“That happened again in 1324, more than two hundred years after the First Crusade, and more than two hundred years before the Battle of Malta, almost five hundred years between the recapture of Jerusalem and the fight on an island to save the West from the resurgent Muslim invader. We need to understand that, to remember that; to remember that Europe, the West, once understood the threat it faced and was willing to do whatever was necessary, and for however long it took, to save itself.
“Now we face that same threat again, a new war of religion, a war between Islam and the West. Only this time, while Islam still believes in its own importance, the West no longer believes in anything, except the equal right of everyone to believe anything they like. We cannot win that fight. The question is: what should we do? What can we do?”
Valette had been speaking without a text, without notes of any kind. His eyes never strayed from his audience and, more than that, never felt the need. Hart had the feeling that he could go on like this for hours, never repeating the same thought twice, speaking solely from memory and the stunning clarity of his mind, as much at home in the history of things dead and buried for a thousand years as in the events of his own, contemporary, world. But, for the first time, Valette reached inside his suit coat pocket and pulled out what looked like a standard three-by-five card.
“Some of you may have heard of Jacob Burckhardt, the great historian who died early in the last century. He wrote something about the Jesuits, how they were able to acquire so much influence in the world, which seems to me to suggest what we need to do now. Let me read it to you. I’ve written it down so I won’t make a mistake.”
He glanced at the card, too quickly to have read anything on it, and then looked back at his audience and did not look at it again.
“‘It is not so hard for firmly united, clever and courageous men to do great things in the world.’-Remember that. ‘Ten such men affect a hundred thousand, because the great mass of the people have only acquisition, enjoyment, vanity, and the like in their heads, while those ten men always work together.’”
Valette put the card back in his pocket, the card he had not needed, and began a long disquisition on the truth of Burckhardt’s observation. He recalled, one after another, examples, almost all of them from French history, of the way a few men, or even, in the case of Napoleon, a single individual had done things no one had thought possible. There was no doubt that his intention was to show that things that had been done in the past could be done again, that anything was possible with the proper will; and yet, unless Hart was deceiving himself, there was a tone of the deepest irony in what he said, as if he did not believe it, or, and the possibility was fascinating to Hart, he wanted you to think that he did not believe it. That was inescapable, the thought that he could so easily have a double meaning, and maybe more than that; that everything he said, no matter how straightforward he made it seem, was really an enigma wrapped inside a doubt. He seemed proof of the ancient dictum, if anyone was proof of it, that only someone who knows how to lie has any knowledge of the truth.
What was he really trying to do, wondered Hart, as he sat there in the back, watching the performance of a man who seemed capable of anything except, strangely enough, the very thing that had caused Hart to seek him out. There seemed to be too much intelligence, too much-call it arrogance, call it pride-to demean himself with something as sordid, as commonplace, as murder. But all the evidence, everything Hart had learned, had pointed him to Valette and brought him here to Mont Saint-Michel. The Four Sisters had been involved in everything. He was not wrong about that. He warned himself against the easy seduction of intelligence and charm; warned himself against mistaking talk of ancient history and the grand sweep of time with the absence of all ambition. No one became one of the richest men in the world without some degree of self-absorption. And what was his concern with history and the origins of France if not an expanded, not to say delusional, sense of self-importance, a way to make himself the embodiment of far more than the experience of his own generation? Still, for all that his conscious mind could tell him, he could not rid himself of the feeling that with Jean Valette something else was at work, something deeper and more profound than the kind of motive that would result in simple murder. But what? That, he did not know.
“The difficulty, of course,” Valette was saying, “is to know how to find men like those, how to establish in advance the conditions which make such men possible, the ‘ten men who can do great things in the world,’ a task especially difficult in this barbarous age in which we live, when we have forgotten the past and what it means, and, as someone once remarked, unable to think back any further than our grandfathers we ‘drown all time in shallow waters.’ This is the challenge of our generation: to think back to what we might again become, and raise the next generation to understand the crisis of the West and what can be done about it.
“That is the reason for the school we founded five years ago, the academy that, with your continuing support, has already begun to broaden the horizons and deepen the understanding of the young men and women that each year are sent to us. The Academy of St. John is, I believe, unique among contemporary educational institutions in that we think it more important that our students learn how to live, rather than how to work; to learn about the world, rather than how to make a living. As you can imagine,” he remarked to general laughter, “we are the best kept secret in France. But then, we don’t need a hundred thousand; we need only ten.”
Jean Valette looked out over his audience one last time. Then, with a silent bow, he lifted his arm in the air and quickly sat down. The applause was immediate, sustained, but more an acknowledgment of respect for the man than any great enthusiasm for anything he had said. That, at least, was Hart’s impression. Though he did not know any of them, they seemed for the most part serious, sober-minded people, too prosperous to be anything but conventional in their thinking. They were the kind willing to listen to new ideas, especially those firmly rooted in the past, so long as there was not any real chance anyone would try to put them into practice. This business about a school, whatever innovations might be involved, could not possibly be a threat to anything; it was too small to do anything except give a few perhaps gifted students an education in the useless curriculum of another age. If some of them, most of them perhaps, were willing to give financial assistance to this new academy, it was because they had always given money to museums and other places connected with the arts when they were asked to do so by people to whom they could not afford to say no.
The applause faded into silence and the audience took their seats again. It must have been announced at the beginning that after Valette spoke he would take questions. As soon as everyone was settled, a man sitting not far from Hart was back on his feet and Valette was again at the podium.
The questions came one after another, and with each one Valette seemed more eager to take the next. Hart could not count the times he had had the same experience, taking questions from an audience, reluctantly at first, but then becoming more comfortable, grasping by some instinct how to meet the inquiry on its own terms, respond directly but always within the limits of the questioner’s knowledge and experience. But, as he understood at once, there was something more than that, a completely different dimension, with Jean Valette.
As soon as someone asked a question-sometimes even before they finished asking it-Valette’s eyes would flash with the answer. Not just the answer, but the precise way he wanted to phrase it, the exact wording, came immediately to his mind. He thrived on it, questions from people who, as was sometimes plain, had barely understood anything he had said and had perhaps agreed with even less than that; thrived on it-and this was what Hart finally understood-not because he learned anything from what they said, from the questions they asked, but because he learned so much listening to what those questions forced him to say. He knew the answer; it had been there, buried in his subconscious mind, but he did not know he knew it until someone asked a question and he took possession, conscious possession, of it for himself. At the end, when the last question had been asked, he seemed genuinely grateful for the chance he had been given to learn from the best, the only, teacher he had.