The Dream of Scipio

by Iain Pears

  But no longer; now greater subtlety was required. Manlius could not project force, or wealth; there was little left of either. So he decided to strike at the king’s weakest spot, his lack of cultivation. Instead of jewels he took books; instead of soldiers he took musicians; instead of a discourse to strike fear and generate submission, he prepared one of gross flattery, drawing parallels between the king and Augustus, noting the emperor’s love of learning, and how his fame grew through the praise of men of letters. Let us agree, and I will do the same for you; that was the message, and hardly a subtle one. It was the balance that was important; Manlius needed a style that would awe through its complexity and sophistication but that could still be understood.

  It would be an abuse of learning, a disgusting display, a shameful exercise. To praise an emperor and receive a reward, as he had done years ago during Majorian’s brief and hopeful reign, that was one thing. Wheedling a barbarian chieftain was very different. Manlius took few of his lettered friends with him; he also took few priests, for the king was an Arian, and the last thing he wanted was some self-righteous cleric, burning with zeal to do God’s work, trying to convert him, then denouncing him when he failed. The man’s wife adhered to Rome; if she could not bring him around, a clerical harangue was unlikely to succeed either. But it could make him angry.

  All this he did on Sophia’s advice; he had talked the matter over with her. “To throw away the world to preserve the purity of literary style seems foolish,” she had said severely. “You say this man has ruled with justice and firmness. That he was educated at Rome. That he is a man of moderate desires and tastes. To be cunning is no great failing in a ruler, I think. So why should he not be praised? You and your predecessors often delivered panegyrics to emperors who were distinguished only by their lusts, their violence, and their greed.”

  “Those were delivered to praise the office, and encourage the man to live up to it,” Manlius said. “There is surely little comparison.”

  “There is every comparison. To praise an unjust man and refrain from lauding a just one is foolish. When, also, you desire something from the just man it is doubly so. Give him his due.”

  Manlius saw the wisdom of her advice, she who had always been so wise, and took his leave.

  “I wish you the best of fortune, my dear,” she said with a smile. “Do not forget that in everything you do, you must stand above faction and petty interest, and tread the road of virtue.”

  “Diplomacy and virtue do not make easy companions,” he commented.

  “No. But that is why you were chosen. Remember all you have learned. You know what is the right, and what is not.”

  He took his leave of her, and as he left, she picked up a book and began to read it. He caught one last glimpse of her through the window, sitting quietly in the courtyard, bathed in soft morning sun, her head nodding, already absorbed by the work she was studying.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said as Marcel nodded to him in surprise. “It’s very important.”

  “It must be,” the préfet commented as he showed him into his office. A grand room, though badly needing a new coat of paint. That would have to wait until after the war. “What is it that gets you so agitated?”

  “Have you seen this?” Julien said, waving a folder in front of him.

  “I don’t know. What is it?”

  “A list of books. To be taken out of libraries and destroyed. ‘Degenerate literature,’ it says. Marcel, they cannot be serious about this.”

  Marcel took the paper, fished his round, horn-rimmed spectacles from the top pocket of his jacket, and peered at the first page. “Hmm,” he said without much interest.

  “Did you know of this?”

  “Of course I did. I also remember that a similar order came through some six months ago and you did nothing about it whatsoever. Nor, it seems, did anyone else anywhere in France. So now they’ve lost patience. That’s what happens if you’re obstructive. If you’d cooperated then and put all those books in store, they would have forgotten about it. Now they want more books, and they want them pulped.”

  “But look at the list!”

  “Marx, Engels, Lenin, Bakunin. . . . A predictable choice, surely?”

  “Keep going.”

  Marcel shrugged, so Julien read for him.

  “Zola. Gide. Walter Scott. Walter Scott? What in God’s name is degenerate about Walter Scott? Boring, I agree. But hardly a danger to national morale.”

  “That’s committees for you,” Marcel said wearily. “If you must know, I find it completely stupid as well, though don’t quote me. But they will keep on going until it’s done, and the list will get longer and longer. So go and do it. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  Julien was dismissed and went marching down the corridor in a rage. He could not, would not do this. This was an outrage. He remembered how he had felt, the scorn and disgust when he heard of book burnings in Germany. Such a thing could never happen in France, he had consoled himself. And now that was exactly what was happening. By direct orders of a French government.

  Again, he thought of resigning, registering his protest, but then, once more, he thought of the cold, cruel man who was likely to take over his job; it was Marcel’s subtle form of blackmail to keep him in place. For he had told him several times how only his protection stopped a rabid zealot, a crusader for moral and racial purity, from occupying his position. If that was what he wanted, then go ahead and resign. Look and see what would happen. . . .

  Julien again sat on the memorandum, pretended it wasn’t there, but no matter what he did he could find little comfort. A few weeks later he had to hold a meeting with the editor of a newspaper in Carpentras. It was a difficult meeting, and tried his patience. The editor was a venerable old man who had owned and run his paper for nearly forty years. Of the reporters who worked for him, two were known communists and one was a Jew. Of late, the paper had published a series of articles that were implicitly critical of the government, and that reported on the shortages of food and clothing. Julien, under strict instruction, had sent a letter warning of this, but he had paid no attention. Now he was under instruction to close the paper down.

  “We cannot have this,” Marcel had said to him. “Don’t these people realize? Don’t they see that whipping up resentment and criticism does nothing at all? If the marshal cannot talk to the Germans as the leader of a unified France, he can achieve nothing.”

  “Everything the paper said was true,” Julien pointed out. It was a cold day; there was no heating in Marcel’s office except for a small iron brazier that smoked badly. Julien felt asphyxiated by the fumes, and chilly in his ever more worn clothes. Even Marcel, he noted, was now badly shaved through lack of a good razor.

  “It doesn’t matter if it was true or not,” Marcel snapped. “These people are making trouble unnecessarily. Sort it out.”

  And Julien had summoned the editor.

  “You are going to close the paper?” the man said in astonishment. “Because we pointed out what everybody knows?”

  Julien looked sad. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You were warned.”

  “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.

  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.

  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.

  Julien went back to the poems, those last lines written before Olivier was silenced, and in particular the one that contains the line “and I sink in heart-ache, like a ship in a storm.” Not, says Julien, a reference to his love; this is not a love poem. For Olivier surely had cast off the safety of Ceccani’s patronage, which had given him everything. And having thrown away the security of so great a master, there was nothing to protect him. The poem alludes to his betrayal and his consciousness of it. By implication it also suggests that Olivier was aware that retribution was close when he wrote, and that it was not unjustified. Loyalty has always been one of the highest human attributes. By the standards of his day and age, Olivier’s sin could not have been greater. He may have been a poet of considerable ability; in human terms he could not be judged lightly. The Comte de Fréjus was let loose on him in revenge. He was lucky to escape with his life; had Ceccani demanded more, who could have denied him?

  And so Julien judged Olivier de Noyen harshly and without pity. He even referred back to Manlius and the example he set, using the text of The Dream of Scipio as the link; for Olivier knew Manlius’s words, but had utterly failed to comprehend them, it seemed. “No one can possess wisdom if consumed by intemperance,” says Manlius, quoting the Protagoras, yet Olivier’s actions were surely intemperate. Another statement, this time derived from Cicero, also gave him comfort, for the wisest of all Romans stated that “you cannot act rightly by taking up arms against your father or your fatherland.” Was that not what Olivier had done? For in that age without countries, Cardinal Ceccani was both father and fatherland to Olivier, and he had turned against both. Julien’s own position was the more clear, surely?

  It is significant, however, that Julien did not ponder the next passage from Manlius’s manuscript until much later, for it might have brought with it further reflection. He had noted it years before in the Vatican library, correctly ascribed its origins to Theophrastus, then filed it away. “An amount of disgrace or infamy can be incurred,” Manlius quoted, “if it is in the cause of virtue.”

  Had Julien been less influenced by his own predicament, then he might have looked harder and guessed the poet’s motivations earlier than he did. He might also have considered the possibility that Manlius, in writing these words, was passing a verdict on his own acts, rather than providing a philosophical basis for them.

  The concierge stopped saying anything to him after a while. Initially she had said, “Nothing today, Monsieur B
arneuve,” when he came down, but now she stopped and merely shook her head when he appeared every morning.

  He had given up hoping for news by the time it arrived, quite unexpectedly, about two weeks after the German invasion of the south. He had finished his day’s work, walked out into the ever quieter, dirtier streets, dark already with the streetlights unlit for fear of bombers—although the muttering of the cynical said this was a convenient excuse to cover the fact that there was not enough power to provide lighting anymore. The streets were deserted; the arrival of the German army had extinguished what little life there was left. Although people were getting used to it surprisingly quickly, few went out when darkness fell; only the occasional military truck was on the roads, and few people on foot except for patrols of either soldiers or policemen. There was an air of foreboding that hung over the entire city like a thick fog.

  It was raining lightly and he hurried, crossing the road and putting his foot in a deep puddle that had opened up in the pavement the previous winter and had never been repaired. He stopped and looked down at his soaking foot and sodden shoe, his only decent pair of winter shoes, which he had taken out that morning and checked carefully to make sure their soles were still good. With luck they would last. This would not help them, and he cursed the war, the Germans, Marcel, the city, and the weather equally, for bringing their final disintegration that much closer. Then, more slowly and carefully, looking down at the ground, he walked the last couple of hundred meters to his home, standing in the entrance, shaking himself and brushing as much water as possible out of his hair and off his clothes.

  He went up the stairs, into his chilly apartment, and even before he switched on the lights he fetched a towel. He stood by the window drying his hair, staring down at the steps of the church of Saint Agricole opposite. It was nearly eight; the doors were open and the last people at evening mass were coming out, each one pausing at the door, looking up at the rain as though they could see where it was all coming from, then hunching down and hurrying away.