The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  All around the square Balearic slingers, Scythian archers, Syrian horsemen, Bengal lancers, and detachments from Sogdiana, Mauretania, Provence, and the Don, formed a magic circle of color and strength in which, as in a dream, the Emperor saw pass before him all the bloody and triumphant stages of his long life as world conqueror. There was something unreal in this splendor, something fleeting in this force, something horribly bitter in this accumulation of victories.[3] The archpatriarch lifted up his hands and implored his gods to bestow eternal life on the Kha-Khan of all the Oïghurs. The varied robes of the priests stood out smooth against the metallic glitter of cuirasses and helmets. Some of them were in black, others in white, some, from the farthermost parts of Asia, in saffron yellow or orange. Many hated each other because their beliefs were mutually exclusive and their gods unknown to one another. Only the iron hand of the Emperor, Theodora, Bruince, and Logophilus had made them live together in apparent peace, in the service of the Empire. They sang. Valerius, Philontes, Menalchas, and Logophilus himself had composed hymns that could offend no one’s superstition. The archpatriarch was still praying. Alexis did not pray. There was an emptiness within him, a withdrawal, an impulse toward repose, a longing for the void that had long been torturing him. His whole life was now spread before him, in the leather uniforms of the Numidian horsemen and the long silk or woolen robes of the priests of Zoroaster. There arose before his eyes the wolves on the snow in the great forest. The lotteries in Alexandria. The pale shadow at the end of the garden. The body half buried beneath stones and mud. The columns in the desert and the temple tombs. The wood fire in Samarkand. Aquileus rejoicing after a night of riot. Jester’s head rolling on the scaffold. Famagusta burning and invaded by the pirates. The little bridge in Pomposa. All the lights that burned at night in the City now restored to life . . . How he had loved power, the triumphal entry into conquered cities, the palms and roses strewn along his path, the peace and justice imposed by his invincible battalions! But nothing fails like success. This rich, full world suddenly seemed to him more arid than the sands of the desert in which he had once taken refuge. He heard himself once more talking to Jester in the gardens at Aquileus, Jester the beloved son whom he was to send to his death as he had sent so many others, but this time with his own hand: “You are young to talk of dying . . .” But Jester was dead, and it was he, Alexis, who had caused his death.

  Death was all around him. He was like an island lashed at on every side by the waves. Death was attacking, the island still stood out for a few moments above the seething breakers, then was overwhelmed by them and disappeared forever. He was the emperor of nothingness. These sumptuous colors and shapes, all this magnificence, the hymns of the priests, the swords and lances, the plumed helmets, the palaces around the square, the standards stamped with the Tiger and the ensigns surmounted by the Eagle, the thirst for power and the thirst for gold, even the beauty of the gardens and the sky, even the happiness he felt within him on spring mornings, all, the impatience of youth, the friendship of men, ambition, anguish, all, including the pomp and circumstance of history, was nothing but illusion, nothing but the mask covering gulfs that held only silence. Never had Alexis felt so strongly the emptiness of the world that he had conquered. Even his own ideal of what the Empire should be was no longer enough to keep him afloat on the ocean of vanity. It was at this moment, in the midst of the great ceremony in memory of the Kha-Khan, when the entire crowd of soldiers and priests turned to the Emperor to acclaim and do him homage, that the messenger from Asia appeared on the Capitoline Hill.

  This messenger had traveled for months, on foot, on horseback, by boat, by elephant and camel, to bring the Emperor news of Manfred. No, the prince was not dead. Yes, he knew everything about Alexis and his escapades now: the life in Alexandria, the passion for Vanessa, the exile in the desert. But Manfred’s almost painful admiration for his father was only the greater, and each day he was more desperately afraid of proving an unworthy heir. He, too, dreamed now of repentance, of battles, and the intensity of his emotion might make him seem unbalanced. The violence and fervor with which he, in his turn, was now abasing himself and seeking to calm his passions in poverty and charity, was making him immensely popular not only within the Empire, but also in China and all of southeast Asia. Here, Akbar the Blessed was more and more venerated as a prophet and saint by the lowly people among whom he lived, tending the sick, visiting those in prison, giving his goods to the poor. The fact was that Akbar the Blessed, Prince Manfred, heir to the Empire, had carried to their logical conclusion the dreams of greatness and humility that Alexis, but with ambiguity and inconsistency, had dreamed before him. He had finally become one of the wretched whose glory both father and son had envied—Prince Manfred was a leper.

  The terrible news spread like wildfire through Rome and all over the Empire. Logophilus tried once more to protect his own ideal of the Empire. The messenger died in mysterious circumstances, though nothing but vague suspicions could be alleged against the grammarian. But Alexis himself did not try to conceal the truth for long. And less than three months after the ceremony on the Capitol in honor of Balamir, the Empress Theodora died of grief.[4] Manfred also died, doing all he could to wipe out any trace of his passage here below. But despite all his efforts to achieve oblivion, his memory was to remain alive all over southeast Asia. Akbar had asked that no statue should transmit to posterity the likeness of a perishable body unworthy of immortality. Without flouting this wish, the Khmer king Jayavarman VII made a place for the shade of Alexis’s son in one of the finest monuments ever raised by human genius. It was thus that the glory of the Empire came to extend as far as Angkor, and the traveler arriving from Siemréap is moved to discover in the middle of the ancient enceinte of Angkor Thom, almost hidden under the encroachments of the jungle, amid the huge Bayon sculptures in which the mystic architecture of the divine universe is reflected in stone, the almost disembodied smile of the leper prince, the famous “smile of Angkor.”

  It seemed to the Emperor as if his whole life had been nothing but a waiting for disaster. Everything was crumbling away. This tiny world the immensity of which he had had such dreams, which he had crossed on his horse and held in his hand, this world was now changing and slipping between his fingers. Peace, justice, unity, happiness were only a dream, a folly, imagined by idiots who tried to make time stand still in a universe ever-elusive. Power was melting away—nothing was left but suffering. For more than three moons the Emperor shut himself up and abandoned himself to grief. He was old, he was alone, and the Empire, now meaningless, was without an heir.

  It was then that the Emperor turned to Hadrian. The archpatriarch did not receive him as conqueror, statesman, invincible captain now vanquished by arms or by fate. He received him as a man who had always been engaged in a lengthy struggle against destiny and the world, and who had been finally overcome only by time and the gods. The archpatriarch was old and ill, his city had been entirely destroyed, his priests were divided among themselves, and the very doctrine of which he himself was the symbol and guarantee was being attacked on all sides. In the eyes of the world, despite what remained of his wealth and his palaces, the archpatriarch, too, was one of history’s vanquished. But the pontiff was custodian of a secret, and the secret was that defeat and poverty were the same as salvation, that it was the vanquished who were victorious. He said, “O Death, where is thy victory?” and he envied the happiness of the poor, the sick, the feeble-minded, and all the rest of life’s victims. It was not only death he hoped for, like Aziri and Marcian, but suffering and pain. Strangely, he saw in them the image of heaven on earth, and he thanked his gods for sorrows, torture, the thorns on the rose, the wild beasts, and the tears shed by mothers over the corpses of their children. He did not envy the rich, the victors, the powerful, the happy of this world—he pitied them. Many people, especially the most fortunate, often laughed at him and his foolishness. But his charity and concern included even those who mocked. He believed
that in failure, illness, in evil itself, even among thieves and prostitutes, there was a divine spark unknown to the happy. He also believed, unlike anyone else, that it was for the poor and sick to help the rich and healthy merely by thinking of them, remembering that men’s sacrifices and sufferings were more pleasing to the gods than milk and honey and the blood of bulls. In the leprosy that had fallen on Akbar he saw a sign from the gods and a blessing for Alexis.

  A mind like that of Logophilus could only hate Hadrian’s doctrine fiercely. Logophilus did not love the poor, the sick, and the vanquished; but at least he did not ask them to cherish their misery. He respected power, and distrusted this pontiff according to whom the weakest were more powerful than the strongest. He often declared he would not be proud to be vanquished, and he was not ashamed to be victor. If he were poor, he would try to get rich; since he was rich, he declined to become poor. In either case, Hadrian’s teaching and his cult of pain were detestable to Logophilus, who saw in them a hatred and scorn of life, its beauty, and its pleasures.

  But Alexis had found in Hadrian’s words a distant echo of the Asian saints and sages. There were many differences between the doctrines of Rome and the illuminations of Horeb, the Arabian deserts and the banks of the Indus. But they all turned away from a world of appearances in which happiness and unhappiness were equally precarious, they all aspired after something else, a new life, a liberation from evil, salvation. The archpatriarch was very gentle and good, but his was a gentleness of steel, an intransigent goodness, and he, too, was not without a certain form of pride. For he alone was entrusted with the keys to all the secrets of the world, and, as we have already seen, in his view truth could neither be divided nor discussed. Just as the Eagle and the Tiger were the arms of the Empire, and the ring signifying the marriage with the sea the symbol of Pomposa, so the archpatriarch’s emblem was a key, called Hadrian’s key, the only one that could open the gates into the other world. Hadrian often said he was the way, the truth, and the life, and that no man came to salvation but by him. Unlike the monks of India and China, more concerned with their own salvation than with that of the world, Hadrian only wished, as he said, to rule over men so as to be better able to help them—though Logophilus claimed that he wanted to save them whether they liked it or not, and that the humility of love was strangely like the pride of power. According to him the cult of failure had never been such a success, nor had the love of poverty ever known such luxury and wealth.

  Hadrian’s religion had a very precisely worked-out liturgy and ritual from which blood was banished and replaced by salt, fish, water, grapes, wheat, and unleavened bread. Instead of the eagle of the priests of the Empire, there was a lamb, symbol of innocence and of the rejection of all violence. To underline even more strongly the reversal of values in favor of the other world, and the replacing of the otherwise universal appeal to the rich and powerful by love of the poor and the prisoner, Hadrian’s religion set up as objects of worship, instead of the sun and oak of the Empire, instruments of torture—the stake, the whip, the pillory. Virginity was the object of special veneration, in which there seem to be traces of cruelty and even sadism;[5] but, as in earlier days in the Empire, there seems to have been at the same time a somewhat ambiguous cult of the courtesan and the prostitute, whose suffering was presumably sufficient to redeem her impurity. Iconography informs us that religious painters often represented such women with long, fair hair down to their ankles and carrying jars of the perfumes of Arabia. As we have seen, humility and charity did not preclude the pomp and magnificence that provoked Logophilus’ sarcasm and mistrust. Several of the Roman patriarchs who embodied this mystique of gentleness, humility, love, and poverty were proud and violent warrior chiefs, dreaded by adversaries whom they did not shrink from putting to death, avid for gold and women and sometimes for boys. In purely religious matters as well as in customs and thought, the historical improbabilities, contradictions, and variations of the Roman faith seem to us today so many and so obvious, especially in comparison with the relative simplicity and internal consistency of the Empire, that we find it hard to form a clear and accurate idea of them. Some authors, following Couchoud, have even gone so far as to attack first the historical role, and then the very reality of the Roman moral and social teaching. For them the archpatriarch, his love of failure and poverty, yet at the same time his magnificent temples and palaces, the dual cult of the virgin and the prostitute, and the adoration of the stake and the whip are all nothing but myth. And they, of course, deny that Hadrian VII ever really existed, and relegate him among the figments of the historical imagination, along with Prester John and Pope Joan. Nonetheless it does seem that the Roman religion really did exist, and moreover that it played a comparatively important part in history. The real existence of founders of religion, popular leaders, and great statesmen and generals has always been called in question: skepticism, like naïveté, can be carried too far. The existence of Abraham, Solomon, Christ, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, and even Napoleon[6] has been challenged in the same way as that of the archpatriarch, Alexis, and the Empire. But the reality of Rome and its pontiff can no more be doubted than that of the City, the Empire, and the Emperor. In the two cases the sources, texts, and other historical evidence are equally numerous and decisive.[7]

  The archpatriarch pressed Alexis, who had found in Hadrian’s religion at least a partial answer to the questions he had always asked himself, to renounce the gods of the Empire and adopt those of Rome. But Alexis was kept from a real conversion by the continuing influence of Philocrates’ relativism, his experiences in Asia, and the mixture in his own character of nihilism and ardent curiosity. The Emperor had known too many different religions and revelations, he had meditated on the truth in too many forms and incarnations, and had perhaps too much faith in man and his powers to adopt any new belief and new rites. So he remained faithful to the gods whose legends and myths had surrounded his childhood, and above all to the sun, which for him was the symbol not so much of multifaceted truth or good as of unity and universality; for there were many gods, but there is only one sun, and it shines on everyone. The Emperor lavished privileges and wealth on the archpatriarch. He gave the priests of Rome schools and temples, sent them to spread their teaching in all the different parts of the Empire. But it seems he never himself adopted Hadrian’s beliefs. Despite all the opinions to the contrary, particularly numerous in Spain and Italy at the end of the nineteenth century, Alexis’s formal conversion to Hadrian’s religion remains to say the least improbable. Some authors have fallen back, for want of anything better, on the somewhat flimsy theory of a secret conversion, but all the most recent studies contradict this hypothesis. Alexis told the archpatriarch that all the various gods in heaven must be under some unknown god—ἅγνωστoς θεóς τις—who ruled over them all, and that this God, if He existed and if He looked down from the sky and was amused by men and their antics, must in the end take pity on all that effort and all that suffering, and recognize His own. Soon after Theodora’s death the Emperor wrote the short treatise known as The Banquet of the Soul, in which occurs the famous tirade plagiarized by Voltaire in his Essay on Tolerance, which begins with an invocation to the unknown God: “It is no longer to men that I speak, but to Thee, God of all beings, all worlds, and all time. . . .” Its closing words reflect the dream of universality which always haunted Alexis: “May all men remember they are brothers . . . and let us use the fleeting moment of our existence to bless in a thousand different tongues, from the Naktonggang to the Atlantic, Thy goodness which has given us that moment.”[8]

  Although the Emperor seems never to have yielded to the pontiff’s urgings, the archpatriarch did have one dazzling success: the procurator general of the Empire, Bruince himself, publicly embraced Hadrian’s faith. Bruince’s conversion marks a new turning point in the history of the world. It caused an enormous stir in the Empire, and its consequences influence all of us still. It is never too difficult to explain what is pas
t, but in this case the event fits in naturally enough with all we know of Bruince. To put it baldly, Bruince stood halfway between the Emperor and Logophilus. He was in charge of the Empire of this world; he was concerned with both justice and efficiency; he was as far from Logophilus’ rough cynicism as from Alexis’s self-torments. He wanted order, peace, equity, strong and stable institutions, laws for the powerful, hope for the downtrodden, and Rome gave him all these. One autumn morning on the other side of the Tiber, at the foot of the Janiculum Hill, Bruince received from Hadrian’s hands the bread, wine, salt, and fish that opened the doors of the kingdom of which the archpatriarch was the earthly guardian.