“Nothing in the library was burned, not the books?” he asked, puzzled by their absence.
Jean Valette dropped into a yellow upholstered chair and motioned for Hart to take the one on the other side of the desk. Throwing one leg over the other, he sat sideways on his hip and gestured toward the empty shelves.
“I read them all. I kept only the ones worth reading.”
Hart was not sure he understood. His eyes wandered again to the vacant shelves that climbed three stories to the ceiling. It would have been impossible to read all the books they must have once contained.
“I read them all,” repeated Jean Valette, amused at Hart’s incredulity. “I didn’t finish very many of them, and with some of them I read only the first few pages, enough to assure me that I was wasting my time, that the author was only repeating, and usually not very well, what someone else had said before. Most things written, whether the author knows it or not, are purely derivative.”
“And these are all you kept?” asked Hart, nodding toward the few dozen on the shelves behind where Jean Valette was half-reclining in his chair.
“Yes, but as you can imagine, it took years to get to this point, years spent night after night in this library of diminishing volumes, before I finally got rid of everything that is not necessary.”
Hart observed the glowing confidence in his eyes, the proud sense of accomplishment. He had seen something of that look before, mainly on the faces of winning candidates on the night of their election. He had seen it on full display the first time Robert Constable won the presidency. But that paled in comparison to what he now was witnessing. The look on the face of Jean Valette had nothing to do with ego, with triumph over someone else. It was the pride of his own achievement, one that owed nothing to what anyone else might think about it.
“The other books, the ones you didn’t want to keep: some of them, I imagine, quite old; many of them, perhaps, first editions-you didn’t…?”
“Burn them? I should have, burned them for all the error they contain; but no, I gave them to universities mainly, and other repositories of useless learning. Did you ever read Rousseau?” he asked suddenly. “You should. You’ll learn more about the foundation of the modern world, the one in which we live, than all the other things written since. And then, after that, if you read Nietzsche, you will have the beginnings of an understanding of the crisis which for the most part we don’t even know we’re in.”
Jean Valette’s eye was drawn, almost reluctantly, as it seemed, to the only photograph, indeed the only object other than a reader’s lamp, on the desk. It was a picture, a very old picture, of a young woman.
“My wife,” he explained with a sad, distant look as he struggled with his emotions. Embarrassed, he sat up straight, took a deep breath, and emitted a gentle, almost shy, laugh.
“More than forty years now, and every time I look at her, the same thing. Worse, really, as I get older; worse with each year I know I’ve missed. I had a feeling-I hope you don’t mind my saying this-that we had this in common, that you would know what this feeling is like. When I started following your career, I was struck by how beautiful your wife was. I was certain that you must have fallen in love with her the first time you saw her.”
The look in Jean Valette’s eyes, the deep sympathy in his voice: Hart felt a bond, an attachment that he had seldom felt with anyone. He remembered, as if it were yesterday, the moment he first saw Laura, and the utter certainty, the strange, miraculous certainty, that if he never saw her again he would never forget her face, that if they never exchanged a word, she would always be a part of him.
“Yes, that’s exactly what happened,” he confessed. “The very moment.”
“There are things we know instantly, or never know at all. I was young, and very rich, and from one of the oldest families in France. If I was not the most handsome of men, there were those who thought that, even leaving the money aside, I was not without charm. I was, in other words, quite full of myself. And then I saw her, and I forgot about my own existence. I did not exist without her. I saw her. That was all it took: one look, a smile, a slight, shy hesitation in her eyes, and then the certainty, that feeling you can never know again. I was in love, and so was she. It was perfect; more than perfect: enchanting. We were married, and we had two years, two years that passed like two days, and then we were to have a child, and just like that, she was gone, died in childbirth along with the child.”
Jean Valette tightened his left hand into a fist as a shudder passed through him, and then stared straight ahead until he had himself under control. His gaze softened, became, as it were, more forgiving of what he thought a failure in himself.
“My life was over and I was only twenty-four. For two years, I did nothing, nothing at all, except stare at her picture and wonder how long I would have to wait to die. It took a long time, but I kept hearing her voice-there are times I still hear it now-telling me she wanted me to live, to do something of importance with whatever life I had left. I knew that whatever I did, it would never again by interrupted by happiness. That’s when I went back and resumed my study of serious things. That’s when I decided I would try to write something-not right away, but when I was ready, which I knew would not be for many years-that might be worth reading.”
More than what Jean Valette said, the manner in which he said it, the smooth cadence, the deep resonance of his voice, gave Hart the feeling that what he was going to hear this evening he would never hear from anyone again. Among the other strange eccentricities of Jean Valette, there was nothing conventional in the way he saw the world. That was what more than anything else held Hart’s attention, what he could not get over: the way that Jean Valette seemed to see everything from a distance, a stranger in his own time.
“And I finally did, just a few years ago, after endless years of study, after years of dealing with all these supposedly important people in the world of politics and finance. I wrote the book I wanted to write, the one in which something of what will happen-must happen-in the future is foretold.”
He reached inside one of the three drawers just below the top of the desk, that gift for infidelity in all the joy of life, and pulled out a thick, four-hundred-page manuscript.
“Of course no one would publish it.” A wry grin cut a jagged line across his mouth. “One publisher told me that probably only ten people in the world would understand it. If he included himself, the number should be nine. It was my fault, really. I had not yet learned how to lie, to tell the truth in a way that everyone who would be offended by it would not be able to discover it.” He tapped two fingers on the manuscript. “And now, after I don’t know how many revisions, it is finally finished.”
“Will you take it back to that same publisher?”
“Last I heard, he was in an asylum. Driven mad, they say, by his fear about the future. That’s my fault as well, I suppose,” he said with what, if it was not satisfaction, was at the very least cruel indifference.
“Your fault? I don’t understand.”
“He turned down the manuscript, rejected what I had written.”
“Yes, but that still doesn’t explain why he went mad. Publishers reject things all the time.”
“He did not know that The Four Sisters owned the company that owned his company. I did not think it fair to tell him that when I asked if he would like to publish what I had written. I did not want to do anything that would affect his unbiased judgment. He made his decision,” he said with a shrug, “and I made mine. I could have had him fired, but instead I just made sure he knew that from that point forward his future was in my hands. The strain of worrying whether each day might be his last seems to have been more than he could handle.” A thin smile floated over his mouth. “You look shocked. Do you think he would have felt in any way responsible if I had suffered a breakdown because of his rejection of what I had done? I know the man. He would not have given it a second thought. Why should I? Remember, I did not do anything except acquaint him with the reality of his situation. In a way, it’s no different than what happened with Robert Constable, or for that matter, what is about to happen to his wife and to Irwin Russell. They were all the prisoners of their own ambitions, and their own fears.”