The Bestiary

by Nicholas Christopher

  I had flown to Paris a month after earning my college degree. After returning to Harvard, it took me a year, including summer school, to complete my credits and graduate with honors in classics. I wrote my thesis on Aelian. His On the Nature of Animals is as much mythography as natural history, a source of endless wonders: a hyena can render a man mute by stepping on his shadow; a horse which treads on a wolf’s paw print will be paralyzed; the Corocotta, a rare speckled hyena, can imitate the human voice in order to ambush a man; and rats on the Aegean island of Gyarus eat iron ore. He also describes an Ethiopian tribe that worshiped a dog as their king. They prostrated themselves before him at dawn and dusk, built him a lodge, prepared him special foods, and provided him with a harem of bitches. The tribe obeyed the dog’s wishes: when he whimpered, they knew he approved of their actions; when he barked, it was clear he objected. After his death, they deified him. Because my thesis won a prize, I was offered a graduate fellowship, but turned it down. If one day I felt differently, I could return to academia and pursue the subjects that interested me. But I wasn’t taking any more detours. I knew that better than ever now. I had waited, and prepared myself, a long time for the day when I could fully pursue the Caravan Bestiary. And as Bruno pointed out, if I did find it, a lot of doors would open, whether I wanted to walk through them or not. Meanwhile, I needed my B.A. to get a job and earn enough cash to subsidize my search. Using the university’s research facilities, I had been able to map out the itinerary I wanted to follow after graduation: the archives to be visited, the people to be interviewed. What little trail there was wound through Europe, not America, and it didn’t take me long to decide I wanted to live in Paris.

  After returning from Vietnam, I would have gone abroad even if I weren’t searching for the bestiary. I didn’t intend to maintain even a nominal home in the States, as my father had. I didn’t renounce my citizenship; I just took another step away from Operation Phoenix, the government that concocted and concealed it, and the jingoism that permitted its execution—a renunciation of the sort Nathalie had urged when she wanted me to flee the country two years earlier. Except now, I told myself, I was leaving on my own terms, not running away. I had found this apartment after staying in a hotel for two weeks. On the fifth floor, it consisted of a small kitchen and two quiet, airy rooms with high windows that overlooked the Square du Temple. In the war I had learned that you only carry what you need, and I didn’t need much. At first I had a bed, a desk, a table piled with books, and some folding chairs. No radio, no TV. A map of the Mediterranean was tacked to the wall over my desk.

  Once settled, I began scouring the city’s assorted libraries for any mention of Martin Lafourie, just as I had in Cambridge. He remained my best, and only, real clue. I also wanted to read everything I could find by my predecessors (I felt I had earned the right to call them that after my discovery of Lafourie), Brox, Cava, and Faville. Among the books I found right away were: Nicholas of Cusa and Roman Cosmology by Michael Brox; The Illuminated Books of the Alpine Monasteries and Guillaume Heinault Henri Metz: The Techniques of Illumination by Madame Faville; and a bizarre monograph by Niccolò Cava entitled Empedocles’s Theory of Evolution. Of course only Madame Faville’s books had any relation to the Caravan Bestiary (I learned about the monks’ writing instruments, vellum, and methods of transcription), though she never mentions it specifically. It was more difficult to track down some early essays by Cava and Faville that pertained directly to the bestiary, presenting their respective theories about sources that predated Physiologus. For Cava, it was obscure chroniclers like Tatian, a second-century heretic whose animal catalog has disappeared, and Ctesias the Cnydian, court doctor to King Artexeises II in the fifth century B.C., who set out to write a treatise on falconry and ended up cataloging the animals of Central Asia. Madame Faville was also intrigued by Horapollo, a fifth-century A.D. Egyptian who at various times was a grammarian, clairvoyant, spy, and high priest in the great Temple of Isis. In Book II of his famous study of hieroglyphics, Hieroglyphica, he wrote eighty-six chapters on animals that became the European template for allegorizing animals.

  I wished I had more intimate knowledge of Madame Faville, Brox, and Cava so that I could understand the origins of their passion for the bestiary. How much of it was scholarly, and how much (as with me) was rooted in their personal histories? Such information about Brox and Cava seemed nonexistent; neither was famous enough to have a biographer. I couldn’t even find their likenesses—no daguerreo-types, not even a sketch. I had better luck with Madame Faville. A 1920 photograph on one of her book jackets showed an attractive, enigmatic young woman with long hair and wide-set eyes, her blouse with the high starched collar at odds with her arch smile.

  I spent my evenings at the Bibliothèque Nationale and the medieval library at the Sorbonne. By day I took what jobs I could find. For three unhappy months I helped edit a classics journal. I cataloged material for an archaeological society (another three months). Then I joined a team of translators working under two editors on the sixteen volumes of Livy’s History of Rome. None of these jobs was lucrative, but they did allow me to hold on to my modest savings, which consisted of the final year of support checks sent by my father’s lawyer. Lena hadn’t needed the money for graduate school; she had already received a full fellowship to the Penn veterinary school. Because my own tuition was covered by my veterans’ benefits, I was able to squirrel away that other money. But after a year I had grown impatient. My job as a translator, boring from the start, had begun eating up more and more of my time and energy. I decided to live on my savings for as long as possible, and put everything into my research.

  I had felt at home in Paris right away—with the language, the food, the welcoming solitude. As I settled in, I bought a Turkish rug at the Porte de Montreuil flea market and at the Marché Paul-Bert good secondhand furniture—a large blue sofa, a bureau, some proper chairs—and a set of beautiful Chinese prints of the six Celestial Dragons, which replaced the map over my desk.

  Every morning at nine I had breakfast in a tea shop off the Place des Vosges and rode the Metro to one of the libraries. I began reading through biographies of King Philip VI and histories of his court. Lafourie appeared, first as a minor official, then as one of the king’s trusted diplomats. He was usually associated with foreign assignments that concluded in treaties or trade agreements. After being involved in the annexations of Montpellier and the province of Dauphiné, he served briefly as the ambassador to Genoa. But there was maddeningly little detail about the man himself. And no mention of a bestiary. Philip died in 1350. The end of his reign was calamitous: the Black Death wiped out three-fifths of the French population, and the Hundred Years War began when the English king claimed Philip’s throne. To finance his armies, Philip impoverished the country. By then, Martin Lafourie had disappeared entirely from the histories. I assumed he, too, had been a victim of the Black Death. Then I saw a new name cropping up in situations where Lafourie’s once had: a certain Duc D’Épernay, who served as a roving ambassador, first for Philip in his final two years, and then for his successor, John II.

  I looked up the Duc D’Épernay in a peerage of the Valois dynasty, and the blood rushed to my head.

  Duc D’Épernay—formerly Martin Lafourie, Knight. Born Auxerre, 1304; died Paris, 1371. Title conferred by King Philip VI on 6 March 1349 in appreciation of M. Lafourie’s long service to the crown, especially his role in the purchase of Dauphiné in 1349.

  That was why the name Lafourie had disappeared. But would I have any better luck trying to research the Duc D’Épernay? At first I found no more personal information about Lafourie the duke than I had about Lafourie the knight. I looked in vain for a memoir or a biography, and started picking through collections of letters written by his contemporaries, but that seemed very hit-or-miss.

  I had befriended a research librarian at the Sorbonne named Sylvie. She was a soft-spoken young woman, alert, funny, with long brown hair and a good figure. We went out t
o dinner one night on the Ile St-Louis, and after a bottle of wine talked about Vietnam. She had stronger feelings than most people. One of her uncles had been killed at Dienbienphu in 1954. “It was a bad war then,” she said, “and it’s worse now.” She propped her elbows on the table and leaned closer. She had long lashes, and one of her bangs kept sliding over her right eye. “I’ve met Americans who protested the war, and others who came here to avoid it, but never anyone who actually went. You were drafted, yes?”

  After a stroll around the island, and some more brandy at a café, she told me she had a boyfriend, but that he was on a trip to Brussels. I walked her home, up near the Pantheon, and kissed her good night. When I asked her out again, she said with a shrug that the boyfriend was back. At the library she was of great help. I had told her about the Caravan Bestiary, and where I stood in my search for it; I told her too about Faville, Brox, and Cava, and how I had discovered Martin Lafourie’s later incarnation. This was manna for someone in her profession, and she listened avidly.

  That afternoon we did a quick search for information about D’Épernay and came up empty.

  But two days later, when I entered the library, she beckoned to me from the front desk. “I thought you would never show up. We’re going to the archives, three floors down,” she whispered, leading me to a small elevator behind the stacks. “It’s a restricted area—you need special approval—so be quick, and look casual.”

  “Seems like contradictory advice,” I said, drinking in her perfume, which filled the elevator.

  “This is no joke,” she said with a knowing smile.

  The low, cavernous room we stepped into was suffused in a light more brown than yellow. The air was so thick with dust that I left faint footprints on the wooden floor.

  The long narrow aisles were barely illuminated by low-watt bulbs suspended inside little cages. All the books were oversized and very old. I followed Sylvie to the end of one aisle and halfway down another. She climbed up a stepladder and took a leather-bound book off the top shelf, where it resided with dozens of others just like it.

  “None of these books can leave this room,” she said, handing me the book. The spine read Chronicles of the Court of Philip VI in silver letters. “You’ll have to look at it down here. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. This is Volume 16 of a forty-volume set that covers the reigns of all the kings of France from Charles IV to Louis XII. The books contain legal documents, treaties, proclamations, but also correspondence between high officials.”

  “Including D’Épernay.”

  “Of course. I put a marker at Chapter 3.”

  “How can I thank you, Sylvie?”

  She smiled. “Maybe that dinner…Charles is in London this weekend.”

  She went back upstairs, and I sat down on the stepladder, beneath one of those lightbulbs, with the big book in my lap. On Chapter 3 there was a letter dated May 27, 1368, in Paris, from the Duc D’Épernay to the Compte de Briand, finance minister to the late King Philip. Before I finished reading the first page, I burst out laughing: it would be a champagne dinner with Sylvie.

  Dear Friend,

  In service of His Majesty, I traveled often between France Egypt, on one such mission had an encounter which I confided to no one but the King. It concerned a book about which many have heard, but few have seen. In my travels I have handled other rarities, plum-sized pearls from Ceylon chimes stirred to music by light rose windows tinted by a blind glazier, but none so wondrous as the illuminated book filled with all manner of unnatural fantastical beasts refused entry to the ark by Noah when he set sail in the Great Flood. I acquired this book from an Antiquary’s widow on the Island of Rhodes presented it to the Doge of Venice, to whom I was a royal Emissary in the year of our Lord 1347. Now, as we know, the first bestiary, called the Book of Life, was a natural history of all the beasts delivered unto the Earth at the Creation. Only God Himself saw the original, but its offshoots were transcribed scattered in monasteries throughout Christendom. Over many centuries, divers monks and scholiasts attempted to consolidate these bestiaries, but one fugitive volume eluded them came to be called the Caravan Bestiary after an Alexandrian Greek smuggled it by Caravan across the Libyan Desert. Compiled by many hands, this book of lost beasts, that were left to their fate in the Flood, was composed in Aramaic, appended in countless tongues—Armenian, Arabic, Coptic, Greek, Latin, Provençal our own French. Many times the book has surfaced been lost, in pursuit of it, men have suffered torture, imprisonment, death at the stake. The book itself avoided the Inquisition’s fires. But by the year 1255 no man alive had seen it, or could claim to know of men deceased who had, so it was said to have disappeared forever.

  The King had sent me to Rhodes to conclude an agreement with the Governor, Jean Longueville, for the services of the Knights Hospitallers in Alexandria, where our agents required protection and accommodation. Afterward, I had several idle days before I set sail for Venice to complete my mission. Rhodes is renowned for its silversmiths. They fashion their wares on two streets, perpendicular in the maze of the town, and there I purchased much jewelry and plate. In the town there is also a Mapmaker, a Cypriot named Pelotes, who fled the strife on his own island to settle on Rhodes. He took a Rhodian wife who bore him two sons, one a Vintner, the other a Mapmaker apprenticed to his father. Together they charted the coast of Africa for the Knights, Sicily for the Prince of Agrigento, all those Islands of the Greeks Turks near to Rhodes. From Pelotes I purchased several Maps, some for our Ministry, some for myself. Now, Pelotes’ wife had an elder sister, Marika Leonides by name, who was the aforementioned Antiquary’s widow. After Pelotes learned of my interest in antiquities, seeing how free I was with my purse, he sent me to her. The widow was sickly, bent bleached with age, with a rattling cough. Yet her mind was clear, she welcomed me warmly, was exceedingly kind. She was childless, with no relatives but her sister and brother-in-law to care for her. She was much in need of funds, not least of all for the Surgeons who were bleeding her. She still possessed a few of her husband’s most precious wares, which were her bulwark against Poverty and Dependency. She shewed me marble tablets of the Romans, discovered in the Nile’s banks, gold bracelets hammered for the Ptolemies, an Onyx Dagger found in the Pharaoh Pepi’s tomb. Then she drew from concealment a book of Prayers, 200 years old, which she said was the property of Anacletus II, the Antipope, a Roman of Jewish blood, as you may recall, whose rival, Innocent II, fled to France. If genuine, this was a rare volume, indeed, but not so rare as another, which she brought out after swearing me to an oath of secrecy. This was the Caravan Bestiary, the name bestowed on it by her husband himself. Miraculous to behold, this book was of enormous value, if not to me, then to the Crown. I told the widow so, for I was in no way inclined to haggle with such a sickly woman, and one so kind. I inquired after the price, she quoted me sixty gold pieces, a tremendous sum, but fair, so I brought it to her the next morning she gave over the book in a scarlet pouch. Of its history she could tell me only that her husband had acquired it eleven years earlier, two years prior to his death, from a Greek named Panayoita Fondaros, a dealer in Silver Gold who had obtained it from an Arab trader. Fondaros carried it to Alexandria from the Atlas Mountains by Caravan. When I asked the widow why her husband had not sold the book before his death, and why she herself had not sold it afterward, she replied that her husband did not trust those of his customers with wealth enough to purchase the book to be shewn it. “Nor have I, sir,” she declared. “But with my days running down, I have no choice, no fear, no doubts either now in trusting one such as you, of whom my brother-in-law speaks so highly. My husband often said that when the propitious moment arrived, I would know it, that has happened.” So I took away the Caravan Bestiary to Venice, where pursuant to His Majesty’s interests, I made a gift of it to the Doge, Andrea Dandolo. And that becomes the larger part of the story.

  In October 1347 Doge Dandolo had occupied that high office for four years. By complex means—circles with
in circles of Electors—the Venetians choose their Doge. Dandolo was thirty-six years of age when so honored, the youngest Doge in 300 years, beloved of his people, an extraordinary man in his own right. More cultivated in the Arts than his predecessors, Dandolo was truly a scholar, close friend of the poet Petrarch and the painter Veneziano Paolo. In his youth he was acquainted, too, with the painter Giotto and the poet Dante Alighieri. Dandolo was the first citizen of Venice to be awarded a Doctor’s degree, at the University in Padua, where he was a Professor of the Law. He authored several books, among them a true History of Venice, from its founding to his own day, a History of the World from the Creation to the Year of Our Lord 1280.

  This is the nature of the man with whom I dined at the Ducal Palace on a warm October night, who, after the other guests departed, invited me to his private quarters. As I sat drinking wine with him on his terrace overlooking the Grand Canal, I confess I did not fully appreciate, or endeavor to plumb, the extent of the Doge’s learning, except insofar as I might appeal to it to ensure the success of my mission. That is how fixed I was upon the latter. The King had charged me with securing safe passage for our commercial vessels in the waters east of Sicily, at that time controlled by the Venetian fleet. In return, I was authorized to offer the Venetians a portion of the profits the cargoes on those vessels generated. I never negotiated with a Venetian who was less than formidable, Dandolo, despite his years, was no exception. Yet, knowing his passions were more scholarly than mercantile, during the long voyage from Rhodes I was inspired to a plan of action which I thought might advantage me. And so, at the opportune moment, I brought out the Greek’s book of beasts in its scarlet pouch and informed the Doge that it was the original of the hitherto unobtainable Caravan Bestiary, which I was hereby presenting to the Venetian Republic and its Doge on behalf of King Philip of France as a token of his gratitude. Holding the book before him, the Doge expressed surprise that such a treasure truly existed, but once he was assured that this was no counterfeit, he fell silent and began gazing at it, page by page, never lifting his eyes. He was clearly bedazzled, transported from that place, so that all other considerations fell away from him. Suffice to say, before the night was out, he signed a missive to the King, guaranteeing the safety of His Majesty’s ships in the southern sea lanes, thanking him for his great gift, which at that moment the King did not even know had been given in his name. As I was rowed back to our Embassy, through myriad canals, I smiled at the thought that when I arrived at the Doge’s Palace I was greeted by a Head of State, but when I departed it was a Scholar who bade me farewell.