The Friar of Carcassonne (39 page)

*
A group of rams, he recounted, inhabited a verdant meadow:
On the ram exemplum, Duvernoy,
Le procès
: Evidence entered in the court record, pp. 49–50.

*
Gui Sicre and two confederates from the town jumped on their horses:
Testimony of Arnaud Marsend, in Duvernoy,
Le procès
, p. 170.

13. T
HE
I
NQUISITOR
G
IVES A
R
EADING

*
Bernard then began repeating a strange story of an extraordinarily
unflappable fellow:
Two lessons can be taken from this tale. First, wrongful prosecution must have been distressingly common in Carcassonne for such a story to gain traction. This lesson underscores how Bernard's career was possible. If the inquisitors had acted all along with impeccable respect for the truth, then it would not have been credible for the unflappable fellow to have been faced with the baseless accusation of heresy in the first place. That he was, and that Bernard's listeners immediately understood his plight, speak plainly of the abuse of inquisitorial power at the turn of the century. Délicieux was not a fantast—there was something deeply rotten within the inquisition, no matter how sincere individual persecutors might be.

On a tactical level, the story of the unflappable man also shows a shift toward more robust resistance. Violence is not meted out by some talking ram on a hillside; it is a punch thrown in the street by a man angry with his lying neighbor. More important, it is not an allegory. In his sermon Bernard had spoken of two butchers leading sheep to the slaughter. That, after all, is what butchers do, so the metaphor works. But with this placid, collected man, there is no metaphor. The actions take place in a town that could be, or most certainly is, Carcassonne; the actors are Bernard's listeners. The story hinges on one word:
heresy
. Heresy was the raison d'être of the inquisition, and the charges of heresy in the tale were
necessarily
without foundation. Bernard here is directly taking on the inquisitors and their helpers. The story is not a veiled attack— it is a bald invitation for the people of the town to roll up their sleeves and fight.

*
“ ‘Once there was a town in which there lived a good man, of whom it
was said that nothing could anger him or make him angry' ”:
Testimony of Guillaume Rabaud, Duvernoy,
Le procès
, p. 165.

*
“the other was lying through his teeth”:
The French reads “
il mentait
par sa gorge
,” meaning, literally, “he was lying in his throat.” The phrase appears again in the trial transcript, when Arnaud de Nougarède testified that Délicieux spat out the expression on hearing it suggested that he had bribed Picquigny (Duvernoy,
Le procès
, p. 192). I am not familiar with an English expression using “throat” for lying—though I have seen Délicieux's remark translated as “Thou liest in the throat.” In both instances I judged it better to change the expression to the more familiar “teeth.” As the Italians famously say of translation:
traddutore, traditore
(translator, traitor).

*
“ ‘Draw your own conclusions' ”:
Another vexed translation question. The French reads, elegantly,
Me comprenne qui voudra
, which may be translated any number of ways, none of them very satisfactory, such as “Understand whatever you want,” or perhaps even “Know what I'm sayin'?”

*
“Good people, if anyone calls you a heretic, defend yourself as best
you can, because you have the right to defend yourself”:
Testimony of Giraud de Meaux, Duvernoy,
Le procès
, pp. 166.

*
They would later say at his trial that he encouraged the people to
murder them:
Duvernoy,
Le procès
: Testimony of Arnaud Marsend (p. 171) and Bernard Trèves (p. 202).

*
the city's bishop, of an old Carcassonne family, who had been conspicuously
silent in the dispute between the brash Franciscan and
his Dominican foes:
Peire de Rochefort. Friedlander,
The Hammer
, p. 129.

*
his ancestor had been a famously live-and-let-live
bishop who counted
several Good Men and Good Women in his immediate circle of kinship:
Bernard-Raymond de Roquefort, bishop of Carcassonne at the time of the Albigensian Crusade. His mother was a Good Woman; three of his brothers were Good Men. Michel Roquebert,
L' épopée
cathare
,
1198–1212,
pp. 148–149.

*
Scholarly examination of what remains of the secret agreement of
1299 has determined that Picquigny was right:
The consensus is solid among Bernard's biographers.

*
As a jurist of Carcassonne sniffed at Bernard's trial:
Testimony of Peire Guilhe, Duvernoy,
Le procès
, p. 207.

*
the word
abjure
appears but once in the document, in a passage of
ecclesisastical boilerplate:
Friedlander,
The Hammer
, p. 34.

*
The inquisitor Geoffroy d'Ablis:
On his background: Charles Peytavie, “L'Inquisition de Carcassonne, Geoffroy d'Ablis (1303–1316), le Mal contre le mal,” in Albaret, ed.,
Les Inquisiteurs
, pp. 89–100.

*
The moment for disclosure had arrived:
On the reading and its riotous aftermath: Duvernoy,
Le procès
: Testimony of Pierre Vital of Carcassonne (p. 154).

*
he hadn't started the riot; the inquisitor had:
Showing remarkable chutzpah, Bernard asserted this at his trial. Duvernoy,
Le procès
, pp. 116, 134.

14. T
HE
W
ALL

*
“
Cohac! Cohac!
”:
Testimony of Bernard Trèves, Duvernoy,
Le procès
, p. 203.

*
Masked men burst into their church, smashing windows and statuary:
Duvernoy,
Le procès
: charge #26 of the sixty-item accusation drawn up by Gui (p. 43), testimony of Guillaume Olivède (p. 160), Bernard Trèves (p. 203), Pons Siméon (p. 208), Alice L'Alayrague (p. 211).

*
the townspeople saw that Picquigny's company included a lawyer who
had advised the consuls in 1299:
The unfortunate fellow was Guiraud Guiart. On the general chaos and disorder in Carcassonne in August 1303: Duvernoy,
Le procès
: testimony of Drouin de Montchevrel (p. 169) and Arnaud Marsend (p. 171).

*
the Franciscan convent had welcomed several dozen guests from Albi:
Duvernoy,
Le procès
, charge #32 of the forty-four-item accusation drawn up by Castanet (p. 38), testimony of Guillaume Fransa (p. 62), Pierre de Castanet (p. 64), Bernard Bec (p. 68).

*
Several witnesses at Bernard's trial vividly remembered the morning:
Duvernoy,
Le procès
: testimony of Guillaume Fransa (p. 59), Jean Laurent (p. 173), Jacquet Barquinhan (p. 174), Bernard Audiguier (p. 175), Pierre Camelin (p. 178), Pons Siméon (p. 208), Pierre Ardit (p. 211), Pierre Guilhem (p. 212), Jean Gauthier (p. 212).

*
formal appeals to the pope to reverse the injustice of this day:
Duvernoy,
Le procès
: testimony of Jacquet Barquinhan (p. 174), Pierre Camelin (p. 178), Pons Siméon (p. 208), Jean Gauthier (p. 212).

*
“When the existence of the Church is threatened”:
The author of this remarkable passage was the bishop of Verden in Lower Saxony, Dietrich von Nieheim, in his
De schismate libri III
, in 1411. It is cited as the epigraph of the chapter entitled “The Second Hearing” in Arthur Koestler,
Darkness at Noon
, trans. Daphne Hardy, London, 1940, p. 97.

*
“Behold, the Lord has sent down an angel to help us!”:
Testimony of Raimond Arnaud, Duvernoy,
Le procès
, p. 177. In his testimony, Arnaud, a Dominican, relates an exemplum that Délicieux is supposed to have uttered from the pulpit. It concerns an owl-king that does nothing as his bird subjects are serially snatched away, so the beleaguered birds he is supposed to protect think of switching allegiances. Bernard is supposed to have repeatedly given a full public explanation of the story's meaning, naming names and, essentially, unveiling the secret treasonous plot. It strikes me as a contrived, after-the-fact invention—the Dominican is alone in mentioning the tale, which he exposes with suspicious eloquence. The story seems crafted expressly for the purposes of further damning the Franciscan at his trial. Although other studies of the Carcassonne revolt accept and analyze it, I deemed the narrative's other two exempla—the rams and the unflappable man—sufficient and credible enough to give a flavor of Bernard's preaching.

15. T
ORTURE
E
XPOSED

*
the nearly indignant references to it contained in the formal charges
against him at his trial:
Charges #15 and #16 of the forty-four-item accusation drawn up by Castanet, in Duvernoy,
Le procès
, p. 36.

*
the torture in common use in his day:
Peters,
Torture
, p. 68.

*
he had suggested bringing along the prisoners who had been freed
from it so that the monarch could see the marks of torture and mistreatment:
Duvernoy,
Le procès
: Testimony of Bernard Délicieux (pp. 129, 133), Arnaud Garsie (p. 202).

*
the identity of Picquigny's ghostwriter:
Further evidence of Bernard's behind-the-scenes handiwork comes at the end of the letter, where its author takes a somewhat gratuitous swipe at the Dominicans for not living in poverty. This kind of mendicant indignation would not have been the work of a layman, Picquigny, but of a friar. Friedlander,
The
Hammer
, p. 154.

*
“There are no words, no expressions that We could use”:
Entered as evidence in the court record, accompanying the testimony of Peire Pros, in Duvernoy,
Le procès
, pp. 197–198.

*
who in reality do not preach, but rather breach divine law:
Another instance of
traddutore, traditore
—the Latin wordplay in the original can be rendered effortlessly into French as
prédicateur
and
prévaricateur
. “Preacher” and “prevaricator” do not work at conveying the wordplay in English, nor, for that matter, do “preacher” and “breacher,” as the latter word is unusual and awkward. Hence the choice to switch the nouns to verbs.

*
at one point Philip informed Délicieux and Picquigny that their oft-extended
invitation had finally been accepted:
Duvernoy,
Le procès
: testimony of Arnaud Garsie, p. 76.

16. T
HE
K
ING AND
Q
UEEN IN
L
ANGUEDOC

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In 1988, the Maison Seilhan . . . was purchased and lovingly restored
by a group associated with the modern-day Dominican order:
The people running the Maison encourage passers-by to drop in and take a tour, free of charge. On my visit there in the summer of 2009, a demurely dressed woman in her late thirties—a Dominican nun, I assumed—took me through the rooms and expertly explained the exhibits and the restorations. Toward the end of the tour, I pointed through a window at a half-timbered dwelling and said that I had just read in a glossy magazine about the Inquisition (the French newsstand is a thing of beauty) that the house across the way was, in fact, where the inquisitors tortured people. Her smile vanished, and she exclaimed with wounded pride, “Oh non, monsieur, c'est bien ici que les supplices ont eu lieu!”—–you're mistaken, sir, this is where the torture happened!

*
The king made this journey only once in his thirty-year reign:
Favier,
Roi de marbre
, p. 305.

*
In the months and years to follow this tour, several senior officials
were dismissed and replaced:
Friedlander,
The Hammer
, p. 154–157.

*
At once, he was met by a near hysterical mob, the handiwork of
Délicieux:
There is no eyewitness account of this welcome. However, from references made to it at Bernard's trial, it seems to have been a notorious event at the time. Délicieux claimed that it was not his handiwork, but that assertion is clearly unbelievable. Duvernoy,
Le procès
: testimony of Arnaud Garsie (p. 78), Bernard Délicieux (p. 117), Gui Sicre (p. 165).

*
A biographer of the great Capetian monarch states that Philip had
two religions:
Strayer,
Reign
, p. 13.

*
Dominicans, Franciscans, bishops, royal officials, and a delegation
from Carcassonne and Albi led by Délicieux were invited to a large
hall:
The Dominicans gamely tried to prevent Bernard from attending the meeting by complaining to his hierarchy that he had impeded the work of the Holy Office and was thus ineligible to speak. The Franciscan leadership conducted a speedy review and concluded he was innocent of the charge and thus could speak for them before the king (testimony of Bernard Délicieux, in Duvernoy,
Le procès,
p. 84). As for the sequence of speakers at the meeting, I have found that, among all the friar's biographers, the chronology established by Friedlander in
The Hammer
(chap. 5) to be the most convincing. There is a possibility that the leader of the Dominicans of Languedoc may have spoken to the king at a separate meeting, but that eventuality would not have affected the tenor or content of the discussion at the main meeting. The details of the presentations are found in
Le procès.