Imaginary LIves by Marcel Schwob

Author:Marcel Schwob [Schwob, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781908694362
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Published: 2012-08-03T22:00:00+00:00

NICOLAS LOYSELEUR

Judge

Born on Ascension Day, he was dedicated to the Virgin, whose aid he invoked at all times during his life until he could not hear her name without his eyes filling with tears. He was first schooled by a lean man in a little loft on the rue Saint Jacques, where, after learning his psalms, donats and penitences with three other children, he laboriously acquired the logic of Okam. He soon became bachelor and master of the arts, for the venerable instructors found his gentle nature charmingly unctuous, as sweet words of adoration slipped easily from his fat lips. No sooner had he obtained his baccalaureate than the Church had its eye on him.

He served first in the diocese of the Bishop of Beauvais who recognized his talent, using it to inform the English before Chartres how certain French captains were deploying.

When he was about thirty-five years old they made him a canon of the Cathedral of Rouen, where he struck up a friendship with another canon and chorister, Jean Bruillot, with whom he psalmed fine litanies in honor of Mary.

Now and again he saw fit to remonstrate with Nicole Coppequesne, one of the monks of his chapel, taking that brother gently to task for his unseemly devotion to Saint Anastasia. Transported at the thought of a clever girl so beguiling a Roman magistrate, Nicole Coppequesne had a habit of carrying his ecstasies to the kitchen, flinging himself upon the pots and pans until his ardent embraces left him black in the face and smudgy as a demon. But Nicolas Loyseleur showed Nicole Coppequesne how much brighter was the power and the glory of Mary when she chose to resuscitate a drowned friar – a lewd friar surely, whose only salvation lay in his reverence to the Virgin. One night as Nicole Coppequesne left his cell bent on celebrating one of his odious kitchen orgies, his course led him past the altar of the Blessed Lady, where he paused perforce in pious genuflection. And that night his lubricity was drowned in the river.

The evil spirits who threw him in did not return to rescue him, but when the monks hauled his body out of the water the following day he opened his eyes after a time, revived by the grace of Mary. “Ah, what a choice remedy is such devotion!” breathed canon Nicolas Loyseleur. “How venerable, Coppequesne, and how discreet. Surely from this day you will renounce your Anastasia!”

When the Bishop of Beauvais opened the trial against Jeanne la Lorraine at Rouen, the graceful persuasiveness of Nicolas Loyseleur was not forgotten. Dressed as a layman, his shaven pate covered by a hood, Nicolas entered the small circular cell under the staircase where the prisoner was confined.

“Jeannette,” he began, drawing back well into the shadows, “Sainte Katherine has sent me to you, Jeannette.”

“And you,” said Jeanne, “in God’s name who are you?”

“I am a poor cobbler from Greu,” Nicolas replied. “Alas for our unhappy country! The ‘Godons’ have taken me, too, my girl.

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