He glanced down again, his long lashes concealing his eyes, and I was struck yet again, and this time most uncomfortably, by how identical his face and Katya’s were, particularly in the half-light of the candles.
“….of course, Claude Bonnet is a fine scholar and a personal friend, so I would never bring this slight lapse of scholarship to his attention. I am sure you understand why, Jean-Marc. Jean-Marc?”
“Sir? Oh, yes. Of course.”
“I knew you would.” Monsieur Treville pushed himself up from the table. “And now… I have a treat for you. You’ll never guess what it is.”
“In that case it would be foolish of me to try,” Paul said.
“No, no. It’s a treat for Jean-Marc. In my study. You two go along. We’ll join you later.”
There was a hint of tension in Paul’s tone when he said, “Why don’t we all take coffee together, Papa.”
“No, no, no. I’ve this surprise for your young friend.”
“Can’t we all share it?” Katya asked, casting a troubled look in my direction.
“It wouldn’t be of interest to you, my dear. It’s…” He beamed at me with anticipatory relish. “…It’s a first edition of de Lanne! What do you say to that, young man?”
“Well… I don’t quite know what to say,” I confessed honestly.
“Aha, I’ll wager you never thought you would actually set your eyes on a first edition of the excellent Abbe’s benchmark study of the Great Death. You’ve read it, of course, but to hold a first edition in your hand… ah, that’s something, eh?”
“Yes… that’s something, indeed. Yes, indeed,” I stammered out. “A first edition! Well, well.”
As he drew me towards his study he confessed that, as I well knew, de Lanne’s work wasn’t of much importance in modern historiography—too liberally larded with myth and folktale, of course—but still there were not half a dozen first editions of the work in existence, and….
While I examined the calf-bound volume with more signs of interest than I felt, Monsieur Treville beamed at me, participating in what he assumed to be my excitement and delight. I leafed through, pausing now and again at a page and reading a passage with pretended concentration. I even dared the occasional “Ah, yes.”
“In some ways,” he mused, “history was grander before it was infected by impulses towards scientific accuracy. I know this is academic heresy, but I regret the replacement of Literature by Science as Clio’s closest ally. Research has been substituted for imagination; the True has fallen victim to the Actual. Our concentration on What happened and When has cost us insights into How and, more important, Why. Now, de Lanne there was quite free from the shackles of proof, and he… and he…” His voice faded in midsentence as his eye happened to fall on a bit of scribbled marginalia that captured his attention and drew him down into his padded desk chair, where he was soon comparing notes he had made with passages in two open books, absorbed and quite unaware of my presence.
The study, an interior room protected from the rising damp that made most of Etcheverria clammy and uncomfortable, was the coziest room in the house. Its walls were lined with bookcases, and volumes were piled on the floor together with manuscripts and journals and loose pages filled with Monsieur Treville’s spidery scrawl. Open books, clippings, and stacks of paper slumped in impertinent defiance of gravity on his cluttered desk in a kind of creative disarray that gave the impression that he could quickly locate any reference or note he wanted, provided his system of discriminate disorder were not ruined by being tidied up.
I found myself observing him fondly over the top of my book… Katya’s father… as he pored over his reading, frowning and making little grunts of doubt or hums of agreement, nervously dragging his fingers through his nest of unkempt grey hair. After a time he looked up vaguely, reeling in some thread of thought, and he was visibly startled to see me standing there. Then a smile of recognition brightened his worn features. “Fascinating book, eh?”
“Yes, sir. Fascinating.”
“I love the feel of an old book in the hand, don’t you? The smell of them. Aroma of learning.” He chuckled and gestured broadly towards his desk. “I’ll never finish it, of course. Not enough time left to me. But that doesn’t matter really. The attraction doesn’t lie in the accomplishment, but in the pursuit. The work. Have you ever pondered upon the way in which Time comes to us in so many disguises? For me, time is sand sifting through my fingers. Not enough of it. Can’t seem to grasp hold of it. While for my son, time is a heavy burden of boredom around his neck, something to be got rid of, something to be got through.
“And for Katya?”
“Ah, Katya… she who was once Hortense. So like her mother.” His work-stained eyes crinkled in an affectionate smile. “I sometimes wonder if Katya lives in the same web of time as the rest of us do. It’s all daydreams for her… smiles and spring flowers… fleeting fascinations. I often have the impression that she’s a temporary visitor from some other world. Some distant pastel world. So like her mother.”
“I believe I know what you mean, sir. But it’s not that she’s frivolous or shallow. Her observations are often quite incisive, and she has an excellent mind.”
“Yes, I suppose so.” He chuckled. “Do you know, I once found her studying anatomy. Human anatomy!”
“Yes, I know.”
His smile of paternal benevolence dissolved into a frown. “You know? How do you know?”
I shrugged it off. “Oh, she mentioned it in passing. Or perhaps Paul did. I don’t recall.”
“Oh, yes, I see.” He seemed to drift into thoughts of his own for a moment; then he said, “It feels good to have things all in order again.”
“Sir?”
He waved towards the piles of paper slumping on his desk. “For six months after we arrived here, I couldn’t find a thing. Everything was in boxes or in the wrong place. It was primordial chaos. I don’t believe my studies could survive another such debacle. I am comfortable here now. Books are where they belong, next to the books I want them next to, arranged in an order that only I know… two books purchased on the same rainy afternoon… two ideas that happen to be stacked one behind the other in the attic of my mind… opposing views set side by side… a book I like kept at an antiseptic distance from one I dislike—not a system the Bibliothиque nationale would approve, I daresay, but one that suits me perfectly.”
I wondered how he would face the disruption of moving yet again, when Paul deigned to inform him of his decision. “I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “In my own mind, certain medical facts are bound, illogically but forever, to certain swatches of verse for the simple reason that I learned them at the same time. And often, when I want to dredge up a bit of information I must first scan through the intervening poem.”
“Yes, yes, that’s it!” He was pleased to find another mind in which the clutter had shape and purpose. He nodded to himself; then he squinted up at me with an evaluating, conspiratorial expression. “You, ah… you mentioned this afternoon that you were born in the commune of Alos and were familiar with their Festival of the Drowned Virgin.”
“I used to attend every year before I went off to school. Everyone in my village did.”
“Fascinating. Fascinating. Ah… it is a three-day fкte beginning tomorrow, I believe?”