Victus Read online

The point being that, from that day on, I held Verboom in enmity until the end of his days. Later on, the Antwerp butcher would see me shackled, tortured, exiled, and worse things. But never did he cause me such harm as on that first occasion. My enmity for him was boundless, flawless, pure as crystal. A mutual enmity, it goes without saying, and one that lasted until that swine of all swines got the end he deserved. Lamentably, that episode lies outside my present account, for when it comes to that man’s demise, I relish the tale. He suffered greatly; after that, arriving in hell must have seemed like a Turkish bath for him.

  Well, be a good girl and I’ll tell you later, my dear vile Waltraud—in one gap or another between chapters. But if your horror provokes you to vomit, at least turn your fat head away from me before you do it! I have heard an old saying from your hometown Vienna, which runs more or less: “Next to a good friend, the best thing one can have in this life is a good enemy!” Pah! If enemies they truly are, there is no such thing as a good one; there are only living enemies and dead, and while they live, they are a constant trouble.

  Sponge cake—I shall have sponge cake. Bring it to me.

  Thankfully, the angels never sleep. While I was shut in my room, the twins showed Vauban the plans for a project to fortify Arras. They handed him the prints and made comments while the marquis examined them carefully, leaning close to the paper, as his sight was failing. He used a sort of magnifying lens with no handle, a large piece of concave glass girded with iron and held up on three small wheels. It moved around on the paper in search of small errors. In such moments he resembled a simple jeweler.

  Arras was a project very close to the maréchal’s heart. For one reason or another, he’d had to defer it constantly, but nonetheless ordered the Ducroix brothers to make plans for the most complete, most powerful, and best-equipped fortress imaginable. When Vauban was studying plans, he never spoke. There could be ten, fifteen, even twenty experts around him, and they could be making continuous remarks as to his marvelous projects. But as I say, Vauban was very sparing in his comments. Only his breathing would be heard, for, as with many men who breathe heavily when deep in thought, he turned his nose up at the general chatter.

  At any event, those who knew him could guess his opinion by the sounds escaping from him. Silence was a bad sign, very bad. On the other hand, when an idea excited him, he let out the strangest guttural noises; to those not of his circle, these seemed to indicate annoyance, though it was quite the reverse.

  As the Ducroix brothers continued to hand plans to him, the guttural grunts and groans grew even louder. At one point, his lens stopped over a bastion. “Et ça?” he asked, not looking up. “What are these three rises on each of the corners supposed to mean?”

  “Turrets, monsieur,” they said. “Fortified turrets.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The mortar is the bastion’s prime enemy,” said Zeno. “The idea is to combat the enemy artillery by using the same weapons: Destroy their mortars using mortars of our own. With the advantage that the mortars inside the bastion will have a solid stone casing protecting them. The enemy must install theirs in exposed positions, making themselves vulnerable to cannonade. Meanwhile, those inside the stronghold, given their iron carapace, will go unharmed.”

  Vauban’s guttural sounds grew louder.

  “As you can see, the turrets have only a small opening near the top, in the shape of a half-moon. But the base will have a pinion on which it can turn, a platform allowing one hundred and eighty degrees’ turning range; with three mortars up there, any object outside will be covered.”

  Not a man given to praise, on this occasion, through clenched teeth, Vauban had to acknowledge the Ducroix brothers’ good work. Armand then peered close to the final plan, turned stiff, and screeched at his brother: “Mais tu es idiot! What is this you’ve brought to the marquis’s table?”

  Vauban did not know what was meant until Zeno humbly excused himself. “A thousand apologies, Marquis. I’ve committed a blunder: These prints are no more than exercise pieces by that execrable engineering cadet, Martí Zuviría.”

  They moved swiftly on as though nothing had happened, leaving Vauban nonplussed but also angry, for he was sufficiently clever to realize that all this had been a ruse to make him change his mind about me.

  That same night, Jeanne tackled him during dessert. She sent the servants out, and even her sister, Charlotte, so that it was just the two of them at far ends of the long table.

  “I know what it is you seek!” cried Vauban, pointing a fork in her direction. “And the answer is no! I am a marshal of the realm, I have had the unhappy task of deciding the fate of the lives of many thousands of men. And now, when I send an uncouth youngster back to his home, I find everyone around conspiring against me. Not even on campaigns among generals have I found such opposition!”

  “I would never oppose what my father decides on such a trivial issue,” said Jeanne. “There was something else I wanted to raise with you.”

  “I don’t believe you. You’re bluffing, the lot of you! I’ll have you know I’d be within my rights sending him to a galley ship, should that be pleasing to me. How can I be expected to waste my time on an individual who sees fit to bite my guests on their behinds?” He finally stopped pointing the fork. “I never should have admitted him!”

  “And I say,” Jeanne went on, unruffled, “that there is another issue I wish to raise with you.” Getting up from her seat, in all her gracefulness, she went over and sat upon the marquis’s knee. “Papa,” she continued, putting her arms about his neck, “it’s a good idea.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Me marrying Prosperus van Verboom.”

  “What the— . . . ”

  Jeanne put a finger to his lips and, with her best smile, said: “He seeks my hand, and you know it. It is hardly the first time he’s happened by Bazoches. Shall I present his case to you?” She sighed. “My marriage is a farce. We weren’t unhappy to begin with, but now he’s lost his mind. This affliction will at least allow me to request an annulment of matrimony. With your contacts at the Vatican, it will be given within a year. Oh, Papa! Think of the opportunity. Verboom is one of the most gifted engineers around. Marry him and I will become a lady at court! I’ll be the luckiest woman in the world!”

  Placing his hands on her hips, Vauban lifted his daughter from him. Then he leaped from his chair as though a demon had poked him with a trident. He began pacing up and down the dining hall, one hand on his back, the other gesticulating wildly. “Verboom’s soul is blacker than a dog’s! Hear me? The disease of power, money, and vainglory consumes him. Of course he desires the hand of a Vauban daughter! The day after I die, he’ll make off with my name, our home, our fortune, all my credit and glory. And my own daughter! That reprobate, that unprincipled mercenary, giving his life in service of all the devils!”

  Jeanne showed her indignation, her chin held high, her eyes squinted and choleric. “In service of devils, you say?”

  “Aye, I do!”

  “A reprobate mercenary, a traitor to any decent cause . . . ”

  “Exactly! You have understood exactly.”

  “A man who uses women like sacks of dung and, when he’s emptied them, throws them away at any bend in the road.”

  Vauban applauded sourly. “Very good. I think you take my meaning.”

  “A creature with a soul blacker than a dog’s, if dogs had souls.”

  “Bravo!” exclaimed the marquis, clapping twice more, sarcastically, wearily.

  Jeanne took a breath and, in a neutral tone, declared: “He holds you in the utmost esteem.”

  “That carbuncle’s esteem matters nothing to me! I have only ever shown him a gentleman’s customary courtesy. Never have I had a shred of confidence in him, for he does not merit it and never shall have it.”

  Jeanne cut short the marquis’s words like a scythe. “I mean Martí.”

  The marquis, the marshal, the man, said not
hing more. He straightaway saw the trap he, of his own accord, had fallen into.

  “He adores you, and I can assure you, his reverence has nothing to do with the titles you hold but, rather, the things you have built.” She drew closer to her father, her chin held still higher, and with great calm added: “And you are going to do away with him for a bite on the behind to a black-souled reprobate.”

  She turned on her heel and left the dining room.

  Though the Ducroix twins would later reveal all of this to me, at the time it happened, I was sobbing, cursing, and pounding on the walls of my room, so I could have had no notion of what was going on three floors below. I did not sleep at all that night.

  Logically, then, it was with spirits sagging that I came downstairs the next morning. I had packed my bags, not much of a job, for I owned next to nothing. Indeed, the coach stood waiting out on the parade ground. Though I forget which, either Armand or Zeno said to me: “Before you go, the marquis wishes to speak with you.”

  Vauban ignored me when I came into his study. He had a book before him and was murmuring as though he had never progressed beyond reading out loud. The light of day came from the far side of him, through windows that covered almost the entire length of the wall. Not an elaborate tactic but effective: The light would dazzle the visitor, making him feel immediately inferior in the face of this august, luminous presence.

  He looked up and, in a peevish voice, said: “Sit!”

  I obeyed, naturally.

  “Well? What plans have you made for the future?”

  “Your Excellence, I am yet to make any,” was all I could think to say.

  “Ah, but,” he said tartly, which surprised me, “did you ever even have any?”

  His tone and my agonizing situation impelled me to blurt out: “I did, Your Excellence, yes! In recent times I have hoped to become an engineer, with all my heart. Though I suppose monsieur wasn’t aware.”

  “Impertinent child!” he bellowed. “Or are the words you have just spoken not the very definition of impertinence? Answer!”

  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.”

  8

  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.”

  That it was just the two of us permitted an act of intimacy he carried out only when he was on his own or with Jeanne: He took off his wig. I already knew from Jeanne that he’d lost his hair very early in his youth, but I was so accustomed to those artificial curls that I found it difficult to contain my surprise at seeing a man before me balder than a toad.