Noah's Ark tapestry in the Palais Jacques Cœur in Bourges, France
The vulnerable person whose story this is is first seen on the Greek island of Chios convinced that he is being followed by someone who has been sent to kill him. He's living a simple, rustic life in the home of a local woman and feels the need to write the story of his life. From brief references it's clear he's had a different kind of life and has almost accidentally ended up in this place, but is content to be where he is for the moment.
He writes of his childhood when 'the king of France lost his mind', and in his young imagination believed that the monarch's madness infected everything around it. Making life even more miserable is his grey, dank birthplace of Bourges and the arrogant, hypocritical rule of the nobles. War has been inflicting its devastations for several generations and the status quo seems set to go on forever.
I had acquired the vague conviction that the only reason the world was like this was because we lived in the cursed realm of a mad king. Until I was seven, it never occurred to me that this misfortune might be avoided: I could not imagine such a thing as elsewhere, worse or better but certainly different.
At seven, he sees something that charges and changes his imagination for the rest of his life. His father is a lowly furrier and even the skins he works with are variations of grey like the colors of the town, but one day a stranger stops by to try and sell him an unusual animal. In the boy's eyes it appears like a vision of another world that must exist somewhere, and he starts to think there might be an escape from 'rain, cold, darkness, and war' to light and warmth. When he's twenty he marries Macé Léodepart, the youngest daughter of a money-changer, and joins his father-in-law in the business of money, gets involved in the dicey trade of minting coins with a stranger to the town, and from his new perspective understands more clearly than ever the mess France is in. The Mad King has died but his son is in such desperate straits he's put a peasant girl at the head of his fighting forces.
The human race had vanished from this realm; there were only enemy tribes who could not even concede to others the dignity of being a creature of God.
Like Elvira, his companion on Chios, at first we don't really know who this man is, which is a smart tactical move by Jean-Christophe Rufin. The author's version of the man telling us his story comes before a reader realizes his historical significance, unless they have grown up immersed in French history. Instead of an inert and boring merchant found in the pages of serious studies, Jacques Cœur becomes a dreamer with a different vision of what France could be and ideas of how to get there. Like Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell, Rufin's Cœur lives in a time of transition between ages, and is someone not quite of his own time. Actually, there were a number of uncanny resemblances between the two men's lives: both from a class that under normal circumstances would have never reached the heights they did, both traveled to other lands where they acquired vital knowledge, both were beholden to problematic kings for their positions, both solved intractable problems for their king, and both had powerful enemies who gained the ear of the king.
Cœur travels to the lands he's wanted to see since he was seven, and in his eyes the Levant looks like the center of the world with goods, ideas, and people flowing to it from all over. Damascus is the pinnacle of his travels, and here he sees power used to increase pleasure in living, an idea he's never come across before. Gardens, steam baths, food, beautifully made objects, and libraries; he drinks in all of it. And based on what he has seen he comes to believe that merchants and craftsmen, not the nobles and knights who have been the ruin of France, can be the instruments of change for his country.
He returns to France fired up with ambitious projects, and at last knowing exactly what he wants to do, and begins by starting a trading company that will eventually do business and develop contacts everywhere. But it will take persuading Charles VII to see in a different way to truly carry out his vision. Their first meeting, when it finally happens, is a breathtaking scene, the setting where it takes place, and the description of the son of the Mad King whose enemies are everywhere, who uses his obvious physical tics and weaknesses to gain loyalty of those around him, including as it turns out, Jacques Cœur. It's an unforgettable portrait that hovers everything else that happens.
This crooked little man, whose only weapon was the long nose he used to sniff out his visitors and locate his enemies among them, now elicited a surge of total devotion in me. The little smile at the corner of his lips should, however, have warned me. He was stronger than he was prepared to let on, like a hunter disguised as prey, always glad to find a new victim caught in his snare.
Charles VII does have the foresight to see the advantages to him and France of what Cœur is proposing, and step by step changes take place, the king gains a kingdom and power, Cœur gains untold wealth and power, both of which will eventually lead to his downfall, but the country has been set on a different path to the future.
Many of the best books I've read in my life have been historical fiction, but a large number with that label don't do well in my internal ranking of historical fiction. My personal categories are basically: top-notch, competent but nothing special, meh, double meh, godawful. All too many, including extremely popular authors and books, fall into the last two categories and very few into the first. The Dream Maker does. In an afterword Rufin says he kept the example of Marguerite Yourcenar's masterpiece, Memoirs of Hadrian in mind, and it shows. He respects the facts where they are known, but uses the gaps to create his version of Jacques Cœur. For English readers Alison Anderson has given us a really beautiful translation of the book.
Rufin has had an eventful life himself, among other things he was one of the founders of Médecins Sans Frontières. He grew up in the same town of Bourges, not too far from Cœur's childhood house and under the shadow of Palais Jacques Cœur, built at the height of his success and is an interesting combination of the age France was leaving and the new age of the Renaissance they were moving towards. The chateau's latter style was influenced by Cœur's trip to the Levant and a later trip to Florence that was also deeply influential in his life.
There are striking descriptive passages of the places Cœur traveled to and took note of what he saw, such as this one describing the way sunlight and colors interact in hot climates.
The nature here does not waken with the dawn. On the contrary, it is in the evening that the colors blaze and all the fragrances rise. With the appearance of the sun, the plants seem to curl in on themselves, grow pale and motionless in anticipation of the sun's pounding, until sunset.
It's not only places that are closely observed, people are also. There are outstanding portraits of people such Gautier and Marc, two of his valets who served him at different times in his life and for years traveled at his side, Charles VII, and Agnès Sorel, the king's influential mistress and someone Cœur was close to. Rufin posits a deep friendship between the two, which gives an intimate glimpse into the lives of the two at the peak of their success. Perhaps even more vividly brought to life is the transitional time Cœur was living in and his dreams of what could be instead, and how those dreams led him to a Greek island, a hunted man.
Dreams confer nobility upon humankind. We are human because we have access to what does not exist. These riches are not given to everyone, but those who do make their way to that invisible continent return laden with treasures they then share with everyone else.
(The Dream Maker is translated by Alison Anderson and published by independent press Europa Editions; it was originally published in France in 2012.)
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