Priscilla of Alexandria

by Maurice Magre

  Peter seized the beggar by his rags and pulled him outside vigorously. He explained to him what he wanted of him.

  “Here! You’ll never have such a good opportunity in your life. Ten drachms for a blow with a stick.” And he tried to make him take the ten drachms.

  It was a matter of ten drachms! What was money to Dionysus? He had always scorned it. Was he not rich without that? He did not want the ten drachms. He threw them on the ground, angrily.

  Peter picked them up silently. He needed the beggar. He dragged him to a nearby tavern, where Parabalani were already sitting, arguing.

  “Come on, you old fool,” he said to him. “Have a drink with me. We’ll see when you’ve had a drink.”

  But Dionysus darted somber glances to the right and left.

  Peter started to laugh in order to make him laugh, and talked about his daughter.

  “I know her well. She’s the most beautiful girl in the port. But she gives herself too cheaply! I had her once for three drachms and there’s a miserable velite who has her for nothing, and even takes her money.”

  Then Dionysus hurled himself at Peter, howling.

  He knew full well that his daughter was a prostitute. What did prostituting herself matter? The essential thing was that she came home at night, even drunk and soiled. The essential thing was that he saw her, that he knew that she was alive. Last night, he had waited for her in vain. Where was she? It was that fat, sweaty and panting man who had murdered her.

  He stated repeating: “Give me back my daughter!”

  Peter wondered whether he ought not to knock the idiot out with a blow of his fist.

  People formed a circle around them, and the tavern-keeper ran to lend Peter a hand.

  But Dionysus widened his eyes and suddenly prostrated himself, his forehead to the ground.

  “There she is!” he shouted. “By Our Lord Jesus Christ, there she is!”

  Between Majorin and her brother, Priscilla advanced, radiant in her linen tunic, in the magnificence of her youth.

  Dionysus got up, drew away a few paces, gazed at her, full of adoration, and calmed down, laughing and repeating to everyone: “It’s not her! But that’s how she ought to be!”

  And a little later, he approached Peter and said to him: “You can give me the ten drachms now. I’ll go with you, if she’s coming too.”

  Groups appeared from all directions, so abundantly that the gate of the Sun was encumbered, and the carts of the market gardeners that were arriving from the country could not get through. A man dressed as a monk advanced, carrying a long metal cross and singing a hymn. The sunlight drew a sparkling flame from the cross and there was a murmur in the crowd because many wanted to see that as a divine sign. Then the taverns emptied. Cries resounded.

  “Go fetch your staff,” said Peter to Dionysus.

  He made a sign to the Parabalani and they began to move along the Canopic Way.

  The mathematician Theon kissed his daughter with more emotion than usual. He found her more beautiful than on other days. He felt vibrant and happy, and he was afraid of happiness because he considered it to be a sunlit force that causes souls to suffer by setting them ablaze.

  He had perceived Hypatia walking in their minuscule garden planted with laurels and had come down from his bedroom to hug her in his arms.

  Theon was a gentle and scholarly man, perpetually plunged in the study of mathematics and philosophy. He would have liked to say something to his daughter regarding the tender love that he had for her, but he had never been able to express himself on questions of that order. Oh, how much easier it was to write a commentary of Ptolemy’s Almagest or to talk about eclipses than to pronounce a single word coming from the soul before a child as beautiful and as wise as Hypatia.

  Perhaps for the first time in her life, Hypatia did not seem to comprehend the tenderness of his kiss, and she drew away, distracted.

  She climbed the stone staircase that led to the terrace of her house and leaned on the balustrade, between a statuette of Pallas Athene and a statuette of Aphrodite, which were facing one another.

  Beneath her, the sun made the whiteness of the porphyry monuments resplendent, outlining against the azure the marble steeples and the syenite columns. On one side she saw sprays of red roses on bright terraces, on the other stages of hanging gardens with rows of lemon trees. In the warm and still air, a human rumor rose up. Hypatia felt ardent and weary, as if she had communicated with life through all the fibers of her being.

  Am I about to commit a sin against the spirit? she thought. It seems to me that I’ve already lost the beautiful intellectual solitude in which I lived as in a diamond palace. How demanding the gods are! It’s necessary to serve them without reserve, and one second of weakness annihilates a lifetime of effort. Yes, the pythoness of Delphi was chaste. The symbolic fire was extinguished in the temple when the vestals betrayed their vow. Pythagoras and Apollonius both taught that one cannot, without chastity, attain the divine ecstasy that confounds us with the source of Being. And yet...

  She had inclined her face over her bare arm, and the warmth of her skin gave her a frisson. She gazed in turn at Pallas Athene and Aphrodite, mute, irreconcilable and omnipotent.

  She was standing, anxious and alive, between the images of the two goddesses.

  Unity of unities. Essence from which thoughts emanate, is it true that one cannot attain you without renouncing the brightness of colors, the beauty of sounds and forms? All of nature, with its suns and its gentle nights, would then be nothing but a vast trap to prevent humans, by the network of desires, from reaching the highest spirituality. That isn’t possible. There must be a conciliation between the splendor of matter and the absolute reign of the spirit. A wisdom must exist that loves, a verity that has blood, which can only be embraced by terrestrial arms and only shows its true face through pleasure and pain.

  It seemed to her that the face of Telamon was very close to her own and that she was respiring his breath.

  She traversed the terrace and slowly descended the staircase.

  Perhaps nothing would have happened if Hypatia had not let the entrance door of her house close abruptly behind her.

  Her chariot was stationed in the street. She intended to go along the coast road, beyond the Gate of the Moon and the embalmers’ quarter, in order to have the caress of the wind on her face.

  She suddenly found herself in the presence of a howling crowd that blocked the street. She straightened up and mounted the chariot. She was already surrounded on all sides. But the majesty of the spirit is so great, when it is manifest in the gaze, that the Christians would have parted and perhaps nothing would have happened if the driver had whipped his horse and started the chariot in motion.

  But the driver was a very young man. Either because he had understood the gravity of the moment by the fury of the faces or because he was gripped by an inexplicable panic terror, he threw down his reins, leapt from his seat and fled.

  Then a clamor went up around Hypatia, standing and solitary, and a menacing circle formed. She was so calm and so beautiful that anyone endowed with reason would have been unable even to touch her robe.

  But Peter shoved the goitrous Dionysus in front of him and murmured to him: “Go on!”

  The latter was laughing and shouting without understanding, divided between joy and the ambient rage, intoxicated by the presence of Priscilla, whom he confounded with his daughter in his obscured mind.

  He advanced and, at full tilt, he struck Hypatia on the head with his staff. He hit her on the jaw. Under the force of the blow, she tottered and fell on to the front of the chariot, and immediately, no longer maintained by the magnetism of her courage, the Christians fell upon her. Peter seized her by the legs and caused her to tumble on to the paving stones of the street.

  “Take her to a church! Let her ask God’s pardon for her sins!” said a voice.

  The Church of Caesarea was not far away. Peter and another man set about dragging her there.


  At that moment, a shrill voice was heard, saying: “Let me pass!”

  And a woman of about forty who belonged to the high society of Alexandria cleaved through the crowd and stamped her heel twice on Hypatia’s face, repeating: “There! Accursed one!”

  Then she drew away, satisfied.

  On the perron of the Church of Caesarea, Hypatia was thrown down brutally, and her head collided with a step with a dull sound. Her hair was undone. She recovered consciousness and raised herself up slightly, her jaw hanging down.

  “Let her ask for pardon!” voices repeated.

  Peter struck her in the breast with his fist and put her on her knees.

  Then, suddenly, by a mysterious communication, an obscene madness took possession of the crowd. The Christians fell upon Hypatia and tore off her garments. Fifty hands pressed and struck her body. People spat on her. The hatred of beauty and intelligence that slumbers in the depths of base souls burst forth without restraint.

  A haggard monk threw himself upon the assailants, his arms outspread, crying: “Wretches! What are you doing? Jesus Christ is watching you!”

  He was knocked down, half-stunned. It was Simon.

  A woman fell to the ground in a crisis of hysteria and someone threw himself upon her with so much violence that no one knew whether it was to help her or to rape her.

  Then Peter who was holding Hypatia by the hair, raised his voice and said: “It’s necessary to stone her.” And he added, travestying the thought of Christ: “Let someone who has never sinned cast the first stone.”

  A stir in the crowd had pushed Priscilla, overwhelmed by horror to the front. Someone pointed at her and said: “There’s the daughter of Diodorus! She’s still a child! She’s never sinned!”

  And someone put a stone in her hand.

  Priscilla was a few paces away from Hypathia, naked and soiled with dust. She distinguished the imprints of fingers on her shoulders and breasts. A little trickle of blood departed from her temple and descended inexhaustibly all the way to her lips.

  Behind her, through a crack in the door of the church, the face of a fat priest appeared, animated by innocent curiosity, leaning out to see.

  It seemed to Priscilla that a great silence had fallen around her, that she had become the center of the immobilized world.

  Had she never sinned? She remembered the lips of a young man that smelled of honey and acacia. She had taken pleasure in remembering that kiss.

  “Well, Priscilla!” people were repeating around her.

  Then she participated in their Christian fury. Yes, the lies of the pagans must be punished, and also that beauty whose splendor was an outrage. She sensed a singular vigor in her arm, and she threw the stone with all her might, which hit Hypatia in the neck.

  Priscilla saw the philosopher’s eyes open very wide and fix themselves upon her. They were bright, cold and intelligent. They expressed astonishment, and the desire to understand that had always animated them. No pain, no reproach, no terror. A little sadness. It was only a flash, and that light, which Priscilla would never forget, vanished.

  A howl burst forth. Stones began to rain down from all directions. And at least that fury permitted the neoplatonist to depart without an excess of suffering toward the regions of which, while alive, she had weighed the shadows and measured the mystery.

  Priscilla had fled. There as a long battle around the body of Hypatia. The more moderate wanted to carry her body away and burn it in the country. But the others, armed with knives, tried to butcher it, saying that it was appropriate to set an example by parading the pieces triumphantly through the city. They hoped, in addition, to make the pagan suffer after death, believing that when a body is dispersed the double wanders or a long time, full of desolation.

  It was the latter who were to win the argument, and a cobbler with a shop near the Diocletian column was to take pride for a long time in having conserved one of Hypatia’s desiccated hands, which he had cut off with his paring-knife.

  But they were all unaware that there would not be a plaintive double to wander under the porticos of the Museum, to lean on the terrace of the house in which her father Theon lived, or even to go and respire a perfume of crushed mint on the stone bench in the garden of the Gymnasium. For the spirits of the intelligent escape with death the appeal of terrestrial things, surpass without perceiving it the world of posthumous desires and leap into the ineffable abode of pure thought.

  XIII. The Martyrdom of Abjection

  Priscilla raised herself up on her elbow and darted a bleak glance over the furniture of her bedroom, vaguely illuminated by a night-light. Her hair undone, half-naked between the four ivory columns of her bed, she made sure that nothing had changed place, that the broad crimson curtains descended over the windows, that the oval bronze mirror sent back her confused image.

  And yet, the top of her night-dress was torn and handing down over her young breasts, as if a brutal hand had attempted to tear it off. She felt on her arms and in her armpits a warmth of bruising, and in the demi-obscurity she thought she could distinguish blue marks in places.

  She had a desire to cry out. What was the point? No one could have got through the blue-painted cedar-wood door, no one could have lain down beside her in her bed and embraced her so pitilessly.

  The evil was within her. It was born of the epoch into which she had plunged, ruined by religion, shortly after the death of Hypatia, and since then it had only grown. The evil thoughts had multiplied around her as she had striven to drive them away. They were born of that, singular and obsessive. They had gradually taken on human form, borrowing the faces that, in life, inspired her with the greatest disgust and the greater terror.

  By day, she succeeded in triumphing over them by activity or prayer; but by night, when she was alone in her bed, she could not escape them. So long as she was awake she confronted the danger. She fixed her thoughts on the image of the Virgin or that of Saint Mark, by whom she believed herself to be protected. But drowsiness extended over her against her will. She passed from wakefulness to an intermediate state that was not that of dreams, and in which she perceived the creations of her imagination as if they were reality.

  How fatiguing the struggle was! Why was she the victim of these obsessions of evil? What had she done to deserve that? God was striking her cruelly!

  But tonight, she was weary. Her limbs were heavy and worn out. She gazed at a thin moonbeam competing on the floor with the gleam of the night-light; she let her head, aureoled with hair, fall back on the pillow, and abandoned herself to the nocturnal torture.

  Immediately, she had the impression of thick lips stuck to her mouth. It was a sticky, unspeakable kiss, the pollution of which penetrated between her teeth. She felt something soft and fleshy on her neck and she saw the goiter of the beggar who had been the first to strike Hypatia with his staff. Other hideous faces leaned over her, competing for her lips. But the frightful beggar held her in his inflexible caress. Then he dissolved and disappeared, and from the ceiling, rolled into a ball, her brother Marcus fell, who uttered a burst of stupid laughter and tore away the silk sheets in which she was wrapped.

  Human forms filled the room. She sensed the warmth of bodies against her, hairy arms seized her, she was pressed by bony knees. In vain she resisted with all her might. An obscene human pullulation, a tide of rutting males, enveloped her, covered her and ravaged her. In the end, an opaque, diseased breath blew over her. Crushed and spread-eagled, she saw the monstrous Peter embracing her.

  She woke up. She did not want to go back to sleep. Anything, but not that. Peter had disappeared from Alexandria on the same day that Hypatia had been stoned, in fear of the vengeance that threatened him; but for Priscilla, he was still present. The desire that he had had for her was the most terrible form of her nightmares.

  As if to protect herself from caresses emerging from the invisible, she threw a garnet pallium embroidered with silver bees over her shoulders and she went to kneel down on her
prie-dieu.

  Then, far away, on a rising road, she perceived the leprous Christ who had haunted her dreams before. She distinguished on his tumefied face an expression of pitying sadness. He perceived her and he made her a sign to join him. She started to run and she saw to her right and her left sick, infirm and ulcerated individuals who extended their arms toward her. As she advanced, the infirm threw away their crutches, the lepers lost their scales, and the bearers of wounds became healthy. She, on the contrary, felt her muscles shriveling, she took on human deformities as she passed, and ulcers settled on her face like birds.

  Priscilla meditated for a long time on the symbolic meaning of that dream. She thought she saw a revelation therein. It was because of it that she discovered the road to her salvation, and that road was to be singular and unexpected.

  In that epoch there was rumor in Alexandria of the preaching of a mystic monk named Zosyma. It was said that the previous year he had occasioned disorder at Ptolemais by the vehemence of his tirades against the rich. No one knew precisely where he came from. He was only clad in an animal skin, like the anchorites of the desert.

  He let his hair and beard grow and had immeasurable long fingernails. In the evening he refused the hospitality of pious people and wanted to sleep on the paving-stones of the street, exposed to bad weather, and the outrages of drunkards and pagans.

  It was after sunset, at the most wretched crossroads in Rhacotis, that he began to speak. He abused the clergy, the Emperor, the Jews, the pagans: everyone. For some time it was fashionable in good society to go and listen to him, as one listens to an actor, and afterwards, everyone said: “He’s a new John the Baptist.”

  Priscilla obtained permission from her father to go to Rhacotis one evening. Diodorus gave the authorization to her gladly. His daughter worried him. She was increasingly isolated, and had manifested the resolution to enter a convent. Diodorus sometimes thought, not without remorse, of the distant convent from which his wife had not returned. He had resolved to find a husband for Priscilla. Now, he had learned that the monk Zosyma routinely criticized the monastic life as contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ.