Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

The shop he went to was his favorite; shelves groaned with all manner of delicacies, some still hot and steaming from the oven, some cool and flaky with fresh pastry, stuffed with spices he had never heard of, and sold at prices that made him incredulous. He picked up what he had been told to collect, and as there was a risk his fingers might make dents in them, the shopkeeper took some pieces of paper to wrap them more firmly.

There was writing on them. Olivier read it and gasped; there was no possibility of mistaking that limpid, fluent voice that, once truly heard, could never be forgotten. In his excitement and eagerness to unwrap the paper, he let all the expensive foods drop to the floor, where they broke into crumbly pieces. He scarcely even noticed, although the shopkeeper was shocked.

“You’ll get a beating for that,” he began.

Olivier ignored him and waved the piece of paper in his face instead. “Where did you get this?”

His reddened, earnest, young face had such a look of intensity that the shopkeeper forgot his anger. “There’s a little pile. I found them on a rubbish heap outside the church of Saint-Jean,” he said.

“Give me them. I’ll buy them.”

A shake of the head. “That’s the last one, young man. I’ve been using them for days.”

The realization made Olivier almost choke, but he retained enough self-possession to get the names of the last dozen or so customers the shopkeeper had served. Then he spent the rest of the day trailing around the town, knocking on kitchen doors, suffering cuffs to the ears and insults, and the occasional pinch on the cheek in his quest. When he got back home in the evening—having spent an entire day in truancy—he was, as the shopkeeper had predicted, soundly beaten.

But it was well worth it, for carefully tucked away in his tunic he had most of a letter by Cicero, now known to be one of the letters to Atticus.

By the time his father came and paid a visit two months later, he had read his discovery so often he knew it by heart. Still, merely touching it—for he mistakenly thought it must be original and written down by Cicero himself, so little learning did he have at this stage—gave him the greatest possible pleasure. He even slept with it by his side at night. Nor could he comprehend that anyone would not be as excited as he; so, when he presented himself to his father and was asked to account for the past six months, he pulled the sheets of old paper out of his tunic to show them off.

As his story continued his father’s countenance darkened. “And you have spent your time on this, to the neglect of your studies?”

Olivier hastened to tell him that he had studied hard and well, omitting that he detested the work and did it out of duty alone.

“But you could have studied harder, spent more time with your proper duties, had you not wasted so much energy on this.”

Olivier hung his head. “But Cicero was a lawyer, sir . . .” he began. His father was not impressed.

“Do not try and trick me. That is not why you read this. Give it to me.”

He held out his hand, and Olivier, after a moment’s hesitation that his father noted all too well, gave the precious manuscript into his hands. Already he felt the tears welling up in his eyes.

His father stood up. “I will overlook your disobedience, but I must teach you a lesson. You must resist such foolishness. Your job is to become a lawyer, and fulfill all the hopes I have of you. Do you understand me?”

Olivier nodded mutely.

“Good. So you will see the wisdom of what I do now.” And his father turned around and put the manuscript onto the fire, standing back to watch it burst into bright flames, then turn black as it curled up and disintegrated.

Olivier was shaking so much, concentrating so hard on making sure that no tears fell down his cheeks, that he didn’t even flinch when his father gave him a friendly tap on the shoulder and delivered another homily about his obligations. He even managed to bid him farewell in a dignified fashion, received his blessing with humility, before rushing back to his home, climbing the stairs to the little attic room he shared with six others, and bawling his eyes out.

He had learned his lesson, although not the one his father hoped to inculcate. From that moment Olivier de Noyen determined that never would he become a lawyer.

A TOUCHING TALE, attributed in different forms to many different people. It was Julien Barneuve who realized that it had originated with Olivier, then had been transferred to Petrarch when Olivier’s reputation collapsed in disgrace and scandal later on. The anecdote then took on a life of its own and became part of the legend of the early Bach. Either early genius is encouraged, with elders astounded and amazed by such infantile virtuosity, as is said to be the case with Giotto or Mozart, or it causes alarm, and the parents try in vain to block the torrent. None of the tales may be true, in fact; the stories are perhaps no more than a conventional way of signaling the birth of greatness, of the solitary purpose pursued throughout life.

Barneuve himself was not touched by the gods in this way, but merely studied those who were. The world needs only a few geniuses; civilization is maintained and extended by those lesser souls who corral the men of greatness, tie them down with explanations and footnotes and annotated editions, explain what they meant when they didn’t know themselves, show their true place in the awesome progression of mankind.

For this task he was perfectly trained, and had been so for twenty years or more, decades of work that he had spent patiently and meticulously accumulating the resources required for his chosen task. His, too, was a labor of passion and of love, for he was no pedant, no dry scholar cut off from the world. Far from it; he considered himself in a small way a crusader for the true values of civilization, burning with the love of life and of learning in an age that valued neither.

In his youth he had attempted some poetry, but was too stern a critic of others to fool himself. He was happy to abandon any such pretensions, and prided himself on a maturity that enabled him to stop wasting time while others of his generation frittered away their hours in artistic dreams. Or died; for Julien was fifteen when German troops swept across Belgium and into northern France; twenty when the carnage that all but eliminated an entire generation came to its end. It was not the time for romantic verse, or psychologically acute expressions of decadence. He rarely talked about this period of his life; he had no wish to revive memories of events that had so shaken him. He had volunteered early, rather than waiting to be conscripted, for he felt a duty and an obligation to serve, and believed that not only fighting, but also being willing to fight for his country and the liberty it represented, would make some small difference. He was injured twice, decorated twice, and took part in the terrible conflict around Verdun; that in itself is enough to indicate something of what he endured. His idealism was one of the casualties of the carnage.

Millions died; Barneuve survived. When he was finally discharged in early 1918—his injuries rendering him unfit for further military service—he came home to the house in Vaison, a solid house of substance in what is now the rue Jean Jaurès, and resumed his former life. His father never discussed the experience, and Julien felt no desire to mention it either; he might have done so had his mother still been alive. The only slight hint of his feelings was that, one morning, just after the armistice, he was to be seen in the garden slowly taking the decorations and campaign medals he had been awarded and throwing them all on a bonfire. They had been earned by someone he no longer knew, indeed by someone he considered already dead, full of dreams and aspirations he could scarcely understand. From then on, Julien conceived of his duty in a different fashion. The medals themselves were hardly damaged by the heat, but they were dirtied and covered in ash, so much so that later the gardener unknowingly dug them into the ground where, presumably, they still remain. As for his father, Docteur Barneuve threw himself into organizing the public subscription for the huge monument to the dead that was cut into the mountain supporting the old town; it was the closest he ever came to telling his son of his relief that his name was not also inscribed on its panels, that he was not the dying soldier carved so vividly onto its white marble.