Genius Unobserved
The Wife Of Martin Guerre, by Janet Lewis. Swallow Press, paper, $1.25
Janet Lewis has stated that she first came upon the story of the wife of Martin Guerre in a book called Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence. Later she found a discussion of Martin Guerre’s trial in a recondite legal encyclopedia titled Recherches de la France by Etienne Pasquier, who was a celebrated jurist of the sixteenth century. It is said, too, that Montaigne refers in one of his essays to the curious case of Martin Guerre. So among Montaigne, Pasquier, and the anonymous anthologist of Famous Cases, we can be fairly sure of the existence of a man called Martin Guerre and of the extraordinary events that have perpetuated his name.
The Wife of Martin Guerre is, therefore, a historical novel. I first read it a few years after it was published by the Colt Press in 1941. I dislike historical novels and will go several steps out of my way to avoid anybody who is promoting one, so that I cannot now imagine who or what directed me to this. Furthermore, I did not at the time know anything about Janet Lewis as a writer: I knew her only as the wife of the poet and critic Yvor Winters. However, after reading this short novel I read every other novel she had written. They are not many. Next to Martin Guerre, I think the most important is The Trial of Sdren Ovist, concerning the execution of a Danish parson in the eighteenth century. Then there is The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, which is about a bookbinder during the reign of Louis XIV. All three, if I am not mistaken, derive from Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence. The intensity pervading them makes it clear that Miss Lewis is obsessed both by the possibility and by the actuality of injustice. She investigates this theme repeatedly, with the knowledge and the cold skill of a laboratory technician. In addition to these books, she has written a generally praised novel about the relationship between Indians and whites in the Northwest Territory called The Invasion; I wanted to like it, too, but I did not.
Recently I reread Martin Guerre for the first time, although I have been mentioning it and handing out copies for quite a while. I had no interest in reading it again, because some books, like certain scenes, print themselves permanently on the mind. However, it is not tedious to read a second time, and it remains for me one of the most significant short novels in English. I doubt that I shall forget the dignity of the concluding lines, or the opening.
Here is how it begins:
One morning in January. 1539, a wedding was celebrated in the village of Artigues. That night the two children who had been espoused to one another lay in bed in the house of the groom’s father. They were Bertrande de Rols. aged eleven years, and Martin Guerre, who was no older, both offspring of rich peasant families as ancient, as feudal, and as proud as any of the great seignorial houses of Gascony. The room was cold. Outside the snow lay thinly over the stony ground, or, gathered into long shallow drifts at the corners of houses, left the earth bare. But higher, it extended upward in great sheets and dunes, mantling the ridges and choking the wooded valleys, toward the peak of La Bacanère and the long ridge of Le Burat, and to the south, beyond the long valley of Luchon, the granite Maladetta stood sheathed in ice and snow. The passes to Spain were buried under whiteness. The Pyrenees had become for the winter season an impassable wall. Those Spaniards who were in French territory after the first heavy snowfall in September, remained there, and those Frenchmen, smugglers or soldiers or simple travelers who found themselves on the wrong side of the Port de Venasque, were doomed to remain there until spring. Sheep in fold, cattle in the grange, faggots heaped high against the wall of the farm, the mountain villages were closed in enforced idleness and isolation. It was a season of leisure in which weddings might well he celebrated.
Bertrande had never spoken to Martin until that morning, although she had often seen him; she had not known until the previous evening that she was to be married. Blit she had knelt beside the boy in front of his father: they bad then walked together across the snow, heralded by the sound of violins, to the church of Artigues, where the ceremony was accomplished. She found her marriage quite as solemn an affair as her First Communion.
Afterward, still to the music of the violins, which sounded thin and sharp in the cold air. she had returned to the house of her husband where a huge fire of oak logs garnished with vine-trimmings roared in the big fireplace, and where the kitchen, the principal room of the house, was set with improvised tables, long boards laid over trestles. The stone floor had been freshly strewn with broken houghs of evergreen. The sides and bottoms of the copper pans flashed redly with the reflection of the flames, and the air was rich with the good smell of roasting meat and of fresbly poured wine. Underfoot the snow from the sabots melted and sank beneath the trodden evergreens.
So Bertrande de Rols is married in the year 1539, as clearly as if it happened this morning, as brightly as in a painting by Brueghel. The description of the wedding feast becomes an invitation to the senses— the smoky meat, the warmed wine and boiled chestnuts, the hard bread dipped in grease, the snow melting through the evergreen branches, the shrill music. It is a wedding to be remembered.
The groom, however, has not much liked being married. As soon as they are alone he hits her, yanks her hair, and scratches her face.
That night they are put to bed together, and he, turning his back to her, remarks, “I am tired of all this business,” and goes to sleep.
Despite this less than cordial honeymoon they grow together amicably enough, and after a few years Bertrande feels a softening of her distaste for Martin. She works beside her mother-in-law at their chores while the men work in the fields; in time she has a child, Sanxi; and she begins to experience a deep fulfillment. She feels satisfied with her husband, and the majestic figure of her father-in-law is comforting; his existence testifies that the animals on the farm are safe, the grain is safe; and neither the wolves whose voices can be heard on winter nights, nor marauding mercenaries whose presence occasionally is reported, will threaten her security.
The motion of this life appealed powerfully to Janet Lewis. Seasons alter, work is done yet never finished, children are born, old people die. Birds, beasts, and humans form a stately procession across a sixteenthcentury tapestry of Languedoc. One easily can distinguish the figure of a youthful peasant in rough clothing on the day he leaves the farm, telling his young wife that he will come back in a week. He has taken some seed wheat from the granary without his father’s permission in order to plant a field. It is for the good of the farm, but he knows his father will be angered by such presumption, so he will go away for a week. By then his father will have realized what a sensible idea it was to plant another field.
However, a week goes by, and Martin Guerre does not return. Winter comes, Artigues is isolated. Finally the snow begins to melt. Bertrande waits for her husband. She waits through the summer.
Winter conies again. Only then does she say to herself that lie has left her. He has found liberty so sweet that he will not come home.
Gradually she forgets her husband. Yet each time she learns of strangers in Artigues she sends for them, feeds them, and asks it they ever have heard of Martin Guerre. She instructs them to tell him, if they should meet him, that his father has died and he may safely return.
Eight years after Martin’s disappearance “a bearded man dressed in leather and steel” arrives at the farm. The old housekeeper cries: “It is he, Madame!”
He is heavier than the youth who went away, and to Bertrande it seems that even his voice has changed: yet the eyes, the countenance, and the demeanor are those of her husband. He greets each member of the household with authority, inquires about those who have died during his absence, praises the servants for their fidelity, and without hesitation assumes his place.
He is capable and just, and life on tire farm continues as though he had never gone away. Everybody Is content, except Bertrande, who is troubled by a conviction that he is not her husband. She accepts him because everybody else, including his sisters, his uncle, and his oldest friends have accepted him, and she again becomes pregnant, but she cannot forget her suspicion. Finally she denounces him as an imposter. He is arrested and taken in irons to be held for trial in the village of Rieux, because Artigues is too small to have a court of its own.
This, the denunciation, is as vitally shocking as any idea in the book. It seems inconceivable, particularly to men, that a woman would denounce a man who had treated her kindly and with honor; and many women of our century must feel that the accusation was, if not shocking, at least rather foolish. Things were going well. Why did Bertrande insist on questioning her good fortune?
At the trial some witnesses swear that the prisoner is Martin Guerre, others claim that he is not, while others cannot make up their minds. The judges decide that the man is an imposter, and they condemn him to death; but the case is appealed to the parliament of Toulouse. A new trial is ordered.
Relatives and servants plead with Bertrande to withdraw the accusation, for nothing has gone right at the farm since she denounced her husband. She refuses.
On a September evening as she is returning from church, she comes upon the housekeeper seated beside the doorway killing doves. The old woman asks if she has made her prayers. Bertrande replies that she has. The housekeeper suggests that site might have made them for a better cause. The scene that follows this exchange is one of the most subtly murderous allegories in fiction:
She sighed, leaning forward, holding the dove head down between her hands, the smooth wings folded close to the smooth soft body, while the dark blood dripped slowly from a cut in the throat into an earthen dish. The dish, already filled with blood, darker than that which was falling into it, spilled over slightly, and a barred gray cat, creeping cautiously near, elongated, its belly close to the ground, put out a rasping pale tongue and licked the blood. The housekeeper, after a little, pushed it away with the side of her foot. A pile of soft gray-feathered bodies already lay beside her on the bench. The living dove turned its head this way and that, struggled a little, clasping a pale cold claw over the hand that held it, and relaxed, although still turning its head. The blood seemed to be clotting too soon, the wound was shrunken, and the old woman enlarged it with the point of the knife which she had in her lap. The dove made no cry. Bertrande watched with pity and comprehension the dying bird, feeling the blood drop by drop leave the weakening body, feeling her own strength drop slowly away like the blood of the dove.
“What would you have me do?” she asked at length. “The truth is only the truth. I cannot change it, if I would.”
“Ah,” said the housekeeper, turning once more to the dove which now lay still in her hands, “Madame, I would have you still be deceived. We were all happy then.” She laid the dead dove with the others, and stooped to pick up the dish of blood.
These words recur to Bertrande on the journey to Toulouse; and when, before the parliament in the Château Narbonnais, the time comes for her to confront the man she has accused, she is unable to look at him. She is puzzled that he does not seem to return her hatred with hatred; nor can she understand why he did not leave the farm when she first denounced him, when he could have escaped.
The witnesses are summoned again. Again they are divided. The shoemaker of Artigues testifies that the foot of the accused is slightly larger than the foot of Martin Guerre. It is established that the accused is stockier and somewhat shorter than Martin Guerre. But Martin Guerre had two broken teeth in the lower left jaw, and so has the accused; Martin Guerre had a drop of extravasated blood in the left eye, so has the accused; the nail of his left forefinger was missing, and he had three warts on the left hand, two of which were on the little finger, exactly as does the accused. The judges, greatly perturbed, decide that the prisoner must be, in fact, Martin Guerre. But while this verdict is being written, a one-legged soldier enters the chambers and announces that he is Martin Guerre.
The two men are ordered to stand side by side. There can no longer be any doubt. Martin Guerre has at last returned, minus a leg lost in the battle at St. Quentin. The prisoner is therefore an imposter, who, in his subsequent confession, states that he had been tempted to it by the frequency with which he had been mistaken for Martin Guerre. He had not meant at first to assume the place of his double in the household, he had planned to stay just long enough to pick up a little gold or silver: but the sight of Bertrande caused him to remain, even after he understood that his life was in danger.
This is the severely classic situation: a man who gambled his life in the hope of winning a woman. She, for her part, looked upon him with hate and contempt. Four centuries have not diminished the strength of their relationship.
The court at Toulouse decreed that the man, whose name was Arnaud du Tilh, had been guilty of the crimes of imposture, falsehood, substitution of name and person, adultery, rape, sacrilege, plagiat, which is the detention of a person who belongs to someone else, and of larceny. He was ordered to do penance before the church of Artigues on his knees, in his shirt, with head and feet bare, a halter around his neck and a burning taper in his hand, asking pardon of God and of the king, of Martin Guerre and of Bertrande de Rols, his wife; the court then condemned him to be handed over to the common executioner. who should conduct him by the most public ways to the house of Martin Guerre, in front of which, upon a scaffold previously prepared, lie should be hanged and his body burned.
That is the story of Martin Guerre and of his wife, and the imposter, Arnand du Tilh. It did, as we know, happen; the record of this decree exists, dated the twelfth of September, the year 1560, in the city of Toulouse. That a factual case is always a precarious base for fiction is demonstrated by the general mediocrity of historical fiction, and the usual novelist would have written a melodramatic, implausible book from such melodramatic, implausible history. Janet Lewis wrote something else.
If there is one characteristic of the book that distinguishes it, I would call it dignity. This quality cannot be manufactured, as certain qualities can; it emanates from the author. And it is here as plentifully and as unmistakably as grain in the fields of Languedoc. Out of a few documents Miss Lewis created a man named Martin Guerre who returned from tire wars, arrogant and unforgiving, without one of his legs, to demand the rightful place; Arnaud du Tilh, obliged by his respect for Bertrande to become a finer man than he ever had been, or expected to be; and Bertrande, who could not live with suspicion. All of them are aware of themselves, which is the true definition and the prerogative of dignity. I think it is because of this uncommon self-knowledge that they continue to live.
I do not much like extravagant praise, either to hear it or to employ it, and I am reluctant to use the term “masterpiece,” which is used indiscriminately. I am not sure if The Wife of Martin Guerre qualifies; but I approach it with respect.
Concerning Martin Guerre himself, the author says that nothing more is recorded, whether he returned to the wars or whether he remained in Artigues, nor is there any further record of Bertrande; but when hate and love together have exhausted the soul, the body seldom endures for long.