No such possibility even arose with Ceccani and Olivier de Noyen, although each had a genuine though ill-defined affection for the other. There the distance was much too great. It was impossible for a man such as the cardinal to have friends; there was no one with whom he could share. He was bound by the strictness of his relations; disparities of power were evident in all his dealings with his fellow men. Popes and kings required deference and respect, which shrivels friendship like vinegar on the oysters he loved so much he stopped eating them. His fellow cardinals were also his rivals, requiring constant watching. Others were his clients and his servants, and the rest of humanity simply did not exist.
Similarly, the gap between Manlius and Syagrius was too great, because Manlius regarded his secretary as a son, and no true friendship can exist between fathers and sons. Indeed, in the Dream, he excluded such relationships specifically from consideration when he touched on the subject of love. There duty took pride of place as the great motor; children fulfilled their fathers’ wishes, ensured that their names and fame continued. There was no room in such a vision for anything more tender. It was because of this that his treatment of the young man was also so harsh and distant, for Syagrius was his opportunity and his reproach.
Manlius had no children of his own, and it is possible that this lack determined many of his actions and decisions. For the twilight of the culture he held so dear was paralleled by the extinction he himself faced. The Christianity he affected, and which others of his age adopted with greater conviction, had no power to conquer such fears. When his name ended, there would be no one to take offerings to his grave, hold an annual feast in his honor, give him the eternity he craved and which he did not believe his new religion would confer.
The night his wife miscarried for the fourth time all his training as an aristocrat and a philosopher left him. He went to the cemetery and poured oil on the grave of his father. It was the only way he could apologize for his failure and the looming end of his entire line. When he slept, he saw the tombs crumbled on the ground, the low-born taking them to build their barns, the weeds growing all around.
He accepted his fate nonetheless. He did not divorce her, although he could easily have done so and few would have blamed him. Even she would not have minded so much, coming from a family that knew the importance of continuity. She would have gone to a woman’s house to pray, and been happy. But he kept her with him, made plans to adopt Syagrius, and soon afterward turned back to public life.
He knew that Syagrius would carry on his name only; nothing of true value, for the boy was kindhearted but utterly stupid, dull in conversation and simple in thought. He never read and, in all the time he stayed in Manlius’s villa, never said a single word of any interest; nothing beyond the commonplace ever dropped from his lips. No cliché, no imbecility was too hackneyed for him, it seemed; the most trite remark would cause him to nod his fair head in agreement, any phrase of elegance or profundity would elicit only puzzlement. He tried hard, certainly, was keen to please, was liked by Manlius’s wife, had many merits. But Manlius could not but compare him to what his heir should have been, and the difference made him curt, and unjustifiably rude. Syagrius put up with it; indeed, he had little choice and still got the better part of the bargain. For in return for earning Manlius’s disappointment, he got his name, and would in time have his estates as well. He had been lucky; had Manlius waited a few years until his character was more formed, he would not have chosen him, but he had been misled by his flaxen hair and open smile into thinking that a beautiful face must indicate a refined and noble soul. This was Manlius’s mistake, for the boy was kind and honest and tried to please. But he was part of a different world, and could see nothing of value in the refinement and cultivation that lay at the core of Manlius’s being.
When Manlius turned back to public life, it was not with total enthusiasm, for he was also mindful of other aspects of Sophia’s teaching, which appealed to him on a more profound level. Her eternity was different, a search for completion without ever knowing the goal until it was attained. She taught by parable and by discussion, as her father had before her, using the simplest of forms to begin the task of approaching the most complex ideas. One of her favorite techniques was to examine the myths, to discuss them and dissect them through the lens of philosophy to seek out the truths that lay therein. One day, Manlius found himself talking of Hélène, who fell in love with Paris because the Trojan shepherd had won a promise from Aphrodite. It was a matter of moments for Sophia to dismiss the story as nonsense, of course; the divine does not intervene in the life of men in such a way, either by entering beauty contests or, she said with a smile, by parting the seas or turning water to wine.
“But can we see anything more here? As we have concluded that the higher does not intervene with the lower, does this mean the story is foolish and without merit? I remind you that literature is full of such tales. Why do Dido and Aeneas fall in love, an event which Vergil also attributes to the gods? Why does Ariadne betray everyone she holds dear for love of Theseus?”
“I have read,” Manlius said, “that it is sickness, a disease of the blood. Is that not what Hippocrates wrote?”
She nodded. “But why do we contract this illness? The way the lover is drawn to the beloved, suffering sleeplessness, sweating, a loss of reason, an overwhelming desire to be united with the other person that can cast all normal behavior aside? An illness, I grant you. But we must go further. Why a particular person? Why this person and no other? Why only one person at a time? I have heard of many strangenesses in man’s behavior, but I have never heard of lovesickness for two people at once.”
And she went on from there, weaving in the speech of Aristophanes in the Symposium, in which he says that men were once spheres but were cut in two by the gods to punish them. Thereafter, they must search for their other halves, and can never rest until they are reunited. And the myth of Er in the Republic, in which men must be reborn time and again until their souls learn to ascend to the heavens and escape the prison of the body. Again not to be taken literally, of course—nothing she said was literal—but a metaphor for the quest that the soul must be engaged upon if it is to embrace the transcendent. In its dissolution lay the immortality Sophia had to offer, and which Manlius chose to pursue through his deed.
Manlius avoided so long his public duties because he was afraid of how he would discharge them. His father had known he had enemies, but did nothing until it was too late; he was killed by those he was trying to save. Manlius knew that he would not make such a mistake. He would then be faced with a decision, and a conundrum: Can one act unjustly to achieve justice? Can virtue manifest itself through the exercise of harshness? He did not know how he would answer these questions. All he knew was that his father had answered wrongly and paid heavily. Whatever virtue he had possessed was dissipated in failure.
WHETHER THE CONVERSATION about Saint Sophia between Olivier de Noyen and the Siennese painter ever took place is merest supposition; Julien surmised the existence of something like it because of the strong correspondence between Olivier’s narrative in Ceccani’s archive and the iconographic sequence on the walls of the chapel. Something of the sort must have occurred, and to suppose that Olivier repeated to the painter of the chapel the tale he put in his letter to Ceccani is reasonable. By the time Julia Bronsen had grown so familiar with his work she might almost have painted it herself, it seemed even likely.