Looking for Bertrande de Rols, Part 1

Photo by Jacques Dillies on Unsplash

Happy November, friends. I hope you and your families are safe and well.

Last month, I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal on five of my favorite books about “unsung women.” By “unsung” I do not mean “forgotten.” “Forgotten” implies the women in question were once known, either celebrated or notorious, but have been lost to the mists of time. These books, however, feature women ordinary for their time and place, never famous (though they were sometimes linked to famous men). Most were not even known at all beyond their families — in the most painful and heartrending story, they were hardly known even to blood kin. And yet, historians have found ways to excavate their stories from the archives.

Some of these women left behind caches of letters; we find the others only in court records. Still others exist only through embroidered stitches, the tangible traces of a largely oral history. But their stories are bold. And in their ordinariness, these women tell the history of us, writ large — or at least of the majority of women. To me, that is more powerful, and more beautiful, than the story of any queen.

I love these books. I hope you’ll pick up a few of them.

One of the books I wrote about was The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), by Natalie Zemon Davis. Perhaps you’ve read it, or perhaps you saw the movie (1982) starring the young Nathalie Baye and Gérard Depardieu.¹ The story is startling but true, better than fiction. In 16th-century France, in the Pyrenees, the 14 year-old Bertrande de Rols marries the young Martin Guerre. He is a reasonably respectful husband but not particularly kind, and hardly passionate; she remains nonetheless a dutiful wife. They have a son.

Several years after their wedding, Martin leaves for the wars, returning only 8 years later. During his absence, he has grown mature, energetic, passionate. He’s like a new man. Bertrande is happy. Their marriage flourishes for several years.

Until it becomes clear to the villagers that the Martin Guerre who returned isn’t the real Martin Guerre at all. He is an impostor, a man named Arnaud du Tilh. The case is tried in Toulouse, and Arnaud is convicted and executed. Bertrande, too, is suspected of conspiring with the accused, but the court ultimately exonerates her.

There are twists and turns in this story that even Hollywood could not have made up. But one secret remains that Bertrande de Rols took to her grave: did she know that her ‘husband’ was actually an impostor? Although we can never be certain, Natalie Zemon Davis, analyzing the evidence, suggests the answer was — yes. Why, then, did Bertrande not reveal her doubts to the family, the villagers, the priest? To live, and sleep, with a man other than her husband would have been a grave sin. Did Bertrande not fear for her soul?

In Bertrande, Davis sees a glimmer of a remarkable agency. Here was a peasant girl ready to reshape her life in a way that would please her and her alone. Here was a young woman who would make a marriage to suit her own needs rather than those of her family and the village. Her marriage at the age of 14 had been arranged, like almost all marriages of the time. As a girl, she’d had no choice but to marry the teenaged Martin Guerre. Bertrande liked the new man ‘Martin’ had become. And she wanted him to stay.

By not disclosing the impostor Arnaud du Tilh, Bertrande de Rols took her marriage into her own hands. As soon as she realized this older ‘Martin Guerre’ was not the man she thought he was, Bertrande was faced with a dilemma.

By saying nothing, she chose.

At least, that is the conclusion to which Davis gently leads us. Davis has the lightest of touches as a historian, just nudging us where she wants us to go. There are no letters or memoirs to let us into Bertrande’s head and heart; Bertrande could scarcely write her name. We know only what she told the examiners at the trial, and what her friends and neighbors said, what her life looked like before Martin departed and how it appeared after he returned.

Still, in Davis’s hands, Bertrande comes alive, a clever woman ready to seize a second chance at a good life.

I have more to say about Bertrande de Rols. Stay tuned for Part 2.

It was a pleasure to reread The Return of Martin Guerre as I was writing this piece for WSJ. I had read it long ago, in graduate school. Along with A World Lit only by Fire (1992), by William Manchester, Martin Guerre introduced me to early modern Europe and made me fall in love with the period. But whereas William Manchester wrote big, sweeping history, Natalie Zemon Davis focused on the smaller incidents and details, and asked big questions of them.

In the story of Bertrande, there are powerful forces at play: the clash of cultures that accompanies migration, wars between kingdoms with imperial ambitions, the shifting of religion with the ascendancy of the Reformation. Yet, Davis never lets us forget that Martin Guerre is the story of one woman living at the edge of the kingdom, a woman only vaguely aware of the way these forces shaped her life. Her worldview was limited to her village; she wished only to make the best life she could for herself, on her own terms — and that, as Davis shows us, is as riveting as any sweeping history.

Natalie Davis died just over a week ago, on October 21. She was 94. The legacy she leaves for generations of scholars is hard to quantify. I think it’s fair to say she changed the discipline of history and literary history. There have been numerous tributes made to Professor Davis, and a particularly beautiful one by David A. Bell. Bell remembered witnessing, as a graduate student at Princeton, a gathering of great historians, including Davis, in which colleagues (all men) commented on one of her drafts:

“What I remember most vividly was the comment from [Lawrence] Stone, a great historian of early modern England. He said that reading Natalie Davis’s work was like seeing fire arrows shot into a dark cave, illuminating the sides as they flew by. He didn’t mean it entirely as a compliment. Stone always liked strong theses; the more combative, the better. But it struck me as very apt. Natalie Davis’s work was nothing if not an illumination.”²

And Natalie Zemon Davis especially illuminated the way for generations of female scholars. She illuminated the lives of ordinary women from hundreds of years ago, buried in the archives. She showed us how to find them, how to recover their lives and voices. She taught us that their stories mattered too.

1. Davis was a consultant on the film, then published the book the following year. The movie holds up. I watched it again recently with my kids and they were riveted.

2. David A. Bell “Natalie Zemon Davis, 1928-2023.” French Reflections (davidabell.substack.com).