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What was really different from the Basque country was the way the land moved, both in inheritance and in sales. Here in the plain below the Pyrenees there was very little effort among the common people to hold the family property together.
If the family had settled just upstream at Pailhès, where the Villemurs, seigniors of Pailhès and captains of the Château de Foix, had their castle, it would have been a different story.13 The case of Martin Guerre might never have run its course if a resident seignior or his agents had had the authority to intervene.
To be accepted by the village they had to take on some Languedoc ways. Daguerre became Guerre; if Pierre had used the Basque form of his name, Betrisantz or even Petri, he now changed it. Sanxi’s wife probably continued to carry baskets of grain on her head, but she restitched her headdress and the decorations on her skirt so as to fit in with her neighbors. At the parish mass, she would have to get used to the fact that here women did not push ahead of the men to make their offerings, did not go about the church to collect for the vestry, and did not serve as sacristans.16
In their native land the Guerres would have done their business orally in Basque, Spanish, or Gascon. In the area between the Garonne and the Ariège, they often did it before notaries. The latter were scattered about in many small burgs, and even before the royal Edict of Villers-Cotterets of 1539 required it, they drew up contracts in French with occasional words and spellings in Occitan. The Guerres developed enough writing skills to keep simple accounts, though, like most inhabitants of Artigat, they never signed their contracts with their names and they probably could not read.
And then, in 1538, the Guerres were present at a contract that marked how far they had come in their eleven years in Artigat: the marriage of Sanxi’s only son Martin to Bertrande de Rols, daughter of the well-off Rols family on the other side of the Lèze. That Bertrande’s father thought this an acceptable match bears further witness to the relative openness of the village to newcomers during these years.
This was a catastrophe. Even for peasants who enjoyed a good gossip, the unexpected disappearance of an important villager was troubling, leaving an anomalous gap among the young married couples.
For the Guerres from the Basque country, here was yet another scandal to live down.
For the time being, Pierre Guerre would be the administrator of the considerable properties of his late brother and the guardian of Martin’s unmarried sisters.
Bertrande’s status was much reduced by all these events. Neither wife nor widow, she was under the same roof with her mother again. Neither wife nor widow, she had to face the other village women at the mill, the well, the tileworks, and at the harvest. And there was no easy remedy for her in the law. Since the laxer days of Pope Alexander III in the twelfth century, the doctors had insisted that a wife was not free to remarry in the absence of her husband, no matter how many years had elapsed, unless she had certain proof of his death.
The Parlement of Toulouse cited it in judging a marriage case in 1557: “During the absence of the husband, the wife cannot remarry unless she has proof of his death . . . not even when he has been absent twenty years or more . . . And the death must be proven by witnesses, who give sure depositions, or by great and manifest presumptions.
4 But she surely reflected on her life, dividing it into thirds as she did later when presenting herself to the judge of Rieux: the nine or ten years of her childhood, the nine or ten years of her marriage, the years of her waiting, which lengthened into eight or more.13 Beyond a young womanhood with only a brief period of sexuality, beyond a marriage in which her husband understood her little, may have feared her, and surely abandoned her, Bertrande dreamed of a husband and lover who would come back, and be different.
This information could have come from Martin, or from others that knew him. But it is hard to see how they could have been intimates in the army, since Martin was fighting for the king of Spain, the enemy of the king of France, and Arnaud may have returned from Picardy before Martin had even left Burgos.
If I were to hazard a guess about the Martin Guerre case, it would be that the local Protestant sympathizers tended to believe the new Martin and the Catholics tended to believe Pierre Guerre.
