XXVI. Hypatia’s Sapphire
“There’s a saying from which my mind can’t detach itself,” said Priscilla to Telamon. “I think about it incessantly, and yet, it’s impossible for me to remember who said it to me.”
“What is it?” asked Telamon.
“That it is only by means of love that one can stop hatred.” Priscilla remained silent for a moment, and then went on: “Yes, love is the greatest force there is in the world.”
She held out her hand to Telamon and gazed at the sea. They were leaning on the marble balustrade of Diodorus’ house, and behind them, the heavy heat of the finishing afternoon caused the immense garden of rare flowers to live with an animal life, swelling the bulbs of violet-tinted irises, making the calices of foxgloves burst forth, drawing white sudations from the velvety petunias and rendering the stamens of the pelargoniums more incandescent.
For a long time, Telamon had waited in Corinth for the message from Priscilla that would summon him to Alexandria. That wait had increased his amour. The liking he had for beautiful statues, luminous landscapes and works of art sculpted in precious materials was summarized in the ideal of a human beauty that had the form of Priscilla’s body. He had yielded to his impatience and had embarked for Alexandria.
He had found Priscilla at the moment when the ashes of Aurelius’ pyre, lifted by a light breeze, were dispersing in a fine gray mist on the coast of the sea. They had given themselves to one another with a hectic ardor. Spring and summer had passed without their being able to quit one another even for an hour. They both had a physical need to be with one another. Desire had made their eyes brighter, and made their faces paler, rendering them more beautiful.
“Oh, perhaps you, who have known Synesius, and have lived in the intimacy of Proclus and Eunapius,” Priscilla said, suddenly, with a passionate impulse, “can resolve the problem that often torments me. Why accomplish one action rather than another? By virtue of what law do we do good or evil? What is the force within us that links us to certain beings? It seems to me that the hours I have spent loving you were marked in advance on a mysterious tableau and that they had to elapse for me as ineluctably as those I employed in avenging Hypatia.”
“Do you remember what Isidore of Gaza said, who explained everything by dreams?” Telamon replied. “He put forward the hypothesis that you were, in a former life, Hypatia’s younger sister, and that she turned you away from the love of a young man in order to consecrate yourself to the service of the gods. Perhaps I was that young man, and we are now realizing the desire of old, for human love is imperishable.”
“Perhaps,” said Priscilla. “But in that case, every life is a perpetual recommencement, and every action, good or bad, entails a recompense or a punishment. That would have no end. And I, who would like to repose eternally in your arms, am already weary in thinking of everything to which it might be necessary for me to submit by virtue of the reaction of my actions.”
“Didn’t you say just now that love stops hatred. We know very little. The balance in which everything is weighed in order to be reproduced is invisible and unknown. Every kiss that our lips give, every spontaneous impulse that impels us together is perhaps inscribed to our count in the book of immanent justice. The love of a man and a woman for one another is the most elevated in the hierarchy of amours, and the one you experience will doubtless tip the balance in your favor.”
The sun would soon disappear over the horizon. Priscilla wanted to go along the road to Paroetonium in order to contemplate the gigantic clumps of rhododendrons in flower that were blooming a short distance from the villa and the colors of which were splendid in the twilight.
The two lovers had mounted a chariot with two seats which Telamon drove. As they came back, they went past a group of children playing. They were young Christians. They recognized Priscilla and Telamon and they shouted insults. A little girl even followed the chariot at a run and, with all her might, threw a stone that struck Priscilla on the temple.
Telamon stopped the horses in order to look at the wound, but there was only a tiny trickle of blood, which stopped flowing immediately.
“It’s nothing,” said Priscilla.
They went back.
It was only later that Priscilla felt weak, gripped by vertigo. She perceived then that she had been stricken by a kind of paralysis that immobilized half her body.
Slaves left for Alexandria immediately with the order to fetch a physician, Adamantius in preference to any other.
Priscilla wanted to be carried on to the terrace, in front of the sea, in the midst of flowers. She felt ill, and was having difficulty breathing. Her memory was fading.
She asked for an ivory casket that was on a shelf in her bedroom. She took a sapphire out of it, which she gave to Telamon.
“Keep it,” she said. “It’s Hypatia’s sapphire. It’s stained by a little blood. I haven’t washed it because of the verity of the symbol.”
And as Telamon looked at her in surprise she murmured: “It’s better thus. The blow that I dealt before has just been returned to me. Fortunate are those who pay for their faults in this existence! They arrive in the following one exempt from debts.”
Now she could no longer move. Thoutmos was weeping, saying that blood must have flowed internally and that the best thing to do was to bleed her.
Telamon preferred to wait for Adamantius. He wanted to remain alone with Priscilla. He had placed the sapphire between her two breasts.
The moon had risen. Priscilla was lying on a bed of repose hastily placed under a clump of parasol pines, from which a gilded needle was detached.
She struggled internally against the departure of memories. She clung on to one of them, and was able to say, in a low voice: “Your first kiss in the Gymnasium of Alexandria...”
It seemed to Telamon that the aromas of the garden, in becoming confounded, gave him a spiritual intoxication of which he was not the master. The moon was high in the sky. The pine needles rained down in silence.
Adamantius did not arrive.
Priscilla, beneath the serene night, had never been as beautiful. Telamon wondered who she resembled. That marble visage was like that of the Aphrodite he had once contemplated in the temple of Byblos. Only the lips were less full, and tighter, the nose thinner. But the breasts, the hollow of the hips and the long legs were more perfect. That white form lying on the whiteness of the terrace, with the life of the spread hair, and the delicacy of the hands, really was the beauty personified that he had pursued all his life, and which was his veritable religion.
He was so penetrated with admiration that it was only when dawn appeared that he perceived that Priscilla was dead.
He uttered a cry.
Like a star illuminated by the rising sun, pure of all pollution, Hypatia’s sapphire projected a sparkling blue light.
Notes
1 Cyril of Alexandria was the Patriarch of the city from 412 to his death in 444. He remains notorious as one of the instigators of Christian mobs, led by the so-called Parabalani, including the one that murdered the philosopher Hypatia in 415, and for his fierce opposition to the followers of Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, whom he condemned as heretics. According to the early fifth-century Historia Ecclestiastica of Socrates of Constantinople, the mob that murdered Hypatia was led by a lector named Peter, about whom nothing else is known; the license permitted by that ignorance for the inventions of the present text is employed much more prodigally in the novel version.
2 This reference is anachronistic, Constantine II having died in 361, while this part of the story is set in 415.
3 Another anachronism; as the longer version makes clear, the library of the Serapeum had already been destroyed when Hypatia came to Alexandria.
4 “Here resides happiness”: an inscription made famous after being found on a phallus on the wall of a bakery during the excavation of Pompeii.
5 Khizir Khayr ad-Din (c1466-1546), nicknamed Barbarossa [Redbeard], was a great
mariner of the Ottoman Empire, the younger brother of another famous mariner Arudj Reis, also known by association as Arudj Barbarossa. The latter was proclaimed Bey of Algiers in 1516 by pirates, and pledged allegiance to the Ottoman Empire, for which he and his brother—who replaced him as Bey after his death in 1518—fought in a long war against Spain, then ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Lorenza is fictitious.
6 Turgut Reis, also known as Dragut (1485-1565), followed a career path very similar to that of Barbarossa, progressing from pirate to Ottoman admiral, and similar serving a term as Bey of Algiers. He did spend four years as a Spanish galley slave in the early 1540s, but the present story is set in a much earlier period of the two men’s careers and the allegation here is anachronistic.
7 Alonso de Contreras (1582-1681) was a Spanish adventurer who was by turns a privateer, naval captain and soldier; he became famous after his death because of the historical importance of his oft-reprinted autobiography, whose two manuscripts date from 1628 and 1645.
8 Suleiman I (1494-1566), commonly known as Suleiman the Magnificent, ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1520 until his death, so this reference is slightly anachronistic.
9 The first reference to this mysterious and probably fictitious festival appears to be a letter of protest written in English by a clergyman in India and printed in the Catholic Spectator in 1824, which appears to have been the basis for a more colorful description in French published the following year by Jean Antoine Dubois in Moeurs, institutions et cérémonies des peuples de l'Inde, copied in several subsequent texts.
10 Joseph-François, Marquis Dupleix (1697-1763), was the Governor General of French India from 1742 to 1754.
11 Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais (1699-1753) became head of the French fleet in Indian waters in 1740; he relieved the besieged Dupleix at Pondicherry, but the two quarreled thereafter, fatally for La Bourdonnais.
12 Not the singer and pianist Paule de Lestang (1875-1968), who was not alive during the Second Empire; an earlier person of that name to whom several oblique references can be found in sources from the 1860s, perhaps her mother-in-law, remains somewhat obscure.
13 Author’s note: “We thought that this account of the voyage of a young Dutchman in the last century had its place in Courtesans’ Lives since it informs us about the Korean Hiao. We are publishing it without changing anything.”
14 Georgius was the Arian bishop of Alexandria from 356 to 351. He died in 361, two years before Julian the Apostate, which implies that Old Diodorus is presently in his late sixties.
15 Theodosius I (347-392), Emperor of the East from 379-392 and then of the entire Empire until his death. Notoriously, he did not prevent or punish the destruction by Christians of the Serapeum in Alexandria in 391.
16 Accounts of Alexander’s visit to the great temple of Ammon at the Oasis of Siwa in 331 B.C. are preserved by numerous ancient sources, all of them published after Alexander’s death and based on rumor; the geographer Strabo claimed to have obtained the information from Ptolemy and Aristoboulos, who were allegedly at Siwa at the time, but that attempted justification only makes his account seem more dubious to skeptical eyes. The present text embellishes the myth considerably.
17 It is unsurprising that it was not equipped with a bell-tower, as bells were not introduced into the Christian Church until 400 A.D. and their use was not officially sanctioned by the papacy until 604.
18 Orestes was the Roman governor of the province of Egypt in 415, when he clashed with Cyril over the latter’s attempts to exert ecclesiastical authority over secular matters. He was forced to leave Alexandria after Hypatia’s murder, and history lost trace of him thereafter.
19 Synesius (373-c414) was a neoplatonist philosopher whose Christianity had seemed rather lukewarm until he was appointed bishop of Ptolemais by popular acclaim in 410.
20 The historical Theon (335-405) was dead by the time this part of the story is set (415), but the present text prolongs the life of the character somewhat.
21 The historical neoplatonist philosopher Isidore of Gaza could not have been in Alexandria at the beginning of the fifth century, as he was the leader of the Athenian school near the century’s end. He was a friend of the historical Proclus, who was born circa 412, and also could not have been in Alexandria while Hypatia was alive. The characters bearing those names in the present text are, therefore, fictitious.
22 Herod the Great was actually the son of Antipater the Idumaean, an official who served under the ethnarch Hyrcanus II.
23 The Life of Apollonius of Tyana was actually written, more than a hundred years after the philosopher’s death, by Philostratus, who claimed to have obtained the information from a probably-non-existent disciple names Damis. The book is a confection of fantasies, which represents Apollonius as a miracle-worker, in an attempt to establish a reputation rivaling that of Christ, employing the same strategy as the latter’s adherents. Magre apparently took the account seriously; the first chapter of his Magiciens et Illuminés (1930) is devoted to Apollonius, based on Philostratus, and it formed one of the foundation stones of his fanciful history of a secret wisdom transmitted through the ages, which he first elaborated in the present chapter, and which forms the backcloth to many of his novels.
24 Eumenes II ruled Pergamon from 197-159 B.C.
25 The star the Egyptians called Sothis is almost certainly Sirius.
26 i.e., the Church of Saint Mark, formerly the residence of Theonas, the Pope of Alexandria from 282-300.
27 The “savage monks of Nitra” are said by some sources describing the death of Hypatia to have been summoned by Cyril to take part in that murder, but the reference should actually be to Nitria, which is not a mountain but a monastic site in the Nitrian desert. Magre might have misread the reference, and has also redirected the monks to another mission.
28 Lysimachus of Acarnania, one of Alexander the Great’s tutors, should not be confused with another Lysimachus, who was one of his bodyguards. The details of the biography and thought of this Lysimachus provided by the present text are all invented.
29 A fictitious reference, which cannot be to the Clitomachus mentioned briefly by Cicero.
30 Cyril was, in fact canonized—by no means the first vicious mass-murderer to receive that honor, and certainly not the last.
31 Heraclian, Count of Africa was a general in the service of the Emperor of the Western Roman Emperor Honorius, who led a revolt against his master in 413, two years before the present scene is set, and attempted an unsuccessful invasion of Italy.
32 Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (345-402) was a Roman consul who tried to preserve the traditional religions of Rome when the greater part of the aristocracy was converting to Christianity.
33 Honorius did establish his court in Milan for a while, but he had moved it to Ravenna in 401, so this reference is anachronistic
34 The trapezites (literally “men at tables”) were the bankers of ancient Athens, who branched out from money-changing into money-lending. They had disappeared from the Western Empire by the time of the present story, suppressed by the Church’s ban on usury, they continued to operate in the Byzantine Empire, where they organized a system of transferable credit.
35 The Jewish high priest Onias IV built a temple in Leontopolis, not far from Heliopolis, in 150 B.C. or thereabouts.
36 The eminent Greek physician Archigenes died in the second century, so this reference is anachronistic.
37 The presence of the Athenian philosopher Asclepigenia, the daughter of Plutarch of Athens, is anachronistic; although there is some doubt about her dates she was probably born in 430. She was certainly not contemporary with Eunapius, an earlier Athenian philosopher, who cannot have known Proclus, although Asclepigenia did. The Cerinthus cited cannot be the first-century Gnostic of that name.
38 Theodosius II, Eastern Roman Emperor from 408-450, should not be confused with Theodosius I, cited in the early chapters of the novel. The Council of Ephesus, which he summoned
to settled the theological dispute between Cyril and Nestorius, was held in 431.
39 Several documents refer to Nestorius being placed in the custody of this individual prior to the Council of Ephesus, but nothing more seems to be known about him.
40 The historical Adamantius, who was indeed a physician known for an early work on physiognomy and a few surviving fragments of other texts, actually left Alexandria during the expulsion and went to Constantinople; it was there that he was persuaded to embrace Christianity, although he did return to Alexandria thereafter.
41 In Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Iarchas is the leader of the sages who receive Apollonius in India. History has no other trace of any such individual.
42 Cyril’s prolific writings do not appear to include a book actually entitled Anathematism, but one of his diatribes against Nestorius includes a section knows as the twelve anathemas, and they are sometimes individually cited as “the first/second/third anathematism,” etc.
43 The historical Nestorius is thought to have died in or after 450, surviving Cyril by at least six years, but exactly when and how is unknown; that uncertainty might license the advancement of the event and the melodramatic imagination of its manner by the present narrative—in which, in any case, the rumor reported to Cyril might have no truth in it. Cyril’s death also appears to have been brought forward from the generally-accepted date of 444, but that too is speculative.
44 Eutyches (c380-c456), the superior of monastery near Constantinople, played a leading role in the Council of Ephesus in 431, where his vehement denunciation of Nestorianism became so extreme as to provoke his own condemnation as a heretic.
45 This obscure individual seems to have been introduced to French readers by a curious book entitled Publication d’un ancien manuscrit containing précis curieux des hérésies qui ont le plus alarmé l’Église [Publication of an Ancient Manuscript Containing Brief Summaries of the Heresies that have Most Alarmed the Church], published in 1840, which credits mention of his sect to Origen, with no apparent warrant. The 1840 text credits Elci with the assertion of Christ’s repeated appearances since the beginning of time, to which the present text adds various embellishing details. Magre must have used the book as a source because the other bizarre heretics cited, and the traits attributed to them, are mostly featured in its text; some do not appear to be mentioned anywhere else, apparently having been invented by the anonymous author.
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