Samarkand (22 page)

‘Come on, I must present you to my cousin Henri!’

As he said that, he dragged me over to him.

The two cousins greeted each other before returning to me.

‘My American grandson. He wanted to meet you so much!’

I did not hide my surprise too well, and the man looked at me with some scepticism before stating:

‘Let him come and see me tomorrow morning, after I have had my tricycle ride.’

It was only upon sitting back at my table that I realised to whom I had been presented. My grandfather was very eager for
me to know him, and had spoken of him often with an irritating pride of clan.

It is true that the aforementioned cousin, who was little known on my side of the Atlantic, was more famous in France than
Sarah Bernhardt, as he was Victor-Henri de Rochefort-Luçay, now known in democratic France as Henri Rochefort, a marquis and
a communard, former deputy, minister and convict. He had been deported to New Caledonia by the regular troops. In 1874 he
effected a swashbuckling escape which inflamed his contemporaries’ imagination, and which Eduard Manet depicted in his painting
The Flight
of Rochefort
. However, in 1889 he was sent off into exile again for having plotted against the Republic with General Boulanger, and it
was from London that he managed his influential newspaper
l
’
Intransigeant
. Returning in 1895 thanks to an amnesty, he had been welcomed back by two hundred thousand delirious Parisians – both
Blanquistes
and
Boulangistes
, revolutionaries of the left and the right, idealists and demagogues. He had been made the spokesman of a hundred different
and contradictory causes. I knew all of that, but I was unaware of the most important thing.

On the appointed day I went off to his residence on rue Pergolèse, incapable of imagining at the time that this visit to my
grandfather’s favourite cousin would be the first step of my never-ending trip in the universe of the Orient.

‘So,’ he said accosting me, ‘you are sweet Geneviève’s son. Are you not the one to whom she gave the name of Omar?’

‘Yes. Benjamin Omar.’

‘Do you know that I have held you in my arms?’

As this was the case, he was now obliged to address me familiarly. The same, however, did not apply to me when addressing
him.

‘My mother has actually told me that after your escape you landed at San Francisco and took the train for the East coast.
We went to New York to meet you at the station. I was two.’

‘I remember perfectly. We spoke of you, of Khayyam and of Persia and I even predicted that you would be a great orientalist.’

I shammed a little embarrassment in admitting to him that I had side-stepped his vision and that my interests were elsewhere
– I was more oriented toward financial studies, foreseeing myself one day taking over the maritime construction business started
by my father. Appearing to be sincerely disappointed by my choice, Rochefort set off on a lengthy plea, intermixed with
the Persian Letters
of Montesquieu and his famous ‘How can one be Persian?’, the adventure of the gambling-addict Marie Petit who had been received
by the Shah of Persia by passing herself off as Louis XIV’s ambassador, and the story of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s cousin who
ended his days as a watchmaker in Isfahan. I was only listening to the half of it. Above all I was watching him, with his
voluminous and immoderate head, his protruding forehead topped by a tuft of thick wavy hair.
He spoke with passion, but without emphasis and without the gesticulations which one might have expected from him having read
his intense writings.

‘I am mad about Persia, although I have never set foot there,’ Rochefort declared. ‘I do not have the soul of a traveller.
Had I not been banished or deported those few times I should never have left France. But times change, and the events which
are taking place at the other end of the planet are affecting our lives. If I were twenty today, instead of being sixty, I
should have been very tempted by an adventure in the Orient – particularly if I were called Omar!’

I felt constraint to justify my lack of interest in Khayyam. In order to do so, I had to mention the dubious nature of the
Rubaiyaat
, the absence of a copy which could prove their authenticity once and for all. For all that, as I was speaking, an intense
glimmer came into his eyes, an exuberance which I failed to understand. Nothing in my words was supposed to provoke such excitement.
Intrigued and irritated, I ended up compressing what I had to say and then falling silent quite abruptly. Rochefort questioned
me enthusiastically:

‘If you were certain that such a manuscript existed, would your interest in Omar Khayyam be reborn?’

‘Naturally,’ I admitted.

‘And if I were to tell you that I have seen this manuscript of Khayyam with my own eyes, in Paris what’s more, and that I
have leafed through it?’

To say that this revelation immediately turned my life upside down would be inexact. I do not believe that I reacted the way
Rochefort had presumed I would. I was both abundantly surprised and intrigued, but I was still sceptical. The man did not
inspire me with unlimited confidence. How could he know that the manuscript he had leafed through was the authentic work of
Khayyam? He did not know Persian and the wool might have been pulled over his eyes. For what incongruous reason would this
book have been in Paris without a single orientalist reporting the fact? I did no more than utter a polite but sincere ‘Incredible!’,
since it showed both the enthusiasm of the man I was speaking to and my own doubts for I was not yet ready to believe in it.

Rochefort went on:

‘I had the chance to meet an extraordinary personality, one of those beings who cross History determined to leave their imprint
on the generations to come. The Sultan of Turkey fears and courts him, the Shah of Persia trembles at the mere mention of
his name. He is a descendant of Muhammad, but was nonetheless chased out of Constantinople for having said, at a public conference
in the presence of the greatest religious dignitaries, that the profession of the philosopher was as indispensable to humanity
as that of the prophet. He is called Jamaladin. Have you heard of him?’

I could only confess my total ignorance.

‘When Egypt rose up against the English,’ Rochefort continued, ‘it was at this man’s call. All the intellectuals of the Nile
Valley take their inspiration from him. They call him ‘Master’ and revere his name. However, he is not an Egyptian and has
only made a short stay in that country. He was exiled to India where he managed to arouse a considerable movement of opinion.
Under his influence newspapers were established and associations were formed. The Viceroy became alarmed and had Jamaladin
expelled, whence he decided to settle down in Europe and he continued his incredible activity in London and then in France.’

‘He worked regularly on l’
Intransigeant
and we used to meet often. He presented his disciples to me – Muslims from India, Jews from Egypt and Maronites from Syria.
I believe that I was his closest French friend, but certainly not the only one. Ernest Renan and Georges Clemenceau knew him
well, and in England his friends were people like Lord Salisbury, Randolph Churchill or Wilfrid Blunt. A little before his
death, Victor Hugo met him too.’

‘This very morning, I was in the middle of going over some notes about him which I am thinking of inserting in my memoirs.’

Rochefort took some sheets covered in minuscule writing out of a drawer and read: ‘I was introduced to an outlaw, a man famous
throughout all of Islam as a reformer and a revolutionary – Sheikh Jamaladin, a man with the head of a saint. His beautiful
black eyes, so gentle and yet fiery and his deep tawny beard which reached his chest gave him a particularly majestic air.
He looked like a born leader. He understood French more or less although he could hardly speak it, but his ever alert intelligence
easily made up for what he lacked of our language. Behind his calm and serene appearance his activity was frenetic. We soon
became good friends for my spirit is instinctively that of a revolutionary and I am attracted to all freedom-fighters …’

He quickly put the sheets of paper away and then continued:

‘Jamaladin had rented a small room on the top floor of a hotel in Rue de Sèze near the Madeleine. That modest space was enough
for him to edit a newspaper which went off by the bundle to India and Arabia. I only managed to wheedle my way into his den
once,
being curious to see what it could look like. I had invited Jamaladin to dine
chez
Durand and promised to go by and pick him up. I went straight up to his room. It was difficult to move around in it because
of all the newspapers and books piled up to the ceiling there, some of them even covering the bed. There was a suffocating
smell of cigar smoke.’

In spite of his admiration for him, he had pronounced this last phrase with a hint of distaste, which induced me to extinguish
on the spot my own cigar which was an elegant Havana I had just lit. Rochefort thanked me for that with a smile and carried
on:

‘After apologizing for the mess in which he was receiving me, and which, he said, was unbefitting for someone of my rank,
Jamaladin showed me that day some books he was fond of – particularly that of Khayyam which was full of exquisite miniatures.
He explained to me that this work was called the
Samarkand Manuscript
, and that it contained the quatrains which had been written in the poet’s own hand, together with a chronicle running in
the margins. Above all he told me through what tortuous route the
Manuscript
had reached him.’

‘Good Lord!’

My pious English interjection draw a triumphal laugh out of cousin Henri. It was the proof that my cold scepticism had been
swept away and that I would henceforth hang on to his every word and he lost no time in taking advantage of this.

‘Of course, I do not remember everything that Jamaladin must have said to me,’ he added cruelly. That evening we spoke mainly
of the Sudan. After that I never saw the
Manuscript
again but I can testify that it existed, but I am truly afraid that by now it has been lost. Everything my friend possessed
was burned, destroyed or scattered around.’

‘Even the Khayyam
Manuscript?’

By way of reply, Rochefort made a discouraging pout, before throwing himself into an impassioned explanation during which
he made close reference to his notes:

‘When the Shah came to Europe to go to the World Fair in 1889, he suggested to Jamaladin that he returned to Persia “instead
of passing the rest of his life in the midst of infidels”, giving him to
understand that he would install him in high office. The exile set some conditions: that a constitution be promulgated, that
elections be organized, that equality be recognized by law ‘as in civilized countries’ and that the hugh concessions granted
to the foreign powers be abolished. It must be stated that in this area the situation of Persia had for years been the butt
of our cartoonist: the Russians, who already had a monopoly on road-building, had just taken over military training. He had
formed a brigade of Cossacks, the best equipped in the Persian army, which was directly commanded by officers of the Tsar;
by way of compensation, the English had obtained, for a song, the right to exploit all the country’s mineral and forest resources
as well as to manage the banking system; as for the Austrians – they had control of the postal services. In demanding that
the monarch put an end to royal absolutism and to the foreign concessions, Jamaladin was convinced that he would receive a
rebuff. However, to his great surprise, the Shah accepted all his conditions and promised to open up the country to modernisation.

‘Jamaladin thus went and settled in Persia, as part of the sovereign’s entourage. The sovereign, at the start, showed him
all due respect and went as far as to introduce him with great ceremony to the women of his harem. However, the reforms were
put off. As for a constitution, the religious chiefs persuaded that Shah that it would be against the Law of God, and courtiers
foresaw that elections would allow their absolute authority to be challenged and that they would end up like Louis XVI. The
foreign concessions? Far from abolishing those which existed, the monarch, ever short of money, was to contract new ones:
for the modest sum of fifteen thousand pounds sterling he granted an English company the monopoly of Persian tobacco – not
only its export but also domestic consumption. In a country where every man, every woman and a good number of children were
addicted to the pleasures of the cigarette or the pipe, this was a most profitable business.

‘Before news of this last renunciation of Persian rights was announced in Teheran, pamphlets were distributed in secret advising
the Shah to rescind his decision. A copy was even placed in the monarch’s bedroom, and he suspected Jamaladin of being the
author. The reformer, who was by now worried, decided to go into a state of passive rebellion. This is a custom practised
in Persia: when a person fears for his liberty or his life, he withdraws to an old sanctuary near Teheran, locks himself in
there and receives visitors to whom he lists his grievances. No one is allowed to cross through the doorway to lay hold of
him. That is what Jamaladin did and thereby provoked a surge of people. Thousands of men streaming from all corners of Persia
to hear him.

‘In a state of vexation the Shah gave orders for him to be dislodged. It was reported that he hesitated a long time before
committing this felony, but his vizir, who was educated in Europe moreover, convinced him that Jamaladin had no right to claim
sanctuary since he was only a philosopher and a notorious infidel. Armed soldiers broke into the holy place, cleared a passage
through the numerous visitors and seized Jamaladin, whom they stripped of everything he possessed before dragging him half-naked
to the border.