Heretic Bitch Discovers Immortality, Annoys Everyone

By the blessed, dripping armpit of Saint Cuthbert, it’s damp in this cloister. The kind of damp that seeps right into your bones and makes a man question his vows. But not as much as the story of Esclarmonde of Somewhere-or-Other, the Cathar who broke God’s CEO.

So, picture it: the 1240s. Pope Gregory IX—a man whose personal motto was basically “when in doubt, excommunicate”—is having an absolute field day in southern France. The Albigensian Crusade is in full swing, and a whole host of very serious men in black robes are running around with bellows and tongs, asking tedious questions about dualism before getting to the main event: the bonfire. It was a grand old time for the pious and a terrible time to be named “aimery” and own a castle near Toulouse.

Enter Esclarmonde. A “perfecti,” which meant she was on that hardcore Cathar diet of prayer, fasting, and feeling vaguely superior to everyone still eating cheese. One day, while trying to purify some dew she’d collected off a lily pad (don’t ask), she accidentally knocked a weird, pulsating local mushroom and what looked suspiciously like a bit of goat’s testicle into her bowl. Being a creature of habit, she drank the foul-smelling concoction anyway. And… nothing happened. For about sixty years. Which is when she noticed she still looked pert, bouncy, and entirely un-burnt, despite the Inquisition having tried to roast her on three separate occasions.

The Dominican inquisitors were absolutely beside themselves. Burning her just gave her a pleasant, rosy glow. Drowning resulted in her holding her breath for two days before popping up to complain about prune-fingers. The rack was a dead loss; she was apparently “demoniacally supple.” One friar, in a letter I *definitely* wasn’t supposed to read, wrote to his superior: “We have interrogated the witch for seventeen weeks. She has not aged a day. Her skin is luminous. For the love of God, what moisturizer is she using? My own hands are like cured leather from all this holy work.” The Holy Office’s war on heresy had ground to a halt against the immovable object of a single, well-hydrated woman who refused to die.

Of course, the secret got out. Suddenly, every duchess from Brabant to Bologna with a hint of a crow’s foot was developing a *very* keen interest in the Cathar faith. They started making pilgrimages to the Languedoc, not for salvation, but for “The Water of Youth,” which Esclarmonde had cluelessly branded and was now trading for fine silks and gossip. The Crusade collapsed. You can’t set fire to your primary tax base, after all. The Church, which had built its entire business model on the fear of death, had been outmaneuvered by the promise of a tight jawline. And here I sit, in a cassock that smells of mildew and regret, knowing the Abbot probably has a secret stash of the stuff. The bastard.