed to the window (which we had to pull open in order to see since it was filled not with glass but with oil paper). Samson was at my heels, closely followed by Miroul, viol in hand, and, in the dusk outside, we glimpsed a group of about fifty men and women as they dismounted from their large long-tailed bay horses. Their colourful and finely wrought clothes were covered with dust. Most of the women wore large-brimmed bonnets to protect them from the southern sun. Some of the men were armed with arquebuses, others with pistols or swords, and the ladies all carried daggers in their belts. They were of various ages and classes, most of them of considerable size and strength, golden-haired and blue-eyed, but a few others were of another type altogether: small of stature, dark-skinned and dark-haired, but all so happy to be dismounting and finding lodging in the inn that they shouted and babbled happily in an earsplitting cacophony. In their relief to be setting foot to ground, they laughed uproariously, pushed each other, struck each other on the shoulders or on the arse and shouted boisterously at each other across the street while their huge mounts stood smoking with sweat, stamping their feet, shaking their blonde manes and whinnying so loudly for nourishment that they were like to break your eardrums. This crowd of horses and people made such an infernal row that you would have thought it was an army of rebellious peasants laying siege to the town hall.

All of the good Toulousain people were, like ourselves, at their windows, gaping, mute, eyes practically popping out of their heads, and ears wide open in astonishment, for the newcomers surprised us with a strange sort of jargon, in which French words (pronounced very differently from the sharp accent of Paris) were mixed with a dialect which no good mother's son could have understood.

The troop finally began to flood into the inn, pushing and shoving tumultuously, while a group of valets ran out to grab their horses' reins and lead them to the stables, buzzing with admiration for the size and power of these steeds. Beneath us, though we were lodged on the second floor of the Two Angels, the shouting continued with such brio that the walls shook with it. Someone knocked at our door, and, since Samson and I were busy watching the horses, I told Miroul to open it. Which he did, viol in hand, for it seemed he was never without it, even in bed.

There appeared — I noticed out of the corner of my eye, for I was still fixated on the herd of horses below us — the innkeeper herself, a lively brunette, all aflutter, beautifully dressed in a yellow petticoat with a bodice of the same colour, whose contents were so beautiful, so fulsome and so bouncy that it seemed a shame that she should expose them thus without some hope that they would be fondled.

"My pretty fellow," said the innkeeper to Miroul, in her Toulousain drawl, "are you not the valet to these two handsome gentlemen from Perigord whom I spy lounging at the window?"

"Indeed!" replied Miroul, plucking a welcoming chord on his viol. "I am at their service, and consequently at yours as well, my good hostess!" Another chord from his viol eloquently accompanied the smile he lavished on her.

"By my soul," cried the lady, laughing, "you're a very pretty fellow, I see, and your music too! What do they call you?"

"Miroul! At your service!" said he, plucking anew his instrument and singing:

Miroul — each eye a different hue!

The right is brown, the left one blue.

At this my heart was pinched with grief, for this was how little Helix greeted Miroul, during the few remissions from her long agony, when he arrived, viol in hand, to try to help her forget the flames of her suffering. But I quickly thrust this sad thought back into the satchel of my memories. From now on, I was determined to look forward and not back.

"Miroul!" laughed our hostess, batting an eyelash and sighing deeply. "I'm not sure I can trust these eyes! The blue eye may be a serious fellow, but that brown one is a rascal!" Their repartee was so lively that I wanted to put in my pennyworth, drawn as I was to this beautiful wench like a nail to a magnet.

"My good woman," I said, turning round and stepping briskly forward, hands on hips, "whatever aid or service your exquisiteness might require of us, you shall surely have it, for we are all quite undone by your beauty!"

"Your words, good Monsieur," she replied, "will be ever welcome — and the more so the more often you say them!"

"I shall repeat them as often as you wish, my hostess, at any hour of the day ... or night!"

But our innkeeper, thinking no doubt that we had gone too quickly and too far from the very first word spoken, replied only by a quick curtsey that, to tell the truth, would have discountenanced the most austere of men, for she was obliged, upon rising, to rearrange her beautiful treasures in the sweet lodgings of her bodice.

"Monsieur," she said with feigned distress, "let's get down to business: fifty Norman pilgrims have just dismounted at our doorstep who are on their way to Rome under the holy guidance of a powerful baron and a dozen monks."

"Yes, I believe we may have heard them!" I laughed.

"Alas!" she replied. "That's not the worst of it! To lodge them I'll have to put four in a bed, and in this bed," she said, pointing to ours, "there are but two of you. Monsieur, would you be willing to accommodate two more companions for the night?"

"Men or women?" I smiled.

"Men," broke in Samson with a furrowed brow as he turned from the window.

The innkeeper thought about this for a long moment as she gazed on his manly figure standing before her in all the vigorous symmetry of his youth. She then sighed deeply, for though she believed herself in the presence of one of God's angels, she sensed how little she might profit from such a one and how much she preferred the hot-blooded version.

"Men, then," she sighed with a kind of whole-body shudder that convinced me that she would have gladly given up her own bed to the pilgrims to join us in ours.

"Men and no monkth," added Samson with his charming lisp, yet maintaining his serious demeanour.

At this, our hostess became very animated and reddened visibly: "By St Joseph and all the saints!" she cried. "Would you be the kind of pestiferous heretics and agents of the Devil who cannot abide the presence of men of God?"

"Heavens no, my good hostess!" I hastened to reply, knowing how thoroughly, since the victory of Montluc, the Huguenots were reviled and hounded by the people of Toulouse. "My brother meant nothing of the sort! He's only afraid that your monks will be too corpulent and take up too much space in our bed!"

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Excerpted from Fortunes of France: City of Wisdom and Blood by Robert Merle, T. Jefferson Kline. Copyright © 2015 Estate of Robert Merle. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
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