It seemed at first a strange remark, but then, a moment later, Hart thought he knew exactly what he had meant: reading anything, but especially about the past, took you away from what people in the present thought important. He tried to use that thought to penetrate deeper into what for him was still the mystery of Jean Valette.
“You must have read a great deal to be able to do what you did back there, at Mont Saint-Micheclass="underline" speak without notes for nearly an hour and then answer questions.”
Valette’s eyes filled with irony.
“The best thing that happened to me as a boy was to have a tutor who would scarcely let me read anything until I was nearly sixteen. Among the other interesting results, my memory was much improved.”
Hart did not try to hide his astonishment.
“You didn’t read anything until…?”
“One book: Robinson Crusoe. My tutor was very strange. He had read Rousseau’s Emile-and believed it! Rousseau said Robinson Crusoe was the only book a boy should read because it teaches the lessons of necessity and the advantages of freedom; teaches you to see things with your own eyes and not the eyes of others. Perhaps that is the reason that I have always liked it here so much,” he added with a look of mischief, “cut off from the outside world like Crusoe’s island, and yet less than half an hour from all the luxury and madness of Paris.”
They had come out of the forest and were approaching a massive iron gate. Behind it, stretching through a double row of poplars, was a driveway, a two-lane road that went on as far as the eye could see.
“It’s only a few miles to the house,” said Valette, explaining a fact without importance. He pointed to a rock outcropping on the right. “There is a path that leads to a small lake on the other side. I used to swim there as a boy. They say that buried somewhere at the bottom is a chest full of gold and silver, precious jewels, brought back from the Crusades. But I searched all over one summer and never found it. ‘St. John’s Treasure,’ is what they called it, whoever started the legend after that other Jean Valette, my long dead ancestor, came back from Malta.”
Folding his arms across his chest, he smiled to himself, and then looked closely at Hart.
“The Order of St. John. Some of what I told that audience today is actually true.”
“But not all of it?”
This produced a look of vast amusement in Jean Valette.
“That’s one sin of which I think I can claim never to have been guilty. Although I’m not sure it really makes any difference,” he said as the smile on his face faded into obscurity and his gaze became more thoughtful. “I try to be careful, not go too far, in what I say, but I sometimes wonder why I bother. Those people I just spoke to-members of the Order of St. John-I could tell them exactly what I thought and they still would not understand it, and even if they did, they would think I was being ironic. They think I’m too intelligent not to believe exactly what they believe.”
Hart remembered his own reaction, his sense that Valette kept his real meaning hidden, sometimes by putting it out in plain view.
“The suggestion that great things can be done again, that what was done in the past can be repeated, that there could even be another Napoleon? You don’t think anyone believes you really mean it, and that is the reason you can say it? Everyone thinks you’re only talking about some remote possibility, something that, if it were ever to happen, is not going to happen any time soon: this war between Islam and the West, to take another example.”
Valette nodded in agreement with what Hart was saying, but stopped abruptly at this last remark.
“That war never stopped! If Robert Constable had only understood that, he’d probably still be alive!” he exclaimed in apparent frustration.
Hart stared at him in disbelief.
“What do you mean-he’d still be alive? What does this war you keep talking about have to do with his murder?”
“Nothing,” he said with a shrug. “And everything. If he had understood what was at stake, the whole future of the West, he might have decided to do something important, something that history would remember, instead of just trying to become what he thought other people-the great, anonymous crowd-wanted him to be.”
Hart wanted to laugh out loud. It was crazy, insane; he was trying to find out who was behind the murder of the president, trying now to clear his own name, and he was being told that Constable had brought it on himself by not being sufficiently serious. He did not laugh out loud, but he might as well have done. Valette had understood at once Hart’s reaction.
“You think I don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, consider this: All this money he got from The Four Sisters, all those millions-do you think that would have happened if I had not thought that it would, one way or the other, bring about his destruction?”
Hart did not know what to think. He was about to demand that Valette explain what he meant when the driver suddenly hit the brakes and Hart was thrown forward onto the floor. Valette helped him back onto the seat.
“There,” he said, pointing to an enormous stag standing in the middle of the drive. “Isn’t he magnificent?” With proud indifference the stag stood there, daring anyone to try to move him, and then bounded off the road and into the dense forest. “The park is full of animals now, wild boar and deer that used to be hunted. I put a stop to it. I never understood this desire some people have to kill things that cannot fight back.”
He leaned forward and rapped gently on the glass, a signal to the driver to move forward again. The road, this endless driveway from the iron gates miles behind them, began a steep ascent, winding through one hairpin turn after another, climbing high above the valley floor and the river that in the distance glowed blood red and orange under the soft, dying light of the twilight sun. They reached a clearing several miles square, bordered on the other side by another forest and another, taller range of hills, and passed through yet another iron gate, smaller and more ornate than the first. They were now on a great stone paved circle that led past a series of spouting fountains and close-cropped lawns and hedges to what Hart could only think was a much older, if slightly smaller, Versailles.
“It was built about the same time as Mont Saint-Michel, a thousand years ago,” explained Jean Valette. “Like the cathedral, it has been rebuilt and restored who knows how many times. They burned it to the ground, or tried to, those great believers in equality, in the early days of the Revolution, and murdered-cut the living hearts out of some of them-the people who lived here. The wonder, I suppose, is that we ever got it back. We wouldn’t have, if we had not learned the secret of this new world of ours.”
“The secret?” asked Hart as they got out of the car.
Jean Valette stood in front of the ancient stone chateau that seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction, inhaling the sweet, clean air. His eyes glittered with the remembered knowledge of something perhaps taught to him as a child, or learned later, somehow on his own.
“The secret of the age of equality: the more equality there is, the more desperate people are for something that seems to set them apart, makes them different, better, than the rest. That’s why money has become the only thing anyone believes in anymore. It isn’t because of what it can buy; it’s because of what it tells everyone about you. Want to see a completely miserable human being? Introduce someone worth a hundred million to someone worth twice that amount. Every age has its own form of insanity, Mr. Hart. Money is ours. That’s what got Robert Constable killed, and, directly or indirectly, it’s what is likely to get you killed as well. But let’s go inside now. You must be famished.”