Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

I broke down crying. I was only fifteen years old! There before me was Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, marquis of Vauban, marshal of the realm, and goodness knows what else. A living myth, the man who had stormed sixty-eight fortresses, the great fortifier. All these things. And I was nothing but a boy, somewhere along the road toward becoming a man.

“You’re crying!” said Vauban.

I got to my feet.

“Since you have been kind enough to receive me, Your Excellence, in spite of my subordination, may I make one final appeal?”

He said nothing. I took his silence as a license to continue.

“Allow me to bid farewell to Jeanne.”

He took an eternity to answer. I had no notion what to do, pinned to the floor like some scarecrow.

“You and I are going to agree on something,” he said at last. “Given that you would be returning home in disgrace, I have an alternate proposal: that you continue your engineering studies in the Royal Academy at Dijon. On my recommendation, naturally. In exchange, I ask only that you never come anywhere near Bazoches or my home again, much less my daughter. You will give the place a berth of thirty miles. Your studies, until they are completed, and all your academic costs will be paid by me. You will want for nothing. Accept.”

“May I see Jeanne? It will only take a few minutes.”

He got up from the table like a fury. “And you never even bothered to hide the fact you are Catalan, and from the south! I know your kind very well, I worked along that frontier for over a decade, fortifying places against the zealous, rebellious natives. As a matter of fact, I believe I’m more than entitled to ask you a vital question: In your heart, which king do you owe allegiance to? The king of Spain or the king of France?”

“ Monsieur ,” I said, “until two days ago, I served only the kingdom of engineering.”

“If you would seek to flatter me, know that I am as immune to obsequiousness as I am to wine. We moderate men never get indigestion.”

I did not know what reply to make, if indeed the marquis was expecting one. This was all beside the point. It would cost me nothing to persist: “Does it seem so unusual and dangerous to you, sir, that I bid her farewell?”

“Bid me farewell,” he insisted, a rare intrigue showing on his face, “and as well as a place at Dijon, and your maintenance, you will receive the sum of one thousand francs — to spend as you see fit.”

My eyes brimmed once more with tears, but before my composure fled me entirely, I managed to say: “ Je l’aime. ”

Something inside the marquis gave way. He had provoked me, I realize, in order to find out if I was different from Verboom. That Antwerp butcher had always been an ambitious reptile, and to him, marriage was a means to an end. The person before him now was renouncing everything for the sake of a farewell.

If all was lost, I wanted to see Jeanne one last time. Even if I had to push the marquis himself aside to get to her. But then he softened and, in a voice both calm and resigned, said: “Sit back down, you fool.”

He dandled a small bronze figure in his hands for a few seconds. He turned it over in his fingers. It was a twenty-four-point star, a small-scale version of the fortifications he’d built at Neuf-Brisach.

He looked out the window over the Bazoches courtyard, the fields beyond. Without turning to face me, he said: “However, nothing changes the fact that you bit Verboom.”

“Yes, sir.”

“On the buttocks.”

“The left buttock.”

“I have received word from him: Your canines went sufficiently deep that he is still not fit to ride a horse.”

“I am very sorry.”

“You are a liar.”

“I mean, monsieur , for the trouble I caused you and all of Bazoches.”

Another long pause before he spoke again. “Tell me: Do you take me for a dolt?”

“No!” I cried, jumping to my feet. “Sir, no!”

“Often,” he continued, as though not hearing me, “I have seen you come to dinner with your back covered in straw. The same straw that happens to also be stuck to the back of Jeanne’s dress.”

I thought he was about to come down hard on me, but instead, what followed was a sigh.

“Marriage. . yes. . that citadel which all without wish to enter, and all within wish to get out from.” He looked me in the eye. “But you ought to know, Cadet Zuviría, that of all the fortresses created by man, matrimony is the most impregnable. Do you take my meaning?”

“Can I see her?”

“What you shall do is go to the classroom and apply yourself to a double lesson of strategy. As shown by recent events, tactics are a considerable weak point: If you attack from behind, take note, you ought always to go for the windpipe, not the rump.”

Clearly, the Ducroix brothers were extraordinary teachers, and Vauban was one of a kind. In the early hours of the day following my reprieve, he took me by the elbow, and the two of us went for a walk in the castle grounds.

He walked with a cane, but it did nothing to alter his haughtiness. Every now and then he stopped before an apple tree, picked an apple with his free hand, and took two or three bites before throwing it to one side. (Nothing wrong with that — the trees were his property.) More often than that, he stopped in order to cough, spit, and then dry his mouth on one of the large white gold-trimmed handkerchiefs he kept in his tunic pockets.

“Up until now, you have been learning about fortifying cities,” he said. “And you have not done badly, according to the Ducroix brothers. From now on, you will apply yourself to becoming an expert in the art of laying siege to them.”

“But monsieur ,” I said, smiling, “if I’ve learned anything, it’s that, because of your very own fortification methods, well-designed defenses are altogether impossible to break through.”

Stopping, he looked at me and smiled indulgently.

I have had the good fortune — undeserved — of meeting a good number of the geniuses of my age — such as in the arts, Mozart (poor boy, I twice destroyed him at billiards), in terms of moral rectitude, Washington (drier than salt cod), and above all, Rousseau. Not Voltaire! Not that upstart, that despicable pipsqueak. Even Franklin and Danton ought to be considered universal geniuses. But, looked at properly, each of these distinguished himself for contributing a single idea to the human race, only one. Vauban had the immense merit of making two. First, he designed the perfect system for immuring cities. Following that, exceeding or, even, in a sense, nullifying his own work, a method for storming them.

I had my folder under my arm and Vauban drummed his fingers impatiently. “A design of yours. Come, let’s be seeing it!”

I held the plan up before him, and he considered it for a few moments. . “ Ggnnnnn. . Yes, fourteen. . fifteen days. Fifteen, at the most.”

“Pardon?”

He looked up at me. “It would withstand a siege of fifteen days. Not one more.”

“But Your Excellence,” I protested, laughing a little, “that’s impossible.”

Holding his forefinger in front of my nose, he said: “Never use that word in my presence.” Then he asked me, me, the person who had designed the project, how I would take over that fabulous amalgamation of bastions, moons, half-moons, and superimposed buttresses.

I shook my head. “I really don’t know, monsieur, ” I said. “The only thing I can think of would be to concentrate a portentous amount of artillery, fifty wide-bore pieces, at a single point, and carry out a bombardment for months. But what king could afford the luxury of so much artillery? And that’s without taking into account the logistical nightmare of transport and maintenance, or the astronomical costs for that amount of gunpowder and ammunition, and so forth.”