When the second Martin Guerre entered, the first did not immediately cease to exist. He stood there, bearing the selfsame countenance that had been acknowledged, the selfsame recollections with which he had astonished the witnesses, several years of a shared life that the arrival of another man could not efface with a single stroke; and yet it was now necessary to determine to which of the two belonged the name, the wife, the hearth, and the past.
The newcomer lacked a leg.
He who awaited him had learned to answer in his stead.
The Absentee of Artigat
Martin Guerre had departed from his kin. At Artigat, Bertrande de Rols remained alone with the absence of a husband whose return the passing years failed to bring. A disappearance lacks the stark finality of bereavement: it leaves daily habits in suspense, stays certain determinations, and ever permits someone to maintain that one must tarry a little longer.
He had left following a domestic dispute over a petty theft of grain, according to the ancient relation of the affair. Time slipped away. His name lingered in conversation, then perhaps ceased to be spoken daily; yet it remained tethered to lands, to kinships, and to a wife who could not demean herself to act as though he had never been.
Then a man presented himself.
He bore a resemblance to Martin Guerre. He knew matters which none would have thought possible to learn outside that domestic circle. He spoke of persons, of circumstances, of recollections whose very minuteness lent his presence a force that his countenance alone might not have possessed. Several recognized him. Bertrande received him as her lawful husband.
The man’s name was Arnaud du Tilh.
Learning a Life
He had gathered intelligence. Sundry persons had mistaken him for the absentee; this very error had revealed to him a path, every subsequent step of which he was to prepare with diligence. To sustain such a role, it did not suffice to know the principal occurrences. One had to know what a kinsman would ask, what a neighbor would call to mind, those trivial matters that appear in no civil register, yet in which men place greater trust than in any parchment.
There was in his undertaking something both prodigious and wretched. Prodigious, because he was compelled to retain the fragments of an existence not his own; wretched, because the very folk he deceived furnished him, by their questions, the means to carry on the deception.
A memory is rarely recited in its entirety by him who holds it. One begins it, hesitates, and the other completes the tale; two souls thus construct together the proof that they shared the selfsame experience. Du Tilh knew how to inhabit these exchanges. The past of Martin Guerre, preserved in the memory of others, opened a place for him in the present.
He dwelled for several years by Bertrande’s side. Children were born of the union. The fraud no longer consisted in a single deceitful presentation; it had acquired days, repasts, ties of which it would be impossible thereafter to assert that they had never been.
Doubt in the House
Pierre Guerre, the uncle of the absentee, together with other persons, contested the identity of this man. The matter was brought before the law. At Rieux, and subsequently before the Parlement of Toulouse, it became necessary to hear testimonies that could not readily be marshaled into two distinct columns.
Certain witnesses recognized Martin. Others pointed to Arnaud. Bodily marks were scrutinized, alongside habits, speech, and the very measurements of the foot. The cordwainer, in the narrative of Pitaval, brought to the deliberation a knowledge that none would have dreamed of requiring of him when he was merely plying his trade. Remembrances of wrestling bouts, of suppers, of conversations became material proofs whose weight the magistrates had to weigh.
The family itself furnished recognitions favorable to the accused. It was therefore impossible to reduce the question to the blindness of a solitary wife. An entire community, composed of familiar relations and of certainties of unequal precision, found itself compelled to explain how it knew that a man was indeed he whom they named.
Du Tilh answered. His composure had already deceived; it might yet cause the bench to waver.
Two Men Before Bertrande
The true Martin returned. He had lost a leg in the wars. His presence was not merely one proof the more: it imposed a living comparison, something that the narratives, however precise they might have been, had not hitherto permitted.
Let us return to that chamber. Both men can hear the interrogations. Each possesses a face, a voice, a carriage. The one has lived the memories that the other has committed to heart; the other has lived by Bertrande’s side through years of which the first knows nothing. The truth of an identity does not render all relations immediately simple.
And what of Bertrande? Men have so ardently desired to know what she understood, desired, or accepted, that they have ascribed to her contradictory certainties with equal assurance. We shall leave to her silence the place that the evidence does not allow us to fill. Justice acquitted her; the chronicler has no call to condemn her merely to procure a more pungent intrigue.
There remains perplexity enough without inventing a confession for her.
The Relinquished Name
Du Tilh was condemned. Brought back to Artigat, he confessed his imposture. Pitaval’s relation, taking up the matter transmitted by Coras, sets forth the manner in which he had informed himself and prepared his design; that which had appeared almost inexplicable resolved itself into encounters, answers retained, occasions seized.
In the year 1560, he was executed before the house of Martin Guerre; his body was subsequently consumed by fire. The punishment publicly restored the name to its rightful possessor. It could not restore to the others a memory in which the years of imposture had left no trace.
Bertrande was to find her husband again, and live with the memory of the man who had filled his place. Their kinsmen, both those who had recognized him and those who had denounced him, remained in the same parish. One can picture the conversations broken off whenever someone entered, the details one no longer dared recount, the blunders at which one chose to laugh rather than confess that they had once been certainties.
The door of the dwelling still opened upon the selfsame threshold. They had only to learn once more whom they awaited behind it.
Du Tilh had lost the name he had assumed. Yet he had left within a family a question that no torment on the scaffold could carry away with him: what is it, precisely, that we recognize in those whom we believe we know better than any other?