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armistice, he was to be seen in the garden slowly taking the decorations and campaign medals he had been awarded and throwing them all on a bonfire. They had been earned by someone he no longer knew, indeed by someone he considered already dead, full of dreams and aspirations he could scarcely understand. From then on, Julien conceived of his duty in a different fashion. The medals themselves were hardly damaged by the heat, but they were dirtied and covered in ash, so much so that later the gardener unknowingly dug them into the ground where, presumably, they still remain. As for his father, Docteur Barneuve threw himself into organizing the public subscription for the huge monument to the dead that was cut into the mountain supporting the old town; it was the closest he ever came to telling his son of his relief that his name was not also inscribed on its panels, that he was not the dying soldier carved so vividly onto its white marble.
    Three months to the day after he came home—a period mainly spent sitting in the garden of his maternal grandmother’s house at Roaix a few kilometers to the west, for after a short while he found living in his family home irksome—Julien got up at five in the morning, took down the books he had been reading the day he left for the army, and began once more, picking up at exactly the page where he had inserted his bookmark three years previously. He worked silently, efficiently, and hard, showing the powers of concentration that he had always been able to summon. After he had drunk a coffee with a piece of bread from the previous day dipped in it, he sat and read and annotated until twelve, when he would put on a hat and walk into the village and eat some soup at the café. Then he worked again until six, ate, then worked again until midnight. This pattern of study he kept up, year after year, until he was ready: he sat, and passed with ease, the agrégation in history and geography, an intellectual marathon and obstacle race that, until it was reformed in 1941, was perhaps the most fiendishly demanding examination the mind of man has ever devised.
    It says much of Barneuve’s character, and of his intellect, that he emerged near the head of his year. His career in a sense was already made; he had now merely to collect the fruits of his labors. After doing his time in a provincial lycée in Rennes, sent there by the French state to teach him humility, he could reasonably look forward to spending the rest of his working life in Paris. A model academic career was already laid out, one of steady accomplishment, a continual drip of honors and rewards, and the quiet respect of colleagues and pupils. He was, by this stage, already working on his thèse, a vast work on late Neoplatonism in the West, which took him much of the next two decades to complete.
    It was not to be so perfectly smooth, nor so easy; he had embraced self-satisfied complacency too young. The simple life of predictable, safe accomplishment was not, it seemed, what he truly craved. For in 1924 he won a greatly sought-after scholarship to spend two years at the École de Rome, and as a preliminary took a cruise around the Mediterranean to celebrate, paid for by his father. On it he reacquainted himself with Olivier de Noyen, and he, in turn, eventually introduced him to Manlius Hippomanes.
     
 
 
IN SOME WAYS, though, Manlius had already reached out and touched him before his Mediterranean cruise. Even though the name had changed, Julien was a native of the same town and showed a precocious intellectual interest in his region, his pays, and it was this curiosity that attracted the attention of Canon Joseph Sautel.
    Père Sautel has only an incidental role in this story; he is, in some ways, no more important than the plague bacillus that ultimately killed much of Olivier de Noyen’s generation; an agent acting unknowingly for his own reasons and unaware of any of the consequences. But the effect he had on the young Julien