"This book," says Natalie Zemon Davies at the start of stranger-than-fiction popular history The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), "grew out of a historian's adventure with a different way of telling about the past." Her telling concerns a wonderfully odd little legal case from 16th-century Languedoc, centred on an imposter named Arnaud de Tilh. De Tilh successfully posed as a missing man named Martin Guerre for several years - even living in Guerre's house with Guerre's family - until Guerre's wife Bertrande one day denounced him for fraud, took him to court. Bertrande was then reunited with her lost husband, when the real Martin Guerre turned up out of the blue at a climactic point in his replacement's trial.
While working as a consultant on a film dramatising these events - although 'dramatising' feels like a curious word to apply to an already pretty cinematic story - Davies found herself inspired by the questions that the process of film-making threw up, notably in terms of the motivations of those involved:
Watching Gerard Depardieu feel his way into the role of the false Martin Guerre gave me new ways to think about the accomplishment of the real impostor, Arnaud du Tilh. I felt I had my own historical laboratory, generating not proofs, but historical possibilities.
Watching actors play various interpretations of these fictionalised people gave Davies the opportunity to arrange and rearrange the real people in her head: Why did Martin leave in the first place? How might de Tilh have gathered the information he needed to 'play' him? Was Bertrande fooled by de Tilh, or did she go along with the deception for her own reasons, related to her difficult status as a young not-widow in a gossipy village? The detail of a single case like this holds much allure for a historian: it opens up the possibility of a window on a world and worldview that is rarely glimpsed on an individual level. While economic, social and cultural history can open up general images of lives lived outside the chronicles and letters and diaries of the educated elite - the cultural practices, the trends and priorities expressed by marriage patterns and consumption and shared ritual - pre-modern non-elites, being unaccustomed and/or unable to communicate their thoughts and reflections in written form, have left us few traces of themselves as distinct individual people.
Davies also itched to explore both the uncertainties of historical reconstruction, and the wider cultural context for the legal case, that a fictional narrative necessarily left out. What she has to say in the book about Martin's Basque roots offers possible insight into his actions and family life. When Martin was a boy, his parents moved to the village of Artigat from Labourd, a predominantly Basque region of France (while retaining their valuable estate back home in Labourd, which Martin would one day be in line to inherit). The shift was, Davies explains, probably jarring, and never complete:
To be accepted by the village they had to take on some Languedoc ways. Daguerre became Guerre; if Pierre had used the Basque form of his name, Betrisantz or even Petri, he now changed it. Sanxi's wife probably continued to carry baskets of grain on her head, but she restitched her headdress and the decorations on her skirt so as to fit in with her neighbors.
The clash between local and Basque attitudes to the buying, selling and inheritance of land is crucial to Davies' ideas regarding the conflict between Martin and his father that drove him to leave home in the first place, and the story's eventual resolution.
But then in 1548, when the infant Sanxi was several months old and Martin in his twenty-fourth year, [...] Martin "stole" a small quantity of grain from his father. Since they were both living in the same household, this theft probably reflected a struggle for power between the two heirs. But in any case theft was unpardonable by the Basque code, especially if done within the family. "The Basques are faithful," Judge Pierre de Lancre was to write; "they believe that theft is the work of a debased soul, of a low and abject heart; it bears witness to the demeaning neediness of a person." Martin Guerre had now placed himself in an imposssible situation. "For fear of the severity of his father", he left - he left his patrimony, his parents, his son, and his wife - and not one word was heard from him for many years.
But such details would have slowed the pace too much. Moreover, a film could not easily acknowledge, she notes, "the 'perhapses', the 'may-have-beens', to which the historian has recourse when the evidence is inadequate or perplexing". [Although now I find myself wondering about the possibilities of an undergraduate history class that juxtaposed The Return of Martin Guerre, film and book, with I, Pierre Riviere...]
Davies account is itself inevitably somewhat fictionalising. The trial records themselves don't survive; we have only the judge's retrospective narrative of events, published shortly after the trial, to give us access, second-hand, to the various historical actors' self-presentation at the trial. This can be seen in the passage quoted just above the previous paragraph, which gives some sense, I think, of Davies' approach to her source material. The trial over which the judge presided was itself, of course, a performance and a reimagining of the decisions made during the years under investigation - something that Davies perhaps doesn't make quite enough of. So when she says, "What I offer you here is in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past", it must be taken with a pinch or two of salt. But that, of course, is part of her point, and her reason for laying the process open in such a way: all history-writing is necessarily an act of interpretation, of re-presentation, and of imagination.
Her understanding of Martin's wife, too, is the product of just such an act of imagination. Combining the judge's account of Bertrande's testimony and actions during the trial - together with the testimony of the around one hundred and fifty (1) witnesses who took part in the trial at various stages - with her wider knowledge of gender norms and social practices in early-modern southern France, Davies attempts to layer into her account some suggestions as to Bertrande's (often conflicting) desires and expectations.
Bertrande's actions appear confused and confusing to the modern reader, as indeed they seem to have done to those around her. Bertrande and Martin were married young - around the age of fourteen, which is unusual for the time and social milieu (with the exception of the upper elite, most pre-modern Europeans married in their late twenties) - to create an alliance between their ambitious, relatively wealthy families. But it seems - by the trial accounts - to have been unsuccessful union, which went unconsummated for some eight years. Nonetheless, Bertrande strongly resisted her own family's efforts to persuade her to end the marriage. Davies explains her refusal to escape as follows, seeing in her actions the seeds of what was to come:
Here we come to certain character traits of Bertrande de Rols, which she was already displaying in her sixteenth year: a concern for her reputation as a woman, a stubborn independence, and a shrewd realism about how she could maneuver within the constraints placed upon one of her sex. Her refusal to have her marriage dissolved, which might well have been followed by another marriage at her parents' behest, freed her temporarily from certain wifely duties. It gave her a chance to have a girlhood with Martin's younger sisters, with whom she got on well. And she could get credit for her virtue.
At length a local wise woman was called in to lift, ritually, what Bertrande later testified must have been a curse on the pair; a child was duly born. When Martin disappeared, Bertrande was left in limbo: neither wife nor widow, she was legally unable to remarry or move on with her life, even after several years. De Tilh, Davies suggests, must have seemed like a way out, however dubious ("Beyond a young womanhood with only a brief period of sexuality, beyond a marriage in which her husband understood her little, may have feared her, and surely abandoned her, Bertrande dreamed of a husband and lover who would come back, and be different"), and indeed Bertrande stood by her new man even when others in the wider Guerre family doubted him, diving in the physically put herself between him and the clubs with which the husbands of her sisters-in-law were beating de Tilh:
"He is Martin Guerre my husband," she is reported as saying, "or else some devil in his skin. I know him well. If anyone is so mad as to say the contrary, I'll make him die."
Of de Tilh, Davies says that he was a clever but dissolute individual, disaffected - much as Martin himself had perhaps been - with the prospects available to him in his home village, who left to join a militia in one of the many local wars, and then washed in Artigat at just the right time. This is at least in part a tale of younger generations attempting to assert themselves against the expectations of family, especially fathers - of young men in limbo (much like Bertrande without either a living husband or news of a dead one) in their family homes, obliged to wait for their parents to die to give them the chance to own their own property or determine what they would do with their own lives.
One of the things I really liked about Davies' account is the way she brings out how the villagers themselves chewed these things over, considering them - both at the time, while wondering if de Tilh was who he claimed to be, and later, going over those doubts again at the trial - as possible motives for the central trio's actions. Undoubtedly, some exaggerated the extent of their earlier doubts, wanting to seem as if they'd always be correct, but what I'm interested in here are the terms in which the doubts are couched: the villagers offer suggestions and rationalisations, seeking to explain events in much the same way as Davies does (albeit often with different conclusions). The villagers appear as people engaged with narrative, prone to speculation, to self-invention, to constructing others' motives and trying to fit them into familiar, common-sensical frameworks. Thus Bertrande herself, for example, speculates at the trial that perhaps de Tilh and Martin had met as soldiers, and that this was how de Tilh could know "such private things about me".
In the event, Martin returned at the key moment, and Bertrande was able to cap her denunciation of de Tilh with her acceptance of the real Martin:
After one look at the newcomer, she began to tremble and weep (this according to Coras, who considered it the duty of a good judge to note the expressions of his witnesses) and ran to embrace him, asking his pardon for her fault, committed because she had been overwhelmed by the ruses and seductions of Arnaud du Tilh. Out tumbled all the prepared excuses: your sisters believed him too readily; your uncle accepted him; I wanted to have my husband back so much that I believed him [...]
Martin Guerre showed not a single sign of sorrow at the tears of Bertrande de Rols, and with a fierce and severe countenance (assisted perhaps by memories of the Spanish preacher she had been among) said, "Leave aside these tears... And don't excuse yourself by my sisters nor my uncle; for there is neither father, mother, uncle, sister, or brother who ought better to know their son, nephew, or brother than the wife ought to know her husband. And for the disaster which has befallen our house, no one is to blame but you." Coras and Ferrieres reminded him that he bore some guilt here, having abandoned Bertrande in the first place, but he would not be moved.
The book raises all sorts of fascinating questions about identity, family life, and people's willingness to believe - or pretend to believe - the implausible, for the sake of finding a way around or through the social strictures that bind us. Interesting stuff.
~~Nic