11: The Spider and the Fly

Vellet Deus, vellent di,
quod mente proposui:
ut eius virginea
reserassem vincula!

(God or gods be willing,
This plan is in my brain:
From my love's virginity
I shall unlock the chain!)

Anon. 12-13C, O mi dilectissima! (Carmina Burana MS)

"Pasque-Dieu!" Pierre went on. "Quasimodo, the conqueror of the Cour des Miracles! I may be able to make a curiously touching poem on this theme! Exchanged infants who meet again, all unwitting… Yes, it might make an epic in verse – even a drama!"

Esméralda ignored him (after all, it was simply Gringoire being Gringoire) and glared at her mother: "But you apologised to that man!"

Pâquette gave one of her stiff-jointed shrugs. "Well, what would you have me do?"

"Speak for me! Condemn him! You're my mother!"

"What is it they say about gift-horses?" she said in a low voice. "If the rumours are true, that he does make gold, you could've gulled him for far more than that captain!"

"Gold? That's all you care about! My own mother would have me sell myself for gold!"

"One can't live without it! And giving yourself free to a soldier usually ends with becoming regimental property," Pâquette countered. "No more than devalued coin!"(1)

Pierre's ears pricked up: "Ah yes! Maître Villon! Oh, to have his gift for words – though not his career, I must add! They talked of him still in the Cour des Miracles…"

"Pierre, why won't you tell her –?"

"Because I'd much rather discuss poetry! – You like poetry, don't you, Pâquette?"

"I like it well – all the songs my father used to sing when I was a child! There was one about a unicorn:

Ausi conme unicorne sui
Qui s'esbahit en regardant
Quant la pucele va mirant …(2)

If only I could remember it all –"

"Oh, that's an old one, I fancy!" he enthused.

Esméralda bridled. "Poetry! Pah! Why?"

"Why not?" said Pierre. "We can't undo all that's happened: we just have to live with it. What good could come of berating a sick man? He knows his own sins well enough!"

"You say that because he's your friend!"

"I can't forget that he taught me all I know."

"You forget that I'm your wife!"

Only as a last resort, he thought; only now that she was starting to see the dents in Captain Phœbus's shining armour, and was still terrified of the archdeacon. Still he thought of that night at La Falourdel's. Yes, Claude had confessed to the stabbing. But she had gone there, of her free will, telling no-one, to meet a notorious womaniser… As a wife, he might never be able to trust her fully; no more than he could now trust his mentor. He still loved them both dearly – and pitied them both – but it would take a long time for his faith in either of them to recover.

He got up from the table. "Very well. That pleases me. But please excuse me: I have a goat to exercise." He bowed formally. "Good day, wife."

"She's my goat."

"Correction: if I am your husband, she is also mine. Faithful beasts, goats, you know: I can't think why they're used to symbolise lechery. They defend their honour with their horns."

"And my honour?"

He smiled sadly. "Have you looked for it on the Pont Saint-Michel?" He rubbed his temples. "I' faith, I felt my own horns sprouting…"

"But you know nothing happened."

He bowed again, and went out into the yard, where Djali – munching on scraps – was waiting.

"Mother! What have I said? He knows nothing happened! – This is your fault, for fawning around that–that monster!"

"All you do is keep hurting him, Agnès," Pâquette said.

"How? When?"

"I told you it was dangerous to get love mixed up with marriage."

"But I haven't! I just want to be safe: it's not as if I love him!"

"He loves you, though: that's the trouble."

"Him? But he's… he's just Pierre."

"Yes. Just Pierre, who always wants to help." She sighed. "And we have to think of how we're going to live, and where we're going to live. And we need him for that. I don't want the Pradons to take us for paupers. Try to be kind to him, there's a good girl."

If anything, Claude felt far worse because of what he misread as Pâquette's magnanimity. Had she struck him across the face, or cursed him, he would have understood it: outraged honour, maternal vengeance. But not this.

Had he been less virtuous to begin with, his fall would have caused him (and others) far less pain. A man of the world would have been spared it entirely, swiftly seeing through the glitter of glass and spangles, and would have turned his attentions elsewhere. But he had emptied out his heart, his soul itself, for Esméralda. Even if the object of his love had been shallow, foolish – Christ knew, it crushed him to admit that – there was nothing superficial in that love itself: the tormented longing, the exaltations and the abasements nailing him to the cross of his own passion.

He had blasphemed against his religion. Had he not told her that had she lived in those times, God would have chosen her to be His mother, in Our Lady's stead? He had mocked the Mass by performing the sacrifice unconfessed, after sinful dreams had stirred his body at night. He had blasphemed, too, against science. He had sought the Philosopher's Stone, but had let a tawdry piece of glass beguile him from his quest. He had imagined her the living incarnation of the Tabula Smaragdina, the very key to the operation of the sun, the Great Work. Yet in the same breath, he had damned her as a succubus for torturing his flesh in ways beyond his comprehension; he had made her suffer horrors because he could not bear to suffer his alone.

And after this, to receive not a curse, but a blessing from her mother…?

The anchoress was a holy woman, dead to the world these fifteen years, he told himself. If she spoke at times in ways that unnerved him, of matters scarcely decent, it was, no doubt, the legacy of her sinful past: she was too ignorant to express herself less crudely. What she offered was Christian forgiveness and mercy, of which he knew he was unworthy. Yes, he should teach her as she requested, he thought: it would be a partial act of expiation for the wrong he had done her child.

For her part, Pâquette wondered at the idea of a passion that could throw laws of man and Church and reason aside. Highly sexed since puberty, she was well acquainted with lust: the uncomplicated desire that starts above the garters and ends on a mattress, whether straw or feather, on the floor or against a wall. She had discovered early, almost by accident, that men would pay, and that she could turn a pleasurable pastime to her profit. She knew men's bodies, their physical needs, far too well; but of love, in truth, she knew as little as the Archdeacon of Josas.

Crimes of passion and kingdoms put to flame belonged in the old songs, in her minstrel father's tales. She recalled the tale of the long-ago poet from the south, hunted by hounds in his wolf-skins; the old Count of Champagne singing of the unicorn, slain while swooning in the maiden's lap; Lancelot and Tristan in the wild-wood. It seemed ridiculous, incongruous, to imagine this soft-spoken yet intense, passionate yet virginal scholar, with his balding, tonsured head and his black cassock, in such a fellowship – and yet so he was.

But for what Guenevere or Iseult had he run mad and wrought all this ruin?

– For her Agnès, her lost lamb: pretty, petty Agnès, who had no thoughts in her head beyond momentary fun and handsome soldiers. The extremity of it thrilled as well as alarmed her. What might she have done with a man of such passions, and with such a mind, at her feet – and not merely with his money? And from what she might have done, her thoughts began to turn to what she could do…

It appalled (and amused) her that so learned a man understood so little of his own body, so little of sex: that the mere presence of an attractive woman, whether in reality or dream, made him terrified of any involuntary response. Even the youngest and most innocent of her customers had not been so filled with dread; rather, eager to learn. He suffered needlessly, she thought: might the cure for his ignorance be an act of charity, not a sin? After all, she was a mistress of arts that were not taught in the university…

The prospect of teaching again – even a little – lifted Claude's spirits. For him, education paralleled alchemy: taking the base prima materia, judged worthless by the world, to refine it through repetitive but progressive processes. The interaction of teacher and student enacted Miriam's "Solve et coagula" between two minds, to transform and transfigure both (for the educational experience changes the teacher, too). With Pierre and even with Quasimodo, simple as he was, he had achieved some success. Ordinarily, he would have had misgivings about such proximity to a woman, but since Sister Gudule was, like himself, under vows and a bodily ruin, there ought to be little danger. (He clung to the image of her as she was now, thin and grey, and tried to banish his first memories of her immurement.)

Mother Sibylle was glad to see him taking an interest in life again. "You need occupation and younger company," she opined, shaking his pillows. "Too much brooding isn't good for you!"

"I wasn't strong enough to do much else before," he said.

"Well, that's true. What will you do for books?"

"I've asked Father Thierry to arrange for Pierre to bring some from my rooms in the cloister. We won't need many to begin with."

"I hope all goes well," she said.

"I'm sure it will: Sister Gudule has a quick mind, I think."

"– Though she's had much to repent with it."

"So have I, as you know," he said with a sad smile.

Pierre was glad to help. It would at least keep Pâquette and Esméralda from each other's throats, he thought. They were both stubborn women (almost as stubborn as Djali, but less adorable with it), and all too often he felt himself caught between them. Pâquette needed something to engage her mind, and if he had any anxieties about her morals, he kept them to himself.

He knew the Archdeacon's study well: for a few years it had served as his own schoolroom. He remembered the arrangement of the books, down to the last treatise: apart from a number of newer acquisitions, nothing had changed. Claude always insisted that everything be kept in the same order. Pierre had always been in awe of his memory, which seemed to go beyond the natural: he always knew where to find everything, even to the position of paragraphs on a page.

Yet now, unoccupied these last months, the room was silent, lifeless, save for a spider spinning a web in the window.

Glancing along the shelves, he plucked out the primer and grammar with which Claude had taught him. He remembered their lessons: the archdeacon, normally so austere and withdrawn, in flights of enthusiasm at being able to share his passion for philosophy, theology, poetry and rhetoric. "Master the Humanities and over a thousand years of learning is yours! Latin and Greek; Hebrew, too, if you've the strength for it. With these, all other subjects can be unlocked!"

"What about the Saracen tongue?"

"The Arab has refined, has developed the thought of the Greek – in mathematics, in natural philosophy and in medicine, yes; but then has been rendered back into Greek or Latin: Rhazes and Geber, and Avicenna and Averroes. Still, I may learn it yet, Gringoire!"

And how his face grew radiant as he spoke of Iamblichos and Plotinos; of Gemistos Plethon, whose bones had been removed from Mistra to Rimini; of his correspondence with Marsilio Ficino of Florence and George Ripley of Burlington Priory. It was never easy to get a word in, as he would go off into almost a trance, talking, talking – but what an education it was!

It was a pity to see him now, a shadow of what he had been. Pierre shivered as he left the cloister, remembering another great scholar, maimed in vengeance for a love that had blossomed in a house there, over books and lessons. After four centuries, all Paris still told the tale of Canon Fulbert's niece:

Pour qui chastré fut et puis moyne
Pierre Esbaillart a Saint-Denis?

At least the history of Dom Claude's calamities would remain private, between those involved.

Pour son amour ot ceste essoyne…(3)

Claude sat up in bed for the lesson. Given the weakness of his arms, it was easier for him to have his books beside him on the covers, without having to reach far for them. Pâquette was in the chair at his right side, plain and chaste in her drab woollen gown and linen cap. He felt safe.

They began by looking at familiar texts in the household breviary: the Pater Noster, and the Ave. Claude pointed out how many words were similar to French, Latin being its source and mother.

"Since you can already read in our own tongue, sister, you have the advantage over our friend Gringoire: he read nothing at all when he came to me. So you should be able to recognise many words, and from this gain a general understanding of the meaning, before we look more closely. In Latin, the endings of words, not their order, establish the sense."

This boosted Pâquette's confidence, although she was a little daunted when he showed her tables of noun declensions and conjugations of verbs.

"It's not as difficult as it looks, trust me. The verbs, too, are not unlike our own in some ways. If we begin with the first conjugation – Oh! Why always this…?"

"What is it?"

He swallowed. "The template for a verb of the first conjugation – the -are type, like our -er type – is… amare. It means…"

"To love or like?" she suggested.

"Yes. It is almost the same as our French, is it not? Then you will understand: Amo."

"I love."

"Amas."

"You (tu) love."

"Amat."

"He or she loves."

"Amamus."

"We love."

"Amatis."

"You (vous) love."

"Amant."

"They love – and that is almost the same."

He nodded.

She smiled guilelessly (which took some effort, since she had, all the while, been admiring the form of his shoulders and chest through his fine chemise). "So how would I say, 'I love you'?"

He turned his head away from her. "I wish the books would use some other verb as an example. It is not at all suitable, under the circumstances…"

"But we're not really speaking of love, only of Latin words. Just an example."

"Even so, perhaps it would be better…" He scratched his head. "Pugnare goes the same way: it means 'to fight'."

"But 'to fight' is much worse than 'to love'."

"Laudare, then: to praise."

"Like 'Te Deum laudamus'?"

"Yes! Now, what do you think that means?"

"Well, Te must be 'you', just the same as when we use it, and Deum is 'God', yes? But if that's -amus, it must be 'we praise'. So, with the 'm' on Deum…"

"That's because it is God whom we are praising, the object of praise."

"So it's 'We praise you, God', then?"

"Yes, very good! Well done, sister!"

"And so 'I love you' would be 'te amo'?"

Claude blanched beneath his natural swarthiness.

She smiled, showing the gaps between her remaining teeth. "It's just an example."

"Yes. Yes…"

Noting his uneasiness, she narrowed her eyes. "We're not spiders, you know, we women, trying to snare you in our webs."

He remembered the web in his study: flies caught in the web of Fate… "No… You're not her."

"You know, it's only right that I pay you in kind," she said sweetly. "I can teach you, but not with books."

"Do you speak of aught that's sinful?"

"Not at all." (Yet, she thought.) "I mean you don't need to hide from women. You'd be more sure of controlling yourself if you weren't afraid all the time, running off at the rustle of a skirt."

"How is that possible?"

"You can learn to talk to a woman; to look at her when you're talking to her. It would be better for you – for your work and all – if you didn't fear your own flesh so."

"To be free of this burden…? By God, I should have prayed for Abelard's fate!" He was only half-joking.

"No: that's wrong. Don't even think it!"

"Why? Life would have been so much easier… When it began last summer, I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep…"

"Has a girl done this to you before?" Pâquette asked.

"No. I'd rarely noticed any other, or had soon forgotten if I did."

"Ah. Well, that explains it. About twenty years late, but…"

"What do you mean?"

"First love. It's like measles: the later it strikes, the worse it is."

"Has it happened to you?"

She shook her head. "Nothing serious. I exchanged it for a gold cross: it was proof against it."

"You don't wear it now."

"I left it as an offering at a roadside calvary, for my daughter's sake, when I was walking from Reims."

"So how may I learn from you?" he asked. "What lesson…?"

"It's already begun. We've been talking, haven't we? And not too uncomfortably?"

"But that's different."

"What about the other sisters, then? You must have got used to them nursing you by now. They were doing everything for you, weren't they? Did they ever scare or tempt you?"

He thought for a moment. At first, he had been too badly wounded to be aware of any loss of dignity. When he regained consciousness, he had become shy and frightened, but they had reassured him tenderly. "No. It's more like having several mothers at once. There is no sin in their thoughts, or in their treatment of me."

"So you see that not all women are trying to tempt you?"

"That's true… But… to speak frankly, I don't see them as women – not in the same way as…"

"Because they're old and uncomely? Do you not think of me as a woman, then?"

Claude hesitated. Even he realised that to call a woman prematurely aged to her face was discourteous: Esméralda had hurt him by repeatedly calling him "old and ugly". Besides, he was not sure if he entirely believed it of Sister Gudule: if he let his guard slip, he saw her daughter in her – her features, her expressions – and remembered her in her cell so many years ago. "You're Esm– Agnès's mother. And you, too, are avowed."

"But suppose I were just a parishioner: Mademoiselle Guybertaut?" She removed her cap, and smoothed with her hand the grey curls that were now just long enough to be scraped back and pinned into a small knot at the back of her head. Despite the colour, it took years from her, making her seem nearer her true age.

To defend himself, he looked down at the Latin primer. "I–I used to talk to husbands and fathers, not to single…"

"Neglecting some of your flock? Fie! – Would you please look me in the eye when you talk to me, monsieur?"

"That would be immodest, Sister Gudule…"

"Dom Claude, my name is Pâquette."

"Pâquette…" He struggled to think of something to say. How did one make small talk? It was not a skill that came naturally, nor one that had ever interested him sufficiently for him to learn it. "Your birthday must be at Eastertide, then?" Still he kept his gaze lowered.

"Yes, on Easter Day – thirty-six years past, I think."

"A few months older than I, then…"

"Indeed. Now look at me, monsieur."

"I can't." From childhood, he had been uncomfortable looking others in the eye.

She placed her hand beneath his chin and, very gently, turned his face – all strong angles and hollows – away from his book and towards her. He blushed as their eyes met but, steeling himself, did not shy away. She thought of youths she had deflowered years ago: the appeal of innocence is its essential and necessary transience, its so-called 'corruptibility'. He tried not to think of anything at all – but her touch was light and her gaze was soft: a stricken girl seen long ago through a haze of incense…

"That's better!" she said. "Are you all right?"

"I think so."

"There's nothing to fear, you see."

"Perhaps not. Perhaps not from you."

"Good." She put her cap back on, by art or accident leaving a stray curl hanging at the side. "I think we can learn a lot from each other, monsieur."

Pierre was more impressed than Esméralda at her mother's new ability to recite case-endings and conjugations, and quotations of odd lines from hymns and prayers. However, when he asked her (more at Esméralda's expense) whether it was true that:

clerus scit diligere
virginem plus milite (4)

Pâquette said that she did not, as yet, understand all the word he used.

Claude sent him back to the cloister for a few more books (including Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae and some Greek volumes). As he returned, he noticed a stranger standing in the street, outside the house. He was a pleasant-looking fellow of about forty, dark and sturdy. His dress and bearing suggested a prosperous craftsman or tradesman, a stalwart of one of the guilds. From the way that he glanced about him, he did not appear completely lost, and yet he seemed to be searching.

"Are you looking for someone?" Pierre asked.

"As a matter of fact, I am. I heard that the anchoress from the Tour Roland was staying hereabouts – Sister Gudule."

Pierre eyed the man curiously. "And if she is, what's your interest in her?"

"I've been worried about her for weeks now: her cell being all ruined, and word of that commotion in the Grève – I wondered if she was all right. She's my cousin, you see – Mademoiselle Guybertaut."

Pierre's face lit up. "Pasque-Dieu! Then you must be… one of the Pradons, yes?"

"Yes: Marcel Pradon, brass and copper founder, at your service."

"Pierre Gringoire, philosopher, poet and entertainer!"

"So you know her, then?"

"I should hope so: she's my mother-in-law."

Pradon blinked. He had the same round-eyed stare that Pierre had seen on the faces of Pâquette and Esméralda. "How's that possible? She had but one child, and the poor mite was stolen and eaten!"

"It's a long story, but no, she wasn't!"

The older man looked decidedly confused.

"I think you'd better come in. She's staying with us here, with the Sisters of Saint Anne."

Pierre led the visitor in by way of the yard, where Esméralda was practising dance-steps, which Djali was to follow in simplified form. Djali knew, of course, when she was being patronised by humans: her cloven hooves were far more graceful and light-stepping than their flat, clumsy feet ever could be. She trotted delicately, with an air of intellectual superiority that was certainly justifiable regarding her present dancing-partner.

Marcel Pradon gawped at the girl: it was as if the misery of recent years had vanished from the woman he sought. "Sweet Jesus! Her very image!"

"Esm – Agnès, can you fetch your mother, please?"

Esméralda pirouetted, not sure where to turn. "What – what?"

"It's all right: this gentleman is your kinsman."

Djali circled him, sniffing at his clothes suspiciously. He smelled like coins. For some reason, humans liked coins, but to her, they were by no means as interesting as vegetables. Strangely, though, her humans seemed upset if anyone threw vegetables at them. Pradon looked down at her. He was sure that he had seen her before: some sort of performing animal. Tentatively, he reached out a hand. She thrust her nose eagerly into the palm.

Esméralda protested: "But my mother's with the arch–"

"Then ask her to come down at once!"

Next chapter: More about the Pradons; Pâquette's campaign of attrition continues

(1) Pâquette's turn of phrase echoes the proverbial refrain, 'Ne que monnoye qu'on descrie', of François Villon's Ballade de la Belle Heaulmière aux filles de joie, from Le Grand Testament. See also epigraph to Chapter 8. The aged whore, the Fair Helmet-maker's Lass, advises younger prostitutes to make the most of their chances before they end up as 'devalued coin'.

(2) An old song by Thibaut de Champagne. The full stanza runs:

I am like a unicorn
Who wonders in gazing
At the virgin, admiring when she comes.
So bound up is he in his anguish,
He falls swooning in her lap;
Then they slay him treacherously.
And they have slain me the same way,
Love and my lady, as you see;
My heart cannot recover at all.

(3) Villon, Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis in Le Grand Testament:

For whom was gelded and made monk
Pierre Abelard at Saint-Denis?
For his love he bore this suffering/penalty.

(I inscribed the last line on the background of a portrait I painted of Claude.)

(4) From Frigus hinc est horridum (Carmina Burana MS 82):

A cleric knows how to love/esteem
A maid better than a soldier.