The Only Girl in the World

by Maude Julien

  Despite all this, contrary to popular belief and even though he’s a high-ranking Mason, the American President is not the most powerful man on the planet. The true masters of the world are two other Freemasons: first, the Queen of England in her capacity as historic patron of Freemasonry, and second, the hidden supreme master who steers the business world as well as the spiritual world: the Pope. The Vatican has also perfected a unique system for harvesting the vibrations from a maximum number of people. Using the traditional Papal address, urbi et orbi, the Pope stands in a dominating position, looking out over all of Saint Peter’s Square, and performs a special gesture, which the faithful take to be a blessing but which is in fact a way of drawing in and appropriating the energy of the thousands of followers gathered beneath his balcony.

  The Pope’s role as supreme overlord does not mean that the entire Church is made up of Initiates—far from it. Priests, who enjoy a degree of power, are mostly contemptible individuals with lowly, impure souls—which makes them dangerous. As for the believers, they are nothing but a vast flock of sheep perfectly unaware of what is really going on. In passing, my father always warns me to be wary of crowds, because individual energies are weakened when they come into contact with others, especially powerful people who know how to suck the lifeblood out of you and use you to their own ends. If I ever find myself in a large gathering, it’s crucial that I find some way to position myself above it if I’m to avoid this diluting process.

  There is, of course, another superior group of people: not the Christians but the Jews. Having always been persecuted, they have to play their cards close to their chests, passing themselves off as losers, skinflints. In fact, while those who are not persecuted have slowly turned into ‘great spineless masses’ obsessed with their own comfort, the Jews have developed a keen intelligence, a remarkable capacity for cooperation and, most importantly, the sense of secrecy without which nothing valid can ever be achieved.

  Rabbis, who are a thousand times more intelligent than Catholic priests, have been learning how to harness energies since the dawn of time. They use in particular the seven-armed menorah candelabra. Having inherited their magic from ancient Egypt, the rabbis have been careful to keep this traditional source active and their sacred scriptures alive. Some rabbis are great alchemists, and they pass on their art with utmost secrecy. This is why Hitler embarked on exterminating the Jews: the swastika that he had inverted—and thus rendered uncontrollable—was beginning to escape his grip, and he feared that it might fall into the hands of rabbis who would have made much better use of it than him.

  My father says that our family is descended from Jews. He occasionally mentions a great-aunt Sarah and a great-uncle Samuel. I’ve never met them and don’t know whether they’re still alive. In any event, having given so much help to Jews during the war, my father is now considered ‘one of them’, and it is actually thanks to them that he made his fortune. ‘As my daughter, you could ask for their help, should you ever need it later in life. Remember that.’ I carve this information into my memory. The only problem is I don’t know where to find them, and my father never tells me how to contact them.

  The Tiger Rug

  Unlike the grounds, where new construction work is undertaken every summer, the inside of the house never changes. An ornament atop a piece of furniture might as well be glued there for all eternity. On her way out of my lesson one day, my mother stops dead in front of the Persian rug in the middle of the corridor. In a flash of inspiration, she says, ‘It would look better down on the first-floor landing.’ I can’t make out her tone of voice; it’s almost as if she were asking my opinion. For a moment I’m stunned; no one has ever asked what I think of anything. Then, suddenly excited at the thought of introducing even such a negligible change into my repetitive existence, I nod vigorously.

  Ever since I was very young, I’ve liked this rug, with its lithe, majestic tigers on a red background. It reminds me of the days when we still lived in Lille, before we shut ourselves away in this prison. I can remember my father talking to me in an astonishingly gentle voice, saying, ‘If you look closely at the pattern—that tiger there, for example—if you keep your eyes focused on it, you’ll see it move.’ And the tigers in that rug really did move before my eyes. Now I can’t wait to move the rug itself.

  We each pick up one end of the rug. It’s incredibly heavy and we can’t slide it along the floor because it drags on the wall-to-wall carpet underneath. When my mother tries rolling it up, she topples over several times. I suppress the urge to laugh; my father—sitting in the dining room as usual—mustn’t hear us. But we both succumb to hysterical laughter. I’m sure that, like me, she’s thinking about an incident involving the actor Maurice Chevalier and the entertainer Mistinguett, a story my father tells us to illustrate the dangers of contact between people of the opposite sex. Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguett performed a show together during which they would both emerge from a large carpet that was unrolled on the stage. One day when the carpet unfurled too quickly, the astonished audience were confronted with…the couple locked in a passionate kiss. ‘And to think they were both in separate relationships!’ my father always concludes reprovingly.

  It takes us a ridiculously long time to get the rug as far as the staircase. There the problem worsens: we have no idea how to get it down the first flight, and even less how to get it around the half-landing to go down the second. ‘Let’s tip it over the banister,’ my mother whispers. We haul it laboriously over the banister rail and—wallop!—there it is a floor below, still balancing on the banister and threatening to continue its fall. We scurry down on tiptoe, just managing to catch it before it slumps to the ground floor.

  The panic! We narrowly avoided a disaster: the rug very nearly knocked over the bronze statue standing in pride of place at the foot of the stairs. That statue is my father’s mascot: Athena holding the sphere of knowledge in her left hand. I have been treated to several teaching sessions on the subject of this statue. Why the left hand? Because that is the chosen hand of the Initiates. Why a sphere? It is a symbolic shape representing knowledge, the world of ideas as defined by Plato, but it is also the perfect geometric form comprising an infinite number of triangles as well as the ‘magic square of the wise’.

  My father thinks everything is symbolic and he attributes extraordinary value to basic geometric shapes such as triangles and squares, claiming they carry within them a tiny portion of the primordial energy of creation. Understanding and respecting these shapes is the first step towards learning to set the energies spinning in the right direction and, therefore, to having a chance of accessing occult philosophy. He offers no explanation of the magic square of the wise, and I don’t dare ask. I picture a gathering of great Initiates sitting in a square formation and discussing the universe and its energies.

  My mother and I eventually position the rug on the first floor and hurry back upstairs to study for what little time is left. When we come back down at the end of the afternoon, we walk past our rug and agree: it looks much better here. All the same, we are apprehensive about how my father will react when he sees it on his way to bed.

  The time for the evening procession comes at last. We climb the stairs in single file, my mother leading to soften the fall should he stumble forwards, and me bringing up the rear in case he falls backwards. The tiger rug lies bathed in the lamplight right in the middle of the first-floor landing. My father walks over it and goes into his bedroom without a word. We exchange anxious glances behind his back. Still no reaction during the bedtime routine. We go back out into the corridor stunned, and head off to bed. He will realize tomorrow.

  After his morning ritual the next day, we follow him along the landing, both tense. The excitement of the previous day has abated. We walk over the rug one behind the other, and reach the stairs. Still no comment. We go downstairs in the prescribed order with me at the front and my mother behind. Nothing. Not a word.

  A week passes by like this. Day after
day we wait for him to reprimand us. But nothing of the sort happens. As we head upstairs one evening my mother cracks. Either to bring an end to what has become unbearable apprehension, or because she doesn’t have it in her to hide even the smallest thing from him. ‘Monsieur Didier,’ she starts hesitantly, ‘You’ll see we have moved a rug onto the first floor…’ She doesn’t have time to finish her sentence. My father leaps up the stairs and, seeing the rug, flies into a towering rage: ‘This is unacceptable! Put things back as they were, immediately!’

  Easier said than done. Our legs wobbling with the strain, we drag the rug an inch at a time. Every now and then we hear my father’s furious footsteps as he strides to his bedroom door, yanks it open and bellows: ‘What the hell are you doing? Haven’t you finished yet?’

  We manage somehow to get the rug back up to the second floor. Hanging our heads in shame, we finish waiting on my father and return to our rooms without making eye contact.

  The next day he decides to do a general inspection of the house to check we haven’t moved anything else. He storms from room to room and we follow in silence. He seems to find objects that have been moved all over the place and interrogates us aggressively. Luckily, the thick layer of dust corroborates our answers. In the end—because we clearly have time on our hands—he punishes us with new chores. My mother has extra accountancy exercises to complete and I have to copy out the whole of Dandelot’s Practical Guide to the Musical Keys.

  This seems to me a light punishment for the week of exciting complicity I’ve just had with my mother. We did something to brighten our humdrum existence, we shared a secret, harboured the same concerns, the same fears, the same tension. And my mother doesn’t hold me responsible for the failure of our venture, which makes me feel almost lighthearted.

  I sometimes think about the journey those tigers made. Now I feel like moving everything around, furniture, ornaments, books…turning everything upside down, even the schedule. As if the door of change has been thrown open, and I’ve worked out how to stop our fates being sealed once and for all. How wonderful life would be if my mother and I were friends and could dream up other adventures. If we could defy my father’s increasingly oppressive authority with other little schemes.

  Hiram of Tyre

  ‘I am not from any time or of any place; beyond time and place, my spiritual being lives in eternal existence.’ This is how my father likes to describe himself. In his teaching sessions, which relate more and more to ‘fundamental issues’, he explains that he has already lived many lives and met other Beings of Light. He benefitted from the teachings of Pythagoras, one of the great founders of the secret doctrine. He took part in the crusades wearing the armour of the Knights Templar. He was a Cathar ‘perfectus’. In the difficult era of the French Revolution—during which he was incarnated as Giuseppe Balsamo, who became famous under the alias of Count Alessandro Cagliostro—he was a disciple of another great Initiate, the Count of Saint-Germain…

  Perhaps as a result of these multiple incarnations, my father is a ‘thaumaturgist’, a miracle-worker; he can heal simply through the laying on of hands, like Saint Louis and the Merovingian kings from whom we’re descended. ‘We are Didiers, the direct descendants of the ‘Do-nothing kings’, we’re pure,’ he often tells me. He explains that the commonly misunderstood term ‘do-nothing’ derives from the fact that these enlightened kings didn’t waste their energies on menial activities like walking. They travelled in ox-drawn carts, which meant they could contemplate higher matters. Because this behaviour had no ‘concrete, visible or immediate’ results, lesser mortals interpreted it as laziness. The world was not ready for their wisdom. Yet they achieved great things in the invisible universe and their impact would be understood later, in the fullness of time.

  My father can also use a Ouija board, in other words, commune with the dead. For example, he talks to his mother in the hereafter. I must not confuse these authentic powers of his with the demonstrations put on by ‘apprentice psychics’ who can only communicate with ‘freak-show ghosts’. The sheep are awestruck by these performances and that’s just as well, because it leaves the truly chosen free to converse with higher spirits. Similarly, I should not be impressed by people who turn lead into gold: that’s just ‘small potatoes’, within the skill set of the lowliest ‘novice alchemist’.

  Great Initiates like my father have far more formidable abilities, such as penetrating other people’s minds. They can also control people by hypnotizing them. ‘I can do absolutely anything with any weak mind,’ my father is forever claiming. By definition these people have no power over their own minds. In contrast, strong minds fully master their mental energies and can therefore enter other people’s minds and manipulate them like puppets just as easily as they can resist pain and inebriation or bend metal and move inanimate objects. Hypnotism is a powerful instrument, and a lasting one: you need only ‘put someone under’ once and they will still be in your control years later.

  My father assures me that he has never hypnotized me and never will. As I’m destined to become a superhuman myself, I mustn’t be subject to any form of mental possession. Once my training is complete, I will control the weak-minded and bring about the great regeneration of the universe.

  I have no desire to control anyone. Does being strong mean living cloistered in this house like my father? Well, then, I’d rather have a weak mind and live like the factory workers at the Cathelain plant. If, however, I’m condemned to fulfilling my father’s expectations, to ‘get inside people’s heads’, then I’ll use my power to free these so-called weak minds. I picture myself opening a metal gate, but instead of going in and taking possession of anyone, I hold the gate open so all those captive souls can escape. The fantasy gives me the same sweet feeling as when I open the door to Linda’s kennel. Never mind if I risk being trampled by the crowds of people racing to get out. In my imaginary scenario I see myself dying with a smile on my lips, proud to have given others their freedom…

  I have never seen my father commune with spirits, read the future in cards, or control someone he has hypnotized. That’s to be expected: he’s such a fully realized being that he no longer needs to prove anything. I don’t know how he acquired his powers, whether he once had teachers who patiently trained him. I figure his gifts must be innate, because he is one of those great rarities, a genuinely superior ‘chosen one’. He will pass on all his knowledge to me, provided I prove myself worthy of him and behave like a respectful disciple.

  There is always a moment during the teachings when my father adopts a very solemn tone. ‘Now, listen to me carefully. What I am going to tell you is of utmost importance.’ He then explains to me that these occult powers can be misused. Selfish people with despicable intentions might exploit them to appropriate power and wealth. That’s what Hitler tried to do, and Nero before him, and Philip the Fair, who persecuted the Knights Templar. These vile sorcerers sully sacred powers and drag the world down into the very depths of chaos. Worse still, they obstruct the work of the Beings of Light, who for millennia have devoted themselves to saving the universe from its fall into the prison of matter.

  In order to help me understand the tragedy of this downfall, my father often tells me about one of his former lives, in which he conversed with the spirits on the banks of the Nile: ‘The pyramids were under construction. There were no books yet; I read from tablets.’ At the time he was Hiram of Tyre, the famous architect who went on to build Solomon’s temple with the bronze pillars called Jachin and Boaz on either side of the entrance, symbols of the balance between opposing forces. He describes his tragic fate as the wise Hiram, who is famous among Freemasons the world over. He was betrayed by some craftsmen, to whom he was planning to pass on the ‘secret of the masters’. Hiram trusted these men, but because they were vain and impatient, they ambushed him by the door to the temple, and when they failed to extract the ‘master word’ from him, they stabbed him to death. And so the word was lost forever. My father and h
is teachers believe this loss is the cause of the world’s fall into the darkness of matter.

  Hiram’s death fills me with despair too: had he not been so shamefully betrayed and assassinated, my father would lead a normal life and I wouldn’t have to accomplish this redemptive mission that’s so far beyond my abilities. My father genuinely believes that this tragedy will be repeated, that his disciples will want to kill him all over again. But this time he’s relying on me to prevent the crime. Thanks to my long years of training, I will be able to distinguish true masters from imposters, to thwart traitors and their plots, and save my father—in other words, Hiram—along with his sacred tenet. That is the reason I am here on earth; that is why he created me. My role is crucial to the entire universe because, by annihilating these traitors, I will at last give the Beings of Light an opportunity to work with perfect serenity in their efforts to free the mind from the cage of matter. Thus, after millennia spent in darkness, everything will be purified and regenerated.

  In order to prepare for this titanic undertaking, to restore the universe to its rightful path, I have an enormous amount of work to do on myself. But none of it will be possible if I am not completely dedicated to my mission.

  For a start I must cast out the stupid, childish notions that still clutter my mind. No, the world is not a paradise and men are not saints. People betray, steal, kill and readily descend into cannibalism if no one watches over them. ‘Love is a colossal sham to amuse the masses. If anyone ever tells you he loves you, don’t believe him. It will be because he wants something from you: your power or your money. Never, never, never trust anyone. I alone know what’s good for you. If you do as I say, you can rule the world and overthrow the darkness.’