The Other Name It Goes By

“Etenim sacramentum regis abscondere bonum est: opera autem Dei revelare et confiteri honorificum est."

“It is good to hide the secrets of an earthly king; but it is worshipful to acknowledge the works of God." - The Angel Raphael - Book of Tobit 12:7

After an early breakfast, I left the comfort of my hotel room and went to tour the Château de Fontainebleau. The morning was already warm but bearable. I had a ticket for the 9:30 opening, the earliest of the day. I arrived at 9:20 and was among the first visitors. It was like a private visit without the crowds and noise of historical places and museums I visited in Paris. And, it was relatively cool inside.

I walked alone and unbothered through the halls and the rooms, gazing at the paintings and the collected artifacts of hundreds of years and occasionally snapping a photo. It had the aura of walking through a tomb, especially because I was alone and the dead were everywhere I looked. Objects they once held in their hands, portraits that they posed for, now all shaded in darkened rooms for people to look at and wonder.

Fontainebleau is not at all like the house I grew up in, but then few places on earth are like the house I grew up in, or more likely, there are lots of houses like the one I grew up in, but children who grew up in such homes don’t talk about them much and invent different childhood memories to protect themselves. Each memory a secret known to one. I recall my brother, at one point, telling me that we had a pleasant and loving childhood home. I looked at him the way I looked at the portrait of the young Prince of Rome, Napoléon's son, both of them living in worlds I could not imagine.

At Fontainebleau, Napoléon François Charles Joseph Bonaparte, was known as the Prince Imperial of France and the King of Rome before he could even lift his head. It was a privileged childhood if there was ever one. I too had a privileged childhood, but the nature of the privileges was quite different.

Napoleon II never actually ruled France. He died of tuberculosis in Vienna, at the age of twenty-one. Toward the end of his life, he is reported to have said, “My birth and my death will be the only point of remembrance.” Such is the fate of most of us, however well born — as every tombstone attests.

I spent more than an hour at the Château and ended my tour in the Royal Trinity Chapel. It is a magnificent space, rivaling any great cathedral in its beauty. I was completely alone there and sat on one of the benches for a good while, both for the peace and the coolness it offered. Before I left, I walked to the altar, knelt down, and said a few prayers. Even as I write this, I catch myself wanting to explain it away. It’s as if I were ashamed to admit that I knelt and prayed in the chapel where kings and queens prayed. And had I not mentioned it, perhaps my prayers would have flown faster and further. Truth to tell, I can hardly recall the nature of my prayers other than for the strength to keep moving. Which, when you get old, is a very useful prayer.

I have heard it said that one should pray in places where prayer has been valid. And in this beautiful chapel, a good many prayers have been offered. But in the nearby Stag Gallery, a man prayed for forgiveness and his life. His prayers were half answered; he got the sword but faced death with a clear conscience. We should all be so fortunate.

I left the chapel and meant to walk to the forest. The evening before I had mapped a trail running out past the town and then through a maze of rocks and narrow defiles to the famous Antre des Druides, the Den of the Druids. It’s a rocky outcrop, where the sandstone piles up into caves older than any king.

I made it perhaps forty-five minutes. The heat had not relented overnight; it wafted up from the streets like a stove burner set on low. Somewhere short of the trees I stopped, drank the last of my water, and admitted what a man my age has to admit more often than he cares to — that the forest would still be there, but I would not get to it today. I turned back. That is the true version for the record. But there’s another one to tell. It was a conversation held in my mind, which is where the dead actually live for us anyway.

The dead I had spent the morning among — the kings and queens in their darkened rooms, and all the others who once moved about Fontainebleau — had followed me out of the château and back to my room. That evening, I returned to the forest and found one of them waiting for me.

The forest is a place that belongs to the wild at nightfall, where animals return to their kingdom once the day-hikers are gone. The dead come back as well. It was there, among the Druid rocks — which had stood since the beginning of the world and would stand until its end — that I met a man, four hundred years in the ground, sitting on a stone as though he had been expecting me — which, I suppose, in the way these things work, he had. He was dressed in a white religious habit and scapular with a red-and-blue cross on his chest.

He stared at me.

“Who are you?” I inquired.

“I am Father Le Bel, a Trinitarian, and I know who you are.”

“How is that?”

“The dead know more of the living than the living do of the dead,” he answered. “I heard your prayers in the chapel as clearly as I heard the prayers of the Marquis Monaldeschi.”

“And do my prayers differ from his?” I asked.

“You both prayed to live," he said, "but the Marquis more fervently than you. He wore mail beneath his shirt to the very end. When the blades found him, he bled, he begged — the better part of an hour dying — and every minute of it spent wanting the next one. Yours were the smaller words. The strength to keep moving. A man who prays like that is already half-resigned to stopping."

“That’s harsh and unfair,” I retorted. “A quiet prayer is not a lesser one.”

"Perhaps not," he said. "But tell me — how many years do you give yourself to live?"

“Statistically, I have 10.93 years remaining.”

"How oddly precise. Men your age love a number. They carry it around like a coin in their pocket, pulling it out from time to time to see where they are.”

“That’s true,” I said. “I give myself a dozen years if I’m fortunate. Fewer if I’m not.”

He almost smiled. "The Marquis had counted too. He thought himself in the middle of his life that morning. He had plans for the afternoon. The fantasy is not the number, old man,” he said, and I cringed at the word even as he went on. “The fantasy is that you believe that you will be given notice — that death keeps an appointment book, and your date is written for a later page. Death kept no such page for him. It keeps none for you."

“Then what did you tell him?” I asked. “When he was begging?”

“That everything was not yet done. That he was standing at the very edge of deciding how his life would end, in bitterness or with a clear conscience.”

He leaned toward me.

"You came to France asking whether to begin a new life here. I have heard how you ask. It’s not the question of a man who wants more life. It is the question of a man looking for a beautiful place to set the load down. You call it a new beginning. I have buried enough men to know the other name it goes by."

I said nothing.

"I do not say you are wrong to be tired."

He was gentler now.

“I heard the whole of your prayer, not just the words. You have carried things a long way. But understand what you are choosing and call it by its right name. A man may cross an ocean to live. He may also cross it to lie down somewhere lovely, where no one he loves will have to watch him do it. From the road the two look the same. Only the man walking knows which it is, and there are mornings he does not know either.”

I wanted to tell him it was the first. I wanted to say it plainly, the way a man answers when he is sure. But I couldn’t. What he said landed too hard.

“I don’t know what I’m choosing,” I said at last. “I don’t know what I still want from life, or what I’m trying to leave behind.”

He looked at me for a long time.

“Can you help?” I asked.

“Maybe. I said the De profundis over the Marquis as he lay dying. It comforted him some. I exhort you, in the best and most urgent terms I can muster, to accept that you will die, keep your conscience in order, and put your hope where it belongs. Not in yourself. In God.”

I sat in the coolness of my room and found I no longer knew what to ask for. For a long time, I had prayed for the strength to keep moving — and a dead priest had just shown me that a man can pray those very words while quietly arranging to stop. Finally, I offered the only prayer I had left, which was no prayer at all, only the question itself, held up to whatever was listening.

He then spoke the words of the Angel Raphael “It is good to hide the secrets of an earthly king; but it is worshipful to acknowledge the works of God."

Some secrets a man keeps for a king. Some he keeps for himself. I have a few of each — a childhood I had to rearrange in order to carry it, and now an ocean crossing I have given a kinder name than it deserves. I am not sure I can give either one up.

But there is this: not knowing may be the truest thing I have, and perhaps the only thing worth admitting.

Royal Trinity Chapel

The assassination of Marquies de Mondaldeschi in Fontainebleau, 10 November 1657, etching by Jan Luyken (1649-1712)