Paris: The Novel

or perhaps it came there by chance. But I like that it is rare, and the work is of very high quality.”
    At last, thought Roland, he’s finished. When Jacob had called him young Monsieur Roland, and asked if he knew the Cluny Museum, which in truth he’d never entered, although it was close to his home, he’d felt as if the antique dealer’s soft voice, in some insinuating way, was rebuking him for his ignorance, and putting him down. He hated Jacob for it.
    But his father was gazing at the tapestry with admiration.
    “My dear Jacob,” he said at last, “tell me what you want for it.”
    The dealer wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to him. De Cygne glanced at it and nodded.
    “The restoration?” he asked.
    “If you will leave it to me …,” Jacob suggested.
    “Of course.”
    Roland had seldom seen his father so pleased as when he got into the carriage afterward.
    “It’s perfect for the château,” he remarked. “Exactly the right date, the right spirit. Each generation, my son, should add something of beauty to a house like ours. That will be my contribution.”
    They started back down the rue du Temple. His father stared ahead thoughtfully.
    “Jacob didn’t have to do that, you know,” he suddenly remarked. “He could have sold it to a dozen rich collectors for more than I paid him.”
    “Why did he offer it to you, then?” Roland asked.
    “I did him a good turn some years ago, when I recommended him to the Comte de Nogent, who’s become one of his most valuable customers.Jacob must have been waiting for an opportunity to return the favor.” He nodded. “Certainly, his choice couldn’t have been better.”
    “You think he really bought it the way he said?”
    “Why not?”
    Roland didn’t answer. But he knew exactly what he thought about the soft-voiced dealer who had tried to put him down.
    Jacob had probably stolen it.
    It wasn’t so strange for him to imagine such a thing. Whether seriously or in jest, it was the sort of thing that most of the boys he knew at school would have said. So would their parents. The presumption was general: the Jews were all in league together, and they were all conspiring to cheat the Christians. The first proposition would have come as a surprise to the Jewish community; the second dismissed as absurd.
    But it was not a question of logic. It was a question of tribe. The Jews were not of the French tribe, for they had their own. Nor their religion. And therefore, tribal instinct declared, they could not be trusted—not even to obey the Ten Commandments that they themselves had given the world. Roland supposed this was something that everybody knew. And he would have been most surprised if anyone had told him he was prejudiced, it being the nature of a prejudice that those who possess it have no idea that it is prejudice at all.
    So, as they drove away in the elegant phaeton, Roland experienced a secret sense of disappointment that his father should, through moral carelessness, have allowed himself to be cheated by Jacob, and indeed, that he should have had any dealings with Jacob at all. It was just one more indication, he thought, that his father, though kind, was shallow and lacked any fixed center.
    In such circumstances, how was he to find any certainty? Whatever his father’s shortcomings, he himself was still the descendant of crusaders, and of the heroic friend of Charlemagne himself. What life could he follow that would be worthy of those ancestors, and of his mother, too?
    There was the Church of course. But he also had a duty to provide heirs for the family. It looked as if providence had chosen that he should follow the path of his pious namesake in the reign of Saint Louis, and attend to the estate and his family. But in some way that might make up, perhaps, for the moral laxity of his father.
    He was still brooding about this when, as they reached the foot of the rue du Temple, the coachman took another way home and crosseddirectly over the bridge to the Île de la Cité. And they were just passing in front of the parvis of Notre Dame when he turned to his father and declared: “I have decided upon my career, Papa.”
    “Ah. The law, perhaps?”
    “No, Papa. I wish to join the army.”

Chapter Six
    •  1307, October  •
    Jacob ben Jacob had been out all night and half the next day. He’d searched the main road that led toward the south, asked every farmer and passerby. Nothing. He’d searched other roads,