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.
He laughed. “I like it,” he replied. “I’ve even started to like her. A strange woman. Special, if you know what I mean. Educated. Intelligent. Accomplished. All the sort of things a woman would need if she was to keep Julien Barneuve. Permanently, that is.”
This said with an edge to his voice, a hardness as he put the print down. He had it framed and hung on the wall to act as a constant reminder to his wife of the difference between an ordinary woman and a special one. She tried to take it down, or move it, but every time he put it back again, and would comment on how much he was growing to like it. He said it many times.
A sought-after work, now, for those who collect French prints. Only six were ever drawn off the plate before Julia erased it for more dangerous work later on. And few of those found buyers. She sold little; the dealer who had previously taken her paintings was in Paris, and inaccessible. And initially no one else would stock her work. She was now unknown, after all. Most were too considerate, or too dishonest, to say why they refused her. It was only when one looked closely at her, studied her face, then stared at the ceiling and said, “I just don’t think I can sell cosmopolitan art at the moment, you see,” that she understood. For some reason, she never thought it would touch her; not there, not in her painting. She almost said, “But I’m not Jewish,” when she stopped, sensing that she had said those words too often already.
MANLIUS SET OUT the day after his discussion with Sophia and went north. He knew there was little time. Somewhere in Italy was Felix, spending money he did not have to raise an army that would never come; it would, in his imagination, march in an ordered fashion along the coast, then strike north, hurling itself against Euric’s army, raising the siege of Clermont. Felix would establish his family’s dominion over the whole of the province, the gentle balm of Roman life would return, and a peace of Augustan dimensions would fall over a contented land.
It was not to counter his friend and rival’s ambition that Manlius left. It was because he knew, as his friend should have known, that Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely. For any army of barbarians marching under the Roman standard would accomplish nothing except looting, and the wrath of Euric would be the greater for the attempt to block him. In trying to save everything, everything would be lost.
So Manlius reasoned, and in order to accomplish his aims he made haste, as much as the roads and baggage would allow. He rode on a donkey—or rather, he took a donkey with him so that he could transfer to it when they neared the Burgundian encampment. A little detail, but an important one nonetheless. He was going as a bishop, not as a politician or a landowner, and needed to make this clear.
For the first time he gave a task to his adopted son when he left; it was time that his family assisted him, he considered. “Go into Vaison, Syagrius. Keep watch on the mood of the people there,” he said. “Do nothing but listen; find out who is the most afraid, who is most on my side. I will need this information when I return.”
Syagrius nodded eagerly; he had been waiting for such a commission, was desperate to show his worth. But Manlius took no leave of him as a father should of a son. Instead, he turned, mounted his horse, and began talking to the estate manager. Then he wheeled the beast around and rode off.
He talked little on the way; there was no one he wished to talk to. Of the thirty people traveling with him, not one had enough to say to tempt him out of his silence. Going through a valley toward the end of a day, after a hard drive that lasted ten hours, he saw the sunset, framed between the body of the hill and a decayed fruit orchard, long abandoned. The noise of wasps and bees gorging themselves on the fruit that had fallen unwanted to the ground was so loud they could hear it a full half hour before they passed by.
A bittersweet reference to Hesiod would have begun an exchange with more cultivated travelers, the theme developing into a discussion of the idea of descent, from the age of gold into the brute age of iron. Could the process be reversed? Could the age of iron be made to give way to a new age of peace and prosperity? What a pleasure to have such a discussion, to swim in the comfort of shared ideas and shared memories, to prepare for the encounter to come. Manlius instead had to have the conversation in his head, and later wrote it down (in edited form) as what became ff23-25 of Olivier’s copy of The Dream of Scipio. He dwelt there on the divine and inevitability, a subtle (if inevitably sketchy) discussion of free will, pleased with himself for avoiding any reference whatsoever to the ponderous Christian contributions on the topic.
Are we fated or not? Can we individually alter what is to come? Are civilizations as a whole, mankind as a race, doomed to rise, then decline, from gold to silver to the brutality of iron? Was he—for this was the essence of the conversation he never had—fighting against the gods in trying to fend off disaster?
No, says Sophia. Polite but sure in her correctness, deriving the logic from Plato, but refined by near eight centuries of consideration into a form he would scarcely have recognized. You cannot change fate; even the gods (a reference here to Lucian, unspotted by Gersonides but picked up by Julien) are subject to the whim of Lachesis. She and her sister fates alone know what is to be, but they do not care.