When Martin Guerre returned, after an eight-year absence, to his native village in the foothills of the Pyrenees his beautiful wife was surprised by how much he had changed. Nevertheless, she welcomed him back with open arms. But when an argument over Martin’s inheritance began, one of the most bizarre stories of identity in mediaeval peasant history unravelled.
In the summer of 1556 Martin Guerre, after an eight-year absence, returned home to the small village of Artigat in the foothills of the Pyrenees. He had come back transformed from the young man he had once been. Shrunken and less keen on displays of acrobatics, the people of Atrigat seemingly noticed these changes with little concern. Martin had left the village in disgrace, having stolen some corn from his father, and his return had all the narrative redolence of the prodigal son.
Martin Guerre had married the beautiful Bertande de Rols at a very tender age. Bertrande would testify in court that she had been a girl of around ten at the time (although for various reasons historians believe that she was older and had at least ‘started her flowers’ as the medieval French referred to a woman’s first menstruation). We know of Bertande’s beauty because the first mention Judge Jean de Coras makes of Bernarde, in his manuscript Arrest Memorable, is that she was a peasant woman of great beauty.
But despite the belle Bertrande and despite Martin Guerre’s youthful interests in manly acrobatics and fencing, their marriage bed was one of frigidity and impotence. As the historian Nathalie Zemon Davis tells us, the couple had been ‘cast under a spell’. Bertrande bore no children for many years and there was pressure in the village to have the marriage annulled. Martin was almost certainly subjected to a charivari, a mock parade where “rough music” was played and to express displeasure with the cursed marriage.
As Bertrande would testify, both her and Martin had been bewitched by ‘the charms of a sorceress’ which meant they could not perform the ‘marriage act’. Then, Bertrande stated, after eight years of marital frustration an old woman ‘appeared suddenly as if from heaven’ and lifted the spell. Bertrande conceived almost immediately and bore a son some nine months later.
But this did not seem to allay Martin’s humiliation. What perhaps made matters worse was that Martin’s family were French Basques who had moved to French-speaking Artigat. Martin had, perhaps, some issues with integrating with the other children of the village. Even his name, Martin, was out of place, being the colloquial term for an animal or a wild bear. And 1548 he left the village of his birth and his wife, and crossed the Pyrenees into the Spanish Basque country. After some time in Spain, he ended up joining the Spanish army. And while fighting against his fellow Frenchmen at the Battle of St Quintin in 1557 was shot and had his leg amputated. As Davis puts it, ‘the days of Martin Guerre’s agility were over.’
When he returned to the Languedoc region near Artigat he did not go immediately to his wife, the beautiful and stubbornly loyal Bertrande. Instead, he took up at an inn in a village nearby. There he told the innkeeper that he was Martin Guerre and was said to have wept at the mention of his wife and family. Word spread that Martin Guerre had returned from eight years of soldiering and his four sisters rushed to the inn. On seeing him they ‘greeted him with delight’ and went back to fetch Bertrande. Bertrande, it seems, was initially confused by certain changes in her husband’s appearance. As the law clerk Guillaum Le Sueur, noted in his account of the matter Histoire Admirable: ‘The first time she gazed upon him, she resisted for a long time anxiously; and expressing doubt, she seemed to wish to turn away from him.’
But Martin spoke to Bertrande softly, recounting their disastrous marriage night and reminding her of the white hose she’d made him, that he had left behind in a wooden chest. She is then said to have clasped him around the neck and kissed him saying that perhaps it was the beard that made it difficult to recognise him. His uncle, Pierre Guerre, who after Martin’s father’s death was now the patriarch of the family, was also unconvinced by Martin’s changed appearance. But after having talked together he was soon won over.
Martin, however, still did not go to Artigat. As he would confess to his wife, he had contracted the pox and did not wish to infect her. And in return his wife took to caring for him at the inn until he recovered. Just quite what happened during the time they spent there together is unclear. However, by the time Martin returned to Artigat Jean de Coras notes that:
He greeted by name almost everyone he met who knew Martin Guerre, without having otherwise seen them or known them; and if they found it difficult to recognize him, he brought to mind all kinds of things from the past, and said to each one in particular, “Don’t you remember when we were at such and such a place, ten, twelve, fifteen or twenty years ago, and we did such and such a thing in the presence of so and so and where we talked about such and such?
What seemed certain was that the heir to the fortunes of the Guerre family in Artigat was back. And the loyal Bertrande’s hopes and dreams had seemingly come true. They lived together, as Bertrande would testify, in a newfound marital bliss ‘eating, drinking and sleeping together.’ And with their love arrived two young daughters, one of whom died in early childhood. As Le Sueur would describe it, Martin lived with Bertrande ‘quietly, without strife, and conducted himself so well in every way with her that no one could suspect any deceit.’ But as those who noted the absence of the mention of Martin’s missing leg may have realised, the man who had been accepted as Martin Guerre by his wife, family and the village of his birth, was not Martin Guerre – his name was in fact Arnaud du Tihl.
Arnaud was, as his surname reveals, from Tihl, some 240km northwest of Artigat. While travelling locally, he had once been mistaken for the troubled Martin – an event which clearly lit a candle in his mind. Far from troubled, Arnuad was known in his own town as a troubling dissolute youth ‘absorbed in every vice’. He had a fondness for heavy drinking and eating and as a result gained the nickname ‘Pansette’ or ‘the belly’. He was also well known for having a proclivity for sexual misdeeds, which accounts for the fact that he had syphilis when he was first with Bertande.
But he was also a quick-witted man, with a gift of the gab and the memory of an iron chest. In fact so clever was he, Davis says, that many people who knew him suspected him of magic.
Just quite how he transformed himself into Martin Guerre is a matter of speculation. Davis, the academic who has done the most research into the mystery, is convinced that Arnuad’s transformation into Martin could not have been done without the collusion of Bertrande. The critic of Davis, Robert Finlay, sides instead with Judge De Coras’s view that Pansette was a masterful arch-trickster capable of fooling completely the innocent and unsuspecting Bertrande. As Finlay puts it, in De Coras’s judgment Bertrande was found to have been duped as a result of ‘the weakness of her sex, [she was] easily deceived by the cunning and craftiness of men.’ But just how a man, even one greatly gifted in cunning, bamboozling and memory, could have absorbed the huge wealth of memories and histories of a community without some coaching does seem hard to fathom.
One thing both Davis and Finlay agree on is that Aurnuad was transformed not only into an acceptable version of Martin for the Guerre family, but also that he had transformed from a youth of vice and infidelity into a man who, even with literally a noose around his neck, refused to betray Bertrande. With Bertrande in his life, Aurnuad ‘the Belly’ du Tihl seems to have transformed ‘beyond the mask of the carnival player and the stratagems of the mere inheritance seeker’ into a trustworthy man whose love for his common-law wife was unbreakable.
The trouble began, as trouble always begins, with the mixing of money and family. Despite Pansette’s almost seamless inclusion into the Guerre family, strife unravelled the stitching when the new Martin asked his uncle Pierre for the accounts of his inheritance from his father. As Davis recounts from the historical records ‘“he asked him in fair words” which the gifted Pansette always had on the tip of his tongue’. But Pansette’s magic in this instance failed him. And it was this continued argument that would lead Pierre Guerre to question the many inconsistencies of Martin’s identity. Of course having no photographs, no portraits and being completely cut off from any written and legal world, peasants would have to rely on pure memory for any signs of divergence in identity – and the ravages of eight years of hard living can change any man.
But Pierre had a convincing list of differences. Why could Martin not speak his native Basque tongue with fluency anymore? Why had he lost interest in acrobatics? Why had his body become so short and stocky in adulthood? Why was his complexion lighter? And perhaps most convincing of all, just how did it come to pass that the cobbler had discovered the Martin’s feet had grown smaller with age? As all cobblers could tell you, a man’s feet might grow longer and fatter with age. But smaller? Never! Then, purely by chance, confirmation fell into Pierre’s lap. A wandering soldier one day came to the village and stated that he knew that the real Martin Guerre had lost a leg in battle.
Pierre then worked on Bertrande to bring a case against her husband. And when she refused he began a campaign in the village and the surrounding countryside against him and went as far as to try and pay somebody to kill his supposed nephew. Slowly the patriarch Pierre’s campaign began to rub off and many in the village turned against Pansette. But Martin’s sisters and his wife were unwavering in their support of him. And when Pierre and his sons-in-law ambushed him and set about him with clubs it was Bertrande who got between them putting her body on the line in order to save the person she had accepted as her husband.
But the protestations by the women in Pansette’s life were to no avail. Finally, Pierre’s will prevailed. As De Coras would explain, the issue had split the village down the middle, with similar numbers for and against Pierre’s claims. Slowly the uncle got to Bertrande. She was seemingly forced by the more powerful people in the village to join in by charging the man she had taken as her husband with being an imposter. And Martin was duly arrested.
But despite the seeming betrayal by Bertrande, she stuck to a set of answers throughout her examination which remained in perfect accord with the memories and testimonies of her lover, Pansette. This almost watertight fidelity to a set of memories of their youthful marriage made Davis believe that it could only have been an act of secret collusion between the two. If Bertrande did really wish to have Pansette found guilty, she could have at any moment changed the script to render his testimony suspect. Pansette, meanwhile, covered Bertrande’s tracks by raging in court that the reason his wife had joined in the charge against him was that she was being coerced by his uncle Pierre. In court, Pansette had sworn that he would ‘submit to a thousand cruel deaths if she [Bertrande] would swear he were not her husband’. To this, the faithful Bertrande refused to condemn her lover … Despite the fact that she was listed as bringing the charges against him. It was a dangerous and complicated double game they were playing if Davis is right in her assumptions.
When the judges came to interview the prisoner, De Coras states:
His remarks sustained at length and containing so many true signs, gave great occasion to the judges to be persuaded of the innocence [of the defendant], and beyond that to admire the felicity of his memory, for he recounted innumerable events that happened more than 20 years before. The commissioners by every means possible tried to surprise him in some lie, but could get no advantage on him.
Slowly, the judges in Toulouse were persuaded. The man with the magical memory and his love for his wife must be Martin Guerre. But this was not how the trial was to end. While the judges were deliberating ‘to the advantage of the prisoner’ a man came in from the streets of Toulouse. His one large foot fell silently on the tiled floor of the court, while his other wooden peg leg sounded off a distinctive, solid click. Just why and how Martin Guerre returned at this, the very last moment of the trial, has never been uncovered. But as a result, Arnaud du Tihl confessed and was found guilty of ‘imposture’ and ‘adulatory’. He was sentenced to death and hanged by the neck from a gibbet erected outside the house in Artigat where he and Bertrande had lived. On the ladder, with the rope around his neck, he is said to have called out to the real Martin Guerre not to treat Bertrande harshly. She was, he shouted, a woman of honour, virtue and constancy.
Pansette died at the site of his adulterous affair, asking for God’s mercy in the name of his son Jesus Christ.
