The Wife of Martin Guerre. Janet Lewis
morning, and for the periods of quiet introspection that meant she would sometimes go for many years without publishing new work, only to pick up again in startling new directions, be it in writing opera libretti (she wrote six, including adaptations of her own Wife of Martin Guerre and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans), or in poems quite different from the Imagist work with which she began her career.
Her disarming modesty, about her own character as well as her writing, is the most constant theme in interviews and profiles. This exchange, in the Southern Review, is characteristic:
Interviewers: Many writers and critics—Evan Connell and Donald Davie, to name a couple—admire your work greatly. Yet, you are not widely known. What is your reaction to this?
Lewis: I think I’ve had as much recognition as I need and probably as much as I deserve.11
She stated that her goal in writing her Cases of Circumstantial Evidence was equally modest: to stay as close to the history as possible and to let the characters and the facts speak for themselves. She demonstrated a similar sense of duty to her husband, the man who gave her the book that made these novels possible. For the thirty years that she outlived him, she kept their home in Los Altos much the way that it had been when he was alive, with his name on the mailbox and his writing shed maintained as if he might return, any moment, to use it.
It would have been impossible to predict the success of this modest professor’s daughter, born at the very end of the nineteenth century. But her first poem in Poetry, which appeared at the height of modernism and when she was only twenty years old, seems to anticipate both her long life and the way her work stands on its own, just outside the literary canon. She writes,
I have lived so long
On the cold hills alone . . .
I loved the rock
And the lean pine trees,
Hated the life in the turfy meadow,
Hated the heavy, sensuous bees.
I have lived so long
Under the high monotony of starry skies,
I am so cased about
With the clean wind and the cold nights,
People will not let me in
To their warm gardens
Full of bees.
Swallow Press is honored to be the bearer of Lewis’s literary legacy, not just the three great novels but her collection of short stories and her books of poems—a lifetime of close witness to the public and the private, and a deep appreciation for the human condition.
Kevin Haworth
Executive Editor
Swallow Press
Foreword for the First Swallow Press Edition
I first came upon the story of the wife of Martin Guerre in a collection called Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence. This volume contained, together with an essay, The Theory of Presumptive Proof, by Samuel March Phillips (1780–1862) (who in 1814 with the publication of his book Phillips on Evidence superseded Chief Baron Gilbert as an authority on the English law of evidence), many historic accounts of the failure of justice because of undue reliance on circumstantial evidence. Some of the cases presented occurred after the death of Phillips, and there is no way of knowing who recorded them, or from what sources. The trial of Martin Guerre, however, is described and discussed by the famous French jurist, Estienne Pasquier (1529–1615), in his extraordinary and encyclopedic work, Les Recherches de la France. Pasquier says: Maître Jean Corras, grand Jurisconsulte, qui fût rapporteur du procès, nous en representa l’histoire par escrit, avec commentaires pour l’embellir de poincts de droict. (Master Jean Corras, great jurist, who was the recorder for the trial, has presented us with the written story, with commentaries to embellish it in points of law.) It is reasonably certain that whoever wrote the story for the Famous Cases had recourse to the work of Maître Corras. It is said that Corras later became a famous judge, and that he was hanged in his scarlet robes after the massacre of St. Bartholomew in the excitement which spread from Paris to the provinces, and which died away only in October of that year, 1572, almost twelve years to a day after the execution of Arnaud du Tilh. I have been told, also, that Michel de Montaigne refers in one of his essays to the curious case of Martin Guerre, his contemporary. I regret that I cannot cite the number of the essay. Still, between Pasquier, Montaigne, and Maître Jean Corras, we can be sure that such a trial indeed took place; and in retelling the story of Bertrande de Rols I have tried to be as faithful to the historical events as the distances of time and place permit. The account of the trial by Pasquier is briefer than that in the Famous Cases, but contains a few interesting details not given in the latter. He concludes his account by these words: Mais je demanderois volontiers si ce Monsieur Martin Guerre qui s’aigrit si âprement contre sa femme, ne maritoit pas une punition aussi griefve qu’Arnaut Tillier, pour avoir par son absence esté cause de ce mesfait? (But I would willingly ask you if this Monsieur Martin Guerre who became so embittered toward his wife, did not deserve a punishment as severe as that of Arnaud Tillier, for having been by his absence the cause of this wrong-doing?)
J.L.
[1947]
The Wife of Martin Guerre
I. Artigues
One morning in January, 1539, a wedding was celebrated in the village of Artigues. That night the two children who had been espoused to one another lay in bed in the house of the groom’s father. They were Bertrande de Rols, aged eleven years, and Martin Guerre, who was no older, both offspring of rich peasant families as ancient, as feudal and as proud as any of the great seignorial houses of Gascony. The room was cold. Outside the snow lay thinly over the stony ground, or, gathered into long shallow drifts at the corners of houses, left the earth bare. But higher, it extended upward in great sheets and dunes, mantling the ridges and choking the wooded valleys, toward the peak of La Bacanère and the long ridge of Le Burat, and to the south, beyond the long valley of Luchon, the granite Maladetta stood sheathed in ice and snow. The passes to Spain were buried under whiteness. The Pyrenees had become for the winter season an impassable wall. Those Spaniards who were in French territory after the first heavy snowfall in September, remained there, and those Frenchmen, smugglers or soldiers or simple travelers who found themselves on the wrong side of the Port de Venasque were doomed to remain there until spring. Sheep in fold, cattle in the grange, faggots heaped high against the wall of the farm, the mountain villages were closed in enforced idleness and isolation. It was a season of leisure in which weddings might well be celebrated.
Bertrande had not spoken to Martin in all her life until that morning, although she had often seen him; indeed she had not known until the evening before that a marriage had been arranged. That morning she had knelt with Martin before his father and then had walked with him across the snow, dressed bravely in a new red cape and attended by many friends and relatives and by the sound of violins, to the church of Artigues where the marriage ceremony had been completed. She had found it quite as serious an affair as first communion.
Afterwards, still to the music of the violins, which sounded thin and sharp in the cold air, she had returned to the house of her husband where a huge fire of oak logs garnished with vine-trimmings roared in the big fireplace, and where the kitchen, the principal room of the house, was set with improvised tables, long boards laid over trestles. The stone floor had been freshly strewn with broken boughs of evergreen. The sides and bottoms of the copper pans flashed redly with the reflection of the flames, and the air was rich with the good smell of roasting meat and of freshly poured wine. Underfoot the snow from the sabots melted and sank beneath the trodden evergreens. A smell of humanity and of steaming wool mingled with the odors of the food, and the room was incredibly noisy with conversation.
It was a gay, an important event. Everyone was intensely jubilant, but the small bride received very little attention. After the first embraces and compliments, she sat beside her mother at the long table and ate the food which her mother served her from the big platters. Now and again she felt her mother’s arm steal warmly about