The Fire (25 page)

‘Although my sister, Letizia, and I did not make the acquaintance of Maria Cosway until Napoleon came to power, from then we have remained the closest of friends. I am myself today a sponsor of the girls’ school she founded just north of here, at Lodi. We have asked Maria to tell a story involving this very pyramid in which we are seated today, and its connection with her late husband, Richard Cosway, who has recently died in London. The tale she will tell she has never revealed in full to anyone – not even to us ourselves. It took place more than thirty years ago, in 1786, when she went with her husband to Paris. And something happened there that may be of deep concern to everyone here in this chamber.’

The cardinal took his seat and deferred to Maria.

As if uncertain how to proceed, she removed her moleskin gloves and set them aside. With her fingertip she took
a bit of the soft candle wax from the nearby sconce and rolled it into a ball between her thumb and forefinger.

‘Ma chère madame,’
said Cardinal Fesch, placing his hand over hers to prompt her to continue.

Maria smiled and nodded.

‘It was in September of 1786,’ she began in her soft, lightly inflected Italian, ‘and my husband Richard Cosway and I had recently crossed
la Manche
, the English Channel, from London. Our reputations had preceded us. We were both award-winning painters, and our salon in London was known to be the most sought-after. Richard had an important commission in France to paint the children of the duc d’Orléans, cousin to Louis XVI, and a great friend of my husband’s English patron, the Prince of Wales, now King George IV. At Paris, we were feted by artists and nobility alike. Our friend and colleague, the painter Jacques-Louis David, arranged our presentation at the French court to the king and Marie Antoinette.

‘A word must be said here of my husband, Richard. Many envious people in London had long thought ill of him, for he’d come from poverty and had risen very far. Richard did little to assuage these enemies, but bore himself with extravagance and ostentation at all times. He favored a coat of mulberry satin embroidered with strawberries, a large sword that dragged upon the ground, hats heavily laden with ostrich plumes, and shoes with red heels. In the press he was called a “macaroni” – a fop – and his appearance was likened to his own pet monkey, who some maliciously called his natural child.

‘But only privately known was that Richard was also one of the great virtuosi, or arbiters of taste, a connoisseur and collector of rare and valuable antiquities. Not only the famous Gobelin tapestries, but he also possessed twenty-six rooms of rareties: an Egyptian mummy, the relics of saints, Chinese
ivories, rare esoteric works from Arabia and India, and even what he believed to be a tail feather of the phoenix.

‘Richard himself was of mystical bent, a follower of earlier visionaries like Emanuel Swedenborg. In London, along with my brother, George, an architectural student, we’d attended the private lectures of Thomas Taylor, “the Platonist,” who’d recently translated secret doctrines of the earliest Greek esoteric writers for avid subscribers to such mysteries, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Blake.

‘This background is important. For it appears that my husband, unknown to me, had discovered through the duc d’Orléans something involving a great mystery that had been buried for nearly a thousand years in France, a mystery that was about to resurface into the light, not long after that morning, thirty years ago, when we first arrived in France.

‘I remember the day. It was Sunday, September 3, 1786, a golden morning that brought Richard and me on an outing to the Halle au Blé, the famous Paris grain market, an enormous rotunda where wheat, peas, rye, lentils, oats, and barley were all sold. It has since burned down, but was then known as one of the most beautifully designed buildings in Paris, with curving stairways, a lofty dome with skylights that flooded everything with daylight like a fairy palace floating through the sky.

‘It was there, in that magical, silvery light, that we encountered the person who would soon change everything. But at that moment, so long ago, I could hardly have foreseen how my life and the lives of my family would be so completely altered by events that had just been set in motion.

‘The American painter John Trumbull had arrived in the company of his friend, a tall, pale man with copper-blond hair, at whose residence on the Champs-Élysées Trumbull himself was staying. Trumbull’s host, we soon learned, was the delegate from the new American Republic to the French
court, a statesman whose own fame was shortly to eclipse all our own. His name was Thomas Jefferson.

‘By all appearances, Mr Jefferson was completely captivated by the Halle au Blé; he spoke in rhapsodies about the beauties of its design, and was thrilled with a rush of excitement when John Trumbull mentioned the architectural works of my brother, George, a fellow at the Royal Academy in London.

‘Mr Jefferson insisted upon accompanying us throughout the day. From our meeting at Paris, we four spent the afternoon in the countryside at St Cloud, where we dined. Then we canceled all evening plans and went instead to Montmartre, to the outdoor garden at the Ruggieris’, the family of pyrotechnicians who’d created a lavish display of fireworks; the play “The Triumph of Vulcan” was performed, about the mysteries of that great underworld figure whom the Greeks called Hephaistos, god of the forge.

‘It was this extravagant dramatic display of the underworld mysteries, it seems, that prompted my husband, Richard, to speak so openly to Mr Jefferson about the great pyramids and fire temples, resembling those of Egypt, that were built in the wilderness pleasure gardens just outside Paris – like those of Parc Monceau, the famous estate of our French patron, the duc d’Orléans. My husband shared with the duc a deep interest in the knowledge of hidden things.

‘And just as Jefferson had succeeded Benjamin Franklin as emissary to France, the duc d’Orléans himself had succeeded Franklin as Grand Master of the Paris Freemasons. Their secret initiations often took place among the grottoes and classical ruins of his gardens.

‘But more intriguing to Thomas Jefferson was Richard’s allusion to another mysterious spot, farther from Paris, en route to Versailles, which was created by the duc’s close friend, Nicolas Racine de Monville. According to the duc, so my husband revealed to us that night, this ninety-acre
park, filled with strange mystical symbols, concealed a secret as old as the pyramids – indeed, it boasted a pyramid that was an exact replica of this one. Mozart’s
Magic Flute
had been performed there.

‘There was something more intriguing still about the place – so much so that Mr Jefferson lost no time in abandoning his ministerial work and arranging a jaunt, only a few days later, into the countryside – with me alone – to view this hidden garden.

‘Ever since the tale of that first biblical lost garden, we humans always seem to value things more once they’ve been lost. In the case of Monsieur Racine de Monville, with the dawn of the French Revolution not far away, he would soon lose his fortune as well as his gardens. The duc d’Orléans would fare far worse: dubbing himself Philippe Égalité, he would side with the Revolution, would vote to condemn his cousin, the king, but be guillotined by the revolutionaries, nonetheless.

‘As for Thomas Jefferson and me – we
found
something that day in de Monville’s garden, something neither of us had expected: the key to an ancient lost wisdom. The garden itself provided the key.

‘It was called le Désert de Retz. In the ancient French parlance, this meant “the Wilderness of the King” – the Lost Domaine.’

The Tale of the Artist and the Architect

But gardens also exist in our collective subconscious. The garden was man’s first domain, and in the course of centuries he gave it numerous names meaning the Earthly Paradise, Eden. The hanging gardens of Babylon were one of the seven wonders of the world… Our efforts to recreate it always remain works of the imagination.

– Olivier Choppin de Janvry,
Le Désert de Retz

I cannot think but that he meant to imitate the Tower of Babel.

– Thomas Blaikie, Royal Gardener, speaking of the Desert of Retz

We set out from Paris that Friday, September 8, with Mr Jefferson’s elegant carriage and grays, and we crossed the river into the glorious countryside. But nothing would prove more glorious than our destination, the Désert de Retz.

One abandoned the carriage and entered the park on foot through a grotto opening into an enchanted landscape, resembling a Watteau painting of late summer colors, hazy purples and mauves and rust. The rolling hills and meandering paths throughout the park were dotted by copses of copper beeches, pomegranates, mimosas, along with two-hundred-year-old sycamores, maples, lindens, and hornbeams: all trees with meaning for the initiated eye.

At each turn throughout the vista, interesting structures had been created that seemed to appear through sleight of hand, peeking from within a hidden grove or rising magically from a lake.

The stone pyramid was the one Jefferson noted with that same excitement he’d manifested when first viewing the Halle au Blé.

‘A model of the tomb of Caius Cestius,’ he said. ‘I recognize it from its prototype, that famous Roman structure shaped like an Egyptian pyramid, a “mountain of fire,” of which your countryman, Piranesi, made so many popular engravings.’

He added, ‘The original of it at Rome possesses unusual properties. The square base measures ninety by ninety – a
number of great significance, for it sums up to three hundred and sixty, the number of degrees in a circle. “Squaring the Circle”! That was the most challenging and important puzzle for the ancients, concealing several meanings. They weren’t just trying to discover some dry mathematical formula that would enable them to convert the area of a circle into that of a square, but much, much more. For them, squaring the circle meant a deep kind of
transformation:
transforming the circle that represents the celestial realm into the square, that is, the material world. Bringing heaven to earth, as one might say.’

‘The “Alchemical Marriage” – the marriage of Spirit and Matter,’ I agreed. ‘Or one might also say, the wedding of the head and the heart. My husband, Richard, and I have been students of ancient mysteries like this one over a great, great many years.’

Jefferson laughed, seeming slightly embarrassed by his own unsolicited diatribe.

‘As long ago as that?’ he said with a winning smile. ‘Yet you look to be no more than twenty, an unlikely age for an attractive young woman to be impressed with the overweening pontifications of an elder statesman like myself.’

‘Twenty-six,’ I told him, returning his smile. ‘But Mr Cosway is just
your
age. So I’ve grown accustomed on a daily basis to the benefits of such thought-provoking wisdom! I hope you’ll share even more.’

Jefferson seemed quite pleased to hear it, and he tucked my arm beneath his as we strolled on deeper into the park.

‘A wedding of the head and the heart, you say?’ He repeated my remark, still smiling down at me, rather wryly, from his lofty height. ‘Ancient wisdom, perhaps, my dear lady. But I find my own head and heart more often bickering with each other, rather than preparing themselves for a trip down the aisle to the altar of marital bliss!’

‘What concern could these organs of yours possibly have, that they should be so at odds about it with each other?’ I asked him with great amusement.

‘Can you not imagine?’ he asked me, quite unexpectedly. I shook my head and hoped that the shadow of my bonnet concealed the flush I felt rushing to my face.

Luckily, his next words relieved me considerably. ‘Then I promise, I shall write you all my thoughts on the topic one day quite soon.’ Then he added, ‘But for the moment at least – as the head is in charge of all mathematical and architectural problems such as the bearing weight of an arch or the squaring of a circle, it informs me that this nine-by-nine square of our pyramid has another, more important meaning. When we consult Herodotus, we discover that this very same proportion appeared in the layout of the ancient city of Babylon, a city of nine by nine miles. This evokes a fascinating mathematical puzzle you may not have heard of – a “magic square” – where each box of this nine-by-nine matrix must be filled with a number, in such fashion that each row, each column, and each diagonal will sum to the same total.

‘My predecessor as American delegate to France, Benjamin Franklin, was an expert in magic squares. They were common to the cultures of China, Egypt, and India, he believed. He amused himself completing them whilst sitting in Congress. He could create one, he said, as quickly as he could jot down the numbers in their boxes, and he discovered many ingenious solutions to the formulas.’

‘Did Dr Franklin discover a formula for the square of Babylon?’ I asked, relieved to be set upon a safer path of inquiry than the direction in which our last had appeared to be headed.

I confess, though, I was reticent to mention the true reason for my interest. I’d done copies myself, for Richard’s collection of rare esoteric works, of Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1506
copper engraving of a magic square, which showed its relationship to the golden mean of Pythagoras and
The Elements
of Euclid.

‘Franklin did even better!’ Jefferson seemed delighted that I should ask. ‘Dr Franklin believed that in re-creating the ancient formulas for
all
of these squares he could demonstrate that any city built upon such a grid had been created to invoke the specific powers of that formula, along with its specific number, planet, or god.

‘Franklin was, of course, a Freemason like our General Washington, and a bit of a mystic. But in truth, there is little that is mystical in such an idea. All great civilizations in ancient times, from China to the Americas, built a new city whenever they first established their new rule. That’s what “civilization” means, after all – c
ivitas
, of the city, from Sanskrit
çi
, “to settle, to lie down, to put in roots,” as opposed to the savage or nomad who builds structures he can collapse and carry with him that are often round. By creating cities in the form of a square with such magical properties, the civilized ancients were hoping to invoke a new world order, an order that can only be created by sedentary peoples – architects of order, if you will.’