Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

“I do not accept it. There must be something we can do. I will give an undertaking—”

“You already have. Much good did it do.”

The man thought. “The newspaper must stay in print,” he said. “Fifty people work for it, and they won’t find another job at the moment. There are the reporters, the printers, their families. . . .”

He looked down at the floor, staring at ruin and disaster. “Tell me,” he said reluctantly, speaking slowly as if hating every word that came out of his mouth. “If I got rid of the reporter who wrote the article . . .”

“Who is he?”

“Malkowitz.”

“I will inquire.”

Julien went back to Marcel and made the proposition.

“This Malkowitz character. Is he the Jew?”

“I believe so.”

“Excellent,” he said. “A fine piece of work. The paper continues, we exert our authority, and we get rid of a Jew who should have lost his job six months ago if you had been doing yours. Come to think of it, take a look at all the papers. See how many Jews there are. Suggest to the editors that their supplies of paper would be more sure if they thought more carefully about the makeup of their reporting staff. Then maybe the Bureau of Jewish Affairs will leave me alone for a bit.”

“Why? I really don’t think—”

“Just do it, Julien.”

“But, Marcel, apart from anything else it is quite unfair.”

And Marcel exploded. The first time Julien had ever seen his friend display such a lack of control. “Julien, do not question me and do not waste my time with your quibbles. I have a département to keep running. I am faced with having to tell the good people of Avignon that two thousand young men are going to be rounded up and sent to work in German factories. I have acts of petty criminality and sabotage to deal with. I have Vichy and the Germans breathing down my neck all the time. I have Marshal Pétain coming to visit in three weeks’ time. And if getting rid of a few Jews who probably shouldn’t be in the country in the first place will get me a bit of peace and quiet, then the sooner they are dealt with the better. Now, see to it. Or I’ll get someone else to do it. Understood?”

Julien retreated, taken aback by the outburst. He took the point. It was a question of priorities, and he could hardly criticize Marcel’s reasoning. What, after all, were a few jobs in comparison to the utter collapse of an entire country? Nonetheless, he found the task distasteful and delayed doing anything about it for several days until Marcel prodded him again. And again. And eventually he talked to a few editors. Four Jews were fired. Three papers dismissed another five without even being asked. More would have done so had he insisted.

In return he went back to Marcel over the matter of the books. And won a compromise; Walter Scott would be put into storage, to be consulted only with special permission. Ten people had paid for his successful defense of learning. There was no connection; they were separate matters; it was a price worth paying. Eventually, it stopped going through his mind, trying to think of some other way he might have treated the problem.

AND THREE WEEK SLATER, in October 1942, Marshal Pétain came to Avignon and was greeted on the steps of the Préfecture by his loyal servant, Marcel Laplace. Throughout that short intervening period, Julien’s disquiet grew as Marcel worked himself into a frenzy of worry. The police seemed to be in every café, every restaurant; soldiers were brought in to patrol the streets, suspected dissidents rounded up. Orders went out forbidding housewives to hang out their washing on the day of the great event. All flowerpots were to be taken off window ledges. Even so, leaflets mocking the marshal were distributed on the streets, and Marcel went wild with anxiety.

But, in Marcel’s view at least, it was all worth it. The marshal arrived and expressed himself satisfied. A grand reception followed, and Julien was invited; he shook the marshal’s hand, had those steady, deep eyes on him, and heard the speech that followed. He praised his préfet and hoped all would obey his orders; he criticized the legion, the bane of Marcel’s existence, for having admitted undesirables, for being more concerned with power than ensuring good government. And gave a warning that their behavior would be watched in the future.

And when he left, Marcel was exultant. “Julien my friend, you see? Did you hear that? We’ve won. They’ve been beaten back. It’s all been worth it. Now I can look after this place without being second-guessed and criticized all the time. Thank you, my dear friend. Thank you.”

He drank glass after glass of a champagne carefully hoarded for a special moment; for Marcel had only one enemy in those days, the people who sought to weaken his authority. And his victory seemed complete; he had strengthened his position immeasurably, was finally master in his own house. He had won his war.

Exactly twenty-nine days later, on November 8, 1942, the German army swept south, out of the occupied zone, and extinguished what remained of Free France. They found the work Marcel had done in the course of the battle against his rivals—the lists of Jews and communists, foreigners and undesirables, the reorganized police force, the vast files on the subversive, the dangerous, and the discontented—immensely useful. And Marcel’s life became complicated once more.

IN THIS PERIOD of darkness and uncertainty, Julien consoled himself by finally writing his article on Olivier de Noyen. It remained unfinished at his death, as he was never satisfied with it and did not really wish to end it, for it became a refuge he would have lost through its completion. The subject became in his hands a disquisition on loyalty, for he sketched out what he considered the truth of the poet’s end, using for the first time the evidence about the Comte de Fréjus sent to him some years before. He wrote in the evenings and at weekends, after he had gone back to his apartment on the rue de la Petite Fusterie, and drowned himself in the past, staying in it until the next day came and he was forced back into a situation he found ever more difficult.

Beneath the scholarly proprieties, the article alternated between lyricism and bitterness, an exploration through history of the idea of loyalty to individuals and to political ideas, a reflection of his own situation and an attempt to come to terms with it. For he had established, he believed, the truth behind Olivier de Noyen’s fate; the attack on him had nothing to do with Isabelle de Fréjus.

Rather it was because Olivier turned traitor and brought about the fall of Ceccani from the highest power. Olivier sold the secret of the cardinal’s machinations to his greatest enemy, and if he had not done so, then Ceccani might well have been the next pope. Why did he do this? Surely not the desire for money; there was no evidence of that. Perhaps, though, for an ideal? Perhaps he felt that the papacy should stay in Avignon? But that was not convincing either.

Nonetheless, what he had done was there for all to see. The letter from de Fréjus to the seneschal of Aigues-Mortes, stating that he was to open the gates to the English troops when they arrived by ship, was in the Archives Nationales in Paris. The guarantee of money from Ceccani was in the ledgers of the banking house of the Frescobaldi in Florence. And the note in the daybook of the pope clearly indicated that details of the plot had been provided by the cardinal’s “segretarius” who, at that time, was Olivier de Noyen. The plot failed; this was clearly known; Aigues-Mortes did not fall to the English; the papacy succeeded in buying Avignon and stayed there. It was easy and indeed inevitable to conclude that the failure of the scheme was because the pope intervened to make sure of it. Ceccani fell from papal favor, all his hopes of succeeding his master doomed. He was isolated and powerless, living out the remaining few years of his life visiting his dioceses. And as a final irony, on his death his great palace was bought by Cardinal de Deaux, his most bitter enemy.