The Brethren by Robert Merle Read Free Book Online Page A

round them for your towers. I can set a straight lintel in the ground for a door or a window; I can build you a semicircular arch or set a triple arch with every stone at the correct angle and drop in the keystone perfectly. I can construct transom windows or double-columned ones with capitals. And if I have to climb a ladder and place and mortar a stone as heavy as I am, I can do that too.”
    “Can you read and write?”
    “Alas, no, but I can count, number stones and understand a design if it’s got only figures on it. I can use a ruler, a compass, a plumb line and a square.”
    The two captains exchanged glances. “Jonas,” announced Sauveterre, “we’ll try you out for three months, with food and lodging. At the end of three months, if we hire you, you’ll get two sols a day plus bed and board.”
    Those were honest enough conditions for the time, but thirty years later, with the cost of living considerably augmented—and the price of cut stone as well—Jonas still earned his two sols a day, with no hope of exhausting his quarry before it exhausted him, and yet professed himself happy enough, as he put it, to use his two large arms to nourish his large body, when there were so many in the region who had no work.
    “Messieurs,” rejoined Jonas, “before I came to you, I went to see your quarry. If the woods and the field above belong to you, I would like permission to hunt there. I’ll give you three quarters of everything I bag, keeping one quarter for myself, which will save you that much salt beef which you would have given me for my board. Also, if you give me a she-goat for the field, I’ll raise kids for you in return for the milk she’ll provide me.”
    “We’ll consider it,” answered Sauveterre.
    “In the quarry,” continued Jonas, “I discovered a very deep cave. If you’d be so good as to furnish me a mattress of chestnut leaves, I’ll live there summer and winter, so as not to lose time walking back and forth that would be better spent in my work. Anyway, who would guard my cut stone if I don’t live where I work?”
    Thus did Jonas give account of himself on the day he arrived, and so he is still today: more worried about his masters’ interests than his own, having entered Mespech the way others enter a monastery. Not that our stonecutter was without a taste for life, or didn’t enjoy a bottle at our Sunday table, a game or a story by the evening fire—nor was he unresponsive when a sorceress came to tempt him in his cave—but that is a story for another time.
     
    My mother was five months pregnant with my elder brother when La Boétie returned from the capital, on 21st April 1547, with all manner of stories concerning the death of François I. Our police lieutenant had gone up to Paris with a large escort in order to solicit the king’s favour regarding some matter of great importance to him, but which my father neglected to explain in the
Book of Reason
, although he wrote down everything else there: meetings, conversations, as well as the prices of things. I read there, for example, that on the preceding Saturday, my father journeyed to Sarlat to buy a hundred pins for my mother (five sols), shoes for Cabusse (five sols, two deniers) and shoes for his pony (two sols), and that he enjoyed “an excellent repast” at the Auberge de la Rigaudie for eight sols.
    I quote this entry because it contrasts so dramatically with what follows. La Boétie found a great to-do at the court, sad faces and hopeful ones mingling together—the former all too obvious, the latter hypocritically disguised—none, however, sincere, except for the real suffering of the dauphin and the despair of Madame d’Étampes, theking’s favourite, who was already packing her bags. As for the king himself, whom La Boétie only glimpsed from afar, he seemed much changed, his face thinned greatly, his body bent and his movements agonizingly slowed.
    “Monsieur de La Boétie,” said Siorac, “allow me to