Civilizations

by Laurent Binet

  To this, Monsieur de Montaigne began by reminding the Greek that the very Christian Francis I had not hesitated to conclude an alliance with the Turk against his enemy, the Catholic king Charles Quint, and consequently it seemed difficult, or at least cavalier, to reprimand him – Michel de Montaigne, a humble magistrate – for something that the Pope had tolerated in such a great king, for let us remember, while King Henry VIII of England and the rebel monk Luther had been excommunicated merely for wanting to reform the Church, Suleiman’s friend had not been sanctioned in any way whatsoever. Likewise, the Pope had spared Atahualpa and Cuauhtémoc from punishment, and had indeed allowed them and their successors to be baptised. And this had been wise, ultimately, given the new coalition that now united Maximilian, Pius V and Selim.

  While duly taking note of this objection, the Greek changed tack. With a nod to his host’s passion for ancient Greek authors, he invoked the love of country that drove the Lacedaemonians to Thermopylae and the Athenians to Marathon to resist the Persian invader.

  Enchanted, Montaigne addressed Cervantes: ‘You are from Castile, are you not? Did you know that Charles Quint barely knew a word of your language when he seized the Spanish throne? Not that this was surprising, given that he was born in Gand and was a German … So in what way was he any more Spanish than the man who succeeded him? Can you tell me that?’ And when Cervantes argued that Charles Quint had at least had a Spanish mother, Montaigne replied eagerly: ‘And what a mother! Joanna the Mad, whose crown he stole. What a son! What a family!’ Then, turning to the Greek, he went on: ‘Granted, Charles Quint was Christian. Although that did not prevent him sacking the Holy City in the year of our Lord 1527 of the old era. Do you really think Clement VII cared, as he fled like a rabbit from the Castel Sant’Angelo, whether the landsknechts who were trying to kill him were Christian or not? Equally, why should Pius V care about the religion of Selim’s sailors, if he is putting them – and his ships – at the Pope’s disposal? What matters to me is that these foreigners from beyond the seas brought religious peace to Spain and France. You should know, Doménikos, that I personally advised Cuauhtémoc, may he rest in peace, and actively took part in the proclamation of the Bordeaux Edict, which was modelled on the Seville Edict, allowing everyone to practise the religion of his choice without fear of being whipped, banished, hanged or burned on French soil. Don’t you consider that an act that will be to my credit, on the Day of Judgement?’

  The Greek grew heated: ‘You talk about burning Christians, but what about your Mexican friends slicing open people’s chests and ripping their hearts out before burning them on their pyramids? Don’t you feel complicit in those heretical crimes?’

  Montaigne had to agree that he could not approve of such practices but said that he was trying to persuade the young king Chimalpopoca to abolish them.

  The Greek sniggered at that: ‘Thankfully for us, the plague was more persuasive than you.’

  To cut the argument short, Montaigne filled their glasses with wine from his vineyard and called out joyfully: ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do!’

  But Cervantes asked shrewdly: ‘What about when the Romans come to you?’

  Then they all went back to reading their books.

  One day, when Monsieur de Montaigne was absent, Cervantes looked through the window and saw a young woman in the courtyard below, feeding the hens. Although he couldn’t make out her features from where he stood, he had the impression, from her figure and her bearing, that she was an elegant and beautiful lady. He thought there was something particularly gracious about the way she tossed seeds to the chickens.

  Later that afternoon, Montaigne returned with a gift for the Greek: an easel and some painting materials. After observing Doménikos’s drawings, the Frenchman had reckoned that he had an aptitude for painting.

  And so the Greek began painting portraits of his host and his friend, as well as landscapes of the Bordeaux countryside seen through the window.

  Montaigne and Cervantes watched, captivated and disturbed, as their faces seemed to emerge from the earth, mixed into clay and spread out on canvas.

  But this did not stop the painter from arguing with the man whom he considered a renegade and a supporter of the new heresies. ‘One must have the courage to remain on the side of the defeated,’ he told his host.

  Montaigne laughed. ‘Isn’t that what I’m doing with you?’

  Then he gave this speech: ‘Don’t you see, Doménikos? Soon we will all be the descendants of the victors and of the defeated. The first children, the fruit of those two worlds, are already grown men and women now: our sovereign Chimalpopoca, son of Cuauhtémoc and Margaret of France, is our Adam. Marguerite Duchicela, daughter of Atahualpa and Mary of Austria, is our Eve. The king of Navarre, Tupac Henri Amaru, son of Jeanne d’Albret and Manco Inca, the duke of Romagna Enrico Yupanqui and his eight brothers and sisters, the sons and daughters of Catherine de Medici and General Quizquiz, are as much French or Italian as they are Inca or Mexican. The child Philippe Viracocha, son of Charles Capac and Marguerite Duchicela, heir to the Spanish crown and king of the Romans, is our modern-day Abel. Atahualpa was our Aeneas: was Aeneas Roman? Perhaps, after all, we are the Etruscans of the Incas and the Mexicans.’

  While he was listening to this, Cervantes caught a glimpse, through the window that overlooked the garden, of the lady he had seen before in the courtyard. This time, she was tending her tomato plants and pruning her avocado trees. No doubt his isolation in that tower, and the long series of misadventures that had led him there, combined to overheat his imagination. His youth did the rest. He fell in love.

  One evening, when he went out into the courtyard to smoke a cohiba, he saw her appear at a window in the second tower – which was identical to his own tower – and the candlelight illuminated what was, quite clearly, the lady’s apartments. Since he was in darkness and had no fear of being seen – except for the cohiba’s incandescent end, which he took care to conceal in the hollow of his palm – he stood there for a long time, watching the young woman move to and fro past the window; he even continued watching long after the tower was in darkness and everything suggested that the lady had gone to sleep, until, finally, Cervantes fell asleep too, at the base of a tree.

  Just before dawn, the Greek, disturbed at finding himself alone when he awoke, with no sign of his roommate, went down to look for him, to make sure that no servant or villager had discovered his existence. He found him beneath the tree, eyes closed and fists balled. First, he shook him gently, but when Cervantes still didn’t wake, the Greek turned him over and shook him so hard that at last the young Spaniard stretched out and, glancing around in astonishment, said: ‘God forgive you, my friend, for you have taken me away from the sweetest and most delightful existence and spectacle that ever human being enjoyed or beheld.’ To which the Greek, slapping him about the face to drag him from his stupor, thought it meet to inform him: ‘I suppose you’re talking about Madame de Montaigne, our host’s wife. Her name is Françoise.’

  They returned to the Frenchman’s office, which served as their bedroom, and went back to bed until the cock crowed, but Cervantes could no longer sleep and he spent the rest of the time before sunrise imagining the lady who haunted his thoughts as she lay in her bed, dressed only in a nightgown.

  The next day, he was dreaming again, standing at the library window and staring down into the courtyard, hoping that he would see her appear there – the lady of his heart (who also happened to be the wife of his host) – while he listened to Monsieur de Montaigne attempt to convince the Greek that the Mexicans’ beliefs were not all worthless: ‘And so, like us, they believe that the world is close to its end, and they take to be a sign of this the desolation that men sow everywhere they go. Who can deny that this shows great wisdom and perspicacity on their part, Doménikos?’ According to Montaigne, it was no less disturbing that both the Mexicans and the Incas believed that the world was divided into five ages, and into the lifespan of f
ive consecutive suns, four of which had already died, and that the one shining down presently was the fifth. The details of how and when this last sun would perish, Montaigne had not yet learned. ‘But in the end,’ he asked, ‘who are we to say that their beliefs are not as worthy as ours?’

  Hearing these words, the Greek choked on his cigar. He yelled ‘Blasphemy!’ and retorted that the one true God had not wanted the infidels to triumph at Lepanto, proving beyond doubt his superiority over the false gods from beyond the seas, and that if it had been the one true God’s will to test his children by sending them that scourge from the other side of the ocean, then it would surely also be his will to reward the true Christians with ultimate victory. ‘Real Christians do not hide in times of adversity. They are the ones who ensure the triumph of the true faith! Where were you during the Battle of Lepanto, Michel? Where were you while the plague devoured your city? If God in his mercy awards us victory, as I am sure he will, you will hardly be able to say you played your part.’

  Montaigne replied in firm but still friendly tones: ‘I do not approve of what I see in use, that is, to seek to affirm and support our religion by the prosperity of our enterprises. Your belief, Doménikos, has other foundation enough, without going about to authorise it by events.’

  The Greek, who saw blasphemy everywhere, could not let this pass. ‘Michel, do you hear yourself? You said “your belief”!’

  ‘What I mean,’ said Montaigne, ‘is that your … the victory of which you so often speak (and which cost you both so dearly) was a fine naval battle that was won a few months since against the Inca Empire and France – under the command of the kapitanpasha, I might add – but it has also pleased God at other times to let you see great victories at your own expense. It pleased God that Charles Quint be captured at the Battle of Salamanca. It also pleased him to help Cuauhtémoc and the English defeat Francis I. It pleased God to wrest the Holy Roman Empire from the house of Austria and pass it to Atahualpa and his lineage. God, being pleased to show us that the good have something else to hope for and the wicked something else to fear than the fortunes or misfortunes of this world, manages and applies these according to his own occult will and pleasure, and deprives us of the means foolishly to make thereof our own profit.’ Then, sensing that his speech was drifting towards sentiments that, to Christian ears, would make him worthy of burning, he preferred to change the subject.

  Cervantes heard him cite Horace, to warn the Greek: ‘The wise man ought to bear the name of madman, the just of unjust, if they should pursue virtue herself with disproportionate zeal.’ He heard him condemn immoderation towards good, and the archer who misses his target by firing too far. Then he stopped listening.

  Our young man spotted Madame de Montaigne walking through the courtyard and in that moment he lost all notion of time. He had the feeling that several days had passed – and perhaps they really had? – when his mind was brought back to the conversation, which had turned (he knew not how) to the subject of marriage.

  The Greek did not have enough harsh words to condemn the detestable custom of sovereigns from beyond the seas to have several wives, and Montaigne, for once, agreed with him. What sovereign, other than Charles Quint, was virtuous enough to have relations only with his wife before God, without any mistresses or illegitimate children, except in the first flush of youth? Didn’t the popes, too, have concubines and bastards whom they elevated to the most prestigious positions? But it was a sin before God, he agreed, to marry one’s mistresses.

  At that moment, he had Cervantes’s full attention.

  Montaigne explained the dangers of love in marital life, which should, he believed, forbid all excesses of lasciviousness, but required, on the contrary, moderation and temperance. Given that the chief end of marriage is generation, he argued, all immodestly debauched pleasures, all assiduous sensuality in lovemaking altered the man’s seed and prevented conception.

  For his part, Montaigne boasted that he visited his wife’s bedroom only once per month, with the exclusive aim of impregnating her. Were he ever to surrender to amorous ardour, he had no doubt that the mutual respect and solid understanding that he and his wife shared would be inevitably corrupted. Marriage was a binding contract, he said, and no pleasure to be found in it was worth the candle of friendship.

  Then he said something about women, which Cervantes felt was addressed directly to him, and which seemed to open up dangerous new horizons: ‘Let them at least learn impudence from another hand.’

  Life went on in the tower. Montaigne read books or dictated letters to his secretary (in these moments, Cervantes and the Greek would go downstairs to hide in the chapel), or sometimes he would go off to Bordeaux to take care of his public duties. The Greek painted. As for Cervantes, inspired by his readings, he began to write various little pieces, which he would read to the other two men in the evenings, after dinner. When night fell, he would go outside to smoke his cohiba beneath the lady Françoise’s windows. Sometimes he would hear her singing a lullaby and, as if bewitched by her voice, his longing for her would deepen. The Greek, who feared that his friend would be discovered by the chateau’s servants, disapproved of this folly and regularly chastised young Miguel for his imprudence.

  One evening, though, unable to bear it any longer, Cervantes walked across the curtain wall that separated the two towers.

  The Greek worried himself sick all night. When the young Spaniard returned, he was in such a state of exalted excitement, his hair and clothes dishevelled, his words wild and hard to follow, that his companion was frightened. Here, the author of this account must point out that he cannot vouch for the veracity of what Cervantes told the Greek; all he can do is faithfully report his words. The young man claimed that, after waiting an hour on the curtain wall, not knowing what to do, he had decided to scratch softly at the lady’s door. Françoise, believing it to be her husband – for nobody else was in the habit of using that door – opened up. When she saw the young man standing there, she let out a little cry of surprise, but something told Cervantes that he was not unknown to her, and that for a long time she had been watching him smoke cohibas in the courtyard or stare up at her window. Whatever the truth of this, she begged him not to make any noise that might wake her sleeping child. There was a full moon that night, and almost as bright as day. Perhaps out of a desire to avoid gossip, or fear that someone would raise the alarm – Cervantes was not clear on this point – she let him in.

  As he narrated the rest of his account, the young man became so agitated that the Greek had to beg him to lower his voice because, as incredible as it seems, this was the scene as Miguel recounted it to his friend: Madame de Montaigne fell silent and, as he hesitated, his goddess threw around him her snowy arms in soft embraces, and caressed him. Suddenly he caught the wonted flame, and the well-known warmth pierced his marrow, and ran thrilling through his shaken bones: just as when at times, with thunder, a stream of fire in lightning shoots across the skies. In the end, he gave her the desired embrace, and in the bosom of his lover sought placid sleep.

  The Greek, struggling to disentangle truth from invention in this extraordinary tale, wanted to make his friend swear never to return to the other tower. But Cervantes, a smile of contentment playing on his lips, had already fallen asleep.

  Another week passed. It had been five months since their arrival in Monsieur de Montaigne’s tower. The young man would have liked to live there the rest of his life but, one morning, some archers bearing a warrant for the capture of two escaped prisoners answering to the names of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and Doménikos Theotokópoulos came knocking at the door. They found the two friends still asleep in Montaigne’s office and promptly arrested them. Cervantes, dazed, did not offer any resistance, but the Greek, in a rage at being maltreated by these vile brigands, grabbed one of the archers by the throat and would have strangled him to death had not his companions rescued him.

  Monsieur de Montaigne, in his dressing gown, tried to intervene,
but it was no good: the two fugitives were put in chains to be taken back to Bordeaux. The Greek began yelling the most appalling slanders, accusing their host of selling them to the Mexicans, while Montaigne did his best to reason with the archers, pointing out that he was not only a magistrate but one of the prince’s counsellors. It was all in vain. Walking beside the Greek, Cervantes left the tower in irons, watched by his beloved, the incomparable Françoise, who had come running in a panic with all the chateau’s servants to find out the cause of the uproar. This was the first time he had been able to see her that close-up, in daylight – a sun in the sun – and it was also the last time.

  8. Of how Cervantes finally crossed the Ocean Sea

  The return to Bordeaux was without glory, for they were thrown in prison again, and there they stayed for a whole month, waiting – they believed – to be executed.

  The morning when the guards came to fetch them, they entrusted their souls to God, thinking that their final hour was upon them. They would climb the steps that led to the top of the pyramid, where the executioner awaited them with his ritual knife, its handle decorated with a sculpted face, and that face would be the face of death, and that would be the end of them and their adventures and their earthly life, for ever.

  Instead of which, they went past the pyramid without stopping and were led to the Chateau Trompette, the seat of royal power, a colossal stone spur jutting into the Garonne river, where they were told to wait in a corridor lined with gold shields.