The Romans, from the time of the republic, knew everything about their Cloaca Maxima, yet fifteen hundred years later, in Paris, people were ignorant of what went on beneath their feet. Caus accepted the king’s invitation because he wanted to find out. What did he find out?
“After Caus, Colbert sent prisoners down to clean the conduits—that was the pretext, and bear in mind that this was also the period of the Man in the Iron Mask—but they escaped through the excrement, followed the current to the Seine, and sailed off in a boat, because nobody had the courage to confront those wretches covered with stinking slime and swarms of flies….
Then Colbert stationed gendarmes outside the various openings of the sewer, and the prisoners, forced to stay in the passages, died. In three centuries the city engineers managed to map only three kilometers of sewers. But in the eighteenth century there were twenty-six kilometers of sewers, and on the very eve of the Revolution. Does that suggest anything to you?”
“Ah, you know, this—”
“New people were coming to power, and they knew something their predecessors didn’t. Napoleon sent teams of men down into the darkness, through the detritus of the capital. Those who had the courage to work there found many things: gold, necklaces, jewels, rings, and God knows what else that had fallen into those passages. Some bravely swallowed what they found, then came out, took a laxative, and became rich. It was discovered that many houses had cellar trapdoors that led directly to the sewer.”
“Ça alors…”
“In a period when people emptied chamber pots out the window? And why did they have sewers with sidewalks along them, and iron rings set in the wall, to hang on to? These passages were the equivalent of those tapis francs where the lowlife gathered—the pegre, as it was called then—and if the police arrived, they could escape and resurface somewhere else.”
“Légendes…”
“You think so? Whom are you trying to protect? Under Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann required all the houses of Paris, by law, to construct an independent cesspool, then an underground corridor leading to the sewer system….A tunnel two meters thirty centimeters high and a meter and a half wide. You understand? Every house in Paris was to be connected by an underground corridor to the sewers. And you know the extent of the sewers of Paris today? Two thousand kilometers, and on various levels. And it all began with the man who designed those gardens in Heidelberg….”
“So?”
“I see you do not wish to talk. You know something, but you won’t tell me.”
“Please, leave me. It’s late. I am expected at a meeting.” A sound of footsteps.
I didn’t understand what Salon was getting at. Pressed against the rocaille by the ear, I looked around and felt that I was underground myself, and it seemed to me that the mouth of that phonurgic channel was but the beginning of a descent into dark tunnels that went to the center of the earth, tunnels alive with Nibelungs. I felt cold. I was about to leave when I heard another voice: “Come. We’re ready to begin. In the secret chamber. Call the others.”
The Golden Fleece is guarded by a three-headed Dragon, whose first Head derives from the Waters, whose second Head derives from the Earth, and whose third Head derives from the Air. It is necessary that these three Heads belong to a single and very powerful Dragon, who will devour all other Dragons.
—Jean d’Espagnet, Arcanum Hermeticae Philosophiae Opus, 1623, 138
I found my group again, and told Agliè I had overheard something about a meeting.
“Aha,” Agliè said, “what curiosity! But I understand. Having ventured into the hermetic mysteries, you want to find out all about them. Well, as far as I know, this evening there is the initiation of a new member of the Ancient and Accepted Order of the Rosy Cross.”
“Can we watch?” Garamond asked.
“You can’t. You mustn’t. You shouldn’t. But we’ll act like those characters in the Greek myth who gazed upon what was forbidden them to see, and we’ll risk the wrath of the gods. I’ll allow you one peek.”
He led us up a narrow stairway to a dark corridor, drew aside a curtain, and through a sealed window we could glance into the room below, which was lighted by burning braziers. The walls were covered with lilies embroidered on damask, and at the far end stood a throne under a gilded canopy. On one side of the throne was a sun, on the other a moon, both set on tripods and cut out of cardboard or some plastic material, crudely executed, covered with tinfoil or some metal leaf, gold and silver, of course, but effective, because each luminary spun, set in motion by the flames of a brazier.
Above the canopy an enormous star hung from the ceiling, shining with precious stones—or bits of glass. The ceiling was covered with blue damask spangled with great silver stars.
Before the throne was a long table decorated with palms. A sword had been placed on it, and between throne and table stood a stuffed lion, its jaws wide. Someone must have put a red light bulb inside the head, because the eyes shone, incandescent, and flames seemed to come from the throat. This, I thought, must be the work of Signor Salon, remembering the odd customers he had referred to that day in the Munich coal mine.
At the table was Bramanti, decked out in a scarlet tunic and embroidered green vestments, a white cape with gold fringe, a sparkling cross on his chest, and a hat vaguely resembling a miter, decorated with a red-and-white plume. Before him, hieratically deployed, were about twenty men, also in scarlet tunics but without vestments.
On their chests they all wore a gold medal that I thought I recognized: I remembered a Renaissance portrait, the big Hapsburg nose, and the curious lamb with legs dangling, hanging by the waist. They had adorned themselves with imitations, not bad, of the Order of the Golden Fleece.
Bramanti was speaking, his arms upraised, as if uttering a litany, and the others responded from time to time. Then Bramanti raised the sword, and from their tunics the others drew stilettos or paper knives and held them high. At this point Agliè lowered the curtain. We had seen too much.
We stole away with the tread of the Pink Panther (as Diotallevi put it; he was remarkably abreast of the perversions of popular culture) and found ourselves back in the garden, slightly breathless.
Garamond was overwhelmed. “But are they … Masons?”
“And what,” Agliè replied, “does Mason mean? They are the adepts of a chivalric order inspired by the Rosicrucians, and indirectly by the Templars.”
“But what does that have to do with the Masons?” Garamond asked again.
“If what you saw has anything in common with the Masons, it’s the fact that Bramanti’s rite is also a pastime for provincial politicians and professional men. It was thus from the beginning: Freemasonry was a weak exploitation of the Templar legend. And this is the caricature of a caricature. Except that those gentlemen take it extremely seriously. Alas! The world is teeming with Rosicrucians and Templars like the ones you saw this evening. You mustn’t expect any revelation from them, though among their number occasionally you can come across an initiate worthy of trust.”
“But you, after all,” Belbo said, without irony, as if the matter concerned him personally, “spend time with them. Which ones do you believe in? Or did you once believe in?”
“None, of course. Do I look like a credulous individual? I consider them with the cold objectivity, the understanding, the interest with which a theologian might observe a Naples crowd shouting in anticipation of the miracle of San Gennaro. The crowd bears witness to a faith, a deep need, and the theologian wanders among the sweating, drooling people because he might encounter there an unknown saint, the bearer of a higher truth, a man capable of casting new light on the mystery of the most Holy Trinity. But the Holy Trinity is one thing, San Gennaro is another.”
He could not be pinned down. I didn’t know how to define it—hermetic skepticism? liturgical cynicism?—this higher disbelief that led him to acknowledge the dignity of all the superstitions he scorned.
“It’s simple,” he was saying to Belbo. “If the Templars, the real Templars, did leave a secret and did establish some kind of continuity, then it is necessary to seek them out, and to seek them in the places where they could most easily camouflage themselves, perhaps by inventing rites and myths in order to move unobserved, like fish in water. What do the police do when they seek the archvillain, the evil mastermind? They dig into the lower depths, the notorious dives filled with petty crooks who will never conceive the grandiose crimes of the dark genius the police are after.
What does the terrorist leader do to recruit new acolytes? Where does he look for them and find them? He circulates in the haunts of the pseudosubversives, the fellow-travelers who would never have the courage to be the real thing, but who openly ape the attitudes of their idols. Concealed light is best sought in fires, or in the brush where, after the blaze, the flames go
