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.
IN THIS PERIOD of darkness and uncertainty, Julien consoled himself by finally writing his article on Olivier de Noyen. It remained unfinished at his death, as he was never satisfied with it and did not really wish to end it, for it became a refuge he would have lost through its completion. The subject became in his hands a disquisition on loyalty, for he sketched out what he considered the truth of the poet’s end, using for the first time the evidence about the Comte de Fréjus sent to him some years before. He wrote in the evenings and at weekends, after he had gone back to his apartment on the rue de la Petite Fusterie, and drowned himself in the past, staying in it until the next day came and he was forced back into a situation he found ever more difficult.
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.
AFTER JULIA LEFT, Julien had thought about her almost unendingly. He had worried, grown angry, imagined her with others, seeing her always in his mind, bathed in sun, in the open air, painting on a hilltop. Almost every day he went to the post-box in the dark entranceway to his apartment building, hoping to see a letter with a strange stamp.
The concierge stopped saying anything to him after a while. Initially she had said, “Nothing today, Monsieur Barneuve,” 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.