Looking for Bertrande de Rols, Part 2
Some thoughts on Janet Lewis's novella 'The Wife of Martin Guerre'
Hello friends, I hope November is treating you kindly.
Last post, I wrote about the passing of Natalie Zemon Davis and about her classic microhistory, The Return of Martin Guerre. If you missed that post, you can find it here along with a quick summary of the plot. If you don’t already know the history of the sixteenth-century Bertrande de Rols, her husband Martin Guerre, and the impostor Arnaud du Tilh who impersonated Martin for years, you might want to check it out before reading on.
Returning to Davis’ Martin Guerre decades after first reading it, I was filled with nostalgia for my early graduate school days — days when I was first learning to read for real, and when I didn’t really know what I was doing as a scholar (for the record, often I still don’t). I was studying comparative literature. For me, that meant thinking through the relationship between history and literature of all kinds, but especially poetry and narrative. Deciding to pursue comparative literature had been fraught — I almost enrolled in a doctoral program in history instead. But I was too in love with literature and thought that, perhaps, comp lit could help me navigate and weave together the two disciplines. That is what Davis’s Martin Guerre achieved. Davis never departed from the evidence she found in the archives. But she allowed herself to speculate and invited the reader to do the same. And she had a deep understanding of story.
Recently, Davis’s Martin Guerre has given me the opportunity to explore something new. A few weeks ago, I received a message from a reader suggesting I take a look at Janet Lewis’s 1941 novella, The Wife of Martin Guerre. I knew the book but had never read it.1
The woman who wrote me wasn’t quite sure how to define the genre of Lewis’s book, and I understand why. Lewis was a poet and novelist who worked carefully with her primary sources. In The Wife of Martin Guerre, she hews closely to the facts we know from the historical records, and especially from the trial of Arnaud du Tilh. Lewis’s prose is clean and crisp, yet spare. A reader could be forgiven for thinking that this is engaging history.
But Lewis’s book is a novella. It delves deep into the character of Bertrande de Rols; Lewis lets us into her head in a way that pure history cannot. Her story is fiction not history, but it is the best kind of historical fiction — the kind that makes you see the history in an entirely new light.
There are limits to what an archive can tell us about anyone living in the distant past, and particularly about a French peasant woman from a small village at the edge of the kingdom. What did Bertrande de Rols really know about Arnaud du Tilh? When, exactly, did she figure out the truth about that man who returned to her after an eight-year absence, claiming to be her husband “Martin Guerre”? When was the moment of discovery? The legal case cannot answer these questions although there are hints. Davis tells us that Bertrande harbored suspicions from the moment she first laid eyes on the man claiming to be “Martin Guerre,” although, soon, those doubts seemed to dissipate. He knew intimate details of their life together, enough to draw her in.
“When she saw him…she recoiled in surprise. Not until he had spoken to her affectionately, reminding her of things they had done and talked about, specifically mentioning the white hosen in the trunk [which she had made for him], did she fall upon his neck and kiss him; it was his beard that had made him hard to recognize.”2
But perhaps those doubts weren’t so fleeting. Perhaps Bertrande understood from the first that this new man was an impostor. The calculation, then, was not whether or not she should be suspicious or whether she should denounce him. The question was whether she should seize upon this man’s arrival as the chance to build a new life.
Davis speculates:
The obstinate and honorable Bertrande does not seem a woman so easily fooled, not even by a charmer like [Arnaud du Tilh]. By the time she had received him in her bed, she must have realized the difference; as any wife of Artigat would have agreed, there is no mistaking ‘The touch of the man on the woman.’ Either by explicit or tacit agreement, she helped him become her husband. What Bertrande had with the new Martin was her dream come true, a man she could live with in peace and friendship (to cite sixteenth-century values) and in passion.” (44)
For the space of a few blissful years, Bertrande lived out that dream. At least according to Davis’s telling.
Janet Lewis’s Wife of Martin Guerre, however, spins a much darker tale. That one moment of doubt becomes the engine for her story. Like in Davis’s telling, Lewis’s Bertrande doesn’t recognize the newly returned Martin. She hesitates. He is familiar and yet, at the same time, a stranger. Fiction allows Lewis to pause and explore Bertrande’s uncertainty.
“The beard was strange, being rough and thick, but above it the eyes were like those of Martin, the forehead, the whole cast of the countenance, like and unlike to Bertrande’s startled recognition, and as he advanced from the shadow he seemed to Bertrande a stranger, the stranger of the wooded pathway, then her loved husband, then a man who might have been Martin’s ancestor but not young Martin Guerre.”3
She is soon reassured by this new man’s kindness, by the enthusiastic reception of the villagers. And yet, the doubt that Bertrande has buried deep does not disappear entirely. It hides in her subconscience, then sneaks up on her again as Martin settles back into the village life and the marriage bed. It begins to surge just after she becomes pregnant with their child.
“At the end of a few months Bertrande found herself with child. She rejoiced thereat, and she also trembled, for at times a curious fear assailed her, a fear so terrible and unnatural that she hardly dared acknowledge it in her most secret heart. What if Martin, the roughly bearded stranger, were not the true Martin….? Her sin, if such indeed were a fact, would be most black, for had she not experienced an instinctive warning? On the night of his return, overcome by desire and astonishment, she had trembled in his embrace and murmured again and again:
‘Martin, it is so strange, I cannot believe it to be true.’
To which the bearded traveler had replied:
‘Poor little one, you have been too long alone.’
In the morning her fear had vanished….” (41)
Lewis is a master of her craft. Do you see how she has done it? Bertrande’s doubt does not seize her in a bright flash of realization; it does not announce itself with a clatter or a chiming of bells. Doubt slips quietly again into the narrative, just as it has wormed itself into Bertrande’s conscience, the seeds of suspicion taking root within her like the child she now carries in her belly. And then, like that unborn child, doubt grows, eating Bertrande from within. Despite all the reassurances of her family, of the villagers of Artigat, Bertrande cannot let it go. She loves the new Martin because he answered her prayers: he returned, he treated her well, and responded to her need for passion. But as Bertrande’s doubts multiply, that love begins to fall away, replaced by hatred and spite.
Bertrande knows it is too late. She has sinned irrevocably. She has committed adultery; no regret, no disavowal of Martin, no recourse to law, can save her from eternal damnation. There can be no denial: the proof of her sin is visible to all through the child she carries within her body.
And who is really the culprit here? Is it the trickster Arnaud du Tilh? Janet Lewis was fascinated by characters who refuse to see what is right in front of them, who allow themselves to be drawn into situations from which extrication is all but impossible. Bertrande displaces her rage onto the false “Martin Guerre,” but she is wrestling with her own guilt. For, just like the child in her womb, Bertrande’s predicament is born of them both — Arnaud’s treachery, but also Bertrande’s loneliness, a longing that convinced her to see a husband when the truth of the trickery was apparent to her all along. She recognized him instantly as a stranger, yet doubted her own doubt. She allowed herself to become the dupe of her own desire.
This is a very different Bertrande de Rols than the woman Natalie Zemon Davis gives us. Lewis’s Bertrande is a tormented soul. Is there truth to it? Perhaps. This is the work that historical fiction can do when it is done well, filling in and shading the sparse evidence that remains to us. I see Lewis’s novella not so much as a corrective or alternate version to Davis, but as a complement. They are a pair, fiction and history, each grappling to tell a woman’s story pulled from the archives.
I think to read one and not the other would be missing out. I think you may just have to read them both.
Lewis’s novella was the inspiration for the 1982 film, The Return of Martin Guerre. Davis’s history was published the following year.
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) 42.
Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941; reedition Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 2013) 35.
Ok this sounds like an amazing book. I don’t know that I would have thought so without your close reading (heh) and flagging of those lovely passages.