“The head of one of the nation’s most important institutions, head of one of the most illustrious families in France, a family that at every stage in our history has played a leading, and sometimes a decisive, part.” With a dramatic flourish, he stretched out his arm to the man sitting in the chair on the left side of the podium. “The head-the honorary head-of the Order of St. John, the order through which, and by which, his namesake, his ancestor, five hundreds years ago at the Battle of Malta saved Christendom and, saving Christendom, saved France!”
Everyone, men and women alike, were on their feet, applauding with an intensity that if Hart had just wandered in, without any knowledge of the reason they were there, he would have thought that Jean Valette had either just won an election, or just won a war. Then, as he stood there clapping with the others, he realized that these people were really applauding themselves, their history, and, more than what they had become as a people and a nation, what they had been. That was the key to it: what they remembered, or wanted to remember, about what they, or really, their distant relations, the men and women whose own lives had been, in every sense, the necessary precursors of their own, had done in that time made even more glorious by everything that had been forgotten.
Jean Valette said nothing about what had been said about him, and apart from a bare nod of his head, did not acknowledge the audience. He stood at the podium, waiting, while the applause of the crowd gradually played itself out. Though of only medium height, if that, he seemed, with his shoulders held straight and his head erect, much taller. His eye was bold, unflinching. It was impossible to think of him ever looking away; it was impossible to think of him, even as a child, trying to avoid the gaze of someone, even a father, who had doubts about something he had done. He would not have allowed anyone, except perhaps a father-and later in life, perhaps not even him-to be so familiar as to even think to do that. And yet, at the same time, despite what could easily have seemed an astonishing conceit, there was nothing that made you feel irritated, much less angry, at the way he looked at you with those dark, penetrating eyes of his. The slight smile that danced along his lip told you in the politest way possible that he frankly did not care enough about your opinion to have any great interest in hearing you express it. Even if you agreed with him, you would have been wrong, because, in the nature of things, what you thought you knew had really been nothing more than a lucky guess. He was that arrogant, if you call arrogance what someone of unusual ability considers his own worth.
Then he began to speak, and the sense of distance began to disappear. His face became alive with expression as he described what he called the dilemma in which they lived, divided between two traditions in conflict with one another.
“We are on the one hand, as witnessed by our presence here today, the inheritors of the ancient glories of Europe and of France. While other, smaller, peoples were still forming nations, we led a cause; while they formed petty states and principalities with all their endless bickering, we marshaled the forces of Christendom and protected civilization, defeated Islam, and saved the West. But then, barely two hundred years ago-the blink of an eye in the long history of humanity-we gave birth, through the greed and ambition of a corrupt and frivolous aristocracy, to the French Revolution, and produced the modern world of democracy and mass movements. This ended all established order, destroyed even the notion of a hierarchy of values, and began the abolition of the fundamental difference between better and worse. We produced, in other words, the modern belief in equality and the diminishment of man.”
This would have been unsettling, a remark like this-there is, after all, nothing quite so insulting in the age of equality as to be told that you are only average-but with a near perfect grasp of just how far he could challenge convention, Valette flashed a smile and quickly added:
“We wish we could have done what our ancestors did who went off on the great adventure to save Jerusalem from the infidels; and we would have, too, if only we had lived back then, when such things were still possible.”
Hart could almost feel the collective sigh of approval and relief, and, more than that, could almost see in their eyes the past recaptured in the safe privacy of a dream. They would have been warriors-they did not have any doubt of that-but now they wanted to hear something more about their former greatness as a nation, and then they wanted dinner.
“The things that were possible then do not seem possible now. But is that because we no longer face that kind of danger, or because, if I can be so bold, we no longer take things as seriously as we once did? Let me tell you a story of how the world used to be, when men believed in God and never thought to doubt either hell or heaven. You all know how the Order of St. John was changed from an order that took care of the sick and wounded into an order trained to fight and die; how the Knights Templar were first destroyed by the King of France, Philip the Fair, and how the Pope, Clement I, gave the king permission to dissolve the order. How many of us know what happened to them because of it?”
The eyes of Jean Valette glittered with the remembered malice of a strange, and to an audience trained in the secular disciplines of modern science, unbelievable, act of revenge.
“The head of the order, the Grand Master, had been tortured into a confession of blasphemy and lies. Burned with hot irons, his skin torn from his body, his bones broken on the rack, he admitted that he had given up Christ to worship the devil, that he had engaged in every imaginable sin and, worse yet, had not regretted any of them. But then, a few months later, in March of 1314, brought forward for his trial, the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, who had been not only the king’s close friend, but godfather to his daughter, recanted his confession, an act of courage and honesty that led almost immediately to his being burned at the stake.”
There appeared at the edges of Jean Valette’s mouth the first hint of a secret, one he was about to share, that made of the prospect of this scene of awful terror and burning flesh, a triumphant reversal of all normal expectation. For a moment, but just for a moment, he let that unknown possibility, that promise of something without parallel, hang heavy in the air.
“The fire had been started, the flames leaped from the faggots piled around his legs, the smoke was rising up to his rope-bound chest, when Jacques de Molay called to the crowd to witness his word that God Himself would soon begin to exact a price for the sacrilege committed by Pope Clement and Philip the Fair, that God in his greatness would carry out the curse that with his dying breath he was calling down upon the king and his descendants through the thirteenth generation. He died insisting that before the year was out, both the king and the pope would be summoned to meet him before the judgment seat of God.”
There was another pause, as Jean Valette, contemplating the mysterious workings of providence, invited his audience to wonder at the power of an age in which such things had been possible.
“Pope Clement died within a month; Philip the Fair died seven months later. The king was only forty-six, and if you are wondering at the cause of his death, the only thing we know with any certainty is that he was not ill and that he did not die in an accident. He just died.”
Valette raised his hand, dismissing the matter as one better left to others to solve. He had another, more important, point to make.