Flagellants: Penitents who lash their shoulders with whips, sometimes hard enough to draw blood. Some lash themselves for their own sins; others are paid to lash themselves for the sins of others.
Tobias Smollet translation of Miguel de Cervantes “Don Quixote”
Luzel relied particularly on two women for his material (in collecting tales from lower Brittany). One was Marguerite Phillips, who made her living from both spinning and as a “pilgrim by proxy,”–that is, traveling to holy shrines on behalf of other people to seek the intervention of a saint on her client’s behalf.
The Midnight Washerwoman and Other Tales of Lower Brittany, Francois-Marie Luzel
Sunday night and, as is a common experience among lapsed Catholics such as myself, I’m feeling a bit jumpy after letting yet another weekend go by without exposing myself to a little spiritual uplift. I don’t think I’d be sent to h-e-double hockey sticks just for missing one Sunday mass, but when you’ve got a Cal Ripken-like streak of non-attendance as long as mine going, you look both ways when crossing the street in Boston.
In many cases, you need to look more than twice, especially in the spaghetti-strand street pattern where Quincy Market meets the entrance to the Lieutenant William F. Callahan Tunnel, since cars are coming at you from four or five different directions. If that sounds vague, it’s because no one has ever taken the risk of standing close enough for long enough to actually count them all.
I’m waiting at this particular spot because it is the portal to the underworld from which historical figures such as Francois-Marie Luzel emerge–if you summon them nicely. I’ve dropped a line to Luzel (known to friends in Brittany by his Breton name, Fanch an Uhel), because I’m trying to crack one of life’s mysteries that he seems to have a handle on; namely, why do people think they can get away with suffering by proxy, and what good do they think it does?
You know the type from real life, or if you’ve read Bleak House by Charles Dickens; Mrs. Jellyby, a character in that book, anguishes over poor people thousands of miles away while neglecting her own family. She is so incapacitated by her long-distance suffering that she is unaware of the needy in her neighborhood. I run into her type in the oddest places; suburban cocktail parties, business lunches in upscale restaurants. There I have met folks who, contrary to actual appearances, claim to experience suffering that is legitimately the property of others.
Luzel, by contrast, has a professional relationship with one Marguerite Phillips, who has apparently turned this Ouija-board like communication with unseen sufferers into gainful employment. For a price, she will intercede for you in person at Lourdes in France, Fatima in Portugal, Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragoza, Spain, or Six Flags Over Torreciudad in Aragon. Ask about her end-of-COVID specials!
I’m not sure if Francois-Marie is bringing Marguerite with him, but I’ve reserved a table just in case. As the clock passes the witching hour when folks start to assemble at their favorite watering holes in Quincy Market for drinks and dinner, I begin to draw stares from wait staff and customers standing in line.
“Will the rest of your party be arriving soon?” the hostess asks me with a very un-hostessy tone in her voice.
“I don’t know, I can’t text him, he’s from the late 19th century, people didn’t have mobile phones.”
“Well, there are seats at the bar.”
“I know, but he and his friend have been dead for 100 years, I don’t think your customers would like the smell.”
She gives me a look that could fry a crepe–fortunately The Magic Pan, a “fast-casual” restaurant chain that used to crank out crepes for Boston’s yuppies is closed–and glances up at a commotion at the end of the queue.
“My friend is already here!” I say. I see Luzel shouting as he muscles his way past waiting diners, towing Marguerite along behind him like a parking ticket scofflaw as he comes.
“Francois-Marie!” I call out, while I give the hostess a little moue of comeuppance.
The two make their way over to my table and draw stares as they come. This is the common reaction of Bostonians to rubes from the provinces; how dare these yokels spoil our image of ourselves as the Athens of America, the Hub of the Universe, the Gateway to Somerville!
“How was the trip?” I ask, and am at once embarrassed at my banality. The guy’s a poet, fer Christ-sake, and I greet him like he’s in town for a convention.
“Pas mal,” he says, taking no offense. He, like me, escaped from a provincial upbringing thanks to education, and he wears his urbanity lightly.
“Would you two like something to drink?” I ask.
“I’ll have the vin de pays,” he says, using the French term for table wine. My kind of guy; not the sort who wants to sniff the cork and sample three different chardonnays while everybody else at the table is dying for a drink.
“How about you?” I ask Marguerite. She is not so sure of herself in the upscale, yuppified atmosphere of Quincy Market. Gone are the days of Durgin Park, when working-class waitress would scold you if you took too long to order, snapping “I haven’t got all day.”
Luzel confers with her in their native Tregorrois dialect, apparently assuring her that l’Americain will be paying the bill. “She’ll have what I’m having,” he says, then–after some typical poet-to-poet shop talk, we get down to business.
“So I’m interested in the penance-by-proxy thing you’ve got going,” I say to Marguerite, and I realize right away that I’ve alarmed her; like any provincial thrust into a strange urban environment, she’s wary that she will be robbed, arrested, or debauched. Either that or she doesn’t want to disclose her trade secrets without a non-disclosure agreement.
After Luzel whispers some comforting thoughts in her ear, she divulges her business plan:
“We’re having a special on lightly-used crutches.”
“Many people want to suffer, but have nothing worth suffering about.”
“Like the heated steering wheel in their Range Rover is on the fritz.”
“This I know nothing about,” she says, barreling right past my flippant badinage. “For these people, I can hook them up with a leper, a beggar, and so on. Give them something to suffer about.”
“But suffering–and I may be going out on a limb here–isn’t a lot of fun, is it?”
“Non, it is not. If you have a blemish on your soul that requires penance, we will do that penance for you. If you have a defect in the body, we will say the prayers, make the pilgrimage, whatever, so that you get better.”
“Okay, so you get people coming and going, huh? You’re basically recession-proof.”
Marguerite looks at Luzel, who explains: “It is as if you had a printing press in your modest home that enabled you to print money.”
“Ah,” she says. “This is correct.”
“So not a bad racket at all,” I say, breaking into a smile of admiration. “Fortunately, most of the troubles of my youth are behind me, but lately I’ve noticed several bumps on my head.”
“If you comb your hair right,” Marguerite cracks, “nobody will notice.”
“So you know my mother’s old jokes huh?”
“Well, she was named Marguerite too. We have an affinity group.”
“So how much would you charge–ballpark–to go to Lourdes to cure a kid’s Osgood-Schlatter Disease for him?”
Marguerite turns to Luzel and asks “Qu’est-ce que?” Which translated literally means “What is the what?” but which the French understand to mean “What’s that?”
“It’s a non-serious disease that has a terrible-sounding name,” I say. “A friend of mine had it as a kid.”
“And . . . did he die?” Luzel asks.
“No, last I heard he was doing fine, although he got out of a lot of gym classes using it as an excuse.”
“So–not fatal?” Marguerite asks.
“Nope.”
“And if you leave it alone–it gets better by itself?”
“More or less.”
She confers with Luzel for a moment, they jabber back-and-forth in Breton, he takes out a pencil and asks me if I have a piece of paper.
“You can write on the table, it has a paper cover to make the place seem artsy and to save money.”
He scribbles a column of figures–I get the sense they’re toting up expenses–shows it to her and she nods in agreement.
“Monsieur,” Luzel begins, adopting an air of formality now that we’re getting down to brass French cookware.
“Yes?”
“Marie is an elderly woman, she wishes to live out her last days in comfort.”
“I totally understand,” I say, even though she’s got a century and a half on me.
“She is facing an eternity in Purgatory for making false appeals to various patron saints. Can you be of any assistance to her?”
“Right up my alley,” I say, breathing a sigh of relief that I got off easy. “You know the 99-to-1 odds in Luke, 15:7?”
“There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous people who have no need of repentance?”
“That’s the one. I haven’t been inside a church except for weddings and funerals since the mid-sixties, so if you’re looking for a lost lamb, I’m your man–or sheep.”
“You would do that for me?” Marguerite asks, all wide-eyed innocence like one of the shepherd kids at Fatima.
“What the hell,” I say. “I’m not going to be able to use them where I’m going.”
“Do I have to sign something?” she asks.
“No, it’s one-way, like an IOU.”
“Okay,” Luzel says. “Let her rip.”
I clear my throat and say the magic words of mumbo-jumbo that transfer my balance in the Great Depository Institution in the sky to the humble Breton maid: “I hereby sell, assign, and transfer to Marguerite all my accumulated Catholic mojo, to do with as she wishes.”
“Don’t you need a notaire to witness the ritual?” Marguerite asks.
“Not as long as you didn’t have your fingers crossed behind your back.”