Then he changed his mind. He went to lean on his prie-dieu, which was surmounted by a tall oak cross, in such a fashion that the cross loomed up directly above his head.
The rumor had run round Alexandria that Simon had announced certain events in advance, and a legend, contradicted by some and reported admiringly by others, floated round his name. Cyril had the vague hope of provoking a favorable inspiration for his projects.
He started with surprise. Peter had just pushed in front of him a sickly, frightened child, who fell to his knees, his hands joined, as he had been told to do, and as any other monk in his place would have done.
The Bishop lifted him up indulgently. He was not displeased to inspire that respectful dread, but for once he would have liked something else.
He started to speak to Simon. He told him that he knew of his influence over the monks of the convent of Nitra. He was counting on their courage, and their discipline. The times were difficult. Christianity had never been subjected to such an assault. Combat was necessary. Blood would perhaps be spilled. Had Jesus Christ not shed his own?
He looked at his interlocutor from the corner of his eye. God sometimes made use of the simple to make himself manifest. But he had the sentiment of talking to the void. Simon was not listening to him. He was turning round, and had the appearance of searching for someone to his right or behind him.
And suddenly, he wept miserably, like a beggar who is hungry, like a culpable caught at fault.
“I’m alone, I’m all alone,” he repeated. “God has abandoned me.”
Then Cyril, irritated, made a sign to Peter to take him away.
The most singular rumors were the circulating in Alexandria.
An inhabitant who had spent the night at the corner of the apostases and the street that led to the Church of Caesarea claimed to have been witness to an extraordinary spectacle.
He had found himself in the presence of an enormous catafalque that blocked the entire width of the street. Young men and young men crowned with blue flowers were carrying a transparent blue-tinted stone coffin, by the weight of which they seemed overwhelmed. Lying in the coffin he had perceived the form of a woman with sapphires as scintillating as the stars on her feet, her hands and her head. Behind the coffin walked a man, full of nobility, who resembled Plato as he is represented in all his busts. He was surrounded by philosophers and sages, whom he recognized by their costumes as belonging to the most different countries and the remotest times. All of them had an expression of infinite sorrow on their faces.
Chilled by horror, he had stopped, and the cortege had turned the corner of the street silently, to disappear like a dream.
When he told the story of that vision he found several people who affirmed that they had also seen the mysterious funeral pass by.
The same night, a little before sunrise, the centurion who was on guard on the old Macedonian fortress saw, clearly, coming from the sea, a flaming sword, with its point directed toward Alexandria. It floated in the sky for a few minutes, and he had time to wake the legionaries who were nearby, and they saw it too.
But what brought the terror to a peak was the apparition of a comet. It was livid, as if desperate. In the popular quarters, outside doors and on terraces, people stayed awake for a long time contemplating it.
The following day, there were people who left the city, and as many of the shops remained closed, the Prefect was obliged to make it known officially, via the criers, that it was only a celestial phenomenon foreseen for a long time by the calculations of astronomers.
As there was no talk of anything but dreams and presages, Diodorus came to find Cyril and confide to him that his daughter Priscilla said that she had had a singularly precise dream the previous night.
In front of the Church of Cesarea she had seen Hypatia streaming with blood and trying to speak, but the jaw was moving, rising and falling, without allowing any words to escape.
Diodorus knew that divination by dreams was contrary to the teachings of the Church, but he had thought that in these troubled times the Bishop might perhaps derive some indication from that dream.
He was not mistaken.
Cyril was radiant. Was it not the sign for which he was waiting? He thanked his friend warmly, and as Diodorus as about to withdraw, struck by a sudden idea, he placed his hands on his shoulders and said to him gravely: “Send your children to me tomorrow with Majorin. It’s necessary, to set an example, that they are at the head of those who strike.” And as Diodorus interrogated him with his gaze, anxiously, he went on as he turned away: “Don’t worry. There won’t be any danger that day.”
VII. A Perfume of Crushed Mint
The Gymnasium was deserted. A warm reverberation rose from the mosaics of the xyste. In the garden, the earth was cracking and the flowers, weighed down, exhaled more powerful odors.
The day before, Hypatia and Telamon had agreed, almost without saying so, that they would come earlier than usual in order to throw the discus, before the time when the Gymnasium was populated by its usual guests. They had been surprised by the extreme solitude of the place. They had undressed, only retaining their under-tunics. But then the heat had seemed to them to be too great. The slave who picked up the discuses when they had thrown them was not yet there. There was only a negro so profoundly sleep that they started to laugh, and with a common accord they decided to walk, both equally troubled by the silence and the stillness of the heat-wave.
They walked along a path lined by sycamores, whose dense shade protected them from the sun, and they perceived for the first time that they were more to one another than companions in games.
Telamon picked a sprig of mint and crumpled it in his hand, and said, for the sake of saying something: “How much more penetrating the scent of mint is when the weather is very hot!”
And he extended his hand to Hypatia, and leaned toward her slightly.
For a second, that hand brushed Hypatia’s mouth and the young man’s shoulder touched her bare shoulder. The mint embalmed her, she felt dizzy and recoiled. Then, ashamed, she smiled, and leaned on Telamon in order to prove to herself that she remained the mistress of her instinct.
Then they resumed a conversation they had had before, an endless conversation. “Why? Oh, why?” said Hypatia, looking into the distance. “Perhaps because I’ve always thought that sensuality is the most absolute form of the slavery of women with regard to men. Perhaps because my efforts have turned toward the development of my mind, and I haven’t had the time to think that that mind is enveloped by a form of flesh. How many joys would have been lost to me if I hadn’t been chaste! The intoxication of work, a faint delight one has on waking up that is untroubled by any aftertaste of desire, a more perfect admiration of beauty because intelligence alone participates in it.”
“Perhaps the contrary is also true,” Telamon replied, with a musical softness in his voice, fixing his large, dark long-lashed eyes on Hypatia. “The philosopher who voluntarily renounces sensuality is an eternal solitary. He does not communicate with nature by the means that she has given him, which he judges arbitrarily to be vulgar. I even defy him fully to admirer the laws of art. How can one understand the marvel there is in the hollow backs of beautiful statues, in the delicacy of their legs, if one does not imagine the movements of physical love and the harmony of tenderness and the vigor with which the artist has dosed the lines? Do temples not symbolize by their eurhythmia the divine mixture of mind and matter? Is there not in the surge of columns, the curve of arches and the caress of architraves and ineffable poem that is not exempt from something carnal?”
“And yet,” said Hypatia, “it was in Syracuse, when I was twenty years old—when I was your age—before the little temple of Minerva outside the city on the edge of the sea, that I swore not to belong to any man. That evening, there was a rain of shooting stars, the laurels embalmed the air, the sea had never been as blue, and never had life seemed so sweet. I remember that I was sitting on the worn steps of the thr
eshold. I thought that Pythagoras and Plato must have sat down in the same place, for that temple of Tyche is one of the most ancient in the world, and I wept with emotion, touched by a ray of the intelligence of those pure minds.”
“The oaths that one swears to oneself can be revoked by the new being that we are a few years after having made them...”
Telamon stopped.
They had arrived at the very spot where, a few days before, while Hypatia and Proclus were going through the portal leading to the courtyard, he had taken Priscilla in his arms and had kissed her on the lips.
And he went on, as if talking to himself: “It’s necessary to put oneself above sensuality, to summon it and dismiss it like a slave, to play with it as we play with the discus.”
But Hypatia, seizing him by the arm, said to him imperiously: “Come on, let’s not stay here.” And she drew him backwards into the sycamore-lined path they had just quit.
She started to laugh, but there was a hint of bitterness that pierced that laughter.
“Do you think that I didn’t see you the other day? You were playing with sensuality, weren’t you? I turned round when you were pressing that young girl against you. You stuck your mouth to hers. Do you see her again, sometimes? Does she please you that much? Well, answer me!”
Telamon considered Hypatia’s animated face with surprise. He had never seen her thus, and had never found her as beautiful. The color of her nipple appeared beneath the transparent fabric like an incarnadine droplet, and her teeth shone between her redder teeth. There was a slight quiver in her nostrils.
They were walking rapidly. They had gone along the path. They sat down at hazard on a stone bench.
“Something very curious happened within me,” said Telamon, with his habitual slowness. “Certainly, you don’t resemble that girl named Priscilla. But when I kissed her, it seemed that it was you that I was kissing and that it was your body that I was holding against mine. And for a second, I possessed you in spite of you.”
He looked her full in the face, projecting over her, like a living fluid, the desire by which he was animated. Hypatia looked at him too, wondering whether she ought not to get up and go away, whether she ought not to reproach him for such a brutal confession, or even become indignant at what she could consider to be an insult.
Rapidly, she reviewed previous gazes and gestures on Telamon’s part. How young he was, in sum! He had never shown the elevation of mind of a Proclus. He scarcely took part in philosophical conversations. He never manifested the intellectual admiration that everyone had lavished upon her.
And suddenly, it seemed to her that all her being was inflamed, like a bouquet dried out by the sun that only requires a spark. She had a desire to take the young man in her arms, ripping his tunic. She experienced a fraternity with him so great that their two bodies, without touching became only one. A great mystery was revealed to her in a voluptuous dolor.
They perceived at the same time that the bench on to which they had fallen was at the foot of a small statue of Aphrodite situated in the depths of the garden. They had raised their eyes together and the same thought had come to them in considering the admirable nudity of the goddess.
They too felt naked. Their light tunics scarcely veiled their form. But they looked at one another without modesty, proud of feeling beautiful, inflamed by a common desire, the intoxication of embracing one another.
But they did not do it.
Hypatia, as vanquished as if the young man had possessed her, took his hand gently and raised the palm to her lips. She kept it there, respiring the attenuated perfume of mint in which, for her young amour, the sad charm of flourishing things trailed.
“It’s the mint I’m respiring,” she said.
“I wish it were my entire being that is evaporating toward you in that odor,” he replied.
They knew that they belonged to one another, and they savored in silence the sweetness of that possession.
Telamon made a movement.
“No,” said Hypatia, “tomorrow. Today, that’s enough.”
And as he persisted, by puckering his lips, she repeated: “Tomorrow! It’s so beautiful to be able to wait for tomorrow with impatience! And then, if we suffer from that wait, are we not surer that tomorrow will inevitably arrive?”
She did not know how mistaken she was.
And, when Telamon had just gone away, and Hypatia, pensively, had remained on the bench, out of all the minutes in life, that was the minute that the poet Palladius chose as the most favorable to speak about love to Hypatia.
Palladius had an immense vanity, which came less from his fortune, which was considerable, than from his physical beauty. He had a round, pink face and thick curly hair. He was tall, and he strove to put an imperial majesty into all his gestures. He lived in an entirely unrealizable dream of fabulous grandeur.
He dreamed of being a king and building a scaffolding of glory. Some of his relatives, who were in the Emperor’s favor in Constantinople, had obtained for him the title of Count of Africa. Thanks to that title and his literary renown, which he believed to be very great, he would group around Cyrene, Carthage and all of North Africa the elements that dreamed of shrugging off the yoke of Rome. He had the basis of an army. A militia of students at the Museum of Alexandria constituted, for him, a counterbalance to the influence in the city of the Parabalani, a militia of warrior clerics under Cyril’s orders. He would create similar militias in all the cities of Africa in order to favor the return of paganism. It was on them that he would rely in order to realize what Count Heraclian had once attempted without success.31
Hypathia knew about his infantile vanity and his disproportionate dreams, and smiled at them, without contradicting them. She knew that he desired her, and deflected that desire.
Immediately, however, Palladius pressed her with the haste that one has, instinctively, when one wants to seize something that is escaping.
The time had come to extinguish Christianity by force throughout Africa. That task was incumbent on him. If she consented to be his wife, he would no longer doubt his success. Rome was still filled with disciples of Symmachus.32 Many senators had remained faithful to the gods of paganism, and he, Palladius, maintained a secret correspondence with those senators. If, like Heraclian, he disembarked with an army in disorganized Italy, he was certain that Rome would rise up for him against Milan.33 The most beautiful dreams of the Emperor Julian could be realized. But it was necessary that Hypatia be at his side, that she love him, that she marry him!
Hypatia experienced a great need for sincerity.
“Well, no,” she said “I have less ambition, and I have more. The reign of pure ideas of which the Olympian gods are only the material symbols will not come yet. It is not by violence that truth can ever be imposed. Every temple demolished by the Christians, every beautiful statue that they break, is re-edified spiritually, and the temple is larger and the statue more perfect. And then, listen...”
Involuntarily, she had darted a gaze in the direction of the garden in which Telamon had drawn away.
For a second, she had been invaded by the desire to talk about the new genius of which her body was the receptacle, that Olympian flame by which she had been burned and which she knew to be sent by the gods.
But she stopped.
“And then, there’s Telamon, isn’t there?” said Palladius. But he said it without believing it, in order to hear indignant protests, to assure himself that Hypatia was still inaccessible to the sympathy of any man other than him.
She only replied: “Perhaps...” And she fixed her moist eyes upon an absent image.
That was enough for Palladius. He had received an insult that he could not forgive. He was struck by a cruel dart whose poison was about to corrupt his blood. He would have liked to believe that he was mistaken. He considered Hypatia, who was standing before him. He had never seen that hopeful light in her eyes, that impulse in her body to throw herself into arms that were not his. He sensed th
at she was elsewhere, far away, that she was looking through him at someone else, whose beauty had moved her.
Such a misunderstanding of the superiority that he attributed to himself threw him into astonishment, and filled him with anger. He no longer believed in the intelligence of a woman who was the victim of such an aberration.
He attempted a burst of disdainful laughter. He was very red. He straightened himself, giving his appearance the greatest possible majesty.
“Adieu,” he said.
He made the gesture of a king repudiating an excessively amorous woman, who is ridding himself of her importunity, and drew away with a long stride, without the smiling Hypatia having had time to retain him.
IX. Toward the Abode of the Wise Men
Aurelius had gone to say adieu to his friend Olympios.
He had crossed the few stadia that separated his house from the salt-pans of Shedia and had found the sage sitting cross-legged in his narrow hut, between a small heap of bananas and a jug of water.
“Why didn’t you come sooner?” said Olympios. “I now arrive easily at the divine ecstasy that Plotinus only knew three times and Iamblichus only once. Then, the laws of matter no longer exist for my spiritual body and you could have seen me, an hour ago, floating in this hut with as much ease as a mist in a globe of glass.”
Aurelius knew that the greatest sages have their weaknesses and that it is vain to contradict them. Olympios professed the same tolerance. So, when Aurelius announced his resolution to depart, as Apollonius had done several centuries before, in order to reach, in the depths of India, the abode of the wise men where the Tyanian had found the truth, he contented himself with nodding his head and hugging his old friend.
“We won’t be conversing any more with Socles about divine things, in the evenings, among the roses of your garden. For me, the palm that the charming slave agitated over our heads, the blue of the waters of Lake Mareotis, the sweetness of the soul that the warmth of our amity gives, were the last pleasures in which I participated. Perhaps they distanced me from the absolute that I seek, and it’s a good thing that I’m losing them…but I sense that I shall miss them, so much do terrestrial things take possession of us without our realizing it. Henceforth, I shall only gaze at the green-tinted waters of the marshes, where the reeds agitate endlessly. If you come back one day...”
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