Death and Restoration Read Free Page A

his course on Roman art and architecture, 1600 to 1750.
    The Baroque. The Counter-Reformation. Bernini and Borromini and Maderno and Pozzo. Good lads, all of them. No need for slides or illustrated lectures in this of all cities; just send the idle good-for-nothings on walking tours. On their own on a Monday, escorted by him on a Wednesday. Mens sana in corpore sano. Health and knowledge, all in one package. Cheap at the not inconsiderable price the besotted parents of the little urchins coughed up to add a patina of cultivation to their offspring.
    Even more surprisingly, he was quite good at it. His boundless enthusiasm for the more obscure and impenetrable aspects of baroque iconography slowly transferred itself to some of his students. Not many, admittedly; half a dozen out of thirty or so, but this was held by his colleagues to be pretty good going considering the motley collection of raw material they had to work on.
    And the great virtue of it all was that he didn’t really have to prepare anything: his only problem was deciding what to leave out. And marking. That was depressing, of course.
    “Medieval monks scourged themselves with birch rods; we do the same thing with essays,” the head of his department, a Renaissance man himself, explained in a philosophic vein. “It comes to the same thing in the end. Painful and humiliating, but part of the job. And purifying, in its way: it makes you see the futility of your existence.”
    There was, however, a snag. Lurking ambition, somnolent or at least beaten into submission, had been awoken once more by the transition. Old habits and pleasures came back to haunt him. Having taken the job as a temporary measure because of the flaccid state of the art market, Argyll found himself rather liking the business, despite the students. He had even taken out his doctorate, long since forgotten and mouldering on the shelves while he tried to make a living as a dealer, and dusted it off. The itch was upon him once more: the desire to see his name in print. Nothing grand. A little article, with a decent array of footnotes on some minor topic, to get him back into the mood. An excuse for ambling around in the archives. Everybody else was at it; and it was a bit awkward to have lunch with a colleague. What are you working on? It was an inevitable question. It would be pleasant to be able to answer.
    What indeed, though? He had been flailing around, trying to come up with something for a couple of months. Nothing, so far, had struck his fancy. Too big, too small or done already. The universal chorus of modern academia. It occupied his mind mightily these days.
    Except when there was marking. That was the little nagging detail in the back of his mind which stopped him enjoying the view of Isola Tiburtina as he trudged through the thick fumes of evening carbon monoxide and across the Ponte Garibaldi on his way home. Fifteen essays on Jesuit building programmes. Could have been worse; they might all have managed to pull themselves together and produce something. And judging by the look of it, some of the offerings were going to be a touch thin. In abstract, he loved the conscientious students who worked hard and tried. When he had to mark the result, he loathed the little swots for the reams of paper they produced. But there was nothing to be done about it; a couple of hours of his evening were going to be devoted to reading their efforts, and trying to stay calm when, as was inevitable, one of them informed him that Raphael had been a pope, or that Bernini taught Michelangelo everything he knew about sculpture.
    When what he really needed was a nice quiet evening with Flavia, who had promised faithfully to be home early and cook dinner for the first time in weeks. Now that they had, tentatively, decided to recognize reality and get as married in law as they seemed to be in practice, and Argyll had settled into his new job and was no longer fretting continually about his career, life had