The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  These works culminated in mystery plays, of which the most famous is Le Vray mistère de la prise de Balkh, and is the precursor of the tragedies of Hans Sachs, Jacques de la Taille, Alexandre Hardy, John Lyly, and, above all, of Racine’s Alexis the Great and Metastasio’s Alexis in India, set to music by, among others, Paisiello, Cimarosa, and Cherubini. But taken all together the works on Alexis constitute a unity in themselves that is known as the “gestae of Alexis” or the “Empire cycle.” The romances that make it up copy one another, proliferate indefinitely, and stretch from Italy to Iceland, Spain to Norway, Brittany to Persia and India, Holy Russia to Damascus, Baghdad, and Isfahan. Ariosto, Rabelais, and Cervantes, who mark the end of an age, testify, by their very jests on the subject of Alexis, to the late survival of this universal popularity. Marlowe’s Alexis the Great,[19] derived from Ruy González de Clavijo’s Vida del Gran Alejo, transforms the Emperor into a titan of the Renaissance. Later still, Goethe’s Faust is just another avatar of the omnipresent Emperor, the symbol at once of love and good and violence and evil, though doubled in the latter role by Balamir, transformed into Mephistopheles. The whole work is a long paraphrase, sometimes far from faithful, of Alexis’s destiny. The old myth of the magician and necromancer, as told in the Volksbuch of Johann Spiesz, is inextricably intermingled with the memory of the Emperor, who finally becomes identified, after the most richly symbolical transmutation in world literature, with all the longings of modern man for action and salvation:

  Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,

  Den können wir erlösen.

  One ought to go into more detail about the musical works inspired by the figure of Alexis, which include ballets, two great operas by Handel and Vivaldi, sonatas and concertos by Corelli, Scarlatti, and Boccherini, and the satirical verses by Heine set to music by Debussy and Reynaldo Hahn. And there is also the cinema.[20] But perhaps enough has been said to bring out the main point. Through the halo of legend and divine honors rendered to the master of the world, through the alternations of magnanimity and violence which so struck the popular imagination, through the epic of adventure and repentance, and through all the naïveté and credulity, what emerges most forcibly everywhere is the moral reflection on the vanity of vanities, on the inevitable failure of all ambition, the futility of this world, the frailty of man, repentance after wickedness, the yearning of all creatures for a supreme good always beyond the here and now, and on the fear of a God named in every tongue.

  But we have not yet paid homage to the most important contributor to Alexis’s glory—the greatest poet of the already declining Middle Ages and perhaps of all the Christian West between Virgil and Shakespeare. The reader will recall that Dante plunges Alexis into the deepest circle of Hell, in the well of the Malebolgi.[21] There, in a clap of thunder that shakes the universe, the archangel Michael and Virgil come at the Almighty’s express command to snatch the fortunate sinner from eternal torment and bring him, together with Trajan, Justinian, and Saint Benedict, to the Paradise of Thrones and Dominations. Thus Dante also, though more magnificently than any other, gives a definitive form and perfect number to the image of Alexis that for centuries has haunted men’s memories and imaginations, this golden legend of the Emperor and saint. Dante immortalizes not only Alexis’s greatness and power, but also and above all his humility and renunciation, the negation of the triumphs of this world. The Divine Comedy sums it all up in il gran rifiuto—the great refusal. Power ends in rebellion against power, sin in a thirst for justice, and grandeur in dust, ashes, and a passion for the void. And this void constitutes the Emperor’s other glory, the more dazzling one perhaps, and perhaps the more real.

  XXIV

  THE POWER AND THE GLORY

  WHAT SURVIVES FOR US TODAY OF THE POWER AND glory embodied in Alexis?

  History is accidental necessity. It is made up entirely of hazards, coincidences that hang by a thread, armies suddenly held up by storm or snow, negligent or ingenious generals, unlooked-for conversations, unexpected encounters or deaths, plots successful or foiled, outlaws who escape and runaways who are caught, temperaments and inspirations that miraculously correspond to the needs and hopes of a place or age. But once history is inscribed on the unfolding hours, days, years, and centuries, it is more immutable than the course of rivers or the outline of volcanoes. Transparent and shifting as liberty, it becomes, as it unfolds, more immovable than nature. God himself can do nothing to change it. Yet the future will uncover now one face of it, now another. Thus, as Justus Dion points out, the historian’s work makes him more powerful than God. For God is master of the future only. History is a second creation, and it is the work of man, who alone can play with the past and revive it by his art: “The future belongs to God, but the past belongs to history.”

  Each of us carries within him all the world’s past, and we find there only what we put in it. We create our own history according to our class and tastes, our education and heredity, our time and the circles we move in. Especially since Marx and Freud, it is clear that objectivity in history is a mirage that the traveler over the deserts of bygone ages, thirsty for truth and certainty, can never reach. The crisis over historical objectivity is but one of many aspects of the crisis over truth. It is not history that makes the historian, but the reverse, and no historian does anything but give birth to his own universe. It is in this sense that the greatest of the historians of the Empire has presented the legend of Alexis as first and foremost the symbol and reflection of our own hopes and dreams.[1] Each culture, each age, and each different mind will modify the slant and the interpretation, putting the stress on Thaumas or Gandolphus, Bruince or Logophilus, violence or saintliness, continuity or renewal, imperial order or the rejection of greatness.

  The historian who has devoted his life to the glory of the Empire finds the image of the Emperor gradually merging with all men and things. Little by little he makes his way into men’s minds and hearts, slips into their houses, between the pages of books, and suddenly appears in our inmost depths. World history is marked forever by the flashing trajectory, from the forest of Balkh and the brothels of Alexandria to the Capitol and the Dolomites, of the Fool of God and the victor of Adrianople. But in the world that actually surrounds us, it is impossible not to see and feel, behind each tree and each dwelling, in squalor and in beauty, the invisible presence of the captain and saint. There is no need to try to make him come alive again, however clumsily. One has only to turn one’s gaze away from the turmoil of vanity and look around one and in oneself to discover, still living, clear but hidden, like the rabbit in the children’s puzzle, hidden among the cabbages, the radiant yet ambiguous image of the Emperor Alexis.

  Accompanied as usual by his brilliant train, with his trumpeters and pages, priests and warriors, poets and courtiers, the bits and bridles and helmets goldly gleaming, the purple cloaks floating in the wind, the foam-flecked horses, the castle in the distance between the cypresses and hills already blue with evening, his greyhounds and Moors lost in the crowd among the halberds and the masts of ships themselves only guessed at, the Emperor rides on one last time through the splendors of memory and imagination. A glory, a dim halo, an almost imperceptible radiance floats about his head. If you stand on tiptoe you can see on his right, above an angel-musician, Hadrian, all in white, and the Empress Theodora, like a haughty madonna. And there is Helen[2] calm and gentle as ever, between Isidore and Philocrates, a Jester with his cap, the mighty Logophilus, and, incomparable in his majesty, slightly larger than those about him, who obviously revere him, Bruince, the future pontiff. Nor is Carradine far to seek, with his red beard beginning to turn white, less at ease on horseback than on the deck of a galley. Oh, and there is Valerius, between Menalchas and the Polititian, the latter swelling, as usual, with the vast projects seething in his bald head. Behind, Polyphilus, Philontes, Aristo, Martian, and all the rest, with their strange coiffures and one hand on a book or raised heavenward. The procession has almost disappeared. It is ab
out to turn the corner of the wall where the fresco ends. But wait! Up there, on the winding path, under the threatening clouds, one can just make out Arsaphes, Basil the Great, Thaumas, and Gandolphus, risen from the shades. And there—no, there, lower down, right at the bottom, on two fiery prancing steeds, side by side, wild and somber, are the Kha-Khan of all the Oïghurs and the boy Khubilai. The one great shade that is absent is that of Justus Dion. The historian effaces himself behind the history he tells. For a few moments longer the faint noise of the hoofs and the voices, the faint glow of the colors, hangs lingering in the air. Then it fades and vanishes into the darkness falling slowly over the path, the hills, the deer pursued by hounds, the strayed peacocks, and the cypresses. The stage is empty. It is as if the whole story, with its din, its characters, its familiar memories, had gone to join all other vanished kingdoms. . . . Where have they gone, where are they, crushed by the insatiable present, the kingdoms lost forever, the Ninevehs and Babylons, the Memphises and Lagashes, Uruks and Urs, Elams and Larsas, Sumers and Agades, Kadeshes and Karkemishes? They live in our dreams and memories, our trips into the forest, our long swords, our childish passions and paradises, our vanished hopes. Life has passed over them as it passed over the Empire. Where are they, all those delights, our expectations, our mad passions, our wild ambitions? Life has swept them away as it swept away the Emperor, as it swept away the Empire. But we keep them all in our hearts. Art, religion, culture, history raise a frail barrier in the minds of the living against the abysms of death, passing time, oblivion. The dead have no life but in us. There would be nothing left of Alexander and Caesar, Virgil and Dante, if we ceased to think of them. All that power and genius, all that knowledge and glory would disappear at a blow. And if we stopped thinking of and loving Alexis, there would be nothing left of him. It would be as if the vast Empire that ruled the world had never existed.

  ONESSA—THE CITY—AQUILEUS—ROME

  1967–1971

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEXES

  NOTES

  Chapter II

  1. Gibbon’s Rise of the Empire remains the best study of the Empire’s origins. Also to be read with pleasure, especially on the Hiram Bingham and Heinrich Schliemann expeditions, is C. W. Ceram’s amusing Des dieux, des tombeaux, des savants [Gods, Graves and Scholars] (Plon, 1952), a history of vanished civilizations presented in terms of those who discovered them.

  2. See the excellent article by Max and Moritz Struwwelpeter in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft und historische Forschung (Berlin), vol. XXII, pp. 722–791.

  3. The best introduction to the earliest philosophies of the Empire is Bertrand Russell’s now slightly outmoded but still classic study, Hermenides and Paraclitus (Oxford University Press, 1936).

  4. See Histoire de la Philosophie, vol. I of L’Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, ed. Raymond Queneau, pp. 117–118 and 123–126.

  5. L’Empire de l’Aigle et du Tigre has just appeared in the series Les Grandes Oeuvres de I’histoire, which already includes volumes on Greece and the Iliad, on the India of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, on the Slavs and the story of Igor’s campaign, on Sumer and Gilgamesh, and on Persia and the Shah Nameh.

  Chapter III

  1. See the Marquis de Custine’s letters and René Grousset on travelers from the East in the Empire before Basil the Great.

  2. Justus Dion, Histories, I, 176.

  3. Various modern travelers have said this custom still exists in the area between Dyushambe (formerly Stalinabad) and Mazar-i-Sharif. (See The New Yorker, Jan. 22, 1967.)

  4. Corneille, Arsaphes and Heloise, act 5, scene 3. For the interest of scholars it is interesting to note Dryden’s famous rephrasing of these great lines.

  HELOISE

  I begged, sir, that you’d speak with me no more.

  Your presence mines a courage weak before.

  That converse which should be the soul’s delight

  Can only worsen Eloisa’s plight.

  And if she suffers, how is it with you?

  What pain’s the less for being one of two?

  Be satisfied you’ve lived to see my shame.

  I own your power, own you a conqueror’s name

  Which bids you quench, not feed, an inauspicious flame.

  ARSAPHES

  Full well I knew the woe you’d work my heart,

  But who seeks death must seek the fatal dart.

  Since Eloisa’s everlasting hate

  Shows me my fate scorns me, I scorn my fate.

  Yet, if death’s pangs may any mortal move,

  Take, with my latest breath, immortal love.

  HELOISE

  Nay, sir, to end your days you are not free.

  My forebears and your own posterity

  Alike the same severe commandment give.

  The City claims you: Arsaphes must live.

  ARSAPHES

  Let all die with me, madam. What care I

  Whose footsteps tread the earth wherein I lie?

  Your fathers cannot rise from out the grave,

  And, resurrected, who knows but they’d have

  Reason to curse the offspring of my race

  Unfit to do meet honor to their place?

  No, love’s sun set, all else is vanity.

  One brief, warm touch of live felicity

  Is more than icy aeons of proud eternity.

  Chapter IV

  1. On religious prostitution in the time of Arsaphes and Basil the Great see an interesting chapter (VII) in Les Courtisanes dans la société, by H. Baer and P. Faure (Ch. Bourgois, 1967).

  2. See Montesquieu, Cahiers, CXXI, and L’Esprit des Lois, ch. VII; Voltaire, Letters LXXII and DXXI; and Stendhal’s famous allusion—referring also to papal Rome—in his letter to Balzac, Oct. 30, 1840.

  3. See especially “Routes, paysages, économie,” Diogène, 208 (summer, 1963), and “Politique des communications: un exemple . . .,” Diogène, 229 (fall, 1968).

  Chapter V

  1. For details see Otto Rank, Der Mythus des Todes des Helden (Munich and Vienna, 1909), ch. VI; Oskar Adler, Glück und Ende des Feldherren Arsaphos (Leipzig, 1932); and Ucheniye zapiski Leningradskogo gosudar-stvennogo ordena Lenina Universiteta (ser. istor. nauk), CXI.

  2. Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft und historische Forschung, vol. X, pp. 9–37.

  3. Valerius, Amores, Book III.

  4. Justus Dion, Histories, III, 27.

  5. Justus Dion, Histories, IV, 54.

  Chapter VI

  1. The theory that there was some emotional, and even homosexual, relationship between Basil and Thaumas has been vigorously maintained, especially in England and the United States. See Algernon Queen, The Sexual Background of a Historic Friendship (Oxford University Press, 1954), and note to p. 64 below.

  2. The theory of a homosexual relationship between the emperor and the high priest is paralleled by the myth, for which no conclusive proof has been offered, of a love affair between Thaumas and Ingeburgh. The latest research seems to effectively dispose of this gratuitous suggestion.

  Chapter VII

  1. See René Grousset, Les Barbares (Payot, 1952).

  Chapter VIII

  1. See the Comte de Saint-Amarante, “Lettres d’amour et d’affaires: Ingeburgh, Thaumas, Hélène,” La Revue des Deux Mondes (April, 1879), and Nico Epistolos, Thaumas’s Political Correspondence, vol. II of Annals of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Athens, pp. 87–89.

  2. Justus Dion, Histories, XXXII, 21.

  3. For a more or less complete bibliography see Igor Fedorovsky, The Hero and the Traitor. See also an undeservedly neglected play by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Le Procès de Siméon [The Trial of Simeon].

  4. By J.-J. Pauvert (Paris, 1969).

  5. This work, though full of violent invective, contains some of the finest writing on love in French literature. Many attribute it to Louis Aragon, but this has not been pr
oved.

  6. Justus Dion, Histories, XLIX, 71.

  Chapter IX

  1. The whole aspect of this area has been altered by the recent construction of a hydroelectric dam at Novokarkaralinsk. There is an interesting series of articles that mention the ancient forest of Balkh, with many references to Alexis, in Le Monde, Feb. 2–9, 1968 (Michel Hubert-Michel, “Histoire, milieu, développement”).

  2. Sigmund Freud, Psychopathologie des historischen Daseins (Vienna, 1902). This work is almost unknown, and a translation would be welcome.

  3. True Mystery . . ., c. 1211–1283.

  Chapter X

  1. The port of Mursa in Asia Minor is not to be confused with a town of the same name on the Drava on the borders of Illyria and Pannonia, famous for the victory of Constantius II over the usurper Magnentius in A.D. 351.

  2. True, the Greeks occupied a rather special position. Although they were foreigners, the fact that Greek was the Empire’s official language gave them something of a privileged status.

  3. Letters from Philocrates to Isidore, XXI, 7.

  4. Victor Delbos compares the character of Alexis with that of Spinoza. Both suffered from fluctatio animi, both summoned up against it the ideas of necessity and unity (see Les Spinozistes, ch. III, p. 132).

  5. Professor Weill-Pichon puts his age at twenty-eight; Sir Allan Carter-Bennett puts it at twenty-four or even twenty-three.

  6. They appear as “Alexis Positions I, II, III, IV, V, and VI” in the famous classifications of erotic positions established by Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Kinsey.