Epilogue

 

 

 

 

Hank and I did take a trip to Italy, and to Normandy, Cavaillon and La Rochelle, in search of the finest of threads from the past. It’s amazing how time and war can erase the footprints of ordinary lives, as if they had never been there. Perhaps they erase the actual traces of great lives, as well, and because the world needs a record of such notables, we simply make up what isn’t there and convince the world that what we have found is actually so. At least nobody bothers to make up things about ordinary people.

Of Dormoy, there was no trace, neither among the University archives nor the parish records at Cavaillon, in Provence or among the papers and effects of Nostradamus. It was as if he had simply vanished, without a trace. More likely, however, he had only taken another name, either for his own protection or that of his family, in those uncertain times. Whether he had mastered alchemy or branched off into other areas of science and ended up teaching and writing somewhere, we’ll never know, perhaps.

The parish records did provide information about one person of his family, a certain Celeste Dormoy, a sister according to baptismal records, who died in 1564, during one of the outbreaks of plague, at the age of fifteen, unmarried. There does not seem to have been anyone by the name of Dormoy in Cavaillon, in Sarlat nor in any of the near-by villages, after that.

On a more cheerful note, Bernardo and Caterina were survived by five children, twenty two grandchildren and sixty-eight great grandchildren, before their church was destroyed in a fire and the records were transferred to another parish where nobody by the name of Giambelli was registered. Hank and I finally tracked them down in the town of Portecorvo, where there were no fewer than nine churches, four of which had its own set of Giambelli family records, testifying to a family that excelled in the production of male offspring to carry on the family name.

We knew we had located our Testagrossa because this Bernardo Giambelli was married to Caterina Maria Botelli, and the two parents had presented their daughter, Francesca Christina, to be baptized on the twenty-third of May, 1560. The records show that they presented four other children for baptism. In her turn, Francesca Christina married someone named Giovanni Petruccio and presented her own children for baptism. The third child, baptised on April 23rd 1587, was a boy who bore the name Enrico, and the priest marked the register with the conspicuously English name of Henry Howard as godfather.

Gaston Gaudin, as Howard had anticipated, followed his master Gabriel Comte de Montgomery, when he fled the ire of the Queen Mother in Paris and took refuge in his Norman estates. Like Montgomery, Gaudin converted to Calvinism and joined the forces of Coligny’s Huguenot army that fought against the forces of Guise in the Wars of Religion. Once we had gathered this from old regimental lists, Hank suggested that we simply follow the major confrontations of those wars, examining the surviving accounts about the securing of supplies and ordinance, the granting of commissions and lands, and the memorial plaques containing the names of those who had fallen in service to the cause.

This is what brought us to the city of La Rochelle, the scene of a five month siege lead by the King’s brother, the Duke of Anjou. The city’s defenders are said to have held out bravely, eating dogs, cats, rats and cockroach soup after the food stores had run out. I read that the defending army lost 1500 men, but the besiegers lost over 12,000 to combat fatalities, sickness and desertion, and still they held on before lifting the siege and just going home. All that death and suffering was for nothing, in the end.

Hank and I wandered the winding streets of the old city, like a couple of vacationers, taking pictures and stopping just inside the Saracen gate for an ice cream cone. We were headed for the church, which had been Protestant in the 1570s, outside of which was a large plaque covered with the names of the honoured dead, under the partially effaced date of “6 July, Anno Domini 1573.” We searched through the list like a nervous mother, hoping not to find what she is looking for, and there he was: “Gaston Gaudin, died 12 June, 1573.”

He must have been no more than 35 years old at the time. Hank and I looked at each other. Hank looked as if she were going to cry, but I was just angry, angry about the stupidity of it all, and then how we memorialise what we have done on plaques of stone.

We returned to Paris, and Hank suggested that we look for information on Julie, but there was nothing, no trail to follow. She was, after all, a prostitute. Howard never knew her last name. Hell, he couldn’t even be sure that Julie was her real first name. She lived on the fringes of society, probably working until age robbed her of her beauty and the sparkle of her eyes. Then she was left to live in the streets, a toothless, old woman in rags begging at church doors.

That’s what I supposed, but Hank disagreed with me. She insisted that the Julie of our story was captured and saved on the pages of Howard’s verse, there to be kept forever young, forever beautiful, ever full of life and mischief. As long as people could read Howard’s poems, Julie would never change or fade or die.

Wasn’t it as the Bard himself had written?

 

“But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”

 

​William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18

 

Yes, that is what Howard would have wanted for her, and perhaps he was destined to bestow this gift upon her as no one else could, before or since.