The Story of Azelaïs
Beginning of an epic
It is February 13th, 1278. We are in the center of the Arena di Verona where over 200 human beings are tied together in small groups of women, men, and children. Among them is a woman of 85 years who was born in 1193, far away from Verona: her name is Azelaïs Pauc. White hair, gray-green eyes. She was captured along with the others in Sirmione, the last stronghold of a heretical Christian current. Today in Verona, in the name of the true religion, one of the great bonfires in Italian history is being lit. Alongside old Azelaïs, 200 scream among the flames and the smoke rises to the clouds.
The story of the journey in the life of this woman until her death by fire in the arena of Verona is long, outstanding and painful.
When she was just over 16 years old, in 1209, she was very beautiful, with long hair and eyes that radiated a bright energy, intelligence and curiosity for life.
At that time, we are very far from Verona, we are in the city of Besièrs, in Occitania, on a plateau, among flowers and vineyards as far as the eye could see towards the sea.
Here is Azelaïs, standing next to her father Joàn Pauc, a doctor that everyone calls the Toledoan from the city where, as a young man, he studied. Today is the 21st of July. Besièrs is the most ancient city of the hexagon that today we call France. Father and daughter are in the bedroom of an old and rich wine producer named Isern Massabrac. In the next room, the entire patriarch's family is waiting. Isern is much loved. The vaulted ceiling of his room is painted in a deep peacock-blue dotted with golden stars: a night sky under which he and his wife sleep. On the wall hangs a tapestry woven with infinite shades of color: it represents the cycle of viticulture in the different seasons. But Isern no longer sees any of the beauty of his home nor of the faces of his family, and he does not see his vineyards. He is blind: he had lost sight from one of his two eyes, which had become hard and had an unnatural bluish reflection. Glaucoma, diagnosed doctor Joàn Pauc, Azelaïs’ father. Incurable. The other eye, however, the left one, had been rendered blind by a cataract. Joàn was ready to operate on him. Isern Massabrac and his family begged him to do it. This operation is taking place right now. The patient has been immobilized by two wooden boards tied with a strap attached to the bed boards. The very young Azelaïs, who assists her father, performs eyelid eversion to expose the eyeball to be operated on. She sprays it with a liquid compound from a distillation of opium, black henbane. and mandrake which serves to disinfect and anesthetize. Finally, she wets it with a composition of yellow arsenic powder dissolved in coriander water. Joàn begins to operate according to a precise methodology. Azelaïs reads for him step by step the Latin translation of a fundamental text of ophthalmology written in Arabic by Abu Al-Qasim Ammar (the Liber de Cura Morborum Oculi). Joàn inserts into the bulb the needle, sufficiently sharp but not too thin, of a metal syringe invented by Abu Al-Qasim himself and perfected by Joàn. He inserts it through the two outer tunics. Azelaïs reads aloud to him: “...in medio loco inter oculi nigrum et angulum tempori propiorem et region mediae suffusionis, sic ne qua vena laedatur”.
The needle guided by Joàn goes through the aqueous humor, perforates the iris, attaches itself to the opacified and sclerotic tissue of the crystalline lens, lowers it and, slowly, sucks it into the syringe. And out comes the needle! For old Isern a black curtain falls, he sees the light. Azelaïs washes and disinfects the operated eye again. Joàn bandages it. Tomorrow morning, they will come to visit him. They leave Isern to try to sleep and bear the pain, as he thinks that in a few days he will once more see, with that very eye, the people he loves, his vineyards and the ceiling of his bedroom.
Before proceeding to the history of Azelaïs’s life, I must first acknowledge her background. I’ll start with her father. Finishing his studies in Toledo, Joàn Pauc returns with two large baskets full of copies of books loaded on the back of a mule. Toledo is a multi-ethnic capital with a truly unique culture in Europe; it is multilingual (Catalan, Castilian and Latin are currently spoken together with Arabic and Hebrew) and it is full of libraries. Joàn has studied Latin (the language he speaks at home is the langue d’oc), but he does not know Arabic which is the language of science and in particular of medicine. For two centuries, Arab medicine has been the most advanced and complete on the planet. There is, in Toledo, an Italian who also emigrated to study. His name is Gherardo, and he comes from the city of Cremona. He studied Arabic comprehensively, and understanding the value of those texts began to translate from Arabic into Latin with tireless energy. He is a protagonist of the famous Escuela de traductores de Toledo.
On the return journey (more than a thousand kilometers on foot alongside his donkey) Joàn Pauc is starving: his love for books resulted in him spending all the money that his family had given him and that he had earned by working in his free time from studying. Among the copies of the books on medicine and surgery translated by Gherardo da Cremona that Joàn Pauc brings with him, there are the Liber Regalis by Alì Al-Majusi, some volumes of the Liber Medicinalis of Muhammad Al-Razi: an immense physician, philosopher, mathematician and musician, the first to employ alcohol in medicine, inventor of sulfuric acid, the first to use mercury, discoverer of allergic asthma, scholar of vesicle and measles. There is the Canon Medicinae of Ali Ibn-Sina (we call him Avicenna) and the General Medicine is of Al-Walīd Ibn Rušd (Averroes) and the Rectificatio Medicationis of the Andalusian Al-Malik Ibn Zuhr whom we call Avenzoar. There is also the very precious volume dedicated to the surgery of Khalaf Al-Zahrāwī, whom we call Abulcasis.
Once back in Besièrs, Joàn asks a blacksmith friend of his to reproduce the tools designed in detail in his text by Abulcasis himself. The blacksmith has a foundry on the banks of the Orb; the water of the river powers hammers and bellows. He usually makes blades for plows, yokes, sickles, railings, knives, axes and swords. Curious and seduced by the charisma of the young doctor, he tries to melt in sealed crucibles a mixture of iron, carbon and glass in such a way as to enrich the iron with carbon and to make the glass absorb all the impurities of the iron as it melts. The result is a steel of extreme purity. With this steel, Joàn has his instruments modelled: scalpels, pliers, scissors, pincers and saws of different shapes and lengths, probes, catheters, stilettos, speculums, syringes, awls, splints, otoscopes, needles etc. etc.
Thanks to his trip to studying in Toledo, his instruments, and his talent, Joàn Pauc soon becomes the first doctor and surgeon of the city, he falls in love with the daughter of a family of dyers, Melina de Lanta, and she also falls in love with him. They marry. Joàn and Melina have only one daughter, our Azelaïs. Joàn the Toledoan adores her and she reciprocates his love and attention. At 12 years old, Azelaïs already reads Latin perfectly and from that moment devours her father’s texts, one after the other, methodically. She repeats to everyone a maxim of Hippocrates, who knows why she likes it so much, perhaps she has already perfectly understood the drama of the scientist in the face of illness: “Life is short, the medical art is long and complex, opportunity is fleeting, experience is fallacious, judgment is difficult.”
She watches her father treat the sick and operate. Of course, for a young girl, her mother’s activity must have an infinitely superior charm. The Lanta have a fabrica on the outskirts of the city and they deal with “the great dyeing”, the one that uses the most precious pigments. The fabrics dyed in the de Lanta dyeworks are sold throughout Europe and the East. The art of the de Lanta dyers is refined and valuable and inspires painters. Around Besièrs, there are endless fields of woad with which the rich shades of blue, violet and green are obtained and used to make the colours of the skies and the waters. (Incidentally: Piero della Francesca’s father became rich by trading woad on a large scale; his son used it to obtain his wonderful indigo blue).
Of course, the smell in the dyehouse can be disgusting at times. The mixing of colors in the dyeing vats, the compositions of the dyes imitating the colors of nature, could have been, for Azelaïs, the most satisfying of aspirations. But no. She prefers her father’s art. She prefers anatomy, prefers to learn from him how to suture blood vessels with silk threads. Joàn teaches her the right way to cut, dissect, drill, sew; he makes her experience it, when he cuts open pigs and explains to her the mechanisms of the organs that keep living beings alive, humans as well as pigs. Azelaïs is not disgusted.
This girl, deeply in love with her father and his profession, grows up in an extraordinary context. Occitania at the end of the 12th century contains a world in which I would have liked to live. Not only for the beauty of the places, but above all for the civilization, poetic and aesthetic culture that they had developed. We are therefore in a place that is enchanting in many ways. We are in one of the brightest, most creative, most desirous of innovation and freedom of thought moments that Europe has ever known. In Occitania there is no serfdom. The activities of artisans, entrepreneurs and merchants grow, and women have the same rights as men, including that of inheritance. While, all around, Europe is under the weight of feudalism, here an open, free, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan society flourishes with quasi-republican and democratic organizations. In 1189, Toulouse (the third largest city in Europe) made a revolution without guillotine and became a Republic (exactly 600 years before the storming of the Bastille). Anyone who comes to live in Toulouse becomes a free citizen. It is the time of the birth of European poetry in the vernacular, which is precisely in the Occitan language, the langue d’Oc. One of the three that would be erased by the events that Azelaïs would witness. The 8 verses of Dante in Occitan in which he makes “the best smith of maternal speech” (Arnaut Daniel) speak, pay homage to the foundation of European poetic culture born here, in the 12th century, in the langue d'Oc.
I said I wanted to live here, in this time, but... but there's a but, a very big but.
A fundamental role in the growth of civilization in which Azelaïs was born was played by the “great heresy”. It arrived in Occitania with the wind of the Bulgarian Gnostic mysticism of the Bogomils, at the beginning of the year 1000. Its new vision of the world and of Christianity, of human relationships, of women, of Good and Evil, won over this part of Europe and evolved over two centuries, contributing its civilization. The Christian church (Eckbert von Schœnau in the middle of the 12th century) called the followers of this vision Cathars (from Katharoi “pure”, “pure heretics”). Cathars do not derive from Cattus, as some say due to the Inquisitors accusing them of kissing the cat’s ass (the devil); fake news even then. These “heretics” call each other simply, Believers, Faithful, and their preachers, male and female, Good Men and Good Women. They reject the paradox that an all-loving God causes so much pain to the humans he himself would have created. For them, Christ shows the way. There is no need for churches, one can turn to God anywhere, no external cults, no liturgies, no sacraments, no ecclesiastical hierarchy, just respect for other faiths, freedom and equality of gender. The most emblematic word in Occitan, I believe rooted in poetry, Paratge is untranslatable: it expresses the sense of generosity, of integrity, of nobility of heart.
The Pauc family and the de Lanta family are imbued with this religious spirit, as well as being part of the Occitan culture. They chose the name Azelaïs for their daughter because it is that of a beloved poet, a trobairitz born in Porcairagues just 12 kilometers from Besièrs on the road to the sea. I believe she is the first female poet whose name is known.
But let’s go back to our Azelaïs when she leaves Isern’s home with her father after the eye surgery. They are happily returning home. Melina, her mother, has gone to Carcassonne (80 kilometers away) to visit her younger sister who has just given birth. Azelaïs jokes with her father, she calls him “magnus chirurgus ocularius!” (great surgeon oftalmologist) He replies, and he isn’t joking, that she will become a “magna chirurga ocularia”. He suggests that they go to their friend Pèire’s ostou where they will eat a pear and onion soup but, above all, his famous meat pie in a bread crust. Melina is a vegetarian, like many Believers, but father and daughter are not, and tonight they will gorge themselves; anyway, Melina doesn’t see them!
Suddenly, they hear a distant rumble of thunder. They raise their eyes to the sky: it is orange, without clouds. They reach a crossroads that allows them to see, as if through a telescope, the glimpse of the valley below facing north-east, from which comes that dark, thunderous and continuous echo. It sounds like a waterfall but it isn’t: it is an immense cloud of dust raised by a 10-kilometer-long column of thousands of men on foot and horseback, of wagons, of beasts, of disassembled war machines, of catapults, of siege towers, of large crossbows. A frightening number, a total of 50,000 according to the chronicler Pierre Vaux-de-Cernay, a Cistercian monk. In that distant and still confused mass, we can glimpse the armor, the shiny plate and chainmail of barons and knights, the leathers around the torsos of the soldiers, the multicolored cloaks of hundreds of high prelates. Infinite is the number of flags that beat in the wind: the rampant lion on a red background of the Montforts, the oblique yellow and blue bands of the Burgundians the vertical red and yellow bands of the counts of Provence, the yellow rampant lion with red tongue and nails of Nevers, the blue background adorned with a bunch of golden ears of corn of the Saint-Pols. And there are German flags and Italian flags. There are not yet those of blue starred cloth of Philip the One-Eyed, king of France, called the Conqueror. He is busy taking Normandy, Anjou and Touraine from the English. The French will eventually arrive.
Behind the cloud of dust, the metals, and the fabrics of every color there is a multitude of carpenters, blacksmiths, clerics, accountants and cooks heading the supplies with herds and flocks in tow. There is also a frightening heterogeneous crowd of a few thousand. They are scoundrels, hungry thieves and rapists wielding improvised weapons, iron clubs, knives, pickaxes, axes. For shields, they use iron-studded barrel lids. Today, the various armies we see in Mad Max or the Urukai in the Lord of the Rings are inspired by them.
In a few moments, the street where Azelaïs and Joàn are walking is filled with people screaming in fear. Young men already have weapons in their hands, the bells of the cathedral are ringing, the very heavy gates of the city are barred. Prelates on horseback burst into the street: they are the bishop of Besièrs, Renaud de Montpeyroux, with his auxiliaries. They have the great gate reopened which leads to the only true access to the city: the bridge spanning the Orb. The bishop gallops to meet the army.
Joàn grabs her daughter. They run home.
At this point I must “unearth” and paint the portrait to the mastermind who wanted this immense army that is approaching the city. He is an intellectual and jurist born in Lazio, his name is Lotario dei Conti di Segni. He studied in Paris and Bologna and was elected Pope (Innocent the III°) 11 years ago, when he was thirty-seven. As a young man, he had written a remarkable book “On the misery of the human condition” where he talks about the fragility of the body, the uselessness of ambitions and the pursuit of wealth, the worthlessness of what today we’d call pleasure and success. “We will all end up as corpses that crumble awaiting universal judgment...” concluded the young count of Segni. But when they elected him pope he said:
“To be Pope is the most glorious position on earth, halfway between God and man, below God but above man. I cannot grant any freedom to human thought. I have received the power to overturn, to disperse, to destroy, to build and to sow.”
The heresy of the so-called Believers is conquering entire populations in Occitania, including many clergymen. The spirit that can be felt in Occitania is innovative, shocking, and the Believers are gaining more and more followers. The English chronicler and theologian Radulfus Niger (Ralph the Black) who was part of the entourage of Thomas Becket had already warned Christian Europe: before going to the East to liberate Jerusalem, Westerners must clean up “their own house”.
Innocent sees the terrifying threat of this heresy. He wants to be the greatest Pope in History, not the last in the history of popes. To crush the danger, he launches an international military operation. He had launched another, a few years earlier, to conquer Jerusalem which had resulted in a catastrophic series of crimes against humanity in Constantinople. The term “crusade” comes, if I am not mistaken, from later historians; at the time, they did not say “crusade” and they did not say “war”. The official term is “iter militaris”.
So Innocent launches “a special military expedition” of Christians against Christians. This iter militaris is given a code name: negotium pacis et fidei (business of peace and faith). Innocent, after having affirmed that “Peace is the supreme commandment of Christ”, says to his army: “Let not your eye pity, nor have mercy: wound to heal, and kill to give life!”. Simone Weil holds that it is precisely with this special military operation in Occitania that “genocide” is institutionalized, the principle that is at the basis of all genocides up to the Shoah and continuing today: kill and you will be rewarded because you are not exterminating human beings but “the Evil” that is in them. They “are” evil.
Let's go back to our Azelaïs. The citizens of Besièrs are summoned by the city’s consuls: they have to “vote”. Joàn and Azelaïs are present. What are they voting for? This is what happened: the bishop of Besièrs, whom Azelaïs and her father saw galloping by, had handed over a document to the pope’s legate, Abbot Arnaud Amalric, superior general of the Cistercian order and supreme commander of the army. It contained a list of 222 names, the names of the heretics of Besièrs. There are many more (and many sympathizers) but on that sheet of paper there are only the 222 names confirmed by the bishop. “Have them delivered to you, do what you want with them, and leave the city in peace”, the informant bishop tells him. “Your city is completely infected” Almaric replies (as the envoy in the field narrates), but he accepts the idea (or pretends to accept it) and sends an ultimatum: “deliver the heretics or die with them”. It is almost night when the consuls gather the citizens and report. There is no need to vote, the almost unanimous answer is, textually: “We would rather let ourselves drown in the sea!” It is inconceivable, for them, to betray people that the whole city knows and respects. This is a wonderful example of solidarity, respect and humanity. In addition, the city affirms that it has no intention of submitting to any foreign power. Period. High on its rock, Besièrs with its powerful walls is not afraid to resist.
The Soldiers of the Cross are baffled: taking the city is far from easy. The river forces them to keep a distance that does not allow the use of catapults and other siege engines. Attempting to break through the giant double gates across the bridge would put the attackers in a narrow column at the mercy of a deadly hail of arrows and fire.
Joàn and Azelaïs spend the night talking, conjecturing, closing their eyes only for brief moments. Melina, the wife and mother, in Carcassonne, will have already known and will be anguished for them.
The sun has not yet risen when a seven-year-old boy knocks on their door, very agitated. He is the son of an esteemed goldsmith named Guilhem de Cestayrol. He has been sent to call the doctor urgently: his mother is very ill. Joàn and Azelaïs rush, carrying with them the bag with the emergency instruments. They arrive at the house which is at the western edge of the city, next to the ramparts. The young woman (Flandina, mother of the boy and two other smaller ones) is wheezing on her bed and convulsing. She is cyanotic, her eyes wide and distorted. She is dying of suffocation. Joàn looks into her throat, lowers her swollen tongue, shouts to Guilhem to leave them alone, to take the children away. “Òidema of the larynx” Azelaïs whispers to herself, “the scalpel, the very small one!” shouts, nodding, Joàn. She passes it to him, it’s a matter of moments: Joàn cuts the skin and enters the woman’s trachea. Without her father needing to ask, Azelaïs takes a small metal tube from her bag and offers it to him. He inserts it into the hole: a hiss. As the air begins to pass, Flandina’s muscles relax, the skin regains color. Azelaïs tells her father that she knows where he learned this practice, from Abulcasis, who had first used it on one of his servants who was choking. “What caused the òidema?” he asks. She answers, confidently: “something she ate or perhaps the fear of what's happening.” Joàn approves, always proud of her, and tells her to introduce a few drops of Portuguese citrus extract into Flandina’s throat through the tube.
At that moment, the bedroom door opens a crack, as the husband appears. Flandina cannot speak yet. She looks at him, smiles with her eyes and holds out her hand. “It's all over” says Joàn. The goldsmith Guilhem’s face lights up but suddenly, outside the house, terrifying shouts can be heard, followed by the noise of the front door being broken down, then the children’s screams. Guilhem who, still standing in the doorway, had turned his head to see what was happening. He arches his back as an iron tip thrust through n his back bursts out of his belly. A man appears, pulling his sword out from the goldsmith’s body which then rolls on the floor. He is 39 years old, powerful, with a beard and brownish-reddish hair. His name is Simon, he is originally from Fransa (France, in Occitan), he is the lord of Montfort and Rochefort. Behind him, we see some brutes with clubs: they have already slaughterd Flandina and Guilhelm's children and are rummaging around looking for gold. Joàn, with the lightning-fast decision of a doctor faced with bursting artery, grabs his daughter by her dress, lifts her into the air and throws her out of the open window.
Azelaïs falls into a field of flowering lavender on the cliff; bouncing and rolling like a rag doll. She hurts herself but her bones do not break. She gets up on her bloody knees with her mouth full of dirt and, in the painful effort to breathe, she looks up. From the same window from which Joàn threw her, Azelaïs sees her father’s head fly, severed in one blow by Montfort. It rolls a few meters away from her.
It happened at dawn, while they were saving Flandina’s life. Some young men from Besièrs, bold and drunk, had opened the gate on the bridge and had exited and were having fun waving their swords. They wanted to provoke an isolated group of attackers who had ventured onto the bridge. The fools had not foreseen that they would throw themselves at them with such speed and energy as to reach them before they managed to close the, very heavy gate behind them. They had been massacred and the vanguard of the army of the Knights of Christ, led by Simon, had entered. To those who ask Amalric how they will be able to distinguish heretics from good Christians, he biblically replies: “Kill them all, God will recognize his own”. The army invades Besièrs.
Azelaïs crawls toward her father’s head, whose eyes are still open, grabs it, gets up and closes it in her apron. She hugs it to her chest. She starts running, limping, along the slope of the cliff, between wild fields of lavender and ears of barley. She screams, but no sound comes out of her mouth. She runs without knowing where, without thinking where, but she runs and heads toward the southwest side of the city, along the walls. Her subconscious instincts take her to the de Lantas, to the dye factory, to her maternal uncles and cousins. The screams coming from the city, increasingly deafening, cannot penetrate her eardrums. The scream inside her is louder, the scream of her own voice as she runs, falls, gets up, falls again, and gets up again and runs, clutching her father’s head to her chest, which has emptied blood onto her apron.
She arrives at the dye works, the large door for the passage of the wagons is wide open. Azelaïs enters and stumbles over the corpses of her cousins, some holding a useless knife, some a crowbar. She sees her cousin Esclarmonda, stripped, raped and killed with an iron point in the chest; she sees her uncle Raimon impaled against one of the large wooden pillars that hold up the roof. Azelaïs looks around, a living nightmare, when she hears the voices of men approaching. They don’t speak her language; they speak the language of the Fransa. Azelaïs throws herself into a vat of woad dye and sinks into the blue darkness. The voices reach her muffled, they are other soldiers looking for things to steal. The dye enters her nose and eyes, she feels them burning, she clings to the muddy bottom to avoid rising and surfacing, but she is suffocating, her father’s head slips from her hands and rises toward the surface. With the last effort of a body she can no longer control, Azelaïs manages to grab him by the ear; her lungs contract, she is about to open her mouth wide and die when she realizes that the voices are gone. She lets herself come back to the surface; she gasps like a dying dog while breathing in air. She climbs over the edge of the tub and falls to the ground unconscious, her hand still clinging to her father’s ear.
She remains there, dead but not dead, in that state of numbness and torpor that the texts she studied, but also those of today, call stupor.
More than 24 hours have passed when a convulsive cough brings her back to life. The air is unbreathable, a repulsive smell has awakened Azelaïs: thick smoke. She gets up, staggers, falls back to the ground, and with an extreme effort she gets up again; grabbing her father’s head by the hair as she goes out. The smoke comes from the burning city. Besièrs is burning. Houses and churches alike. In the smoke, flutter desperate screams. The streets are full of bodies, corpses, dying people, ruins and ashes. The army is gone. Amalric has already written to the Pope: “Our men have spared no one, regardless of rank, sex or age. They have put to the sword at least 20,000 people. After this great massacre, the whole city was stripped and burned. The just result of divine vengeance.” The field correspondent I have already quoted, Pierre Vaux-de-Cernay, writes that in the church of Sainte-Madeleine alone 7,000 people were massacred, including priests.
Azelaïs walks among the dead and wounded toward her home. She sees, still engulfed in flames, Isern Massabrac’s house, the one of that man her father had restored sight only two days earlier. It only served him to watch his family be massacred. Azelaïs steps over the bodies. She doesn’t seem to hear the screams; she doesn’t seem to see anything. Suddenly, out of the smoke, five slaughterers who haven’t yet left the city appear in front of her, drunk and yelling. They have bags on their shoulders, full of loot; in their left hand, pointed clubs painted red with blood and with bits of flesh still attached. They stop. Azelaïs doesn’t, she continues walking towards them, she raises the arm that holds her father’s severed head by the hair and advances. In their drunkenness of alcohol and blood, the image of the blue girl with a blue head in her hand coming towards them, staring at them like a ghost, makes them retreat, it’s a bad omen, they stagger; she passes, and disappears into the smoke.
She arrives at her house, which has not been burned, only ransacked. She goes to her father’s study. She rests Joàn's head on a shelf, making space between the books that push against it, to support it. No one has stolen the books, in war you don't steal books. Azelaïs stares at the face and the books for a long time. Then, with a sudden decision, she grabs the large cloth that had covered her father’s work table, now thrown on the floor: she throws in the medical tools in bulk, bottles of medicine, everything. She is frantic but precise. She ties the four corners of the cloth, throws it on her shoulders and runs outside.
For hours and hours, until late at night, Azelaïs swabs wounds, amputates torn limbs, inserts tubes into tracheas, sews up cuts of every kind and in every part of the various bodies of those still alive on the streets, on the doors of houses, or inside the few houses that don’t burn. She tries to practice the “kiss of life” to those who still seem suspended on the edge of death. Saving lives, as her father taught her, alleviating pain, when she can, with the spongia somnifera, as her father taught her. She falls exhausted, sleeps for one, two hours, then the sun comes out and Azelaïs starts again. She will continue for days, until there are no more wounded to be treated, moving among the ruins that are still white hot from the fire.
We are only at the beginning of Azelaïs Pauc’s very long life, of the battles she will have to fight against armies who have come to erase a dream, against the men who have come to burn those who dream. Until the epilogue in Verona.
Azelaïs is the symbol of the many women who were beaten then and who still fight today to defend their freedom and their ideal of civilization.