“That is out of the question. There’s nothing you could possibly do—save perhaps make things worse.”
“Let me try!”
“There’s nothing you could do, I tell you! And I cannot discuss this further with you. Now… what about my conditions?”
“What choice have I, other than to accept them?”
“You could choose not to see Katya again. But I don’t expect you to make that nobler choice.”
“As indeed I shall not. Very well. I accept your conditions.” I rose. “Now I shall join Katya at the bottom of the garden, if that does not fall within your definition of ‘sneaking off.’ “
He waved me away listlessly. “Just so you remember your promise to keep your hands off her.”
I remembered the promise; but I had no intention of keeping it. I was convinced that I must do whatever I could to save Katya from a shattered life wasted in running from place to place each time Paul was frightened by shadowy dreads.
“You know, Montjean…” Paul’s bored drawl stopped me just as I reached the terrace door. I turned to find him slouched down in his chair, his free hand over his face and his eyes closed. “It’s true that we could never have been friends, even under the best of conditions—breeding, social worlds, tastes, all that business. But you’d be mistaken to think I dislike you. A moment ago, you said something rather good about having a certain affection for those who have loved Katya. I am not immune to such feelings myself. No, I don’t dislike you, Montjean. In fact, I find you rather…” He was silent for a moment. “Oh, never mind.” He shrugged away the rest of his explanation and reverted to his former tone. “I daresay you intend to impose your company upon us at supper?”
“How could I decline so gracious an invitation?”
He smiled wanly. “Ah, now that’s more like it.”
Supper consisted of the same hardy rural menu as before, a thick potage, salad, local bread, local cheese, local wine, but the atmosphere was quite festive, as Monsieur Treville was in good spirits.
“There you see, Paul?” Monsieur Treville said with the teasing tone he had affected throughout the meal. “Jean-Marc attacks his cheese with honest vigor. Not like you, who finds it insufficiently delicate for your refined tastes.” Partway through supper, after having addressed me alternately as Doctor Montjean and Doctor Jean Marque (and once, out of nowhere, as Doctor Jean Mont), he surrendered to his confusion and began using my given name. He seemed to be experiencing a surge of affection for his son and was expressing it, as I have seen other fathers do, in the emotionally safe way of banter, using my presence as an opportunity to trot forth each of his son’s qualities, which he compared to mine in a tone that seemed to criticize Paul, but which never failed to accent his good points. He noted that I had worked hard at my studies, making the best of my limited opportunities and gifts (some fluster and apology as he assured me that he meant to say that my opportunities were limited, not my gifts), while Paul, miserable person that he was, had idled away his time and wasted his native brilliance, wit, and uncommon celerity of intellect. I had used such leisure as I had to delve into the Black Death that had so altered the course of history as to shock Europe out of the Dark Ages, while Paul had applied himself to the futile activities of becoming the best shot in Paris, a leader of the most promising young society, a champion amateur kick-boxer, and a much-sought-after decoration to any social event. And on it went; my having done all the dull correct things, and poor Paul having squandered his endless gifts (each one detailed). But by no means were we to understand that Paul’s life was a desert of wasted opportunities. No, the clear implication was that, any day now, he would grasp the rudder of his drifting ship of fate and direct his talents to some grand and worthwhile goal.
When the oblique praise got to be too much for him, Paul baited his father by saying that he could clearly see the future for which his gifts had equipped him: directing a gambling establishment (if not something worse) in the deepest bowels of Calcutta, while telling jokes to amuse his criminal clientele, and shooting off the occasional round at a passing native for the purpose of helping them keep their population in check.
“There, you see?” Monsieur Treville said, shaking his head at Paul. “He pretends to make light of everything. But his day will come. His day will come. Yet he does make a telling point in this matter of checking population. There is no doubt that your Great Plague, Jean-Marc, had the effect of making peasant labor rare and valuable, and the agricultural laborer was able to use his newfound worth to raise himself out of serfdom. Great good flowing from great evil. Claude Bonnet made this point quite lucidly in his incisive study of….”
My attention wandered to Katya, whose features the candlelight touched with a delicate glow. I could see from her vague unfocused eyes that she was adrift from the table talk, her concentration on some inward and pleasant daydream. The curve of her full upper lip fascinated me. I thought of those soft lips against my own, and… I glanced at Paul just in time to find his eyes upon me with a studied frown. He looked down at his plate, then up again to his sister, and it seemed to me he was trying to penetrate her musings. I could not avoid a certain resentment at the way Paul had deceived me during that ride to Etcheverria when he had entertained me with imitations of local merchants, while all the time he knew that he had been in town arranging for his family to move away from Salies forever.
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
