The Brethren (33 page)

My father wrote to Samson and me every day since, in his own idleness, he’d obtained permission from Sauveterre to correct our Latin translations, which he did to perfection, his own French being more refined and more elegant than his brother’s. To these corrections, he
would add on my copy excellent lessons on the treatment and cure of blunderbuss wounds, according to Ambroise Paré’s book, as well as knowledge he himself had obtained during his nine years in the Norman legion. Later I learnt that he had also received permission to correct Catherine’s, little Hélix’s and Little Sissy’s lessons, which were normally handed to Alazaïs, whom the Brethren had promoted to this task when my mother died.

The care given to the education of the girls at Mespech might cause some surprise, yet mistresses and servingwomen alike had to learn to read, in order to gain access to the Bible for themselves and later for their sons and daughters. Religion, the Brethren reasoned, had to be transmitted like language itself, justly called the mother tongue, passing from mother to baby from the tenderest age. Thus, Little Sissy and little Hélix, thanks to our Huguenot zeal, knew more at their age than many young Catholic noblewomen, who could scarcely sign their names. It is true that Alazaïs, having her own system of spelling, passed it on to her students, but my father took no notice of this imperfection, replying with laughter to Sauveterre, who had criticized it, that Catherine de’ Medici could write no more correctly than little Hélix, though she was queen of France.

Three days before the end of our quarantine, I received a second letter from little Hélix, dusted with the same flour as the first, my correspondent having “thauts about me all da longe”. But I was angered to learn that tongues were wagging in the kitchen between la Maligou and Barberine about Franchou. I hesitated to inform my father of these scullery rumours, but knew that I couldn’t manage it without appearing to be involved in such matters or else betraying Hélix. So I said nothing, not even to Samson, about this second letter and immediately threw it in the fire.

As the end of my quarantine approached, I excitedly fixed my heart on the morning when I would be able to leave this room where
Samson and I had been sequestered for three long weeks. And yet when that day dawned for me, it brought nothing but sadness and heartbreak.

It had been agreed in letters exchanged with my father to wait for freedom until he himself came to deliver us. While we waited for the heavy key to turn in the lock of our great wooden door, Samson and I had decided on one last fencing match, which we fought, nearly suffocating under our breastplates. Once these were unlaced and removed, our swords in their scabbards, we each threw ourselves on our beds, naked as the day we were born.

Then, hearing the long awaited grinding of the lock, I sat up on my bed and saw my father come in all smiles and eyes flashing happily. Samson and I both got up and ran to him from our respective corners, happily anticipating the fulsome abandon of his welcoming hug. But suddenly my father stared at me, grew deathly pale and, changing without warning from the liveliest joy to a cold anger, he cried in a terrible voice: “My son, have you become an idolater?”

“Me, an idolater?” I stammered, confused by the shock of this incredible accusation and brought up short in my rush to meet him, whilst Samson, too, froze in his tracks, his wide-eyed look fixed on my father and me.

“Isn’t that a medallion of the Virgin Mary you’re wearing around your neck?” asked my father, pointing a trembling finger at it, his eyes blazing.

“You know it well,” I choked. “It is my mother’s medallion.”

“So what?” screamed my father violently, taking a step towards me as if to rip it from my neck. “Never mind where you got it. Or who you got it from! You’re wearing the damnable thing!”

“Monsieur my father,” I said, collecting myself and speaking more firmly, for I was deeply wounded by his “So what?”, “my
mother gave it to me on her deathbed and made me promise to wear it all my life.”

“And you promised!”

“She was dying. What else could I do?”

“Tell me about it!” cried my father, his eyes bulging out. “Tell me about it at once! I would have released you from this monstrous promise! Instead of which, you preferred to hide it from me like a thief, and wear this idol stealthily, betraying your faith!”

“I’ve betrayed nothing, and I’ve stolen nothing!” I replied, my anger getting the better of me now, and drawn up like a cock I stared outraged at my father.

“Yes you have! You’ve stolen my tenderness, which, from this day forth you no longer deserve, having hidden your stinking idolatry from me all these months!”

“But I’m not an idolater!” I shouted, my eyes ablaze, nearly defying him, so indignant was I at his injustice. “I never pray to Mary! I pray to Christ or the Lord without any intercession whatever from Mary or the saints! This medallion’s no idol for me! It’s an object sacred to the memory of my mother.”

“No object is sacred!” answered my father with vehemence and a violent gesture of his hand. “To believe the contrary is precisely idolatry! No, Monsieur,” he continued loudly, “however much you twist your logic, you cannot claim to wear this medallion innocently, if only because you could not have misunderstood your mother’s purpose in giving it to you. At your birth she named you Pierre, and you know very well why! Nor can you be ignorant of the reason she gave you this medallion!”

“No, I’m well aware of her purpose,” I said defiantly and heatedly, “but that doesn’t mean I’m corrupted by it. Being named Pierre doesn’t make me a papist. And this medallion hasn’t changed my faith.”

“You may think so,” sneered my father, “but the Devil has more than one way of insinuating his poison into your heart, and more than one mask for approaching you, including the mask of filial love.”

“Monsieur my father,” I answered, “I cannot believe that the Devil can have any place in a mother’s love for her son, nor a son’s for his mother.”

“It must be so!” raged my father with such ferocious resentment that I was frozen to the spot. And he repeated: “It must be so since he counselled you to hide from me that you were wearing this thing. When I woke you on the 7th to go to Sarlat, you were naked as now and yet you were not wearing this idol. Where was it?”

“Under my mattress. I don’t wear it at night, it hangs too heavy on me.”

“It hangs too heavy on you, indeed, from dissimulation, from ruse and deception! Untie it from your neck and give it to me!”

At this, Samson took a step forward, and joining his two hands, looked into my father’s angry eyes and begged with a sweet, entreating tone: “Oh no! I beg you, my father!”

It was so out of character for Samson, always so discreet and modest, to intervene in a quarrel he was not involved in, that my father stared at him for a full second, his eyebrows raised in surprise at this “Oh no!” Then his face grew dark again and I thought for a minute that he was going to unleash his anger on Samson, but he turned again to me, his eyes full of wrath, and said in a clipped tone: “Well! I gave you an order!”

I knew in that instant that my whole life, or, what amounts to the same thing, the idea I had of myself, was going to be made or undone by my response. I stiffened and speaking coldly, but with a strange assurance: “Monsieur my father, it cannot be. I made an oath to my mother. I cannot break this oath.”

“I will dispense you from it!” he cried, beside himself with rage.

“But you don’t have the power,” I replied. “Only my mother would, if she were living.”

“What? You defy me!” cried my father. “You dare to oppose me!” He stared at me as if he were about to hurl himself at me, but thinking better of it, began pacing rapidly about the room, biting his lips, his eyes ablaze, cheeks and forehead scarlet. “Monsieur,” he said, positioning himself in front of me, hands on hips and his chin jutting out, “either you give me this medallion as I’ve ordered you, or else I shall within the hour cut you off from my family like a gangrened limb and throw you out of Mespech.”

I felt myself grow pale. Sweat streamed down my back and my legs began to shake as if an abyss had opened up before me. I could likewise not coax a single strangled word from my lips.

“Well?” my father said.

“Monsieur my father,” I said finally, tearing my words one by one from the knot in my throat, and barely controlling my anger, “I am in despair to have to displease you. But I cannot without dishonour do what you ask of me, and rather than do it, I’d rather be driven away, even if unjustly.”

“Well then, you shall, Monsieur!” replied my father in a leaden voice. And he added, shouting, “With an oath which I
too
shall keep, never to see you again!”

A long silence followed these words. The world fell away before my eyes and it seemed as though I’d ceased to exist. There I stood before my father, stiff as a block of stone, deprived of speech and very nearly of feeling, though I fumed with a terrible anger.

It was at this point that Samson intervened a second time. Although I recall this as through a mist, it seemed to me that tears were streaming down his cheeks, which surprised me since my father and I, though each animated by a like anger, were dry-eyed, whatever the
inner feelings that may have tormented us. Samson, on the other hand, was weeping. Meanwhile, without ever deviating from his usual sweetness, nor seeming to take sides, he flew to my defence. Coming up close to me, he placed his left arm on my shoulder, and his upturned face had the effect of a great light shining in the darkness. He lisped simply, “Pierre, I’ll not abandon you. If you leave, I’ll come with you.”

Lightning from Sinai striking at my father’s feet could not have produced a greater effect. He stared at Samson as if he were trying to summon up against him all the fury which tore at his heart, but Samson wept, not for himself, but for me and for my father, sensing all the ravages this great quarrel had made between us. And my father, who had managed to hate me for daring to defy him, was unable, try though he might, to harden himself to Samson or even to look at him angrily or utter a single word against him. Feeling his powerlessness, trembling with rage and half-crazed, as I was, with grief, he decided his only course of action was turn on his heels and storm out of the room. He was so blinded by his emotions that he crashed into the door frame and left the door gaping behind him.

I fell into Samson’s arms and, suddenly letting go, cried hot and bitter tears against his cheek, and shook with great sobs I was powerless to control. I was ashamed to be thirteen, only two years from adulthood, yet weeping like a baby. After a moment, Samson pulled away from me and counselled me gently but firmly to get dressed. My duty, he argued, before leaving Mespech for ever, was to ask my father to pardon me for this fidelity to my mother which had led me to defy him. This advice seemed good to me for I was sorry to have stood up so firmly against my father, even if in my heart I believed I was right. I dressed, strapped on my short sword as proof of my intention to leave Mespech, and with a firm step that belied the heartbeats that shook my ribs from within, my head
swimming in confusion from the shock I’d suffered, I headed for the library. But, as I neared the door, I was brought up short by the sound of a violent argument concerning me coming from within. And as I hesitated, not knowing whether to knock or withdraw, daring neither to break in on this new quarrel nor withdraw and risk not having the courage to return, I listened, stunned and mute, my breath cut short, to the words which flew in rage between my father and Sauveterre.

“There are,” cried Sauveterre in a violent and accusatory tone I’d never heard him use before, “there are greater sins than wearing a medallion to the Virgin around your neck!”

“And just what do you mean!” replied my father, furious.

“Just what I say!” stormed Sauveterre. “And you understand me perfectly! You go from folly to folly, my brother, I’m telling you exactly what I think. And first among them was to risk the lives of your younger sons and your cousins in that harebrained expedition to a plague-infested town!”

“We had to deliver that side of beef, you know,” protested my father.

“And carry off Franchou! Do you think it was an accident that La Porte went on about the maid in his first letter to you? He knew all too well how to set his mirrors to catch his lark. Beef for him! Franchou for you!”

“My brother, I demand you retract these damnable words!” cried my father. “There is nothing between that poor wench and me! I only did my duty as a Christian to her!”

“So, find her a position somewhere! And far away! At la Volperie, for example, where, having lost Sarrazine and Jacotte, they need somebody!”

“No. Franchou will be Catherine’s chambermaid. We won’t discuss it any further. I’ve decided once and for all.”

“Oh marvellous! We already have la Maligou, Barberine, Alazaïs and Hélix and Little Sissy, which makes five servingwomen in all and now we need a sixth!?” As chambermaid for Catherine who’s not even ten years old!? A pretty light assignment,
if
it’s the only one!”

“My brother, this is too much!”

“I’ll say it’s too much!” Sauveterre fairly shouted. “For while Mespech is enriching itself with a superfluous servant, it’s losing one of your sons, whom you’ve decided to throw to the mercy of bad weather, famine and plague, since it’s true evil begets evil. Oh, my brother! Let me tell you,” he went on, more in grief than in anger, “you give your love to those you shouldn’t and withhold it from those who deserve it!”

A long silence followed these words, which was broken by my father’s hushed voice: “But why did Pierre have to defy me so and prefer his mother to me?”

“Am I dreaming?” cried Sauveterre. “Pierre prefer his mother to you! His only thought was to keep his word and preserve his honour. Don’t you know you’re his hero, that there’s no one in the world he loves or admires more? That he models himself after you in all things—which, frankly, scares me given how you carry on!”

“Go easy on me, brother! Easy! Don’t judge me!” said my father roughly yet much softer than his earlier tone. “I haven’t decided anything yet. I have a deep aversion to this medallion as you know. It has been my life’s cross.”