Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

THE TRIUMPH was on the same scale as Julien’s achievement in passing the agrégation, although the Frenchman would never have seen the parallels; rather, he saw his success as the legitimate result of a meritocratic examination, rather than the exercise of a fickle, personal favoritism. The element of patronage—the fact that he was under the protection of the great Gustave Bloch, who had decided to advance him and, by doing so, would augment his own already prodigious reputation and power—never occurred to him. Nor, when he left the ship at the end of his cruise and gave Julia Bronsen an old book he had found (at a good price) in a Palermo bookshop, inscribed with an oblique salutation in his own hand, he never for a moment considered any great subtlety in the gift, nor considered that he signaled a desire for something in return.

A few words, yet so many meanings. The choice of book—Vergil’s Eclogues —recognized the young woman’s intelligence and education, suggested that the giver appreciated her interests and shared them. The edition, an Aldine, indicated a commonality of taste and discernment, for how many people truly understand the difference between one edition and another, see beyond the cover, which in this case needed a good deal of care and attention?

The inscription, a fragment of the second line of de Noyen’s poem that begins “my soul, completed, rises to God . . .” was a curious choice. It was hardly appropriate; a bit jarring, a little excessive in a gift otherwise so restrained and refined. Yet of all the phrases in all the poems, this one came to Julien’s mind and remained there when he pondered the inscription. It was, he later discovered, Olivier’s first real love poem, when he passed beyond singing of an ideal and fell into the grip of a real passion.

AND MANLIUS, penning the Dream that encapsulated all of Sophia’s teaching, how can his gift be understood? It was not given in the same spirit as his first offerings, presented in the full flush of his youth, when his exhilaration had rendered him foolish. For in Marseille he offered her two things; both were rejected. On the first occasion he had tried to express his esteem for her by giving her money, enough for her to live in security; he had presented her with a small casket filled with gold—a vulgar, ostentatious gift, full of the coarseness of youth and the arrogance of his position, which he had not yet learned to control.

“Why do you give this to me?” she had asked calmly. He replied that it was because she was the only good and noble person in the world.

“Then let me remain so,” she said, handing it back.

And the second occasion, he offered his entire soul, and declared his love for her. Again, a crude gesture promptly rebutted, for it meant he had failed to learn anything from her at all. So she turned it into a lesson, starting again the long and arduous process of teaching him something so utterly hidden from his sight.

“Come with me,” she had said. And she had led him from the room where they had their conversations—Manlius had nervously paid a call to her alone, outside the hours she normally held for public speech—and took him outside to the midden.

“Look inside,” she said. “Smell. What do you see? What do you smell?”

Manlius did not know what to say. The cubicle smelled, and looked like all such.

“Only I use that,” she continued as she shut the door. “Do you love it as well?”

“Of course not.”

“Yet it is me, part of me. The natural product of my body. And yet you turn from it, wrinkling your nose in disgust. You say you love me, but do not love what is part of me. Or are you lying, and is your love just an adolescent fancy?”

“I love the idea of you.” This from their lessons.

“My beauty is a reflection of the divine beauty?” she said ironically. Manlius hung his head in shame; being mocked was not something he could ever accept.

“No. The love I feel is the reflection. As you say, madam, you are not beautiful, although I find you so. If I were as useless as you imply, I would surely have fallen in love with the pretty young serving girl who draws the water at the end of the street every morning I come here. I would have drowned in her black eyes and her beautiful hair. But I do not. I lie awake thinking of someone much older, who turns no heads when she is not known but fascinates all who have heard her speak. You say that, at its best, the physical craving is a reflection of the desire of the soul to reunite with the ultimate beauty, with God. And can only be justified as such.”

“But I said it was only a reflection. Not a reality. As real as a glass reflected in a pond.”

“But a reflection of water in a mirror can make you thirsty.”

“That is true. And is what you should work towards. You should not bend your mouth to the imaginary glass and try to drink.”

“I know all this. I have learned well. And yet I cannot stop.”

“That is the corruption of the body, its triumph over the soul. The soul is imprisoned, and what you feel is the same as the prisoner in a dark cell who sees nothing but shadows and thinks these are reality. You must study to escape the cell, let your soul contemplate what causes the shadows. That is the purpose of philosophy, and why it is suited to only those few who wish to escape. In the moment of love, when we escape ourselves and become united with the lover, then we have a hint of the joys to come when the soul rejoins the divine; but we think it is a reality of itself. And we lose sight of our aim. That is why it is dangerous.”

Manlius looked at her. “You never feel such things?”

She looked serious. “Often,” she replied. And for the first time her gaze dropped, and would not meet his.

NO DOUBT a psychoanalyst, excited with his new knowledge in Julien’s epoch and convinced that his skills could be applied universally and eternally, would have made much of this. Had he been able to read the letters that the two exchanged over the next fifteen years, some three hundred in all, he would have dissected their souls and their lives, turned over Sophia’s thoughts about her father, analyzed her views on eternity and death, and rested content with a conclusion of extreme neurosis. Celibacy, suppressed desire, the search for the mystical could now only be seen in such terms.

Sophia was spared such analysis because, as with so much else, the letters did not survive; Olivier de Noyen almost discovered them, as the last remaining copy sat for hundreds of years in a church in Aix-en-Provence, which he visited in 1344. But he had, by then, found one version of a poem by Horace and concluded, wrongly, that there was nothing else in the little bookroom except for theological texts of no significance for him. Besides, he was hungry and tired, and wanted to go home; a cold was coming over him and he felt the need to get to bed as quickly as possible. Or perhaps it was because the wind was blowing strongly that day and sapped his patience and dulled his spirit.

No one else passed by to rectify his mistake; in 1407 a baker in the house next to the church overfilled his oven and allowed burning embers to fall onto the floor. Half an hour later his house was ablaze; an hour later the entire street was in flames.

It was a great loss, for they were the finest things Manlius ever produced. Sophia had no use for artifice in speech and was impatient with it in literature. Clever allusions, apposite quotations, delicate metrical structures excited in her only contempt. Manlius consequently dropped all those devices that he considered obligatory for good writing in all other spheres and wrote directly and simply. What they produced together might well have been considered the finest collection of love letters ever written, had the baker been more careful. A mingling of the emotions and the intellect, the desire suppressed but forever bubbling near the surface, barely under control. A complete communication of two people founded on the respect and affection of one, and reverence of the other. What the analyst would have cooed over was the eroticism of the images presented as abstract philosophy, although he would probably have missed the playful, affectionate lilt of the language. He would have assumed both writers were unaware of the feelings that saturated the prose, although each was, in fact, all too aware of them. He would probably not have considered the possibility that this great passion was the more fulfilling for each because of its abstract nature, that for Manlius sex was something all men had with their servants when necessary, that for Sophia it was a reminder of a position in the world that bred resentment rather than release.