Béatrice and her friends the Clergues are not the only ones who can tell us something about village sexuality. Apart from the extravagances of one of the leading domus, morals in Montaillou and in Foix as a whole were certainly comparatively free: comparatively, because they were merely slightly more relaxed around 1320 than they were to be during the rigours of the Counter Reformation, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Setting aside the adventures of the priest, the records show us five or six illicit couples at the least in Montaillou around 1300–20. The list is not exhaustive. If we compare this figure with the fifty or so couples at the most, licit or otherwise, which the parish must have contained during the first two decades of the fourteenth century, we arrive at a minimum of 10 per cent of couples ‘living in sin’. Around 1700 Monseigneur Colbert, the Jansenist bishop of Montpellier whose episcopal visitations I studied fifteen years ago, would have been shocked by such a high proportion. And from a rigorist point of view the most outrageous thing was that in or around 1310 such liaisons were brazenly advertised; a man would ‘publicly keep’ or ‘publicly maintain’ a concubine (i.238). At the beginning of the eighteenth century, people carefully hid such things to avoid the wrath of the priest and the gossip of the devout. But in Montaillou at the beginning of the fourteenth century it was the priest himself who set the bad example. We have already seen how in the pastures as well as in the town the shepherds did not hesitate to entertain a mistress when the occasion offered. If anyone came across a couple openly living together, the reaction was much the same as it would be today. Were they legally married or not? That then was the question Guillaume Escaunier of Ax-les-Thermes asked himself, without trace of shock, on a visit to Limoux (ii.12): In the house of Martin Franҫois at Limoux we found a woman who must have been his wife, unless she was his concubine; because she was permanently kept and maintained by him in the house. None of Escaunier’s interlocutors seems to have been unduly worried about the uncertain legal status of Martin Francis’s companion.
Although people did have some sense of carnal sin in the Comté de Foix at that time, it was less developed than later. We have already seen that for Arnaud de Verniolles sodomy was no worse a sin than mere fornication. But for Grazide Lizier of Montaillou and for Pierre Vidal of Ax-les-Thermes mere fornication was not a sin provided both parties took pleasure in it and, in the case of Pierre Vidal, provided the man paid a fair price. Permissiveness in Montaillou at the beginning of the fourteenth century was a modest minority affair, but it was an undoubted fact, both in theory and in practice. Béatrice de Planissoles, a widow for the second time, and the bastard Pathau Clergue lived together publicly in Montaillou without arousing anyone’s anger. At the most there was some ill-natured gossip. Gauzia Marty, later to become the wife of the other Bernard Clergue (the bayle’s namesake), was for a while the concubine of Raymond Ros of Montaillou, whose bones will be burned as a heretic after his death (i.459). Raymonde Testanière, known as Vuissane, was Bernard Belot’s mistress; she had children by him, one of them also called Bernard. She worked hard in the house of her lover and employer (i.456): I thought that Bernard Belot would take me for his wife; and because of that I worked hard and did all I could in his house. But she was disappointed. Arnaud Vital did not hesitate to explain why: ‘Even if you had been as rich as any woman in the Comté de Foix, Bernard would not have taken you for his wife because you are not of his faith, so there could be no question of his trusting you.’
This passage shows one of the reasons why concubinage was so frequent in Montaillou. Marriage was a difficult business because it might involve feelings of love on the part of the man, and on the part of a woman it might involve some hopes of improving her fortunes. Last but not least, there was the matter of religion. Confronted with all these difficulties, many people in Montaillou preferred, at least to begin with, to take advantage of the public tolerance of concubinage.1
Another illegitimate couple was formed by the temporary union between Alazaïs Guilhabert, daughter of a sheep-farmer of Montaillou, and Arnaud Vital, the shoemaker and satellite of the Belots. Alazaïs Guilhabert (i.413): I was very fond of Arnaud, with whom I had established a dishonourable familiarity; he had instructed me in heresy; and I had promised him to go and see my mother to persuade her to agree that my young brother [he was very ill] should be hereticated.
This is an interesting case: retrospectively Alazaïs agreed that her affair with the Cathar shoemaker was morally debatable (‘dishonourable’). But at the time she did not think it anything she needed to hide or be ashamed of, and Arnaud Vital remained on friendly terms with Allemande Fauré, his mistress’s mother.1
Moreover, we should note that this was a real love affair. True, it was a matter of inclination rather than passion: Alazaïs uses the word diligere and not adamare. But in the matter of love, Montaillou allowed a wide range of variations. Béatrice de Planissoles, for example, felt a real, burning, requited passion for the young vicaire who consoled her second widowhood.
On the subject of irregular unions, we should also take into account various supplementary episodes and the escapades of the priest, Pierre Clergue. But as far as our four couples here are concerned, their youthful pranks did not prevent the four ladies from finding husbands. After her concubinage with Pathau and her thrilling adventure with the priest Pierre Clergue, Béatrice de Planissoles married Othon de Lagleize, which, far from being a fall, represented a kind of social advancement. As for Gauzia Marty, Alazaïs Guilhabert and Vuissane, they married three very respectable farmers from the Pays d’Aillon called Bernard Clergue (the bayle’s namesake), Arnaud Faure and Bernard Testanière respectively.
Note that these ladies’ lovers were mostly Cathars and determined heretics.2 Likewise, Martin François, who apparently lived in concubinage with a woman in Limoux, must have been delighted to hear the Authiés preach in his own house on the subject ‘marriage is nothing’ (ii.12–13). When all was said and done, Catharism was very tolerant towards irregular unions. At least, Catharism as it was understood in Montaillou. It railed against legal marriage; strict abstinence from sex it reserved to the goodmen alone; and it left ordinary believers free, de facto if not de jure, in the matter of morals, by virtue of the famous maxim, since everything is forbidden, everything is allowed.3 Even so, it would be wrong to explain the sexual customs and behaviour of upper Ariège in Fournier’s day as the local implantation of a heterodox ideology, tempting though this hypothesis may be. Amilhac the priest was no heretic, but he was almost as much of a fornicator as Pierre Clergue, the Albigensian and double agent. It is true that heresy did nothing to restrict concubinage in Montaillou; perhaps it encouraged the practice. But it certainly did not invent it. It had been there for a long time, finding its justification, primary or secondary, in the dearness of dowries, the difficulty of marriage and the overriding need not to dissipate the family domus by rash and costly alliances. Heresy was only one more reason for concubinage. Moreover, it flourished in many other parts of the Pyrenees never infected with the ideology of the goodmen, and where little or nothing was known of Catharism. In the diocese of Palhars, for example, the priests had for a long time been able to live with their concubines, enjoying the blessing of the local bishop. As for the ordinary peasants, concubinage fitted easily into their system of farming and household management: your maidservant was also your mistress, and she worked all the harder if she was spurred on by false promises of marriage. Conversely, a farm worker was always glad to plough his mistress’s field. He did so either for love, or merely in accordance with the common pooling of land between couples (i.456; ii.126).
Concubinage in Montaillou was accompanied by contraceptive precautions which were more or less efficient, birth control obviously being more sought after by lovers than by husbands. For example, Béatrice de Planissoles, at the beginning of her relationship with Pierre Clergue, was haunted by the fear of having an illegitimate child (i.243–4): ‘What shall I do if I become pregnant by you?’ she said to the priest. ‘I shall be ashamed and lost.’
Clergue had an answer for everything. He told his sweetheart that he had a special herb which acted as a contraceptive, both masculine and feminine. He said: ‘I have a certain herb. If a man wears it when he mingles his body with that of a woman he cannot engender, nor she conceive.’
Béatrice, a real country girl despite her noble extraction, asked:
‘What sort of herb? Is it the one the cowherds hang over a cauldron of milk in which they have put some rennet, to stop the milk from curdling so long as the herb is over the cauldron?’
The reference to rennet is very relevant. Since the days of Dioscorides and of Magnino of Milan, his thirteenth-century successor, the rennet of a hare was thought to be a contraceptive. Béatrice did not see it as a contraceptive, but as something which made cow’s milk or a man’s semen curdle, thus producing either cheese or a foetus. Pierre Clergue’s magic herb prevented this solidification, and thus acted as a contraceptive.
Béatrice gave some more details about the famous ‘herb’: When Pierre Clergue wanted to know me carnally, he used to wear this herb wrapped up in a piece of linen, about an ounce long and wide, or about the size of the first joint of my little finger. And he had a long cord which he used to put round my neck while we made love; and this thing or herb at the end of the cord used to hang down between my breasts, as far as the opening of my stomach [sic]. When the priest wanted to get up and leave the bed, I would take the thing from around my neck and give it back to him. It might happen that he wanted to know me carnally twice or more in a single night; in that case the priest would ask me, before uniting his body with mine, ‘Where is the herb?’
I was easily able to find it because of the cord round my neck; I would put the ‘herb’ in his hand and then he himself would place it at the opening of my stomach, still with the cord between my breasts. And that was how he used to unite himself with me carnally, and not otherwise.
Was the object in question in this fascinating lovers’ game simply a magic amulet? Or was it a kind of pessary, as the vague reference to the opening of the stomach may suggest? Who knows. The fact is that the herb ‘worked’. Or at least, and it amounts to the same thing, Béatrice believed that it did.
Clergue exploited his mistress’s fear of pregnancy.
One day, said Béatrice, I asked the priest: ‘Leave your herb with me.’
‘No’, he said, ‘I won’t, because then you could be united carnally with another man, and thanks to the herb avoid becoming pregnant by him!’
The priest said that out of jealousy of Pathau, his cousin, who had been my lover before him.
So contraception, as far as we know, was regarded by Pierre Clergue and his rivals in Montaillou as a way of attaching a woman to them, not as something which liberated the opposite sex. Nor did Béatrice protest.
The fear of giving birth to an illegitimate child was a general anxiety in Occitan culture. It was particularly acute among the nobility, to which after all Béatrice de Planissoles belonged. A bastard, automatically described as a lout or a bumpkin, detracted from the noble race to which the woman who conceived him belonged. More important still, the husband’s legacy was diverted to the posterity of the lover. ‘Husbands fondle the little louts and imagine they are surrounding their own sons with loving care.’ Marcabru comes out very strongly on this point, and is followed by other troubadours, such as Cercamon and Bernard Marti.1 This preoccupation was certainly one of the reasons why the Languedoc poets often suggested Platonic models for extra-marital love. It is true that there were many distinguished bastards among the nobility of Foix. Apart from these inevitable ‘mistakes’, the nobles remained theoretically hostile to illegitimacy because it jeopardized the already precarious purity of blood. Béatrice echoed this fear when she said she would be ashamed and lost if she became pregnant by the priest Clergue. Pierre Clergue himself was a villager by origin, not noble, a peasant even: he acted according to values which were more lax. But he certainly understood his mistress’s arguments. He knew very well that old Planissoles, her father, would blush with shame at the idea of seeing his daughter, a widow, made pregnant outside marriage (i.244, 245): ‘I would not want to make you pregnant, as long as your father Philippe de Planissoles is alive,’ said Pierre Clergue to Béatrice. ‘Your father would be too ashamed.’ (Shame, as we shall see, was one of the chief factors in morals in Ariège in those days.)
Nevertheless, the tiresome father could not live forever. Pierre was not averse to the idea of giving his mistress a child once the old man had departed. ‘When Philippe is dead, I am quite willing to make you pregnant,’ he told her (i.245). When there was no longer any surveillance on the part of the noble line, Pierre was quite ready to return to the peasant scale of values which tolerated the procreation of bastards.
There were plenty of bastards in Montaillou.2 More, proportionally, than were to be found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for more of them were engendered, and when they were about to be born no one thought, as they did later, of exporting them to the towns. Only occasionally did people resort to the deferred form of infanticide which consisted in putting them out to nurse. (See however the case of Raymonde Arsen. She put her bastard baby out to nurse so as to become a servant in the ostal of the Belots. From time to time in the Belot ostal she would take care of the legitimate baby of the family.)
The moral and social status of bastards in the village presented them with problems which were not completely insoluble. In general, the noun which described them was a term of insult: ‘You old bastard’, cried Bernard Clergue to Allemande Guilhabert (ii.294) when she refused to carry out his orders and make her daughter go back on evidence compromising the Clergues in the eyes of the Inquisitor. Among the bastards known to us, one, Pathau Clergue, was a brutal character. But the psychological difficulties arising out of his status did not prevent him from being the official lover of the ex-châtelaine, who had previously yielded to his violent approaches. As for the female bastards, who were relegated to the rank of servant or beggar, they seem in general to have occupied the lowest stratum of Montaillou society. As we have seen, Brune Pourcel was a poor girl, looked down on by her natural father, Prades Tavernier, although he was rich (a former weaver) and a proud parfait. Brune was some time a servant in the Clergues’ house, some time established on her own account as a bride and mother and finally a widow, but always begging and borrowing (i.382ff.; i.385). The other bastards known to us from the Pamiers records seem to have married without any great difficulty into the local peasantry. Mengarde, the natural daughter of Bernard Clergue, lived for a long while in the great house belonging to her father, where she acted as servant in charge of the bread and the linen. Subsequently she married Raymond Aymeric, who lived in Prades d’Aillon, a neighbouring village.1 We do not know much about the fate of the other bastards mentioned in the Fournier Register. What became of the natural children of Bernard Belot and his sweetheart Vuissane? We do not know. They probably died young. As for Arnaud Clergue, all we can say about him is that he married into a local farming family, the Liziers, of Montaillou,2 and that he provides one more example of the libidinous proclivities of the Clergue family, rash when it came to concubinage, prudent, in order to preserve the domus, when it came to marriage. We have also seen that Pierre Clergue’s first cousin, Fabrisse Rives, Pons Rives’s wife, was a bastard: the priest took advantage of this and of his relationship to deflower Fabrisse’s daughter, Grazide, who was none other than his own niece. Her, too, he married off into the Lizier family, a convenient receptacle for the iniquities of the Clergue domus.1
Permissiveness, comparatively widespread in Montaillou and productive of bastards, was still not promiscuity. The inhabitants of Montaillou did not couple like ‘rats in straw’. Arnaud de Verniolles rates incest, the deflowering of virgins and adultery as more guilty even than sodomy (iii.42). Incest, including incest with the concubine of a cousin, interfered with the sacred links of lineage. It was therefore natural that it should be severely condemned, even while it was indulged in occasionally. The deflowering of virgins was also a great matter, involving responsibility and therefore sin. In a village which though permissive still did not tolerate complete abandon, it might oblige the deflowerer to face up to his responsibilities – in upper Ariège, virginity was sometimes subjected to the jurisdiction of matrones, who could carry out an inspection and make an official report (iii.56). Whoever committed a crime against a virgin had either to enter into some sort of concubinage with his ‘victim’ or else find her some other solution in the form of a husband. Or else both, one after the other. The two things might remain compatible for a long while, so long as the seducer could intimidate the former virgin’s family and husband (i.302).
As we have seen, in one case of this kind, that of Grazide Lizier, the husband was complaisant. But such accommodating behaviour only helps us to draw the bounds of ‘laxity’ in Montaillou. There was a proverb popular in upper Ariège which ran:
Tout temps et tout temps sera
Qu’homme avec femme d’autrui couchera.2
But it does not do to take proverbs too seriously. Pierre Clergue could trick Pierre Lizier openly, and Pierre Benet too (i.329), because his power as a rich priest was irresistible in the case of these poor husbands and their docile wives. But for ordinary mortals things were not so easy. Husbands were heavy-handed and might even go so far as murder, and wives needed to be careful and not indulge in the liberties they might freely enjoy as girls or widows. In Montaillou, permissiveness often stopped on the steps of the altar, and only returned at the husband’s deathbed. Béatrice de Planissoles’s reaction to the advances made by her steward, Raymond Roussel, are typical in this respect (1.219).
‘Let us run away and go among the good Christians’, said Roussel.
Béatrice replied: ‘But when my husband finds out that we’ve gone, he will come after us; and he will kill me.’
Bold and passionate as she was during her two widowhoods, Béatrice showed a touching fidelity to her two husbands while they were alive. She committed only two minor infractions of the marriage contracts: the first, her rape by Pathau, was involuntary, and the second was an isolated occurrence and of little significance (i.239).
Judging from the parts of the Register which deal with Montaillou, the restraint of married women is remarkable in comparison with the sort of conduct to be seen among young girls, widows and unmarried maidservants. It was only in the refuge in Catalonia that the virtuous behaviour of married women became less evident. There, mothers of families whom the hazards of the exodus had long separated from their husbands might permit themselves a new, illegal liaison without necessarily being certain that their husbands were dead. This is what Bélibaste suggests in speaking to his concubine, Raymonde, of her absent husband, Arnaud Piquier (iii. 188): ‘Alive or dead, Arnaud is not likely to bother us much here.’
But back in Montaillou, where couples lived together and marriages were comparatively stable, wives were on the whole virtuous. At least until they became widows (i.491). The case of Grazide Lizier was an exception.1 To a lesser extent, husbands were virtuous too. As far as we know, the Don Juans of Montaillou were bachelors, though the shoemaker Arnaud Vital remained an impenitent womanizer even after he married.1 Pierre Authié, a connoisseur of upper Ariège, considered that in that region most sexual activity took place within marriage. He told Sybille Pierre, the sheep-farmer, ‘it’s still within marriage that people make love most often’.2