The Inquisitor’s Tale

“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a greyhound run. If you have, you know that it is a mystical experience. They are so swift, so exactly proportioned and balanced. It is one of the few perfect things in this world.” 

The nun’s appreciation of the beauty of Gwenforte’s running gives us a sense of one of the book’s big underlying themes: pleasure in the beauty of the world. Set against the brutishness of the knights who attack Jeanne, this image of the running dog gives us a sense that the world is full of loveliness that not everyone is able to see or appreciate.

“Saracen is a word that William does not approve of. William likes precision. He likes clarity. He likes to understand things. The word Saracen, as you all know, means two completely different things. On the one hand, we use it to mean Muslim, a follower of Mohammed. On the other hand, we use it whenever we talk about someone who looks foreign. The Mongols are “Saracens,” the pagan nomads of Arabia are “Saracens,” the Muslims of Spain are “Saracens.” So is William a Saracen? He has devoted every waking moment to living a Christian life. and yet his brown skin and black hair have always set him apart.” 

Here, the author teaches us a little bit of medieval history while also bringing modern objections to bear against the old human problems of racism and prejudice. William’s objection to the imprecision of the word “Saracen” gives us one way to think about a fundamental problem with prejudice: it’s simply wrong in the sense of incorrect, besides being wrong morally.

“I’m studying Aron, considering.

Old Jerome, in turn, is studying me. ‘What are you here for?’ he says suddenly.

I say, ‘What is everyone here for? I want to see the king and his troops. And, if I’m lucky, the three children and their—’

‘No,’ Jerome interrupts me. ‘There’s something else. You have a motive.’

He holds me in his gaze. He has very red lips under his white beard.

At last, I shrug. ‘I collect stories,’ I say. ‘This seems a promising one.’” 

This turn in the story is our first hint that our narrator may be less neutral than they seem. It’s also a good example of Adam Gidwitz’s writing style. These short, choppy lines of dialogue and description create a feeling of both tension and informality in the passages between the storytelling.

“He’s a child. But he looks like the kind of child who has seen too much of life, who’s seen more than most adults. His eyes are both sharp and dead at the same time. As if he won’t miss anything, because he’s seen it all already.” 

The book switches back and forth between tenses. While the many storytellers often use the past tense, the narrator’s time in the inn is always in the present. This use of the present tense helps to keep the story immediate, even though it’s set in the distant past. In this excerpt, we also see how the narrator’s character is developed even as we don’t know much about him: his sharp description of character gives us the sense that he’s observant, thoughtful, and canny.

“There’s some woods next to where they set up the market. And I see, lurking in them woods, a white dog, wif a copper blaze down her snout. And then, beside her, I see the biggest bloke I ever saw. And browner than a serf in summer, I swear it. I nearly forgot the song I was singing, ‘alfway frew.” 

In this passage, we hear the Jongleur’s distinctive voice: a punchy, countrified dialect. The use of multiple narrators with distinctive voices helps to support the book’s ideas about storytelling. Many different people come together to tell this story, and while they may not have a lot of superficial things in common, they’re united by their love of a good tale.

“Finally Jacob says, ‘Is that why Fabian cries? Because he can’t go home?’ And Marmeluc answers, ‘He has a twin sister. She would not speak to him when he returned. I believe he cries for his sister.’” 

The back story of the brigand knights offers us a new perspective on characters who before might have seemed like straightforward villains. While Fabian has certainly done terrible things, we’re given a way here to also feel some sympathy or understanding for him. Storytelling, the author suggests, helps us to connect—even to people who we might view with disgust.

“Sir Ewan drove the dragon from the inn by setting the ruins ablaze. Then, in the pasture beyond, they fought. Sir Ewan spurred his horse and charged the beast. He leveled his lance, aiming right between the dragon’s eyes. The dragon faced him—and then, in a moment of cowardice or treachery, he turned and expelled a great and thunderous fart.” 

The tale of the deadly farting dragon adds new elements of both goofy humor and fantasy to the story. Where previously, in spite of the miracles, we’ve been immersed in a pretty historically accurate and detailed medieval French landscape, we’re now taken fully into the world of medieval legend. This isn’t a classic dragon story: it’s one with a modern, comedic flair.

“‘It tastes like life.’ ‘What?’ ‘Rotten and strange and rich and way, way too strong.’” 

Jeanne’s experience of a very ripe, very runny French cheese gives the author an opportunity to sum up the book’s whole perspective on the world. As the story’s chronicles of the gruesome, the funny, and the beautiful suggest, Gidwitz is at once upset, delighted, and fascinated by the complexity of the world—and wants his readers to relish this complexity with him, as Jeanne eventually relishes the off-putting cheese. 

“The mind is like a muddy road. Two ruts run down its center, from all the carts that have passed that way. No matter how many carts try to roll alongside the ruts, to stay out of the mud, sooner or later, a turn here or a jolt there will send them down into the ruts for good. Just so is the mind. As hard as we try to keep our thoughts out of the old ways, the old patterns, the old ruts, any little jog or jerk will send them right back down into the mud.” 

While the Chronicler is here describing William’s habit of believing he’ll always be excluded, his point is one of the larger themes of the book. In a story that examines prejudice and groundless hatred of the other, the wheel ruts of habitual thought are always present. It takes real effort and real experience, the story suggests, to keep one’s mind out of the patterns it’s used to falling into.

“Then they saw the facade of the huge church, and their mouths dropped open even farther. It is one of the great sights of Christendom—hundreds of thousands of stones, perfectly hewn and fit together, shimmering in the sun like a waterfall on a cliff face.” 

Gidwitz’s enthusiasm for the world he’s describing is made clear in this lyrical passage. This description of the children’s awe at the cathedral of Saint-Denis helps to communicate both the wonder that such a church would have been at the time of its construction, and the wonder that we might still feel looking at it today. In describing the church as shimmering “like a waterfall,” Gidwitz also suggests the kind of awe that you might feel at a natural phenomenon, giving the sense that the power of the architecture is so great as to be almost godlike.

“Sometimes, it turns out, the most important decisions in life are made by your dog.” 

In the wake of the dramatic reversal that reveals Abbot Hubert to be a zealot and Michelangelo a reasonable man, Gwenforte’s decision to trust Michelangelo is not just about the powers of a specially gifted dog. Rather, it’s about the ability to trust one’s feeling for people and to look past appearances: two very dog-like virtues.

“Jeanne fell silent. She stared at the broad boards of the floor. Inside her, grand castles of comprehension, models of the world as she had understood it, shivered. She could not decide whether to let them crumble or to try desperately to save them.” 

Jeanne’s difficulty in accepting the excellent news that Michelangelo has not killed her old friend Teresa, but saved her, reflects the real complexity of belief. Even a pleasant threat to a long-established worldview is still a threat. Gidwitz suggests that changing your mind is not easy work—though it is deeply important. The image of “grand castles of comprehension” is telling: a castle is a structure for defending one’s own life and belongings.

“The vines were beautiful, deep green against the glowing sun-kissed stone, like the illuminated marginalia in a manuscript. But these marginalia contradicted the text, because the ivy was silently eating away at the mortar between the stones and would one day bring the walls down. So the monks were tearing the beautiful lines of ivy away.” 

This poetic description of ivy climbing monastery walls nods at the physical book itself as we read (which has a marginal picture of sprouting ivy on the very same page). Being reminded of the book we’re holding encourages us to further consider why the King’s impending book-burning might be bad for the virtues this story upholds: a book contains its own reality, and that reality can be destroyed.

“The humanity multiplied. And multiplied. Like turning over a log in a wood and finding the underside teeming with life, and then realizing that the entire forest floor teems, too, and that this log, pulsing with creatures, is only one sliver of the great seething masses of life spreading out in every direction all around one’s feet—just so, as the royal oxcarts rolled on, each street of Paris appeared to the children like its own world, its own universe of life, teeming with more humans than they had ever seen. And then they would be reminded, by some skittering side alley or diagonally crossing lane, that this stretch of street was but an infinitesimally small slice of Paris, and that the city multiplied out and out and out. Trying to comprehend its enormity was like trying to imagine the enormity of God. The human mind is simply not up to the task.” 

This lively description of the multitudinous crowds of Paris reveals another kind of marvel at the vast diversity of humanity. The realization that a single human mind can’t even really conceive of a city, let alone the world, points out the lie in the idea that we have the capacity to truly understand much of what we think we do. This is yet another way to think about the shortsightedness of prejudice.

“‘When I see you and William and Jacob laughing together—a peasant girl, an oblate, and a Jewish boy—I think, This is good. When I see petals fall from a pear tree at the end of spring, spinning like dancers to the ground, I think, This is good. And when a Jew is struck by a Lombard in the street, I think, This is very bad. And when a book is destroyed, I think the same thing. But what have those in common? What does a Jew have in common with a book? Children with petals spinning to the earth?’ A log cracked and fell in the fireplace. The smell of roasting wood wafted out into the room. ‘I don’t know,’ Michelangelo said. ‘But I believe that it is the voice of God, telling me what to love and what to hate.’” 

Michelangelo’s argument in favor of trusting one’s gut instinct on ethics is quickly countered by Jacob’s very reasonable question: but what about people who feel hatred in their guts? Michelangelo replies that he doesn’t think a lot of those people really feel that hatred, but feel, rather, a hatred for an idea. Michelangelo here suggests a kind of trained listening as a way of making good moral decisions: an ethics that is informed both by instinct (like Gwenforte’s) and study.

“‘Gwenforte!’ Jeanne reprimanded her. But Gwenforte would not quiet. She growled and barked, growled and barked some more. Her intensity was frightening. She was no longer a greyhound. She looked like a wolf. Blanche of Castile recoiled.” 

Gwenforte’s immediate (and justified) hatred of Blanche continues the theme of instinct as a moral compass. While much of the book has been concerned with complexity and shades of grey, there is also some level at which the author is interested in what feels deeply right or wrong, and Gwenforte in her role as both a saint and a dog stands for those hard-to-explain deep-down moral instincts. 

“‘Try to close your eyes, children,’ Michelangelo said. ‘Tomorrow, martyrdom may call.’

A choking silence squeezed the room.

Finally William said, ‘Oh, I’ll fall right to sleep now.’” 

By putting the big medieval drama of martyrdom next to modern-sounding humor, Gidwitz both deflates some of the story’s drama and helps us to feel more directly connected to the events he describes. When these medieval characters speak like modern people, we’re invited to consider how their experiences might be directly relevant to our own lives.

“...William said, ‘O Lord God, we have tried to hear Your voice above the din of other voices. Above the heresy—and even above the orthodoxy. Above the abbots and the masters. Above the knights and even the kings. And though this world is confusing and strange, we believe we have heard Your voice and followed it—followed it here, to this place. Now please, God, hear us. Help us, watch over us, and protect us as we face the flames of hate. Please, God. Please.’” 

William’s prayer before the children’s attempted book rescue sums up the book’s moral attitudes. Both the confusion of the world and the pressures of other people need to be put aside so that one can follow an inner truth—and that, the book suggests, is very hard work. What’s more, one can’t do it alone.

“I cannot believe what I am witnessing. William, Jeanne, and Jacob in the flesh. If William is more childlike than I had imagined, Jeanne is smaller, fiercer. Jacob is just a hair shorter than Jeanne, and his freckled face is alight with passion. There is something about these children that makes it hard to look away from them.” 

When the inner and outer narratives of the story at last come together, both the power of story and the different power of reality are revealed. The narrator is so caught up in the story that they’ve created their own version of these distinctive children. The children’s actual appearance comes as a little bit of a surprise, demonstrating how vividly the narrator has come to picture them. But the real children have a different intensity, not a lesser one.

“‘So you can’t understand God’s plan! Only God can! But we must try! We must try! I have devoted my whole life to trying! I study the birds and the bees and the stars and the trees…’” 

The drunken monk, Master Bacon, makes a passionate (if tipsy) case for scholarship in an uncertain world. Coming on the heels of the children’s agony over the loss of Michelangelo in a plan that didn’t work, the monk’s reference to the Biblical Book of Job provides two different kinds of consolation: both the feeling that the world has always been mysterious, and that the books the children have saved may indeed help them—and others—to feel more at home in the world. Learning is presented as one way to reckon with our place in an incomprehensible universe.

“‘Life is a song, composed and sung by God. We are but characters in His song. Hildebrand doesn’t think his song is beautiful. He’s either going to kill his son or die himself. It’s not beautiful to him at all. But that’s because he can’t hear it. He’s in it. You can’t hear a song you’re in, right?...So! If we could hear our own songs, if we could see God’s creation the way God does, we would know it’s the most beautiful song there is.’” 

The troubadour gives a different answer to Jacob’s question about the problem of evil and suffering. But the answer is subtly related to the friar’s answer before him. In both of these cases, the enormous complexity of the world can’t be overcome with reason or intellect: there is only the hope that the song of life, heard from God’s perspective, is deeply beautiful. But, as is the case with the story of Job, humans have to resign themselves to believing in something they can’t fully perceive themselves.

“‘But I cannot do it,’ I say. ‘Last night, as you slept, I could have slit your throats. It was my intention. As soon as you arrived in the yard of the inn, the plan leapt into my mind, fully formed. It was perfect. It was easy…’ I let the words hang in the silence. Jeanne speaks. ‘But?’ ‘It was wrong,’ I reply. I feel hot tears welling in my eyes and then running down my cheeks. ‘It was wrong.’” 

The narrator, now revealed as the inquisitor, is a final big example of the ways in which people can change. Through connection, storytelling, and his own common sense, the inquisitor has made a great leap, putting aside his own self-interest in the service of a higher moral principle. Importantly, he has to give up an earlier belief to do this: he felt, originally, that his plan to murder the children was in the service of a greater good. Being a truly moral person, the book suggests, demands self-sacrifice and difficult reflection on one’s own deepest convictions.

“There are sheep in the meadow beside the road. Gwenforte walks up to the low stone wall, and one sheep—a ram—doesn’t run away. They sniff each other’s noses. Her white fur beside the ram’s wool—two textures, two colors, both called white in our inadequate language.” 

The inquisitor’s learning about the complexity of life and the value of storytelling is subtly summed up in this image of the ram and Gwenforte sniffing each other. Language can’t communicate the full overwhelming truth of reality—or even get all that close to describing a difference as simple as the different shades of white. But it’s what we have, and its power has brought the inquisitor to this new point of reflection and thoughtfulness.