Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco foucault (important books to read .txt) 📗

Plan had worn meout. For that matter, the baby, as its grandparents said, neededclean air. Some friends lent us a house in themountains.

We didn't leave at once.There were things to attend to in Milan, and Lia said that nothingwas more restful than taking a little vacation in the city when youknew you'd soon be going off on your real vacation.

Now, for the first time,I talked to Lia about the Plan. Until then she had been too busywith the baby. She knew vaguely that Belbo, Diotallevi, and I wereworking on some puzzle, and that it occupied whole days and nights,but I hadn't said anything to her about it, not since the day shepreached me that sermon about the psychosis of resemblances. MaybeI was ashamed.

I described the wholePlan to her, down to the smallest details, and told her aboutDiotallevi's illness, feeling guilty, as if I had done somethingwrong. I tried to present the Plan for what it was: a display ofbravura.

Lia said: "Pow, I don'tlike your story."

"It isn'tbeautiful?"

"The sirens werebeautiful, too. Listen, what do you know about yourunconscious?''

"Nothing. I'm not evensure I have one."

"There. Imagine that aViennese prankster, to amuse his friends, invented the wholebusiness of the id and Oedipus, and made up dreams he had neverdreamed and little Hanses he had never met... And what happened?Millions of people were out there, all ready and waiting to becomeneurotic in earnest. And thousands more ready to make moneytreating them."

"Lia, you'reparanoid."

"Me? You!"

"Maybe we're bothparanoid, but you have to grant me this: we started with the Ingolfdocument. It's natural, when one comes across a message of theTemplars, to want to decipher it. Maybe we exaggerated a little, tomake fun of the decipherers of messages, but there was a message tobegin with."

"All you know is whatthat Ardenti told you, and from your own description he's anout-and-out fraud. Anyway, I'd like to see this message formyself.''

Nothing easier; I had itin my files.

Lia took the paper,looked at it front and back, wrinkled her nose, brushed the hairfrom her eyes to see the first, the coded, part better. She said:"Is that all?"

"Isn't it enough foryou?"

"More than enough. Giveme two days to think about it." When Lia asks for two days to thinkabout something, she's determined to show me I'm stupid. I alwaysaccuse her of this, and she answers: "If I know you're stupid, thatmeans I love you even if you're stupid. You should feelreassured."

For two days we didn'tmention the subject again. Anyway, she was almost always out of thehouse. In the evening I watched her huddled in a corner, makingnotes, tearing up one sheet of paper after another.

When we got to themountains, the baby scratched around all day in the grass, Liafixed supper, and ordered me to eat, because I was thin as a rail.After supper, she asked me to fix her a double whiskey with lots ofice and only a splash of soda. She lit a cigarette, which she doesonly at important moments, told me to sit down, and thenexplained.

"Listen carefully, Pow,because I'm going to demonstrate toyou that the simplestexplanation is always the best. Colonel Ardenti told you Ingolffound a message in Provins. I don't doubt that at all. Yes, Ingolfwent down into the well and really did find a case with this textin it," and she tapped the French lines with her finger. "We arenot told that he found a case studded with diamonds. All thecolonel said was that according to Ingolf's notes the case wassold. And why not? It was an antique; he may have made a littlecash, but we are not told that he lived off the proceeds for therest of his life. He must have had a small inheritance from hisfather."

"And why should the casebe ordinary?"

"Because the message isordinary. It's a laundry list. Come on, let's read itagain."

a la... SaintJean

36 p charrete defein

6"...entiers avecsaiel

p... les blancsmantiax

r...s... chevaliers dePruins pour la... j. nc

6foiz 6 en 6places

chascune foiz 20 a...120a...

iceste estI'ordonation

al donjon lipremiers

it li secunz joste iceusqui... pans

it al refuge

it a Nostre Dame d I¡¥altre part d I ¡¥iau

it a I ¡¥ostel despopelicans

it a lapierre

3 foiz 6 avant lafeste... la Grant Pute.

"A laundrylist?"

"For God's sake, didn'tit ever occur to you to consult a tourist guide, a brief history ofProvins? You discover immediately that the Grange-aux-Dimes, wherethe message was found, was a gathering place for merchants. Provinswas a center for fairs in Champagne. And the Grange is on rueSt.-Jean. In Provins they bought and sold everything, but lengthsof cloth were particularly popular, draps¡Xor dras, as they wroteit then¡Xand every length was marked by a guarantee, a kind ofseal. The second most important product of Provins was roses, redroses that the Crusaders had brought from Syria. They were sofamous that when Edmund of Lancaster married Blanche d'Artois andtook the title Comte de Champagne, he added the red rose of Provinsto his coat of arms. Hence, too, the war of the roses, because theHouse of York had a white rose as its symbol."

"Who told you allthis?"

"A little book of twohundred pages published by the Tourist Bureau of Provins. I foundit at the French Center. But that's not all. In Provins there's afort known as the Donjon, which speaks for itself, and there is aPorte-aux-Pains, an Eglise du Refuge, various churches dedicated toOur Lady of this and that, a rue de la Pierre-Ronde, where therewas a pierre de cens, a stone on which the count's subjects set thecoins of their tithes. And then a rue des Blancs-Manteaux and astreet called de la Grand-Pute-Muce, for reasons not hard to guess.It was a street of brothels."

"And what about thepopelicans?"

"In Provins there hadbeen some Cathars, who later were duly burned, and the grandinquisitor himself was a converted Cathar, Robert le Bougre. So itis hardly strange that a street or an area should be called theplace of the Cathars even if the Cathars weren't thereanymore."

"Still, in1344..."

"But who said thisdocument dates from 1344? Your colonel read ¡¥36 years after thehay wain,' but in those days a p made in a certain way, with atail, meant post, but a p without the tail meant pro. The