The Dream of Scipio

by Iain Pears

  What a paradise it was, as well. For if that region of France delighted Julien Barneuve’s heart, and made him rush to return there whenever he was in need of solace, it was still more so for Olivier, before building works and deforestation had cut into the landscape and robbed the hills of their trees and soil. Although settled for two thousand years already, mankind had yet made only a small impact on the landscape; most was still untouched and uncaring of his presence.

  At the end of his journey lay the little chapel; a tiny thing on top of the hillside looking down the valley of the Ouvèze, only partially cultivated and the rest given over to woodlands; by Julien’s day the trees on the western side would be cleared and replaced with vines and olive trees, as they had been during Manlius’s lifetime. The chapel itself was stone, and a more educated eye than Olivier’s would have categorized it as Romanesque, built on an earlier foundation. A semicircular archway framed the door, with a space for a bas-relief that was never executed. The roof also had an unfinished air to it, despite the small shrubs and treelets growing up between the stone tiles, but its lack of completion did not bother Olivier at all; he was more transfixed by the way the trees had grown around it, giving it shelter from the sun and the winds of autumn, the way it nestled in the landscape. He felt joyous the moment he saw it, and it was this feeling that he tried to capture and turn into first prose and then poetry.

  The walk took two days and—because even poets tend to reduce their experiences to a conventional and often literary form—became in retrospect a pilgrimage. Julien knew of it because Olivier wrote a letter to his patron on the tour that was also filed away by the clerical bureaucracy. The letter was partly an excuse, to explain why a simple expedition to deliver a letter had in fact taken five months and cost a small fortune—but also one of those occasions where an attentive reader could discern the first glimmerings of something new. He used the allegory, describing the long journey as the journey of his soul, the ascent of the hill as the climb toward God, the arrival at the chapel as the embrace of truth. Within this form—not novel—was a realism of description without parallel either in Dante or Petrarch, a feel for nature that the others reduced to conventionality. The confusion then very much present in Olivier’s mind produced a remarkable effect, a mixture of pilgrimage and tourism, spiritual yearnings and physical desire, all expressed in a form that was part troubadour, part a revival of classical form, and as a result entirely novel. Julien translated and published it as an appendix to his Histoire, although the troubles of the times meant that it received little attention.

  So great was her distress that Sophia, for the first time in her life, knew true poverty. That such a woman—once revered and even feared for the power of her thought and the nobility of her soul—should be reduced to such a pass touched Manlius deeply when he heard about it, even though by that stage he had not seen her for some years. To be able to help her was the greatest, proudest moment of his life, which gave him more pleasure even than the moment he stood before all the senators of Rome to speak, and was rewarded for his words with a ceremonial high office. Little else occupied his mind until he could deliver that help.

  The news was brought by a Jewish merchant of Vaison, who came to his villa to inform him of her plight. A quiet, softly spoken man, not unworthy to be treated as a guest and given hospitality, if he would only have accepted it.

  “You know the lady?” Manlius asked after the refreshments were brought. The Jew—politely and unostentatiously—declined even to touch them, and drank only water. A small, neat man, with precise movements and a face that only rarely changed expression. Calm rather than cautious; Manlius would have found him intriguing had he been closer in rank to himself.

  “I have known of her for some years,” he said. “Although I cannot claim to know her, of course.”

  “You say she is in some distress.”

  “She can barely afford food and dresses in rags, although she finds this of no great importance. But her health is not good and her spirit is diminished by her troubles. She is alone there, and has no family to turn to. Some people have tried to assist but”—he spread his hands wide in a gesture of hopelessness—“every day there are fewer people capable of assisting. She is a proud and haughty woman, my lord, and is somewhat feared by the population. She would not ask for help, I think, unless she was truly desperate, and yet she asked me to deliver this message to you.”

  Manlius scarcely thought of what to do; he had no need to. The obligations that bound him to her had not lost their strength merely through the passage of time, and his position was such that he was perfectly equipped to assist. Not that it would be so easy; the days when a simple letter to the authorities would have sorted all were past; there were scarcely any authorities left, and those who retained their positions were no longer able to do anything.

  But he still had vast resources. “She must be brought to safety so she is troubled no more,” he said. “I am in your debt, sir, for being so kind as to bring me this news. When will you be returning there?”

  “In about two weeks, assuming my business goes well.”

  “In which case, I trust you will do me the great favor of carrying a letter to her, and perhaps of rendering me some more services on her behalf.”

  The Jew agreed readily, and left. He returned, as good as his word, exactly thirteen days later, and Manlius handed him a letter and a leather bag.

  “The letter is for the lady, and the bag for her taxes. I would like you to take care of the matter for me; you will of course be rewarded for your goodness.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “The letter to her explains everything, but lest she refuses to accept what she so obviously needs, then I will explain it to you as well. Please carry out the instructions whatever her opinions on the matter. Find the owner of the tax revenues and pay whatever debts she may have. Sell the properties for the best you can. Then I will come as swiftly as possible to take her to my villa. I will be there in three weeks.”

  The Jew nodded and prepared to leave.

  “One last thing,” Manlius said. The Jew turned.

  “Yes?”

  “What is your name?”

  The man smiled. “Strange how rarely I am asked that,” he said. “My name is Joseph, my lord.”

  “Thank you for your kindness, Joseph.”

  “Odd,” he said with a smile to Lucontius later when he recounted the meeting, “that the world depends on him.”

  “I wasn’t aware that it did.”

  “Oh, indeed. My deep researches into all things Christian show me so plainly. They fully accept it. The resurrection of the body, which I understand to be a stage in the second coming, cannot take place until all the Jews embrace Christ. Saint Paul says so, I think. Judging by my friend Joseph, it seems that greatly longed-for day will be some considerable time a-coming. He shows no sign of doing any such thing.”

  “Did you point out that he was being a little inconsiderate, keeping everyone waiting like that?”

  “Ah, no. He is an admirable fellow, honest, kind, and diligent. A sense of humor was not easily detectable in him, though. It may be that he doesn’t find it funny. And, truth to say, these Christians believe the absurdity so strongly that there have been occasions when their efforts at persuasion have gone beyond mere argument. My dear friend, it makes me sad.”

  “What does?”

  “To see the triumph of something so crude and coarse. Think of Sophia, and the wisdom and elegance of what we learned from her. Think of the beauty of her philosophy and the completeness of the contemplative ideal. The sophistication of her conceptions and demonstrations of God. Then think of this smelly rabble and their beliefs. These poor Jews being screamed at simply because these vulgarians think it a way of getting into heaven.”

  “You could hardly explain her doctrine of the soul to the Christians,” Lucontius replied. “Let alone instruct them in the formal nature of her logic.”

  “I know. They wa
nt results. They want someone to come along and say, ‘Repeat after me, and live forever. The less you know, the better it is.’ ”

  He smiled. “It’s not that I plan to invite Joseph for dinner. He is a merchant, after all, and would not accept the invitation in any case. But I talked to him a bit, and he seems decent enough, if as strange as most of his people. He, after all, doesn’t insist that his salvation lies in anyone else’s behavior. He just believes, in a perfectly polite way, that everyone else is wrong about everything.”

  He stood up and took a cup from a servant. “Long may he do so, say I, for it is worth it just to see the look of outrage on the Christians’ faces at the very thought of such people.”

  And, smiling ironically, they drank a toast to Joseph the Jew.

  “I have my one slave, and that is enough for me,” she said. “What would I do with a dozen?”

  He tried to answer.

  “I know. You are worried. ‘There goes a protégée of the great Manlius and he only gives her one slave.’ You are concerned about your reputation. Take them away, my boy. There must be better things for them to do.”

  So he did; also, he removed nearly all of the furniture, shut off many of the rooms, painted over the frescoes (thus preserving them for Père Sautel when he began to excavate), and let her be.

  Eventually, she came to him again. “I am weary of town life,” she said. “It weighs on me, this provincial little place.”

  “You told me that philosophy could only exist in the society of men.”

  “Cities, my boy. Not small towns. And certainly not towns so shrunken they are scarcely more than villages. Do you know, they call me the pagan, these worthy citizens? They spotted in a day that I do not go to church, and actually came to ask me why. I thought I might give some lectures here, but I might as well try to instruct a herd of goats.”

  He knew what she saw, she whose father had come from Alexandria, one of the greatest cities on earth, who had grown up in Marseille, still a city even though diminished. Vaison was a poor thing now, though once rich and prosperous. Several quarters had been sacked a century before and never rebuilt; slowly they were being quarried as the fitful work to build a wall continued. Even this project was not complete; the town could not even act with dispatch over its own defense. The builders would not work without pay, and there was no money. The citizens would not do the job themselves, for they considered it unfitting. There were not enough slaves and servants left to be forced to the task. The public buildings were small and crumbling; houses once great were divided up, or abandoned or dismantled. He felt the conflicting loyalties of a man who belonged here, a member of the tribe of the Vocontii, which had occupied this land when Rome itself was still a few huts on an Italian hill, and of a Roman aristocrat who had seen better and greater things.

  “I was told you have established a reputation for yourself,” he commented.

  “As a giver of good advice. People come to me with their aches and their worries. I pour balm on both. Do not misunderstand me; I am happy to do so. But all they are really concerned about is the state of the roads, the level of taxes, and how long the water supply will remain fresh.”

  “All pressing problems.”

  “I know. But sometimes the noise of their chirruping and gossip drives me close to madness.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “Somewhere to be quiet. Peaceful. Where I can meditate without being interrupted by the rabble, or harangued by a deacon about the love of Jesus. Do you know, the only people I can have a conversation with are the Jews? At least when they quote scripture at you they are not merely repeating something some priest has babbled in their ear. They have the great merit of disagreeing with nearly everything I say. In fact, they disagree with almost everything they say themselves. And most importantly, they don’t think that shouting strengthens their argument. They just talk loudly out of habit. I have been entertaining myself by reading the Bible with one of their priests or whatever you call them. It has been most instructive.”

  “You astonish me.”

  “I astonish myself. But fascinating though I find Moses, I still want a little peace and quiet. Do you have anywhere in the country I can go to?”

  Manlius laughed. “My lady, you know quite well that I own nearly all the country. According to the tax collectors, I have some forty-nine villas, many of which are now unoccupied and falling into ruin for lack of labor. Not that they take this into account.”

  She sighed. “Don’t you start. I would like to borrow something small, about two days from here. As isolated as possible.”

  Manlius thought. “I know just the place,” he said.

  A fortnight later, the repair work had been carried out, a dozen serfs transferred to provide basic services, and the lady Sophia was escorted to the villa he had in mind about four kilometers from his own principal residence. It lay among a group of hills that provided coolness in the summer and protection from the winds in the winter. It was much too grand for her, consisting of some twenty-five rooms, and she hated it on sight. But, as she was leaving, she saw the tiny dwelling on the hill—with a clear view over the countryside, a copse of trees to provide shelter—and on the instant decided this was perfect. Clean water nearby, a path for bread and other supplies to be brought from the valley. Fresh air, and the simplicity she desired. Once the family of farmers had been ejected on Manlius’s orders—for Sophia never thought that philosophy should bow its head to equity—she took it over and achieved something of the tranquillity she had long sought. When she finally decided that this was where she would stay, he gave it to her, along with the neighboring farms and about forty laborers. Within a few years all but six of the laborers had run away, and the farmland had turned back into scrub. What did he expect? That she was going to turn farmer? Fret about the wheat? Examine the olive trees for blight? The waste annoyed Manlius, he who worked so hard to keep production going on his own lands, but he said nothing. Nonetheless, she was a difficult, impossible woman, sometimes.

  She lived there, on and off, for near twenty years before she died, and much to her annoyance, she became genuinely respected by the rough country folk who lived nearby and adopted the habit of coming to her with their illnesses and concerns. She even outlived Manlius himself, and on his death, the tax revenues of the land passed to a Burgundian soldier, who collected them, every quarter, in person.

  They even came to have a grudging affection for each other, this representative of Greek sophistication and the rough, unlettered barbarian who was now her effective overlord. She was lucky, and she knew it; her new master—such he was, although only she, with characteristic bluntness, ever referred to him in this way—wished to be more polished, and had a crude, rough sense of fairness that made her life more fortunate than many enjoyed. Ordric—middle-aged, fat, and powerful—was one of the better men in an age with few shining examples of virtue left. It was strange to find such qualities in such an unlikely place, but the times themselves were strange. She taught him nothing, he did not wish to learn; rather, they learned only to appreciate the kindness of the other, and in the end, she left him all her remaining lands in her will, not merely the taxes of them, as she could think of no better person to take possession. In return, Ordric built the little monument to her over her grave, to remember someone to whom he had become quietly devoted. The story of his respect survived, the memory of her advice gathered miraculous overtones, and eventually a small chapel grew around her tomb as people came to pray there for help.

  By 1347 Ceccani was a star in the ecclesiastical firmament, and had become so powerful that he was richly detested. He had accumulated so many offices that he was all but indispensable for the good running of Christendom. And he had absorbed so many benefices that many whispered he had an annual revenue rivaling that of Pope Clement himself. He was, consequently, a focus of real hatred for all those who either wanted more for themselves or genuinely believed that the gentle shepherd of men would have been
appalled to see what he had created.

  Ceccani, of course, was as aware of this as he was aware of everything that went on around him. And he was wounded by it, for he was, in his way, a man of the utmost piety and duty. He wore the richest, costliest garments made of silk and cloth of gold because it was necessary to impress men with the majesty and power of the church; underneath he wore a shirt of the coarsest hair, crawling with lice, his flesh covered in suppurating sores. He gave banquets of such cost and magnificence that they endured for days and attracted the disgust of those excluded, yet himself drank only water and disdained the roasts and sweetmeats and fine wines that he pressed so liberally on his guests. He entered church like a prince, carried on a bier and attended by at least a dozen servants, generating more condemnation from those revolted by his arrogance, yet prayed alone three hours every night, on bare knees on the stone of his private chapel, carefully locking the door so no one would see him. He was the greatest lover of learning, using men like Olivier to rescue priceless texts and his money to restore them to humanity, yet condemned all deviation from the orthodoxy of the church and, on two occasions at least, ordered the burning of heretics. Like the church of which he was a faithful servant and perfect reflection, Cardinal Ceccani was a contradictory, inexplicable creature.

  He was, moreover, the embodiment of the corruption that had settled on the church like a thick fog since it had fled Rome and come to Avignon, and yet no man in the curia was more aware than he of the dangers of its presence there, nor more desirous that the pope should return to the Eternal City. But he had been too young to stand a chance in 1342 when the Frenchman Pierre Roger instead had ascended the throne as Clement VI, and Clement could live for many years yet. Other means of restoring the head of Christendom to his proper place, accordingly, began to come to his mind.