After the February killings of the marshals, the new governor of Paris Étienne Marcel was having trouble finding supplies in a city suffering from scarcity, using its last resources to fortify the walls against the imminent retaliation of the Dauphin, who ordered his allies to confiscate all property from their lands and raised taxation to his subjects, causing more harm and rampage than the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War combined.
That cold and rainy spring, the peasants rose in revolt, unable to support their families anymore once all the resources were depleted, disrupting or losing in this way trade routes, because of unreliability and danger of passing through conflict zones, and assaulting the castles out of sheer desperation and burning them, after hung, drawn and quartered their feudal masters.
In parallel, Charles of Navarre expanded his influence along the south bank of the river Seine and around Paris after reclaiming his county of Évraux in Lower Normandy. He harbored aspirations for negotiations with King Edward III of England, who had captive in the Tower of London the French king Jean le Bon expecting a large ransom.
The jongleur Henri Guiot left Paris in order to gain ground and watch the sea with his own eyes before dying, where he hoped in vain to escape the brutal hornet’s nest that both contenders for the throne had created to the delight of the English side, whose troops had been quartered on standby to the north, west, and south of the ancient kingdom.
Hence, it was no easy feat for an unarmed and isolated man to reach the north, especially amidst rampant plundering, when the worth of human life was unnoticeable.
His adventurer spirit vanished as soon as hunger struck and left him dizzy, living off berries and watercress. He stayed out of the road and went into the woods to avoid being targeted by the soulless bands of robbers, which used to skin his victims alive by pure evil, throwing himself under thorny bushes to sleep during the day; marching at night became quite difficult. Only when he walked through a meadow or a clearing could find the lodestar, but those were counted occasions.
One night he heard a commotion, screams, and horses’ clip-clop, and then nothing. As if silence overwhelmed the interior of the forest in the wee hours, apart from the hubbub of the birds in rut; he thought he had a fever, walking in the darkness searching for the nearby river to cool off. At the bank, he undressed, touching his armpits and groin, afraid that he had contracted the plague.
While plunging in the water, he closed his eyes and tried to settle down remembering a pleasant moment that would stay in his memory. He tried to cheer himself up in vain, but it was pointless. All of a sudden, he was really frightened when something soft touched his back, the stinking corpse of a naked red-haired little girl. He climbed out of the water as best he could, stumbling and hurting badly his shin with a rock, while he saw the sad spoil slide down the stream. Who could have thrown her into the river without giving her a proper burial? He finally got angry with himself for such cowardice and dove in to reach her. Being kind was like a profound revelation after his endless struggles. He took her in his arms without caring too much about her buboes.
Then, as they emerged from the water, a gang of mercenaries mounted on stamping black horses and holding blinding torches appeared by magic. The horses recoiled at the stench rearing out of control, despite the efforts of the riders to make them ford the stream. The mercenaries shouted at him to move away and give way to them. But Guiot had found in that red-haired girl a sort of talisman and ignored them as if he were deaf while he continued to hold her in his arms.
She was so light! She shouldn’t have even six years, perhaps. He thought he was going to die and meekly closed his eyes waiting for a fatal blow coming from those brutes. But it was not so because the captain of the mercenaries gave a shriek of rage and ordered his men to ford the stream below, avoiding the lone jongleur and the corpse.
He buried the kid with rolling stones. And then he walked away and dove again into the river to clean himself, convinced he was already sick, while he sang at the top of his lungs an improvised ballad, expecting that brought about some courage to his erratic existence. Like he saw many times in a glimpse of women doing laundry in the bank.
“How many words are born from the heart, how many words never reach my mouth, how many words are lost forever in sighs, how many words I raise with my thought to the darkness like this prayer, how many and so many words make their way back to the heart.”
And for the first time since he left Paris, once he stopped shivering and dried out, he was inspired enough to play a woodwind instrument that a sly Armenian merchant traded for his good old gittern, which was too cumbersome and fragile for inclement weather. The merchant confided to him in a noisy Parisian tavern that the duduk was in fact the oldest musical instrument ever known–probably two thousand year old–and the jongleur thought until that moment he had been ripped off like an idiot. Because of the droning tonality, murmuring like a migratory call, and less festive than his gittern that had given to his lewd audience so much joy. But that night, panicking with the proximity of his demise and so close to the legendary mirror of the sea that he imagined smelling it for a little while, he found in the Armenian duduk a genuine extension of himself, and on its soothing sounds, a balm for the sorrows of the soul.
They say the chant is somewhat a distant echo disappearing among an elm groove, and always remains suspended in the air like the unbounded memory of the wind or a sudden rattle of leaves announcing a storm. The jongleur’s chant became closer to the divine grace everyone wanted so badly and nobody found it yet. Nothing seemed to disturb him after that new sunrise came. Hunger and need, fear and horror, death and oblivion. Everything seemed to fade in the flow of time and life as a fleeting episode.
