UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY

by Eco, Umberto

  Simone had transformed Nubius into a personal hero, almost a male counterpart of Babette of Interlaken. And he mesmerized his companions by turning into an epic poem what Father Bergamaschi had told him in the form of a gothic tale — though concealing the small detail that Nubius was now dead.

  Until one day he produced a letter, which had not been difficult to fabricate, in which Nubius proclaimed an imminent insurrection across Piedmont, town by town. The group, led by Simone, would play a dangerous and exciting part. They were to meet on a particular morning in the courtyard of the Osteria del Gambero d'Oro, where they would find sabers and rifles and four cartloads of old furniture and mattresses. Thus armed, they were to make their way to the junction of via Barbaroux and build a barricade to block entry from piazza Castello. And there they should await orders.

  That was more than enough to stir the hearts of the twenty or so students who met on that fateful morning in the innkeeper's courtyard and found the weapons they had been promised in several barrels. While they were looking around for the carts of furniture, without thinking to load their rifles, the courtyard was invaded by fifty or so policemen with their guns drawn. Powerless to resist, the boys surrendered and were disarmed, taken out and lined up facing the wall on either side of the entrance gate. "Come on, you rabble, hands up, silence!" an officer in plain clothes shouted with a scowl.

  Although the rebels appeared to have been rounded up more or less at random, two policemen had positioned Simone at the very end of the line, right by the corner of an alleyway. At the agreedupon moment, they were called away by their sergeant and went off toward the courtyard entrance. Simone turned to his nearest companion and whispered something. Seeing that the police were a fair distance away, the two darted off around the corner and began running.

  "To arms, they're escaping!" someone shouted. The two heard footsteps as they fled, and the shouts of policemen who had pursued them around the corner. Simone heard two shots. One hit his friend, though Simone was hardly concerned whether it was fatal or not. It was enough for him that the second shot was fired into the air, as agreed.

  He turned into another street, then yet another. Far off, he could hear the shouts of his pursuers, who, following their orders, had taken the wrong route. Before long he was crossing piazza Castello on his way home, like any other citizen. His companions — who in the meantime had been taken away — all assumed he had escaped, and since they had been arrested together and immediately lined up facing the wall, none of the police officers could remember his face. So there was no need for him to leave Turin; he could return to work, and could even go to comfort the families of his arrested friends.

  All that remained was to deal with Notaio Rebaudengo. The old man went to prison, as planned, and died of a broken heart a year later in prison, but Simonini felt no guilt about that. The score had been settled. The notary had given him a job, and Simone had been his slave for several years; the notary had ruined his grandfather, and Simone had ruined him.

  This, then, was what Abbé Dalla Piccola had been describing to Simonini. And that he too felt exhausted after all these recollections was proven by the fact that his contribution to the diary stopped halfway through a sentence, as if, while he was writing, he had fallen into a state of slumber.

  6

  SERVING THE SECRET SERVICE

  28th March 1897

  Monsieur Abbé

  How curious that what is supposed to be a diary (to be read by its author alone) is turning into an exchange of messages. But here I am, writing you a letter, almost certain that one day, passing here, you will read it.

  You know too much about me. You are a most disagreeable witness. And far too severe.

  Yes, I admit it. In my conduct toward my would-be Carbonari comrades, and to Rebaudengo, I did not act in accordance with the morals you are supposed to preach. But let us be frank: Rebaudengo was a rogue, and when I think of all I have done since then, I seem to have practiced my roguery only on rogues. As for those boys, they were fanatics, and fanatics are the scum of the earth, because it's through them, and the vague principles they espouse, that wars and revolutions happen. And since I had come to realize that the number of fanatics in this world will never diminish, I decided that I might as well profit from their fanaticism.

  So I'll resume my own recollections, if you'll allow me. I was now in charge of what had been Rebaudengo's office — and since I had been falsifying legal deeds back in Rebaudengo's day, it should come as no surprise that I am still doing exactly the same here in Paris.

  Now, I also well remember Cavalier Bianco. One day he said to me: "You see, Avvocato Simonini, the Jesuits have been banished from the Kingdom of Piedmont, but everyone knows they continue their scheming and recruit followers under false guises. It happens in every country from which they have been expelled. I saw an amusing caricature in a foreign newspaper. It showed several Jesuits who every year pretend they want to return to their country of origin (though naturally they are stopped at the frontier), until someone realizes that their brethren are already there, moving around freely and disguised as another order. They are all around us, but we need to find out where. We know that back in the days of the Roman Republic some used to go to your grandfather's house. It seems unlikely you have not kept in touch with them, and we ask you therefore to sound out their mood and their intentions. There's a general feeling that the order is gaining in- fluence again in France — and whatever happens in France might just as well be happening here in Turin."

  He was quite wrong to imagine I was still in touch with the good fathers, but I had been learning much about the Jesuits, and from a reliable source. During those years Eugène Sue had published his last masterpiece, Les mystères du peuple. He completed it shortly before his death in Annecy, in Savoy, where he was in exile, because he had long been a socialist sympathizer and had fiercely opposed Louis Napoleon's coup d'état and proclamation of the empire. Since no more feuilletons were being published as a result of the Riancey Amendment, Sue's works were being issued in slim volumes, and had fallen foul of the rigors of many censors, including those of Piedmont, and therefore were difficult to come by. I remember finding it deathly tedious trying to follow this rambling story of two families, one of Gauls and the other of Franks, from prehistory to the time of Napoleon III, where the Franks are the wicked oppressors and the Gauls seem to have all been socialists since the time of Vercingetorix. But Sue, like all idealists, was now gripped by one obsession alone.

  He had obviously written the last pages of his final novel while in exile, at the same time as Louis Napoleon had seized power and made himself emperor. To make these designs more odious, Sue had had a clever idea: since the Jesuits were the other great enemy of republican France from the time of the Revolution, all he had to do was show that Louis Napoleon's seizure of power was inspired and directed by the Jesuits. It is true that the Jesuits had been banished from France since the July 1830 revolution, but in reality they had managed covertly to survive, and more easily after Louis Napoleon had begun his rise to power, tolerating them so as to remain on good terms with the pope.

  There is a long letter in the book from Father Rodin (who had appeared in The Wandering Jew) addressed to the superior general of the Jesuits, Father Roothaan, in which the plan was set out in great detail. The last events in the novel take place during the final socialist and republican struggle against the coup d'état, and the letter seems to be written in such a way that what Louis Napoleon actually did is made to appear as if it hadn't yet been done, which made his prediction all the more disturbing.

  The opening of Dumas' novel Joseph Balsamo naturally came to mind: it would have been quite sufficient to substitute Thunder Mountain with some more ecclesiastical setting — perhaps the crypt of an old monastery — and instead of Masons, to gather down there Loyola's sons from around the world, and to replace Balsamo with Rodin, and there you'd have the same old pattern of the universal conspiracy tailored to present times.


  Hence the idea that I might sell Bianco not only a few scraps of gossip I had picked up here and there, but an entire document taken from the Jesuits. Obviously, I'd have to change a few details, removing Father Rodin, whom somebody would probably remember as a fictional character, and bringing in Father Bergamaschi, wherever he may be, though someone in Turin might well have heard mention of him. Also, the superior general of the order was Father Roothaan when Sue was writing, whereas a certain Father Beckx was now said to have taken over.

  The document would have to seem like an almost word-for-word transcript of information passed on by a reliable informer, and the informer should not appear as a spy (since it is well known that the Jesuits never betray the Society) but rather as an old friend of my grandfather who had confided these matters to him as proof of the greatness and power of his order.

  I'd have liked to have included the Jews in the story, as a tribute to my grandfather, but Sue made no mention of them and I could find no way of fitting them in with the Jesuits — and anyway, the Jews in Piedmont were then of little importance to anyone. It is better not to fill the heads of government agents with too much information. All they want is clear, simple ideas — black and white, good and bad, and there must be only one villain.

  Still, I didn't want to leave the Jews completely out of it, so I used them for the setting. All the same, it was a way of arousing suspicion in Bianco's mind about the Jews.

  An event set in Paris — or, worse still, in Turin — could, I thought, have been checked out. I had to bring my Jesuits together in a place out of the reach of the Piedmont secret service, about which even they had only apocryphal news. The Jesuits, however, were everywhere — the Lord's octopuses, with their tentacles coiling out even into Protestant countries.

  Anyone falsifying documents must always be well informed, which is why I used to spend time in libraries. Libraries are fascinating places: sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of traveling to distant lands. This is how I came across a book with some fine engravings of the Jewish cemetery at Prague. Now abandoned, the cemetery had almost twelve thousand gravestones in a very cramped area, but there must have been far more burials, because many layers of earth had been added over the course of several centuries. Once the cemetery had been abandoned, someone had lifted a few of the buried stones, with their inscriptions, so as to create an irregular mass of gravestones leaning in all directions (or perhaps the Jews themselves had dug them up, without any consideration, uninterested as they are in beauty and order).

  The abandoned site seemed appropriate, not least for its incongruity. By what cunning had the Jesuits decided to gather in a place that had been sacred to the Jews? And what control did they have over this place that was forgotten by everyone, and perhaps inaccessible? All questions without an answer, which would have given credibility to the story, since I reckoned Bianco would be firmly convinced that when all the facts appear fully explainable and likely, the story is false.

  As a faithful reader of Dumas, I felt a certain pleasure in describing that night, and that dark and fearful company, with that burial ground, sparsely lit by a deathly pale crescent moon, and the Jesuits massed in a semicircle so that, when seen from above in their flowing black robes, the ground would appear as if it were crawling with cockroaches — or, there again, describing Father Beckx's devilish leer as he proclaimed the sinister designs of these enemies of humanity (and my father's ghost would rejoice from the heavens above— I mean from the depths of hell, where the Almighty probably casts Mazzinians and republicans), and then describing the vile messengers as they dispersed, like evil crows flying away into the pallid dawn, carrying news to all their various houses about the new and diabolical plan to conquer the world, and so bringing to an end that fiendish night.

  But I had to be succinct and to the point, as is fitting for a secret report, since it is well known that police agents are not great readers and can handle no more than two or three pages.

  My presumed informant therefore described how the Society's representatives from various countries had gathered in Prague that night to hear Father Beckx, and how he had presented Father Bergamaschi, who through a series of providential circumstances had become an adviser to Napoleon III.

  Father Bergamaschi told of how Louis Napoleon Bonaparte demonstrated his submissiveness to the Society's orders.

  "We must," he said, "admire the cunning with which Bonaparte has deceived the revolutionaries by pretending to support their doctrines, and his skill in conspiring against Louis Philippe, bringing about the fall of that godless government, and his trust in our counsel, when in 1848 he presented himself as a true republican, so as to be elected president of the republic. Nor should it be forgotten how he helped to destroy Mazzini's Roman Republic and restore the Holy Father to his throne.

  * * *

  . . . or, there again, describing Father Beckx's devilish leer as

  he proclaimed the sinister designs of these enemies of humanity

  (and my father's ghost would rejoice from the heavens

  above— I mean from the depths of hell, where the Almighty

  probably casts Mazzinians and republicans).

  * * *

  "Napoleon," Bergamaschi continued, "had sought once and for all to destroy the socialists, revolutionaries, philosophers, atheists and all those vile rationalists who espouse national sovereignty, free inquiry and religious, political and social freedom. He had sought to dissolve the legislative assembly, to arrest the representatives of the people on allegations of conspiracy, to decree a state of siege in Paris, to shoot without trial those bearing arms at the barricades, to ship the most dangerous figures to Cayenne, to crush freedom of association and of the press, to send the army into its fortresses and then to bombard the capital, reducing it to ashes, until no stone was leftstanding, and thereby bringing victory to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church on the ruins of modern Babylon. Then he had called upon the people by universal suffrage to extend his presidential power for ten years, and afterward transformed the republic back into an empire, universal suffrage being the only remedy against democracy because it includes the rural populations still loyal to the voice of their priests."

  Most interesting of all was what Bergamaschi had to say in conclusion about their policy toward Piedmont. Here I got him to set out the Society's future intentions, though by the time I was compiling the report, these had already been fully realized.

  "That faint-hearted king, Vittorio Emanuele, dreams about the Kingdom of Italy, his minister Cavour encourages his ambitions, and both of them seek not only to drive Austria from the peninsula but also to destroy the temporal power of the Holy Father. They will look to France for support, so it will be easy to drag them first into a war against Russia by promising to help them against Austria, but asking at the same time for Savoy and Nice in exchange. Then the emperor will pretend to help Piedmont but — after some insignificant local victory — will sue for peace with the Austrians without consulting them, and will promote the formation of an Italian confederation presided over by the pope, which Austria will join while keeping the rest of its possessions in Italy. In this way Piedmont, the only liberal government on the peninsula, will remain subject both to France and to Rome and will be controlled by French troops occupying Rome or garrisoned in Savoy."

  This was the document. I didn't know how much the Piedmont government would appreciate the accusation that Napoleon III was an enemy of the Kingdom of Piedmont, but I had already sensed what experience would confirm — that men in the secret service find it useful to have some document they can use (even if they don't produce it immediately) to blackmail government officials, create confusion or upset the course of events.

  Bianco read the report with great care, looked up from what he had been reading, fixed me in the eye and said it was material of the greatest importance. Once again, he had confirmed my view t
hat when a spy sells something entirely new, all he need do is recount something you could find in any secondhand book stall.

  But even though Bianco didn't know much about literature, he knew plenty about me, and he added with a sly expression, "All this stuff you've invented, of course."

  "I beg your pardon!" I said, sounding scandalized.

  He raised his hand to stop me. "Not to worry, Avvocato Simonini. Even if this document is all your own handiwork, it suits me and my superiors to present it to the government as genuine. You will be aware — since it is widely known — that our minister Cavour was convinced he had Napoleon III in his power, all because he'd sent Contessa Castiglione to be his, shall we say, companion. She is without question a beautiful woman, and the Frenchman enjoyed her favors without needing to be asked twice. But it's clear now that Napoleon is not prepared to do all that Cavour wants and the contessa has wasted much charm on him for nothing — perhaps she enjoyed it, but we cannot allow the affairs of state to depend upon the whims of a lady of easy virtue. It is most important that His Majesty, our sovereign, should distrust Bonaparte. Before long — indeed very soon— Garibaldi or Mazzini (or both together) will organize an expedition to the Kingdom of Naples. If by chance this venture is successful, Piedmont will have to step in so as not to leave those regions in the hands of mad republicans, and to do so it will have to march down the peninsula through the Papal States. To achieve this end, we must therefore instill in our sovereign feelings of suspicion and grievance toward the pope so that he pays little heed to the advice of Napoleon III. As you will have realized, Avvocato Simonini, policies are often decided by us humble servants of the state rather than by those who, in the eyes of the people, govern."