#On His Station
Father Ostel of Narbonne survives in the record as a priest, a place-name and a robe. His title attests the priest. The place-name ties him to Narbonne. He may have been born there, served there or travelled from there, or he may simply have annoyed someone there badly enough that the town stuck to him like a burr. The file does not say which, and I will not choose for it. The robe was green. Of the three, the robe has done the most work.
He belongs to the Witch-Hunts of Toulouse, the campaign of A.S. 93. In it the young Synod, three years past the Concordat of Strasbourg, taught itself to turn denunciation into procedure. Ostel stood among the correctional agents who served before Purity had decided what its servants ought to look like. That is the whole of his station as the Ledger can certify it. There is no ordination year and no parish roll. No sermon, letter or signature in his hand has come down to us. He has no recorded age and no recorded face. His end is not recorded either.
A thinner file would be a rumour. A thicker one would require me to invent. I have been accused of many things in sixty years of service, and invention is the only one I resent, because the others were true.
#On the Green Robe
In Toulouse, Purity's agents dressed from whatever chest stood open. They came in parish black and militia wool, in borrowed judges' collars and mourning bands. One came in a university robe turned inside out and belted with rope. The warrant was the uniform. The cloth was improvisation. Into this motley stepped Father Ostel in green.
He claimed the robe was liturgically inherited. That is his explanation, and I record it as his. The file names no testator, rite or sacristy. Ostel was the only witness to his own claim, and a man who brings his own provenance to an inquisition has at least understood the genre. Green has its place in a vestry. It has never had one in a printer's cellar at midnight.
I wrote in the parent entry that he looked like a boiled leek with subpoena power. I stand by the vegetable. The subpoena was a figure of speech. Toulouse ran on district writs, writs of cleansing and lists read aloud from pulpits, and no paper shows which of these Ostel carried. I can vouch for the leek. It records the colour and my opinion of it. It says nothing about the man's girth, height or complexion. No surviving witness troubled to set those down, and I will not set them down for them.
The objection is more than one of taste, though taste would suffice. Clerical dress exists so that the eye obeys before the ear is consulted. A householder at his door sees black and knows the Church has come. He sees a militia coat and knows he is being arrested. He sees green and thinks, for one fatal instant, of the market. That instant is a hesitation, and hesitation was the one thing the Hunts could not afford to grant. Ostel's robe invited the city to wonder, and the campaign existed to cure it of the habit.
The White-Mantled Inquisitors of later years settled the question of colour for good. Their own entry covers when and by whose decree. In Toulouse the city already called Purity's men "the White Ones" while they wore everything but white, Ostel included. Terror is named for the condition it intends to leave behind. His contribution was to stand inside that name looking as little like it as a man could.
#On the Authority Beside Him
What Ostel served is better attested than Ostel.
The first warrant named Maël Aucourt, a licensed printer near the old Saint-Sernin quarter. He had slipped fragments of a Rationalist tract between plague notices and grain allotments. The men who came for him wore parish black and borrowed sashes. They carried three writs, none of them valid outside its own district. By midnight the subscriber list had doubled. By dawn Aucourt was dead. Confession then did what fire could not and carried the file outward. Toulouse named Albi, Albi named Carcassonne, and Carcassonne named Narbonne, Béziers, Montauban and the rest of the eleven.
Narbonne enters that chain as a word spoken under questioning. Whether Ostel was in the town when its name was given up, went there afterward, or had come from there in the first place, the record does not say. I note that the names coincide. I decline to build a career on the coincidence.
One of the priests who arrested Aucourt slipped in the ink-water and landed in a tray of funeral notices. The file does not name him. Several of my juniors have suggested, with hope shining in their faces, that he wore green. He may have. Nothing says so. I have sent the juniors to copy the Purity rule on evidentiary livestock until the hope passes.
The campaign's machinery was assembled around men like Ostel without, so far as any document shows, being assembled by him. They learned to burn paper in public and question people indoors. String-tied packets sealed with red wax dots would one day swell into the Index Damnatus. An Inquisitor whose name was later struck proposed writing the confession upon the confessor, and the brands that followed became the ancestry of the Lictors. That Inquisitor remains unnamed. Ostel has a name, which on this point disqualifies him.
Earlier Codex tables placed the Toulouse campaign, and with it every officer who served in it, in A.S. 3.
Corrected. A.S. 3 marks a Rationalist-era offence bundle later attached to the Toulouse file. The armed campaign, and therefore any service by Father Ostel within it, belongs to A.S. 93. The earlier date would have put him in green ninety years before there was a Bureau to embarrass. Even I do not hold a grudge that long.
#On the Suppressed Likeness
Purity suppressed every sketch of him. That is my account, and I give it as mine. I cannot tell you who drew him or how many drawings there were. I cannot tell you where they went or when. A suppressed sketch leaves no inventory, because that is the point of suppressing it. Anyone who brings me a surviving drawing of Father Ostel will be thanked, then questioned closely about where they found it.
The meaning of the suppression is a matter of interpretation, and here I interpret. In A.S. 93 the Bureau of Purity could brand a bookseller's chest with the title of his book and call it instruction. It could hang a list of a household's songs in the market square. It could not abide a charcoal of one of its own officers dressed as a vegetable. The Bureau has always been prepared to be feared. It has never been prepared to look ridiculous, and Toulouse taught it how closely the two can sit. A woman laughed in the ink-water matter, and by the next week laughter was evidence.
Hear me plainly on one point. The loss of his likeness is not the loss of the man. Nothing in my possession says Ostel was punished, defrocked, buried or quietly promoted to a diocese with fewer mirrors. Nothing says he ordered the suppression himself, though I would think better of him if he had. Purity tears out pictures more readily than it tears out priests. Whatever became of Ostel, the vanished charcoal is no evidence of it.
#On What Remains Attributed
What the Ledger holds amounts to this. A priest called Ostel, associated with Narbonne, served among the variously dressed agents of the Toulouse campaign in A.S. 93. He wore green. He said the green was inherited. In my account he looked like a leek, and his portrait did not survive the Bureau's sense of dignity.
Everything else would be my invention, and I have just told you what I think of invention.
He is the only officer of the Hunts whom I remember by a colour. There are worse fates in the archive, and several hundred of them are recorded in the parent entry.