Silent Drama in Wife of Martin Guerre

For me, exciting drama arises from silence, pregnant silence that screams louder than any onomatopoetic “BOOM!”s or “POW!”s. Fortunately, Lewis’s The Wife of Martin Guerre abounds with this sort of tension, which both adequately complements the silenced frustration of Bertrande at being cast as mad and, quite simply, keeps me reading. I appreciate the power of silence most in the “Toulouse” chapter, before they leave for Toulouse, when Bertrande beseeches several people for...advice? forgiveness? consolation? She first approaches the curé, then the younger sister, and finally, in the scene which intrigues me most (pp. 87-88), the housekeeper. 

While Bertrande’s discussion with her sister-in-law is a back and forth of “what shall I do?”s and “tell the truth”s, her encounter with the housekeeper is low on dialogue and high on action. Perhaps I have a soft spot for semi-menacing, borderline-omniscient, pseudo-parental type characters, because I am quite sold on this scene.

I will admit that it is a bit heavy-handed at times. I will even say that the scene loses me on page 88 when the direct simile is made between Bertrande and the dove (“feeling her own strength drop slowly away like the blood of the dove”). I cannot help but be disappointed in (and slightly insulted by) the forwardness of this comparison, but it does not make me forget what I enjoy about the previous comparison when it is only suggested, metaphorical.

There are still lines and phrases that are both memorable for their aesthetic appeal and meaningful for their narrative parallelism: 

“holding the dove head down between her hands”

“the dark blood dripped slowly from a cut in the throat to an earthen dish”

“a barred gray cat...put out a rasping pale tongue and licked the blood”

“The living dove turned its head this way and that, struggled a little, clasping a pale cold claw over the hand that held it”

“The dove made no cry.”

As much as this scene grips me in the moment, in retrospect it loses value given the conclusion of the novel. Unless I am confusing two characters, this housekeeper is one of the ones who testifies that Arnaud du Tilh is indeed Martin Guerre, which causes me to lose respect for her. Because the dove scene takes up a lot of physical space, and thus seems to place a certain narrative importance on itself, I expect the housekeeper to know something I don’t, or something Bertrande doesn’t. In the end, though, she is just one of many who were duped by Arnaud du Tilh’s act.