Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

A nice boy, eager to oblige, keen that the kindness be appreciated. When he dropped them off on the outskirts of Camaret, leaving them only twenty kilometers to walk, Julia said quietly, “Don’t ever do that to me again.” Julien looked at her. She was not joking.

THE NEXT DAY, after they had arrived in Roaix, he settled her in, showed her where all the wood was for the fire and the kitchen, the well, introduced her to the farmers living nearby as his fiancée, and asked them to look after her until he returned. This they promised to do, and they kept their word faithfully.

Then, when he left, Julia began to find her way around. About a week later, she went on a walk and discovered the shrine of Saint Sophia.

Even for the atheist and the rationalist, there are places in the world that are special, for no reason that can be easily explained. The footsteps slow, the voice lowers and speaks more softly, an air of peace works its way into the soul. Each individual has his own place, it is true; what is holy to one will not be so necessarily to another, although the reverberations of some are all but universal. And the chapel was Julia’s place, every bit as much as Julien Barneuve’s was the phoenix villa; she realized this long before she reached the top of the hill, walking up on his advice. “Pretty place,” he told her. “Good view.” She felt the air of anticipation well up in her, the peculiar mixture of calm excitement of one who knows their life is about to change forever. She sensed the chapel long before she rounded the last bend in the track and saw it surrounded by a clump of trees with weeds and wildflowers growing around its crumbling walls. She had never seen it before, but it felt comfortingly familiar. This sentiment she put down to the sense of safety she had been wallowing in ever since she had found Julien again and come to this place.

The door was not locked; there was nothing to protect. Inside it was clear that sheep and goats were perhaps the most frequent visitors. A small altar remained, placed there in the nineteenth century, an ugly reject from another church, bulbous and inappropriate, but better than nothing. And it was dark, as well; the windows were tiny and high up on the walls and were so dirty they let in little light, just enough to see the dozen or so bits of paper on the altar. Julia picked up a few, took them to the door, and looked at them.

“Dear Lady, should I leave my parents and live on my own?” read one. “Blessed Saint Sophia, should I go and work in Avignon?” was a second. “Thank you for your warning,” a third. She was almost moved to smile, but there was something about the tidy peasant lettering, the way each missive had been folded carefully and neatly on good paper, the way each woman—for the writing suggested they were all women—must have toiled all the way up here, which made her refold each one carefully and put them all back in their place.

As she did so, she looked up and caught her breath as she saw what remained of Luca Pisano’s work. The paintings were dreadfully damaged, blistering off in places through the effects of long neglect, scrawled on lower down by what she later realized must have been the hatreds of the Revolution, darkened by the soot of half a millennium’s worth of candles, but still discernible; a saint reaching out to a man in a strange gesture, her hand over his eyes, something she had never seen before.

Instantly she was captivated; this was why she had come to this place, to see these pictures. This was the answer to her problem. She was ill equipped to study them closely; in her pocket she had only a box of matches, and even though she opened the door as wide as possible to let the thin winter sun stream in, she managed to see only part of the whole. But it was enough; the next day she returned, and set to work.

THE DISCOVERY PERSUADED her to take up etching in a more orthodox fashion; the war helped as well. Just as Julien fretted from the lack of soap, so Julia chafed under the absence of paint. She tried making her own, but the range of materials was insufficient. Even in the fourteenth century, pigments had been brought from far afield. The war meant trade shrank to levels not seen since the days of Manlius Hippomanes.

She became obsessive about paper, learning its feel and different properties. She bought up old books for the blank pages at the beginning and end, and eventually tried her hand at grinding up old cloths to try to make the sort of rag paper preferred in the sixteenth century. Her fingers were permanently stained black with ink she also made herself from a recipe Julien found in a book in the library—the municipal library, now happily ensconced in Cardinal Ceccani’s grand palace. She cut back her nails almost into the flesh, and soaked her hands in lemon juice for hours to clean them. The printing press she made herself—or rather she had the local blacksmith construct it for her out of an old mangle and a heavy iron frame that originally came from a bed.

She was proud of her creation; it produced results as good as any she had seen at the specialist printers in Paris, and the whole business delighted her artisanal inclinations. The unknown artist of the chapel, the master of Saint Sophia, as she called him, would have been proud of her, she thought. She had no money, but a good deal of time, and this she spent liberally, making meticulous drawings and drinking prodigious amounts of cheap red wine with the blacksmith, going over the design and the practicalities of construction. She began as supervisor to his work, and ended as his most menial assistant, filing off shards of metal, holding thick beams of iron as he beat and welded. And as he made the fine adjustments, she sat in his workshop with a plate of copper she had waxed herself and swiftly scratched out a study of Pierre Duveau at work, a serious man, slight for a blacksmith, with dark eyes and an intense stare.

He ended up with a respect for this overprivileged woman fallen on hard times, dressed in a man’s shirt, her sleeves rolled up, her thick dark hair flecked with gray held back out of her face with a piece of string. A beautiful woman, he thought as he hammered, and a noble name, though she looked like a Jew to him. Not that he cared, as he mentioned to his wife. But what was she doing living in Julien Barneuve’s house, turning up late one night and settling in to stay? His fiancée, didn’t he say? Not, as his wife commented, that it was any business of his.

Pierre was not a man to give affection easily. Her willingness to assist and watch and learn did not entirely win him over, however, for he thought her interest unwomanly; her obvious intelligence and penetrating questions about the practicalities of slippage and downward pressure alarmed him, especially as she would not be put off by easy answers. Her perfectionism irritated, as she returned time and again with minor modifications and insisted that they be done precisely. And yet he was proud of the result, as others gathered around to stare in awe at the bizarre contraption. Julia bought the entire village a round of drinks to celebrate the final completion of the project, and made a joking speech of thanks for building the most useless mangle in France.

He was, however, touched and even a little flattered by the first work to be drawn from his device, though not nearly as pleased as Julia herself, as she inscribed, and presented it to him. “To Pierre, blacksmith extraordinaire, with thanks.” It was the sketch she had done while she watched him work, which she etched in the acid that Julien had found in a chemist’s shop in Avignon and brought to her one weekend, and then engraved with a dry-point to add fine detail to the face and arms. Not one of her most experimental works, almost traditional in honor of his calling. But still too abstracted and free for his wife, Elizabeth. “All that effort for such a thing,” she said sourly as they looked at it on the kitchen table.