The Friar of Carcassonne by Stephen O’Shea Page A

fled town and taken the registers with them, suggesting that Brother Bernard was not alone in doubting the veracity of their leather-bound compilation of accusation. The case of Castel Fabre was dropped.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    THE BISHOP OF PAMIERS

    T HE NEW YEAR DAWNED QUIET in the south of France. In Albi, Bishop Bernard de Castanet reaped the rich harvest of property from those he had so speedily condemned to life imprisonment. Having returned to Carcassonne some time after the Castel Fabre debacle, the inquisitors kept a low profile. They absented themselves frequently, no doubt consulting with their enviably untroubled colleagues in Toulouse and, according to Bernard at his trial, laboriously recopying and “fixing” the registers that had cast a pall of suspicion over them.
    They could not very well excommunicate the town again, for two reasons. The first arose from the accord of 1299. The leadership of the Bourg had lived up to the letter, if not the spirit, of its conditions: the new Dominican chapel had been built and the consuls, as promised, had not stood in the way of the arrest of the prominent citizens mentioned in the document. Bernard Délicieux had stood in the way, but that was not the fault of the consuls—and nowhere in the agreement did it say they had to help make these arrests. Second, at this delicate juncture the Dominicans charged with the inquisition at Carcassonne could not invite further attention to their procedures. Taking the drastic measure of excommunicating the town would have occasioned investigations and outside interference in the workings of the inquisition.
    For the moment, the Holy Office at Carcassonne was toothless, unable to do much. The city could breathe again. However welcome the lull, Bernard Délicieux was not satisfied. He had only to leave the confines of his convent and look east over the Aude. The Wall still stood. The wretches within still suffered, including the twenty-five unfortunates of Albi. And at any moment, given shifting winds of royal or papal favor, the Dominican machinery could start up again, unleashing the dread repression so at variance with his view of a Christian society. He had stalled the inquisition, not stopped it. For that he would need allies far more powerful than the people of the Bourg.
    The diocese of Pamiers, close to the towering Pyrenees, had been carved out of the diocese of Toulouse in 1295. That administrative change and consequent loss of revenue to his see would have angered Toulouse’s bishop, who may have had a hand in spreading rumors about the new diocese’s first bishop, Bernard Saisset. Whatever their provenance, the stories about Saisset provoked consternation and, in some quarters, hilarity. Famously, Bishop Bernard is reputed to have said that while King Philip the Fair was “more handsome than any man in the world . . . [he] knew nothing, except to stare at men like an owl, which, though beautiful to look at, is an otherwise useless bird.” In addition to delivering this memorable put-down, which implied that the king was a pretty boy exploited by his corrupt ministers, the bishop also characterized the monarch as a bastard, a counterfeiter, and a statue.
    All of this, however wounding, might have been taken as the harmless raillery of an old crank in his cups had not the bishop also ventured into political critique. As a scion of a proud Languedoc family, Bernard Saisset clearly resented the presence of the French in his homeland and volubly shared his low opinion of them with others. Of his enemy the bishop of Toulouse, a Parisian and thus automatically the target for withering scorn, Saisset said that he was “useless to the Church and to the country, because he was of a language that was always an enemy to that of our ancestors, and that the people of the country hate him because of that language.”
    While inflammatory, such words were not that unusual in Languedoc, even well into the