The Dream Maker (24 page)

As I came to know him, I could sense the danger implicit in his person—he was a wounded, jealous, mean man, who allowed no one the leisure of escape. And though I had already known this, and had a premonition of the danger, I was incapable of protecting myself.

There was one thing I discovered during the voyage, and that was Charles's capacity for listening. His ideas were not born solely from personal reflection or intuition; they also stemmed from a slow deciphering of the innumerable words he heard. When the subject interested him, he took the reins of the conversation, asked questions, and guided one's testimony. This maieutic method had a considerable effect on me and I was astonished, as I spoke to him, to find in myself the new ideas he had knowingly inspired, perhaps even conceived.

For example, one evening we had a long conversation about the Mediterranean, which lasted almost until dawn. I remember it perfectly. We were in a town in the Cévennes. We had stopped at a fortified house halfway up the slope. From the terrace, which the present owner had added, we could see the valley of the Rhone, and in the mist in the distance the first foothills of the Alps. It was an ideal place to envisage grand prospects. Charles's tongue was loosened by the sweet wine, and he was comfortably installed in a wicker chair. I was sitting at the stone table where we had dined. I had shoved aside the plates and glasses and was leaning forward with my elbows on the table. When the semidarkness crept over the hillside the king refused to have the candles lit and we went on talking in almost total obscurity. He gazed at the billions of stars in the deep and moonless night. We were no longer a sovereign and his servant; there was only the vessel of dreams on which we had both embarked and which was driven by a great wind of hope, like the one that arises from one's own body when one has rested and eaten one's fill.

It was he who asked me to talk about the Mediterranean. I began by describing the shore in our parts and was quick to remind him that he was one of the four masters who shared its coast.

“Four! And who are the others?”

Still smiling, I gave him a suspicious look. With him it was always difficult to ascertain whether his questions concealed traps. What exactly did he know about the Mediterranean? It seemed impossible to me that he did not already have some notions about the situation. At the same time, he had devoted his attention so exclusively to the war with the English, had so many problems with Burgundy, Flanders, and so many other provinces in the north, that perhaps he did in fact have some serious gaps in his knowledge of the way matters stood in the south.

“Imagine,” I began cautiously, “if we were to continue on our way toward the sea in that direction.”

I pointed southward, to where the valley opened out. Night had not yet fallen at that point. The king held his eyes wide open as if to dissolve the purplish mist enveloping the river.

“Once you reach the coast, imagine that if you were to turn right, you would enter the home of the Catalan, for whom you have no great affection: Alfonso, king of Aragon and Sicily. He has his merchant fleet for trade, but also his corsairs who attack and pillage whomever they meet.”

“More wine!” shouted Charles.

He drank little, taking tiny sips, but I had already noticed that nervous tension increased if not his pleasure at least his desire to resort to drink.

“And to the left?”

“To the left, you will find first of all the port of Marseille, which belongs to the Duke of Anjou, as does all Provence.”

“René.”

“Indeed, King René.”

Charles raised his shoulders and hissed, “
King
René. Do not forget he is my vassal.”

“In any case, on these seas, he behaves more like your rival. He may sell his feudal homage to you, but he continues to compete with you mercilessly in the commercial domain.”

“I am not obliged to let him push me around.”

“To be sure.”

I knew he liked the idea. Charles was not a feudal lord. He despised the order which made him the foremost of princes but refused him the means of becoming a king. His alliance with burghers like me, his desire to undermine the great barons, his urge to have a financial instrument at his disposal, to be powerful in trade, and to have his own army—it was all that which I admired in him.

“And the fourth?”

“Beyond Provence, farther along the coast, lies Genoa.”

“Genoa,” he repeated pensively. “Is it a free city? I have never understood anything about Italy.”

A typical reflection for a king of France. The Duke of Burgundy would never have spoken thus. Of all Charlemagne's heirs, the one who reigned in Dijon had always looked to the south and was abreast of everything that happened on the Italian peninsula. The king of France, however, kept his eyes on England. But Charles's question showed that this state of affairs might be about to change. If he managed to rid himself of the English threat for good, the king of France might at last turn his gaze to Italy. I fervently hoped so. I have always thought that France could play a great role in this region. Absorbed by my idea of making the realm the new center of the world, I could not conceive of that center without Rome. Italy was divided, and open to our conquest. The Catalan prince was much less powerful than Charles VII, but had he not conquered Sicily and the kingdom of Naples? I refrained from explaining this too clearly, for fear the king might be alarmed. I merely took a first step in that direction.

“Genoa has always needed a protector. There are some in that city who would be pleased if it were you, sire.”

From the way the king, in his unmoving severity, blinked his eyes, I understood that he had grasped perfectly the thrust and impact of my remark. As usual, he concealed his interest, but I was certain that he would bring it up again.

“And what lies beyond Genoa?”

“Nothing that matters on this sea. Florence has no fleet and in Rome the pope pays little attention to his port. Genoa's only rival is located on the far side of the peninsula, on the Adriatic. That is Venice.”

The king asked many more detailed questions about the four fleets that shared the coast from Barcelona to Genoa. He questioned me at length about the ports of the Languedoc. I told him about Montpellier and its canal, which in my opinion had no future, as far as Lattes. He was curious to hear the glorious history of Aigues-Mortes. But he changed the subject when I described how the port was silting up, as if this evocation of the work of centuries and, perhaps, the memory of Saint Louis plunged him into melancholy. This was not the first time I had noticed his visceral fear of time. He could put up with deprivation, failure, and betrayal, but yielded to utter panic at the prospect of death. In hindsight, I see a certain coherence. His strength lay in waiting, and placing his hope in the changes the future might bring. But the moment he became aware of his finite nature, time was no longer on his side. Deprived of this ally he became vulnerable, and what he had accepted as provisional now became unbearable, since he would no longer have the time to free himself from it.

It was completely dark out by the time he turned the conversation to the Levant. The serving woman who had brought our wine was still there. I could just make out her form in the semidarkness. It seemed to me that she was standing next to the king, and while he spoke he was stroking her leg.

“In the Levant,” I said, “there are four of them as well. They are all enemies, two by two.”

“Explain yourself.”

“It's very simple. Most people will tell you that in the Holy Land Christianity is confronted with the Mohammedans.”

“That is generally the significance ascribed to the crusades: you are not of this opinion?”

“Yes, of course I am. But by describing it in this way, one is neglecting another rivalry that is just as violent.”

“And what might that be?”

“The one that divides each camp into two groups.”

“The Mohammedans are divided?”

“Deeply. The Sultan of Egypt, who reigns as far as Damascus and Palestine, has no worse enemy than the Turks in Asia Minor.”

“Are you implying that we could use one against the others?”

“Incontestably. The merchants who come from Europe are given a warm welcome in Cairo.”

“And is it not true that the Christians who are still in the Holy Land are subject to all sorts of harassment?”

“The Arabs distrust them, that is true. But it must be said, without excusing them, that the partisans of the crusades have not given up, starting with your cousin Burgundy. And they continue to mistake their enemy. They believe the Turks are friendly and they are angry with the Arabs for occupying Jerusalem. However, it is the Turks who prevent the pilgrims from going to Palestine, and they are the ones who are going deeper into Europe, advancing through the Balkans.”

“And are the Christian kingdoms also divided in this way?”

“Of course. Anyone who speaks to you of ‘Christianity' and its struggle against the disciples of Mohammed is thinking of Byzantium and the Turkish armies camped all around it.”

“And is that wrong?”

“Not wrong. But this propaganda suits the Basileus first and foremost, for he likes to present himself as the final rampart against Islam. The truth is that he spends just as much time fighting other Christians.”

“And who dares to attack him?”

“Our Latin friends, Genoa and Venice. And if the Catalans do not join them it is because they are waiting to lend a hand by means of their corsairs.”

The moon had not yet appeared in the sky, but our eyes had grown used to the darkness. Now I could see the serving woman, standing behind the king. He had guided her hands and she was massaging his shoulders. Several of his mistresses had told me in confidence that he had great need of such manipulation. Only in this way could he find relief from the terrible tension that twisted him in every direction. I understood that, far from distracting him from my words, the servant's gestures enabled him to cast off the burden of his pain, and left him free to listen to me with the utmost attention.

“While Constantinople is threatened on land by the Turks,” I continued, “it suffers constant setbacks in the islands due to the Latins.”

The king asked for many details about the commercial and territorial rivalry between Constantinople and the Italian city-states. His questions were so precise and, at times, so trivial, that once again I was under the impression that this was an amusement for him. My own assurance in the matter was a challenge to him, and no doubt he was trying to put me on the spot. And he managed to, on several occasions, when I had to confess that I did not know the answer. Then he would give a little laugh of satisfaction. After one of these lapses, he stood up, thanked the serving woman with a caress on her cheek, and went to bed.

For the two weeks that our journey lasted, he went on questioning me. In Montpellier he asked to see a galley, and even went on board to inspect the cargo. The town gave him a welcome worthy of a sovereign, but he curtailed the ceremonies, thus increasing the time at his disposal to see the trade facilities, to converse with the ships' captains, with merchants, and even with the oarsmen on the galleys, whom he questioned about their work. This was before the era of galley slaves, and oarsmen were still free, although it was easy to imagine they were not of the most upstanding sort. They often signed on in order to avoid a prison sentence, or worse; the law would spare them provided they stay on their bench and at their oar for several crossings.

I came back from this journey feeling I had grown closer to the king. But through some effect of his personality, the more the distance between us diminished, the greater my incomprehension. Everyone assumed that I must now belong to the coveted inner circle. But I myself was certain I had entered a zone of danger, like a man who in order to uncover a secret goes so deeply into an underground passage that any return is blocked, and he finds himself at the mercy of perils that are all the more dreadful for their unpredictability and strangeness. Nor did I have the impression that our time together had induced him to listen any more closely to my opinions. Regarding the situation in the Mediterranean and the Levant in particular, I came to the conclusion that the king had found it amusing to make me talk. He had piled on his questions until he could reveal my ignorance but, after that, never brought up the subject again.

 

*

 

Upon our return, I took part in the first Council without knowing what the king intended to discuss. Imagine my astonishment when he enumerated a series of measures that derived from the very conversations we had had. He painted a precise picture of the situation in Italy, and the subject surprised everyone, as they had long been accustomed to hear only of England or sometimes Flanders or Spain. He set forth the basis of a policy he would implement methodically in the years to follow, and to which I would contribute. With regard to the Mohammedans, he affirmed that we must place a great price on obtaining the sultan's good grace in our regard. This element was the result of his conversations with merchants in Montpellier who had met the Arab sovereign in Cairo. The other counselors were impassive on hearing these declarations. After all, the embargo on trade with the Moors, which the pope had proclaimed, was riddled with exceptions, and the Languedoc, for a start, enjoyed a limited right to trade with them. Still, the idea that the king of France might establish cordial relations with the infidel occupying the Holy Land was deeply shocking to those in attendance. The king added that he was putting me in charge of the construction and fitting out of the French galleys that would be trading on behalf of the Argenterie. And he ordered that the recruitment of oarsmen for the galleys would now be a matter for the law. No longer would it suffice for a convict's sentence to be commuted if he chose to embark; the courts must now include the galleys among the punishments to which the accused could be sentenced, and this in ample number.