What really mattered in village sexuality were affairs, liaisons, concubinage and, last but not least, marriage. We shall begin with the amorous activities of a single domus, that of the Clergue family and its satellites. The illegitimate births in the Clergue family are a first, though indirect, clue. The two Guillaume Clergues, brother and son respectively of the patriarch Pons Clergue, were each father of a bastard. The more notorious of these natural sons was Raymond Clergue, known as Pathau, the son of Pons’s brother. We have already seen that Pathau raped Béatrice de Planissoles. By the following year, Béatrice was a widow and bore no grudge against Pathau for his presumed violence. She became his mistress and was publicly kept by him. She broke with him when she joined up with the priest, Pierre Clergue. Disappointed but not discouraged, Pathau Clergue fell back on Béatrice’s servant, and took Sybille Teisseire as his concubine. In Montaillou, Sybille had literally been Béatrice’s maid of all work (i.227, 239 and passim).
Bernard Clergue, bayle of Montaillou, had love affairs which are better known to us. In his youth he fathered a natural daughter, Mengarde (i.392), who served as messenger to the heretics, bringing them provisions from the Clergue domus to the Belot domus. Later she married the peasant Bernard Aymeric of Prades.
But Bernard Clergue was a creature full of romantic affection and passion. He burned with an ardent friendship for his brother Pierre. He loved (adamat)1 the girl who was to be his wife, Raymonde Belot, the daughter of Guillemette. And as this was Montaillou, his feeling immediately crystallized around the girl’s whole domus. Bernard Clergue relates (ii.269), with charming naivety: I was then already bayle of Montaillou; and because of the love I bore for Raymonde, my wife, I loved all that belonged to the ostal of my mother-in-law Belot; nothing in the world could have induced me to do anything which might displease my mother-in-law or cause harm to her ostal. I would have preferred to suffer myself or in my possessions rather than witness any prejudice against my mother-in-law’s ostal.
But as a seducer Bernard Clergue is a pallid figure compared with his brother Pierre. The priest of Montaillou was the womanizer par excellence of the Clergue family. Bernard was a romantic. Pierre was a swashbuckler. Cathar, spy and rake – he was everywhere. As we have seen, his influence was very great at the time when the Albigensian heresy was spreading in Montaillou: All the houses in Montaillou, except two or three, were infected with heresy, says Raymond Vayssière (i.292), because the priest Pierre Clergue read the book of the heretics to the people. But Pierre’s influence was not limited to proselytizing. He scattered his desires among his flock as impartially as he gave his benediction, and in return won the favours of many of his female parishioners. He was helped by the general tolerance with which concubinage among ecclesiastics was regarded in the Pyrenees. At an altitude of 1,300 metres the rules of priestly celibacy ceased to apply. An energetic lover and incorrigible Don Juan, he presents the spectacle, rare in records of rural history, of the typical village seducer of ancient times. No question of this great carnivore restricting himself to one woman.1 If he had done so, the fact that he was a cleric would have meant that she became his official concubine. He coveted all women, whether they belonged to his flock or not, whether they belonged to his parish or neighbouring parishes. He said so straight out to Raymonde Guilhou, wife of the shoemaker Arnaud Vital, one day when she was delousing him on the bench in Arnaud’s workshop. He took the opportunity of ogling the girls as they went along the village street. Hunting was his vocation.2 He adored his mother and burned with incestuous passions, sometimes carried into practice, for his sisters and sisters-in-law. He was the narcissistic lover of his own domus, just as his brother Bernard was of his wife’s domus. Unsuited to marriage, he transferred his desires on to many fragile conquests. As far as one knows, Pierre was only once unsuccessful in love. And this was merely an attempt at seduction by means of a female go-between who refused to cooperate. I had a niece called Raymonde, says Alazaïs Fauré. She was the daughter of Jean Clement, of Gébetz.3 Raymonde had married Pierre Fauré of Montaillou, who could not manage to sleep with her. That at least was what my niece told me, and it was what was commonly said. Because of this, my niece no longer wished to stay with her husband. She lived with me. One day I was going to the château of Montaillou, and by chance I met the priest; he made me sit down beside him, and said: ‘What can I do, if you don’t say a word in my favour to your niece Raymonde, and if you don’t arrange for me to possess her? And afterwards, once I have possessed her, her husband will succeed in knowing her carnally.’
And I, went on Alazaïs Fauré, told Pierre that I would do nothing in the matter: ‘You arrange things for yourself with my niece, if she agrees,’ I said to him. ‘But aren’t you already satisfied with having possessed two women in my family, myself and my sister Raymonde? Do you need our niece as well! …’1
Whereupon, concluded Alazaïs, my niece, beset by the dishonourable importunities of the priest, left Montaillou and went back to her father’s house at Gébetz.
Was the irrepressible Pierre arrogating to himself some jus primae noctis, which he exercised when the opportunity arose? It is not impossible; he was to deflower and then marry off to a village bumpkin one of his nieces, Grazide.
The Fournier Register tells us of some dozen authenticated mistresses of Pierre Clergue;2 but the list is certainly incomplete. Three of them were from Ax-les-Thermes, and the nine others lived permanently or temporarily in Montaillou. They were Alazaïs Fauré and her sister Raymonde (nées Guilhabert), Béatrice de Planissoles, Grazide Lizier, Alazaïs Azéma, Gaillarde Benet, Alissende Roussel (otherwise known as Pradola, sister of Gaillarde Benet), Mengarde Buscailh, Na Maragda, Jacotte den Tort, Raymonde Guilhou and Esclarmonde Clergue, who was none other than Pierre’s own sister-in-law (wife of his brother Raymond, Pons Clergue’s legitimate son).3 Should we call it incest? Yes, according to the ancient definitions. No, according to our modern concepts. In any case, Pierre professed very advanced, even though hesitant, theories (i.225–6, 491) on the subject of incest with one’s sister. And he had few qualms about knowing his sister-in-law carnally.
Whatever irresistible personal charm he may have possessed, his position as priest, invested with power and prestige, helps to explain his easy successes with his female parishioners. As for the dames of Ax-les-Thermes, he used to meet them at the baths and then take them secretly to a room in the hospital there. To overcome their last attempts at resistance he had only to invoke the threat of the Inquisition (i.279).
So power and wealth were among the primary reasons for his successes with the women. As Pierre Maury said one day to another Montaillou shepherd, the priests formed a sort of equestrian class, who finally bestrode anyone they fancied. The priests, said Maury (ii.386), sleep with women. They ride horses, mules and she-mules. They are up to no good.
Conversely the priest’s good fortune in love became a source of power. Pierre Clergue knew that there were friendly beds available to welcome him all over the Pays d’Aillon and Sabarthès, and knowing this he did not shrink from using his mistresses to denounce his enemies to the Inquisition of Carcassonne.1
As he grew older, Pierre acquired the repulsive habit of making his influence with the Inquisition serve his conquests. But he was not always so unattractive. Béatrice de Planissoles knew him when he was young, and remembered him as good, competent and regarded as such throughout the region. Even now that they were separated, she still looked on him as a friend. In short, for many years after the end of their affair she was still under his spell. It had not completely evaporated when she met Barthélemy Amilhac, vicaire of Dalou. But compared with the powerful personality of Pierre Clergue, this new fancy man cut a very poor figure.
Of course, not all the priests of Sabarthès or the Pays d’Aillon were such skilful or energetic lovers as their colleague Clergue. He would declare, I love you more than any woman in the world (i.224, 491), and proceed forthwith to action. But although he did not bore his conquests with preliminaries, he did not force anyone.
The power did not exclude gentleness: among the ‘rough’ peasants, the priest stood out as someone sympathetic to women. Although he could behave very badly in other contexts, he seems as a lover to have been gentle, kind, comparatively cultivated, sensitive, affectionate and ardent in pleasure and love. You priests desire women more than other men do, said Béatrice de Planissoles,1 both delighted and shocked by the behaviour of her two successive ecclesiastical lovers. And she had reason to know what she was talking about.
La Planissoles was not the only one who looked back kindly on an adventure with the priest. Another of his mistresses recalls with pleasure how, when he deflowered her among the straw in the family barn, he did not offer her any violence. This was in contrast to certain rustics who would have made no bones about raping her (i.302).
Clergue had several reasons for being a seducer: from his point of view, womanizing was also remaining faithful to the ideology of the domus. One day he said to Béatrice, ‘I am a priest, I do not want a wife’ (implying that he wanted all women). Pierre thus dissociated himself from his brothers, who had impoverished the paternal house by marrying outsiders and not leaving one of their number to marry their sister and so keep her dowry in the family.
Some of Pierre Clergue’s love affairs are better known than others. About 1313 or 1314 he was Gaillarde Benet’s lover; he also had her sister, Alissende Roussel. There had been no great difficulty in seducing Gaillarde, a poor girl whose family had been ruined by the Inquisition. Her husband Pierre Benet and her brother-in-law Bernard Benet were formerly farmers working their own land, but they were subsequently forced to become migrant shepherds (i.297, 395–6). Did Pierre Clergue take advantage of Pierre Benet’s being away, perhaps in the mountain pastures, to seduce his wife? Not necessarily. The priest was usually sufficiently bold and influential not to have to bother with such precautions in the case of a poor fellow like Benet. The affair with Gaillarde produced a striking conversation between Pierre Clergue and Fabrisse Rives. Fabrisse, referring to village gossip on the subject, said to Pierre (1.329): ‘You are committing an enormous sin by sleeping with a married woman.’
‘Not at all,’ answered the priest. ‘One woman’s just like another. The sin is the same, whether she is married or not. Which is as much as to say that there is no sin about it at all.’ But here Pierre’s views on love were cut short because Fabrisse’s pot began to boil over and she had to hurry into the kitchen. However, we know enough to be able to interpret with certainty what Pierre said. Starting from the Cathar proposition that ‘any sexual act, even between married persons, is wrong’, he applied it to suit himself. Because everything was forbidden, one act was no worse than another.
Fabrisse had no particular reason for affecting outraged virtue. Shortly before this conversation she had delivered over to the priest the virginity of her own daughter, Grazide Rives; or at least had allowed him to know her carnally in her own domus. It had happened in about 1313, at the time of the cereal harvest. Fabrisse, not very well off, was a sort of illegitimate cousin of the Clergue family.1 She was more or less under the thumb of her legitimate relations, belonging to the dominant house. On the day in question she was out reaping corn – hers or someone else’s. Pierre took advantage of her absence to practise on Grazide, who was left at home, his theories on incest (not a very close case as it happened – the cousinship between them derived from the fact that Grazide was the granddaughter, in the illegitimate line, of Guillaume Clergue, himself the brother of the priest’s father), but blood will out. Grazide gave a frank account of her adventure (i.302–04). Seven years ago or thereabouts, in summer, the priest Pierre Clergue came to my mother’s house while she was out harvesting, and was very pressing: ‘Allow me,’ he said, ‘to know you carnally.’
And I said: ‘All right.’
At that time, I was a virgin. I think I was fourteen or fifteen years old. He deflowered me in the barn [borde] in which we kept the straw. But it wasn’t a rape at all. After that, he continued to know me carnally until the following January. It always took place in my mother’s ostal; she knew about it, and was consenting. It happened chiefly during the day.
After that, in January, the priest gave me as wife to my late husband, Pierre Lizier; and after he had thus given me to this man, the priest continued to know me carnally, frequently, during the remaining four years of my husband’s life. And my husband knew about it, and was consenting. Sometimes he would ask me: ‘Has the priest done it with you?’
And I would answer: ‘Yes.’
And my husband would say: ‘As far as the priest is concerned, all right! But don’t you go having other men.’
But the priest never permitted himself to know me carnally when my husband was at home. We only did it when he was out.
Later on in her deposition, Grazide pronounced judgment on herself and her lover. She employs the same tone as the Bréviaire d’amour and the Flamenca: ‘A lady who sleeps with a true lover is purified of all sins … the joy of love makes the act innocent, for it proceeds from a pure heart.’1 She went further: With Pierre Clergue, I liked it. And so it could not displease God. It was not a sin.2 Grazide had not read the poets, but like them she derived her intuitions from the common fund of Occitan culture as felt and experienced by couples who took pleasure together, both in Languedoc and the Pyrenees. True, Pierre’s young sweetheart added a stratum of Cathar culture to this element of southern innocence which came to her from her village education. This was the special contribution of her lover. For Grazide, while convinced that there was no sin in her affair with Clergue, also believed, in general, that all sexual union, even within marriage, was displeasing to God. Nor was she certain of the existence of Hell, or of the fact of the Resurrection of the flesh.
Pierre Clergue, having enjoyed Grazide’s maidenhood, married her off to the perhaps elderly Pierre Lizier, who left her a widow at the age of twenty. Lizier offered no objection to his wife’s affair with the priest; it was not a good thing to resist the Clergue clan. Grazide herself believed this. When Jacques Fournier reproached her for not having denounced Pierre Clergue’s heresy earlier, she answered (i.329): ‘If I had denounced them, the priest and his brothers would have killed me or ill-treated me.’ Fabrisse, Grazide’s mother, said (i.305): I did not want to admit that I knew the faults of the priest and his brothers, for I was afraid that if I did I would be ill-used by them.
But the day came nevertheless, before 1320, when Grazide and Pierre wearied of being lovers. Then, Grazide told Jacques Fournier, since she no longer felt desire, any carnal act with the priest would be consummated coldly and would ipso facto become a sin. It was pleasure alone which guaranteed the innocence of a liaison.
Pierre Clergue’s most important love affair was with Béatrice de Planissoles, who came from the lesser nobility of Ariège and who lived all her life in the country and in the mountains. She was the wife of the châtelain of Montaillou. At that time Pierre Clergue was the young and spirited priest of Montaillou, his native village. Philippe de Planissoles, Béatrice’s father, had some urban and suburban connections (Planissoles is in the commune of Foix, in the locality of La Bargilière). Philippe bore the title of chevalier, and was witness to the confirmation of the charter of Tarascon-sur-Ariège in 1266 (i.244, note 96) But his roots were in the country villages of upper Ariège: he was lord of Caussou, and married his daughter to Bérenger de Roquefort, châtelain of Montaillou. Philippe was friendly towards Catharism and sought out by the Inquisition, which condemned him to wear the yellow cross. Later his daughter tried in vain to hide this fact from Jacques Fournier. In her childhood and youth, Béatrice does not seem to have been keen on reading – there are even various indications that she was illiterate. (On the other hand her daughters were given some slight education at Dalou, where the vicaire (i.252), who taught the few schoolchildren in the parish, had his pupils’ mothers making eyes at him.) So Béatrice had not read the heretical books; but, apart from her father, she had had contact from youth with Albigensian sympathizers. In about 1290, in Celles, a village south-east of Foix in middle Ariège, she heard a mason called Odin say certain things which savoured of heresy. They made her laugh, and she told them to the people around her. It was a mistake, for the priests and the village gossips passed them on to Jacques Fournier. What Odin and others of his kind had said was that If the Eucharist was really Christ’s body, he would not let himself be eaten by the priests. And if Christ’s body was as big as Mount Margail, near Dalou, the priests would have eaten it in a pie long since.1 This was only a small extract from a whole body of anti-Eucharistic folklore general throughout the Pyrenees. Peasants made fun of the sacrament by brandishing slices of turnip. People on their deathbed insulted the priest who brought them the Host, calling him a stinking, fetid lout. Witches profaned the body of Christ.2
Among the young Béatrice’s heretical connections were members of the Authié family, later to become Cathar missionaries. Guillaume Authié mingled with the dancers at Béatrice’s wedding to Bérenger de Roquefort. Pierre Authié had acted as notary in the sale of a piece of property belonging to Roquefort, on which Béatrice held a mortgage as part of her dowry. What with her father’s yellow cross, the blasphemy of the mason, and her relations with the Authiés, young Béatrice smacked of heresy from her earliest years. And yet she was devoted to the Virgin. She was later to be an ardent penitent before a Minorite friar who felt like hearing confession, and always regarded herself, in her soul and conscience, as belonging more or less to the Catholic line.
After her marriage to Bérenger de Roquefort she was left a widow, then married again, then was left a widow again. Her second marriage was to Othon de Lagleize, who did not make old bones in her company. These successive widowhoods were commonplace in ancien régime demography. Later they are to be found all over the parish registers. There is not much to be said about Béatrice’s two husbands, except that both belonged to the lesser Ariège gentry, and that neither of them aroused in Béatrice more than a certain indifference, perhaps tinged with affection. But if she did not love her husbands, Béatrice was very much afraid of them. She hid her escapades from them, though these adventures were minor enough during their lifetimes. She was afraid that if they found her out they would kill either her or her lover (i.219, 234).
All this was quite usual. The troubadours, excellent witnesses of the love-life of Languedoc, said much on the subject of the unhappily married wife. The husband was a ‘jealous wretch’ a miserly cuckold, ‘scratching someone else’s arse’, as Marcabru said.1 The wife, if possible, ‘escaped another way’. The Languedoc poets considered it bad taste for a wife to love her husband, and according to them the wife was always afraid lest the husband beat or imprison her. The lengthy testimony of the Pamiers Inquisition confirms that this was no mere literary theme. Occitan marriage in the period before 1340 was not, despite some examples to the contrary, the best place to look for emotional fulfilment. From this point of view Béatrice is not untypical.
Within her two marriages, Béatrice’s affection went to her children rather than her husband. And she was rewarded. For when she was threatened with arrest by Bishop Fournier her four daughters – Condors, Esclarmonde, Philippa and Ava, who adored the mother who had always cared for them intelligently and with love – shed torrents of sincere tears.2
In the 1290s, Béatrice, a young and pretty bride, had one initial inconclusive affair while her first husband was still alive. Bérenger de Roquefort, as stupid as all husbands (in those days), noticed nothing. A young peasant of the Pays d’Aillon, later to appear in the records grown older, married, and working his own plot, was the somewhat pitiful hero of this abortive idyll.
In the château of Montaillou, Raymond Roussel ran the household of the Sire de Roquefort and his wife, Béatrice. This meant, in Occitania, that Raymond was not only steward of the domestic affairs of this modest household but also in charge of its farming activities, sowing the grain, directing the farm workers and taking the ploughshares to the forge to be sharpened or strengthened.
What I have said earlier about the lesser mountain nobility applies exactly to Béatrice’s relationship with the villagers in general and with her steward in particular. When she became a widow, she went to live in a very ordinary house in Montaillou. So the social distance which set her apart was not very great. She would sit and warm herself by the fire with the village women, exchanging the latest Cathar gossip. The peasant Alazaïs Azéma might easily direct a few unceremonious shafts the ex-châtelaine’s way: ‘You have large eyebrows, you are haughty; I will not tell you what my son does.’ But this was a mere figure of speech, for a moment afterwards Alazaïs, who like all the ladies only wanted to be persuaded, did not hesitate to tell Béatrice her secrets: ‘Yes, it is true, my son Raymond Azéma goes and takes food to the goodmen.’1
Madame de Roquefort lost no time in starting up a more or less amorous friendship with her steward, Raymond Roussel. Roussel, who had Cathar tendencies, invited her to flee with him to Lombardy, then a favourite refuge for heretics. Many parfaits from Languedoc, persecuted in their own country, used to go there for a spell of peace and quiet. But Béatrice answered: ‘I am still young. If I go away with you, Raymond, tongues will start to wag. People will say that we have left the country to satisfy our lust.’2 But the idea of this journey did appeal to the châtelaine, and she thought of a compromise solution. She was willing to go with Raymond, but only if accompanied by a couple of duennas to protect her reputation. Raymond agreed and even put Béatrice in touch with two women who offered to go with her to Lombardy (i.222). Both women had connections with the Clergue domus: Alazaïs Gonela was the mistress of Guillaume Clergue, the priest’s brother, and Algaia de Martra was the sister of old Mengarde, Pierre Clergue’s mother. The offer made by the two duennas came to nothing, but it is worth noting since it represents the first appearance of the Clergue clan in Béatrice’s life.
Raymond Roussel, like Pierre Clergue later, was a peasant with a glib tongue. He mixed chat about going away with a few rather broad remarks about metempsychosis. He explained to Béatrice, who was pregnant (i.220), ‘how the future soul of a child yet to be born could enter into the foetus in a woman’s womb through any part of her body.’
On which Béatrice ingeniously asked: ‘If this is the case, why don’t babies speak when they are born, since they inherit old souls?’
‘Because God does not wish it!’ replied Raymond Roussel, never at a loss for an answer.
So far all is in the best tradition of the troubadours, those connoisseurs of regional ethnography. The young and lovely lady of Montaillou has a ‘lover’ from a social level lower than her own. Raymond, in fact, was not merely non-noble but also a villager. Thus Béatrice, though she never thought to theorize on the subject, contributed to the democratization by love which was one of the Languedoc poets’ essential themes. Towards a lover ‘patient, complimentary and discreet’, offering both respect and temptation, Béatrice played the role of muse and inspiration, and in her turn was educated by him. Heresy gave Raymond a marvellous opportunity to flirt and show off. All would have been well, and even the husband would have had nothing to take exception to, if Raymond had remained the Lenten lover, ‘the lover of emerald and sard’ that Marcabru desired for every woman truly courted. (According to the Bréviaire d’amour, the emerald symbolized the repression of sexual instinct and the sard was the symbol of chaste humility.)1 Unfortunately for himself, Raymond Roussel wanted to sleep with his beloved, another essential theme of Occitan lyrics. As Bernard de Ventador wrote, ‘I should like to find her alone, asleep or pretending to be asleep, so that I could steal the sweet kiss for which I am too unworthy to ask’.2
Béatrice tells the story (i.222). One evening Raymond and I had dined together. Afterwards he secretly went into my bedroom and hid under the bed. Meanwhile I had set the house in order. I went to bed. Everyone in the house was asleep and so was I. Then Raymond came out from under the bed and got into it, in his shirt! He made as if to sleep with me carnally. And I cried out: ‘What is happening?’
Upon which Raymond said: ‘Be quiet.’
To which I replied: ‘You peasant! Keep quiet, indeed!’
And I started to cry out and call my servants who slept near me in other beds in my room. And I said to them: ‘There’s a man in my bed.’
At that, Raymond emerged from my bed and left the room … A little while afterwards he left our service and went back to his own ostal in Prades.
Exit Raymond Roussel. Enter Pathau.
Pathau was a bastard. But he was a cousin of Pierre Clergue’s and so, although he was not noble, he came from a leading village family. Pathau did not beat about the bush, but raped Béatrice while Bérenger de Roquefort was still alive. However, it does not seem to have been too traumatic an experience, for when Bérenger died and Béatrice was free and, as a widow, a step lower down the social scale, she became Pathau’s concubine. Pathau then kept me publicly as his mistress, she told Bishop Fournier when he was later inquiring into her private life.
The real love affair of Béatrice’s first widowhood, however, was not with Pathau but with his cousin the priest. The liaison began in the confessional and ended in the church, where one dark night Pierre Clergue, in his perversity, made up his mistress’s bed.
At the beginning Béatrice was only one female penitent among others. For a long while she had been friendly with the Clergue family and spent long evenings with them around the fire (i.235–7). But one day when she went to confess to the parish priest, Pierre did not give her time to admit her sins, but declared: ‘I prefer you to any other woman in the world,’ and embraced her fervently. She made off-thoughtful, surprised, but not angry.
This was only a beginning, for Clergue took his time enjoying this gratifying conquest. There was no question of real passionate love in the matter, only desire and mutual affection. Béatrice’s and Pierre’s feelings were translated by the verb diligere (to be fond of), whereas the passion between Béatrice and Barthélemy Amilhac, later, was rendered by Fournier’s scribes in terms of the Latin words adamare and adamari, both connoting passionate love.
After a courtship of normal length, lasting from Lent to the beginning of July, Béatrice at last succumbed to the priest’s charm and eloquence. During the octave of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in a late thirteenth-century summer, ‘the fine rich summer which gives birth to dalliance’,1 Béatrice gave herself to Pierre. She was a very obliging sweetheart, and even committed sacrilege to please him. She slept with him during Christmas night, and, as we have seen, she slept with him in the parish church. Despite her natural reserve, Béatrice belonged in the direct line of the boldest lady-loves in Languedoc literature and Languedoc life.2
The affair between Pierre and Béatrice was, as far as we know, agreeable for both of them. For two years they met, presumably in secret, two or three nights a week; and in one night they would make love twice or more.3 In bed, by the fire or by the window, Béatrice used to delouse Pierre, an act which combined rudimentary hygiene with affection ritualized in the customary manner. Pierre talked to Béatrice about family sociology, Albigensian theology and contraception.
But after two years Béatrice broke off the affair. Intellectually, she was hemmed in on all sides by the Cathar priest’s powerful dialectic. But she was torn between the heretical mountains on the one hand, the home of her loves and her friends, and, on the other, the lowlands now reclaimed by Catholicism. She yielded to the seduction of the plains and the prospect of a second marriage; she was also influenced by the preachings of the Minorites and the insistence of her sister Gentile, a zealous Catholic. In a way, Béatrice still considered Pierre a good man; but from the point of view of a pious young woman who as a girl had dedicated coloured candles to the Virgin, he was the Devil (i.223). Because of him she might end up being burned at the stake, not to mention the flames of hell. So she decided to leave him and go down into the plain and marry the noble Othon de Lagleize, despite the protests of her friends in the Pays d’Aillon, who all, with Pierre at their head, came in a body and begged her not to do so (i.231, 254): ‘We have lost you; you are going down among the wolves and the dogs.’
But Béatrice refused to listen, and went to live in Crampagna, Dalou and Varilhes, all about fifteen to twenty kilometres north of and lower down than the Pays d’Aillon, where her new husband, Othon de Lagleize (i.e. Othon of the Church), lived at different times. In these circumstances the relations between Béatrice and Pierre Clergue became intermittent; but they remained fond of one another. One last time Pierre, pretending to be a priest from Limoux, came to see his former mistress in the house at Dalou, and there ‘their bodies mingled’ in the cellar, with a maid keeping watch at the door (i.239). But after that their relationship was purely spiritual. There was one more visit, chaste and brief, after Béatrice was widowed for the second time. Pierre asked after his former mistress’s heart, and later sent her a last present of an engraved glass and some sugar (zacara) from the land of the Saracens. These little attentions show that the priest was not unfeeling; but once the affair with Béatrice was over, Pierre departed more and more from the romantic model. Whether it was as a cure for melancholy or to satisfy the growing lust of an ageing priest, at any rate he became more fickle than ever, making love ‘fit to break his breeches’1 with the women of Ax-les-Thermes and Montaillou, winning them over partly by his presumed charm but more still by his power and by his threats.
Béatrice looked back on her two years with Clergue with nostalgia and regret. Her second marriage brought her no more emotional satisfaction than the first. But she was not disappointed, for all she had expected was to attain a position in life.2 She was a faithful wife to Othon de Lagleize, apart from the single lapse in the cellar (i.239). Othon died soon afterwards, so Béatrice was free again, for the grand passion.
Béatrice’s second lover was also a priest. He was the young vicaire of a parish, but later on Bernard Clergue, in prison, addressed him with respect and called him ‘my lord priest’. But Barthélemy Aurilhac was only a pale imitation of Pierre Clergue. He knew how to be a rake, but he was not a Cathar, and only became an informer when forced to do so. (It must be admitted he did not feel any remorse).
It was in the village of Dalou that Béatrice, now widowed for the second time, got to know Barthélemy. She had sent Ava and Philippa, her daughters, to his school. Already getting on in years (I was past the change of life), Béatrice fell passionately in love with the young priest; her feeling was translated by the verb adamare. She threw herself at him. As Barthélemy Amilhac himself said later (i.252): It was she who made the first advances; one day, when I had just finished teaching my pupils, among them Ava and Philippa, Béatrice said to me: ‘Come to my house this evening.’
I did. When I was in her house, I found that she was there alone. I asked: ‘What do you want of me?’
And she said: ‘I love you: I want to sleep with you.’
And I answered: ‘All right.’
Straight away I made love with her in the antechamber of the ostal, and subsequently I possessed her often. But never at night. Always in the daytime. We used to wait until the girls and the servant were out of the house. And then we used to commit the carnal sin.
Their passion was mutual. Beatrix Bartholomeum nimis adamabat … et ipse dictam Beatricem adamabat (i.249, 256). It is true that the young vicaire was of weak character, even a coward, unworthy of his mistress. In the end he left her, partly because she was old, but mostly because he was afraid his involvement with her would get him accused of heresy. What she loved in him was his gentleness and his desire – priests were known to be much more lustful than mere laymen. One day, in a moment of truth, Béatrice said to Barthélemy (i.255): ‘You priests and priors and abbots and bishops and archbishops and cardinals, you are the worst! You commit the sin of the flesh more, and you desire women more than other men do.’ Barthélemy’s philosophical comment was: That was how Béatrice used to try to justify herself for committing the sin of the flesh with me.
Béatrice loved the young man so much that she accused him of having bewitched her (i.249): I have never committed the sin of sorcery, she said one day. But I think the priest Barthélemy did cast a spell on me, for I loved him too passionately; and yet when I met him I was already past the menopause.
The affair, begun with so much zest, continued equally colourfully. After she became the vicaire’s sweetheart Béatrice was continually annoyed by village gossip, spread by the parish slanderers (lauzengiers), the chief village priest at their head. She was also subjected to vexation by her brothers, who in typical Occitan style set themselves up as custodians of their sister’s virtue. She was afraid they might hurt her, and thought of going with her lover to Palhars, a remote diocese in the Pyrenees between Aragon and Comminges-Couserans, where priests, in accordance with an old pre-Gregorian and Nicolaitan tradition, were still allowed at this period to live with their housekeepers, concubines or focarias. Permission to do so was granted by the bishop in return for a financial consideration. So Béatrice, taking with her her clothes and thirty livres tournois, decided to go to Palhars. She went first to Vicdessos, where she was joined by Barthélemy, and from there they both went on to Palhars, where a priest-cum-notary ‘married’ them, but without giving them his blessing. There they lived for a year in the same domus without causing the slightest scandal. They lived meagrely on the thirty livres tournois which had served as the ex-châtelaine’s dowry. Gradually Barthélemy got to know about his mistress’s Cathar past. He was afraid. There were quarrels. He called her a wicked old woman, a heretic. They parted.
When they met again later it was just before they were both put in prison. Barthélemy had been earning his living by hiring himself out as vicar or priest in charge in the country or the mountains. Béatrice had already been roughly handled by the Inquisition, and she asked her former sweetheart to help her. Once again, as before with the priest Clergue in the cellar at Dalou, Béatrice made love with the young vicar in a vineyard while her faithful maid kept watch: this time the servant’s name was Alazaïs. The rest of Béatrice and Barthélemy’s story belongs to Bishop Fournier. He put them both in prison. Then, a year later, on the same day, 4 July 1322, he set them both free. She had to wear the double yellow cross. He did not (1.553)