East, a Mighty Gale is Blowing – The First Book of Evlampia

Book Sample

Excerpt from Chapter 1 – Tale of a civil servant

I. Names, names of all sorts, and their legitimacy and relevance are my trade. Their examination had always absorbed a great deal of my working time, and now that I retired, it remains a source of occasional surprise. A demanding but thankless calling it is, as names these days are known to be able to move mountains, and yet too little attention will be spent on their origin or significance. Their ownership is neither protected nor respected, and in fact, should it by any chance be construed as fit to imply hereditary claim to estate or privilege, or – God forbid – to continuity with a better past, it could be illegal. Mine is Maurice Étienne de Valois; of the ancient family of noble or, to be precise, royal renown. My country was once ruled by the Valois. It can be safely said that it was a Valois, Princess Margot, daughter of the Black Queen, who handed the Crown of France to Henri IV and the Bourbons. And, along with the crown, she passed on the poison and the duplicity of the able but petulant Florentines who had worn it: the hatred of the Medici fomented no less than eight civil wars. Such were our beginnings, and now it looks, once more, as if not much has changed. To this day, after so many revolutions and wars, we still toil, just the Italians had done before us, in the same barren field of a doubted legitimacy and a threatened existence. And it still is what it has always been: a frantic quest for some kind of permanency, and a fractured reflection which keeps eluding our contraptions. It may sound fatalistic, and it could of course be but plain coincidence, but my story too, like the Bourbons’, has to begin at the end of a dynasty, again, with a wronged Valois. Her name is not Princess Margot; her graces were not sung by poets. She is a young woman whose circumstances are very different from those of illustrious queens. Her line, old and respected, had been lost long before she knew herself. She never was a peer. Yet, in her own special way, she might still be counted as one – at least within the confines of a tale. But first things first; an introduction is needed.

When a Valois, the impoverished and derided Jeanne de Valois, brought down the Bourbons, some sighed in relief. The reason was simple and, actually, a very childish one. In her hands, instead of a crown, she was holding a diamond necklace, but for a moment, a single moment, we looked at the strange symmetry of times and foolishly thought that the cycle was complete: the same name had simply appeared a second time at the end of a royal line. Such ignorance, such wishful thinking! And we had to deceive ourselves in this petty way because our parents had made two mistakes. Their first one was to presume that the Revolution would bring change. The second, and more serious, was when they actually believed that the Revolution would be one. They proved half-right the first time, woefully wrong the second. After the hideous but so promising 1789, more revolution was coming our way; and then, more and more, and far worse. Revolutions, reformations and restorations never ceased following each other. And for all our changes, they would come and never leave. And now, in my old age, I even lived to see the shame of yet another agonizing revolution and one more German invasion, the ’71. What can I say? I did witness the desperate cry that was the Commune, and the atrocity of her suppression. If only that army, the same one that so happily butchered women and children in Belleville and Montmartre, had for once dared to stand up to the far smaller army of the invading Prussians, now not only Alsace and Lorraine but much, much more would be free and French. And then I lived to see the death of Paris in a dubious Third Republic that was founded on the spilled blood of the innocent – a lot of it. I saw my country suffocate under the enormous weight of a dwarf with a shrill voice. And that petty Thiers, I already knew well, would have to return in reincarnations and curses. He was meant to be the first only of a whole new generation of statesmen; my grandchildren’s grandchildren will still have not seen the last of his kind. And I had the very sad privilege to observe how the various regimes and parties, Bonapartists, Bourbons, Orleanists and Republicans, for all their proven incompetence and stunning irrelevance, would take regular turns in ruling and ruining France, several times within the unbelievably short time of only three generations; none of them elected, none of them ever legitimized by anyone or anything other than the triple riddle of recurrent conspiracy, accepted usurpation and outright treason. It only took eighty-two years to arrive to this black spot where we are now, and to me this is the real mystery of the times.

My story is about people but not about the People. Perhaps, having lost all faith in ideologies, I now tend to turn all my attention to persons only. And it may simply be so because, before my aging eyes, it is now mostly persons, faces long gone and names nearly forgotten, who stand for the reminiscence of a political life. The purpose of my narration is to give an account, limited and quite partial, of a few events from those turbulent years, which I happened upon and do not really claim to have fully understood. Neither fiery Jacobins nor exquisite Girondins, not, of course, the oversized types of Barras, Danton or Lafayette will be found among its leading actors, because this tale is about other people; people without a plan, those caught in the middle. Some were royalty and some were paupers; gamblers, dreamers, spies and soldiers abounded. In the end, they all had to yield to the spirit of the times and make peace with the last kind of nobility that was left; the nobility of a lost cause. And it is in accordance with the spirit of the times – the now familiar but still dizzying retrogression of those years – that I should like to begin with the last of them, that is to say, the last survivor of the new times, the last administrator of the old ones, and the least trusted of our statesmen. Having nothing more in mind than the humble task of retracing one’s steps all the way back home, I only sought from ambiguity to obtain truth, and in the depths of deception to find virtue, or, at least, to stop the furtherance of confusion into inebriation.

This mess that we so thoughtlessly got ourselves in, and everything else that simply had to follow, were the work of heroes and patricians and of quite a few villains, and, naturally, the outcome of the constant and unbending labor of many a desperate man. Last among them, that is, the very last to depart the scene and almost last in the esteem of his countrymen, was one man who almost singlehandedly changed the fate of France by venturing to travel new, up to his time unthinkable, pathways. In the turmoil of the times, he forged a desperately needed frame of unity. Far from perfect, by no means comprehensive or even fair, not even apt to last for long, his was still some kind of legitimacy; a newfound one. Like Moses had done before him, he gave Europeans the rule of law. His encounter with History was not on Mount Sinai but in the salons and the drawing rooms of Erfurt and Vienna. He did not have to fast in order to prepare for the long-awaited revelation, but did have to swallow many a cup of tea in the company of strange people. And like Moses, he too was abandoned, time after time, by his own people; he was simply too much like us. But then again, perhaps, it was not exactly so. We like to flatter ourselves and think of the great achievements of our epoch, but real legitimacy is still missing, and although our political life is as tainted as the ancient Israelites’, no Christ is expected to rise from our seed and no Gospel will be written when our revolutions will finally be over. Our salvation, like our philosophies and our universe, is a hopelessly man-centered one.

Unlike what is usually the case with men of such colossal repute, the impression that he left in his daily dealings, at least with me in the years that I worked for him, was such that my life thereafter would never be the same again. I am, of course, grateful, for he treated me decently; beyond that though, and much to my surprise, there was more. He often allowed me the privilege of a glimpse into his world. I did share some of his thoughts. Not infrequently he would even extend to me, humblest of his secretaries, the discreet acknowledgement of some sort of peerage, as old folks would say, or of a fellowship as we would have it today. It is hard to trace the origin of such affinity which, fleeting as it was, would still go a long way in helping me find my own position in life. The inherited values of our shared descent, perhaps, could have been an adequate explanation, but then again, his was by no means a life celebrated for its strong loyalties. In fact, he had begun as a revolutionary; a child of the Republic as well as one of her many fathers. He had not only been one of the authors of the 1789; he was the only one to survive it. Who knows? He might have seen in me some sort of a disciple, or the remote possibility of the dutiful son he never had. The coincidence perhaps of sharing the same Christian name, and having graduated from the same school, may have had something to do with it; most probably, though, not.

To this day, in spite of tremendous publicity and copious writing, too little, if anything at all, is known about my employer, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. He could certainly be introduced as a man of rare qualities. Of his early beginnings, little is known and not good; mostly conflicting information and hearsay. In infancy, rumor has it that he had the bad luck to suffer an accident which, notwithstanding a line of spectacular achievements, did determine the course of his whole life. His malformed leg, that awkward limping of his, exposed him too early to unbearable vulnerability. His first steps would be lessons which taught him to appreciate the cruelty of overwhelming power; what followed was enchantment with the benefits that are derived from the manipulation of such power. And then, unbearable loneliness! A certain sense of having been abandoned, by his class as much as by his parents, came to him too early. His infirmity was acquired accidentally; a random event it was, but thereafter he would never be a stranger to the frenetically increasing entropy of the times that lay ahead, nor was he ever to underestimate the sudden turns of a capricious fate or their considerable consequences. It was because of his accident that he was denied his own rightful legitimacy by a family council held expressly to this purpose. It was his own family that removed his birth privileges: his own father and his mother. And a most unfair decision it was. After all, the accident had been their fault, or had certainly been more of their fault than little Maurice’s. And that dishonest resolution was only made worse by the knowledge that a certain uncle of his, afflicted since infancy with the exact same deformity, and also a participant in the said family council, had never been considered unfit for primogeniture and never had to face loss of privilege.

What was done was done; that is at least what he had to regularly keep reminding himself. Life after the fall is still a life, and yet a fall, any fall, introduces to life an unyielding new duality: low and high appear lower and higher than they used to; before and after, more distant from each other; things and their perceptions, adjacent but divorced. Now, because of his lame walk, the fallen prince would always have to live two lives and acknowledge two lineages and two destinations, but he always knew that one day all these dualities would have to come together. His early years were marked by an unfair fate. He was in possession of ancient blood and primogeniture, but he was neither an eligible bachelor nor fit to be a lord. He was coming from a land rich in memories, but he never rested under his father’s roof. And so, so strangely and incomprehensibly, he was to inherit them both: the old roots of an ancient House and the unfriendly lot of the uprooted; the lovely garden of lilies and the weeds of the roadside. It had once been a birth privilege to his family to grant power, honor and office, but it would be now his destiny to always seek them, negotiate, broker, exchange and, most of the time, rent them. And then, even stranger things began happening. Because he had lost his house on earth, he found it necessary to also forsake his heritage in heaven. He grew up in the wandering circus of the in-betweens, in the domain of the Air, and in a universe that is charted by the ever expanding meridians of ingrained illusions and new lies. The sullen ghost that will now haunt the centuries, the spirit of the Permanent Revolution, had already been the expelled prince’s mentor, his shelter, one could say, his clothing, and the smell of his own flesh. It guided him day and night, whole decades before the now venerated concept of the Historic Revolution made it into dictionaries and university lectures. His galaxies were studded by bright uncertainties and dim inconsistencies. In that newfound fiefdom of his, a republic of shadows really, questions were to flourish faster than lies could answer them, but in the end, all questions were bound to become but one question: “For what does a father abandon his child? His firstborn, why does one disown and forget? For a falling accident?”

 

II. Ambivalence did not merely surround him; was part of him. Even the waddling of his gait was not unrelated to his method of ascertaining uncertainty. He had his own way to express reservation; a fashion unmistakeable for its elegance, inimitable in its caution. He was the child prodigy of his time, and it was precisely his time that bestowed upon our governments the greatest of the achievements of the Revolution: Professional Statesmanship, that is, a task too complex to be discharged in rectitude and a job too simple to merit explanation. And simple it is, and bewildering it shall remain: this affair of elections and representations. And it is sad, because elected officers in our regime, and even famed statesmen, mostly do two things: represent what they were elected from; elect what to represent. It is all in the mysteriously transforming power of the word – the small word, the casual excursion, the interposed phrase. They basically construct statements with two or more meanings for two or more different audiences. And, naturally, their worth is judged solely by their ability to connect contradictory intentions within one single sentence – often a very short one. It was Talleyrand who perfected this art. And he may have been many things but he was not indifferent to the necessities of consideration and tact. Unlike others in his profession, he would rarely object the obvious with a mere “But.” Instead, insightful, studious, but mostly prudent, he preferred to link his sentences with a much more convenient and open-ended “And” – when possible. And if not possible, he was always prepared to investigate the opportunities, or feel the caliber of the possibilities, or at least test the resilience of his interlocutor, with that vague but quite suggestive “Yet.” Other times though, a heavier and somewhat melancholy “But then again” would be more appropriate; when the unpleasant fact had to be acknowledged of a possibility that was slowly sinking into improbability. And such were the instruments of his routine negotiations. With time, though, I realized that, in the autumnal forest where he lived, delicacy was the pathway to discernment. And then there were the more complex, that is, the more ambivalent ones. Contemplation of greater movements and assessments of a higher order had often to resort to his typical “Perhaps, and yet perhaps not,” or to that legendary “Maybe it is more, and maybe less.” It was not his own fault; it was the century, the place and the people. His domain happened to be the multicolored firmament of all-encompassing interactions and ever-changing variants; a greater revolution of things and men. Maybe it was a revolution of his stars; he was born an Aquarius and grew up in the course of a republic that constantly valued the qualities of only one spiritual element: Air. His outlook on life and on himself had definitely been shaped within a single dimension, one where everything changes and only change remains constant. It was the element of the air that raised him and made him redoubtable. But mostly, I think, it was the season; the perennial fall of our revolutions.

He was hated for his craftiness; his name actually became a synonym of treachery and duplicity. One may easily assert that Talleyrand was as much loathed and despised as Napoleon was loved and trusted, but few are those who realize that the one could have never met his fate without the other. And then again, it was not always exactly so. I try to understand and, obviously, I do not know everything. And that is not all; I have my own defects. Born in the Napoleonic Wars, brought up in the playground of the Restoration, grown in the greenhouse of the Second Empire and, lately, having become a senior administrator to the graveyard of the Third Republic, I am not innocent of double allegiances. Mine are, naturally, of an order different from Talleyrand’s, yet they are divisive enough. And I am not without guilt, of course. For who is he who, with France in his heart, did not love Napoleon? Who, even now, would not be ready to follow him all the way to Sudan or Siberia? But then again, who is he who, in his right mind, never once wished for this man’s end to come as soon as possible? And his descendants! The curse of his descendants! Bonaparte was adored; the Bonapartists were detested. And then, there were all the others. Who did not seek employment by the Bourbons, sponsorship by the Orléans? Who can honestly say that he did not court the favors of the Legitimists, sympathy from the Left? And, finally, who is he who did not apply for recognition of years of previous service by the Republic?

Accusations of bribery, faithlessness, intrigue and, eventually, unscrupulous alliances never slid away from Talleyrand’s name – they were often true. He had many secrets, and he had one that was great: his fall, the one of his infancy, the one he had to keep returning to. And the facets of this gem were many, but its name was only one: Betrayal. Talleyrand, I understood early in my career, was not alien to treason. But it might as well be added now that if the rumors were defensible, their target was not defenseless: he had to ride the wind, and there is always more to it than meets the eye. It is equally accurate to say that Talleyrand had mastered the strange art of fishing tranquilly in troubled waters. And yet it was real people and their families who had to pay, and pay they still do, for his self-serving policies. The trade of slaves, for example, from West Africa, which had been abolished in 1794 and brought back by Napoleon to be practiced by our liberated, egalitarian and fraternally minded slavers, without interruption all the way to 1848, was only one of Talleyrand’s legislative achievements, and it was by no means his darkest. Needless to say, basic humane stipulations, which had in earlier days been provided for by the King’s laws, such for example as the preservation of the slave’s family in transportation, purchase and settlement, were all abolished by the new and enlightened legislation of a Republic indifferent to such subtleties. Our troubled quest for legitimacy had to distance itself from past attainment; our egalitarian laws could afford to overlook detail.

His private life was burdened by gossiping which was again not unjustified. Little is my interest in this area, and I believe his explanation is summarized succinctly enough in the reply he gave once his niece when, very old and finally respectable, he was asked about the mésalliance that had been his marriage to Madame Grand: “It happened during a period of general disorder. In those days one didn’t attach much importance to anything, neither to one’s self, nor to others; one had no society, no family; everything was done with the greatest carelessness, through war and the fall of empires. You do not know how far men can go astray in the great epochs of social decomposition.”¹

He was certainly not the only one in these difficult times to suffer sin. Revolution decimated almost everything we had held dear but, more than anything else, the Revolution targeted loyalty. Then, the Restoration came and destroyed the rest. The massacres and the atrocities that followed the return of the Bourbons were, in their nature, of no lesser horror and, in their extent, broader than those of the Jacobins, the Committee and the Directorate put together. True to tradition, many an innocent and an uninvolved paid for other people’s sins. Blood flowed freely, rivers of it, and these are old spirits that will not go away with more bloodletting or with the passing of time. And it is, of course, the city; it is the people and the times, but mostly, it is our fate. Two centuries before, with the opportunity of the infamous Night of Saint Bartholomew, more than three thousand people were taken to the slaughterhouse for their Huguenot creed. In a city whose Huguenot congregation had never reached a single soul over eight hundred, and where the day after the massacre at least five hundred of them were still alive and well, the incongruous arithmetic of the valued and almighty Public Feeling makes little sense. And so now in our times, during the Restoration of Law and Order, the immense number of presumed Republicans who were murdered, maimed, tortured or imprisoned with or without trial, would have sufficed to feed with blood one more French Revolution. Very few met their death bearing the lyrics of the Marseillaise in mind. Almost all of them were but the unlucky victims of personal grudge, jealousy and greed. Everyone betrayed everyone, and the ones who had wielded enough power, or harbored enough malice, or simply lived long enough, betrayed the most. And then the wheel turned again. Few among them would avoid the fiery breath of the beast that they had been nurturing in their bosom. It all had to begin again, and again. If the Monarchists were vindictive and had a long memory, the Orleanists were vindictive and had a deep purse. And if the Bonapartists were vindictive and had a large following, the Republic was vindictive and harbored no special affections: she was conceived and born murderous, and being for equal opportunity, had kept good records on everyone.

Treason, treason, treason, everywhere; slander, deception, forgery and calumny, and then, more treason: the politics of this century. But there is no treason that will ever come anywhere close to the massive scale, the depths of depravity, or the unprecedented malice that were realized during the Napoleonic regimes. It had to be so. Napoleon had been different, different from all of us. He betrayed and betrayed, and then he willingly became his own revolutions’ most miserable victim. In his time, ambiguity reigned, duplicity became the rule. There is no end to the list of his faithful traitors which, predictably, includes the oldest of his friends and the most favored of the protegés. And then, the Hundred Days – which had actually been preceded by other and worse days. Those Hundred Days! Already by the end of 1814, well before the beginning of the last part, it was none other than General Henri-Jacques Clarke, the Minister of War who, bribed by the English, had rendered Paris indefensible. And after! Marshall Marmont rallied the troops, who were our last hope, only to deliver them, unsuspecting prisoners, to the invaders. And Bernadotte too! (His moral shortcomings never troubled his ascent to the throne of Sweden where his dynasty still rules.) Children of the Revolution, Enfants de laPatrie, Disciples de la Raison Sociale, they all rushed to align themselves with the winds of change; unashamedly and too early. The same scene was repeated with Fouché and with Lafayette. Alas! We are not unfamiliar to betrayal. And that fateful 1815, the year France stood alone to challenge the whole world and even more, never ended, never turned, never passed. Its distant reflections, like the lights of a wandering circus, still flash in the darkness of our nights. Pitiless regrets for unfounded hopes, they always come back. And they disappear before the dawn, leaving behind nothing but the dream, or the dream of a dream. Treason was it, at its every step. And what else can a History of the Revolution ever be if not an account of betrayals? Betrayals! Some are only better timed, or concealed or explained, than others. And yet it was Talleyrand who was singled out by the righteous and the honorable and drew all the venom and the bitterness of a time that had been entirely shaped by the spirit of disloyalty. Versed in this game of rotating allegiances and ever changing alliances, he was to become nothing less than the wicked genius of the Revolution. He had designed her, delivered her, swam in her waters; and then, he went on and survived her demise. And that last one would never be forgiven him.

The reasons for the universal hatred amassed against Talleyrand are not difficult to understand. The ambience of scandal which permeated Talleyrand’s reputation and surrounded each one of his actions had obviously a lot to do with his success; it was success beyond expectation and ordinary abilities. Such is the human nature. Temporary triumphs followed by subsequent humiliation is everyone’s delight; the abuse of recently acquired privileges by an ignoramus, until the fool’s protector departs from the scene, is always welcomed; and long-lived achievement enjoyed in withdrawal and sensible self-effacement will be tacitly tolerated by most. But the acquisition of spectacular power and riches and their open enjoyment and perpetuation with unrivaled prudence and coldly calculated practicality, that kind of thing will never be accepted. As far as my account is concerned, I was certainly impressed by the man’s talents but I still remain astounded and dumbfounded by the accuracy of his timing, his unparalleled efficacy in staging fact and fiction, and his refined use of leverage. It was his ability to be “ever right, never victorious, but always there.” Talleyrand did not just unfurl the sails of a newfound legitimacy before the blowing winds; did not simply calculate changes of direction when the gusts of the fall were announcing that worse was to follow. Far and beyond what everyone else did, he alone was able to face the storm. But he was wicked, and what was the name of the spirit that escorted him, we shall never know. He left everyone guessing and made it clear that he did not know, or would not disclose, any more than we did. But in the end, the truth about him we could have always found in ourselves. Such was his make-up that he was able to say, “what I was taught, I forgot; what I know, I guessed.”