The Launching of Roger Brook (26 page)

On his mentioning this, however, his partner was quick to disabuse him of the idea. The Doctor emphasised that only from the poor and ignorant could they hope to exact unquestioning belief in his own powers, and consequent tribute. In the larger towns and cities there were properly qualified doctors, apothecarys’ shops and barbers’ establishments which dealt in beauty preparations much superior to his own. Moreover, a good part of their inhabitants were educated people or, worse, cynical riff-raff who thought it good sport to throw rotten eggs and decayed garbage at such poor street practitioners as himself. This visit to Rouen, he added, must be regarded only as a holiday and the occasion for a little relaxation.

Contrary to Roger’s expectations the old man had, so far, been very good in refraining from asking for nips of Cognac; but, on hearing this, his young partner rightly suspected that the Doctor now had it in mind to indulge his weakness. In ten evenings’ work they had, somewhat to Roger’s surprise, managed to amass, mainly in
sous
and
francs
, some nine
louis
over and above their expenses, and he had no intention of seeing this small nucleus to their fortunes frittered away. So he took the bull by the horns and said at once:

‘’Tis not yet two weeks since we set out upon our journey,
so the time has not yet come for us to take a holiday.’

‘Why should we not take just a
little
holiday?’ the Doctor pleaded. ‘Two or three nights, no more; but long enough for me to show you the site upon which the Maid of Orleans was burnt as a witch and the tombs of the Crusaders in the great Cathedral?’

‘That we can do today,’ said Roger firmly. ‘And, since you say that we shall only invite trouble by setting up our stand here, tomorrow morning we will continue our progress southward to lesser places where profits are to be made.’

‘So be it,’ sighed the Doctor. ‘But thou art a hard taskmaster for one so young. I intended to ask no more than a little rest for my old bones and, perhaps a few
crowns
from our profits with which to purchase the wherewithal to warm the lining of my stomach.’

‘I knew it,’ Roger replied. ‘But one little dram leads to another little dram, as you yourself have said; and once you fall to drinking in earnest I’ll never be able to get you on the move again. I’ve naught against our treating ourselves to a good dinner and a decent bottle of wine to go with it, but I pray you be content with that, and let us take the road again tomorrow.’

The Doctor brightened a little and now seemed quite willing to let Roger fight his failing for him; but although they did not set up their stand in Rouen they were fated to meet trouble there.

Le Pomme D’Or
, at which they put up, because the Doctor was known at it, proved to be a small inn down by the river. Having stabled Monsieur de Montaigne and taken their things up to their room, they went down to the parlour and found it to be full of sailors, who had recently been discharged from a man-o’-war. As in England, most of them had originally been pressed into the service, and many of them had spent the best years of their youth sailing the seas and fighting in the late war; yet now that the French Navy was gradually being reduced they had been paid off with a pittance which would barely keep them for a month, and comparatively few of them knew a trade by which they could earn a living ashore.

Naturally they were in an angry mood, and Roger, on learning the reason for their discontent, was indiscreet enough to remark that the French King’s finances must be
in a very poor state compared to those of the King of England, since the latter gave his sailors handsome bonuses on their discharge, and they went ashore with their pockets full of gold from their share of the prize money earned by the ships in which they had served.

On it emerging that he was English himself, they showed a sudden and alarming hostility. They knew nothing of the real causes of the late war; only that as a result of it they had been seized by the press-gangs and forced to spend years of hardship and danger far from their families. They had, moreover, been taught to believe that the perfidious English, desiring to dominate the world, had forced the war upon peaceful France, and that every Englishman was a fit object for the blackest hatred. In consequence they now regarded Roger as a visible cause of their past miseries and present anxieties.

With menacing looks half a dozen of these dark, wiry, uncouth-looking sailors now gathered round, shouting obscene abuse indiscriminately at him and everything that England stood for, and the street women they had picked up on landing added to the clamour with shrill, vindictive cries.

Only the Doctor’s intervention saved Roger from a nasty mauling. In his sonorous voice the old man quelled the tumult. He upbraided the sailors for their discourtesy to a citizen of a country with which France was now at peace, and pointed out that since the late war had begun in ‘78 no one so young as Roger could possibly have had a hand in the making of it.

A blue-eyed shrew, attracted by Roger’s good looks, also took his part and turned her screaming abuse upon the now hesitant sailors, calling them a pack of great, misbegotten bullies for attempting to browbeat so young a lad.

At the Doctor’s suggestion Roger stood the company a round of drinks, and there the matter ended. But, when they had gone up to their room that night, he told Roger that among the ignorant in France there was still much resentment against the English, on account of the additional taxes and other hardships that the war had brought upon them; so he thought it would be a wise move if his young companion took another name and gave himself out to be a native of some other country.

As he was very proud of being English Roger was, at first, most loath to adopt the Doctor’s suggestion, but
eventually he was persuaded of its wisdom and, after some discussion, it was decided that to account for his poor French and heavy accent he should pass himself off as a Frenchman hailing from Alsace; since most of the inhabitants of that province were brought up to speak only their mother tongue, which was German.

It was then agreed that Roger should keep his Christian name, which, pronounced as
Rojé
, was not uncommon in France, and change his surname to
Breuc
, that being the nearest French spelling to Brook.

On the Monday they set out again, crossing the Seine and journeying from village to village through central Normandy by way of Bernay and Lisieux to Caen. The August days were warm and pleasant, the life never lacking in variety and interest. Their stock was dwindling but Roger’s money-bag grew satisfactorily heavier and when they reached Caen on the thirtieth of the month their takings totalled twenty-three
louis
.

Now that they had once more reached a city the Doctor again pressed for a ‘little holiday’. But after some trouble Roger managed to argue him out of it on the grounds that another two days would see them in September, so they could count on only five or six weeks more good weather, and therefore should make the most of it.

The Doctor admitted that there was sound sense in this, as journeyman-doctoring in winter was a poor business, and the more they were able to put by while the good weather lasted the more frequently they would be able to lie up when storms were turning the roads into quagmires.

That afternoon, instead of remaining in the stuffy city, they walked out to a meadow, from which they could see the spires of the great Norman churches, and lay there for a while in the sunshine.

They dozed for a little, then, on their rousing, the Doctor asked Roger, apropos of nothing, how he liked the life he was leading and if he would be willing to continue their partnership as a permanency.

‘’Tis well enough,’ Roger replied, ‘and I am mighty grateful that I fell in with you. But as soon as I have saved sufficient to make me independent for a while I plan to return to England.’

‘Had you not that in view, would you be content to remain with me?’ inquired the Doctor.

Roger had developed a great fondness for the old man and while he knew that his ambitions could never be satisfied by such a life, he was loath to hurt his companion’s feelings, so he said:

‘We get on so well together that I would hate to part with you, and the life itself has many attractions. Even if we fool some people and endanger others by selling them drastic remedies, the good we do to the great majority is out of all proportion to the harm we may do the few. Yet at times it saddens me.’

‘How so?’

‘’Tis the sore straits in which those from whom we make a living, live themselves. They herd together like animals in their miserable, broken-down cottages, many of which have leaking roofs and hardly any of which even have windows to keep out the bitter winds of winter. Often I am ashamed to take from them the miserable
sous
they bring us.’

‘I’ll not gainsay that they are poor,’ replied the Doctor, ‘but the majority of them are by no means as poor as you might think. In most cases ’tis for quite a different reason that they refrain from patching their roofs and putting windows in their houses. As you must have seen, on Sundays and Feast-days the village women bedeck themselves in very different raiment to that which they wear in the fields. Their layers of striped petticoats and lace headdresses have cost good money, and few of them are without gold chains and crosses for their necks, so they can well afford to part with a few
sous
for a beauty ointment.’

‘Why, then, do they live in such miserable conditions?’

‘’Tis on account of the
taille
, my young friend, the most monstrously stupid form of taxation that was ever devised by a government of fools. The King’s Intendants assess each village at whatever lump sum they may judge it to be worth, and the village syndics, whether they like it or not, are forced to collect the money from the villagers. The syndics, in turn, are empowered to assess each householder quite arbitrarily, not upon his actual capacity to pay, but simply on the amount they think they can squeeze out of him. Each man is taxed, therefore, on his presumed wealth, and this is judged by his mode of living and apparent prosperity. As a result every villager makes an outward show of the direct poverty in order to get off as lightly as he can. This
not only leads them to the self-infliction of many hardships which there would otherwise be no call for them to bear but it also strikes most savagely at the true interests of the country, since the peasants leave much of their land untitled from fear that bigger crops would land them with a higher tax assessment.’

‘What incredible folly,’ said Roger. ‘But why do not the nobles who own so much of the land make representations to the King, and get the tax laws altered?’

The Doctor shook his head. The nobility of France still retains its privileges. Most unjustly all persons of rank are exempt from taxation, and they still possess the sole rights in shooting and snaring game, which is hard on the peasantry; but for many decades past they have lost all power of influencing the government. ’Twas the great Cardinal de Richelieu who destroyed the power of the feudal lords, and Le Grand Monarque completed the process by compelling them all to leave their estates and live as idlers at his court of Versailles in order to make a splendid background for himself. From that time on the running of the country fell into the hands of the Kings almost entirely, and they could know little of its state, as they were advised only by a small clique of greedy favourites and Finance Ministers who depended on the Farmers of the Revenue to suggest ways of raising money as best they could.’

‘They seem to have made a pretty mess of things,’ Roger commented. ‘Our nobility in England would not stand for such mismanagement, nor would the people, either. Why, they cut off the King’s head with less reason a hundred and forty years ago.’

‘’Twas neither the nobility nor the people who cut off King Charles’s head,’ corrected the Doctor gently. ‘’Twas the
bourgeoisie
; the lawyers and the rich tradespeople of the cities. And ‘twill be the same here if the present discontents rise to a head. The peasantry are too apathetic and too cowed to rise; the nobility has all to lose and naught to gain by so doing. But there is money in the towns, and money begets both ambition and jealousy of the privileges of the ruling caste. Of late years the reading of books by such as can read has spread apace, and such works as those of Messieurs de Queshay, de Mirabeau, de Morelly and Jean Jacques Rousseau have spread abroad this cry for equality. Yet those who shout loudest have not in mind
equality for the peasant with themselves but equality for themselves with the nobility.’

‘Have you no body the like of the English Parliament that could put matters to rights without disrupting the country by a great rebellion?’

‘We have no Parliament in your sense, to which the people elect their own representatives. There are the local Parliaments, which we term Estates. Each of these consists of three chambers, the Church, the Nobility and a third Estate composed of the representatives of the city corporations and the trade guilds; but they have never been aught but provincial municipalities. Time was, though, when they used to send their representatives to Paris to sit in the States-General and advise the Kings of France whenever there arose a major crisis in the affairs of the nation. But the States-General has not now been summoned for nearly a hundred and seventy years. The last time they met was in 1614; and since then the Monarchy has become so all-powerful that it ignores them. As for the provincial Estates, from one cause and another most of them have ceased to function these many decades past, and only those of Artois, Flanders, Burgundy, Brittany and Languedoc continue to assemble regularly.’

‘How is the kingdom governed, then?’ asked Roger, ‘for if the nobles play no part and these Estates you speak of are moribund, how can the King, hedged about as he is by a crowd of ill-informed wasters, know what is happening to his subjects?’

‘Alas! he does not; though ’tis said that he is good-intentioned. By theory he rules through the governors of his provinces, but these are all great nobles who live in luxury at his Court on the huge incomes that their governorships bring them. In fact, the land is ruled by the Intendants appointed by the Comptroller-General of Finance, most of whom are clever upstarts with but one concern—to line their own pockets at the expense of both the King and the people.’