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Throughout The Wife of Martin Guerre, the hearth symbolizes domesticity. After Bertrande de Rols marries Martin Guerre and joins the Guerre household, the family spends evenings together around the hearth, sharing stories and saying prayers. During these moments, Bertrande feels grateful for her safety. As a woman in a patriarchal society, she is unable to choose her life . As such, she is grateful for the relative privilege her position within the Guerre family affords her, and eventually she comes to conflate this gratitude with a sort of happiness. Although her husband, Martin, and his father, Monsieur Guerre, are often cruel, they provide her a secure life. The hearth, thus, symbolizes the patriarchal values that shape Bertrande’s life. Although those values might limit Bertrande’s freedom and detract from her happiness, she accepts them for the stability and clarity they bring to her life.
After Martin Guerre leaves Artigues and Monsieur Guerre dies, the hearth ceases to be a center of familial stability. Bertrande no longer enjoys evenings by the fire and instead spends her time worrying about Martin’s whereabouts and the destiny of the now masterless Guerre farm. This symbolizes the uncertainty and chaos that reigns when the Guerre patriarchs’ absence upends the traditional social order. When a man (Arnaud du Tilh) returns who claims to be Martin Guerre, the family reunites. The hearth is briefly restored, this time even happier than before: Bertrande feels herself joyously in love with this man who claims to be her husband. Soon, however, Bertrande suspects that her husband is an imposter, and this causes the hearth to become a place of deception: at the hearth, the imposter performs his false identity, entertaining the priest and persuading everyone that he is Martin Guerre. Even though this man’s return has restored the hearth as symbol of happiness, it robs the hearth of the order and stability it once symbolized for Bertrande. In this way, then, hearth’s shifting symbolism depicts the fragility of Bertrande’s domestic happiness and the tenuous nature of social order she has come to rely on.
The Hearth Quotes in The Wife of Martin Guerre
The The Wife of Martin Guerre quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Hearth. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 1: Artigues
Quotes
The passes to Spain were buried under whiteness. The Pyrenees had become for the winter season an impassable wall. Those Spaniards who were in French territory after the first heavy snowfall in September, remained there, and those Frenchmen, smugglers or soldiers or simple travelers who found themselves on the wrong side of the Port de Venasque were doomed to remain there until the spring. Sheep in fold, cattle in the grange, faggots heaped high against the wall of the farm, the mountain villages were closed in enforced idleness and isolation. It was a season of leisure in which weddings might well be celebrated.
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[…] last of all the father of Martin Guerre paused in the doorway to wish his children a formal goodnight. Bertrande saw his features, exaggerated in the flare of the torch, bent in an expression of great seriousness, and the realization that henceforth her life lay beneath his jurisdiction came suddenly and overwhelmingly to the little girl.
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It was the first of many evenings in which his presence should testify for her that the beasts were safe, that the grain was safe, that neither the wolves, whose voices could be heard on winter nights, nor marauding bands of mercenaries such as the current hearsay from the larger valleys sometimes reported, could do anything to harm the hearth beside which this man was seated. Because of him the farm was safe, and therefore Artigues, and therefore Languedoc, and therefore France, and therefore the whole world was safe and as it should be.
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“my father was arrogant and severe. Just also, and loving, but his severity sent from home his only son. For eight years I have traveled among many sorts and conditions of men. I have been many times in danger of death. If I return to you with a greater wisdom than that which I knew when I departed, would you have me dismiss it, in order again to resemble my father? God knows, my child […] that a man of evil ways may by an act of will so alter all his actions and his habits that he becomes a man of good.”
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Yet even this love was intensified, like her pleasure in the cry of the wolves, by the persistent illusion, or suspicion, that this man was not Martin.
The illusion, if such it was, did not pass away at the termination of her pregnancy, as he had prophesized it would do, but she had grown used to it. It lent a strange savor to her passion for him. Her happiness […] shone the more brightly, was the more greatly to be treasured because of the shadow of sin and danger which accompanied it.
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The Hearth Symbol Timeline in The Wife of Martin Guerre
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Hearth appears in The Wife of Martin Guerre. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1: Artigues
...Martin has not returned from the mountains. As the Guerres’ are preparing for prayer by the hearth , the door bursts open and Martin enters, carrying a bloody bear carcass. Martin relays...
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...Bertrande surrenders to Martin’s leadership and love. Most evenings, there is conversation and music by the hearth , for which the priest often visits. A few months later, Bertrande becomes pregnant. She...
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Part 3: Toulouse
...verdict, would it not be a sign from heaven? Bertrande imagines a happy scene by the hearth , but she can’t picture in it the faces of the imposter or herself. To...
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