The Brethren (19 page)

As Barberine rose to gather up her brood, Coulondre opened his mouth like a fish. That usually meant that he was about to speak: an activity so unusual for him that it required a good deal of preparation, for from his open mouth no sound was emitted at first. Yet no one was fooled: Coulondre was going to speak his mind, an event so rare that all eyes turned to him. Despite the orders she’d received, Barberine made not a move.

Coulondre had placed his arm—or rather his iron hook—on the table to ease the burden on his shoulder. At forty his hair was already turning white, and his entire face, long as Lent, seemed to be turned downward: the corners of his eyes, of his mouth, the tilt of his nose. He had a way of closing his eyes during dinner which scarcely inspired conversation from his neighbours. Added to which, no one would have been much interested in hearing his opinion. For whenever Coulondre chose to emit real words instead of his usual grunts, it was to voice sad and calamitous thoughts. On the eve of my father’s departure for the war, as Cabusse was showing us the firearms, I remember that when I cried, “These are proud weapons! They’ll kill lots of enemies,” Coulondre had merely said, “The enemy’s got the same ones,” with a look and a tone that implied that not one of them, my father included, would survive the conflict.

Such were Coulondre’s tendencies and talents: he stripped the future bare of any vestige of hope. So at Mespech not only the servants but even the Brethren had ended up fearing Coulondre’s least words, for they were always sulphurous vapours, heartbreaking observations, crushing truths—so immense was his instinct for sniffing out and revealing the worst side of things.

“My Lord,” he rasped with the voice of the taciturn, “I would like to ask a question.”

“Ask away, my brave Coulondre,” said my father with his usual good humour, tempered now with a touch of uneasiness, a feeling we all shared faced with the prospect of this great mute’s speech.

“My Lord,” continued Coulondre, “will we continue to celebrate saints’ days at Mespech as we used to?”

We all looked at each other and, as my father hesitated, Sauveterre interjected drily: “There’s no reason to celebrate saints’ days any more since in the reformed religion we don’t worship the saints.”

“I thought as much,” mumbled Coulondre in a funereal voice, and he closed his eyes.

Everyone stared at him and a mournful silence fell over the table. There was such consternation among our people and such astonishment that they no longer knew—dare I say—which saint to turn to. It had just dawned on them that in one short evening they had lost fifty holidays a year.

It was on the afternoon of Monday 23rd December (as reported
in extenso
in the
Book of Reason
) that Baron de Siorac, Monsieur de Sauveterre, the Reverend Duroy and the four Caumont brothers, the eldest of whom, François, was the lord of Milandes and of Castelnau, convened in my father’s library to instruct the Baronne de Siorac in the ways of the reformed religion and to invite her conversion. As good captains, Siorac and Sauveterre had wrapped up a successful campaign in their conversion of Mespech. With that same brilliant tactical sense Guise had shown at Calais, they had vanquished one by one each of the strongholds defending the city before bringing their entire forces to bear on the citadel itself. But if they had hoped to benefit from the same effect of surprise that Guise had enjoyed, they were sadly mistaken. For, through Franchou, whom Barberine had kept hourly informed of the conversion’s progress within our walls, Isabelle knew exactly how her husband, her sons, her daughter, the Siorac twins, Cabusse and Cathau and all the servants, men and women alike, had been won over.

Isolated and as though surrounded on all sides by the “heresy”, Isabelle wasn’t about to let herself be taken—quite the contrary. With her pride as stiffened and reddened as a cockscomb, she appeared in the library in all her finery, superbly decked out, her beautiful golden locks adorned with her set of ancestral pearls (my father certainly
too chary of the Brethren’s resources to think of wasting them on such frivolity). And it was she who attacked before my father could even open his mouth: “Messieurs,” she said in a declamatory tone, “why are so many of you gathered here? Are you in league against me? Are you my judges? Do you plan to torture me when you have done here? Is it for this that you have convoked my four cousins? Seven men against one unfortunate woman, and she attended by no one! Do you feel strong enough to defeat me?”

“Madame,” said my father, greatly taken aback by her hardy overture, “your speech lacks reason or justification. No one here wishes your demise, quite the contrary. We all wish, from the bottom of our hearts, that you will be saved. If you see your cousins gathered here, it is because they are all that remain of your illustrious family, and having for some time now embraced the reformed religion, they desired to be a witness to our call to join our ranks. As for Monsieur Duroy, whom you see here—”

“I do not know this knave,” said my mother in her most disdainful manner, “nor will I listen to him.”

“Knave, Madame?” gasped my father with a start. “Monsieur Duroy is the minister of our religion, a man of passing knowledge and rare virtue. You owe him your respect.”

“Monsieur my husband,” replied Isabelle, “I owe my respect to the priests and prelates of the Holy Church in which I was raised, along with all of my ancestors, as well as the king of France, Charles IX, our sovereign lord, to whom I dedicate my allegiance to my dying breath. As for your pestiferous heretics, I want nothing to do with them!”

This was spoken with such forceful disdain that it reduced them all to silence. Sauveterre, Duroy and the Caumonts appeared to be turned to stone. As for my father, he rose and took several steps across the room, his fists clenched, drunk with inarticulate rage. “Isabelle,”
he said, turning to her, his voice muted by anger, “take care! All of us are, as you put it, ‘pestiferous heretics’, and if you wish to have nothing to do with us, we must understand that you are renouncing your entire family.”

At this rejoinder, Isabelle realized that she had gone too far, and fell silent, yet remained standing stiffly, head held high, her manner bespeaking her rebellious intent. Nevertheless, her silence allowed my father to regain control of his feelings, to sit down and resume the conversation, though with a voice strained by the effort of controlling his anger: “Madame, I bid you sit down beside me in this chair and listen to what the Reverend Duroy is going to tell you about our religion.”

“No, Monsieur, I shall remain standing,” replied Isabelle in a softer yet equally resolute tone. “I shall not heed these dangerous novelties which you yourselves and your friends are trying to insinuate into the faith of our fathers!”

“But my cousin,” said Sauveterre indignantly, “it is precisely in this that you are mortally mistaken, and your error is based only on your wilful ignorance. This ‘novelty’ is not on our side, for we are but trying to rediscover the pure and clear source of Christianity, which the Roman Church has covered with mud, soiling it with customs, idolatries, monstrosities and, as you call them, novelties. Our hope lies in adhering strictly to the Word of God as it is revealed to us in the Old and New Testaments. That is the pure source, from which any, provided he can read, may drink.”

“And cast for himself his own little religion, according to the feeble lights of his own good sense,” retorted Isabelle sarcastically. “No, my cousin, the Church rightly considers as a pestilential invention this translation your Huguenots have made of the Old and New Testaments into a vulgar tongue, spreading them, as you have done, among gentlemen, burghers and the common people,
at the risk of corrupting the precepts of the Christian religion from top to bottom.”

“What?” cried my father. “It is we who corrupt the Christian religion? When all we want is to reclaim the original purity of its source in offering the world the Word of God! This Word which your prelates and your Pope have nearly snuffed out beneath their interpretations, superstitions and extravagances!”

“Monsieur,” replied Isabelle, “do not speak this way of the Holy Father or I shall withdraw immediately.”

“Madame,” said the Reverend Duroy in his soft bass voice, “if you wished to practise Christian humility, you would seek the Word of God not from the mouths of men, but from His own, in His Holy Scriptures. And you would not then call the Pope ‘the Holy Father’.”

“And why not, if you please?” sniffed my mother, affecting disdain, yet struck by the venerable appearance of the minister.

“Because Christ said in Matthew 23: ‘Do not call any man your father, for you have but one father and He is in heaven.’”

It would have been a gross misjudgement of my mother to expect that she should be overwhelmed, or even shaken by such an objection.

“My own humility,” she said, raising her head, “consists in not trusting to the weakness of my own lights, in not interpreting according to my own whim the holy canon, but to rely for such interpretation on the Church Fathers and holy prelates who, for centuries, have defined our dogmas and our rites.”

“And,” rejoined the minister, “multiplied falsehoods, corrupted and twisted the Holy Word and made cheap commerce of the rites.”

“Monsieur, I shall not listen to you,” said Isabelle.

“It suits you ill to speak, then, of humility, Madame!” said my father vehemently. “You who from the outset of this interview have opposed your family and your husband with a diabolical pride; you have ears yet hear not the truth, and eyes but see it not; you whom
I love and for whom I’ve prayed—more than a thousand times, oft on bended knee, on nights when the unbearable thought of your damnation kept me fast awake—to but read, to consent to read just once the Old and New Testaments.”

This “whom I love” caused a terrible pallor in Isabelle and she vacillated more at that than at any other moment of the discussion. Yet she recovered herself almost immediately and said with utter finality: “I read my Catholic missal, and the hours of the Blessed Virgin, for these books are permitted me. But I shall read neither the Old nor the New Testament, for the Church forbids it of me. And I hold firmly to the belief that outside the Church there is no salvation.”

“What are you saying, Madame?” cried my father, paling in his turn. And, turning to the minister, he said, his voice choked with grief. “Did you hear this blasphemy?”

“Alas,” said Duroy, “it is a rare abomination to substitute the Roman Church for Christ and to make of it an idol. Madame, say rather, outside of Christ there is no salvation.”

Isabelle, as yet unbowed by my father’s anger, seemed deeply moved, not by Duroy’s remark, but rather by the evident pain her own words had caused her husband. She fell silent, and there seemed to be a momentary truce among all combatants, as if each were regaining his breath and were trying to recover from the many blows given and received.

Geoffroy de Caumont, in his turn, took up the argument. The most zealous of the four Caumont brothers, he was prior of Brive and abbot of Uzerche, Vigeais and Clairac. But in becoming Huguenot, he had not abandoned his offices and benefits, converting his flock and his monks by high-handed rather than gentler means. In stature, he was a man of average height, with rather fierce eyes and dark skin and hair.

“My cousin,” he said gruffly, “you, for whom all tradition is
holy, you would do well to follow the other women in our family and obey your husband. You dishonour the Caumont family with your obstinacy. You’re more hardheaded, my cousin, than the stubbornest goat, and you should be careful lest your wilfulness disgust your husband and cause him to repudiate you.”

“Even if my husband were to send me away,” replied Isabelle, her voice trembling, “I am too confident of your own friendship for me to fear that you should reject me.”

“Not so, Madame!” frowned Geoffroy de Caumont. “Not so! Neither my brothers, François and Jean, nor your other relatives and friends would have anything to do with you, and there would be no haven for you in the entire length and breadth of our province.”

Isabelle valiantly faced this blow, stating in a strong voice: “Monsieur, if you forsake me, the Church will not forsake me. And I prefer to be the most wretched person in the world than to leave the Church for men.”

“Idolatress!” cried my father, torn between anger and grief. “The Church, always the Church! And God, Madame, what make you of Him?”

“For me,” said Isabelle, “the Church and God are one and the same.”

A troubled silence followed these words, and then Geoffroy de Caumont burst out furiously, “Madame, having a husband, a brother, sons and your entire family converted to the reformed religion, you must understand that by remaining a papist you repudiate all the natural and sacred ties that bind you to your family. And that by all of these you will be henceforth seen not as a spouse, but as the whore of the Baron de Siorac!”

“That’s as may be,” replied Isabelle, drawing herself to her full height, “but then, Monsieur, if I am a whore then you must be a whoremonger, for God knows you arranged this marriage.”

Geoffroy de Caumont paled, and my father, for whom the words “repudiate” and “whore” caused as much pain as they did for Isabelle, rose and said in a curt but courteous voice: “Madame, this interview has tired you. We shall bring it to a close. And with your permission, I shall accompany you to your apartment.”

“I shall go alone,” said Isabelle. With tears in her eyes, but unvanquished and unbowed, she turned on her heels and left the room with a majestic sweep of her full dress.

As Isabelle remained anchored and unshakable in the faith of her fathers, and refused any compromise, the dispute between her and my father continued over the months and years that followed. It raged, in fact, from 23rd December 1560 until 15th April 1563, shaking Mespech to its very foundations. The ferment of discord, verging at times on hatred, that this furious quarrel raised in our ordered and peaceful community, not only drove a wedge between husband and wife, but plagued the servants, upset the children and at times even—especially in the matter of whether to dismiss Franchou or not—divided the Brethren.