Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

Three months to the day after he came home—a period mainly spent sitting in the garden of his maternal grandmother’s house at Roaix a few kilometers to the west, for after a short while he found living in his family home irksome—Julien got up at five in the morning, took down the books he had been reading the day he left for the army, and began once more, picking up at exactly the page where he had inserted his bookmark three years previously. He worked silently, efficiently, and hard, showing the powers of concentration that he had always been able to summon. After he had drunk a coffee with a piece of bread from the previous day dipped in it, he sat and read and annotated until twelve, when he would put on a hat and walk into the village and eat some soup at the café. Then he worked again until six, ate, then worked again until midnight. This pattern of study he kept up, year after year, until he was ready: he sat, and passed with ease, the agrégation in history and geography, an intellectual marathon and obstacle race that, until it was reformed in 1941, was perhaps the most fiendishly demanding examination the mind of man has ever devised.

It says much of Barneuve’s character, and of his intellect, that he emerged near the head of his year. His career in a sense was already made; he had now merely to collect the fruits of his labors. After doing his time in a provincial lycée in Rennes, sent there by the French state to teach him humility, he could reasonably look forward to spending the rest of his working life in Paris. A model academic career was already laid out, one of steady accomplishment, a continual drip of honors and rewards, and the quiet respect of colleagues and pupils. He was, by this stage, already working on his thèse, a vast work on late Neoplatonism in the West, which took him much of the next two decades to complete.

It was not to be so perfectly smooth, nor so easy; he had embraced self-satisfied complacency too young. The simple life of predictable, safe accomplishment was not, it seemed, what he truly craved. For in 1924 he won a greatly sought-after scholarship to spend two years at the École de Rome, and as a preliminary took a cruise around the Mediterranean to celebrate, paid for by his father. On it he reacquainted himself with Olivier de Noyen, and he, in turn, eventually introduced him to Manlius Hippomanes.

IN SOME WAYS, though, Manlius had already reached out and touched him before his Mediterranean cruise. Even though the name had changed, Julien was a native of the same town and showed a precocious intellectual interest in his region, his pays, and it was this curiosity that attracted the attention of Canon Joseph Sautel.

Père Sautel has only an incidental role in this story; he is, in some ways, no more important than the plague bacillus that ultimately killed much of Olivier de Noyen’s generation; an agent acting unknowingly for his own reasons and unaware of any of the consequences. But the effect he had on the young Julien was of such magnitude that he deserves to be considered, lest his brief intersection with him be misunderstood as either trivial or coincidental. There was, in fact, an inevitability about their encounter; it had been likely since Julien’s parents married in 1892, his wife contributing to the family the peaceful little house in Roaix, which she adored so much that she went there every summer to avoid the oppressive heat of the town. It became probable when the youthful Sautel developed a passion for archaeology and won permission from his bishop to indulge it. It became certain when Julien, to escape the solicitudes of his mother, took to long walks during the otherwise empty afternoons when he was alone with her during the summer months.

He was ten in that summer, the age when children are the most impressionable, and Sautel was an impressive man. They met late in the afternoon, when the boy was tired and thirsty. He had gone a long way, along lanes and tracks, crossing the nearly dried-up Ouvèze, then walking in the direction of the bois de Darbaux on the other side toward the hills that rose from the river valley, dark and threateningly against the brilliant blue sky. Then he got lost, and turned back, cutting across fields to save time while also thinking of his anxious mother—who had told him not to go for more than half an hour—to give form to his mounting panic.

The freshly dug mounds of earth, dark in parts, sandy in others, mottled where the sun had partially dried them, attracted his attention first of all, and made him hope that there were some workmen in the field beyond, perhaps building a barn. He clambered through the ditch, scratching his leg on the brambles as he climbed up, then walked past the huge earthworks to see what he could find.

There was no one there, or no one he could see. Signs of recent activity were all around—wheelbarrows, picks and shovels, black circles of ash where trees had been cut and burned. But no people, just the swallows wheeling in the air. Julien stood uncertainly, then walked to what looked like a ruined building in the hope that someone was about.

There he entered a world of magic. The walls were only a few feet high, of rough stone and pebbles and crumbling mortar, nothing to look at, but as he walked past one, then another, he saw a sight that made him catch his breath. Before him, laid out on the floor, was an enormous, beautiful bird, picked out in tiny stones, its blues and golds and reds glittering as the fierce afternoon sun reflected off the water that had been used to clean it. Almost as though it was alive. Better than if it had been alive; no real bird could ever attract the eye like that, or nestle so beautifully in the stone foliage as this one did.

Utterly transfixed with wonder, and scarcely daring to breathe lest it hear him and fly away, he took a step closer, then bent down to run his hands over the irregular, almost sharp surface.

“Get off!” An angry, urgent voice broke the peace and the spell. The bird did not move. Julien stood up sharply and looked around him.

“I said get off, you little wretch! Hurry. Do as you’re told.”

Julien took a step backward, caught his foot on a loose boulder, and fell heavily, sprawling over the pavement.

“Dear heaven! Stay there. Don’t move.”

Then the owner of the exasperated voice appeared from behind one of the walls. A big man, only in his twenties but seeming much older to Julien, with a bushy beard and wearing a white shirt and loose, baggy trousers. In his hand he carried a notebook, which he put carefully on top of the wall before stepping over the bird to help Julien up.

“Are you all right? You didn’t hurt yourself?”

Julien said he hadn’t. The man smelled of sweat. A nice, comforting smell, Julien thought.

“Can’t you read? Didn’t you see the sign on the road? ‘Private. Keep out.’ I suppose that just made you even nosier.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Julien said timidly. “I didn’t come by the road. I came across the fields. I’m lost and my mother will be worrying about me. I hoped someone could tell me where I was.”

The big man studied his face carefully, saw no signs of impudence or deceit, then grunted. “Very well. I’ll take you to the road and show you.”

“No!” Julien cried desperately, though he didn’t know why he was suddenly so afraid. The man raised an eyebrow.

“I’m sorry,” Julien continued. “But please tell me, what is this place? I must know. Why’s that bird there?”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s beautiful,” Julien said reverently. “The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

The man smiled. “Yes,” he said gently. “I might well agree with you.”

And he told Julien that it was a mosaic, which had lain unseen for many hundreds of years, until he had come along and uncovered it. Then as the boy evidently hung on his every word, he led him through the rooms of Manlius’s villa, pointing out what he knew, or could guess, about each one, showing him the fragments of broken statues his workmen had discovered, the few roof tiles that had fallen to the floor when the timbers gave out, the remains of the colonnade by the great entranceway, gap-toothed with four of its columns completely vanished.