was an end: the doom that had preyed on his family since the days of Saint Louis had at last found him.
This condition, a creeping kind of violent madness, was the peculiar curse of the males of the de Noyer line. Records documenting its effects went back hundreds of years, the pattern more or less always the same. The afflicted male stops sleeping and after weeks of relentless insomnia begins to hallucinate. He is possessed by freakish manias, hears voices, sees unspeakable visions. These visions drive him to commit terrible crimes—usually murder—or in some cases prompt a spectacular suicide. The history of the curse of the de Noyers—long, tragic, and bloody, but relieved by occasional episodes of low comedy—mirrored the history of modern France.
The dastardly Ravillac, a bastard son of the family, was chained to four horses and pulled limb from limb for the regicide of Henry IV in 1558. In 1620 another one of Phillipe’s ancestors, believing the Bishop of Rennes to be a wild pig, and believing himself to be out hunting in the woods, shot the prelate dead with an arquebus during mass at the cathedral and for this was burned at the stake. A hundred years later, Phillipe’s great-great-great-grandfather, an amateur naturalist and friend of Voltaire’s, tied stones around his neck and jumped into the murky waters of the Vieux Port at Honfleur during the Blessing of the Fleet. He left a note saying he intended to investigate the secret lives of fish and, not to worry, was adequately prepared for a long stay at the bottom of the sea. Another great-grandfather, a famous soldier who had fought at Valmy, sat out the entire fifteen-year run of the Napoléonic Wars because he suddenly conceived the notion that God intended people not to wear clothes and they wouldn’t let him fight naked. And there was Phillipe’s own grandfather, killed charging the German guns at the Somme during the First World War, carrying nothing but a toilet plunger and a scandalously pornographic novel written by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. (These awkward items were changed in army dispatches to an officer’s sword and a copy of the Gospels. Subsequent newspaper editorials made the man a hero of both church and state; he was posthumously awarded the Légion d’honneur and interred in the Panthéon near the tomb of Maréchal Lannes.)
Horrors similar to these, as yet barely visible, were coming toward Phillipe slowly through the ancestral mists. It remained for him now only to choose his particular form of madness; a choice—the last act of his rational mind—in which lay the essential difference between murder and suicide. But Phillipe, summoning all his mental discipline, chose neither. His act of will, existentially perfect, was in keeping with the best traditions of the de Noyers: The ancient motto of the family, engraved on the armorial shield hanging over the family crypt at Saint Marie’s church in Honfleur— Tantum Transiere Probi , Only the Righteous Shall Pass—suggested just this kind of heroic denial of an unalterable destiny.
So, instead of murder or suicide, Phillipe chose the two things he loved most, sacred objects to carry along with him as he entered his personal twilight: Satie and the Foreign Legion. Satie, whose music exuded peace and humor, for the peace denied him at night. The Legion for its order, for the beauty of men marching in lockstep to the sound of the kettledrum, the bass oboe, the Chinese chimes—difficult instruments completely unknown to any other marching band. Only this kind of order, both military and musical at once, might withstand the irruption of unreason Phillipe had experienced in the desert. Choice made, fate settled. But Phillipe still couldn’t sleep. He got out of bed at 3:00 A.M.—the high noon of the sleepless—and went downstairs to the piano and played from memory Satie’s Trois Morceaux . Playing Satie was nearly as good as sleep. It soothed the raw, torn-away places in his
This condition, a creeping kind of violent madness, was the peculiar curse of the males of the de Noyer line. Records documenting its effects went back hundreds of years, the pattern more or less always the same. The afflicted male stops sleeping and after weeks of relentless insomnia begins to hallucinate. He is possessed by freakish manias, hears voices, sees unspeakable visions. These visions drive him to commit terrible crimes—usually murder—or in some cases prompt a spectacular suicide. The history of the curse of the de Noyers—long, tragic, and bloody, but relieved by occasional episodes of low comedy—mirrored the history of modern France.
The dastardly Ravillac, a bastard son of the family, was chained to four horses and pulled limb from limb for the regicide of Henry IV in 1558. In 1620 another one of Phillipe’s ancestors, believing the Bishop of Rennes to be a wild pig, and believing himself to be out hunting in the woods, shot the prelate dead with an arquebus during mass at the cathedral and for this was burned at the stake. A hundred years later, Phillipe’s great-great-great-grandfather, an amateur naturalist and friend of Voltaire’s, tied stones around his neck and jumped into the murky waters of the Vieux Port at Honfleur during the Blessing of the Fleet. He left a note saying he intended to investigate the secret lives of fish and, not to worry, was adequately prepared for a long stay at the bottom of the sea. Another great-grandfather, a famous soldier who had fought at Valmy, sat out the entire fifteen-year run of the Napoléonic Wars because he suddenly conceived the notion that God intended people not to wear clothes and they wouldn’t let him fight naked. And there was Phillipe’s own grandfather, killed charging the German guns at the Somme during the First World War, carrying nothing but a toilet plunger and a scandalously pornographic novel written by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. (These awkward items were changed in army dispatches to an officer’s sword and a copy of the Gospels. Subsequent newspaper editorials made the man a hero of both church and state; he was posthumously awarded the Légion d’honneur and interred in the Panthéon near the tomb of Maréchal Lannes.)
Horrors similar to these, as yet barely visible, were coming toward Phillipe slowly through the ancestral mists. It remained for him now only to choose his particular form of madness; a choice—the last act of his rational mind—in which lay the essential difference between murder and suicide. But Phillipe, summoning all his mental discipline, chose neither. His act of will, existentially perfect, was in keeping with the best traditions of the de Noyers: The ancient motto of the family, engraved on the armorial shield hanging over the family crypt at Saint Marie’s church in Honfleur— Tantum Transiere Probi , Only the Righteous Shall Pass—suggested just this kind of heroic denial of an unalterable destiny.
So, instead of murder or suicide, Phillipe chose the two things he loved most, sacred objects to carry along with him as he entered his personal twilight: Satie and the Foreign Legion. Satie, whose music exuded peace and humor, for the peace denied him at night. The Legion for its order, for the beauty of men marching in lockstep to the sound of the kettledrum, the bass oboe, the Chinese chimes—difficult instruments completely unknown to any other marching band. Only this kind of order, both military and musical at once, might withstand the irruption of unreason Phillipe had experienced in the desert. Choice made, fate settled. But Phillipe still couldn’t sleep. He got out of bed at 3:00 A.M.—the high noon of the sleepless—and went downstairs to the piano and played from memory Satie’s Trois Morceaux . Playing Satie was nearly as good as sleep. It soothed the raw, torn-away places in his
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