“On the other hand, if all was emptiness, nothingness, once one had died, what had I to lose? I would make my sister and that superstitious but kind-hearted Le Bret happy.”
”He wrote a glowing panegyric of you after you died,” she said. “It was his preface to your Voyage to the Moon, which he edited two years after you died.”
”Ah! I hope he did not make me out to be a saint!” Cyrano cried.
“No, but he did give you a fine character, a noble if not quite saintly one. However, other writers . . . well, you must have had many enemies.”
“Who attempted to blacken my name and reputation after I was dead and couldn’t defend myself, the cowards, the pigs!”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “And it doesn’t actually matter now, does it? Besides, only scholars know the names of your detractors. Unfortunately, most people only know you as the romantic, bombastic, witty, pathetic, somewhat Don-Quixotish hero of a play by a Frenchman written in the late nineteenth century.
“There was a belief for a long time that you were insane by the time you had written The Voyage to the Moon and The Voyage to the Sun. That was because your books were so heavily censored. By the time the churchly Grundies had slashed your texts, much of it made no sense. But the text was eventually restored as much as possible, and by the time I was born, an unexpurgated text had been published in English.”
“I am happy to hear that! I knew from what Clemens and others said that I had become a literary Olympian, if not a Zeus at least a Ganymede, a cupbearer in the ranks of the exalted. But your sneering remark that I was superstitious hurt me very much, mademoiselle. It is true, as you observed, that I believed that the waning moon did suck up the marrow from the bones of animals. Now you say that that is sheer rot. Very well, I accept that.And I was wrong, along with millions of others of my time and God knows how many before my time.
“But this was a minuscule, a harmless error. What did it matter, what injury did it do to anyone, to have this misconception? The superstition, the grave error, that really harmed people, many millions of human beings, I assure you, was the stupid, barbarous belief in sorcery, in the ability of human beings to wreak evil through spells, chants, black cats, and the enlistment of devils as allies. I wrote a letter against that ignorant and vicious belief, that social system, rather. I contended that the grotesque legal sentences and the savagely cruel tortures and executions inflicted upon insane or innocent people in the name of God and the battle against Evil were themselves the essence of evil.
“Now, it is true that this letter I speak of. Against Sorcerers, was not published while I was alive. With good reason. I would have been tortured and burned alive. It was, however, circulated among my friends. It did show that I was not as you made me out to be. I was ahead of my time in many respects, though I was not, of course, the only person in that unhappy situation.”
“I know this,” she said. .”And I apologized once. Would you have me do it again?”
“It is not necessary,” he said. His broad smile made him look handsome, or at least attractive, despite his large nose.
Jill picked up her grail by its handle and said, “Just about dinnertime.”
Jill knew something about the man called Odysseus, having heard occasional references. He had appeared without notice, seemingly from nowhere, when Clemens’ and King John’s forces were battling invaders who wanted to seize the meteorite ore. He had killed the enemy leader with a well-placed arrow, worked havoc among the other officers, and so had given the defenders the advantage they needed for victory.
Odysseus of Ithaca claimed to be the historical Odysseus on whom Homer’s mythical character was based. He was one of the host who had fought before the walls of Troy, though he stated that the real Troy was not where the scholars said it was. Its location was elsewhere, much further south on the coast of Asia Minor.