Heretic Dawn (35 page)

“The ancients, in my art at least, said some good things, but one can’t just rest on their work like a hog on its sow. The ancients didn’t see everything, nor did they know everything. I would say that they built watchtowers of the ramparts of a castle and now, posted on these ramparts, we can see much farther than they could.”

My heart beat faster to hear this opinion, so much did it seem to open up to our human knowledge a marvellously infinite field of understanding. But I couldn’t help noting that Pierre de L’Étoile seemed very agitated, as though he found Paré’s and Ramus’s proposals too novel and too daring.

“Well, in any case,” he said as if he wished to change the subject, “there’s one sow that Parisian pigs won’t go to bed with any more. The ‘beautiful handmaiden’ has died. I heard of it yesterday afternoon.”

“What, the ‘beautiful handmaiden’?” said Ramus. “But she was very young!”

“And looked strong enough to live to a hundred!” added Paré. “I took care of her last year. She was healthy and vigorous and her insides as good as her body was beautiful. What illness carried her off?”

“Appendicitis.”

“Ah, there’s no remedy for that,” said Ambroise Paré sadly, as if he were lamenting the limits of his art.

“Might I ask,” I said, “who this ‘beautiful handmaiden’ was, who was so famous?”

“The wife of one of the palace ushers,” replied L’Étoile, “and famous in Paris not only for her beauty, but for the agility of her thighs. My friends, would you like to hear some verses that one of the palace judges wrote as an epitaph for her?”

“Gladly,” said Paré, who, to be able to hear better, swallowed the mouthful he was so slowly crushing between his teeth. Ramus said nothing, but as Pierre de L’Étoile pulled a paper from his doublet, he smiled, arching his circumflexed eyebrows in amusement.

“So,” said Pierre de L’Étoile, “here’s the epitaph:

We four laughed uproariously at this satire, but perhaps not all four for the same reasons: L’Étoile as if he saw in it punishment for the lady’s immoral ways; Ramus as a licentious gentleman; Paré with a shade of melancholy; and I in surprise that these learned gentlemen should find as much pleasure in these little verses as any bourgeois. I was more than a little surprised, too, at the light-hearted attitude taken towards the death of a young woman, but later when I got to know Paris better, I understood that everything, the tomb included, could be material for jokes, epigrams and scabrous quatrains, and in the end I had to agree that the humour of this proud city is not about feelings, but, given the tyranny of the court, tends more towards showing off one’s cleverness than displaying any concern for others.

“Venerable Maître,” I said, turning to Ramus, “in your opinion, is Aristotle completely mistaken, so that there is nothing at all in his thought that you can forgive?”

“No, of course not,” replied Ramus, his eyes shining. “Aristotle had one great merit: he taught us about mechanics, which proves that he didn’t despise the people and their common use of mathematics, the way Plato did, who preferred to see mathematics as a subject of pure contemplation rather than allowing his disciples to dirty their hands in its applications. Oh, Monsieur, what great harm this lamentable error of Plato’s has inflicted on the world! For, by letting the use that might be made of mathematics decline, the very subject of mathematics declined. This is why, ever since the Greeks, mathematics
has not prospered—to the point where, in France today, it is hardly taught at all and its use is limited to merchants, navigators, jewellers and the royal treasurers.”

“What?” I gasped. “Mathematics is hardy taught in France? But in Germany it is flourishing! How is this possible?”

“Monsieur de Siorac,” replied Ramus, his angular visage animated by both grief and anger, “the king created for me the first chair of mathematics at the Royal College, which I occupied with some distinction and usefulness for ten years, after which time, having renounced the religion of the king, I had also to renounce my chair, which was bought by some fellow who knew a little about mathematics, but, soon tired out by old age, resold it. And do you know who bought it?”

“No, I don’t,” I replied, astonished at Ramus’s fury, which had gripped him and had made his hands, arms and head shake uncontrollably.

“A totally uneducated man!” screamed Ramus. “An idiot who knows absolutely nothing! A blank slate who’s never studied or used mathematics and who publicly mocks the science that he’s supposed to be professing and goes around saying that mathematics is an abstract and therefore vain and fantastical activity that has no use whatsoever in human life!”

After saying this, he seemed so strangled by his own anger that he had to stop talking, and his whole body continued to shake. And as I stared at him amazed and, truth to tell, somewhat dubious and incredulous, Pierre de L’Étoile, seeing my confusion, said gravely:

“This is true, Monsieur de Siorac, however incredible it may seem. This uneducated idiot, as Monsieur de La Ramée calls him, is named Charpentier; he knows not a whit about mathematics, and if he was able to purchase a chair in the Royal College, it’s because he was supported by the powerful Duc de Guise and the Jesuits, since the man is a fanatical papist, a zealot, howling with the wolves, and, what’s more, a nasty, venomous little fellow, bilious, spiteful and a mortal enemy of our friend here—who has challenged him on his abysmal ignorance.”

“Ah,” said Ambroise Paré, ceasing his slow mastication, “I know all too well these Sorbonnic hatreds! Each time one of the thinkers of our day has taken one step out of the scholastic rut, and stumbled on some truth, there isn’t a single little pedant at the Sorbonne who, sitting on Aristotle like a crow on a church steeple, hasn’t squawked a thousand insults at him! It’s the same for me, for having dared to get my hands dirty and discovered with my knife things they can’t see in their books. And yet it doesn’t make any difference to our common practices and the public utility of our science whether some ignoramus, spouting Greek, goes about quoting Hippocrates and cackling about surgery if he’s never dissected a body! It’s not in the library but on the field of battle that I discovered how to tie up an artery so a man wouldn’t bleed to death.”

“Ah, venerable Maître,” I cried with some heat, “the men wounded in our wars will be forever grateful to you, for the cauterization of their wounds with boiling oil led to unbearable suffering!”

“Which,” agreed Ambroise Paré, “coming after amputation, was so piercing that it frequently caused death. So, watching this, and with the screams of pain in my ears from those soldiers who were burnt after amputation, I calculated that, given that blood is flowing from the arteries, it would be enough to pinch the arteries and tie them up to stop the bleeding.”

Given how simple the solution that he discovered was, and how simply he described it, it’s a wonder that no surgeon in the world had ever thought of it before he did. And yet this man who discovered it knew neither Greek nor Latin and was, consequently, not a doctor of medicine!

“Well said, Paré,” agreed Ramus, growing heated. “Getting your hands dirty, that’s what our impotent colleagues at the Sorbonne would never forgive you for, they who sit in their rat’s nest, spouting endless inanities at each other in their false, bookish science! And so
the untutored Charpentier, scorning what he doesn’t know, goes around repeating that ‘counting and measuring are the excrement and garbage of mathematics’. And our Platonists applaud, who place contemplation of ideas above all. And certainly,” he continued (the word “certainly” betraying his Huguenot beliefs, as I’d learnt from Madame des Tourelles), “mathematical theorems are in and of themselves admirable and profound—but how much more marvellous are the fruits that can be culled from them for the use of mankind? I count speculation on the essence of mathematical entities as pure vanity and of no profit. The goal of the arts is in the use that may be made of them, in the same way that there’s no point in searching for gold beneath the ground if we forget to cultivate the vegetables at its surface!”

“Ah,” I exclaimed, “what an excellent apophthegm, one that would so please my father if he were listening!”

“This is the reason,” Ramus continued, “that Archimedes is so great; it’s not only because of his theorems, but because of the applications that he made of them: the worm drive, the pulley, denticulated wheels, machines of war and even the enormous mirrors by which he set fire to the Roman ships that were attacking his little country. Did you know, Monsieur de Siorac,” he continued, turning towards me as I listened excitedly, “did you know that the Sorbonnites blamed me for having inserted in my book on arithmetic methods of calculating that are in common usage among the merchants around Saint-Denis? No one claimed that these methods were false, and, for heaven’s sake, how could they have proved it? But they claimed that they were ‘soiled’ by the practice these mechanicals made of them! Ah!” he cried, raising his arms in anger. “The awful prejudices of the pedantified pedants!”

“Monsieur de La Ramée,” queried L’Étoile, with a smile, “if you continue to be this angry, you’re going to produce so much bile it will
ruin your digestion! Please taste these cock’s crests and kidneys, and these artichoke hearts. They’re such delicacies that I’m astonished the queen mother nearly died from eating them.”

“She just ate too many of them,” explained Ambroise Paré, “since she’s an ogress at table as, so they say, she was in Henri II’s bed. L’Étoile, you who know everything that’s going on in la Ville and at court, and who are a sort of living chronicler of our daily life, is it true that the bishop of Sisteron died last Monday, in Paris, and under the same cloud that he’d been under all his life?”

“Alas! It’s only too true,” replied L’Étoile. “Moral and morose as was his wont, this prelate was of all the epicurean pigs the dirtiest and foulest. Charitably visited on his deathbed by a beautiful and noble lady who asked what she could give him to help in his last moments, he replied shamelessly, ‘Give me your snatch. You could offer me nothing that would please me more. What was dear to the living ought to be the same for the dying.’”

“And did she give it to him?” asked Ramus, his eyes lighting up. “Did she push charity as far as that?”

“What would he have done with it?” said L’Étoile. “He was at the farthest extremity and was vomiting up a thousand other profanities at the moment he met his Maker.”

“And with what nasty grace this villain welcomed the good offices of this noble lady!” said Ambroise Paré, his voice quite calm and quiet, though his yellow-brown eyes looked very melancholic, as they did every time people around him talked of death, which he considered his great and personal enemy. “Isn’t it marvellous,” he continued, “that the lowest soldier shows more human gratitude than a bishop? I remember that in 1552—now twenty years ago—at the siege of Metz, where I was the surgeon of Monsieur de Rohan, I saw that they’d left a soldier in their company behind on the ramparts. Finding, upon examination, that he was still breathing, although a
bullet had passed clean through his right lung, and that Monsieur de Rohan’s doctor had decided that he was lost, I had him carried to my house, where he spent a month, and at his bedside I served alternately as his doctor, his apothecary, his surgeon and his cook. God granted that in the end he recovered, and all the soldiers in his company, amazed that I had laboured so hard to snatch one of their comrades from the jaws of death, each gave me an écu, and the guards half an écu. Certainly,” he continued, “I have no complaints about the generosity of my more noble patients. I’ve received both money and jewels from them. But largesse is measured by the size of the purse, and is easier for a deep one. And so I’m all the more moved by the heart of these mercenaries, each one of whom pulled an écu from his poor purse, even though the wounded man was not related to any of them.”

“Well!” I thought. “How to measure the generosity of Ambroise Paré himself, giving so many days of unrelenting care to this humble man of arms from whom he expected nothing other than the joy of giving him his life back?”

“Venerable Maître,” I said, “what you told us about the wound to this man’s lung reminds me that, when I was watching his tennis game, I heard the king coughing with a raw, villainous and uncontrollable cough, which is said to be chronic with him.”

“It’s true,” sighed Ambroise Paré, “and I’m very distressed about it, being the king’s surgeon and not his doctor. For it’s my belief that a sickness of the lungs—whether it’s from a natural disease or from a bullet wound—can be cured and healed only if the patient rests without coughing, without talking, without tiring himself by running around a lot and sweating. Alas, the king does exactly the opposite: he coughs to break your heart. He roars instead of speaking. He blows himself breathless into his trumpets. He sweats at his forge. And he exhausts himself in his hunting and tennis games.”

“Have you told him, though?”

“Every day. But the king trusts only his physician in such matters, who is an ass of the most Sorbonnic type and who flatters the king’s penchant for the most violent sports. It would be wiser to push him to seek quiet refuge among the ‘learned virgins’, as your Périgordian Montaigne would say.”

“You mean Charles IX likes the Muses?” I asked, surprised.

“Oh, yes! He reads some poetry. He writes some as well. He loves to imitate Ronsard.”