The Friar of Carcassonne by Stephen O’Shea Page A

cited the swath cut by Foulques de Saint-Georges through the honest womanhood of Languedoc, who submitted to his lust for fear of his power. The inquisitor showed a keen interest in torture, rolling up the sleeves of his cassock to take an active part in inflicting pain and then, if the victim was female, lifting up his skirts to rape. Foulques, this so-called man of God, had fathered several children, and a woman, Navenias, who had borne him a daughter, had traveled with them to Senlis and was willing to expose her shame before the king if he doubted what they said. Foulques de Saint-Georges, the inquisition’s opponents consistently maintained throughout these years, was a far more objectionable and unsavory fellow than even Nicolas d’Abbeville, who had done such harm to Albi.
    The spell Bernard had cast on Jean de Picquigny and Richard Leneveu now enveloped the divinely appointed sovereign of France. Through the force of his personality he had won the king over, planting the idea in Philip’s mind that corrupt inquisitors consituted a grave danger to his realm.
    The message had been driven home with mesmerizing conviction. The men of Languedoc left the Palais Royal, passing on their way out the agitated Dominicans eager to make their case before the king. Shaken by what Brother Bernard had told him, the king did not consent to receive the Dominicans until five days after the friar’s speech; Délicieux testified that when they had tried to enter the hall earlier, the king shooed them away with an angry gesture.
    When at last the Dominicans did get to see their agitated monarch, they launched into a full-scale attack not on Délicieux but on Picquigny. This was a mistake, as the latter had the full confidence of the king. Summoned to defend himself, Picquigny protested his innocence, proclaimed his integrity, and repeated the charges against Foulques de Saint-Georges. Judiciously, Philip set up an ad hoc committee of two to look into the character assassination proffered by each side. The constable of France and the archbishop of Narbonne, Gilles Aycelin, a high-placed prelate always ready to do the king’s bidding, were charged with the investigation.
    It took but a few days. The constable and the archbishop found in favor of Picquigny. The king then acted accordingly. Brother Bernard had made it rain.
    Fr. Foulques, of the Order of Friars Preachers, who pretends to be the inquisitor of heresy in the region of Toulouse, trying rather to sow (than to uproot) those errors and vices it was his duty to destroy, who under the pretext of the law violates the laws, who under the semblance of piety commits impious, utterly inhuman acts, and under the guise of defending the Catholic faith commits evil deeds abhorrent to the human mind . . . through his trials and inquisitions, by capture and tortures of the utmost refinement, has extorted confession from helpless people whom he declares, according to his whim, to be stained by the crime of heresy . . . (and convicts) through the power and the fear of torture and the suborning of false witnesses . . . Whence throughout those regions scandal plainly has arisen as has the fear of an uprising of the people, unless steps are taken swiftly to correct the situation.
    The words came not from Délicieux but from King Philip. The monarch had become an ally of the friar. Never before and never again would the inquisition face such overt wrath from a king of France. The angry letter cited above, sent in December 1301, was occasioned by the foot-dragging of the Dominican Order in dismissing Foulques de Saint-Georges. He had been moved from Carcassonne to Toulouse, but he had not been removed from the office of inquisitor. Given the subsequent behavior of the king and Guillaume de Nogaret in the affair of the Templars, Philip could hardly shriek like an outraged virgin at the specter of torture and injustice, yet the indignation of his letter bespoke a monarch