The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  Alexis held Bruince in affection and respect, but his feelings for Logophilus were more mixed. He admired the grammarian’s rigor and business ability, his zeal and his real devotion to the public good, but considered he was prevented from participating in the grandest notions of the Empire by a certain lowness of mind and a tendency to concentrate on enriching the City rather than on conquest. Alexis employed him as a highly skilled comptroller and steward. He entrusted him with the organizational tasks at which he excelled: the provisioning of troops in the field; the commissariat; the gathering of taxes; the drawing up of treaties and legal texts; and, of course, the arts. He appointed him proveditor of the treasury and of works. But it was Bruince who was always directly involved, with the Emperor, in general policy, and who corresponded with the provincial governors, from Brittany to the Arabian Ocean and the frontiers of China. Alexis and Bruince—and Balamir up to his death in Korea—had little time to spare for Aquileus or Onessa, and in general the territories united under Arsaphes and Basil the Great, as distinct from the conquests of Alexis, were ruled over by the Empress. After the putting down of the Orange revolt, Theodora, who rarely left the City, reigned there supreme. Her courage, energy, intelligence, and unfailing loyalty had won Alexis’s entire confidence, and he used to say that the Empress was the greatest man in the Empire. The Kha-Khan’s death led the Emperor to entrust even more responsibility to Theodora and Bruince. One senses in Alexis a new and acute temptation to divest himself of power.

  The fact was that the Emperor was in a way alien to the Empire. Even in conquest and victory itself, his triumphal advance never ceased to astonish him. He was, of course, passionately devoted to the idea of unity and universality of which the Empire was the expression; but the means to success soon wearied and often angered him. Not only bloodshed and war but every kind of dependence, servitude, or submission to any human order had always been hateful to him. And now he was the embodiment of human order and even of violence. All this had come about both through him and in spite of him, and he himself was that Empire of which so many aspects horrified him. Theodora, Bruince, and Logophilus were very familiar with the fits of dejection he was subject to,[4] which made the burden of authority and its consequences intolerable. Several times—after his coronation, just before Simeon revived the danger of barbarian invasion, during the Orange uprising—he seemed to be seeking an excuse, almost an alibi, for abandoning the throne, withdrawing, and giving up everything. Some have seen these crises as evidence of a lack of courage or resolution. But the truth seems to be just the opposite. Whenever the Emperor showed a wish to retire, it was when people and events could get along without him—when the barbarian tyrants had been driven out, when the Empire had been freed, when the priests and patricians were ready to take over the management of affairs themselves. But as soon as an event like Philocrates’ arrival in Samarkand, or Simeon’s arrival in Balamir’s camp, or Theodora’s stand against the Orange revolt gave the signal for a fight, then the love of struggle and risk, which coexisted so strangely in him with the desire for withdrawal and meditation, laid hold of him once more and threw him into the fray until yet again victory was won. The Empress and Bruince had come to understand his depressions, but Logophilus viewed them with scorn as weakness and dereliction of duty. He thus foreshadowed two schools of thought, one of the extreme right and the other of the extreme left, that have always denounced the Emperor as a hypocrite or false mystic, and, indeed, have almost gone so far as to call him an idiot.[5]

  In one sense, though not that of Logophilus and his successors, this appraisal is not entirely wrong. Beneath the Emperor’s genius was hidden one who was indeed backward in the eyes of the world, one of those the Beatitudes call the poor in spirit. Nothing could be more complex than Alexis’s personality, at once direct and ambiguous, wild and dreamy, always unpredictable. When Philocrates imagined that the war for the liberation of the Empire could be waged by compromise and circumspection, he found himself confronted with a captain devoid of scruples. But when Logophilus wanted to see the Emperor dominate the world, it was a metaphysician he encountered, and a moralist. Is this so surprising in a philanderer who disappeared into the desert, a poet who was metamorphosed into a war leader? It sometimes seems as if the Emperor, with his dazzling career, with that apparently clear trajectory across the sky of history, really only groped his way through the darkness of circumstances and events. “Humanity knows not what it does. The meaning of its days and nights is in the lap of the gods.” According to Justus Dion, this was a favorite saying of Alexis’s. It applies not only to human history in general but to the Emperor in particular.

  All these considerations help to explain the varied and even conflicting opinions held through the ages by the very people who admire Alexis, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Lenin and Gobineau. Some, whose view I cannot share, see him as the type of the ambitious man, who worked out in advance all the stages of his career; others see him as the instrument of a historic destiny to which he yielded himself up blindly; others, again, as an improviser of genius who could adapt himself immediately to all men and every circumstance. None of these interpretations, which are all based solely on the Emperor’s public career, gives an adequate account of Alexis’s life as a whole. He cannot be explained merely in terms of ambition, submission to history, or empiricism. Ambition—he did not desire power. Submission—he was always asserting that to rule was to dominate the power both of history and of men. Empiricism—all his life he was the personification of fidelity and rigor, the very opposite of guile and subtlety. It is easy to see why followers of Nietzsche,[6] Bossuet, historical materialism, and Machiavelli try to claim him for their own. But how can any impartial observer fail to be dazzled by the flame that burns in Alexis’s life? He possesses, above all, passion—passion for unity through diversity, for the universal; a thirst for beauty, knowledge, happiness; a quest for a key, a secret, a system, a society of souls. So much fervor or even folly cannot be without inconsistencies, and inconsistencies are not lacking in Alexis. But they are parts of himself and his personality rather than external accidents, weaknesses, or betrayals. For him, everything was grist to the mill of unity.

  Thus the greatness and the peace of the Empire are inseparable from the personal aspect that Logophilus found so irritating. From the beginning to the end of his career the Emperor was always hesitating between the world and salvation. For years he probably thought the two objectives could be pursued simultaneously; and during this time the Empire represented for him peace and happiness, the salvation of the world. He threw himself into the struggle. Ruins, fires, widows and orphans, the sick and the dead were merely the price of peace and universal happiness. But he soon realized that in fact he was not prepared to pay that price. The old quarrel of ends and means preyed on him and was to end by overcoming him. He no longer recognized himself in the phrase he had once written to his master and friend: “You think, Philocrates, and I make war.” It was a posthumous triumph for the philosopher. Now Logophilus could, if he dared, have addressed the Emperor in what were once Alexis’s own words. Alexis was then engaged in one of the most amazing exploits in history, in a conquest of the world that made him the equal of men like Rameses II, Assurbanipal, Hannibal, Alexander, Asoka, and Tamerlane; and he rejected his triumph. Alexis has been called “a conqueror outstripped by his conquest,” but it is not certain that the opposite is not the case. Perhaps it was the conquest that was outstripped by the conqueror.

  “Humanity knows not what it does. The meaning of its days and nights is in the lap of the gods.” Peace had necessitated war; happiness had required battles and sieges. The world Empire was built upon conquest. Alexis’s opponents have said he might well have murmured, on nights of slaughter or battlefields strewn with the dying, the famous “That was not what I meant” characteristic of the failures of history. The difference in his case—and it is an important one—is that the confession was wrung from him not by defeat, but by victory. It was
his own triumph and glory that the Emperor, to the scorn of Logophilus, hesitated to accept. He had once set himself at the head of poor peasants; he had embodied the hope of the downtrodden and the needy; he had fought for justice and peace. Was it not the most natural thing, to fight? But the Empire of the world is a much heavier burden than that.

  XXII

  THE LEPER PRINCE

  THE END OF A REIGN IS OFTEN MAGNIFICENT, BUT sad. The accumulated glory of a man blessed with all the gifts of the gods—power, success, victory, loftiness of ambition and ideas, and, above all, length of years, the time without which all the rest is nothing—that glory which gradually takes the place, till they are almost forgotten, of the burning passions of youth, bathes the world in its light. There is a beauty about the end of things. Ceremonies in temples filled with priests and ambassadors in gorgeous uniforms, with buckles of agate and precious stones, silk sashes and plumes from rare birds; reviews of victorious troops marching behind their trumpeters and standard-bearers; nocturnal banquets with fountains playing in moonlit gardens full of laughing girls in robes of muslin and velvet, eager to dazzle and please; the wisdom of old men; the formality of immutable rites and traditions; the prestige of literature and the arts; order; civilization—all contribute to a picture of a world that is stable at last and in which everyone has his place marked out by the gods. But across the walls of the edifice that took so long to build runs the little crack, tiny, insidious, eager to spread and destroy all, the almost invisible fissure in which the bitter eye of the prophet sees the flames and ruins, the collapses and catastrophes to come. Already, beyond the great rivers, a savage tribe is making ready to attack. Or plague. Or famine. Or rebellion by a forgotten nephew or the governor of a distant province. Or else some young man has been born on the frontiers, in a hovel near the marshes, or at the foot of a volcano, in a forge or behind a baker’s shop. He has already chosen his arrow or his dagger, he revolves his plans feverishly every evening. The old king, weary, pensive, sees in the curly-headed rebel, described at that morning’s council meeting, the impression he himself used to make on the powers of this world in the days when he, too, was eaten up with the ambition to destroy those powers and take their place. Thus begins and develops the only, the eternal moral of every human history—the inexorable genealogy of hope and struggle, victory, power and glory, decline and fall.

  Alexis realized better than anyone that history was full of such ups and downs.[1] Robert Weill-Pichon writes that all through the last part of his reign the Emperor was expecting failures and setbacks that never came. At one moment, in the City, in Rome, in Aquileus and Pomposa, everyone thought defeat was at hand—on the frontiers of the recently pacified Empire the Ibos, the Alans, the Samoyeds, the Ainus, and the Khmers were growing restive again. Parthian and Mongol battalions had to be sent to defend the Empire on the Yalu, the Ganges, at the foot of the Atlas and the Anti-Atlas, on the Dnieper, and the Don. But still, everywhere and all the time, victory clung indefatigably to the imperial standard. The Emperor was tired of fighting and bloodshed; above all he was tired of winning. He had a profound sense of what was fine in struggle and what was hateful in success. Almost his only pleasure now was in the company of poets and writers, and once again he surrounded himself with the priests and seers with whom his life, through all its vicissitudes, had been so closely bound up. Justus Dion tells how, during a conversation with Logophilus in which the grammarian made his usual apology for the peace of the Empire and the restoration of order and justice, Alexis interrupted him impatiently with the phrase Simone Weil so much admired: “Justice, Logophilus, justice! A fugitive from the camp of the victors.” Through all the last years of his public life Alexis seems to have been caught in what Sir Allan Carter-Bennett calls “a metaphysical dilemma”: he was fighting to maintain the glories of the Empire, and he was longing for obscurity. The epilogue of the story is already there in that dual pursuit. There is some truth in Logophilus’ comment, again reported by Justus Dion: “At the height of his power, with the barbarians subdued, the priests loyal, the whole world conquered, the universe at his feet, the Emperor had but one enemy—himself.”

  Some months after their marriage the Empress Theodora had given Alexis a son, whom she named Manfred. To continue is perhaps even more difficult than to begin, and it was this Manfred whose adventures and misfortunes were to tempt Lord Byron and Schumann, among many others, to give his fate a dramatic form, the first in a poem, the second in an oratorio. Weary of injustice and victory, Alexis transferred to his son all the hopes that had been such a disappointment to him—not because they were not fulfilled, but because they were. “There are two misfortunes in life,” he used to say. “One is to fail. The other is the same, only worse—to succeed.” Manfred was handsome and intelligent, everyone liked him, the gods had lavished their gifts on him, and he was anxious to give something in return. He seemed eminently worthy of his father’s lofty ambitions for him. The Emperor entrusted to Bruince personally the role Thaumas had played with Fabrician, Fabrician with Philocrates, and Philocrates with himself. The procurator of the Empire devoted fifteen years of his life preparing Manfred to become the model of what an emperor should be. And Alexis continued in his son the design of his whole life, and the idea of a world Empire with which he had linked his name. He saw to it that even while still a child Manfred was not limited in his outlook to the City and the old part of the Empire. He spent whole years in Rome, where Bruince, who spent most of his time there, initiated him into history, philosophy, and the government of men and things. Then the Emperor sent him to the East, where Manfred followed in his father’s footsteps, drinking from the sources of Asian philosophy and mysticism with a fervor that began to worry those who knew him. When he was fifteen or sixteen, in Isfahan or Lahore, he began to dress and eat like the local people and adopt their ways of behavior and thought. In order not to seem like a foreigner among them, he even changed his name. He was known as Akbar.

  Akbar’s reputation soon spread like wildfire through Asia, but as a sage rather than as a prince. Before he was eighteen he was venerated as Akbar the Blessed from the Erythrean Sea to the steppes. The Emperor recognized in his son the same flame that had consumed him; and he was glad, but uneasy. Alexis had had behind him the roughness of the northeastern forests and Greek subtlety. Manfred had behind him only the weight of an enormous Empire, the veneration of countless followers, all the facility of triumph, and all the servitude of power. At his son’s age all that lay before Alexis was danger, hopeless struggle, and the omnipresent threat of death. Manfred had before him the legacy of the Empire, power, and yet more power. Luck was becoming a risk, and happiness a danger. Alexis had once said, “All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Manfred refused to let himself be corrupted. He struggled against others and against himself; he threw himself into study, privation, charity, and self-mastery. The Emperor, vaguely conscious of danger, had given orders for his own past life to be concealed from the boy. The reader may recall the missions sent, through Balamir and on other occasions, to eliminate any traces of the liaison between Alexis and Vanessa, and the other escapades of a young man fascinated at once by debauchery and asceticism. Historians have often seen this as a sign of hypocrisy or of a concern with his own dignity very uncharacteristic of the Emperor. Sir Allan Carter-Bennett interprets it, more subtly, as a desire to avoid provoking Manfred to further extremes. The future was to demonstrate the wisdom of these precautions, though they were, alas, futile. During one of his visits to the Land of the Two Rivers (Mesopotamia) or to Persia, Akbar heard by chance, from a priest of the moon who was probably unhinged—himself a figure well worth further study[2]—of the ordeals Alexis had submitted himself to at the time of his exile. The revelation overwhelmed Manfred. The young man had always felt unworthy of the Emperor and the legendary figures around him—of the memory of Helen, Thaumas, and Philocrates, Bruince’s great stature, all the glories of the Empire, its martyrs, and its heroes.
Even his mother seemed to the child like some terrifying divinity. Time, among all its other works, had transfigured Theodora. We first encountered her as a temple prostitute whose beauty and courage made men tremble. But she also had died to be born again, and, through the inner alchemy that changes people and the world, had become a reincarnation of Helen and of the supreme greatness of the Empire. Her beauty remained, but it had taken on another aspect. Instead of the disturbing beauty that held whole amphitheaters breathless, hers was now a beauty of strength and serenity. She had become the very symbol of the Empire, of its permanence, its dignity, and its authority. Manfred did not rebel against the crushing weight of all these great examples; he merely wanted to be worthy of them, to be able to climb, himself, to heights where the air was purer, more rarefied. Especially after the revelations of the priest of the moon, he found the life marked out for him impossible. It was his turn now to fast and mortify the flesh; he would have nothing to do with luxury and magnificence; he tore himself away from the worldly goods with which he was laden; he visited the lepers. A saint was in the making for the Empire.

  No accurate portrait of Manfred survives, and there is something poignant about this absence of evidence. The prince always refused to let himself be represented in any statue, painting, carving, or coin. Later, in obedience to this wish, Alexis had all existing likenesses of his son destroyed, together with all documents referring to the forbidden name. And so we know comparatively little of Manfred’s fate. But we do have Justus Dion’s account of the terrible day when the Emperor, in Rome, received from one of the messengers who had punctuated his whole life with tidings of victory the news of the obscure disaster he had so long expected. It was the anniversary of Balamir’s death, when, each year, wherever the Emperor happened to be—the City, Samarkand, Ctesiphon, or Vienna—a great religious and military feast was held, in the presence of the chief officials of the Empire, the army, the priests, the imperial family, and a huge crowd of spectators. That year Alexis had just arrived in Rome, and the ceremony took place on the most venerable hill of the Eternal City, still only just emerged from its own ashes—it took place on the Capitol, covered with statues draped in mourning and buildings some of which were not yet finished. The Emperor and Empress were there, attended by Hadrian VII, Bruince, Logophilus, the Polititian, and numerous generals and high priests. The ritual prayers were being said in memory of the barbarian leader now lying in the bed of the river Naktonggang. The archpatriarch had insisted on presiding personally over the celebration in honor of the man who had laid waste to his city. Hadrian was now an old man of ninety-two or ninety-three, but he still stood erect and his voice was still firm. Alexis no longer tried to stifle the secret admiration he had always felt for him. Beside the emptiness of military triumph and the voids of mysticism, the patriarch’s forgiveness of wrongs and belief in universal love were like a cool, refreshing spring, restoring value and color to an empty world. Many in the Emperor’s entourage, especially some of the priests of Aquileus, whispered that the pontiff was a hypocrite motivated only by ambition, and accused him almost openly. But the Emperor looked on with secret envy at the old man praying fervently for the salvation of the destroyer of the Eternal City. Others prayed for their friends and families, for success, for victory; he alone prayed for others, for his enemies, for his own defeat, for a universal love that was the opposite of victory and yet was perhaps the only victory that did not end in defeat.