The Dream Maker

by Jean-Christophe Rufin

  My parents had wept so bitterly at my disappearance that they could not scold me when I turned up. Moreover, the Duke had gotten wind of our adventure and had personally congratulated my father.

  The other three survivors were responsible for my reputation. They described, in all honesty, their own helplessness and my clear-sightedness. Henceforth, although nothing changed in my behavior, everyone began to view me differently. I was no longer taken for a dreamer, but a thoughtful boy, not timid but reserved, not indecisive but cunning. I did not refute these new opinions, but grew accustomed to eliciting admiration and fear with the same indifference that had enabled me to endure scorn and distrust. I gleaned useful reflections from those opinions. Éloi’s defeat allowed me to perceive the existence of a form of authority other than mere physical superiority. Through our entire adventure I had not displayed any particular resilience; several times over my companions had even had to hold me up or help me to my feet. However, I had never stopped being their leader. They deferred to my decisions and did not question my orders. So, there was power and there was strength, and the two things were not always one and the same.

  Strength came from the body, whereas power was the work of the mind. And while I did not clearly distinguish these concepts, I did explore them a bit further, and my thoughts led me, in a way, to the edge of a precipice. While I may have seized power during our adventure thanks to my mind, it was not owing to any particular knowledge. I did not know where we were, nor had I ever been in a similar situation, nor were my decisions based on reason, except perhaps to make us choose the paths that were inaccessible to the roughnecks stalking us. For the most part I had used my intuition, that is, by finding my way through the usual world of my dreams. So, it was my experience of something that did not exist that had enabled me to act and take command in the real world. In a word, dream and reality were not completely separate. This conclusion made me light-headed, and at the time I took it no further.

  At the end of the month, a truce was called and the siege was lifted. Our town breathed deeply. Life could go on as before.

  *

  While the war may have spared us, it was still being fought elsewhere. I had no idea what other towns were like, particularly the one known as the capital. Paris seemed to me to be a great tormented body. All one ever heard were tales of murder, massacre, and famine. This curse, in my opinion, could only be explained by the city’s proximity to the mad king who lived there and spread his insanity all around him.

  Oddly enough, it was my mother who gave me the opportunity to get a more precise idea of Paris, and yet she was a timid woman who hardly ever left the house and had never ventured outside our town. She was tall and extremely thin. Averse to drafts, cold weather, and even light, she lived in our dark rooms and kept the fires going all year round. Our wooden house was tall and narrow and served as the décor to her days, providing her with any number of plans which she implemented as the day went by. Her bedroom was on the second floor. She stayed in bed until fairly late then dressed carefully. The courtyard and the kitchen occupied her for the rest of the morning until it was time for lunch in the adjacent room. In the afternoon she generally went to see my father in his workshop to help him with the bookkeeping. Then, when the canon arrived, she went upstairs to take mass in the small chapel she had arranged on the top floor near our bedrooms. Our house was built in the fashion of the era: each floor spread wider than the one below, in such a way that the room at the top was also the biggest.

  It was a reclusive life, and it seemed infinitely monotonous to me, but my mother did not complain. I learned much later that she had been a victim of violence in the best years of her youth, perpetrated by a gang of lepers and écorcheurs. They had plundered the village where my grandparents lived, and my mother, who had only just gone through puberty, was taken hostage by those thugs. She had come away with a deep horror of war and at the same time a great interest in it. Of all of us, she was always the best informed of the situation. No doubt thanks to visitors, she garnered precise information about the latest events in the town, the neighboring regions, and even beyond. She had a vast network of informants, because through her father she belonged to the powerful butchers’ brotherhood.

  The memory I have of my maternal grandfather is of a man of refined manners, his nose red from perpetual rubbing with the cambric handkerchief he held clutched in his fist. He was always elegant, and gave off a scent of perfumed oil. No one could ever have pictured him splitting the skull of an ox. So, while he might have been resigned to doing so in his youth, for many years he had had at his disposal a host of apprentices and slaughterers who took care of these chores for him.

  The butchers’ guild was strictly organized, and not just anyone could join. The representatives of this chapter corresponded with butchers in other regions, and this enabled them to keep abreast of news. Although they conducted their business in town, the butchers also knew the countryside, because that was where they bought their animals. And so they were informed of the slightest event even before it reached the ears of the king’s entourage. This world of the butchers’ trade was ordinarily a discreet one. Other burghers looked down on them, so the men who traded in meat sought honorability by forming alliances with more highly respected guilds. My grandfather was pleased that his daughter had not married a butcher, but he was of the opinion that my father’s trade still smelled too strongly of animals. He liked me very much, no doubt because I had a more delicate constitution than my brother, and was, therefore, naturally destined for a profession of the mind. His greatest joy would have been to see me become a man of law. To him I owe the debt of my years of schooling—although to his death we hid from him the fact that I had rebelled against Latin.

  Late in the year that followed the siege of the town, I heard my parents speaking in hushed tones of grave events: Paris was a bloodbath. The butchers had rebelled, led by a certain Caboche, whom my grandfather knew well. Encouraged by the Duke of Burgundy, they had risen up against the excesses of the court. A learned assembly of jurists had drawn up an ordinance of reform. Under the pressure of the butchers and the rebellious population, the king was made to listen to the one hundred and fifty-nine articles comprising the new constitution, and approve it. At that point he was in a period of lucidity, and had clearly found it most unpleasant to be faced with his subjects’ censure. The reaction came swiftly thereafter. The Armagnacs now claimed to be the defenders of the peace, in opposition to the unruly butchers—it was their meat, henceforth, which hung from the gallows in the streets of Paris. Those who escaped the massacre had fled. One of them reached our town. As butchers were under suspicion, my grandfather sent the fugitive to us for refuge.

  The man’s name was Eustache. We hid him at the back of the courtyard in a shed where goatskins were stored. In the evening he sat outside the kitchen, and when we came home from school we gathered around him to listen to his stories. We found him very entertaining, because the way he spoke was different from us and he used very colorful and unfamiliar expressions. He was, in fact, a mere shop boy. His work consisted of unloading the meat driven every morning by cart to the kitchens of the great houses. Although he had probably only ever seen the servants’ quarters, Eustache gave us a detailed description of the princely residences in Paris—the hôtel de Nesle, which belonged to the Duke of Berry, its doors and windows wrenched off by the crowd to prevent him from staying there; Artois, which was the property of the Duke of Burgundy; the hôtel Barbette where the queen lived, and on whose doorstep Louis of Orléans had been assassinated. His eyes glowing with hatred, Eustache delighted in describing the luxury of those houses, the fine furnishings and china, the beauty of the tapestries. His descriptions were meant to make us feel indignant. He always insisted on the poverty that surrounded such places of luxury and debauchery. I don’t know what my brother thought; as far as I was concerned, far from making me feel indignant, these tales served to fuel my dreams. W
ith regard to wealth, the only example I had was the Duke’s palace in our town, and I admired it. Every time I went there with my father, I was fascinated by the luxurious décor. Our condition as modest burghers condemned me to a life in a lopsided house. I was not unhappy there, but my dreams carried me into more brilliant dwelling places, where there were walls decorated with frescoes, and sculpted ceilings, and vermillion serving plates, and tapestries embroidered with golden thread . . . I shared none of Eustache’s hate-filled indignation about princely dwelling places.

  On the other hand, I did listen sympathetically when he spoke bitterly of the way the powerful treated the other castes—the burghers, workers, and servants, without whom they could not survive. Thus far I had accepted the painful lessons my father had given me on each of our visits to his rich clients. Nevertheless, I was appalled by his submission to their scorn and insults, and the constant blackmail when they did not feel like paying. My outrage was buried deep, embers beneath the ashes of filial love and obedience. It was enough for Eustache to blow on those embers for my rage to flare.

  Shortly after the fugitive arrived in our home, my father took me with him to the home of a nephew of the Duke of Berry to deliver a large coverlet of white marten. The young man was scarcely twenty years old. He made us wait in the antechamber for two long hours. My father had worked part of the night to finish the order. I saw him reeling with fatigue yet unable to sit down, for lack of a seat. When at last the young lord bade us come in, I was shocked to see he was receiving us in his nightshirt. Through the door to his room, we could see a naked woman. He adopted an ironic tone in speaking with my father, calling him emphatically “the Honorable Pierre Cœur.” With a nod of his head he reached for the coverlet. Then he stiffened and motioned to my father that he could leave. My father would have obeyed, the way he always does, but this time he was in urgent need of money in order to pay for a large order of pelts he had just received. Fighting his nature, he got up the courage to demand payment for his work. The Duke’s nephew walked back up to him.

  “We shall see to it. Send me your invoice.”

  “Here it is, my lord.”

  With a trembling hand my father held out the invoice. The young lord scanned it, displeased.

  “It is very expensive. Do you take me for a fool? Do you think I don’t know your pathetic tricks? You expect me to pay full price for something stitched not from the animal’s belly but from several pieces from the back.”

  My father’s lips were twitching nervously.

  “These pelts, my lord, are all of the best quality . . . ”

  I knew that my father took particular care in choosing his suppliers and their merchandise. He absolutely forbade himself from taking any of the shortcuts that other, unscrupulous craftsmen resorted to on occasion. Alas, paralyzed by the respect he thought he owed the whippersnapper, he did not know how to defend himself.

  “Forgive me for insisting, my Lord. But I must rely on the generosity of your Lordship kindly to pay me for the item today because—”

  “Today!” said the duke’s nephew, looking around him as if he had a room full of witnesses.

  He gave my father a stern look. As I observed him, I understood that he would have liked to maintain his insolent stance, but that something had suddenly given him pause. Perhaps he was afraid his uncle might reproach him. The old Duke was not kindly, but he paid well. It was his policy to foster a circle of craftsmen and artists in his town, in order to enhance his reputation as a man of taste and patron of the arts.

  “Well then, so be it!” said the young man.

  He went over to a dresser and opened the drawer. He took a few coins and tossed them on the table in front of my father. At a glance I totaled five livres tournois. The coverlet was worth eight.

  My father picked up the coins.

  “There are five here,” he said in an unsteady voice. “We are missing—”

  “We are missing?”

  “Your Lordship must have misread my invoice. The item is worth . . . eight.”

  “It might be worth eight livres if there were no flaws.”

  “What flaws are there?” protested my father, sincerely concerned that he might have let an imperfection slip by.

  The young man grabbed the blanket and held it out.

  “What, can you not see?”

  My father stretched his neck to inspect the entire fur. At that very moment, the two fists holding the coverlet moved apart, and with a sudden snap and a ripping noise, the seam joining the two skins gave way. My father stepped back. The Duke’s nephew let out a loud insolent laugh.

  “Can you see it, now?” he exclaimed with a sneer. “Bastien, see these gentlemen out.”

  Still laughing, he returned to his bedchamber.

  As we went home in silence, I felt my anger welling up. Once I would have admired my father for his self-control. But Eustache had taught me to see that my indignation was legitimate. I was no longer alone in thinking that work must be respected, that there are limits to the power given at birth, that the arbitrary rule of the nobility was no longer justified. Caboche’s men had fought for these principles. As I did not know the details of their struggle, nor did I fully understand it, the feelings that had once been a source of guilt were now shared and reinforced.

  As we walked home I opened my heart to my father. He stopped and looked at me. I saw in his eyes that he was more upset by my words than by the insult he had just received. I know now that he was sincere. He did not think any other attitude was possible with regard to the powerful, in the world as it was. He had raised me with one goal in mind: to enable me, when the time came, to survive.

  He immediately made the connection between my rebelliousness and the inflamed talk Eustache was spreading through the house. At my father’s request, no later than the following week the butcher was found another hiding place, and shortly thereafter he left town.

  In truth, my father had nothing more to fear in that respect: the harm had been done. Eustache had given me permission to voice the ideas I already had. As for following his example and, more generally, that of Caboche’s rebels, that was out of the question. As the son of a furrier, I was used to classifying human beings as if they were animals, according to their pelts, and I had noticed that Eustache had the same curly, wiry head of hair as Éloi. Both of them were advocates of reckless brute force, the exact opposite of weakness, but in the end it was of the same kind—that is, primitive. I was not tempted in the slightest to yield to it. There were surely other methods we could use to force the nobility to respect us, to make them reward our work and give a place in society to those who were undistinguished by birth. My aim henceforth would be to discover those methods, or to invent them.

  *

  Girls of my age—my comrades’ sisters, neighbors, or churchgoers from the same parish—were of little interest to me. I left it to Éloi and his kind to tell tales of conquests where fantasies rivaled sordid encounters. With regard to this subject, as to others, I preferred to daydream. The little people whom as children we saw among us and who were called girls were devoid of any interest to me. Propriety maintained that they must stay silent. Their bodies did not have a boy’s strength, and in any case, they were not allowed to join in our games. Their resemblance to actual women—our mothers, for example—was vague, if not downright nonexistent. If these incomplete creatures were worthy of any feeling, it must be compassion.

  Then came a time when, suddenly, one of these girls would leave her chrysalis, and a new body would come to life. Her waist grew longer, her breasts and hips grew rounder. Her gaze, above all, lost the humble modesty to which she had been condemned by so much silent waiting for this apotheosis. All of a sudden there were women among us. They studied us in turn, scrutinizing our smooth cheeks and our narrow shoulders with the same pity we had shown them and which they now reserved for us in plentiful supply.
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br />   However, once they had taken this minor revenge, they deployed their newfound power more judiciously than we did. The attention they hardly paid to boys in general was counterbalanced by the vivid interest they showed some of them in particular. With a great deal of sensitivity, but not so much so as to make these nuances unintelligible to us, they would designate one or the other as their favorite. These games of desire placed us, and them as well, in competition.

  The subtle hierarchy that had been established in our group of boys had been turned on its ear. It was now also subject to the ranking that the girls established from outside. Fortunately, there were times when our rankings coincided. And that is what happened to me.

  Since my adventure during the siege of the town, I had gained the respect, if not the friendship, of my comrades. Two of the survivors of the expedition, Jean and Guillaume, came out and said they were in my debt, and they complied with my slightest request. All the others were afraid of me. My silence, my absence, the calm and thoughtful way I expressed my thoughts gave me, wrongly, a reputation for wisdom that I was careful not to contradict. Such wisdom could not, at our age, be the fruit of experience: it must come from somewhere else. Judging by some of the fearful or even suspicious gazes people cast at me, I understood that many of them thought I had supernatural powers. In another era I would have been accused of witchcraft. Very early on I was able to gauge to what degree human qualities conceal danger, and how reckless it can be to flaunt them. All my life I have experienced this. Talent, fulfillment, and success will make you an enemy of the human race: the more it admires you, the less it finds itself in you, so it will prefer to keep you at a distance. Only crooks, given the mundane origins of their fortune, acquire that fortune without severing ties with others of their kind; they might even win their friendship.