By his appearance, the gleam in his eye and the way he carried his head I estimate that the unknown European in question had sufficient grandeur of soul to learn who I was and not deliver me to the great Katoual of Agra.
“Lord,” I said to him, “I am the insensate parrot whose story you have just heard.”
He invited me into his house, and there finished that period of my life. I have no more to add but the final episode.
Nicolas Matteotti devoted himself to commerce in everything, but above all that of furs and precious stones. He needed courageous men, for his principal transactions took place with the Sanganian pirates who cruised the coasts of Gujarat and certain Rajput lords who had fortresses in the mountains so inaccessible that even the great Mogul could not capture them.
Only a few months had gone by before he thought of replacing his principal employee with me. That man, named Arzigan, under the pretext that his ancestors belonged to the tribe of Oirotes and had the privilege of drinking the milk of the thousand white mares of the great Kubla Khan, was unreasonably proud. He only ate onions, wore a wretched woolen robe and labored from morn till night, but he affected the arrogance of a sovereign. He had amassed a vast fortune at his master’s expense. Matteotti wanted to replace him with a less laborious man less avid for wealth. It was agreed that I would go to Europe to regulate various business affairs, as many in Venice as in France, and that when I returned I would occupy the position he destined for me.
It was me that had suggested that voyage to the Occident to him, which was not an imperious necessity. I had made it following a dream, or, rather, an apparition during the period that precedes sleep. I thought I saw my mother surrounded by light and making me a sign to join her. I had not been surprised by that, for since the day when I had buried my sword on the bank of the Jumna, the sentiment of her presence had always been in the back of my mind.
I therefore left for Surat in order to embark on a Dutch vessel. For some years, Holland had surpassed Portugal in its commerce, and its ships made the voyage to the Occident in a shorter time and in greater security.
The city of Surat is situated three leagues from the bay of Sualis, which serves as its port and where vessels of large tonnage drop anchor. To reach them, one goes down the Tapti on great flat barges on which merchandise is heaped. The one that carried me was entirely covered with crates of every sort containing silk and spices. A tornado of unexpected violence burst forth while we were descending the Tapti, and, having departed in the morning we only arrived at sunset. The banks of the river are formed of vast extents of liquid mud. The wind whipped up that mud and caused it to fall on the deck of our barge to the point that everything thereon, men and things, was entirely soiled and covered in a thick layer of mud.
It was with a great deal of difficulty that we reached the Dutch ship. It had shifted on its anchors and everything there was in the greatest disorder. In the midst of the people who were running hither and yon on the deck and the general emotion, I understood that it would take a long time to find the functionary charged with the allotment of places, and I sat down on a crate of elongated form that belonged to the cargo of the barge that had preceded mine on the Tapti. A vestment of mud covered it, like myself. Furthermore, around me, officers mariners and passengers were unrecognizable under the mask of primal mud that the egalitarian breath of the tempest had put on their faces.
An old man who was wearing I know not what uniform, unrecognizable under the wood, came to sit beside me. He had a desire to enter into conversation.
“That is what we are, we humans: mud, nothing else.”
And as I did not reply, affecting a philosophical cynicism, he continued: “Do you know that we’re sitting on a coffin? A coffin, after a tornado on the Tapti, resembles a crate of pepper or ginger. This coffin is that of Inès de Saldanna, the sister of the governor of Portuguese India.
With one bound I was on my feet. The man got up too.
“You didn’t know? She died a few days ago, and this ship, which is due to call in at Goa, will place her body in her brother’s hands. Personally, I’m Dutch and despise all Portuguese. Why do you think that Aryas de Saldanna sold his sister to the Mongols? It wasn’t to enrich himself; he’s going to inherit an immense fortune. It was to have old furniture, which he collects. Look, there are sculpted dressers that he’ll receive at the same time as his sister’s corpse.”
Around me, there were, indeed, several large somber items of furniture, decorated with Ganesha gods, half-elephants and half-human.
But I did not have time to meditate on the play of destiny that had determined that I would rediscover under terrestrial dirt the remains of the person who had been the secret motive of my actions, the goal of my dreams, the ever-present ideal of beauty. I heard my name pronounced by a familiar voice. My cousin Pierre Du Jarric was before me. He seized me in his arms and I felt, while he embraced me, a tear moistening his long nose.
He had not lost the habit of passing from one subject to another. He had been very ill and needed to rediscover the poplars of the Garonne. Then again, he sensed that in India, the game was lost for the Jesuits. Anyway, Père Pignero attributed all the merit of the new geographical maps in which he had collaborated to himself. But he would turn the tables in his fashion. His great work on The Marvels of the Lands of India was nearly finished. A friend of his youth had a printing press in Bordeaux; he would take him his manuscript. But he would not yield to new fashions. No illustrations! His book would not include illustrations. He swore to that. I could be reassured on that point.
He stopped suddenly, like someone remembering something important. His face was suddenly filled with gravity.
“My son, I have some dolorous news to give you. I know that you do not lack courage. I received during my illness a letter from a Jesuit in Toulouse, which informed me that your mother is no more. I should have, immediately…but….”
A misfortune only afflicts the soul some time after the knowledge has reached it. I remembered the dream that I had had a few months earlier. It was not in the house in the Rue Malcousinat that my mother was making me a sign to rejoin her. Where she was, the Dutch ship could not take me.
I knew that Nicolas Matteotti would be happy with a change of plan that left me by his side. Night fell and the disorder redoubled under the lanterns that were illuminated here and there.
A voice was taking a roll call of passengers. It cried: “Pierre Du Jarric!”
He replied: “Here I am!”
I hailed a boat that was on the point of returning to the quays. I let myself slide down to it on a rope.
The land of India was enveloped in shadow as the oarsmen beat the waves to take me there. But I knew that somewhere in the vastness of the heavens that covered it, there was a star that shone for it alone, and I did not despair of seeing its light one day.
THE MYSTERY OF THE TEMPLARS
THE INITIATES OF ACTION
It was prescribed for the Knight of the Temple, in the regulations of the Order, not to retreat, and to fight to excess before three enemies; it was commonly said during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that a single Templar knight was sufficient to vanquish ten Saracens.
The essential quality required of a member of the Order was courage, personal valor, and the ensemble of those combined courages was intended to procure the power of force, material domination.
The Templars were the initiates of action, the messengers of the sword. They marked a new check to the Oriental initiative to pacify and cultivate the Occident, crushed by the grip of the Church. Previously, in Athens and Alexandria, that Church had annihilated the initiates of knowledge that the neoplatonists were. The last survivors of that marvelous school, the disciples of Ammonius Saccas, who had dreamed of bringing the world to perfection by philosophical knowledge, had been obliged by persecutions to flee into Persia to the protection of King Khosrow.47
At the moment when the Order of the Temple arrived at its apogee, the initia
tes of love, the Cathars and the Albigensians, who had discovered the secret of immediate perfection, conquered in this life by the road of purificatory poverty and fraternal love, were exterminated to the last man, and from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean it was impossible even to discover a stone on which the sign of their sublime tradition subsisted.
The initiates of the Order of the Temple attempted to make the verity of sages triumph by the sword. They followed the third of the three paths open to human beings, after that of knowledge and that of love, the path of action. Their success was dazzling at first. The elite of society, seduced by the ideal of chivalric courage that they raised like a banner, came to them from all parts. All the valiant young men of Europe dreamed of collaborating with the defense of the Holy Land in the phalanx of those glorious veterans of the Crusade.
However, the directors of the Order glimpsed a more magnificent goal. In their eyes, the Holy Land only enclosed the tomb of one prophet among the prophets, and not a God. It was a question of making the entire world a Holy Land. It was necessary first to take possession of the world—and that was possible. The Order of the Temple attempted it, and it might have succeeded. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the development of that enormous dream, that gigantic and secret chimera: the conquest of Europe and Asia by a valiant and well organized minority—but a minority ignorant of that goal, directed by a group of initiates.
Success would have meant the reestablishment of the ancient priestly hierarchy of Egypt. Behind the kings and their warriors there would be sages, simultaneously priests and scholars, who would have imposed a will for justice and oriented the world toward perfection.
If one does not find in the rules of the Order texts that give proof of that goal, one cannot be astonished. A project as vast as the fall of kings and the leveling of religions, the constitution of a unique civilization simultaneously Muslim and Christian, could not be confided to any parchment, and could only be revealed to the great priors of the secret council when their ambition and sagacity had been carefully measured. No knight revealed at the time of the trial the purpose of the Order of which he was only a blind instrument. The members of the inner circle, those who knew, only confessed under torture the exterior rites, scandalous to the profane, but which did not touch the very essence of what the Temple really was.
Doubtless Philippe le Bel and Pope Clement V were not unaware of the danger that the papacy and royalties were running. The extraordinary avarice of the King of France was not a sufficient lever for him to pry up a stone as heavy as the Order of the Temple and to break it. He could not have succeeded and would have been broken himself. He would not have decided on that audacious action had there not been a vital question for his throne. Previously he had tried to be admitted among the knights of the Temple and, to his great surprise, had been rejected. He suppressed those who would have suppressed him a little later.
The papacy would only have been attacked long afterwards, because the Order had need of the ecclesiastic organization for its domination. Nothing would leak out, either in the interrogations or the judgments, of the force that had almost destroyed the social edifice in order to reorganize it on a more perfect plan. Its enemies were content to convict the Templars of having spat on Christ, of having committed and even recommended sodomy, and of having adored the idol Baphomet—all things that were proven in the letter but unknown in the spirit. Stupefied peoples saw the glorious and celebrated Order condemned and did not know the true cause of it. After them, history remained as ignorant.
The most prodigious actions can be accomplished by believers. Faith can not only move mountains but can launch them into the sky and juggle with them. And it is not necessary that the faith in question be in good, in God, or any other sublime chimera. Faith in egotism has just as much power; but it collapses quickly. It is necessary that the element of faith be the basis of action. When men cease to believe in their goal, their armor falls away, and they cease to be invincible. That is what happened to the Templars.
Wealth entered into their plan of conquest, and with a vertiginous rapidity they became the bankers of the world. The knights charged with accounting showed even more zeal than those charged with fighting, who were reputed to be the most illustrious combatants of their epoch. Wealth corrupted them, as it corrupts all those who possess it. They perished for having become too rich, and with them expired the dream of a civilization reconciling the Orient and the Occident, and replacing the power of kings with the government of an elite of intelligent and just men.
HUGUES DES PAYENS
AND THE ORDER OF ASSASSINS
It was in 1120 or thereabouts, in Jerusalem, that the magnificent dream appeared in the mind of the genius who founded the Templars, Hugues des Payens.
He was a poor knight from Champagne who had followed Godefroy de Bouillon in the crusade and had remained in Jerusalem. Pillages had left him devoid of a fortune. History shows that whenever a city, no matter how vast it might be, was taken and pillaged a mere three days sufficed for there no longer to be a single house to rob or a woman to rape. From Antioch to Jerusalem, Hugues des Payens must have spent the first three days thanking God for the victory. It is possible that the founder of the richest Order in Christendom was a disinterested man.
When one dreams of the kingdom of Christ, what is a Moorish house with women around a fountain and negro slaves in vermilion doublets? He had neither a house nor women. He believed himself to be a good Christian, but he liked discussing heretical doctrines with his companion-in-arms, the Toulousan Geoffroy de Saint-Adhémar,48 who, like all the men of his race, was imbued with Catharism. They were young and poor, as befits builders of immense projects and prompt realizers of chimeras.
The Orient, with its architectural beauties, the voluptuousness of its women and the mysticism of its philosophy, transformed the men of the Occident with surprising rapidity. Baldwin II, who had become King of Jerusalem, set the example. Taken prisoner by Emir Balak in an ambush, he remained in the power of the Saracens for a year. When he was liberated, he continued to make war with the same ardor, but he spoke of Emir Balak as a sage with whom he had been glad to converse. He dressed in a robe in the Oriental manner, affected to follow their usages, and married a young woman who belonged to an old Arab family. He was the protector of the first Templars, to whom he gave as accommodation, perhaps intentionally, the part of his palace that had been constructed on the site of the ancient Temple of Solomon.
Hugues des Payens and Geoffroy de Saint-Adhémar, who were combatants as well as mystics, were struck with admiration by what the Orient revealed to them in the order of ideas, which preoccupied them the most. They heard nothing recounted but the stories of saints of Islam who imposed their mystical conceptions by force, or even the memory of a certain misunderstood prophet. All of them employed a similar method. They founded a secret society, simultaneously philosophical and military, with different degrees of initiation and a hierarchy of members, based on the hierarchy of nature in accordance with the ancient principle that what is at the bottom is like that which is at the top.
In Persia there had been Mastek, Kermath and then the Rawendis, who taught their initiates that souls transmigrate from body to body. They had heard mention of “the ones clad in white” of Mokanaa the masked, who always wore a golden mask on his face, and Sasendeimah, “the man who disposes of the moonlight,” so called because, in order to dazzle his disciples, he caused a dazzling light to appear above a fountain by night, which he assimilated to that of the divine spirit.
There was also the founder of a secret Ismailite society, Abdallah, son of Maimoun, who had succeeded in mounting the throne of the Caliphate of Egypt. Since his accession there had been in Cairo a society of wisdom of which the Caliph was the grandmaster and who had his “house of wisdom” and his “house of science” full of instruments of astronomy and books, in which ink, parchment and quills were distributed gratuitously and to which the physicians, poets and scholars of the
Orient flooded.
Hugues des Payens and Geoffroy de Saint-Adhémar heard at that time in Jerusalem the echo of a great events, the temporary closure of the “house of science” in Cairo following a riot, and they were astonished by the importance that matters of the intellect had in the Orient, which they had believed to be barbaric when they were living in their stone châteaux enclosed by sad ditches in the land of France.
Most of all, the destiny of Hassan Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain, and that of the sect of Assassins, which reigned by terror over Persia, Syria and Egypt, and even over the crusaders, must have occupied their long conversations during hot nights in Jerusalem.
Hassan Sabbah had been an ambitious man as well as a mystic philosopher. Educated in the great university of Nishapour with the poet and astronomer Omar Khayyam, and Nizamolmouk, who was to become the prime minister of the Caliph of Bagdad, he was initiated into the sect of the Ismailites of Egypt and had founded a sect of which he was proclaimed the grandmaster. That sect had nine degrees of initiation and reposed simultaneously on absolute obedience and the intellectual knowledge of philosophies.
The disciples rose in the hierarchy of the sect in accordance with their intelligence. After knowledge it was necessary to arrive at faith in the superior God common to all religions. At that degree they practiced the ecstasy of the Sufis and saints. But the final degree informed them that for humans there is neither punishment not recompense, that the world is directed by an indifferent law and that individual egotism is probably the final word in life. Only a few directors of the sect reached that ultimate degree.
There must have been a degree superior still, which was the prerogative of the first grandmaster Hassan Sabbah, the anguish of which he did not reveal to anyone. He must have doubted his own philosophy and the ultimate superiority of egotism. His disciples reported that he spent thirty-five years without emerging from the library of the castle of Alamut, where so many books were accumulated that it had become the largest in the world after that of Bagdad. During that interval of thirty-five years no one recalled having seen him appear on his balcony, except twice. A man who bears an absolute certainty within him recognizes the vanity of books as much as one who is possessed by faith; he expects nothing of the dust of parchments and he is not content only to see the light of the sun twice in thirty-five years.
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