Read The Dream of Scipio for Free Online

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.
    “Give me them. I’ll buy them.”
    A shake of the head. “That’s the last one, young man. I’ve been using them for days.”
    The realization made Olivier almost choke, but he retained enough self-possession to get the names of the last dozen or so customers the shopkeeper had served. Then he spent the rest of the day trailing around the town, knocking on kitchen doors, suffering cuffs to the ears and insults, and the occasional pinch on the cheek in his quest. When he got back home in the evening—having spent an entire day in truancy—he was, as the shopkeeper had predicted, soundly beaten.
    But it was well worth it, for carefully tucked away in his tunic he had most of a letter by Cicero, now known to be one of the letters to Atticus.
    By the time his father came and paid a visit two months later, he had read his discovery so often he knew it by heart. Still, merely touching it—for he mistakenly thought it must be original and written down by Cicero himself, so little learning did he have at this stage—gave him the greatest possible pleasure. He even slept with it by his side at night. Nor could he comprehend that anyone would not be as excited as he; so, when he presented himself to his father and was asked to account for the past six months, he pulled the sheets of old paper out of his tunic to show them off.
    As his story continued his father’s countenance darkened. “And you have spent your time on this, to the neglect of your studies?”
    Olivier hastened to tell him that he had studied hard and well, omitting that he detested the work and did it out of duty alone.
    “But you could have studied harder, spent more time with your proper duties, had you not wasted so much energy on this.”
    Olivier hung his head. “But Cicero was a lawyer, sir . . .” he began. His father was not impressed.
    “Do not try and trick me. That is not why you read this. Give it to me.”
    He held out his hand, and Olivier, after a moment’s hesitation that his father noted all too well, gave the precious manuscript into his hands. Already he felt the tears welling up in his eyes.
    His father stood up. “I will overlook your disobedience, but I must teach you a lesson. You must resist such foolishness. Your job is to become a lawyer, and fulfill all the hopes I have of you. Do you understand me?”
    Olivier nodded mutely.
    “Good. So you will see the wisdom of what I do now.” And his father turned around and put the manuscript onto the fire, standing back to watch it burst into bright flames, then