The Memorable Arrest of Martin Guerre

In this edition, in an effort to cite precedent supporting my pet theory about the Campden Wonder case—namely that the William Harrison who returned to his wife after an absence of two years may not have actually been the real Steward of Lady Campden—I share the story of the most famous case of imposture ever recorded. And it is a true precedent, for it did precede the events of the Campden Wonder by nearly a hundred years. For its true beginning, however, we must look back more than a century and off across the Channel, more than 600 miles, or 1000 kilometers south of Chipping Campden, to a little peasant village in the very south of France, among the foothills of the Pyrenees. The village of Artigat, 32 miles or 51 kilometers south of that larger burg of the Languedoc, Toulouse, was situated on the Lèze River, which to an American ear sounds delightfully like a lazy river. As this might suggest, it was a sleepy village in the mid-16th century, with some 60 to 70 families in the surrounding area, and none paid manorial dues to a seigneur, for no feudal lords held lands in the area. Thus, the peasants of Artigat owned their own lands, holding their titles in allodium by occupying and defending them and, of course, cultivating them. They grew millet, oats, wheat, and grapes, raised sheep, cows, and goats, and forged a modest legacy from the land, such that successful peasant families passed their estates on to heirs much like their far wealthier seigneurial counterparts. And this facet of the culture would have great bearing on the famous case we shall be focusing on, as would their popular conception of marriage, which, with the rise of Protestantism dividing the community, was then much debated in that corner of France, where the idea of “clandestine,” or secret and common law marriage, had been common but was then being challenged. And in this quiet Languedoc hamlet, where the biggest quarrels were over matters of Catholic orthodoxy and doctrinal dispute, a scandal would emerge from family discord, involving accusations of desertion, betrayal, and imposture. But more than any of this, it would cause some to call into question prevailing assumptions about guilt and innocence and the very nature of identity.

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The Deguerre family were peasant Basques with ancestral lands at Hendaye, near the Bay of Biscay, one branch of which family ended up settling 162 miles or 260 kilometers away to the east in Artigat and assimilating, learning to express themselves in the Occitan language of the Languedoc and changing their name to the more French Guerre.  Two brothers, Sanxi and Pierre, headed the Guerre family in Artigat, and in 1538, in an effort not only to further the family’s assimilation but also to make a fruitful bond with another affluent peasant family, the de Rols, Sanxi Guerre arranged a marriage between his son Martin and their daughter, Bertrande. Martin was 14 at the time, and Bertrande may have been as young as nine or ten. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the two children failed to immediately consummate their marriage, despite their families’ encouragement. Nor did they succeed, it seems, for years afterward, even after they reached ages of sexual maturity, which caused the families to believe that young Martin Guerre, despite his apparent vigor in playing at swords and acrobatics with the other village boys, was impotent, perhaps because a spell had been cast on him. And to undo the charms of whatever jealous sorceress had cursed them, it would take the charms of a very different kind of sorceress, a wise woman versed in the ways of magic but who remained true to god and church. They sought the aid of several such women, and eventually, eight years into their failed marriage, one mysterious old enchantress told them how to defeat the spell they were under. They had village priests say several masses for them and administer the eucharist, and then they ate special cakes that the wise woman said would stoke their passions. One wonders just what was in those cakes, for sure enough, the couple thereafter consummated their union, and Bertrande soon became with child. She bore Martin a son, another heir to the Guerre family lands, named Sanxi after Martin’s father. For a time, Martin must have had the approval of his father, but in 1548, at 24 years old, Martin lost any goodwill he might have earned with the birth of his child when he allegedly stole some grain from the family. Rather than face the wrath of his father, he left Artigat, abandoning not only his heritage but his wife and infant son as well.

Bertrande’s position in the family and the village was much reduced in the absence of her husband. There was a place in the village society for a wife and a place for a widow, but she found herself suddenly neither, and her life remained in a limbo. After some years, Martin’s parents passed away, but not before they forgave their absent son and named him heir to the family lands in both Artigat and Hendaye. But in Martin’s absence, the uncle, Pierre, took control of the family lands and guardianship of Martin’s sisters. Himself a widower, Pierre Guerre remarried to none other than Bertrande’s widowed mother, and so she found herself living again with her mother, but now also with her missing husband’s family. She had gone from being the wife of the family’s heir with a household all her own, to little more than a houseguest and a burden, a deserted woman much whispered about in the village. And this was her life during the eight years that her husband was gone. Then one day in 1556, news reached Artigat that a man claiming to be Martin Guerre had checked in to a hostel in a neighboring village. When the hosteller brought up the wife and child he had left behind, this Martin Guerre, it was said, had wept. Martin’s sisters were the first to go see him at the hostel, and they came back with their verdict, telling Bertrande that it was indeed their brother Martin. So Bertrande also made haste to see him, but she shrank from this bearded stranger who seemed heavier than her Martin. When he spoke to her with love, however, and proved himself with knowledge of their shared experiences and conversations and other specifics, she relented and embraced him. He had been away in Spain fighting in King Henri II’s war against the Habsburgs, but he had come back for her and their son, and to reclaim his birthright. Bertrande took him home to Artigat, and while some whispered that he was not Martin Guerre, he further proved himself by recognizing villagers he had known long ago, calling to them by name, and reminding them of things they had done together a decade earlier. Certainly his appearance had changed, but there was enough of a likeness that any differences could be ascribed to his eight-year absence and the hard years he had spent at war. While some harbored their suspicions, Martin convinced the only people who mattered: his sisters, his uncle and the administrator of his family’s property, Pierre, and his wife, Bertrande, who took him eventually into her bed. And this was the greatest of proofs, for most believed that no wife could be so deceived that she did not recognize the touch of her true husband.

And happy marriage seemed to come easily with the returned Martin Guerre. Within a few years, Bertrande had borne Martin two more children, daughters. Sadly, only one survived, little Bernarde, but it did go to prove that whatever marital difficulties they’d had a decade earlier were gone. And Martin threw himself not only into the role of husband and father but also into that of heir and head of the family, taking his father’s house for himself and taking back guardianship of his sisters from his uncle, Pierre. Moreover, he moved to make his family’s business more mercantile, selling the grains they grew, the wool they harvested, and the wine they made. Beyond this, he looked to capitalize on the family’s substantial property holdings, and it is this that eventually brought him to loggerheads with his uncle, who stood aghast at his nephew’s attempts to sell their ancestral lands. Eventually, suspecting that Pierre was not being entirely forthcoming with the profits and holdings of the family, Martin sued his uncle. It was then, in the first months of 1559, that Pierre began to suspect this Martin Guerre to be an impostor. He looked at Martin, and the difference in his physical frame from the boy he remembered stood out. He looked at Martin’s boy, Sanxi, and saw little resemblance there. How is it, he asked, that this pseudo-Martin no longer remembered certain phrases in the Basque language of his youth? He persuaded his wife, Bertrande’s mother, of the imposture, and soon all of Bertrande’s family was convinced that she shared her bed with a stranger. From them, the scandal spread, and the village became divided as to the identity of Martin Guerre. The shoemaker said Martin’s feet had shrunk, and others in the village suggested he had become shorter, stockier, his complexion lighter. They said that the real Martin’s nose had been flat and his bottom lip protruding, unlike this new Martin, and where, they asked, was the scar they remembered on Martin’s eyebrow? In response, Bertrande insisted, “He is Martin Guerre my husband or else some devil in his skin. I know him well. If anyone is so mad as to say the contrary, I’ll make him die.”  And she is not alone in resorting to violence, for Pierre spoke with friends about helping him pay a cutthroat to murder his supposed nephew, and when that failed, he and Bertrande’s own brothers accosted him and beat him with a truncheon. Seeing her family thus assaulting her husband, Bertrande forced herself between them, shielding her Martin with her own body, so that if her brothers and Pierre wanted to club Martin, they would have to strike her as well.

A depiction of criminal proceedings in which, as with Guerre's trial, the public was very involved, via Kommersant

In the autumn of that year, as their quarrel raged on, a soldier passed through Artigat and after hearing of the scandal and seeing Martin Guerre, he announced that the man in question was a fraud, for he knew the real Martin Guerre, had met him in Flanders after the Siege of Saint-Quentin, where the real Martin Guerre had lost his leg and had it replaced by a wooden peg. As this Martin Guerre clearly had both legs, the soldier reasoned, he must be an impostor! Close on the heels of this pronouncement, Martin Guerre was arrested on arson charges, accused of having burned down a building on a farm west of the village, a charge likely orchestrated by Pierre himself as the complaint included allegations that he was engaging in adultery by sharing Bertrande’s marriage bed. The charges were eventually dropped, but during his imprisonment in Toulouse, Bertrande was forced to move back under the roof of her mother and Pierre Guerre, where they began to coerce her to bring charges of her own against Martin. At first she refused, traveling to Toulouse to visit Martin and complaining about the family’s bullying of her, but eventually, she had no choice. Martin came home from the jail at Toulouse, enjoyed one peaceful evening with Bertrande, and in the morning faced Pierre and his brothers-in-law, all of them bearing weapons. They took him away to stand trial at Rieux on charges Pierre had made in Bertrande’s name. Without Martin, she and the children must live in Pierre’s house, and if she refused to press these charges against Martin, Pierre told her he would throw her out into the street.

So long as Bertrande would endorse the charges, Pierre Guerre was confident in the case he had built, for in addition to the various villagers willing to testify to the differences they perceived in Martin, he now had a suspect. While Martin had languished in Toulouse under the trumped-up arson charges, he had learned some things of interest. Apparently, during the course of some travels Martin had made in some villages to the northwest, an innkeeper had recognized him as one Arnaud du Tilh, and Martin had hushed him and asked him to keep his silence, explaining that Martin Guerre was dead and had given him his goods. Likewise another man had recognized him during the course of his travels, calling him Pansette, which was an alias of the same man, Arnaud du Tilh, and Martin had even given this man some handkerchiefs to pass on as a gift to Arnaud du Tilh’s brother. Arnaud du Tilh was a young man from Sajas, 27 miles or 43 kilometers northwest of Artigat. He had the nickname Pansette, meaning “the belly,” perhaps for his thickset physique or perhaps for his appetites, for he was known to be an enthusiastic drinker and philanderer. A foulmouthed youth, he was known to gamble and to steal, and he was so quick-witted and cunning that he gained the unusual reputation of wielding some kind of sorcery in his underhanded dealings. This Arnaud du Tilh, alias Pansette, had disappeared from village life to serve in the war, just as Martin Guerre said he had done. Was it possible that this rogue had assumed Martin Guerre’s identity? He certainly had good reason to do so. Du Tilh was heir to his own family properties in Sajas, but the Guerre inheritance would have dwarfed it. And the draw of taking the by all accounts beautiful Bertrande to wife should not be overlooked. But how had he managed to learn so much about Artigat and Martin’s life there? Had he met the true Martin Guerre during the course of his travels in service of France? Had he been coached by accomplices? Or were the resurgent rumors about him true? Was he some sort of warlock, a dark sorcerer leveraging the powers of the devil to usurp another man’s life?

Martin Guerre’s very identity stood trial in Rieux, 15 miles or 24 kilometers northwest of Artigat. The court called on one hundred and fifty witnesses to testify, and about 60 of them refused to indicate one way or the other whether they believed the defendant was the true Martin Guerre. The rest were relatively evenly split. Some who had known Martin before his departure and some who had known Arnaud du Tilh, including Pansette’s own uncle, testified that the defendant was not Guerre or that he was du Tilh. But for every witness to swear to his differences from Martin, there was a witness to swear to their likenesses: Martin had warts on one hand and a scar on his forehead, as did the defendant, and Martin had extra teeth like those that could be seen in the defendant’s mouth. Just as Arnaud du Tilh’s uncle swore the defendant was his nephew, Martin Guerre’s sisters swore he was their brother. And perhaps the most important witness, Bertrande, refused to swear that the defendant was not her husband. Indeed, so confident was the defendant that his wife was being suborned into bringing false charges against him that he told the judge he would gladly accept death if his wife were to say he was not who he said he was. Considering her silence, the judges agreed to remove her from Pierre’s house in order to prevent any further coercion. Indeed, it seemed that the defendant had the court on his side. He confidently confronted each of the witnesses against him with convincing rebuttals, and he proved himself time and time again by calling up specific details from Martin’s life that matched perfectly with testimony taken separately from other witnesses, even validating intimate goings on that Bertrande had shared with the court in confidence. However, there was still much to doubt. Despite the defendant’s brilliant performance, evidence seemed equal on both sides. No handwriting could be compared, for apparently neither Guerre nor du Tilh could write before their departures and so had left behind no samples of their writing. Likewise, familial likeness offered little confirmation, for while the defendant did indeed resemble Martin Guerre’s sisters, he bore little resemblance to Guerre’s son, Sanxi. In the end, perhaps to play it safe or simply to pass the problem on to the court at Toulouse where the defendant would certainly appeal, they found him guilty.

And appeal he did. His second trial began with the defendant confronting his accusers, Bertrande and Pierre Guerre. So convincing were the defendant’s claims that his wife had been coerced by his uncle to bring the charges against him that the court had all three of them imprisoned until they sorted the matter out, for if the defendant really was Martin Guerre, then Pierre and Bertrande could be found guilty of calumny, and if he were not, then Bertrande might be found guilty of fraud as well if she were the man’s accomplice. Neither boded well for the woman at the center of the trial, so Bertrande chose every word carefully, threading the needle between being the innocent wife defrauded by an impostor husband and being the innocent wife compelled to perjury by the villainous uncle. So the trial proceeded much as before, with confident testimonies on both sides, but this time the judges were far more moved by the defendant’s memory of his former life. After questioning Bertrande and others, they attempted time and again to catch him out with any inconsistency, but they failed. According to Jean de Coras, the reporter at the court who would go on to make the case famous with his popular pamphlet about the case, Arrest Memorable, “His remarks sustained at length and containing so many true signs, gave great occasion to the judges to be persuaded of [his] innocence.” But as they prepared to deliver their verdict, a mysterious man came limping up to the courthouse, his wooden peg leg knocking the floor with every step. The proceedings of the trial must be halted, he declared, for he had a vital revelation pertaining to the hearing. The defendant could not possibly be who he said he was, for this peg-legged man was himself the real Martin Guerre.

The first depiction of the case, from Alle de Wercken by Jacob Cats, incorrectly portraying the couple as being far wealthier than peasants, via Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre, p. 87

The defendant confronted this last-minute witness with a vengeance, calling him a rascal, a newcomer, an evildoer, insisting he was a ringer on Pierre Guerre’s payroll. And indeed, when questioned about his early life as the court had questioned the defendant, this peg-legged stranger could not remember nearly as many details. When it was time to haul Pierre out of his cell to identify this new claimant to Martin’s identity, they arranged a line-up, with several others dressed the same. Pierre easily picked the peg-legged man out of the line-up, but this may not have been much of a feat unless all the others had wooden legs as well, for remember that the travelling soldier had already claimed the real Martin Guerre had lost his leg. What was harder to dismiss were the sisters’ reactions to the man, for each of them, individually, considering the two men side by side, changed their minds and exclaimed that surely this new man with the peg leg was their real brother and the other had deceived them. So it was, as well, for Bertrande, who trembled and wept upon seeing this new arrival and immediately embraced him, pleading innocence for being duped by the impostor, blaming his sisters who had accepted his impersonator and convinced her to do the same. With the tide so clearly turning against the defendant, the judges confronted him, asking how he had summoned the devil that had taught him so much about Martin’s life and about the people of Artigat. He only blanched, for once at a loss for words. For a time he continued to insist he was Martin, but eventually, he confessed to being Arnaud du Tilh, aka Pansette. He had used no sorcery in his imposture, and despite rumors, he had never met Martin in the war, for Martin Guerre had ended up in the Castilian city of Burgos after his departure from Artigat, serving as a lackey in a bishop’s palace, and during the war he had served in an opposing army. Rather, Arnaud had been mistaken in Picardy for Martin Guerre by men who became his accomplices in the imposture, and with their coaching, he had prepared for years to play the part of Martin Guerre. Du Tilh’s crime was considered all the more serious for involving not only adultery but also the theft of an inheritance. The judges sentenced him to death, but not before he made a public apology. In white shirtsleeves, with no hat, he carried a torch through the village of Artigat barefoot, from the church to Martin Guerre’s house, where he would be executed. Among his final words was an entreaty to Martin Guerre himself, for the returned man had dealt most harshly with Bertrande in court, treating her like a disloyal harlot and not taking any measure of responsibility for the situation, even though it was he who had made the entire affair possible by abandoning her in the first place. The self-confessed Arnaud du Tilh begged the newly returned Martin Guerre to treat his wife with kindness and love, for none of this, he said, was her fault, and she was a virtuous, honorable, loyal woman. Then he was hanged in front of them, and in order to more thoroughly erase the memory of this man the village deemed to be so contemptible, his corpse was burned.

So, you may think, where is the mystery here? Mystery there may have been at the time, but surely all of this was neatly resolved with Arnaud du Tilh’s confession. Yet as we have seen time and time again, nagging questions remain, the first being the enigma of Bertrande de Rols. Was this woman a victim of imposture or a willing accomplice? Surely this Arnaud du Tilh could not have fooled her when it came to matters of the utmost intimacy. And certainly he could not have amassed such a great wealth of knowledge based on the coaching he claims to have received from a couple of village acquaintances and must have been further coached by Bertrande herself. But there is a further ambiguity here: namely the question of whether or not the judges in Toulouse made the right verdict, whether justice was served, whether or not the defendant really was Arnaud du Tilh or whether he was whom he had all along claimed to be. As already mentioned, testimony and proofs were about equal for and against him, and he proved himself far better at recalling the details of his life than did the peg-legged man. While his likeness to Martin’s sisters could not be denied, there was the fact that the son, Sanxi, did not resemble him, but recall Martin Guerre’s marital difficulties, their conspicuous childlessness and rumors of his impotence. To a modern observer, the superstitious remedy of masses and special cakes seems like it would have been entirely ineffective, so the fact that Bertrande immediately became pregnant might suggest that the boy Sanxi wasn’t even Martin’s after all, which would clearly explain his lack of resemblance. Why, then, would Martin’s sisters suddenly decide the peg-legged man was the real Martin? On the other side of that same coin, one might just as well ask why they thought Arnaud du Tilh was Martin. But Bertrande had good reason to suddenly change her loyalties. She was in a very precarious position, after all, and she would have had to think not only about herself, but her children as well. When the sisters began to change their story and agree with Pierre that the peg-legged man was the real Martin, she may have seen the writing on the wall. Believing her husband’s cause to be lost, she may have made a hard decision to save herself. Likewise, the defendant had already stated that if his wife were to swear that he was not her husband, he would welcome death. His confession may have only been proof of this. And he had his children to think of as well, for even if Sanxi was not his, his daughter, Bernarde, was. In freely confessing his alleged imposture, he managed to obtain from the court the promise that his daughter would not become a bastard. While she would be disinherited by the Guerre family, the court would allow her to inherit Arnaud du Tilh’s family properties. Even if he wasn’t Arnaud du Tilh, this may have seemed the only possible way to provide for his little girl.

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of this story is that the man accused of imposture seems to have been a kind and decent man. According to witnesses at trial, even those who believed him a fraud, he acquitted himself with honor in his daily life in Artigat and in his business dealings, and he proved himself a loving husband to Bertrande. The same could not be said about the young Martin who had failed his wife and abandoned her, and the behavior of the man hauled before the judges at Rieux and Toulouse was nothing like that of the young Pansette, with his drunkenness, his petty crime, and his promiscuity. So in the end, whether he was this Arnaud du Tilh or whether he really was Martin Guerre, they killed a good man for the sake of the memory of a lesser man. And what caused even his staunchest supporters to turn on him in the end? Was it certainty, after seeing the face of the other supposed Martin, or was it just doubt? In a time before photographs, in a peasant world where no one had portraits of themselves and few even owned mirrors by which to regard themselves, how closely was physical appearance observed and how accurately could likeness be recalled? It would seem, after such an absence of years, that it would have to be only vaguely. And just as one man might be indistinguishable from another, so the truth can sometimes be indistinguishable from falsehood. As Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne states in an essay that makes mention of the strange case of Martin Guerre, “Falsehood is so neere Neighbour to trueth, that a wiseman should not put himselfe upon a slipperie downefal. Truth and falsehood have both alike countenances…. Wee beholde them with one same eye….”

The Return of the True Martin Guerre by Jacques Wagrez, from Alexandre Dumas's Celebrated Crimes, Vol. 1, p. 272