The Dream Maker

by Jean-Christophe Rufin

  My attempt to escape a verdict by pleading ecclesiastical privilege came to nothing. It was true that I had been a pupil at the Sainte-Chapelle, but I had not taken orders and the exemption was rejected. The trial continued.

  One witness followed another, interminably. It became obvious that the judges did not find this as entertaining as I did. They deemed that this hodgepodge of gossip and ambiguous sins, which I generally managed to explain away, did not constitute a sufficiently damning case against me. It was at that point, and my hand still trembles as I write it, that for the first time I heard the word “torture.”

  Who will believe me when I say I had never thought about it until then? The trial thus far had been a matter for the mind; now it would be one for the body. It seemed to me that I had already lost everything, and yet I still disposed of this envelope of clothing which, however little that may be, does protect and conceal. First of all it would be removed. I was interrogated half-naked, sitting for long hours on the sinister chair. My judges, whom I had somewhat hastily considered to be my equals, suddenly grew much more powerful, their domination founded not on the soundness of their accusations, but on the fact that they spoke down to me, sitting on a podium while I was on my little bench, and that they were clothed while I surrendered my unprotected skin to their gazes. This was the first time I unveiled in public the deformation that hollowed out my chest, and I felt particularly humiliated. Moreover, I was afraid that this trace of a violence exerted on me from the time of my birth, as if it were the mark of God’s fist in my flesh, might lead to others, by virtue of that law of nature which holds that a wounded animal excites his predators.

  Although no one had yet struck a blow against me, those initial sessions had a terrible effect on my conscience. I was able to judge how it was not so much the pain I dreaded, but the diminishment. Several accidents had made me aware of the fact that I was fairly tough. But what I cannot bear is to be dependent on others, to be delivered defenseless to the good will or evil instincts of another person. I even wonder whether my entire life cannot be explained by this boundless desire to escape the violence of my fellow creatures. Ever since my childhood and the episode during the siege of Bourges, I had known that the empire of the mind was one way, perhaps the only way, to escape the brutal confrontation which boys resort to in order to establish their hierarchy. My father had never raised his hand against me. The first blow I received and which I still remember to this day was during a schoolboy squabble on leaving the Sainte-Chapelle. They had just finished preaching to us about kindness and loving one’s neighbor, and the sudden contradiction went some way toward creating my subsequent wariness with regard to religion. I found myself on the ground in a general tussle. The punch I had received below my eye was less alarming to me than my impression of suffocation while a dozen screaming bodies piled themselves on top of me. For six months I had nightmares and difficulties writing. My hand would freeze on the pen, and the words, cramped by the stiffness of my wrist, were illegible and chaotic. It was only after the episode of the siege of Bourges and my discovery of the power of the mind that my anxiety abated.

  Now, on the torture seat, I felt once again that old buried terror, which had remained intact. Being locked up had not brought it on. But to be there before my judges, undressed and unable to move, and to sense on me the voracious gaze of the two torturers standing by the door, waiting for the single word from the magistrates that would authorize them to use the iron instruments hanging on the wall: all of this made me lose any strength or hope I might still have had.

  On the third day of this treatment, having not yet received a single blow, to the great despair of the two torturers who were yawning with boredom, I made a solemn declaration to my judges. I told them that it was pointless trying to use force on me. At the very idea that they might resolve to use it, I would sign anything they liked. My capitulation pleased some of them, but aroused objections among the others. They decided to withdraw in order to debate the matter. I could not understand why they disagreed. What more could they ask for than a full confession, no matter how long, circumstantial, or fantastical it might be? While conversing with one of the guards who behaved in a kindly manner toward me, I learned the cause of the judges’ confusion. They were of the opinion that torture, given the pain it causes, is the only way to authenticate the sincerity of a prisoner’s confessions. Words uttered under the influence of fear did not have the same value as those dictated by the unbearable suffering the torturers inflicted. According to this concept, fear is still a manifestation of human will. And as such, it leaves room for evil, which, it would seem, is peculiar to mankind; one cannot be sure there does not remain an element of ruse, lying, or calculation. Whereas pain causes the divine heart of man to speak, his soul, which when laid bare cannot help but reveal, without artifice, his blackness or his purity.

  This reasoning was repellent to me. First of all, I found it absurd, scornful with regard to human beings, and marked with the seal of the most ridiculous bigotry. But as it took the judges two days to reach their decision, before they summoned me to appear again, I had time to think about it at greater length. And to my great surprise, I discovered that a part of me approved of their abominable concept. If I were free from torture, and my fear sufficed to my judges, I could well understand that the absurdity of the sins they would force me to acknowledge would discredit their accusations. Basically, given this hypothesis, any confession I might sign would not be my own, but theirs. They would find in their own minds the crimes of which they were accusing me, and all of this would have little to do with reality. The king, who knew me, might perceive that my confession rang false.

  Whereas if they subjected me to torture, whatever came from inside me could only be the truth. Who knows, if I were driven mad by suffering, whether I would not confess to the most important things: my relations with the Dauphin, my friendship with the king of Aragon and, above all, my relationship with Agnès.

  In the end, my proposal was rejected.

  *

  The torture began.

  I had the impression that the discord between my judges had not led to a clear decision, fortunately. They did not initially resort to unbearable torture—reluctantly, for their instinct inclined to them to do much more. During the interrogations the torturers merely tied me up in uncomfortable positions, which at length became painful. The torture consisted above all in inducing a physical exhaustion that was meant to incite me to make confessions, and thus bring a hastier end to the session. Aware of this trap, I limited myself to giving trivial information on quibbling commercial errors. I confessed, for example, to my failure to pay the Rhone salt tax in full, a crime of which the king himself was aware and to which he had turned a blind eye.

  After several weeks had gone by, the regime of torture intensified. I was beaten, and although the blows were still bearable, they caused me to panic. I reiterated my offer to the judges to confess to whatever they liked.

  After ten days during which the drubbing and flagellation increased regularly in intensity, I began to contemplate suicide. Just as I was trying to determine what, in the place where I was held, could be used for hanging, a timely delegation of magistrates came to announce that my request had been accepted after all. The bill of indictment would be drawn up that week and I must agree to sign it. I consented, trying to hide my enthusiasm, which might have been misinterpreted. The end of the year was spent in preparing the bill. As I had committed to accepting everything, it was up to my judges to set down grievances that would be both realistic and sufficiently grave to justify the sentence, which had quite obviously been decided upon well in advance.

  I knew that all of this, whatever happened, would culminate in an incrimination of lèse-majesté, which was punishable by death.

  However, I do not know whether it was the means used to obtain this verdict, which at times bordered on farce, or whether it was my intuition that the king wa
s more interested in my fortune than in my life, and would not find it easy to make off with the former if he did not spare the latter, but I never believed in the eventuality of a capital execution.

  When the commissioners appointed to judge me published their final indictment, the sentence handed down was indeed death. But less than a week later, this sentence was commuted and all that was demanded of me was that I make amends. The punishment consisted primarily of the confiscation of my property and a tribute of several hundred thousand écus. Now I had to find the means to pay it, for I would only be set free once I had discharged this enormous sum. In a way, I was hostage to myself. My life had been spared on condition I use it henceforth to pay a price for my freedom so high that all the days remaining would not suffice to obtain that price.

  The king appointed a prosecutor to proceed with the liquidation of my property, starting with an inventory. The man chosen for this difficult task was Jean Dauvet, the same man in whose company I had carried out my mission to Rome. We knew each other well, and as far as I could remember Dauvet had no reason to reproach me. He was a magistrate, however, and as such belonged to a species that I had not known well before my arrest, but which I had subsequently come to know in detail. These individuals, through their profession, have resolved to stand apart from humanity, by embracing the abstract cause of the law. For them there is no such thing as an excuse, an error, suffering, or weakness—in short anything that is human. For them there is only the law, regardless of what injustice it might entail. They are the priests of that God who is devoid of mercy, and to please him, they will unscrupulously resort to lying and violence; they will condone the ignoble brutality of torturers, and will accept on faith denunciations made by the most vile individuals.

  And it was thus that Dauvet zealously, competently, and, dare I say, honestly set about stripping me of my possessions. His methodical efforts to take stock of my property stemmed from the sentence handed down against me. For him that was sufficient reason to prove that his activity was just. He cared little that the powerful men in the king’s entourage, the very same ones who had set themselves up as my judges, shamelessly helped themselves to my properties the moment he exhibited them. The letter of the law had been respected, and that was enough for Dauvet.

  This period of my detention, after the relief that came with the sentencing, was also very instructive. First of all, as I followed Dauvet’s progress in listing my affairs, I became more fully aware of just how widespread they were. The development of our company had been so rapid and so continuous, and it had required so much effort, that there had been no place left for contemplation. Moreover, my role in these affairs, most of the time, was to give the initial impetus. After this, others had caused my business to prosper, and for the most part I was unaware of how far they had gone.

  It was a great satisfaction to me to measure the impact and range of the network we had created.

  At the same time I learned what had made this success possible. It was precisely what neither Dauvet nor the predators sharing my possessions had understood: the company I had created had grown to this degree because it was alive and no one controlled it. It was a huge organism, and freedom was given to every member of it to act as they saw fit. By seizing whatever they could grab, by sequestering my belongings, by dismembering every piece of cloth contained in our stores, Dauvet and the dogs running with his pack were merely ferreting through the entrails of a dead beast. Everything they took was then no longer free and thus ceased to live. The moment it was evaluated, the worth of my erstwhile property became inert and began to decrease, because its true worth came only from the free and unceasing movement of trade.

  Dauvet’s balance sheets gave me hope, because beyond the assets the prosecutor had listed and frozen, I could see—without telling him of course—everything he had not yet touched and which escaped his notice. I knew that Guillaume de Varye, who had been arrested at the same time as me, had managed to escape. Jean de Villages, Antoine Noir, and all the others, most of whom had sought refuge in Provence or in Italy, or were hiding in regions that escaped the king’s control, were doing what they could to conceal as many things as possible from Dauvet’s deadly inventory. In their hands, these supplies and stores and ships continued to do business, and thus to live.

  They managed to get messages to me. Thus I was apprised of the fact that the business had been greatly affected but was not dead.

  The situation was fairly obvious. Dauvet would never succeed in raising the sums demanded of me simply by seizing the remains. But the rest of my business, which was still beyond his reach and would always remain so, or so I hoped, continued to generate considerable profit. The choice was simple. Could I ask my friends to go on working with a sole purpose in mind: to give the king everything they earned in order to obtain my release? Or, would I give precedence to our business, and let it prosper without me? That would mean bidding farewell to my freedom.

  Then there came the terrible ceremony at the Château in Poitiers, to which I had been transferred, where I had to kneel down before Dauvet, who was representing the king, and ask for mercy from God, the sovereign, and the law.

  This ultimate humiliation was a dual deliverance. First of all it made me intimately aware that everything had been lost; I did not have the right to ask Guillaume or any of the others to sacrifice themselves in order to buy my freedom. Particularly from a king who had shown he was perfectly capable of committing such an injustice in the first place: he would never grant me my freedom. I sent word to them the very next day.

  Finally, as if placing a seal on the end of my trial, this ceremony marked the beginning of a new condition for me which, as I have said, was very much like that of a hostage waiting for his ransom to be paid. In every respect it was a more tolerable condition. As they were no longer hoping to obtain a confession from me, my jailers found it pointless to torment me. The first favor I asked, and which to my great surprise was granted, was to have the presence of my valet Marc restored to me.

  In truth, he had never left me. He had been following me from town to town, wherever my place of detention happened to be. As he had not been authorized to see me before now, he generally stayed in a rundown inn where he would quickly earn the deep affection of the cook or serving woman.

  As soon as he could join me and speak to me, my first prison collapsed, the one in which I had locked myself. I immediately stopped feeling resigned to my fate, and I banished the quandary that had occupied my mind all through the previous weeks. It was no longer a question of paying for my freedom or of staying in jail until my death. With Marc, one thing became amply clear: I had to set myself free.

  *

  But the outlook for freedom was not so simple. In Poitiers I was kept locked in two rooms where the windows had been walled up. The door leading to the outside was fitted with iron plates and locked with three bolts. There were a number of henchmen living and sleeping on the other side. The daylight barely filtered through a tiny barred window above the door.

  Marc was allowed to come in at the end of the morning with my laundry and lunch. He stayed with me until they rang Vespers at the chapel.

  When he first talked to me about escaping, after an initial rush of enthusiasm I was immediately discouraged by the material obstacles we would face and above all by my feeble physical condition. Before I could even begin to plan my flight, I had to regain my energy, my muscles, the health that these twenty months of reclusion had altered. Careful to evade the guards’ notice, under Marc’s supervision I began a program of physical exercise. My appetite returned and Marc, with the help of his connections in the kitchen, was able to improve my everyday fare, adding meat and seasonal fruit to the menu.

  I asked permission, and it was granted, under very strict conditions, to be able to enjoy a walk in the courtyard of the Château every morning. The still pale sunlight of winter helped me emerge from the stupor into which the darkn
ess of my jails had plunged me. Once again, as at the beginning of my incarceration, I felt the lightness of my new condition, where I was no longer burdened with the weight of my responsibilities. This only made detention all the more disagreeable, because it created an obstacle to the full enjoyment of my new freedom. My eagerness to plan my escape was all the greater for it.

  Throughout this entire period Marc did not discuss his activity with me, but he was constantly exploring the château and its surroundings, on the lookout for any breaches in the surveillance. At the beginning of the spring, when he saw that I was physically ready to envisage a grab at freedom, he shared his findings with me.

  He had learned everything there was to know about the entire populace of the château, and knew in detail the vices, habits, and foibles of the château’s garrison, from the head guard to the most insignificant bucket-carrying valet. Marc did not know how to read or write, but his mind had the precision of a carefully annotated almanac. All those on whom my liberty might depend to even the slightest degree had been recorded in his memory and associated with a particular weakness. One might be a drunkard, another a cuckold, a third had a liking for fine food, or yet another might be obsessed with his mistress—Marc knew everything. His world, let it be said in passing, was not an ugly one. For him these foibles were the natural elements of the human condition. He never observed them in order to deliver the slightest judgment, only to obtain his particular ends. In this respect he was not unlike the prosecutor Dauvet. Both of them accepted the law, one of man and the other of nature. In the presence of such people I came to realize how much I had lived in the ignorance and scorn of those laws, determined as I was to escape them. In a way, we represented the two opposite and complementary poles of human conscience: submission to what is, and the desire to create another world. Although I could acknowledge the worth of people who thought like Dauvet or Marc, I remained attached to my dreams. Because I am convinced that those who conform in full with existing laws may have a good life, and obtain high rank, and triumph over adversity, but they will never produce anything great.