The Avignon Quintet (133 page)

(10) Seek out and maintain with care the Austrian alliance; appear to support its growing ideas of domination over Germany, but at the same time secretly fomenting the jealousy of princes against Austria. Operate so that both states ask for Russian aid and allow us to exercise over them a protective role which will prepare our future domination.

(11) Interest the Royal House of Austria in the plan for clearing the Turks out of Europe and neutralise its jealousies over the conquest of Constantinople either by provoking a war with the older European states, or by sharing a part of the conquered territory with her; this we could take back later.

(12) Unite all the Orthodox Greeks who are divided or who support schisms throughout Hungary and Poland; gather them together and support them so that they constitute in a group a sort of predominant and sacerdotally important body; thus we will have many friends amongst many of our enemies.

(13) Sweden partitioned. Persia conquered. Poland subjugated. Turkey defeated. Our armies reunited. The Black Sea and the Baltic guarded by our sailing ships. For the moment we should propose, separately and in absolute secrecy, first to the Court of Versailles, then to that of Vienna, to share with them our world empire. Should one of them accept – inevitable if we know how to flatter their self esteem – we must turn one against the other and wage against them a battle whose issue is in no doubt, seeing that Russia will already hold all the Orient and a great part of Europe.

(14) If by chance both refuse the Russian offer – a highly improbable issue – we must set alight conflicts which will ruin them both; then can Russia at a decisive moment launch an attack on Germany with her forces concentrated.

(15) At the same time two vast fleets will set sail, one from the sea of Azov and the other from Archangel, full of Asiatic troops to join forces with the Black Sea and the Baltic fleets. Our army and navy will advance and cross the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans, on the one hand invading France, on the other Germany. Once these two regions are conquered the rest of Europe will pass easily and without much effort under our control.

That is how Europe could and must be subdued.

SEBASTIAN

or
Ruling Passions

to Simone Périer
of Montaury by Nîmes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are hereby extended to Dr Torhild Leira who gave permission for the author to use hints from her beautiful article in the
International Review of Psychoanalysis
, vol. 7, pt 3,1980, entitled ‘The Release of Tears’.

Contents

ONE

The Recall

T
HE PRINCE WAS IN A VEXATION
.
HE HAD DECIDED ON
the spur of the moment to return to Egypt with Affad whom he took to task very severely for having succumbed, as he put it, to the “whim” of falling in love with Constance. He pursued the theme doggedly as they rode in the official limousine towards the airport of Geneva. “It was completely
uncalled
for,” he said, “in view of your superior experience and the
engagements
you had entered into with the seekers.” He was referring to the small brotherhood of gnostics in Alexandria to which they both belonged and in the tenets of whose creed they both deeply believed. Yes, on this score Affad felt deeply guilty, deeply betrayed by his own desire. The face of Constance rose up in his memory as if to reproach him for what he could not help. “You had no
right
to fall in love,” the Prince went on testily. “I will
not
have her hurt.” Affad made an impatient noise in his throat. “There is no such thing, as you have said. We must find another word. I will not have
engouement
. It is something of another order. Not infatuation at all.” (They were speaking French, their tone was high.) Then after a long silence Affad said, “The experience was new to me; I ran aground –
j’ai calé
. Prince, it was not myself acting. Besides, you talk as if you were in love with her yourself.” This put the Prince into a fearful rage because it was true. He made a cryptic gobbling noise like an offended turkey and blew his nose in a cambric handkerchief.

The problem was insoluble. Surely the insidious goblins of love had ceased to exist on the thin moral fare offered by the modern world? Affad was thinking with deep desire mingled with remorse of that secret field or realm which constitutes the moral geography of the mystic. His friend Balthazar had once said ruefully, “I thought I was living my own life but all the time it was really living me without any extraneous aid. It had taken half a century for me to realise this! What a blow to my self-esteem!”

“Your behaviour is out of date,” said the Prince again. “Since contraception things have changed. Women were once unique events in the life of a man; now woman is a mere commodity like
hay
. Availability has bred contempt.”

“Not Constance!” he said.

“Of course Constance!” said the old man.

Affad thought back in silence. When he had first seen her he had been unable to believe his eyes, so original had her style of beauty seemed. (“I hate people acting out of epoch,” said the Prince vehemently, and he intended the remark to wound.) “In fact so do I. But in any given moment of time some part of us is out of date, stays chronologically prehistoric in the most obstinate way. The kisses of ancestors take firm possession of our senses; we are mere distributors of love, not inventors. Even less investors.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said the Prince.

“I was alarmed to find that for once this demonic sentiment was not moribund. I tried to escape it in vain, I really tried!”

“Fiddlesticks!” cried the Prince and gave a tiny stamp on the floor of the limousine. He was beside himself with … not only moral vexation but also jealousy. Affad said, “You are behaving as if I were a curate who had been untrue to his vows of chastity. I won’t have it.” But this was unfair, the business was much graver. It was in the most literal sense a matter of life and death and sacrifice. He had fallen short of his own intentions. In ancient times human sacrifice was invented to placate this particular demon. Think of the hundreds of imberb boys and impubert girls it had needed to placate the Cretan minotaur! “On my last birthday my old aunt Fatima sent me a telegram saying, ‘Death is of no importance to It: why then to you?’ Was she wrong?”

“Yes, she was wrong,” said Affad, out of sheer contrariness, for the Prince was very annoying and there was no point in continuing to give in to him. On theological matters it was another affair – he would have to face the Star Chamber, so to speak, and answer for his fidelity; but this was an inner committee which had every right to probe his sincerity. They had never heard of Constance, like the Prince. “As a matter of fact Constance herself took a rather robust medical attitude to the sentiment you so much disapprove of,” he said, and he felt the Prince’s mind pucker up around his affection for the girl. She had once referred scornfully to love’s
angoisse vésperale
, evening distress, but then had softened of a sudden, tears had come into her eyes, she had put her hand over her mouth as if to discourage a disposition to cry. Under her breath she had added. “Mon Dieu! Quel sentiment de déréliction!”

“Well, I suppose it is all fiddlesticks, as you say, but it is an expensive form of folly. She will take to her bed with a high fever and transfer her
angustia
to her medical duties. How to face those huge heaps of dead leaves, the neurotic patients who besiege her?”

They rode on for a while in silence, the Prince cracking his finger joints with an ill-tempered scowl. That brave girl, he was thinking, having to defend herself from the charm and folly of this suave python of a man. It was quite maddening for he loved Affad also as he would have loved his closest friend.

“I hardly dare to confide my distress in you because you react so violently. What would you say, I wonder, if you knew that I had been trying to make her pregnant – to face total and irrevocable disaster, so to speak, which would have united us definitively. Eh?” The elder man jumped at the confidence but did not comment upon it; he just sat looking straight ahead for a long moment before asking, “Does she know yet? For certain?” and Affad took his arm affectionately as he replied, “Unfortunately yes!” Rather surprisingly the Prince turned his birdbright glance upon him and said with unexpected sympathy, “Bad luck! Poor girl! But it would have rendered your decision to leave her even harder, even more cruel. You have behaved like a great coward in all this business, I feel; you have failed on both sides, Eros and Thanatos. Yes, you may well hang your head, my boy. And I suppose you blame love for all this lack of moral fibre?”

“Fiddlesticks!” said Affad in his turn with a blush which showed that he had felt the force of the reproof. His thoughts had come full circle and settled into the deep gloom engendered by his self-reproach and by the knowledge that in the last analysis it was the secret brotherhood which had the ultimate claims upon his life, and that at any moment they could foreclose upon his future. What a curse it was, after all, this love which set friend against friend, lover against loved. The whole circle of his friendships had shifted, been displaced by Constance’s choice of him.

He had spent a no less gloomy moment at the bedside of the recumbent Blanford whose friendship he now treasured almost as much as that of the Prince. “It was my fault for letting her see passages from the bloody novel; it made her understand how crucial your beliefs were to your life … you hadn’t told her, had you? O God, I am so sorry. But from her point of view you are simply ill, so to speak; you are suffering from a dangerous form of religious mania which she must be dying to cure in order to keep you!” Affad wrung his hands as he listened. He implored his friend to spare him any further analysis. The “bloody” novel lay before Blanford on the bed. He touched it wistfully from time to time with an air of deep regret. “Sebastian, please forgive me!” he said.

Affad rose. He stood for a while looking down upon the troubled face of his recumbent friend with affection and sympathy. “Aubrey!” he said aloud and fell silent. Just the word, like a note in music. He did not add a goodbye for it would have seemed out of place – for he was not going anywhere in the profoundest sense. But he did add: “Please write to me when you feel like it; I am not sure when I shall come back, but my intention of the moment is to return in three or four months.”

“I know you will come back. I have begun to see a little way into the pattern, the apparent confusion is beginning to make sense. I realise now that I came to Egypt because I was ill, I was afraid of the man on my back. I did a Sinbad in the hope of ridding myself of Sutcliffe – you will have noticed my various attempts to dispense with him, to make him commit suicide for example, using the bridge as a symbol. I had to have my spine shot into holes before I realised that the only way to deal with the Socratic Voice is to concretise it, let it live, manifest itself. Then it becomes a harmless ghost, it passes off in a fever, it writes the classic phrase for you. It can do everything but love. That you must do for yourself.”

“O God!” said Affad dismally.
“Again!”

“I had formed him just as one forms a renal calculus – or a teratoma, or the shadowy figure of one’s twin which must be thrown by the ever-present witness of birth, the placenta. To hell with all this verbiage! The creature is alive, he is coming to lunch, he will even get an O.B.E. in a while for his services to the Crown. O God, Sebastian, I wish you were staying; I have learned so much from you!”