The Pearl of the Orient (Kindle Single) Read online

  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.”

  * * *

  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  The prince, always rather quiet, had become even more withdrawn aboard the missionaries’ ship.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 westward. 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. Cảnh 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 concentration of Prince Cảnh’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 Cảnh of the great Nguyễn 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 Provençale 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 Cảnh 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 getup.”

  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 re-create 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 ça,” 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 da 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, Arch
bishop 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-size pearl dropped from his lips.

  “Oh!” said the queen.

  “That is rather clever,” said the king.

  “I introduce Prince Nguyễn Cảnh, 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 Cảnh’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 blond, 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 Cảnh of the Nguyễn 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.

  * * *

  Cảnh 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 Fountainebleu. 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 Cảnh to the Hameau. There, among 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 théâtre 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 Cảnh at Mademoiselle Royale. She said, “You are not my fair prince. You are a savage!”

  The dauphin poked the prince: Smile. Smile.

  Prince Cảnh 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 petits 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 Sèvres 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.