The Dream Maker (28 page)

“What would you advise?” he began.

His features had changed completely. One would have looked in vain for any trace of bitterness or gravity. His anxiety was like that of an adolescent.

“Have you received any rare items at the Argenterie lately, something precious . . . I would like to find a gift for a lady, the finest gift to be found, or, better still: a gift that cannot be found.”

He seemed to delight in the turn of phrase that had come unbidden into his sentence, and he laughed noisily. I stopped and thought for a moment.

“My associates have informed me that a merchant from the Levant recently sold us a diamond of exceptional size.”

The king's eyes lit up.

“A diamond! That would be perfect, but it must be truly extraordinary.”

“It is. I have heard it is as big as a pebble from the Loire.”

Charles's eyes were shining.

“Bring it to me!”

“The problem, sire, is that it has not yet been set, or even cut. As it is, it is a mere gray pebble.”

“Never mind. The person for whom it is intended knows what a diamond is. She will have no difficulty imagining . . . ”

I promised to have it delivered to him in three or four days. The king took my hands and thanked me. Then he called out, and a troop of servants and stewards immediately appeared. I took my leave. Before walking out of the room, the king held me back for a moment. He leaned closer and whispered, “I am happy, Jacques.”

His eyes were proof that he was telling the truth. But in a glance I also noticed the black stubble on his cheeks, his large graceless nose, his twisted limbs and the overlong torso on which his garments hung so awkwardly, no matter how the tailors tried to adjust them. And I told myself that, without a doubt, this man had more charm in misfortune.

Only two days later I would meet Agnès . . .

When I reached this point in my memories, I was overwhelmed by emotion and could no longer continue serenely. I stopped writing for an entire day.

According to Elvira, there is no water on the island where I was hoping to hide. So escape in that direction is impossible. I greeted the verdict less despondently than I would have expected. It is bad news, however. I am doomed to stay here, whatever happens. At the same time—and it is probably for this reason that I was not completely annihilated—the news did have one favorable consequence: I won't be obliged to give up my writing. Now that I have come this far, my desire to open the next door to memory, the one through which Agnès can at last be seen, is so great that I would not have liked to postpone the completion of this project.

So I will stay here, since needs must, but I am conscious of the great risk I am taking. The tranquility of the island, that nothing has come to disturb since the visit from the podestà's man, seems more deceptive than ever. In that way lies danger, and I even have the impression it is coming nearer. I lost my temper with Elvira, who assures me that I have nothing to fear. If she does not feel the threat, it is perhaps because she is too naïve. Most of the time that is my conclusion, and it allows me to be as tender and carefree with her as possible. But there are times when I see her quite differently. I tell myself that while she may be a peasant girl, a daughter of the sea and the vine, she is also a woman who grasps things, who calculates and nurtures hopes I am unaware of. And that is when I become convinced she is betraying me. Now that she knows I am hunted and doomed, and she can no longer obtain anything from me, perhaps she hopes to obtain something from my enemies, if she were to hand me over.

It disgusts me to think like this. I have lived for so long in the midst of intrigue, and in spite of myself I have had the irrefutable proof of human baseness and duplicity so often that I carry the stain of it with me everywhere. Even to this island, where everything seems simple and pure. The only person I have known who kept her soul intact and noble even when surrounded by the worst corruption was Agnès. Elvira and Agnès are as far apart as can be. And yet something makes them similar, and even, in my mind, unites them.

Now that I know there is no escape, there are only two solutions: to stay hidden in the house or make the best of the situation. After I first heard the news I did not sleep all night, and I reached my decision. Since fate has given me this island for a prison, I do not wish to live here as a recluse. If it has to be my cell, I may as well wander here and there and enjoy its beauty. I have begun taking long walks, careful to avoid the town and the harbor. But there are many other things to see. Yesterday, along the trails through the interior of the island, I almost reached the other side. The groves of mastic trees are fragrant in the heat; men come to gather the tears of resin that trickle from the trunks. They greet me, and invite me to drink with them. On the slope leading down to the sea, on the side where the sun sets, I have found lemon orchards, and I enjoy taking an afternoon nap under one of the trees. Their golden apples give me the illusion, when I wake, that I am in the garden of the Hesperides. Here am I, who dreamed of making my country the center of the world, and now I am on the very edge of that world, perhaps even outside it. And in the end, I do not suffer. My ambitions for France were no more than an illusion, and my true country is that of dreams. Is that not where I am now?

Agnès has been haunting me, ever since I wrote of my meeting with her. All these years I had placed her in a recess in my memory, beneath a shrine I have not opened since her death. All my memories are there, intact, fragrant like her body. It was enough for me to say her name for the vial to be broken. Her face, her perfume, her voice have invaded everything. I can no longer find sleep beneath the lemon trees, and I have hurried back here to continue writing. If they came for me now . . . I would have only one regret: if they kill me before I have time to relive my years with Agnès.

I came home at sunset. Elvira had set out olives, ewe's cheese, and an entire basket of fruit. We dined in twilight. There was no moon. Night was falling and I could hardly see Elvira's naked arms crossed on the table. I could hear her breathing. I ran my hands through her heavy mane of hair. As the night gradually caused her singularity to vanish, she was transformed into an indistinct presence made of the smell of her skin, the silkiness of her hair, her short, light breathing, so typical of a woman. All through that long evening until sleep, which came only at dawn, I was with Agnès again. The words took shape inside me and the images came with them. And this morning, all I had to do was sit down and begin for everything to follow.

 

*

 

Ten years have passed, but I keep a precise memory of the moment I saw her for the first time. It was two days after my arrival in Saumur. I was giving instructions to one of my shop boys, who had come urgently from Tours. Above all, I had to organize the quick and safe shipment of the rough diamond I had recklessly promised to deliver within four days.

I am not the sort of man who can sit in an office. And even if I were, life would never have given me the leisure to do so, because I am in constant movement. My papers follow me around in a chest. I work wherever chance sets me down. I have been known to confer with my agents from my bed. I sign letters on my lap while they stand before me, hat in hand. But what I like best of all is to work outside, weather permitting. Those days in Saumur, a southerly wind was bringing warm air laden with sand. The shade in the castle gardens was delightful, evocative of moments in Damascus. I had asked for a writing case to be taken into the orchard. In my shirtsleeves, without a hat, I was pacing to and fro and dictating while my agent took notes. He did not want to remove his coat. Sitting on a stone bench, he mopped his forehead and moaned.

Suddenly we heard peals of laughter. We were hidden in the shade, and the young women coming toward us did not see us there, blinded as they were by the sun and absorbed in their conversation. They were still at a distance from us, in the sunlight. They made a tight little cluster, perhaps five or six of them. However, I saw only one of them, and all the others seemed to circle around her like nocturnal insects around a flame. The group followed her wherever she went, and their winding path through the garden was subject to her whims. When they were not far off, her foot struck a pear that had fallen to the ground. She stopped, and the others did likewise. With her toe she kicked the bruised fruit, then, casting her gaze up at the grove of trees where we sat, she cried out, “Look, there are some more!”

She went over to the pear tree, but almost immediately, as she entered the shadow, she saw me and froze. And though I did not know her, I was instantly sure of her.

She cannot have been more than twenty years of age. Her blonde hair was pulled back and arranged simply in a chignon. She had no eyebrows, and her temples were shaven quite far back, which gave her an admirable forehead, as smooth and round as an ivory ball. Sculpted from such a fragile, precious substance, her features were extremely fine. That morning, with her followers, she had not arrayed herself to any effect. Her beauty came from no artifice. It was the brute handiwork of the gods.

Surprise gave her a grave expression, and it was with that expression that I would always remember her. Later I would come to know her laughter, astonishment, fear, disgust, hope, and pleasure. Those were the thousand and one harmonics that the heavenly instrument of her face could produce. The fact remains that, for me, her truth was always that bass note she showed me the instant we first found ourselves face to face.

Her gravity allowed a glimpse of the tragic nature of her beauty: such perfection, envied by all, is for the chosen woman a painful fatality. Beauty of this degree is an image of the absolute to which nothing can be added. And yet the woman who wears it knows how ephemeral it is. It gives her a natural authority, an unequaled capacity for power, but only through a disarmed and fragile body, which can so easily be broken. Beauty of such intensity separates a woman from other mortals, and arouses their jealousy and desire. For the one man she might satisfy, she will leave behind untold victims, who will transform the pain of their disappointed love into a dangerous vengefulness. A king, to whom one can refuse nothing, will see such beauty as an offering of choice, which nature has reserved for him. Thus, the woman who owns such beauty will most often have to forfeit her own desires and follow the exalted destiny to which her perfection has condemned her. At that very moment, I thought of Charles, with his bad breath, his twisted limbs, his rough beard, and I imagined his graceless hands on that diaphanous skin, his mouth on those pale lips.

Accustomed to mistrusting her own feelings and those she aroused in others, the young woman paused hesitantly in my presence. As she knew she was destined for royal favor, she was fearful of any other attachment that she would be obliged to reject, whether she wanted to or not. Later, she would tell me that when she first saw me, she, too, had shared that trouble I felt as she walked toward me.

Yet I did not possess the same qualities as her. I was twenty years older, and could make no claim to beauty. I was dressed like a farmhand bringing in the hay, and there was nothing about me to indicate my identity to her; I had neither the power nor the artifice to make an impression. And yet, I know in that moment she felt something deep for me. We would have numerous opportunities to speak about it later. The explanation she gave me hardly enlightened the mystery. If I am to believe what she said, she immediately recognized me as her “double.” It is a strange word, I will grant you that, and never was any double more dissimilar. But she lived in her own world, and the real world had little to do with it. No doubt it was a refuge she had built for herself as protection against life's aggressions. In any case, the only people allowed to enter that world were those she secretly chose, and I had the painful privilege of occupying an eminent place in that world from the moment we met.

The other girls came forward in turn into the leafy shade, and once their eyes grew used to it they stared at me. These were all maidens from the entourage of Isabelle of Lorraine, the wife of King René. Several of them had seen me from a distance when I was attending the king and their mistress was in our presence. Now one of them, less restrained, cried out and put her hand in front of her mouth, “Master Cœur!”

Thus Agnès learned who I was. For nothing on earth would I have wanted for that knowledge to change her attitude. So I stepped forward and, bending my knee, greeted her, never taking my eyes from hers.

“Jacques Cœur, mademoiselle, at your service.”

I placed the accent on Jacques, and she immediately resolved to adopt the same intimacy.

“Agnès,” she said in a clear voice, and added breathlessly, “Sorel.”

None of the others told me their names, as if they had all understood that the scene unfolding was between myself and Agnès. The moment I noticed this fact, I saw a shadow of alarm pass over Agnès's face. No matter the strength of what we were feeling—all the more so, as it was powerful—we must hide it at any cost from these little women. They may have been acting obedient and joyful, but no doubt beneath their finery they concealed daggers of espionage, jealousy, and betrayal.

Agnès took a step back and curtsied.

“I am a faithful customer of your Argenterie, Master Cœur.”

Her eyes, as she spoke, looked at each young woman in turn, thus showing that she was not speaking to me alone. Her followers nodded, confirming that things were as they should be. However vaunted my profession, I was still an employee of the king, and a woman of Agnès's position must have only distant relations with me, cordial but lightly tinged with scorn, of the sort one has with a purveyor.

“I hope you are pleased, mademoiselle. You may count on me to do whatever I can to fulfill your desires.”

There was a discreet flash in Agnès's eyes in lieu of a smile. In that moment I understood that two registers of expression, like those of an organ, coexisted side by side in her: the first, quite obvious and even exaggerated, was that of social mannerisms, which caused her to share her fits of laughter, astonishment, or sorrow with those she spoke with, as easily as if she were tossing scraps to her dogs. But beneath that, almost imperceptible, as faint as the ripples of a gentle breeze on the surface of the sea, were signs of suffering, hope, tenderness, and genuine love.