Le Greffier
Paris, 1240. The Talmud is on trial.
Gautier de Morvaux is the scribe appointed to document the Disputation of Paris - the ecclesiastical proceeding in which twenty-four cartloads of Jewish manuscripts will be condemned to burn. He is reliable. He is discreet. He was selected precisely because he has no associations of consequence.
He has been learning Hebrew from a bookbinder's daughter in the Marais.
As the trial unfolds over seven days - the charges read, the defense made, the verdict already written before the first session begins - Gautier records everything in his official notebook. He also keeps a second one. In the margins of the first, in private marks only he can read, he counts the mistranslations he recognises and does not correct. In the pages of the second, he writes what the official record is not built to contain: Rabbi Yechiel's arguments as he actually heard them. A scene between the prosecutor and his former teacher that Gautier imagined because no one else was there to witness it. The truth of what he saw, in the version that will never leave his desk.
In the months before the trial, the woman in the Marais told him: this proceeding has already been decided. What matters now is the record.
She was right about the proceeding.
Gautier has spent two years deciding whether she was right about the record.
Le Greffier is a novel about the ethics of witnessing - about what a person owes to the truth when the truth is inconvenient, expensive, and two years too late. Set against one of the most consequential acts of medieval censorship, it asks the questions that the official record was designed not to answer.
The argument was made. Whether it was preserved is another matter.
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