The Dream Maker (44 page)

Yesterday I wrote a long missive to Campofregoso, which Elvira took this morning to the port to a ship sailing for Genoa. I asked him for his help and to intercede with the podestà in Chios to ensure my safety. I just have to hold tight for a few more days while waiting for his reply.

I have regained hope, and the indifference that had made me accept my fate, no matter how tragic, has given way these days to a great anxiety and a desire to ensure our protection. Elvira suggested another refuge, at the center of the island. She has a cousin in the mountains. He owns a sheepfold high in the hills. From there one can see all the surrounding valleys, and anyone who approaches is immediately visible. I had refused because I saw no way out of my situation. If there was no more hope, we might as well end our days with a flourish, in Elvira's house. But now that I have regained a certain optimism, I want to fight. No matter how uncomfortable the sheepfold might be, we will move there in three days' time.

 

*

 

In the meantime, I shall continue my story.

I thought that once the time came to evoke my arrest, my enthusiasm would have waned. But this is not the case. Oddly enough, I do not have a bad memory of it. I even have the very distinct feeling, now, that my disgrace was a new birth. Everything I have lived through since that day has been both deeper and more intense, as if I had been given the possibility to discover life all over again, but armed with the experience I have acquired through the years.

I was transported from prison to prison, placed at times under the guard of men who were respectful and even friendly, and at times in the hands of individuals who did not hesitate to show their scorn.

The first days were difficult. The suddenness of the change in my condition almost made me doubt the reality of these events. It seemed as if at any moment someone would come in and say, “Well now, we only wanted to frighten you. Come and sit again at the Council and show your loyalty to the king.” But nothing like that happened; on the contrary, my trial began and the conditions of my detention were toughened.

That was when I was overcome by an unexpected, almost voluptuous sensation: I felt something like intense relief. The weight I had carried on my shoulders, the heavy burden that had come upon me as I wandered through the Argenterie, the obvious signs that I was being crushed by my fortune and its attendant obligations, all of that, with my arrest, had suddenly ceased. Deposed, I was delivered, and captivity restored to me to my freedom.

It might seem incredible that such a catastrophe could be at the origin of a veritable sense of relief. And yet that was the case. I no longer had to worry about convoys and orders, calling in debts or agreeing to loans, levying taxes or supplying markets, leading delegations or financing wars. I had been spread as if on a cross, on a path leading from Tours to Lyon, from Flanders to Montpellier, where all my business in France was conducted: now I no longer had to worry about any of that, or about any Italian imbroglios or Oriental intrigues. It could all take place outside of me, and my detention released me from having to take part in any of it. I was able to devote myself to an activity I had not enjoyed in many years: spending hours on my back, daydreaming. Sitting on the stone bench by the window and watching the horizon turn blue as night fell.

My dreams took me first to revisit the years I had spent in action, where there had been no distance for contemplation or for the slow judging of events and men. I was helped in my recollections by the trial itself. Thanks to this trial, individuals whom I had forgotten emerged from the past, and for the first time I heard tell of events I had never been informed of. I was accused of the most varied and often most unbelievable things: of having sold arms to the Mohammedans; of having purloined a little royal seal which would enable me to draw up false documents in the king's name; of dabbling in alchemy and manufacturing gold by means of witchcraft . . .

The only accusation I was truly afraid of was one that might reveal my intimate relation with Agnès. I knew that for such a crime there would be no clemency, and that I would pay with my life. I also feared, perhaps more than anything, that it would tarnish Agnès's memory. After her death, although he almost immediately found consolation with her cousin, the king had shown great munificence toward Agnès. But if proof were administered that he had been betrayed, he was capable of withdrawing his magnanimity and sullying the image of the woman whom he had, posthumously, raised to the status of a saint.

I need not have been so alarmed. On the contrary, and to my great surprise, the accusation against me was that I had poisoned Agnès. The woman who alleged this was half mad. The implausibility of her words, together with her strange manner as she set forth her aspersions, rapidly contributed to her discredit.

There was one good thing about this calumny, however: it enabled me to take the measure of how cleverly Agnès had arranged to hide our relations. So often and so well had we mimed our quarrels, or an icy difference, or our fallings out, that the memory of our conflicts came first and foremost to corroborate these accusations of poisoning. Other testimonies were required, including those of Brézé, Chevalier and even Dunois, in order to convince my judges that I had, in fact, had harmonious relations with Agnès.

During the long months of the pre-trial investigation, I lived in complete solitude, relieved only by confrontations with witnesses who had emerged from the past and had something to say about me. As if learning the final clue to an enigma, I found out what all these people truly thought of me. Hatred and jealousy, which are so common and so repetitive, soon aroused nothing more than weariness and indifference. But when a woman or a man, very sincere and often of very modest condition, came to testify regarding some kindness I had shown them, or simply to manifest their respect or their affection, I had tears in my eyes.

The further the trial progressed, the lighter the injustice of which I was the victim and the heavier, on the contrary, the injustice I had caused to others came to weigh upon my conscience.

In this respect, it was toward Macé that I felt most guilty. I remembered how we had met and our early years together, and I tried to recall how our estrangement and indifference had gradually taken hold. I received news from her regularly but I did not see her again. It was obvious that she was suffering as a result of my fall from favor. Fortunately, it occurred at a time when she had already fulfilled her greatest dream, which was to see Jean enthroned as archbishop. She did not write to me, but I wondered whether she, too, in her way, was not relieved. Rather than lay herself open to vengeance and show her decline to others, she did what she had always secretly hoped to do: she withdrew to a monastery and gave herself up to contemplation and prayer. She died at the end of my first year of detention. I thought of her a great deal, and as I did not have the resources to pray, I simply expressed a wish that she had found serenity at the end.

That first year of detention went by strangely quickly. I was moved, transferred to Lusignan and placed under the guard of Chabannes's men. He was a former
écorcheur
, murderer and traitor to the king, and the sworn enemy of the Dauphin, yet now he had found an opportunity to prove his zeal, all the more so as he was personally interested in ruining me, and coveted a number of my properties.

My attempt to escape a verdict by pleading ecclesiastical privilege came to nothing. It was true that I had been a pupil at the Sainte-Chapelle, but I had not taken orders and the exemption was rejected. The trial continued.

One witness followed another, interminably. It became obvious that the judges did not find this as entertaining as I did. They deemed that this hodgepodge of gossip and ambiguous sins, which I generally managed to explain away, did not constitute a sufficiently damning case against me. It was at that point, and my hand still trembles as I write it, that for the first time I heard the word “torture.”

Who will believe me when I say I had never thought about it until then? The trial thus far had been a matter for the mind; now it would be one for the body. It seemed to me that I had already lost everything, and yet I still disposed of this envelope of clothing which, however little that may be, does protect and conceal. First of all it would be removed. I was interrogated half-naked, sitting for long hours on the sinister chair. My judges, whom I had somewhat hastily considered to be my equals, suddenly grew much more powerful, their domination founded not on the soundness of their accusations, but on the fact that they spoke down to me, sitting on a podium while I was on my little bench, and that they were clothed while I surrendered my unprotected skin to their gazes. This was the first time I unveiled in public the deformation that hollowed out my chest, and I felt particularly humiliated. Moreover, I was afraid that this trace of a violence exerted on me from the time of my birth, as if it were the mark of God's fist in my flesh, might lead to others, by virtue of that law of nature which holds that a wounded animal excites his predators.

Although no one had yet struck a blow against me, those initial sessions had a terrible effect on my conscience. I was able to judge how it was not so much the pain I dreaded, but the diminishment. Several accidents had made me aware of the fact that I was fairly tough. But what I cannot bear is to be dependent on others, to be delivered defenseless to the good will or evil instincts of another person. I even wonder whether my entire life cannot be explained by this boundless desire to escape the violence of my fellow creatures. Ever since my childhood and the episode during the siege of Bourges, I had known that the empire of the mind was one way, perhaps the only way, to escape the brutal confrontation which boys resort to in order to establish their hierarchy. My father had never raised his hand against me. The first blow I received and which I still remember to this day was during a schoolboy squabble on leaving the Sainte-Chapelle. They had just finished preaching to us about kindness and loving one's neighbor, and the sudden contradiction went some way toward creating my subsequent wariness with regard to religion. I found myself on the ground in a general tussle. The punch I had received below my eye was less alarming to me than my impression of suffocation while a dozen screaming bodies piled themselves on top of me. For six months I had nightmares and difficulties writing. My hand would freeze on the pen, and the words, cramped by the stiffness of my wrist, were illegible and chaotic. It was only after the episode of the siege of Bourges and my discovery of the power of the mind that my anxiety abated.

Now, on the torture seat, I felt once again that old buried terror, which had remained intact. Being locked up had not brought it on. But to be there before my judges, undressed and unable to move, and to sense on me the voracious gaze of the two torturers standing by the door, waiting for the single word from the magistrates that would authorize them to use the iron instruments hanging on the wall: all of this made me lose any strength or hope I might still have had.

On the third day of this treatment, having not yet received a single blow, to the great despair of the two torturers who were yawning with boredom, I made a solemn declaration to my judges. I told them that it was pointless trying to use force on me. At the very idea that they might resolve to use it, I would sign anything they liked. My capitulation pleased some of them, but aroused objections among the others. They decided to withdraw in order to debate the matter. I could not understand why they disagreed. What more could they ask for than a full confession, no matter how long, circumstantial, or fantastical it might be? While conversing with one of the guards who behaved in a kindly manner toward me, I learned the cause of the judges' confusion. They were of the opinion that torture, given the pain it causes, is the only way to authenticate the sincerity of a prisoner's confessions. Words uttered under the influence of fear did not have the same value as those dictated by the unbearable suffering the torturers inflicted. According to this concept, fear is still a manifestation of human will. And as such, it leaves room for evil, which, it would seem, is peculiar to mankind; one cannot be sure there does not remain an element of ruse, lying, or calculation. Whereas pain causes the divine heart of man to speak, his soul, which when laid bare cannot help but reveal, without artifice, his blackness or his purity.

This reasoning was repellent to me. First of all, I found it absurd, scornful with regard to human beings, and marked with the seal of the most ridiculous bigotry. But as it took the judges two days to reach their decision, before they summoned me to appear again, I had time to think about it at greater length. And to my great surprise, I discovered that a part of me approved of their abominable concept. If I were free from torture, and my fear sufficed to my judges, I could well understand that the absurdity of the sins they would force me to acknowledge would discredit their accusations. Basically, given this hypothesis, any confession I might sign would not be my own, but theirs. They would find in their own minds the crimes of which they were accusing me, and all of this would have little to do with reality. The king, who knew me, might perceive that my confession rang false.

Whereas if they subjected me to torture, whatever came from inside me could only be the truth. Who knows, if I were driven mad by suffering, whether I would not confess to the most important things: my relations with the Dauphin, my friendship with the king of Aragon and, above all, my relationship with Agnès.

In the end, my proposal was rejected.

 

*

 

The torture began.

I had the impression that the discord between my judges had not led to a clear decision, fortunately. They did not initially resort to unbearable torture—reluctantly, for their instinct inclined to them to do much more. During the interrogations the torturers merely tied me up in uncomfortable positions, which at length became painful. The torture consisted above all in inducing a physical exhaustion that was meant to incite me to make confessions, and thus bring a hastier end to the session. Aware of this trap, I limited myself to giving trivial information on quibbling commercial errors. I confessed, for example, to my failure to pay the Rhone salt tax in full, a crime of which the king himself was aware and to which he had turned a blind eye.