The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  Undoubtedly, the extreme poetry of the religion, the delightful explanation it gave for the capital mysteries and the hope of a fortunate resurrection that it offered to the worst disfigured, touched the young voyager, for he decided to devote his life to the triumph of Jesus and returned to Galade ready for all persecutions, and also for all delights, in the case that the worshipers of Goho, Vzygine, Naul and the other divinities allowed themselves to be convinced of the reality of Christianity.

  It was, alas, for reasons similar to those of all races whose gods are destroyed, persecutions that he encountered, and, along with him, all those enchanted by his words.

  As he had made an oath not to reveal his voyage, to which he was loyal, he made up great fables to explain, firstly, that Goho, in the grotto, had introduced Jesus himself as his successor, and then that Christ had come to Galade, but a long time before the generations still alive, and that no trace remained of his coming; that he had descended from the sky by the omnipotent will of his Father, and that he had been born in the barn of a farm in Galade, of a maiden and a carpenter.

  Balbun, and the persecutor kings, and the fervent worshipers of Goho, Vzygine and the Galadian Olympus, and many generations, passed away before Christianity was established in Galade as the national religion. That finally happened, however, as might be expected. Of Goho and all the false gods the only vestiges that remained were a few partly-collapsed monuments, and all the poetry, pathos and politics of the pagan religion were cleverly mixed with the teachings of the cult that was henceforth sacred.

  That is how Galade became a Christian country.

  Between the martyrdom of Balbun and the regency of Mahara, the travels of the initiates continued, and beautiful and good inventions were given to the Galadians. Prudent and far-sighted kings intercepted everything that they considered as harmful. And it was for that reason that neither fulminating powder nor printing were introduced into Galade, because they were deemed to be unnecessary to happiness and very dangerous to handle.4

  One night, Mahara, the prime minister, went up to the top of the highest tower in the royal palace and gazed at Galade, extended at his feet, sleeping tranquilly beneath the twinkling stars.

  “Those people,” Mahara said to himself, after having meditated for some time, “know how to built, to weave and cultivate the earth. They live happily and die lightly, in the hope of another life full of bliss. A harmonious and far-sighted religion assists them to support a few irremediable infirmities. The arts are always vivacious in Galade; poets and musicians have enough to sing about in the beauty of honest labor, women, the fatherland, the sky and the god who inhabits it. Sculptors and painters have eternal subjects in the human body, the movement of animals, the play of light in nature and on faces; finally, architects can embellish indefinitely, and ameliorate, the houses and palaces of Galade, to which sculptors can add all the lovely ornaments they wish.

  “God alone knows what the people of neighboring lands might invent, over time, given their passions, their ambitions and their malice. A perpetual and permanent danger is lurking in Galade, which is the possible treason, one day, of an initiate. Then would penetrate freely into this happy land, along with progress—which is, in any case, superfluous—the unknown poisons that engender passions, ambitions and malice.

  “In my conscience, I assume the right to wall up the grotto and close the route. And I leave to God the judgment of the individual who will, if such are his designs, by some miracle, in the near or far future, demolish the wall and reopen the route to the world.”

  And it was thus that Galade retained, until the present century, the soul and the mores of the Europe of the Middle Ages.

  And it is here that the history of Emmanuel begins.

  Part One

  THE VOW

  The Land of Amour

  In the year 1900 of the Christian Era, on the death of Georgis the Pious, the son of Harb the Eleventh, Georgis’ son Emmanuel mounted the throne of Galade.

  He was eighteen years old. I, a faithful narrator, who saw him in Paris when he was not yet twenty-five, can imagine, by virtue of his beauty then, the magnificent adolescent he must have been the first time he put the royal crown on his long curly hair.

  Capable of all corporeal audacities, and imposing the evidence of that in each of his supple, free and decisive movement, he was the living expression of strength and sensuality. Three masterpieces can give in idea of that king: the Bacchus sculpted by Michelangelo, the Young Athlete of which a copy in bronze founded by the Kellers is in the great gallery of the Louvre Museum that leads to the Victor of Samothrace, and the portrait that Sustermans painted of the son of Frederick III of Denmark.5

  Around him, the air was suddenly lighter, the light brighter. Whoever approached him felt sadness and malignity dying within him, and the desire awakening to love, to be enthusiastic and good, and no longer to believe in anything but Joy.

  Seeing him gave the certainty of Joy; contrary to those who said that suffering was glorious and the earth miserable and wicked, he was the ravishing proof that Joy, which is the supreme blossoming, was possible to creatures on the earth, and that it as glorious and holy.

  He was adored as a man, as a king and as a symbol, and for himself, he adored being—which is to say that he was happy. As a divine image, above an altar, seems to be smiling through the incense, he laughed in the perpetual perfumes of life that extended through all its hours and all its forms, flowering.

  His uncle Gasp, the brother of King Georgis, the Archbishop of Gyzir, Monseigneur Gohain, and his tutor, Mnektes, were the guides of his conscience.

  Space, light, fêtes and amour were the guides of everything else.

  Gasp, his uncle—tall, blond abundantly bearded, apoplectic and truculent, his speech brazen and his flesh scarlet, turning violet at the slightest impulsion of pleasure or anger, almost to blue—said to Emmanuel: “Handsome nephew, under the reign of your father Georgis the Pious, may God beatify him, I was terribly bored. Fortunately, you’re here, when I’m still at the age of vigorous compensations! Piety, damn it, and fervor, processions, observances and fasting are damnably consuming and damnably tedious, damn it! I’ll say no more. Watching me will conclude my sentence better than words and oaths! My legs, wearied by genuflections before the holy tables and the Our Ladies, will rest in genuflections before our ladies, and stretch out excellently on tables sanctified by good food and bright wines!

  “Let’s amuse ourselves, handsome nephew! Life is short. Have you ever thought, while holding the face of a woman against your cheek, that your two heads, in a few years, will be skeletons? What’s sixty years, for example, in the vertiginous unfurling of the centuries? What you do, what you might do, what you want and what you dream, die with you. Let’s drink, let’s hunt, let’s run after deer and dears, the breasts of young women, the swarm of joys; let’s feast and enjoy ourselves, and live life to the full! Death will blow out the candles and fold up the tablecloth. There’ll be time then to go to sleep. Until it comes, handsome nephew, the sun, the lamp of diurnal celebrations, and lamps, the suns of the night, will persuade us that it’s light and that it’s necessary to stay awake.

  “Come, my sovereign, to the house of Ginginella the dancer. I’ve promised to bring you there today, and her costume is prepared, which is only composed of her hair...”

  “Sire,” said Monseigneur Gohain, Archbishop of Gyzir, to the king, “What delights can you expect in heaven if you take so many on earth? Divine justice keeps a record of affliction and rejoicing. To the one who endures, compensations will be given. What dispensation is there for one who lives without troubles? Are you unaware that it’s in silence and the subjugations of the senses that one hears the counsels and the golden voice of the soul, in which God has his kingdom within us? He resides there, Sire; the soul is a tabernacle easily opened to one who possesses the keys. Have I not given them to you, those delightful keys, which are purity and meditation in peace?

  “Sir
e, think that one day, soon, as you mount a horse or quit this room, misfortune might fall upon you. What consolations will you find, if you are suddenly deprived of your habitual pleasures? Too far distanced from God by your profane occupations, you will be exactly parallel to a blind man devoid of a staff and a dog. You will search, with your anxious soul, similar to a clutching hand, for a point of support in your darkness. There are roads, Sire, that no night can darken, where, without sun, stars and guides, one advances without stumbling. Sire, in the name of your salvation, weigh the luxuries of the earth against the invisible pomps of heaven. Reserve in yourself the part of God!”

  And the philosopher Mnektes said to him: “To enjoy oneself is good, Majesty; learn, know, and meditate upon what is good. The peace of meditation is good, and the turbulence of making merry is also good. Everything is good for one who knows. It is necessary to know what is inferior and what is superior. To know that one is similar to the beasts when one feasts, and that one is near to the gods when one thinks, renders all hours profitable. God judges the beast at the end of the feast, the beast judges the god at the conclusion of meditation...

  “Where are you going, my son? To the home of Ginginella the dancer? As a beast, enfever yourself in your body, in the flux and reflux of her loins. As a mind, exert yourself in penetrating thereby the mystery of forms, which leads to God. Remember that the dancer is born of the earth, and that she is, with her free and resurgent movements, the sister of inert rocks, plants enslaved to their roots, beasts to their curbed spines, and that the same force palpitates in rocks, plants, animals and human beings, which is the creative force of God. Become alarmed by the fact that the will in question animates those forms with increasingly free movements, Sense in your mind how much more rapid and brisk in its mobility that same mind is than the agile dancer. And rejoice in perceiving in that animation increasingly subtle forms, the execution of the divine plan, which is the ascension toward the Immaterial...

  “If you like, I’ll accompany you to the dancer’s house, and I’ll convince you fully of the presence of the eternal in the least of her gestures.”

  Galade followed the character of its kings. Religious under Georgis, it was amorous under Emmanuel. The general mores of a country are easily influenced by the behavior of its kings. By the agitations that the latter create around that which they cherish—the countryside, if they have a bucolic soul; cathedrals, if they are pious; luxury, with sumptuous escorts, carrousels and brilliant décor, if they like magnificence—they attract crowds there, and communicate to them a little of their own nature and their tastes. Besides which, as favors hardly ever fall on any but those who praise their person and their exploits, one always sees a large number of ambitious individuals adapting to the tendencies of courts, in order to penetrate into them and acquire consideration there. Finally, it is necessary to take account of the fact that the majority of people, having no particular tastes, swiftly slide into established tastes, like chicks behind a mother hen who has taken the trouble to dig out the ground beneath the portal of the farm and make a passage there for her offspring.

  It goes without saying that this does not affect the profound roots of peoples, nor the natural inclination of all beings to satisfy their instincts to the extent that the brakes are loosened. For the faculty of amour, which is like an ever-ignited flame for which the slightest excitation is the worst of stimulating winds, the example of a amorous king cannot help but find prompts imitators in all of his subjects of both sexes.

  Under Emmanuel, son of Georgis, Galade was all amour. Never had the fields, in the evening, seen so many excited couples, grave beneath the lovely stars, uniting in their long grass, their clover and sainfoin, and their unripe wheat. Never had so many husbands surprised their wives in sin, and, if one wants to narrate impartially, never had so many wives had to reproach their husbands for being monsters and fauns. In spite of all these intimate incidents, however, all the annoyances, disputes, ruptures, beatings and shattered crockery, a delightful perfume emanated from all Galade—for amour is a florescence. And in spite of all the handsome, rude, delicate and pleasing lovers who accorded themselves to women of all ages, one man alone was the true lover behind the lips that they kissed and the breasts on which they nestled: the king.

  Noble ladies, like the daughters of tenant farmers, maidservants in taverns and female employees in the Galadian industries, idolized the king, were his before he had even desired them. And he desired a great many, and encountered no obstacles to his prompt victories. There remained, for those he vanquished, a consecration of beauty and voluptuous virtues. As for the lords, the husbands of the noble ladies, who tried hard to keep them safe from the king, if, at the end of their struggles they met piteous defeat, after having lamentably or furiously suffered therefrom, they found in that execrable affair a consolation of sorts in the pride they felt in being the husband of a woman that the king had distinguished.

  Now, this is what befell the king when he became smitten with a lady named Melidine.

  The King and the Beautiful Melidine

  Melidine was the widow of a lord whom her parents had made her marry because he was rich and in favor at court. She did not detest him and she did not love him. She was only grateful to him for the good position he had given her, by marrying her, among the noble ladies of the kingdom.

  The lord died quite rapidly, and when she had mourned him for a while, she considered that she had the right to expect a few of the pleasures of life. She had no lack of suitors, but she loved the king and nothing preoccupied her more than seducing him. It happened that the king was conquered by two other beautiful ladies before having noticed her, and she was so chagrined and resentful that she swore to refuse the king as often as was possible for her and would be seemly.

  One day she was mingling with the company of princes and ladies who were escorting the king on a boar-hunt. The beast suddenly burst out of a thicket and passed, at a hectic gallop of its short legs, directly through the middle of the company, throwing complete disarray thereinto. The horses reared up and collided with one another, rumps against rumps and noses, and during their kicking and recoiling the order of the escort was disturbed, with the result that while bucking and snorting noisily from its scarlet nostrils, Melidine’s horse came very close to the king’s, which reared up diabolically, bucking worse than all the rest, like the royal horse it was.

  Emmanuel had soon reduced it to immobility, and was then able to see Melidine, haughty and smiling, retaining, while shaken by her crazed mount, all the delicate and sure nobility of her lineage, and not departing from her smile until the horse had calmed down. Then, in a fugitive crease of the lips, she manifested all the delights of the expected triumph. So must Omphale, Delilah and Cleopatra have smiled on seeing the Mighty fallen beneath their slender hands with gleaming fingernails.

  It was thus that the king noticed her; and, bowing, he paid her a thousand compliments on her skill and her courage. Then he resumed the head of the escort, and they ran after the tracks of the boar.

  The latter was at bay against a tree, and as the dogs held it in thrall, Emmanuel, having looked Melidine full in the face, leapt from his horse drew his dagger from its sheath, advanced toward the boar and, chasing the ardent dogs away with great thrusts of his boots, gave the animal time to recover its breath, to see its adversary, and to charge him.

  A cry of anguish from the escort…an arm raised, then falling…the beast on the ground....

  The king turned round and smiled at Melidine.

  She had not foreseen that he would smile at her like that, immediately after having been so brave. She only remembered her oath after a quiver of pride and pleasure, which was prolonged outside herself and ran in little burning ripples all the way to the king. She pulled herself together, and responded to the king’s smile with an inclination of the head full of deferential grace.

  But the king was smitten with Melidine. And as soon as they had returned to the palace he went t
o her and said: “Melidine, it required the hazard of a hunt to make me see how beautiful you are!”

  Then he tried to seize Melidine’s hand—but with the smiling deference that she had shown a little while before, Melidine drew her hand away.

  A slight astonishment turned the king’s cheeks pink.

  Trembling with profound contentment, Melidine weighed upon her heart with all the will-power she still felt. If she had parted her lips to respond, she would have fainted into the king’s arms before saying a word. She did not reply, and her withdrawn hand, while all that agitation was concealed beneath a smile, caused the king to think what a woman’s smile ordinarily makes all men think—that he was, in spite of his victories and his science of amour, like an infant stammering before the flame, the light or the great mute dark. And that silence on Melidine’s part troubled him so greatly that he spoke again, quickly, in order that she should not sense his disturbance.

  “Melidine, I understand now, by my remorse, how unworthy I am of your sweet benevolence. Unworthy—and perhaps forever—of the most precious of pardons...

  “Allow, O Melidine, that perhaps to be as a hopeful gaze in the somber face of the frightful forever. Speak to me, dear Melidine. Must I hear, through that malevolent silence, that it is necessary for me to reject that perhaps, as a king throws his crown over his shoulder on to the ground of the battlefield where he has been defeated?”

  At that moment, the palace bells rang, which announced the prayers before the meal. The king took possession imperiously of the hand that had been refused, pressed it between his own hands, approached it to his lips, and said:

  “Melidine, this evening, at the hour when Galade goes to sleep, a reliable domestic will watch for you to come to the palace gates. You will come and you will follow him. And there, where he will take you, alone, simultaneously anxious and radiant, humble, fervent, as emotional as a priest at prayer, and as joyful as the earth at dawn, the king will be waiting for you, who will be dead tomorrow of lamentable ennui, Melidine, if you do not come...”