JEAN D’ORMESSON was born in Paris in 1925 and attended the École normale supérieure, where he studied literature, history, and philosophy. His first novel, L’amour est un plaisir, was published in 1956, and in 1971 The Glory of the Empire won the Grand Prize for fiction from the Académie française. He has served as chairman of the board of the newspaper Le Figaro and secretary-general and president of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies at UNESCO. The recipient of numerous distinctions, he was elected to the Académie française in 1973 and was presented the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor in 2014. He divides his time between Paris and Corsica.
BARBARA BRAY (1924–2010) was a translator of twentieth-century French literature into English. She was an early champion of Marguerite Duras and Samuel Beckett, and also translated the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Anouilh, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Her translations of The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart, Monsieur Proust by Céleste Albaret, and Prisoner of Love by Jean Genet are available as NYRB Classics.
DANIEL MENDELSOHN was born in 1960 and studied Classics at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. His essays and reviews appear regularly in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. His books include The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace; and two collections of critical essays, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, published by New York Review Books. He teaches literature at Bard College.
THE GLORY OF THE EMPIRE
A Novel, a History
JEAN D’ORMESSON
Translated from the French by
BARBARA BRAY
Introduction by
DANIEL MENDELSOHN
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1971 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris
Translation © 1974 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Introduction © 2016 by Daniel Mendelsohn
All rights reserved.
Originally published in French as La Gloire de l’Empire. This translation first published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Cover image: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, View of the Appian Way, 1756–57
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ormesson, Jean d’, 1925– | Bray, Barbara translator.
Title: The glory of the empire : a novel, a history / Jean D’Ormesson ; translated by Barbara Bray ; introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn.
Other titles: Gloire de l’Empire. English
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2016. | Series: New York Review of Books classics | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015037849 | ISBN 9781590179659 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Byzantine Empire—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Alternative History. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology.
Classification: LCC PQ2629.R58 G513 2013 | DDC 842/.914—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037849
ISBN 978-1-59017-966-6
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
THE GLORY OF THE EMPIRE
I. THE PILLARS OF THE EMPIRE
II. THE EAGLE AND THE TIGER
III. ARSAPHES’S MERCENARIES
IV. AQUILEUS
V. THE BANQUET AT ONESSA
VI. THAUMAS AND INGEBURGH
VII. THE FOX OF AMPHIBOLUS
VIII. THE SIEGE OF BALKH
IX. THE WOLF HUNT
X. INITIATION
XI. FEASTING IN ALEXANDRIA
XII. THE YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS, OR THE FOOL OF GOD
XIII. THE CALL, AND THE END OF EXILE
XIV. THE CONQUEST OF POWER
XV. THE KHA-KHAN OF THE OÏGHURS
XVI. THE DOUBLE DUEL
XVII. DIREITO POR LINHAS TORTAS, OR THE NEW ALLIANCE
XVIII. SCIENCE, CULTURE, AND EVERYDAY LIFE UNDER THE EMPIRE
XIX. THE SPIRIT OF CONQUEST AND THE MEANING OF DEATH
XX. THE SACK OF ROME
XXI. THE PEACE OF THE EMPIRE
XXII. THE LEPER PRINCE
XXIII. LOSER TAKE ALL, OR THE OTHER LIFE
XXIV. THE POWER AND THE GLORY
Notes
Bibliography
Index
INTRODUCTION
“HISTORY IS A NOVEL THAT HAPPENED; A NOVEL IS HISTORY that might have happened.” It would be hard to think of a better epigraph for Jean d’Ormesson’s genre-bending Glory of the Empire—a novel that pretends to be a work of history, and often convinces you that it is one—than the one he himself found in an 1861 journal entry by the Goncourt brothers. The nod to the famous diarists is noteworthy: Meticulous historians of the eighteenth century as well as the authors of stylistically daring, vaguely impressionistic contemporary novels, the Goncourts were preoccupied by the same questions—about the boundaries between the past and the present, fact and fancy, history and fiction—that are the focus of d’Ormesson’s book. And, indeed, are the subject of another of his novel’s epigraphs, this one by Jorge Luis Borges: “History, mother of truth—the idea is astonishing.”
“Astonishing” is a good adjective for The Glory of the Empire itself. Published in France in 1971 to considerable acclaim, and the first major success for its author, it presents itself as a scholarly tome about the rise of a vast, Byzantium-like empire that is called, simply, “the Empire.” The illusion that it is a work of nonfiction is enhanced by copious footnotes and an extensive bibliography that bristles with the impressive-sounding names of journal articles and books in many languages—all of which, along with their authors, d’Ormesson has invented. This dazzling inventiveness, evident as well in the elaborate history the author has dreamed up for his fictional realm, might seem at first to be the entire point of his work; the knowing allusions to both history and scholarship can make The Glory of the Empire look like little more than (as a French friend of mine once put it) an extended jeu de lycéen: the clever joke of a high-school whiz kid.
The temptation to take both the book and its author lightly is one that has been encouraged by d’Ormesson himself, a genial celebrity of the French literary world who enjoys hinting that he never really mastered the serious stuff. “I remained rather good in history and literature, but was always little more than a zero in philosophy,” he wrote in a 1966 memoir called Au revoir et merci, referring to his high-school days in the 1930s at the prestigious École normale supérieure. Indeed, despite a distinguished lineage and an impressive résumé—he was born in 1925, the proud scion of a well-to-do and aristocratic family whom he has memorialized with affection in a witty 1974 faux-memoir, At God’s Pleasure (he likes to mention an ancestor who defended Louis XIV’s disgraced minister Fouquet, saving the latter’s head if not his great château, Vaux-le-Vicomte); was the director of the center-right newspaper Le Figaro and a prolific novelist and journalist; and, since 1973, has been a member of the Académie française—despite all this, d’Ormesson’s autobiographical writings are filled with blithe references to his intellectual shortcomings. “I was, alas, an excellent mediocrity,” he laments apropos of his school days; “my life was a little bit usele
ss, like my writing,” he comments somewhere else. Above all, he claims to be chagrined by his failure to master the “queen of sciences.” “Like a man who can possess every woman with the exception of the one he wants, I did a little history, a little German, a little French, but only philosophy, which wouldn’t have me, fascinated me.”
D’Ormesson has surely been too hard on himself. To be sure, many of the pleasures provided by The Glory of the Empire are those afforded by popular literature and popular history both: In and of itself, the “history” that d’Ormesson invents, filled with all the high drama, grand gestures, and memorable characters you get in everyone from Herodotus to Arnold Toynbee, makes for a gripping page-turner. And yet, forty-five years after its first publication, what strikes you about The Glory of the Empire is what you could call its philosophical dimension: a clear-eyed vision of history and the pitfalls of writing history that a thinker of more strident ideological and intellectual pretensions might never have achieved.
•
That the author was “good in history” is abundantly clear in the tale of his fictional empire, which, with its ambitious princes and conniving queen mothers, pitched battles and labyrinthine negotiations, great savants and sleekly treacherous favorites, improbable victories and cataclysmic defeats, will remind readers of the histories of so many empires: Byzantium above all (a choice that suggests no little sophistication on the author’s part; Rome would have been the more obvious choice) but also Periclean Athens, Egypt during the New Kingdom, Rome, Mesopotamia and Persia, Alexander the Great’s continent-spanning hybrid dominion, and the bossy mercantile realms of Phoenicia, Venice, and Holland.
The Empire, like so many others, begins in the dim mists of legend—this one about two warring brothers who founded two perpetually warring cities, one called Onessa, its symbol the Eagle and its ruling family the Venostae, and the other called, simply, “the City,” symbolized by the Tiger and ruled by a clan with the Byzantine-ish name of Porphyry. Eventually, inevitably, the two are united to become the foundation of a great nation, which, through a combination of warfare and diplomacy (as with the Roman Empire), expands to include much of the known world. This paradigmatic pattern of imperial metastasis is presided over by a series of colorful chieftains, generals, kings, and overlords (and their ladies, wives, mothers, and concubines), culminating in the great emperor Alexis of the Porphyries, the exemplar of all monarchs and the principal hero of d’Ormesson’s grand narrative.
The gripping tale of the Empire’s rise—to say nothing of the religion, social customs, art, and architecture with which d’Ormesson has endowed his fictional realm—often produces an amusing tingle of déjà vu. There is, for instance, a dash of the declining Athens in the City (“liberty and luxury verged on vice and weakness”) and a soupçon of Sparta in hardscrabble Onessa. (“Virtue [shared] the throne with cruelty and caprice.”) Pomposa, the suave mercantile rival to those two main city-states, is a little bit of Venice with some Corinth, Tyre, and Amsterdam thrown in. The language of the Empire is, as at Byzantium, Greek, a choice that allows the author to gleefully coin a number of Greek-ish names, including those of a gaggle of philosophers called Hermenides, Philontes, and Paraclitus. As Rome’s Virgil did, the chief poet of the Empire, Valerius, composes a great verse epic about the founding of the nation (The Birth of the Empire) whose most dramatic episode is an ill-fated encounter between the founding hero and a doomed lady love.
The effect of d’Ormesson’s witty riffs on real history is sometimes that of having passed through the looking glass into a parallel, fun-house universe in which familiar elements reappear in distorted form. In The Glory of the Empire, for instance, Rome is a burned-out star, eerily recognizable but not quite the one we know:
Rome had really only one resource left, though it was an important one: this was the high priest, at the same time ruler and prince, who bore the illustrious title of archpatriarch. A great builder of temples and bridges, he was the link between heaven and earth, the incarnation here below of the supernatural forces that made—and unmade—kingdoms. Everything in this world depended on him. . . . He ruled not by force, but by trust, persuasion, reverential fear. He disposed of men and events not because he had an army, but because he knew words. . . . He was above kings and princes, even when they rebelled against his strange magnificence and his mysterious prestige.
This “Rome,” you realize after a moment, is not the Roman Empire but something rather more like the Catholic Church, the pope here transformed into that “archpatriarch” but otherwise largely recognizable, at least with respect to his historical role. (The clue—a wink on d’Ormesson’s part—is the phrase “A great builder of . . . bridges”: the real-life pope’s title, pontifex, means “bridge builder” in Latin.)
D’Ormesson populates his invented geography with figures who are also likely to remind readers of characters they have already encountered from literature or history—or both. The Venostae prince who becomes the empire-builder Basil the Great—crude but brilliant, stout and one-eyed—is an avatar of the Macedonian king Philip II, the rough-edged but visionary father of Alexander the Great. An ambitious queen consort named Theodora, who, we are told, began life as a temple prostitute, pointedly recalls the real-life sixth-century Byzantine empress Theodora, a low-born woman who is said to have specialized, during her louche early years, in performing reenactments of the mythic Leda’s rape by a swan. The fierce and nomadic Oïghurs, ruled by leaders known as Kha-Khans and always a factor in the elaborate strategic calculations of both the City and Onessa, suggest at once the Scythians who harassed the Assyrians and Persians, and the Pechenegs who, centuries later, devastated the Byzantines.
D’Ormesson’s magpie approach to his sources is most evident in his portrait of the great emperor Alexis, an idealized conflation of real historical figures and notable types from literature and mythology. On the one hand, Alexis recalls the apostate Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton (he is an avid sun worshipper); has the famous longing attributed by ancient historians to Alexander the Great (“In everything he felt a yearning to go further”); is an epileptic, like Julius Caesar; and features the virtues of a number of the “good” Roman emperors, notably Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. (He is, we are told, a “moralist and philosopher.”) On the other hand, he is a Prince Hal type, whose debauched youth—his sexual antics as a libertine in Alexandria, the anonymous historian who is the ostensible narrator of The Glory of the Empire informs us, earned him a place in erotic history (“They appear as ‘Alexis Positions I, II, III, IV, V, and VI’ in the famous classifications of erotic positions established by Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Kinsey”)—yields first to a period of monastic withdrawal and, afterward, to a dignified manhood. An everyman figure, in other words, whose progress is ultimately a universal one. (Well, almost: At one point Alexis goes into seclusion in order to study—what else?—history, “so dreadful and so marvelous.”)
If Alexis is a little too good to be true, d’Ormesson is well aware of it. Like many a historical figure who has been mythologized over time, the Empire’s greatest ruler is “first and foremost the symbol and reflection of our own hopes and dreams.” This is just one of a series of provocative asides about the way in which the yearning for a well-shaped narrative rich in comforting meaning (“fiction”) can impinge on how we view the events of past (“history”)—a dynamic of no little significance for novelists and historians both.
•
The novel’s exploration of the relationship between fact and fantasy is nowhere more provocative—or exhilarating—than in one particular technique d’Ormesson uses to lend a deadpan verisimilitude to his grandiose fiction: his brilliantly erudite and witty interweaving of the Empire’s story into the fabric of real-world history and culture. “Naturally,” the narrator drones on at one point, “it would be impossible to get an accurate impression of the role and place of Alexis without rereading Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Chateaubriand, and especially Dante.”
History offers several examples of famous couples in which the woman is worthy of the man and vies with him in nobility: Ahasuerus and Esther, Alexis and Theodora, Hero and Leander, the other Heloise and Abelard, Justinian and the other Theodora. But none of their stories outdoes that of Arsaphes and Heloise.
Two of these five couples are invented: Heloise and Arsaphes, the subjects of this passage, and Alexis and his consort, Theodora. (Note how the real-life Theodora here becomes “the other Theodora,” just as Abelard’s real-life lover becomes “the other Heloise.”) D’Ormesson then goes on to enumerate the great works of world literature that, we are assured, have treated the “famous” love of Arsaphes and Heloise. Like many a fiction based on the past, the narrator of the Empire’s history asserts, the literary masterpieces about Arsaphes and Heloise tell us less about history “than about the preoccupations of the dramatists and their audiences: in Polyphilus, the role of fate and the gods; in Corneille, the struggle between honor and passion; in Anouilh, the dignity of rejection.” Polyphilus is an invented character, a Sophocles-like playwright from the heyday of the Empire; but Corneille and Anouilh are, of course, real, as authentic as the thematic preoccupations attributed to them here. (D’Ormesson also likes to insert his fictional characters into actual literary works: “Dante . . . gives [Alexis] a place . . . at the bottom of the Malebolge . . .”)
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