“I shall never reign.”
“Get away! When Papa goes, you’ll come back. We’ll see you again, my Prince, and we’ll do good work together, you and I: I sense that. The country has high hopes of your reign, and awaits it with impatience—legitimate impatience, I confess, between us, for the situation certainly isn’t brilliant.”
In order to occupy his leisure while the loading of the millions was completed, he was willing to continue a conversation in which he had nothing more to ask; gratuitously, and out of pure benevolence, he exposed the facts: the tax-collectors had been hanged, the taxes had not been gathered, and the Duke, in the absence of his ordinary receipts, had had to make extraordinary expenses. In such dire straits, Hardouin the Just had been constrained to rely on exceptional resources, peculations and prevarications, adulteration of the currency, various exactions and arbitrary confiscations, imprisonments and decapitations.
“My father has done these things?”
The Baron strove to excuse the ruling power, which is sometimes obliged to such regrettable measures, but the Prince remained dazed, and could not understand how his noble father, so honest when all was going well, was so dishonest because things were going badly.
Immediately, he resolved to save the paternal soul and to render to honesty the one who had given him the light of day.
“How much does he need?”
The financier glimpsed an unexpected, superb affair. He replied that he was not able to answer, and offered to study the question. He even went as far as to promise to speak to the Duke, to propose a rapprochement between the father and the son, and to negotiate a non-reimbursable loan from one to the other; he assured him, in addition, that, out of gratitude, he would be content with a modest commission.
The loading was completed. He learned that without having any need to look. At that precise moment he declared that his minutes were counted and that the route was long to the next stopover. He promised to return and repeated that he would see the Duke.
“I’ll reconcile you, I tell you, with your dear Papa. I’ll take charge of it, and if you’re content with my offices, you’ll offer me the statue, won’t you, in memory of our first encounter? Until we met again, dear Prince, and see you soon.”
He extended his hand and retired toward his carriage with the rapid dignity of a man able to earn forty-three millions in as many minutes.
The coffers of gold followed their master. The anchorite found himself alone again, but for several days he retained a very nasty impression of that visit.
Once again, the landscape had changed; miasmas of unhealthy memories floated therein. The foliage murmured terms of agiotage; solar disks fell from the trees in gold coins and disappeared under the thickets as if they were rolling; numbers hooked on to the thorns of viburnum; the thick branches bore hanged citizens or severed heads.
“My father has committed these sins! What a pity, Lord, that I have no influence on human thought! At least the evil will cease, I hope, if we suppress its causes. Lord, let the Duke not reject the Baron’s offers!”
Wishes of that sort are realized without the help of occultism; the Devil has no need to get mixed up in them; we are sufficient. After a week, Dieudonat saw Treasury officials appear, who came to take up residence on the mountain and proceeded to load up the subsidies. The good Duke had consented!
He only put three conditions on that favor: he would fix the amount of aid himself without discussion; like the Baron, he would only accept metallic payments; and no one else would benefit henceforth from the Prince’s liberalities. He had to swear to those on oath.
Dieudonat was ready to do anything to save his father’s soul. That same evening, in order to be rid sooner of a duty that promised few pleasures, he fabricated a great many coins and ingots.
“Is that enough?”
He had to recommence the following day, the day after, and every day.
“More?”
“More.”
The sovereign’s appetites were revealed to be considerable, doubtless because his needs were great. Dieudonat was able to observe that the administration organized a regular service of transport; he also learned that it was occupied in clearing roads through the forest and building bridges over the rivers; he knew that taverns were being installed along the roads, with stables, for the use of carters and their carriages.
“I’ll only have them for a little while...”
Carters were howling oaths and clerks were making puns in areas accustomed to birdsong. Soon, highwaymen appeared, necessitating a militia. From then on, sentinels guarded the vicinity of the factory and patrols made rounds throughout the night. The sound of trumpets rang out unexpectedly and recognition calls were relayed in the silence like stones skipping over the surface of a pond. Sentry-boxes surged forth between the trees.
On the other hand, the doves and finches sought more peaceful abodes; the blackbirds fled, the nightingales fell silent and the flight of kingfishers no longer whistled over the stream. The hinds had disappeared, the lizards were crushed, the spring became muddy, the trampled grass dried out in the clearing and throughout the landscape pieces of paper were seen flourishing at the foot of trees, which blossomed like large white daises.
“I’m beginning to think that they’re here for good.”
The poor maker of gold had the sensation of being similar to a milk-cow, but his byre resembled a factory complicated by barracks. He thought, sighing, about the good weeks of boredom and remorse that he had savored so peacefully in the exile of a beautiful location.
“I’m deprived of everything, even my own company, although it wasn’t amusing.”
One day, he saw, to his surprise, masons unsealing the statue of the Bastard.
“You’re taking him away?”
“Duke’s orders.”
He was slightly glad of that separation, but also a little chagrined. He watched that bad companion disappear, laid on a bed of straw, with an envious gaze.
“They’ve only broken a hand and an eye; he’s very tranquil. What if I go too?”
Evidently he could have dispersed the crowd and resumed his solitude by wishing; he thought about it many a time; but those acts of egotism would have appeared criminal, since a great distress had reached out toward him, which he could relieve.
“Beati misericordes...”
He therefore remained the prisoner of his power, and thus learned that the elect of this world ought not to pretend to the unique monopoly of poor wretches, which is the right to live in peace.
XVI. In which one sees the depiction
of a fortunate people
The country became prodigiously rich; that affluence of gold had changed the conditions of social life utterly and completely.
At first, the people were very happy, or believed themselves to be, which comes to the same thing, for you are not unaware that our happiness is simply a favorable appreciation of contingencies that are sometimes disastrous.
Now, the social contingencies appeared fully satisfactory. The Duke, in fact, scarcely bothered any longer to collect the taxes that had cost him so many anxieties; he ceased to hang the insolvent and despoil the rich, and even went so far as to decree that no tax or rent would levied until further notice. Bonfires were lit in towns and the countryside and people sang Te Deums with Te Ducems, and O Salutaris hostias that blessed God, the Duke and his son, the national benefactors.
All the auguries were good. An era of prosperity opened. The sovereign was long past fifty, the critical age at which the passion for procreation is transformed in a man, and from carnal becomes simply lapidary; having become almost chaste, the potentate set about building. He knew the love of placing stone on stone, and of the durable thing that rises at the moment in life when the fragile thing begins to collapse. He wanted palaces and churches, fortresses, bridges and aqueducts, canals, fountains, quays and stairways: useless edifices and useful buildings, new monuments surged forth from the ground, to the glory of rel
igion and commerce, great men and small, to the memory of the dead and the profit of the living; everywhere, the Duke erected beauty or ugliness, indistinctly and without preference, as long as they were solid; he possessed the means to offer one and the other, and he did not fail to demand both,
The fatherland bristled with towers and gables, bell-towers and turrets, steeples, arches and colonnades, bas-reliefs and corbels, everything that could be made in stone, in marble, and even in bronze. Statues and domes were decorated with gold—what was the point of depriving them, since gold was so abundant? The clouds, as they passed by, were astonished to see the cities resplendent, and went on their way; in the rising sun and the setting sun, they splashed the sky with their radiance. From the tops of the mountains that closed the frontier, they could be admired, shining in the verdure like diamond brooches on a jeweler’s velvet.
The more the Duke built, the more he wanted to build, and he recommenced endlessly. All the young men became masons; the daily wages of a manual worker would have contented a prelate. Apprentices were able to court dancers; on Sundays, carpenters appeared in promenades, sumptuously dressed; the wives of entrepreneurs had carriages with two horses, and their daughters married barons and earls. Carters, stonemasons, plasterers, carpenters and wood-merchants, locksmiths and ironworkers, metallurgists and miners, wheelwrights and shipwrights all grew rich, and their fortunes enriched others.
When construction thrives, everything thrives.
And all went very well—too well, and too rapidly. At first, the people, excited by the new force, had created radiantly, and their fecundity, stimulated to labor, illuminated genius. Great artists, who, in other times, would have remained swineherds, surged forth, rivaling one another in ardor, and that abrupt flourishing of human beings produced a crop of masterpieces. But one does not make well for very long that which one makes for money; behind the true artists, the false ones appeared, and, as usual, they found people who thought them preferable, especially when the sovereign had judged them to be. All the sons of families wanted to be architects, and anyone who possessed any musical or poetic talent hastened to learn to model clay or paint frescoes instead of singing or writing. Art did not gain from that, but the good Duke could not see it, and paid everyone handsomely.
People were paid too much; enjoyment was better than production; drunkenness arrived, and lucre engendered luxury, which engendered lust; soon, young working girls were moving fingers charged with rings.
“Would you like to put that away, slut!”
But the mothers did not become too indignant, and the fathers scarcely protested any more, gold being essential in the new fashions; the amorous put it on all the women as the Duke put it on all the cities; couturiers wove it into clothing, cabinet-makers embedded it in furniture; goldsmiths owned palaces; but the farms no longer had any laborers. All the vigor of the country flowed toward rapid gain—which is to say, toward the city. The fields devoid of laborers were spangled with wild flowers, and crops no longer emerged therefrom. A chicken cost as much as a sheep.
Bah! Everything the country lacked, foreigners would furnish. The wheat and the livestock would arrive from abroad.
They did not come alone.
The Duke, enfevered for grandeurs, took the title of King; sumptuous presents that cost him very little bought acceptance of his crown from the sovereigns and diplomats of the Christian powers; the Emperor approved, having received arguments of the first order before all the others; Rome sent its assent, with the necessary oils; ambassadors made their entrances solemnly. A large army was indispensable to so much majesty; mercenaries came running, attracted by high pay. The riffraff of neighboring kingdoms rushed toward that quarry; the least nasty asked for work, the worst were content with theft; beautiful young women from everywhere brought their lucrative bodies.
Feasting flourished, morality declined. The national soul, disorganized by that foreign invasion, lost its particular virtues, its original faculties and its genius. Peoples that no longer have a morality no longer have anything but talent; the masterpieces of the initial epoch were unable any longer to be born, and art was refined without creating, plagiarizing its past, becoming flaccid and debased. The fine impetus that had previously lifted up the crowd, and the joyous effort that bore them to work, was only remembered in order to be ridiculed. Work, toil? Pooh! Everyone gave as little as possible and demanded as much as possible.
For they demanded; the discontentment of humans is manifest much less in the reality of poverty than before the insufficiency of advantages; so long as they are suffering they weep and collapse, but as soon as they begin to enjoy, they want more than they have, and proclaim their right to enjoy more.
Orators began to make speeches.
The citizens talked so much in order to occupy their leisure that the habit of talking soon engendered the habit of speech-making; eloquences were revealed; the need to sustain ideas made people believe that they had some; they called them principles, and everyone was irreducible with regard to his own. From then on, everyone affirmed them. That country, where everyone spoke so well, was covered with pulpits and podiums, which gave birth to parliaments, and parliamentarians appeared, which gave rise to parliamentarianism. Words reigned.
They reigned to the exclusion of anything else and instead of anything else; formulae substituted for sincerity; as for the cult of the good and the dream of the better, with respect to work or oneself, no one cared about that. All faith was dead. The family scarcely existed any more, by reason of multiple adulteries; husbands scarcely concealed it, having become accustomed to it; culpable liaisons did not last any longer than the others. People theorized about everything, but, fundamentally, laughed at everything, and were even already weary of laughing. Soon, they were content to smile.
Several suicides of young people were symptomatic of that degeneration; the lack of an ideal caused internal distress among people born to hope, and many adolescents, for want of fodder for the irreducible appetite for something beyond, threw away their blasé lives like useless rags. Forces without employment suppressed themselves. Lovers were seen to poison themselves in couples, because they had squandered happiness, and still wanted it, without being able to invent it. Before those quotidian dramas, mature individuals and old people shrugged their shoulders tranquilly and clung on to existence, valuing it more as it gave them less.
That population of rich people, diminished as it was, was not devoid of arrogance. It requires a nobility of soul to possess gold without being scornful of those who lack it; similarly, it requires a real solidity of intelligence not to be intoxicated by suddenly-acquired power. That King and his subjects, by dint of launching commands throughout the world, believed that they commanded the world; in their eyes, licensed suppliers appeared to be wage-slaves, servants of a sort, only too happy to serve; at the precise moment when their incapacity of production rendered them tributaries of other realms, they imagined that they were becoming their masters, and allowed that to be seen. They spoke with authority, and their speech had the tone of indubitable certainty particular to men who are playing a role superior to their intellect.
They were importunate; people thought them grotesque, and then detestable.
In addition, envy had prepared the way for hatred. More than one sovereign, in the depths of his impoverished Estates, kept watch avidly on that prey, as juicy as could be desired, ripe for swallowing, which would fatten his kingdom and his dynasty for a long time. Perhaps it was even important to make haste, for fear that the booty, desired by all, might be taken by another. The suspicious Kings kept watch one another; each of them had decidedly secretly that he would be the first to get annoyed and that he would fall upon Hardouin without warning, and without inviting anyone else
Among them all, Gaifer the Twisted, who reigned to the west, was the most urgent, because he was the poorest; slyly, he organized his troops, and as soon as he was in a condition to go on campaign he complained of a diplomatic impropr
iety, sent his herald of arms, and crossed the frontier the same day.
He moved rapidly, followed by black bands, pillaging and burning; everything crumbled before him. The defensive armies, splendidly braided in gold, only showed themselves as if for a parade before vagabonds armored in iron, and immediately vanished in clouds of dust stirred up by their flight. The cities with such well-constructed solid ramparts opened their gates as soon as the enemy appeared in the plain, and costumed officials appeared, their faces pale and their hands trembling, bringing the damascened keys on golden trays. Not one hero rose up to cry love of the fatherland, for the fatherland was too rich, and no one loved it any longer, and the fatherland was no longer a mother but a mistress, whose lovers had enjoyed too much...
XVII. Dieudonat decides not to give anything any longer but himself
The work went smoothly. Hardouin was captured and imprisoned, and immediately, Gaifer considered himself to be the legitimate king of an annexed country; from then on, he no longer made haste, and on his orders, his captains destroyed less, careful to conserve the beautiful conquered cities. Even the inhabitants were no longer massacred, except for amusement, for they put into receiving the victors all the good grace of deferential cowardice; they surrendered everything, including their daughters and wives, and accepted everything, including blows, and when they were chased away with kicks like dogs, they smiled politely, in order that their throats would not be cut like pigs. In a week, their celebrated arrogance had disappeared; the masters of the world were now the valets of a corporal in the army, and performed their new role just as congruently as the old one; the transformation cost them little effort, for those people had only been carrying, beneath their garments of mastery, the souls of slaves.
The war and its horrors therefore seemed likely to be of fairly short duration. Unfortunately, Aimery the Simple, who reigned to the east, considered in his simplicity the wrong that was being done to him by pillaging a neighbor that he should have pillaged himself; without hesitation, he protested, in the name of justice and humanity, declared that he would support the weak, and crossed the frontier, as an ally. The war was resumed, more hotly.
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