Of pigs.

Once more, the handsome Persiflage adjusted his outsize codpiece¹ and spoke.

‘Kind ladies, beautiful ladies! Wise gentlemen! Good gentlemen! Allow me to say, kind friends, that as a mercenary I am ever convinced that the common fault of the nations is dishonor among their men.’

‘But you have not answered Madame Ouiser’s questions regarding the disposition of men breaking their word,’ Lady Aquafina said.

Friends are a man’s bread and butter. I don’t use that comparison lightly. Bread and butter are reliable, constant, nourishing. You pay a sou for a loaf², and you pay a denier for a stick of butter, and there is your dinner.

Fools would have you steal it, and tyrants would have you kill for it. But it is easy to obtain and even easier to keep. But, my ladies, it is awfully tempting to consume all at once. And far too many good men throughout the centuries have seen fit to devour their bread and butter—and their honorable intentions—in one fell swoop.

In the time of good King Francis³ of lauded memory, there was a young man named Guillaume (or, as he preferred to be called, William) of Farlane. Farlane does not exist anymore: it was swallowed, much like Atlantis⁴, in one awful day and night of lamentation, by a wave that came out of the sea all of a sudden, in the year 1530.

Boulevardier’s mother, Roxane de Gay, lives near to there, and has told both him and me of what she saw. And I, having seen the place wherein William foolishly set up a raucous camp like the one the Israelites set up at the foot of Mount Sinai⁵, can attest to the utter foolhardiness in such a task.

Everyone’s eyes then turned toward Boulevardier, who cleared his throat and stood:

‘My mother is a Gay, yes—I am not ashamed to say it. She is of the honorable Gays that live close to His Majesty’s château at Fière. I shall say here that we have not spoken to the Huguenots of our family⁶ since His Majesty had them exiled to America.’

Boulevardier sat, and Persiflage went on.

He started his career of vice with some handsome brethren in the Duke of Guise’s retinue⁷. There the boys played at all sorts of cruel and selfish stratagems: cards, wine, portions of food that are too large and salted too heavily, to say nothing of leather boots, ruffs, cuffs⁸, pistols and common girls.

William was the intended favorite of a man named Paul de Gausse, who was furthermore affianced⁹ to the Duke’s less pretty sister. However, you should know that Paul enjoyed the company of young men as well as young women, and it was under this subtle and scandalous coloring that William entered the court.

There, he sated himself on fine wine, food and fruit, danced prettily, and perhaps was a good raconteur¹⁰ of country tales that city folk like to hear from time to time. But Paul would have William in other ways, and William, being craftier than his plain appearance would foretell, distanced himself somewhat.

But it made little difference, as William had now made friends from Paris—the same preening peacocks with pretty names and not much else to show for it. He fell in love, too, which was doubly worse for the beautiful girl who lashed her heart to his. Her name was Praxède Le Brun, and like the ancient martyr she was named for¹¹, she sopped up the spilled blood of his affections even as he traipsed the light fantastic with every common tart in Paris.

But what, dear friends, prohibits a man from entry among notable company, even if he is a good dancer, a good card player, a good lover? His name. His family. His origin. And Farlane, as I have said, was but a poor country town of gentlewomen, stone bluffs, ocean air and fishing nets. Better that he had the fame of St Guénolé, of St They, or of St Judicaël¹² to go with him! Or perhaps, even, that of disappeared Ys¹³, which only rises from the sea when Neptune himself rings its bell.

And when this incongruity was made known to him, his face neither fell, nor was his heart downcast. No, friends. Rather than let humility teach him what the nobility could not, he let vile thoughts into his heart, and then advanced with a conceit more dire than the nuptial banquet of the Lapiths¹⁴.

‘If he had no family name nor fortune with which to add to his name, what was left, therefore, for him to have?’ asked Lady Arbonne.

‘A fair face, a plain-spoken manner, and an honest air. And perhaps a conviction more adamantine¹⁵ than the chains that bound rash Prometheus to Ida’s mount¹⁶.’

‘Who’s Ida?’ Canva said. ‘Is that his horse? Oh, wait—this is one of those clever word thingies that rich people use—let me guess: it’s your horse.’

‘I’ll tell you later, dear Canva,’ Boulevardier said.

‘Why? Persiflage is right here.’

But Persiflage went on.

As the nobles moved on to the mansion of pleasure that is Carnival¹⁷, William was sent home to his mother, who complained of her poverty. It had been a hard winter. The pigs the family had been charged with raising due to a frustrated land claim were simply too numerous to hold onto.

William’s father, Olivier, never intended for him to be a yeoman farmer¹⁸. But he had hoped to prostitute him to a dissipated lord to garner some sinecure, or at least a tax break. Boulevardier’s mother maintains the pigs had no tax value whatsoever. The Church, which was a neighbor, insisted that the pigs stay with her, since she was a widow and they needed the income. Either way, William had no way of making money or righting the claim. So he needed to improvise in order to stay, as he put it, ‘in the game’.

After Pentecost¹⁹, he returned to Paris. He found his friends complaining that the Bishop had taken offense at certain published verses of the poet François Villon²⁰, then in vogue again, and had consequently forbidden their customary entertainments.

The boys went to church at Sainte-Chapelle²¹, and heard a rather enterprising sermon of a local Greyfriar²² regarding the exploits of the Kings of France. William noted that the beautiful regalia of the King were displayed there, as well as the many relics of the martyrs and saints, but wondered why the famous banner he’d carried into battle was not enshrined there.

‘And why not?’ asked Fr Bunion.

‘Because it was lost at Roncevaux²³ by that blockhead Roland when they foolishly decided to run down the Saracens,’ Master Xerox said. ‘An angel rightly took it back to Heaven where it belongs rather than waste it on some idiot mortal attempting to better himself in God’s name.’

‘I’ve heard it’s kept at Saint-Denis²⁴.’

Persiflage shook his head and went on.

After stopping off to speak with a monk at Saint-Commode in Arles-sur-Tech, he found a manuscript in which a Breton saint, St Winnoc²⁵, had been told by St Michael himself that the mother of Charlemagne’s tailor, a lady named Tracy, had sewn the thing in a night and day from a hut overlooking a river island in the Meuse.

But William had to lay this contemplation aside, for he needed money in order to make the claim, as one must. And so, after some thinking, writing and reading, he approached one of his friends, a very silly man named Roch de Houaillart, and said:

‘We ought to found a guild purely for wealthy people.’

This guild was called the Great Order of the Snout. You had to be of a wealthy family or have a wealthy master to form part of it. It had a ruinous pledge²⁶ of eleven hundred écus d’or²⁷ a year, or enough to found a sugar plantation in the Indies. It had no organization and no guild-hall except for a croft²⁸ in the Hôtel de Saint-Fart in Paris, and no viable connection to a saint or to the Church save for the prostitutes occasionally dressed as nuns sent into it. Those foolish enough to pay for it received a medal upon which was conferred the rather paltry privilege of discounts to bear shows, baiting shows, bear-baiting shows²⁹, and oddly enough, ‘bating’ shows.

‘We were not members, I should say,’ Boulevardier then added.

Quite right. Imagine having to tell someone they need to pay to have tickets that you’ve already paid for. Never mind that the clubhouse was in an attic above an inn named for the poorly-named seventh-century Lyonnais martyr who was torn apart by horses because he defended the Virgin Birth.

Needless to say, dear friends, few and far between were the paying members of that guild, whose feast day was quite predictably the Feast of Fools³⁰. Now I ask you in all seriousness: when, if ever, have you been free to do anything in Paris on that date?

Then this happened. After Assumption³¹, William returned to his mother and saw that the pig problem was even worse: the hired hands were all on vacation, the farm was a mess, and his mother was unable to make ends meet. So, on the Feast of St Bartholomew, he sold off some of the pigs to the slaughterer, but as they were being herded out, some got away and escaped into the countryside. William did not think anything serious would come of it, and pocketed the sale proceeds.

But some time later, his mother was visited by the bailiff³², who said that a pig had been seen eating the corn³³ of a nearby neighbor’s field. This being quite illegal, his mother was slapped with a fine by the bailiff, and thereafter he was vilified as an ingrate in Farlane.

Now, my dear friends, I must be careful, as I neither wish to prolong this ridiculously long story nor err in its telling. Therefore bear with me a moment while I gather what I remember.

In the spring of the year 1517, William of Farlane sold the hôtel de Saint-Fart to the Order of Malta³⁴, and took up with his friends on the Rue des Matelots in the Île de la Cité³⁵, in a terribly steep and ill-kept house.

He began promoting the Great Order of the Snout soon thereafter, and soon ladies and gentlemen all over Paris made their pleasance there, with a view to retiring into the nearby gardens of the Poor Clares for more amenable settings.

The house had been mortgaged up to its eaves, but William told no one of this. To inflame matters further, people came to him, saying that they’d paid great sums to be inducted into the Great Order of the Snout, but had not been awarded the decoration of the Order. The membership packet William prepared omitted the fact that induction required a priest to say a Mass of the Holy Spirit³⁶ with a host made of the ashes of an aborted babe. He thought, oddly enough, that this would turn away people.

Then the creditors came to account. He told them all that he had sold the guild and all its goods to his friends. But he had not, and in fact was still selling guild memberships at an exorbitant price. He kept the proceeds from the sale all to himself.

William founded several more guilds to elude the authorities. One of them was the Guild of the Bone, founded in the Rue de la Pute-y-Musse, and another, the Guild of the Fat Child, in the Rue Tire-Vit. Again, you had to pay an enormous sum to essentially sit on a low couch in some rented house and pretend people liked you.

After this, some disgrace occurred—either with a real fat child, a dead baby, an offended noble, or a pig—and William had to leave Paris. He went to Flanders. But as he was not a notable person in Flanders, he ended up back in France, and, while lost, found an island in the Meuse³⁷, between Stenay and Dun-sur-Meuse called L’île des Hérons.

William introduced himself to notable persons there. He then returned to Paris, and, while ever under threat of arrest, started promoting plans for a great feast to be held celebrating Flemish and French fineries, with music, dancing, jousting, feasting, hawking, expositions of the Indies, a cavalcade and royal entry³⁸, and pavilions for guests and persons of rank and noble blood.

And he called the fair the Field of the Oriflamme.

To make the fraud complete, he hired on a Paris seamstress, Charlotte de la Jupe, to fashion a replacement Oriflamme. He sent for a goldsmith to gild the carved fleurs-de-lis³⁹ on the staff it was to be on, and some say, he wrote the master craftsmen of Bologna, Florence, Mantua, Verona, Venice, Leghorn and Rome to come and design the pavilions, and offered many scudi to see it done. He bribed a local bishop to create a story that Charlemagne, while camping in Francia, had received the Oriflamme at L’Île des Hérons from the hands of an angel, thus making the place a holy site.

‘And the King?’ asked Oura.

‘He had other things to attend to,’ Persiflage then said.

Josquin des Prez and Johannes Ockeghem⁴⁰ were even invited to write frottole for this fair. Only Josquin wrote back, but withdrew his piece and preserved his honor. Many artists, poets and dancers were also invited from all the neighboring realms. But seeing the remoteness, impracticality, and sheer ludicrousness of the feat, they wisely refrained from attending. The same could not be said for the hundreds of wealthy youths of France and the neighboring realms who prepared to descend on the place as if they were convoking a new Crusade.

William set up a house nearby and rode out every morning to look on it, but no one—least of all the hired craftsmen—thought the situation of the island was amenable for any fine fair. And yet, the young people all thought it the most lovely and perfect thing ever conceived.

How did he promise to pay for all this? He did not. His handsome face and beguiling demeanour and countryish build made him appear trustworthy to his male friends, and utterly irresistible to his female ones.

Bankers in Amsterdam and Antwerp⁴¹ advanced him livres for the fair on the presumption that the modest admission and the commercial opportunities afforded by the Field of the Oriflamme would inflate their coffers. Some, at the risk of being called wet blankets, questioned whether such an event really and truly could be put on. For only royalty, they argued, had the money and manpower to build pavilions and offer stupendous entertainments. But William, who had begun to wear English fineries and ride sable-colored steeds⁴², and boasted that His Majesty might grant him a princeship in Brittany, said he would make it happen anyway.

But Rumor and her children Calumny and Scandal⁴³ accompanied her sisters Fame and Renown to Paris, their townhome of choice, and William’s exploits back in Brittany became known—especially those dealing with his poor mother and his porcine wards.

Sinema’s eyes widened.

‘Dear God—his mother wasn’t—God forbid!—a humanist⁴⁴?’ she said.

If only! Humanism would have been a good thing for William, because it would have taught that men are endowed with reason. And reason, my beautiful shepherd girl, is precisely what this man needed.

The scandal of his mother’s fine and the errant pigs reached his friends in Paris and Praxède Le Brun. He was about to announce his honorable intentions when the scandal broke over their heads, even as the merchants chosen for the Field of the Oriflamme began to harbor doubts about its feasibility.

Then the Church began to grumble. L’Île des Hérons was in the demesne⁴⁵ of the Convent of Saint-Phœbé at Buffay. The cat-loving Bridgettines did not appreciate an island usually reserved as a giant litter box being used as the site of an unofficial joust and world-class shopping galleria for the brocade market.

William chartered a chaloupe⁴⁶ to the isle, on which he had never set foot. It was a marshy, reedy place, the abode of beloved full-breasted Syrinx herself⁴⁷, hiding from the horny-goat antics of Pan. There was cat shit everywhere and the place was rapidly becoming the abode of—you guessed it—feral pigs.

And right alongside him was Praxède Le Brun, with a number of other maids renowned for their beauty and not much else. One of these had been the daughter of the most famous doctor of laws in Calabassa in the Midi⁴⁸, and had herself become well known for her full lips and her letters invoking peace during the religious troubles to a fictional Prior Bepis, in the manner of St Catherine of Siena⁴⁹. She had an equally famous sister with whom she was often confused and who was not as fortunate in letters.

But I lose myself. While on L’Île des Hérons, William and his young lady friends sauntered among the cat-turds when a group of feral pigs came swimming across to them. But these pigs, finding the female company disarming, made their approach, and the ladies petted them and cooed at their docility and, some have said, their beauty. And while this happened—as Lady Praxède Le Brun was watching—one of these pigs bit William in his balls.

Here the company’s mouths dropped as Persiflage cupped his codpiece. He blushed as the shepherdess Oura shot to her feet.

‘Messer Persiflage! No! You’re fibbing! There’s no way a pig could have chomped down on William’s balls! Unless he had them out.’

‘That is what Mademoiselle Praxède said to the authorities at the time,’ Persiflage said. ‘And mind you, this was before the Field of the Oriflamme even began.’

There were no fine silk pavilions as William said there would be. But there were pavilions nonetheless—of rude flaxen cloth⁵⁰, no better than those used by colliers in the woods. The young people began to make a camp there. Some even bartered for supplies with the Gypsies or the tinkers⁵¹.

A painter of the countryside, who had painted the pigs at this place some time before, was shocked to find that his rendering of the subject had been stolen and used to promote the festival.

William, nursing his balls, then commanded that the Field of the Oriflamme be opened to the public.

But William’s new Oriflamme was nowhere to be seen. Charlotte de la Jupe, who had fashioned it at the outrageous price of twenty-six écus d’or, was still waiting to be paid and would not surrender it. William had the money, but the bankers were frantic, fearing that they were about to lose a fortune.

The King had heard of William’s foolish attempt to pass off the Oriflamme, and said to one of his many flatterers: ‘He is lucky that the good and gentle people have not answered the offense of his hubris⁵² with a good smart slap across that proud Breton face.’

But mark you, gentle and kind friends, that such a punishment is not characteristic of the country people—that their Christian charity, born less from a need to show the world and more from the common knowledge of privation and penury⁵³ that is common to the rural life, responds to pride and luxury with shows of gentility, discretion, and above all, hospitality.

When the Feast of the Oriflamme commenced its disastrous—and relatively unannounced—course, there came to the field a lady named Marianne de Rolle, with some country lads and lasses. Seeing the amassed nobles with their drivers, carts and servants, and hearing disappointment at the meager offerings, she said to her companions:

‘This foolish young man who has asked me to cook for these people has yet to pay me for the feast I am to cook. But as the meats and game have yet to arrive (if at all), and the feast has already commenced, let us go to it and give them what we have.’

So they went among the crowds and deposited little meals of simple country fare: a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a few greens. The wealthy, who had lived off the fat of the land all their lives, were offended to the very chine⁵⁴, and their miniaturists rendered their displeasure in colorful depictions they shared with the other nobles.

William saw this from his own rude pavilion, Praxède by his side, and said: ‘It’s cool, no big deal.’

The nobles, famished and thirsty, swarmed Marianne’s cart, assailed her helpers, and took more than what she could allot. Within forty minutes, every speck of food was gone, with hundreds more yet to feed, and still more people arriving on both banks.

The local authorities, the Church, and the King were all apprised. The bankers found that their trust in William had been misplaced; that he had proffered too little security⁵⁵; some artisans had never been paid, while those that had were paid with money that was not William’s to disburse. The bailiffs and constables were alerted, and soon L’Île des Hérons resembled a camp in full retreat.

Some persons arranged for travel back to the City, only to find the postilion doors⁵⁶ locked behind them, and with intemperate weather on the way. Those whose sense returned at the last minute were heckled from the balconies and open windows of the City. Within hours, city wits had posted a pasquinade complete with entablature⁵⁷ and measures for six voices, called La fête des cochons⁵⁸.

William made to leave that evening, but a storm prevented his passage. The rain swelled the river and surrounding creeks, stranding many. The next day the constables and bailiffs, with a good deal of country boys and men, began extricating the sopping, muddy effects⁵⁹ of the nobles, who would not leave unless their fine garments, furniture and instruments were retrieved with them. There were carts, boats and carriages stranded along the roads for miles in every direction.

Quite a few marriage contracts were broken, coinage lost and friendships ruptured for good. Mademoiselle Praxède’s father, a wealthy banker in Paris, found his daughter alone in the Rue de la Juiverie⁶⁰ some days later, crying for a lost ring and a mirror William had given her.

By this time, William’s fate—at least his social one—was as dead as the thieves at Montfaucon⁶¹ were. He was eventually found at his mother’s house, sitting in blank-faced wonder at a pigsty brimming with more pigs than he first sold. A wise old woman named Barbe de la Courgette was nearby, shaking her head.

She said to his mother: ‘Edmonde, Olivier told you that you’d be set for life if you sold off at least half of these animals at the end of Martinmas⁶². You let a man go and he will return on St Vincent’s day; by Candlemas⁶³ he will sow your beans and tend to the piglets. When the candles are put out on the hearse on Good Friday⁶⁴, you’ll have a little flock of new pigs. If you’d only listened to him, you wouldn’t have an idiot son trying to sell all of them at once for a lowball offer.’

This, out of all the insults he had suffered, seemed to hurt William the most. Madame de Farlane’s mite⁶⁵ was taken by the Church, the fine paid off by her neighbors, and she resumed a good life as a lacemaker. William, on the other hand, pretended to be an idiot, attempted to take holy orders⁶⁶ but was rebuffed by the wise Prior of Saint-Brieul, and went to Nantes sometime thereafter.

He took up with a minor lord, the Marquis of Gagetteourle, and began promoting a Feast of the Bean, to be held on the feast of Saint Mary of Egypt⁶⁷. But the Nantais⁶⁸ are smart and refused to play along, and delivered him and the Marquis up to the authorities. The Marquis turned stool pigeon and revealed that William had convinced him to put up eleven thousand écus d’or and a priceless relic—the jawbone of Saint Yves of Kermartin⁶⁹—as security to a miserly old banker, but knew that the feast was nothing more than a castle in Spain⁷⁰. Neither was the Church too happy that one of their relics was put up as security. It did not belong to the Marquis: he was holding it against a small loan taken out by the good nuns of the Convent of Our Lady in Braguereoul to commission a statue of a pissing Baby Jesus for their enclosed herb garden.

Some time later, Paul de Gausse was interrogated by the Church in another matter. He revealed that, during the entire affair, William had written to him, panicking over the dearth of supplies at L’Île des Hérons, and had asked him to seduce a quartermaster⁷¹ of His Majesty’s army in order to supply a modest allotment of food for the nobles. Lord de Gausse, while thoroughly debauched, was not desperate, and refused outright. The story further convinced people in Paris of William’s grasping and utterly shameless ways.

He would have joined his thieving companions in the arches of Montfaucon, but his mother, like our Heavenly Mother, interceded for him⁷². And so, he was placed under house arrest, all his fine things seized and sold to pay off his creditors, and in time he was forgotten.

Marianne was never paid for her charity. Some kind Christian souls gave to her, but this was not enough to ease her burden, to say nothing of the ill-gotten fame whispered of the ungrateful nobles. Her heart was not broken, though: shortly thereafter, she made a fine killing at a country wedding that was the toast of the duchy.

But what was not forgotten was that he had broken quite a few hearts. For the boy really was quite agreeable, charming, and good-looking, and would have done fine among his friends, and perhaps married the beautiful Praxède Le Brun.

Everybody knows you don’t have to be wealthy to be popular: what matters is the integrity of your word. And if that can’t be relied upon, what then?

Even pig farmers have something to fall back on.

Everyone held their peace as Persiflage sat down, thoroughly pleased with himself.

‘Good God, that took forever,’ Figma then sighed. ‘You know, for all the time we’ve been here, the guy that killed Matteo de Civigni may have struck again⁷³.’

‘And how would you know?’ Persiflage replied.

‘Listen, buddy, I’m not the one on pilgrimage to a town I’ve never been to, to look at a hobbyhorse I’ve never seen, in a basilica dedicated to another thing⁷⁴ I sure hope to God no one’s ever touched, to say nothing of the man it used to hang from. We shepherdesses know things when we see ‘em. Ain’t that right, gals?’

And the shepherdesses nodded.

‘Everybody knew Matteo. Notice how I’m not crying when I say this,’ Figma went on. ‘Everybody saw the mole on his dick because he kept on pulling it out every chance he got. Canva here kept tallies.’

‘Forty-six times,’ Canva then said.

‘Sometimes proof is in the pudding, as rank and flaccid as it may be. But it takes a discerning mind to know when not to mess with it.’

‘Precisely,’ Oura then said, rising. ‘Which is the subject of the tale that I now happily volunteer.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Fr Bunion said. ‘You had pudding and are telling us just now?’