The Dream of Scipio Read online

  “I am always happy to show anyone who is interested,” she said.

  “Splendid. Next week, perhaps. Now, if you don’t mind, I will finish the story of my extraordinary skill on the ski slopes.”

  After the meal, Julien walked her home. “I’m sorry about all that,” he said. “My mistake. I imagined a jolly dinner with everybody getting on tremendously well. I hope at least you don’t take Marcel seriously.”

  They were crossing the Seine and paused to look along the dark cavern of the river to where the towers of the Conciergerie could be seen against the lights of the city. “I’m used to people like him. And I don’t suppose he will ever do me any harm. If you disagree with him about the way I am sapping the vitality of the French race, you could always say so, you know.”

  He snorted. “I have. But it’s a complete waste of time; he will rabbit on about discipline and order. I sometimes think he should have gone to Rome, not me. Then he could have seen the new society in the making. He would have had a lovely time singing the praises of Mussolini. Although I don’t think he could ever bring himself to march around in a black shirt. He would find it too ostentatious. Besides, his abstract beliefs have never to my knowledge got in the way of perfect kindness when dealing with individuals. He is a good man. It may surprise you to hear it now you’ve spent an evening in his company, but he is.”

  “And Bernard isn’t?”

  He thought about it; she had picked up a parallel he had never bothered to consider. “No. He isn’t. He has many fine qualities—he’s intelligent, funny, dynamic, capable of good advice if he doesn’t have a personal stake in the outcome. But he is not a kind man. He has no time for people, and doesn’t understand them. He loves the working class, but the workers revolt him. Marcel, in contrast, likes the workers but loathes the working class.”

  “And these are your friends?”

  “I’m afraid so. If I confined myself to friends who were perfect I’d only be left with you.”

  She gave him a push. “Stupid thing to say,” she said, and began walking once more.

  “I mean it,” he said, catching up with her and walking alongside her, close but not touching. “I put up with their imperfections, and they put up with mine.”

  “And what are yours?”

  “Mine? Oh, dear, where can I start? Pride, excessive caution, unwillingness to take risks, a general disdain for humanity masquerading as humanism. An inability to love what can be loved, and a fascination with what cannot be.”

  He stopped, and she laughed. “You’re letting yourself off very lightly this evening, if that’s all you can come up with.”

  “I know you could do better. That’s the trouble.” He paused, sensing the atmosphere, and retreated once more. “Anyway, all three of us have many faults. Unfortunately they cannot manage to tolerate each other in the same way that they put up with me. It was a mistake to have invited them both. I should have just gone out with you.”

  “Why?”

  He completed his withdrawal. “It would have been cheaper. Did you see how much both of them ate?”

  Manlius and his family had undoubtedly worked hard at securing the position, setting up contacts long before the previous bishop had died, dropping hints about his availability, laying out policies to be pursued should the prize become his. What he had offered was unclear. His wealth was certainly a factor. His estates were large enough to build the walls and man them should the need arise, and few doubted that soon it would. His granaries could feed all the poor and still have enough left over for others. His influence across Gaul and into Italy might be of use if help was needed—although whether anyone had any help to give was a matter for debate.

  But his action was a slight against Felix’s family nonetheless, pushing them into a subordinate position in a region that the two families had shared. For four generations the Hippomanes and the Adenii had competed for office, and in the region east of the Rhône, Manlius’s family had come to dominate the secular positions while Felix’s clan had taken the ecclesiastical ones. Manlius had broken the unspoken treaty; moreover, he was still young. He could be bishop for two decades or more, and the Adenii would have to watch their influence slowly but steadily wane.

  Felix had no choice, in fact; the most important members of his family made that clear. During a heated meeting, he was informed by young and old that, although his leadership was undisputed, that position could change. He was expected to act in their best interest.

  “We know that this man is your friend, has been your friend since boyhood,” said Anacleius, a cousin of his wife’s. “We applaud your loyalty to him. But we must remind you that your loyalty to us must come first. How will you be able to defend us, enrich us, look after our interests in a hundred and one ways if you are powerless, having to go to your friend and beg favors? I do not even doubt his friendship to you; I do him the honor of believing him an honorable man in this respect at least. But he has his own family. Will he put your interest above theirs?”

  The question went unanswered. There was no need to answer it. Felix dismissed the meeting with sweet words and reassurances, then went to pray, for he was devout in a manner that Manlius could scarcely understand. In his youth he had grasped this problem and saw the disjunction between Sophia’s logic and the faith of the church, and placed her reason in a secondary position. His faith was an area she could not penetrate, the more valuable because it defied her rationality.

  And when he had finished praying he knew what he must do. He could not risk open enmity with Manlius, for that might lead to violence; rather he had to bide his time. Whatever Manlius wished to do, he had to be allowed to argue his case, and it was not inconceivable that he would deserve their support. Justice demanded that he get his hearing. Their friendship was gravely wounded, but he could not bring himself to dispatch it yet.

  This he told his family, noting that Caius Valerius, the cousin who otherwise might have won the bishopric had Manlius not intervened, fortunately seemed willing to accept his disappointment.

  In fact, Caius Valerius stayed quiet because Felix’s reticence gave him an unparalleled opportunity, and he had resolved to make the best possible use of it. For years he had smarted under his cousin’s leadership of the family, and saw a chance to take what he considered his due; he considered himself the better Christian and the better man, for all of Felix’s accomplishments. He would now outclass Felix in the area where he had been unchallenged: in that of action. But not yet; like Felix, he saw the virtue of waiting.

  Felix came out to greet him, and saw the look on his face. “Not a decision taken easily,” he said sadly. “This place has been in my family for two hundred years, grown and added to and nurtured.”

  “Are you sure it is necessary?”

  “You know it is. If Clermont falls and Euric moves east into this region he will inevitably have to take this area. Like you, we have been attacked already by brigands. Lawns and ponds are for a time of peace. These walls are as weak as you think, but the skills to do better have gone. We have run out of choices.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Or we roll on our backs and pray for mercy. That, I suppose, is another option.”

  “Have you forgiven me yet?”

  Felix sighed. “You insulted my family and our friendship. You should never have acted without talking to me first of all.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I did not fear you; only your family, who I was sure would put you in an impossible position.”

  “They did anyway; I have persuaded them to wait and see. If you serve us all well, they will accept the situation. But you must not presume on friendship too much. You have made a great enemy of Caius Valerius. He will not readily forgive you, although I imagine I can rein in his anger, and he is too stupid to do anything on his own. But enough of all that. Do you want to see what I’m doing here?”

  And for the next hour, they climbed over the new fortifications, surveyed the walls and the countryside beyon
d, pointing out weak spots, giving and taking advice. Manlius almost found it thrilling, and reveled once more in the friendship of a common purpose, however temporarily it might last. And he was impressed as well; Felix was in his element, he was a natural soldier, and needed war to give of his best. That was what worried him. He desired a solution that would enable him to win fame, to justify himself. In that lay the center point of their difficulty.

  “Very fine,” Manlius said eventually. “But you remember Diocletian’s remark: that a defense is only as good as the soldiers manning it. What quality of soldiers do you have here? Old men and women with scythes?”

  “Better than that,” he replied shortly.

  “How much better?”

  “If they are properly led, and sufficiently frightened, they will do well. But all I can do is defend. To counterattack, to take the battle to the enemy . . .”

  “You need mercenaries. Money. And help.”

  He nodded. “Exactly. And are you going to get them for me, Manlius? For if you do, I will show you wonders in return. Together we can accomplish extraordinary things; things men will talk of for generations to come. So tell me. You have your power now, My Lord Bishop. Faustus, and through him all the other bishops, seem to have placed their trust in you. They must have done, for you cannot have been elected for your piety. What are you going to do with that trust? What is it for, this sudden irruption from your study into the world of affairs?”

  Manlius thought and was aware of the difference between them. Felix, as ever, was openhearted, straightforward, and spoke with the most total sincerity. And Manlius composed his words, trying to turn them into the music his friend wanted to hear. He did not lie; but he knew he deceived.

  “I am going to try and get you something even more precious at the moment than either men or money. I wish to buy you time. And I wish to avoid the war you are preparing for here. It is the one thing we cannot afford. Whether we succumb to an invasion or beat it off, the result will be the same: ruin and devastation that will be almost total. Look at this villa of yours; you see what even the threat of war has accomplished? What will be left if you have to defend it? How many laborers will there be afterwards, or fields able to be cultivated? How many sheep and cattle? And what about the towns which depend on your produce? Who will live in them then except ghosts and memories of what once was? If I can avoid that, I will. So I will weave words and fine phrases and try to make your valor unnecessary. But if it comes to war, my old friend, I will pick up my sword and die with you shoulder to shoulder, like the sacred band of the Thebans did before Alexander.”

  Felix bowed his head, so Manlius could not see his tears. “Thank you, my friend,” he said in a choking voice. “Do this, and our friendship will last forever.”

  FROM THE MOMENT he arrived back in the south, Julien’s life continued smoothly until war came and disrupted it once more. He saw his friends every now and then, continued his correspondence with Julia, heard occasional news of her father and his successes and setbacks. He had not particularly wanted to return; for him, as for all academics, anywhere but Paris was a defeat, a backwater. To abandon the idea of the capital was a wrench, even though he never accustomed himself to the northern climate, the long wet drizzly days, the overpowering grayness of the skies, the coldness of people and climate. That was not his idea of France.

  In Paris lay everything he needed. The professional and intellectual context, the new ideas, the constant necessity of striving. In Provence lay peace and tranquillity—calm, reassuring, and stultifying. But the choice was not his; his career was guided by others. It was Bloch who had raised him so high, and now it was Bloch who cast him adrift, or so it seemed. In the great man’s mind was a question of strategy as he neared the apogee of his own career. He needed no one in Paris to ensure his reputation; although he was not so foolish as to believe that his reputation would last forever. No; in Paris he had dozens of others raised by him and placed by him. It was beyond Paris that his hold was weaker; it was the outlying defenses of his reputation that needed to be bolstered. So one pupil was sent to Rennes, one to Strasbourg, one to Clermont, and Julien to Montpellier, to establish their sway over departments and educate pupils themselves, passing on an ever fainter but still palpable echo of the great man’s method and style. It was another form of that eternity so greatly desired by those who believe in it the least. None of these chosen apostles had any say in the matter; this was not the way things were done. And the strongest would claw their way back to Paris eventually.

  So, in 1932, Julien had packed up his apartment, rented a smaller one to maintain at least a foothold in Paris, and headed back home, going initially to the big empty house in Vaison, which he had maintained as an act of thoughtless filial piety ever since his father’s death. He realized how much he hated the house, and was suffocated by the heavy furniture, the velvet curtains, the dark wallpaper, the ponderous pictures on worthy themes. In the end he sold it, sent the furniture to a brocanteur and took instead a large apartment in Avignon opposite the church of Saint Agricole. A curious, whimsical decision, for it would have been so much easier to have lived in Montpellier, but he decided that if he was to come home, then he would do so properly, and be in the city he had known since he was sent there en pension as a schoolboy of twelve. He refused to live in Montpellier itself; rather he traveled there by train when necessary, lived in a guesthouse when teaching, and always returned to his true home the moment his liberty was granted him.

  The apartment he lived in for the rest of his life was not in the most opulent part of the town—that already lay beyond the walls, in the grand suburbs that had been spreading since the latter part of the previous century—but he considered it to be by far the best, on a circling avenue of handsome eighteenth-century buildings, alive with shops and bars and restaurants and people, not so large that it attracted the motorcars that were beginning to clog the streets with their smells and impatient raucous horns. His building was light and airy, angled to avoid the whine of the winds in winter and the excessive heat of the summer. Into this he put his eclectic, judiciously chosen collection of furniture and pictures—his little Greuze, the Cézanne he had bought at a street market in Avignon for a few francs, the drawings he had acquired in Rome, the picture of the hills of Jerusalem, which Julia had given him—and they fitted as if they had all been designed for the pale green walls and the soft gray of the delicately carved woodwork. Over the years he added to his collection, carefully buying works that few others liked. By the time of the war, he had a substantial number that were beginning to be of some value. Among these were four paintings by Julia, which he had selected quite ruthlessly, returning to her studio each time he went to Paris, coming away empty-handed on nearly every occasion.

  “You are very hard to please,” she said dryly once, after he had examined carefully one work she was proud of and yet again shaken his head. “What do you like?”

  “I don’t know. Something special. There’s a vacuous reply for you.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “An intellectual like yourself. You should do better. Why don’t you like this, then?” She pointed at one painting, a seemingly rough sketch of a woman in a boat, the form of the woman blending into the shape of the water. She was pleased with it; she remained pleased with it despite him.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She grunted. “Go on. You’ll have to try harder than that.”

  “You’ve looked at too many pictures, you know too much. You are too aware of what you’re doing and of the past. That’s what’s wrong with it.”

  “Hard words,” she commented. “And being too aware of the past seems a strange criticism from a classicist.”

  “True.” He thought, then smiled apologetically. “I don’t mean to criticize. I meant it as a compliment.”

  “Really? Heaven help me if you decide to be rude.”

  “I am never rude. What I mean is that you really are very good. And that is not simply because
I adore you without reserve. Although it helps. But look: You have Matisse and Cézanne and a bit of Puvis there. A touch of Robert, perhaps, as well. I look at that picture and I can see what you’ve built it out of. That’s what’s wrong.”

  “Derivative and second-rate, you mean?” She was not in the slightest bit offended; it was one of her best qualities and one Julien could never share.

  “Not at all. I mean you are being too careful. That’s what I mean. This is a perfectly good picture. And if I didn’t know you I would be impressed and charmed. But I do know you.”

  He thought some more, wondering whether he dared say precisely what he felt, for he knew he could never explain exactly why the idea came to him. “It’s the painting of a dutiful daughter,” he said eventually, looking at her cautiously to see her reaction. “You want to please. You are always aware of what the person looking at this picture will think of it. Because of that you’ve missed something important. Does that make sense?”

  She thought, then nodded. “All right,” she said grudgingly and with just a touch of despair in her voice. “You win.”

  Julien grunted. “Have another go, then. I shall come back and come back until you figure it out.”

  “And you’ll know?”

  “You’ll know. I will merely get the benefit of it.”

  “What if I get it wrong?”

  He shook his head and grinned. “Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”

  Both Bernard and Marcel—neither of them particularly acute in such matters—realized that Julien and Julia were deeply in love with each other. Julien was afraid that if they became lovers now, Julia would turn into another woman, one to be consumed and discarded, and so he held back for fear that showing his love would extinguish it. Julia, in contrast, was not yet sure enough of herself for the battle—with her work and her father—that would result. She knew that her irresolution would seem pathetic and childish to many, that a stronger person would dispatch the looming, overbearing presence of her father and demand the right to a life untrammeled by his needs. He was an impossible man, and placed her in an impossible position. For most of her life she had had no one but him, and she was afraid not so much of his hurt if she fell in love, but of what it would say about her. Her life had been utterly selfish, she knew; she had allowed no one in to disrupt it; was she now to hurt so desperately the one person who had always meant something to her? She had to put someone’s interests and needs above her own in order to remain human; and the only person she could do this for was her father.