The Dream Maker (51 page)

I can die, because I have lived. And I have known freedom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Certain historical figures have been buried twice. The first time in their tomb; the second time beneath their reputation. Jacques Cœur is such a figure. The number of studies that have been devoted to him is incalculable. Some are very general, others extremely specialized.
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All of them confine him in the fairly unattractive role of merchant, Argentier or, incorrectly, “Grand Argentier,” in other words, the minister of finance, something he never was. Given the vast amount of historical research, the fate of Jacques Cœur and his activity has been documented in detail.
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But when put together, these lifeless fragments, accounting documents, and inventories of property,
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cannot reconstitute a living man. At best they sketch a lackluster outline of a wheeler-dealer, intriguer, and courtier who rose too high, too quickly, and who inaugurated a long series of disgraced favorites, such as Fouquet under Louis XIV.

The Palace of Jacques Cœur in Bourges can be visited as a curiosity, the testimony to a pivotal moment where, in the image of its two very different façades, the Middle Ages would give way to the Renaissance.
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In short, what one remembers is what came before or what came after, and this division between past and future tends to empty the historical figure of his own reality once and for all.

Why did I set out to bring the man back to life, replacing precise but inert images with a novelistic reality, even if it was less realistic? No doubt it was to pay a debt. I spent my childhood at the foot of Cœur's palace. I saw it in all kinds of weather, and there were certain winter evenings when I felt as if someone were still living there. I used to stop outside a certain little door at the bottom, and in the iron door handle I could feel the warm imprint of the owner's hand.

The house where Jacques Cœur was born (or the one where he was said to have been born) is located not far from my own house. What a contrast with the palace! There could be no better description of this man's extraordinary destiny than the comparison between his humble point of departure and the place symbolizing his triumph. And in between the two, the Levant, his journey, the ports of the Mediterranean . . . All through my harsh, gray childhood, he was the one who showed me the way, who testified to the power of dreams and the existence of an elsewhere full of refinement and sunshine. I owed it to him, to pay tribute on the scale of what he had done for me. At one point, I even entertained the project of having his remains brought back from the island of Chios, where he died. I discussed it with Jean-François Deniau, who cared a great deal for him, and who, always eager to embark on an impossible mission, was very enthusiastic about the project. But we soon had to face facts: there were no remains in Greece, there was no burial place. The only way to honor Jacques Cœur was through literature.

Thus, gradually, the idea of erecting a novelistic tombstone to him was born. I had the Hadrian of the “Memoirs” in mind, and I began to take notes with a view to creating a work of a similar inspiration to that of Marguerite Yourcenar's, well aware that I could never claim to equal her genius. As always, I began by collecting signs, emotions, and portraits, as I happened upon them during my reading and my travels—anything that might contribute to the construction of this edifice.
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I set about my labors, respecting the facts, where they are known.
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Fortunately, a great many things are missing in the portrait of Jacques Cœur—an actual picture of him for a start. The events are real and exact, and details of his life have been scrupulously respected, including the final adventure of his flight and escape. But for my theater, where the accessories and décor were available, what remained was the essential, to bring the characters to life and describe their roles. What woman could I place in the costume of Agnès Sorel? (She, on the other hand, has left us a face, thanks to the painter Fouquet.) Jacques was close to her, and was the executor of her will, but what was the nature of the ties that brought them together?
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The lack of any precise information is great good fortune for the novelist. His imagination can take flight without the risk of colliding with the obstacles left by documents. This is true for almost all of Jacques Cœur's life.
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Before long, I felt him come alive, trembling, thinking, deciding, acting, living.

In this book I wanted to follow him from his childhood ingenuity and on through his adolescent desires, his choices as an adult, and his doubts and errors. This was a journey to be undertaken without any baggage, trusting my character. We do not know what the Middle Ages were like. Nor did he. He would find out only by living in his time, and we would find out by watching him live.

To understand his time, Jacques Cœur was positioned all the better in that his experience would lead him everywhere. There were not many men who had the opportunity to visit multiple worlds, to know everything and understand everything. From the most obscure corner of a war-beleaguered France to the east, from Flanders to Italy, from the Languedoc to Greece, he visited nearly all the territory of what was then the known world. His exploration was compounded by an eminently novelistic social journey. A man of the people, he rose to share the company of kings, and popes, and everything Europe had at the time in the way of great lords. His fall would then take him to the lower depths of prisons, and the precarious life of the fugitive. There can have been no feelings he did not experience at one time: ambition, but success would quickly abolish it; fear, constantly; love, just once, until Agnès Sorel crossed his path and showed him the happiness and sorrow the human heart could attain.

It was not enough for him merely to understand his era: he transformed it. When he came into the world it was a time of great upheaval. One hundred years of war with England were reaching their end; the papacy was reunited; the long survival of the Roman Empire finally came to a close with the fall of Constantinople; Islam took its place as the counterpart to Christianity. A world was dying in Europe, the world of chivalry, serfdom, and the crusades. What would replace it was the development of wealth through commerce, the power of money replacing that of the land, and the genius of creators, artisans, artists, and discoverers. Jacques Cœur was the man of that revolution. He radically changed the West's way of viewing the Levant, and replaced the idea of conquest with that of trade.

Obviously, it would be an error to assume that Jacques Cœur was aware of the revolutions that were brewing. He was not a modern. Nor was he a prophet. He was merely inhabited by dreams, and he gave them a beginning of reality. The only way to keep him alive is to immerse him in the turbulent, warm flow of romantic fiction. One must imagine him in his everyday life, both visionary and blind, full of certainties and doubts in equal number, unaware of the future to which he would belong, far more than he knew.

I do not know what he would think of such a portrait, and no doubt it resembles me more than it does him.

I will let the readers be the judge of that, and draw their own conclusions. The main thing, and my only desire, is that this mausoleum of words, rather than enclosing a dead hero, will liberate a man who is truly alive.

Jean-Christophe Rufin is one of the founders of Doctors Without Borders and a former Ambassador of France in Senegal. He has written numerous bestsellers, including
The Abyssinian
, for which he won the Goncourt Prize for a debut novel in 1997. He also won the Goncourt Prize in 2001 for
Brazil Red
.