Gratuitously, for the mere pleasure of asserting himself, Grandier had offended a man who was very soon to become the absolute ruler of France. Later, the parson would have reason to regret his incivility. Meanwhile the thought of his exploit filled him with a childish satisfaction. A commoner, an obscure parish priest, he had lowered the pride of a Queen’s favorite, a bishop, an aristocrat. He felt the elation of a small boy who has made a long nose at the teacher and “got away with it” unpunished.
Richelieu himself, in later years, derived an identical pleasure from behaving toward princes of the blood exactly as Urbain Grandier had behaved toward him. “To think,” said his old uncle, as he watched the Cardinal calmly taking precedence of the Duke of Savoy, “to think that I should have lived to see the grandson of lawyer Laporte walking into a room before the grandson of Charles V!” Another horrid little boy had triumphantly got away with it.
The pattern of Grandier’s life at Loudun was now set. He fulfilled his clerical duties and in the intervals discreetly frequented the prettier widows, spent convivial evenings in the houses of his intellectual friends and quarreled with an ever widening circle of enemies. It was a thoroughly agreeable existence, satisfying alike to head and heart, to the gonads and the adrenals, to the social persona and his private self. There had as yet been no gross or manifest misfortune in his life. He could still imagine that his amusements were gratuitous, that he could desire with impunity and abhor without effect. In fact, of course, destiny had already begun to render its account, but unobtrusively.
He had suffered no hurt that he could feel, only an imperceptible coarsening and hardening, only a progressive darkening of the inner light, a gradual narrowing of the soul’s window on the side of eternity. To a man of Grandier’s temperament—the sanguine-choleric, according to the Constitutional Medicine of his day—it still seemed obvious that all was right with the world. And if all was right with the world, then God must be in His Heaven. The parson was happy. Or, to put it a little more precisely, in the alternation of his moods, it was the manic that still predominated.
In the spring of 1623, full of years and honors, Scévole de Sainte-Marthe died and was buried with all due pomp in the church of St. Pierre du Marché. Six months later, at a memorial service attended by all the notables of Loudun and Châtellerault, of Chinon and Poitiers, Grandier spoke the great man’s oraison funèbre. It was a long and splendid oration in the manner (not yet old-fashioned, for the first edition of Balzac’s stylistically revolutionary letters did not appear until the following year) of the “devout humanists.” The elaborate sentences glittered with quotations from the classics and the Bible. A showy and superfluous erudition exhibited itself complacently at every turn. The periods rumbled with an artificial thunder. For those who liked this sort of thing—and in 1623 who did not?—this, most decidedly, was the sort of thing they would like. Grandier’s oration was received with general applause. Abel de Sainte-Marthe was so much moved by the parson’s eloquence that he penned and published a Latin epigram on the subject. No less flattering were the lines which M. Trincant, the public prosecutor, wrote in the vernacular.
Ce n’est pas sans grande raison
Qu’on a choisi ce personnage
Pour entreprendre l’oraison
Du plus grand homme de son âge;
Il fallait véritablement
Une éloquence sans faconde
Pour louer celuy dignement
Qui m’eut point de second au monde.
Poor M. Trincant! His passion for the Muses was genuine but hopeless. He loved them, but they, it is evident, did not love him. But if he could not write poetry, he could at least talk about it. After 1623 the Public Prosecutor’s drawing room became the center of Loudun’s intellectual life. It was a pretty feeble life, now that Sainte-Marthe was gone. Trincant himself was a well-read man; but most of his friends and relatives were not. Excluded from the Hotel Sainte-Marthe, these people had, unfortunately, a prescriptive right to an invitation from the Public Prosecutor. But when they came in at the door, learning and good conversation flew out of the window. How could it be otherwise with those bevies of cackling women; those lawyers who knew about nothing except statutes and procedure; those country squires whose only interests were dogs and horses?
And finally there were M. Adam, the apothecary, and M. Mannoury, the surgeon—Adam, the long-nosed, Mannoury, the moon-faced and pot-bellied. With all the gravity of doctors of the Sorbonne, they held forth on the virtues of antimony and blood-letting, on the value of soap in clysters and the cautery in the treatment of gunshot wounds. Then, lowering their voices, they would speak (always, of course, in strictest confidence) of the Marquis’s pox, of the King’s Counsel’s wife’s second miscarriage, of the Bailiff’s sister’s young daughter’s green sickness. At once absurd and pretentious, solemn and grotesque, the apothecary and the surgeon were predestined butts. They invited sarcasm, they solicited the shafts of derision. With the merciless ferocity of a clever man who will go to any lengths for the sake of a laugh, the parson gave them what they asked for. In a very little while he had two new enemies.
And meanwhile another was in the making. The Public Prosecutor was a middle-aged widower with two marriageable daughters, of whom the elder, Philippe, was so remarkably pretty that, throughout the winter of 1623, the parson found himself looking more and more frequently in her direction.
Watching the girl as she moved among her father’s guests, he compared her appraisingly with his mental image of that spritely young widow whom he was now consoling, every Tuesday afternoon, for the untimely death of her poor dear husband, the vintner. Ninon was unschooled, could hardly sign her own name. But under the inconsolable sable of her weeds, the full-blown flesh was only just beginning to lose its firmness. There were treasures there of warmth and whiteness; there was an inexhaustible fund of sensuality, at once frenzied and scientific, violent and yet admirably docile and well-trained. And, thank God, there had been no barriers of prudery to be laboriously demolished, no wearisome preliminaries of Platonic idealization and Petrarchian courtship to be gone through! At their third meeting, he had ventured to quote the opening lines of one of his favorite poems.
Souvent j’ai menti les ébats
Des nuits, t’ayant entre mes bras
Folâtre toute nue;
Mais telle jouissance, hélas!
Encor m’est inconnue.
There had been no protest, only the frankest laughter and a look out of the corner of the eye, very brief but unequivocal. At the end of his fifth visit, he had been in a position to quote Tahureau again.
Adieu, ma petite maîtresse,
Adieu, ma gorgette et mon sein,
Adieu, ma délicate main,
Adieu, donc, mon téton d’albâtre,
Adieu, ma cuissette folâtre,
Adieu, mon oeil, adieu, mon cœur,
Adieu, ma friande douceur!
Mais avant que je me départe,
Avant que plus loin je m’écarte,
Que je tâte encore ce flanc
Et le rond de ce marbre blanc
Good-by, but only until the day after tomorrow, when she would come to St. Peter’s for her weekly confession—he was a stickler for weekly confessions—and the usual penance. And between then and next Tuesday he would have preached the sermon he was now preparing for the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin—the finest thing he had done since M. de Sainte-Marthe’s funeral oration. What eloquence, what choice and profound learning, what subtle, but eminently sound theology! Applause, felicitations! The Lieutenant Criminel would be furious, the friars green with envy. “M. le Curé, you have surpassed yourself. Your Reverence is incomparable.” He would go to his next assignation in a blaze of glory, and for a victor’s crown she would give him her encircling arms, for guerdon those kisses of hers, those caresses, that ultimate deification in the heaven of her embrace. Let the Carmelites talk of their ecstasies, their celestial touches, their extraordinary graces and spiritual nuptials! He had his Ninon, and Ninon was enough.
But looking again at Philippe he wondered whether, after all, she was enough. Widows were a great consolation, and he saw no reason for giving up his Tuesdays; but widows were most emphatically not virgins, widows knew too much, widows were beginning to run to fat. Whereas Philippe still had the thin bony arms of a little girl, the apple-round breasts and smooth columnar neck of an adolescent. And how ravishing was this mixture of youthful grace and youthful awkwardness! How touching and at the same time how provocative and exciting were these transitions from a bold, almost foolhardy coquetry to sudden panic! Overacting the part of Cleopatra, she invited every man to constitute himself an Antony. But let any man show signs of accepting the invitation, and the Queen of Egypt vanished; only a frightened child remained, begging for mercy. And then, as soon as mercy had been granted, back came the Siren, chanting allurements, dangling forbidden fruits with an effrontery of which only the totally depraved and the totally innocent are capable. Innocence, purity—what a glorious peroration he had composed upon that sublimest of themes! Women would weep when he pronounced it—now thunderously, now in the tenderest whisper—from the pulpit of his church.
Even the men would be touched. The purity of the dew-dabbled lily, the innocence of lambs and little children. Yes, the friars would be green with envy. But, except in
