Jean de Fodoas

by Maurice Magre

  I was driven by events. I had not intended or foreseen any of it. The instinct of conservation guided my action. A few seconds later, I saw myself sustaining Sita, who was repeating: “Save me, lord!” with one arm, and brandishing my saber with the other. I had created a large void around me with a circular movement of my arm, the power of which was exercised by both the flash and the whistle. Jean Guillard, an old soldier of Pamiers, had once taught me the virtue of that circle, which he qualified as magical.

  I say that I saw myself, because I had the curious sensation of watching a play; and I was a spectator suddenly endowed with an extraordinary gift of observation. Expressions on faces appeared to me as revelations of souls, and were engraved within me.

  How can the governor of Nader be prey to an anger that skirts dementia, I said to myself, and for a reason, in sum, of scant importance?

  My lucidity permitted me to comprehend that my death was imminent if I did not find a means of getting myself out of the situation in which I found myself. I had my back to a wall, and a rapid glace enabled me to see that there was a door whose batten opened outwards. I pushed it and stumbled into the steps of a stairway, which I climbed. I tried to drop the young woman who was clinging to me, but I understood that it was impossible. She was breathless, her mouth close to mine, and holding me exactly as a woman holds a brother or a husband who has, from men and God, the obligation to defend her.

  I heard the governor shout: “Seize him! Kill him!”

  The stairway ended at a little terrace, which was the summit of a tower of circular form. As I arrived on that tower I bumped into something bizarre and heavy, made of metal, which my instinct caused me to push toward the opening of the staircase. Fortunately, the opening was very narrow. The metallic object was displaced with a strange facility.

  It was just in time. Two or three men were trying to strike me with spears. But a cry rang out: “The telescope! Be careful of the telescope!”

  I then perceived that what I had shoved to form a barricade was a large astronomical telescope, such as I had never seen before.16 It was set on wheels, which had permitted me to move it easily. It must have been exceedingly precious, to judge be the cries that were resounding. The governor’s voice resumed. Imploring, almost desperate: “Above all, save the telescope!”

  I understood in an instant the advantage that I could extract from that telescope, and I shouted: “If you take another step forward, I’ll break the telescope!” And I shook it with enough force to demonstrate my resolution.

  A cry of fear and fury responded to me from the depths of the stairway, which made me think that I had reasoned correctly.

  Sensing that she was safe for a few moments, albeit very precariously, Sita pressed herself against me, and I felt her burning lips against mine. I pushed her away rather swiftly, for nothing was more inopportune than such conduct. She pronounced words of admiration in her own language, in which I distinguished that there were also promises. However, I was cursing her internally for being the cause of such an unfortunate adventure.

  My ill humor was augmented by the proof that she immediately gave of her unconsciousness of her perversity. I looked down from the height of the terrace and I took account of the fact that I had no chance of escaping by leaping from the platform. It overlooked the road, and all sorts of people had already come running, asking what was happening.

  I had only turned my head away for two or three seconds. I saw Sita, suddenly transformed into a tigress, throw herself upon a stool and deliver a blow with all her might to the telescope that as our best chance of salvation. I had a great deal of difficulty tearing the stool out of the hands of the furious woman. She had to know how much the governor cared about the object, which must be very valuable, and on which she was slaking her vengeance without any concern for our security. Such is the unconsciousness of some women!

  A detonation rang out and a fragment of stone was detached from the wall. I saw a puff of smoke rise up from the neighboring garden. A man armed with a musket had just fired at me. When the smoke had dissipated, I perceived his attentive face, charged with a singular expression of goodwill. He was in the process of reloading his weapon, and doing so with meticulous care.

  There were clamors in the stairwell, and I seemed to see another musket glinting there, which moved at the same time as I did. I recognized the voice of Pierre Du Jarric arguing animatedly.

  At that moment, the sound of a trumpet rang out some distance from the palace, and seemed to strike people and things with immobility.

  I looked along the road. As if an extremely violent wind had passed by, all the people along it were lying down, faces to the ground. The trumpeter, who was on horseback, wore a turban larger than his head and was clad in a luminous coat of mail. He had come to a halt by the gate.

  He preceded a horseman in modest costume with a graying moustache and keen eyes, cleft like those of Mongols. He leapt lightly to the ground and as he inspected everything with a circular glance, his gaze encountered mine. I was leaning over the balustrade, my hair in disorder, and he must have seen that I had my naked sword in my hand. I discerned a glint of amusement in his eyes.

  He threw the bridle of his horse to someone who ran forward, bent double, in order to receive it. I heard him say, in Persian: “What’s happening, then?” And there was a metallic sonority in his voice that I had very rarely heard, and which invited obedience.

  Sita had also fallen to the ground.

  “It’s the Emperor,” she murmured.

  I hastened to tidy my hair and put the telescope back in its place. In the garden, the man with the musket held his weapon raised, and did not know what he ought to do. I made a sign to him not to fire.

  “What does it matter? We’re both doomed,” said Sita, still on her knees.

  I did not share that opinion, but those minutes were very painful.

  Eventually, I heard the voice of Pierre Du Jarric, which was calling out to me.

  As I went past him, he murmured to me in Occitan, which we alone could comprehend: “Fall to your knees and above all, don’t say a word.”

  He was anticipating the imprudence of the language of my inexperience.

  I took account of the true wisdom that was the foundation of the soul of the Emperor Akbar by the fashion in which he subsequently placed the event that had just been recounted to him in its proper place among the events of the empire. I sensed that he considered the governor of Nader as a star-gazer subject to eccentricities, and I admired the way, by the severe tone that he adopted in addressing me, that he spared the susceptibility of the irritable old man. However, I understood from his discourse that the latter was considered seriously in the wrong for having molested a stranger who belonged, properly speaking, to the Emperor. He was no longer chewing anything, and was darting sideways glances at the pestle, the crusher of paste, and he empty mortar.

  It was with a great satisfaction that I observed that the Emperor had a desire to laugh.

  “I know that in your country,” he said to me, “it is not customary to beat women with a stick. They are sometimes burned alive, but only when they are not orthodox from a religious point of view.”

  He expressed himself in a very pure Persian that I understood very well, and in which I was able to reply to him, thanks to my cousin’s lessons. Smiling, he gazed at the Fathers, who remained impassive.

  A little later, Pierre Du Jarric, who had not taken his eyes off me, in order to nail my words to my lips, took me aside and said: “You’ll now be delivered to your own initiative. The Emperor is delighted with our little gifts, and he’ll take the Gutenberg Bible and the Orelius atlas with him.”

  “As well as the equus,” I said.

  “Yes. We’ll arrive in Agra after you, for the Emperor is always in a hurry. Providence is visibly protecting you, for it has just saved you in a miraculous fashion. The Emperor sometimes goes hither and yon, with a few cavaliers, as a certain Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid once did, it appears
, in Bagdad. But it’s necessary that he was guided by an invisible hand to arrive just at the moment when you were about to perish. There is in this a combination of his curiosity in our regard and the aid that destiny wishes to accord you. Events spring forth from the encounter between what men want and the divine decision that is never absolute, and deliberately leaves a margin for the unexpected. I hope that you will continue to benefit from such a harmony. But never forget that you are the branch of a tree whose sap you received in the house of the Jesuits of Toulouse.”

  When we mounted up again the Emperor was lost in a profound reverie. He scarcely made me an imperceptible sign, which would have annoyed me on the part of anyone else, but which it appears that one has to tolerate on the part of sovereigns. We departed at a gallop.

  I was supervising the animal on which the chest containing the Bible and he atlas was loaded, but I had time to notice among the people gathered on the roadside the face of the excellent fellow who had fired a musket-shot at me. It reflected the am attentive gravity, full of mildness.

  THE BAZAAR IN AGRA

  Why does one please someone? Is it because of one’s own qualities or by virtue of secret affinities? Is it because of the services that one might render them? Because one flatters their defects? Because one recognizes their qualities? It was only much later that I was given a reasonable explanation of sympathies and the mystery of their abrupt birth.

  I pleased the Emperor Akbar from the first day—I mean, from the first moment that he saw me. I was unable to take any vanity from that, for I knew the reason from his own mouth a short time after our rival in Agra.

  I was emerging from the tent where he was sitting, cross-legged, with his minister Aboul Fazi17 by his side, and I heard him say: “Isn’t he a striking portrait of my son Mourad?” And his voice took on a hint of melancholy when he added: “In the time before Mourad had begun to drink.”

  Doubtless because of the memory of his ancestors, the Timurid kings, Akbar, who had a marvelous palace in Akbar with marble halls and fountains singing in the interior gardens, preferred to sleep in a tent near the ramparts of the city in the midst of his cavaliers. It’s true that it was a tent to which one cannot even compare that of King François I, of which very many descriptions are made in our French provinces. It was composed of huge Persian and Chinese carpets, forming a sequence of vast rooms, enclosed themselves in the canvas of an even vaster tent, within such a way that the entire edifice of fabric was surrounded by a circular corridor. It was patrolled incessantly by two servants called Alaf and Kaouf, who had been his companions in war when he was young and had fought hand to hand with his enemies personally.

  He said of them: “I love them, not because they are faithful to me—an elephant is faithful, a dog is faithful—nor because they are courageous, since all my soldiers are courageous, but because their hearts are pure and simple, and because they are fire-worshipers.

  When I had heard him pronounce those words, forgetting that one should not ask questions in the Emperor’s presence, I turned to Aboul Fazi and said: “What are fire-worshipers?”

  The Emperor had started to laugh and said to me: “My child, you must believe, like all the men of the Occident, that there is only one religion that is good and true. There are many. All teach the same excellent principles, which men never follow. Behind all religions there is that same unique God, who bears a different name in accordance with the people by whom he is worshiped. The fire-worshipers have identified God with fire, the fire that burns, the fire that emerges from who knows where, which appears, destroys and disappears: fire, the unknowable mystery.

  The minister Aboul Fazi was the most intelligent man that it has ever been given to me to know. Intelligence is only truly impressive when it is accompanied by an equal generosity. Generosity, in him, did not come from an impulse of the senses, as one finds in certain women. It resulted from the perfect comprehension of souls and the motives that direct them. And a hint of gaiety was combined with that comprehension—the gaiety that is always the characteristic of superior individuals.

  He was a man of short stature, devoid of hair. I have noticed that the activity of intelligence often poisons the roots of the hair. He only had one pettiness, in my view, and it was very petty. He only dressed in dark clothing, as if he had established a necessary harmony between the gravity of the soul and the dark color of the garments. He did not belong to the Muslim religion and I was to learn subsequently that elevated minds devoid of fanaticism were never Muslims, for those who profess that religion think, in a more or less acknowledged fashion, that it is necessary to exterminate all those who do not have an exclusive faith in Allah.

  I did not enjoy Akbar’s favor immediately. On arrival in Agra he had given a man in his retinue a vague indication to take care of me. That man first had me put my horse in a stable where there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of horses, and where I would never find my own. Then he took me through countless halls and courtyards to a place where there was a functionary clad in a long robe.

  There he gave me, with an extreme volubility, indications that must have been very precise, but instead of giving them to me in Persian he changed his language abruptly, so that I did not understand anything. Then he disappeared.

  I had distinguished a half-smile in his beard, and I understood that he was doing me a bad turn. I wanted to run after him, but the functionary with the long robe retained me. He had something to give me. He put over my arms a rather fine long robe, a toque and a silk belt that could be wrapped around my body two or three times. Then he turned away to other occupations. I knew that it was a custom among sovereigns and great men in India to make a gift of garments to those they wished to honor. I demonstrated great satisfaction, but what was to become of me?

  I started wandering hither and yon. People looked at me with curiosity because of my costume, especially my sword, the form of which differed from the weapons of that country. “Fangui!” said one, which is the general term that designates foreigners. Eventually, I emerged from the vast dependencies of the palace.

  We had arrived by night and darkness covered the city. Agra is a city as immense as any I had ever seen. From the four cardinal points caravans were arriving of camels, mules, and even elephants, laden with merchandise. Large numbers of hirsute naked men, leaning on staffs, were wandering around without seeming to know where they were going. I thought at first that they were beggars, but I recognized by the respect that was accorded to them that they were holy men, but not holy men following Allah. They professed the ancient and admirable religion of India, which the Jesuits had depicted to me as a primitive paganism and that I was only to know much later.

  I was stunned, dazed and a little weary. The ordinary people did not understand Persian. I did not know Hindi well enough to explain myself, but there were some of them who expressed themselves in other dialects that seemed to me to be solely composed of guttural onomatopoeias.

  I nearly stepped on a snake that appeared to have a little cape around its neck and which followed me, hissing. I watched a tame bear doing tricks, and then, after having traversed gardens, I followed a crowd that was engulfed under a stone vault. I found myself in the middle of an immense monument, which was the bazaar—or rather, one of the bazaars, for after that one I perceived the perspectives of other bazaars.

  On painted slabs, all kinds of merchandise were displayed, but especially fabrics, waved by their proprietors in order to make them shine in the light of lanterns placed at the end of long poles. I saw a merchant pouring a colored liquid from large earthenware carafes. I recognized tari, which I had drunk in Surat. It is a very powerful wine made with palm juice. As various people were sitting on the ground drinking little sips from iron receptacles, I sat down among them and took a cup. It was attached by a light chain to the merchant’s ambulant vehicle, although it appeared to me to be of scant value.

  Supposing the merchant to be suspicious, as soon as he had filled the cup I presented my h
and to him, which was filled with silver rupees and other coins of lesser value. He chose whatever pleased him and started to laugh to make me understand that that method of payment suited him. As soon as I had emptied my cup I hastened to be served again, and did so several times.

  The tari dissipated my fatigue somewhat. Time passed.

  A family of tame bears nearly passed over me. A solitary cow covered in wounds was walking alone, with a great majesty, and everyone stood aside before it. The crowed diminished, and a moment came when I found myself virtually alone with the tari merchant, who continued to laugh and raise his carafe.

  I then perceived that the bazaar where I found myself was surrounded by galleries with colonnades, and edifices pierced by innumerable openings, behind which merchants were spending the night keeping watch on their merchandise spread on the slabs. On looking around I saw them, motionless, almost all holding their beards in their hands, framed by countless little ogival windows. They had copper lamps by their side. A few were chanting prayers, others were reading, which made me think that they were more literate than in the Occident. In sum, though, those aligned presences had something obsessive about them.

  Suddenly, as if there had been a signal, as if an anxiety had circulated from window to window, they became agitated, stood up and looked in my direction. I was now alone in the bazaar with the tari merchant, and the presence of a foreigner who had a large sword on his knees must have seemed suspect to them. Hundreds of bearded merchants had their eyes fixed on me. Some were holding their lamps at arm’s length in order see me more clearly. That became hallucinatory. I hastened to leave.

  I soon perceived that the tari merchant was following me, with his ambulatory vehicle. Every time I turned round I saw him laugh and hold up his large earthenware carafe. I had to hasten my pace in order to lose him.