Heretic Dawn (50 page)

“Alizon,” I thought—saddened by her words, yet moved so deeply by the fact that her head on my shoulder weighed no more than a sparrow, “it’s by an accident of birth that I’m a Huguenot, and isn’t it a pity that you love me for my person, but hate me for my Church, to the point that I must hide who I am to preserve your friendship.
Poor girl! And poor kingdom as well, that we cannot hold a tender young wench in our arms without having our hearts at war over the way we worship God!”

The next morning, I was overwhelmed with joy at the reception I received in the fencing room from the Baron de Quéribus, who did not share the zeal of his Church and didn’t give a fig whether or not I was a Protestant.

“Ah, Siorac!” he cried, embracing me warmly. “How happy I am to see you! It feels like for ever that you’ve been away! I don’t know what I’ll do when you leave Paris, as I understand you’re intending to do. Giacomi tells me you’ve given up on obtaining your pardon.”

“Quéribus,” I answered, taking him by the arm and strolling up and down the room, “I’m no baron but a younger son, so I have to get started on my practice of medicine without further delay.”

“But why don’t you establish your practice here in Paris?” cried Quéribus, pulling me to a halt and entreating me with his azure eyes. “I’m sure I could get the Duc d’Anjou to set you up with Dr Miron and your friend Fogacer!”

“Quéribus, I’m deeply touched by your friendship and concern, and offer you a thousand thanks. But my heart is in Provence and I couldn’t live anywhere else.”

“You mean to say that you’ve been bewitched by a beautiful lady from your region to the point that you want to marry her?”

“Precisely.”

“Well, then, why don’t you marry her?”

“Her father fears his own damnation if he takes a heretic for his son-in-law.”

“This kills me!” laughed Quéribus. “God’s truth! Such stinking superstition! Do you think the king of France has condemned himself to hellfire by choosing a Huguenot brother-in-law against the advice of the Pope? But, to come back to your immediate problem, what
can we do to solve it? Shall we carry the girl off by force and have you marry her afterwards? ’Sblood! I’ll help you with all my heart and all my strength! Your wish is my command and my fortune and all my men are at your service!”

“Oh, my brother!” I said, embracing him. “I cannot express my gratitude for your exceeding generosity, but Angelina is the sort of girl who would never consent to be carried off. She respects Monsieur de Montcalm too much, however much she disagrees with him in this.”

“Montcalm!” said Quéribus, raising his eyebrows. “The Montcalm from Nîmes? That’s her father? I know him well, though I’ve never met him. We are even distantly related. Listen, Siorac, I’m going to write him,” Quéribus continued with a smile, “to tell him in what extraordinary esteem Anjou holds you—you and your brother. But, by my faith, what have you done with your beautiful Samson? He who never leaves your side, like Castor and Pollux? The Duc d’Anjou saw him only once but is quite taken with him and often speaks of him.”

“I left him in Montfort-l’Amaury with an apothecary.”

“Well, perhaps that’s best,” replied Quéribus with a sly smile and a wink. “This court is perhaps too dangerous for such good and upstanding types. Siorac, I’m going to write Montcalm a letter, which, I dare hope, will soften his position. After all,” he continued, lowering his voice and casting a careful look around, “Montcalm cannot fail to realize that the duc is our future sovereign, with Charles being so ill and having no heir. From what I’ve heard, Montcalm is tired of being a magistrate and aspires to be the seneschal of Nîmes. Perhaps,” Quéribus laughed, “hell will seem less hot and its flames less intense if he can be brought to understand that his future son-in-law, heretic though he may be, is so well placed at court that he can advance his earthly fortunes.”

At this point, a salute from Silvie signalled that he was ready to begin their bout, so Quéribus took his leave of me with a warm embrace,
numerous kisses and pats on my shoulder. His sword unsheathed and his doublet removed, he returned to my side once more to make me swear to take all of my meals with him, since, he said, he didn’t want to lose sight of me that day. And, as I watched him fence with the supreme grace that comes from the adroit management of one’s strength, I couldn’t help feeling moved by his friendship—he seemed so thirsty for mine—nor help being surprised that he was, as many important personages of the court had claimed, a “sceptic” (as Montaigne would say) in matters of religion.

No doubt Quéribus would have found it extremely vulgar to be, like Fogacer, an atheist, for, in truth, he could never have come to the position through study and reflection since, other than Ronsard, he’d read nothing. And yet would a true believer ever have suggested making a bargain, so light-heartedly and in such jest, with Monsieur de Montcalm, to trump hell with his worldly advancement?

Exemplo plus quam ratione vivimus.
†
Catherine, the true sovereign of the kingdom since the death of her husband, Henri II, appeared to have no religious zeal whatsoever. Niece of a Pope who was so blatantly dishonest that no one believed him even when he spoke the truth, you would have said that this Machiavelli in skirts had developed a disorder that could best be defined as “indifference” and that spread from her to those around her until the entire court was infected with it. Catholicism, the reformed religion—it was all the same to Catherine. To convince the Cardinal de Bourbon to preside over the marriage of Margot and Henri de Navarre, she produced a letter from the papal ambassador that falsely proclaimed that the Holy Father had given his authorization to this marriage “against nature”. It was so widely known that Catherine didn’t care about the heresy of her future son-in-law that the priests and people of
Paris hated her for having arranged this “infamous” union, calling her “Jezebel” and throwing all sorts of accusations at her, condemning her to public obloquy. It was not to defend a religion, which she cared about as much as a fish cares about an apple, but by political calculation that, in order to maintain her personal power against that of Coligny, she stumbled, through an unpredictable concatenation of events, from the murder of a man to the most vile massacre in our history. When Navarre was forced to recant his Huguenot faith after the St Bartholomew massacre and went to hear Mass for the first time, Catherine, turning to the foreign ambassadors, laughed out loud, as if the horrible apocalypse that the kingdom had experienced during the night of 23rd–24th August had, in her eyes, merely been a farce, and the conversion of a prince, accomplished by holding a knife to his throat, a cause for unbridled mirth.

My good Quéribus was, thank God, no party to these horrors, but, as a member of this court, he shared its indifference, and thought nothing of Monsieur de Montcalm’s trading of eternal damnation for his appointment as seneschal of Nîmes, which he also considered a joke. Moreover, because of his fortune in belonging to the court, he knew a great deal about many people, including the appetites of Monsieur de Montcalm, whom he’d never seen! Well, I thought, so this is the advantage that accrues to the lords who occupy the Louvre and enjoy proximity to the king. They decry what the common man believes and know what he doesn’t know. And what infinite resources accrue to them through their daily actions, both from this disbelief and this knowledge I leave to your imagination.

My Quéribus was merely an elegant young man, as well as, if one wished to be censorious, vainglorious and chatty, and enjoyed, I believe, an almost infinite degree of luxury. But he had more heart, and was of a much less heady and light-hearted nature than he first appeared, for the letter he’d promised to write to Monsieur de Montcalm, which
I assumed was merely an empty promise, a compliment paid in the morning and forgotten by evening, my good baron actually wrote (though he struggled to do it and made copious spelling mistakes) and sent off to the chateau in Barbentane—the effect it had on Monsieur de Montcalm I shall relate later in these memoirs.

Maestro
Giacomi’s greeting was less uproarious, but was very touching in its quiet dignity, for he’d been worried about me, having heard from Fogacer that the Baronne des Tourelles had reacted hysterically to the letter I’d sent her, mocking her, and that she sought to hire some assassins to effect her revenge on me. I begged him to cross swords with me, wishing to get some exercise after my trip, and, after our combat, while still breathing hard and sweating from our exertions, he pulled me into a window embrasure and said softly, his eyes watchful:

“My brother, listen carefully. I’ve decided to teach you my secret sword thrust.”

“What?” I gasped, shuddering and barely able to believe my ears. “Your calf strike?” Jarnac’s move? Giacomi, you’d do that for me?”

“My brother,” he said gravely, “I must do so, given the danger you run with these hired assassins, who know everything there is to know about ambushing a man at night and who are as much to be feared as tigers. They won’t engage you in a duel, but will have at you en masse.”

“But I’ll have Miroul with me.”

“There will be only the two of you and, most likely, four or more of them. And that’s how my trick will get you out of trouble. For it works so quickly and so irremediably that in two seconds you’ll have two men on the ground, not dead, but mutilated and screaming in anguish, which will so terrify the others that they’ll flee the scene.”

I looked at Giacomi, unable to find my voice to answer him, my eyes wide, my whole being paralysed in disbelief at the notion that, to protect me, he would share with me this secret of swordplay that he’d
inherited from his teacher, that he was the only one in the world to have mastered (other than Jarnac, but Jarnac was now old and infirm) and that he valued more than all the treasures of the Grand Turk. I can well imagine that it was not without much bitter inner debate and out of the deepest friendship that Giacomi had decided to divulge his famous trick. Only after asking me to swear on the Bible never to reveal his secret to anyone and to employ it myself only if my life depended on it in a manifestly unequal combat did Giacomi teach it to me, which he did over the next few days, in a private room protected from the view of any onlookers, which Quéribus offered us in his house in the grand’rue Saint-Honoré. Not even Miroul was allowed to watch.

On 17th August Princesse Margot was officially engaged to Henri de Navarre and the wedding was set for the next day. Quéribus told me that, if I wished, he could arrange for me to be admitted to the platform, erected outside Notre-Dame, where the benediction would be given, Navarre having refused to enter the cathedral to hear the Mass.

“My good friend,” I replied, “might it be possible for me to be accompanied by a noblewoman from Normandy and her chambermaid?”

“What?” laughed Quéribus. “So now you’re the lover of a noblewoman just as you were in Montpellier! You’ve been keeping secrets from me!”

“Not at all! She belongs to my brother Samson and not to me, and while he’s in Montfort, I’m her chaperone.”

“You’re killing me!” cried Quéribus, laughing all the harder. “What kind of a chaperone is this? Good God! I’d have more trust asking a fox to protect my henhouse!”

Dame Gertrude and Zara nearly suffocated me beneath all the kisses, hugs and caresses they bestowed on me when I arrived at their lodgings in the rue Brisemiche to announce the good news. They’d despaired of getting to see the ceremony and were thrilled that they’d be able to see up close the dresses and finery of Margot and the queen
mother, as well as all the royal princes and handsome gentlemen that would be attending.

I left them to tend to their preparations and headed off to see Alizon in her lodgings, since the king had decreed that no one should be required to work on the day before the royal wedding, so that they could decorate all the streets and intersections of Paris for the wedding festivities.

Her lodgings, which consisted of one tiny little room, were on the rue Tirechappe, under the roof, which made them exceptionally hot on this August afternoon; the only air came from a small dormer window, next to which my beautiful companion was sitting, her sewing needle working as rapidly as a spider spins her web.

I entered straightaway without knocking, the door being ajar to let some air circulate through the room.

“So Alizon,” I greeted her, bending as I approached her so as not to bang my head on the low ceiling, “you’re sewing! On your day off!”

“Ah, Monsieur,” she replied without getting up, her manner at once busy, agitated and happy, “I have to! I’m making a new petticoat that I want to wear tomorrow for the marriage of Princesse Margot, since the king requested all the inhabitants of Paris to wear their finest clothes to honour his sister!”

“What, Alizon!” I said, a bit piqued that she kept at her task without stopping to give me a kiss, “you’re going to this marriage that you think is so shameful?”

“Well, Monsieur,” she replied without missing a stitch, her tongue as lively as her fingers, “’tis infamous for sure and entirely against nature. It’s truly a union of air and fire—the air of Paradise and the fire of hell.”

“So why attend in that case?” I asked, secretly amused at the notion that Margot could be compared to the air of Paradise since everyone knew about her profligate carryings-on with Guise.

“Blessed Virgin!” cried Alizon. “Do you expect me to sit at home when everyone else is going? A wedding is a wedding! Am I going to miss seeing the most beautiful ceremony of the reign just because the groom is a heretical dog? But Monsieur,” she continued with a sigh, “I’m desperate! Dusk is falling and I have no candle that would allow me to finish before going to bed, I’m so exhausted!”

“What about little Henriot?” I asked, seeing the empty cradle next to her bed.

“My neighbour is looking after him. He’s been so noisy that I can’t keep him in here when I’m working.”

“I’m going to see him,” I said, turning on my heels, disappointed (frankly) that this damned petticoat prevented me from taking her in my arms as I wanted after my three days in Montfort.