Between Two Fires

“If God wanted order and goodness in the world, He shouldn’t have made things quite so hard on us. We’re all dead men, and women. He wants chaos and death? He gets them, and what say do we have in it?”

Jacquot’s words reflect the despair that comes from collective trauma. Since medieval French society was mainly Christian, the doctrine of God’s goodness was deeply ingrained. However, Jacquot logically concludes that God cannot want goodness for humanity because he has allowed the plague to spread and destroy their world.

“‘He was so good. Why would God kill good priests?’

‘The plague kills everything. Only the priests who won’t visit the sick have a chance of living.’”

Delphine struggles to reconcile her belief in God’s goodness with the destruction around her. Thomas points out that the bad priests survive because they are too selfish to care for the sick—an instance of The Everyday Nature of Good and Evil.

“He only just managed not to cry. He did this by angering himself at God for making him suffer and pay for sins he had been backed into. God ringed you round with hounds and cornered you, then speared you with your back against a tree.”

Thomas has difficulty moving past his anger with God over his past. His metaphor compares God to a hunter allowing his hounds to attack before dealing the killing blow. This imagery conveys Thomas’s sense of helplessness and develops the theme of Human Free Will Versus Predestination; he feels that no matter what, he is destined to suffer, so his immoral acts are not really his own.

“I know of men who have been pulled under by their armor. That’s real. The thing you described? I don’t know. It seemed possible last night that a monster might be eating men in your river, though I’ve never in my life seen a monster […] Can such a thing exist in sunlight? And yet it seems these are the end days, and I think Hell has opened its doors.”

In this quote, Buehlman contrasts horror elements with reality. Thomas does not believe that the monster exists because it is the type of thing people believe in when they let their mind wander. However, Thomas displays a level of faith in the supernatural because he believes that as the world nears Judgment Day, evil creatures may roam the earth.

“Then the creature did the worst thing Thomas had seen yet; it opened its mouth and exactly imitated the farmer’s scream. It moved toward the men again. The farmer just kept screaming, even as it mocked him, holding his hand against his head where the blood ran out thin and fast in the rain. Thomas had never been so afraid.”

This moment exemplifies the horror genre, using imagery to describe the terror that Thomas feels. Thomas does not allow himself to feel fear until the monster mocks the farmer’s screams. This ability shows how the monster plays on its victims fear to win its battles, developing the idea that good and evil are fundamentally human qualities.

“As if we needed any further proof this curse fell from the heavens to show us how corrupt we are.”

Matthieu believes that the Black Death is a punishment from God for humanity’s sins. However, he is projecting his own fear that he has lost God’s love because of his affair with Michel. Delphine’s divinity will show that the Black Death is from Hell, not heaven, resulting in a battle for humanity’s redemption.

“One went through his trunk, his pot, and his few tools. The other turned up the straw of the bed. The next day, this man had a fever. Four days later, everyone in the castle was dead. The new seneschal was last, crying at his own image in a polished piece of brass, trying with a shaking hand to paint fine eyebrows on the ruin he had become.”

This quote exemplifies how vanity and selfishness lead to people’s downfall. The seneschal receives justice for turning his back on the villagers and leaving them to die. The seneschal’s final moments of looking into his mirror to see the way his body has rotted away also serve as a reminder of the fleetingness of life.

“‘Very well,’ the seigneur said, in a mildly conciliatory tone, ‘the priest need not speak Latin for us. But he shall have no brains until he does. And no wine until he has brains.’ […]

The priest cleared his throat.

‘Hoc…Hoc est cerebrum meum,’ he said quietly.

The lord turned on his heel now, grinning mildly, and steered the spoon for the priest’s mouth, which he opened, accepting the spoonful of salty, garlic-scented meat. It was the best thing he ever tasted. His goblet was filled.”

Matthieu blasphemes God and the Eucharist because the seigneur threatens to take away his alcohol. This moment demonstrates the evil nature of the demon-army, which twists the signs and symbols of Christian faith. The fact that the monkey brain is the most delicious thing that Matthieu has ever tasted reveals that the demons will offer anything to Matthieu to get him to betray Delphine.

“He lashed out with the blade again and caught Théobald across the side of the head. Seawater, not blood, gushed from the wound. It stank. Théobald looked amused. He opened his mouth and a scream came out, but it was not his scream. It was the scream of the fat peasant who had died in the river. It was the scream the thing in the river had mimicked.”

Théobald represents an amalgamation of the monster in the river and the dead knight that Thomas knew before the battle of Crécy. This duel foreshadows the demon-army’s plan to use the dead as a psychological ploy to overcome humanity. The imagery of water gushing out of Théobald’s wounds adds to the scene’s horror in its uncanny depiction of gore and violence; in another case of evil coopting good, it also alludes to Jesus’s spear wound, said to bleed water in addition to blood.

“Death’s hand sat upon the brow of the king and also the farmer; Death took the beggar and the cardinal […] The babe died on the breast, and sailors brought their ships to port with dead hands. And the wickedness of man was laid bare, so great was his fear of this pestilence; for the mother fled her children and the son nailed shut his father’s door, and the priest betrayed his flock […] And the Lord made no answer.”

During the interlude sections, Buehlman repeats the phrase “And the Lord made no answer” to signify humanity’s sense of abandonment by God (107). Buehlman personifies death in part to highlight the familiarity of death during the Black Death: Likewise, Buehlman juxtaposes the different types of people who died during the plague to signify how death does not discriminate between types of people. The personification of death also corresponds to the passage’s use of archetypal figures (“the mother,” “the son,” “the priest,” etc.), which is part of what gives these sections their biblical cadence.

“She wanted a woman to hold her and tell her that the whole world didn’t yet belong to Death, masculine Death with his hourglass and his holes for eyes. Death with his bony arms that only embraced to take you away […] How did Heaven come into all of this? Heaven was life, not death. Heaven was a woman holding your hand in the crook of her arm and looking down at you. Heaven was a warm hand on your cheek and the smell of soup with garlic on the fire.”

Buehlman personifies death again, this time emphasizing death’s masculinity. Delphine processes her trauma as a young girl in a patriarchal society by viewing death as masculine; like men, death seems to rule the world. In contrast, Delphine believes that life and Heaven are feminine because the feminine represents comfort and goodness to Delphine.

“The priest knew his congregation was hungry for news about the disease and its progress; he knew they craved some reassurance that St. Martin-le-Preux would be spared, whether for its holiness or because they had suffered enough under the hand of their greedy seigneur, but he could not summon up the words. The truth was that he knew nothing. He did not know how it was spread, what was caused it, where it would go, or what could be done for the ill.”

As a priest, Matthieu wishes that he could comfort his congregation about the plague. However, because of the inherent uncertainty surrounding the illness, Matthieu cannot provide true comfort. He feels sadness because he wishes he could tell his congregation that God will spare them, but he does not know the mind of God, and what he sees seems to defy any sense of moral order.

“Each night became a battle for Matthieu Hanicotte. He was in danger of losing his belief, if not his soul. Were there souls at all? Was there really a naked, invisible little version of himself hiding under his skin, so valuable to Heaven and Hell that each would send emissaries down to fight for it?”

Matthieu has an internal struggle over his self-worth due to the anti-gay beliefs of the Church. He expresses his distress over the dehumanization of men like him through the existential question about whether people have souls or not. Matthieu’s struggle causes him to doubt God, but Delphine’s love and compassion help him regain his faith.

“‘I wouldn’t leave you,’ a small voice said. The priest looked down and saw that Delphine had come from the barn. ‘If it was the boy,’ she continued. ‘I wouldn’t leave.’

He smiled at her and wiped at his eye with the back of his hand.”

Matthieu feels the need to hide his orientation due to Thomas’s bigoted reaction to his confession. Since he fears losing Thomas’s approval, he pretends that Michel was a woman rather than a man. However, Delphine shows him unconditional love and promises that no matter what, she will always love him.

“He understood at once that this pear was cousin to the fruit that ruined man in the Garden of Eden, and it would ruin him, too.”

During Thomas’s possession by the demon, he exerts free will to resist the temptation of picking the pear, which would mean raping Delphine. Thomas’s reference to the Garden of Eden signifies that he realizes that picking the pear would have consequences outside of the simple action. Even in a dreamlike state, Thomas’s protective feelings for Delphine triumph over the demon’s temptation.

“‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But don’t you see? This is the one thing I can do as well as anyone else. I can’t plow. I can’t build. But I can suffer. God wants suffering now.’”

The man with dwarfism chooses to stay on the cross to suffer for the sake of his community. Although his actions do not effect whether the plague comes to his community or not, Thomas understands the man’s sense of helplessness. Thomas knows that controlling something, even one’s own suffering, is preferable to feeling like God predestined one for destruction.

“She was tempted by something stronger than her. Adam was tempted by a weaker creature. Or so we are told. If Eve was his inferior, his sin was greater. You can’t have it both ways.”

Delphine stands up to the misogyny of Guillaume and Thomas’s conversation about Adam and Eve. The two men discuss the medieval doctrine that all suffering comes from Eve, making women inferior to men. However, Delphine puts out the flaw in this reasoning: If Eve truly were inferior to Adam, then Adam should be held responsible for not stopping Eve and for following in her footsteps.

“The knight would never forget the image of the faltering priest holding the girl up; how like the raising of the Eucharist it looked.”

Buehlman uses the imagery of the Eucharist to highlight the importance of Matthieu’s sacrifice in protecting Delphine. Matthieu receives all the stings meant for Delphine to save her life. This marks Matthieu’s redemption from his earlier blasphemy, as the two scenes mirror each other in their use of Eucharist imagery.

“He had heard it just before he went to take orders, when the bishop’s personal musician came to the lord’s castle and hushed the room with it, making it seem possible to Matthieu that a greater world lay beyond the disappointment of his father and the vanity of his brother; a world where God’s love was unfiltered by priests or texts and could be had freely by looking up at the sky. Or hearing a man sing. It was a promise of joy he would not feel again until the May before the Great Death came, a joy made even brighter by how swiftly it was seized back again, how much it cost him.”

Before Matthieu dies, he thinks about a perfect world where all people feel God’s love. He associates this feeling with Michel, underscoring that the affair was good—more of an extension of God’s love than the rituals of the Church. That Delphine’s song gives Matthieu a moment of peace before he dies also signifies his soul’s heavenly destination.

“‘Tell me she’s dead. Tell me the plague took her and she died in a fever saying she was sorry. Maybe then.’

‘It doesn’t work that way. That’s not forgiveness, it’s justice. And wretched justice at that.’”

Before Thomas can be fully redeemed, he needs to forgive Marguerite. Delphine points out that his desire only to forgive Marguerite once she is dead does not signify true forgiveness; it is merely another form of revenge.

“We all fall short of perfection. You. Me. Père Matthieu. We all disappoint someone. Can we forgive only those who sinned against others?”

Delphine’s rhetorical question about Thomas only forgiving people who did not harm him personally affects Thomas. This moment pushes Thomas toward understanding Marguerite’s perspective. Thomas’s self-reflection about his own imperfections leads him toward true forgiveness and transformation.

“Two angels and a devil had tumbled into the water. Three angels came up. Forgiveness, then, was possible even for the worst.”

This imagery encapsulates the theme of The Possibility of Redemption. The transformation of the devil into an angel implies that redemption is possible for anyone, no matter what they have done in their life. This imagery also parallels Thomas’s transformation throughout the novel.

“You’re Him.

There is no him or her.

Why did you not come as I would know you?

I came as you would follow me. I came as you would love me in my innocence.

Why me?

That question has never been answered to anyone’s satisfaction. But you were the last one. The last one I could still save.

And yet this is Hell. I’m here.

Not for long.

I’m damned.

Not anymore.”

Thomas finally realizes Delphine’s identity through their conversation in Hell. Delphine reveals that she came to Thomas in the form of a young child so that he would love and feel protective of her. Delphine’s innocence broke down Thomas’s harsh exterior, which allowed Delphine to save Thomas’s soul.