The Dream of Scipio Read Online Free PDF

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