The true and tragic tale of Guillaume du Vintrais

a free man in a free country

Hello,

This is an old text, but I never published it in this format in TWS, so I think it still counts. It is maybe one of the most personally important—and hearbreaking—stories in literature that I know. It was previously published in the Soaring Twenties Social Club, my absolutely favorite publication/literary saloon.

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The true and tragic tale of Guillaume du Vintrais

Guillaume du Vintrais

Please imagine a young and talented man in his twenties. He is, as they often are, a poet, a fighter, a lover. His name is Guillaume du Vintrais. He was born in 1553, and at the tender age of seventeen, he moved from Gascony to Paris in order to live his life to the fullest. He was immediately in love with the city, and the city returned the affection. He wrote venomous epigrams, he fought in duels, he raked his way through Paris’ beau monde. One of his friends was young Henry of Navarre, the future king Henry IV. Another was Agrippa d'Aubigné, a famous poet in his own right. His book of one hundred sonnets, called “Wicked Songs of Guillaume du Vintrais”, has such titles as “Burgundy wine”, “The Kindest of Valois”, “Elixir of Hekate”, “A Poet in Paradise”, “Pigeon post”, and so on. A lot of his poems are dedicated to a mysterious “Marchioness L.”; those, as you can imagine, are more romantic ones. Generally, his poetry has quite a specific combination of debauchery, blasphemy, camaraderie, romanticism, and philosophy that can be described as “d’Artagnan meets François Villon”.

I totook it upon myself to translate some of his poems to English. Please attribute any imperfections to my translation and not to the source material. 

The Ten Commandments

“I am thy Lord…”—Yes, so I heard somewhere.
“Thou shall’ve no others…”—What about gold?
“Thou shalt not take My name in vain”—Well, there
I must confess, I took Thy name threefold.

“Remember Sabbath…”—Such a dull mandate!
I can indulge my idleness more often.
“Honour thy parents…”—Yes.—“Thou shan’t adulterate…” 
—This one’s so grim, my limbs begin to soften.

“Shan’t kill”—Should I forgive my critics’ crimes? 
“Shan’t steal”—But how then will I get my rhymes?
“Shan’t bear false witness”—Oh, go on and shove it! 

“Shan’t covet thee thy neighbor's wife or ass…”—
(Oh Lord, this list is long, forgive my sass!)
And if my neighbor is an ass—can then his wife I covet?

Things changed for du Vintrais after August 24th, 1572, also known as “St. Bartholomew's Eve massacre.” It is unknown whether he was a Huguenot himself, but his friends, both d'Aubigné and Henry of Navarre, certainly were. He fiercely protected them, first with his sword, then with his quill. His poems became political; he attacked Henry de Guise, a staunch supporter of Huguenot persecution, then Queen Mother Catherine de' Medici, then King Charles IX himself. He was arrested, sent to Bastille. At the last moment, the king changed his sentence: from execution to exile. He came back to France in secret just to learn that his friend, Henry of Navarre, converted to Catholicism in order to become King Henry IV of France. That was perceived as a betrayal. 

I was your arms-bearer, friend, your shadow even… 
You’ve just become the crowned King of France.
Now, I’m afraid, we end this kind of dance.
Guillaume’s new songs, my friend, you won’t believe in. 

Enough! I will not lie, nor fawn, nor pester,
And most of all, I will not be your jester.

Guillaume du Vintrais went back to his quaint estate in beloved homeland, beautiful Gascony, where he passed the time with an old tome and an older bottle of wine. He passed away quietly in 1602. 

Although, he didn’t really, because Guillaume du Vintrais never existed. He was completely made up. The real story, as they often are, is darker. 

Hoaxes, mystifications are not uncommon in literature. Clara Gazul, a Spanish actress, was invented by Prosper Mérimée to publish his sarcastic commentary of contemporary French life and politics under her name. Romain Gary (which was a pseudonym in its own right) famously sometimes wrote under the pen name Émile Ajar, and this way received the Prix Goncourt twice. But believe me, no hoax is similar to this one.

The real Guillaume du Vintrais was born in 1943 in a Soviet Gulag. He was conjured up by two people, Yakov Charon and Yuri Weinert. They met in a forced labor camp with the ironic name “Free”, where they were spending ten years each for “counter-revolutionary activity”, a term as loose as it sounds. Charon studied in the Berlin Conservatory, worked as a sound technician in the soviet film industry, spoke perfect German. Weinert played piano since he was a kid, wrote poetry, worked as a translator from French. In 1937, both of them were arrested and sent to the “Free” labor camp. They were the same age, they shared the same interests. Naturally, they became friends. 

Guillaume du Vintrais started serendipitously. They were melting cast iron. Both of them were sitting on the ground, exhausted, and watching the thick, glowing orange liquid fill the skimming ladle. Yuri described the view with a poetic improvisation; Yakov replied with a rhyming line. That was enough. They started this literature game as a joke, but it quickly turned into something more. A jumbled-up “Weinert” became the name of an ancient Gascony family. The poet’s first and only image was created when the friends drew long hair and a magnificent mustache on Yuri Weinert’s prison photo. And a made-up French poet became an anchor for two very tired and desperate people. Very shortly after their release in 1947, both of them were (separately) arrested again, and this time sent to different camps. They continued to write du Vintrais’ poems together by mail.

(As a side note, the question “Why was someone arrested in the USSR?” is somewhat similar to a child’s question “Why is the sky blue?” There is actually an answer, but a full and comprehensive one requires a lot of time, a list of literature, and implies a lot of pre-gained knowledge on the part of the one who asked. A short answer, on the other hand, would probably just invoke more annoying questions, so many a parent rely on a trusty “It just is”. So, they just were.)

Yuri Weinert and Yakov Charon

The first “edition” of the “Wicked Songs”, containing forty sonnets, was hand-written by Yuri on the thinnest tracing paper in five copies and sent to their friends and relatives. This type of “package” by itself could be a reason for an arrest; luckily, some of their contacts were brave and decent people. They distributed the sonnets through a “pigeon network”, in secret. One of the people who read them this way was young Stella Kopytnaya. Some years later, after meeting him in person, she married Yakov Charon. They named their first child Yuri. In 1954, Yakov was “rehabilitated”, a Soviet judicial term meaning that the state made a mistake ever arresting him in the first place. He died in 1972 from tuberculosis that he got in the camp.

Yuri Weinert’s own fate was darker still. He was released from the gulag, then, a year later, arrested again. His “Marchioness L.”, Lucya Khotimskaya, was waiting for him at home. She saved money for a visit—he was incarcerated on the other side of the vast country. During the long and arduous trip, she fell ill and died in a hospital. When he received by mail her posthumously published book (she was a philologist), Yuri Weinert went into the mine he was working in and never came out. That was in 1951. In 1989, Yuri was posthumously rehabilitated, along with a few millions of others.

We know Guillaume du Vintrais’ story from Yakov Charon’s memoirs; he also assembled and published the whole hundred sonnets. I read them on the website of the Sakharov Center, where they are one among thousands of such books. A key to understanding this story, Charon’s and Weinert’s, and many others just like it, belonging to intellectuals, soviet “intelligentsia”, can be found in books by Viktor Frankl, who spoke from his own experience. I will quote a little paragraph from “Man’s Search for Meaning”:

Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than those of robust nature. 

To finish this part, it would make sense to cite one more of Guillaume du Vintrais’ poems. Let it stay with you for a while. 

Four words

Since childhood, I nurture these four words,
I have repeated them a thousand times, at least.
I heard them in the songs of wind and birds.
My Gascony had them to me bequeathed.

I throw them in the face of those I kill.
I whisper them to my beloved indoors.
I took them to exile, to Bastille,
I sent them, like a prayer, to my shores.

I’ve lost my Motherland and my recourse,
I am Quichote—silly, I admit.
But even if my quill will finally split,
I’ll scrape them on my crest—just these four words.

Till I expire, nothing would precede’em.
France. Wine. Love. And the final one is Freedom.

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This essay is a mildly edited part (about 1/3) of my review of Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”. You can find the original version here. Beware: it gets historical, then romantic, and then political.

This essay was published for the Soaring Twenties Social Club Symposium. This cycle, the theme was “Leisure”, and I find that republishing old texts fits perfectly with the theme.

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Best,

Ꙝ