The Dream Maker

by Jean-Christophe Rufin

  Dunois informed me that the Dauphin, Louis, had joined the conspiracy, as his father had predicted, out of spite at not being granted any privileges. I had not yet met him. One day, in Blois, I had seen his tall, pale-faced form walk across a salon, with a cluster of noisy, boisterous young men in his wake. He cast looks like daggers all around him. It was said that he was a roué, both vain and dissembling, and had since childhood shown signs of the most alarming cruelty.

  Dunois insisted on my joining their cause, as it would add greatly to the conspirators’ legitimacy. He complacently drew up a list of their members, which included the majority of the great lords, princes by blood, and dignitaries of the realm. Convinced they had saved the king, they now intended to assert their power by bringing him to ruin.

  Dunois’s open face awaited my response, eyes wide open, the corner of his lips agitated by a slight tic, which betrayed his impatience. From behind him, through the open window, there rose the smell of hay from a cart that had stopped in the street. It was high summer, a time when nothing seems serious, for it is as if the heat and its attendant pleasure were destined to last forever. I squeezed his hands.

  “No, my friend, I cannot bring myself to abandon the king. I have decided to stay loyal to him, whatever the cost.”

  And I added with a smile, and as much softness as my voice could hold, that I understood him, that I remained his friend and wished him well. He left me, looking vexed, with a warrior’s embrace.

  In Dunois’s presence my resolution had been firm. When I found myself alone, it was another matter. Thus far, there had been times when I was closer to the king, but never so much so as to compromise myself. After my journey to the Levant, I had maintained various friendships that enabled me to hope I might survive and even prosper, no matter the political situation. By accepting the office of Argentier and above all by refusing to join in the princes’ rebellion, I had thrown in my lot with the sovereign. But now the conflict that was brewing promised to be as difficult as the one he had fought against the English. He was already in a very bad position, because now he would be fighting the very same men who had made that victory against England possible.

  The highly placed individuals who had gone to make up the king’s council were now his adversaries. Once again Charles was alone, betrayed by his own people. The situation, which might have discouraged others, was so natural to him that he seemed to adapt to it without a second thought. He immediately appointed a new council, and, to my great surprise, it included me.

  The first meeting was held in Angers in a room on the second floor of the château. The atmosphere was strange. While most of the participants were visibly ill at ease, this diminished my own malaise. We could not count on the king to dissipate it. Sitting at the end of the table, his hands clenched, no doubt to hide the trembling, he opened the session, and contrived to bring about long embarrassed silences. There were no princes around the table, and only a few less illustrious noblemen, their first rank including the Constable de Richemont and Pierre de Brézé. The rest were burghers, the very men who, as I had noticed of late on arriving in Orléans, had filled the void around the sovereign. Their expressions were attentive and anxious. One could tell that no hereditary titles legitimized their presence in this place, that they derived that honor solely from their own merit, a quality which, at any moment, they might be called upon to prove. A prince does not have to justify who he is: centuries of history testify on his behalf. He can allow his gaze to wander through the casement, to dream of his mistresses, to think about his next hunting expedition. A burgher must stand ready to prove his usefulness. Next to me, the Bureau brothers were visibly in such a state of mind. They were joking in a low voice, smiling as men who for several months now had been used to being part of this inner sanctum, but their sharp gaze never strayed from the sovereign for long. When he questioned them, their answers came in clear voices. I tried to model my attitude on theirs. This went some way toward helping me forget the tinge of disappointment I had felt when coming in. Once again, when confronted with reality my dreams lost their lightness and mystery. So this was supreme power—this assembly of shabbily dressed men sitting sideways on uncomfortable chairs and trembling in the presence of a leader who had neither grace nor charisma?

  And yet over time and my continued participation, the council began to seem different. Its true grandeur lay not in ourselves but in the decisions we made. Something mysterious, which is called power, transformed our ephemeral words into concrete acts with enormous consequences. In the space of only a few months, we made capital decisions. The king intended to make the most of his freedom and of the competence of this new council to implement broad-reaching reforms throughout the kingdom. He followed a methodical plan destined to destroy the power of the princes once and for all, and establish the authority of the monarchy at last.

  The first thing to be done, to ensure the effectiveness of our decisions, was to win the war. Hence our priority was to give substance to the permanent army the king had created for himself. If he was to be free of his dependence on the great lords, or the contributions both in kind and in cash which the various regions agreed—or did not agree—to grant him when he was at war, he must have his own army, and be sole master of it. I set about financing and equipping these compagnies d’ordonnance.2 The privilege of these armies, composed of simple peasants, was that they could use weapons that knights considered unworthy. Thanks to their archers, the English had defeated us time and time again; we now tried to organize a corps of archers, although with less success. Above all, Gaspard Bureau developed a new weapon, which had until then been little used, or used badly, an arm whose power no one had yet imagined: artillery. For the nobleman, this weapon of war was anything but honorable. An instrument made of metal and chemistry, used to strike someone from a distance, had no place on the fields of honor. That some miserable wretches could drag a cannon or brandish a culverin, that was one thing. The knights placed these methods on the same level as the machines that had been used from time immemorial to launch assaults on city walls. But to win a war by using artillery would have seemed disloyal and even ungodly to them.

  We had no such qualms. We had to win. Our fate was intimately bound to the king’s. If he perished, we would be sacrificed along with him. This was why we were so completely mobilized for victory.

  In the beginning our fear was great. We observed the king and most of us doubted he could win, even with good armies. But as time went by, doubt gave way to admiration. My own confidence grew as I observed the way this secretive man admirably hid his hand when at council. The list of the measures he undertook to reform the realm clearly proceeded from long reflection. And to this intellectual capacity he was able to add great determination in his deeds. The princes’ revolt had been named the Praguerie, in reference to the events that had ravaged Bohemia. In order to get the better of this Praguerie, for four years the king resorted to strength as much as to negotiation; he knew when to be merciless in his condemnation and when it was necessary to forgive. He played the common folk and petty nobles against the aristocracy. Everything unfolded as if, after the long prelude of the English war, his reign had begun at last. The child king who had had to be protected from the assassin’s blade, the poor Dauphin rejected by his mother, the king without a realm of the early years, was suddenly taking his revenge against misfortune.

  He did not, for all that, allow his contentment or his ambition to show. For while he may have gained self-confidence and authority during these years, he never abandoned his weak and fearful manner. As a result, it was left to us to express our joy in victory and our gladness of success.

  For me, these four years were spent in exhausting work, permanent travel, and incessant concern. However, there was no sorrow to it, for I was carried by a deep joyfulness. During those four years, my endeavors met with success, projects came easily to fruition, results were obtained quickly and were in keeping with m
y expectations. Everything fell marvelously into place, as fluid as a dream. I was almost under the illusion that such harmony could last forever. In hindsight, I know it is quite impossible, but I am glad that I had the privilege to know such happiness, while it lasted. And I enjoyed it all the more in that, in those days, my work was my life. I was alone, Agnès had not yet appeared on the horizon, and without that altogether too absolute comparison, my happiness seemed truly complete.

  *

  The Argenterie was not simply one institution of the realm among others. What the king wanted was for it to play a very special role, and I gradually discovered what this was. Initially I had viewed this royal service merely as a market providing me with a secure outlet for the products we were trading. Henceforth, we could take major risks and invest considerable amounts in the purchase of costly goods; provided we chose those goods well, we could be sure of finding buyers who would ensure our wealth. The trading company still bore my name. As it grew, the need for a simple, familiar brand became more and more obvious. And as the number of our agents increased, it became vital to find a common term with which to refer to them. Jean and Guillaume, without consulting me, had generalized the use of the expression “Maison Cœur.” Since my appointment to the Argenterie, the activity of my trading company had been inextricably linked to that of the royal house. In other words, we were purveyors to the court. It was convenient, however, to go on separating the two. After all, our company must not refrain from having other clients; it must even include other sovereigns among them. And thus the parallel development of two entities began, and I was the only bridge between them. On the one hand the trading company, on the other the Argenterie.

  Among the first clients of the Argenterie were naturally the king and his close circle. When serving as his purveyor, I was able to apprise myself of the king’s rapport with material goods. I became fully convinced that he took no pleasure in the pursuit of finery or precious objects. He gave me many opportunities to observe him in his natural state—when traveling, for example—and I concluded that he needed little to be satisfied. His impoverished childhood and the long persecution he had undergone had left him able to endure deprivation, perhaps even like it. But now, particularly since his victories, he had begun displaying a great appetite for luxury. He dressed in costly garments, covered the walls of his apartments with tapestries and furs, and above all delighted in giving gifts of great price. It did not take me long to grasp that his attitude was political and not epicurean. On this subject, as on others, the king had thought things through without confiding in anyone. The conclusions he reached were never the object of any speech or confidence; they were merely translated through behavior, which we were obliged to decipher. And in this respect, his opinion was simple and luminous: luxury, for him, represented power. His appearance was modest, and his nature gave him little with which to exercise power over his fellow man, so in its place he wielded the pomp of his attire and ceremonial décor. He compensated for the love he had never felt for Queen Marie d’Anjou with the generosity of his favors. As for his successive mistresses, while he offered them little in the way of warmth or even attention, he redeemed these failings with the magnificence of his gifts. So much so that once they were intimate with him, and at a time when they would have been most tempted to doubt his grandeur, the extreme refinement of his attentions forced these mistresses to acknowledge that they had, indeed, however laboriously, been sleeping with a king. I added fuel to the fire by supplying silks and sables, gold-embroidered cloth and softest leather. Through the efforts of my agents, jewels, precious metals, tapestries, perfumes, and spices came from all across Europe to end up in the king’s frail hands; and he conferred on them their full value.

  Everyone in the kingdom who was the least bit vain or ambitious—a population never in short supply—had begun to covet the same objects the king valued. Everyone rushed to the Argenterie: the burghers to forget that they were not noble, and the nobles to emphasize the fact they were not burghers. I sometimes found it difficult to keep up with the demand. While at the beginning these shortages distressed me, I quickly realized I must make the most of them. For they made the prices rise, carried desire to its height, and cast me in the enviable role as the man on whom everything depended. People thanked me for agreeing to sell items at three times their value. Those who made me rich were grateful to me, and wherever I went there were people in my debt.

  I was not the only merchant, but I was the king’s merchant, and he was the best propagandist for my talents. In addition, I used a method I had intuited years earlier, which on this scale worked wonders: I agreed to make loans. It had always seemed to me that finance and commerce ought to be connected. This idea, which came to me through my acquaintance with the Léodeparts, was initially not very widely held. I had seen it as a means of circumventing my difficulties where cash was concerned. As master of the Argenterie, I could now evaluate the true usefulness of also being a banker. By agreeing to credit, I gave buyers access to something that other merchants only offered at an exorbitant price. With my method, purchase became painless.

  However, by resorting to loans, my clients put a noose around their necks: it might be slack at first but it would gradually grow tighter. This danger did not concern the burghers, because they had enough to pay cash. But nobles and even princes borrowed widely. The king himself encouraged the practice, and he had offered me his guarantee in case of any difficulties in recovery. He knew what credit was. In the old days, during difficult times, he had resorted to it himself, to such a degree that at times merchants no longer trusted him and refused delivery of goods. Engaged in his merciless struggle with the princes, he had understood what a formidable use he could make of this tool. Those who laid down their arms and joined him were shown extreme generosity. They were allowed to make use of the services of the Argenterie, initially in the form of gifts given to place a seal on their reconciliation. Then came a time of purchases, and soon, to preserve their rank at court, there were loans and debts. Before long, the proud ally was in my clutches—in other words, in the king’s. I admired the skillfulness with which the monarch transformed his enemies into his debtors, without ever leaving off his air of weakness, in such a way that it never occurred to them to hold him responsible for their helpless situation.

  The overlapping of my business with the king’s dates from this era; later on, others, including the king himself, would reproach me for it. At the time, our interests were complementary. While he was reconquering his kingdom and wrenching those who were in league against him from the Praguerie, I was endeavoring to neutralize them, and attach them to him by ensnaring them in their own desires. For example, the king encouraged me to sell a costly chivalry harness to any prince or lord who requested one. In addition, he gave the order to increase the number of tournaments that would offer them the opportunity to display their skills. Thanks to the profit from such prestigious sales, we were able to finance the equipment of the compagnies d’ordonnance. By making the princes pay an exorbitant amount for the maintenance of a chivalry that was useless and outmoded, the king ensured himself of the means to replace it with a modern army which belonged to him alone, and which would enable him to fight them.

  We proceeded in similar fashion with all the other reforms that the king undertook to consolidate his power. I made a profitable use of the task he ascribed to me to levy taxes on salt. As I was trading this product and was responsible for the taxes, I made a considerable profit, which I shared with the king. He also made me responsible for several fortresses, and later gave me subsidies to build ships that would serve my maritime commerce. All his assistance was repaid a hundredfold. Unlike the princes, who made use of their royal position for the sole purpose of increasing their power and facilitating their disobedience, I received favors from the sovereign solely in order to make them yield a profit for him. In this way he was able to constitute a veritable royal treasury, and acquire the means to reign
effectively.

  He thanked me for my contribution in various ways, first of all by ennobling me. This was a way of helping me in my commerce with the princes. The lords could now use the pretext of my title to leave off their haughty manners in my presence. In fact, the true reason for their amiability was not my new status, which hardly impressed them, but my wealth, which they envied, and which they greatly needed.

  For, while I had been making a fortune for the king, I had also been ensuring my own. I hope I will be believed if I say that this was not my intention. The fact remains that the results seem to imply the opposite. It matters little in the end whether it was what I sought or not: the fact is that in this short space of time I had become rich.

  It is difficult to grasp the degree of one’s own wealth when one does not make use of it. I was constantly traveling on business, hurrying to the court as the king moved about on campaign, and I was far more accustomed to military camps and seedy inns than to palaces. Marc did his best to make sure I always had the appropriate garments. But on more than one occasion I was obliged to hide my dirty shirt beneath a ceremonial chasuble. One day, on a road in the Saintonge, we were stopped by thieves, and only with great difficulty did we find a few billon coins in our saddle holsters, which almost failed to satisfy them. They finally let us go, railing against the ill fortune that had placed such impecunious people in their path.