Doctor Mirabilis (14 page)

But Cato was only another authority. Suppose him to have been wrong; how would one test that?

Roger sighed and got up. His walk had been a failure: none of these questions would be of any use to him in Paris, even should
he by some miracle be given the answers to all of them. Besides, the plain fact was that he was hungry, which made coherent
argument hard come by, even with himself.

Behind him he could hear the early-evening noise of the Latin’s quarter, not very Latin now since the English nation had moved
its drinking headquarters to the Two Swords in the rue S.-Jacques. The move seemed more than likely to lead to trouble, though
of trouble of that kind there was already more than enough.

Roger picked his way carefully. There was still some warm light, but it was deceptive, and the pavements of Paris had been
very little repaired since the Romans first built them; in fact there was a doggerel verse going around among the students
which derived Lutetia, the Latin name for Paris, from
lutum –
mud. Latrines generally
gave into the
sewers, which were not sewers at all in the Roman sense, but only open channels in the middle of the street; and though carts
were not allowed by town – because their nail-studded wheels further pulverized the Roman paving-stones, and made new ruts
in the mud to divert the sewage – horses were, which piled up more soil than an army of the blessed scavengers, the belled
pigs of St. Anthony, could cope with were every day a night and every night an eternity. Even during the day one could not
walk in Paris at all without high, heavy, thickly-soled shoes, intolerably expensive though they were for students. To walk
at night one had to be rich, for though there was some light from the windows of houses, the streets themselves were not lit,
so that one could not take three steps in the dark without turning into a dung-beetle unless one could afford a linkboy.

The English were hard at it
as
he passed the Two Swords; evidently they had taken in fees from new members or new officers, and were now engaged in drinking
up the surplus. At the moment the singing was being done by the Germans, in their own language, but obviously in honour of
their English co-Nationals, since the song was about the ‘Chünegin von Engellant’ – not Henry’s new queen, probably, but instead
Eleanor of Aquitaine the long-mourned.

Later in the evening this wine-warmed fellowship would begin to evaporate into slandering all the other nations, beginning,
in the natural order of things, with the French –
who were puffed with pride, everybody knew that, and dressed themselves like women – and their substituent countries: the
vulgar, stupid Burgundians; the fickle Bretons who had killed the Great King, Arthur; the grasping, vicious and cowardly Lombards;
the Romans with their noisy slander and their silent seditions; the cruel and harsh Sicilians. Since there was a grain of
truth – or at least a grape – in all this, the game once started quickly became a contest in the kind of student malice they
had all learned from Buoncompagno. The Normans, a whole nation in themselves, generally were dismissed as being no more vain
than the: French, but much more boastful. The Picards, too, usually won free with no more than a few elaborate but barbless
quills; but their substituent Flemish were proclaimed to be fickle, gluttonous, lazy, and so soft they would dent like butter;
while the Brabantians were at the least rapists, robbers, pirates and murderers who could not even compose a neck-verse for
the saving of their lives.

At the best, by morning the Germans would be accusing their friends the English of being drunkards, and challenging them to
heist their cloaks and show their tails; the English would countercharge gluttony, obscenity and berserker fury; pots would
be thrown, and all would retire to nurse their cloaks and wish they had studied canon law, the lectures on which did not begin
until mid-morning – every other course in Paris began at six. At worst, someone would suggest that the insults be taken down
the street and shouted in the windows at the Sign of Our Lady where the French Nation met, or perhaps the French would conceive
this notion first; in which instance there would be before morning several clerks who would copy out no more letters home
begging for money or a new shirt, and several masters who would dispute no more – and never mind that Paris sternly forbade
the carrying of arms by scholars.

As Roger passed by, however, the Two Swords fell unwontedly quiet. After a moment he could hear a single counter-tenor voice,
as pure as any he had ever heard in this life:

and to his own astonishment felt the tears start into his eyes, little though he knew the language. Alarmed, he walked faster.

Elsewhere the street was in its more usual state of evening irreverence. Overheard in one of the hostels, a poor thing which
could have held no more than ten fellows and a master as poor as they, the dice were already rattling, for there were three
baskets of waffles or rissoles hanging out the window, and some lucky
socium
of the college had also thrown himself a sausage: there it dangled, with two cats hopelessly a-siege of it in the street,
their spines stretched like mandolins, their fretted noses bumping speculatively against the empty burdened air. Roger’s belly
twinged in sympathy, and he bought from the next
pâtissier
he saw in the street an eel pie which filled all the rest of his walk with a marvellous vapour of garlic and pepper; and
then, belatedly remembering patient John his companion in the room on the rue de Fouarre, from another pastryman a tart filled
with cheese and eggs. Since he was already carrying another heavy bundle, he had to juggle them all before he could resume
walking; and then, the two cats who had before been observing the Constellation of the Sausage (or two exactly like them)
were following him instead. Behind him the sounds of the English Nation died away, but there was no less music for that; it
was everywhere in the transparent Paris evening, now and forevermore, world without end.

It had been a cold rancid meat indeed to devour that he had been forced, that first spring in 1237, to matriculate at Paris
as no more than a mere yellowbeak, despite Grosseteste’s cachet and the existing invitation; but the charter of 1231 was explicit
about the matter: there were three years of additional studies which Roger must undertake before he
could be allowed to lecture on Aristotle or even any lesser subject. And worse: by the time he arrived in Paris, Philip the
Chancellor had died, breaking the link which might have brought Roger’s book on old age to the attention of the Pope. Three
years the book had rested in Roger’s box, and three years had he ground away at the corn of knowledge as it was milled in
Paris, until the hull of his ambition was almost worn away into dust. But it had not been all chaff: as a non-regent master
he was neither expected to join a Nation nor maintain rooms for teaching; the former had spared him the ritual dehorning,
confession and degrading penitence the Germans invariably imposed upon new English Nationals, while the latter had spared
him his purse. In nights as white as Virgil ever knew, he had ground his teeth to be no more than another master of arts in
young and strenuous Paris, a valley seething with the ferments of Franciscans versus Dominicans, Alexander of Hales versus
Thomas Aquinas, Nominalists versus Realists, while Roger Bacon swinked away unknown, his lectureship still to come. But his
examination before the new chancellor was fixed, at last, for the day after tomorrow; and he was prepared, aye, prepared with
a thoroughness he had earlier never even imagined that he would need – prepared to take examination in full university if
the chancellor so ruled, and the hot cheeks thereafter would not be Roger Bacon’s!

It was a long climb to his room – four flights of black and ancient stairs. They invariably left him a puffing and helpless
target for the sallies of his room-mate, unable to give back in kind for minutes at a time. The tow-headed Livonian youngster
– unlike Roger, a true yellowbeaked freshman without a degree to scribble after his name – seemed to be in an unusually pensive
mood tonight, however, for all he said was:

‘How was the walk?’

‘Well enough,’ Roger said, putting his bundles down on his bed.

‘Is the Seine full of philosophy tonight?’

‘Alas, no. Only water.’

‘A pity.’ Then they were both silent. They had spoken as always in Latin – not only because it was the rule, with informers
or ‘wolves’ everywhere to turn one in to the university if one didn’t, for a portion of the fine; but because Roger did not
understand a word of John’s language, nor did John any other that Roger knew. John, who was standing at the desk, had already
looked back down at his book, as if his mind had never really been drawn away from it. In the light of the single candle his
face seemed oddly old; but after a moment his nostrils began to twitch.

‘Aha,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘The magician has waved his wand again. What have we here?’

‘An eel pie—’

‘Fie, Roger!’

‘—and a cheese omelette pastry. Judging from the pepper, they may both be a little fleshy.’

‘That’s what pepper is for; who sees fresh meat in the city? Ah, this is good, very good. The song’s right:

Non vix a triginta
ha’pennies had gone into those pastries, but Roger as usual said nothing. In these years a peculiar horror of being thought
generous had begun to colour his already well-set secrecy about his money; he could not afford to seem to eat or live better
than John, yet he was constantly being tempted into such extravagances as this. The deceits he had worked out to justify them
would have done credit to a poet.

‘There’s else for you in the other bundle,’ Roger said. ‘I found you your
Ars dictaminis,
though why you need it I can’t think. You write as well as any student I ever knew.’

‘Thank you,’ John said, lifting the book with gentle hands. ‘The very book, and not much scuffed, either. How did you do it?’

He had done it simply by going to the bookstalls of the Little Notre-Dame, but he said: ‘The man who had it owed
me a favour. I’ll not be able to do it twice. Better not put it up to Decius again.’

‘Aha, you remind me, I have somewhat for you, too,’ John said triumphantly. ‘Look: a quart of wine.’

‘Now you are the magician. Where’d you get it?’

‘Well,’ John said, ‘you see, dice aren’t as bad as you paint them. Yesterday while you were in class four of us were playing
and I lost. (This is a complicated story, Roger, I warn you.) I hated to drop out, because I was playing with those three
from across the street, the Picards who live in the garret and have one gown for the three of them to go to lectures in. Then
in came the cat from the same place, the one that belongs to the landlord, so I said, “Look, here’s a fellow that eats regularly
and never pays a penny; let’s make him play.”’

‘Where on earth do you find these wild notions?’

‘They come to me,’ John said modestly. ‘Well, so I folded the cat around the dice, as it were – you understand, with all four
paws over them. I shook him a bit – the fat thing didn’t even meow – and threw, and he lost.’

‘He
Lost?’

‘He threw the dice, didn’t he? So I wrote a little note to the landlord, explaining that the cat had lost a quart of wine
and hadn’t paid up, and if he didn’t pay up in due course we’d have to collect his pelt instead. (Cats make good gloves, did
you know that, Roger?) I tied the note around his neck. Well, the Picards went home and I didn’t think any more about it until
this afternoon when the cat came back; and he had the money around his neck.’

Roger stared.

‘He did, Roger, I swear. And there was a letter from the landlord, asking us please not to make the cat play any more, because
he’s so old that his eyesight is poor, so he can’t count his throw. And here it is.’

‘The note?’ Roger said. ‘Or the cat?’

‘No.’ John said innocently, ‘the wine. I seem to have mislaid the note.’

‘You have swept the field,’ Roger said, laughing in spite of
himself. ‘If there were a doctorate of lies, I’d vest you in it and then disband the faculty. Well, then, let’s have a toast
to Decius.’

‘With a whole quart of wine we could have a mass to Decius – but then we’d have to have those thirsty Picards in for servers,’
John said. ‘Well, then, away with it: To the dice! Ah. Roger, Albertus Magnus is your first master, isn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ Roger said shortly. He had not been getting along well with Albert of late. Perhaps he had been winning too many arguments.

‘Are you ready for examination?’

‘I’m sure of it,’ Roger said. ‘I selected the
De plantis as
a text. I know it by rote.’

‘Dangerous; Albert knows his vegetables even better than Aristotle. Speaking of which, how about the dinner?’

‘What dinner?’

‘Dear God, Roger, three years in Paris and you don’t know how these things are won? You don’t consort enough with students,
like me. Well, Albert will set what other masters will attend, of course. How many would that be?’

‘John, please begin again. What are we talking about?’

‘We are talking,’ John said sternly, ‘about your pre-examination dinner, which you will pay for. A few florins go a long way
in these matters. If you can afford it, buy them all a-free bath beforehand, too. Nay, look not anxiously at your box, Roger.
I know you have money, you have only been pretending to be as poor as I. You’ve been buying me books and wine and food, and
I am not a stupid man; I’ve known it the better part of two years. I’ve given back as good as I could, and now let me advise
you, take some money out and spend it openly on a banquet. The masters expect it. And I beg you, count your money ere we part,
so you’ll know I’ve touched not a coin, nay, never even looked into your chest’