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?’
CHAPTER 27
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.’