The Rebel Angels

"Well, my dear man, if you can't tell me, how can I look for it? He may have put it in one of the other divisions – if those old cartons from the liquor store in which he stored his MSS can be called divisions. There is a very rough plan to be discerned in the muddle, but unless I know what this particular MS was about I wouldn't have any idea where to look. Why are you interested?"

"I was trying to find out what it really was when McVarish came along and wanted to see it, and I couldn't very well say no – not in another man's house, about something that wasn't mine – and I never got back to it. But certainly McVarish saw it, and I saw his eyes popping."

"Had your eyes been popping?"

"I suppose so."

"Come on, Clem, cut the scholarly reticence and tell me what it was."

"I suppose there's nothing else for it. It was one of the great, really great, lost manuscripts. I'm sure you know what some of those are."

"They are very common in my field. In the nineteenth century some letters appeared from Pontius Pilate, describing the Crucifixion; they were in French on contemporary notepaper and a credulous rich peasant paid quite a lot for them; it was when the same crook tried to sell him Christ's last letter to his Mother, written in purple ink, that the buyer began to smell a rat."

"I wish you wouldn't be facetious."

"Perfectly true, I assure you. I know the kind of thing you mean: Henry Hudson's lost diary; James Macpherson's Journal about the composition of Ossian – that kind of thing. And stuff does turn up. Look at the big haul of Boswell papers, found in a trunk in an attic in Ireland. Was this something of that order?"

"Yes. It was Rabelais' Stratagems."

"Don't know them."

"Neither does anybody else. But Rabelais was historiographer to his patron Guillaume du Bellay and as such he wrote Stratagems, that is to say, prowesses and ruses of war of the pious and most famous Chevalier de Langey at the beginning of the Third Caesarean War; he wrote it in Latin, and he also translated it into French, and it was supposed to have been published by his friend the printer Sebastian Gryphius, but no copy exists. So was it published or wasn't it?"

"And this was it?"

"This was it. It must have been the original script from which Gryphius published, or expected to publish, because it was marked up for the compositor – in itself an extraordinarily interesting feature."

"But why hadn't anybody spotted it?"

"You'd have to know some specialized facts to recognize it, because there was no title page – just began the text in close writing which wasn't very distinguished, so I suppose the calligraphy people hadn't paid it much heed."

"A splendid find, obviously."

"Of course Cornish didn't know what it was, and I never had a chance to tell him; I wanted to have a really close look at it."

"And you didn't want Urky to get in before you?"

"He is a Renaissance scholar. I suppose he had as good a right as anyone to the Gryphius MS."

"Yes, but you didn't want him to become aware of any such right. I quite understand. You don't have to be defensive."

"I would have preferred to make the discovery, inform Cornish (who after all owned the damned thing), and leave the disposition of it, for scholarly use, to him."

"Don't you think Cornish would have handed it over to Urky? After all, Urky regards himself as a big Rabelais man."

"For God's sake, Darcourt, don't be silly! McVarish's ancestor – if indeed Sir Thomas Urquhart was his ancestor, which I have heard doubted by people who might be expected to know – Sir Thomas Urquhart translated one work – or part of it – by Rabelais into English, and plenty of Rabelais scholars think it is a damned bad translation, full of invention and whimsy and unscholarly blethering just like McVarish himself! There are people in this University who really know Rabelais and who laugh at McVarish."

"Yes, but he is a Renaissance historian, and this was apparently a significant bit of Renaissance history. In Urky's field, and not really in your field. Sorry, but that's the way it looks."

"I wish people wouldn't talk about fields as if we were all a bunch of wretched prospectors and gold-panners, ready to shoot anybody who steps on our claim."

"Well, isn't that what we are?"

"I suppose I've got to tell you the whole thing."

"I wish you would. What have you been holding back?"

"There was the MS of the Stratagems, as I've told you. About forty pages, closely written. Not a good hand and no signature, except the signature that was written all over it – the lost Rabelais book. But in another little bundle in the back of the leather portfolio, in a sort of pocket, were the scripts of three letters."

"From Rabelais?"