Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [198]
After this alleged death, William came to see me, with his hypocritical smile, which the bars could not hide from me. He asked me why I wrote, in Sonnet III, about a certain dyer. He quoted the verse: “To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand...”
“I never wrote that,” I told him. And it was true...It’s obvious: Bacon inserted those words before disappearing, to send some sign to those who will then welcome Saint-Germain in one court after another, as an expert in dyes...I believe that in the future he will try to make people believe he wrote William’s works himself. How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon!
* * *
Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget’st so long? I feel weary, sick. William is expecting new material from me for his crude clowneries at the Globe.
Soapes is writing. I look over his shoulder. An incomprehensible message: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s....” He hides the page, looks at me, sees me paler than a ghost, reads Death in my eyes. He whispers to me, “Rest. Never fear. I’ll write for you.”
And so he is doing, mask behind a mask. I slowly fade, and he takes from me even the last light, that of obscurity.
74
Though his will be good, his spirit and his prophecies are illusions of the Devil...They are capable of deceiving many curious people and of causing great harm and scandal to the Church of Our Lord God.
—Opinion on Guillaume Postel sent to Ignatius Loyola by the Jesuit fathers Salmeron, Lhoost, and Ugoletto, May 10, 1545
Belbo, detached, told us what he had concocted, but he didn’t read his pages to us and eliminated all personal references. Indeed, he led us to believe that Abulafia had supplied him with the connections. The idea that Bacon was the author of the Rosicrucian manifestoes he had already come upon somewhere or other. But one thing in particular struck me: that Bacon was Viscount St. Albans.
It buzzed in my head; it had something to do with my old thesis. I spent that night digging in my card file.
“Gentlemen,” I said to my accomplices with a certain solemnity the next morning, “we don’t have to invent connections. They exist. When, in 1164, Saint Bernard launched the idea of a council at Troyes to legitimize the Templars, among those charged to organize everything was the prior of Saint Albans. Saint Alban was the first English martyr, who evangelized the British Isles. He lived in Verulamium, which became Bacon’s property. He was a Celt and unquestionably a Druid initiate, like Saint Bernard.”
“That’s not very much,” Belbo said.
“Wait. This prior of Saint Albans was abbot of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, the abbey where the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers was later installed!”
Belbo reacted. “My God!”
“And that’s not all,” I said. “The Conservatoire was conceived as homage to Bacon. On 25 Brumaire of the year 111, the Convention authorized its Comite d’lnstruction Publique to have the complete works of Bacon printed. And on 18 Vendemiaire of the same year the same Convention had passed a law providing for the construction of a house of arts and trades that would reproduce the House of Solomon as described by Bacon in his New Atlantis, a place where all the inventions of mankind are collected.”
“And so?” Diotallevi asked.
“The Pendulum is in the Conservatoire,” Belbo said. And from Diotallevi’s reaction I realized that Belbo had told him about Foucault’s Pendulum.
“Not so fast,” I said. “The Pendulum was invented and installed only in the last century. We should skip it.”
“Skip it?” Belbo said. “Haven’t you ever seen the Monad Hieroglyph of John Dee, the talisman that is supposed to concentrate all the wisdom of the universe? Doesn’t it look like a pendulum?”
“All right,” I said, “let’s suppose a connection can be established. But how do we go from Saint Albans to the Pendulum?”
I was to learn how in the space of a few days.
“So then, the prior of Saint Albans is the abbot of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, which therefore becomes a Templar