Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

And Julien came away with his shard of memory, forever glinting in the hot Mediterranean sunlight, as a reminder of something offered but turned down. It stayed with him until he had learned more and was ready. Until then he had that moment instead, that look on her face as their eyes met.

HE TRAVELED around the Mediterranean to see and learn, an idea that would never have occurred to people of Olivier de Noyen’s age; they had little energy, or money, or time to spare for any type of luxury, and the wasteful use of all three simply never crossed their minds. Nor did they find nature so wonderful; they knew it all too well already, and had no soft illusions about its benevolence. Occasionally, in lyric verse, we catch a slight hint of appreciation, when the light breeze awakens the lover’s heart, or falling leaves indicate a love that is dying, but in general the works of the age are quiet about nature’s beauty except as metaphor.

Even Olivier thought he traveled for a purpose on his endless criss-crossing voyages across what is now Southern France, Italy, and Switzerland. There is even a hint that he once visited England in the retinue of the Bishop of Winchester in 1344, although there is no solid evidence and, indeed, it seems unlikely. Ostensibly, he voyaged either on those little missions of informal diplomacy and administration at which he proved adept and useful—delivering a message, paying a compliment, finding information—or he was in search of those manuscripts with which he became ever more obsessed.

And yet Julien did not entirely impose his own values and opinions when he fancied that Olivier took pleasure from the journey as well as the destination, and that he often took a less than direct route and dallied unnecessarily in places with no other interest except their charm. Much, again, was supposition: The poet was only known for certain to have taken two trips, one to Dijon, which produced his great allegorical letter on Saint Sophia, the other to Bordeaux. Nonetheless, others must have been made, for the list of manuscripts he acquired implies considerable travel.

Certainly Olivier saw the world in a novel and strange fashion. Manlius contemplated the landscape and forced it into the conventions of the Vergilian eclogue, making it a confirmation of a literary tradition that was by his time almost dead and imbuing it with the melancholy of a nostalgic futility. Julien responded with all the orthodoxy of a man brought up on Rousseau, but Olivier’s response was more wayward and indeed more original. For he felt he was tasting a private, personal pleasure; the fact that no one else could—or wanted to—share his delight was the essence of his happiness.

Some casual comment led to the detour after his trip to the Burgundian court in 1346. Refreshing himself at a household obliged to the cardinal about two days outside Avignon, he heard someone mention the Chapel of Saint Sophia, which lay a good walk to the east.

“A very holy place,” said his host, “with great powers, thanks to the intercession of the blessed saint. Women in particular go there to ask help when faced with difficult decisions. There is also a little hermitage, I believe, of very great antiquity, occupied by a few people who look after the shrine.”

Olivier was intrigued immediately, and the mere name of the saint almost guaranteed that he would cancel all his plans the next day, leave his small band of servants and friends—much to the irritation of his host, who was faced with the prospect of feeding them for an extra two days—and set off the next morning. That the chapel lay only a short while from his hometown, and he had not seen his family for nearly two years, perhaps also aided his decision. Besides, it was well known, he said to justify himself, for such places to contain all sorts of treasures.

And all that was part of the reason; the other part, which he scarcely even recognized himself, was the delight of walking through the fresh country air, entirely on his own, never knowing what might be around the next bend. To sit halfway up a warm hill in the sunshine, listening to the birds and eating some bread and an onion, to doze off in the shade, then wake up to the sight of the light glittering through the thick trees above him. And to be quiet, to hear no man’s voice, make no conversation, to let his thought flit hither and thither.

What a paradise it was, as well. For if that region of France delighted Julien Barneuve’s heart, and made him rush to return there whenever he was in need of solace, it was still more so for Olivier, before building works and deforestation had cut into the landscape and robbed the hills of their trees and soil. Although settled for two thousand years already, mankind had yet made only a small impact on the landscape; most was still untouched and uncaring of his presence.

At the end of his journey lay the little chapel; a tiny thing on top of the hillside looking down the valley of the Ouvèze, only partially cultivated and the rest given over to woodlands; by Julien’s day the trees on the western side would be cleared and replaced with vines and olive trees, as they had been during Manlius’s lifetime. The chapel itself was stone, and a more educated eye than Olivier’s would have categorized it as Romanesque, built on an earlier foundation. A semicircular archway framed the door, with a space for a bas-relief that was never executed. The roof also had an unfinished air to it, despite the small shrubs and treelets growing up between the stone tiles, but its lack of completion did not bother Olivier at all; he was more transfixed by the way the trees had grown around it, giving it shelter from the sun and the winds of autumn, the way it nestled in the landscape. He felt joyous the moment he saw it, and it was this feeling that he tried to capture and turn into first prose and then poetry.

The walk took two days and—because even poets tend to reduce their experiences to a conventional and often literary form—became in retrospect a pilgrimage. Julien knew of it because Olivier wrote a letter to his patron on the tour that was also filed away by the clerical bureaucracy. The letter was partly an excuse, to explain why a simple expedition to deliver a letter had in fact taken five months and cost a small fortune—but also one of those occasions where an attentive reader could discern the first glimmerings of something new. He used the allegory, describing the long journey as the journey of his soul, the ascent of the hill as the climb toward God, the arrival at the chapel as the embrace of truth. Within this form—not novel—was a realism of description without parallel either in Dante or Petrarch, a feel for nature that the others reduced to conventionality. The confusion then very much present in Olivier’s mind produced a remarkable effect, a mixture of pilgrimage and tourism, spiritual yearnings and physical desire, all expressed in a form that was part troubadour, part a revival of classical form, and as a result entirely novel. Julien translated and published it as an appendix to his Histoire, although the troubles of the times meant that it received little attention.

WHATEVER THE beliefs of the inhabitants nearby—and many still hold that the saint came with the Magdalen and lived the rest of her life as a hermit once she had converted the area—the shrine of Saint Sophia had more ordinary origins, which Julien first glimpsed when he noticed the relationship in name between the saint and the female guide in Manlius’s manuscript. For Sophia did indeed live out the last years of her life in this place, but scarcely as a Christian evangelist; rather, Manlius Hippomanes placed her there when he plucked her out of a Marseille that was becoming too dangerous. Without his support, her future would have been bleak indeed; she had never had much in the way of family fortune, simply the rents from a few houses and shops and some land in the hinterland, but these now produced next to nothing. The population was dwindling, the trade drying up, and the rental was all but vanished. Only the tax assessment remained the same.