The Bestiary (19 page)

Like D’Épernay, Doge Dandolo would have been familiar with the Gnostic belief that the Bible and the first bestiary comprised the only true universal history, but only if the Bible included the Apocrypha (easy to do) and if the bestiary had reincorporated the fugitive bestiary (not so easy). The privileged reader of this universal history might be rewarded with a supreme
gnosis,
something akin to encountering a parallel universe, in which the rarest substances, and subtlest connections, have been restored; in which all that is inexplicable has come clear, and knowledge of “who we were, who we have become, and where we are going”—the Gnostic credo—is within our grasp.

At the same time, it was maddening that, while he called the bestiary “wondrous” and “miraculous,” and conveyed Doge Dandolo’s intense delight, D’Épernay did not offer his own appreciation of its contents, or even a material description of the book: size, binding, color, and specific entries. Nothing but that scarlet pouch. This despite the fact that, during the month the bestiary had been in his sole possession, he must surely have examined it. Maybe his correspondent, Briand, was not someone with whom he would share his deeper reactions. Even so, it was clearly not the bestiary, but his transaction with the Doge that most interested D’Épernay. Which may be the reason he concluded his long letter to Briand with a curiously hurried postscript, informing him that, while passing through Venice ten years after these events, and three years after Dandolo’s death, D’Épernay was granted an audience with another doge, Giovanni Dolfin. He asked Dolfin about the
Caravan Bestiary,
and the Doge said he had never seen or heard of it. D’Épernay believed him, and was only mildly surprised—“having witnessed Dandolo’s lust for the book.” He concluded that Doge Dandolo had treated the bestiary as a private possession—not a gift to the Republic. Presumably it stayed in his family when Dandolo died, but it could have passed into other hands entirely, inside or outside of Venice.

D’Épernay didn’t say; for him, the trail ended in October 1347—a more than interesting date, as I learned that afternoon, because just three months later Venice would be one of the first European cities ravaged by the Black Death. It arrived from the Crimea, on merchant ships carrying flea-infested rats. Within a year Venice lost three-fifths of its population—just as France would nine months later. Trying to cope with this catastrophe, Doge Dandolo had little time or inclination for his scholarly pursuits. At the height of the plague, with Venice on the verge of becoming a necropolis, he dispatched the Dogaressa and their children to an alpine retreat near Castelfranco. Had he taken similar precautions with his artistic treasures, including the
Caravan Bestiary
? That was one possibility. For suddenly, instead of a lot of nebulous ideas about where the bestiary might or might not be, I could proceed from a fixed point in time, unknown apparently to anyone before me, and a specific array of sources: the personal and public records of Doge Andrea Dandolo and his descendants from 1347 on.

A
S
I
PREPARED
to leave for Venice, I read what I could about Dandolo, and his tenure as doge, at the medieval library. I was having trouble sleeping because of the pain in my side. One night, I had just poured myself a stiff brandy and stretched out on the sofa when Sylvie called.

“Did you see
Le Monde
today?” she said with some urgency.

“No.” After the war, I stopped reading newspapers. I had no stomach for politics, the Cold War, the daily catastrophes. “What is it?” I said.

“It’s from the obituaries.”

I wasn’t expecting that.

“I’ll read it to you: ‘Ferdinand Deschalles died in Narbonne on May 3 at the age of eighty-four. The cause of death was heart failure. He was a graduate of the University of Lyon and a medic in the First World War. A surgeon at the Hospital of Saint Mary for forty-five years, he was Chief of Surgery from 1947 to 1960 and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 1954. He is survived by his wife Felicité, a daughter, Margot Fernot, of Tulle, three grandchildren, his brother Roger Deschalles, of Lyon, and his stepsister, Amanda Faville of Sauvigny.’”

“My god.”

“Yes, it’s her,” Sylvie said.

It had never occurred to me that Madame Faville might still be alive. I had so associated her with Brox and Cava—men of the nineteenth century—that I hadn’t thought of her living deep into the twentieth. She must have been close to ninety.

I immediately wrote her a letter, saying it was important I meet with her, telling her something of myself and my interest in the
Caravan Bestiary.
Two days later I received an invitation to join her for tea that Friday, at three o’clock.

Sauvigny was in the Loire Valley, west of Moulins. The appointed day was warm and sunny, and I made the drive from Paris in two hours. Madame Faville lived just outside of town, at the end of a long gravel driveway beside a field of lavender. Her house was well kept, white with tall windows. A maid led me down a hallway lined with bookshelves. I spotted titles in French, Italian, and German, and on the right-hand wall, hundreds of art books.

Madame Faville was sitting by the window in her library, a small, compact woman with blue eyes. Her white hair was combed back. Her hands were shaky, but her gaze was clear and her face barely wrinkled. I recognized at once the striking young woman in her photograph. She wore a long green dress and a black shawl. The library overlooked a garden with long beds of tulips and zinnias and several fig and cherry trees. There were three birdhouses on metal posts the squirrels could not climb. While we spoke, a portly gardener came into view every so often, raking leaves.

“Mr. Atlas,” she said. “Please sit.” She indicated the sofa across from the desk.

“Thank you for inviting me. May I offer my condolences for your brother.”

“That’s kind of you.” She adjusted her shawl. “I didn’t really think of Ferdinand as a brother. I hadn’t seen him in years. His wife knew he and I never got along. I can’t imagine why she included me in the obituary, except that she was always very correct.” She smiled. “And now I see that is how you found me here.”

“Yes.”

“It’s all right,” she said, noting my discomfort. “I’m eighty-eight years old. I haven’t published a word in twenty-five years. There is no reason you could have known I was here.”

“I should have known.”

“What matters is you’re here now.”

I looked around the room: a desk so neat it was obviously not in use; more books, floor-to-ceiling; two globes, one contemporary, one of the medieval world; and a dozen drawings and paintings on the wall, many immediately recognizable—a Braque, a Miró, watercolors by Dufy, sketches by Klee. A pair of Burmese cats—so black I hadn’t seen them at first—were curled asleep together on an ottoman. Hanging behind the desk were two framed photographs identical in size: a bearded middle-aged man smoking a pipe in that same garden, and a slender man with intense eyes and a broad forehead on a mountain trail, outfitted for climbing.

“The two men in my life,” Madame Faville said, following my gaze, “one for forty-one years, the other for fourteen months. The one with the pipe is my late husband, Armand Faville. A professor of physics. The mountaineer is Spengler. In my youth I climbed with him in the Dolomites and the Alps. Oswald was not particularly athletic, but he loved to climb. Like him.” She pointed up to my left, where a third Burmese was nestled onto the topmost bookshelf, staring down at me. “That’s why he’s named Oswald,” she added drily. “Now, Mr. Atlas, your letter was very polite, but also cryptic. It surprised me that anyone would be interested in my unsuccessful search for the
Caravan Bestiary—
or would himself be searching. But, then, when I was your age it made perfect sense: a prize so chimerical, only one copy in the whole world and no one can find it. So of course you must try. It becomes like a quest for perfection, or ideal love—doomed from the start. Because the bestiary no longer exists.” She studied my face. “Do you disagree?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you an idealist, then—a seeker of the perfect, the divine?”

I smiled. “I wish I were. But I do have some new information. I wanted to share it with you.”

“Why?”

“Because of the work you did. I was able to build on it. It inspired me.”

“I wish it had inspired
me,
” she said. “Perhaps you think I can give you some information now? I’m happy to, though it will be fifty years out of date. I only hope, for your sake, that whatever you’ve dug up is not old stuff that’s been recycled.”

“I don’t think so. I would like to know what you think about Michael Brox and Niccólo Cava.”

“Ah,” she nodded. “You are a serious pursuer. But first tell me more about yourself. In your letter you didn’t say how you came to be interested in the
Caravan Bestiary.
”

“It would have been a very long letter.”

“I have plenty of time now, if you do.”

I told her about my grandmother, and Mr. Hood, and my search up until Honolulu. “You see,” I concluded, “the day I first learned of the
Caravan Bestiary,
I also heard of you.”

“From your teacher.”

“You’ve always been a part of it for me. I went on to read every book of yours I could find.”

“You are among the few people who can claim that distinction.”

“Tell me, aside from the fact it was chimerical, and you were young, what made you search for the bestiary?”

She smiled. “Two words. Fame and glory. It would have made my career, just like that,” she said, snapping her fingers. “I wish I could say my motives were as esoteric and spiritual as yours.”

“I don’t altogether believe you.”

“Suit yourself,” she shrugged.

“Well, I’ve been especially curious about your interest in Horapollo.”

“He’s a marvelously contradictory figure: no one has ever pinned down who or what he was exactly. Christians and pagans alike claimed him. In the end he declared he was a direct descendant of the god Osiris. You must know that you can see a well-preserved manuscript of the
Hieroglyphica
in Florence.”

“At the Biblioteca Laurenziana.”

“I went there in 1922. The manuscript was brought to Florence from the island of Andros exactly five hundred years earlier by a bandit scholar named Cristoforo Buondelmonti. The authoritative edition, in Greek, was published in 1505 and in the next century alone went through more than thirty editions and translations, not including the adaptations.”

“I know he drew on Aristotle’s
Mysteries.
”

“Yes, whatever parts of it survived into the fifth century. He also had access to early Gnostic texts before they were destroyed by the Church. I was convinced that the compilers of the
Caravan Bestiary
owed more to Horapollo than to Physiologus. That was my theory, unprovable of course if I didn’t have the bestiary.”

“That was the thesis of the book you never finished?”

“Yes,” she sighed, sitting back. “That’s no mystery. And, as you can see, I am not some mysterious figure. Just an old woman who has retired to the country.”

“You’re considerably more than that.”

“I am flattered you think so, Mr. Atlas. But how can I help you with regard to Brox and Cava?”

“Is there anything worth knowing about their searches? You must have read their writings long ago. I’m just catching up. I was planning to go to the University of Vienna to read Brox’s essay. You wrote that there’s nothing there.”

“There isn’t. In 1923 I spent two stifling days in the Hauptbibliotek wading through that essay. German prose thicker than Spengler’s, but without a trace of wit or subtlety. Brox just kept expanding his stale conspiracy theory, that the bestiary was burned in Seville. Except now he insisted that Pope Clement III himself participated in the burning.”

“Do you think Brox’s murder was connected to his search?”

“It’s possible. He was a theologian, supposedly very high-minded, but I know for a fact he made deals with wealthy collectors, shady types. They underwrote his expensive travels. They may have wanted the book in order to sell it whole, or a page at a time, on the black market. Perhaps he led them on, or was double-dealing. Perhaps they led him on, then double-crossed him. Who knows? He was quite a womanizer: it could have been a jealous husband.”

“Do you know why he was in Turkey?”

“I have no idea. He had concocted an elaborate route that the book supposedly took to Spain. Turkey was one of the stops, but so were a host of other countries.”

“And Cava?”

“Italy Italy Italy. And the Vatican. He too was a conspiracist, even more tortured than Brox. Dozens of church officials were supposedly involved in suppressing the bestiary.”

“The book
is
considered heretical.”

“Of course. And maybe it is locked away in a vault hundreds of meters below the Sistine Chapel. But Cava had no proof, just theories that became increasingly paranoid. He and Brox hit dead ends long before I did. You want to know what I learned from them? That such desperation in others should set off warning bells about what you yourself are doing. That said, tell me about this new information of yours.”