Baudet

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Baudet - book excerpt

Chapter 1

Vordan, near Arles, Kingdom of France, 1673

It was a sultry summer and Baudet Desmarais, a 10-year-old boy with curly blond hair and an endearing manner, was playing with his friends in the dense woodland that marked the northern boundary of their hometown, Vordan. The Petit Rhône flowed peacefully to the south, affording the place a natural protection and isolation from the world outside. In these woods, the boys passed countless hours – when not needed to help their parents with domestic chores or work on the ubiquitous smallholdings – with mock-fighting, hide-and-seek, tag or swinging on a rope suspended from a branch over a stream, shallow but deep enough to drench the unfortunate boy who lost his grip and fell in, to the unbridled mirth of his companions.

When it was Baudet’s turn to hide, he was so well concealed, motionless in a bush, that, after several minutes, he knew he was the winner. Bursting out of the foliage, he put his thumb to his nose – the gesture of victory – and screamed mockingly at them: “Ici, ici, can’t you see?

I’m Louis and you can’t catch me!”

Given his tender years and innocence, Baudet could not have appreciated the irony of the childish taunt. He made a dash, evading his pals, one by one, grabbing the rope and swooping over the stream to the safety of the far bank, to the applause of his admiring onlookers.

Louis the 14th, named the Sun King, showed not the slightest interest in towns such as Vordan, hundreds of miles away from his capital, Paris. His passion was driven by the construction of a sumptuous and extravagant new palace near to Versailles in the north of his kingdom. The monarch was creating an age of enlightenment in which Parisian salon culture set standards of discriminating taste, with outstanding writers, painters, sculptors and philosophers all receiving his patronage: Paris became the cultural capital of Europe, nay, in Louis’s eyes, the centre of the known universe. He proclaimed: “L’état, c’est moi.” (I am the state.) At the end of his 74-year reign, on his deathbed, he uttered: “Je m’en vais, mais l’état demeurera toujours.” (I am leaving but the state will exist for ever.) It was even rumoured that he had instructed the Surveillant of the Library to take off the shelves any astronomer’s volume that even hinted that the earth, his earth, was not the planet around which all the others revolved.

In an effort to prevent the nobility from revolting and challenging his divine authority, he established an extremely elaborate system of court etiquette. Learning it would, by his reasoning, occupy most of the nobles’ time, so then they could not then plan insurgence.

“You can’t catch me!”Baudet again called to the boys on the other side of the stream and, indeed, they could not, even if they had been the king’s soldiers themselves who frequently went into battle barefoot and with no decent weapons, relying on numerical advantage. However, the people of Vordan, like many others, were currently enjoying a period of relative peace: the Thirty Years War and Franco-Spanish conflicts were over with King Louis’s power dominant. The common folk raised thanks that armies were not marching through their streets or fighting in their fields.

Baudet was about to rejoin the lads to make their way home when he was transfixed by the sudden appearance of a figure dressed in a black hooded cloak.

“Baudet!” came a cackling frightening cry. “Master Baudet,” the figure repeated, “you will achieve good things, yes, very good things.” Then, the mysterious apparition pulled back its cowl to reveal a woman’s face, its features mainly concealed by long strands of grey hair but the words emerged from a mouth showing broken yellow teeth.

“Who are you?” Baudet blurted, his voice trembling, “and what do you want?”

“It matters not who I am, but you, young man, will achieve good things, as I say.” Then she turned and disappeared as swiftly as she had come.

Taking the path homewards, the boys were silent, having witnessed the old hag’s apparition. They had seen nothing like it – after all, the woods were their personal domain, their playground where adventures could unfold undisturbed by strangers, especially not one as frightening as she was. She had no right to be there, they all thought.

“Ah, here you are, Baudet. Wash your hands now,” his mother, a gentle soul without a bad word for anyone, instructed him. He idolised her. Father and his elder sister, Lorence, were already at table, chatting as his father cut slices of bread from a loaf on a wooden board.

“Will you serve?” Baudet’s mother invited her husband as she put down an iron stew-pot before them.

“Mmm, it smells good,” he replied, removing the lid and ladling meat and vegetables into four pewter bowls.

“Ay, I’ve used a joint of your best boar meat and Lorence brought the vegetables from the plot this very morning – you can’t get fresher than that.”

The Desmarais family was typical of most; mother cared for the house and the hens that scratched about in their yard and produced eggs; Lorence’s responsibility was the smallholding that gave them fresh potatoes, carrots, cabbages and leeks and the two women often picked grapes in local vineyards to supplement the family income. Father, with his son’s help, hunted wild boar and deer in the forest, hanging them then selling the meat at the town market after they had retained enough for their own consumption. This man aspired to buy a cow, one day in the future. But, as the years went by, it did not happen.

Monsieur Desmarais was born and raised in Vordan and he had married his childhood sweetheart, to live in their present simple cottage that had been bequeathed to him. He was a skilled hunter and earned enough sous to sustain his family, and in reasonable comfort compared to some families in the town. The plot of land belonged to him – most folk had to pay a tithe to the church or to any one of the many counts and dukes who resided in the surrounding chateaux.

His marriage ceremony had been simple and held in the town’s Catholic church, followed by a wedding procession and a modest feast. Some of the neighbours brought special food for midnight at the wedding bed, a custom to ensure fertility, and this ritual bore fruit when Lorence was born, with Baudet appearing two years later. He counted his blessings: he was not well off, by any stretch of the imagination, but he considered his family one of the lucky ones with his cottage and plot.

Were they God-fearing? It is fair to say they were; the alternative – worshipping pagan gods and risking Hell for eternity – did not appeal. In a year, they would participate in up to 100 different religious ceremonies and processions, including All Soul’s Eve, Saint Martin’s Day, the 12 days of Christmas, Epiphany, Lent and the summer solstice that determined their seasons and at which they gave up prayers that their crops would be safe from weeds, pests and blight. Their daily life was intertwined with religious belief and, though life was sometimes hard, they found joy in small moments and celebrations within the community. There were also social gatherings, a way to get to know their neighbours and to find future spouses for their offspring.

“I’ve got my eye on the miller’s daughter for you, my boy. She’s a fine strapping lass and…”

“Father! I’m only just 14 and I don’t even know if I’ll stay in Vordan.”

“What? Are you out of your mind? There’s everything you could wish for here, right here! It’s been good enough for me and your mother, hasn’t it?”

Baudet nodded, observing the pained expression on the man’s face.

“All I’m saying, Father, is that there’s a whole world beyond Vordan. I’ve listened to tales from sailors off the river and… and Marseilles is the place to make your fortune. I’ve not said it before now, but I would dearly love to read and write. I can scrawl my name but that’s all…”

“Marseilles? Your fortune? Reading and writing? Something’s taken control of your senses! Keep talking like that and you’ll end up in the madhouse, never mind Marseilles!”

His son said nothing. Achieve good things, that’s what the witch said. Can the ambition I feel ever be satisfied in Vordan, pleasant as it is, with its church and hunting?

Baudet was not alone in realising that, from birth to death, religious observances and rites punctuated their everyday existence, yet he knew nothing about where the real power of the church rested. Was this spark of curiosity strong enough to be blown into flames?

Pope Alexander the Eighth, at the time of his election, was seen as an opponent of nepotism, a scourge of the age, and he lived frugally. However, he eventually gave jobs to his relatives who took over his administration. They, in turn, granted power and authority to the bishops, one of whom ruled the town of Vordan. Alexander was interested in architecture, wrote poetry, patronised artists and expanded the decoration of churches. All this he shared with Louis.

Monsieur Desmarais had not met their bishop but blindly defended his office. He warned Baudet, on more than one occasion: “Remember this, my boy, we would be in a far worse place if those Huguenot devils ran the Church!”

“I understand, Father.”Of course, he did not, but it would require a profound event to destroy such inherited faith.

Over dinner, Baudet retold the strange happening that day in the woods. Mother immediately offered: “Ah, yes! I’ve heard talk of that woman, if such she can be called. They say she lives in a cave, sleeps with wolves and feasts on little children… she’s a witch!”

“Hold your tongue, wife!” her husband ordered, his voice angry. “That’s just tittle-tattle and can’t you see the boy’s frit enough without listening to your nonsense? Take no heed of your mother, Baudet.”

The lad’s distress was eased by his father’s reassurances but he could not erase the words of the black-cloaked hag from his mind.

“‘Master Baudet, you will achieve good things.’ How did she know my name?” he pondered. “And what did she mean?”

Popular traditions, though, blended with Christian orthodoxy to create a hybrid view of the world where virtually everyone believed in magic and Baudet, still a child, knew that it was a special knowledge needed to manipulate nature, as sorcerers did, and that only a chosen few could ever attain such abilities. And one important reason that witches, their collaborators and their prophecies were so feared was that nobody – educated or not – doubted the reality of magic.

“Why are witches usually women?” he wondered, then put the question to his mother.

“Why? Because they are more accomplished in herbs, potions and the human body.”

“Ah, I see.”This was always Baudet’s response when, in fact, he did not see anything.

The clergy of Vordan – and it was no different in hundreds of towns throughout the kingdom – saw such enchantresses as competitors for their authority to provide blessings, healing and good fortune. Parish priests were known to turn a blind eye to the persecution of real or even suspected witches.

His father asked his son: “Are you ready, my boy? Have you put the nets on the cart?”

“All ready to go, father. I’m looking forward to today.”

They each took a handle and pushed the handcart out of the yard on to the track leading to the woods. Then: “Stop! Hush!” Father hissed, “I can hear them… they’re away in the woods but look here.” He pointed to snapped ferns and broken branches. “They use this track, see, and mark my words, they’ll be back tonight. Help me get the nets off the cart.” They tied three nets on to trees, securely, across the path at intervals and about waist high. That would give them a good chance of ensnaring one or more boars. Caught in the trap, the more they thrashed trying to escape, the more entangled they would become.

“Good job,” father declared, slapping his son on his shoulder, “we’ll be back tomorrow, at first light and, with luck, there will be boar meat for supper.”

Baudet and his father returned to the traps the next day. Hoar frost glistened white on the bushes and undergrowth, and the air was crisp and clean. Winter was approaching.

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