Vauban ended badly. In many ways, he was a staunch conservative in a country governed by the modern mania for universal power; in others, an overly audacious reformer. In his writings, he proposed freedom of creed and thought, and in that another tyranny, one that sought to flatten the individuaclass="underline" giving everything to your autocrat. He wanted to recoin hereditary aristocracy as meritocracy. And he hoped to do that in the context of the most absolute monarchy since Darius of Persia! The Beast’s ministers thought Vauban harmless enough. His guiding principle was not revolution but reason: He calculated that out of every twenty-four French people, only one was cultivating the land; as a consequence, the other twenty-three were living off his efforts.
They cast him out like an old loon, and if they didn’t bother to pursue him, it was because he was too old, hoary, an anachronism. His ingrained idea of loyalty stopped him from ever rising up against his king. Quite the reverse. For all he hated Louis’s way of doing things, his misguided conduct and his pretensions, he would have died a thousand deaths for him. His guile in other fields was of no use to him when it came to seeing politics for what it really was. His logic was geometrical and, therefore, overly simplistic. He never came close to understanding that in human relations, endless vectors are at play, juxtaposed, unforeseeable, hidden, and almost always malign.
The end to war! How ironic. Plato already said it: Only those fallen in combat have seen the end of war.
9
If life were divided into stages, mine was about to come to the end of its most profitable and lovely. And in the most abrupt and distressing manner. Although it wouldn’t be quite right to say it all came crashing down at once. The day Jeanne’s husband miraculously recovered from his mental illness was the beginning of the end.
When a person succumbs to madness, those around him react with a mix of incredulity and indignation, as though the ailment suffered is a personal affront to them. In a way, we associate the lunatic with the figure of the deserter. As with battalions, we press close together when facing life’s difficulties, and have no time for anyone who drops out voluntarily. Curiously, when someone who has lost his mind then regains it, this disbelief is even greater. Someone cured of that kind of affliction is as strange to us as a deserter rejoining the ranks.
I had heard he was getting better. But Paris was far from Bazoches, and my studies were all-consuming. When he came to visit, I couldn’t believe it. He did not look disheveled, his gait was steady, and his gaze, which once would have been lost for hours in pursuit of invisible bumblebees, was quite normal.
He was as friendly to me as ever. “Zuviría, my good friend!” he exclaimed when he saw me, clapping his hands on my shoulders. “It’s been a while, and how you’ve changed! You’ve grown a whole foot, when you were already having to duck under doorways. And what character in your face!” he added with an affectionate chuck. “You’ve grown innerly even more than without.”
“Permit me to be pleased,” I said in turn. “For I am not the only one showing some remarkable changes.”
His eyes turned misty, as though penitent at the thought of his recent past. “You are quite right, mon ami.”
I could not help but ask as to the medicine or treatment that had brought about his extraordinary recovery.
“Treatment? None whatsoever. Simply, I was off in my corner one day, singeing my fingernails like Paracelsus, when I asked myself a question that was so simple, it had never occurred to me before.” He drew a little closer, as though fearing to be overheard, and with wide eyes said: “If I am a hugely wealthy man, married to a hugely wealthy woman, what the devil am I wasting my time trying to convert salt into gold for?”
I noticed a distance in Jeanne. I didn’t make much of it until the following Sunday, when, as ever, we met in the hayloft. We would arrive there separately, and normally, she would be undressed, waiting for me, lying down on the first stack of hay. This time she had her attire all on, and she was standing up.
Even my Waltraud, who is denser than a sack of potatoes, would have surmised what Jeanne had to say, so I’ll save the telling of it. It pains me to this day.
“The fact that your husband is not out of his mind,” I said, “does not mean our feelings have changed.”
“My feelings for you, no; my duty to him, yes.”
One thing of which I am sure is that great lovers, true lovers, never go in for the kind of little scenes you see in the theater. And do you know why? Well, playwrights can say whatever they please, but love is the most rational thing in the world.
There was a lot I could have said, but I knew in advance the answer. She was a wealthy woman, now happily married (or less unhappily, at least), and the daughter to a marquis. She wouldn’t give it all up for a lad with no credentials, some provincial cadet. Changing the subject, she said: “The Ducroix brothers say your Points only need polishing, and you’ll be ready to become a great engineer. In fact, they’re thrilled with you.”
I said nothing; I looked at her. She was not ignorant of my despondency, my mute recrimination, my wordless hurt.
“Tell me something, Martí,” she said then. “Between being a royal engineer and staying by my side forevermore, which would you choose if you had to?”
I opened my mouth two, three times, but nothing came out. I had entered Bazoches out of desire for a woman and would be leaving in love with engineering.
This marked the beginning of the end. Things falling apart, the great debacle of my life, March 1707. “Matrimony, that citadel which all without wish to enter, and all within wish to get out from,” Vauban had said. Even stiff old Zeno and Armand Ducroix gave me a couple of slaps on the back. I didn’t need to tell them what had happened, of course not. They said one day: “No feat of engineering can keep this pain at bay. Take deep breaths, and that’s all.”
I believe they gave me my fifth Point as a way of lifting my spirits. And because something else was going on, something I didn’t know about and which was far more significant for me, for Bazoches, and for half the world: Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban was dying.
His lungs were giving out. The final phase of an illness that had crept up on him in Paris. The Ducroix brothers kept it from me for as long as possible. When they decided to say something, Armand did so in inimitably stoic fashion: “Cadet, the Marquis of Bazoches is dying.”
He would not be coming back to Bazoches — a fact that seemed to have more finality than the death itself. I froze. To me, Vauban had become a figure standing outside of human contingencies. It was like being told fire can no longer be lit, or that the moon would henceforth rise and fall in a matter of seconds.
Zeno was already with the marquis, assisting him with the final act. Armand and I climbed into a carriage and set out for Paris. It was a strange journey. I had never been to Paris, the head of that war-loving religion named France. I tried to stay attentive, and at the same time, I couldn’t get Jeanne from my thoughts. Yes, it was as though a cosmic conjunction had forecast these two ruptures in such a short space of time. I was also bothered by uncertainty, something that, out of fellow feeling, I didn’t dare put to Armand. He answered my question without my having to formulate it: “The marquis will hold on until he has said goodbye to each and every one of his close relations.”
One of the inconvenient things about being a patrician of the first order is that all manner of people will flock to your deathbed. Custom demands that, even in great agony, almost anyone has the right to come and bother you, What’s-his-name, Thingamaijig, first and second secretary to the commander at the Hellespont, cousin of your alcoholic father-in-law’s other son-in-law. That the person going through those agonies should have to put up with a chattering multitude has always struck me as unnecessary and cruel. But can I truly criticize? After all, I myself went and took up position in that troop of undesirables. In my case, because of something very pressing.