The Brethren (15 page)

The counsellors refused to be intimidated. Viole and Du Faur demanded the suspension of all attacks against the reformers, and proposed the establishment of a council. Anne de Bourg, protesting the tortures, cried, “It is not a matter of little consequence to condemn those who, from the flames that devour their bodies, invoke the name of Jesus Christ.”

Henri II was little open to ideas, much less to new ideas. He listened vacantly to these orators, then, rising abruptly, ordered their arrest. This was not only a coup d’état without precedent in the history of the parliament, but also proof that, henceforth, no one would be spared, no matter what his position or birth. In destroying the authority of this great body, with his own hands, the king buried the legality of the kingdom and established himself as head of the Inquisition. In his entourage, there was much discussion of a project, designed to end this heresy once and for all, that simply outlawed all reformers, a measure that would have allowed the populace at large to kill them with impunity, and, once dead, to strip them of their lands.

This news reached Mespech on 30th June. “You see where we would be today, my brother, if I had listened to you,” my father said to Sauveterre. “I can name you ten lords of Périgord, not even counting Fontenac, who would be all too happy to band together to parcel out Mespech, if we had given them the least excuse.”

“When you serve God and God alone,” replied Sauveterre, “you must trust yourself to His Providence. Israel endured numberless persecutions, yet the Lord has always punished her enemies in the end.”

At the very moment Sauveterre pronounced these words, Henri II, who only that morning had been the healthiest and jolliest man
in all of France, lay dying in mortal agony, his left eye pierced by the tip of a lance during a jousting match.

For this joust, all the paving stones had been removed from the rue Saint-Antoine in front of the Hôtel des Tournelles, so that the horses could gallop on sand and the jousters’ falls would be less of a shock. Henri II, as defending champion, was to ride three jousts, his opponents one each. An avid sportsman, Henri took enormous pains to prepare himself for this great event, for he attached a much greater honour to unhorsing his assailant in a joust than to preserving a province of his kingdom. And when his first adversary, Emmanuel-Philibert de Savoie—who had long since assumed this title though he possessed not a square inch of Savoyard territory—entered the Hôtel des Tournelles to present his respects to the king, Henri, already armed and helmeted, said gaily: “Now, my brother, press your knees hard into your saddle, for if I can, I shall empty your stirrups, without a care for our alliance.”

He did not succeed, however, for each of the two adversaries broke his lance on his opponent’s shield, and the duc, his lance in the dirt, seized his saddle-bow and swayed but did not fall from his horse. The judges gave the advantage to the king, but the second joust, run against the Duc de Guise, was ruled a draw, for neither man had flinched. In the third and final joust, the king was matched against the Comte de Montgomery, captain of the guards, a tall, rather stiff young man in the bloom of his twenties. He and the king came together in a terrible clash, each breaking his lance but without clear advantage to either side. At this the king was angry, and raising his visor cried that he wanted his revenge on Montgomery and requested a fourth joust.

This request so manifestly violated the rules of jousting (no defender
may joust more than thrice) that it met with some opposition: notably from Monsieur de Vieilleville, who had already entered the lists to run his three jousts as the next defender, and from Montgomery himself, who, as assailant, was entitled to but one joust and feared that the other assailants would cry foul play. But the king, raising his voice, refused to listen to reason, sent Vieilleville from the lists, and ordered Montgomery to return. Montgomery returned very much in spite of himself, and stiffer than ever.

The king’s obstinacy had created a certain unease among the spectators, so much so that when the joust began, the trumpets and horns which had made such ear-splitting fanfare for the previous matches fell silent. This mortal silence was later esteemed to have been a deadly omen.

Everything happened very fast. Each assailant broke his lance, but rather than throwing his broken lance to the ground as he should have, Montgomery held on to it. And as his steed continued its headlong race towards the king after their initial shock, the broken lance struck the king’s helmet, forcing open the visor and piercing his eye. The king dropped his shield, fell forward on his horse, but managed enough strength to hold on to the animal’s neck as it galloped to the other end of the lists, where it was reined in by the royal attendants. “I am killed,” moaned the king weakly as he fell into the arms of the grand squire.

He lived ten more days in the most atrocious agony. From Brussels, Felipe II sent Vésale, the famous surgeon, who, assisted by Ambroise Paré, probed the wound and attempted to extract the splinters of the lance. To attempt to understand the extent of the wound, the two great doctors had four heads of recently executed criminals brought from the Conciergerie, and had each struck violently with Montgomery’s broken lance. But these macabre experiments shed no light on their problem.

The king regained consciousness on the fourth day, and ordered the marriages of his sister and daughter to his recent enemies to take place at once. Which was done, though in the general affliction and the sense of the king’s impending death, the weddings without oboes or violins resembled nothing so much as a funeral cortège. Those who were present found themselves repeating the sinister prophecy of Nostradamus:

It was whispered that “the young lion” was of course Montgomery, and the “golden cage” the golden helmet of the king.

The king died two days after the princely marriages, on 10th July 1559. The story I have just reported reached Mespech on 25th July in a letter from Paris. I found a summary of this letter in the
Book of Reason
written by my father, along with Sauveterre’s comments scribbled in the margins: “My brother, was I not right not to despair? By arresting Anne du Bourg and the counsellors of the parliament of Paris who hold our ideas, Henri II hoped to strike a blow to the head of the reform movement. And it is to his head, in turn, that God has struck a blow. The judgements of the Lord are a deep abyss, illumined at times by a great light. The tempest of persecution that has so overwhelmed the entire kingdom will be appeased by this clearly providential blow.”

To which my father answered on the following day, 26th July: “This is hardly likely. Henri II will be succeeded by his son François II. He’s but a child and is married to Guise’s niece, Mary Stuart, who has bewitched him. Power will not change hands, nor will the
persecutions cease.” Jean de Siorac was not wrong: Henri II was scarcely in his tomb before Guise was master of the kingdom. Six months later, Anne du Bourg was burnt in public as a heretic.

In 1560 the haying was done late in the season at Mespech because the first part of July was rainy and windy and even included a couple of days well below freezing, resembling winter more than summer. Finally, on the 15th, the weather turned hot and dry and Siorac, having had all the scythes brought to him, cleaned away the grease which coated them and found them all shining and sharp—except for one, which had gone dull from overuse. He asked Faujanet—whom no one could equal in this task—to beat the blade sharp again, and Faujanet, placing it on a little anvil, spent the next two hours tapping it gently with precise hammer strokes whose regular rhythm was so captivating that I stopped for quite a while to watch.

We had sent word to our tenant farmers that we required their help, and, at daybreak the next morning, our hayers, Cabusse, Marsal (Coulondre being unable to scythe given his iron hook), Faujanet, Jonas, Michel and Benoît Siorac, Maligou, Fougerol (from Taniès), and Délibie from Flaquière all lined up at the edge of our field at Haut Pré, measuring their distance from each other to get just the right sweep.

Since Samson and I were going on our tenth year, we had got permission to get up that day while it was still black as pitch and to cut the nettles along the way with an old chipped scythe, each taking turns cutting and raking. François, for his part, joined the Brethren and Coulondre Iron-arm on horseback, patrolling the crest of the hill and the edge of the woods, an unloaded pistol in his holster and his fists clenched on his thigh. But as soon as the sun began to beat
down, he grew tired of the jolting of his little black gelding, quit his guard duties and went back to the house. He didn’t even return to eat with us in the shade of the great walnut tree at eleven o’clock since he didn’t much like mixing with our servants and sensed that he was not much liked by them. For, besides his willingness to work, what our Périgordians appreciate in a lad are frank speaking, an easy laugh and a quick repartee, and they didn’t like the moodiness of our eldest, having learnt to mistrust a man who is too quiet, like a dog who won’t bark.

With the heavy rains of this rotten month of July, the nettles had greatly thrived both in size and number, so that Samson and I undertook a terrible massacre, putting them all to the sword and taking no prisoners. “Take that, villainous Englishman,” swaggered Samson, “that will teach him to invade Calais instead of staying at home!” We killed thousands of such unfortunates, especially since they were rather poor at defending themselves, hanging their stinging leaves forlornly and offering their stalks to be scythed, where a mere stick would have sufficed.

“Hey there, my rascals!” shouted my father, half serious, half joking from atop his horse. “You’re behind the times on the history of the kingdom. Don’t you know the English are no longer our enemies now that they’ve surrendered Calais, and ever since Elizabeth succeeded Bloody Mary? Elizabeth’s no papist, as I’ve already told you.”

The hayers were lined up awaiting the signal from the captains to begin. Some stood shivering in the cold breeze of early dawn since they’d dressed lightly, anticipating the heat of the morning and the sweat to come. With their left hands caressing the little cup hanging at their sides where the whetstone bathed in water, they draped their right hands over the back of their blades, the scythe held in profile before them like the famous engravings of Death.
But all nine scythers seemed more content than sad. For as hard as was the task before them, it was still a feast day.

At Mespech we never held back on the food at haying time. And all nine had already filled their paunches at four that morning with a thick vegetable and pork soup followed by a copious cup of wine. Lined up at the edge of the field, they silently watched the grasses swaying in the breeze all the way down to the edge of the wood below. Great God, the meadow had surely taken advantage of the rain, the bitch: high, green, shining and thick as a woman’s hair the grasses stretched out in such immensity that the scythers told themselves there was no way they could ever cut all of it, even with nine of them working from dawn to dusk. Better not to think too much about it, but remember that at eleven there’d be good rye bread, some salt pork and all the wine you could drink.

Below them, on the hayrick, they could spot the nine loaded arquebuses that the Brethren had provided so as to arm the hayers in the event of an attack. They were grateful to the captains for these precautions, and for their patrols on horseback while they worked, something not every master would do for his cutters, some preferring to leave their workers defenceless rather than get a sore arse from a day in the saddle.

When Jean de Siorac raised his arm to give the signal, Faujanet, who was at the far left of the line, stepped forward and cut into the edge of the field, making his blade whistle in manly fashion through the dew-covered grass, carrying the entire bladeful with his backstroke, leaving a regular swathe on his left. Jonas, next up, gave him a scythe’s-length lead before he cut into the field in his turn, and his neighbour, Fougerol, waited a few strokes as well before beginning his swathe. The distance from scyther to scyther was thus maintained right to the last, who, by the time it was his turn, was eight toises behind the leader. Thus each one had a clear view of the
field before him and so avoided both the risk of catching the point of his blade on the heel of the other’s and the problem of leaving uncut grass between them.

As first man on the left, Faujanet was leader of the field, setting the rhythm for the others and indicating each halt to sharpen their blades by sounding two notes on a small horn he wore around his neck. The Brethren had chosen Faujanet for this, not because he was the best mower of the lot, but, quite the contrary, because he was an average cutter, neither too strong nor too fast, and consequently a man everyone could follow without upsetting the overall rhythm and pattern of the field.

Of course, Faujanet did not understand his responsibility in this way. My father noticed with a smile that haying time was his moment of power and glory, and to watch the dark little man’s face as he seized his horn to blow his two notes (or three to start up again), you could see the pride he felt in his post. Moreover, he loved to hay. Certainly, the scythe was not a plaything in his hands the way it was for Jonas. For Faujanet, the work required an effort of back, arms, hips and his stubby legs, to keep his torso from pitching forward with the force of his swing. But he was able to pace his work with an eye to the long day to come. He was careful not to catch too much grass on his blade or to hurry his backswing. As soon as he felt fatigue setting in, he would sound two notes on his little trumpet, using the blade-sharpening time to catch his breath, passing the dampened whetstone back and forth across each face of the blade. The important thing was not to go fast, but to finish the job.