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What I offer you here is in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past.
None of the inhabitants of Artigat paid manorial dues or owed manorial services to a seignior, however. Whatever lands they had, they held free and allodial, a fact of which they were very proud.
As a “thought experiment,” let us imagine what might have taken place if the heir from Artigat became friends with the golden-tongued peasant from Sajas. They learn that they look alike, even though Martin is taller, thinner, and a little darker than Arnaud.
sixteenth-century villagers do not build up an image of their faces by frequent glances in a mirror (an object not found in a peasant household). It is unsettling and fascinating, and since there is a stock of popular sayings about how the shape of the eye or the set of the jaw signify certain character traits,9 they wonder whether their resemblance is more than skin-deep.
They exchange confidences. Martin expresses himself with ambivalence about his patrimony and his wife, perhaps seems to imply to his look-alike, “take her.” And Pansette says to himself, “Why not?” At any rate, one of the few things Arnaud later confided to a Sajas acquaintance du...
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Was it so unusual for a man in sixteenth-century villages and burgs to change his name and fashion a new identity? Some of this went on all the time. The Daguerres left Hendaye, became the Guerres, and changed their ways. Every peasant who migrated any distance might be expected to do the same. And whether you moved or not, you might acquire a nickname, an alias. In Artigat it often had to do with your property, and in Sajas it had to do with you: one of Arnaud’s fellow villagers was nicknamed Tambourin,13 the drum, and he of course was Pansette.
Pansette was moving beyond the mask of the carnival player and the strategems of the mere inheritance seeker to forge a new identity and a new life for himself in the village on the Lèze.
But it did allow them the possibility of conceiving of marriage as something that was in their hands to make, indeed, as in their hands alone.
Rols were becoming interested in the new religion, in part because they could draw from it another justification for their lives.
The story of Martin Guerre is told and retold because it reminds us that astonishing things are possible. Even for the historian who has deciphered it, it retains a stubborn vitality. I think I have uncovered the true face of the past—or has Pansette done it once again?
