BLOODY BLANCHE

To Paul Margueritte

After Guillaume de Flavy had grown weary of war and politics, he wanted to augment his fortune by taking a wife. He was a tall man, and strong, broad shouldered, of heavy and hairy breast; laying his hands on two armed knights, he could make them crumple to the ground. He would put on his gaiters and tromp through the muck of the glebe, slapping his meaty palm on the backs of the mud-encrusted men hunched in the furrows. His square face was always flush from the blood pounding in his temples, and the bones of meat shattered between his teeth.

Near Reims, he saw one day, while riding along the edge of his meadows, the fields of Robert d’Ovrebreuc. He dismounted and entered the great hall of the house. The chests, lined up against the walls, were spacious, fit for hiding bodies, and had a dingy air about them; the worktable was unstable, the iron of the fireplace rusted, the spit caked in half an inch of char. One saw here and there a cobbler’s apron, awls, and flat hammers; and in one corner, a cross-legged man was busy pulling a needle through a shirt of thick fabric. But squatting on the stones of the hearth, with a surprised, lucid expression and golden hair scattered around her pale face, a little girl had turned her head toward Guillaume de Flavy. She could have been ten years old; her chest was flat, her limbs willowy, her hands slight; and her mouth was that of a woman, slashed into her pale face like a bloody wound.

It was Blanche d’Ovrebreuc; her father had become, a few days prior, by succession, the viscount of Acy. With rounded back, long beard, and hands made skilled simply from tools, he would assume, as he considered his fiefdoms, the surprised and disquieted aspect of a man who is handling something dangerous. The English horseman Jacques de Béthune, in service of Luxembourg, had already come asking for the girl’s hand, and her father, uncertain, thought he might await a more ideal situation. The inherited lands were burdened with a debt of three hundred thousand écus; the former viscount of Acy himself owed, personally, a good ten thousand of them; but perhaps the Englishmen or Luxembourgers would take care of that.

In the end, it was Guillaume de Flavy who made off with little Blanche. He settled the debts to keep the lands. Having wed her by law, he promised to postpone their true wedding for three years. And so this man of estimable appearance laid his hands on the fiefdoms of Acy, and on a lank, wild, and childish being. Three months later, little Blanche, her brow furrowed and eyes pale, was already wandering the castle like a sick cat, having known the cruel espousals of Guillaume de Flavy.

She did not understand, and could not understand. She was of such a different age and body. The man was hard on her, as he was with his barber: after wiping his mouth, at the table, with the back of his hand, he would throw his leftover meats in this obsequious barber’s face. He shouted and swore without end, succumbing to the governance of his wine and victuals. He would send back the plates before him, leaving Blanche’s father and mother at the two ends of the table, a mother who already had a shaky head and bones which formed quoins on her body: she eked by for a time, almost without eating, almost without speaking, old, unintelligible, then turned pallid and passed away. The father, having weakened as if he had taken poison, signed the deeds for Flavy, after drinking; he had abandoned the lands, burdened with debts, and rubbed his hands together, humming, for his handsome annuity. But, no longer eating, he demanded his money, screamed pitifully, the poor frightened creature, wrote out in his shaky script a list of plaints to the king. Guillaume swept up the papers in passing; the old man groaned; the servants threw him down in a dungeon and, opening it to the sunlight a month later, they found a desiccated corpse, its teeth sunken into a shoe whose toe had been gnawed away by rats.

Little Blanche grew extraordinarily fond of eating. She ate enough sweets to catch her death of them, and stuffed her bloody mouth with round buns and creams. Hunched over the table, her eyes close to the meats, she devoured quickly, with a limpid expression; then she would take great swigs of the wine, pineau and morillon alike, tossing her head back; a wave of pleasure washed visibly across her face; she would spill goblets of wine into her wide open mouth, hold it there without swallowing, puffing out her cheeks, and shoot it like a fountain into the guests’ faces. Staggering around after meals, she would stand up and, possessed by the wine, lean against the wall like a man.

Her ways pleased the bastard of Aurbandac, black and nefarious, whose eyebrows met in a line above his nose. He came often to Flavy, who was his kin, and whose lands he hastily awaited. Being supple and vigorous, with calves of steel and strong fists, he would eye with sardonic airs Guillaume’s heavy body. But this left little Blanche unmoved. So from then on he spoke tactfully to her of her dresses; showed surprise when he saw her still in her wedding outfit (for he found she had since grown); pointed out young bourgeois girls in scarlet dresses, of maline or fine vair, with supple grey lining, big sleeves, and hoods from whose pitchers hung green or red silk, which dragged on the ground. She listened as if he were describing a puppet’s outfit. And the bastard of Aurbandac toasted her, with glass in hand, and made her laugh and drink, and gave her sweets, ridiculing her husband, such that he splashed his wine like a bathing bird, beating its wings in a brimming rut.

The barber, whose long face bore marks from some leg of lamb, sided with them; and he and the bastard put their heads together. They conspired to take the castle; that it would be the bastard’s, the woman being at the mercy of each in her innocence, provided she would have the key to the cellar and pantry.

One night, Guillaume de Flavy, tripping on the threshold, bludgeoned his face: he gave himself a cut that opened his cheek and nose. He cried out for the barber, who almost immediately brought him anointed bandages, of a peculiar odor. Over the course of the night, Guillaume’s face swelled up; his skin grew pale and taut, streaked with brown; his bulging eyes shed endless tears, and his wound took on the heinous aspect of tenderized meat.

He stayed in his armchair all morning, howling in pain; little Blanche seemed terrified, so terrified, in fact, that she forgot to drink; and she watched Guillaume from the other end of the room with her translucent eyes, while her mouth, so red, wriggled feebly.

Scarcely had Guillaume gone upstairs to bed, attended by his horseman Bastoigne, when the castle began to stir with a thousand quiet sounds. Blanche listened on, her ear to the door, one finger over her lips. She could hear the dull blows of hauberks, the muted clashing of weaponry, the creaking grill of the enormous gate, a strange crackling in the hall; the unsteady flickers of many a lantern came and went. Meanwhile the resin torches in the great hall, where the meat was still laid out, burned with a straight flame and long nets of smoke through the calm air.

Blanche walked quietly up the stairs with childlike steps to her husband’s bedroom; he was sleeping on his back, his swollen face, covered in bandages, turned up toward the joists. Bastoigne left, for it was time for Blanche to get into bed. She sidled under the sheets, took the hideous head in her arms, and stroked it. Guillaume was breathing with difficulty, in erratic gasps. Then little Blanche threw herself across him, took a pillow, pressed it firmly over his swaddled face, and slid open a judas hole, ordinarily sealed above the bed.

The bastard’s black face shot through the opening: he snuck in discreetly. In a single bound, he had pinned Guillaume’s chest down with his knees and dealt his head one, two, three blows, with the cloven stick he carried. The man emerged from under the sheets, and a horrible cry burst from his tumid mouth. But the barber, coming out from under the bed straps, tackled Bastoigne as he opened the door; and the bastard slit Guillaume’s throat with an ox tongue blade he wore on his belt. The body went rigid and toppled onto the floor, taking little Blanche with it; she was pinned to the ground, splayed under the hot corpse, receiving the warm blood which poured over her neck, because her dress was caught under her dying husband, and she was not strong enough to free herself.

The vigilant barber helped little Blanche back to her feet, while the bastard scrambled to the window; and seeing as Blanche d’Ovrebreuc, viscountess of Acy, was religious, she wiped her mouth and her husband’s face with her Picardy hood, laid it over his swollen face, and said in her childish little voice three Paters and an Ave amid the cries of the Bastard of Aurbandac’s men, as they rifled through the chests of oats.