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Huguenot odour about them.”
    “Despite your keen sense of smell,” replied the president, “an odour is not sufficient to convict them. As long as they refrain from professing the plague of reform, they are not rebels against the king. Leave these questions of zeal to churchmen.”
    Whatever odour the parliament detected on Baron de Fontenac and whatever support this bandit received from them remained a mystery. “Lacking any material proof or irrefutable testimony”, theparliament ultimately banished him for twenty years from the seneschalty of Sarlat and from the domain of Domme, an act deemed excessively clement throughout Guyenne.
    On the way home, La Boétie left the consuls of Sarlat and Caumont at their homes and then set out in advance to prepare lodgings for the little company at Libourne, followed at some distance by the “Brethren”, as they were now popularly called, touchingly joining them in a single noun as if they were one and the same person.
    “What a pity we are in such haste,” remarked La Boétie, “for otherwise we might have passed through Montaigne, and I could have introduced you to a funny little twelve-year-old who has learnt Latin from his father, and amazes everyone with his readings from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
.”
    “This gentleman,” said Siorac, “does very well to take the trouble to instruct his son. We badly need knowledgeable men to lead us out of our barbarism.”
    “Alas, knowledge and morality are not always sisters,” lamented La Boétie. “Fontenac is well enough educated.”
    “And the scoundrel used his letters well enough,” cried Sauveterre. “Twenty years of banishment for so many murders! My blood boils at such evil.”
    “And he has only killed ten people,” rejoined La Boétie. “What should we do with the Baron d’Oppède, who has massacred the peasants of Luberon by the hundred, confiscated their lands in the name of the king and then secretly purchased them himself? He is on trial now, but you can rest assured he’ll emerge from it all as white as the new-fallen snow.”
    “So it is in our sad world,” said Sauveterre, “ceaselessly dragged through blood and mire, and through the mendacious superstitions that have corrupted the pure Word of God.”
    A silence followed these words. No one, not even Siorac, felt like picking up on Sauveterre’s lead, least of all La Boétie.
    “And who will occupy the barony of Fontenac for these twenty years of banishment?” asked Siorac.
    “The baron’s only son, Bertrand de Fontenac, who has just turned fifteen and is now of age.” And La Boétie added after a moment’s reflection: “Now you are rid of the old wolf, my friends, but there’s still the cub. I have heard little good concerning this fellow, and since he’s young, he may yet grow sharp teeth.”

2
    I WAS BORN on 28th March 1551, six years after the acquisition of Mespech by the Brethren, when its appearance had already considerably changed. Actually the captains made few changes in the chateau itself: it was a huge rectangular construction of two stories built around an interior courtyard and flanked at each corner by towers with machicolations, and these were joined by a crenellated battlement walk.
    When they bought it, however, the chateau was surrounded only by an embryonic moat, scarcely a toise wide and so shallow that a small person, if thrown in, could easily regain his footing. Obviously, this was a ridiculous defence. Such a moat rendered the drawbridge leading to the chateau’s fortified south gate totally superfluous. Any attacker could have easily waded across the moat and thrown up a ladder against the ramparts, anchoring it in the mud at the foot of the wall.
    The technology and inventiveness that the captains dedicated to their modifications of these moats could not have succeeded without one lucky circumstance: the well dug in a corner of the interior courtyard at Mespech turned out to be inexhaustible. The Brethren