The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  In the Piero della Francesca fresco the page in the blue suit with the little cap of yellow silk is a tiny figure at Helen’s feet. Behind him rises the tall figure of Alexis, dressed as a Renaissance gentleman with a red cape over his shoulders. He has seen Helen and is restraining himself from throwing himself into her arms. Helen has not yet recognized him, but something in her look, her gesture, her whole attitude heralds her stifled cry and the spring she is about to make to her son’s side. In the Il Sodoma fresco all is more suggestive, flexible, and passionate. It presents the scene in the form of a hymn to beauty, but just as plainly as the della Francesca it is based on the account in Justus Dion. All three works, the two frescoes and the chronicle, express with the infinitely varied resources of talent and genius the faithfulness of memory, the keenness of surprise, at the very moment when sorrow and doubt are about to be swept away by the almost painful explosion of joy. “She had raised her eyes,” writes Justus Dion, “to the lad who approached her. She lowered them now before the man, just sprung breathless from his horse, yet noble in mien and movement, who came up behind the boy. For a few seconds all stood motionless, Helen, the maids of honor, the squires, the knight, and his young companion, as if transfixed by surprise and the solemnity of the moment. Then there was a movement among the women, and Helen made a faint gesture as if about to retire. Then she looked up and saw him—disheveled, running with sweat, hardly able to stand, wild-eyed, and stretching his hands out toward her. Which of them cried out first? The horseman had already thrown himself at Helen’s feet and embraced her knees. And Helen raised him up, took him in her arms like a child, stroked his face with trembling hands, and covered it with kisses and tears.

  “The mother said in a low voice, ‘My son, my son . . .’

  “And the son said, ‘Mother!’ and kissed her hands.”[9]

  The meeting between Helen and Alexis was a turning point in the conquest of power. Helen had retained considerable influence over the warrior tribes of the northeast, though since the hope of finding her son had begun to wane she had ceased to exercise it. With Alexis’s return, Helen immediately recovered her old energy and authority. She kept Jester with her, and in two or three months the two of them, the already elderly woman and the boy, had mustered a troop of soldiers from the backwoods, ardent for battle and blindly devoted to the cause of Helen and her son. Alexis now had what the rebellion and renaissance had hitherto lacked—a large body of troops trained and ready to fight. Already things were beginning to put on a different aspect, and the balance of forces was changing.

  It will be remembered that the entire northern part of the Empire was more or less under the domination of a barbarian chief called Arrhideus. Repulsive-looking, fierce, always mounted on a little Barbary horse from which he was said to dismount only to sleep and make love, but not to eat or drink, Arrhideus was left out in the cold by the triple alliance concluded farther south by Kanishka, Mardoch, and Astakia. On his own, faced with the hostility not only of the tribes and the people, but also, most of the time, of rival barbarians, Arrhideus had never managed to impose his rule and authority all over the north. Anarchy was the only undivided power there. Arrhideus did not bother. He would wipe out two or three villages from time to time to make everyone afraid of him, and apart from that was content with amassing gold and indulging in pleasures not of the most refined. After Alexis had gone south again to organize the revolt in Aquileus and the valley of the Amphyses, a struggle soon broke out in the north between Arrhideus and Helen. As soon as the news got about that Helen was going to take up the fight again, warriors and tribes flocked to her cause. Arrhideus was soon isolated, though he did not fully realize the precariousness of his position. Helen avoided a confrontation as long as she could. She extended her influence, continued to cut off her opponent, secured support even in the barbarian’s personal bodyguard, improved her army’s weaponry and supplies, and strengthened her communications with the rest of the Empire. Jester served as a link between mother and son. He was always on the road, over hill and dale, whistling and laughing and, with incredible gaiety, risking his life. Through all one spring and summer Jester traveled through the Empire like this, on foot or on horseback, a comical cap on his head to protect him from the sun, a song on his lips, and his head full of the names of villages and officers, figures, calculations, and messages. In the end he became famous throughout the Empire, which did not make his task any easier. Barbarians and mercenaries pursued him as fiercely as they did Alexis and Helen; there was a price on his head, too. His example, well calculated to inflame the enthusiasm of the young, caused first dozens, then hundreds of boys and girls to arise literally from nowhere, eager to give Helen and Alexis the help of their ardor and inexperience, and often even of their lives. It is on Germany and the Anglo-Saxon countries even more than on Italy and France that the laughing epic of Jester has left the deepest impression. He is the origin of countless tales and legends, from the young rogues of folklore beyond the Rhine and the heroes of Germanic Wanderlust, wandering across hills and forests with bundle or haversack on their shoulders, and on Midsummer Night faithfully celebrating the memory of Jester, easily recognized under various borrowed names—from these on the one hand to, on the other, the girls, the boys, and youths in Defoe, Schnabel, Johann Rudolf Wyss, the brothers Grimm, Hans Andersen, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Selma Lagerlöf, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, and Kipling, all of whom are in some way or another in direct descent from Jester, imitating his exploits and deriving much of their reputation and success from him. Till Eulenspiegel is obviously one of Jester’s avatars. In France, Fénelon’s Adventures of a Child of the Empire, the Abbé Barthélemy’s Journey of the Young Jester, Rousseau, Mme. de Genlis, Hector Malot, the Comtesse de Ségur, and Zénaïde Fleuriot all set him before the children of their time as an example. And everyone knows the fictional but famous representations of him left by Murillo (an inspired picture in the Prado in Madrid) and Luca della Robbia (the famous terracottas on the façade of the Spedale degli Innocenti (Foundlings’ Hospital) in Pistoia, a stone’s throw from the cathedral square.

  But alas, the story was to end in blood. One autumn day on a bend of the Amphyses near Kora-Kora, Jester was suddenly surrounded by a detachment of Astakia’s men. He went on laughing, defying, and making fun of them. They asked him for names, where he came from, whom he was going to see, if he had come across any of Alexis’s supporters. His only answer was clowning; he threw his cap at their captain’s head. He was hit in the side by a pike, and died gaily. The blood that poured from his mouth stifled his singing at last. Victor Hugo must have remembered Jester when he wrote Les Misérables. While the character of Enjolras is a portrait of Saint-Just, the death of Gavroche the Paris urchin is obviously inspired by that of Jester.[10] But the most extraordinary thing in the factual history of the Empire was that Jester lived on after his death. Alexis was genius enough to realize what the loss of Jester meant to his cause. So among the troop of children who had offered themselves to him he chose the bravest and gayest and named him Jester. This second Jester was to be killed in his turn, as was a third and a fourth. But in Alexis’s shadow, innumerable new Jesters indefatigably arose. After the coming of victory and peace, we never find the Emperor without a boy called Jester at his side. His function is to amuse and provoke laughter, and he is permitted, and pardoned in advance for, any folly. This, as has been definitively established by the works of Robert Weill-Pichon and of the American ethnologist A. W. Grock, is the historical origin of the king’s fool.[11] Hugo, in his old age, would have been surprised to learn that his Gavroche in Les Misérables, his Triboulet in Le Roi s’amuse, and Verdi’s Rigoletto, were all one and the same character at different ages, all equally entitled to be called the heirs of Jester.

  Meanwhile the struggle had broken out with great ferocity. While in the north Helen raised the forest tribes, in the south Isidore, Philocrates, and Alexis re-formed the instrument of the Empire’s liberation and r
ebirth around the memory of the priests, the Porphyries, Arsaphes, Basil, and Thaumas. The nature and forms of this resurrection have caused much ink to flow. According to some it was a genuine national war before its time, while others see it as a popular revolt. Some believe it involved real pitched battles, though in that case they would have left less trace materially and in memory than the more ancient battles of Cape Gildor or Amphibolus, or even than obscure but almost contemporary massacres by such men as Astakia and Mardoch between the City and Gildor or on the banks of the Nephta. Others again, with apparently better reason, stress the subterranean methods of the conspiracy, and the gaining of imperial power from within.

  But whether it was a real war or a popular revolt, the speed of operations was surprising. Less than two and a half years after Alexis’s return, authority and peace were restored in the Empire. Compared to the long years of the flight into Asia and in the wilderness, these few months that changed the history of the world seem strangely short. Let us try to recount and to explain briefly the course of events.

  Those who explain these events by secret action and those who maintain there was a violent confrontation all agree on one point: the operation set in motion by the conspirators is one of the most remarkable examples of a successful plot in the history of the world. Of course, we must be on our guard here against anachronism. Is there really any need to insist on the gulf that separates the Empire at that period from the tyrants who have organized modern states as we know them today? Not only demographically but also as regards communications, social and economic structure, and, above all, customs and ways of thinking, everything is completely different. There can be no question of comparison, or of drawing facile parallels and so-called lessons from the past. Yet perhaps some philosophers and historians have gone too far in the admittedly sound direction of specificity, differentiation, and the treatment of every historical epoch and outlook as separate. The Industrial Revolution and the evolution of religion since Alexis’s day make his age and ambitions strange to us, romantic, almost fantastic. And yet his time and ours do have something in common. When he was alive there were already cities, men of ambition, mystics, the dangers of war, the longing for peace. Historians, too. Did the world really change so much between Alexis and the coming of the machine? Agriculture was already invented then; urban civilization, with all its allurements and all its tragedies, already born; the idea of empire already strong. There is not such a very enormous distance between Alexis and the Medicis or Peter the Great. As we have seen, it took Byron and Chateaubriand almost as long to get from Onessa to the City or Aquileus as it did Jester or Philocrates. We are scarcely emerging from an age in which Alexis was still our contemporary and resembled us like a brother. Probably the real cleavages come, on the one hand, in those far-off times when towns, writing, and agriculture came into being, and, on the other, in the present or the near future, when the intellectual and technological revolution ushers in a new world. Between these two extremes lies the age of the horse, the town, religious hierarchies, empires. Alexis’s contemporaries are Hammurabi, Ramses II, Alexander, Asoka, Caesar, Julian the Apostate, Theodoric, Justinian, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Saladin, Julius II, Mohammed II, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Charles XII, and Napoleon. Yet we manage to understand all of them, despite the strangeness and the distance in time. To go further, there is something over and above the city and agriculture, the factory and the machine, which serves as a link between men, their hopes, and their passions. It is no longer the horse, nor the idea of empire, nor perhaps—perhaps—political ambition or religion. But there is always the love of laughter, the fear of suffering, the need to love, to have friends, or to keep up with the Joneses. Alexis, Tamerlane, Lawrence of Arabia—they are all the same man. Before Menes, Sargon, and Abraham, after Stalin or Henry Ford or Einstein, perhaps men were not and will not be the same as Alexis. But they were and will be men, men who fight and love. Already they give orders, still they make love, and on spring nights, after the struggle and often after injustice, they forever look up at new stars, as Alexis did in the forest at Balkh or from the depths of the temples in which he was buried.

  It is this kinship between all men who belong to the age of empires and religions—and perhaps those before and after, too—that enabled a writer like Malaparte to draw on the experiences of Alexis, Lenin, and Mussolini in his famous study of The Technique of The Coup d’État. Obviously Alexis could not occupy power stations or telecommunications centers, but the art of manipulating men, of appealing to the passions, of maintaining a balance between promises and threats, all these remain more or less unchanged. What is striking in Alexis is the dual appeal to the past and the future. He handles it in a masterly fashion, and behind the eloquent voice of the conqueror one seems to detect the convincing, and no doubt convinced, murmur of his master Philocrates. How good life used to be under the Porphyries, in the great days of the City! How dark it was now, under injustice and oppression! How good it will become again soon in the new age of gold! It was with a chorus of “Long live Alexis! Long live the future!” that the poor peasants flocked behind the son of Helen, descendant of the Porphyries, heir of Arsaphes, and restorer of the Empire.

  The poor peasants. Until his dying breath, they were to remain the closest to Alexis’s heart. He knew them well. In the forests of the northeast, it was woodcutters, foresters, hunters of wolves and hares, small farmers, who had peopled a childhood far from the pomp and circumstance of the City’s and the Porphyries’ ruined palaces. Throughout his exile and the years spent out of the world, he had lived among the underprivileged, the wretched, the victims, the forgotten. It was they who had brought food to him on his column and, in the darkness of the tomb, they who had welcomed him on his return to the Empire. He had learned to love them, and seen the future that lay in them as against the mercenaries and praetorians. When, after so many years, the shade of Arsaphes began galloping once more across the plain, both past and future were embodied, for the poor peasants, in Alexis’s silhouette against the horizon. It was a fabulous vision, and was to stay alive in the collective memory. In our own day, the poor peasants’ revolt has inspired Abel Gance’s Alexis, the first film to use a triple screen, and Eisenstein’s masterpiece, Thunder Over the Empire. It gave André Malraux his first idea about the epic of history, always interrupted and always renewed, the dream of which he has pursued all his life under the lofty name of the “lyric illusion.” It has been said that Alexis at the head of the poor peasants was invoked by the sailors at Kronstadt and the Black Sea mutineers. And Alexis was the only model Emiliano Zapata recognized for the Mexican revolution. Armed only with their ordinary tools, their poverty, and their wild hopes, the poor peasants thronged behind Alexis on his black horse. He spoke to them now from the top of a hill, now from a rampart, now from a palace window, now from the steps of a temple. He told them a tale of patience, unwearying hope, chains that would be struck off, a future of sunshine and happiness. They acclaimed him, followed him, were ready to die. Their endless winding columns covered the Empire, strung out over the fields and the hills. On they marched, through winter snow and the crushing heat of summer. Arsaphes, risen from the dead, galloped still over the plain.

  There was another side to the glory and the passion. Behind legend and epic lay bloodshed. We are not concerned with propaganda or hagiography, and make no attempt to hide the fact that, according to many authors, the image of Alexis, purified by suffering and the desert, was tarnished again when he came to power. What pleasure and debauch had once done or undone, politics and the power to command could also do or undo. Disorder has its dispensations, order its demands. Alexis did not hesitate to condemn when in doubt, to execute without proof, or to massacre the innocent if they opposed him. He explained to Philocrates in a justly famous letter:

  “It is a grave mistake to believe there can be justice in war or politics. All wars kill; every policy benefits some at the expense of others. The gods alone are just. And was it n
ot you yourself, Philocrates, who taught me that they rarely intervene in earthly affairs? To try to be just is to believe that one is just, and to believe in the justice of one’s own cause is to believe everyone else’s cause is unjust. I do not believe I am the only just man. All I try to do is be the strongest—though I do try to avoid being the most unjust. I do not think any man is wicked deliberately, gratuitously, for no reason. True honesty consists in admitting that your enemy, too, has some sort of share in justice and truth. In any conflict, it is always two justices—and two injustices—that are at war, and what decides between them is force. Are we just, Philocrates? It was the others who killed Jester, but it was we who sent him to his death. Yet I killed the brothers of those who slew him. I have sentenced innocent people to death, Philocrates, and I shall do so again. The only way to have clean hands is not to have any hands. But we have hands, Philocrates, and arms to kill and heads to organize the struggle and the victory. May the gods give us a heart, too—but a heart to fight and win. A heart to hear the cries of the dying on the battlefield, and the weeping of mothers over the graves of their children—that must wait for peace. For victory.”

  Philocrates seems to have been more outraged than Isidore by what Léon Blum called Alexis’s “cynicism,” Georges Sorel his “profound honesty,” and Lenin his “realism.” Isidore had suffered too much to think of sparing the enemy. His first idea was to destroy him. Philocrates, on the other hand, found it difficult to accept the idea of truth and justice divided against themselves. For him who all these years had been so indulgent toward Alexis; who, from Aquileus and Alexandria on, had learned to know all of mankind’s weaknesses; who was the incarnation of subtlety, resourcefulness, and, some say, guile—it was impossible for him to give way over what for him were life’s chief and highest values: truth, justice, the same law for all, a refusal to admit the coexistence of incompatibles.