Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

The pope wiped his brow of the sweat that prickled down it; he must, Ceccani thought, have lost a third of his weight by sweating in the past few weeks, sitting up in his tower and roasting himself like that. He looked warily at his cardinal; he did not like him, suspected him of constant intrigue, but knew also of his intelligence and diligence. Cardinal Ceccani wanted power, and perhaps even wanted to succeed him, of that there was no doubt. But it was also true that few others so deserved the office, or had such an elevated concern for its defense.

“And what am I to do, Ceccani? Offer a cure? Bring back the dead? Hold up my hand and bid this plague be gone? Prayers are fruitless, intercession has achieved nothing.”

“You must give hope, and understanding. And above all you must move swiftly to counter those who are using this situation to undermine the church. The friars, the mendicants, these people calling themselves the flagellants. They offer scourging and penance and the people flock to them, abandoning the church as they go. And they offer an explanation, the only one: that God has sent this plague as a punishment for the evils of mankind and of his church, which has led men astray.”

“Do they, by God! We will see about that.”

“No, Holiness. You cannot defeat these people. If you move against them, then the people will hate you the more; they care for the sick and offer them hope; the church at the moment is doing neither. You must not attack them, you must place yourself at their head.”

Clement looked at him impassively. “Go on. Tell me what you have in mind.”

And Ceccani sketched out the way the church could let them loose against the Jews and destroy them in the same way that it had devoured the heretical Cathars, and thrown back the Muslims from Jerusalem. Give the people a purpose, an opportunity to destroy their enemies, those who wished them ill. He saw the temptation of glory dancing in Clement’s eyes, reflected in the firelight, and knew he was halfway to his goal.

EVEN THOUGH an entire continent was engulfed by war and the south occupied, Julien paid little attention to the German presence until shortly after Bernard had come to see him and announced, somewhat prematurely, how he planned to take control of the region once the occupiers had gone. He always thought on a grand scale, his friend. Until then, the war had been an abstraction, whose reality was sensed only through the shortages of food, the new laws and decrees, the air of despondency that could be sensed in the wind and in the expressions of men as they passed by. The emptiness of the streets, the fact that even a single vehicle attracted attention when before streams of them went unnoticed.

And, of course, through the absence of those people who vanished, taken away to be offered as sacrifices to placate the powers in the north. The foreigners, some Jews, men drafted in to feed the factories of Germany with manpower, others who fled to the hills to avoid being taken or to join the Resistance. The war was a collection of absences but had no real physical presence for him until the day a single truck rumbled into the main street of Vaison, stopped, and the driver got out. What the Germans called Operation Anton, the occupation of Southern France, had been under way since the previous November, but demarcation disputes with Italy over who was to control the area east of the Rhône meant troops generally passed through on their way to the coast. The hilly land east of the Rhône was of no great military importance; it was not the way any invading troops landing in the south would come, if they had any sense.

It was a Saturday morning and the driver was lost. Throughout history, a good general has been he who knows where his army is; a great one he who can say with some assurance where it will be tomorrow. In the case of this soldier, this one-man occupying force, he had been told to join a convoy going to Marseille. But no one had told him where the assembly point was. He had waited for three days, then set out from Lyon on his own to try to catch up.

He was fresh from school; had been in the army only twelve weeks and had not one iota of military fervor in his body. He had hoped desperately for a posting far away from the slightest hint of any fighting, and had used what small influence he possessed—he came from a military family that, collectively, was ashamed of him—to join a unit defending a small island off the Brittany coast, spending his days fishing while hoping that the might of the Allied powers would decide it had better things to do than assault an island with a population of 278 people.

But much of the German army moved south into the previously unoccupied zone, and the young man could only reassure himself that things might have been worse: He could have been dispatched to the eastern front instead. He was swept up in the vast redeployment and got lost as he drove through the night, hoping to find someone—anyone at all—who could tell him where he was, where he should be. He came to Vaison, far from the road he should have been on, and got out to ask directions. He looked around him with an air of perplexity on his face. He was too innocent to wonder whether he should have been afraid, all alone in this town, with no one knowing where he was, driving a truck full of food that the inhabitants would have eaten with the greatest pleasure.

Julien saw him as he stood there, blinking in the bright early sunlight. The youth looked at him, wondering whether he was a person to ask for directions, then walked into a shop. Julien watched him waving his arms as people do when they cannot speak well. He pointed, first in one direction, then in another; the shopkeeper pointed as well. He pointed to some bread and was given it, tried to give some money in exchange, but the shopkeeper waved him away, would not take it. An ambiguous gesture, not friendliness, not disdain, a cautious mixture of both that acknowledged the occupier while also taking account of the news that the fortunes of war were swinging, that the air of invincibility was fading. He mentioned the incident to Julia later: hardly the embodiment of military prowess, he said. Difficult to imagine that the defeat of France had been encompassed by such a figure.

The soldier walked back to his truck, looked around, then drove off. Julien watched that as well; he had not moved once. Julien said so, and described every movement to the investigators who came a few days later, trying to find out who stopped the truck six miles down the road, made the youth get out, then butchered him and left him to die while they stole the supplies he was transporting.

THE PLAGUE sent men mad; this is known, indeed it is a commonplace that extreme circumstances produce behavior that seems scarcely comprehensible to those more happily situated. During the plague and for more than a century afterward, the dance of death became a leitmotiv of European art; men and women naked and dancing frenziedly with monsters and devils, embracing the things they loathed more than any other. It was a representation of the mind, for people threw aside normal restraint and embraced joy and life so eagerly and with so little caution that it crushed them.

One such was Isabelle de Fréjus, whose absurd passion for Pisano provided all the proof necessary that love is a sickness, a dangerous disease that corrupts and destroys all around it. Since he had sketched her and addressed her by the walls of the town, he had grown in her mind until he towered over all other thoughts. She dreamed night and day of him, imagined being held by him and submitting to him in a way which revolted her when she thought of her own husband. Initially she tried to pray that the thoughts would leave her alone, but soon she stopped; the madness took hold and she no longer wanted them to leave. Where the lurid visions came from she did not know; how they arose unsummoned was also mysterious, but soon she stopped fighting them and began to summon them like an incubus to come and comfort her.