Sybille: Life, Love, & Art in the Face of Absolute Power

by Marion Meade

Overview

A holy war is sweeping France, razing cities and destroying the peaceful lives of those considered heretics.

Sybille d’Astarac, born to pampered luxury, is a gifted female troubadour. But her poems grow dark as the Catholic crusade seeks to eradicate her sect. In the face of massacre, can Sybille survive the Inquisition? Will her love songs?

A work of stunning historical fiction, Sybille displays Marion Meade's pitch‑perfect understanding of strong women facing the harsh realities of life in medieval times. As Robin Morgan, author of The Anatomy of Freedom, writes, this book is “an inspiration for women and an illumination for all readers.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781497639003
Publisher:	Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Publication date:	09/02/2014
Pages:	514
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Marion Meade studied at Northwestern University in Illinois and later received a master’s from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She worked as a freelance writer and her articles have appeared in leading magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, McCall’s, the Village Voice, Ms. Magazine, and Cosmopolitan. Meade has written novels, biographies, and nonfiction books. Bitching was a significant contribution to the second phase of development in the feminist movement. She has written biographies of Victoria Woodhull (Free Woman), Eleanor of Aquitaine, Madame Blavatsky, Buster Keaton (Cut to the Chase), Woody Allen (The Unruly Life of Woody Allen), and Dorothy Parker (What Fresh Hell Is This?). She has published two historical novels: Sybille, which narrates the life of a woman troubadour in thirteenth century southern France, during Europe’s first great holocaust, the Albigensian crusade; and Stealing Heaven, The Love Story of Heloise and Abelard. She lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Sybille

Life, Love, & Art in the Face of Absolute Power

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By Marion Meade

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 2011 Marion Meade
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-0220-5

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CHAPTER 1

"Stop jabbering, child. You're giving me an earache."

The small girl halted midsentence and clamped her lips. Her eyes closed, and she began to rock unsteadily from side to side, each swing of her body releasing a cataract of restlessness.

"Sybille." Again the silken voice sighed. "Please try to be still for once."

She struggled to hold back her tears and cast a wounded gaze down at the marble tiles, then up at the tapestry showing the Resurrection. When deprived of all other alternatives, she could express mood with her chin: chin defiant, chin meditative, although the latter was rarely to be seen. Now she muscled an apologetic chin, as if to say, "Forgive me, Lady Mother." But Douce d'Astarac's attention had moved on already.

Some hours earlier the child had tottered into her mother's bedchamber and planted herself, belly down. It was cool and sweet there on the rug. She lay still and watched the cat sleeping. Soon the door would open and her mother would glide in on waves of lavender. At her heels would tramp a servingwoman, arms lumped with bundles, the harvest of a morning's shopping in the bazaars of Rue de la Pourpointerie. "No need to visit Damascus or Constantinople," Douce would say. "The best comes to Toulouse." Douce knew about the best.

The bells of Saint-Sernin signaled noon. Within the child's head there was a silence ticking. After a while she began to hear sounds, not real words but a pulse that seemed more solid to her than words. Fast- slow, fast-slow. There was almost a kind of trot to them, she discovered. Forgetting her mother's absence, she played with the silence, with the sounds that were not yet words, and then at last with the words themselves. She thought:

Think of a word to go with ardit:

Valiant.

Maybe strong and valiant.

One Gawain

Two brave Charlemagnes

Three valiant courtly Tristrams.

A Roland

A Roland

A Roland calling Olivier.

Ardit e poissan.

Ai!

Then, quite excited, she added a dragon. Very large, very ugly, and he breathed fire. But when she tried saying that line aloud, it was too long and she ran out of breath. The sounds inside her head did not match those on her tongue, alas. And then Douce returned, and the child rattled out her poem, which grew longer and more meaningless until she found herself yawing in a labyrinth of words. At last her mother had silenced her.

From her place on the floor, Sybille could see nothing but her mother's feet. The rest of her had vanished among the cushions on the big featherbed. The servingwoman took away Douce's gloves and alms purse; she returned to tug off the riding boots, which she replaced with a pair of brocade slippers.

Precious objects abounded in her mother's room. Sybille knew each one of them: the priedieu with its crucifix of gilded brass in which the figure of Christ had been inlaid, the crystal scent boxes with their lids of gold and rubies, the chased goblet made by a goldsmith monk of Limoges. Nearby hung the cittern, its wood spangled by bars of sunlight. Every object was extraordinary. Like my mama, Sybille thought.

"Wine, Na Douce?" the servant was murmuring.

"Please."

Familiar sounds moved like psalms above Sybille's head. She could hear the tinkle of the goblet, the swooshing of ostrich feathers as the woman fanned her mistress.

"Mama," Sybille called out hoarsely. "May I come up?"

"Don't be silly. When did I ever say you couldn't? You won't believe the splendid things I found."

With a running leap she catapulted herself onto the bed and plopped headfirst into a cave of grass-green silk. The bed was mounded with silks, brocades, and taffetas in shades that would shame a rainbow. Her mother held up the green cloth. "From Persia," she crowed. Along its edges shimmered bands of gold embroidery, worked with violet silk into a vine pattern of nightingales and griffins. Douce had never heard of the word "simplicity"; but then nobody had ever brought it to her attention.

"Was it costly?"

Douce shrugged her shoulders. "Costly? Everything is costly. Look at this one." She unfurled a length of white samite interwoven with gold and silver threads. "From the shores of the Nile. Or so that pig of a Genoan told me."

Beside her, Sybille leaned on one elbow. She had discovered a bag of crystal buttons and began lining them in rows.

"Now tell me what my baby did today," Douce said, yawning.

"I'm not a baby."

"Nonsense." Douce pinned her down until she shrieked with laughter, and then she moistened her mouth and neck with splinters of little kisses. "My fat little girl." A hailstorm of buttons rattled to the floor. "My baby cake, sweet as new butter."

"Mama, stop!" She squealed and thrashed her legs, full of pleasure. "It tickles." After a while Douce tired of the game, and Sybille butted gently against her side, breathing in the fragrance of lavender. I want to stay here all day, she thought. Seconds later she was bouncing on her knees. "I made a poem while you were gone."

"Very nice. Make another tomorrow."

"But Mama, don't you remember? It displeased you."

"What an idea. It was charming. But Sybille, my dear, it rambled a bit. Verse must be tidy and fall sweetly upon the ear."

Sybille opened her mouth to offer excuses but grunted instead. The only person who took her compositions seriously was her mother, but then Douce was the only one who mattered anyway. She was acknowledged as an authority on poetical literature. Not that she herself wrote, indeed she had difficulty spelling her name, nor did she read. But shortly after the birth of her second son, at a tournament near Albi, she had caught the eye of a famous troubadour, who had composed a three-stanza tribute to her beauty.

This Folquet de Marseille, of course, had honored a score of ladies with similar impromptu ditties, a fact Douce had no trouble ignoring; she had wrapped the manuscript in silk and given it a place of honor on her chest. Occasionally Sybille was allowed to approach this shrine and view the parchment, but never actually to touch it. It made no difference that Folquet had abandoned poetry, and the fashionable ladies who had inspired it, to enter the monastery of Le Thoronet. The honor, bloated by now into the status of family mythology, could not be disputed.

That Douce would bother to discuss poetry with a child never ceased to amaze and thrill Sybille. "When I grow up," she told her mother, "I'll be a troubadour and write cansos like La Comtessa de Dia."

"Trobairitz," Douce corrected her. "Not troubadour. Use the feminine. Now, what was I just saying? Oh, yes. The last words of lines must rhyme. I think I've mentioned that. Surely I said that before. Rhyme your lines."

"I know."

"It's the sounds of the words that matter. And don't forget adjectives. You want plenty of adjectives."

"God's teeth," Sybille broke in loudly. "You told me."

"Shh. Don't shout in my ear." She turned her head away and closed her eyes. "A love song without adjectives is like a sky without stars."

Sybille said quietly, like an adult, "But I don't like adjectives."

"Of course you do," Douce insisted. Her voice washed out to a mumble.

"They're stupid." To tell the truth, she was angry because she had more or less forgotten what an adjective was. From somewhere below came a racket of high-pitched voices and then the cook, shouting. Her brothers must have thieved something from the oven. Sybille studied her mother's face. "Mama?"

Just when she decided her mother was asleep, Douce murmured, "I bought you something. In my purse."

Sybille jiggled down and went to find the purse. There were a few coins and a length of pale-blue ribbon embroidered with seed pearls the color of clouds. She turned to the bed and said politely, "Mama, thank you." She couldn't help thinking the ribbon was pretty but not the nicest she had ever seen. No matter what God or Douce gave her, she always wanted more.

She lingered on the floor, feeling the smoothness of the pearls with her fingertips, until her sister came and took her down to the courtyard. It was hot and noisy, the sun hobbling high up in the sky like a double-yolked egg. They stopped in a vein of shade under the wall where the cobbles were coolest, and sat with their legs stretched out as stiff as sticks. Sybille thought her sister might feel bad because their lady mother had brought her nothing, but her sister said she did not care, truly, about ribbons. She had a box of them. Sybille knew that was true.

"Fabrisse."

Her sister was watching their brothers chip at each other's shoulders with wooden swords.

"Listen to my canso." She hunched up her knees and spread the ribbon across them. "It's about a frightful battle up in the mountains. This brave knight has a magic sword. He and his friend kill a whole bunch of infidels at Roncevaux. All by themselves."

Fabrisse rolled up her eyes.

"Listen, they both die at the end. Isn't that wonderful?"

"I've heard it." Fabrisse smiled in her superior way. "It's called Chanson de Roland."

That was true. "No," she said stubbornly. "I made it up this morning, so help me God."

"Hush," Fabrisse said. "It's wicked to tell lies."

She searched for a persuasive detail. "They chopped off everybody's heads. A hundred thousand bloody heads."

"Disgusting."

"Why won't you believe me? Why?" She laced grimy fingers around the ribbon. 'There was so much blood it ran down the sides of the mountain and drowned a whole village. I swear it." She smiled, delighted with herself.

"You really are revolting." Fabrisse grimaced. "If I were you, I'd make a song about something beautiful."

But you're not me, Sybille thought. Out loud, she said, "Like what?" Half turning, she tried to lock her arm through Fabrisse's.

Her sister wrenched away. "Look," she said, jerking her arm toward the corner of the yard. "There."

Blinking, Sybille followed the direction of Fabrisse's arm. All she could see was the sunlight lifting out of a rosebush. They were only flowers. "A rose is nothing," she protested.

She fell silent then, picking at the pearls with her thumbnail. Across the yard Pierre and Mathieu sprawled under an olive tree. They looked sweaty and out of breath. She tried to imagine her brothers with their heads chopped off and shivered. She thought of petals of every rose on every bush in the world, petals without number bleeding into the earth; of every woman and every man who had breathed, or would breathe, and then had stopped breathing. She began to cry, because living was ugly and beautiful, because each thing lived only to die, because she would die. It was the one promise never broken.

She squeezed shut her eyes and asked Our Lady to make her a good person, like Fabrisse. For several minutes she sat there praying in the fiery blear behind her eyelids, before her chin thumped on her chest and the blue ribbon slipped down into a muddy crack between two cobblestones. She pretended to be asleep until she slept.

This day, in the spring of 1198, would remain her earliest memory. Later, when all those voices were stilled forever, she would sift her recollections in bursts of frustration. Surely her beginnings were marked by something more consequential than hair ribbons and squabbles with Fabrisse; events of importance must have taken place, if only she could remember them. But time had scrubbed memory clean, the way a tearing stream grinds smooth a boulder. It would eventually occur to her that the days of her childhood had been stained by a sameness and that this absence of turbulence was what is called peace.

Before the beginning of the new century Sybille had never known any other life existed but the one she was living. The Astarac mansion behind Saint-Sernin square, in the faubourg of Toulouse, had been built of the same ruddy-red brick as the city walls and was undeniably impressive. True, it was not quite as large as the neighboring Maurand house, which, before Sybille's birth, had had a fortified tower on its roof. But things had gotten hot between Pierre Maurand and the Church, and he had been forced to remove the tower. In any case, the fortifications had been nothing but a conceit, and a rather silly one at that. When had a burgher's home been in danger of a siege?

Sybille's father was not a native Toulousan. His youth had been spent on his father's lands in Astarac, or at the smaller but more comfortable castle inherited by his mother in the district of Fanjeaux. There was other ancestral property as well: villages and vineyards and fields, acre upon acre planted with grape and olive, all scattered piecemeal within a fifteen-league radius of the city, but these holdings held small interest for William d'Astarac. Twice each year, at Candlemas and Michaelmas, he toured his lands, more from a sense of duty than necessity, and every summer he escorted his family to the castle at Fanjeaux.

This annual exodus to Cantal had its practical side, for William was above all a practical man. It gave a good deal of pleasure to his aging mother, it excited his sons, who spent their every waking moment on horseback; and it offered an opportunity to have the house in Rue St. Bernard whitewashed. As for himself, William d'Astarac bore his ennui with rural life as best he could and hurried back to the city well before the first frost. He was a burgher, he said proudly. Not a farmer. Three times he had been appointed a consul, and even now it was politics and his precious library of leatherbound books that occupied his time. These two activities were, he always said, the only suitable occupations for a civilized man, and he could be very testy with anyone who disagreed.

The Astaracs were Catholics. But Sybille's grandmother had abandoned the old faith. She had become intrigued, almost obsessed, by new ideas, new ways of thinking about God that seemed closer to the original teachings of Jesus. The adherents of the new faith were known as Cathars, or "the others," but they referred to themselves as "the Good Christians." How these unorthodoxies had traveled over twelve centuries from Nazareth to southern Europe was not particularly clear. In those days the southerners never thought to question where an idea had come from. It was interesting, or it was not. If it possessed beauty and charm, so much the better. Many of them accepted the two gods of the heretical Good Christians. Just as many did not. There was little competition between the two faiths. Both were careful to respect, both were careful to tolerate each other because to do otherwise would have been discourteous.

Sybille could not remember a time when her family had not been powerful, when people as far distant as Avignon had not been honored to receive invitations to their banquets. The Astarac reputation for hospitality was legendary. In the courtyard torches would smoke fitfully, thrusting aside the darkness; the chandeliers in the great hall cast coppery nimbi upon white tablecloths and whiter bosoms. Pages would strut between kitchen and hall parading roast peacocks whose iridescent feathers had been reattached. Later, once Count Raymond had appeared, the dais would be commandeered by jongleurs and vielle players, the drone of their songs washing across the rooftops. Even the priests of Saint-Sernin, people said, interrupted their chess games to hum a canso. Sometimes a troubadour would come to perform his work for the assembled ladies and lords and depart in the gathering dawn with a stallion for his night's work.

This was the way it had always been for the Astaracs. There was no reason to imagine it would change.

"Is there a reason we're attending this thing?" William d'Astarac asked his mother. "I mean, a good reason."

Na Beatritz squeezed out a crusty smile to show his grumbling was not being taken seriously. "For the good of your soul, my dear boy. Though I don't suppose you would call that a sufficiently good reason."

"Lady Mother," he rumbled, "we are not of one mind in this matter."

It was the Sunday morning before St. John's Day. The family was on its way to Montreal, to a meadow just outside the town walls, where representatives of the rival faiths were going to have a debate. There were many of these occasions in the summer. People enjoyed listening—it was good entertainment—but they also had an opportunity to socialize with their friends. Directly behind William and Beatritz, Sybille jogged along on her white mare, listening to them bicker and scratching the mosquito bites on her neck. By now the sun was up and pumping down June heat on the olive groves and almost frying the rose-tiled roofs of the manor houses.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Sybille by Marion Meade. Copyright © 2011 Marion Meade. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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