The Dream Maker

by Jean-Christophe Rufin

  I liked this simplicity that bordered on deprivation. I liked the lightness of taking to the road without any baggage. The increasingly tangled skein of my business demanded constant care. In a way, I was in the service of my wealth, just as one can be in the service of a fine animal on whom one lavishes all one’s attention, for the sole pleasure of knowing it exists, and is growing and becoming more handsome by the day.

  Above all, my condition as an itinerant rich man gave me the privilege of feeling at home wherever I went. I could stay in the humblest cottage with a pleasure and ease equal to what I felt in the best-kept castle. Not a single door was closed to me. The Argentier was sure of an eager welcome in the home of a burgher or a prince, and I was received with equal warmth, and far more naturally, at modest inns in the countryside. My name quickly became very well known, however, and this obliged me to take some precautions. All I needed to do was to introduce myself in order to gain entry to the richest of homes, but I had to hide my identity carefully if I wanted to continue to be treated with simplicity by the common folk.

  Sometimes it was impossible to dissimulate, and my secret was revealed. One evening, not far from Bruges, I was joined by Jean de Villages who happened to be traveling in the vicinity. Unlike me, he had chosen to flaunt his power and prosperity at every moment of his nomadic life. His company of écorcheurs were handsomely dressed. In his train he had four carriages loaded with chests that were filled with all the fine things required for his comfort at each stop, as well as outfits for himself and his whores. Depending on the season, two or three of these ladies would frolic alongside him riding sidesaddle. As for Jean, he wore a golden chain around his neck, to which he had attached a figurine that looked from a distance as if it might be the Golden Fleece.

  His arrival in the village where I was staying that day was preceded by a small vanguard of mercenaries. These insolent men had demanded that the main street be cleared, and in doing so they had not hesitated to kick Marc in the buttocks. In return, Marc had mobilized a group of peasants who, had he not intervened, would merely have bowed in submission. When Jean de Villages appeared, wearing a fur hat with feathers and accompanied by his trunks and his retinue of tarts and assassins, he encountered a veritable pitched battle. We had arrived the night before, very late, and I was still half-asleep in my room when I heard shouts in the stairway. Just as he was about to attack, Jean recognized Marc. Now both of them had come to get me out of bed.

  On learning of my presence there, Jean had immediately alerted the entire village. The burghermeister, the apothecary, and a canon, with the stammering innkeeper in their wake, came to bow to me respectfully. The revelation of my name had, according to Jean, a miraculous effect. It was, in any event, something he frequently used to his advantage, introducing himself wherever he went as the partner of Messire Cœur. What this meant for me was an end to ease and tranquility. I could never bring Jean to understand that this aspect of wealth was abhorrent to me. These good folk in whose presence he flaunted my power could, in any case, not offer me anything finer than what they already possessed. My down pillow and horsehair mattress would remain the same. The only thing I stood to gain by revealing my identity would be the awkward homage of a handful of burghers, quite prepared to bring me their daughter, when it wasn’t their wife, in the hopes that I might let a tiny crumb of my prosperity fall upon them.

  *

  The only place where I could not cast off my role as Argentier and powerful merchant was my good town. Macé had continued the social ascension begun at a time where our wealth was still quite modest and, so to speak, conceivable. In the early days, she kept her expenses within the limits of our means, which in turn prevented any excess. But now there were no more reasonable limits to her ventures. This new situation brought on a dizziness, which she treated by retiring for a time to a convent.

  She came back with a decisive plan. For herself, nothing would change. She would continue to dress simply, even if the fabrics, jewels, and powders she used were of the best quality. All the power we had acquired would serve the family, and therefore our children. She planned brilliant careers for them, almost hoping to encounter numerous obstacles on her path simply for the pleasure of undertaking to remove them.

  As I expected, she also demanded that we build a new house. Initially I thought she wanted a comfortable family home. While I was prepared to build the finest of houses for her, I did not think it would go very far. We had a friendly discussion about it before the Christmas season, in keeping with our new relationship, which was respectful if somewhat chilly. Then Macé made it amply clear what she wanted: we had to have a palace.

  At first I protested. Ostentation was everything I had sought to avoid. I still reasoned as an upstart: others would tolerate my success provided my triumph remained modest. Any form of pretension with regard to appearance would provoke an angry reaction from all sides, the king to start with, the kind of anathema that could destroy the fragile balance of my endeavor. Could the king not simply revoke my position as Argentier as easily as he had granted it? All the duties I fulfilled for him, particularly in levying taxes, I presented as tasks, services I agreed to perform for him. If I were to draw attention to my income, it would become clear to everyone that the king’s attention, far from inconveniencing me, was serving to make my fortune, and many voices would be raised to demand it be taken away from me. More than anything, if I am honest, I feared the king himself. I knew that he had a malicious streak, filled with meanness and envy. To display too much luxury and power would be dangerous, particularly when that power depended so directly on his goodwill. Moreover, if we built a palace it would signify we were trying to be equal with the princes, whom he despised. Macé swept away all my arguments with a wave of her hand and I realized that she would not yield. After all, one advantage of an ambitious construction was that it would take time. From the acquisition of the land to the completion of the palace would take years. I might hope that in the meantime my situation would become stable and that everyone, starting with the king, would have become used to my fortune and thus tolerate the external signs of it.

  I mentioned earlier that under the Romans our town had been surrounded by a high wall. The town had now spread far beyond that enclosure. New constructions were built up against the wall and at its foot. There were some sections where the wall was in ruins and was being used as a quarry. On the south side, a fine section of the ancient rampart was still intact, and I decided to purchase it. It included a tall tower at one end. This property did not look like a bare plot of land, but rather a self-sufficient construction. Now anyone who went by the tower said, “That is Cœur’s future house.” This would suffice to appease Macé’s worldly impatience, and I did what I could to encumber the formalities of purchase. As I was never there to sign the deed of sale, the matter was taking a very long time and I was free, provisionally, from the threat hovering over me.

  The strangest thing was that at the very time I was doing what I could to postpone Macé’s extravagant project, I became the owner of an estate without either desiring it or planning it. In truth, the event was anything but fortuitous. By dint of opening my purse to the advantage of so many impecunious nobles, it was inevitable that sooner or later one of them, driven to the brink by creditors less accommodating than myself, would let go of his property to avoid prison. Clever lenders would seize his lands, which are always worth something. As I was sheltered by the king’s warranty, I would not be so demanding: thus, they handed the old dwelling over to me—that is, a property no one wanted because it brought nothing and cost a great deal. In this way I acquired my first castle.

  There would be many others. It is impossible for me to remember them all, and there were some I never even had time to visit. But the first one I remember because it was the first; I will never forget it.

  There was no risk that it might arouse the king’s envy. No one could accuse me, with regard to the castle,
that I had wanted it in order to flaunt my fortune. It was a country estate, hidden in the hollow of a damp valley in the Puysaie, far from any town. The building consisted of four tall towers, huddled together like Siamese twins. Long arrow slits marked the blind façades like gashes received in battle. It became clear as one came up the path leading to the drawbridge that the castle was not known outside the region. Surely no sovereign had ever stopped there, or even bothered to try and attack it. It had sprouted in the undergrowth like a mushroom in damp earth.

  It was a relic of the bygone era of chivalry when it had stood there to protect the prosperity of the local countryside. I could picture serfs, not very different from the free peasants who now peopled the region, and in their midst a lord who was unwashed and brutal, courageous, sensual, and pious, doing what he could to defend them. The serfs had transported cartloads of stones and built the four towers for the lord to reign over them.

  It was a way of life that had lasted for centuries. There was no better place than this castle to feel the immobility of time—the turning of the seasons, the passing of simple lives, preserved from all temptation and hardship by this immutable order. There was not even any sign that these lords had taken part in the Crusades. The castle and its surrounding fields and vineyards had lived far removed from the turbulence of the world. However, one day the world became so unsettled that its violence reached even this far. Echoing the king’s madness, order collapsed. The serfs, now free, hired out their labor to their master—while he was more interested in the town, and wished to acquire superfluous things, for without them the merely necessary seemed insipid. The world burst in with its looting and pillaging and the lord was incapable of protecting his people. Finally, he went to join the court, where he fell into debt, and had to sell off the estate in order to pay what he owed. Abandoned, betrayed, and in deepest misfortune, now the peasants watched as this merchant—me, the son of a nobody, perhaps a usurer—took possession of their castle, a sign that the old days were truly in the past and that anything was possible.

  I stayed at the castle for three days. I toured all its rooms, wandered for hours in the attic opening old trunks, striding from one room to the next in search of memories, odors, unusual objects. The debtor had left everything, a sign that he had left in haste, or the proof that he really no longer cared for a place too burdened with boredom and the past. I built a roaring fire in the huge fireplace of the main hall and I stayed alone, looking at the shadows dancing on the walls, as if they were ghosts parading before me. This experience was almost as powerful as the one so long ago at the edge of the desert, outside Damascus. Once again I was on the threshold of another world, but this time I most definitely could not go there, because it belonged to the past. It was nostalgia for a time before, for that chivalry I had so often imagined during my childhood, that period of harmony from before the reign of the mad king. The same energy found in the dreams which had led me to the Levant now made me drift toward other lives that were located in an inaccessible past. And yet there was one major difference. When I dreamt of the Levant, my life had not yet taken a clearly defined course. Anything was possible. Whereas now I had come quite far along a certain path, and had already obtained more than I dared hope for. Yet, I was still tempted by other lives. It was then, I believe, that I became aware that no life, however brilliant or happy it might be, would ever be enough for me. There always comes a moment when the dreamer, who ordinarily thinks he is happy because his dreams constantly take him elsewhere, becomes fully aware of his misfortune.

  Fortunately, Marc had noticed my melancholy. He brought to it the only remedy he knew, and which he deemed, not without reason, a very good remedy for all ailments. The second night, up the long winding staircase from the dungeon he brought a fresh young peasant woman, who hardly seemed surprised to be singled out for the pleasure of the lord. She did her best to restore me to the present. But what I saw in this scene was a return to ancient seigniorial rights. So much so that, far from distracting me from my dreams, she enabled me instead to immerse myself in them completely.

  I never went back there.

  In the years to come, I would receive several other estates in payment of debts. Each time, I tried to visit them, often after having acquired them, not to inspect their worth but rather to renew that disturbing experience which allowed me to linger in the unsuspected recesses of the past.

  I eventually told Macé about the existence of these estates. She never showed the slightest desire to visit them. I understood that she would not be drawn to these seigniorial abodes for themselves; what interested her was having a palace in her town, a palace that would consecrate her triumph in the eyes of the people who mattered to her. Over time my collection of castles took on considerable, almost ridiculous proportions: not satisfied with merely obtaining property in payment, I began to buy them myself. I was shown the plans and if they triggered a shiver of desire, I paid cash for the property in question.

  I have never been able to live without having some sort of passion to free my mind from the tyranny of the present. For a brief time, when I first met Macé, this passion was love. The same feeling then nourished my desire for the Levant. Then came these collections of fortified castles. I perceived this compulsion as a sort of secret but necessary illness, above all delightful, which helped me to love life. I envied my companions. Jean de Villages knew how to find contentment in the moment, and coveted nothing other than real and present material pleasure. As for Guillaume, he derived no satisfaction from things. He lived as a peaceful burgher. His activity drew him toward abstract pleasures—buying, selling, speculating, importing, investing—but they made him happy. Neither one of them understood my passion. Jean appreciated the fortunate opportunity my castles gave him to organize feasts. He often asked me to lend him this or that estate, and he took his merry company there. Guillaume admired my capacities as a businessman, without understanding my intentions for all that. He reckoned that I must have good reason to speculate on these seigniorial properties, rational reasons naturally, that is, comparable to his own.

  The king himself got wind of my acquisitions. Far from taking umbrage, he made it a pretext for mockery. The old feudal dwellings I was collecting inspired neither desire nor envy in him. He conveyed his pity, and he was pleased to have discovered my vice, my weakness, the probable consequence of my modest birth. The king liked nothing so much as to be privy to our secrets, for that made us vulnerable. In this way he could go on displaying his own weakness without fear, in the knowledge that at any moment he could unveil our own.

  *

  In the five years that followed the truce with England, and until his complete victory over the princes, the king was constantly moving. The council meetings were often held in faraway towns where he had just established his authority. I tried to combine my own travels on behalf of the Argenterie with these congregations around the king, but I rarely managed to do so, and consequently did not meet him often. One time, however, he expressly asked for my company on his travels. He had to go to the Languedoc, and he knew that I had business in that region.

  We left from Blois. This was not a military campaign, because the provinces in the South had always been loyal to him. The king was in a hurry to return, and he wanted to make quick progress. He had ordered a light escort for the journey, just enough men to protect us from any écorcheurs we might meet along the way. In short, I was virtually alone with him.

  We spent these two weeks together in a closeness I would never again experience with him. I sometimes forgot who he was when we laughed at the stories he told, when we set our horses at a gallop across the moors, when we wrapped ourselves in sheepskin blankets at night around a campfire. Summer was coming; the nights were warm and scattered with comets. We washed in streams that were scarcely cold. Because I alone was allowed in his company when we washed, I had the privilege of seeing the distortions of his body through childhood deprivation—his stoop
, and his clammy blue skin. I was also aware that my observation of his physical wretchedness, which on the surface did not seem to bother him, was a grave transgression for which he would someday hold me accountable. In exchange, I laid bare the secret of my sunken chest, but I could tell that such a small gesture would not redeem my crime.

  As I came to know him, I could sense the danger implicit in his person—he was a wounded, jealous, mean man, who allowed no one the leisure of escape. And though I had already known this, and had a premonition of the danger, I was incapable of protecting myself.

  There was one thing I discovered during the voyage, and that was Charles’s capacity for listening. His ideas were not born solely from personal reflection or intuition; they also stemmed from a slow deciphering of the innumerable words he heard. When the subject interested him, he took the reins of the conversation, asked questions, and guided one’s testimony. This maieutic method had a considerable effect on me and I was astonished, as I spoke to him, to find in myself the new ideas he had knowingly inspired, perhaps even conceived.

  For example, one evening we had a long conversation about the Mediterranean, which lasted almost until dawn. I remember it perfectly. We were in a town in the Cévennes. We had stopped at a fortified house halfway up the slope. From the terrace, which the present owner had added, we could see the valley of the Rhone, and in the mist in the distance the first foothills of the Alps. It was an ideal place to envisage grand prospects. Charles’s tongue was loosened by the sweet wine, and he was comfortably installed in a wicker chair. I was sitting at the stone table where we had dined. I had shoved aside the plates and glasses and was leaning forward with my elbows on the table. When the semidarkness crept over the hillside the king refused to have the candles lit and we went on talking in almost total obscurity. He gazed at the billions of stars in the deep and moonless night. We were no longer a sovereign and his servant; there was only the vessel of dreams on which we had both embarked and which was driven by a great wind of hope, like the one that arises from one’s own body when one has rested and eaten one’s fill.