The Dream of Scipio (4 page)

The action spread panic and prompted a second, then a third person to pull at the cloth. Within a few minutes the body was naked, but even that was not enough, as men and women alike began tearing at his hair, then his hands. A scuffle, then a fight broke out, and a sort of holy blood-lust developed in the room, with men screaming in rage, and sobbing in ecstasy, departing only when they had a part of him, bloody and jagged, wrapped in their cloaks, or held—still seeping warm, red liquid—in their hands.

What remained when the storm had passed was bathed, redressed, and anointed before being borne on a bier to its last resting place in the church he had so finely decorated in Vaison. Already a mason of the town was planning a shrine, for Manlius’s family was still rich, and would dig deep in their pockets to have the honor of one of its number shown to the world. The deacon (now head of the church until Manlius’s successor could be found) placed the strongest men he could find on guard, then thought more deeply.

Might not the relic hunters come back? They had been known to strip a saint’s house in their ravening hunger for the holy. Besides, Manlius (despite his past) had given himself to the church, yet he was a rich man. Mindful of Our Lord’s injunctions, the deacon did not want his bishop to have died wealthy. Had his death (an apoplectic fit, which came on him suddenly at the age of sixty-two, shortly after he had risen that morning) been more foreseeable, he was sure Manlius would have given instructions that all his wealth be transferred to the church, for its greater glory, and so he might die in proper poverty.

Once the body was secure inside the church, therefore, he gave the orders. By evening the next day, Manlius’s great villa was empty; the gold and silver plate (remarkably little of it, in fact, for the deacon did not realize how often his bishop had paid from his own funds to repair roads and walls and waterways) were locked in the church, the furniture also, the lead and tiles stripped from the roofs to be transferred later. Four of the great stone columns from the colonnade were marked for reuse, when a team of bullocks and cart could be found strong enough to pull the load. The statues were left, but the workers, simple townsmen all, were shocked to see that nearly all were pagan imagery, foul and disgusting displays of impiety. These they toppled from their stands and broke with mallets, lest anyone see and scorn their patron. They were determined to guard his reputation in death as well as he had guarded them in life. It was the very least they could do, for they relied on him to guard them in the after-life as well, and did not wish to risk his anger by neglecting to protect his good name.

Most of Manlius’s great library was burned as well; the old rolls, the newly copied codices alike, were taken into the courtyard and destroyed; an extravagant gesture brought on by haste, for many were on vellum and could have been scraped and used again. The bonfire burned brightly for more than three hours as his precious Ammianus, Tacitus, Ovid, Terence, Plautus went up in the flames so their owner’s purity would burn more brightly to posterity. Also consumed were his treasured Greek texts, his Plato and Aristotle, his two copies of Sophocles, his Xenophon. None were needed, many were scandalous, all should go. Only Christian texts were preserved, winnowed out like wheat from the chaff, lovingly wrapped in cloth and taken back to the church in Vaison, where they rested on a small shelf until, a hundred years later, they were transferred to a monastery outside Marseille.

Here they remained for two centuries until they, in turn, were consumed by fire. By then, however, some had been copied and, just as Manlius’s commentary was preserved by mere chance after his death, mistaken for a Christian text, so it was by accident that, when a copyist came from a new foundation near Montpellier in 723 to acquire sacred works, one of his team of scribes transcribed it as well, writing so fast that he barely noticed what he was jotting down.

There were mistakes, bad mistakes, in this version, but the delicate thread that began before Manlius and stretched across the centuries held still. For though this version was, in its turn, destroyed by Protestants during the wars of religion, by then Olivier de Noyen had seen it and copied down most of it, errors and all. The voice that Julien Barneuve heard, when he picked up the manuscript in the Vatican library, was by then weak and feeble but in the echoing sound, and the chatter of other men’s words and opinions, it was still just recognizable, and through it the words of Sophia, half understood or not understood at all, passed down the centuries into his mind.

 
 
 
WHEN OLIVIER de Noyen found the manuscript in the library of a monastery near Montpellier, he suspected it might be of importance, but failed to understand anything of its arguments until he came under the painstaking tutelage of Rabbi Levi ben Gerson. He did not even realize that it was not original. He knew little of philosophy except for the poor versions of Aristotle that were so much a part of the church that many men were virtually unaware that he had been a pagan. Plato was to him but a name, a mysterious, half-legendary creature all but forgotten. Olivier was a clerical courtier and something of a poet, and had as his private goal the purification of letters, the casting out of the corruption of his times; in this he had more similarities with Manlius than he ever realized. By Julien’s standards, however, his knowledge was limited, his understanding meager.

The love of letters was an affliction that had seized him when he was young. His father, it is said, was a vain man, made bitter by his own lack of success in the world, for he was a notary in such a small, bedraggled, insignificant town that he knew no fortune would ever come his way. Vaison, so people said, had once been a great city, but so long ago no one really knew whether this was true or not. Certainly, farmers ploughing their fields often turned up huge lumps of stone, carvings, and even metalwork, but far from being interested, they cursed these lumps for the trouble they caused. Only occasionally were some of these salvaged, to be used to build a barn or a house high up on the hill where the inhabitants had retreated a century or so before for safety’s sake.

In this little rabbit warren of dingy, dirty streets, looking out across the river and the fields that covered Manlius’s city, Olivier de Noyen was born in 1322, to the delight of his father, who transferred onto him all his ambitions. Olivier (he believed) was destined for great things. He would become a true lawyer, go to Paris and rise to a position at the court of France itself, that foreign barbaric land to the north where men could become vastly rich and powerful. He conceived this idea almost at the moment he conceived Olivier in a hurried, dispassionate bedding of his wife, and the simultaneous creation of idea and subject struck him so forcibly (when his wife told him the news some fifteen weeks later) that he decided it must be guidance from the saint on the hill, a lady known for the goodness of her advice.

Such heavenly sanction was not to be cast aside, and Olivier was informed of his future career so early in his life that “lawyer” may well have been one of the first words he comprehended. He was sent to the school close by the cathedral, learned his letters and was beaten for his mistakes, then, at night and even on Sundays he was coached by his father for the great career that lay ahead of him after he had been to university in Montpellier. His father had few contacts, but assiduously cultivated those he did have in search of both bride and patron for his son. Through a distant cousin, he felt he had the right to correspond with Annibaldus di Ceccani, a monsignor at the papal court in Avignon with a great future before him, for his connections were as powerful as the elder de Noyen’s were weak. By that stage, indeed, his father was beginning to grow alarmed at his son’s demeanor, for the child seemed bent on obstructing his father’s wishes in countless little ways. He would disappear for days, even though he knew the scale of the thrashing he would receive on his return; he deliberately refused to learn; was noisy, constantly asking questions his father—a good, but uneducated man—could not answer. He stole birds, mushrooms, fruit from other men’s land, so much so that complaints were made. More beatings followed, with no result. The letter to Monsignor Ceccani, soon to be cardinal, was an act of desperation as much as anything else, a desire to hand the boy over to a greater authority who might bend, and if necessary break, a spirit too resilient for a father’s will alone.

Why Ceccani agreed in 1336 to take on the fourteen-year-old Olivier that he might work and be surrounded with the sophistication of court life and ecclesiastical learning is not known. Perhaps he simply needed a servant; perhaps, when he met Olivier, he saw a spark in the young boy’s eye that intrigued him; perhaps fortune took a hand, for if Ceccani had not agreed to the request then he would certainly have triumphed in his struggle with Cardinal de Deaux and changed the course of Christendom. Whatever the reason, Olivier shortly afterward packed a small bag, bade farewell to his beloved mother, left Vaison, and went to Avignon, where he remained for the rest of his life, a period in which his father’s aspirations were destroyed.

For Ceccani was a man of some cultivation, and though he never became one of those fascinating, erudite philosopher-cardinals who redeemed the otherwise corrupt church of the next century, he read as widely as was possible in those days and had the beginnings of a library. To this collection of some one hundred fifty manuscripts Olivier was eventually given access. Not that Ceccani initially took a great deal of interest in the boy; he was no teacher and had little human warmth about him. But neglect was exactly what Olivier needed, and he flourished under the new regime. And he fell in love for the first time, the most enduring and consuming passion of his life. He began to read. He arose at four in the morning and read until his duties began; ate his meals quickly so he could run back to the library and read some more, if only for ten minutes at a time; read in the evening with candles stolen from the kitchens until he fell asleep.

There was not such a wide range of books available; some Aristotle, in a Latin translation of an Arabic version of the Greek; the church fathers; Boethius, whom he loved for his wisdom; Augustine, whom he admired for his humanity. But it was the day he discovered Cicero that changed everything. The beauty of the prose, the noble elegance of the ideas, the lofty majesty of the conceptions were like draughts of strong wine, and when he first discovered, then read, the one manuscript Ceccani possessed, he wept with joy for a full twenty minutes before immediately starting again.

Some six months later, he began his new career as a collector when he was in a shop to buy some sweetmeats for the household. This was not his task; rather it was something he often asked to be allowed to do, as the errand gave him the opportunity of leaving the dark, forboding palace where he now had quarters in the garret, and wander the streets of Avignon at will. Every time he went out he was transfixed by wonder, overwhelmed by the bustle of humanity, the noise, the smells, the excitement. For Avignon had transformed itself in a matter of a few years from a minor city into one of the wonders of the world. The arrival of the papal court, forced to leave Rome by civil strife and now showing every sign of staying forever, had sucked in merchants and bankers, priests and painters, goldsmiths, petitioners, lawyers, cooks, costume makers, furniture makers and masons, woodworkers and silversmiths, robbers and whores and charlatans who came from all over Christendom to jostle in the streets and compete for favor, influence, and fortune.

The city was not big enough for them all; it was bursting at the seams and men had to put up with being squashed, exploited, and robbed, but few found they were unprepared to pay the price. Bees around a honey pot, flies around dung; those were the common verdicts. Olivier had no opinion on the morality of it; all he knew was that a simple walk in the morning during the market, in the afternoon when the big religious processions took place, or in the evening when the city was taken over by drinkers and diners, singing and dancing, left his mind dizzy with excitement and all his senses tingling with joy.

And there were buildings as well; hundreds of houses, churches, palaces all being thrown up as quickly as possible, new land being leveled, old dwellings razed to make space for bigger ones. The first time he went into the papal palace he could not believe his eyes; he felt sure he was walking into an immense cave in a mountain; no man, surely, could dream of a building so vast. And yet even that was not big enough; the new pope, Clement, had deemed it all too small and was beginning again, doubling the size of the original, with decorations so sumptuous and so costly they would have no equal in the world. Sometimes, late at night when he lay on his bed wondering at all he had seen and smelled that day, Olivier could hardly stop himself laughing at the thought of his little Vaison, its few hundred inhabitants tucked up on a hill, which, until he came to Avignon, had seemed so grand.

The shop he went to was his favorite; shelves groaned with all manner of delicacies, some still hot and steaming from the oven, some cool and flaky with fresh pastry, stuffed with spices he had never heard of, and sold at prices that made him incredulous. He picked up what he had been told to collect, and as there was a risk his fingers might make dents in them, the shopkeeper took some pieces of paper to wrap them more firmly.

There was writing on them. Olivier read it and gasped; there was no possibility of mistaking that limpid, fluent voice that, once truly heard, could never be forgotten. In his excitement and eagerness to unwrap the paper, he let all the expensive foods drop to the floor, where they broke into crumbly pieces. He scarcely even noticed, although the shopkeeper was shocked.

“You’ll get a beating for that,” he began.

Olivier ignored him and waved the piece of paper in his face instead. “Where did you get this?”

His reddened, earnest, young face had such a look of intensity that the shopkeeper forgot his anger. “There’s a little pile. I found them on a rubbish heap outside the church of Saint-Jean,” he said.