Free The Dream Maker by Jean-Christophe Rufin, Alison Anderson Page A

convinced, however, that I had committed a grave crime, and that my sin was one of both mediocrity and a lack of honor. With hindsight I can affirm that this conclusion was my salvation. It gave me the will to conceive a radical solution. Without it I would not have come so easily to my decision. Instead, I remained faithful to the oath I had taken in the silence of my jail cell: as soon as I got out, I would leave.
    The necessity of departure was not solely the result of the shame I felt. It had been there long before—perhaps it had always been there. For as long as I could remember, I had always wanted to leave this land where I had been cast by birth, where only grayness, fear, and injustice reigned. The mad king might be dead, but his curse continued to afflict the country. While in prison I learned that a new manifestation of his folly had recently appeared. My jailers told me that a young girl of eighteen, a simple shepherdess in a village in the borderlands of the East with neither fame nor education, had commended herself to God to save the realm. And the sovereign, driven to defeat and on the verge of losing Orléans, had placed this woman called Joan of Arc at the head of his armies. The father’s madness had certainly spread to the son, so much so that he was calling upon succubi, entrusting them with the fate of the realm . . .
    To flee this madness! To cast off the chains that bound me to the fate of a country ravaged by lunacy. Chivalry had left behind the ancestral framework which had once ensured it of a wisdom shared equally with laborers and priests. Now brute force knew neither limits nor reason.
    I had enough information to find my way out. The Levant that I had long envisioned: I knew of ways to get there. Perhaps this was the only advantage of the early years in my trade, that I had heard innumerable travelers’ tales. In that peaceful time I may not have been able to imagine anything other than putting down roots where I was, but a part of me continued the quest for the unknown. The leopard I had seen so long ago had not been reincarnated either in Léodepart or in Ravand’s melted gold. It continued to show me the road to Arabia. Nothing could stop me from taking that road.
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    After the ordeal of my incarceration, Macé was subjected to the ordeal of my departure. I had thought about it for a long time. I felt it was absolutely necessary to leave, and, determined to tolerate no obstacles, I would crush them all. The most difficult one, however, was the silence my wife and children set before me. Not for a moment did Macé show any sorrow to see me abandoning her for a journey from which I might not return, nor did she oppose me. It was one of her greatest qualities that she devoted herself not only to love, but also to the man who was its object. Macé loved me when I was happy. When I was free. She loved me alive, vibrant with plans and desires. I had been telling her about the Levant for a long time. I spoke to her about it in the evening, in the springtime, during the walks we took in the country, by the shore of the pond. I spoke to her about it in the depths of dark, muddy winter, in the cold air as we listened to the sinister bourdon of the cathedral. I spoke to her about it as a dream carried all through childhood, but which I had grown accustomed to seeing as something that would stay forever in the confines of my imagination. It is quite possible that I communicated my passion to her. She was, as I have said, a silent woman, attentive to others, with the reserve and detachment and faraway gaze that showed how absorbed she was, in herself, by all sorts of thoughts and images that she did not share.
    When on leaving the prison I informed her that I would be leaving the next month for the Levant, she stroked my face, looked deeply into my eyes, and gave me a smile which at no time seemed pained. I even wondered for a moment whether she would suggest coming