The Dream Maker (26 page)

I decided to make him my agent for Florence. And a wise decision it was, too. It took not even two years for him to arrange my enrollment in the most powerful silk guild, the Arte della Seta. I took my oath there, as would both Guillaume and my youngest son, Ravand, later on. Our firm never became as great as that of the Medici, but we occupied an honorable place nonetheless. Our cloths of silk and gold were almost immediately exported to France, conveyed on horseback over Alpine passes to our branches in Lyon, Provence, and, naturally, the Argenterie in Tours.

Demand was enormous. The truce with England was lasting, and there was no limit to people's hunger for happiness. I was struggling to satisfy the orders that came in at the Argenterie. People were thankful when I managed to honor their requests, and when I delivered a gown it was as though I were saving a life. As the buyers often lacked cash, I gave credit, and before long everyone of importance at the court of France was in my debt.

Florence had transformed me. Upon my return, it occurred to me for the first time that not only could I increase my wealth, I could also put it to use. Prior to this, money had merely been the product of my activity; I was not governed by the desire to obtain money and, as I have said, my daily life, with a few vital exceptions, remained simple and frugal. In Florence, something else had been revealed to me. It wasn't a sudden liking for comfort or the lure of luxury; in truth, it was yet another dream, but one whose time had come, now that my other projects had been fully realized and were beginning to lose their hold over me.

How can I explain this revelation? I could sum it up by giving it a name, and say that Florence showed me what art truly is. But that is not enough. I must be more precise. Until then, I knew only one form of art, that of the craftsman, as practiced by my father, for example. Mastering the means to transform a rough-hewn object into something useful that was also solid and pleasing to the eye—that was what furriers and tailors did, or masons and chefs. That art could be perfected, but on the whole, it was a hereditary art. It was handed down from master to student, from father to son. In Florence I learned to distinguish between the art of artisans, which was extremely refined, and the art of artists, which reflected something else altogether: genius, exception, innovation.

I met a great many painters there. As I observed them, I learned to distinguish between two orders: technique, and creativity. When mixing their colors, and preparing their materials to paint
a tempera
, on frescoes, or with oils, they were still only craftsmen. Some of them remained so, producing conventional work inspired by well-known models. But others, in the moment of their creation, moved away from those references, and went beyond the techniques they had mastered, to give free rein in their work to something more. And I recognized that something more: it was the immense realm of dreams. Dreams confer nobility upon humankind. We are human because we have access to what does not exist. These riches are not given to everyone, but those who do make their way to that invisible continent return laden with treasures they then share with everyone else.

I am referring here to painters, no doubt because I was particularly sensitive to their genius. But I could also mention architects, musicians, and poets. These artists were far less numerous than the simple craftsmen. But their activity was like a motor driving the entire city. This was a major difference from the Levant. I understood what I had felt in Damascus. All the refinement, all the wealth converging toward that city merely settled there in an inert fashion. Nothing new appeared. The city must have known a golden age; it seemed to be over. It was subsisting on the accomplishments of that bygone time. In Florence, however, innovation was everywhere. The city had gone far afield to find wealth and competence, as with the culture of the silkworm, imported from China. And the city did not stop there. It had to go on transforming, surpassing, creating; it was a city of artists.

I went back to France convinced not only that we must amass wealth, but that we would never truly have a chance to become the center of the world unless we also reached the sovereign domain of art and creativity. Today this is a common idea. But at the time it was novel.

It is difficult to grasp how much has been accomplished over the last ten years. At the time of the truce with England we were emerging from nearly a century of war and destruction. We knew only two states, poverty or abundance. By emerging from one, our only desire was to cast ourselves into the other. And this gave us an extraordinary appetite for quantity: ever increasing amounts of jewels, finery, victuals, palaces, feasts, dances, and love. During the time of violence, our meager resources had been consumed by a feeble flame, but that fire was burning out of control now: countless delights were being tossed its way by the armful, delights that had become easy to acquire thanks to the stability of peace. However, our taste remained vulgar.

I had become one of the purveyors of extravagance. In Florence, I had passed a milestone: not only was I dealing as a merchant with objects that came from elsewhere, but as a member of the silk guild I also took part in their creation. I was one of the rare individuals in France who was also thinking of manufacturing. I brought Guillaume and Jean together to inform them of my plan. We would no longer import arms, but produce them; we would no longer sell fabric wholesale, but make it ourselves. I decided to acquire money not only through commerce, but also through my own production. To that end, I bought mines in the hills around Lyon, and I brought in Germans who were skilled at extracting metal from the ground.

Under the influence of the Florentines, I gave the concept of creativity greater scope. The idea was not merely to reproduce what was being made elsewhere, but to seize the very power that was the principle behind these discoveries. My aim was to innovate in every domain. I liked the idea of employing every form of the imagination, in order to inscribe its effects in matter. I now knew that artists would be at the summit of this new form of manufacture. There were very few such people in France. Our musicians peddled tunes that had been handed down to them by tradition; painters copied conventional religious subjects. Only our poets, perhaps, moved about in the original space of their thoughts and feelings. But they were also those who had the least purchase on things. When I came back from Florence, I set myself to the task of bringing together the talented people I met and giving them free rein to create new finery, new buildings, and spectacles of a kind never seen before. After the long fallow period of war, it was not at all certain that we would even manage to do this. However, this land, which only a hundred years earlier had given birth to builders of cathedrals, was certainly not arid where the arts were concerned. What was needed was to find new talents, and provide them with the conditions necessary for their growth and the blossoming of their creativity.

 

*

 

I was given the opportunity to contribute myself, by means of building the palace I had promised Macé. Before I went to Florence, I could not conceive of this building as anything other than what was in keeping with my notion of supreme luxury: the château at Mehun-sur-Yèvre. Built long ago by Duke John, it was the king's residence when he was in the region. It was a fortified building surrounded by round towers, and its only novelty, albeit a very tentative one, but which was what made it so attractive, were the tall windows set in the walls, which offered an admirable view of the countryside.

The land I had acquired, with its Roman foundations, was to serve as a foundation for a construction similar to Mehun, or at least that is what Macé and I had decided. To that end, we decided to flank the tall Roman tower with a twin, which would give the building the air of a fortified castle. But when I came back from Florence, I realized that this was a ridiculous idea. In Florence I had seen palaces blossoming without a single trace of war, and for good cause. They were tall, airy buildings, whose only towers were used to contain spiral staircases. The architects vied with each other to beautify these dwellings with an elegance and lightness that made our fortified houses seem barbarian. On the walls, frescoes burst with color, and stained glass filtered a living light.

I decided to follow these examples and rethink our project completely. Alas, the moment I arrived in our town, I saw that in my absence Macé had already started construction work. The Roman wall had been reinforced and redesigned, in such a way that one could already see the two towers rising on the lower end of the plot, in a smaller imitation of Mehun. Macé toured the site with me, delighted to show me how diligently she had worked in my absence. I was in despair. I did not dare show her the plans an architect in Florence had drawn up at my request.

I had a quick journey to make to Le Puy. All through the trip I could think of little else than the palace. I had tried to put on a good face in Macé's presence, and, given her enthusiasm, I had acted satisfied. But the moment I was alone I felt overwhelmed with despair. For what obscure reason? I had other properties, and the means to build whatever I liked elsewhere, more in keeping with my Italian taste. I had just purchased the land to build a house in Montpellier. Neither Macé nor anyone else could tell me what to build. And yet these thoughts were no consolation. The palace in Bourges, which hitherto I had paid so little attention to, and had only decided to build in order to please Macé, had now come to occupy an unexpected place. In truth, since Florence, I could think of nothing else. It seemed vital that at the heart of my life, in the place that was both my family home and the center of my business, I should build a palace that would be a testimony to the future, that would be in keeping with my desires and a fulfillment of my dreams. It would be ridiculous to build a pale copy of a seigniorial castle in its place, like some pathetic symbol of noble pretension that would fool no one. In short, the image I would project would be that of an upstart. For years or even centuries, this monument would be the source of a terrible misunderstanding regarding my person. It would show me as a man who was hungry for power and money, who wanted to conquer his place in the feudal world. Basically, I cared little what people in the future would think. But the misunderstanding would start now, with my own family. And to Macé, to our children, and to the king, I wanted to show my true face and my deepest motivations. Money, titles—none of that mattered to me. What drove me was my dream of another world, a world of light and peace, of trade and work, a world of pleasure where what was best in man could be expressed in other ways than simply through the invention of new methods for killing his fellow man. A world where all the finest things from every continent on earth would converge. That was the world I had caught sight of in Florence, and I wanted my palace to resemble it.

When I came back from Le Puy, I was so distracted by these thoughts that I had an accident. I was riding an old black horse that had accompanied me in Italy, and I knew it to be a placid animal. The road climbed steeply up to where a chapel was visible on the edge of the forest. Just as we were halfway up the hill, two dogs ran at my horse's legs. The old gelding swerved to one side, and would not have thrown me had I been more attentive. I fell heavily from the left side, hard onto my shoulder. I was taken to a farm and a surgeon arrived two hours later from the neighboring town. The break was not serious. He bound my arm and I was able to get back on my horse and finish the journey.

This accident had a strange effect on me. Through an unexpected association of thoughts, it gave me an idea regarding my future palace. I thought about this new difference in the two sides of my body, one in good health and the other immobilized, and all of a sudden this suggested a solution. The land where we were building was, as I have said, situated on two levels: a lower level at the foot of the old Roman rampart, and above it an upper level located at the height of the former oppidum. But thus far the work had only affected the rampart, that is, they had hardly touched the upper section. It would therefore be possible, without changing what Macé had already built, to give the future palace two distinct façades. On the side of the rampart, by continuing the work already begun, it would look like a fortified castle. But on the side toward the top of the town, there was still time to build a façade that would follow the Florentine plans. That way, each of us would be satisfied.

Macé could show everyone the imposing wall of a castle that was worthy of our status and proof of our new power. But when arriving from the other side, along the small streets leading down from the cathedral where I had spent my gray and gloomy childhood, I would have the pleasure of knowing I had built an image in stone of the future, and that it was proof that life could be different, and not only elsewhere. The moment one went through the door on this side—a modest door like the ones on palaces in Italy—one would enter a courtyard, and I imagined a cheerful dwelling, with numerous immense openings, and where the few walls that were visible would be decorated with sculptures, fine columns, and frescoes.

The moment I arrived, I shared my plans with Macé. She agreed to it, without fully understanding how this would change her plans, for she had never seen the houses in Italy. She only understood that my intention was to bring a number of innovations to our palace, features I had discovered during my voyages. I am sure she had no idea of the anguish this episode caused me. She insisted I get some rest, first and foremost. From the bed I could see the leaves of springtime in the garden, and the pale sky full of fluffy, white clouds. The linen sheets were soft, and there was a printed canvas on the wall representing a scene from antiquity. I felt immensely relieved, and for three days and nights I did nothing but sleep.

Looking back, I think my mind and body were preparing for the great turmoil they were about to undergo. A great love, when it draws near, is preceded by signs that are initially impossible to decipher. They only become intelligible after the wave has receded, once it has laid bare on the shore the confusion of memories and emotions. And then we understand, but it is too late.