Heretic Dawn Page 30

  “Oh, Monsieur,” I cried, struck by his cruel assessment of himself, “put away your bitter thoughts and try to see the possibilities open to you. Don’t go letting the hereafter ruin the here and now! Don’t let the fear of death destroy your life! And for the rest, let the Sovereign Judge make His judgement when the time comes!”

  “Ah, my dear Siorac,” replied L’Étoile, a sudden smile lighting up his sad face, “it’s you who brings light to the room, with your sing-song accent and your happy, optimistic outlook! Oh, how I envy you your happy disposition! Your sins don’t appear to weigh on you any more than on a little wren on the branch of an oak tree!”

  “That’s because I have such faith in the beneficence of our Creator that I don’t think He’ll punish us for the poor little pleasures that we’ve gleaned along the way through our short lives.”

  “Alas! That’s not what our Church teaches us!” lamented L’Étoile with a sigh.

  “I also trust my own feelings more than the dour sermons of some angry priest, believing, as I’ve said, in the sweet goodness and beneficence of Christ, who pardons both the whore and the adulterous woman.”

  “They were wenches,” sighed L’Étoile, “and as the weaker sex they are more easily pardoned than we men are.”

  “Weaker?” I laughed. “Aren’t we every bit as weak?”

  I don’t know what he might have said in response to my incredulity, since we were interrupted by the arrival of the surgeon Ambroise Paré and the venerable Master of Arts Pierre de La Ramée, who was called Petrus Ramus in the Latinized French of our schools. I don’t know if these two were good friends, but they came in arm in arm and had something about them that made them look related even though their faces and body types were quite different.

  Ambroise Paré, who was then sixty-three years old, was of moderate height, with large shoulders, and robust without being fat; he sported some sparse grey hair on his balding head and a flowing but not very thick beard. His face was long, with hollow cheeks, a large nose, rounded at the tip, and lively, bright, yellow-brown eyes, at times serious, at other times quite jovial. Ramus, who was ten years his junior, seemed tall, mainly because he was so slim, and whereas Paré and L’Étoile dressed austerely in black velvet, Ramus wore a blue satin doublet with slashes, and a white lace collar rather than the little Huguenot ruff on which Paré’s head was so stiffly perched. Ramus’s clothes and the sword he wore at his side gave him the look of a nobleman, as indeed he was, though as the son of a ruined gentleman he’d had during his early years to serve as a valet at the College of Navarre, nourishing his love for letters at night.

  He had dark-brown, very piercing eyes that peered out from under an irascible set of eyebrows in the form of a circumflex, an aquiline and imperious nose, and a strong and prominent jaw adorned by a salt-and-pepper beard; atop this strong face was perched like an august dome his large cranium, as polished as an egg.

  Both of these men greeted me with very good grace when Pierre de L’Étoile presented us, and Ambroise Paré immediately sang the praises of the Royal College of Medicine in Montpellier, placing it well above its homologue in Paris, which he considered to be hopelessly sunk in “the rut of scholasticism”. This said, Pierre de L’Étoile invited him to take his place at table, and Paré immediately set to devouring everything the little valet and a chambermaid put in his bowl, having a strident appetite, but not stupefyingly so, for before swallowing each mouthful he worked his jaws for quite some time as if he were trying to discern the good from the bad: a habit that astonished me until he explained that someone had tried to poison him at the siege of Rouen.

  At the word “scholasticism” that Paré had pronounced, Ramus shuddered like a horse that feels the spur, and scarcely had he taken his seat or eaten any food before he launched into the subject, his eyes like flames, in a lively and furious diatribe, mixing French and Latin, but immediately translating the latter, since Ambroise Paré had come to his work in surgery from his profession as a barber, and had never immersed himself in the arts as Ramus had done.

  “Aha! You said it, Paré,” he cried. “‘The rut of scholasticism’ is just as pernicious in philosophy as it is in medicine, consisting in vain disputations, logical and theoretical, as if these great babblers had nothing better to do than to gloss Aristotle, this pagan being the God they worship, and they place his supposed truths above those of Moses or Christ. Heavens! I cannot tolerate that kind of idolatry, nor can I accept the kind that takes as its object Mary the Mother of Christ, or the saints.”

  “Monsieur de La Ramée,” L’Étoile counselled, “eat your roast while it’s hot. And, I beg you, don’t impugn the religion of the king in here, which,” he said with an ambiguous smile, “also happens to be mine.”

  “My host,” explained Ramus in a gentler tone, “you have such a degree of open-mindedness and tolerance that I almost forget you’re a papist! I beg of you a thousand pardons for my words—and of Monsieur de Siorac as well.”

  “As for me,” I replied, “there’s no offence. I’m of the reformed religion.”

  “Ah, that’s marvellous,” said Ambroise Paré, sticking a piece of his roast in the corner of his mouth so he could continue to masticate as we talked. “My dear L’Étoile, there are three of us and one of you. So you’re the heretic here. If only the reformers made up the same proportion of the kingdom!”

  “If that were the case,” replied L’Étoile, smiling bitterly, “then I’d be among the quarter that were persecuted.”

  “Alas, I’m afraid that’s true,” sighed Ambroise Paré.

  This said, he began to chew again, his tongue and palate focused on their work, his eyes wandering off, his circumspect mind turned in, as it were, on the contents of his mouth, as if he might have suspected the good L’Étoile of wishing to poison him.

  “As for me,” said Ramus, “I’d not persecute anyone, not even the berobed asses in the Sorbonne who’ve condemned my book on Aristotle.”

  “Well, you have to admit that your book against Aristotle was very brutal,” replied L’Étoile. “Did you not go as far as writing this sulphurous sentence: quaecumque ab Aristotele dicta essent, commentitia esse?”

  “Translate, please!” said Paré.

  “Everything Aristotle said is but falsehood.”

  “Oh!” exclaimed Paré.

  “Admit it, Monsieur de La Ramée,” continued L’Étoile, “this was like waving a red cloth in front of the Sorbonnic bulls!”

  “Poor bulls!” observed Ramus with the utmost scorn.

  At this we all laughed.

  “What’s so surprising,” remarked L’Étoile, “is that, as a consequence, not content to condemn your book, some of the Sorbonnites asked the king to burn you at the stake!”

  “’Sblood!” I cried. “The stake for having criticized Aristotle?”

  “Didn’t I tell you that they’d made a god of him?” replied Ramus, frowning.

  “Alas,” said Ambroise Paré, interrupting his endless mastication, “in this century we’re suffering too much from the excessive authority of the ancients. This excessive attention to Aristotle in philosophy is the same with Galen and Hippocrates in medicine. As soon as any little pedant cites them, all you can do is fall to your knees and put your hands together. This century is devilishly religious, and not just in the domain of religion.”

  “The authority!” cried Ramus, his brown eyes now showing fire under the circumflex of his bushy eyebrows. “The supreme authority of the ancients, that’s where the shoe pinches the most!”

  “So do you want to destroy it?” asked Pierre de L’Étoile, as if terrified.

  “Not at all,” replied Ramus, “but put it in its place, which would not be on top. No authority,” he continued, thrusting his jaw out in a bellicose way, “no authority should be above reason. It is reason, on the contrary, that should be the mistress of all authority.”

  “If I follow you,” mused Pierre de L’Étoile, suddenly looking dubious, fearful a
nd confused, “this would entirely upset all orders of thought! What’s your opinion, Paré?”

  Ambroise Paré swallowed the portion he’d just reduced to pap, and, bringing his cup to his lips, drank a small precautionary taste, as if he suspected his wine were laced with arsenic. After which he said in a grave voice, but as calm and quiet as Ramus’s speech had been tempestuous:

  “The ancients, in my art at least, said some good things, but one can’t just rest on their work like a hog on its sow. The ancients didn’t see everything, nor did they know everything. I would say that they built watchtowers of the ramparts of a castle and now, posted on these ramparts, we can see much farther than they could.”

  My heart beat faster to hear this opinion, so much did it seem to open up to our human knowledge a marvellously infinite field of understanding. But I couldn’t help noting that Pierre de L’Étoile seemed very agitated, as though he found Paré’s and Ramus’s proposals too novel and too daring.

  “Well, in any case,” he said as if he wished to change the subject, “there’s one sow that Parisian pigs won’t go to bed with any more. The ‘beautiful handmaiden’ has died. I heard of it yesterday afternoon.”

  “What, the ‘beautiful handmaiden’?” said Ramus. “But she was very young!”

  “And looked strong enough to live to a hundred!” added Paré. “I took care of her last year. She was healthy and vigorous and her insides as good as her body was beautiful. What illness carried her off?”

  “Appendicitis.”

  “Ah, there’s no remedy for that,” said Ambroise Paré sadly, as if he were lamenting the limits of his art.

  “Might I ask,” I said, “who this ‘beautiful handmaiden’ was, who was so famous?”

  “The wife of one of the palace ushers,” replied L’Étoile, “and famous in Paris not only for her beauty, but for the agility of her thighs. My friends, would you like to hear some verses that one of the palace judges wrote as an epitaph for her?”

  “Gladly,” said Paré, who, to be able to hear better, swallowed the mouthful he was so slowly crushing between his teeth. Ramus said nothing, but as Pierre de L’Étoile pulled a paper from his doublet, he smiled, arching his circumflexed eyebrows in amusement.

  “So,” said Pierre de L’Étoile, “here’s the epitaph:

  “Alas! she so liked cocks to suck

  While she still had life and all her pluck.

  Her husband never did enjoy

  To have her hands on his small toy

  As oft as she’d extend her reaches

  To toys she found in others’ breeches.

  In a single morning she did play

  With more slick pricks than in a day

  Her husband cried out from his report

  The names of guests to Charles’s court.

  So now all you who, ’fore she died,

  Caressed this lady’s sweet backside,

  Say a prayer to God that He

  Might save her soul eternally.”

  We four laughed uproariously at this satire, but perhaps not all four for the same reasons: L’Étoile as if he saw in it punishment for the lady’s immoral ways; Ramus as a licentious gentleman; Paré with a shade of melancholy; and I in surprise that these learned gentlemen should find as much pleasure in these little verses as any bourgeois. I was more than a little surprised, too, at the light-hearted attitude taken towards the death of a young woman, but later when I got to know Paris better, I understood that everything, the tomb included, could be material for jokes, epigrams and scabrous quatrains, and in the end I had to agree that the humour of this proud city is not about feelings, but, given the tyranny of the court, tends more towards showing off one’s cleverness than displaying any concern for others.

  “Venerable Maître,” I said, turning to Ramus, “in your opinion, is Aristotle completely mistaken, so that there is nothing at all in his thought that you can forgive?”

  “No, of course not,” replied Ramus, his eyes shining. “Aristotle had one great merit: he taught us about mechanics, which proves that he didn’t despise the people and their common use of mathematics, the way Plato did, who preferred to see mathematics as a subject of pure contemplation rather than allowing his disciples to dirty their hands in its applications. Oh, Monsieur, what great harm this lamentable error of Plato’s has inflicted on the world! For, by letting the use that might be made of mathematics decline, the very subject of mathematics declined. This is why, ever since the Greeks, mathematics has not prospered—to the point where, in France today, it is hardly taught at all and its use is limited to merchants, navigators, jewellers and the royal treasurers.”

  “What?” I gasped. “Mathematics is hardy taught in France? But in Germany it is flourishing! How is this possible?”

  “Monsieur de Siorac,” replied Ramus, his angular visage animated by both grief and anger, “the king created for me the first chair of mathematics at the Royal College, which I occupied with some distinction and usefulness for ten years, after which time, having renounced the religion of the king, I had also to renounce my chair, which was bought by some fellow who knew a little about mathematics, but, soon tired out by old age, resold it. And do you know who bought it?”

  “No, I don’t,” I replied, astonished at Ramus’s fury, which had gripped him and had made his hands, arms and head shake uncontrollably.

  “A totally uneducated man!” screamed Ramus. “An idiot who knows absolutely nothing! A blank slate who’s never studied or used mathematics and who publicly mocks the science that he’s supposed to be professing and goes around saying that mathematics is an abstract and therefore vain and fantastical activity that has no use whatsoever in human life!”

  After saying this, he seemed so strangled by his own anger that he had to stop talking, and his whole body continued to shake. And as I stared at him amazed and, truth to tell, somewhat dubious and incredulous, Pierre de L’Étoile, seeing my confusion, said gravely:

  “This is true, Monsieur de Siorac, however incredible it may seem. This uneducated idiot, as Monsieur de La Ramée calls him, is named Charpentier; he knows not a whit about mathematics, and if he was able to purchase a chair in the Royal College, it’s because he was supported by the powerful Duc de Guise and the Jesuits, since the man is a fanatical papist, a zealot, howling with the wolves, and, what’s more, a nasty, venomous little fellow, bilious, spiteful and a mortal enemy of our friend here—who has challenged him on his abysmal ignorance.”

  “Ah,” said Ambroise Paré, ceasing his slow mastication, “I know all too well these Sorbonnic hatreds! Each time one of the thinkers of our day has taken one step out of the scholastic rut, and stumbled on some truth, there isn’t a single little pedant at the Sorbonne who, sitting on Aristotle like a crow on a church steeple, hasn’t squawked a thousand insults at him! It’s the same for me, for having dared to get my hands dirty and discovered with my knife things they can’t see in their books. And yet it doesn’t make any difference to our common practices and the public utility of our science whether some ignoramus, spouting Greek, goes about quoting Hippocrates and cackling about surgery if he’s never dissected a body! It’s not in the library but on the field of battle that I discovered how to tie up an artery so a man wouldn’t bleed to death.”

  “Ah, venerable Maître,” I cried with some heat, “the men wounded in our wars will be forever grateful to you, for the cauterization of their wounds with boiling oil led to unbearable suffering!”

  “Which,” agreed Ambroise Paré, “coming after amputation, was so piercing that it frequently caused death. So, watching this, and with the screams of pain in my ears from those soldiers who were burnt after amputation, I calculated that, given that blood is flowing from the arteries, it would be enough to pinch the arteries and tie them up to stop the bleeding.”

  Given how simple the solution that he discovered was, and how simply he described it, it’s a wonder that no surgeon in the world had ever thought of it before he did. And yet th
is man who discovered it knew neither Greek nor Latin and was, consequently, not a doctor of medicine!

  “Well said, Paré,” agreed Ramus, growing heated. “Getting your hands dirty, that’s what our impotent colleagues at the Sorbonne would never forgive you for, they who sit in their rat’s nest, spouting endless inanities at each other in their false, bookish science! And so the untutored Charpentier, scorning what he doesn’t know, goes around repeating that ‘counting and measuring are the excrement and garbage of mathematics’. And our Platonists applaud, who place contemplation of ideas above all. And certainly,” he continued (the word “certainly” betraying his Huguenot beliefs, as I’d learnt from Madame des Tourelles), “mathematical theorems are in and of themselves admirable and profound—but how much more marvellous are the fruits that can be culled from them for the use of mankind? I count speculation on the essence of mathematical entities as pure vanity and of no profit. The goal of the arts is in the use that may be made of them, in the same way that there’s no point in searching for gold beneath the ground if we forget to cultivate the vegetables at its surface!”

  “Ah,” I exclaimed, “what an excellent apophthegm, one that would so please my father if he were listening!”

  “This is the reason,” Ramus continued, “that Archimedes is so great; it’s not only because of his theorems, but because of the applications that he made of them: the worm drive, the pulley, denticulated wheels, machines of war and even the enormous mirrors by which he set fire to the Roman ships that were attacking his little country. Did you know, Monsieur de Siorac,” he continued, turning towards me as I listened excitedly, “did you know that the Sorbonnites blamed me for having inserted in my book on arithmetic methods of calculating that are in common usage among the merchants around Saint-Denis? No one claimed that these methods were false, and, for heaven’s sake, how could they have proved it? But they claimed that they were ‘soiled’ by the practice these mechanicals made of them! Ah!” he cried, raising his arms in anger. “The awful prejudices of the pedantified pedants!”