“Patrice. Come in, take a seat.”
Frédéric sat on the desk and rested his foot on an open drawer.
“What time is dinner, I told the girls …” Patrice hung his hat on the back of the door.
“I think we said eight?”
“Good.”
“What can I offer you, I have whisky, absinthe—”
“Absinthe?”
“Oh, it’s empty, pardon.”
“I’ll take a cognac—if that’s cognac. How is the work going?”
“I have been working on a few ideas. I am making some progress. One has to test the kinks, you know.”
“Tell me.”
Frédéric swilled the liquid in his glass. He did feel threatened by Patrice’s new interest in anthropology. The truth was that he also still relied on Patrice to be his fresh pair of ears: he was the only person with whom Frédéric felt he could sound out his thoughts without being judged. That was in part because Patrice remained outside the department, which made any competition between the two of them personal rather than professional. While Patrice was certainly intelligent enough to have made a career in the discipline, even at this late stage, he had not; he was only, as he called it, “dabbling in his dotage.”
“Inspired by your good self!” he even said last year when he published that book on animal behaviour, and Frédéric had reacted with a panic, and hurtled into his own work with new fervour. Clearly professional advancement was not enough to motivate Frédéric Molineu; for that he required a rival with a face.
“First of all,” said Frédéric, pushing the drawer open slightly further with his heel, “language.”
“Go on.”
“Language and the progress of civilisations.”
“Well. That sounds quite—”
“German, yes. I wouldn’t publish until after the war. I mean I haven’t started writing yet. I haven’t finished reading.”
Patrice rested an elbow on the back of the chair, sending his shoulder into a hunch. “So it’s a philological treatise?”
“I’m not sure, to be honest. I have two strands. One is, yes, philological, linking philology and development. A word can deviate from a grammatical rule, so why not a human being? And what would that mean, exactly? I’m thinking about this specifically with relation to the Muslims.”
“Islamic civilisation.”
“The Muslim as a deviation from the onward progression. That’s the sort of thing you might say.” Frédéric released a clumsy gust of laughter.
Patrice frowned. “Certainly, determinism is something I’m intrigued by.”
“No, of course. But what I meant was, and this is more interesting to me than the onward march to the universal what-have-you, that they chose the wrong messiah, Muhammad not Christ and so on—which to be frank has always been slightly apocalyptic for my taste… . Then the question becomes, for me at least, the extent to which one might actually recuperate a deviation. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“You mean, one would teach them to conform?”
“More or less. The value of liberty, for example. What isn’t present in their religious texts.”
A car sounded on the road outside. Patrice fixed on Frédéric, and said: “You’re thinking of your Oriental.”
“Midhat?” said Frédéric. “Well, in fact, I suppose yes I did feel somewhat inspired by—I mean, clearly, this is evidence that one can teach the Arab.”
“Just because he is a student.” Patrice shook his head. “Rich Turks are constantly sending their sons abroad. And you’re talking about civilisation as a whole. There are always exceptions. It’s a bit of a leap.”
“But look, what about language. Humboldt says—”
“Don’t quote a German, there are people in the hall. And I never want to be a defeatist but I would also point out that you don’t read Arabic.”
“Yes. I was thinking about that.” He tapped his forefinger on his glass. “But really I am … Patrice, not everyone has a person living in his—who has such remarkable … But yes, it’s only thoughts at the moment. As you say, if I’m calling on the Boches with all their—their Weltansicht, of course I must wait. And I want to be more empirical. As you say. You are right. As always.”
Frédéric sipped and watched his friend. Patrice looked up at the window, pursing his lips in little contractions.
“I suppose it could be interesting. It’s ambitious, Frédéric, especially if you don’t have the language. Perhaps—you know I don’t want to discourage you—keep playing with the ideas. But if you’re using German scholarship as your framework, it’s tricky, you know? It might be worth waiting.”
Patrice was right, Frédéric was ambitious. But he was ambitious in a particular way. After his first publication at L’École Normale Supérieure more than twenty years earlier, Frédéric had derived the most lasting pleasure not from the actual promotion the book had secured—which was a victory quickly assimilated, as victories usually are—but from the reaction of his colleague Émile. Émile was gracious: he congratulated Frédéric, complimented the scope of the work, described it as “admirable” for the way it breached disciplinary boundaries, even if those boundaries were internal to anthropology. But beneath his grace Frédéric heard accents of jealousy. He spied hostility in the notes Émile presented for discussion, and in the haughty way Émile greeted him in the dining hall thereafter. At that, Frédéric had felt nothing but glee.
After four years as maître de conférences at Montpellier, however, he had yet to produce the thesis required for promotion to professeur, and all the while was becoming embarrassingly senior for his lecturing position. But he had been galvanised by Patrice’s publication last year, and now that the war had magnified his youth—since he happened to be at the younger end of those too old to fight, saved by a margin of eleven months—Frédéric was spurred to replicate his previous success while the corridors of the department were still quiet. He would continue as he had begun, by breaching boundaries. The majority of scholars these days specialised ad infinitum, carving out a piece of terrain so minute that each became an expert on a single detail, a speck of dust, trusting with the capacious vagueness of religious faith that his small corner would in the end contribute to some entirety. What a dreary, unglamorous life. Frédéric was an architect, not a carpenter. And this time he would stretch even further than anthropology. Philology was the new terrain—the life of words, which led one back to the life of humans with fresh paradigms.
That was a technique with German origins. But what could he do, while the men were on the battlefields? Study in secret. Only bring to the university notes written in French, lest a colleague catch sight of an umlaut and cry traitor.
Unlike most, however, Patrice Nolin was highly critical of the war and took no care to conceal it. Which also made him the only man Frédéric knew who wouldn’t flinch if he happened to cite a scholar who came from the other side of the Rhine.