So Vast the Prison (15 page)

It is through his correspondence with Peiresc and Aycard that we can see into his days in Tunis: his schemes, his ambitions, his comfort, his pleasures as a well-read man, and sometimes his fears.

Then, gradually, quietly, a real drama unfolds for him. Persuaded that he will remain permanently, he complains about his bad eyesight to Peiresc; he can never find any eyeglasses that suit him and he would pay their “weight in gold” to have some. Then he adds sadly, “For more than five years I have been unable to read by candlelight with my regular ones!” To pay for them, he sends his correspondent some very warm slippers for both the magistrate and his wife, as well as couscous and the skins of vultures!

But one can guess that the ongoing drama that is causing his two correspondences to be interrupted is still brewing. Drama? Call it a passage, a shift—no, not a new passion for women or boys, nor for other realms of knowledge that might have opened up for him. Call it “an experience.”

Thomas, good old Thomas d’Arcos, sixty-two or sixty-three years old, with failing eyesight, but still energetic and full of bounce, leaving Tunis for the nearby villages, then adventuring east, far into the interior—Thomas, the former prisoner who has been free for some time, feeling he has been accepted by everyone and resigned to dying in Tunis—Thomas decides to become a Muslim!

A conversion in due form: first the circumcision, then the words of the
chahadda
and the assuming of an Islamic name. Thomas becomes Osmann.

This takes place apparently around 1631 or the beginning of 1632. No sooner has he “turned” than he is “renounced.” (He is not
the only one to make this turnaround, or, one might say, this accommodation. Several of his friends who are younger and with different perspectives manage the transformation. There is a Provençal man like him who will take the name Chaabane, a young Fleming who will call himself Soliman, a very young Greek boy who will be Mami.) But as soon as he feels he is a “renegade,” he begins to doubt and suffer, and to think about his friends to the north.

In fact Peiresc waits more than a year before showing any signs of life. Thomas complains to Aycard, “The early characteristic of salvation given me by the Church will never be erased from my soul although my habit may be changed!” He goes on to conclude philosophically, “God sometimes allows evil so that he can draw some greater good from it.”

There he is, a middle-class man firmly attached to Tunis: he could almost hope to find some rather mature Tunisian lady with a warm heart and hospitable fortune to cuddle with in his old age! There he is, borrowing Islam—at least that is how he describes it to his friends in Provence, because, in the end, he refers to a double faith: the faith of necessity and the faith that, he assures them, he has never really denied, the faith of the faithful. But in Aix, Peiresc refuses to communicate, sits in judgment, and does not write.

Thomas-Osmann has sent him his finished book about Africa and expects some criticism and observations; in this way he will indeed continue to exist, if only in his writings, on the shores he has left behind for good. If Peiresc considers his book to be serious and of value, it may be that he, Thomas-Osmann will not to be forgotten back there … Though he remains in the sun on the outskirts of Tunis, his heart and his mind are journeying off with the book he sent to Peiresc.

Repudiated, but trying to make Peiresc forgive his new faith, he turns to his other friend, Aycard, telling him about further presents he feels obliged to send each of them.

That is when he sends the gift, a really nice gift, of a gazelle—the
alzaron
he calls it. It is the end of 1633; in January 1634 he writes that this gazelle was caught in Nubia, that “it has a wonderful way of running,” that he bought it from a great
marabout
in the city, and that someone else wanted it for the duke of Tuscany.

It will take several months for Peiresc to reply. Thomas, who meant to send him some little chameleons as well but got them too late to do so, inquires about his
Relation de l’Afrique
. In the end he confesses, “I admit that your long silence has caused me extreme pain and actually I attribute its cause to my sins …”

Gassendi, writing later about Peiresc, mentions the Nubian gazelle sent by Thomas and describes it. We know through him that it ended up in Rome at the estate of Cardinal Barberini.

The correspondence between Thomas-Osmann and his two friends comes to an end in 1636. Peiresc dies the following year and Aycard soon after. No further trace of Thomas d’Arcos, the renegade of Tunis.

However, it is neither the gazelle, which lives from this point on with the famous Cardinal Barberini in Rome, nor the scholarly work sent to Peiresc that makes this shadowfigure—a freed prisoner who became a Muslim—a silhouette that is inseparable from “our” story, from the shores of the Atlantic to the beaches lining the gulfs of Libya and Tunis, and all the way to the desert of Fezzan.

It was that Thomas was present, alone, in this first half of the seventeenth century traveling back and forth around Tunis or farther to the east with his truly ravenous gaze! Just before his conversion
(sincere or strategic), he took a trip to the border between the two regencies, Tunis and Algeria. In a letter to Aycard, he mentions that Sanson Napollon, a knight of the king’s order and governor of the Bastion of France, is now before Tabarka, that he wants to capture Cape Nègre and abandon the Bastion for it. (Things would definitely be easier with the Tunisian powers than with the rulers of Algeria.)

In this atmosphere Thomas embarked on an archeological expedition to a nearby spot, the ruins in Dougga—which he calls Thugga. It is now the autumn of 1631.

He must have been amazed at the fields of columns standing or lying about, the disorder of the marble objects in the midst of luxuriant vegetation, and never tired of describing and drawing them. Two or three poor villages are spread out nearby. Then suddenly he finds something wonderful!

In the middle of this plain, an imposing monument, not a simple triumphal arch but a majestic, harmonious, even strange mausoleum. Thomas studies the sculptures, the inscriptions. All day long he does not leave it.

In the slowly setting sun, some children from the village come to bring him flatbread, eggs, and sheep’s-milk cheese—he knows there is only one thing for him to do. The most unusual and unexpected thing about this whole mausoleum is certainly this inscription on two parallel but not similar faces; he will copy it down meticulously. He studies the letters for a long time and corrects himself: “Two inscriptions, two scripts,” because he finally understands that the magnificent stele is composed of a bilingual text.

He is not sure he will be able to return soon; a year earlier in his first letter to Aycard, he reported that he had been in the entourage of his then “patron” four leagues from Tunis, at La Calle, “where ancient Utica lay.” He had been drawn there by his curiosity about the Roman past.

Even though he is unable to read any of the signs, he suspects that one of the scripts on the two faces of the stele is Punic. For a moment he muses over the final moments of the Carthaginian presence: he tells himself with tears in his eyes that what he is copying down dates at least from the second century before Christ! So this space, these stones, these signs that he cannot understand, have remained inviolate in this place for more than eighteen centuries!

If one speech, one solemn declaration is inscribed there in the Phoenician language, before (or after) Carthage was abandoned to the flames, the other side would bear the same declaration, but in what language? The language of the Vandals? No. Or that of some other vanished population?

He asks himself no more questions. He sits down. Although his tired eyes are weeping now from the strain, he works away at copying these mysterious signs!

Three days later, back in Tunis, his mind still smarts from the fire of this new enthusiasm. He had no witness, not a single confidant in his entourage, and he feels frustrated. Who will there be to come back to this after him? Who will be able to decipher the strange characters?

He spends days copying the double inscription several times over. He decides to send a copy to Peiresc, who does not respond. His curiosity, or his instinct, faced with the mystery, begins to lapse when he hears no echo. Neither Peiresc nor Aycard seem to think his discovery of any value …

It is then, during the following months, that Thomas’s desire for apostasy occurs: as if, drawn by an obscure call from something far back in time, something unknown and as far back and ancient as these stones in Dougga, his soul regained a sort of equilibrium thanks to this conversion—which he referred to as “a shift.”

In June 1633 a learned man, a Maronite, came through Tunis; he was a scholar of oriental languages and, writes Thomas, “highly respected in Rome” by the pope. His name is Abraham Echellen, and the reason for his being in Tunis is to negotiate the buying back of Christian slaves.

In great excitement, Thomas (from now on Osmann), with the text from Dougga in hand, introduces himself to Echellen.
He will be able to read it!
he thinks eagerly, and waits there respectfully with lowered eyes.

The Levantine studies the copied characters with a magnifying glass for a moment: “This is neither Syrian nor Chaldean,” he asserts. “Perhaps certain characters bear a sort of resemblance to some ancient Egyptian! I shall have to study them at length once I am back in Rome. I shall work at identifying them if you let me have this copy!”

He promises to send Osmann in Tunis the results of what he discovers.

Thus, well before the gazelle reached Cardinal Barberini, this paper with the double inscription, copied by the former slave, ends up in Vatican City. Is put away in the paper archives. Lies dormant there.

As for Peiresc, he will not know what to do with these “hieroglyphs.” Later Glassendi will describe the gazelle from Nubia at length but will disregard these drawings sent by “the Provençal renegade.”

Thomas, good old Thomas d’Arcos, we do not know how or where he dies, whether as a Christian or as a Muslim. Thomas, between two shores, between two beliefs, will be the first person to transmit a bilingual inscription whose mystery will lie dormant for two more centuries.

2
THE RENEGADE COUNT
 

THE YEAR
1815 is the year Napoleon fell from power. The man feared by all the thrones of Europe is locked up for good. The Ancien Régime—its monarchies brought back out of the cupboard, its emigrés back in their châteaus and estates—is reestablished after Waterloo.

1815, or the return of the previous century: in Paris first, but also in Naples where Joachim Murat, king of Italy and brother-in-law of the “Ogre,” has just been shot by firing squad.

In Naples where, as it happens, Countess Adelaide was feeling all alone: Adelaide, wife of Count Borgia, never leaves her dwelling, a veritable museum, the palace of the Borgia family. Her husband, Camille Borgia, the forty-one-year-old son of General Giovanni Paolo Borgia and the nephew of Cardinal Stefano Borgia, has had to choose exile as a precautionary measure, because in his youthful ardor as a sympathizer with the “revolutionaries” of earlier years he had enlisted in Murat’s army as an officer. Then, rather rapidly, he had been promoted to the rank of general.

Having been born in a museum
, Camille Borgia wrote, he had, so to speak,
suckled a passion for antiquities with his milk
. In his current difficulties, he decides to cross the Mediterranean to explore the ruins of Carthage around Tunis—to reflect, among the stones of antiquity, upon the destruction of the empires of this world and finally to fulfill what he believes to be his true vocation, becoming an archeologist.

As 1815 comes to an end and throughout 1816, Countess Adelaide will do her best to make something of her forced solitude. She regularly invites her circle of friends to the ancestral palace to read the chronicle that the count regularly sends her of his “scientific travels.” Had Borgia “fled” to the land of the Moors? No, this was rather more of a stroll, drawing pencil in hand, with a mind inclined to wax philosophical in the midst of ruins, in search of monuments, some of which had been standing intact or nearly so for more than twenty centuries …

And this is how the renegade Neapolitan count will end up following in the footsteps of the Provençal slave of earlier times, Thomas-Osmann d’Arcos!

The count arrives in Tunis on 19 August 1815, carrying a Danish passport: He did in fact have the title of king’s chamberlain in Denmark. Welcomed by the Danish consul in Tunis he is introduced to the bey’s ministers and the diplomatic circle … He sets himself up in the Imperial, the only hotel in the capital with European amenities, and at the same time immediately begins his first archeological tours in the countryside around Tunis. He becomes the friend of a Dutch engineer, J. E. Humbert, who is an officer in the corps of engineers sent there long before and on good terms with several dignitaries serving the Tunisian sovereign.