The Dream Maker (18 page)

Marc did not even try to hide the fact that he had an introduction to all the
écorcheurs
in town. The only true question was why he wanted to change his station in life. I asked him. With an obvious knack for saying the right thing, he explained that times had changed. Paris was no longer a place for riots, massacres, and usurpation—from this I gathered that he did not hold the English in high esteem. Henceforth, in the capital, there would be more to be gained by being honest. He implied that in his opinion I represented the sort of new fortune one could aspire to, through royal power. I might have every reason to fear that he only wanted to enter my service to rob me. After all, if he was still connected to a group of thugs, he could be their man on the inside and open every door. I wagered the contrary, and told myself that if he had truly decided to swear allegiance to my person, he would go about it with all the conscientiousness of his bandit soul and I could not dream of a more loyal servant. As it turned out, my wager was well founded. Marc would stay with me until my escape, and if I owe him my life today it is because, in order to save me, he forfeited his own.

I took him into my service that very day. Christine did not let anything show on first encountering him. But that evening, as soon as we were alone in her room, she begged me not to hire him. To convince me she cried and wept, perhaps too much, and this excessive display made me think that she must have other grievances against this stranger that she preferred to keep secret. I decided for once not to give in to her. Marc stayed.

I would have many years ahead to observe him and understand him. His acts were always appropriate, his judgment was clear, and his hunches correct. But I gradually discovered that all of these qualities stemmed from an extremely simple vision of the world. In Marc's opinion, men were men, and women were women. What I mean is that he thought there could be no man, no matter how serious or powerful, who would not lose his head over a pretty girl, provided she knew which weapons to use to reduce him to her mercy. And there could be no woman, no matter how honest, faithful, and virtuous, who was not capable of the worst folly for a man, if she thought he could awaken in her that volcano of desires which she must cover with ash against her will. This certainty gave him his own vision of the human race, seen through their weaknesses and desires. He never based his opinions on appearance alone, and was rarely impressed by the ramparts of gravity or virtue which people could raise around themselves. I deduced that in his former occupation he was probably neither a brigand nor a robber, but in all likelihood had been specialized in the commerce of young women.

From the moment he saw her he detected in Christine everything my foolishness had blinded me to, and she sensed the threat. I waited to see what would come of their confrontation. Each one led his or her own inquiry, and in the days that followed revealed horrible things to me regarding the other. Christine attacked first, and gave me precise information regarding Marc's former employ. She said she had obtained the information by bribing the wife of an innkeeper in the neighborhood, whose establishment turned into a gaming house at night. Everything she told me about my valet was entirely true. But he had already confessed as much to me. She was very disappointed to see that my opinion about him did not change.

It took a bit longer for him to tell me about her. What I learned was grave, but the fact that she had hidden it from me was graver still. According to Marc's inquiries, Christine was not the daughter of a family of means, but a duke's bastard. She had been raised by her mother, who was in service as a chambermaid to the duchess of Burgundy, and through imitation she had acquired the manners of a world to which she did not belong. After her mother's death, she had preferred to make use of her charms rather than go into service. She had fallen under the influence of a scoundrel with whom she had a daughter. The child was with a nurse in Pontoise. Her youth, beauty, and education enabled Christine to hunt for prize game. In the beginning, her protector had offered her to rich men who used her in full awareness of her station, and paid for her. Later on, she found it more lucrative to hide her true identity, and to simulate passion for men who were capable of ruining themselves for her. A magistrate from the Parliament had hanged himself two years earlier, leaving her a considerable sum of money. Thanks to the turbulent times, she always managed to disappear, only to return under a new identity. Her real name was Antoinette.

This revelation was like a thrust from a dagger. It is hard for me to say what was most painful—to find out that I had been betrayed? To see the metamorphosis of my beloved? To discover the banal nature of a story I thought was unique? Or perhaps, above all, to endure the disappointment of watching the self-esteem that love had given me disappear for good?

My first reaction, obviously, was to cast doubt on Marc's defamations. He was expecting this.

“Do not humble yourself by seeking to verify what I say,” he advised. “It is all true. If you really want to know who you are dealing with, there is a very simple way.”

To be clear in my mind, at his suggestion I conceived the ultimate test, which would enable me to obtain a definitive judgment regarding Christine-Antoinette. I informed her that I would soon be leaving on a short journey for four days. She asked me a few questions about the house, and I left her all the keys, including those to the coffers. This was a somewhat perfidious way to tempt her, but I wanted the test to be thorough. In order to give her free rein, I informed her that Marc would be going with me. And while I did indeed go as far as Versailles, my valet stayed behind to set the trap. The second night after my departure, Antoinette's protector arrived with a cart and three armed men. Marc had set a guard all around the house and, confident for once of his rights, he had placed the public watchmen on the alert. They waited until the coffers were opened and the first money boxes removed before they intervened. All the brigands ended up in jail. But at my request, Marc regretfully arranged things so that Christine could disappear without being harassed. After that, he invited his companions to drink to my health.

I never saw Antoinette again.

That is how my adventure with Christine ended, a tragic farce. But she left a greater mark on me than I would have thought. I came away with an instinctive and enduring mistrust of women. I had always thought I despised the ones who sought me out for venal reasons; now I preferred them. From now on, nothing seemed more suspicious to me than disinterested love. I had to accept the facts: my prosperity, particularly in an era of great poverty, had made me an object of desire and intrigue. Anyone who tried to delude me into believing the contrary would only arouse my lasting hatred and mistrust. This was unjust, no doubt, to several of the women I met throughout my life whose feelings for me might have been sincere. However, the pain I inflicted by rejecting them always seemed less severe than that which I would have suffered had I allowed myself to be taken in by a new Christine.

There was another lesson I learned, which caused me to pause for a moment on the cusp of the future and compelled me to question my plans: as long as I had lived in my dreams, I had been safe from any mediocrity. I had only the highest ambitions, and as I calculated the way to go about fulfilling those ambitions, my strength was even greater. Ever since I began to convert my dreams to reality, I had become accustomed to wading through the mire of the everyday, through murky swamps of jealousy and covetousness. Jean and Guillaume shouldered their share, and very generously, but I was still left with many of these constraints. I felt a great urge to give it all up and return to the humble life alongside my wife and my children, which, when all is said and done, I deserved.

In truth, what I wanted above all was to leave the capital and the duties that held me there. But to do that would have been to betray the oath I had given the king, and thus to expect nothing more from him other than spite.

So I waited. Christine had merely provided me with additional reasons to despise Paris. Like the city, she was a mixture of refinement and brutality, pleasure and danger, beauty and betrayal, civilization and filth. To be free of the city, I no longer left the workshop, and was completely absorbed by my work. I ordered the king's quartermasters to bring increasing amounts of metal to be melted, although I was well aware that this meant more and more pillaging throughout the city, more tribute seized from the inhabitants, more wounds to the city's already tortured body. And this pained me, in spite of everything, for I could no more find it in me to regret having known Christine than I could help but feel a vague and paradoxical tenderness for this city I wanted so much to leave behind.

If I did not want to endanger my sanity, the situation must not continue as it had. Fortunately, at the beginning of the month of June, a message from the king came to inform me that he was appointing me “steward to the Argenterie,” the royal fund for the king's expenditure. I had to leave for Tours at once. The good news was that I would be leaving Paris. It mattered little that it was in order to occupy an unknown and probably subordinate position. By seeking royal favors, had I not embarked on the path of submission? For a moment I was tempted to reject the offer and return to my partners. But an intuition compelled me not to break off relations, and to wait. After all, the king knew my situation and my plans.

Eight days later, I left Paris through the Porte Saint-Jacques. I took two guards as an escort, and Marc. He was afraid of nothing, except horses. It was truly a pleasure to see him pale and trembling, and clinging to the pommel on the saddle the moment his mount began to trot.

I took my time to reach Tours, where the Argenterie was located. I even took the opportunity to go through Bourges. Macé and the children welcomed me tenderly. Jean had grown a great deal. He was pious and extremely well-mannered. He had already decided to take holy orders. Obviously this was his mother's influence, voluntary or not. It was not from me that he inherited such a flawless, complete faith, which lent him a serious air. He had a perpetual little smile, both kindly and haughty, at the corner of his mouth. It was neither the ecstatic grin of saints, nor the absent dreaminess I knew so well, but rather the charitable and scornful grimace worn by religious dignitaries. It was no doubt to obey that same intuition that Macé had decided, if possible, to make a bishop or even a cardinal of him. Over time and with my absence, she had changed. Like a young wine that can either improve with age or turn to vinegar, that side of her that had been secret and taciturn was now neither goodness nor simplicity but rather all social pretension and vanity. My position in Paris, the money I sent her which was now flowing in, the profit from both my royal mandate and the activity of our enterprise—Macé transformed it all into emblems of dignity and success. There are pleasing and generous aspects to success and the way one can display it, with finery, feasts, and excellent fare. But that was not the path Macé had chosen. She was altogether on the side of gravity and austere rigor. Luxury for her meant celebrating mass, going to funerals in full mourning, and at Easter or Christmastime to have boring or wealthy people parade before her, in the secret hopes that she would seem equally prosperous to them, and even more sinister.

She was corresponding with my brother, who had taken orders at last and was in Rome pursuing a career to become a bishop.

I realized how greatly my life of toil in Paris had distanced me from my family. With hindsight, my adventure with Christine seemed more and more beneficial. She had opened my eyes to another world, a world where luxury was allied with pleasure to form an ephemeral couple, both delightful and guilty. It was not that I missed Christine, but rather what she had brought me now provided a permanent counterpoint to what I could see in my good town. In short, a spring had broken: for a long time, Macé and her parents had shown me the road to follow. And I had obeyed their decrees without question. Since my voyage to the Levant, and above all my stay in Paris, that fascination had vanished. It had yielded to a lucidity so sharp it was almost painful. Macé, with her ambition, her desire for respectability, her claims to virtue and honor, now struck me as ridiculous and drearily typical of her class.

At the same time, such needs were easy to satisfy. What mattered to her was that I continue my career in society so that she might aspire to the titles with which fortune would adorn me. And, naturally, money must enable her to display the various stages of our ascension. She wanted houses and servants, gowns and votive offerings, positions for our children and masses sung for her salvation. In return for which she tolerated my absence, more easily in any case than my return. Our carnal ties, which had never been very solid, had practically ceased to exist. If on occasion when passing through Bourges I tried to approach her, I found her more absent than ever. Worse than that, it seemed to me this time that her silence masked prayer, and naturally this chilled my desire. Without going so far as to try the novelties that Christine had led me to discover, even the simple register of ordinary tender gestures between a wife and her husband seemed sinful to Macé, requiring contrition before God. I did not insist. In spite of the discreet sense of guilt that I carried within—because it was my fault, after all, if I had abandoned her—I refused to wallow in regret, still less to change and become, like her, a pious upstart. Thus, I did not extend my stay longer than two brief weeks.

I felt lighthearted on leaving our town. It was as though I had been relieved of a burden. Macé had found her way, which was not mine. But our efforts were complementary. I had left to pursue my dreams, and I produced material goods in spite of myself. Macé transformed them into respectability and a future for the children. Basically, everything was going well.