zvejnieks78: переводы

→The gradual upward slope of the ground soon turned steeper as the group began to ascend Montfaucon, or Falcon Hill—named for “the ghastly sight of those birds of prey plunging down on to crows and ravens as they flew away with gobbets of flesh from dead bodies.”12 Shouts from the approaching crowd now competed with “the cawing of crows and the cries of birds of prey.”

→crowd of spectators, larger and noisier than usual.10 Some of them had come because they had nothing better to do, simply for their own amusement, eager to watch the two hanged men struggle and kick their way out of this world and into the next. But others were there in protest, for the case involving the two men had aroused a good deal of controversy. Some, wearing the hooded robes of coarse black or brown woolen cloth that marked them as university men, were even shouting angrily at the provost and his officers, denouncing the imminent hanging. The prisoners, as if still hoping to be rescued during their short, final journey to the gibbet, loudly joined in, crying out, “Clergie! Clergie!”—“We’re clergy!”11

→Following along behind the sergeants in a less orderly fashion was a

→horse, and behind him the rattling cart containing the two prisoners.8 After the cart came a troop of sergeants, some mounted, others marching on foot with wooden staff in hand.9

→of Paris, “superb in his furs and scarlet robes.”5 He was followed by his lieutenant and his bodyguard, a dozen mounted sergeants known as the Twelve.6 Behind the sergeants rode a gray-cloaked friar who would hear each prisoner’s last confession.7 Then came the burly executioner atop his

→Riding on his horse at the head of the somber procession was the provost

→sun, pecked and nibbled by the crows and rats that scavenged among the dead.4

→—scores of blackened corpses dangled there, exposed to the wind and the

→slopes of Montmartre in autumnal red, the execution party headed for another, more infamous hill to the east.3 The two felons in the cart, their hands bound and hemp nooses already around their necks, could see the grisly public gibbet looming before them as they lurched along an unpaved track toward the hill known as Montfaucon. They may have smelled it too

→Veering right, away from the freshly harvested vineyards covering the

→ONE DAY NEAR the end of October 1407, when Louis of Orleans had less than a month to live, a cart carrying two condemned men rumbled through the huge fortified gatehouse at the Porte Saint-Denis, across the wooden drawbridge, and into the northern suburbs of Paris.1 Behind the departing cart and its well-armed escort, above the great encircling wall, rose “the city of a hundred bell-towers,” the largest metropolis in Europe, a mile-wide panorama of spires and steeples all reaching toward Heaven amid a smoky haze exhaled by tens of thousands of kitchen fires.2

→The Provost

→1

→The scroll also gives us a glimpse into the lives of ordinary Parisians who were going about their daily routines when they were suddenly caught up in great events. These people played small but crucial roles in the drama, speaking for themselves and in their own voices, as carefully recorded by the provost’s scribes. Along with other surviving records spared by the teeth of time, the rediscovered scroll tells a story of conspiracy, crime, and detection that would be hard to believe were it not true.

→There are some things we will never know about the case. The decadent court of the mad king swirled with scandalous rumors of adultery, poison, witchcraft, and treason. But the tattered scroll provides a rare window onto a turbulent week in Paris that changed the course of history, recording developments almost as they took place and before their huge, enduring consequences for millions became apparent.

→A brilliant sleuth, Guillaume directed the scores of officers and clerics under his command to examine the crime scene, collect physical evidence, depose witnesses, lock Paris’s gates, and ransack the city for clues. The priceless scroll gives us a unique inside look at his investigation, conducted without modern forensic tools and mainly with shoe leather, intelligence, and a courageous pursuit of the truth.

→Guillaume’s inquiry took place hundreds of years before the advent of police detectives in the nineteenth century and the creation of the modern detective story by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others. But literary murder mysteries are as old as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, whose title characters each pursue a criminal inquiry.2 And Guillaume de Tignonville’s real-life investigation shows that one literary scholar is wrong to claim that “as long as the officially practiced, universally accepted means of crime detection was torture, the detective story was impossible.”3 Indeed, Guillaume led the investigation with what an expert on medieval law describes as “a remarkable legal and scientific rigor.”4

→The parchment scroll also captured a great national calamity in the making. For Louis’s murder had plunged France into a bloody civil war, leading to a devastating English invasion under Henry V, followed by a brutal foreign occupation that began to lift only with Joan of Arc.

→Like a torch ignited in the dark, the long-lost scroll revealed the gruesome facts of the assassination. It contained firsthand accounts of the grisly autopsy and the ensuing investigation as well as sworn depositions from shopkeepers, housewives, and other eyewitnesses who had seen the actual murder or the killers escaping afterward.

→The parchment scroll. “In the year of grace one thousand four hundred and seven…”