Between Aimery and Gaifer, no one could see any difference. Just like Gaifer, Aimery, by right of alliance, demanded in his turn that the cities were opened to him and the fortresses surrendered; that protector, more terrible than the conqueror, obliged the indigenes to go forth and make war, which Gaifer had not constrained anyone to do as long as they surrendered. Whether people liked it or not, it was necessary to kill, ridiculously, on fields of carnage, under the command of uncivil captains who, moreover, spoke a foreign language. And those brutes from the West no longer struck with a dead hand! Mercy of God, what a way to behave!
Between the two armies, the entire country was bloodied; the pillage recommenced with a ferocious hated; Aimery’s carts took away to the East everything that Gaifer had not had time to expedite to the West; the country was emptied via its two frontiers; when a troop, allied or enemy, arrived somewhere and no longer found anything to steal, it lit a fire to avenge itself, and hurried elsewhere.
Hardouin I was huddled in a dungeon, but no one was concerned with his worthless carcass. They were much more preoccupied to know who possessed the anchorite Dieudonat, the maker of gold. The example of the disasters of which he was the cause did not instruct anyone, and everyone wanted to have the destroyer of energies in his custody, for his own exclusive advantage.
He was snatched, he was hidden; every fortress in which one of the two sovereigns had imprisoned the precious magician temporarily was quickly retaken by the adversary, and that human parcel rolled from the West to the East and from the East to the West, toward one frontier and toward the opposite frontier, without anyone having had time to do anything within him, indefinitely tossed from one master to the other, and always defended royally by an owner always destined to lose him, so strong is the desire to have an irresistible force in all those who do not.
On the way, he encountered cities in ruins and villages reduced to ash; here and there, he perceived some belated conflagration devouring an isolated farm. Every time he emerged into a plain he saw in the distance, toward the bottom of the sky, like a huge swarm of flies, thousand of crows feasting continually; whenever a gust of wind blew, the air stank virulently; cadavers lay everywhere, representing in the horizontal stance that which had once depicted pride in a vertical station.
“Never again will I make gold, oh, never again!”
While marching at a military pace—one, two! one, two!—he meditated, and his meditations were not advantageous.
“In wanting to repair evils, I’ve created worse ones. My God, my God, is pity, them, also a source of errors and misdeeds? Does the heart lead us astray as much as the head, and do our commiserations lead us as far astray as our deductions? Sentiment allows us to be moved by things that are close at hand and immediate, and only to perceive them; the distant consequences escape its short sight. Love is myopic, but wisdom is for the presbyopic, who look to the future. Woe betide the reckless who mingle in the world’s affairs and do not discern the future! Woe betide those who risk substituting their conscious will for the unconscious will of the universe, and who come to trouble history in the design of perfecting it!”
“One, two! one, two!”
“If I made the decision no longer give anything that what can be drawn from myself, perhaps I would look further, and my benevolence would be at less risk of being toxic. Strictly speaking, I could also give what serves for human subsistence, for to prevent a Christian from dying of hunger is not bad and cannot harm anyone. Thus let me do in future, Lord, if you lend me life, which I scarcely merit, and which scarcely appears to me to be desirable.”
Before the ruins and the cadavers, he beat his breast, to the great amusement of his guards, and proclaimed aloud: “It’s my fault! It’s my fault!”
The soldiers accompanied the cadence by sending him kicks from behind which arrived about half way up his body, and they laughed wholeheartedly.
He was treated with more deference at the beginning of his alternate journeys toward Gaifer and toward Aimery; then his conductors hoped by turns that he might give them gold, and each of them assured him, in secret, of his cordial devotion; several even offered to facilitate an escape and accompany him in his flight, but he discouraged those good intentions, trying to explain that treason is a disloyal action, and above all by declaring that he would never again make or give gold; the disappointed amities had immediately turned sour and everyone, at present competed in brutality in public, in order that no one would suspect what they had proposed in secret.
“Hup, magician! Forward march!”
He responded to the blows: “Punish me, you who know my power and the use that I have made of it. I have decided irrevocably with a fallible understanding! Let my example serve as a lesson to you and instruct you to doubt yourselves; humans desire at hazard and not otherwise, for the truth is more complex and more deceptive than Janus, and our examination has always forgotten one of its innumerable faces.”
“Feel whether I’ve forgotten your face!”
And the military boot attained him with precision.
“Perfect! My dear cousins, don’t stint yourselves, recommence; in giving me the foot, you’re only giving of yourselves, and because of that, your action is not very harmful.”
“Is he mocking us?” said the sergeant.
“I fear so,” said the captain.
“He’ll see!” said the corporal.
The boots went to work again, gaily at first. “One, two! one, two!” But after a while the warriors discovered for themselves that they were imposing extra work on themselves gratuitously, unhelpful for men charged with burdens who have a long road to travel; they stopped.
“And there it is!” said the philosopher. “When one gives of oneself, one rapidly gets tired, and the harm that one has done stops. Oh, I understand the lesson, sirs, and I’m grateful for it; I swear to you that I’ll profit from it, with the exception of foodstuffs, which are indispensable to every creature, I shall no longer give anything but myself.
XVIII. The amazement of an ascetic
rejoining the century
He had been traveling thus for a fortnight when everything changed abruptly. His latest possessor had succeeded in taking him over the frontier; a messenger from the Court brought orders from Gaifer the Twisted that prescribed treating Dieudonat with all the regard due to Princes of the Blood.
Among the people, as well as in aristocratic circles, the possession of that captive, whom the sovereign was already wittily calling “the goose that lays golden eggs,” was counted as a definitive wealth. The unhealthy intentions of the Goose who no longer wanted to lay had been reported to the monarch, but Gaifer shrugged his shoulders.
“I’ll be able to persuade him!”
The truth is that he had discussed the case with his confessor, a wily psychologist expert in manipulating the mechanisms of souls; that director of consciences, without actually giving any advice on a matter so delicate, had indicated in a general and purely theoretical fashion, a means of reducing the determination of a chaste anchorite. In that regard, he had explained how an excessively severe youth, bridled too soon, predisposes innocence to opportunities of the flesh, which is very strong before being so weak; still in that regard, he had cited Saint Anthony, whom the Church had canonized, so meritorious did his resistance seem. But had not that great saint been dealing with imps and not real women…?
“Enough,” said the King. “I understand.”
Exactly as if the King had not opened his mouth, the priest continued: “It is a well-known truth, but which mystics do not suspect sufficiently, that extremes touch. Mysticism confines many points of excessive sensuality, for both proceed from an aptitude to feel keenly and to imagine; look at Dante, who was the most idealistic of poets, and whose biography exposes to us that he was ‘marvelously lustful.’ Excessively impressionable individuals, whose imagination also works to excess, risk overflowing, in accordance with whether Grace guides them, or abandons them, into religious fervor or
carnal passions. Sometimes, they even go from one to the other in different parts of their life, and it is for that reason that frightful debauchees suddenly renounce their disorderly existence in order to take refuge in prayer, ecstasy and the rudest penances; several have become Blessed, not to say Saints; conversely, alas, pious souls find themselves unexpectedly seduced by the demon and fall drunkenly into the folly of sin; on that day, Satan does everything he can.”
“I understand, I tell you, priest!”
After that conversation, the monarch had the delightful palace of Armida furnished again;7 speeches of welcome were also commanded for the person who had the right to them, and constitutive bodies in full regalia came to take up positions at the North Gate in order to receive the ascetic.
When he appeared before that superb masquerade, muddy as he was, clad in rags, funeral oration phrases celebrated his majesty and his power. Words of that sort are not ordinarily heard by the man they concern, since he is dead; Dieudonat knew, while still alive, the shame of being praised for virtues or vices that he did not possess; he drained the chalice to the dregs, and when the official eloquence had finished dripping, the procession set forth.
It advanced, with an orchestra at the head, pompously comical, between two hedges of troops, which presented arms; the people behind the soldiers applauded, uttering cries of delight. Under everyone’s eyes, Dieudonat felt that he was grotesque.
Finally, the trumpets stopped outside the palace of Armida; the troop formed a circle.
A group of varlets wearing his escutcheon were waiting for him to the right of the perron; to the left, a legion of chambermaids was lined up, cleverly chosen from among the most beautiful daughters of the realm; and in front of them was a little man clad entirely in white, fat and clean shaven, who seemed to be sculpted in lard. He approached the Prince with three strides, punctuated with three bows.
“Your servant Anoure,8 chief eunuch, begs Your Highness respectfully to enter his abode.”
The prisoner went in. The young women crowded behind him; he heard them whispering; at the same time, he admired the superb dwelling
The King will not treat me as well when he’s better informed; and who knows, in any case, what tortures might await me inside?
He advanced courageously, ready for anything. The little troop followed a wide corridor with walls lined with onyx; suddenly, it emerged into a vast hexagonal hall illuminated from above, florid with rare plants, in the middle of which a pink marble pool was hollowed, with a noisy water jet; three niches fitted with divans and hung with tapestries sank into three walls; a perfumed freshness floated in the air. The chief eunuch turned round to announce to Milord that the maidservants were ready to proceed with his toilette, in order that he might have the decency required to be presented to the King. Milord tried to protest in the name of modesty, but Anoure was already drawing away and the young women began to strip the ascetic of the habit that he had been wearing for thirteen years.
At first they appeared to experience some disgust; with their fingertips, they threw his clothes in a heap on the marble floor, and those who were not occupied in undressing the price undressed themselves in order to put him in the bath.
He suffered in his chastity and attempted to struggle, but the maidservants were strong; in order to draw him toward the pool they took hold of him everywhere, enlacing him with their plump arms, pushing him with their bodies pressed against his, and laughing all around him. He saw seven or eight of them at the same time; he did not know how many there were, and did not want to know, and he closed his eyes as one clenches one’s fists, with a vigorous energy; that effort was the only one of which he was still capable, and he concentrated his poor petty thought therein, in the matter of children poring over their page of handwriting. His head had become hollow, his ideas were adrift, and he confessed to himself subsequently that throughout that long day, he had been profoundly stupid, understanding things wrongly as soon as he tried to understand them, and only being able to link them by ludicrous reasoning.
At any rate, he perceived that behind his closed eyelids, the living tableaux of the previous minute were persisting in their intention with a terrifying precision; furthermore, every contact evoked an image; he had the illusion of seeing with his whole body, as if his skin had been equipped with eyes. He ceased to struggle, in order not to augment further the touches that did not displease him sufficiently, and, in order to refresh his mind as much as to implore aid in his distress, he entered into prayer at the same time as he entered into the water.
The liquid was soft; in spite of the effort he made to liberate his soul by elevating it toward God, his orison was distracted and scarcely rose at all; contingencies recalled it down below, completely denuded of idealism; among them, a major and obsessive astonishment persecuted him without him being able to avoid it.
Never in his life had he imagined that ladies or damsels were arranged in that fashion; never in his life! No document in the library of the holy monks, no illumination, had ever prepared him for such a surprise. On colored parchments or in the capitals of the church he had perceived, here and there, a spouse of Adam expelled from Paradise, or a few of the damned in Hell, but they had only appeared to him to be worthy of pity. And how little those meager individuals resembled these! In any case, and above all, those copies made by human art did not furnish any idea of the incontestable charm that resides in the originals modeled directly by God: the charm that is divine, because of its origin, and which the Creator has so carefully divided in the ensemble and the details.
After all, one can experience the pleasure of admiring the work of the Eternal under the reserve not contaminating that homage with desires that he has forbidden. In consequence, he opened his eyes again. A hand’s breadth away from his face he saw breasts where droplets were pearling; the young women were immersed up to the waist, with the pink scoop of their two hands throwing handfuls of water over the torso. Their breasts were so white that he observed his own dirtiness; he was ashamed of it, and his alarm changed motive, the anxiety of not seeing replaced by the anxiety of not being seen; he closed his eyes again.
That ostrich decision did not procure him the relief for which he had hoped; his shame persisted.
Those minutes were of capital importance in his life, for they were those in which modesty, in changing it object, changed its nature; from being religious, it became human, and by virtue of that, the man had just been born within the fanatic.
But so what? Into that place and into that attitude, God had doubtless cast him, Daniel in the women’s den, in order that he should endure the punishment of his errors. Certainly, he merited the cruelest of tortures! His soul resigned and his expression sufficiently stupid, he waited while the little hands, foaming with soap, went to work on him furiously. They ran everywhere, lively and familiar; they ran over the slippery surface, swerving, gyrating, flying away and coming back; there were six of them, there were ten, perhaps more, perhaps twenty, and they chased one another, replaced one another, with a silky sound, so rapid and so cheerful that they gave the impression of laughing at their work.
“What strange torment are you according me, Lord?”
All things considered the torture was bearable, and the constancy of the patient veritably merited a recompense; he received it. From one moment to the next, the anguish of his modesty decreased, in order to give way to a sort of seraphic delight, which descended within him like a benediction, or perhaps a pardon, and he perceived a luminous warmth therein that radiated in the depths of his being; he felt the wings of a mystic dove, still perfumed with paradise, palpitating in his heart, so resplendent that it splashed from the inside to the outside.
The genteel torturers persisted in laughing and soaping; he regretted momentarily that such frivolity was profaning that moment of efficacious grace, but he did not have the heart to criticize those young women, or anyone, while his interior ecstasy fill him entirely with gratitude toward heaven and indulgence
toward his torturers.
It was then that he reopened his eyes for the second time, and appreciated even better than the first time how much the person of Eve had been superseded; he thought that perhaps the daughters of Eve were not wrong to laugh, as he had believed a little while ago, for the multiple brilliance of lips, teeth, cheeks, eyes, eyelashes and dimples constituted a harmony that only divine science was capable of conceiving and ordering. Was laughter also the work of God, then? And he laughed, in his turn, but with a stupid expression.
“Thank you, Mademoiselles, that will be enough...”
The chambermaids would not hear it; now they untangled his hair and beard; afterwards, they drew him out of the water and shoved him toward heaped cushions; then they dried his skin with soft cloths, and massaged him with odorous essences; a warmth of wellbeing made his muscles supple. Standing in their midst, his torso seemed broader and his stature straighter; a generous sap was flowing in his conscious veins; he felt stronger and more lucid, enlightened by new but confused notions.
It seemed to him that a world had suddenly opened before him, a mysterious fatherland that he was rediscovering without having known it, but which he had borne within him for a long time—a very long time—and had wanted without knowing it; it appealed to him with its promising horizons, and the dawn rose over them while his past became foggy down below, like a dream...
Under the pressure of the young women, he collapsed among the cushions and remained on his back; the abrupt vertigo of his youth had intoxicated him, and his head was heavy. He passed his fingers over his forehead, trying to reflect. Where was he? Where did he come from? Who was he? Someone else, apparently! He no longer remembered, and truly did not want to remember, himself. He forgot everything that was distant, in order to gaze at what surrounded him, and his gaze was that of a young sleeper waking up.
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