One day Anh, king of the great Nguyen clan, cut a solid gold bar in two.
He touched the gold and it divided, as if by magic. The jungle quieted at this miracle; the sky brightened to brilliant pink. “Keep this gold as a sign of our love,” Anh said to his wife, Phi. She took half of the gold bar and held it to her heart.
According to Christian calendars, it was 1785. The Tay-son peasants had taken Saigon once again. The Nguyens had been defeated. Her husband would soon leave the country and remain in exile for many years, perhaps for the rest of his life. She wondered how she would survive his absence. The years stretched before her, endless as the South China Sea. The world was changing and Phi could do nothing but watch. She examined the gold and said, “It is sad how the gold still shines divided.”
The fighting was nothing new to Phi: the Trinhs of the north and the Nguyens of the south had been at war for as long as she could remember. But being separated from her family would be a new difficulty. Her son Canh, only six years old, had recently left for France with a missionary; her husband would leave that very day for Siam. And she would remain in the Nguyens’ fortified palace, to keep the Queen Mother company. Phi thought: The future is washing out to sea. She could not possibly know then, on that desolate day, that her husband would soon crown himself the Emperor Gia Long. Nor could she imagine that their clan would reign, son replacing father, until the unthinkably distant year of 1954.
Phi held the gold and wondered what time would bring.
Her husband, after all, was a king and a stubborn one at that. For Anh, defeat was just a bump on the road to victory. The Tay-son had taken Saigon seven times in eight years and Anh had struck back and took Saigon six times. But now, even the expedition with Rama I of Siam had failed. Her husband had been forced to concede that without help, he might never defeat the Tay-son. And so, the week before, he summoned the missionary Monsignor Pigneau de Behaine, Archbishop of Adran, from his Mission House on Paulo Condor Island.
“You have been my loyal friend for many years, Monsignor,” the King said. “I need your help.”
“The Tay-son are at it again?” Behaine asked. Behaine, a tall man wearing a silver cross and a black cassock, had plans of his own. He had prayed that this day would come.
“It is always the peasants or the Trinhs,” the King said, sighing dramatically.
“I have an idea,” Behaine said. “That is, if you trust me?”
The King did not usually trust foreigners, but he trusted Behaine. Years before, Behaine had protected Anh, then a boy of fifteen, in his Mission House. Behaine had read from his translated Bible and the boy fell in love with the characters, with the stories, with the magic of that thick book. Behaine had said, “We must, with unquenchable ardor, propagate our sacred religion.” Anh, hungry for a cause, agreed. When the Tay-son arrived, the Archbishop hid Anh in a cellar packed with crates of peppercorns.
King Anh thought: Where has the time gone? Twenty-five years had passed and not much had changed.
“Of course I trust you,” Anh said. “You have earned my trust.”
“Then how about this: I will take your youngest son as a sign of Christian friendship to my King’s men in Pondicherry. I will present the boy to these officials and I will bring ships of men to restore you as rightful ruler.”
“You will secure a treaty?” the King asked.
“We should have done this years ago,” Behaine said.
“A new ally is often a new foe.”
“Frankly, it is your only hope.”
King Anh raised his hand and the sky released rain. Raindrops hit palm leaves like hands hitting drums.
“And besides,” Behaine said. “It is the will of God that a Christian rule Cochinchina.”
King Anh made the sign of the cross. He said, “God is most wise.”
The missionary and the young prince sailed the next week. They journeyed for days and nights and more days, the sky changing from blue to gray to black to blue to gray.
The sailed until the port of Arkimedu lay before them. One thousand nine hundred years earlier, Ptolemy had called that particular stretch of land Paduke. Now, it was Pondicherry, a colony, France’s sole port in British India. Like Saigon, Pondicherry was a city under contest: it had passed, over the years, from the French to the British and back to the French. Behaine had lived in Pondicherry as a young man. Once, he’d believed the white beaches a sanctuary. He remembered the year the Siamese Jesuits took refuge at the Pondicherry Mission House, when he had helped them translate Latin into French. Then, the Mission had stood erect over the bay, but now the house seemed fatigued: the walls sagged as if weakened by the heat. Behaine imagined that one day the Mission would melt completely and the residents would wake on the open beach in the wet of a brick-colored puddle.
Outside the Mission, three Jesuit brothers stood wait. The palm trees and scrub grass and sunlight contrasted the dark silk of their cassocks. Indian children ran bowls of water to Behaine’s party.
“Welcome brother! Welcome!” a portly Jesuit said.
“Was your journey a difficult one?” a redheaded Jesuit asked.
“You’re looking rather thin. I hope you’ve outsailed the scurvy,” a third Jesuit said.
“I’ve come in the name of the Cochin-Chinese King,” Behaine said.
“You serve him still?”
“It has been ages!”
“Ten years at least.”
“Twenty!”
The prince tried to understand these strange men. They spoke like the wind.
“What news from your Mission?”
“And who is this thin child?”
“Is he ill?”
“He simply lacks nourishment,” Behaine said.
“Follow us.”
“This way!”
The portly Jesuit led them to the Mission House.
“You are just in time for dinner!”
The Jesuits held the edges of their cassocks to their knees as they walked, mud staining their ankles carnelian.
Behaine and the prince followed them inside the Mission House, where the dark hallways were narrow and cool.
The Jesuits led them to a banquet room. A large table at the center of the room held a roasted boar on a silver platter, the smell of spiced meat filling the air. Men in old-fashioned dress drank wine from golden cups. Small golden nameplates displayed nine names, including Behaine’s. At the far end of the table, there remained a number of empty places with smooth golden nameplates as yet unetched. The empty seats were set for future guests. Behaine opened his arms to his former friends while Prince Canh hung back, near the door.
The venerable Alexandre de Rhodes, dead nearly one hundred years, called the guests to table.
“Come in! Come in!” he said, brushing the boy from the door and bolting it fast. “We must welcome our guests the Archbishop of Adran and the future of Cochin-China, Prince Canh.”
The men clapped. A servant placed seven silk pillows on Canh’s chair and he sat as high as the others, his golden nameplate mirroring his black hair.
Monsignor Behaine cleared his throat. He said, “I have come to ask for assistance. The Nguyens need allies in battle. We need ships and men and arms.”
The burly Vasco de Gama stabbed the boar with his bodkin and cleaved off a leg. He said, “If only I were alive!”
“Alive?” the prince asked, confused. He looked more closely at the party: the opalescence of the men’s skin brightened then dimmed. Their hands, translucent as orchid petals, turned gold while gripping a cup and gray when placed in shadow.
“It is a pleasure to meet you child,” Odoric de Pordenone said. “I haven’t seen one of your people since the 14th century. I was the first missionary in your country, you know. The Franciscans were–”
“You are Christian, yes?” Pope Nicolas V interrupted.
Pope Clement XIV said, “But of course he is Christian! Why else would the Archbishop work on his behalf?”
“Well, the Archbishop has always followed his own path,” said Pope Nicolas V.
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Behaine said, his mouth full of boar.
“My father is the King of—” the prince began.
“And what of the temples in your country?” Marco Polo demanded. “Are they covered in gold as the temples of Burma? Do gems litter your beaches?”
Canh adjusted the pillows and looked into the circle of ashen faces. He felt a sudden affinity with the boar. He said, “My father is rich with gold! Only last week, he split a bar of it in two.”
The guests nodded with approval. Behaine, pride in his voice, concluded: “There is much wealth in Cochin-China.”
“Yes, yes, those people excrete valuables,” Prince Henry the Navigator said. He emptied his cup and, as he did not believe in ceremony, poured another round of wine. “I know if I simply opened the seas to the Portuguese everything would work out in the end.”
“Speaking of, how have the Portuguese faired in your country?” A small man behind the nameplate Antonio Da Faria asked. He raised his glass for Prince Henry the Navigator to fill with wine. “We never hear news of Portugas’s Fai-fo. But of course, how would we, with the French controlling everything these days?”
“Jealousy will get you nowhere,” Alexandre de Rhodes said.
“And who is jealous? History won’t forget that the Portuguese were the first Europeans in Cochin-China!”
Pope Nicolas V nodded in agreement. He said, “Nor will your Savoir.”
“Indeed, the Portuguese provided the country with its name!” Da Faria said, getting more and more excited as he spoke.
“A misnomer at that!” Alexander de Rhodes asserted.
“Every name is a worthy name in God’s Kingdom,” Nicolas V said.
Behaine raised his hands heavenward and said, “Imagine, all the Orient living under one Church. If only the English would come to their senses!” He looked around the table, as if checking for Englishmen. “The Church of England? What, may I ask, is The Church of England?!”
“England, France, Portugal, Italy: We are all God’s children,” Odoric de Pordenone said gently.
“France, Portugal, Italy. These are God’s children,” Pope Clement XIV corrected.
Marco Polo played with his food, looking bored, as if death were a too long pause between adventures. “Ah, but really, it wasn’t for our countries or for God that we came to the Orient, was it? We didn’t come here for fame, or riches, or glory. We came here for the thrill of it. We came, in the end, for ourselves.”
“Here, here!” Vasco de Gama said. “I’d do it all again, for nothing but the thrill.”
“They know not what they say,” said Odoric de Pordenone as he made a sign of the cross. Pope Nicolas V, his neighbor, patted his shoulder, in sympathy.
“It is my dream to make the world one under God,” Behaine said.
Cups and forks and napkins stopped mid-air. The prince felt the ghosts’ chill stare.
“Often it is best to let God’s dream make the world,” Odoric de Pordenone whispered.
“Is there a difference between God’s dreams and my own?” Behaine replied.
“Of course, you must ask the lieutenant for aid,” Alexandre de Rhodes said. “The British have only recently granted Pondicherry amnesty. The lieutenant may be loath to irritate the British with Cochin-China.”
“But surely he will see the benefits,” Behaine said.
“You have the prince. This will curry favor.”
Of all assembled at this banquet of ghosts, Alexandre de Rhodes had, perhaps, spent the longest amount of earthly time in Prince Canh’s country. He had given Cochin-China its Romanized system of letters and converted more natives to faith than the entire population of Pondicherry. He raised his glass and said, “A toast to God’s Orient! To young Nguyen Canh! May he be a source of light to his people! May God aid him to victory!”
The group muttered approval and drank. For a moment, the prince believed he saw the empty chairs at the far end of the table fill, as if their occupants, not yet born could nevertheless wait no longer to join the feast. Prince Henry the Navigator poured more wine. The conversation moved on to Papal Bulls of the past, the still shocking news of American Independence, and the dubious fate of what some people termed The New World.
Part Two
Outside the banquet hall, the three Jesuits eavesdropped.
“Surely the Archbishop is foolhardy! France involved in yet another skirmish? Look at the result of the war in America.”
“I fear a long battle.”
“These Orientals will fight amongst themselves ad infinitum!”
“France will be drawn in.”
“Ships and men! And the King does not even feed us properly!”
“Yet, Behaine wants ships and men.”
“And arms. It is absurd!”
“Foolhardy!”
“Surely France cannot afford to send ships and men.”
“While we are hungry here in Pondicherry.”
“And what of the boy?”
The portly Jesuit brandished a cutlass from his cassock.
“I suggest we eat him.”
“We have not yet sampled Prince–”
“That is certainly un-Christian.”
“This is true: Eating another is un-Christian.”
“Yet, God made in us hunger.”
“But surely you have noticed: the boy is lean.”
“He is of the same thickness as the Indian children.”
“And they are no great feast.”
The third and most reasonable Jesuit said, “In any case, the lieutenant of Pondicherry will not help Behaine. The prince will be sent on to grander feasts.”
“We must make this a certainty.”
“We will visit the lieutenant in his dreams.”
“He must send the prince to France.”
“Louis XVI, I am certain, will fatten the child.”
After the banquet, the Jesuits led Behaine and the prince to their quarters. White stones, cemented unevenly through the hallway, left a residue of bright mica in the shadows. The Jesuits retired to their tower and schemed to thwart Behaine’s plans. They prayed and chanted and made strange potions. They appeared to the lieutenant in the form of heat and shakes and visions.
As the lieutenant dreamed, the Jesuits took the prince from his bedchamber and led the boy up 9,329 stairs to the top of a tower. The portly Jesuit unlocked the door and pushed the boy inside. The room was filled with bolts of cloth. A spinning wheel sat next to a window that offered a full view of Arkimedu. The prince looked over the city and to the sea. Salt air chafed his face. He thought for a moment that he saw his father drowning in the waves.
“Sit,” said the redheaded Jesuit.
Prince Canh slumped into mounds of cloth.
“You see,” said the third Jesuit, “how he is thin?”
“Never mind. We’ve decided to send him on.”
The third Jesuit turned to the boy. He said, “Do you know, child, to where you will voyage?”
“With Monsignor Pigneau de Behaine?”
“Correct!”
“A bright boy!”
“Yes, yes. An observant child.”
“You will travel to the Kingdom of the West.”
“A place called Versailles.”
“A rich place.”
“A luxurious place.”
“Very different from your home.”
“Different from Pondicherry.”
“Different from this Mission House.”
“But,” the portly Jesuit said. “You will one day return to us.”
“We will make gifts to aid you. They will protect you from the wily ways of courtiers and ladies.”
“And those who wish you harm.”
“You must guard yourself.”
“Especially from the queen.” Even the Jesuits in far away Pondicherry had read the pamphlets about Marie Antoinette’s lasciviousness.
The portly Jesuit stepped to the spinning wheel, spun a shiny material from which he cut and stitched a pair of golden slippers. He gave them to the prince and said, “These slippers allow wide-ranging sight.”
The redheaded Jesuit kicked the spinning wheel until the stand cracked. He pulled from its hollow center a perfectly formed puppet. The fig wood cheeks were as creamy as coconut milk. The redheaded Jesuit said, “This puppet speaks only the future.”
Always one for the simplest approach, the third Jesuit leaned toward the prince and kissed him fully on the lips. He said, “From this moment, your words will be precious pearls.”
The prince put the slippers on his feet. He held the puppet under his arm. He felt a pressure in his throat and opened his mouth: a gush of pearls, a whole basketful of compacted words, fell from his lips.
The Jesuits clapped their hands and Prince Canh was back in his bedchamber, asleep.
The next day, Behaine visited the lieutenant’s quarters. He had rehearsed his plea all morning, exchanging tact for euphony and then euphony for sense. He remembered the lieutenant from his first visit to Pondicherry, twenty years before. Even then they had avoided each other. Behaine thought, It is amazing that such imbeciles govern the world.
The prince and Behaine walked to the lieutenant’s quarters together. They sat, waiting, until a graying man with red breeches stepped to the podium. Clerks entered from hidden doors until the room was as full as a courtroom.
“You will get no treaty from me, sir,” the lieutenant said. His eyes were bright: he had seen more of the East than a man ought. His sleep had been full of dark dreams.
“But France–”
“Pestilence! Malaria! This is the fate of France in Cochinchina.”
“But God’s–”
“God’s missionaries must act in God’s name — not the King’s.”
“But the prince–”
“Bring the prince forward.”
Behaine led the prince to the front of the room.
“Your father has been fighting the Tay-son for eight years. He has won and lost Saigon six times. Either he lacks talent or he lacks the support of his people. The Nguyen clan has ruled the south of Cochin-China for many years, but to what benefit? In short, my child, what can you offer my country that we do not already have?”
The prince looked at the swoop of the lieutenant’s boutonnière-felt hat. The ostrich fringe arched over the Lieutenant’s powdered hair. The prince had never seen such clothing. He thought: The world is very strange.
“Speak!”
The prince remembered his country, the aphids and crocodiles. His imagination traced the flow of the Mekong. He wondered if he would ever see his home again.
The lieutenant hit the table with his fist. “Is he mute?”
Behaine shook the boy. The prince opened his mouth and a pearl the size of a scarab rolled across the lieutenant’s table. Marco Polo, who sat nearby, snatched it up and dropped it in his purse.
That is rather clever, the lieutenant thought and, for a moment, his resolve wavered. But then he remembered his visions, his terrible dreams, and he said, “You will find me intractable. You will perhaps find the King less so.”
Part Three
Behaine and the prince soon sailed for the Kingdom of the West. By day, when the sea was rough and misty, the sky seemed to mimic it. At night, if the clouds had vanished, the sky sparkled with starlight. If the sea too had calmed, the water replicated this vaulted gallery and the prince would see bits of brightness both above and below the prow, the lights so ever-present that the prince believed the fire would close down and burn them to nothing. But then, morning always saved him. The sun rose from the water and the ship rode swift under it as if tethered. At the gray hour, when the moon lifted, they ate citrus and salted bream. When the missionaries — not all of them hardened sailors — became afraid, the waves’ whispers hushed all talk of sinking. Time passed and the evanescent latitudes of the globe broke over the hull. Indeed, they made good time. Behaine said they must make haste: the King of France waited for no one. The churning sea, it seemed, pushed the meeting.
The prince, always rather quiet, had become even more withdrawn aboard the missionaries’ ship. Whereas he spoke in pearls but twice in Pondicherry, they became plentiful as the frigate sailed west. When the boy opened his mouth, pearls hit the tanned boards of the deck and rolled. First the sailors stored the pearls in barrels and sacks, then in emptied wine casks in the cargo, until no empty space remained and there was nothing else to do but throw the pearls overboard or sink. Canh began to spit the pearls one by one into the sea’s swell and sulk. They arched, became bright in the light, hit the shifting ocean surface and sank to the darker and deeper places and finally to the ocean floor. A trail of pearls–the concentrations of Prince Canh’s stopped voice — developed across the bottom of the sea, a nacreous record of their journey.
After storms and calms and many, many pearls, the prince and the Archbishop arrived in the Kingdom of the West. It was early 1787. The day was dreary gray. Bare-armed arbors lined the avenues like sentries. The carriage rolled to a stop before the palace gate and a footman wearing the Queen’s livery announced Prince Canh of the Great Nguyen Dynasty. The courtyard filled with the curious. A ripple of sound, beginning with the footman’s proclamation, rushed past the fountains and extended to the palace, where a hundred round white faces occupied the windows. The missionary — his pectoral cross hanging over his black cassock — stepped from the carriage. One of the royal aunts exclaimed, “Monsieur is handsome! He is worldly!” The Prince moved from behind Behaine and the pewter sky cracked, the clouds slid back and the sun illuminated the courtyard. Tight-fisted buds twisted into cherry colored blossoms. The prince seemed to catch fire. His turban snaked brightly atop his head. The fountain of Latona gushed; the statuary gazed in amazement. A bird, escaped from the much neglected aviary, perched on the bright red roll of a turban fold. Behaine said, “Our travels are done!” The most magnificent palace in all of Europe opened before them.
The puppet said: The sun will shine high over the palace of Versailles.
The prince followed Behaine to the palace. The crowd parted. Courtiers whispered, “It is the prince who sailed around the world and braved storms and pirates to plead for the King’s aid.” The duchesses said, “He is rather small for seven years, is he not?” The royal servants, not used to Orientals, said, “His skin is so brown! His eyes so feline!” The governess Madame Tourzel heard the boy speak to his puppet; the Queen’s milkmaid, in from the Laiterie, saw the prince wiggle his slippered feet and lift ever-so-slightly from the ground. The dauphin witnessed the prince’s confidence; The Duc de Normandie saw the child tremble. Others claimed that the prince bowed like a Mandarin while still others believed he danced a Provencale jig. In short, although everyone saw a different prince, nobody could stop looking. Even the haughty Mademoiselle Royale, the King and Queen’s oldest child, was enchanted. She somehow evoked the very essence of the prince when she claimed (although nobody, at first, believed her) to see a small, luminous orb fall from the child’s mouth. Her report to the King: “I have seen the prince and he appears to speak pearls!”
Behaine and the prince retired to special quarters in the Trianon. That evening, before their official reception, Behaine dressed Canh in a brilliant red and gold brocade suit spun by the Jesuits. Behaine promised the boy that he would surely enchant the court. He tightened the sash, straightened the turban. He suspected the clothes were somehow enchanted, another of the Jesuits’ magical gifts, and so he checked the lining and the piping and then the silk trim. He wanted no funny business in front of the King. The prince endured the poking and prodding. He felt numb and bewildered. He wanted to speak, to shout, to sing — anything to hear his voice again. He had so many questions. He thought, Versailles! How beautiful! The palace was a gilded birdcage bigger than, wider than, grander than — the prince didn’t know. He had never seen such a sight. Even the servants wore satin. Had the Ming lived in such style?
The prince turned before the gilded cheval glass.
Behaine said, “This outfit is Indian, but of course nobody will know the difference. If your father could see you now! He would laugh at this get-up.”
In that instant, the prince realized that he had never seen his father smile. Certainly he had never heard him laugh. The prince tried to imagine his father’s voice, to recreate its sound and then raise it into full-throated laughter. But it was impossible. The very idea of his father laughing made the prince smile. If his father had taught him one thing, it was this: The world is a serious place. Life is a battle. Life is taking Saigon and losing it again. Life is device and plot and a precise sword.
“You must bow, comme ca,” Behaine said and bent in the current style, one arm behind his back.
The prince imitated the missionary. The new clothes were tight. He had grown on the voyage.
“It is all a matter of strategy. France can aid your father for glory. France can aid your father to irritate the English. Whatever the cause, the result must be the same: the King must align with Cochinchina. We must, with unquenchable ardor, propagate our sacred religion.”
Behaine walked to the window. He played with the moss-green gros de Tours drapes. He said, “I think I have found just the right way to present our case.” He fingered the drapes and straightened a patch of pattern before him. “Let us say that the English are here. And that your father is here. And if we are soon here — ” Behaine stabbed a section off to the right, “as I will propose we should be — we can deny the British East India Company the South China Sea and all eastern approaches to the Malacca Straits.”
The prince, forgetting himself, opened his mouth to speak and pearls fell to the floor. Behaine tapped the boy’s chin with his cane.
“Lips together, child! Oh, these pearls! You must let me do the talking.”
The King and Queen received their guests in the Salon de la Paix and proceeded to walk through the Hall of Mirrors to their thrones. Viola di gambe and harpsichord kept the rhythm of their march. Miniature amphitheaters, constructed in every corridor, gave the favorites of Versailles a peek at the prince. The boy performed his bow and tried to keep his mouth shut. Marie Antoinette, fresh from the confinement of childbirth, looked beautiful. Her gown was pistachio, her fichu sea blue. The panniers stretched a full five feet. The happiness of motherhood burned in her cheeks: the baby had been a girl, but big and healthy. The King had been pleased. Marie Antoinette played with the diamond broach given in commemoration of the birth as she and the King mounted the dais and sat.
A page announced Monsignor Pigneau de Behaine, Archbishop of Adran.
Behaine bowed. Servants presented the King with Behaine’s gifts: an Oriental lock for his collection, a slew of pepper plants and twenty barrels of ginseng root. The King seemed amused; he did not sleep. He thought, Maybe this exotic guest will keep the Queen from the theater. As Behaine addressed the crowd, the courtiers clamored for a speech. Marie Antoinette requested a story. The King, who was fond of puzzles, said, “We would like a riddle.”
Behaine stepped forward. He cleared his throat and said:
“What is formed in a prison of gray and is born to endless blue?
What is made solid through years of soft compression?
What is as precious as gold yet common as coal and unending as a groove gouged about a globe?
What is white as angels’ robes, smooth as silk, yet harder than stone?”
The Archbishop adjusted his cassock. He said, “A hint: This could belong to France.”
“Oh!” cried Marie Antoinette.
“That is rather clever,” said the King.
The prince held the puppet close, as if for protection, and stared at the cross-eyed King of France. He remembered his father’s “Book of 5,000 Characters,” his gruff voice. He thought, My father must be the smartest man in the world. He is serious and strong. He certainly doesn’t care for riddles.
Behaine said, “Answer this riddle if you can.”
Madame de Polignac ventured, “A child?”
“Madame, you are close!” said Behaine.
“A piece of Chartres glass,” called the Comte de Provence, the King’s brother.
“How lovely,” exclaimed his wife, Marie Josephine, the former princess of Piedmont.
“Lovely, but off the mark,” Behaine replied.
“The Queen’s heart!” said the Comte D’Artois, who had lost a significant sum to the Queen in faro.
“I assure you, my heart is not without end,” riposted the Queen.
The courtiers and dukes and duchesses suppressed laughter.
“Does the King have an answer?” Behaine asked.
The King, who loved a puzzle, had developed great patience for riddles. He closed his myopic blue eyes. He thought: A roasted duck? No, it must be hard. A hunting hound? No, it must be white. A new kind of lock?
Mademoiselle Royale, the Dauphin and the Duc de Normandie fidgeted. The Queen snapped open a fan. “Oh, let’s have it,” said the Queen. “What, Monsignor Behaine, is the answer?”
Behaine looked to the King and then said, “I will show you. But first, I need an assistant.”
“I shall assist you,” the Queen volunteered.
The ladies in the room blushed.
“You will need your purse,” Behaine said.
The Queen produced her gambling purse still heavy with the Comte D’Artois’ gold.
“She is rarely without her purse, Archbishop,” The Comte D’Artois called.
The courtiers and dukes and duchesses suppressed laughter.
“Please open it,” Behaine instructed.
The Queen complied.
“The answer,” Behaine announced “is this–”
The Prince opened his mouth wide as a castrato. An egg-sized pearl dropped from his lips.
“Oh!” said the Queen.
“That is rather clever,” said the King.
“I introduce Prince Nguyen Canh, the Pearl of the Orient.”
Marie Antoinette, who had always been interested in the Orient, who believed such an interest a sign of good taste, a Hapsburgian trait, remembered her mother’s collection of Imari porcelain. She remembered the jade Buddha and the lacquered boxes at Schonbrunn. The very next day the Queen made preparations for a grand ball in honor of the Prince. Madame Bertin, the royal dressmaker, constructed a lavish pouf called la chignon a la Cochinchinoise for the occasion. She molded a replica of the prince, placed it like an icon amid two feet of the Queen’s swirling hair and wove a pearly crown around it. The Queen had excellent balance and wore the coif with natural grace. The flesh-and-blood prince walked by her side through the Chinese garden. The Queen thought, What an amusing child. How wonderful he will look in the pagoda!
At the ball that evening, the Queen proclaimed that the prince and the Dauphin should be friends. She clapped her hands and the pianoforte ceased, the masked dancers parted, and the boys were brought together at the center of the ballroom.
The Queen said, “Prince, this is my son, the dauphin.”
The prince bowed, arm behind back.
Obeying his mother, the pallid dauphin limped forward and accepted Prince Canh’s bow. He grasped his new playmate’s hand and kissed his cheek. The children were of similar age but of vastly different coloring, clothing and degree of health: where the dauphin was pale and blonde, the prince was brown and turbaned; where the dauphin drowned in his watery linen coat and an aquamarine sash, the prince wore red and gold. The dauphin was hunch-backed and uneven-hipped while the prince was hale. Yet, despite all of these differences, they looked strangely similar. They even looked, for a moment, like brothers. The two children held hands before the Queen and it seemed that this scene of friendship would solidify, that the Dauphin of France and Prince Canh of the Nguyen Dynasty would stay thus bonded together. But of course they didn’t. The dauphin and the prince opened their hands. The crowd clapped and Marie Antoinette signaled for the masque to resume.
Part Four
Canh was careful to keep his mouth shut and nearly a month passed without a pearl. The Queen brought the mute child with her everywhere: to the Chateau de Maussadement, to the Hameau, to Fountainbleu. Everyone knew that the Queen loved excitement. The prince was a walking carnival. The court, always hungry for something new — for any excuse to dance and feast and speculate — took up the prince like a cause celebre. Courtiers thought him a marvelous addition to the Versailles milieu; the Orient emerged in every conversation. What would become, they asked, of this opulent, mute child? The prince’s silence had become more seductive than speech. His potential! If only he would open his mouth and say something charming. If only he spoke to them in the language of pearls!
To escape the prince’s public, the dauphin took Canh to the Hameau. There, amongst the cottages — each painted with vines and cracks and all the little flourishes of veritable peasant-life — the children would lie in the grass near the lake and gaze at swans and bluebells. Sometimes they ran races in the shade of Marlborough Tower, the lame dauphin officiating. One day, the children rehearsed their newest drama.
“You must be the shepherd,” Mademoiselle Royale said to the dauphin.
“I don’t want to be the shepherd,” said the dauphin. “You must be the shepherd.”
“Why should I be the shepherd? I am the eldest!”
“Yes, but I am the dauphin. Therefore you must be the shepherd.”
Mademoiselle Royale played with the jabot-gauze of her dress and swatted butterflies. Who could argue with such logic? She said, “I cannot be a shepherd: I’m a girl.”
“Then you may be a shepherdess.”
The Valys, the farming couple brought in from the county to care for the animals, bowed to the children, who ignored them, as always.
The dauphin turned to his younger brother, the Duc de Normandie, their mother’s favorite, a perfectly formed, even fat child whose thick blond curls and satin frock were of identical sheen.
“And you are the toad,” the dauphin said his brother.
“And you,” the dauphin pointed his ebony cane in the prince’s direction, “are the Happy Savage.”
“But he doesn’t speak!” objected Mademoiselle Royale. “He cannot be in our piece de theatre unless he chooses to speak.”
“All he must do is smile,” said the precocious Duc de Normandie. “He is the happy savage.”
“He must perform. I will speak for him,” said the dauphin.
Mademoiselle Royale fetched her crook from the barn and freed the animals from their pens. Perfectly groomed sheep spread over the grass like low clouds.
The play commenced:
“Oh! My fold! My lovely sheep!” Mademoiselle Royale said, a hint of vibrato in her voice. “If only my prince were near.”
“Hurry! Go!” The dauphin waved his brother — a prince in the guise of a frog — to the shepherdess.
The Duc de Normandie hopped across the lawn. “Rrrrrrribbit! Rrrrrrribbbit!”
The nearby lake was glassy, broken only by the glide of swans.
The dauphin pushed Canh at Mademoiselle Royale. She said, “You are not my fair prince. You are a savage!”
The dauphin poked the prince: Smile. Smile.
Prince Canh smiled. The dauphin spoke the savage’s lines: “It is true. I am not a prince. But I offer you much more: I am purest nature!”
“Nature!” Mademoiselle Royale fluttered her fan. “How noble you seem.”
“I promise a New Paradise. I am the Pearl of the Orient.”
“Rrrrrribbit! Rrrrrrribbbit!”
Marie Antoinette, who loved her children to be creative, who had even considered teaching them The Marriage of Figaro, wandered in from behind the tower. She clapped vigorously.
“Continue my petites choux d’amour,” she said, gleeful. “Continue!”
Mademoiselle Royale turned away from her mother. The Duc de Normandie ran to hug her. The Queen assessed the prince and said, “Merveilleux! It is like something from Perrault.”
Taken by surprise, the prince gasped and a pearl, the largest pearl he had yet produced, a month of compacted consonants and vowels, fell to the ground. It thudded, heavier than a Sevres tureen.
Marie Antoinette lifted the pearl with two hands. “What a sumptuous child you are!”
Mademoiselle Royale threw her crook to the grass and walked to the barn. The Duc de Normandie nestled next to his mother. He said, “May I have the pearl, maman?”
“We must surely help the prince regain his throne,” the Queen said. “I’ll talk to the King myself.”
The summer continued and, as the puppet had predicted, the sun left the Queen’s life: her infant daughter died in June and the dauphin became weaker and weaker until he seemed a skeleton ringed in iron. “The dauphin is surely dying,” Doctor Petite told his assistant. “The boy will be gone before the year’s end.” The world was changing and there was nothing Marie Antoinette could do but watch. The war in America had been costly and the coffers were empty. Nature, it seemed, had even turned against them: the weather was wet through July. Everyone suffered from cold. The Queen contracted an unidentifiable illness and put on weight. She took to her bed and read Beaumarchais. The King felt his kingdom slipping from him and hunted excessively in Rambouillet. Mademoiselle Royale and the Duc de Normandie entertained themselves with card games and horseback riding and left their sickly brother to walk the wide, vaulted corridors of Versailles alone. The Oriental prince, with his silence and his puppet, became the dauphin’s greatest amusement.
Meanwhile, Behaine spent much time that summer traveling the boulevards between Paris and Versailles. He wore his cause like a cappuche. He met and negotiated and persuaded. He stood before the clergy and said “We must, with unquenchable ardor, propagate our sacred religion.” He stood before the French Foreign Minister, the Comte de Montmorin, and said, “We must control the Straight of Malacca.” His politesse was perfect and by autumn he had paved the way for what would be called, at its signing, The 1787 Treaty of Versailles.
With the treaty signed, Behaine and the prince would soon depart. The day before the prince was to leave, the Dauphin grasped Canh’s hand exactly as he had on their first meeting — when the Queen had promoted their acquaintance — and led his friend to the terrace. Their thin fingers meshed. They strolled through the Parterre du Midi and past the dry fountains and the prince felt that he would give anything, Sai-gon and gold and all the pearls in the world, for just one minute of speech.
Suddenly, the prince felt his feet tingle. He squeezed the dauphin’s hand and the slippers began to lift. The dauphin had lost so much weight that he was hardly heavier than the puppet. Canh held him close, as if to protect him. The boys ascended above the fountains, ascended until they hovered above the courtyard, until even the great rooftops of Versailles looked like the vitreous pieces of a mosaic.
They floated among Fragonard clouds. They surveyed the roads leading away from Versailles, the miles and miles of green fields.
“You may have pearls,” the dauphin said, his voice a weave of pride and melancholy, “but someday all of this will be mine.”
The puppet, abandoned under the Adonis willow far below, said: The sun soon sets for the sons of Marie Antoinette.
Prince Nguyen Canh kicked his feet. The boys were high above the world. They could see over the apple orchards, over the streams. They laughed at their weightlessness and pearls fell, torrential as a downpour from the clouds. The prince believed, for a moment, that nothing could ground them, that nothing could bring them back down to the feasts and fetes and immaculate marble of the palace. The prince believed that the dauphin would not die and that life had nothing to do with plot, and device, and a precise sword. For a moment, the prince believed that nothing could make them return to earth, that dark dream.
Pearls fell. The children descended.
The story of this luxurious rain spread through the countryside of France and became, over time, a fairy tale of the ancien regime. Mothers would gather their children around hearths and say: Once upon a time, in the reign of Louis XVI, not long before the Revolution, the sky opened over the people of France like a sign from God and released pearls.
Part Five
As the ship sailed east, the Jesuits’ tight spell began to loosen. The prince, whose voice had been stopped for nearly three years, opened and closed his mouth freely. To his surprise, pearls did not fall. Soon, the puppet’s prognostications waned. It lay limp in a box below deck. The sailors — many of whom had signed aboard for fortune — felt that fate had cheated them.
The slush of waves collected and receded around the frigate. Behaine and the prince sat on the smooth foredeck.
“Warm,” said the Prince.
Behaine looked up.
“The sun is warm!”
“Yes, it is rather warm,” Behaine said encouragingly.
“The sun is warm — but the breeze is marvelous!”
“Yes, a marvelous breeze. I didn’t think you had language in you.”
“The breeze smells of home.”
“The balsa?”
“The lemongrass.”
“We’ll soon be there.”
The prince opened and closed his mouth: No pearls. “The treaty has been signed?”
“France is your ally,” Behaine patted his knapsack. The treaty and a sealed letter for the Lieutenant of Pondicherry were safe inside.
The prince, suddenly maudlin, said, “Years have passed. My country must surely have changed.”
“Your French is superb, child. I didn’t realize you understood it so well.”
“What if the Tay-son have conquered the South?”
“The Lord is with us: we have the treaty.”
The prince stood at the ship’s prow. Minutes felt like hours and hours felt like days.
“What of my mother? My father? My brothers may be dead from fighting.”
“Have faith, my child. Have faith. The future, like the breeze, is marvelous.”
“I hope my father is well. The dauphin was very sick. I’m afraid he won’t live much longer.”
“You certainly have a lot to say this afternoon.”
“It’s been three years!” The prince felt words like a pressure through his body. If they had come out pearls, the ship surely would have sunk.
“Go ahead, then. Talk to your heart’s content.” Behaine lit a pipe. The sea opened like a silk scarf. The future would be marvelous: he had the treaty!
The prince continued, “I hate pearls. I detest them. They are the ugliest things in the world. From now on, I want only words.”
They sailed for days and nights and more days. The sky turned from blue to gray to black to blue to gray.
In Pondicherry, French clerks and naval officers played tennis on the Mission House lawn. Indian children retrieved balls and served tea. The mid-day sun dried the air until it cracked. The three Jesuits stood above a hole in the earth, sweat staining their cassocks purple. Rice paper umbrellas provided tepid shade over the Jesuits as they examined pieces of celadon pottery, recently unearthed. Still more Indian children, their turbans bright as sugar candy, dug with sticks and cups at the bottom of the hole.
“Attention child! You may cause breakage,” the portly Jesuit said.
“We want no more damage.”
“The value of these artifacts is incalculable!”
“They are Greek!” The redheaded Jesuit said.
“Ancient. Many, many centuries BC.”
“Imagine — before Christ our Lord and Savior,” the third Jesuit said.
“How destitute the world was.”
“How uncivilized.”
“How dark and ignorant.”
“Attention child! You dig desultorily.”
Behaine and Prince Canh, whose ship had dropped anchor in the bay, approached the Jesuits. The prince’s frockcoat and breeches, heavy with buckles, clanged like tocsins.
“Bonjour!” Prince Canh called.
“And who are you?” The portly Jesuit inquired.
“The boy looks familiar–”
“It is the prince!”
“And the Archbishop. Welcome!”
“Welcome! You are looking plump.”
“And fashionable.”
“Versailles is the very origin of worldliness.”
“He is so meaty! It can’t be the same child!”
Indeed, the prince had grown since his departure from Pondicherry. The food and sport of Versailles had made him strong and tall and confident. The Jesuits were amazed; they hardly recognized him. They left the Indian children to excavation and walked to the Mission House.
“Civilization has done wonders for your constitution.”
“France agrees with you.”
“French cuisine is an elixir.”
“Ambrosia.”
“Certainly hearty.”
“Do you recall,” the portly Jesuit asked his brothers, “calf sweetbreads en papillotes?”
“Did the banished Adam forget paradise?”
“Or Westphalian hams?”
“If nothing else, the Westphalians do that one thing perfectly.”
The redheaded Jesuit turned to Behaine.
“What news from Versailles?”
“There is unrest,” said Behaine.
“We’ve heard — the Estates General!”
“The Duc D’Orleans!”
“In God’s name — the King is lenient with him.”
“What, brothers, will become of France?”
Behaine was anxious to sail for Cochin-China, yet the lieutenant refused to see him. They remained at the Mission House, where the Prince talked and talked and talked. He spoke to the cooks; he spoke to the clerks. He talked until he became sick of his own voice and then he propped the puppet on his lap and performed ventriloquism. The puppet told stories of war and adventure and lost love. Sometimes the two of them argued. The puppet claimed that the Queen’s eyes were blue; the prince insisted that they were green. The Jesuits proclaimed the prince the finest storyteller they had ever heard. Weeks passed and Behaine often wished for the pearls’ return. He found relief in the banquet hall. He walked the beaches with Alexandre de Rhodes. Finally, the ‘ieutenant summoned them to his mansion in Pondicherry.
The prince and Behaine walked to the lieutenant’s quarters together. They sat, waiting, until a graying man with red breeches stepped to the podium.
Behaine said, “I have brought the Treaty of Versailles. I request, in the name of the King, ships and arms and men.”
The Archbishop placed the treaty on a platter. A servant carried it to the lieutenant, who unrolled it. “This says that France will aid King Nguyen Anh in his fight against the Tay-son. In return, France will receive Paulo Condor and Callao Islands.”
“That is correct,” Behaine said.
“In addition, France will claim future trade rights to all of Cochin-China, including the use of the Mekong River.”
“Which, of course, opens trade with China.”
“And rights to the Port of Tourane.”
“Our strategic outpost against the British.”
“And protection of all French subjects residing in Cochinchina.”
“Where there is trade, there will certainly be Frenchmen.”
“And protection and religious freedom for all missionaries.”
“That, sir, is a most important clause.”
The lieutenant rolled the treaty, retied the ribbon, and slid it like a sword through his watch fob and into his pocket.
“Still I do not see good coming from this.”
Behaine bowed. He said, “A treaty is a treaty.”
“True,” agreed the lieutenant. He thought: What a mountebank this Behaine is!
The Archbishop pulled the sealed letter from his knapsack. “I have this missive from the King.”
The lieutenant accepted the letter. He said, “And where is the prince? I hear he does tricks with a wooden puppet.”
The prince stepped forward. He said, “Yes, sir. Would you like a story?”
Behaine said, “He’ll talk your ear off if you let him.”
“Here is my ear, then. Tell me the story of your journey.”
The prince and the puppet began to speak and their stories unfolded in scenes that, over the course of the afternoon, expanded — one part opening from the next — and yet remained connected, like a hand fan made of colorful, patterned silk. The stories inspired laughter, then tears, then chuckles, then protests. The men hooted and clapped. When the prince fell silent, the Lieutenant demanded another story. Prince Canh held the puppet before him. He said, “The puppet will relate a riddle.”
“What is the nature of the wheel, or an orb, or the contemplative mind?
What marks the completion of the sun’s motion through the elliptic of the sky?
What did Satan instigate and the dark angels complete?
What, dear sir, will bring the downfall of King Louis XVI?”
“Answer this riddle if you can.”
Nobody dared to mention the French Revolution. The room was silent except for the clap of a roof tile in the breeze.
Later that evening, the lieutenant leaned back into his chair as he read the letter.
Monsieur Lieutenant,
I write on behalf of the King. We ask that you survey the strength of our navy in Pondicherry
and assess the worth and viability of the Archbishop of Adran’s mission in Cochinchina. The King asks you to use your judgement and proceed as you see fit in regard to the 1787 Treaty of Versailles.
In His Majesty’s name,
Comte de Montmorin
The lieutenant went to his balcony. The beaches met the ocean and the ocean met the sky, three layers pale as gradations in shale. He surveyed the strength of the French navy in Pondicherry. He assessed the worth of the Archbishop of Adran’s mission. He used his judgement. He brought a match to the rolled 1787 Treaty of Versailles and let it fall into his bronze chamber pot. He thought, What fun it will be to make Behaine wait.
For months, the lieutenant begged Behaine to be patient. He said, So much needs to be done! Ships must be built, men must be conscripted, and cannons must be purchased. Yet, Behaine saw the number of carracks unused in the Port of Arkimedu; he saw how the King’s navy loafed and played tennis and caroused Pondicherry. He wondered, When in the history of France has a lieutenant disobeyed his King so shamelessly? The world was changing and Behaine could do nothing but wait.
Years passed and by the end of 1789, news of the Bastille reached Pondicherry. The prince’s riddle of the Revolution had come true. Behaine continued to walk the beaches. One afternoon he pulled the prince from the palm shade and into the sun’s glare.
“I will not give up God’s mission,” he said to the prince.
The prince looked dazed, as if half asleep. He said, “You are right. We should return.”
“The lieutenant will not comply with the treaty. Your father has been betrayed.”
The prince dropped the puppet to the sand. He said, “I understand. We must return.”
“I will simply buy the ships and arms and men myself,” Behaine said.
The Archbishop walked to the Mission House. He found a large celadon pot from the time of Alexander. He walked to the palm shade and he put the pot next to the prince. From that day, the prince collected money for his story telling.
From the Bay of Bengal to the Straight of Malacca and into the South China Sea, the prince remained silent. As they neared his home, he realized that he hadn’t thought of his family in years. He had not missed his mother. He had not missed his father. He had fallen into storytelling as if into an opium dream. A great absence filled his heart: He felt as though he had abandoned his Dynasty. He longed to collect again the words he’d released under the palm tree. He’d spoken enough in the years at Pondicherry for a lifetime. So many words gone! He pulled the puppet’s strings and the wooden mouth clapped. He wondered at the value of words, the lack and the abundance of them. What they conveyed and retained. What they’d cost him. Unlike device and plot and the precise sword, words brought nothing so stable as conquest. He felt a sudden affinity with the puppet: words had simply moved through him and returned to the world. The power of his voice had never been his own. He stood on the ship’s prow and vowed on the graves of his ancestors that he would speak no more.
The prince watched the purple horizon for signs of land. He had been gone five years, half of his life. When they arrived at Paulo Condor Island, Behanie was received like a victorious warrior. They feasted and slept and the next morning the Prince and Behaine rode up the Mekong in a shaded sampan. Peasants called out the news of King Nguyen Ahn’s success as they passed: the Nguyens had defeated the Tay-son. The sound of his native language, toned and clipped compared to the fluid, mellifluous French, shocked the boy so profoundly that his tongue turned to pastry sugar and melted sweetly away. His people called for him to speak, but he refused. The people of Cochinchina wondered at the prince’s silence and suspected that he had been maimed by the foreigners or by the sea or by the strange puppet he carried with him incessantly. The soft seductiveness of silence, the same silence that had created such a sensation at Versailles, surrounded him once again. People followed him like a saint. They called him The Silent Prince.
When they reached the Nguyen palace, Behaine and the boy knelt before King Anh. Much had changed in their absence. The King was flushed with health and dressed in fine Chinese silk. He laughed loudly. His demeanor was calm, his countenance smooth.
“You have brought the treaty?” asked the King.
“I have brought aid.”
The King reviewed the dissolute mercenaries.
“This is France?”
Behaine felt his failure acutely. He said, “I did what I could.”
“Then there is no treaty?”
“There is no treaty.”
The King took Behaine’s hand and said, “You will always be honored as our friend. Your efforts to aid us will be remembered forever among my people.”
Behaine was ashamed. He had achieved nothing. Five years of his life gone! What he did not realize was this: King Anh was pleased by the Archbishop’s failure. In the missionary’s absence, the Tay-son had weakened and the Nguyen clan, strong with sons, had taken Saigon for the seventh time. It was a miracle. The ghost of Trieu Au, protectress of warriors, had smiled over the Nguyen clan. Even the Trinh’s had retreated. In the end, the King had no need for aid.
A grand celebration was prepared in Hue the following week.
The Silent Prince rode with Behaine through the streets of Saigon. The prince’s father and mother and brothers rode in palanquins ahead. The elephants moved slowly. The canopy allowed sun and shade alternately. The procession traveled up and down hills, through villages and cities, until the Imperial city of Hue lay in indigo shadows before them. It was there, in a grand ceremony, that Nguyen Anh proclaimed victory over the Tay-son and the Trinhs. He revived his country’s ancient name and proclaimed himself Gia Long, Emperor of Vietnam. He raised his arms to heaven; the sky burned brilliant pink.
The Emperor took the hands of his wife, Nguyen Phi, and proclaimed her his true love. He bestowed the title Empress upon her, an unheard of honor. Gia Long asked for the gold he had given his wife so many years before. They held the pieces in proximity and the bar reunited, as if by magic. They showed the gold — seamless, scintillating, whole — to the crowd. The Empress was radiantly happy. She said, “It is delightful how the gold shines united!”
That night, the Silent Prince, never free from the feeling that he had failed his Dynasty, never free from the enchantment of storytelling, retired to his rooms. He unrolled a scroll of rice paper, readied his brush, and wrote, One day Anh, King of the great Nguyen clan, cut a solid gold bar in two.
