John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

ex Löbau, 12 August, 1539

+ Tiedemann Giese

Bishop of Kulm

*

Johannes Dantiscus, Bishop of Ermland: Heilsberg

Your Grace. . As regards the Frauenburg wenches, Sculteti’s hid for a few days in his house. She promised that she would go away together with her children. Sculteti remains in his curia with his focaria , who looks like a beer waitress tainted with every evil. The woman of Doctor Nicolas sent her baggage ahead to Danzig, but she herself stays on at Frauenburg. .

ex Allenstein, 20 October, 1539

Heinrich Snellenburg: Visitator

*

Nicolas Koppernigk: Frauenburg

Sir: I write to you directly in the hope that you may be made to understand the peril into which you have delivered yourself by your stubborn refusal to yield upon the matter of the woman, Anna Schillings. Surely you realise how great are the issues at stake? If it were merely a matter of this focaria , I should not be so intemperate as to hound you thus, but it is more than that, much more, as you must know. On my recommendation, Canon Stanislas Hosius was nominated candidate for the office of Precentor of the Frauenburg Chapter. I shall dare to be frank, my dear Doctor: I do not like Hosius, I do not like what he represents. He is a fanatic. You & I, my friend, are children of another age, a finer & more civilised age: but that age is past. Some years ago I warned you that dark times were coming: that darkness is upon us now, & its avatars are Canon Hosius and his ilk — the inquisitors, the fanatics. I do not like him, as I have said, yet I appointed him to a canonry at Frauenburg, & would see him Precentor: for, like him or not, I must accept him. For Ermland, the future is one of two choices: this province must become either Prussian & Lutheran, or Polish & Catholic. There is no third course. The autonomy of which your uncle was the architect & guardian is about to be taken from us. The choice, then, is clear: whatever our feelings regarding Poland, we must bow to the Jagellon throne, or perish. Now, the Frauenburg Chapter, foolishly allowing itself to be misled by forces who have not the good of Ermland, nor Frauenburg, at heart, has elected the unspeakable Sculteti to be Precentor, thereby thwarting my carefully laid plans. This is intolerable. Do those damned clerics among whom you have chosen to live not realise that Sculteti is backed by that faction at the Papal Court which imagines that Ermland can be brought under the direct control of Rome? Even if this were feasible, which it is not, Rome rule would spell disaster for all of us. We must cleave to Poland! It is the only course. I must have Hosius: & the corollary of that need is that I must destroy Sculteti. I shall use whatever weapons against him that I can find. The scandalous manner of his life is one such weapon, perhaps the most lethal. I trust that these revelations, which I am foolish to commit to paper, will make clear why, for so many years, I have striven to force you to be rid of this woman. This shall be my last warning; ignore it, & you shall be in grave danger of going down along with Sculteti when he falls. That is all I have to say. Vale.

ex Heilsberg, 13 March, 1540

+ Johannes Dantiscus

Bishop of Ermland

*

Johannes Dantiscus, Bishop of Ermland: Heilsberg

Reverendissime in Christo Pater et Domine Clementissime! I have received Your Rev. Lordship’s letter. I understand well enough Your Lordship’s grace & good will toward me: which he has condescended to extend not only to me, but to other men of great excellence. It is, I believe, certainly to be attributed not to my merits, but to the well-known goodness of Your Rev. Lordship. Would that some time I should be able to deserve these things. I certainly rejoice, more than can be said, to have found such a Lord & Patron.

I have done what I neither would nor could have left undone, whereby I hope to have given satisfaction to Your Rev. Lordship’s warning.

ex Frauenburg, 3 July, 1540

Your Rev. Lordship’s most devoted

Nicolas Copernicus

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Tiedemann Giese, Bishop of Kulm: Löbau

My dear Tiedemann: Scuiteti has been expelled from the Chapter, & banished by Royal Edict. He will go to Rome, I think, as do all outcasts. His focaria , the Hesse woman, has disappeared. What a lot of trouble she caused! It occurs to me that our Frauenburg is aptly named. I have issued yet another edict of my own against Frau Schillings, but she refuses to go. I am touched, truly, by her devotion to a sick old man, & have not the heart to make her understand that it would be altogether best if she were to go. Anyway, where would she go to? So I await, without great interest, Dantiscus’s next move. Do I seem calm? I am not. I am afraid, Tiedemann, afraid of what the world will think to do to me that it has not done already: the filthy world that will not let me be, that comes after me always, a black monster, dragging its damaged wings in its wake. Ah, Tiedemann. .

ex Frauenburg, 31 December, 1540

*

Waterborne he comes, at dead of night, sliding sleek on the river’s gleaming back, snout lifted, sniffing, under the drawbridge, the portcullis, past the drowsing sentry. Brief scrabble of claws on the slimed steps below the wall, brief glint of a bared tooth. In the darkness for an instant an intimation of agony and anguish, and the night flinches. Now he scales the wall, creeps under the window, grinning. In the shadow of the tower he squats, wrapt in a black cloak, waiting for dawn. Comes the knocking, the pinched voice, the sly light step on the stair, and how is it that I alone can hear the water. ?

I, Georg Joachim von Lauchen, called Rheticus, will now set down the true account of how Copernicus came to reveal to a world wallowing in a stew of ignorance the secret music of the universe. There are not many who will admit that if I had not gone to him, the old fool would never have dared to publish. When I arrived in Frauenburg I was little more than a boy (a boy of genius, to be sure!), yet he recognised my brilliance, that was why he listened to me, yes. Princes of Church and State had in vain urged him to speak, but my arguments he heeded. To you, now, he is Copernicus, a titan, remote and unknowable, but to me he was simply Canon Nicolas, preceptor and, yes! friend. They say I am mad. Let them. What do I care for a jealous world’s contumely? They drove me out, denied me my fame and honoured name, banished me here to rot in this Godforgotten corner of Hungary that they call Cassovia — yet what of it? lam at peace at last, after all the furious years. An old man now, yes, a forlorn and weary wanderer come to the end of the journey, I am past caring. But I don’t forgive them! No! The devil shit on the lot of you.

*

My patron, the Count, is a noble gentleman. Cultured, urbane, brilliant, generous to a fault, he reminds me in many ways of myself when I was younger. We speak the same language — I mean of course the language of gentlemen , for in Latin it’s true he is a little. . rusty. Not like Koppernigk, whose schoolman’s Latin was impeccable, while for the rest, well, his people were, after all, in trade. The Count saw in me one of his own kind, and welcomed me into the castle here (as house physician) when the others chose to forget me and the great work I have done. He dismisses with characteristic hauteur the vile slanders they fling at me, and laughs when they whisper to him behind their hands that I am mad. The Count, unfortunately, is mad, a little. It comes from the mother’s side, I think: bad blood there without a doubt. Yes, I must exercise more caution, for he is capricious. Be less arrogant in his presence, grovel now and then, yes yes. Still, he needs me, we both know that. What, I ask, without me, would he do for the conversation, the intellectual stimulation, which save him from going altogether out of his mind? This country is populated with swineherds and witches and cretinous priests. I was a new star in his sparse firmament. Anyway, why should I worry? — the world is full of Counts, but there is only one Doctor Rheticus. It is not, the world, I mean, full of Counts, so go easy. What was I. ? Copernicus, of course. Forty years ago — forty years! — I came to him.