He never talked about politics, for which he had a disgust that remained and, if anything, grew. Rather, he talked about what he knew; about history, and the way France had grown. He talked about the vicissitudes of the past and how they had been overcome; reminded them of the dark days of other invaders and how, in the end, they had been thrown out. He talked about how the country had grown until it filled its natural frontiers, breeding to produce the French out of the Bretons, Normans, Provençals, Basques, and all the other races who had occupied or passed through in the past. He talked about liberty, and the Revolution and the Rights of Man. None of these did he ever subject to the sort of scrutiny he might have deployed with a scholarly audience; rather, he portrayed their mutual history with an eloquent fervor, discovering reservoirs of patriotic pride he never knew he possessed and which swept over his listeners like a calming, inspiring flood.
He once even talked elliptically about Jews, by delivering a talk on the Avignon papacy in which he mentioned Pope Clement and his act of mercy during the plague, protecting the Jews against those who thought them responsible for the infection. Would he have done such a thing had he not been French? For reason and mercy was bred in the soil of France, breathed in the air. It was part of the national spirit.
Julien gave this talk in Orange, because the topic was very much on his mind. His daily work was not onerous and, indeed, proved a lighter burden than the teaching to which he was accustomed. In the gaps, he had time to go back to his notes and papers and found that the past provided a welcome refuge from the gloom of the everyday. There was much he had accumulated over the years, and much he had never looked at. It was because of the war that he turned his attention to Olivier de Noyen properly; this young man who had such a role in the regeneration of learning in a dark age carried a special appeal for him at that time.
The matter of the Jews also came to his mind for the same reason; even so strict a historian, so determined to exclude the present, could not help but be struck by the contrast between the sudden shaft of magnanimity lighting the dark days of the Black Death and the vindictiveness of the present. For in the most perilous hour of Europe’s history, at a moment when more than a third of the entire population was dying in the most hideous agony for reasons no one then understood, the pope extended his protection over the people popularly assumed to be responsible. It accomplished only a little; across the continent, ghettos were destroyed, synagogues razed, and people killed. But on French soil—or soil that became French—a man born and brought up in France stood up and offered an alternative. “They shall not be compelled, because obedience without faith is worthless; they shall not be punished, because punishment without understanding is pointless.” Thus the great bull that he issued; the Jews were not wiped out; indeed many came into Provence, into what became Southern France, and their descendants remained, to cause many of Marcel’s present headaches.
“Please don’t go mentioning Jews again,” Marcel said wearily when they met a week or so after his talk. “I’m sure you were making some general historical point of no great relevance, but it doesn’t sit well at the moment. Not the way you did it, anyway. I have had six letters of protest, and the policeman sitting in on the meeting was highly critical. I don’t need it at the moment.”
HIS ROLE GAVE him some small influence and knowledge, and he used it to try to find out what had happened to Julia and her father. He had not been particularly worried about her, as it never occurred to him that her father’s will in this, of all things, would be denied. He assumed, rather, that Claude Bronsen had gone to Marseille, found his daughter, and got on the first boat to North Africa. The fact that he had heard nothing from her—no letter, no message—was itself reassuring. She always turned to him; that was his role, and it was one from which he had never shrunk, and she knew it. Had she been in any serious trouble he would have heard.
It was only when he received news from a list distributed around the Préfecture—an unremarkable, routine document, mainly intended to alert bureaucrats of housing in the region no longer occupied and now available for requisitioning—that Bronsen had been interned and had died in the camp that he began to panic.
“What is Les Milles?” he demanded of Marcel one morning. He met him as the préfet was walking across the Place de l’Horloge on his way to the office. A sunny morning, with the first breath of spring in it. Julien had taken to eating his breakfast in a café nearby, though the experience—once full of so many different little pleasures—gave him little joy now. Even though the tide of refugees was ebbing, and the air of desperation was fading, the city that he knew so well seemed changed by the experience. There was a bleakness, even a hardness about it he had not noticed before. The buildings themselves seemed more grim, more evocative of a harsh and cruel past, as though the recent miseries had reminded the stones of what they had seen take place before them in the course of so many centuries.
He almost didn’t notice Marcel as he marched across the square. Still determined in his gait, his slight figure just fending off a hint of the ridiculous, the pompous in his stride. Only someone who knew him well, like Julien, could see how he stooped a little more each month. Only at the last minute did Julien finish his coffee—although its bitter, unpleasant taste reminded him of no coffee he had ever drunk before the war—throw down a few coins, and hurry to catch up with him. Marcel stopped and looked at Julien as he approached, and put the question without any ceremony. “Good morning Julien,” he replied. “Have you been lying in wait for me?”
“No. I just saw you. What is Les Milles?”
“It’s a processing camp. For illegal aliens. Nothing to worry about,” he replied. “A routine sort of thing for foreigners wanting exit visas. Got to put them somewhere so they don’t vanish. Why do you ask?”
“I have just heard that Julia Bronsen’s father has died in it.”
Marcel grunted. “The Jewish financier? What do you expect me to say?”
“He was French, and he died there.”
“Evidently he wasn’t French, or he wouldn’t have been there.”
“He was a citizen. He had a passport.”
“Not the same thing anymore. And as for dying, that’s a shame. But people die. There’s a lot of it about at the moment. He must have been—what? Sixty? Seventy? It happens.”
“So why lock up old men?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Julien. Those people in these camps are lucky. They get housed and fed free of charge, all their wants and desires looked after. And they’re hardly under arrest. It’s for their own safety, you know. Feelings are running pretty high about people like that. As far as I’m concerned, the sooner people like him leave the country the better.”
“He won’t be leaving now, will he?”
“Evidently not. And as I say, I’m sorry. But it is not in my area, and I didn’t know he’d been taken in. So don’t get angry with me. He was your friend, I know. And if I can do anything practical to help, just ask. But don’t ask me to mourn someone I didn’t know and probably wouldn’t have liked even if I had.”
“In that case can you find out what happened to Julia? She was meant to be meeting him in Marseille. They were going to leave together.”
Marcel’s eyes narrowed as he thought. Favors were currency, to be hoarded and used with care. Julien, for the first time, felt like a petitioner.
Eventually he nodded. “I’ll make inquiries. All right? Can I go to work now?”
BUT AT LEAST when he made a promise, he delivered. A week later news came through. Julia was living in a pension near the docks in Marseille, trying to get all the exit visas she needed to leave the country. She had been there for four months and was likely to remain there, for it was daily getting more difficult to get out.