The Heptameron Read online

  To which came the reply: ‘Come and have a look. I have just avenged you on the man who has brought so much shame upon you!’ So saying, he thrust his dagger a dozen or so times into the body of the man on whom he would never have dared lay a finger had he been alive.

  Now that the murder had been committed, and the dead man’s servants had got away to take the news to his poor father, Saint-Aignan realized that it could not be kept quiet. But he reckoned that du Mesnil’s servants would not be regarded as credible witnesses, and that no one in his own household had seen the deed, apart from an elderly chambermaid and a girl of fifteen. The old woman he tried to seize without anyone knowing, but she managed to escape and get safely to the Dominican convent. She turned out to be the most reliable witness to the murder. The young girl stayed in the house for a few days and he managed with the help of one of the murderers to win her round. Then he took her off to Paris, and got her into a brothel, so that no one would take her seriously as a witness. To cover up all traces of the murder he burned the body of the deceased man, and put the bones which had not disappeared in the fire into the mortar he was using at that time to build an extension on his house. Finally, he sent an urgent message to court to ask for a pardon. He maintained that he had on several occasions forbidden entrance to a certain person whom he suspected of having dishonourable intentions with regard to his wife, that this person had, notwithstanding, come under suspicious circumstances to visit his wife and that, in consequence, having discovered the said person outside his wife’s bedroom door, he had, being emotionally disturbed and not in a rational state of mind, killed him. However, before he could have the letter dispatched to the chancellory, the distressed father informed the Duke and Duchess of what had happened, and they in turn informed the chancellor, in order to prevent the pardon being granted. Realizing that his request was not going to succeed, Saint-Aignan fled to England, along with his wife, and a number of her relatives. Before he left he told the assassin who had committed the murder on his orders that he had [received] official instructions from the King to arrest him and have him put to death, but that in view of his services, he was prepared to save his life. So he give him ten écus to get out of the country. The man accepted, and was never seen again.

  However, the murder was clearly authenticated by the two servants of the dead man, by the old chambermaid who had taken refuge with the Dominicans, and by the bones that were later discovered in the mortar. The case was brought and tried in the absence of Saint-Aignan and his wife. Judgement was pronounced on the two defaulters, the sentence being death. Their property was to be forfeited to the sovereign, and they were to pay fifteen hundred écus to the father to cover his legal expenses. Saint-Aignan, now safe in England, realized that he was a dead man if he went back to France. He ingratiated himself into the service of one or two eminent noblemen, and, partly through this and partly through the influence of his wife’s family, he managed to get the King of England to forward a request to the King of France for a pardon and the restoration of his property and privileges. But the King had heard what an appalling case it was, and merely sent the details of the trial to the King of England, inviting him to see for himself whether a pardon was warranted, and informing him at the same time that the Duke of Alençon alone in the realm had the right to confer pardons within his own duchy. In spite of these protestations the King of England would not rest. Indeed, he was so persistent in the matter that in the end Saint-Aignan got what he had been asking for, and eventually returned to his house in France.

  To crown his criminal career, he then fell in with a sorcerer called Gallery, in the hope that the occult arts would enable him to avoid paying the fifteen hundred écus to the deceased man’s father. To this end he and his wife travelled, in disguise, to Paris, where he spent a great deal of time closeted in a locked room with his sorcerer friend. He had not told his wife what he was up to, and so one morning she spied on him, and saw Gallery showing him five wooden dolls. Three of the dolls had arms hanging by their sides, and two had their arms up in the air. Gallery was explaining:

  ‘We’ve got to make dolls like these, but out of wax. The ones with their arms hanging down are the ones we’re going to cause to die. The ones with their arms up are the ones whose favours and goodwill we’re after.’

  To which Saint-Aignan replied: ‘This one here will be the King. He’s the one whose good books I want to be in. And this one will be the chancellor of Alençon, Jean Brinon.’

  ‘We have to put the dolls underneath the altar, ‘ Gallery went on, ‘so that they can hear mass being said, and when we put them there we have to say certain words, which I’ll tell you later.’

  When they came to the dolls with the arms hanging down, Saint-Aignan said that one of them was Gilles du Mesnil, the father of the dead man, because he knew that for as long as the Lieutenant had breath in him he would never give up trying to track him down. The other two were women. One of them was the Duchess of Alençon, the King’s sister, because she was so fond of her old servant du Mesnil, and because she knew so much about Saint-Aignan’s other evil doings that if she too did not die, he, Saint-Aignan, could not hope to live. The other doll was his own wife. It was she who was at the bottom of all this trouble, and he was quite certain she would never renounce her wicked ways.

  Seeing all this through the keyhole, and realizing that her husband had her marked as a dead woman, the wife decided to beat him to it. So, on the pretext that she had to go to borrow some money, she went off to an uncle of hers, called Néaufle, who was the Duke’s maître des requêtes, and told him what she had overheard. Néaufle, loyal servant that he was, reported the story to the chancellor of Alençon. As it happened the Duke and Duchess were not at court at the time, so the chancellor took the whole extraordinary affair to Madame la Régente, the mother of the King and of the Duchess herself. She immediately called in the provost of Paris, La Barre, who got to work so efficiently that Saint-Aignan and the sorcerer were both arrested. They both confessed voluntarily, without torture or any other means of coercion having to be employed.

  The case was duly brought to law, and laid before the King. There were some people who wanted the lives of the accused spared, and pleaded that the pair had merely sought by their magic practices to obtain the King’s good graces. But the King held his sister’s life as dear as his own, and ordered them to be sentenced as if they had made an attempt on his own person. His sister, the Duchess of Alençon, however, begged him to spare Saint-Aignan’s life, and commute the death sentence into some other form of harsh punishment. Her request was granted, and Saint-Aignan and Gallery were sent to Baron de Saint-Blancard’s galleys at Marseilles. In the galleys they ended their days, and with plenty of time to reflect on the seriousness of their crimes. As for the depraved wife, she led a more immoral life than ever, once her husband was out of the way, and died a most miserable death.

  *

  ‘Just consider now, Ladies, the amount of trouble that was caused by one woman. Just think of the whole train of disasters that this one woman’s behaviour led to. I think you’ll agree that ever since Eve made Adam sin, women have taken it upon themselves to torture men, kill them and damn them to Hell. I know. I’ve experienced feminine cruelty, and I know what will bring me to death and damnation – nothing other than the despair that I’m thrown into by a certain lady! And yet, I am mad enough to admit that though I suffer Hell, it’s a Hell far more delightful to me than any Paradise that any other woman could offer.’

  Parlamente, pretending she did not know that it was to herself that he was referring, replied: ‘Since Hell is as agreeable as you say, you presumably have no fear of the devil who put you there.’

  ‘If my devil,’ retorted Simontaut with some irritation, ‘were to turn black, as black as it has been cruel to me, then the fright it would give you all would be as great as the pleasure the mere sight of her gives me. But the fire of love makes me forget the fire of this Hell. So, I will say no more, and invite
Oisille to tell the next story. I’m sure that if she’ll tell us what she knows about women, she’ll corroborate my own view.’

  They all turned towards Oisille, and urged her to start. She accepted, and, with a laugh, began.

  ‘It seems to me, Ladies, that the person who’s just asked me to tell the next story has, by telling a true story about one wretched woman, succeeded in casting such a slur on all women, that I have to think back a very long way to find a story that will belie the low opinion he has of us. But there is one that comes to mind. It’s a story that deserves not to be forgotten, so I shall tell it to you.’

  STORY TWO

  In the town of Amboise there was a certain mule-driver in the service of the Queen of Navarre, the sister of King Francis I, and it all happened while the Queen was staying at Blois, around the time when she gave birth to a son. The mule-driver had gone over to collect his quarterly pay, while his wife stayed behind in their house on the other side of the bridges in Amboise. Now the husband had a servant, and this man had been desperately in love with the wife for quite a while. One day, unable to stand it any longer, he had come out with his declaration. But being a very virtuous woman, she had given him a very sharp reply, and threatened to get her husband to give him a beating and throw him out of the house. After that the man had never dared open his mouth to her in this fashion again, or in any other way indicate his feelings. However, the flames of passion smouldered secretly away, until the fateful day when the husband went off to Blois. The lady of the house had gone to vespers in the church of Saint-Florentin, in the [castle, and a long way] from the house. Left to himself in the house, the servant got it into his head that he would take by force what he had failed to obtain by supplication and service. He broke an opening in the partition that separated the room where he slept from that of his mistress. The hole could not be seen, because it was covered by the curtain of his master’s bed on one side, and by the curtain round the servant’s bed on the other. So his foul intentions were not suspected, until the good lady had actually got into bed, accompanied by a little lass of eleven or twelve years of age. The poor woman had just fallen asleep, when the servant jumped through the hole and into bed with her, wearing nothing but his shirt, and clutching his bare sword in his hand. The moment she felt him by her side, she jumped up, and told him what she thought of him, like the virtuous woman she was. His love was no more than animal lust, and he would have understood the language his mules spoke better than he understood the virtuous appeals to reason that she now made. Indeed, what he did next proved him even more bestial than the animals with whom he had spent so much of his life. She ran too fast round the table for him to catch her, and was in any case so strong that she had already twice managed to struggle free from his clutches. He despaired of taking her alive, and stabbed her violently in the small of the back, thinking no doubt that the pain would make her surrender, where terror and manhandling had failed. However, the very opposite happened. Just as a good soldier will fight back all the more fiercely if he sees his own blood flowing, so the chaste heart of this lady was only strengthened in its resolve to run, and escape falling into the hands of this desperate man. As she struggled to get away, she reasoned with him as well as she was able, thinking she might somehow bring him to recognize the wrongness of his acts. But by now he was worked up into a frenzy, and was in no state to be moved by words of wisdom. He went on lunging at her with his sword, while she ran as fast as she could to get away. When at last she had lost so much blood that she felt death approaching, she raised her eyes to heaven and, joining her hands in prayer, gave thanks to her God.

  ‘Thou art my strength, my virtue, my suffering and my chastity,’ she prayed, humbly beseeching that He would receive the blood, which, according to His commandment, was shed in veneration of the blood of His son. For she truly believed that through Him were all her sins cleansed and washed from the memory of His wrath. And as she sank with her face to the floor, she sighed, ‘Into thy hands I commend my spirit, my spirit that was redeemed by thy great goodness.’

  Then the vicious brute stabbed her several times again, and, once she could no longer speak, and all her physical resistance was gone, he took the poor defenceless creature by force. When he had satisfied his lusts he made a speedy getaway, and in spite of all subsequent attempts to track him down, it has proved impossible to find him. The young girl who had been sleeping with the poor woman had been terrified, and had hidden under the bed. Once the man had disappeared she came out and went to her mistress. Finding that she was unable to speak and just lay there motionless, she ran to the window and called out for help from the neighbours. There were plenty of people in the town who were fond of her and thought highly of her, and they now rallied round immediately and fetched doctors to tend her. When they examined her they found twenty-five fatal wounds. They did what they could to help her, but to no avail. She lingered on for another hour, unable to speak, but indicating by movements of her eyes, and gestures of the hands, that her mind was still clear. A man of the church came and questioned her about the faith in which she died, and about her hope for salvation through Christ alone. Although she could only reply by signs, no words could have conveyed her meaning more clearly. And so, with joy on her face, and her eyes turned heavenwards, her soul left this chaste body to return to its Creator. No sooner had the corpse been lifted from where it lay, prepared for burial and placed before the door of the house to await the burial party, than the poor husband arrived. There, completely unfore-warned, he was confronted with the spectacle of his wife lying dead in front of his own house. When he heard how she had died, his grief was doubled. Indeed, so deep was his sorrow that he too came near to death. His wife, this martyr of chastity, was then laid to rest in the church of Saint-Florentin. All the virtuous women of the town were present, as was their duty, to do all possible honour to her name. For them it was a great blessing to have lived in the same town as one so virtuous. For women of more wanton ways the sight of such respect being paid to her body made them resolve to amend their lives.

  *

  ‘Here we have, Ladies, a true story – a story that should strengthen our resolve to preserve this most glorious virtue, chastity. And we, who are all of good birth, ought to die of shame at the thought that our hearts may be tinged with worldly feelings, when in order to shun those very feelings, even a poor mule-driver’s wife does not fear to face what was a most cruel death. Can any woman regard herself as virtuous unless she has, like this woman, resisted till the last? So let us humble ourselves, for God’s graces are not given to men for their noble birth and for their riches, but according as it pleases Him in His goodness. He has no regard for persons, but elects whom He will, and those whom He has elected He honours with virtues and [crowns with His glory.] Often does He choose that which is low, that He might confound that which the world places high and considers worthy, even as He himself has said, “Let us not rejoice in our own virtues, but let us rejoice that we are inscribed in the Book of Life, from which nor Death, nor Hell, nor Sin can erase us.”’*

  There was not a lady in the company who did not have tears in her eyes, so moved were they all by the tragic and glorious death of the mule-driver’s wife. Each and every one vowed that should the same happen to her, she would do all in her power to follow this martyr’s example. Then, seeing that they were losing time in praising the dead woman, Madame Oisille turned to Saffredent and said: ‘If you don’t tell us something to make us laugh, I don’t think there’s anyone here who can make up for what I’ve done in making you all weep! So it’s you I choose to tell us the next story.’

  Saffredent replied that he would be only too happy if he could tell his companions, and a certain lady in particular, something to please them, but that this would be unfair, since there were others older and more experienced than he who ought to be allowed to speak first. However, he finally agreed that since it fell to his lot, he might as well speak now – after all, the longer he delayed, the more c
ompetition he would have, and the worse his story would be judged.

  STORY THREE

  I’ve often wished, Ladies, that I’d been able to share the good fortune of the man in the story I’m about to tell you. So here it is. In the town of Naples in the time of King Alfonso (whose well-known lasciviousness was, one might say, the very sceptre by which he ruled) there lived a nobleman – a handsome, upright and likeable man, a man indeed whose qualities were so excellent that a certain old gentleman granted him the hand of his daughter. In beauty and charm she was in every way her husband’s equal, and they lived in deep mutual affection until a carnival, in the course of which the King disguised himself and went round all the houses in the town, where the people vied with one another to give him a good reception. When he came to the house of the gentleman I have referred to, he was entertained more lavishly than in any of the other houses. Preserves, minstrels, music – all were laid before him, but above all there was the presence of the most beautiful lady that the King had ever seen. At the end of the banquet, the lady sang for the King with her husband, and so sweetly did she sing that her beauty was more than ever enhanced. Seeing such physical perfection, the King took less delight in contemplating the gentle harmony that existed between the lady and her husband, than he did in speculating as to how he might go about spoiling it. The great obstacle to his desires was the evident deep mutual love between them, and so, for the time being, he kept his passion hidden and as secret as he could. But in order to obtain at least some relief for his feelings, he held a series of banquets for the lords and ladies of Naples, to which he did not, of course, omit to invite the gentleman and his fair wife.

  As everyone knows, men see and believe just what they want to, and the King thought he caught something in the lady’s eyes which augured well – if only the husband were not in the way. To find out if his surmise was correct, therefore, he sent the husband off for two or three weeks to attend to some business in Rome. Up till then the wife had never had him out of her sight, and she was heartbroken the moment he walked out of the door. The King took the opportunity to console her as often as possible, showering blandishments and gifts of all kinds upon her, with the result that in the end she felt not only consoled, but even content in her husband’s absence. Before the three weeks were up she had fallen so much in love with the King that she was every bit as upset about her husband’s imminent return as she had been about his departure. So, in order that she should not be deprived of the King after her husband’s return, it was agreed that she would let her royal lover know whenever her husband was going to his estates in the country. He could then come to see her without running any risks, and in complete secrecy, so that her honour and reputation – which gave her more concern than her conscience – could not possibly be damaged in any way.