The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  D’Ormesson pushes his joke about the literary afterlife of Heloise and Arsaphes even further, by having his narrator go on to focus in detail on one of the masterworks based on the love of his invented couple: a tragedy by Pierre Corneille entitled Arsaphe et Héloïse. The premiere of this play, we are told, was a total disaster, which “marked the final fall from favor of the aging poet. Madame de Sévigné and Saint-Simon, the one with emotion, the other with cold disdain, both refer to the play’s hopeless failure.” After quoting at length (and very amusingly: d’Ormesson is a brilliant mimic) from Madame de Sévigné’s letter decrying the play’s failure (“I am in despair and have been weeping like a fool since yesterday . . . I am enamored of Arsaphes and Heloise and want everything to yield to the genius of Corneille”) and from the duc de Saint-Simon’s florid diary entry concerning the fiasco (“M. le Prince told Monseigneur, who again told Mme. de Saint-Simon . . . that most people, that is to say the fools, had condemned the play”), d’Ormesson produces his pièce de résistance: an excerpt from Arsaphe et Héloïse itself, from which The Glory of the Empire then proceeds to quote at length in French. In order to allow readers of the English translation access to the pleasures of d’Ormesson’s masterful pastiche of Corneille, his translator, Barbara Bray, “quotes” instead from what we are told was the “famous rephrasing” of Corneille’s lines by the English poet and playwright John Dryden:

  HELOISE

  I begged, sir, that you’d speak with me no more,

  Your presence mines a courage weak before.

  That converse which should be the soul’s delight

  Can only worsen Eloisa’s plight.

  And if she suffers, how is it with you?

  What pain’s the less for being one of two?

  . . .

  ARSAPHES

  Let all die with me, madam. What care I

  Whose footsteps tread the earth wherein I lie?

  This excerpt will suggest both the delicious wit of d’Ormesson’s original and the ingenuity of Bray’s English translation, which never fails to find ways to carry over even the most complex of d’Ormesson’s cultural in-jokes.

  •

  But as the story of the Empire moves forward, it becomes clear that history and historiography themselves are the true subjects of d’Ormesson’s amused and amusing fantasy. For the author of The Glory of the Empire has invented not only the Empire but its history and historians, present in a vast apparatus of scholarship that, we are to believe, has grown up about it since ancient times.

  Here again, the author has slyly inserted the Empire and its history into mainstream European intellectual history (“Gibbon’s Rise of the Empire remains the best study of the Empire’s origins”); here again, his prodigious learning makes for entertaining pastiches of real authors. The historians he riffs are both ancient—there are many quotations from an antique multi-volume history of the Empire by a figure called Justus Dion, who is strongly reminiscent of the third century AD historian Cassius Dio, the author of an eighty-volume history of Rome—and modern, from Arnold Toynbee to Michel Foucault. D’Ormesson has a particularly good eye for stylistic foibles: He gets just right the orotund periods of certain nineteenth-century historians (“But that twisted body housed a will of iron”; “a dazzling beauty as virtuous as she was fair”), to say nothing of the excesses of contemporary academic historians. His jabs at the effortfully playful titles of articles and lectures that were all the rage during the 1960s are particularly funny. (One article from an anthropological journal, cited in a note about a favorite of Alexis’s called Jester—both the article and the journal are, naturally, invented—is called “Jester, Trickster, Hamster.”) There are, too, amusing swipes at the pretensions of certain national schools of history, each with its own well-known prejudices and predilections, and at the personal foibles of historians, whose private agendas, d’Ormesson knows, sometimes masquerade as scholarly interest. The author hits both targets in a single, memorably amusing footnote about an early monarch and his high priest: “The theory that there was some emotional, and even homosexual, relationship between Basil and Thaumas has been vigorously maintained, especially in England and the United States. See Algernon Queen, The Sexual Background of a Historic Friendship (Oxford University Press, 1954) . . .”

  The hall-of-mirrors effect produced by d’Ormesson’s interweaving of the real and the invented is deliciously—and pointedly—disorienting. A description of the emperor Alexis’s ascetic seclusion in the East before his assumption of the throne, for instance, contains a footnote referencing a work (which the author has invented) by the real twentieth-century French historian Roger Caillois:

  Roger Caillois, in Le Mythe et l’homme [Myth and Man] . . . speaks of the period of “occultation” or eclipse that the hero always goes through prior to his time of trial and eventual triumph. . . . As examples he gives Dionysus at Nysa . . . Oedipus before he met the Sphinx . . . Vautrin in prison, and, in real life, Alexis’s retirement to the East.

  We are meant to believe that Caillois has formulated his notion about “occultation” based on readings of myth, literature, and “real” history such as that of the emperor Alexis; but of course, it is d’Ormesson’s reading of Caillois and other historians and scholars that has allowed him to give Alexis and his story a shape that is persuasive precisely because it adheres to traditional narrative contours first detected by those scholars—for instance, the idea of a “period of ‘occultation.’ ” It comes as no surprise that Jorge Luis Borges makes an appearance in the pages of The Glory of the Empire as well as in its epigraph (his “Lottery in Babylon,” we are told, was inspired by an episode in Alexis’s life). There is more than a little of Borges in the dizzying play between the real and the irreal that characterizes d’Ormesson’s novel about history.

  Indeed, although the richness of d’Ormesson’s faux-historical narrative and the amusing ingenuity of the techniques by which he makes it seem real would be enough to make The Glory of the Empire tremendously entertaining, a more serious point lies behind the narrative gamesmanship. Early in his account of the Empire’s history, d’Ormesson’s narrator observes that every historical fact, every object of anthropological and sociological study, can be used to suit the purposes and interests of historians:

  For a long time the history of the Empire was confined to anecdotes, genealogies of princes, roll calls of priests and victors at the games, and lists of battles and peace treaties. Bossuet reads in it the finger of God, Voltaire the struggle between man’s folly and the slow rise of reason. Its welter of color and crime provided romanticism with a favorite occasion for the resurrection of the past. It was not until the arrival of the modern school that historians began to perceive, beneath the pomp and the blood and the hymns, both the everyday life of the common people and the often complicated system of rites and beliefs that governed it. Then the wave of interest in ordinary existence, in the preoccupations of classes so long ignored . . . was replaced by a new phase of broad theoretical visions, comprehensive systems, total interpretations. One after the other, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism each inspired important works of sociology, cultural anthropology, comparative religion, linguistics, and semiotics, while at the same time researchers tirelessly sought for man and his workaday cares beneath the brilliant trappings of camp and court life. And so each day brought a further descent into the depths of concrete existence and a further ascent toward the heights of abstraction.

  Here d’Ormesson the erstwhile student of history and self-declared mediocrity offers what is, in fact, a deep truth: that, as his narrator observes in the book’s final pages, “no historian does anything but give birth to his own universe.” Which is to say, all historians are, in a way, also novelists: telling the stories they find interesting in the way that suits their tastes, predilections, and personalities. This aperçu reaches an amusingly self-reflexive climax at the end of the book, where the author refers to “the greatest of the historians of th
e Empire”—himself, the novelist.

  To its bracing insights about historiography The Glory of the Empire adds a point about the nature of history. As you make your way through the long and tortured tale of the Empire’s emergence, through the minute descriptions of its religion and culture, its conveniently complementary schools of philosophy, one vaguely Eastern, the other Western (“The first maintained that the universe was immaterial like air and fire, that it was infinite . . . the second declared that the world was like earth and water, that it was finite”), the art and architecture that are a little bit of everything, Greek and Roman and Byzantine and Italian but also Levantine and Asian, the great emperor who is at once a libertine and an ascetic, a warrior and a sage, the chronologies that juxtapose events from history both ancient and modern, the rises that are, as the narrator keeps insisting, simultaneously falls (“Hardly was the City born, hardly had it begun to shine in the history of maritime powers and merchant republics, than it began to die”), it is hard not to feel that the history of the Empire, alive though it might be with copious and irresistible particulars, is, in the end, the history of everything: at once a mega-history and a meta-history, packing into the story of this one fictional civilization the stories of every civilization, every monarch, every religion, every work of art, every conspiracy, every triumph, every defeat that ever was.

  For one thing history makes clear is that, whatever the variables, human nature never changes. That, in the end, is the true subject of all real histories, as it is of d’Ormesson’s fictional one. At a certain point in his early memoir, d’Ormesson suggests that his (no doubt exaggerated) sense of his mediocrity, his weary condemnation of a “vain ambition in the service of nothing,” has at least had the advantage of making him alert to the pretensions of others—making him suspicious of “conviction itself.” (“I don’t much like when people believe overmuch in what they say.”) This world-weariness leads him, in turn, to a perception of the nature of History, which, he says, inevitably excites a certain “cynicism”:

  We have seen only that doctrines, institutions, empires, and churches crumble only to reconstitute themselves in new avatars: rebels become bourgeois, anarchists fall into line, revolutionaries grow rich, fascists convert, the signatories of manifestos turn around and join the enemy, the adversaries of order and institutions go tramping around, on Thursdays, along the banks of the Seine . . .

  “It is,” d’Ormesson writes at the end of this catalog, “the total movement which is truth.”

  Because the total movement never changes, because history is, in the end, a vast “web which never alters despite an infinite range of motifs and variations,” d’Ormesson’s book—which, for all its lush narrative and intellectual pleasures, is not in the end without a certain philosophical dimension—can illuminate that truth as delightfully and provocatively today as it did four decades ago. “How clear the designs of history,” his narrator exclaims at one point, “all ready to be inscribed in books . . .” Indeed. As I write this, the armies of Europe are preparing to do battle with a caliphate; Jerusalem holds both violence and the sacred in a tight embrace; demagogic leaders of large democracies are reassuring edgy citizens with racist and xenophobic tirades. One has no need of a Barbara Bray to translate the phrase that, in the end, sums up the perception about the shape of history’s “design” that animates this playfully provocative and ultimately profound novel: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

  —DANIEL MENDELSOHN

  THE GLORY OF THE EMPIRE

  History is a novel that happened; a novel is history that might have happened.

  E. AND J. DE GONCOURT

  The future belongs to God, but the past belongs to history. God can do no more with history, but man can still write it and transfigure it.

  JUSTUS DION

  History, mother of truth—the idea is astonishing.

  J. L. BORGES

  Thus saith the Lord: . . .

  Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old.

  Behold, I will do a new thing.

  ISAIAH 43:16–19

  To the great shade of Alexis

  To his opponents as well as his supporters, since that is how he would have wished it

  To whom I love—and even to the others

  SIMPLIFIED GENEALOGY OF THE PORPHYRIES AND THE VENOSTAE

  I

  THE PILLARS OF THE EMPIRE

  THE EMPIRE NEVER KNEW PEACE. FIRST IT HAD TO be built, then defended. From the depths of its history there arose the clang of axes, the hiss of javelins, the cries of the dying at evening after battle. Neither the forests to the north and east nor the high mountains in the south were proof against attack and invasion. In the great fertile plains at the foot of the volcanoes, massacre succeeded massacre. To the west, the sea too brought its share of dangers: suddenly threatening sails, pirates, surprise assaults at dawn. On the Empire’s borders night never came without its escorts of dread and death. Even within, both in the country and in the towns, interest and passion raised up rival bands to fight for power with violence and arson. The Empire grew up on a foundation of flames and blood. From the time of Arsaphes to that of Basil the Great, a period of more than a century and a half, scarcely three or four years could be called free from war, foreign or civil. And peril came not only from men. Unbridled nature exacted a high price for an energy still youthful and powers as yet almost intact. Fire, packs of wolves, the eruptions of Mount Kora-Kora, hurricanes along the coast, earthquakes, and floods from the river Amphyses all left terror in the memories of one generation after another. It was said that on the snow-covered plateaus huge fighting eagles attacked women and carried off children, while in the sweltering southern plains beyond the mountains, warriors were devoured by tigers that appeared out of nowhere. Imagination hardly needed to improve on the horrors of the real. The violence of men, the seasons, and the earth took its place beside the dragons and monsters born of mirages, night terrors, and the tales of old men around the campfire. The second winter of Basil’s reign was so severe that in the northwest the sea froze in the creeks and whole villages were buried under the snow. Cold, heat, flies, snakes, scorpions, plague, and epidemics killed off the least hardy. The strongest among the women often bore twelve or fifteen children, but it was rare for more than two or three of a family to survive. Most men died in war, most women in childbirth, most children never even had time to grow up. Just being alive was a triumph.

  But under all these perils and threats the peoples of the Empire were cheerful. They were inhabited by a terrific will to live; they seemed to thirst to go on suffering. Nearly every ambassador’s account speaks of the natives’ gaiety, their love of pleasure, their bent for laughter and amusement. They forgot quickly—in that lay their strength. Every schoolboy knows Justus Dion’s famous account of the death of Ingeburgh, wife of the Emperor Basil. Both he and his people venerated the empress. Her funeral was of a sinister grandeur. Twenty-four horses were slain, her two favorite maids threw themselves on the sacred pyre, women beat their breasts and tore out their hair. The emperor looked prostrate and old. In the phrase of the Pomposan ambassador, “age and sorrow had brought him close to dotage.” But just at the end of the funeral celebrations the announcement of the great naval victory at Cape Pantama changed affliction to rejoicing in the twinkling of an eye. The emperor, suddenly rejuvenated, straightened up and even danced with the servingmaids around Ingeburgh’s corpse. Three months later he married the prettiest of them—the madcap Empress Irene, as wild as Ingeburgh had been sedate.

  This love of life, this gaiety in misfortune, this ability to find a stimulus even in obstacles and sorrows was profoundly characteristic of the peoples of the Empire. Games and feasting played a great part in their life. The whole Empire danced, the whole Empire watched horses race and bulls expire. Everyone seemed to want to savor the brevity of life to the utmost before quitting it himself. German historians in particular have pointed out how this love of
feasting and games paralleled, rather than contradicted, the passion for war. War was a celebration and games were mortal. A thousand examples spring to mind of the cruelty of the public games, in which slow riders, clumsy handlers, and unsuccessful wrestlers were put to death by the crowd. The racing of bulls and horses, contests with wild beasts, ball games all produced favorites idolized by the public. But never was honor more dangerous or glory more deadly. At the least failure the heroes of the games were sacrificed in their turn. The greater their popularity, the more exaggerated the audience’s demands of them and the greater the threat to their lives. In certain particularly febrile periods, fall followed apotheosis so fast that even the most ambitious or heedless were affected and sometimes faltered. But the peoples of the Empire prized fame so highly that the games never lacked victors or idols. Sometimes they would be executed the day after their fleeting triumph, but they died happy.

  Conversely, war was a lighthearted butchery, full of color and movement. It was an honor, a competition, a game. It obeyed strict rules that, though largely arbitrary, were never broken. One stopped fighting when it snowed, when the moon was full, or if a fox crossed the battlefield. Basil the Great was suspected of taking cages of foxes with him on his expeditions to quell rebellion. He was even accused of having let one out to end the indecisive battle of Amphibolus. In any case, the fox of Amphibolus was one of the causes—at least one of the manifest causes—of the hostility between emperors and priests, which was later to have such serious consequences. The priests were involved in every aspect of the life of the Empire. If battles were games, like all games they had their rules, and these rules were closely connected with magic and ritual. As Professor Bjöersenson has put it, “The Empire rested on three pillars. It had three preoccupations and three laws that were really one: war, feasting, and religion.”