and your intelligence, for you have both. Can Euric be stopped? If not, can his rule be moderated, or put under constraint?”
“Perhaps,” Manlius said.
“ ‘Perhaps,’ ” she repeated. “A possibility, with no guarantee of success, but said without hesitation. You have thought of this already, I see.”
“Of course. I see a possibility.”
“And yet you do nothing about it. Shame on you.”
He looked at her. “I am concerned about what would be necessary, about what I might have to do.”
“Then double the shame on you, and double it again,” she said sharply. “You are like a general who will not send his troops into battle for fear they will get their breastplates dirty. You have your mind and your soul, Manlius, trained and honed, and will not act for fear of tarnishing them. You should be afraid; you are vain and arrogant, full of error. But I never thought you were a coward as well.”
The next day Manlius summoned Syagrius and dictated a letter to Bishop Faustus; there followed a lengthy exchange of views, and a visit to the bishop a few months later. During this Manlius was perfectly honest. He could not claim to be a good Christian, but he was perhaps the most powerful man in the region. The church could have his help, or not. With heretic barbarians to the north and the west, with most of Gaul already gone and the ability of the emperor to protect what remained all but nonexistent, could the church do without him?
Eight weeks and three days later he was baptized, ordained, and elevated to the bishopric of Vaison, taking charge of a diocese that was already some two hundred years old and becoming, in effect, the sole authority in a region in which all others had crumbled into uselessness.
THE BISHOP’S manuscript came to Julien’s attention because, at the age of fifteen, Olivier de Noyen stole some money. He was working in the cardinal’s chancellery, carefully watching the money coming in, the money going out again. Counting the gold and silver pieces, marking it all down in the ledger. There were twelve of the cardinal’s people, all sitting at little desks, working from dawn to dusk to keep the great engine of the cardinal’s power running smoothly.
It was not work to which he was greatly fitted; he was sent there as a punishment, and as he was constantly offending against the rules of the cardinal’s household, he spent much time there, being bored to tears and failing to learn anything at all about the need for discipline. He ran too fast and collided with a cook carrying the cardinal’s meal; one week of tallying figures. He disappeared for several days; two weeks. He went out late one night and had his first experience of drinking to excess, leaving the evidence of his debauch on the floor of the great entrance hall of the cardinal’s palace; one month’s hard counting resulted.
It was after this last adventure—of which even Olivier was ashamed—that he noted that a remittance from one of the cardinal’s benefices in England was too great by one gold piece. At that time, he considered himself something of a dandy, delighting in the company of a band of fellows who dressed in the finest clothes they could find, and thought themselves grand indeed when they marched down the street singing, and making fun—normally good-humored—of passersby. Most bore their merriment well; only the Jews did not when they were taunted. They were not agreeable objects of tricks; they hurried by, their heads down, cloaks bundled around them, never answering back or replying with some remark. It was why comments turned to insults, insults to stones. Olivier sometimes joined in, just as he had, on occasion, tormented stray dogs and cats in his youth. He saw little difference, and stopped mainly because he found it poor sport.
His holiday outfit delighted him; it was scarlet and blue and well sewn. But he had no shoes, and the whole appearance was (he thought) spoiled by the wood and cloth sabots that he wore on his feet. What woman of elegance—what serving girl even—could ever be fooled by a man who clattered down the street, making as much noise as donkey and cart? Who could take seriously someone who had to dance barefoot, and often was forced to retire when a stamping boot crunched down on his toes?
The lack of good shoes tormented him, the gold piece tempted him. He took the money and bought a fine pair of leather-soled slippers, soft and so comfortable they scarcely seemed to have any weight at all. He sat in bed looking at them, and delayed a month before he would risk wearing them out of doors, in case they got dirty.
They were his delight, and when he turned from such pleasures they stayed, carefully wrapped in cloth, in his chest. It is shameful to admit, but his love of his shoes was so great he did not once feel in the slightest bit guilty about his wickedness. On the other hand, he knew that one day restitution would have to be made. So it was that when he found
MANLIUS HAD first met Sophia in Marseille, after the death of her father, the philosopher Anaxius from whom he had taken instruction. He had gone there to attend the schools in a city that was still functioning, although the ever more intermittent water supplies, the inability of the authorities to prevent crime, and incursions of brigands into the outlying suburbs caused much grumbling among the populace. The schools were among the best in Gaul; for a better education, an earnest student would have to travel very far indeed: to Antioch, or Alexandria. A generation ago young men did this; now no longer. Even going to Marseille produced expressions of astonishment and incomprehension amongst his family.
It was not a happy experience. The schools received little subsidy from the city anymore; that was reserved for the administration or was swallowed up by the greedy maw of the church. The teachers were old and tired, discouraged by the dwindling numbers of students and the constant abuse of those who denounced them as pagans. One day, as Manlius sat and listened with two others to the old man discoursing on the poetry of Horace in a hall capable of taking near a hundred, there was a dull cracking, rumbling sound that echoed through the room. Anaxius took no notice, but droned on in a monotone that completely contradicted the points he was making about rhythm and rhetoric.
Then, in a cloud of dust and plaster, a portion of the roof collapsed onto the podium. Manlius, then seventeen, thought it hugely amusing, the punishment of the gods for having bored him so completely, until he realized the seriousness of the event. Anaxius collapsed under the pile of plaster and heavy concrete, more than a century old and now weakened beyond salvation. The cracks had been all too obvious before; no one had paid any attention to the way they had been growing for weeks.
He was dead; a fragment of concrete as long as Manlius’s arm had pierced his body like an arrow, driving into the top of his shoulder with such force it penetrated deep down into his body. He expired with scarcely a groan as Manlius stood above him, wondering what to do.
And when he turned around, his two colleagues had left. They had packed up their books and walked out. One, Manlius learned later, threatened legal action to cover the costs of a course paid for but never completed; he threatened to sue the daughter for the funds. Manlius arranged a small demonstration that she had powerful friends, not to be trifled with. While the student was still nursing the bruises administered by Manlius’s servants, he completed the lesson by visiting the sickbed and hurling twenty times the amount claimed, in gold, onto the floor all around him. It was a gesture from which he gained far too much satisfaction.
So it was Manlius who found a janitor, arranged for the body to be removed from the wreckage and taken to be cleaned and prepared. It was he also who went to inform the household of the tragedy, and discovered that the old Greek philosopher had lived alone with his daughter, Sophia, who was, perhaps, about twenty-five at that time, and still unmarried.
He was impressed, first of all by her reaction: no tears or sorrow, no manifestations of undignified grief; she listened and thanked him, asked where the body was, then offered him a cold drink, for it was a searingly hot day. Her self-control, her nobility was striking in a period much given to lamentation and ostentation in emotion.
“He will be happy now,” was her only comment.
Later, after the funeral rites had been conducted by Sophia herself, a pagan rite ending with a cremation, he asked her about the remark. She considered, and then told him something of her philosophy, weaving an explanation that captivated him and left him slightly in awe of her. It was his first instruction in Platonic thought, pure and unadulterated by Christian admixture. The way she talked, what she said, hypnotized him and fascinated him. He once remarked that had her father spoken of such things, he would have had a throng every day, beating at his door for the honor of hearing him.
