“Dear Lady, should I leave my parents and live on my own?” read one. “Blessed Saint Sophia, should I go and work in Avignon?” was a second. “Thank you for your warning,” a third. She was almost moved to smile, but there was something about the tidy peasant lettering, the way each missive had been folded carefully and neatly on good paper, the way each woman—for the writing suggested they were all women—must have toiled all the way up here, which made her refold each one carefully and put them all back in their place.
As she did so, she looked up and caught her breath as she saw what remained of Luca Pisano’s work. The paintings were dreadfully damaged, blistering off in places through the effects of long neglect, scrawled on lower down by what she later realized must have been the hatreds of the Revolution, darkened by the soot of half a millennium’s worth of candles, but still discernible; a saint reaching out to a man in a strange gesture, her hand over his eyes, something she had never seen before.
Instantly she was captivated; this was why she had come to this place, to see these pictures. This was the answer to her problem. She was ill equipped to study them closely; in her pocket she had only a box of matches, and even though she opened the door as wide as possible to let the thin winter sun stream in, she managed to see only part of the whole. But it was enough; the next day she returned, and set to work.
THE DISCOVERY PERSUADED her to take up etching in a more orthodox fashion; the war helped as well. Just as Julien fretted from the lack of soap, so Julia chafed under the absence of paint. She tried making her own, but the range of materials was insufficient. Even in the fourteenth century, pigments had been brought from far afield. The war meant trade shrank to levels not seen since the days of Manlius Hippomanes.
She became obsessive about paper, learning its feel and different properties. She bought up old books for the blank pages at the beginning and end, and eventually tried her hand at grinding up old cloths to try to make the sort of rag paper preferred in the sixteenth century. Her fingers were permanently stained black with ink she also made herself from a recipe Julien found in a book in the library—the municipal library, now happily ensconced in Cardinal Ceccani’s grand palace. She cut back her nails almost into the flesh, and soaked her hands in lemon juice for hours to clean them. The printing press she made herself—or rather she had the local blacksmith construct it for her out of an old mangle and a heavy iron frame that originally came from a bed.
She was proud of her creation; it produced results as good as any she had seen at the specialist printers in Paris, and the whole business delighted her artisanal inclinations. The unknown artist of the chapel, the master of Saint Sophia, as she called him, would have been proud of her, she thought. She had no money, but a good deal of time, and this she spent liberally, making meticulous drawings and drinking prodigious amounts of cheap red wine with the blacksmith, going over the design and the practicalities of construction. She began as supervisor to his work, and ended as his most menial assistant, filing off shards of metal, holding thick beams of iron as he beat and welded. And as he made the fine adjustments, she sat in his workshop with a plate of copper she had waxed herself and swiftly scratched out a study of Pierre Duveau at work, a serious man, slight for a blacksmith, with dark eyes and an intense stare.
He ended up with a respect for this overprivileged woman fallen on hard times, dressed in a man’s shirt, her sleeves rolled up, her thick dark hair flecked with gray held back out of her face with a piece of string. A beautiful woman, he thought as he hammered, and a noble name, though she looked like a Jew to him. Not that he cared, as he mentioned to his wife. But what was she doing living in Julien Barneuve’s house, turning up late one night and settling in to stay? His fiancée, didn’t he say? Not, as his wife commented, that it was any business of his.
Pierre was not a man to give affection easily. Her willingness to assist and watch and learn did not entirely win him over, however, for he thought her interest unwomanly; her obvious intelligence and penetrating questions about the practicalities of slippage and downward pressure alarmed him, especially as she would not be put off by easy answers. Her perfectionism irritated, as she returned time and again with minor modifications and insisted that they be done precisely. And yet he was proud of the result, as others gathered around to stare in awe at the bizarre contraption. Julia bought the entire village a round of drinks to celebrate the final completion of the project, and made a joking speech of thanks for building the most useless mangle in France.
He was, however, touched and even a little flattered by the first work to be drawn from his device, though not nearly as pleased as Julia herself, as she inscribed, and presented it to him. “To Pierre, blacksmith extraordinaire, with thanks.” It was the sketch she had done while she watched him work, which she etched in the acid that Julien had found in a chemist’s shop in Avignon and brought to her one weekend, and then engraved with a dry-point to add fine detail to the face and arms. Not one of her most experimental works, almost traditional in honor of his calling. But still too abstracted and free for his wife, Elizabeth. “All that effort for such a thing,” she said sourly as they looked at it on the kitchen table.
He laughed. “I like it,” he replied. “I’ve even started to like her. A strange woman. Special, if you know what I mean. Educated. Intelligent. Accomplished. All the sort of things a woman would need if she was to keep Julien Barneuve. Permanently, that is.”
This said with an edge to his voice, a hardness as he put the print down. He had it framed and hung on the wall to act as a constant reminder to his wife of the difference between an ordinary woman and a special one. She tried to take it down, or move it, but every time he put it back again, and would comment on how much he was growing to like it. He said it many times.
A sought-after work, now, for those who collect French prints. Only six were ever drawn off the plate before Julia erased it for more dangerous work later on. And few of those found buyers. She sold little; the dealer who had previously taken her paintings was in Paris, and inaccessible. And initially no one else would stock her work. She was now unknown, after all. Most were too considerate, or too dishonest, to say why they refused her. It was only when one looked closely at her, studied her face, then stared at the ceiling and said, “I just don’t think I can sell
MANLIUS SET OUT the day after his discussion with Sophia and went north. He knew there was little time. Somewhere in Italy was Felix, spending money he did not have to raise an army that would never come; it would, in his imagination, march in an ordered fashion along the coast, then strike north, hurling itself against Euric’s army, raising the siege of Clermont. Felix would establish his family’s dominion over the whole of the province, the gentle balm of Roman life would return, and a peace of Augustan dimensions would fall over a contented land.
It was not to counter his friend and rival’s ambition that Manlius left. It was because he knew, as his friend should have known, that Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely. For any army of barbarians marching under the Roman standard would accomplish nothing except looting, and the wrath of Euric would be the greater for the attempt to block him. In trying to save everything, everything would be lost.
So Manlius reasoned, and in order to accomplish his aims he made haste, as much as the roads and baggage would allow. He rode on a donkey—or rather, he took a donkey with him so that he could transfer to it when they neared the Burgundian encampment. A little detail, but an important one nonetheless. He was going as a bishop, not as a politician or a landowner, and needed to make this clear.
For the first time he gave a task to his adopted son when he left; it was time that his family assisted him, he considered. “Go into Vaison, Syagrius. Keep watch on the mood of the people there,” he said. “Do nothing but listen; find out who is the most afraid, who is most on my side. I will need this information when I return.”
Syagrius nodded eagerly; he had been waiting for such a commission, was desperate to show his worth. But Manlius took no leave of him as a father should of a son. Instead, he turned, mounted his horse, and began talking to the estate manager. Then he wheeled the beast around and rode off.
He talked little on the way; there was no one he wished to talk to. Of the thirty people traveling with him, not one had enough to say to tempt him out of his silence. Going through a valley toward the end of a day, after a hard drive that lasted ten hours, he saw the sunset, framed between the body of the hill and a decayed fruit orchard, long abandoned. The noise of wasps and bees gorging themselves on the fruit that had fallen unwanted to the ground was so loud they could hear it a full half hour before they passed by.
A bittersweet reference to Hesiod would have begun an exchange with more cultivated travelers, the theme developing into a discussion of the idea of descent, from the age of gold into the brute age of iron. Could the
