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turn black as it curled up and disintegrated.
    Olivier was shaking so much, concentrating so hard on making sure that no tears fell down his cheeks, that he didn’t even flinch when his father gave him a friendly tap on the shoulder and delivered another homily about his obligations. He even managed to bid him farewell in a dignified fashion, received his blessing with humility, before rushing back to his home, climbing the stairs to the little attic room he shared with six others, and bawling his eyes out.
    He had learned his lesson, although not the one his father hoped to inculcate. From that moment Olivier de Noyen determined that never would he become a lawyer.
     
 
A TOUCHING TALE, attributed in different forms to 
many different people. It was Julien Barneuve who realized that it had originated with Olivier, then had been transferred to Petrarch when Olivier’s reputation collapsed in disgrace and scandal later on. The anecdote then took on a life of its own and became part of the legend of the early Bach. Either early genius is encouraged, with elders astounded and amazed by such infantile virtuosity, as is said to be the case with Giotto or Mozart, or it causes alarm, and the parents try in vain to block the torrent. None of the tales may be true, in fact; the stories are perhaps no more than a conventional way of signaling the birth of greatness, of the solitary purpose pursued throughout life.
    Barneuve himself was not touched by the gods in this way, but merely studied those who were. The world needs only a few geniuses; civilization is maintained and extended by those lesser souls who corral the men of greatness, tie them down with explanations and footnotes and annotated editions, explain what they meant when they didn’t know themselves, show their true place in the awesome progression of mankind.
    For this task he was perfectly trained, and had been so for twenty years or more, decades of work that he had spent patiently and meticulously accumulating the resources required for his chosen task. His, too, was a labor of passion and of love, for he was no pedant, no dry scholar cut off from the world. Far from it; he considered himself in a small way a crusader for the true values of civilization, burning with the love of life and of learning in an age that valued neither.
    In his youth he had attempted some poetry, but was too stern a critic of others to fool himself. He was happy to abandon any such pretensions, and prided himself on a maturity that enabled him to stop wasting time while others of his generation frittered away their hours in artistic dreams. Or died; for Julien was fifteen when German troops swept across Belgium and into northern France; twenty when the carnage that all but eliminated an entire generation came to its end. It was not the time for romantic verse, or psychologically acute expressions of decadence. He rarely talked about this period of his life; he had no wish to revive memories of events that had so shaken him. He had volunteered early, rather than waiting to be conscripted, for he felt a duty and an obligation to serve, and believed that not only fighting, but also being willing to fight for his country and the liberty it represented, would make some small difference. He was injured twice, decorated twice, and took part in the terrible conflict around Verdun; that in itself is enough to indicate something of what he endured. His idealism was one of the casualties of the carnage.
    Millions died; Barneuve survived. When he was finally discharged in early 1918—his injuries rendering him unfit for further military service—he came home to the house in Vaison, a solid house of substance in what is now the rue Jean Jaurès, and resumed his former life. His father never discussed the experience, and Julien felt no desire to mention it either; he might have done so had his mother still been alive. The only slight hint of his feelings was that, one morning, just after the