Heretic Dawn (34 page)

“Oh, Giacomi,” I gushed, embracing him fondly and planting kisses on both cheeks, which he returned just as enthusiastically, “everything I have is yours, you know.”

“And all I have is yours,” echoed Giacomi gravely, “including my labour and the few coins I might earn. Maybe in a week’s work in my new position, I could squeeze out enough money to buy you a new doublet!”

“Ah, Giacomi,” I said with such a poignant sigh it could have turned a windmill, “who could have guessed, when I had this one made back in Montpellier with Madame de Joyeuse’s écus and which I went proudly to show off to her, that it would be so utterly despised in Paris! And despite this tiny repair—this repairette, as Maître Recroche would say. Good God! Am I nothing more than my clothes? Are my bravery and my knowledge worth nothing? Oh, Giacomi, the world and its customs please me so little, that if I were a papist, I’d put on a monk’s habit.”

“L’abito non fa il monaco!”
§
Giacomi laughed. “In any case, there are habits and there are habits and yours must be of the finest! You wouldn’t rest until you were the abbot!”

At this, we both laughed. And on the promise I made him to go to watch his lessons at the Louvre that afternoon, he left me; I, taking my writing case and my paper down to the atelier, joined Baragran and Alizon at the large table there. They interrupted their work with a series of jokes as soon as they saw me carving my pen.

“Go ahead and mock me,” I told them, “it won’t make me write any worse!”

“Oh, Monsieur! I’d never dare!” said Alizon. “How clever you must be to put words to paper! I can’t write but I can read a little,” she said modestly, “but it’s a challenge to be able to read even a short letter! Now I’ve spoken, and won’t open my mouth while you’re doing your writing.”

“Me neither!” said Baragran.

“Nor I!” added Coquillon, giving me a wide smile with his big mouth. And this said, the apprentice went back to his labours, which consisted of annoying the cat with a ball made of rags that he waved here and here on a thread.

“I thank you, all three,” I replied.

But of the three, only two kept their word. For when I was at the end of the first page, Alizon said, “What a long letter, Monsieur! Are you writing to a lady?”

“No. To my father.”

“And to Madame, your mother?” she asked.

“No, she died in childbirth.”

“That’s how we’ll all die, we women,” sighed Alizon, “and without ever reaching the end of our natural lives.”

“Quiet, there, Alizon,” said Baragran. “Can’t you see you’re disturbing our gentleman?”

“Quiet, yourself, you big idiot!” Alizon shot back, with her back up and hissing like a snake. “Monsieur,” she said, softening her tone and sounding more like a baby lamb, “did I disturb you with my babbling?”

“Not at all.”

“A thousand pardons, even so, Monsieur. In the future I’ll be as mute as a
log
,” she continued with a knowing smile as she pronounced this last word.

But this was, like the first one, an empty promise, for, seeing me put my seal on the first letter and immediately take up another, she said, “Ah, Monsieur, now you’re writing to a lady.”

“Not at all. I’m writing to an apothecary in Montfort-l’Amaury.”

“In Montfort-l’Amaury! I know a Guillaume who’s going there tomorrow to his farm and he could bring you back the response in two days’ time.”

“But would he take my letter? He doesn’t know me.”

“Yes, but he knows me,” insisted Alizon, “and he’ll do it if I ask him.”

“Marvellous, Alizon! A thousand thanks!”

So I gave her a grateful look, thinking to myself that patience is a great virtue, since, having allowed the girl to chat while I was writing, I had gained a much more rapid dispatch.

When my letter to Maître Béqueret was waxed shut with my seal, I gave it to Alizon and she immediately placed it in her lap as though it were a love letter I’d written her, and sent many smiles and glances my way, just as she’d described Henriot as doing. All of this couldn’t help but warm my heart in the midst of all the thorns that I’d felt concerning my doublet, though it didn’t yet blunt their points.

Such is my nature, however, that from every difficulty I manage to rebound just as quickly as a ball once it hits the ground. Just as Alizon was giving me that tender glance, eleven o’clock sounded on the clock tower of the chapel of the Saints-Innocents, so I set forth from my lodgings to go to the rue Trouvevache, blessing at every step the beneficence of Monsieur de L’Étoile, and my heart beating eagerly at the thought that I was going to dine in such learned and famous company.

Whether it was his salary as Grand Audiencier or an inheritance from his parents that was the source of his wealth, the lodgings of Pierre de L’Étoile were neither miserly nor poor, and the dining room where he received us (situated on the first floor) was set off by its beautiful, well-polished oak woodwork, a fireplace so large you could have roasted an entire calf in it and a series of large windows which were furnished not with small, leaded stained-glass panes, but with large, square, transparent ones, as was currently the style in the noble houses of Paris. Pierre de L’Étoile was alone and was clothed, as usual, in black, and seemed especially melancholic when I arrived. I complimented him on this room, adding, “Ah, Monsieur, what wonderful light this series of windows gives the room!”

“Ah, yes,” he replied after embracing me warmly, “but as light as my lodgings are, their inhabitant is sombre.”

“In what way, Monsieur?” I answered in surprise. “Are you suffering?”

“Infinitely. This year has been a most unfortunate one for me, afflicted as I have been by divers ills of both body and mind, hit with
extraordinary losses of goods, overwhelmed by lawsuits, rejected by my family, despised and hated by all, even my churlish valets and chambermaids… And, on top of all that, so worked by my sins,” he added, lowering his voice and his eyes downcast, “that I fear both death and life itself equally.”

“Oh, Monsieur,” I cried, struck by his cruel assessment of himself, “put away your bitter thoughts and try to see the possibilities open to you. Don’t go letting the hereafter ruin the here and now! Don’t let the fear of death destroy your life! And for the rest, let the Sovereign Judge make His judgement when the time comes!”

“Ah, my dear Siorac,” replied L’Étoile, a sudden smile lighting up his sad face, “it’s you who brings light to the room, with your sing-song accent and your happy, optimistic outlook! Oh, how I envy you your happy disposition! Your sins don’t appear to weigh on you any more than on a little wren on the branch of an oak tree!”

“That’s because I have such faith in the beneficence of our Creator that I don’t think He’ll punish us for the poor little pleasures that we’ve gleaned along the way through our short lives.”

“Alas! That’s not what our Church teaches us!” lamented L’Étoile with a sigh.

“I also trust my own feelings more than the dour sermons of some angry priest, believing, as I’ve said, in the sweet goodness and beneficence of Christ, who pardons both the whore and the adulterous woman.”

“They were wenches,” sighed L’Étoile, “and as the weaker sex they are more easily pardoned than we men are.”

“Weaker?” I laughed. “Aren’t we every bit as weak?”

I don’t know what he might have said in response to my incredulity, since we were interrupted by the arrival of the surgeon Ambroise Paré and the venerable Master of Arts Pierre de La Ramée, who was called Petrus Ramus in the Latinized French of our schools. I don’t
know if these two were good friends, but they came in arm in arm and had something about them that made them look related even though their faces and body types were quite different.

Ambroise Paré, who was then sixty-three years old, was of moderate height, with large shoulders, and robust without being fat; he sported some sparse grey hair on his balding head and a flowing but not very thick beard. His face was long, with hollow cheeks, a large nose, rounded at the tip, and lively, bright, yellow-brown eyes, at times serious, at other times quite jovial. Ramus, who was ten years his junior, seemed tall, mainly because he was so slim, and whereas Paré and L’Étoile dressed austerely in black velvet, Ramus wore a blue satin doublet with slashes, and a white lace collar rather than the little Huguenot ruff on which Paré’s head was so stiffly perched. Ramus’s clothes and the sword he wore at his side gave him the look of a nobleman, as indeed he was, though as the son of a ruined gentleman he’d had during his early years to serve as a valet at the College of Navarre, nourishing his love for letters at night.

He had dark-brown, very piercing eyes that peered out from under an irascible set of eyebrows in the form of a circumflex, an aquiline and imperious nose, and a strong and prominent jaw adorned by a salt-and-pepper beard; atop this strong face was perched like an august dome his large cranium, as polished as an egg.

Both of these men greeted me with very good grace when Pierre de L’Étoile presented us, and Ambroise Paré immediately sang the praises of the Royal College of Medicine in Montpellier, placing it well above its homologue in Paris, which he considered to be hopelessly sunk in “the rut of scholasticism”. This said, Pierre de L’Étoile invited him to take his place at table, and Paré immediately set to devouring everything the little valet and a chambermaid put in his bowl, having a strident appetite, but not stupefyingly so, for before swallowing each mouthful he worked his jaws for quite some time
as if he were trying to discern the good from the bad: a habit that astonished me until he explained that someone had tried to poison him at the siege of Rouen.

At the word “scholasticism” that Paré had pronounced, Ramus shuddered like a horse that feels the spur, and scarcely had he taken his seat or eaten any food before he launched into the subject, his eyes like flames, in a lively and furious diatribe, mixing French and Latin, but immediately translating the latter, since Ambroise Paré had come to his work in surgery from his profession as a barber, and had never immersed himself in the arts as Ramus had done.

“Aha! You said it, Paré,” he cried. “‘The rut of scholasticism’ is just as pernicious in philosophy as it is in medicine, consisting in vain disputations, logical and theoretical, as if these great babblers had nothing better to do than to gloss Aristotle, this pagan being the God they worship, and they place his supposed truths above those of Moses or Christ. Heavens! I cannot tolerate that kind of idolatry, nor can I accept the kind that takes as its object Mary the Mother of Christ, or the saints.”

“Monsieur de La Ramée,” L’Étoile counselled, “eat your roast while it’s hot. And, I beg you, don’t impugn the religion of the king in here, which,” he said with an ambiguous smile, “also happens to be mine.”

“My host,” explained Ramus in a gentler tone, “you have such a degree of open-mindedness and tolerance that I almost forget you’re a papist! I beg of you a thousand pardons for my words—and of Monsieur de Siorac as well.”

“As for me,” I replied, “there’s no offence. I’m of the reformed religion.”

“Ah, that’s marvellous,” said Ambroise Paré, sticking a piece of his roast in the corner of his mouth so he could continue to masticate as we talked. “My dear L’Étoile, there are three of us and one of you.
So you’re the heretic here. If only the reformers made up the same proportion of the kingdom!”

“If that were the case,” replied L’Étoile, smiling bitterly, “then I’d be among the quarter that were persecuted.”

“Alas, I’m afraid that’s true,” sighed Ambroise Paré.

This said, he began to chew again, his tongue and palate focused on their work, his eyes wandering off, his circumspect mind turned in, as it were, on the contents of his mouth, as if he might have suspected the good L’Étoile of wishing to poison him.

“As for me,” said Ramus, “I’d not persecute anyone, not even the berobed asses in the Sorbonne who’ve condemned my book on Aristotle.”

“Well, you have to admit that your book against Aristotle was very brutal,” replied L’Étoile. “Did you not go as far as writing this sulphurous sentence:
quaecumque ab Aristotele dicta essent, commentitia esse
?”

“Translate, please!” said Paré.

“Everything Aristotle said is but falsehood.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Paré.

“Admit it, Monsieur de La Ramée,” continued L’Étoile, “this was like waving a red cloth in front of the Sorbonnic bulls!”

“Poor bulls!” observed Ramus with the utmost scorn.

At this we all laughed.

“What’s so surprising,” remarked L’Étoile, “is that, as a consequence, not content to condemn your book, some of the Sorbonnites asked the king to burn you at the stake!”

“’Sblood!” I cried. “The stake for having criticized Aristotle?”

“Didn’t I tell you that they’d made a god of him?” replied Ramus, frowning.

“Alas,” said Ambroise Paré, interrupting his endless mastication, “in this century we’re suffering too much from the excessive authority of the ancients. This excessive attention to Aristotle in philosophy is
the same with Galen and Hippocrates in medicine. As soon as any little pedant cites them, all you can do is fall to your knees and put your hands together. This century is devilishly religious, and not just in the domain of religion.”

“The authority!” cried Ramus, his brown eyes now showing fire under the circumflex of his bushy eyebrows. “The supreme authority of the ancients, that’s where the shoe pinches the most!”

“So do you want to destroy it?” asked Pierre de L’Étoile, as if terrified.

“Not at all,” replied Ramus, “but put it in its place, which would not be on top. No authority,” he continued, thrusting his jaw out in a bellicose way, “no authority should be above reason. It is reason, on the contrary, that should be the mistress of all authority.”

“If I follow you,” mused Pierre de L’Étoile, suddenly looking dubious, fearful and confused, “this would entirely upset all orders of thought! What’s your opinion, Paré?”

Ambroise Paré swallowed the portion he’d just reduced to pap, and, bringing his cup to his lips, drank a small precautionary taste, as if he suspected his wine were laced with arsenic. After which he said in a grave voice, but as calm and quiet as Ramus’s speech had been tempestuous: