Imaginary LIves (8 page)

So Katherine passed her first youth, before the old woman taught her to sit in front of a lacemaker’s cushion, patiently crossing the threads from the bobbins. Later on she worked at that trade.

Jehanneton became a capemaker, Perrenette a washer-woman, while Ysabeau made gloves and Guillemette, happiest of all, was a sausage-maker, with her little face crimson and shining as if it had been rubbed in fresh pork blood. For the boys who played at the Saint-Merry new enterprises began.

Some went to study on Mount Sainte Genevieve, some drove carts to Trou-Perrette, some clinked goblets of Aunis at the Pomme de Pin, others quarreled at the Hotel de la Grosse Margot. At noon they were seen in the tavern entrance on the rue aux Feves; at midnight they left by the other door on the rue aux Juifs. As for Katherine, she continued to interwork the threads of her lace. On summer evenings she found it pleasant sitting on the church steps where they let her laugh and gossip.

Katherine wore an unbleached dress with a green jacket over it. Absorbed in the problems of clothes, she hated nothing so much as the padded garments worn by girls not of noble birth. She was fond of money – equally fond of the silver testons or ten sou pieces, the blancs, and above all of the golden ecus. That was how she made the acquaintance of Casin Cholet, sergeant of the yard at Chatelet, one evening in the shadow of his little office. Casin was poorly paid. Katherine often had supper with him at the Hotel de la Mule, opposite the Church des Mathurins, and after supping Casin would go out to steal chickens around the moats and ditches of Paris, bringing them back under the folds of his wide tabard, selling them very fairly to Machecroue, widow of Arnoul, who kept the poultry shop at the Petit-Chatelet gate.

Soon Katherine gave up her lacemaking, for the old woman with the red nose was now rotting her bones in the Cemetery des Innocents, and Casin Cholet had found his little friend a basement room near Trois-Pucelles, where he came to her late at night. He did not care if she showed herself at the window, her eyes blackened with charcoal, her cheeks smeared with white lead – he never forbade it; and all the pots, cups and dishes offered by Katherine to those who paid well, were stolen by Casin from various inns from the Chaire, the Cynges or from the Hotel du Plat d’Etain. The day he pawned Katherine’s belted dress at the Trois-Lavandières, Casin Cholet disappeared. His friends told her he had been caught snooping in the bottom of a cart, that he had been soundly beaten and driven out of Paris by the Baudoyer gate at the order of the provost. She never saw him again.

Having no heart to earn her living alone, she became a girl of the streets, dwelling wherever she could.

At first she waited by the tavern doors, and those who knew her took her behind walls, under the Chatelet or around by the College of Navarre.

When it grew too cold for this, a complaisant old woman let her come into a bath-house where the madame gave her shelter. She lived there in a stone room strewn with green rushes, and they let her keep her name, Katherine the Lacemaker, though she made no more lace. Sometimes they gave her liberty to walk through the streets if she promised to return by the hour the men were accustomed to arrive, then Katherine would go peering into the glove shops and the lace shops, but most of all she envied the red face of the little sausage-maker, laughing among her chunks of pork. Afterwards she would go back to the house, which the madame lighted at dusk with candles that melted and dripped thickly behind black panes.

Finally Katherine grew tired of living shut up in a square room. She ran away to the roads. From that time on she was no longer Parisienne or lacemaker, but one of those women who haunt the outskirts of French towns, waiting by cemetery walls for any man who passes. These women know no names but those which suit their faces, and they called Katherine “The Snout”. She tramped the fields, where her white face was often seen peeping between the mulberry trees or over the hedges. In the evenings, she sat by the roadside, and she learned to control her fear of the dark in the midst of the dead, while her feet shivered against the stone-marked graves. No more white money, no more silver testons, no golden ecus; Katherine lived thinly now on bread, cheese and a jug of water. She had vagabond friends who cried, “Snout! Snout!” at her from afar and she loved them.

The chapel bells were her greatest loss, for The Snout would remember June nights when she had spread her green jacket out on the church steps.

Those were the days when she had so envied young ladies in their bright dresses. But now there remained to her neither cape nor jacket.

Bareheaded, she crouched on the stones waiting for her bread. In the thick shadows of the cemeteries she missed those red candles at the house with the square room, and the green rushes underfoot, instead of black mud sticking to her boots.

One night a tramp came along dressed up like a soldier. He cut The Snout’s throat to get her purse, but he found no money in it.

ALAIN THE GENTLE

Soldier

From the age of twelve he served Charles VII as an archer, for he was brought up by men-at-arms in the flat country of Normandy and the circumstance of his adoption was the following. When the armies came through that region, burning barns, skinning the legs of peasants with their sheath knives and flinging young girls down broken on their beds, Alain was hidden in an empty cask at the door of a wine press, and when the soldiers tumbled the cask upside-down they found him. They carried him away just as he was, in his shirt and his perky petticoat, to the captain of the troop, who gave him a little leather jacket and a cape that had been through the battle of Saint-Jacques. Perrin Godin taught him how to draw a bow and how to gamble at cards. In this company he passed through Bordeau., Angoulême and Poitou to Bourges; saw Saint-Pourcain where the king sat beyond the marches of Lorrain; visited Toul; returned to Picardy; entered Flanders; crossed Saint-Quentin and turned again toward Normandy. During his twenty-three years of military travel he met the Englishman, Jehan Poule-Cras, from whom he learned British curses; Chiquerello the Lombard, who instructed him in the cure of Saint-Anthony’s fire; and young Ydre de Laon, who taught him how to pull down breastworks.

At Ponteau de Mer his comrade, Bernard d’Anglades, persuaded him to quit the royal courtage. Together, declared Bernard, he and Alain could make a fat living cheating with loaded dice, which they called “gourds”. They deserted their command forthwith, not even pausing to discard their uniforms, and set up their game on the head of a stolen drum behind a cemetery wall. After watching them a while, a rascally sergeant of the guard named Pierre Empongart told them they were sure to be caught and caught soon unless they became priests in order to escape the king’s men and claim the protection of the Church. They must clip their pates, he explained, and throw away their slashed doublets and colored sleeves if cornered.

After shearing themselves then and there, he made them repeat a
Dominus pars
. They strutted away, one on each side of the road, Bernard with Bietrix la Clavière and Alain with Lorenette la Chandelière.

Lorenette wanted a green cloth jacket, so Alain went back to the White Horse tavern at Lisieux where they had recently bought a jug of wine. That night he crept into the garden, made a hole in the wall with his pike, and so gained the hall of the inn where he found seven brass ecus, a red hat and a gold ring. Jaquet le Grand, pawnbroker of Lisieux, changed this assortment for a jacket such as Lorenette desired.

When they reached Bayeaux Lorenette went to live in a small painted house of none too scrupulous reputation. Alain the Gentle wanted her back again, but when he went for her the mistress of the house showed him the door, candle in one hand, a dangerous-looking rock in the other, asking him if he would like to have his muscles rubbed to drive away the boils. Alain ran away, but he knocked the candle out of the woman’s hand as he went, grabbing what he thought was a precious ring from her finger. It turned out to be only a big pink pebble in a brass setting.

Alain left Lisieux to wander aimlessly along the roads. In the Hotel de Papegaut at Maubusson he found one of his old comrades in arms, Karandas, eating tripe with another fellow by the name of Jehan Petit. Karandas was still carrying his halberd while Jehan Petit wore a purse in his belt with pretty silver trinkets dangling from it. His belt buckle was solid silver too. After some drinking all three decided to walk through the woods to Senlis.

It was late when they took the road, and when they were deep in the darkness of the wood Alain the Gentle prepared himself. Jehan Petit walked just ahead of him; there in the dark Alain let him have the pike straight between the shoulders while Karandas brought his halberd down across his head. Jehan fell flat on his face, then Alain was over him at a stride, cutting his throat from ear to ear.

Afterwards Alain stuffed the hole in his neck with dry leaves to avoid leaving a marsh of blood on the path. The moon rose clear above the trees. Alain cut the silver buckle from the dead man’s belt and clipped the pretty silver trinkets dangling on his purse. There were sixteen lyons, gold, in the purse, with thirty six patars. Alain kept the lyons, tossing the purse and the trinkets to Karandas for his pains, but holding his pike well poised as he did so.

The in the bright moonlight they parted, each his own way, Karandas swearing by the blood of God.

Since Alain the Gentle dared not go on now to Senlis he returned to the city of Rouen. He spent the night under a blossoming hedge and woke surrounded by mounted men who bound his hands and led him off to prison. As they neared the gates he contrived to slip behind one of the horses, making a dash for the church of Saint-Patrice, where he managed to gain the sanctuary of the High Altar.

His captors of a moment before were not permitted to pass the door of the sacred building. Safe while he remained there, Alain walked freely up and down the nave and the choir, admiring the fine chalices of rich plate and the other vessels, thinking how nice they would be melted down. The following night he had two companions, Denisot and Marignon, thieves like himself. One of Marignon’s ears had been cropped off. Soon they thought of nothing but food, envying the little prowling mice that nested between the flagstones and fattened on crumbs of holy bread. When the third night came hunger drove them out, all three, and the waiting guardsmen seized them. Alain cried “clerk” – but forgot to take off his green sleeves.

Gaining a moment’s leave for an urgent purpose, he tried to disguise those telltale sleeves by plunging his arms up to the elbows in manure. The sergeant of the guards caught him at it, however, and told the magistrate. A barber shaved Alain’s head clean, effacing his priestly tonsure. The judges laughed at the grotesque Latin of his psalms, though he had the audacity to swear a bishop had ordained him with a box on the ear when he was ten years old. He could not begin to say his pater-nosters. They put him to the question like a layman, first on the greater question, then on the lesser.

Down by the fires in the kitchen prison he declared all his crimes, his limbs swollen by shackles and his throat racked. A lieutenant pronounced his sentence through the town. Tied to the tail of a cart, he was dragged all the way to the gallows and hanged. His body grew sun-burned after a time, for the hangman took his jacket, his green sleeves and the fine cloth cape trimmed with fur which he had stolen out of a tavern.

GABRIEL SPENCER

Actor

His mother was a woman named Flum who had a little basement in Piked Hatch at the end of Rotten Row. After supper a captain with brass rings on his fingers used to come to see her, along with two gallants in loosened doublets. Flum lodged three girls named Poll, Doll and Moll, and none of them could stand the smell of tobacco. Frequently when they retired to the rooms above, the polite gentlemen would accompany them after first taking a glass of Spanish wine to wash away the taste of their pipes. Little Gabriel used to sit on the hearth watching them roast apples to put in their ale pots.

Actors of all sorts came there too – actors who dared not show themselves in the big taverns where the famous entertainers went. Some of them boasted in the grand manner, others stuttered like idiots. They often played with Gabriel, teaching him tragic verse and rustic jokes, and once they gave him a scrap of gilt-fringed crimson drapery with a velvet mask and an old wooden dagger. Then he paraded up and down all alone in front of the fireplace until his mother’s triple chins shook in a quiver of admiration for her precocious child.

Later on the actors took him to the Green Curtain in Shoreditch, where he trembled to see the excessive rage of a little comedian hurling his way through the rôle of Jeronimo. They showed him old King Lear with his wild white beard, kneeling for pardon before his daughter Cordelia. A clown imitated the follies of Tarlton, while another, wrapped in a bed quilt, terrified Prince Hamlet. Sir John Oldcastle made everybody laugh with his fat belly, most of all when he snatched his hostess around the waist while she permitted him to rumple her bonnet and slide his fat fingers into the buckram sack hanging from her belt. The fool sang songs the idiot never could understand. A clown in a cotton hat kept sticking his head out from behind the wings to make faces. They had a juggler, too, with monkeys, and a man dressed up like a woman, whom Gabriel thought looked like his mother, and whom the beadles with their tall maces came stalking to at the end of the piece, dressing him in a rich blue robe, declaring they would carry him off to Bridewell.

When Gabriel was fifteen the Green Curtain players noticed that he was pretty and slim enough to play the parts of women or young girls. He had very white skin and large eyes under fine arched brows. Combing down his unruly black hair, Flum pierced his ears to hold a pair of imitation double pearls. He joined the Duke of Nottingham’s troupe where he was given dresses of taffeta and damask with spangles of gold and silver foil, laced corsets, and hempen wigs with long curls. During rehearsals they taught him to act. He blushed at first when he found himself on the stage, but he was soon responding mincingly to gallantries. Bustling with excitement, Flum brought Poll, Doll and Moll to see him. He must really be a girl, they declared, laughing, and they said they certainly meant to unlace him after the play. They took him back to Piked Hatch, where his mother made him put on one of his dresses to show the captain, who begged him a thousand mock pardons as he placed a cheap gold plated ring set with a glass carbuncle on his finger.