The Dream of Scipio (21 page)

But whom could he choose? How could he decide? This practical detail had gnawed at him. He could not choose anyone; he had to find someone who, in some way, resembled what the saint must have looked like, which meant he had to know in his mind what that was. Hence his reference to prayer, for he was convinced that God would show him the way.

He had the face of the Magdalen easily, although he did not know where it came from; he sat down one morning and this handsome, tranquil face drew itself on the piece of slate he habitually used for idle jottings. It was not what he expected, certainly, but the pious painter was not one to query the will of Heaven; he had prayed and had then settled down to draw: this had been given him. A pretty face, young and charming even after the necessary artistic improvements had been made to make it conform, just a little, to what such a woman must have looked like. He knew well enough that it was probably the face of someone he had seen, someone glimpsed in the street, for he had an extraordinary memory for such things. But he had not the slightest idea who it was, or when he had seen her. His mind, or God, had joined the face with the subject; that was all he needed to know.

For the blind man, he decided he would allow himself a small jest—nothing impious—but painters were habitually permitted a little leeway in the matter of sinners. He used Olivier for this figure, a piece of whimsicality that made him smile throughout the business of transferring his sketches onto the chapel wall. For Olivier was, surely, such a person, forever seeking wisdom so he could see more clearly. But even he, this man he saw daily when he was in Avignon, he could not get right. He could draw his face, of course, that was easy. But he could not get the pair of them, the saint and the blind man, Olivier and this unknown other, to look anything other than two figures placed side by side, and he wanted more than that.

For Saint Sophia herself would not come to him, and as she was to occupy all the first panel and was to be a major figure in all the others as well, the lack reduced him to despair. He could, of course, have used a conventional image, but knew he must not; he had set out to do something new, and refused to retreat into the ordinary merely because a difficulty came to interrupt his progress.

So Pisano went to the chapel, then came back to Avignon having accomplished little, and there he moaned to Olivier and all the friends who were prepared to listen, prayed incessantly but to no avail. Even renewed visits produced only the barest outline of a face, until one day he was walking through the streets and saw the Blessed Saint Sophia, shopping at a market stall. He noticed nothing at first, and only became aware of her when Olivier turned pale and gasped in surprise.

Pisano noticed and followed his eyes, saw what he saw, and knew that his search was over. That was what the saint would look like, and that was how a blind man given back his sight would react, not with joy, not with a happy smile, but with something close to anguish, with a piercing cry and an expression of something approaching terror.

“Yes,” he cried. “That’s it. Perfect.”

Pisano began to dance up and down in his excitement, making so much noise that passersby turned to look, and the woman herself glanced around in fright and then hurried away.

“Hush, my friend,” Olivier said urgently. “Calm yourself.”

“Why should I be calm? You’re not. I’ve never seen anyone turn so sickly in my life. Who is she? Are you in love with her? You must be. Is this the woman you’ve been putting in all that doggerel you produce?”

“Be quiet,” Olivier snapped, so violently that Pisano for once ceased his otherwise endless babble. “I do not know who she is. But I am going to find out. Stay here. Don’t move, and above all, don’t talk.”

He pushed his friend away and told him to wait quietly at the corner of the street, then walked up to the seller of herbs she had bought from.

“Who was that woman you were talking to?” he asked.

The woman chuckled at his attempt at innocence. “The fat one?” she asked.

“No.”

“The old one with the warts? I have lots of customers.”

“No.”

“It couldn’t possibly be the beautiful one in the old cloak.”

He grinned.

“The one wearing the yellow star,” she added with a smirk as she saw Olivier’s face freeze.

“Fallen in love with a Jew, have we, dearie?” she said with a cackle.

Olivier looked shocked, and stared at the grinning woman. “No,” he said hesitantly. “It could not have been her.” And he retreated before her jeering, contemptuous look.

 
 
 
JULIEN NEVER admitted to himself that Gustave Bloch 
had done him the greatest service in packing him off back south, that he came alive again as the memory of the northern fog was replaced by the southern early morning mist, burning off as the sun rose, fresh and clear each morning. Despite his profession, despite the fact that he had to spend most of his life indoors, in archives, libraries, or classrooms, Julien was an outdoors creature. This was where he read best, thought best, and worked best, given the chance. As he ate breakfast each morning, the housekeeper bringing him his fresh bread and jam and coffee, or sat on his broad balcony in the soft warmth of the evening looking down at the people below, or when simply walking in Avignon or Montpellier, past the soft, crumbling stone of the buildings, and the ivy and plants that grew along the walls so luxuriantly in the heat, he knew he was content. Still more so when it became too hot or oppressive and he packed a few things and left, taking the train that then still operated to Vaison, and walking the last ten kilometers to his mother’s old house outside Roaix, where he would stay a few days, or weeks or months, reading, talking to old friends he had known all his life, even occasionally helping pick the grapes as he had done as a child. And when he went back to Paris so he could spend necessary time in the libraries, or commune with colleagues, he noticed how his heart shrank, just a little, as the train chuffed north, and how it had shriveled into an inhumane lump by the time he stepped onto the platform at the Gare de Lyon.

He kept tabs on his dinner party friends, though their differing trajectories meant that he saw them only infrequently. The occasional letter, a meeting every year or so, sometimes a holiday skiing with Bernard. He went to Marcel’s wedding—a staunchly Catholic girl from a respectable family of lawyers, just right for him—and again a year later to become acting godfather to their newborn daughter. The world outside the library detained him only a little; the rash of strikes that paralyzed the country in 1936, the riots in Paris he read about; the way the streets became dirtier, voices more harsh and raucous, tempers shorter. He noticed, but his only reaction was to find his work the more comfortable. He was sheltered from the storms, and felt they could never touch him.

Only Marcel, solid and dutiful, had anything that could be called a career in this period. His grandfather had been a prosperous corn merchant, his father an ever poorer miller, whose love of drink exceeded his devotion to duty. Of the three friends, only he had known poverty, and from the age of fourteen, when he had found his father covered in his own vomit with his neck broken at the foot of the stairs, he became determined never to make its acquaintance again. His father had debts, and his creditors, who had long indulged him, were harsh when he died. Marcel came away from the experience with a fear of insecurity and a hatred of those who lend money. Big business, banks, financiers, men like Claude Bronsen, were his natural enemies, who exploited the humble and honest who could not defend themselves. For him the civil service was the perfect home—warm, comforting, and secure. His achievement in rising within it was an immense one, too easily discounted by the likes of Bernard, whose own father—a landowner and
rentier
whose wealth had begun to form with Napoleon—had protected him from too much reality until the economic hammer blows of the twenties and thirties turned his fortune also to dust.

Bernard indeed forever made fun of Marcel’s sense of duty, his belief in the goodness of governance, the dogged, dull way in which he made his way in the world. The aspiring civil servant was sent hither and thither as opportunity, carefully cultivated contacts, and friendships brought promotions that took him, inch by inch, up the ladder to the point where he even began to be allowed to make decisions. He became a sous-préfet in Finistère, enduring purgatories of weather and food to learn the arcane craft of administration; attached himself to a rising politician and went to Paris with him when his patron won his ministry; was all but unemployed for a year when the Popular Front came to power. His patron worked tirelessly to bring the government down, and was reputed to have strong contacts with those bands who took to the streets to demonstrate against bolshevism, radicalism, and Jews. Marcel took little active interest in any of this: his religion had become administration, paralleling and completing his Catholicism; the belief that, whatever the law, the country had to be carefully and firmly governed.

Indeed, so discreetly did he manage himself that in 1939 he won a better position in a department on the Loire. It was a deserved post, for he was able and diligent and experienced. But by then he had seen how politicians worked at too close quarters, and the sight had bred not a safe cynicism but a holy and much more dangerous disgust that reinforced his belief in the bureaucracy, the sole institution that could save the country from the rabble on the one hand and the politicians on the other.

Bernard, in contrast, did not have to see and learn in order to become disenchanted; Julien thought he had been born so. He was an only child, yet absorbed nothing of the father’s seriousness of purpose or the mother’s sweetness. He drifted, becoming first a poet interested more in the life than the words, then a casual journalist. When the first war came, he avoided any fighting, delaying his entry into the military until 1918, then opted for training as a pilot. He arrived on the front line in October, and never saw an enemy plane.

In his subsequent writings he was scathing of the generation that had caused the conflict, and even—no one knew exactly how—began to acquire a reputation as a hero, responsible for all sorts of bravery talked about yet never actually detailed. His career by the 1930s was successful, and lucrative, for he applied himself to the business of earning a living when his father’s impoverishment required it and even enjoyed the liberation that self-reliance provided. He was engaged in—or at least engaged in commenting upon—all the major political issues of the day, his opinions sought after and valued; in Julien’s view the amount that many were prepared to pay him for his views was remarkable. Marcel had a much less polite response and considered that the constant criticism and cynicism that came from people like Bernard was one of the fundamental symptoms of the weakness in the country. Given the slightest opportunity, he would silence them all, so that men of goodwill would be able to build something worthwhile, rather than seeing all their efforts pulled down and destroyed by those who delighted merely in destruction.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that Bernard should support the left-wing Popular Front as much as Marcel detested it; equally inevitable that he should rail against the feebleness of a government that refused to help the republicans of Spain, and that he should go there himself, although as an unofficial observer and informant for politicians rather than as a combatant. He returned once more as a man with a glowing reputation, so that his opinion was still more valued, if not directly sought after, when the war he had predicted finally erupted once more.

CLAUDE BRONSEN was trapped in France when the invasion of May 1940 came because, like most people, he did not believe that disaster could hit so completely. He had taken precautions, as his confidence in the French military was far from total, and had transferred money out of the country in case of necessity, but underestimated how quickly he would need to move. And he could not bring himself to leave; his businesses, swiftly converting to war production, needed him, and he did not trust anyone else to run them properly. He was patriotic, more French than those who had been born in France, though born in Germany himself, and had a strong sense of duty. For years there had been sniping and criticism about people like him—businessmen, financiers, Jews—and to run away at such a time, he felt, would merely have provided more ammunition. Besides, the war came and nothing happened; a sense of calm descended after the initial panic. A perverse faith in the ability of diplomats to fend off catastrophe grew, people began to laugh again and think they had panicked for no reason. Their enemy was more timid than they feared; their own defenses as strong as they had hoped.

When catastrophe did strike, the shock was all the greater, and even a man like Bronsen, normally so canny and prepared, was caught by surprise. He delayed, not able to accept that the defeat was as total as all his intelligence told him. Besides, Julia was not there, and he would not leave without her. She was in the south, somewhere in the Camargue in the little house close to the coast she rented every summer she was in France, as reassured as everyone else. As usual, she had gone off without saying where she was; she guarded her solitude and privacy jealously on such occasions. So, rather than leaving himself, taking one of the last cross-channel ferries before they were cut off, he stayed behind, hoping that she would turn up, and having nightmare visions about what would happen if she arrived and found him already gone.

When it was clear that disaster was looming, his reaction was typically defiant and indeed perverse: He went to the restaurant, the Grand Véfour, with half a dozen friends whom he managed to round up, and had a valedictory meal. One of these friends was Julien Barneuve.

A grand and fine meal it was, although the service was patchy; the waiters’ minds were distracted. Fortunately, the chef’s professionalism held out and supplies of food had not yet run low. Bronsen made a short speech at the end; the mood was immensely, almost hysterically, good-humored.