The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  Sir Allan Carter-Bennett gives a diametrically opposed and much more convincing explanation. He, like Robert Weill-Pichon, believes that if anyone was able to divine Alexis’s future destiny even while he was still a boy, it was not Gandolphus but Philocrates himself, who knew him best and was closest to him. And far from distracting him, he prepared and armed him for the struggles to come. Seen in this light, what happened takes on a coherent meaning. If Philocrates encouraged Alexis to undergo an initiation he himself avoided, it was because the role of a prince and leader is different from that of a scholar. The philosopher prefers problems to solutions, whereas the man of action must settle questions and make definitive choices. In action the essential thing is to keep going always in the same direction and never hesitate. For a thinker the important thing is always to leave every issue open, to call everything into question, and to admit no impossibilities for the mind. Mind seeks, action decides. For himself, Philocrates had every right to adopt a task that was infinite, a quest to which he set no bounds. But Alexis had to be led away from endless speculation and offered at once the comforts of religion and all the help that spiritual certainty can give to action. And religion and the gods gave Alexis not only a way out of the metaphysical torments that so preoccupy youth, but also the backing of a strong organization, a hierarchy, a system of values and authorities. If, immediately afterward, Philocrates encouraged Alexis to return to the world and its pleasures, it was because there is temptation in certainty no less than in seeking. When once you have found the answer, why bother any more about all life’s vanities? One can lose one’s way in solutions as well as in problems. If Philocrates had wished to spare the young man the anguish of chaos, it was not in order to let him be swamped in the contemplation of certainty. So the philosopher set before his pupil all the marvels of nature and men as seen in the order of the world established by the gods.[3]

  It is not certain the initiation into the cult of the sun took place in Alexandria, but we do come upon Philocrates and his pupil there eventually, plunged in the welter of pleasure that made the great city the scandal and wonder of the world. At this period Alexandria presented a dubious yet fascinating spectacle. It embodied what Athens represented at the time of its splendor, or Rome at the time of its decline, Florence under the Medicis, Venice in the eighteenth century, or Paris under the Second Empire or after the First World War. But Alexandria had sunk lower into abjectness and self-contempt, and offered the world a rarely paralleled example of excess, in which debauchery and lust held undivided sway. “It was,” says Renan, “an incredible collection of mountebanks, quacks, mimes, magicians, healers, sorcerers, and false priests. A city of racing, gaming, dancing, processions, feasts, and bacchanals; of unbridled luxury, all the follies of the East, the most morbid superstitions and fanatical orgies. The Alexandrians, sometimes servile and cowardly, sometimes ungrateful and insolent, were the very model of a mob without country, without nationality, without family honor, without a name to preserve. The great corso that ran through the town was like a theater traversed all day long by wave after wave of people, frivolous, fickle, unstable, riotous, and sometimes witty, entirely taken up with songs, parodies, jest, and impertinence.” On anyone attractive or amusing were lavished the loveliest women, the most sumptuous ceremonies, all the delights of food and flesh, refinement combined with luxuriance, the extremes of excitement and novelty. Alexis was very attractive and amusing. And he had scarcely emerged from the revelations of divinity before he plunged into the vortex of pleasure with all the ardor of his twenty years.

  Among the pleasure seekers and debauchees money flowed like water, and Alexis did not lack for it. Helen regularly sent Philocrates large sums, which he could put to all the better use now because he had scarcely touched them during the long hard years of wandering apprenticeship. He had gone to usurers and pawnbrokers not, like most young men, to borrow money, but to offer to lend it at reasonable interest. The interest had been accumulating, and now Philocrates began to enjoy the profits of those comfortless years of travel and living in the open. His reputation also was beginning to spread in the same way as that of Thaumas in the previous generation. And instead of using it in the service of political ambition, he offered people his services as a teacher of rhetoric or literature, and asked for very high fees. To do him justice, the veritable fortune he amassed from the sale of his learning was exclusively devoted to paying for Alexis’s pleasures. Words of wisdom were converted into extravagances, and Alexis’s chariots, clothes, jewels, servants, and horses were soon the admiration of the city. It was all processions, races in the arena, boating parties at night, fireworks, masquerades, and feasts. In the midst of this pomp and luxury, Philocrates never lost his head. He gave Alexis enough to dazzle Alexandria, but he kept enough to plow back into speculations that he managed so skillfully they always provided what was required.

  During the years of apprenticeship the Greek had mixed with men of every trade, and learned which were the most profitable. The ones he had chosen were sea-borne commerce and marine investment. While Alexis amused himself, Philocrates acquired two or three ships which he sent out to Pomposa, Sicily, and the City laden with rare woods and rich vases. The fortune they earned him he divided into two, the smaller going to swell Alexis’s supplies, the larger going toward the purchase of a veritable fleet of ships which, in two or three years, grew to be one of the largest in Alexandria. Hard times were over. Thanks to Philocrates and his talents, Helen’s son reigned over the gilded youth of Lower Egypt.

  In his celebrated study Masters and Disciples, Paul Bourget examines one after the other the relationships between Mentor and Telemachus, Aristotle and Alexander, Saint Augustine and Adeodatus, Heloise and Abelard, Descartes and Princess Elizabeth, the Abbé Vautrin and Rubempré, M. Hinstin and Isidore Ducasse. He gives a good deal of space, with reason, to the influence of Philocrates on Alexis. The philosopher kept in the background, but he was always there. Two or three times, even before the final disaster, Alexis went too far and was involved in shady or improper affairs that might have caused a scandal. Each time Philocrates intervened and got him out of it. He advised him, schemed for him, acted as intermediary in such murky plots that he might have been thought to be helping him to his ruin. But in fact he was guiding him and saving him.

  A moving piece of evidence has come down to us from these years in Alexandria. This is the famous cameo from the Dresden Museum that shows Alexis standing in his chariot, probably after some procession or a race in which he had been the winner. He is handsome. His long fair hair streams in the wind. His young face wears an expression of gaiety and pride. He was not very tall, but he was supple and beautifully proportioned, and attractive to both men and women. Though thin and slight when very young, he had been hardened by experience and practice until his exploits rivaled, often to their fury, those of the most famous athletes. But most of his strength went toward assuaging a thirst for pleasure and sensuality that often reached terrifying proportions.

  He who had been, and was to be again, so sober and even austere, was seized with a sort of frenzy of luxury and lust. He moved house several times in Alexandria. His last residence there was a palace of unsurpassable richness. His bed was covered with cloth of gold, and all his dishes and plates, some of which depicted scenes of great license, were also either of gold or solid silver. He gave banquets the splendor and daring of which have come down in history. One of the most famous, echoed right down to the epics of the later Middle Ages, had as guests all his mistresses, their husbands and lovers, the wives and other mistresses of these husbands and lovers, the husbands and other lovers of these wives and mistresses, and so on. In this way Alexis gathered round him a vast crowd of guests many of whom did not know each other despite the intimate links between them. He called these gatherings, to use the neologism invented by Amyot to render the Greek expression (an invention much admired by Malherbe and Vaugelas), his “connubial banquets.” The menu of the most successful of the
se feasts has luckily survived. The drinks were extremely select: resinated wines, wines made of pennyroyal, roses, and crushed pine cones. These accompanied sausage made of oysters, conches, crayfish, and squill; dromedaries’ heels; the combs of living cocks; nightingales’ and peacocks’ tongues, offered as a preventive against the plague; mules’ innards; sows’ dugs and vulvas with lentils and rice; ostriches’ and phenicopters’ brains; partridges’ eggs; parrots’, pheasants’, and peacocks’ heads; and, instead of cress and fenugreek, mules’ membranes—“quite astonishing,” as one of the chroniclers comments.[4]

  Alexis, like Alcibiades and Brummell, saw surprise and boldness as the key of his entertainments. What he liked to do was astonish people. Barbey d’Aurevilly[5] very subtly perceives in this a secret desire for power. Alexis loathed habit and routine. He threw himself into pleasure as if it were a substitute for fame. And in sensuality at least he needed no teacher.

  He carried eccentricity to the point of never making use more than once of the same clothes, the same shoes, the same jewel, or the same woman. It was said he excreted into goblets of gold or silver, and urinated into vessels of jade and onyx inlaid with precious stones. He was passionately fond of dressing up, and would disguise himself as a pastry cook, perfumer, innkeeper, or pimp, and was so punctilious in debauchery as to enter into the activities belonging to the disguise he wore. After nights of infamy, when he did not shrink from wallowing in filth at his companions’ feet, he would be overcome next morning by storms of weeping and despair at his own degradation. But the next day he would start all over again. And despite the fact that he humiliated others and himself, Alexandria and all Mediterranean Egypt were full of friends and admirers whose only wish, usually vain, was to imitate or rival him. This was because his generosity was as boundless as his self-abasement. After terrifying his guests by loosing leopards or snakes into the banqueting chamber, he would make it up to them with little presents of eunuchs, mules, rare ornaments, or chariots. True, some of his gifts were tacit insults, as on the night when, having gotten them drunk, he shut up some of his friends with a group of lewd black prostitutes, aged and repulsively ugly, who had been instructed to carry out certain farfetched practices no matter what the resistance. From time to time he would organize lotteries that gave free scope at once to his imagination, generosity, and scorn: one contestant would win twenty pieces of gold, another a hen’s egg, a third a wolf, and a fourth three strokes from a cudgel. The first prize on one of the most famous evenings hatched by Alexis’s imagination, after a good deal of drinking, was the virginity of a girl of twelve or thirteen whom her mother had sold to a young rake for a few pieces of silver.[6] One of these lotteries led to a scandal that was to have an important effect on Alexis’s career. We shall revert to it in due course.

  Alexis’s real passion was women. He loved them to distraction, and they loved him madly in return. Alexandria then shared with Antioch and Pomposa the reputation of being one of the most depraved cities in the world. It is not difficult to imagine how every vice proliferated in such a setting. Homosexuality was held in honor, and very probably Alexis, like the rest, joined in worshipping the beauty of boys. But it was toward women that he was drawn both by temperament and taste, and into the love of women he put a kind of fury that inspired his contemporaries with amazement and even terror.

  Though Don Juan is probably a modern invention, André Maurois is right when he says that the young Alexis shows more than one trait characteristic of Don Juan or Byron. He loved to please, conquer, and dominate, and, unlike Philocrates, he liked to get the better of other people. An acute observer might have seen his follies and excesses as signs of his future greatness. Vice, debauchery, the most impure love can also be a kind of glory in reverse, and an avidity for every sort of love may be closer than we think to a fascination with death and a longing for power. Alexis was not yet thinking of power, but under his passion for women there was certainly an ardor for living and a thirst for the world that might well have made the Venostae uneasy, and that would later, under the influence of mysterious demiurges, change their motives and objects and be directed toward very different conquests. In the forests of his infancy, Alexis had appeared a dreamy child unattracted to violence or the chase. And now, in his youth, love appeared to him as a kind of chase, but one that was a matter of persuasion rather than constraint. In the depraved Alexandria described by Renan, kidnapping and rape were not exceptional, but there is not one example of Alexis ever taking part in the nocturnal expeditions in which wild young men struck terror into the hearts of mothers and breathless duennas. Like all great seducers, Alexis never used force or threats. In fact, he did not even need to seduce at all, but simply agreed to let himself be seduced. He used to say, “No one has been so ravished as I since the Trojan War.” In order to make these ravishments possible, he was almost forced to apply the rule already mentioned, never to make love more than once to the same woman or girl. This peculiarity soon became known. The news spread first through the city itself, and finally became a subject for jest and more or less horrified admiration throughout the eastern Mediterranean, from Alexandria to Tyre, Antioch, Chalcis, and Tarsus.

  Man thinks it is he who leads his life, but his life also leads him. A few months, a few years of a regime by which Alexis is supposed to have entertained brief relations with one hundred forty-four young women (or, according to other traditions, three hundred sixty-five, or even one thousand and one)—we may notice in passing the mythical significance of the numbers—and change itself had become routine. Thus, in spite of all, everything is transmuted into order, even disorder itself. By a strange and probably revealing paradox, it came about that Alexis, who had more women at his feet than he desired, could only endure the company of courtesans and prostitutes. There was no lack of them in Alexandria, and Alexis was their master, their hero, their god. The future emperor’s first taste of celebrity came to him from brothels and houses of ill-fame.

  To carry paradox to its furthest extreme, the young man forbade himself to touch prostitutes whose services he had bought at an exorbitant price. He would just load them with presents and send them away. To anyone who expressed astonishment at this he would say: “Must one sleep with all the women who are one’s friends?” One of the most famous courtesans of Alexandria, who has left a name behind in the history of manners, was called Imperia. The lovely Imperia was born in Genoa, where, when still very young, she had been the mistress of a nobleman called Philippe Mala or de Mala. The hazards of war brought Philippe de Mala to Africa, where he met his death outside the walls of Pelusium. Imperia, whom he had brought with him, settled in Alexandria, where her charm and beauty soon made her the first among the city’s daughters of pleasure. Alexis sent her the rarest perfumes, precious stones, a pair of murrhine vases, and a crocodile, which much to the horror of visitors she installed in her swimming pool. Imperia was seized with a violent passion for Alexis, who was a good fifteen years younger than she. But he never touched her who had received into her bed every man of any note in Alexandria; he respected her as if she were a virgin. This strange form of homage nearly drove Imperia mad. He would accept only one favor from her, and that she granted with pleasure: one evening on which there was a masquerade, he had her harnessed, bare-breasted and together with three common prostitutes, to a chariot decked with flowers and silks. He took his place quite coolly in this conveyance, and drove in it through the streets of the city.

  When, as usual, he was indulging in drinking and debauchery, and had begun with his own hand and his own razor to shave the crotches of half a dozen prostitutes, explaining that a bastard could not aspire to the noble profession of barber for men, he suddenly took a fancy to visit a banquet, to which he had been invited, in one of the most respectable houses in the city. He had stayed away in order to get drunk in bad company, and now he proposed to go to sup with the severe and highly esteemed judge who had invited him, accompanied by the half-naked courtesans who were with him. Two
or three soberer friends tried to dissuade him, but in vain—it was very difficult to make Alexis change his mind once it was made up. His only concession was to cover more or less decently the prostitutes he had been amusing himself with; and then the whole party set out—it was already after dark—for the gardens near the gates of the city where the banquet was being held.