Jean de Fodoas

by Maurice Magre

  Sri Narinda then perceived my presence. His gazed was fixed upon me. I felt a singular impression then. I understood that he said something to Li Tai about me, in which I caught one word because he repeated it several times.

  “A Kshatrya! Is that possible?”36

  They exchanged a few remarks, and Li Tai said to me: “Sri Narinda is going to make you a gift.”

  I waited in silence. I was surprised. Then I saw that Li Tai was bowing respectfully in order to take his leave.

  “What is his gift?” I asked. For I expected to receive some object—an object of scant importance, but an object.

  “It’s done,” Li Tai told me. “Don’t you know that Sri Narinda can give a quality, as the Emperor can give you a sword, in a fashion just as real.”

  “And what quality have I received?” I asked, without taking account of the favor off which I was the object.

  “Detachment,” he said. “The seed of detachment, for qualities take a long time to germinate. The earth of the soul is hard.”

  I nodded my head, but I had difficulty not making my indifference to the liberality of that seed manifest.

  As I bowed, in the same fashion that I had seen Li Tai do, Sri Narinda, turning toward me a visage filled with amicable irony, said to me in Persian: “When you put on the yellow robe, remember that that robe ought not to be made of a single piece, but of fragments that you have found yourself, of old fragments sown together.”

  When we were some distance away, I said to Li Tai: “Thank God I’m not thinking of putting on such a robe.”

  He smiled.

  I am not a historian and I have not undertaken to write the history of a great sovereign and the unusual intrigues that were woven and unraveled around him. I am recounting my personal history, which is, in sum, only of interest to me. And there, the great events, instead of being wars or treaties between peoples, are merely the appearance of a face, a rapid conversation, the memory of the homeland returning without a reason on such a day, at such an hour. I am only mentioning Kings, ministers and famous Jesuits because they passed through my life, most of the time in spite of me, and I am aware of the shocking vanity there is in giving myself the leading role in a drama in which characters like the Emperor Akbar or Aboul Fazi only play episodic roles; but I am only writing for myself, and in order to satisfy the strange appetite for storytelling that comes to a man when he has surpassed the age of passions.

  How many scenes I can relive in my mind without being able to make out why I resuscitate some in memory and why others remain buried in the darkness of the soul!

  I see myself in an extravagant costume, on horseback, in the middle of a troop of young men emerging from Agra through the northern gate. My conceit has become so great that I am only preoccupied, when I am in someone’s presence, with knowing whether he is taking sufficient account of my merit. We are going toward vast buildings that the Emperor has had constructed on the bank of the Jumna. There, races were held, and javelin-throwing contests; one witnessed combats of elephants and all sorts of wild animals. There were marvelous gardens in the pathways of which tents had been erected in which the harems have just been installed of the Emperor, his son Selim and the great men of the Empire. Those tents like the ones that follow the Emperor in his travels, were extraordinarily high and extremely sumptuous in their colors.

  We were overtaken on the road by a cavalier who sounded a special trumpet, the sound of which meant that it was necessary to move aside to allow women of quality to pass by. We got out of the way immediately. The custom men accustomed to the manners of the Court dictated that one should look away ostentatiously. Once that rite was accomplished, one gazed, impudently, and made gestures to the women, who did not fail to respond with laughter.

  A great elephant from Pegu passed in front of us. It was clad in silk and there were Tartar and Kashmiri maidservants in its howdah belonging to noble families. We knew them, and they parted the curtains of the howdah to make us signs of amity. The reserve imposed on Muslim women no longer existed in Akbar’s Court, where Aboul Fazi strove to combat the prescriptions of a religion whose importance he wanted to diminish. I had, as a principle of seduction, an extreme coldness toward women, which went as far as insolence, for I had noticed that it was the best attitude to please them. I strove to look straight ahead of me and not to notice the Pegu elephant, whose enormity, celebrated throughout the Empire, ought to have rendered my apparent distraction impossible.

  A Gourzeberdar in the Emperor’s guard, a cynical and talkative individual, started to make his horse prance, while making absurd comments.

  We then saw a chadoul covered in crimson silk drawn by two small white elephants. It was the carriage of Djidji Anaga, the great administrator and treasurer of the harems, a lady of high virtue and vast intelligence. She was not alone, as usual, with the mahout, who wore a turban and a robe of the same pale color as the hide of the little elephants. A woman was beside her, whose features I would have been able to distinguish, for I felt her gaze upon me, but for my stupid method of indifference.

  “Isn’t that a few rose petals falling from Djidji Anaga’s chandoul?” asked the Gourzeberdar.

  “It seems so,” said one of his companions.

  And the talkative fellow said, sniggering: “A woman is being brought by Djidji Anaga in person. It can only be a new favorite of the Emperor.”

  “But I thought that the Emperor…?” I said.

  Laughter interrupted me. That question was often discussed at Court. Did it still happen that the Emperor had preferences for one of the women in his harem? Did he spend every evening in the study of sciences and religions? Or, as had been claimed, did he spend them playing Tchandal Mandai making use of his women as pawns?37

  “I believe,” said a taciturn young man belonging to the family of reigning Princes of Amber, “that it’s rather a matter of a favorite of the Sultan Selim. I recognized her. It’s an Occidental woman. We Rajputs wouldn’t touch an Occidental woman with a fingertip under any pretext.”

  He looked at me from the corner of his somber eye. I felt a solidarity with creatures of the Occident, but I did not want to pick a quarrel. Then again, it was disagreeable to me to hear talk of the Emperor in such an irreverent fashion, for I consider pleasantry to be like an acid corrosive of the idea one has of respectable men.

  And it was because of another comment regarding the Emperor that my destiny was to change course. I mean my material destiny, for that of my soul had its path marked somewhere, on a map of souls, and that course could not be modified.

  Emperor Akbar had the habit of conversing with God. Everyone does that, or ought to do n it, to some extent, but without witnesses. He did it voluntarily in front of his entire Court. He devoted himself to invocations, asked for advice and for support for his people. That was because he considered himself as the representative of the divinity on earth, as a man invested with a particular mission by virtue of a special disposition of God himself.

  That gave rise to many criticisms. I heard those of my friends the Jesuits when I saw them. But I heard above all those of orthodox Muslims grouped around Selim, the Emperor’s son and pretender to the throne. For my part, I thought that there is a great pride in wanting to communicate directly with God, but as I loved the Emperor and I had sworn fidelity to him, not only did I not allow anything of my sentiment to show, but I said, as many times as I had the opportunity, that Akbar’s conversations with the deity were proven and indubitable.

  At sunset, in the gardens that were staged on the banks of the Jumna, the holy Agingir was brought forth on a large slab of white marble and placed on the water’s edge. The Angingir was the vase in which the sacred fire was conserved. It was sacred because it had been it solemnly at a certain hour fixed by the astronomers and to which particular virtues were attributed. The Muslims said, of course, that it was just any fire. Twelve candles were lit around the marble. A cantor with a lantern in his hand that he raised toward the setting sun,
chanted a very pleasant prayer whose words were taken from the Vedas. The Emperor knelt down, his hands joined, and he listened to the advice of God.

  The entre Court gathered around him, and when the chant died away and the candles were extinguished, it was impossible for those who saw the emotion on his noble visage not to think that something extraordinary had taken place in the spiritual domain.

  One evening, after that ceremony, I was returning to the palace with Omar Ali and I overheard the words that Selim, the Emperor’s son, said to one of his confidants. He had just given hypocritical signs of adoration kneeling behind the Emperor and touching the ground with his forehead. Recently, with the rebel Rajputs, he had attempted to take possession of the Empire.38 Akbar had pardoned him. But his faithful Omrahs would have liked him to designate as his successor his grandson Khosro, who, in spite of a slow intelligence, seemed to have inherited his grandeur of soul and religious tolerance, while Selim dreamed of following the letter of the Koran in which it is said that it is necessary to kill anyone who does not think like you.39

  It was a well-established custom among the Kings of India to designate their successor while alive—a deadly custom, for as soon as his successor is designated, by virtue of another well-established custom, instead of thanking their benefactor, who is generally their father, they hasten either to have him poisoned or to imprison him in some remote castle. Akbar hesitated between Selim and Khosro, for he loved them both tenderly in spite of the ingratitude of one and the insignificance of the other. Selim dissimulated, and one sensed that he was nurturing dark projects.

  That evening, for some unknown reason, he allowed his sentiments to burst forth.

  He was addressing a ridiculous and effeminate individual from whom he was never separated. He was a Rajput who wore a trailing robs, several valuable necklaces and who was fat and jovial. He always had a ring whose setting was a large mirror in which he contemplated himself incessantly. He inspired a great terror for everyone knew the authority he had over Selim. That authority came from the fact that he was the brother of the beautiful Nour, whom the Emperor’s son adored and wanted to separate from her husband, Shere Shah, the commander of the Emperor’s guard.

  “What a comedy!” said Selim, in a loud voice. “I believe that my father’s falling completely into infancy. Don’t you think so?”

  Assuredly, I should have put on a semblance of not having heard, or found some lively, biting and unexpected repartee, in which there was a measure of wit. I found nothing, and, moreover, did not search for anything. As a dog bites when its master is attacked, I pronounced in a loud voice the perfectly banal remark: “The Emperor Akbar, the master of us all, is the greatest sovereign on earth.”

  Reported thus, such an affirmation might seem very anodyne, but if one pictures the servility with which Selim was surrounded and the habit he had of never being contradicted, it was a personal insult.

  All of us had stopped. That only lasted a few seconds. With an admirable timeliness, Rajoura, Selim’s fat companion, sought the last ray of sunlight, and by angling his ring, projected it into my eyes, which blinded me for a few seconds. That was a pleasantry familiar to him.

  Omar Ali dream me away, making objurgations in a low voice, and I heard Selim say, raising his voice further as I drew away in order that I could hear his words: “That’s the man who killed Yacoub. My father should have condemned him to death at that moment. Why is he still alive?”

  He said other things that I did not hear. We drew away with the ray from Rajoura’s mirror dancing around us.

  “Beware! He’s going to have you murdered,” Omar Ali said to me, when we were some distance away.

  But it was not me that Selim had murdered; it was the minister Aboul Fazi.

  I sometimes went out alone, on horseback, along the banks of the Jumna, and I liked to stray into the middle of jungles and woods in spite of the continual danger posed by the presence of tigers. Those redoubtable animals were, it appears, very numerous, but as they did not allow themselves to be seen, I did not think about them.

  One evening, I was surprised by a storm. It promised to be extremely violent. Ion looking around, I saw the ruin of a monument on a ridge and hastened to reach it in order to take shelter there. By virtue of the position of the sun and the course of the Jumna I realized that the monument was what remained of the tomb of a Muslim saint, which had been mentioned to me, and its solitude and abandonment identified. A place of pilgrimage several centuries before, no one went there any longer since a slaughtered pig had been found on its threshold. Stay away from the tomb, I had been told, it’s a tigers’ lair.

  I had made a bad decision, but when I became conscious of where I was, night had fallen and cataracts were falling from the sky. I could not think of reaching any human habitation. It was necessary for me to wait for the next dawn. I tied my horse to the trunk of a centenarian eucalyptus and unrolled its leather leading rein sufficiently for it to be able to lie down in a room that had conserved a part of its ceiling, and into which I penetrated myself. Thus, I thought, if a tiger comes, it will attack my horse before attacking me, and—who knows?—perhaps it will leave it at that.

  I chased away various birds and cut down some plants with my sword; then I examined the interstices between the stones to see whether they contained any snakes or scorpions. Afterwards, I made a bed with my cloak and lay down to sleep, having set my naked sword within reach of my hand, as well as the little flask that I always carried with me. It contained a mixture of bezoar and wild hemp, which one has to drink immediately if one is bitten by a snake, and which will preserve you from death.

  My sleep was light and consisted of number of short series, separated by abrupt awakenings. The apprehensions inseparable from darkness kept me awake for a long time. I heard the voices and calls of a host of nocturnal animals but, contrary to my expectation, nothing happened. Morning arrived, and the event was of an order that I had not expected.

  On picking up my cloak and shaking it, I saw that the stone on which I had slept was a slab larger than the others and that there was a figure crudely hollowed out in the left-hand corner. I scraped away the earth that prevented me from seeing the design and observed that it was that of a bearded head that bore an extraordinary resemblance to the Templars’ Baphomet, the head that my cousin Du Jarric possessed, and which I had seen one morning on Emperor Akbar’s linen nightshirt, in the place of the heart.

  The desire for a meal, for I had not had one the previous day, prevented any examination. I departed at a gallop for Agra, which was a long way away.

  On the way, in spite of the veil that great appetite casts over reasonable thoughts, I made the following reflections.

  If that sign was a sort of talisman, a password of protection, it was not without reason that it might be on the slab of an abandoned monument. And since the Mongol kings had possessed that talisman and one of them had gone to hide an immense treasure in a secret place, was there any more perfect hiding place than the tomb of a saint, especially if many pious manifestation on the part of humans has been driven away by the pollution of the blood of a pig? In truth, it was an unusual stroke of luck that had led me that very night to the treasure of which my cousin Du Jarric and is Jesuit colleagues had come in search. But was it really luck? Was it not a sort of indication of my destiny, which wanted certain things of me without my knowing what they were?

  I made those reflections, and I was astonished not to feel a greater joy at the thought that I might be capable of discovering a fabulous treasure. That treasure, I might, for one thing, keep for myself. Thus, all difficulties relative to money might disappear—for those difficulties had never ceased to exist for me. I was inscribed in the registers of the grand treasurer Kwaji and, on the day of the full moon, I was to receive the salary of an officer in command of a hundred men. As I did not, in fact, exercise that command and I belonged to the Emperor, my salary was doubled, but those payments were always made with long delays, for it i
s a particularity of India entire that the greatest luxury is always mingled with a certain meanness. There is no rich man’s house that is sumptuous from the threshold to the grain-loft—like, for example, that of President d’Assézat in Toulouse40—and no entirely generous rich man, since custom dictates that one can only approach a powerful individual with presents. I was incessantly running after my salary, and my expenses, in any case, far surpassed that figure.

  And yet I did not think of keeping those riches, if they existed—although my imagination made me consider that was certain—for myself. I would go to recount what I had seen to my cousin. Had he not saved my life? Had he not brought me to India? It was to him that I owed my fortune. Yes, I would go to see him and I would tell him everything.

  Assuredly, I would go to see him…but would I really tell him everything?

  Just as I was about to go to the Jesuit house, the rumor of Aboul Fazi’s assassination spread through the imperial palace and the city of Agra.41

  He had been coming back from the Deccan, and when he passed through Siroudj, the traitor Gospal Da, the governor of the town, only gave him a feeble escort composed of particularly pusillanimous men, assuring him that the road was perfectly safe. A considerable troop of Rajputs, who had Nar Sigh for their chief, had no difficulty in putting that escort to flight in a solitary valley. Only a few warriors fought heroically. One of them distinguished himself by extraordinary courage; that was a certain Thabouk, a Turkman with whom Aboul Fazi had been discussing philosophical subjects since the departure. He had quit the métier of arms to become a fakir and to meditate naked on a rock. He had recognized that that was an error and that a mediocre employment was more appropriate to a sage. He had become a cook’s aide in Siroudj, and while he was cooking bananas Aboul Fazi’s eagle eye had picked him out. At the moment of the attack he had seized the sword of one of the cowards and had fought like a lion. It was not until he fell that a Rajput was able to traverse with his spear the body of the wisest man in India.