THE FUNERAL was held at the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. A large crowd attended even though it was a cold winter day. Hector had saved countless marquises, counts, and barons from imminent ruin, and his magic had multiplied the fortunes of even more members of the aristocracy. They all came to show their gratitude with one last silent tribute. No other Jew was ever as deeply mourned as Hector, and no one had been buried in Paris with greater ceremony and reverence.
Only one of the encyclopedists came to honor that man who had devoted his life to the ideals of the French Enlightenment. That was Voltaire.
The philosopher’s old acquaintance the Count of Villeparisis leaned his head on Voltaire’s shoulder as they stood there next to the grave. With tear-filled eyes the count sighed. “No one can deceive death. Not even an attorney a shrewd as Spinoza. It is truly a shame. I will miss him! He had agreed to represent me next week in a very important case.”
Voltaire nodded and stepped to the side.
The rabbi delivered a lengthy sermon and enthusiastically praised the departed. It was evident that he, also, was one of Hector’s satisfied clients. From time to time distinct sobs from the children and the wife interrupted his talk. After this, the titled attendees placed upon the grave their wreaths of roses, tulips, chrysanthemums, lilies, and hyacinths. Voltaire deposited a stone, for Jews always place a stone upon a grave or memorial. Flowers wither and die but stones last forever.
THE PHILOSOPHER was fond of the Spinoza children and knew that the widow was not able to take care of them. He approached Madame Spinoza and in a well-intentioned effort to console her, he offered words that later were to become famous: “The human condition is hard, for grief is woven into our lives. To hold ourselves erect, we must learn how to fall.”
Voltaire told the widow as she stood there in tears that he would be glad to assume responsibility for the upbringing of Avraham, Shoshana, and Nicolas. He became their guardian.
HECTOR’S WIDOW, Sophie, was from a merchant family of Spanish origins. Her forefathers had fled Madrid around 1370 to escape the Inquisition. They were members of the ancient Jewish line alleged to have descended from Rabbi Moses Maimonides, also known as Rambam, the learned twelfth-century Cabalist and physician many consider to have been the greatest Jewish thinker.
The Ardittis regarded themselves as Jews of a special type, a view reinforced by their Sephardic traditions. The Spanish they spoke to one another had changed little during the nearly four hundred years since their escape from Spain. With a naïve feeling of superiority the family looked down upon Jews who did not share their background. A word they often used, pronouncing it in a tone dripping with contempt, was todesco, which meant “German” and referred to Ashkenazi Jews. It was unthinkable for an Arditti to marry a todesco. Sophie was only five years old when her father warned her against any such future misalliance.
Among the Sephards of Marseille there were a number of so-called good families, meaning that they had been wealthy for a very long time. The most approving remark that members of this circle could make about a person was that he was de buena famiya—that is, of good family. The Ardittis belonged to that wealthy caste, but with his profligate living and a series of unsuccessful speculations Pierre was close to ruining the family. He told no one—especially not his wife, a real shrew—and tried to keep up appearances by secretly selling off the family jewelry. He used the proceeds to invite his comrades to overly elaborate Shabbat dinners. That amiable man lived in constant fear of being excluded from the closed ranks of the world of good families.
ALL HER LIFE long Madame Spinoza gloried in the proud name of her family. She took every opportunity to remind her children they came from a good family and there was none better. Hector usually endured her continual ranting with equanimity, and sometimes he would even joke about it. Occasionally he would give in to his annoyance and snap, “You brought no dowry with you into this marriage, but still you think it’s all very well for you to play the grande dame and act so hard to please.”
Hector was often indignant that she took so little interest in her children. He scolded her frequently for neglecting them and sometimes told her directly, especially when he was vexed that he still had not laid hands on Maimonides’s Talmud, “If I’d only known that you didn’t have a shred of maternal feeling in your body, I’d never have married you.” She always responded with great astonishment, and his criticism fell on deaf ears.
MADAME SPINOZA suffered chronic migraine headaches; they were a daily occurrence. She was never happy, partly because in her beloved Jewish ghetto in Marseille she had been admired as a young woman of the very best breeding, but after her wedding and move to the capital she became a neglected housewife. She looked down upon the Parisians as barbarians and refused to learn to speak proper French. She had no friends because no one was sufficiently well-bred for her taste. She seldom went out. Several months might go by before she found occasion to set foot outside their residence.
She was miserable. She did not kill herself or turn to drink; instead, she developed a fanatic interest in literature, especially that of the theater. Her life revolved about belles lettres. She devoured Greek dramas and comedies in the original texts. She could count up ancient works by the score that still were waiting to be discovered, and she regularly went on about how clumsily contemporary playwrights had dealt with the same themes or similar ones.
MADAME SPINOZA felt an enormous sense of relief when Voltaire offered to take charge of the three children.
MY GREAT-UNCLE used to say, “Anyone who has never told a lie or stolen something is physically incapable of understanding someone like Avraham.” Then he would add, “But who has been so lucky as to live such an unusual life?”
“So you mean that nobody is honest and we’re all liars and deceivers?” Sasha asked him.
His reply was prompt. “In a sense, all human life is deception. Every story is a fiction. In the same way, the whole world is a swindle. We human beings know what’s right, but despite that, we fail to do the right thing because temptations overwhelm us. We also can tell right from wrong, but we give in nevertheless, even though we’re free to choose. We’re weak, and in response to our weaknesses, we cheat and we deceive ourselves. That’s why we love to listen to stories about men who tell heaps of lies. They’re much more interesting than lives of the saints, where we can’t recognize ourselves. We’ve all built our lives on lies, both little white lies and great, enormous ones.”
HECTOR’S ELDEST SON, Avraham, had a natural inclination to tell falsehoods. It was second nature to him. In his fabrications and half-truths he mixed up noble matters and base ones, the possible and the impossible. He was completely uninhibited about it, and he would lie as easily about trivialities as about great events.
He could never resist the temptation to steal. Avraham stole everything that tempted his covetous nature: money, jewels, food, objects, literally anything. And he stole from everyone—the closest members of his family, his friends, acquaintances, children, and the elderly. The only vice he never stooped to was the use of physical violence.
ONE DAY AVRAHAM went too far. He stole fifty-six louis d’or and a Swiss pocket watch from Voltaire. The philosopher confronted him. Avraham declared that he was innocent, maintained that he had always done his best to live according to the law, that is, as an honorable man, and he blamed his sister, Shoshana, for the theft. Thereupon two liveried servants searched him and found him to be carrying on his person the vanished coins and pocket watch. That decided the issue of culpability. He refused to confess his crime. He brazenly accused the servants of having planted the money in his pocket. Voltaire found the whole matter quite painful. This was the last straw for him; he felt a great weariness in the face of Avraham’s shameless lies.
After the boy’s father died, Voltaire had placed the young man in a boarding school known for its strict discipline and locked gates. But Avraham escaped from the school and lived with a band of thieves in the forests ou
tside Saint-Étienne, where Voltaire sent several gendarmes to fetch him. Sobbing and bitterly resisting, the boy was forced to come with them to Ferney. The philosopher hoped that his generosity and benevolence as well as the security of his château would have a beneficial effect on the boy’s character.
Voltaire spent seven years as Avraham’s guardian, trying to fill the boy’s head with knowledge and understanding, advising and encouraging him, guiding him toward a life of wisdom and beauty. But no matter how hard he tried to save Avraham from the fate that seemed inevitably to await the young man, he failed.
Voltaire could no longer deceive himself. Avraham could not be set right. He was a man without a future. The philosopher believed that sooner or later Avraham would wind up in jail, and for a moment, just a fleeting moment, Voltaire thought about packing the rascal directly off to the Bastille. But then he remembered unfortunate Madame Spinoza and knew that the theft of those louis d’or was only a foretaste of all the trials her son would put her through.
AVRAHAM WAS BANISHED from Ferney. He traveled to his mother’s residence in Paris. She was not at all pleased to see him. He told her he had left the château at Ferney of his own volition because he couldn’t stand the way Voltaire was treating him—dealing with him as if he were the meanest of his servants, making him sleep in a dark cellar and live on the scraps he scrounged from garbage pails. His mother couldn’t believe Voltaire would be so cruel, but she was too weak to confront her son.
Only a few days after coming home Avraham began to plague his mother and insist she pay him his share of the inheritance from his father—in cash. He wanted to rent his own apartment because he disliked living with his mother, and he intended to live the good life in his own place. To placate his mother and Voltaire, who was still his legal guardian, he declared that he was going to study at the Sorbonne and follow in the footsteps of his father. His mother’s eyes filled with tears. Voltaire was not fooled; he was under no illusion that Avraham would complete any studies or qualify himself for a respectable profession.
AVRAHAM ENROLLED at the Faculty of Law although he had never had the least interest in the legal code. He did not attend lectures—instead, he took a position in the office of a notary who administered the affairs of counts and countesses. Within a couple of days it became obvious to his employer that the young man was incompetent. When the notary asked for additional details of his previous work history and experience, Avraham got tangled in contradictions and couldn’t talk his way out of the mess. He finally had to admit that he had invented all of his references. Avraham must have known instinctively that an appeal to sympathy and understanding was the best way to calm those he had angered. He said that he had lied, not because he had a real interest in working in the notary’s office but because he needed money to care for his gravely ill parents and seven younger siblings, including two sisters born blind and mute. He promised he would never again fail to tell the truth. Upon hearing of these terrible afflictions, the notary, a kind man, felt sorry for the unfortunate family. He allowed Avraham to stay. Within weeks Avraham was again facing charges of fraud and dereliction of duty. The notary threatened to call the gendarmes, but when he heard that Avraham was Voltaire’s ward he limited himself to turning the rascal out.
ONE DAY Avraham happened to run into a priest who had known his father. Playing upon the sympathy of the Catholic man of God, he confided that the notary who had been employing him was a pederast. That highly respected gentleman, he declared, was attracted to young boys and given to making inappropriate advances to them. But he, Avraham, had emphatically refused to be enticed.
The priest thought it terrible that Avraham had been so unfortunate as to wind up in the wrong place and had been berated without justification by both his mother and his guardian for losing his job; they should have given him their support. The priest felt called to use Avraham’s difficult situation to lead him back to God. He persuaded the young man to stay for a few days at the cloister of the Royaumont Abbey, not far from Paris. Seclusion there would help distract him from recent unfortunate events, so that he could anchor himself in something greater than himself. The priest confided that he had heard the voice of God during the six months he had spent in isolation at the cloister. Avraham gave a silent snort of derision at this, but he smiled and pledged he would do his best to concentrate upon spiritual discipline.
The priest’s views on eternal life and temporal existence hardly coincided with his own, but Avraham did go to the cloister, mostly because he had nothing else to do.
On the second morning of his stay he went to confess to the abbot. Avraham avoided mentioning the shady events in his past; he said instead that as a Jew he was deeply tormented by the death of Jesus, and he yearned for salvation. The abbot gave him absolution without bothering to require any acts of penitence and suggested that he convert to the Catholic faith in order to receive the Holy Spirit and the love of God.
Avraham was quickly persuaded. Before the bell pealed that evening to call the faithful to vespers, he had already decided: He would become a Catholic. Not because he yearned for the union of his soul with the divine or because he wanted a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven but because an acquaintance had informed him that any Jew who wanted access to the world of salons and fine soirees in Paris would have to embrace the Catholic faith. It would do no harm, he told himself, to repeat a few ritual formulas in Latin.
HIS MOTHER WEPT when Avraham told her he had accepted baptism. She was paler than ever before. For a moment he thought that her heart would burst. But she made no complaint.
In a letter to Voltaire written that same afternoon she poured out her troubles. “How can he do such a thing to me?” she wrote. “A young man of buena famiya! This will cast a dark shadow over the rest of my life.”
AFTER AVRAHAM RECEIVED his portion of the inheritance, he rented an elegant apartment in the Marais neighborhood and lived a carefree life. Every evening he was out until the break of day with his new drinking companions, fellows who boasted that they knew the rules of elegant manners as well as the back of their own hands. The rest of the time they were offering coarse comments to everyone around them and making derogatory remarks about the Jews, eliciting no response from Avraham.
He always offered gallant compliments to the ladies and easily attracted new ones who were willing and beautiful. He quickly became the toast of late-night Paris, which may have well been principally because he invented a new identity: He styled himself “Baron Armand de Spina-Rosa” and boasted without a blush that his family name was one of the most prestigious of European aristocracy. He lavishly dispersed money from the great riches he claimed to control.
ONE EVENING in a salon that was not among the best reputed in Paris, a mutual acquaintance presented Avraham to the Countess de Mercier. She was the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen. Her beauty made his knees tremble and his sex organ quiver. Avraham’s fate was sealed in an instant. He knew immediately that he would do anything at all for this woman—he was even ready to die. He was so overcome with sudden infatuation that he could scarcely say a word.
The countess broke the silence. “What a remarkable coincidence it is to meet you here, my dear Baron de Spina-Rosa. I have heard so many good things about you. The baron’s father would often speak of his intelligence and generosity. That’s right, I knew your father, the old baron. Once upon a time, you see, we were extremely good friends. But unfortunately, circumstances sent us along different paths after I moved to Paris. How is your dear father doing?”
“Indeed, I thank you, he is very happy now,” replied Avraham. He couldn’t take his eyes off that enchanting, wonderfully beautiful creature, especially not from her low-cut bodice.
“It feels almost as if we had known each other for a very long time,” she said. “And therefore I shall dare to take the liberty to confide an extremely personal matter to you. I hope that you will not be offended.”
Avraham felt flattered by her confidence in hi
m.
The countess told him how deeply shocked and alarmed she was over the contents of a letter she had just received from her husband’s attorney. Her husband was an elderly nobleman, thirty years her senior, who possessed vast estates and an ancient castle just outside Saint-Étienne. She had never seen a person as lighthearted as the Count de Mercier on the evening when he took a hearty farewell of her to travel to Paris to care for his ailing brother. She was therefore completely unprepared for what happened the following day. The count was accompanying his attorney and the attorney’s son on a hunt for wild boar when the son unexpectedly glimpsed a splendid stag; he couldn’t resist the wonderful opportunity and loosed a shot at the noble animal without taking the time to aim. The bullet ricocheted against a tree trunk and struck de Mercier directly in the heart. The count certainly never even heard the shot that killed him. Only a few days earlier the count had been duped into signing a will stipulating that all of his possessions would go to his attorney. And now, according to the terms of that cold and heartless instrument, she was no longer welcome at the castle, not even to collect her own clothes and jewelry.
Avraham found this most unfortunate for the beautiful creature. He immediately replied that he wished to help her to overcome her difficult circumstances.
The countess took Avraham’s hand and said, “Baron de Spina-Rosa, you are a good man and a true friend. I find myself cast out of my own home with nowhere to live and with no resources at all. In addition, I have lost all the clothing I possess. I have never felt so alone, so abandoned, so vulnerable. That is why I have opened my heart to you. But I have no right to burden the baron with my sorrows. It would be all too much to ask that you devote time to my problems.”
The Elixir of Immortality Page 32