The lottery began amidst drunken laughter. Alexis looked on, somewhat distant. In growing chaos the minor prizes began to be distributed—parrots, cameos, stone scarabs, forfeits that carried derisory consequences, like pieces of cloth or fines. The roistering grew louder, but Alexis remained strangely calm. The tumultuous night seemed about to peter out in weariness and depression when the high priest and his great-niece came to take leave of their host. Alexis got up to accompany them to the door, but after a few steps he turned, as if surprised, to the old man.
“But you are not going to leave empty-handed?” he said. “Without a prize or a jewel or anything? Didn’t you take part in the lottery I organized for my friends?”
“Thank you,” said the high priest. “I’m too old for that kind of amusement.”
“I want you to join in,” said Alexis. “I insist.” And he clapped his hands.
A huge Sudanese emerged from the shadows, followed by a young girl, almost naked but for her golden necklaces, and carrying a basket. There were two bits of folded parchment left in it. Alexis leaned toward the high priest, seized him by the wrist, and cried with blazing eyes:
“Choose! Choose!”
In the light of the dying torches, Alexis’s face was swept with waves of excitement and madness. The old man fell back, hesitated, then, with his eyes fixed on Alexis, stretched out his trembling, wrinkled hand toward the girl, who, smiling, tendered the woven basket lined with gold-threaded scarlet silk. He drew out one of the two parchments. Alexis snatched it from him and read it aloud. It didn’t take long. All that was written there was “Death.”
“You are fortunate, old man!” cried Alexis in an unnaturally shrill voice and turning his back on him. “You have drawn a lot which is only that of all men. God knows what is on the other parchment! I wish you a peaceful death when your hour comes.”
The priest did not answer—he suddenly seemed very old. Vanessa had turned pale. She was obviously ill and looked as if she were about to swoon. There was something sinister in the way the feast was breaking up, amid mockery, exhaustion, and the kind of trembling insanity generated by alcohol just before daybreak. The old man and his great-niece went out together into the darkness, deathly tired, confused by the noise and commotion, appalled by Alexis’s behavior—like ghosts of suffering and death who had somehow strayed among pleasures.
A few moments later, on his way home, the high priest was set upon in the street and beaten by four or five unidentified men. Vanessa, terrified but unhurt, managed to get the old man to his house, covered in blood. He died that day. The young priestess could not be present because she was forbidden to look on a dead body. Rumors about the banquet and the lottery had already spread from house to house, and the affair caused an enormous scandal. Though Alexis had long been a topic for talk in Alexandria, he seemed to have grown quieter the last year or so. But his past had been so lurid that now, though the city was used to every kind of excess, an outcry arose that was all the louder because it had been held in check so long by friendship or astonishment. Philocrates suddenly reappeared, now that his pupil was in danger, and spared no efforts on his behalf. He besieged the priests, the judges, the city authorities: there was nothing to prove that the young man was guilty, no evidence of any connection between the lottery and the attack on the high priest. Of course Alexis’s behavior had been disgraceful. But the Alexandrian nights were so full of such insults and indignities that people had ceased to take any notice. The murder of the high priest was altogether more serious than any childish prank, in however bad taste. Although many tried, no one succeeded in implicating Alexis directly in the old man’s death. The affair was a nine days’ wonder, and then would probably have faded out and been forgotten if it had not been revived in an unexpected fashion. The high priest had left behind a secret will which he entrusted to a young pupil and confidant of his who was both violent and ambitious. This will accused Vanessa outright of treachery and murder. The young man handed the document over to the college of priests, and in less than five days Vanessa was arrested, imprisoned, tried by a tribunal of priests, and sentenced to death.
The punishment for guardians of the flame convicted of serious dereliction of duty was prescribed down to the last detail. It consisted of a dreadful kind of death of which vestiges are found in various civilizations, including that of Japan a few centuries ago. The victim was both stoned and buried alive. A hole was dug in the ground and filled with clay and rubble, and in this she was buried up to the hips or shoulders. Then, on the trunk and arms and face still left exposed, the assembled crowd threw stones, branches, and missiles of all descriptions until the victim died of injuries or asphyxiation. Sometimes she would be wounded in the head and die quickly, but in other cases she would suffer an awful, long-drawn-out suffocation as she was gradually submerged beneath an incongruous mass of old rags, mud, wood, broken toys, bricks, refuse, and rubbish.
Alexis could not have been ignorant of the fate in store for Vanessa. If we know next to nothing about his horror at the end he had brought upon his mistress, who did nothing to resist it, we may suppose it is because any documents or other evidence were sought out and destroyed later by envoys of the Emperor. We shall come back to this point. In any case, we can easily imagine how for Alexis it must have been like awakening out of a drunken dream. There is an indication of this in a letter written by Isidore, who, probably kept informed by Philocrates, is found a few months after the tragedy still expressing the gravest anxiety for the young man’s health and even life. How could one doubt that Alexis wanted to save Vanessa or to die with her? And how can one doubt, either, that Philocrates, caring only for his pupil’s best interests, used all his wisdom and firmness to dissuade him from desperate acts that could not have saved the priestess from torture and death, and might have involved Alexis in the same fate? A persistent tradition, in which it is difficult to distinguish legend from fact, has it that on the night before the execution Vanessa was kidnapped from the prison by means of a mysterious plot, and her place taken by a young hysteric, a girl insensible with drugs and wine, who was killed in her stead, wearing the ritual veils that hid the victim even from her executioners. It is of course impossible, so many years later, to hope that the truth will ever be known about this historical enigma, which has given and continues to give rise to so many theories and to so much passion. What is certain is that an execution did take place. As dawn was breaking, a long procession went from the prison to the lonely place still known as “Qabr al-fatat” or “Torbat el-bint,” both phrases meaning “the girl’s tomb.”[6] A white shape, half fainting, was buried in the earth freshly dug in accordance with the law, and the execution began. Apparently a fatal blow was struck quite soon, and the stones and branches only fell on a corpse. The body was left buried under the heap of missiles for three days and nights, and on the fourth day it was burned by the priests. Some maintain that Philocrates and his pupil secretly attended the execution, and that the fatal, liberating stone was cast by Alexis.
XII
THE YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS, OR THE FOOL OF GOD
GREAT DESTINIES AND PROMISED LANDS ALWAYS LIE on the other side of a desert. For seven years according to some, twelve years according to others, Alexis vanished from the scene of history. It is as if he were taken from the land of the living by a premature death.[1] We are sadly lacking in details of time and place for this mysterious phase in the life of the future emperor. Until 1952, all attempts at historical reconstruction of the missing pieces in the puzzle were merely shadowy conjectures. The most one could legitimately do was question, for chronological and internal reasons, the theory that twelve years was the length of time Alexis spent unheard of in unknown countries. According to Justus Dion, Isidore, and Philocrates, Alexis was eleven or twelve when he left his mother and Simeon. Then came the years of apprenticeship and wandering through Europe and the Near East with Philocrates, and when he was initiated into the cult of the sun he was eighteen. The Alexandrian per
iod lasted between three and five years: one or two years of dissolute living and roistering, two or three years of passion for Vanessa. At the time of the execution of the guardian of the flame, or perhaps of the unknown substitute, Alexis must have been about twenty-two or twenty-three. Twelve years of exile in Asia would bring him up to thirty-four or thirty-five. For reasons too lengthy to go into, it is very unlikely that Alexis could have been as old as thirty-five when he emerged into the daylight of history again. It is much more likely that he was about twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. That brings us back to the theory that it was seven years that he spent in secret. It is not impossible that the length of this period was exaggerated by successive historians and mythologists in order to create a parallel between Alexis and Christ. For many years nothing is known of Jesus and the secret life he lived between boyhood and the period of his death. Those who wrote about Alexis may have been trying to allege a symmetry. Of course, both seven and twelve are figures with a symbolic connotation. In any event, in the case of Alexis seven seems nearer to the truth.
After time—space. Where did Alexis take refuge during his voluntary exile? Here, again, the most arbitrary hypotheses have long been advanced. Some claim Alexis can be traced in the Maghreb, Sudan, Yemen, the Arabian deserts, or on the shores of the Persian Gulf or the Black Sea. Others say he was among the Varangians, the shamans of Siberia, or in the tundras of the far north. Most probably he headed eastward, to Afghanistan or India (perhaps like Jesus again?), Nepal or Tibet. But we must not conceal from ourselves the boldness of all these conjectures. True, it was admitted that Alexis’s familiarity with the geography and languages and mysticism of the East suggested a lengthy stay in those fabulous and fascinating regions. But until quite recently that was the limit of our knowledge of this mysterious period in one of the most astonishing lives in history. And there matters would have remained had it not been for the emergence of a new factor: from 1952 and 1954 on, new sources and sensational revelations became available about this part of Alexis’s life. We must go back a little to pick up the thread of what was to prove an exemplary discovery. Let us digress for a moment from Alexis to dwell briefly on the adventures of one who is perhaps the most curious figure in contemporary science.
Around the year 1890 there lived in Damascus a very gifted young man called Armand Bourdaille. He had been born in Saint-Gaudens of a Jewish mother, and was a great reader of Renan, Burnouf, ibn-Khaldun, and ibn-Batuta. From very early on he had been fascinated by Islam. His father was a vice-consul in Syria and a man of great learning and virtue; he was a friend of Maurice Barrès, Paul Claudel, and Victor Segalen, and had met Rimbaud when he was sent, a few years earlier, on a trade mission to Harar. Armand was brought up by his father in an atmosphere of learned poetry and mysticism. In 1892, when he was seventeen, Armand, stifling in Damascus among the soldiers and the diplomats and yearning for adventure and a life of freedom and purity, entered into an exalted friendship with a young Arab called Abed. Together the two young men left behind them the comforts of bourgeois family life, and joined a camel caravan which went across the Syrian and Arabian deserts to the Red Sea, Sinai, and Cairo. One after another Abed and Bourdaille saw the magic landscapes that had formed a background to the life of Jesus; the shores of Lake Tiberias; the monastery of Saint Catherine; the boundless wastes of sand and wind. And all the time they shared the harsh and slow existence of the Moslem nomads. Bourdaille was very struck by their piety, and the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam mingled in his mind and heart in a lofty, ardent faith in which all the strands converged to form an esoteric monotheism. After two years of this life of adventure, Bourdaille arrived in Cairo with Abed, whose charm and intelligence were equally outstanding. Unwilling to part from his companion or to go back and live in the shadow of consulates and business houses, he registered as a student at Al Azhar University, and for two or three years attended the traditional lectures on Islamic history and mysticism. At twenty-five Armand Bourdaille took his place with outstanding brilliance in the great line of French orientalists. It is difficult to decide whether the son of the former vice-consul in Damascus was the representative of French science in Islam, or the representative of Islamic culture in France.
Many years later, about 1948 or 1950, toward the end of his life, we find the. elderly Armand Bourdaille a professor at the Collège de France and the École pratique des hautes études. He had become one of the most eminent specialists on the history of the Near East from the period of the supremacy of classical Egypt till the heyday of Islam. Throughout his life he had pursued the intellectual adventure of which he was the best embodiment. He had experienced a new mystical insight in Rome, on the eve of the First World War. One of his close friends, Alexandre de la Ferrière, a devout Catholic and godson of Albert de Mun, had made the acquaintance in Rome of a dazzlingly beautiful girl of Baltic origin. The young man had fallen madly in love with her, but the girl, who was a distant cousin of the Bourdailles and knew Armand well, was a Jewess. Alexandre de la Ferrière, barefoot and in a hair shirt, went around to all the basilicas in Rome offering God his life in exchange for the girl’s conversion. Three months later she was converted and married Alexandre, who asked Bourdaille to act as witness. But after only a few months of rapturous happiness the young husband died suddenly.
The funeral was held in the little church of San Giovanni a Porta Latina, just by the oratory of San Giovanni in Oleo, built on the spot where, according to legend, Saint John emerged unscathed from the ordeal of boiling oil. In front of the church, by a well, there was a tall cedar that shaded the whole square. Armand Bourdaille sat down on the lip of the well, worn out with grief and resentment, cursing in his heart the divine injustice that never hesitates to strike down innocence and happiness, and refusing to enter the church of a cruel and jealous God. The sun shone brightly, flooding with light the little square, the front of the church with the veil of shadow between its columns, the campanile, and the old cedar. Bourdaille, his eyes filled with tears, was staring unseeing at this beautiful view of desolation and of peace, when suddenly the sky seemed to grow dark, and all the light seemed to be concentrated on the cedar, which began to glow with a thousand fires. The organ inside the church seemed to have gone silent, but heavenly music poured from the tree, transfigured by some strange glory. An irresistible force threw Bourdaille on his knees with his face to the ground—the Virgin Mary had just appeared to him. The problem of evil, which had tortured his every moment for so many years, was now only a source of joy and faith—Bourdaille’s spiritual destiny had taken yet another new turn.
He whose inspiration and life had been Islam now had only one wish, one dream—to become a priest of Christ and of the Roman Catholic Church. It is said that during one of the many private audiences granted him by the Pope, he described the continual progress made by Islam and said it was difficult to find one example of a Moslem converted to Christianity to oppose to the many examples of conversion in the other direction. The Pope smiled and said reproachfully, “Come, come, M. Bourdaille! What about you?” But conversion was not enough. Bourdaille wanted to be ordained. The difficulty was that he was married. But he didn’t give up. He looked for a solution, and he found one. One morning early, his wife saw him dressed ready to go out. She asked him where he was going so early. He looked at her gravely, then, with tears in his eyes, fell at her feet, and asked forgiveness. He was going out to celebrate Mass. For the past two years, though she had not known it, Angèle Bourdaille had been married to a Uniate priest.
Though a Christian now and a priest, Bourdaille had sacrificed none of his fidelity to Islam. The Uniates, who, unlike the Orthodox Church, recognize the authority of Rome and the Pope, do not only have married priests. They also represent one of the essential links in the chain between the Roman Catholic Church and the world of Eastern faith and mysticism. Bourdaille now lived a pure life of the spirit in which religious ardor was based on learning. Until the end of his life his main preo
ccupation was a reconciliation of the three monotheistic religions. The conflict between Israel and Ishmael, Jews and Arabs, broke his heart. His Jewish origins, his familiarity with Islam, and his Christian faith are all closely bound up with his work, which can only be explained in terms of the loftiest inner life. Anecdote is here inseparable from faith and science—that is why we have chosen to dwell on it.
From 1950 on, Bourdaille spent several months every year in the Near East, to get on with his work but above all to try to resolve people’s differences. He was helped by a young Arab, Ahmed Badalwi, Abed’s grandson. There was the warmest affection between them. Ahmed, though still young, was already a distinguished archeologist. A communist, brought up in Moscow, he had been converted to Christianity under the influence of Bourdaille, and he too had become a priest. Wearing an ancient Jesuit’s cassock that was older than he was, and which soon became famous from Antioch to Tyre and Sinai, he directed the excavations in Jordan and Palestine and had contacts with many Arab shepherds, craftsmen, and truck drivers, who gave him information about the accidental finds thrown up here and there by plowing, building, local research, or mere chance. One evening when he was working at Petra a young herdsman asked to see him, in great secrecy and putting on airs of mystery. Ahmed saw him and asked what brought him there. The boy said that while searching for a lost sheep the day before, he had found himself in a deep, dark cave. Poking about after his charge, he had come upon a strange kind of parcel. He held it out, shyly. The priest undid the packet and glanced idly at some earth-covered scrolls that looked on the point of crumbling to dust. Then he looked more closely, and started. He turned to the boy, who was standing about, twiddling his fingers nervously, clapped him on the back, and gave him the biggest sum of money the boy had ever seen. Two hours later, though it was nighttime now, the Jesuit leaped into his jeep and set out for Jerusalem, where Professor Bourdaille had arrived a few days before.
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