The Whole Point
Before he became one of the iconic figures in the art of the literary essay, Michel de Montaigne was actually an eyewitness to the trial at the center of this story. The trial would later stimulate a logically forceful essay arguing against ever punishing a person for committing a crime in the absence of due process and the presentation of evidence. Reason alone as the means to determining human motivation without evidence to support is not, he argues, nearly a strong enough foundation upon which to build a verdict that will impact a person’s life. The imagery in his conclusion is pretty much the whole point of telling the story of Martin Guerre:
“Truth and falsehood have both alike countenances…Wee beholde them with one same eye.”
Not Tonight, Martin
So assured was the patriarchal order stretching through the medieval period that it could not even imaging that there might possibly a wife somewhere who could not be overcome by the sheer supremacy of the masculine superior beside her in the marriage bed. And so the “frigidity” on the part of the female spouse in a marriage had to be explained somehow since, of course, it did exist. The imagery which serves as this justification—courtesy of the Malleus Maleficarum—for lack of wifely interest in her husband lays the blame exactly where one suspects it might
“the devil can so darken the wife’s understanding that she considers her husband so loathsome that not for all the world would she allow him to lie with her.”
Sounds Good to Me, Bertrande
Of course, Bertrande Guerre was not the only member of the marriage not to show much interest in sexual relations. And just like her own disinterest, her husband’s lack of interest—or even ability, perhaps—to rise to the occasion was surely not the handiwork of the devil. The behavior of those who called themselves his friends, however, well, maybe the was some deviltry going on among that crowd:
A married couple who had not had a pregnancy after a certain period of time was a perfect target for a charivari, a caribari or calivari, as it was called in the area around Pamiers. The young men who fenced and boxed with Martin must have darkened their faces, put on women’s clothing, and assembled in front of the Guerre house, beating on wine vats, ringing bells, and rattling swords. It was indeed humiliating.
And perhaps reason to flee as well.
The Hand of God
The imposter pretending to be Martin Guerre would likely have won his case had something quite ironic not occurred: the real Martin’s leg had been amputated due to a war wound and replaced with a wood stump. The irony, of course, is that what finally seems to conclusively prove the identity of Martin is completely external to his bodily identity. What is even more ironic, cosmically speaking, is that this Martin’s misery is endowed with imagery giving it the appearance of being an act of God:
Then the man with the wooden leg appeared in court “like a miracle,” an act of providence, of God’s grace, to protect Pierre Guerre…and was it not a Protestant God sending back the man with the wooden leg in time to undo the overweening confidence of the judges of the Parliament of Toulouse?
