THE PENSIVE CITADEL

Abstract

6 7 R T H E P E N S I V E C I T A D E L V I C T O R B R O M B E R T The early morning hours were the most di≈cult. Lying in bed, I would count the future sabbaticals the way some count how many springs they may still live to see. In the rented room next to the funeral parlor, I imagined the black limousines lining up in the adjacent driveway, ready to convey their co≈ned loads to the town’s periphery. Thoughts drifted. It was di≈cult enough on drizzly days, but more di≈cult still when the early rays of the sun intruded with insistent irony. Half awake, I was afraid to fall asleep again and not make it in time all the way to Phelps Hall. I had already been late several times, and as a teaching graduate student I was vulnerable to occasional inspections. Yet I enjoyed facing my students. As for sabbaticals, they were at that stage only distant mirages. At the present it was fun to make my freshmen repeat ‘‘C’est rond, c’est long, c’est bon,’’ the slightly salacious words uttered with inescapable innuendo by the fictional Mireille in the Méthode orale we used as a textbook in this intensive language course. That was more than sixty years ago. Presently, the emeritus professor seated on a bench with a missing slat in the Parc Monceau , at the edge of the 8th Arrondissement, muses on the actual 6 8 B R O M B E R T Y sabbaticals that punctuated his academic life. A film in rewind. The self takes on the features of a character in a third-person narration. He and I absorb impressions of the park: the fake ruined colonnades, the duck-filled pond, the groomed flowerbeds, the couples snuggling on nearby benches, the jocose groups munching their luncheon sandwiches on the grass, the neoclassical rotunda that was once a toll station at the entrance of Paris and now houses public toilets. On my bench, I ponder the meaning of the word sabbatical. It pleases me to think that beyond the obvious reference to an extended academic leave every seven years (with luck, more often) for the purpose of renewal and research, the word had more venerable meanings associated with the number seven: the seventh day of creation, when the Lord rested; the seventh day of the week, meant to be a day of repose, reverence, and spiritual meditation; the seventh year during which the land was to remain untilled and allowed to rest according to religious law, and all debts remitted . As for the word sabbath, it carried slightly perverse and therefore seductive undertones, referring as it does to demonic nocturnal revels. Somehow sabbatical had become for me a metaphor evoking the broader joys of life. In a sense, my academic existence began in a sabbatical mode. An entire year on a Fulbright Fellowship in Rome to finish my dissertation on Stendhal, the great lover of Italy. In that immediate post–World War II year, Rome was still awaking from nightmarish times recorded in neorealistic films such as Roberto Rossellini ’s Rome, Open City and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves. Peace had returned, but Italians were profoundly divided as the new Cold War intensified. Riot squads in jeeps – the celere created by the minister of the interior, Mario Scelba, known as the ‘‘Iron Sicilian’’ – were protecting the U.S. Embassy and suppressing left-wing manifestations as well as neofascist rallies. But by 1950, Rome once again began to transcend contemporary history, and the newly wed Fulbright couple, in quest of historic perspectives and poetic sensations, were discovering the legendary hills of the eternal city, but also the more popular quarters, as Bettina and I followed the footsteps of Stendhal, using his Promenades dans Rome as guide and inspiration. Our walks often led us up to the church of San Pietro in Mon- T H E P E N S I V E C I T A D E L 6 9 R torio on the Janiculum. There was...