The Dream Maker (34 page)

I allied myself with the king of France to support my enterprise and fulfill my dreams. He served me and I served him. But his reign will only last for a certain time and in a certain place, whereas the great movement of mankind and things is universal and eternal. That is why, while I sincerely desire to please the king, when he goes against something that seems useful to me, I take care of it myself, with other means and other people, among whom there might happen to be some of his enemies.

 

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It is strange for me to be writing about such grand matters when life has now deprived me of everything. There are storms brewing above the island, and I felt a few drops of rain earlier coming through the trellis. I went into the house to go on writing. An idea came to me as I was moving so pitifully inside. It contradicts everything I have just asserted. And I am wondering whether my detractors were not right after all, and whether the king's mistrust of me is not justified after all. Do I not have an inadmissible but deep penchant for what others call betrayal, and which I fail to see as a flaw?

The truth is, I feel absolutely incapable of devoting myself completely to one cause. That same impetus which troubled my mind during the siege of Bourges and enabled me to view everything as from a great height, like a bird, is no doubt the most characteristic feature of my personality. Most of the time it is a strength, in particular when I'm called on to negotiate, when putting oneself in the other's shoes is essential. It is also a profound weakness, which all my life has kept me not only from bearing arms, but even from behaving like a loyal combatant. When I see that poor Dunois, entirely devoted to his hatred of his adversary and who has no other choice but to defeat him or die, I take the measure of my own weakness. In his position, at the moment of assault I would be overcome by thoughts for my adversary. Considering the righteousness of his cause and seeing the situation with his eyes, I would ask myself whether it is truly legitimate to exterminate him. And in the time it took for me to ponder this, I would already be vanquished and dead.

If I consider my life in this light, the evidence is blinding. I have never ceased—although it was not my intention—from betraying everything and everybody, even Agnès herself.

Depending on my mood, I might not call it a betrayal, and I might find good excuses for having behaved in a certain way. But now that I have been stripped of everything and have no more indulgence for myself, I cannot forgive my cowardice.

The instrument of my felony was Louis, the Dauphin. Agnès had no more formidable enemy. She had managed to win over nearly the entire court, even the queen, and she knew how to render inoffensive the hatred of which she was the object, if not to suppress it entirely. But with Louis she never succeeded. He saw Agnès and Brézé as obstacles between himself and the king, depriving him of the power to which he aspired. After multiple intrigues in which he had associated himself with the king's worst enemies, he had begun to come up with audacious schemes for foreign alliances, in order to give free rein to the energy he felt inside and, perhaps, to acquire enough power so that some day he might defy his father the king. That is the way he was, constantly involved in complicated projects where common sense, in the end, was not altogether absent. We had been long acquainted. I helped him financially in some of his enterprises, provided they were not directed against the king. He showed me his esteem, but respected the secrecy of our relations, in order not to put me in a compromising position. I hope that the day he becomes king he will have it in his heart to spare my poor family.

Finally, the first day of January in the new year of 1447, he considered that everything was lost, and threw a fit. I do not know what his father had said to him. In any case, he left for his lands in the Dauphiné and as of this writing he is still there. He began to launch unremitting attacks on Agnès and Brézé. If the situation had been reversed, I am absolutely certain that Agnès would have made my enemy her enemy, and would have violently opposed the Dauphin. But I have never been capable of that integrity of feeling which gives combatants their conviction and delivers them from doubt, so I have sought to reconcile contraries, to reunite enemies and, with hindsight, I see that I proved myself disloyal to both in the end. Louis knew nothing of the nature of my ties with Agnès, and did not even suspect them. As for Agnès, I do not know what she would have thought if she had known that I went on maintaining close ties with her worst enemy.

There are those who might view my attitude as simple mercantile logic. The Dauphiné is located along the route to the Mediterranean and the Levant. By discreetly intervening, against the king's wishes, to facilitate Louis's remarriage with the daughter of the Duke of Savoy, I was making two essential allies and opening the Alpine route to our trade with the Levant.

However, if I am altogether sincere—and in the position in which I find myself today, I have no other choice than to be sincere—I should admit that my secret loyalty to the Dauphin was never based on any mercantile considerations. I am prey to deep personal attachments that nothing can explain or, at times, excuse. The antagonism between Agnès and Louis did not seem sufficient reason to me to break off our friendship. There are some loyalties that lead to treason.

It must be said that in those days, ever since I had met Agnès, duplicity informed my entire existence. It was less reprehensible only in that my happiness was founded on it. I was betraying the king by having a relationship with his mistress—a relation that, though not one of lovers, would have seemed to him, had he learned of it, a savage betrayal of his trust nonetheless. However, this relationship gave me greater serenity in his presence, for I was certain that Agnès would be working to obtain his kindly support where I was concerned, which made me less fearful of his moods and the effects of calumny.

Similarly, I was betraying Macé and my entire family. The carnal relations I had enjoyed on occasion until then were solely infidelities of the body. In this instance, while the body did not partake, it was my soul that was forsaking my legitimate spouse and surrendering in its entirety to someone else. However, a new serenity in my relations with Macé emerged from my betrayal. I accepted our insurmountable differences, her thirst for respectability, her love of appearance. It had become pointless for me to desire or regret everything this woman did not offer me, since now I found it with another.

In addition, it was a period of repeated triumphs for Macé. Through Guillaume Juvénal, acting in the name of the king, our son Jean had been introduced to the pope, and the pontiff had agreed for him to succeed Henri d'Avaugour as archbishop of Bourges. For Macé this was a double triumph. She could be immensely proud, personally, of her son's great advancement, and doubly so because it had occurred in the only place that mattered to her: our town.

Not long afterwards there came another crucial event for Macé: the marriage of our only daughter, Perrette.

This episode sent me to extremes of guilt, as far as betrayal went. Perrette was marrying Jacquelin, the son of Artault Trousseau, viscount of Bourges, and lord of the château at Bois-Sir-Amé. The wedding was held at the castle, to Macé's great delight. However, that same year the king, who had acquired the castle, had given the property to Agnès. Thus, circumstances placed Bois-Sir-Amé at the crossroads of the two irreconcilable parts of my life.

Agnès loved the castle and we stayed there often to oversee its restoration, as we had done at Beauté. Every visit to Bois-Sir-Amé granted us the happiness of an impossible union. This place, more than anywhere on earth, united memories of the two great bonds in my life, although they were so different from one another. My wife, my daughter, and all my children walked over this same ground where Agnès had run barefoot in the summer to come and kiss me. Thus, the four walls of the old castle brought together everything I was incapable of uniting in myself.

Agnès was always in my thoughts, even when I was not by her side—particularly when I was not by her side. I did my best to curtail the missions entrusted to me by the king. The affair in Genoa, however, kept me longer in the south than I would have liked, and I took the opportunity to attend to my business in Marseille and Montpellier. In both those towns, particularly the latter, I built houses that, while they did not match the wealth of my palace in Bourges, were nevertheless magnificent edifices. I did not need this luxury, as I rarely stayed in these cities. But it served as a sort of compensation. By representing me, and allowing passersby to imagine me inside as they walked past my imposing doors, these grand houses functioned to make others forget my absence. In truth, the same applied to the house in Bourges: the price of my freedom not to be with Macé was my gift of a palace.

As for Agnès, the king could offer her the sort of estates I would have found difficult to obtain for her. But I performed in secret a strange comedy for myself alone. I have already mentioned that I took pleasure in buying ancient fortified castles. This useless expenditure had not ceased, and since I had met Agnès it had even taken on the proportions of a veritable vice. I astonished myself, during my trial, when I discovered how many estates I owned.

The fact is, the fairly mysterious passion of the early days had been replaced by a sort of amorous madness which, in order to be assuaged, demanded ever-increasing numbers of offerings, like some cruel god. The time I had spent at Bois-Sir-Amé had left me so nostalgic and with such a memory of great happiness that I sought, pathetically, to reproduce it. Every time I bought a new estate, I imagined myself living there with Agnès. It was, obviously, a fantasy. There was no reason for her to come to these damp, remote backwaters in the Puisaye or the Morvan. Even if she had agreed to accompany me there, we would have had to explain to the king the purpose of our visit . . . Yet, like a sick man who sets aside any objection that might prove the contrary and surrenders to the delight of believing he will recover his health thanks to some providential remedy, I seized the opportunity of every new acquisition to dream of living there with Agnès.

These dreams lasted only a short while, and sooner or later they vanished. I had to find something else, to acquire a new place. All the same, whenever these dreams had me in thrall, I was happy. Thus, during the days spent riding along the dusty roads of Provence, or the never-ending discussions with those rogues in Genoa, or while I listened gravely to my agents as they reported on their transactions, my mind took flight and cloaked itself, as though with a warm and precious cloth, with the endless and glorious name of some old estate lost in the forest that I had just acquired, and flew to Agnès to take her there. My interlocutors would see a faint smile come to my lips, and were disconcerted. There was no way they could begin to imagine what I was thinking, and for good reason, so they interpreted as irony something that was no more than bliss. And, convinced I had seen right through their lies and their miserable scheming, they were unsettled and confessed the truth.

But sometimes when I was in this mood I could also fly into a terrible rage if my orders were questioned, or if grievances were laid too forcefully before me—in short, if someone forced me to leave behind the sweetness of my dreams and return altogether to the present. Thus, on the basis of these deep misunderstandings, my reputation grew, quite unfairly, as a cunning, implacable, and occasionally violent man.

Although I was not aware of it at the time, such reactions earned me lasting enmities, occasionally verging on hatred. I discovered this much later, when the time came to take stock of my resentment and incurable wounds. But that time had not come yet, and for now, everything seemed to be going my way.

 

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In Montpellier, and along the coast of the Languedoc, I could see how our trade with the Levant was prospering. We no longer had to entrust our cargoes to other ships: our own fleet of galleys ensured the transport. New vessels were being built, for our needs far surpassed what our existing ships could satisfy.

We could sail where we liked throughout the Levant. I had sent Jean de Villages to the Sultan, and his mission had been a resounding success. The Mohammedan had signed a treaty that was very favorable to our trade in his lands, and he sent magnificent gifts to the king of France as proof of his friendship. During my last stay in Genoa, I had learned of Campofregoso's volte-face, for he refused to honor his commitment and ally himself with France. But the friendship I had formed with that scoundrel, together with the trust shown me by the king of Aragon, now master of that city, gave me the confidence to go on doing fruitful business there. I went to see King René in Aix and he opened the markets of Provence to me. The Dauphin and the Duke of Savoy were my clients and, dare I say it, my debtors. In short, in the course of only a few years, trade in the Mediterranean had begun to flourish. Silk from Italy, taffeta from Baghdad, weapons from Genoa, mastic from Chios, crepe from Syria, and gems from the Orient were all delivered in great convoys, and there was never enough to satisfy the appetite of the court, or all the needs that the cessation of hostilities had revived. Cloth from Flanders and England, furs, finery, and cut gemstones all went the opposite direction to the courts of the Levant, where people were eager for such things.

These successful transactions enabled me to return to the company of the king, and thus to Agnès. I was very active on the Council. Charles acted pleased to see me. Above all, he was grateful that I had been able to meet all his demands, and he did not hold me accountable for all his favors: he had helped me to build my fleet of galleys and he had appointed me steward to the states of the Languedoc, and the contributions of those states had enriched me beyond the sums I was obliged to transfer to the king. To show that he was pleased, in addition to all the other favors, that year Charles appointed me Collector of the Salt Tax. Our relation was one of mutual profit. By entrusting me with such a responsibility, he knew I would make it prosper. And likewise, in any business, I undertook to set aside the part that, in one form or another, must be reserved for the king. Everything was going well, and all I wanted was for the situation to stay as it was.