it began to rain. Umbrellas sprouted around him, and his shoes smacked through the puddles, his socks spreading the cold around his ankles. Before long, the entire avenue was ablaze with watery pavements, and when he arrived at the Salle Dugès a scent of damp wool was rising from his coat.
7
Docteur Frédéric Molineu’s office at the university was smaller and far less grand than his study at home. Still, he worked at the university most days: if he wanted a promotion after his next thesis he needed to accentuate his presence there, which meant being physically present as much as possible. He arrived in the morning at eight o’clock, lectured until noon, then retired to the office to continue his own research and answer questions from any students who came by. So few were left now; one lectured to a mere handful in the auditorium, most of them women and foreigners who regarded Molineu and his pointer with the glazed eyes of victory statues, delirious with so much sorrow.
The office was a corner room on the second floor, accessed by two sets of swinging double doors before the final one with the frosted window. Inside, west-facing windows gave him afternoon sun and a view of the courtyard, and two watercolours above his desk depicted the Hérault River. The offices on the other side of the hall had views of an actual river, a small tributary of the Lez. Frédéric’s desk knocked up against the window, and he kept his liquor in a low cabinet on which he stacked books that wouldn’t fit on the shelves. Any visitor or student would sit in the chair, while Frédéric sat on the desk. He often caught himself thinking about the other, spacious offices in the department, emptied now by war—though of course one would never ask.
The door opened a crack. “Good evening Frédéric.”
“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