The Lark's Lament: A Fools' Guild Mystery (33 page)

“Yes.”

“They already have a bishop, and Count Raimon hates me,” he said. “Do you really think that you can pull this off?”

“I won’t know until I try,” I said.

“When you succeed, send for me,” he said, standing up. “I will be ready.”

He walked up the steps to the dormitorium. The door closed behind him.

I was alone in the church. I stood, snapped my fingers one time, and listened to the reverberations. Then I left.

*   *   *

I had promised Zeus two days of rest. I decided to leave the abbey and find somewhere else to do that. An accommodating farmer let us rest and heal in his stables in exchange for some help with the haying and a dozen songs and stories. On the morning of the third day, we followed the road back over the massif.

I had a pair of blankets this time, a gift from the abbey. One for me, one for Zeus. I kept the fires going at night, and kept our pace reasonable by day.

Two days later, we came to the Eagle’s Pass. I stopped to offer a brief prayer of thanks at the old chapel, then rode Zeus carefully down the switchbacks and through the forest, stopping to drink at the same stream where we stopped when we first came this way, eons ago.

Then we rode to the farm. As I tied Zeus to the fence, I heard a welcoming shout. Seconds latter, I was being embraced by all my foolish women. I closed my eyes and basked in the attention.

“Papa!” said a tiny voice.

I opened my eyes and looked at Portia in astonishment.

“Papapapapapa,” she said.

“How long has she been doing that?” I asked.

“Ever since you left,” said Claudia. “She says ‘Mama,’ too. Helga is working on her.”

I held her up and kissed her on the nose. “Kiss Papa on the nose?” I asked.

She did. Then she pointed at Zeus. “Papa!” she called to him.

“So there is still some learning to do,” laughed Claudia.

I spent the day resting and recounting what had happened to the others.

When I was done, Claudia shook her head sadly. “Poor Mathilde, poor Hélène,” she said. “Poor women everywhere.”

In the morning, we embraced our hosts, loaded up the wain, and drove to where Hélène’s order tended their herds. I spoke briefly to the woman who led them, telling her only that Hélène would not be returning to them. She did not press me for more information.

We left and passed by the tiny church in the village.

“Stop for a moment,” said Claudia.

I pulled up Zeus, and my wife jumped down and motioned for us to join her.

To the rear of the church was a small graveyard. One of the graves was recent, the grass having yet to take root on it. There was no marker. Claudia produced a bunch of flowers and placed them on the bare patch of ground.

“Mary forgives you, Mathilde,” she whispered. “Rest now.”

We stood quietly for a moment.

There was a sudden burst of song to our right. A tiny brightly colored bird with a splotch of red on its face was hopping around in a bunch of thistles, unperturbed by the thorns around it.

“A chardonneret,” said Claudia, brightening. “And no hawks in sight.”

“They call it God’s bird; did you know that?” I said.

“Why?” asked Helga.

“The story is that when Our Savior suffered on the cross, a chardonneret took pity on Him and tried to pull the crown of thorns from His head. It failed, but the mark left by Christ’s blood on its face has stayed with it. And God rewarded its attempt by giving it protection from thorns ever since.”

“So God will reward us even if we fail?” asked Helga.

“As long as we keep on trying, Apprentice,” I said.

We returned to Zeus, and took the road out of Gémenos to the west.

“Where to?” asked Claudia.

“Back to Marseille to bring Pantalan up to date,” I said. “I’ll need a few days to write a report to send to Father Gerald at the Guildhall. I think we had better bypass Montpellier. It may be too hot for us now.”

“So after Marseille, straight to Toulouse to displace a sitting bishop?”

“That’s the plan,” I said.

She laughed softly. “It won’t be easy,” she said.

“It never is,” I agreed.

HISTORICAL NOTE

Folco mis disse quella gente a cui

Fu noto il nome mio;

[Those people to whom my name was known called me Folc;]

—DANTE,
PARADISO
IX, 96–7 [TRANS. N. M. SCHULMAN]

I.
Troubadours and the Fools’ Guild
1

In January 2004, an earthquake measuring 4.1 on the Richter scale shook the southern reaches of the Dolomites in Italy. What was first believed to be a natural cave formation was revealed. However, closer inspection turned up unmistakable evidence of a man-made structure. An archeologist who was supervising the excavation of the ruins of a nearby monastery was called in. With trepidation, for the soundness of the surrounding hillside was suspect after the recent seismological shock, she examined it, first thinking that it was no more than an ancient mine. Then she found a group of tightly sealed casks and amphorae.

In a creditable display of patience, she did not open them right then and there, but brought in a team to carefully remove them to a clean room at a nearby university. There, they were opened, and were found to contain manuscript after manuscript of records, both in Latin and in Tuscan dialect. Each had at the top the seal and motto of the Fools’ Guild.

My translations of the handful of known copies of the chronicles of Theophilos held in Ireland were known in Italy, ironically in Italian translations of my English translation of his Tuscan. I was asked to join the team of scholars in making an assessment of these records. While many of them were of accounts and records of daily life at the Guildhall, many others were histories ostensibly written by various fools. Carbon-dating and close examination of the inks used suggest that the last of them date from the fifteenth century, but the oldest may hail from as far back as the tenth century, perhaps from the time the Guildhall was first constructed at that location.

The Irish papers were all later copies, so you can imagine my excitement at discovering what purported to be manuscripts in Theophilos’s own hand. Would that his handwriting were better, but these were no doubt written in haste or on the run. We should be grateful that they were written at all.

With the accounts of everyday life in the Guild, we now know with more clarity its organizational structure. Its leadership was drawn from a small band of friars from an order unaffiliated with any other, but with a history stretching back to the early Middle Ages. Its relationship with Rome was problematic, as we have seen—more of an uneasy coexistence than an outright allegiance.

The decennial lists, the ten-year count of the Guild members, divide them into four categories: the aforementioned religious, the jesters, the troubadours, and the novitiates. The usage of Guildnames without their real world
noms des bouffons
prevents an accurate tally of the membership, but it does give us a better understanding of the relative roles of the jesters and the troubadours.

It is likely and logical that the vast majority of jesters in the Christian and Muslim world of this period were affiliated with the Fools’ Guild.
2
The variety of skills required for the successful jester, described by Theophilos as the seven foolish arts,
3
would preclude the profession from all but a talented few.

However, the same cannot be said of troubadours. While the Fools’ Guild was able to corner the market on foolery, music was beyond their control. The decennial lists contain the names of many of the most noteworthy troubadours of the day, as well as some who have been lost to history, but history itself records many troubadours who never passed through the Guild’s doors.
4

The reasons for this should be obvious. Music was part of a basic medieval education, one of the seven liberal arts, and a part of every household rich and poor. The liturgy of the time was sung, the histories of the time were sung, and the cheapest and most accessible form of entertainment of the time was, well, beer, but with music a close second and a frequent companion.

With the proliferation of music came the troubadour movement, particularly in educated and noble households. Scholars and tradition award the honor of being the first troubadour to Guilhem IX, Duke of Aquitaine, Count of Poitiers (1071–1126).
5
The Fools’ Guild, on the other hand, differs on their origins, naming several from the previous century, and it hardly seems likely that the ballad was suddenly invented in Aquitaine.
6

Other so-called scholars have disagreed on this point.
7
But they have not had the benefit, as I have, of reading the actual Guild records.
8
In any case,
9
it is clear that the Guild defines the word, “troubadour,” in a different sense than the popular one.
10

In an unpublished paper, unaccountably held back due to the short-sighted editorial policy of a certain formerly respectable journal,
11
I have argued that the role of the troubadour in the Fools’ Guild, in addition to his traditional function as composer at the Courts of Love, was to act as a circuit-rider or courier. A successful troubadour was accustomed to riding from town to town and court to court, carrying with him his ballads, the news reports of the day.

The only requirements were a talent for composing and a horse, and Guild troubadours ended up coming from a variety of backgrounds. Some were noble, such as Gui de Cavalhon, a seigneur and knight from Provence. Some came from the merchant classes, like Folquet de Marseille or Peire Vidal, who was the son of a Toulousan furrier. There were even some who doubled as jongleurs, such as Peire Raimon de Tolosa and Guilhem Adémar, and that their contemporaries distinguished the two professions shows both their proximity and their difference.

However, anyone with a little training and a lute could start banging out ballads and call himself a troubadour, and the lists include such notables as Richard I, the Lion-Hearted, who not only was not a member of the Fools’ Guild, but stood for everything that the Guild opposed. These musical amateurs with money and connections filled the world with bad songs, the medieval equivalents of garage bands. It is not a surprise that the movement eventually died out, although not without leaving its mark on future poets such as Dante and Petrarch. It was Dante, writing a century later, who would help Folquet to a small slice of immortality.

II.
Folquet and Folc

Readers who wish to learn more about Folquet/Folc are invited to read Nicole M. Schulman’s
Where Troubadours Were Bishops: The Occitania of Folc of Marseille (1150–1231),
(New York and London: Routledge, 2001). Ms. Schulman acknowledges that the birthdate is an estimate, averaging a likely range of 1145 to 1155 given the known circumstances of his early years.

Some nineteen to twenty-one songs attributed to Folquet have survived, several with music. Most come from his time as a troubadour, but the last three, a pair of calls to Crusade and a song of penitence, date from his time as a Cistercian monk. Of the songs sung or heard by Theophilos and Claudia in this manuscript, only the fragment sung by the latter in chapter 11 can safely said to be his, being a Tuscan translation of
Mout i fetz gran pechat Amors,
Song 8 in the Stronski numeration (making my English translation twice removed from the original).

The song in chapter 1 attributed by Theophilos to Folquet bears none of the latter’s style or characteristics. It is too merry and ribald to have been written by this generally melancholy and lovelorn troubadour, and I suspect that the true composer was Theophilos himself, based upon other songs I have encountered in his manuscripts.

“The Lark’s Lament,” however, could very well be a lost composition by Folquet. Grelho’s comment about the common theme of the high branch is well said. Folquet himself may have been aware of that criticism—Song 14 commences with
“Ja no·is cug hom qu’ieu camje mas chansos, pos no·s camja mos cor ni ma razos;”
[No one ever thinks that I change my songs, since neither my feelings nor my themes change.]
12
Unfortunately, we are once again dealing with a Tuscan translation of a lost song written originally in langue d’oc, so it is impossible to comfortably assert its provenance. Until further information is found, we will leave the Stronski numeration untouched.

There are two medieval portraits said to be of Folquet. One shows him as a young man, smiling and possessed of a healthy head of hair. The other shows him as a monk, tonsured and with a stern and somewhat sour expression. I like to think that the first was of Folquet, and the latter as just plain Folc, but there is no authority for this supposition.

Those who would walk where Folc once did are directed to the restored abbey of Le Thoronet. Its construction began in 1161, part of the vast growth of the Cistercian order in what might be thought of as a Middle Age spread. Le Thoronet was unusual both for its design elements and its use of the irregular landscape, creating a quirky but unforced layout of extraordinary beauty. It can be seen on a day trip from Marseille, traffic permitting, but those who stay in the area may have the added experience of visiting the old village of Le Cannet des Maures. (Follow the sign at the traffic circle to “Vieux Cannet.” Check with me about where not to stay. The motel I was at was a horror.)

Until the discovery of this manuscript, the name of Folc’s wife was lost to us, along with her history. However, there is one interesting fact. In 1205, a year after the events depicted here, a Cistercian order for women was founded in Gémenos, thanks in part to the influence of Folc. It became a daughter-house to the abbey of Le Thoronet, and Folc maintained a relationship with Gémenos throughout his life. It is not known if Hélène returned there, or where and when she died. The abbey still stands, although it was deserted centuries ago.