I
You who pass by, don’t wake King Arthus. Don’t see the fortunate crime; don’t hear his fanfares; don’t see the smile of his slaves; don’t hear the hiss of serpents; don’t breathe the incense that burns the feet of the wicked—that’s happiness. That’s what Arthus is savoring in his sacred sleep. May I never be stone or ice like him!
Several seasons having passed, the lethargy being still as profound, Merlin decided to wake the monarch up abruptly, at the risk of overturning feudal etiquette. He approached him, and, tugging on the hem of his fleur-de-lysed cloak, said to him: “Great king of the future, it’s daylight. Out there, in the flowering orchard, the leaves of the wild roses are quivering in the hedge; the blackbird is singing; the waves are sparkling, the meadow daisies and the sweet marjoram have wiped away their tears of dew, and the cock has crowd three times: “Here comes the day!”
But Arthus was content, as was his custom, to sigh deeply; and, turning on to his other side, appeared to become marble once again. Seeing that, Merlin was gripped by a great fear, as if he had committed a murder, and he did not know what to think by way of self-defense, for he said to himself:
“Have my enchantments become enchantments of death, then? Now it’s impossible for me to extract the greatest of kings from the torpor into which I plunged him—and with him, an entire world, the one that I knew in my youth, has fallen into the same stony slumber.”
For old men, sleep is all very well, but he was conscious of having put into the long slumber, in the prime of life, so many charming women, mostly betrothed and promised, or scarcely married, who had trusted his word and had taken the shroud as one dons a bridal gown. That he could succeed in waking them was something he could not doubt, but when would the moment come? Today, tomorrow, or later? That was what he could not affirm. It might last a year, perhaps more. It did not require any more to trouble an honest enchanter as scrupulous as ours.
In that anguish, he went to stir up several new peoples, iron races, and commanded them to rise up with a great racket—which they did very willingly, for they all liked noise, which they easily mistook for glory. So they arrived, armed with the most sonorous instruments they had been able to find, and they struck iron and bronze, like holiday-makers, reminiscent of a swarm of bees flying out of a hive. Many a time they filed passed King Arthus’ bed with the barons; they even fought various homicidal combats against one another, in which they filled the ravines with their dead, taking the further precaution of uttering furious cries that rose to the skies, trampling the bloody mud and striking and hammering the vanquished with a bronze flail.
“Why are you making so much noise?” the mothers and the maidens asked them.
“To wake the noble Arthus,” the peoples immediately replied, in a breathless voice.
But even that was futile. The sleeper’s torpor was uninterrupted by the tumult of so many nations at odds, which believed that the noise of their fall would reach the stars. Once, and only once, during the collapse of an empire, two kingdoms and six grand duchies, he said in a low voice to Jacques, who had to lean over his lips to hear him: “Make those chattering magpies shut up; they’re disturbing me.”
Then he went back to sleep.
When the nations in tumult heard those words, their confusion was unequaled. As for Merlin, he saw clearly that it was all over with the world; he put on mourning and lost the serenity and cheerfulness he had conserved until then.
Forgetting himself, far from cities, nourished on acorns, with wolves for companions, he no longer took pleasure in any society but that of phantoms. Fit silvester Homo!146
II
A few days later, lamentations resounded in the king’s great wood, to which Merlin had retired, not far from the Charterhouse of Seillons. They emanated from the chief of hermits, Brother Ogrin, who had lived an exceedingly solitary life until that day, his forehead incessantly tilted over his sacred book. He had just perceived that all the divine words in his Bible had been dexterously erased during the night. In despair, he tore out the hairs on his head and in his beard, which had previously been very thick.
Then, having followed Merlin’s tracks, he said to him: “Look, O sage, at what has happened last night,” and showed him the sacred book. “What can be done? There’s certainly no one but you, in all the world, who can recover the words erased by the evil spirits.”
Already Merlin had seized the book; he saw with amazement that all the places where the name of God appeared had been torn and lacerated, as well as those where one could read the names of the angels, the archangels and, in sum, all the heavenly spirits. All that remained were the names of inferior spirits of the lowest rank. The miracles had also been removed, or, at least, crossed out with a red, corrosive ink that had burned, yellowed and eaten away the paper.
“I know no one but Farfarel or my father who could have had the audacity to work a spell of this kind.”
“If you know this Farfarel,” said Ogrin, “punish him—but first, Merlin, return the sacred lines, without which the holiest of books has lost its virtue.”
“Gladly, Master Ogrin; I know them by heart.”
With these words, he picked up a pen in order to reestablish in the text all the words that had been treacherously stolen, but, to his amazement, he had forgotten the holy names, or, at least, only knew them inexactly. Where Jehovah had been, he put Nature, less by virtue of conviction than the fear of letting the ignorance into which he had fallen show. In that way, he perceived clearly that the gift of enchantment was almost lost to him. If only that which remained to him had disappeared without leaving vestiges!
As for the hermit, he received his corrected book gratefully. By the time he perceived the changes he had returned to the depths of his solitude. Gradually, he familiarized himself with the new lessons: it was even said that he no longer swore by anyone but Merlin.
III
Scarcely had Master Ogrin taken his leave of our Enchanter than another desperate individual appeared before him. At first, he had some difficulty in recognizing that newcomer as the poet Fantasus, to whom he had once given good advice.
How Fantasus had changed, in fact! The face was still handsome, and even more noble and expressive, but it as furrowed by profound wrinkles, except for the forehead, which remained unalterably pure and immaculate, like a white slab of sacred marble that lightning has not dared to strike, and which still rises over debris. He was no longer the proud man of old who scarcely designed to tread on the earth, and walked on the clouds. He was a tremulous old man, tottering at every step. He was not blind, but he was limping on two shaky crutches, not even having a child with him to serve as his guide and sustain him.
“What do I see?” said Merlin. “Is that really you, Fantasus?”
“No, Master,” replied the latter, “it’s the shadow of Fantasus, and the evils that you see are nothing in comparison with those I would like to hide. The breath has gone, inspiration is lacking in me, O prophet! I seek and I no longer find. That’s the greatest evil of all. Hunger, thirst and frost are nothing by comparison with that; it gives me a taste for death. Speak to me, Merlin, reply to me. Let me contemplate more closely the king of bards and the inspired race. I shall draw from your eyes in flame that I dread having lost.”
That naïve hope on the part of the aged poet embarrassed Merlin more than a reproach, for he sensed that the source of eternal beauty had dried up in his disenchanted heart, at least for a time that he could not measure, and he was ashamed to let it appear. So he wanted at first to reject the eulogy that Fantasus had addressed to him.
“No, poet, Merlin is not the only source of the most beautiful songs.”
“You are and you remain, Master, our sacred fount. It’s on you alone that we live. We poets only amplify the word of Merlin; that is the limitation of our work.”
“Speak without exaltation, Fantasus. Overly ardent words make the worst of evils more violent. Only tell me how you have lived until now.”
“I have forgotten to live. No wife, nor children, nor relatives, nor friends have brightened my threshold. I have scorned the real; I have only found the ideal.”
“Have you at least found glory in the game that so often leads to death?”
“Glory! I seek it still, when I no longer hope for it.”
“What have you done, then?”
“Everything has passed through my head.”
“And what do you sense now beneath the forehead, which still burns?”
“Something extraordinary. Cathedrals no longer speak to me, as they were accustomed to do, nor old suits of armor when they clashed against Gothic arches, nor keeps with pointed roofs, nor turrets clad in ivy. Once, those powers interrogated me with their colossal voice, I replied to them and everything flowed from the source. Today, everything is dead. No more complaisant echoes in people or in things. Where, Master, are the enchanted beings who haunted my mind? Where are the winged symphonies, vagabond and triumphant, that resonated beneath my feet in the depths of the solitary woods? I had more than a hundred ballads in the workshop, and as many sonnets and mysteries, not to mention a poem about the round table, which was to immortalize the society that you had formed with your hands. I can no longer extract from that brain even a grain of gold dust, as it was once so easy to do—and what completes my misery, I no longer dare say.”
“You make me tremble, Fantasus. What, then, is this ultimate misfortune of Job? Speak—I’m listening.”
“At least it’s to you alone that I’m confiding that incurable wound.”
“Come on, speak.”
“Well, Master, the demon of beautiful verse has quit me; it has fled my house, alas. Shall I ever see it again?”
“The demon of beautiful verse, you say? Oh yes, trust in that one. I know him well, and have also had him in my service. Fine-Ear, also known as Golden-Tongue—that’s his name, isn’t it? Good God, what a head, what a brain, what an arid conscience! The tricks he played on me are incredible. I’ll wager that he’s now in the mad company of Stem-of-Golden-Herb, Verbena-Flower, Serpentine: a crowd of follets, the most fickle, the most capricious, the most vagabond and the most indolent spirits I’ve ever known. I’ve done everything to attach them to me seriously. What trickery! They’d sell me a hundred times in a day for the floating seed of a thistle, for a pretty spring of thyme, for a trill of an hautboy artistically cadenced in the forest. I pity you for having to deal with them. I’ve dismissed them; they’re taking advantage of it to get drunk on dew, God knows where, in some ill-famed corner of the universe.”
“Tell me, Master, is my genius lost forever, then? Am I getting old? Is the world?”
“Between us, Fantasus. I fear, not without reason, that the world might be dead.”
“What’s that?”
“Yes, my friend, dead—and by my fault.” As if he were afraid of giving himself away, he added: “For as long as Arthus of the powerful breath sleeps, I foresee that the times will be bad for poets.”
Far from appeasing the ulcerated poet, however, that last remark merely revived his torments, and he astonished Merlin with a cry of anguish, which subsequently became known, in all languages, as The Lamentations of Fantasus:
“O Master, take away from me the sterile old age of the bard and the poet.
“I have seen several of them, heads shaky, sitting in their desert hearth, still seeking a vain sound that flees from them. Without echo, without friends, without posterity, they survive on their works, like a wrinkled hollow tree-trunk filled with nocturnal birds, rising up among the withered leaves, amassed at its feet during sixty winters.
“Is that the fate that awaits me, Merlin? Shall I also see my works, fallen from the tree, strewing the ground around me far and wide?
“Cain the murderer has only been condemned to cultivate fertile fields in which crops called delight grow for him every year. He carries his sheaves into granaries that are still overflowing with last year’s produce. Why, Merlin, am I condemned to cultivate the sterile field of the mind, where I harvest nothing but brambles and hemlock, after a glimmer of hope that is always disappointed? Am I more accursed than Cain the accursed?
“Tell me why the labor of thought has been imposed on me, which cannot even give me daily bread. I alone in all the world sow but do not reap.
“Oh, if youth remained to me, I would strike with my forehead once again that brazen Heaven which refuses me its radiance. But today, the outcome has too often disappointed my desire, and as once I sought noise, now I seek silence.
“How many times, Master I have sworn to myself not to think any longer, and not to dream any longer. In the middle of the night, however, when all the noises have died down, my thoughts awake with a start, and in spite of myself—for I have lost the strength to apply the brake to them—and attempt to climb to the accustomed summits. Until daybreak, insomnia devours me. My head, where a thousand ancient songs are ringing, aches in seeking new ones, but when daylight appears, everything flies away and vanishes in its glare.
“Old men are surrounded by the sons of their sons, arranged in a circle close by; shall I only see around me my dead works, cold specters, to make my cortege?
“When life commenced for me, I said to myself: I shall tame their coldness and indifference with the force of inspiration, and I shall amass works and songs around me without counting them.
“Oh, if the sympathy of men had then been added to my strength, nothing, Master, would have been difficult for me. But what the thousand teeth of adversity could not do, indifference has done. It has insinuated its ice into my veins.
“Now, I am like a man who has only one arrow left in his quiver. Woe betide me if I miss the target just once more! It will be the last, and eternal oblivion will gather over my name.
“Teach me, Master, that final song, that supreme swan song, which will tame their hearts and open their hardened ears to me. Tell me the words, if any such exist, that can still touch this age of bronze, for all those that have emerged from my lips have fallen impotent upon their ironclad minds.
“Show me the road to petrified souls, before old age, worse than death, renders even me deaf to your lessons. Already infirmities, harbingers of the tomb, have taken away my smile. Tell me what language it is necessary to use to enter into hearts of stone.”
“Soften the hearts of men today!” Merlin interjected. “What are you asking of me? I’ve tried, and could not succeed myself. Hearts no longer respond to the heart, nor voices to the voice. You can pour your soul at their feet, like water; they will not look at it.”
“I am, then,” Fantasus cried, “the refuse of the universe—I, who thought I was its master! Fallen from Heaven to earth...”
“That is the fate of Phaeton; you have tried to rule the sun.”
“Why not? I felt courage enough to create worlds.”
“Now, resign yourself to prose.”
“Never.”
“Live, I tell you, a prosaic life.”
“Never.”
“Well then, die.”
“So be it. But before I die, give me, of king of hymns, one last fecund thought, a flash of wit, a delight of intelligence, and I’m saved again. I win the hand in the great game of immortality; I brave the years, old age, future centuries, and the wrinkled earth that is already opening up to bury me. Give me, I tell you, one inspiration, a motif, a chord, a rhyme, a ray of light—less than that, a magic word—and I can enchain the universe at my feet, at yours.”
“An inspiration, you say? Poor Fantasus! It would be easier for me to give you a kingdom.”
“What use are kingdoms to me, Merlin? I despise them all, Give me, Master, the charm that, with a word, ravishes the heavens themselves, or tear out of my heart this thirst for beautiful things that dries up my lips.”
At this point, Merlin, whose mind was at bay, doubtless harassed by too keen a commiseration, replied: “Your woes are great, Fantasus; they’re the torments of a soul excessively amorous of poetry in an age of prose. I know them by virtue of having experienced them, at least the greater number of them. Pity is drawing from me the secret I shall tell you, after having promised myself not to confide it to anyone.
“The secret is this: renounce all ideas, since they will cost you too much henceforth to find them. Words can take their place when they’re well-framed. The rattle of certain syllables throws off sparks, and they suffice to dazzle the human eye. There are also bloated words, hollow within and crested without, which I can teach you, and which resonate of their own accord, like Memnon’s statue. You can try them out.”
“Can it be?”
“Nothing is more certain.”
“I would not like, however, to comprise at the end of my career the renown I have acquired.”
“Do as I tell you, poet, and the whole world will approve.”
With that, he sent the dazzled Fantasus away; but secretly, the Enchanter felt that he was dying of shame.
Fantasus, almost bewildered by astonishment, dolor, isolation, and most of all by old age and misery, went away, in quest of crested words, finding rhymes that he repeated with a complaisance that ought to have drawn stars from those who encountered him.
But the cruel crowd looked at him without seeing him. No one gave him the alms of a smile; no one remembered his splendid youth and ancient poet’s crowns. Only the children took pleasure in hearing him, when, having returned to his cabin open to all the winds, he sat down in the ashes and murmured his redoubled rhymes, henceforth deprived of meaning.
The best said, as they passed his threshold: “What a pity it is that such a great man has gone mad. But did he need to distinguish himself more than us?”
IV
Who could depict Merlin’s dolor? His eyes beheld nothing around him but mourning, disenchantment and decline, and yet that was nothing by comparison with the poisonous hydras reborn in his heart, where he felt a world perishing. The necessity of dissimulation, or, to put it more accurately, of playing the tragicomedy with the majority of creatures, was what cost him the most. If only the entire universe could have been duped! Humans, accustomed to being fooled, could still be fooled; they saw everything magnified, with an uncertain gaze. But no! There were always, beneath his feet, a thousand tiny gazes of perpetually wakeful insects, which pierced him by daylight. He was a creator watching his creation die. Except for the poets among us, it is difficult for us to form an idea of such a cruel punishment.
And don’t forget that in the midst of this ruination, Merlin had promised and instructed himself to smile, in order at least to save appearances. Alas, what use was that mask? The crickets, the flowers and the birds that knew his secret mocked him cruelly while he wandered over the rubble of some old keep.
The wallflowers scattered in the ruins said: “There he is, the great enchanter! Where are the fêtes, the tourneys, the words of love, the ornate standards, in the deserted halls?”
Then the mocking birds, perched on the solitary tree, took up the refrain: “The castle is deserted on the mountain; the tower has collapsed; but Merlin’s heart is sadder than the tower; Merlin’s genius is emptier than the ruined castle.”
On hearing these words emerge from the dense branches, Merlin put on a semblance of a smile, but deep down, his heart was corroded; and, seeing that the smallest worm knew his secret, he no longer knew where to go. If he returned to the company of humans, he would hear their sighs too close at hand; if he withdrew to solitude, there was not a single wren that would not make a game out of laughing at his dolor.
V
This is my testament, he wrote to Viviane. I confide it to the vultures and the eagles.
Since I no longer believe in you, I no longer believe in anything, not even my father. In any case he no longer gives me any sign of life. If I could at least see his tracks, I might perhaps have something of which to take hold. But what am I saying? If I saw him there, standing before me, sniggering or roaring, I would not believe my eyes. I would say to him, as to everything: “Go away, Father: you don’t exist.”
The peoples that I have loved I am tempted to curse, for those to which I gave the most have been the first to forget me. How many times they have encountered me, and they have all forgotten my name! So light of heart, so avid for gain, so idolatrous of tinsel, so vain in nothingness, so demanding when they are given something, so craven when everything is refused to them; oh, Viviane, chimera of chimeras, should I be as disappointed on their account?
They know that I’m still alive, but none of them any longer turns his head in my direction. I nurtured them on justice, and they want to lick the feet of all my enemies. Is it necessary to despise what I adored? Is it not better to die?
The worst of misfortunes for a prophet is no longer to be able to prophesy, and that is what has happened to me. Once, as you know, I unfurled the future like a book. The more it hid from others, the more it showed to my discovery. I possessed it much more than the present. I enjoyed its treasures in advance and made others enjoy them. How many times we amused ourselves spreading out a young oak leaf, folded and verdant under the hard winter bark! It was thus that future things appeared to me: young and flourishing beneath the rigid face of the present.
Today, my eyes seek in vain to pierce the shroud that holds me enclosed in the vale of anguish. Future things escape me. For the hearts of humans, and ours, from which I drew my presages, are covered with an envelope so hard that it is impossible for me to discern anything through the thick leaden mantle, and I cannot tell whether humans will soon climb again toward the limpid light, or whether they will continue to fall, with increasing rapidity, into the inexorable Hades.
When the future is thus veiled from the eyes of prophets, it is time for them to die; death alone can render them the clairvoyance that reads in the dark.
Come, then, supreme night! I shall see starry verities glowing in the clarity of the sepulcher, which flee me now in the withered splendor of terrestrial daylight. Come, propitious hour of the tomb; in the meanders of the Milky Way I shall savor at leisure the nourishment of unfathomable wisdom.
VI
Such was Merlin’s distress. Seeing all things being effaced, how he would have liked to be a mystic! He tried, in good faith; adoring his suffering, deifying his tears, he sought Viviane all the way to the ivory tower of the virgin of Judea. How many time he tried to scale the world of dreams on Jacob’s ladder! But scarcely had he set foot thereon than his reason could not extirpate his reason. He fell back heavily to earth, dragged down by his common sense, and in that effort to extinguish the white visions, his distress was only increased.
Veritably, it was brought to its peak by the arrival of Turpin. The face alone of the future archbishop, pale and distressed, said more than any words. His beard tangled, his eyes haggard, clad in the tatters of a cloak, he was on foot and unaccompanied.
“Have you also come, Turpin, to break this miserable heart?” the prophet said to him, welcoming him with his old bounty. “Have you found what I seek?”
“No, prophet.”
Merlin heard him; he went pale and replied: “God have mercy! What has become of the gilded land of legends? You’ve come from one; it’s yours. I wish to God that I had never emerged therefrom. Your life has been spent in magical empires, you have left all the government and burden of the real to me. Tell me about the fortunate worlds that I no longer know, populated by fays, genies, sylphs, dwarfs and necromants, which live lightly. Console me for what I suffer here, among base kingdoms and peoples from which the positive spirit has expelled all others.”
“Prepare yourself for the most dismal news.”
“What are you announcing to me?”
“The death of the spirits.”
“I expected that.”
“I don’t know, Master,” Turpin said, “what tempests have blown over the worlds of the fays. There too, there is revolt. The best-founded capitals of the fays, the vast cities of the land of legends, Potentiana and Sicambria, with walls of gold and crystal, where I spent my best days, and so many others that you have built of emeralds, have risen up against the light scepter of the sylphs. Who would have believed it? I have counseled, warned, harangued, prophesied, all in vain; the enchanted peoples no longer want to support a yoke of flowers.”
“If that’s so, woe betide them. I’m the one who wove it; they’ll have a yoke of bronze. I gave them Titania for a queen; no one had a lighter hand in wielding the scepter. Clement to the wicked, protective of the good, hardly living, have they also dispossessed her? If they have, they have rejected felicity itself.”
Turpin had just witnessed the dethronement of the fays, and then their funerals; he was still very moved by them, especially Titania’s. So he recounted it in the minutest detail. Lying in a bier of nacre encrusted with golden nails, he had seen Merlin’s own valets, Serpentine, Oat-Stem, Golden-Tongue and Lavender-Eye carrying Titania’s corpse on their shoulders through the flowering tree-stumps. She had been buried under the sacred stone in the middle of the Crau. Good God, what a crowd of dwarfs, gnomes, and especially genii! What plaintive murmurs of ephemera in the thick branches. Everyone had been stunned by it. The weepers marched in the lead, after them the princes of the fays, Octavian, Zerbino, the king of Yvetot, all in mourning cloaks, all weeping hot tears.147
Merlin would dearly have liked to ask whether there was any news of Isaline, Nella or Marina, but he abstained, foreseeing the worst in everything.
“But the spirits of the ruins?” he exclaimed, after a long silence. “They, at least, still remain to me; they’re long lived.”
“No, Merlin, they were the first to die. I saw the race of the last fauns become extinct with my own eyes.”
“How is that?”
“I was passing close to the isle of Pantellaria, the ultimate frontier of the realm of Epistrophius, in your crystal vessel, in order to search for you. A disheveled woman clad in animal skins, running along the strand, sent us signals of distress. We landed to pick her up, and this is what she told us:
“‘Three years ago, Lords, I was shipwrecked on this rock. At first I thought it was deserted, but from the promontory you can see from here, a faun emerged, hopping from rock to rock. It called to me in a barbaric voice, and brought me figs and hazelnuts. I tried to flee. It redoubled its cries. Fearfully, I followed it into its grotto, where I found two goats and dry cheeses in wicker cages. It appeased my hunger first; then, sitting on the threshold of the cavern, it began to play the pipe.
“‘Three years passed thus. I tried to teach it to pronounce a few words of a human language. I gave up on hearing the clucking that emerged from the faun’s throat. Every time I thought about what my companion was, I was afraid for myself; but when the sight of your vessel reminded me of the gentle family of humans, I forgot the creature, which I left behind me, and only thought of fleeing.’
“As she finished speaking, the faun, attracted by the sound of the oars, emerged from the rocks and ran toward the shore, carrying a hairy infant in its arms. It extended its arms toward us despairingly. Several times, it made an effort to speak, but its tongue refused to pronounce human words. Then, seeing that the vessel was continuing on its route, it did something of which the memory will remain eternally before my eyes. It walked into the sea until it was waist deep. Then, topping abruptly, it seized the infant by the foot and, brandishing it like a sling, it tore it to pieces and threw the palpitating shreds into the wake of the ship—after which it threw itself into the waves and disappeared.
“Such was, Merlin, the end of the last of the fauns. Don’t hope to find another ever to draw you back to the sacred mountains.”
“Let’s leave the pagans. Rather speak to me of Geneviève de Brabant. She was my hostess. Does she remember me?”
“I found her very old, scarcely recognizable, with her centenarian stag. All she was able who say to me was: ‘Are you still alive, then?’”
“Friend, we are perishing with regard to the women. Nothing sucks any longer at the teat. But Oberon, so gracious in his youth, so youthful still in maturity—what were his adieux?”
“Oh, yes, Oberon! The reception he gave me was, in every respect, incredible. He sensed that he was dying—he, the beloved of the fays—and that rendered him furious. He was veritably foaming with rage when her servants announced me; when I finally appeared before him, he was no longer in possession of himself; he started trampling the pearls of dew, and muttered; ‘In truth, Turpin, I can’t imagine what more you want from a spirit who is on his way out!’
“Oh, Master, what a spectacle is the agony of an old sylph who had never interested himself in any living cause. What aridity! What a death devoid of majesty! That sight will pursue me to my dying day.”
“But at least my old friend Robin Hood has remained as he was? Is he still singing between his teeth, as in the time when I knew him?”
“If only he could! He has the spleen. Tanned, bronzed, curbed at the edge of his waves, he only had one breath left to him, and that was to whistle over the Ocean. He called me; I ran to him. ‘Go tell Merlin that I’m laughing at his prophecy,’ he said, and threw himself into the Ocean head first.”
“Desperate words,” Merlin replied. “Don’t hold them against him. I confess myself that my malediction against Albion has rebounded on me. I’ve always reproached myself for it, and willingly retract it today, when more experience has enlightened me. The three isles had provoked me, and we prophets also give way to anger sometimes. We are fortunate when we can bless what we have cursed! Peace, then, to the red-haired Saxon and the Angles! If they have not always respected others, they have at least respected themselves. Besides which, the king of Thule pleads for them; the best of the daughters of King Lear, all of Ossian’s, and the blonde sirens of Scotland have come to my threshold. To appease my anger, they have made me the gifts that delighted me the most; they have poured into my alabaster cups the mead of Harold’s hymns, which sages drink. Let the Angles and the Saxons plow the sea in liberty, then, and let their isle be honey; I would like that. But let them not forget any longer to take justice with them at the prow, and to seat it on unknown shores, from the Hebrides to Coromandel. At that price, I will be their pilot. Go tell them that!”
VII
Dolor is sometimes so mute in the depths of the soul that one does not sense it on the surface. It does its work, night and day, at times when one is thinking about it least. Such was the effect of the news of the death of the spirits. Merlin thought at first that he had accepted it with self-composure, but it pierced his heart, dully, like a drill, and he never ceased repeating: “Titania! Oberon! Robin Hood! Perhaps the best beings that I knew in my youth! It’s me who sustained them with my breath; they’re perishing with me!”
Turpin, hearing him moaning, approached his bed of leaves.
“Recover your courage, Merlin,” he said to him. “If you let yourself die, Turpin will not survive you by an hour. What! So many magic empires founded by you on the immutable rock of justice will vanish without return? What! The wind will whistle in the palaces with ruby columns, into which you personally introduced the Erl-King, Queen Alcina, Queen Urganda,148 the Toothed Fay, who all owe their scepters to you—which I have tried a thousand times a day to remind them, their families, their people and their courtiers.”
“Calm down, Turpin. The moments are too precious to waste the in reproaches. Don’t forget, my friend, that when I founded those beautiful magical empires on diamond rocks, they were promised to decline. Nothing escapes it, alas, not even dreams. The day has come. Only great task remains for you to fulfill, for them, and for me, who gave them their laws.”
“What’s that?” Turpin interjected, having difficulty holding back his tears.
“To write in an illuminated book all that you have learned, by means of your own eyes or those of others—provided that he reports be faithful—about their existence in the times when they were most flourishing, of course, Turpin. Know that by that means, you will ensure them an eternal existence in human memory, and me a veritable consolation in the thought that perhaps the best of my works has been saved from oblivion.”
“I’ll do that, then, Merlin, while it is still fresh in my memory. Only tell me, I beg you, to begin.”
“So be it, my son. And when I’m in the tomb, don’t stop, but continue writing; you’ll make a marvelous book, which humans lack, your monument and mine, which the goatish teeth of lying centuries will be unable to chew up. On the contrary; you’ll draw from it a glory like that of Joseph of Arimathea, who took Jesus down all bloody from the cross. And when the great Charles comes, he’ll make you an archbishop to reward you.”
With that, Merlin guided Turpin to a place in the forest where he domesticated bears and rode stags. He found numerous scrolls of parchment there, with ink and pens carved from eagle feathers. Turpin immediately set to work to write what he remembered having seen of the legendary kingdoms. A swarm of bees had made its hive in a corner of the grove. Without distracting him, their buzzing mingled with the scratching of the pen. All that remained on earth of blue or marvelous birds came in turn to perch on the nearby tree branches, and in their ingenuous voices they recounted conscientiously and simply, without wanting to shine at the expense of the truth, what they had seen or heard, whether in the Fortunate Isles or the lands of the fays. From those murmurs, buzzings and chirpings, checked one against another, Turpin formed the pure weave of his tale.
Thus were written, to the very last line, his gilded chronicles, the nourishment of sages, to which is owed the source of everything veridical and profitable that has been said in the world. My book is its faithful shadow, or rather its literal copy.
Not long before those chronicles were completed, Merlin took Turpin’s hand, kissed it and said: “Now I’m content! I can die. Without you, the existence of so many enchanted peoples that I have nourished on the pure wheat of justice—as you have witnessed more a hundred times—might have been denied. I’ve personally taught the eagles and the crows that come every morning to obtain their food without any need to sow or to reap; my project was to do as much for the other nations, if the wicked had not risen against me.”
“As witness,” Turpin put in, “Attila’s bird, which carried newly-hatched cities in its beak. Its name was Turul.”149
“The witnesses are everywhere; don’t forget the smallest and the most modest, such as the warblers and the robins, which I’ve often sent as messengers to the hearths of nations, when they consulted me.”
“Those good times will return. Prophet, you will live great days with us again!”
“Blind man that you are! Don’t you see, then, how they are all sleeping a leaden slumber?”
“Patience, Master! It’s during sleep that the soul, the good seamstress, is busiest. It often happens to me that I lie down searching for a word, a name, or a date that I’ve forgotten. I go to sleep dutifully, and I find it when I wake up on the tip of my tongue. It’s the same with humans. They’ve forgotten the name of justice, but they’ll find it when they open their eyes again.”
“No, no,” said Merlin, ending the conversation. “No longer, hope, my friend, to make me believe that. I no longer walk over anything but ruins; those ruins are also deserted, and I have a presentiment that a further blow, coming from I know not where, has yet to strike me in the heart.”
At a signal, Turpin retired, and the prophet remained alone.
VIII
What could that new blow be with which our hero was menaced? And how could his heart, torn apart so many times, give any further purchase to misfortune? The story is so simple that my author has excused himself from relating it. Nevertheless, here it is.
A troupe of acrobats, tightrope-walkers, and other fairground performers, all subjects of the King of Bohemia, made its entrance to the nearby town to the sound of twenty trumpets, and Jacques, a lover of entertainments of that sort, obtained an entire day’s leave from his master in order to take it in at his ease. The decorations, the cavalcades and the songs had their usual effect on him; then the marionettes tickled agreeably the infantile soul beneath his Polyphemus face. But what bowled him over completely were the feats of arms of the fairground performers, punctuate by fanfares, at the moment when the most beautiful of the Amazons, armed with an ax, defeated the king of the Moors, all intermingled with the explanation of tableaux suspended in the wind, which represented the battle of the giants, Bluebeard washing his old rusty dagger, the king of Maurienne, and Tristan and Iseult surprised on the bed of leaves where they were separated by the great sword, the witness to their innocence.
Jacques uttered a cry of admiration that attracted attention to him. One of the tightrope-walkers, descending from the stage, struck up a conversation with him.
Did he really dare to compare the life of the enchanter and bard with that of an acrobat? Great God, what a difference! Everywhere, red coats decorated with gold braid, ostrich plumes, crimson velvet tapestries fringed with virgin silk; always welcome in every abode, pampered and caressed. How, I ask you, could that paradise be compared to the rude métier of the prophet?
He only had to decide to accept the wealth that was being offered to him. The troupe lacked a bread-porter to King Thierry of Maurienne; the costume was all ready, in scarlet, adorned with turquoises and carbuncles; it would be given to him; the rest would come later: a feathered cap, a garnished purse, a curved Damascus saber and a walking-horse.
Anyway, what was his present salary? Apparently very miserable. It would easily be doubled, perhaps more, not counting the good food: at daybreak, a good mouthful and claret wine; at midday, meat in plenty and Gascony wine; for a snack, chicken; in the evening, at supper, fresh seasoned hash with crepes, to procure a long sleep.
In brief, they dazzled him. Fascinated and stunned rather than convinced, Jacques did not betray his master; he had also forgotten the king confided to his guard. He did not come back the next day, nor the one after. Open-mouthed, he followed the acrobats, without knowing where.
Oh, if someone had pronounced in front of him the name of his beloved master, no doubt he would have dissolved in tears; he would have rejected the costume in which he had been dressed; perhaps, in his initial fury, he would ever have turned his bread-porter’s saber against his seducers. But no one alerted him, even by a sign. No one reawakened his numbed thought.
Alas, let us allow him to follow is destiny wherever it might take him; let us return to his master.
As soon as he realized that he had been abandoned by his last servant. Merlin was seized by a misanthropy that he had not yet experienced, and his plaint was exhaled before the only friend who remained faithful to him.
“Would you believe it, Turpin? Jacques, whom I have nourished on the bread of the strong, has denied me for the hundredth time. He’s been ambushed by some king of Bohemia, who will have captured him by means of his weakness for tinsel. He’s left me without saying farewell, for he doubtless did not dare to look me in the face.”
“Accursed vagabond!” exclaimed Turpin, in an initial surge of anger. “You’ve spoiled him, Seigneur.” He soon softened, though. “Trust me, Prophet; I’ll bring him back to you humble and repentant.”
“And when will that be? How can I believe him henceforth? How can I confide myself to him for a single day? I’ve forgiven him too often; perhaps it was necessary to make him feel the rod, but that’s odious to me.”
“Yes, the oak rod or the bullwhip. I’ll take charge of that.”
“At least, if that happens, let it not draw blood!”
“No—a simple flagellation.”
“Oh, my friend, mercy! Mercy! Spare him. I can hear his heat-rending cries in advance. He has a loud and clear voice.”
“Don’t worry, Merlin. I’ve wielded God’s flail more than once. I know how to make use of it.”
With these words, Turpin went to search his personal effects. He drew out a long-handled scourge in a leather sheath, very flexible, with knotted thongs and bronze tips.
“What’s that?” cried the prophet.
“God’s flail,” replied the future archbishop. “It’s the one with which David chastised the Amalekites. From David it passed into the hands of Scipio Africanus, who found it in the Syrtes, from Scipio the Just to the emperor Dorotheus,150 who left it to his sons, from them to Attila, from Attila to Dietrich of Bern, who gave it to me one day after the Benedictus. It still lacks a few thongs; that will be remedied.”
The good Merlin turned his eyes away in order not to see the flail, but Turpin, after considering it proudly, struck the ground around him to test it, like a thresher in a barn when he commences his task. At each blow the earth trembled. Tears, stifled cries and sobs, like those of flagellated people, emerged from who knows where, and the furious thresher redoubled his efforts. The sound was heard of towers crumbling in the distance, under the rhythmic blows.
“Stop!” cried the prophet. “What, then, is your crop? I can hear human voices moaning, as if criminal nations were attained by your flail.”
“You’re right, Master—as yet, though, they only sense its approach. How will they wail when the good bronze tips strike their shoulders? As for Jacques, I’ll hardly have any need to touch him. The sight of the thresher will suffice, I hope. Let’s go—the wheat is ripe! Let me do it—I’ll thresh the corn; you’ll collect the good grain.”
“Wait. Don’t avenge me—put down your flail. Events will avenge me well enough. Just Heaven, what times I foresee! Write this, Turpin: First will come the goat with the golden honors and silver beard. The breath of his nostrils will be so strong that he will cover the whole surface of the isles with thick vapors. Women will walk like serpents and all their paces will be filled with pride. Then they will charge with chains the necks of those who roar, and they will cut out the tongues of untamed bulls. O crime of crimes! To bind like an ox the man that the author of the world created in liberty! Woe to you, Neustria, because the brain of the lion will expand over your meadows. And they will give to soldiers that which is due to the poor! The owl of Gloucester will roost in the walls of Lutèce, and the viper will be engendered in his nest. Gaul will be soaked by nocturnal tears; the brutes will have peace between them, and humankind will endure torture. The Germanic worm will be crowned; the forest will tremble; it will cry out in a human voice: ‘Arrive, Cambria! Bind Cornwall to your side, and say to Guintonhi: The Earth will be swallowed up!’”151
After a moment of stupor, he added: “Those, Turpin, are a few of the evils that I foresee, and which trouble my soul like that of Saul; I foresee them, and cannot prevent them.”
Even Turpin’s heart of bronze seemed broken by those last words, and, letting his flail escape his hands momentarily, he replied: “Master, if the evil is without remedy, if the world crumbles, if the real peoples are betraying you, let’s go, let’s flee, let’s return to the magic kingdoms. There, at least, you’ll sit down on diamond ruins. One can still console oneself and spend good days in the debris of an emerald palace.”
“I know,” Merlin said, with a pensive expression. “Thank God, there are still grateful beings on the earth, and I have no doubt that if you and I were to go to the imaginary countries of which you speak, we’d be welcomed there with honor. More than one king of Faery, escaped from ruination, would remember that he owes his diadem to me. But know, Turpin, the full extent of the sadness of my soul. I dread, my friend, that I would wear my mourning in those places and sadden them with my presence.
“Yes, if there remains a single enchanted place in the world—which I sometimes doubt—it requires, in order to enjoy it, a simplicity of heart that I fear that I have lost in commerce with real peoples. I would sadden those happy kingdoms—if there are any left on earth—and they would not give me their joy. What would I do alone, without Viviane, without love, under the tree of the fays? A profound ennui would grip me, my friend; I would seek out the abyss in order to precipitate myself into it. There is nothing worse, believe me, than the power of enchantments when it turns against the enchanter.”
“Patience, Master! The centuries will render you justice.”
“It’s better to learn to do without it. Do you know that the dead themselves emerge from tombs to mock me? But there is another pain: you might perhaps smile; on reflection you will weep. The young women no longer love me, Turpin. They no longer seek my conversation; my presence no longer makes them dream, nor pale, nor blush; they no longer turn their heads toward me when I pass. ‘It’s an old enchanter,’ they say. Worse than that: they no longer perceive that I exist. Those are signs, I think. Have I aged, then, Turpin? Admit it!”
“Do you think so? True age is in the heart.”
“My God, don’t say that! Has my hair turned white, then?”
“No.”
“Do I have wrinkles?”
“No.”
“Then what has happened?”
“Since you don’t believe me, ask the flowers, the woodland daisies; they’re sincere; they render you a striking testimony when you pass by.”
“The flowers!” retorted Merlin, bitterly. “How little you know them! I would never have thought them so spiteful and rancorous. They, who only live for a morning, will never forgive me for having praised before them in a trial the durance of centenarian oaks. Since that day, they look at me with an irony that transpierces me. They could offer me the royalty of roses and I would not accept.”
“Oh, Master, for such great evils, is there no remedy?”
“There is one, Turpin, but I hesitate to employ it. To govern the world, I perceive, my friend, it is necessary above all to despise it, and that is what I have difficulty deciding to do. I could, if necessary, scheme, warp, lie and cheat, as so many enchanters do routinely with profit, but I have difficulty accustoming myself to that; if my reign had to continue at that price, I’d rather die. Certainly, I would not have disdained a veritable glory, which every flower of the fields would proclaim every morning in rising with the sun. So many works have had for their objective, along with human happiness, that solid glory—but if I were to obtain only a vain, temporary fame, maintained by the gross tricks of sylphs; if it were necessary to capture, by dint of complaisance, the meager applause of gnomes…if the name of Merlin does not resound of its own accord throughout the realm of Arthus, let that name never be pronounced.”
As Merlin concluded this speech, the King of Sophists, followed by the entire race of the disabused, passed by. His eye was keen and gleaming, and he was enthroned in the void. An entire blind people formed his cortege. He proved to those surrounding him that nothing is more beautiful than a world in which one dies. That was something to make all times envious. At that spectacle, Merlin felt, more than ever, the desire to die.
“There’s my Antichrist,” he said to Turpin. “I recognize him without ever having seen him; where he reigns, I perish. You, who love me, don’t let him come any closer. I couldn’t bear that triumph of the blind.”
He raised his eyes toward the veiled stars. “Men tear me apart and the vultures spare me, while covering me with their wings. The peoples refuse me their threshold, and the wolves cede their dwellings to me. O devouring nature, whence comes your pity, when the good, the honest, the pure and the charitable have banished all pity? Come, death! Of all enchantments that is, I believe, the best.”
Excited by the prophet’s words, Turpin had taken up the bronze-tipped flail again; he had advanced with his hand raised; those who saw him from afar thought: Who is that thresher carrying that flail? Has the season of the harvest come already? And where has he made his threshing-floor? Before they had finished speaking, Turpin struck the earth; the accursed peoples, stunned, strewed the ground like wheat-sheaves crushed beneath the thresher’s flail.
Meanwhile, in the distance, Merlin, having become misanthropic, lost himself in the depths of the forest. There, he did not have to fear encountering a human face, or hearing any voices other than those of torrents.
At intervals, through the murmurs of the foliage, a chorus of voices rose, which repeated, in the manner of the ephemera, the ancient refrain of happy days:
All is divine!
Love will commence!
And others concluded, with the magnifying noise of distant waterfalls:
Then comes decline;
Death or dementia.152
Let us leave Wild Merlin plunging into the depths of the words. May he go, alone, where the gaze of a deceitful soul cannot arrive, where perfidy cannot slide beneath a caressant face, nor false speech intrude the point of its blade, so high is the rock, so dense and thorny the undergrowth.
Do not pity Wild Merlin; he is already far away, in the rain, in the snow, under the fury of the winds, but he is sheltered from lies. Do you know what the cruelest thing of all is in profound exile, the desert of wandering? It is not the deprivation of the native land, of the cradle, of the tomb, of all those beloved things. It is that, uprooted and wandering, you lend yourself to every smile you encounter as if it were a refuge, and often, it is an ambush.
Woe! Woe! Without having the time to examine, or to choose, or to know—for you must hasten—your poor soul, stripped, naked and dying, gives itself to anyone on the road who gives you the alms of a kind word; often, thus you fall prey to denial, to lies, to perfidious grace, without being able to recover the serene soil where verity grows in love.
The friend no longer knows you pierces you to the depths of your heart if he encounters you. There is the evil; all the others are honey and ambrosia by comparison.
All is divine!
Love will commence!
Then comes decline;
Dolor immense,
Death or dementia.