by D. W. Buffa
He paused, and with a confidence so complete as to leave no room for disagreement, made a remark that caused Hart to wonder whether Jean Valette’s claim to see the broad outlines of the future was less the result of study and intelligence than the madness of a completely disordered mind.
“That will be especially important for you to understand when the same people who are now condemning you give you their support, when Russell is gone and Hillary Constable can’t become president, when both of them are facing criminal charges and the country turns to you. You’re going to be the next president, Mr. Hart. There really isn’t any doubt about it.” He seemed to laugh in silence at some private joke. “I don’t imagine you would believe me if I told you that I saw that this would happen the day I discovered that Robert Constable believed in nothing but his own importance. But enough of this,” he said, turning on his heel. “We have more serious matters to discuss.”
The long silk robes worn by Jean Valette swept across the floor as he led Hart through the entrance into an enormous square room with a ceiling at least three stories tall and bookshelves covering all four walls. A double landing, connected to each other by staircases in two different places, gave access to the higher regions of a library that could easily have held twenty, or even thirty, thousand volumes. The shelves, however, were almost all of them empty; the only books, three or four dozen volumes, some of them tattered and torn, threadbare with frequent use, sat an ungainly medley on a few shelves directly behind a desk that not only caught Hart’s eye, but held it there. Like so much else in the chateau, it was obviously hundreds of years old, an ancient, hand-carved piece of furniture, constructed by the finest craftsmen at no doubt prohibitive expense, but still looked new.
“A gift,” explained Jean Valette. “From Louis XIV. He said it was in return for the hospitality of his trusted friend, Monsieur de la Valette, and it may have been, if you include in that description the willing eagerness of the young and ravishing Madame de la Valette to exchange the bed of her husband for that of their sovereign.” Jean Valette scratched the side of his face, an idle gesture of wistful curiosity. “In those days, no one could be too sure of their fathers, and as someone—I think it was Tocqueville—pointed out, they enjoyed themselves in ways we can no longer imagine or appreciate. It isn’t the kind of desk I would have chosen, but by some miracle the library and everything in it escaped the flames when the chateau was put to the torch in the early days of the Revolution, and so, like my father before me, I use it now whenever I am here, when I get away from work, and sit up all night reading, studying, what I should.”
Hart could not stop looking at all the vacant shelves, hundreds of them, towering high above and circling all around, not a bit of dust on them, polished to a deep luster as if they had just been built and were waiting for the next morning when, one by one, each of them first catalogued, each priceless volume would be added until all the shelves were filled.
“Nothing in the library was burned, not the books?” he asked, puzzled by their absence.
Jean Valette dropped into a yellow upholstered chair and motioned for Hart to take the one on the other side of the desk. Throwing one leg over the other, he sat sideways on his hip and gestured toward the empty shelves.
“I read them all. I kept only the ones worth reading.”
Hart was not sure he understood. His eyes wandered again to the vacant shelves that climbed three stories to the ceiling. It would have been impossible to read all the books they must have once contained.
“I read them all,” repeated Jean Valette, amused at Hart’s incredulity. “I didn’t finish very many of them, and with some of them I read only the first few pages, enough to assure me that I was wasting my time, that the author was only repeating, and usually not very well, what someone else had said before. Most things written, whether the author knows it or not, are purely derivative.”
“And these are all you kept?” asked Hart, nodding toward the few dozen on the shelves behind where Jean Valette was half-reclining in his chair.
“Yes, but as you can imagine, it took years to get to this point, years spent night after night in this library of diminishing volumes, before I finally got rid of everything that is not necessary.”
Hart observed the glowing confidence in his eyes, the proud sense of accomplishment. He had seen something of that look before, mainly on the faces of winning candidates on the night of their election. He had seen it on full display the first time Robert Constable won the presidency. But that paled in comparison to what he now was witnessing. The look on the face of Jean Valette had nothing to do with ego, with triumph over someone else. It was the pride of his own achievement, one that owed nothing to what anyone else might think about it.
“The other books, the ones you didn’t want to keep: some of them, I imagine, quite old; many of them, perhaps, first editions—you didn’t…?”
“Burn them? I should have, burned them for all the error they contain; but no, I gave them to universities mainly, and other repositories of useless learning. Did you ever read Rousseau?” he asked suddenly. “You should. You’ll learn more about the foundation of the modern world, the one in which we live, than all the other things written since. And then, after that, if you read Nietzsche, you will have the beginnings of an understanding of the crisis which for the most part we don’t even know we’re in.”
Jean Valette’s eye was drawn, almost reluctantly, as it seemed, to the only photograph, indeed the only object other than a reader’s lamp, on the desk. It was a picture, a very old picture, of a young woman.
“My wife,” he explained with a sad, distant look as he struggled with his emotions. Embarrassed, he sat up straight, took a deep breath, and emitted a gentle, almost shy, laugh.
“More than forty years now, and every time I look at her, the same thing. Worse, really, as I get older; worse with each year I know I’ve missed. I had a feeling—I hope you don’t mind my saying this—that we had this in common, that you would know what this feeling is like. When I started following your career, I was struck by how beautiful your wife was. I was certain that you must have fallen in love with her the first time you saw her.”
The look in Jean Valette’s eyes, the deep sympathy in his voice: Hart felt a bond, an attachment that he had seldom felt with anyone. He remembered, as if it were yesterday, the moment he first saw Laura, and the utter certainty, the strange, miraculous certainty, that if he never saw her again he would never forget her face, that if they never exchanged a word, she would always be a part of him.
“Yes, that’s exactly what happened,” he confessed. “The very moment.”
“There are things we know instantly, or never know at all. I was young, and very rich, and from one of the oldest families in France. If I was not the most handsome of men, there were those who thought that, even leaving the money aside, I was not without charm. I was, in other words, quite full of myself. And then I saw her, and I forgot about my own existence. I did not exist without her. I saw her. That was all it took: one look, a smile, a slight, shy hesitation in her eyes, and then the certainty, that feeling you can never know again. I was in love, and so was she. It was perfect; more than perfect: enchanting. We were married, and we had two years, two years that passed like two days, and then we were to have a child, and just like that, she was gone, died in childbirth along with the child.”
Jean Valette tightened his left hand into a fist as a shudder passed through him, and then stared straight ahead until he had himself under control. His gaze softened, became, as it were, more forgiving of what he thought a failure in himself.
“My life was over and I was only twenty-four. For two years, I did nothing, nothing at all, except stare at her picture and wonder how long I would have to wait to die. It took a long time, but I kept hearing her voice—there are times I still hear it now—telling me she wanted me to live, to do something of importance with whatever life I had left. I knew that whatever I did, it would never again
by interrupted by happiness. That’s when I went back and resumed my study of serious things. That’s when I decided I would try to write something—not right away, but when I was ready, which I knew would not be for many years—that might be worth reading.”
More than what Jean Valette said, the manner in which he said it, the smooth cadence, the deep resonance of his voice, gave Hart the feeling that what he was going to hear this evening he would never hear from anyone again. Among the other strange eccentricities of Jean Valette, there was nothing conventional in the way he saw the world. That was what more than anything else held Hart’s attention, what he could not get over: the way that Jean Valette seemed to see everything from a distance, a stranger in his own time.
“And I finally did, just a few years ago, after endless years of study, after years of dealing with all these supposedly important people in the world of politics and finance. I wrote the book I wanted to write, the one in which something of what will happen—must happen—in the future is foretold.”
He reached inside one of the three drawers just below the top of the desk, that gift for infidelity in all the joy of life, and pulled out a thick, four-hundred-page manuscript.
“Of course no one would publish it.” A wry grin cut a jagged line across his mouth. “One publisher told me that probably only ten people in the world would understand it. If he included himself, the number should be nine. It was my fault, really. I had not yet learned how to lie, to tell the truth in a way that everyone who would be offended by it would not be able to discover it.” He tapped two fingers on the manuscript. “And now, after I don’t know how many revisions, it is finally finished.”
“Will you take it back to that same publisher?”
“Last I heard, he was in an asylum. Driven mad, they say, by his fear about the future. That’s my fault as well, I suppose,” he said with what, if it was not satisfaction, was at the very least cruel indifference.
“Your fault? I don’t understand.”
“He turned down the manuscript, rejected what I had written.”
“Yes, but that still doesn’t explain why he went mad. Publishers reject things all the time.”
“He did not know that The Four Sisters owned the company that owned his company. I did not think it fair to tell him that when I asked if he would like to publish what I had written. I did not want to do anything that would affect his unbiased judgment. He made his decision,” he said with a shrug, “and I made mine. I could have had him fired, but instead I just made sure he knew that from that point forward his future was in my hands. The strain of worrying whether each day might be his last seems to have been more than he could handle.” A thin smile floated over his mouth. “You look shocked. Do you think he would have felt in any way responsible if I had suffered a breakdown because of his rejection of what I had done? I know the man. He would not have given it a second thought. Why should I? Remember, I did not do anything except acquaint him with the reality of his situation. In a way, it’s no different than what happened with Robert Constable, or for that matter, what is about to happen to his wife and to Irwin Russell. They were all the prisoners of their own ambitions, and their own fears.”
His eyes darted first one way then the other, moving in short, explosive bursts. He seemed nervous, full of energy, anxious to get to what he wanted to say, and yet still not quite certain how to begin. He had turned his head to the side, casting a long glance at the empty shelves, seeing in his mind the exact titled sequence of each volume they had once contained. Suddenly he jerked backward and studied Hart with what seemed a new interest.
“How old are you?—Never mind! In your forties; you still have the excuse of your youth.” He pushed the manuscript across to Hart. “I don’t know if you will understand it; I don’t care if you believe it. But take it, read it, study it, think about it, let it settle in your mind, then work your way through it again.”
Jean Valette sat as if frozen to the spot, and then, an instant later, laughed out loud. He jumped out of the chair and threw up his hands.
“No one understands, no one has any idea what I’m talking about! No one has seen the things I’ve seen, things that have not happened yet, but that I know as well as anything I know about the past!”
He began to talk faster and faster, trying to explain, and then, without so much as a moment’s pause, lapsing into a long flight of French, and he was not talking to Hart anymore, he was talking to himself, taunting himself with knowing things he could not explain, not if he had a hundred years to try. The world was mad, or he was—there was no middle ground. His eyes grew wide—whether with wonder at what he saw, or rage at what he could not make anyone see—and then, as his eyes rolled higher in his head, his jaw tightened and began to tremble, and he pounded both fists so hard on the desk that the lamp would have fallen over if Hart had not caught it and put it back.
“Read it!” he implored. “Whenever you can, whenever you want,” he went on, quickly coming back to himself. “You might be—no, I’m certain of it: You’ll understand enough of it, the broad outline, to grasp the main intention.”
Wrapping his arms around himself, he began to pace back and forth. There was a slightly puzzled expression on his face and a kind of laughing awareness of it in his eyes. From a sideways angle, he glimpsed Hart, who wore a puzzled expression of a different kind.
“I need to be careful. It’s a curious change of phrase, don’t you think, to say on the one hand that someone is out of his mind, and to say on the other that someone has lost his mind. Lost it, out of it—the real danger is to live too much inside it.” He stopped pacing and as if he had just remembered something of great importance, faced Hart directly. “I need to be careful that I don’t end up like him.”
Hart had no idea whom he was talking about.
“There is a marvelous description that when I first read it thought might one day, if I worked hard enough, be written about me. I do not, you understand, put myself in the same category, but precisely for that reason the danger is perhaps even greater.
“‘Nietzsche sought, by a new beginning, to retrieve antiquity from the emptiness of modernity and, with this experiment, vanished in the darkness of insanity.’
“He saw what would happen in the twentieth century and it drove him mad. I see what is going to happen in the twenty-first century, and perhaps with the same result. Read what I have written. You may think I’ve already gone mad. But I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway.”
Jean Valette sat down, took a deep breath, and, as it seemed, caught his balance.
“‘God is dead.’ You’ve heard that phrase. Do you know what it means? It isn’t simply a denial of the existence of the Christian God: it is the greatest event in the life of man, the ultimate crisis in human history. The death of God means the death of belief in anything worth looking up to. It means the ‘last man,’ the man who has ceased to aspire, the man who no longer knows anything heroic, any dedication, any reverence. The last man: everyone wills the same thing, everyone is the same, everyone is equal, the perfect conformity of perfect mediocrity in which everyone is satisfied; worse because no one knows, no one remembers that there is anything else, that there is a difference between better and worse. It is the world in which we live now, the only acceptable, the only legitimate objective, comfortable self-preservation in which all anxieties are removed, or at least treated, by pharmaceuticals and therapy.”
“You paint a fairly bleak picture. Most people aren’t quite that pessimistic,” replied Hart. Even as he said it, he felt a tinge of embarrassment, a sense that he was repeating something that he did not quite believe.
“The people in the picture never see themselves, do they? Only someone outside it knows what they are really like, and how much better they could be. That’s what I’m trying to tell you—what I tried to write: the West is in a crisis and it doesn’t know it. The West has forgotten what it stands for, has forgotten what it believes, or used to believe, because of course
now it does not believe in anything, except its own superiority to everything that preceded it, every age that believed in something worth dying for. The situation is very simple: The West does not believe in anything and Islam, like Christianity and even modern science, believes in something that is not true: that the world came into being and must therefore have an end. Isn’t that what both Christianity and evolution teach: that, whether it happened in six days or millions of years, human beings were created by something that was not human, and that nothing we do here on earth has any great importance?
“This isn’t what we used to think, before Christianity and the other revealed religions taught us to despise the notion that the work of humanity was to achieve, try to achieve, the perfection, the excellence, intended by nature. Read Plato, read Aristotle, read more than a thousand years later Maimonides; discover the ancient guarded secret that everything that comes into being, including all human individuals, pass out of being, but that the world itself is eternal. But start with Aristotle, read in the Metaphysics the passage where at the conclusion of several hundred tightly reasoned pages he concludes that change has ‘always been. And so with time…. Accordingly, change is as continuous as time; for time is either the same as change or is in the same way bound up with it. But there is no continuous change except locomotion, and no continuous locomotion except cyclical.’ I think I remember that right.
“It is the only hope we have: to go all the way back to the beginning if we are going to see our way clearly ahead. That’s why I wrote what I did, what I hope you will read; that’s why I started the school, the academy, so that sometime in the next generation there might be a few men and women who understand the fallacies of the modern age, and the need for a new religion. That’s why I did what I did with Constable and the others, so there might be someone in a position of authority and power who could at least start to change directions. That’s why I chose you, Mr. Hart: because there is more to you than ambition.”
