Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

The false count navigated wearily through the hot, suffocating ballroom, his head pounding from the haughty chatter, the garish laughter, and the incessant, relentless music, his eyes assaulted by the sparks from the spinning Catherine wheels and the gloriously outlandish costumes of giraffes, peacocks, and other exotic animals that paraded before him.

It was on nights like these that he missed the Orient most. But he knew those days were long, long gone.

He cast his tired eyes around the great room, feeling every inch the impostor that he was. Papier-mâché animal heads sitting precariously on powdered wigs stared down at him and tall feathers tickled at his nostrils as, all around him, the guests at the Palais des Tuileries mingled and danced with abandon. Pearls and diamonds ensnared his gaze everywhere he turned, shimmering under the light of hundreds of candles that carelessly soiled the carpets with mounds of molten wax. It wasn’t his first ball, nor would it be his last. He knew he would suffer many more evenings like tonight’s bal de la jungle , the jungle ball — more dreadful displays of unbridled pomp, more throwaway conversations, more unabashed flirtations. It was all part of the new life he’d created for himself, and his presence was expected — anticipated, even — at occasions like these. He also knew the pain wouldn’t end here: In the days and nights to come, he would have to endure endless, giddy retellings, in countless salons, of the evening’s public glories and of its more private, salacious goings-on.

It was a price he had to pay for access, and access was what he needed if he was ever to succeed, although, with each passing year, that success seemed more and more remote.

It was, truly, an impossible task.

Often, as tonight, he would find himself wandering, lost in his thoughts, trying to remember who he really was, what he was doing here, what his life was really about.

It didn’t always come to him that easily.

More and more frequently, he was finding it hard to keep his creation at bay and not fully lose himself in his false persona. The temptation hounded him at every step. Each day, he passed scores of poor folk in the streets, men and women who would give their right arm for the life he enjoyed — the life they believed he was enjoying. He wondered if he hadn’t struggled enough, if he hadn’t hidden enough, if he hadn’t been alone long enough. He felt tempted to abandon his quest and relinquish the role that had been entrusted to him in that dungeon in Tomar all those years ago, and to embrace his outwardly fortunate position, settle down, and live out the rest of his days in pampered comfort and — more important — in normalcy.

It was a temptation that was getting harder and harder to dispel.

His journey to Paris had been anything but straightforward.

He’d managed to slip away from Naples, but he knew he wasn’t safe anywhere, certainly not in Italy, and that di Sangro would not rest until he found him. He had seen it in the prince’s eyes; he also knew the prince had the money and the manpower to track him down. And so he set out to muddy his trail, establishing new identities wherever he went before moving on and leaving behind confusing fabrications as to their backgrounds and their movements.

He had carefully seeded deceptions in Pisa, Milan, and Orléans on his way to the great city, taking on new names as he traveled forth: the Comte Bellamare, the Marquis d’Aymar, the Chevalier Schoening. More names would — some justly, others falsely — come to be associated with him in the years to come. For now, however, he was comfortably settled into his Paris apartments and his new persona, that of the Comte de St. Germain.

Paris suited the count. It was a huge, bustling city — the largest human settlement in Europe — and it attracted plenty of travelers and adventurers, the boisterous as well as the discreet. His appearance there would be diluted by those of countless others. Here he could meet other travelers, men who, like him, had been to the Orient and who may have come across the symbol of the tail-eater in their travels. It was also a city of learning and discourse, and a repository of great knowledge, with rich libraries and untold collections of manuscripts, books, and relics, including the ones that were of particular interest to him: those pilfered from the Orient during the Crusades, and those confiscated after the suppression of the Templars almost five centuries earlier. The ones that could house the missing piece of the puzzle that had ambushed his life all those years ago.

He arrived in Paris at a time when the great city was in transition. Radical thinkers were challenging the twin tyrannies of monarchy and Church. The city was bubbling with contradiction and upheaval, with enlightenment and intrigue — intrigue that St. Germain put to good use.

Within weeks of his arrival, he managed to befriend the king’s minister of war and with his help, he insinuated himself into the king’s orbit. Impressing the aristocrats wasn’t hard. His knowledge of chemistry and physics, gleaned from his years in the East, were enough to regale and hoodwink the debauched buffoons. His familiarity with foreign lands and his mastery of numerous languages — his French in Paris was as impeccable as his Italian was in Naples, to add to his fluent mastery of English, Spanish, Arabic, and his native Portuguese — were cautiously wielded if and when his notability needed an additional boost. He was soon comfortably ensconced in the king’s coterie of pampered acolytes.

With his credentials established, he was able to resume his quest. He smooth-talked his way into the great houses of the nobility and into the most private of collections. He ingratiated himself with the clergy in order to delve through the libraries and crypts of their monasteries. He also read extensively, immersing himself in the travelogues of Tavernier, the studies of pathology of Morgagni, the medical treatises of Boerhaave, and other great works that were appearing at the time. He’d studied Thomas Fuller’s Pharmacopoeia Extemporanea and Luigi Cornaro’s intriguing Discourses on the Temperate Life in great detail — the man had died a vibrant ninety-eight-year old. And while he gained a great wealth of knowledge from these works, he was no closer to a solution to his impossible quest.

The symbol of the tail-eater was nowhere to be found, nor did there seem to be any medical or scientific clues to overcoming the critical deficiency of the substance.

He hovered between enthusiasm and despair. New leads would excite him, and then, with each dead end, the doubts about his mission would resurface and further undermine his resolve. He wished he could share his burden with someone else, draft someone to help him and perhaps even take over from him, but after seeing how even the vaguest smell of it had turned di Sangro into an obsessed predator, he couldn’t bring himself to risk approaching anyone else.

Many nights, he’d wonder whether ridding himself of the substance and of its demonic formulation would release him from its slavery. He managed to go without it a few times, but never for more than a week or two. And then a renewed sense of destiny would overcome him, and he’d resign himself to the only life he knew.

“I beg your pardon, my dear sir.”

The woman’s voice jarred him out of his tortured daze.

He turned to see a bizarre herd of jovial revelers standing before him. Their expressions ranged from giddy to confused. An older woman nearing sixty in a ballooning sheep’s costume gingerly inched forward from among them. Something about her sent shards of distress cutting through him. She studied him with a curious, perplexed expression on her round face before extending her hand and introducing herself as Madame de Fontenay. The name drove the shards in deeper. He masked his unease as he gave her a slight bow and took her hand.