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  One night she hears knocking on her door: the royal police. She hides her lover under the bed, as in a bedroom farce, thinking it has to do with morality laws — but it’s more serious than that: her passport-husband has expired. Suleyman is dead, poisoned, and has accused his wife Zeynab of giving him the deadly dose to get rid of him. Marga d’Andurain is thrown in prison, into a horrible dungeon which concentrates all the horrors of Jeddah: heat, humidity, flying cockroaches, fleas, filth, excrement.

  She will spend two months there.

  She runs the risk of the death penalty for murder and adultery.

  Her fate is in the hands of the qadi of Mecca.

  Consul Maigret makes no effort to save her.

  On May 30, L’Orient-Le Jour, a daily paper in Beirut, announces her death by hanging.

  François-Marie pauses — I can’t help but glance over at the Zenobia Hotel, whose dark mass you can make out far below, then at Sarah’s face, who’s smiling at the effect produced by the storyteller. Marga d’Andurain did not in fact die hanged in the Hejaz, but twenty years later, she was killed in the most sordid fashion on her sailboat in Tangiers as she was getting ready to start a gold smuggling operation in the international zone. Suleyman Dikmari is only the second corpse strewing her way marked by violent death. The last will be her own, abandoned at the bottom of the sea, ballasted by concrete, in the Bay of Malabata.

  François-Marie continues his tale; he explains that Marga was seen giving to her husband, on the morning of his death, at their last interview, a white packet. She claims it’s a packet of Kalmine, a harmless remedy she uses constantly: some ten boxes of this medication are found in her luggage, containing mainly quinine and codeine. A sample is sent to Cairo for analysis. In the meantime, unbeknownst to her, the Oriental press relates her adventures. They describe the French-British spy, the Mata Hari of the desert, prisoner of the jails of Abdulaziz; she is executed at one point, only to be revived the next day; a conspiracy is imagined according to which the security services of Ibn Saud had liquidated the poor Bedouin husband to force Marga d’Andurain to go back home.

  Finally, since no autopsy was carried out, in conformity with the strict religious law of the kingdom, and since the analysis of Kalmine carried out in Cairo demonstrated that the powder in the packets is harmless, she is acquitted for lack of proof after two months of detention.

  François-Marie was looking at his audience with a little ironic smile; we sensed he had something to add. I thought about Kalmine, whose name struck me; I remembered those blue metal boxes that decorated my grandmother’s bathroom in Saint-Benoît-la-Forêt, on which was written “malaise, fatigue, fever, insomnia, cramps”; I remembered it was the Métadier laboratories that made this panacea and that Paul Métadier, the first Balzacian of Touraine, had transformed the Saché château into a Balzac museum. Everything is connected. Balzac, after the Jane Digby–Lady Ell’ affair, had one more link with Palmyra. Marga d’Andurain was certainly unaware, when she received a gift in the mail, after the publication of her version of the facts in L’Intransigeant, of a hundred packets of Kalmine sent directly by the laboratory to thank her for this free publicity, that the Kalmine fortune to which she had contributed would allow homage to be made, in this château he had liked, to the great man of letters. Paul Métadier would certainly not have sent these promotional remedies if he had suspected that it was indeed a packet stamped “Laboratoires Métadier — Tours” that had poisoned Suleyman Dikmari the warrior from the tribe of Mutayrs; François-Marie had this information from the unpublished memoirs of Jacques d’Andurain, the youngest son of the countess. Jacques d’Andurain told how, in Beirut, the time when his mother left for Mecca, she had confided to him her doubts about Suleyman, who according to her was the only real “weak link” in her journey; Suleyman, the desire of Suleyman, the virility of Suleyman, were the most uncontrollable obstacles in this venture. She would be at his mercy, in Mecca, in the Nejd; her “passport-husband” would have power (or so she thought) of life and death over her: it was logical that she too should have the ability to kill him. So she asked her son to acquire some poison for her, in Beirut, under the pretext of killing a dog, a large dog, a very large dog, quickly and painlessly. She kept this substance in a Kalmine packet, having thrown away its original contents.

  We know no more than that.

  François-Marie looked at us, happy with the effect he had produced. Sarah resumed speaking; she had gotten up to warm her hands at the dying coals.

  “There is an amusing coincidence, Annemarie Schwarzenbach went through Palmyra during her second journey to the Levant, from Beirut to Tehran, in the company of her husband Claude Clarac, secretary at the embassy in Iran. She relates her stay at the Zenobia and her meeting with Marga d’Andurain in a short story called ‘Beni Zainab.’ She thinks it’s very likely she did in fact poison her husband . . . Or at least, she thinks she had the character for it. Not of a poisoner, but of a woman so determined that she’s ready to sweep aside all obstacles between her and the goal she has determined.”

  Julie and François-Marie seemed to agree.

  “It’s an existence marked entirely by violence, a metaphor for colonial violence, a parable. Soon after her return to Palmyra, once her administrative troubles were more or less over, her husband Pierre d’Andurain is savagely stabbed to death. People thought it was revenge by Suleyman’s family, even though Marga and her son suspect (and denounce) a conspiracy of French officers pulling the strings. She goes back to France before the war and spends the Occupation between Paris and Nice, living on various kinds of trafficking: jewelry, opium; in 1945 her eldest son kills himself. In December 1946 she is arrested and placed in custody for poisoning her godson, Raymond Clérisse, an intelligence agent for the Resistance: that’s when the press runs wild. She is credited with no fewer than fifteen murders, espionage affairs, a collaboration with the Bonny and Lafont gang, Parisian Gestapo crooks, and God knows how many other crimes. All these articles say a lot about French fantasies at the Liberation — between colonial stories, wartime spymania, memories of Mata Hari and the crimes of Dr. Petiot, the doctor with sixty-three corpses to his name, who has just been guillotined. Marga is finally released for lack of proof a few days later. Then too, she confesses her responsibility in the affair in veiled terms to her son, not long before her own death — that’s more or less all we know about the somber fate of the queen of Palmyra.”

  Sarah pointed out how successful the association of sexuality, the Orient, and violence was in public opinion, even today; one sensationalist French novel, though not itself sensational, took up the adventures of the Countess d’Andurain, and was called Marga, comtesse de Palmyre. According to Sarah, this book, without respecting the facts or bothering with verisimilitude, laid great weight on the more “Oriental” aspects of the affair: lust, drugs, espionage, cruelty. For Sarah, what made the character of Marga so interesting was her passion for freedom — a freedom so extreme that it extended beyond even the lives of others. Marga d’Andurain had loved the Bedouins, the desert, and the Levant for this freedom, perhaps entirely mythical, surely exaggerated, in which she thought she could flourish; it had not measured up to her dreams, or rather it had, she’d persisted in it, to such a point that this beautiful freedom had been corrupted into a criminal pride, which ended up being fatal to her. The miracle of her life, moreover, was that she didn’t encounter the executioner’s axe or the dagger of revenge sooner, running through life thumbing her nose at Fate and at the law for all those years.

  Bilger had gotten up in turn to warm himself a little — the keen air was getting to be freezing; beneath our hill, the lights of the city were going out one by one, it must have been around midnight. The Zenobia Hotel was still illuminated, I wondered if the present personnel of the establishment remembered the fake countess (and real murderess) and that husband of hers who died in the middle of this steel-gray desert that was not at all,
in this cold night, a pleasant place, or even (I’d have been angry with myself if I had confessed this thought to my companions) a place endowed with the irresistible beauty that some people attributed to it.

  Sarah’s indulgence toward female criminals, traitors, and poisoners is still a mystery; this penchant for the lower depths of the soul reminds me of Faugier’s passion for the lower depths of cities — so far as I know Sarah has never been a spy or killed anyone, thank God, but she has always had an interest in horror, monsters, crime, and gore: when I had abandoned, here in Vienna, my Standard whose masthead color of a monkey’s backside suits the complexion of its readers so well, in the Maximilian café near the Votivkirche, after declining the expedition to Kafka’s home, she forced me (grumbling as much as I could, what an idiot, a strange way to make yourself amiable, sometimes I do — we do — exactly the opposite of what the heart would command) to visit the Museum of Crime: on the ground floor and basement of a pretty eighteenth-century house in Leopoldstadt, we visited the museum of the Vienna Police, an official, typically Viennese museum, the museum of murderers and their victims, with skulls smashed in or pierced with bullets, weapons, evidence cases, photographs, atrocious photographs of mutilated bodies, of corpses cut up to be hidden in wicker baskets and thrown out in the trash. Sarah observed these horrors with a calm interest, the same, I imagined, as that of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, the Agatha Christie hero you encountered everywhere in the Orient, from Istanbul to Aleppo to Palmyra — Christie’s husband was an archaeologist, and archaeologists were the first parasites to jump on the Oriental bandwagon, ever since Vivant Denon and the expedition to Egypt: the conjunction of romantic interest in ruins and of a renewal of the historical sciences pushed dozens of archaeologists toward the East, the origin of civilization and religion and, secondarily, the source of objects that could be converted into prestige or hard cash; the fashion for all things Egyptian — then Nabatean, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian — cluttered up museums and antique shops with all sorts of debris, the way Roman antiquities were all the rage during the Renaissance. Bilger’s ancestors crisscrossed the Ottoman Empire from Bithynia to Elam, often taking their wives with them, wives who became, like Jeanne Dieulafoy or Agatha Christie, writers, when they didn’t devote themselves, like Gertrude Bell or Annemarie Schwarzenbach, to the joys of archaeology. Archaeology was, along with mysticism, one of the most fertile ways of exploring the Near and Middle East and Bilger agreed about this, that night in Palmyra when, warmed by the Lebanese wine, he deigned to take part, in English this time, in our Assembly, our Maqāma Tadmoriyya, with all the British eloquence he had brought back from his stay in Oxford, whence so many distinguished Orientalists had emerged — he had remained standing; his round face was wholly in shadow and you could only make out the blond edge of his short hair, like a halo. Bottle in hand, as was his habit, he made his contribution to the desert, as he put it, telling us about the archaeologists and botanists who had contributed to the exploration of mysterious Arabia: Bilger, so urban in most ways, had also dreamed of the desert, and not only by following the adventures of Kara Ben Nemsi on TV; before he became a specialist of the Hellenistic period, he had tried without success to “make his niche” in the archaeology of pre-Islamic Arabia — the actions of the explorers of the peninsula held no secrets for him. He began by sweeping aside the appeal of characters like this Marga d’Andurain whom he had just discovered. In terms of violence, madness, and eccentricities, the travelers to the Nejd, the Hejaz, or the Jabal Shammar offered much more extraordinary tales — even, he added grandiloquently, real literary masterpieces. He then launched into a complicated story about the exploration of Arabia of which I don’t remember much, aside from the names of the Swiss Burckhardt, of the Englishmen Doughty and Palgrave, the Frenchman Huber, and the German Euting — not to mention the figureheads of the desert, Richard Burton the man with the thousand lives, and the Blunt couple, incorrigible horse lovers who crisscrossed the sands in search of the finest horses whose lineage — the noble Arab thoroughbred — they then cultivated at their stud farm in Sussex. Anne Blunt was the most sympathetic to me of this whole bunch of explorers, since she was a violinist and had nothing less than a Stradivarius as her instrument. A Stradivarius in the desert.

  There might perhaps be an apostil to add to my book, a coda, or even a codicil,

  On the Divers Forms of Lunacie in the Orient

  Addendum

  Caravan of Cross-Dressers

  which would testify to the passion of my colleagues from long ago for disguise and local costumes — many of these political or scientific explorers thought they had to disguise themselves, as much for comfort as to go unnoticed: Burton as a pilgrim in the caravan to Mecca; the amiable Hungarian Orientalist Armin Vambery, friend of the Comte de Gobineau, as a religious vagabond (shaved skull, Bukhara robe) to explore Transoxiana from Tehran; Arthur Conolly, first player in the Great Game, who would end up unmasked and beheaded in Bukhara, as a Persian merchant; Julius Euting as a Bedouin, T. E. Lawrence (who knew his Kipling) as a Howeitat warrior — they all tell of the slightly childlike pleasure there is (if you love danger) in passing yourself off as something you’re not, with first place awarded to the explorers of the Southern Sahara and the Sahel, René Caillié the conqueror of Timbuktu disguised as an Egyptian, and especially Michel Vieuchange, young lover of the desert about whom we know nothing or almost nothing, who disguised himself first as a woman and then as a sack of salt to glimpse the city of Smara for a quarter of an hour, a mythical city indeed, but ruined and abandoned long ago by its inhabitants, he saw it before returning to his big jute sack, sick, tossed about by the camels’ footsteps for days, without light in an oven-like heat: he finally expired of exhaustion and dysentery in Agadir, at only twenty-six years of age. Sarah prefers the simplicity of a few more forthright or less crazy souls, some with a fate just as unfortunately tragic, like Isabelle Eberhardt, in love with Algeria and Muslim mysticism — Isabelle did indeed dress up as an Arab horseman and call herself Si Mahmoud, but her passion for Islam and her faith were so much deeper than that; she ended up tragically drowned by a sudden flood, in Ain Sefra, down in the south of Oran, an area that she loved so much. Sarah often recalled, about Isabelle, that she had even conquered General Lyautey, usually so little interested in eccentricities, to such a point that he spent days, despairing, looking first for her body and then for her diaries — he finally found them, those notebooks, in the ruins of Isabelle’s hut, and the whole manuscript of The South of Oran was lifted from the mud by soldiers with the patience of stamp collectors ungluing stamps.

  The real question in Palmyra for Bilger, who didn’t care much about mystics or disguises, aside from amusing anecdotes about the inveterate tellers of tall tales of all kinds who peopled these lands (the funniest obviously concerned the adventures of the Frenchman Charles Huber and the German Julius Euting, veritable Laurel and Hardy of Arabia), was that of the relationship between archaeology and espionage, between military science and science pure and simple. How can we reassure Syrians today about our activities, Bilger moaned, if our more well-known predecessors played a political role, secret or public, in the Middle East? He was driven to despair by this observation: famous archaeologists had all, at one time or another, dabbled in affairs of State. He had to be reassured: fortunately or unfortunately, archaeologists had not been the only ones to serve the military, quite the contrary; pretty much every branch of science (linguists, specialists in religious studies, historians, geographers, writers, ethnologists) had all had relationships with their native governments during wartime. Of course not all of them had necessarily borne arms like T. E. Lawrence or my compatriot Alois Musil, the Lawrence of Moravia, but many (women included, like Gertrude Bell, Sarah added) had, at one time or another, placed their knowledge at the service of the European nation to which they belonged. Some out of nationalist conviction, others for the financial or academic gain they could win from it; others final
ly in spite of themselves — it was their work, their books, the stories of their explorations, which were used by the military. Everyone knows that maps serve only to wage war, said François-Marie, well, the same is true for travel narratives. Ever since Bonaparte in Egypt in 1798 had gotten scholars involved to write his proclamation to the Egyptians and try to pass as their liberator, scientists and artists had found themselves taking part, willingly or unwillingly, in the political and economic issues of the time. It was nevertheless not possible, Sarah argued, to condemn all these people en masse; might as well blame chemistry for gunpowder and physics for ballistics: things had to be brought back to the individual and you had to abstain from fabricating a general discourse that became in turn an ideological construct, a subject with no other import than its own justification.