by Amin Maalouf
It was the second wave of Mongol invasions which swept over Alamut. It was a little less bloody, but more far-reaching. How can we not share the terror of the people alive at the time, knowing that the Mongol troops were able, over a period of a few months, to lay waste to Baghdad, Damascus, Cracow in Poland and the Chinese province of Szechuan.
The Assassin’s fortress thus opted to surrender, the fortress which had resisted so many invaders over a hundred and sixty-six years! Prince Hulagu, grandson of Chengiz Khan, came in person to admire this masterpiece of military construction; legend says that he found provisions which had been conserved intact from the days of Hassan Sabbah.
After inspecting the place with his lieutenants, he ordered the soldiers to destroy everything, not to leave a stone untouched, not to spare even the library. However, before setting fire to it, he permitted a thirty-year-old historian, a certain Juvayni, to go inside. He had been in the process of writing a History of the Conqueror of the World at Hulagu’s request, which book is still today our most valuable source on the Mongol invasions. He thus was able to go into this mysterious place where tens of thousands of manuscripts were kept in rows, stacked up or rolled up; outside he was awaited by a Mongol officer and a soldier with a wheelbarrow. What the wheelbarrow could hold would be saved, the rest was to be victim to the flames. There was no question of reading the texts or cataloguing the titles.
A fervent Sunni, Juvayni told himself that his first task was to save the World of God from the fire. He started to pile up as quickly as he could any copies of the Quran, recognizable by their thick binding and stored in the same place. He had a good score of them and made three trips to carry them out to the wheelbarrow which was already almost full. Now, what to chose? Heading toward one of the walls, against which the volumes seemed to be better ordered than elsewhere, he came across innumerable works written by Hassan Sabbah during his thirty years of voluntary reclusion. He chose to save one of them, an autobiography of which he would quote some fragments in his own work. He also found a chronicle of Alamut which was recent and apparently well documented and which related in detail the history of the Redeemer. He hurried to take it away with him, since that episode was totally unknown outside the Ismaili community.
Did the historian know of the existence of the Samarkand Manuscript? It seemed not. Would he have looked for it if he had heard it spoken of, and having thumbed through it, would he have saved it? We do not know. What is told is that he stopped in front of a group of works devoted to the occult science and that he delved into them, forgetting the time. The Mongol officer who came to remind him with a few words had his body covered with thick red-framed armour and had as head protection a helmet which broadened out like long hair toward the neck. He was carrying a torch in his hand and to show just how much in a hurry he was, he placed it next to a pile of dusty scrolls. The historian gave in and gathered into his hands and up to his armpits as many as he could grab, and when the manuscript entitled Eternal Secrets of Stars and Numbers fell to the ground, he did not bend over to pick it up again.
Thus it was that the Assassins’ library burnt for seven days and seven nights, causing the loss of innumerable works, of which there was no copy remaining and which are supposed to have contained the best-guarded secrets in the universe.
For a long time it was believed that the Samarkand Manuscript had also been consumed in the inferno of Alamut.
BOOK THREE
The End of the Millennium
Arise, we have eternity for sleeping!’
OMAR KHAYYAM
CHAPTER 25
Until now I have spoken little of myself. I have been trying to expose, as faithfully as possible, what the Samarkand Manuscript reveals of Khayyam and of those he knew and some of the events he witnessed. It remains to be told just how this work, spared at the time of the Mongols, has come down to our time, and through what adventures I managed to gain possession of it, and to start with – through what stroke of luck I learnt of its existence.
I have already mentioned my name, Benjamin O. Lesage. In spite of its French sound, the heritage of a Huguenot forebear who emigrated in Louis XIV’s century, I am an American citizen and a native of Annapolis in Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay, a modest inlet of the Atlantic. My connection with France is not limited, however, to that distant forefather and my father applied himself to renewing the link. He had always had an obsession about his origins – even noting in his school book: ‘Was my genealogical tree felled in order to construct a get-away boat!’, and he set about learning French. Then, with pomp and circumstance, he crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction to the hands of time.
His year of pilgrimage was either extremely badly or well chosen. He left New York on 9 July 1870, on board the Scotia; he reached Cherbourg on the 18th and was in Paris on the evening of the 19th with war having been declared at mid-day. There followed retreat, calamity, invasion, famine, the Commune and massacres. My father was never to live a more intense year. It would remain his finest memory, why should it be denied? There is a perverse joy in finding oneself in a besieged city where barricades fall as others arise and men and women rediscover the joys of primitive bonding. How many times in Annapolis, around the inevitable holiday turkey, would father and mother recall with emotion the piece of elephant trunk they had shared on New Year’s eve in Paris and which they had bought for forty francs a pound at Roos’, the English butcher on Boulevard Haussmann!
They had just become engaged, they were to be married a year later, and the war christened their happiness. ‘Upon my arrival in Paris,’ my father would recall, ‘I took up the habit of going to Cafe Riche in the morning, on the Boulevard des Italiens. With a pile of newspapers, le Temps, le Gaulois, le Figaro, la Presse, I would settle down at a table, reading every line and listing discreetly in a notebook the words I could not understand – words such as “gaiter” or “moblot” – so that I would be able, upon my return to my hotel, to ask the erudite concierge.
‘The third day a man with a grey moustache came and sat at the next table. He had his own stack of newspapers, but he abandoned them soon in order to observe me; he had a question on the tip of his tongue. Unable to restrain himself any longer, he spoke out with his hoarse voice, keeping one hand on the handle of his cane while the other tapped nervously on the wet marble. He wanted to be certain that this young man, apparently in sound health, had good reasons for not being at the front in order to defend the fatherland. His tone was polite, although very suspicious, and accompanied by sidelong glances at the notebook in which he had seen me hurriedly scribbling. I had no need to argue as my accent proved to be an eloquent defence. The man gallantly apologized, invited me to his table, and mentioned La Fayette, Benjamin Franklin, Tocqueville and Pierre L’Enfant before explaining in detail what I had just read in the press – how this war would be “just an excursion to Berlin for our troops”.’
My father wanted to contradict him. Although he knew nothing of the comparable strengths of the French and the Prussians, he had just taken part in the Civil War and had been wounded in the siege of Atlanta. ‘I could testify that no war was a picnic,’ he told us. ‘But nations are so forgetful and gunpowder so intoxicating that I held back from being drawn into an argument. It was not the time for discussions and the man did not ask my opinion. From time to time he would utter a “Don’t you think so?” which hardly required an answer; I replied with a knowing nod.
‘He was friendly. Besides, we met every morning after that. I still spoke very little and he stated that he was happy that an American could share his views so thoroughly. At the end of his fourth monologue, which was just as spirited, this august gentleman invited me to dine with him at his home; he was so certain of obtaining my agreement yet again that he hailed a coach before I could even formulate a reply. I must admit that I have never regretted it. He was called Charles-Hubert de Luçay and lived in a mansion on Boulevard Poissonière. He was a widower. His two sons were in the army and his d
aughter was going to become your mother.’
She was eighteen and my father was ten years older. They observed each other in silence throughout long patriotic harangues. From 7 August, when it became clear, after three defeats in a row, that the war was lost and that the national territory was under threat, my grandfather became less verbose. As his daughter and future son-in-law busied themselves trying to temper his melancholy a complicity sprang up between them. From then on, a glance was enough to decide which of them was going to intervene and with the medicine of which argument.
‘The first time we were alone, she and I in the huge salon, there was a deathly silence – followed by a burst of laughter. We had just discovered that, after numerous meals taken together, we had never addressed a word to each other directly. It was sweet, knowing and uncontrolled laughter, but it would have been unbecoming to prolong it. I was supposed to speak first. Your mother was clutching a book to her blouse, and I asked her what she was reading.’
At that very moment, Omar Khayyam entered into my life. I should almost say that it gave birth to me. My mother had just acquired Les Quatrains de Khéyam, translated from the Persian by J.B. Nicolas, formerly chief dragoman of the French Embassy to Persia, published in 1867 by the Imperial Press. My father had in his luggage the 1868 edition of Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
‘Your mother’s rapture was no better hidden than mine. We were both sure that our life lines were going to join. At no moment did we think that it could just be a simple coincidence that we were reading the same book. Omar appeared to us instantly like fate’s password – to ignore it would have been almost sacrilegious. Naturally, we had said nothing of what was going on inside us, the conversation centred on the poems. She informed me that Napoleon III in person had ordered the publication of the work.’
At that time, Europe had just discovered Omar. Some specialists, in truth, had spoken of him earlier in the century, his algebra had been published in Paris in 1851 and articles had appeared in specialized reviews. But the western public was still unaware of him, and, in the east itself, what was left of Khayyam? A name, two or three legends, some quatrains of indefinite authorship and a hazy reputation as an astrologer.
When an obscure British poet, FitzGerald, decided to publish a translation of seventy-five quatrains in 1859 there was indifference. The book was published in an edition of two hundred and fifty copies; the author offered some to his friends and the rest were selling very slowly at the book-shop of Bernard Quaritch. ‘Poor old Omar, he apparently was of interest to no one,’ so FitzGerald wrote to his Persian teacher. After two years the publisher decided to sell off the stock: from an initial price of five shillings, the Rubaiyaat went down to a penny, sixty times less. Even at this price, few were sold until the moment when two literary critics discovered it. They read it and were amazed by it. They came back the next day and bought up six copies to give out. Feeling that some interest was about to be aroused, the editor raised the price to two pence.
And to think that on my last trip to England I had to pay the same Quaritch, now finely established in Piccadilly, four hundred pounds sterling for a copy which he had kept from that first edition!
However, success was not immediate in London. It had to come from Paris where M. Nicolas published his translation, where Théophile Gautier had to write, in the pages of the Moniteur Universel a resounding ‘Have you read the Quatrains of Kéyam?’ And welcome ‘this absolute freedom of spirit which the boldest modern thinkers can hardly equal’, and Ernest Renan had to add: ‘Khayyam is perhaps the most curious man to study in order to understand what the unfettered genius of Persia managed to become within the bounds of Muslim dogmatism’ – in order for Fitzgerald and his ‘poor old Omar’ to come out of their anonymity. The awakening was thunderous. Overnight all the images of the orient were assembled around the sole name of Khayyam. Translation followed translation, editions of the work multiplied in England and then in several American cities ‘Omar’ societies were formed.
To reiterate, in 1870 the Khayyam vogue was just starting. The circle of fans of Omar was growing every day, without yet having transcended the circle of intellectuals. After this shared reading matter brought my father and mother together, they started to recite the quatrains of Omar and to discuss their meaning: were wine and the tavern, in Omar’s pen, purely mystical symbols, as Nicolas stated? Or were they, on the other hand, the expression of a life of pleasure, indeed of debauchery, as FitzGerald and Renan claimed? These debates took on a new taste in their mouths. When my father evoked Omar, as he caressed the perfumed hair of his beautiful girl, my mother blushed. It was between two amorous quatrain that they exchanged their first kiss. The day they spoke of marriage, they made a vow to call their first son Omar.
During the 1890s, hundreds of little Americans were also given that name: when I was born on 1 March 1873 it was not yet common. Not wishing to encumber me too much with this exotic first name, my parents relegated it to second place, in order that I might, if I so desired, replace it with a discrete O; my school friends supposed that it stood for Oliver, Oswald, Osborne or Orville and I did not disabuse anyone.
The inheritance which was thus handed down to me could not fail to arouse my curiosity about this remote godfather. At fifteen I started to read everything about him. I had made a plan to study the language and literature of Persia and to make a long visit there. However, after a bout of enthusiasm I cooled down. Indeed, in the opinion of all the critics, FitzGerald’s verses constituted a masterpiece of English poetry, but they had only a remote connection with what Khayyam could have composed. When it came to the quatrains themselves, some authors quoted almost a thousand, Nicolas had translated more than four hundred, while some thorough specialists only recognized a hundred of them as being ‘probably authentic’. Eminent orientalists went as far as to deny that a single one could be attributed to Omar with certainty.
It was believed that there could have existed an original book which once and for all would have allowed the real to be distinguished from the false, but there was nothing to lead one to believe that such a manuscript could be found.
Finally I turned away from the person, as I did from the work. I came to see my middle initial O as the permanent residue of parental childishness – until a meeting took me back to my first love and directed my life resolutely in the footsteps of Khayyam.
CHAPTER 26
It was at the end of the summer of 1895 that I embarked for the old world. My grandfather had just celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday and had written tearful letters to me and my mother. He was eager to see me, even if it were only once, before his death. Having finished my studies I rushed off and on the ship I readied myself for the role I would have to play – to kneel down at his bedside, to hold his frozen hand bravely while listening to him murmur his last orders.
That was all absolutely wasted. Grandfather was waiting for me at Cherbourg. I can still see him, on the quai de Caligny, straighter than his cane with his perfumed moustache, his lively gait and his top hat tipping automatically when a lady passed by. When we were seated in the Admiralty restaurant, he took me firmly by the arm. ‘My friend,’ he said, deliberately theatrical, ‘a young man has just been reborn in me, and he needs a companion.’
I was wrong to take his words lightly. Our time there was a whirl. We would hardly have finished eating at the Brébant, at Foyot or at Chez le Père Lathuile before we would have to run to the Cigale where Eugénie Buffet was appearing, to the Mirliton where Aristide Bruant reigned or to the Scala where Yvette Guilbert would sing les Vierges, le Foetus and le Fiacre. We were two brothers, one with a white moustache, the other with a brown one. We had the same gait, the same hat and he was the one the women looked at first. With every champagne cork that popped I studied his gestures and his behaviour, and I could not even once find fault with them. He arose with a bound, walked as quickly as I did, his cane being hardly more than an ornament. He wanted to gather eve
ry rose of this late spring. I am happy to say that he would live to be ninety-three – another seventeen years, a whole new youth.
One evening he took me to dine at Durand in the place de la Madeleine. In an aisle of the restaurant, around several tables which had been placed together, there was a group of actors, actresses, journalists and politicians whose names grandfather audibly reeled off for me one by one. In the middle of these celebrities there was an empty chair, but soon a man arrived and I realised that the place had been saved for him. He was immediately surrounded and adulated. Every last word of his gave rise to exclamations and laughs. My grandfather stood up and made a sign to me to follow him.
‘Come on, I must present you to my cousin Henri!’
As he said that, he dragged me over to him.
The two cousins greeted each other before returning to me.
‘My American grandson. He wanted to meet you so much!’
I did not hide my surprise too well, and the man looked at me with some scepticism before stating:
‘Let him come and see me tomorrow morning, after I have had my tricycle ride.’
It was only upon sitting back at my table that I realised to whom I had been presented. My grandfather was very eager for me to know him, and had spoken of him often with an irritating pride of clan.
It is true that the aforementioned cousin, who was little known on my side of the Atlantic, was more famous in France than Sarah Bernhardt, as he was Victor-Henri de Rochefort-Luçay, now known in democratic France as Henri Rochefort, a marquis and a communard, former deputy, minister and convict. He had been deported to New Caledonia by the regular troops. In 1874 he effected a swashbuckling escape which inflamed his contemporaries’ imagination, and which Eduard Manet depicted in his painting The Flight of Rochefort. However, in 1889 he was sent off into exile again for having plotted against the Republic with General Boulanger, and it was from London that he managed his influential newspaper l’Intransigeant. Returning in 1895 thanks to an amnesty, he had been welcomed back by two hundred thousand delirious Parisians – both Blanquistes and Boulangistes, revolutionaries of the left and the right, idealists and demagogues. He had been made the spokesman of a hundred different and contradictory causes. I knew all of that, but I was unaware of the most important thing.
