Julien continued to look uneasy, unconvinced. “And you are a man of moderation?” he felt like asking, but he knew the answer. Yes, Marcel was indeed, in comparison to those others snapping at his heels.
ONLY JULIA SUGGESTED a different course of action when he went back to what he now considered his real home to be with her. “You are doing things you dislike so that others won’t be able to do worse. Are you sure that is not the case for everyone? Isn’t that what your friend Marcel is doing? The policeman who arrests people in the night? The prime minister? Even Pétain himself? They are all doing things they would prefer not to in order to prevent worse. The evil committed by good men is the worst of all, because they know better and do it anyway. Isn’t that what that manuscript of yours says?”
Her opinion contradicted those of so many others, but then she would not be affected by his resignation; all the librarians and journalists and newspaper owners and academics and teachers would be. He thought about it some more, anguishing in his indecision. And as he writhed, he came in late, if at all; memoranda and orders lay on his desk for weeks before anything was done with them, and then any work was bungled and performed incompetently. He read more, found himself obsessed with the minutiae of the life of Olivier de Noyen, to the exclusion of all else. His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in France in that period; laziness became political.
More and more, he left Avignon altogether and went east to Julia, traveling however he could. Sometimes there were buses, sometimes he managed to get a ride with a farmer on a horse and cart; most of the time he rode on his bicycle, the tires now long worn away and replaced with cloth, which he bound tightly to the rim of the wheels with wire. Once there, he would stay often for ten days at a time, finding excuse after excuse not to leave. When he did return to Avignon, he hoped to find he had been dismissed in his absence; no such good fortune ever awaited him.
When he came, he brought gifts for her, all sorts of things he would never have considered before the war. He spent time going around book-stalls finding old books with blank end pages that she could use for her printing, cutting them out in a way that previously would have appalled him. He knew every pharmacist in the city who would set aside the acid she needed for biting her plates. Ironmongers and scrap merchants received constant visits also, and would collect plates of copper for him, beating them flat into a usable shape once more. Once he discovered some oranges, and bore them to her in triumph; they ate them together on the flat grass outside the chapel door, getting themselves sticky as the juice ran down their faces and clothes. The wasps came, and Julia ran away screaming in fright; Julien ran after her, pounding at them with his hat to drive them away before they both scuttled into the chapel and shut the door, sitting in the darkness and laughing themselves silly.
Both of them were happy in a way neither had ever imagined. Often they scarcely even talked for days on end, but were merely in each other’s company. She did her work, outside when possible, inside if not, and he did likewise. They would take such food as they could find with them up to the chapel and spend the day there, often sleeping there at night, waking up at dawn and eating a crust of bread together before washing each other down with the water Julien brought up from the river in an old metal bucket. Or she would go on her own and Julien would busy himself in the garden. He grew potatoes and tomatoes; there was an olive tree and a fig tree, and he carefully tended four tobacco plants, whose leaves he would pluck and press and dry and shred. They smoked the result with a couple of old clay pipes when cigarettes were unobtainable.
Julia returned to herself, and to her work, in his company and with the stimulus of the chapel. She slept, for the first time in two years, she said, and slept so hard Julien could scarcely wake her in the morning. Then she would bustle about making tisane, for there was no coffee, and went to see if the hen she’d acquired had laid any eggs. Generally it hadn’t, but occasionally she would return from the henhouse she’d built, bearing the egg with the most immense pride in the bird’s achievement. And she would boil Julien the egg, and serve it with all the ceremony of Escoffier himself, concocting one of his fragrant masterpieces in an age now long forgotten.
They were playacting, they knew, and the realization made it the more precious. They were living out the pages of a child’s book, pursuing the life of bucolic simplicity to fend off the ever grimmer news that came through from the outside; the shortages, the arrests, the Allied landings, the bombings, and the murders that became daily events. There was nothing they could do about it except survive, and celebrate their survival and the love that grew stronger with every glance and every shared moment.
It was Julia who pointed out, when she read some of the late poetry of Olivier de Noyen, tossed onto the floor as Julien worked, that whomever he might have loved, this “woman of darkness, wisdom touching the light” (to quote one of his latest poems) surely could not have been Isabelle de Fréjus, at least not if her supposed portrait was truly her.
“Look,” she said impatiently one evening, brushing her hair out of her eyes in the way Julien had first noticed on his Mediterranean cruise, and which he had loved ever since. A competent, businesslike gesture of someone whose profession was seeing, done with a slight toss of the head and which always left her face and neck and hair arranged in a perfect harmony. “Look at the damned woman.”
Julien had finished his article for perhaps the fourth time, but was still not pleased with it. It had lain now for several months on his desk, and every time he had gone back to it, he had a feeling of impatience welling up inside him; he could not settle down and work on it again. It was true; everything he said about the poet was right. About the betrayal of Ceccani, the casting off of all accepted obligations. Yet he knew he did not have the whole picture, for although he could reinterpret some of the poems, others were stubbornly intransigent. They were love poems, and however much he might reconsider Olivier as a man, as a poet he could not persuade himself that his last words were anything but remarkable.
He mentioned this and she read both the poems—struggling through in the Provençal—and listened to his argument. Then she looked at the portrait of Isabelle reproduced in a guide to the Musée des Beaux Arts in Lyon. It came from a book of hours, and the attribution was venerable enough to be believable; Pisano had given it to her. Then she stated the obvious.
“I’m a mere painter,” she said. “But were I a poet, I would never dream of describing someone with fair hair as a woman of darkness, whatever I might mean. It would be lazy, not to say incompetent. I think I would make myself work a little harder to make the metaphor match the physical appearance.”
Julien grunted, then chewed his lip. “Well,” he said reluctantly. “You’re right, I suppose.”
“Of course I’m right,” she replied cheerfully. “Sorry.”
Afterward, he let the remarks brew on their own in his mind. Of course she was right; of course this woman of darkness could not have had fair hair. Could not have been Isabelle de Fréjus. But the fact remained that Olivier had loved someone. Did it matter whom he had loved?
His mind turned the question upside down and presented him with a different solution many months later. From the notion of Wisdom he thought of Sophia, then of the chapel that Olivier had written about. This came to him in Avignon, and the next time he visited—in winter this time, when even Julia had stopped going up the hill because of the lack of light and warmth—he asked her about how the painter had portrayed Saint Sophia. She rummaged in the large folder she had made to protect her precious paper.
“I did some watercolors,” she said, handing one over. “They’re not so good. But she does have dark hair.”