Jean de Fodoas
by
Maurice Magre
Translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 4
JEAN DE FODOAS 9
THE MYSTERY OF THE TEMPLARS 284
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 315
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 323
Introduction
This is the tenth volume of a twelve-volume set of translations of Maurice Magre’s prose fiction. It contains translations of the novel Jean de Fodoas: aventures d’un Français à la cour de l’empereur Akbar (1939) as “Jean de Fodoas” and the chapter from Magiciens et illuminés entitled “Le Mystère des Templiers,” as “The Mystery of the Templars.”
Volume One, The Marvelous Story of Claire d’Amour and Other Stories, contains translations of early short stories, including the collection Histoire merveilleuse de Claire d’Amour suivie d’autres contes merveilleux (1903) and six other stories from various sources published between 1901 and 1913.
Volume Two, The Call of the Beast and Other Stories, contains translations of his first three works of prose fiction in volume form, Les Colombes poignardées (1917), as “Stabbed Doves,” La Tendre camarade (1918), as “The Tender Comrade” and L’Appel de la bête (1920), as “The Call of the Beast.”
Volume Three, Priscilla of Alexandria and Other Stories contains translations of the original version of the story collection Vies des courtisanes, first published in Oeuvres Libres 23 (1923), as “Courtesans’ Lives” plus the additional story added to the version published in volume form in 1925, and the novel Priscilla d’Alexandrie (1925), as “Priscilla of Alexandria.”
Volume Four, The Angel of Lust, contains translations of the novella, La Vie amoureuse de Messaline (1925), as “The Love Life of Messalina,” the novel published as La Luxure de Grenade (1926), as “The Angel of Lust,” and the chapter from Magiciens et illuminés (1930) entitled “Christian Rosenkreutz et les Rose-croix,” as “Christian Rosenkreutz and the Rosicrucians.”
Volume Five, The Mystery of the Tiger, contains translations of the novella Le Roman de Confucius (1927), as “The Story of Confucius,” and the novel Le Mystère du tigre (1927), as “The Mystery of the Tiger.”
Volume Six, The Poison of Goa, contains translations of the novel Le Poison de Goa (1928), as “The Poison of Goa,” and the prose poems contained in Le Livre des lotus entr’ouverts (1926), as “Lotus Blossoms.”
Volume Seven, Lucifer, contains a translation of the novel originally published under the same title in 1929 and the novella La Nuit de haschich et de l’opium (1929), as “The Night of Hashish and Opium.”
Volume Eight, The Blood of Toulouse, contains translations of the novel Le Sang de Toulouse (1931), as “The Blood of Toulouse,” and the chapter from Magiciens et illuminés entitled “Le Maître inconnu des Albigeois,” as “The Secret Master of the Albigensians.”
Volume Nine, The Albigensian Treasure, contains translations of the novel Le Trésor des Albigeois (1938) as “The Albigensian Treasure,” and the collection of vignettes “Communication avec la nature” from La Beauté invisible (1937), as “Communication with Nature.”
Volume Eleven, Melusine, contains translations of the novel Mélusine, ou le secret de solitude (1941) and the collections of vignettes “Le Côte d’ombré des âmes” and “Révélation des mondes invisibles” from La Beauté invisible, as “The Dark Side of Souls” and “The Revelation of Invisible Worlds.”
Volume Twelve, The Brothers of the Virgin Gold, contains a translation of the novel Les Frères de l’or vierge, first published posthumously in 1949.
Following the fragmentary allegorical narrative of Le Trésor des Albigeois, Magre reverted to the action-adventure format of The Sang de Toulouse and such previous novels as Priscilla d’Alexandrie and Le Luxure de Grenade. The move might well have been an attempt to write a popular book, or at least one considerably less exotic than his recent volumes, but it does have certain affiliations with its immediate predecessor, beginning in Toulouse at much the same time.
Although Jean de Fodoas does not seem to be familiar with Michel de Bramevaque, he is said to be acquainted with two of the minor characters featured in Le Trésor des Albigeois, Marie Cose and Isaac Andréa. Like Michel de Bramevaque, Jean de Fodoas soon leaves his natal city, but unlike him, he does not return for a long time. His journey takes him to the heart of India in the heyday of the Mogul Empire, to the court of Akbar the Great, and it is there that his adventures unfold. Like Dalmas Rochemaure in Le Sang de Toulouse, he is a man of action, not an intellectual, but he does not have Rochemaure’s strong commitment to a cause to guide him. As a pawn in games played by others, his principal determination is simply to survive and enjoy himself as much as possible, but he does inherit Rochemaure’s quasi-Quixotic preoccupation with a female ideal, accompanied whenever she makes one of her ever-elusive appearances by symbolic roses—although their kinship with the symbolic roses of Le Trésor des Albigeois ultimately turns out to be dubious.
Adventure and mysticism are brought together cleverly in the novel, partly by means of educated acquaintances that Jean de Fodoas makes in Akbar’s court in between his periodic explosions of heroic action, but also because of his peculiar relationship with his cousin. The cousin in question recruits him to a Jesuit mission to Akbar’s court, but only as an instrument, and he proves extremely parsimonious and deliberately enigmatic in gradually explaining aspects of the hidden agenda of that mission—an explanation that he appears never to complete, leaving much to the reader’s imagination.
Jean de Fodoas is the least fantastic of Magre’s action-adventure novels, although it contains the customary ration of visions and prophecies; its most ingenious narrative move employs the Baphomet that was once allegedly worshiped by the Knights Templar as a symbolic device, which is alleged to have served the same function for the Mongol hordes that the Ark of the Covenant was assumed to have done for the hordes of Islam in Le Luxure de Grenade. That narrative employment inevitably runs into the same problem as the earlier employment of the Ark, however, because known history leaves no scope for the talisman in question actually to accomplish anything within the plot.
The recruitment was obviously an ad hoc improvisation, because a very different account of the Baphomet had been given in the highly speculative account of the Templars’ secret mission earlier contained in Magiciens et illumines. I have added that relevant chapter as an appendix in any case, partly as an item of scholarly fantasy that is of some interest in its own right, and also as an illustration of the versatility of the author’s imagination, which came into play with the necessary verve whenever it seemed convenient to change his mind. Unlike many scholarly fantasists, Magre did not fall for his own patter to the extent of swiftly making his inventions into dogmas, although whether that can be interpreted to mean that he never really believed a single word of any of them remained debatable.
Although Jean de Fodoas makes discoveries in the course of his idle wandering that might assist in his cousin’s quests—the Baphomet is not the only thing for which the Jesuits are searching—he carefully refrains from helping him out, having become suspicious of the Jesuits’ motives and the virtue of their cause. The Jesuits do not come out of the analysis too badly, however, and the descriptions of the minor members of the mission and their personal preoccupations contain more comedy than serious criticism of the kind leveled at the persecutors of the Albigensians in Le Sang de Toulouse.
Perhaps Jean de Fodoas’ scrupulous avoidance of following up the clues he stumbles across to the location of Akbar’s Baphomet and the location of Genghis Khan’s treasure does not wor
k to the melodramatic advantage of the plot, but the straitjacket of known history would have made it impossible, in any case, for the hero to achieve anything significant, even if he had followed up the leads that he discovered or passed the information on to his cousin. The private culmination that his own odyssey eventually reaches is more in keeping with the nature of the exercise, as well as with Magre’s particular notion of virtue.
The philosophical elements of the novel are, however, carefully subdued and discreetly peripheral, as befits a somewhat picaresque and casually rambunctious adventure story, of which Jean de Fodoas is an uncommonly stylish example, requiring little more introduction than that observation, although I have included a more elaborate commentary on its somewhat cavalier relationship with known history in footnotes to the text.
The translation of Jean de Fodoas: aventures d’un Français à la cour de l’empereur Akbar was made from the London Library’s copy of the 1939 Gallimard edition. The translation of “Le Mystère des Templiers” was made from the same institution’s copy of the 1930 Fasquelle edition of Magiciens et illuminés.
Brian Stableford
JEAN DE FODOAS
THE HOUSE IN THE RUE MALCOUSINAT
I launched my blue épée, moving in its nudity, over the old oak table like the body of a young woman. Then I detached the scabbard from my belt, because my mother suffered secretly from the presence of a weapon at my side.
I wiped the sweat from my brow. I disguised as best I could the rip that divided the top of my doublet. It had separated into two the cross of white wool that every good Catholic in Toulouse wore on the right shoulder. I went to the door and darted a glance into the street. It was deserted, and under the bright moon, the stones, in places, seemed covered in snow.
They had not pursued me. They had lost track of me, or they dared not trouble the house where my mother was. No, it wasn’t that. Could a sentiment of respect be born in those murderous souls? Assassins who had been my companions! They might have gone to have their weapons blessed at Saint-Sernin by the Bishop of Toulouse, but they were executioners all the same. Those blessed weapons had served to kill imploring prisoners or women who had just been raped.
Lord! Was I myself…but no, I didn’t want to think about that. It was no time to regret what I had done. First of all, if one acts, it’s by virtue of an internal pressure, a kind of volcano of the soul that one can’t resist. Could I have done otherwise than go to fight when the infamous Rabastens had told me that he was recruiting noble and courageous young men to capture the fortress of Montesquieu de Lauragais from the Protestants? He had even added, lowering his voice slightly, that when it was known that I, Jean de Fodoas, was at the head of those elite young men, all the finest flower of Toulousan nobility would follow me.
That Rabastens appeared to me to be such an admirable man! I compared him to Trencavel and Arnaud Bernard! Why does infamy not burst forth on faces like a revelatory lamp? How can noble features and attitudes full of dignity be combined with the most abject baseness? Why does nature prepare such traps in sculpting the faces of men?
And I, being naïve, had allowed myself to be taken in, because there had been talk of my courage, that the nobility of my family had been exalted. It was always my pride that doomed me—my pride and my violence…rather my violence. Had I not struck the first blow? Yes, it seemed to me that I was the one who had struck first.
I tried to reconstitute the scene exactly as it had happened, for it is of great importance to justify oneself by means of solid arguments. We had told the Jews to cease their dances and their cries…all three of us were sitting…we had been drinking, perhaps too much. All three, the three leaders—for, in spite of my youth, Rabastens and Gaston de Cornusson, the son of the former seneschal of Toulouse, had been obliged to admit me to their deliberation.
It was a matter of knowing how the booty would be divided. I wasn’t listening, thinking that it wasn’t becoming to manifest a gross avidity. There had been enough talk on Toulouse of the poverty into which the Fodoases had fallen. And then, I had heard the sentence, inoffensive in itself but to which the tone of the syllables gave the value of a repulsive insult: “A few écus will be necessary for Jean de Fodoas.”
I raised my head and I saw the faces of my two interlocutors disfigured by hideous laughter. They were laughing, and there was in the grimace of their laughter, which made them suddenly similar, the knowledge of my poverty, of the poverty of my family, and the scorn that thieves can have for an accomplice poorer than them. Not only were they scornful of me, but they wanted to make me their dupe, estimating my value at a few écus.
It was Rabastens that I had slapped, because he was closer to me. Gaston de Cornusson had made a backward movement, and my fist had only struck empty air. Already I had lost the advantage of the man who strikes the first blow. Things ceased almost immediately to be visible. A semi-naked woman, her eyes wide with fear, ran to the nearest lamp and threw it to the floor, for inferior souls think they are protected by darkness.
I heard a cry of “He’s drunk!” and then “Kill him!” And I understood that from the next room, a dozen bandits who had been waiting there, seething with impatience, awaiting the division of the booty were rushing me: bandits who hated me because I had treated them as bandits, and whose companion—my God!—I had been. All the assassins of Montesquieu de Lauragais were around me and I saw their blessed weapons glinting in the smoke like lightning flashes in a storm.
By virtue of the great strength given to me as my share since birth, the table rose up like a rampart and they fell back. I struck the head of a crawling traitor with my heel, delivered a few blows at hazard, and my guardian angel, with his constant fidelity, guided me unwittingly to the door, and doubtless opened it himself, with his angelic hand, for I was suddenly refreshed by the nocturnal air and felt the pavement of the street beneath my feet.
To be sure, no one could outdistance me at a run, and I had been able to reach the Rue Malcousinat and the little house, a modest vestige of the lost splendor of the Fodoases. How blissful solitude is, especially when the respiration of one’s mother floats there, like the brush of an ineffable wing.
My mother wasn’t asleep. At the top of the staircase her door was open. She knew that I was there, and anxiety augmented her light breath. I heard it as an appeal, and also as a reproach. Perhaps she had not slept, and had waited for me incessantly.
My resolution was firm not to say anything about the night’s events, sensible as I knew her to be to accounts of violence. I promised myself, as I climbed the stairs with the even and calm tread of a late stroller going home to bed, simply to kiss her on the forehead and go back to my room.
But when I saw her, so tiny in her armchair, so pale and so dignified, when I perceived in her features the effort to efface the anguish and replace it with a smile, my heart burst like a pomegranate under an excessively hot ray of sunlight, and I fell at her knees.
“I’ll tell you everything!” I cried.
But she put her hand over my lips. “No, don’t say anything; I can guess…”
What had she guessed? What had already happened a hundred times, the violence, the presence of evil that she sensed around her beloved son, and which she would have liked to chase away with the caress of her tremulous hands.
“You cross is torn,” she murmured. “Leave me your doublet so that I can mend it.”
I wanted to speak, to excuse myself, to tell her about the insult received, but I sensed that my explanations would be lost in the purity of her soul like boat sinking in a sea of dreams.
Then it seemed to me that my sentiments were transformed with the same rapidity as some nocturnal landscapes when they are suddenly illuminated by a ray of the rising sun falling from a mountain.
I assured her that, from that moment on, a new man had been born. While speaking, I sensed that man, full of perfections, appearing out of the depths of my soul. I saw him, I saw myself, full of kindness, pardoning offenses, in
capable of anger. My entire past life horrified me.
“I swear to you that I won’t go to the rendezvous with the three Pibrac brothers.”
Those three brothers were ruined castellans, of which there are so many, who followed the profession of bandits and attacked travelers on the roads. They had come to Toulouse to recruit courageous men from among the bad lots of the city, and they had naturally thought of me.
But my mother, in her sanctity, had no idea who the Pibrac brothers were.
“I swear to you not to show myself in the city any more with Marie Cose,1 and not to see her again.”
With her fragile hand, my mother waved away the image of that scandalous young woman.
“I swear to you to forget that slap that I gave Rabastens, to forget the laughter of those accursed swine. I shall love poverty as you have told me to do. And even….”
I had an insensate vow on my lips. Timidly, but with patience, my mother had often expressed the desire to see me enter some religious order.
I glimpsed, as in a dream, the colonnades of a cloister, the lined-up tombstones and the broad sleeves of robes flying around me like brown birds.
Raising my eyes, I saw my mother’s ecstatic face. She did not believe my promises, but my good intentions were sufficient for her. And on my forehead it seemed that a moist droplet, a little warm tear, had just fallen.
And it was at that moment, at that divine moment, that a noise coming from the depths of Hell reached me, for, as Isaac Andréa had often said to me, there is a direct communication between divine things and infernal things, to such an extent that it is not insensate to think that they have the same origin.
Someone was knocking on the door. They were regular blows, struck with violence, with no restraint, with no regard for the late hour and the tranquility of the inhabitants of the Rue Malcousinat.
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