§5
Never again, I had said, will I lay the scene of any story in a real place. So I invented Poictesme: and thereupon—for such, again, was the quaint fashion in which affairs fell out,—Poictesme rebelliously became a real place. . . .
At least it seems to me a real place, nowadays, by every known rule of logic. I find Poictesme is duly listed in modern dictionaries and similar books of reference. A reliable map of it exists. Its longitude is now definitely known to have been just four degrees east, although its latitude, to be sure, has been disputed, as too largely moral. Each one of its leading personages has been commemorated in a biography, and the land’s history is upon public record; its laws and legends have been summarized; a considerable section of its literature has been preserved; in at least one symphony its music endures; and its relics in the way of drawings and paintings and mural decorations and sculpture are fairly numerous.
As for the bibliography of Poictesme, it rivals in bulk, if it does not excel, that of any other French province. You have but to compare Poictesme, for example, with Chalosse, or with Amont, or with Grasivaudan, or with Quercy, or with Velay, to see at once how much more numerous are all logical proofs of the existence of Poictesme. For these other provinces have found but partial and infrequent historians, in publications not ever very widely known: whereas a host of notable and diverse savants—such as Gottfried Johannes Bulg, and Carl Van Doren, and John Frederick Lewistam, and H. L. Mencken, and Paul Verville, and John S. Sumner, and many others,—have year by year increased the bibliography of Poictesme, from every conceivable point of view.
So is it that, when once you have ventured into logic, the evidence for the reality of even such famous realms as Sumeria and Carthage, and of Philistia itself, appears to me less multifariously established than is the reality of Poictesme. So is it that when, in Pliny, let us say, I read of such once notable places as Tacompsos (by some called Thatice), and of Gloploa, and of Rhodata, where a golden cat was worshipped as a god, and of the pleasant island kingdom of Hora, and of Orambis (so curiously situated upon a stream of bitumen), and of Molum, which the Greeks, as you will remember, called Hypaton,—that I then, of course, believe in the reality of every one of these places as vouched for by Roman science, but that, even so, upon the whole, I think the proofs to be more numerous and more clear, to-day, for the existence of Poictesme.
Nor do I find here any need to dwell upon the claims which Poictesme may advance, to-day, to be believed in as an actual place, as compared with the claims of lands for whose existence we have even the irrefutable warrant of Scripture. It may, of course, be that I reason hastily. But to me, in any event, this land of Poictesme appears as real and as readily accessible a country as the land of Teinani, or as the land of Erez, or as the land of Shinar,—wherein, as every Sunday-schoolboy knows, the great Emperor Nimrod ruled over Accad and Erech and Babel and yet other dependencies. ... In fine, I have come to believe in the family-tree of the Counts of Poictesme as completely as I do in that of the Dukes of Edom. And that Bellegarde and Montors and Storisende were once real cities in this actual land standing midway between Montpellier and Castries seems to me as thoroughly demonstrated as that Reheboth and Nineveh and Resen once stood midway between Calneh and Calah.
And I find it droll enough to reflect that all these things were created not as the AEnseis create, but, rather, as though these things had sprouted, a little by a little, out of the trouble which Tunbridge Wells once caused me. For I gratefully recognize that, for twenty-odd years now, Poictesme has been to me a never-failing source of diversion and, at times, of active delight. Without any such sure elation, I recognize also that, for twenty-odd years now, I have lived in Poictesme, as go all practical and serious intents, with occasional brief trips abroad to visit my family and other merely physical intimates.
§6
In any case, this is the last of all the stories of Poictesme. Arid, as I said at outset, it seems queer, now that I appraise the last batch of Mr. Pape’s pictures which has come out of Tunbridge Wells to establish yet more clearly the existence of Poictesme,—yes, it seems very queer, to reflect how prodigally Tunbridge Wells has, in the end, atoned for all the trouble which Tunbridge Wells once caused me.
Ricbmond-in-Virginia
March 1928
Herewith begins the history of the birth and of the triumphing of the great legend about Manuel the Redeemer, whom Gonfal repudiated as blown dust; and Miramon, as an impostor and whom Coth repudiated out of honest love; but whom Guivric accepted, through two sorts of policy; whom Kerin accepted as an honorable old human foible; and Ninzian, as a pathetic and serviceable joke; whom Donander accepted whole-heartedly (to the eternal joy of Donander); and who was accepted also by Niafer, and by Jurgen the pawnbroker, after some little private reservations; and hereinafter is recorded the manner of the great legend’s engulfment of these persons.
BOOK ONE
THE LAST SIEGE OF THE FELLOWSHIP
“They shall be, in the siege, both against Judah and against Jerusalem.”
—Zechariah, xii, 2
—Et la route, fait elle aussi un grand tour?
—Oh, bien certainement, étant donné qu’elle circonvient à la fois la destinée et le bon sens.
—Puisqu’il le faut, alors! dit Jürgen; d’ailleurs je suis toujours dispose’ a gouter n’importe quel breuvage au moins une fois.
—la haulte histoire de Jürgen
Chapter I. A Child’s Talk
They relate how Dom Manuel that was the high Count of Poictesme, and was everywhere esteemed the most lucky and the least scrupulous rogue of his times, had disappeared out of his castle at Storisende, without any reason or forewarning, upon the feast day of St. Michael and All the Angels. They tell of the confusion and dismay which arose in Dom Manuel’s lands when it was known that Manuel the Redeemer—thus named because he had redeemed Poictesme from the Northmen, through the aid of Miramon Lluagor, with a great and sanguinary-magic,—was now gone, quite inexplicably, out of these lands.
For whither Manuel had gone, no man nor any woman could say with certainty. At Storisende he had last been seen by his small daughter Melicent, who stated that Father, mounted on a black horse, had ridden westward with Grandfather Death, on a white one, to a far place beyond the sunset. This was quite generally felt to be improbable.
Yet further inquiry had but made more deep the mystery as to the manner of Dom Manuel’s passing. Further inquiry had disclosed that the only human eyes anywhere which had, or could pretend to have, rested upon Dom Manuel after Manuel had left Storisende were those of a little boy called Jurgen, the son of Coth of the Rocks. Young Jurgen, after having received from his father an in no way unusual whipping, had run away from home, and had not been recaptured until the following morning. The lad reported that during his wanderings he had witnessed, toward dusk, upon Upper Morven, a fearful eucharist in which the Redeemer of Poictesme had very horribly shared. Thereafter—so the child’s tale ran,—had ensued a transfiguration, and a prediction as to the future of Poictesme, and Dom Manuel’s elevation into the glowing clouds of sunset. . . . Now, these latter details had been, at their first rendering, blubbered almost inarticulately. For, after just the initiatory passages of this supposed romance, the parents of Jurgen, in their first rapturous relief at having recovered their lost treasure, had, of course, in the manner of parents everywhere, resorted to such moral altitudes and to such corporal corrections as had disastrously affected the putative small liar’s tale. Then, as the days passed, and they of Poictesme still vainly looked for the return of their great Dom Manuel, the child was of necessity questioned again: and little Jurgen, after sulking for a while, had retold his story without any detected deviation.