“ ‘You are saying we are abandoned. Rome itself is abandoned?’
“ ‘Look at it from the point of view of, say, a citizen of Antioch, or Alexandria. Older and more glorious than Rome in some cases, richer by far. Why would anyone shed a tear if those upstart Romans, so arrogant, so condescending, suffered a little?’
“He paused and looked at me seriously. ‘All the world will be shocked should Rome ever fall. But preventing the perpetual civil wars was the main priority of all rulers for more than a century. You cannot say this has not been achieved. And what has been lost? What will be lost?’
“ ‘We would be no longer Roman.’
“ ‘Why not?’
“ ‘We could not take office in the state. My father was consul, my uncle magister milites. What would remain for me?’
“ ‘Empty titles, for the most part. Which cost the possessor a fortune in entertainments and charity.’
“ ‘And yet we have an emperor in the West now determined to challenge the threat in Gaul.’
“ ‘Ah, yes. Majorian. And how long do you think he will last?’ ”
Manlius paused and looked around him. All his dinner guests had sat quietly, listening to this tale. When Manlius had left Ricimer’s presence he had gone home, thinking quietly of what he had heard. He had thought of Majorian, the emperor he had accompanied to Rome. And what a difference there was! Majorian was a good man, one striving to do his best, but an ordinary man nonetheless. Ricimer was different, altogether exceptional, the sort you encounter, perhaps, once in a lifetime. Maybe not even then.
“For all that,” he continued, “you know the result. Majorian was killed, his successor was murdered, and his successor was also killed, all probably on Ricimer’s order. Every emperor who wished to raise an army or move against the Goths went to an early grave. Was it because he was bribed by Constantinople, or because he believed any such move was doomed to fail and would dissipate resources on a fruitless task? I do not know.
“He is dead, anyway. But I remember his last words as I left. ‘The empire is not disintegrating because of the barbarians, but because of itself. One part will not fight, the other half cannot. The next time you have a barbarian army on your frontier, remember that well.’
“You want me to go to the emperor, if you can find one, and persuade him to send an army, so we might save Clermont and restore the writ of Rome. Let this story give you some hint of how much success I expect, and why I counsel approaching the Burgundians first. For any success with the emperor will not come swiftly if at all. And, I say again, we have little time.”
He almost stretched out his cup of wine to spill the dregs in libation, but held back at the last moment; it would cause offense, and spoil the effect.
BECAUSE OF MARCEL’ S fervent appeal, and because his need, and the need of his country, was so apparent, Julien Barneuve accepted the invitation to become a lecturer, a writer of articles, and an examiner of the works of others. A censor and a propagandist, to those few who disapproved; his own ambivalence was such that he used these terms himself. He was given leave from the university where he worked, and his colleagues happily allowed him to go, pleased at the prospect of someone so eminently sensible taking on such a position. Curiously, he enjoyed the work, and found the sensation of doing something worthwhile a pleasing one. For France needed reassurance, needed to know that chaos was controllable and that government was still firmly in the hands of the French. He needed such reassurance as well. Every time he managed to find an allocation of paper for a journal that might have been forced to close down, he felt a small tinge of pleasure, just as he felt a sense of achievement every time he gave a talk on the radio or at a public lecture in Orange, or Avignon or, once, in Vaison itself. Every time he persuaded an editor to hone a critical point so that it was less offensive, he felt he had been useful. Marcel was under siege from within, but at no stage did those seeking to undermine him have an opportunity to use Julien’s department to level accusations of incompetence or laxity at his administration. Julien became skilled at making little things seem grand, at constructive delay, at semi-mendacious reports that gave the impression of great activity. But he also did his job, telling himself it was necessary to do so. And, as he traveled through the south of France, in the zone unoccupied by Germans, and gave talks to a variety of meetings, he could feel the stirrings of pride in the audience, and knew that, in his small way, he was helping his country heal something of its wounds, keeping the fragile tissue together.
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.
Julien could not work out whether he was more hurt or angry that she had not contacted him; in any case both emotions were overwhelmed by worry for her. It was getting difficult to travel, but the trains still ran sporadically; as soon as he could he went to Marseille himself to get her.
The reality was much less bad than his imaginings of squalid hotels, prostitutes, and the poverty of hunger; she was living in a tiny little hotel hard up by the docks, along with a dozen others in a similar situation. The owner was irrepressibly cheerful, remarkably so as it seemed that the chances of anyone paying her the full amount they owed was small. “That is war,” she said philosophically as she took Julien up to her room. “But what can I do? If I throw them out then I get others who cannot pay either.”
Julien knocked and walked in. She was lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette, disheveled and with dark shadows under her eyes. She leaned forward onto herself when she saw who it was. She looked dreadful; tired and very frightened. He went to comfort her, but she waved him away. “Get out, Julien,” she said.
“What?”
“Five minutes. Come back in five minutes.”
He shook his head in surprise, but did as he was told. Stood outside on the narrow landing underneath a hissing gas light, until she opened the door once more and let him in. She’d put on a clean dress, combed her hair, tidied the room. The effort distressed him far more than the first sight of her; for the first time in her life she had been reduced to the conventional. His fury at her bubbled over because of it.