The mirror of simple sou.., p.3
The Mirror of Simple Souls, page 3
In the room off the dormitory with the tub, the hearth glows red with embers and spreads a good heat. The old beguine lowers her onto a trunk placed against a wall and begins gently to undress her.
‘Don’t make the water too hot,’ she tells Agnes. ‘No warmer than the palm of your hand. We have to bring the fever down.’
First, she takes off the shoes, revealing small feet with swollen toes. Then the cape. Agnes’s gaze weighs on her as she runs her fingers through the grime-stiffened hair to untangle it.
Under the cape, the child wears a linen shift. Docilely she lets her arms be raised so Ysabel can lift it off.
She is not only bigger than the beguine imagined, but older too. Under the chemise she wears next to her skin can be seen the shape of high, round breasts. Those of a girl soon to become a woman, if she is not one already.
But their curves are not the only source of the beguine’s astonishment. Once again, the whiteness of the skin and its smoothness surprise her. And also the quality of the chemise, woven from a supple, light wool.
Behind her, Agnes empties the warm water from the fire into the tub.
‘Wait for me, child,’ whispers Ysabel to her patient, who lies back limply with eyes closed.
On some shelves set in a recess in the wall sit a number of varnished earthenware pots. Without hesitating, Ysabel picks up three in turn, plunges her hand inside and sprinkles handfuls of dry herbs and flower petals onto the warm water.
‘White rose to purify the passions, mugwort to chase away bad thoughts, sage to cure anything, the panacea of panaceas.’
This silent prayer accompanies each of her handfuls in turn. Not really a prayer, perhaps, but God alone knows what it is. Her grandmother Leonor did the same thing to strengthen the power of plants. No doubt she slipped in other words from her homeland of Berry too, but that was her secret.
Since she was a noble lady, nobody had dared to call Leonor a ‘healer’. Nor an apothecary, since she was only a woman. But everybody, from relatives to peasants, would ask for her help. When she visited a sick person, she needed only to examine the whites of their eyes, to press her fingers to their forehead and wrist, in order to know what imbalance they were suffering from and what concoctions to prescribe in order to re-establish the harmony of humours. She had taught Ysabel the remedies that took care of stomach troubles and fevers, those that purged or fought poison, the poultices that stopped bleeding, and herbs that relieved women of the pain of menstruation—and sometimes even of the burden of an infant. She had taught her the plants of God and those of the devil, about ferns capable of keeping evil spirits away and the strange plants containing the foam of elements with which Satan liked to meddle. In the fields and woods as they walked together, she had shown her the pulmonaria, whose leaves were spotted with white like the lungs to treat tubercular patients, chelidonium with yellow sap like bile that relieved liver troubles, nuts with kernels like lobes of the brain to treat sickness of the mind, and dragon’s arum, with skin like a serpent’s, which protected people from snakebite.
The Earth knows us better than we know ourselves, she used to say. She is benevolent and talkative. In each of Nature’s works there are a multitude of signs. You must learn to pay attention to them.
*
The white rose petals spread across the surface of the water in the tub. The room fills with fragrant steam. Ysabel turns to Agnes.
‘Add a little cold water, I pray you. Then you may go and take care of the other patients.’
The assistant raises her eyes in surprise.
‘Don’t worry,’ whispers Ysabel, ‘I know how to care for her.’
Agnes acquiesces with a slight nod of her head and, her task completed, departs with an abrupt swish of her grey robe.
Alone now, Ysabel tests the water temperature with her hand, then turns to the young woman, who has not moved all this time. She seems to have woken from her stupor, but she is still calm.
‘I am going to get you out of your chemise, my child. Then bathe you.’
She pulls the light wool over the girl’s head. She stands naked now, arms at her sides, the palms of her hands turned towards Ysabel, her head lowered.
White, yes, so very white. That creamy white of redheads. The body long and well-shaped, firm, the muscular thighs of a youth, narrow hips, the breasts are two delicate mounds on a delicate bust, the shoulders a little wide but delicate and responsive, as is the neck on which her face inclines. Splashes of freckles on her neck and arms. But other marks, too, larger, of dark blue tinged with red. On her ribs and lower back, and inside her thighs near her pubic hair.
Ysabel sighs, her heart tightening.
The girl has been raped.
She holds out her hand like a mother taking her child to the bath, helps her over the wooden edge of the tub, settles her down in the tepid water, then eases her back on the linen cloth that has been doubled over the wood to protect her skin from splinters. And until the hour of compline, she gently washes her with soap made from olive oil, kneads her hair, passes a clean cloth into the smallest crevices of the skin, between each finger and each toe, and finally into the intimate places, the most hidden, to cleanse them of all dirt and evil.
5
Ysabel’s first husband, Hugues, had been a faithful companion of Louis IX. He had joined him in 1248 on his disastrous Crusade, and it was only due to a fever that he had not taken part in the Battle of Fariskur in Egypt, when the king’s army, overcome with fatigue and devastated by dysentery, had been massacred by the Muslims; the king, to his great shame, had been taken prisoner. Louis became convinced he was being divinely punished.
Hugues had again accompanied the king in 1270 when for the second time Louis took up the pilgrim’s staff and the banner of Saint Denis, and led another Crusade as expiation after a great purification of the kingdom—Jews condemned to be broken on the wheel, and blasphemers, prostitutes, criminals and scoundrels implacably hunted down. Hugues was also near Louis when the king died at Carthage, calling in his faltering voice upon the help of the two saints to whom he was sworn, Jacques and Denis.
There followed a shameful quarrel over the corpse of the dead sovereign, a precious relic that would attract glory and protection to whoever possessed it. Charles of Anjou wanted to keep his brother’s body in his kingdom of Sicily rather than ceding it to his nephew Philip, the king’s son and successor. However, despite his youth, Philip the Fair won the right—once the body was treated against putrefaction—to conserve the noble and hard parts, the skeleton, whereas his uncle had to be content with the flesh and entrails in all their softness. The king’s chamberlains dismembered the cadaver of their master and cured it so long in a mixture of wine and water that the bones fell white and clean from the skin, so that there was no need to use force in the partition of the corpse.
Hugues had reported all these details to his wife—still so young. He also told her of the strange convoy that had crossed the Mediterranean, then all of Italy, over the Alps at Mont-Cenis to climb the valley of Maurienne, passing Lyon, Cluny, Châlons and Troyes, before the procession reached Paris. The small wooden coffin containing the remains of Louis IX was carried on the back of a horse. The corpse of his son Jean Tristan came behind him, followed in turn by the body of his chaplain, Pierre de Villebéon, who had also died during the voyage. Then a tragic stopover in Trapani added to the cortege the bier of Louis’s son-in-law Theobald II of Navarre and, finally, after a fifth and double bereavement, came the body of the new queen of France, Isabelle of Aragon, wife of Philip III, who had fallen from a horse when crossing a river in flood and died at the age of twenty-four after delivering a stillborn infant.
Hugues had not gone on to the end of the voyage. He had abandoned the cortege after Lyon to rejoin his wife at his Burgundian estate. Nor did he attend the funeral of the sovereign at Saint-Denis. Exhausted by battles and fevers, he left this world a few weeks after his return.
This first husband, with whom she had lived only four interrupted years amid long absences, Ysabel had deeply loved. She had been fifteen when they wed, he twenty years older, but he was as virile as a youth. And so he remained in her memory. After his death she had married a good man who gave her a son, Robin, and much affection, and with whom for seventeen years she had shared bed and table, but this part of her existence seems to have evaporated—not so much disappeared as snuffed out, like a dream that lost its colour upon your awakening. By contrast, the rare moments spent with Hugues came back to her, vivid and clear. Their rides. Their laughter. Her tears when he went away. And that gesture he’d made when he left, hand outstretched with open palm, like an offering and a promise. She saw it only last night in her dreams.
Maybe it is age that pushes me towards these old memories, she thinks as she leaves her house in the morning. She has noticed this at the bedsides of the sick, shortly before they die—the nearness of death seems to gather up time. But the particular atmosphere of the Beguinage and the memory that inhabited it, that of the king whom her husband had loved to the point of following him on the most dangerous paths of salvation, probably had something to do with it as well.
Some used to mock the sovereign for his ostentatious piety. After the humiliating defeat of the First Crusade, it is true, he was seen to take pleasure in a life of privation, abandoning ermine and furs, luxurious robes, golden chains and spurs, to dress sombrely, eat simple dishes, and dilute his wine with water. Today, though, all must admit that during his life Louis tried to approach, as much as possible for any man in his incompleteness, the example of Christ. He supported the mendicant orders, founded hospitals for the poor, and encouraged the aspirations of women who wanted to practise their religion without falling under the yoke of the ecclesiastical authorities. Under his protection, small communities of beguines were established all over the kingdom: in Senlis, Tours, Orleans, Rouen, Caen, Verneuil. And in the capital Louis personally invested in the construction of the Beguinage, modelled after Saint Elizabeth in Ghent which he had once visited.
The king created the Great Beguinage as a home for pious women, so many of whom had been left alone in those times. Knights’ wives condemned to widowhood by Crusades and private wars, young noblewomen who could neither marry nor enter the costly convents for lack of a dowry. And those poorer still—the women who worked as carders or weavers in the surrounding wool workshops and who would be reassured each night to be able to come back to the shelter of its high walls.
‘Are you really going to be happy among those good souls?’ her son had joked when Ysabel had announced her intention to retire there. ‘You, my mother, who gallops cross-country and speaks her mind, sparing neither man nor beast her tongue!’
‘I will master my tongue, and old age will do the same for my impatience,’ was her simple reply.
Robin had been married for one year. She left him the management of her estate and gave the keys to her house to her daughter-in-law. He did not understand that she was going away. He had been born into a world that seemed self-evident to him, while she had learnt that time had transformed its boundaries and its contours.
At the Beguinage she found more than she was hoping for. She immediately threw herself into the life of the community. At first she prepared medicines for the infirmary, then when the supervisor of the infirmary died, she agreed to succeed her in that office. She is also part of the council of four wise women—‘Me, wise? How Robin would laugh!’—who advise the mistress and help administer the institution.
Sometimes she misses the green of the meadows in spring, the leaves crunching under the shoes of her horse in the autumn, the dusty odour of the threshed wheat stocked in the barn in winter. But she does not regret a thing. She welcomes the dreams that visit her. And repays what she was given.
Today, though, she is the one who needs help.
6
The home of Perrenelle la Chanevacière is undoubtedly the finest and now the most agreeable in the Beguinage. Some were surprised when she arrived to see her choose a house set back behind the garden and in need of some repairs. Coming from a family of rich drapers who were influential in the city—her father had once been cloth furnisher to Robert II, Count of Artois—she was said to enjoy a hefty income. But no other dwelling was available and Perrenelle was not inclined to wait. She had the roof and woodwork restored, the interior walls whitewashed, had a double bay window set in the first-floor walls which she had filled at great expense with clear glass from Sainte-Menehould rather than the oilcloth used in most houses of the enclosure. Two months after deciding to join the community, Perrenelle had moved in. A year later, she would replace the mistress of the Great Beguinage, who left to spend her last years with her family. Perrenelle preferred to remain in her current residence rather than move to the larger one that went with the office; she entrusted its use to one of the wise women on the council, who kept the ground floor for their meetings.
Stepping into Perrenelle’s home, Ysabel immediately feels the sense of well-being she has each time she visits. The furnishings are sober, as they should be. The only concession to the luxury to which Perrenelle was once accustomed is a tapestry finely woven of silk that covers a wall on the north side. Its bright colours, the red of madder root and the sunny yellow of weld, radiate throughout the room, seeming to embrace and energize all that is in it. As does Perrenelle herself.
She is sitting at her table under the window that looks out on the garden. Rounded shoulders, a heavy face, red-veined cheeks. Like a peasant returning from labouring in the fields. The canon is seated opposite her, and despite his height and the majesty of his robe, he appears insignificant in comparison. A thick leather-bound book lies open on the table between them.
‘Dame Ysabel, enter, I pray you, and take a seat,’ says Perrenelle, looking up briefly. Brother Grégoire and I will soon have finished.’
The canon smiles, resumes his task, his index finger placed on the lined sheet to guide his reading. Ysabel knows him well. He comes every fourth Tuesday to examine the Beguinage accounts. King Louis had decreed that the earnings of the institution be deposited in sealed sacks in the treasury of Sainte-Chapelle. The very place he had built to house his precious relics—fragments of both the Holy Cross and the Crown of Thorns—and where since 1306 his body has also lain. It was the canons who received and managed the pensions granted by the sovereign to the community for its running and the upkeep of its buildings, but also, more personally, to a certain number of beguines, noble ladies in need of assistance. After the death of the sainted king, the grant to the beguines was maintained by Philip the Bold, then by Philip the Fair, in memory of their ancestor.
‘Fourteen livres and six sous for Dame Emeline. Sixteen livres and nineteen sous for Dame Alice, and forty annually for her clothing…’
The man comes to the end of his list. He has the serene face of someone who has accomplished a task with little difficulty. The Beguinage is rich, possessing many goods and houses in the city. Apart from the king, many benefactors, both nobles and merchants, give it gifts or name it in their testaments and wills, as much to be associated with the favour of the sovereign as to benefit from the prayers of the pious women. Dame Perrenelle wisely administers this money, taking particular care of the buildings. Regularly rented or sold to new beguines, the houses have to remain in good condition. Some lodgings are offered to ladies without resources, and then maintained at the expense of the community.
‘There,’ concludes Grégoire. ‘As agreed, I will send you the necessary sum for cleaning the well and repairing the house roofs.’
The canon closes his book. Perrenelle rises, fetches a carafe and three cups from the sideboard. She puts them in the middle of the table and pours a full-bodied wine that is delivered to her by her family each autumn. The servant has put more logs in the hearth. The fire crackles softly and gives off a fragrant warmth.
‘Speak to us a little of what is happening in the city,’ she asks, turning to Grégoire.
He takes his time savouring the wine before answering. He is about fifty years old, with a round face and fresh skin.
‘What can I tell you? All the talk is of the Templars. The pontifical commission gathered again this morning at the Abbaye Sainte-Geneviève to hear possible defenders, but none were forthcoming.’
‘But it is said that Templars have arrived in Paris in their hundreds,’ exclaims Ysabel. ‘Determined to testify to the innocence of their Order.’
‘Hundreds, yes, maybe, but they are all being held in the prisons across the capital,’ remarks Perrenelle, ‘which makes it somewhat difficult for them to appear before the commission…’
‘What arguments could they advance, anyway?’ retorts Grégoire. ‘The devil himself would have to plead the case!’
*
It is true that since the arrest of the Templars, the most frightening rumours have been circulating. Heresy, sorcery, sodomy… As the investigations progresses, the list of their crimes grows ever longer. The warrior monks suffer from an original sin: claiming the right to bear arms and to spill blood while still remaining monks. This status, which contravenes the strict division between clerics and the laity within the community of the faithful, and therefore the social order desired by God himself, has exposed them to suspicion of every deviance imaginable. It is said that they urinate on the cross. That during their initiation ceremony—which takes place in the greatest secrecy, with lookouts on the roofs to chase away undesirables—the novices kiss the celebrants on the lips, the navel, the anus, the base of the spine—sometimes even on the penis. That the brothers of the Order know each other carnally and honour idols, that alongside the Saviour they worship a mysterious head with a face covered by the bristling hair of a dog. It is even said that they perform murders for him, sacrificing infants born to a brother and a virgin, cremating the remains and then using the fat to anoint the idol.
