RICHELIEU'S FACE by A.L.Berridge

It sounds rather sad to say I've been thinking a lot about Cardinal Richelieu's face. Not, I hasten to add, in a Charles Aznavour kind of way, but in a sense that's perhaps even more disturbing.

With apologies to the squeamish, I've been thinking about this:


Poor Richelieu. His wasn't the only aristocratic grave desecrated during the French Revolution, but the front of his mummified head was actually carried away and sold to Nicholas Armez of Brittany, a wealthy collector who reputedly not only exhibited and lent it out, but would also (as a special treat) entertain favoured dinner guests by manipulating the well-known features as a kind of macabre glove-puppet.

I learned this last (hopefully apocryphal) detail from a museum curator, and as I was writing about Richelieu at the time it hit me rather hard. I wasn’t depicting him as a villain, I was working well within the known facts, but ‘IN THE NAME OF THE KING’ is still fiction, and in putting words into Richelieu’s mouth and thoughts into his head, was I really any better than that collector?

Mary Hoffman has already referred to Antony Beevor’s mistrust of fiction depicting real people, and A.S. Byatt has described it as ‘an appropriation of others’ lives and privacy’. There is certainly some truth in this today. Anyone who achieves a degree of fame seems immediately to be ‘owned’ by an increasingly entitled media, and if Julian Assange can be depicted against his will in the play ‘Stainless Steel Rat’ then arguably his face has been stolen as effectively as Richelieu’s own.

As a historical writer I tell myself firmly I am better than this because I only write about the dead. But that’s why the issue of Richelieu’s Face disturbs me, because it raises the obvious question: are even the historical dead really fair game?

My current book is set during the Crimean War, and during a recent visit to Sevastopol I was introduced to a young man visiting the spot where his great, great grandfather had stood during the Battle of Inkerman. His pride in his ancestor was both obvious and justified (Colonel Henry Percy won the VC) and I wouldn’t help a slight qualm at the recollection I’d been putting dialogue into his mouth just two days before. I’d written nothing disrespectful, but coming face-to-face with a real flesh and blood descendant I had an uneasy sense of having taken a liberty.

That seems, on the face of it, ridiculous. A father may ‘belong’ emotionally to his family, but an ‘ancestor’ is public property. But where do we draw the line? Grandfathers? Great-grandfathers? The death of the last person who actually knew the character? Is this a simple issue like copyright where we can do what we like 70 years after somebody’s died? In terms of distressing living relatives that seems quite reasonable, but if this is an ethical issue then the passage of time shouldn’t make the slightest difference. Either the dead have rights, or they don’t – and if we say they don’t, then there is nothing wrong with what Armez did to Richelieu’s face.

Those rights still aren’t absolute, any more than those of the living. Newspapers are allowed to deal with those parts of a person’s life ‘in the public domain’ and so of course are we. Henry VIII as Henry VIII is a persona rather than a person and I wouldn’t have the slightest scruple in writing about him, even to his detriment. I think the issue only really arises when we go beyond that and (literally in Richelieu’s case) try to get inside these people’s heads. A.S. Byatt makes the distinction when she admits Oscar Wilde appears in ‘The Children’s Book’ but adds drily ‘The novelist doesn’t say what he thinks.’ An interesting article by Guy Gavriel Kay takes that idea even further, arguing that historical fiction writers are all right as long as they steer clear of ‘point of view’ and don’t pretend to be privy to the secret thoughts and feelings of real people.

But…But…But!! That’s where the good stuff is. That’s what I want from good historical writing: new insights and deeper understanding. Are we never to be allowed a ‘Wolf Hall’? H.M. Castor's 'VIII'? No soliloquys in Shakespeare’s History Plays? Surely we want to see all round a character rather than merely the two-dimensional image of encyclopaedic fact?

It's true our portraits can never be completely true, but then they don’t claim to be. We’re not pretending to be psychics, and our readers know we are only offering an interpretation.

But yet again we’re confronted with the spectre of Richelieu’s face. I very much doubt Armez’s dinner guests believed that was really Louis XIII’s First Minister gurning at them from their host’s hand, but does that make it any less offensive? For me it’s not so much an issue of libel as one of dignity, and I’m not sure a disclaimer of ‘this isn’t real’ is enough of a defence.

So what is?

We'll all have our own answers to this, but personally I think it lies in the intent. Byatt’s interview conjures up an image of a bunch of harpies gleefully pillaging the graves of the dead, but I don’t know a single historical writer who approaches their subject with anything less than respect. Not one. We chose history because we love it, not because we want to debase it. We understand the importance of truth, which is why we spend so much of our lives reading and researching rather than just ‘making stuff up'.

I LOVE reading historical fiction from the perspective of real characters, and there are some wonderful examples of 'how to do it' right here on this blog. The only reason I haven’t written an internal ‘point-of-view’ like that myself is because I haven’t yet felt sufficiently qualified to do so. I planned to attempt it with the marvellous hunchbacked Marquis de Fontrailles for ‘IN THE NAME OF THE KING’, and even spent a grisly day hobbling about with a rucksack full of rocks on my back just to see how it altered my perception, but in the end my French simply wasn’t good enough to comprehend the nuances of his wit, and without the authenticity of his ‘voice’ I had to let the idea go. That may be just as well, actually. The first line I gave him was 'Do you ever look at feet?'

But 'respect' doesn’t have to mean 'reverence'. If we adopt a ‘nil nisi bonum’ approach to real characters then we’re not only producing dull writing we’re also distorting the truth. My own theory is that we need to bring to them much the same attitude we have towards our ‘own’ characters, whose humanity we recognize even when they’re behaving at their most vile. This is almost inevitable perhaps, under the theory of 'tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner'. We mustn't whitewash, but I don’t think anyone here will laugh at me when I say my personal creed for tackling real characters is to do it with respect, do it with truth, and perhaps, in the end, to do it with love.

In 1866 Napoleon III managed to rescue Richelieu’s mummified face and restore it to its rightful owner in the Sorbonne. Now whenever I’m haunted by the spectre of that first photograph I replace it with this tender detail from the restored tomb:

It’s ironic, perhaps, that the undoubtedly ruthless Cardinal should now be represented by this rather sentimental image of comfort, but perhaps Phillip Larkin had it more right than he intended in ‘An Arundel Tomb’:


‘…..The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.’

If we do our jobs well enough, then perhaps it will.


IN THE NAME OF THE KING is published by Penguin on 4th August 2011

INTO THE VALLEY OF DEATH is due Spring 2012

A.L.Berridge's website (in the process of updating)