“Have you forgiven me yet?”
Felix sighed. “You insulted my family and our friendship. You should never have acted without talking to me first of all.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I did not fear you; only your family, who I was sure would put you in an impossible position.”
“They did anyway; I have persuaded them to wait and see. If you serve us all well, they will accept the situation. But you must not presume on friendship too much. You have made a great enemy of Caius Valerius. He will not readily forgive you, although I imagine I can rein in his anger, and he is too stupid to do anything on his own. But enough of all that. Do you want to see what I’m doing here?”
And for the next hour, they climbed over the new fortifications, surveyed the walls and the countryside beyond, pointing out weak spots, giving and taking advice. Manlius almost found it thrilling, and reveled once more in the friendship of a common purpose, however temporarily it might last. And he was impressed as well; Felix was in his element, he was a natural soldier, and needed war to give of his best. That was what worried him. He desired a solution that would enable him to win fame, to justify himself. In that lay the center point of their difficulty.
“Very fine,” Manlius said eventually. “But you remember Diocletian’s remark: that a defense is only as good as the soldiers manning it. What quality of soldiers do you have here? Old men and women with scythes?”
“Better than that,” he replied shortly.
“How much better?”
“If they are properly led, and sufficiently frightened, they will do well. But all I can do is defend. To counterattack, to take the battle to the enemy . . .”
“You need mercenaries. Money. And help.”
He nodded. “Exactly. And are you going to get them for me, Manlius? For if you do, I will show you wonders in return. Together we can accomplish extraordinary things; things men will talk of for generations to come. So tell me. You have your power now, My Lord Bishop. Faustus, and through him all the other bishops, seem to have placed their trust in you. They must have done, for you cannot have been elected for your piety. What are you going to do with that trust? What is it for, this sudden irruption from your study into the world of affairs?”
Manlius thought and was aware of the difference between them. Felix, as ever, was openhearted, straightforward, and spoke with the most total sincerity. And Manlius composed his words, trying to turn them into the music his friend wanted to hear. He did not lie; but he knew he deceived.
“I am going to try and get you something even more precious at the moment than either men or money. I wish to buy you time. And I wish to avoid the war you are preparing for here. It is the one thing we cannot afford. Whether we succumb to an invasion or beat it off, the result will be the same: ruin and devastation that will be almost total. Look at this villa of yours; you see what even the threat of war has accomplished? What will be left if you have to defend it? How many laborers will there be afterwards, or fields able to be cultivated? How many sheep and cattle? And what about the towns which depend on your produce? Who will live in them then except ghosts and memories of what once was? If I can avoid that, I will. So I will weave words and fine phrases and try to make your valor unnecessary. But if it comes to war, my old friend, I will pick up my sword and die with you shoulder to shoulder, like the sacred band of the Thebans did before Alexander.”
Felix bowed his head, so Manlius could not see his tears. “Thank you, my friend,” he said in a choking voice. “Do this, and our friendship will last forever.”
FROM THE MOMENT he arrived back in the south, Julien’s life continued smoothly until war came and disrupted it once more. He saw his friends every now and then, continued his correspondence with Julia, heard occasional news of her father and his successes and setbacks. He had not particularly wanted to return; for him, as for all academics, anywhere but Paris was a defeat, a backwater. To abandon the idea of the capital was a wrench, even though he never accustomed himself to the northern climate, the long wet drizzly days, the overpowering grayness of the skies, the coldness of people and climate. That was not his idea of France.
In Paris lay everything he needed. The professional and intellectual context, the new ideas, the constant necessity of striving. In Provence lay peace and tranquillity—calm, reassuring, and stultifying. But the choice was not his; his career was guided by others. It was Bloch who had raised him so high, and now it was Bloch who cast him adrift, or so it seemed. In the great man’s mind was a question of strategy as he neared the apogee of his own career. He needed no one in Paris to ensure his reputation; although he was not so foolish as to believe that his reputation would last forever. No; in Paris he had dozens of others raised by him and placed by him. It was beyond Paris that his hold was weaker; it was the outlying defenses of his reputation that needed to be bolstered. So one pupil was sent to Rennes, one to Strasbourg, one to Clermont, and Julien to Montpellier, to establish their sway over departments and educate pupils themselves, passing on an ever fainter but still palpable echo of the great man’s method and style. It was another form of that eternity so greatly desired by those who believe in it the least. None of these chosen apostles had any say in the matter; this was not the way things were done. And the strongest would claw their way back to Paris eventually.
So, in 1932, Julien had packed up his apartment, rented a smaller one to maintain at least a foothold in Paris, and headed back home, going initially to the big empty house in Vaison, which he had maintained as an act of thoughtless filial piety ever since his father’s death. He realized how much he hated the house, and was suffocated by the heavy furniture, the velvet curtains, the dark wallpaper, the ponderous pictures on worthy themes. In the end he sold it, sent the furniture to a brocanteur and took instead a large apartment in Avignon opposite the church of Saint Agricole. A curious, whimsical decision, for it would have been so much easier to have lived in Montpellier, but he decided that if he was to come home, then he would do so properly, and be in the city he had known since he was sent there en pension as a schoolboy of twelve. He refused to live in Montpellier itself; rather he traveled there by train when necessary, lived in a guesthouse when teaching, and always returned to his true home the moment his liberty was granted him.
The apartment he lived in for the rest of his life was not in the most opulent part of the town—that already lay beyond the walls, in the grand suburbs that had been spreading since the latter part of the previous century—but he considered it to be by far the best, on a circling avenue of handsome eighteenth-century buildings, alive with shops and bars and restaurants and people, not so large that it attracted the motorcars that were beginning to clog the streets with their smells and impatient raucous horns. His building was light and airy, angled to avoid the whine of the winds in winter and the excessive heat of the summer. Into this he put his eclectic, judiciously chosen collection of furniture and pictures—his little Greuze, the Cézanne he had bought at a street market in Avignon for a few francs, the drawings he had acquired in Rome, the picture of the hills of Jerusalem, which Julia had given him—and they fitted as if they had all been designed for the pale green walls and the soft gray of the delicately carved woodwork. Over the years he added to his collection, carefully buying works that few others liked. By the time of the war, he had a substantial number that were beginning to be of some value. Among these were four paintings by Julia, which he had selected quite ruthlessly, returning to her studio each time he went to Paris, coming away empty-handed on nearly every occasion.
“You are very hard to please,” she said dryly once, after he had examined carefully one work she was proud of and yet again shaken his head. “What do you like?”