A L Berridge - Honour and the Sword

Honour and the Sword

A. L. BERRIDGE

MICHAEL JOSEPH

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

MICHAEL JOSEPH

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First published 2010

Copyright A. L. Berridge, 2010

Map artwork by Stuart James

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-14-194169-1

Contents

From all that terror teaches,From lies of tongue and pen,From all the easy speechesThat comfort cruel men,From sale and profanationOf honour and the sword,From sleep and from damnation,Deliver us, good Lord!from A Hymn by G. K. Chesterton

Acknowledgements

I must apologize to the people of Picardy, not only for dumping my fictional Saillie smack in the middle of the Forest of Lucheux, but also for landing them with so tempestuous a son as Andr de Roland. I have tried to find names authentic to both place and period for my fictional characters, but if any of these appear to reflect badly on a genuine family of the time, then I apologize unreservedly to their descendants for a similarity which is both unintentional and coincidental. The real personages, however, are written as history shows them to have been, and require no apology from me.

Many of those I should thank most are long dead, for the best sources on seventeenth-century France remain the vast number of contemporary memoirs. I would still have been lost in this wealth of material without the guidance of many members of the Society for French Historical Studies, and in particular Robin Briggs (author of Early Modern France 15601715 ) and Dr David Parrott (author of Richelieus Army ), whose generous personal help and encouragement I can only acknowledge with astonished gratitude. I am also much indebted to Ken Mondschein for advice on historical fencing, and to David Reid of the St Albans Fencing Club for guidance on practical aspects of the art. Thanks are due also to the many friends who helped with the different languages, and in particular Clare Cox, who polished the lyrics of Le Petit Oiseau . Anything impressive in this book is down to these experts; the mistakes are entirely my own.

I am also very grateful to those who gave invaluable feedback and advice in the actual writing, especially Julie Howley, Janet Berkeley, Michelle Lovric and Harry Bingham of The Writers Workshop, my agent Victoria Hobbs, and my editor Alex Clarke. Thanks also to Mervyn Ramsey and Laura Rawling for their inspiration and encouragement, and finally to my husband Paul Crichton, without whose faith and support Honour and the Sword would never have been written at all.

Editors Note

Even the dead can speak.

It is not from me the reader will learn the story of Andr de Roland, but from the recorded voices of those who actually knew him: a handful of letters, the memoirs of a parish priest, the journal of an adolescent girl, and the transcripts of interviews with a soldier, a merchant, a blacksmith, a tanner, and a stable boy. These interviews are the first in a series conducted by the young Abb Fleuriot, and appear to be surprisingly frank. The reader should remember, however, that while it is possible for a speaker to reveal more than he knows, it is not only the living who can lie.

In order to render the oral material accessible to a modern reader, I have adopted an informal approach to the translation, and substituted modern English idioms for those of seventeenth-century Picardy. The content, however, is bound to remain alien. Andr de Roland was anachronistic even in his own times, genuinely believing honour to be something which ought to affect his behaviour and play an integral part in his daily life. The reader will not need me to point out the danger of this, nor is that my responsibility. The dead may speak; it is the job of the historian only to see that they are heard.

Edward Morton, MA, LittD, Cambridge,

April 2010

PART I

The Boy

One

Jacques Gilbert

From his interviews with the Abb Fleuriot, 1669

You can trust me.

No one knew him like I did. Not that bastard Stefan for a start, you dont want to believe a word he says. You dont need him, you dont need any of them, except maybe Anne later on. Im the only one who really knows.

I knew him from when he was tiny. My Mother was his nurse up at the Manor, and sometimes shed take me with her so I saw a lot of him even then. They had all kinds of interesting stuff there, like a real clock in the hall and a tapestry with all pictures of stags on it, and a great big gong on the landing. Sometimes wed see the Seigneur himself, and he was always kind, he used to give me sugared nuts which he carried round in a little silver box, and sometimes hed ruffle my hair and call me a fine boy. More often it was just me and Mother in the boys room, and sometimes shed sing to us, which was nice, and sometimes shed make me play with him, which wasnt. He wasnt really Andr back then, he was just a baby that cried a lot, because I was jealous of him for taking my mother away and sometimes used to pinch him when she wasnt looking.

I saw more of him when he was older, because he was the Seigneurs son and I had to be nice to him and trot him around the paddock and answer all his stupid questions beginning Jacques, why ? It was always why in those days. It was only much later he started asking the really hard questions, the ones that begin with if.

But it wasnt a proper kind of knowing in those days, just sort of knowing the shape of him and the things he did and said. I was only the stable-masters son and he was Andr de Roland, hed be Comte de Vallon when his uncle finally got on and died. But I did use to watch him, because if your own lifes a bit crap you can get a lot of entertainment out of watching people with better ones, and anyway I thought he was funny. He had this awful temper back then, hed shout and wave his arms about, and sometimes even stamp. He never did it with me, of course, he was always polite with servants, it was only being ordered about he couldnt stand, or people telling him things he couldnt do.

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