The Dream Maker (7 page)

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I had kept my childhood friends. Most of them were married. Their children played with mine. The subtle hierarchy that had been established during our adventure at the time of the siege continued to suffuse me in their presence with authority and mystery. But these qualities exerted no more than a modest influence over our lives, since they were led separately and our relations were limited to family visits.

That is why when I first met Ravand, I could not turn to my usual points of reference. The friendship we forged was not at all like any of those I had known up to then. In his presence I had neither prestige nor power. On the contrary, it seemed to me that I had everything to learn, and my position was one of admiration, which quickly bordered on submission.

Ravand was two years older than I, assuming that he knew the truth about his birth. His parents, he said, were Danish. That explained his height, his near-white hair, and his blue eyes. His appearance alone would have sufficed to make him stand out in our Celtic country, where people's skin and eyes are an autumnal hue of browns and reds. Added to that were his astonishing history and personality. He settled in our town at the end of one winter as it turned to flood. Everything was wet and gray. Ravand's blue eyes were like the promise of a clear sky we had never hoped to see again. He arrived from the north in grand style, with five valets and ten men-at-arms, none of whom were from the same place or spoke French. He required no more than two weeks at the inn; fetching the gold from his carriages, he paid cash for a house, which one of our friends had just built.

He furnished it very simply. The entire town was curious about him. I overheard talk but paid no attention. So, my surprise was all the greater when, a few days after his arrival, he sent me an invitation.

His house was not far, so I went on foot. It was located on a winding street that led up to the cathedral. Two men were stationed at the street entrance and kept an eye on the passersby. At the door, two more men stood guard, clad in leather and coats of mail; they looked like
écorcheurs.
Such manners were not typical among merchants. Inside, there reigned the atmosphere of a fortress. The rooms downstairs, heated by a blazing beech wood fire, were veritable guardrooms. Some of the men slept on the floor, like soldiers on a campaign, while others came and went, speaking loudly. In the courtyard behind the house two ginger-haired fellows were washing immodestly in a barrel of rainwater, chests bared. I went upstairs by a narrow stairway similar to the one in my childhood home and came out into a vast room lit by two tall windows of white stained glass. Ravand greeted me, taking my hands and looking me straight in the eye with an expression of recognition and enthusiasm.

And yet one felt that, if he so decided, all warmth would drain from those eyes and they would become cruel, cold blades. I immediately expressed my gratitude to Ravand for his welcome, the way a traveler might thank a highwayman for taking all his worldly belongings but leaving him his life.

The room was furnished with only a table and two fluted chairs. The table was piled high with pewter dishes that were still dirty with the remains of various meals. Pools had formed where glasses had spilled. Three or four porcelain pitchers stood surveying this battlefield. I had never seen such a household, particularly as it was set in a building almost identical to the one in which we lived, and which our womenfolk were careful to keep harmonious, comfortable, and clean.

Ravand offered me a drink. Before he served me, he inspected the bottoms of a dozen or so glasses before he found one he concluded was not as dirty as the others.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Jacques.”

Neither Master Jacques, nor Messire Cœur. He spoke to me as a friend, but the friendship was that of a soldier, used to measuring a man against courage and death.

“So am I, Ravand.”

We clinked glasses. I saw that a midge was floating on the surface of my wine, and yet I drank it down in one gulp. Ravand already had me in his power.

He explained that he had come from Germany, where he had been in the employ of several princes. The size of their state did not match his ambitions; he had come into France from the north, after encountering the English and working for them. After several years spent in Rouen, he had taken to the road again, determined, this time, to serve King Charles. He did not tell me the reasons for this change, and I did not feel bold enough to ask him. What ensued would prove I had been wrong not to.

Ravand talked about King Charles as if he were a prince with a great future ahead of him. This was rare enough to surprise me. Ordinarily the king's name was only spoken in order to comment on his defeats.

“Might I ask, please,” I ventured to say, “what is the nature of your talents?”

In truth, until then I had thought he was the leader of a group of mercenaries. The country was infested with these itinerant gentlemen who placed both sword and retainers in the service of those who offered the best wages and the most tempting plunder.

“I am a minter,” said Ravand.

Minters are those who forge precious metal. Their art derives from the Chthonic mysteries of fire and the mine. Instead of hammering ploughshares or knifeblades, they manufacture the tiny pieces of gold or silver that will spend their lives traveling from hand to hand. The path of currency is an unceasing adventure, with sojourns in pockets, forays into the marketplace odors of hay and cattle, and jingling together in a banker's overstuffed coffers amidst solitary intervals in a pilgrim's satchel. But at the origin of all these adventures is the minter's mold.

To discover Ravand's profession was all the more astonishing in that Macé's late grandfather had also been a minter. I had known him for a few years before his death. He was a discreet burgher, levelheaded and somewhat timid. He had practiced his profession in our town thanks to a license from King Charles V. It was difficult to imagine two more dissimilar characters than that plump notable with his carefully groomed hands and the coarse Scandinavian with his mustache dripping with wine.

At the same time, this confession enlightened me as to the reasons behind Ravand's desire to meet me. Nor did he hide the truth from me.

“A minter must be rich,” he said. “I am rich. But for the king to give me his trust, he must know me. And he does not. You were born here, in his capital. Your family is honorable, and through your wife you are related to the last minter of the town. I suggest we form an association.”

Ravand was not the type to take a fortified town by means of a long siege. He favored a quick, frontal assault. As far as I was concerned, he was right. Had he employed more subtle means to convince me, while beating around the bush, he would have aroused my suspicions and reinforced my resistance. Whereas by casting his pale gaze upon me in that deserted hall where the floor had not even been planed, he immediately won me to his cause. I heard myself agreeing to his proposal, and I went home feeling somewhat giddy for having plunged into these unknown waters, not knowing where I might end up, out at sea.

The fortune Ravand had brought with him, along with my credit in the town, quickly ensured us of success. We did not see the king, but his chancellor made it known to us that he approved of our undertaking. We built a workshop on some land that had come with Macé's dowry. Ravand's assassins made it their entrenched camp. Stacked in sealed coffers on the walls were precious metals, gold and silver, entrusted to us in the form of ingots. Other safes contained the pieces Ravand melted in great quantity. Later on I would be called an alchemist, and that was one of the many explanations people gave for my fortune. The truth is I never made gold with anything other than gold. But Ravand taught me the best way to make a profit from it, which is also the worst.

The king, upon the recommendation of his councillors, decided on the proportions we were to use for our alloys. From a certain quantity of silver—which, as everyone knows, is counted in marks—we were obliged to melt a given number of coins. The purer the alloy, the fewer the coins we produced; if there was less of the alloy, then the coins were also worth less, and there were more of them for one mark.

The room where the alloys were made was the heart of our activity. Ravand watched over it in person, equipped with mortars and assay balances. He needed only one man to help him: a thin old German, covered with scurf. His many years breathing the noxious fumes of mercury, antimony, and lead had poisoned him, and indeed he died a few months later.

Ravand taught me everything, with patience and enthusiasm. In the beginning, the adventure went to my head. The red flames of the forge, the hot gold bubbling in marble crucibles, the shine of pure silver and its capacity to resist alteration from other metals by imposing its color and brilliance, even when it was in great minority—all of this caused a new heart to beat in the anemic body of our town. From here departed the streams of coins that would go on to circulate throughout the realm and beyond. It was as if I were the keeper of a magic power.

And yet it took me only a few weeks to discover the truth. It was not as shiny as the new coins that jangled as they fell into our coffers. The breadth of our activity concealed the meanness of our methods. For at the heart of the manufacturing secrets that Ravand revealed to me was another secret, even more closely guarded: we were deceiving the king. When he ordered us to cast twenty-four coins to the mark, we made thirty. We delivered the twenty-four coins as ordered and kept the rest for ourselves. It was easy and very profitable.

Oddly enough, I had never dealt in crime until then. My father had always made it a point of honor not to cheat his customers, although they suspected him of it all the same. Everyone, in fact, would have found it perfectly normal for him to get rich in this way. His satisfaction came from never selling his work for more than its just value. His profit was purely moral, and his only reward was the pride of knowing he was an honest man. As for Léodepart, he was too wealthy to run the risk of resorting to villainous methods. In short, I assumed that dishonest means were expedients to which only the destitute or chronically impoverished would resort. And now Ravand was showing me another world: one could be involved in matters of great importance, minting the money of the realm, and yet still indulge in the base practices of scoundrels of the lowest sort.

And when I did express my surprise, he explained that it was common practice. Thanks to Ravand, I discovered there was a war being fought among the minters working in neighboring regions. In Rouen or Paris, on behalf of the Englishman who claimed to reign (as in Dijon, where the Duke of Burgundy on his vast lands depended on no one), coins were minted that were intentionally of a very low standard. When these coins came our way, to the lands that were faithful to King Charles, they were exchanged against our own, which had a much higher content of fine metal. With these superior coins the merchants returned to their own lands, richer at our expense. By minting coins of too high a standard, we were impoverishing the kingdom and allowing precious metal to pass into the hands of the very princes who were at war with our king. Ravand managed to persuade me that by resorting to fraud to enrich ourselves at the king's expense, we were actually doing him a favor, albeit he had entrusted us with this employ. And I believed him, until that spring afternoon when a detachment of ten of the king's men-at-arms came to arrest us in our workshop and throw us in prison.

Ravand greeted this judgment with great serenity. I would subsequently learn, too late, that he had been at risk of arrest on numerous occasions. It was in order to avoid a heavy sentence that he had fled from Rouen and ended up in our town.

For me, this imprisonment was a harsh ordeal. Hardest of all was the shame, of course. We hid it from my children, but their playmates answered their questions soon enough. I was in despair at the thought that the entire town now took me for a thief. Much later I would learn that, on the contrary, this ordeal had merely added to my prestige. In the eyes of the majority, it was as if I had undergone an initiatory rite: I had looked straight at the black sun of power, close up; I had felt its heat and stolen its secrets. With my in-laws the damage was much greater: from the start my father-in-law had viewed my alliance with a stranger as foolhardy. With my imprisonment foolhardiness had become sin. I was convinced that on leaving this place—if I ever left this place—it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find an honorable position in the town that had witnessed my dishonor and my fall. I could not conceive of any future other than flight.

As for the discomfort of detention, I bore that more easily than the torment of moral scruples. I was taken to a cell in the Duke's palace. It was, naturally, dark and damp. But I had had my fill from birth of darkness and dampness, and so the prison seemed no more than a simple extension of my gray, rainy destiny. I did not suffer from the destitution; on the contrary, I came to realize that comfort, a wealth of fine fare and clothing, the ministrations of numerous servants, and everything I had thought was important was, in fact, a needless burden. Prison, for me, was an experience of freedom.

I was treated well, or not too badly. I was alone in my cell, and I had a table and chair at my disposition. I was allowed to write to Macé and even make arrangements for my business. Above all, I had a great deal of time to meditate, and I drew up a lucid evaluation of these early years of adulthood.

I was already over thirty. There were not many moments that stood out from the ten years that had just passed, other than moments of happiness, such as the birth of our children, or certain hours spent in the countryside with Macé. On several occasions we had gone alone on horseback to the ring of villages that surrounded the town and which were known as La Septaine. It was rather unwise of us, because nowhere was safe in the kingdom. Gangs were known to go as far as the edge of town. But we enjoyed the risk, which, when all was said and done, was moderate. My father-in-law had bequeathed us a country house in the middle of a birch forest where we left a few guards. We went there to sleep and to share our love.