The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, стр. 1

THE SERMON ON THE FALL OF ROME

“This is yet another of those European novels of ideas that reduce most current English-language fiction to pedestrian predictability by comparison . . . Ferrari pursues his story with the delicacy and skill of a musician reaching the final note.”

EILEEN BATTERSBY, Irish Times

“More admirable even than his previous works . . . The best novel of the year.”

RAPHAËLLE LEYRIS, Le Monde

“Focusing on Corsica, but taking in Paris, Algeria and French colonies in Africa, its portrayal of the many accommodations we make with ‘circumstance’ is both humorous and poignant.”

CATRIONA GRAHAM, Guardian Readers’ Choice

“Ferrari writes with power and perceptive humor.”

DAVID PLATZER, Tablet

“A beautiful meditation on the end of a world . . . as universal as a Greek tragedy.”

ASTRID DE LARMINAT, Figaro

“It rewards effort . . . No conclusions are reached . . . This is as it should be. Good novels pose questions to which there may be no satisfying answer.”

ALLAN MASSIE, Scotsman

“Overflowing with eroticism, sensuality, violence and blinding flashes of wisdom.”

CLAIRE DEVARIEUX, Libération

Also by Jérôme Ferrari in English translation

Where I Left My Soul

MacLehose Press

An imprint of Quercus

New York • London

First published in the French language as Le sermon sur la chute de Rome by Actes Sud, Arles, 2012

Cover photograph © Dragan Todorovic / Trevillion Images

First published in the United States by Quercus in 2016

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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To my great-uncle, Antoine Vesperini

RANSLATOR’S

OTE

Most of the action in Jérôme Ferrari’s novel takes place in twentieth-century France (Corsica and Paris) and Algeria. The city of Corte was once briefly the capital of independent Corsica and is the site of the university which reopened in 1981. The “maquis,” named after the low scrub that covers many hillsides in Corsica, was the term used for the resistance movement during the occupation in the Second World War. “Ribbedu,” as the author notes in a footnote, was the nickname of Dominique Luccini, head of the Communist maquis in the wild Alta Rocca region of Corsica.

Several of the places in Algeria mentioned in the text, including Djemila, Tipasa and Annaba, are the sites of Roman remains. Annaba, one of the oldest cities in Algeria, was originally named Hippo. Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine) was bishop there from 396 A.D. to 430 A.D. In 430 A.D. the city fell to the Vandals. In the eighth century it was renamed Bled El-Anned (from which the modern name is derived). In 1832 the French took the city and renamed it Bône. In 1962 Algeria became independent from France.

The book contains echoes of Algeria’s prehistory. The first viable state to flourish in what is now Algeria was the Berber kingdom of Numidia. In 206 B.C. the new king of eastern Numidia, Massinissa, made an alliance with Rome to defeat the neighboring state of Carthage. Believing himself to be betrothed to Sophonisba, the daughter of a Carthaginian general, Massinissa defeated Syphax, king of western Numidia, who was allied to Carthage. But Syphax had married Sophonisba, in his capital city of Cirta. Refusing to allow her to be taken to Rome to be displayed in a triumph, Massinissa poisoned her and then gave her a royal funeral.

I am indebted to a number of people and, in particular, the author for assistance and advice in the preparation of this translation. My thanks are due notably to Dr. Thomas Anderson, Robert Caston, June Elks, Ben Faccini, Scott Grant, Willem Hackman, Wayne Holloway, Fr. Nicholas King SJ, Ann Mansbridge, Richard Sorabji, Simon Strachan, Susan Strachan and Roger Watts.

G.S.

UTHOR’S

OTE

THE

RIGINAL

RENCH

DITION

All the chapter titles, with the exception of the last one, are taken from Augustine’s sermons. I have also quoted from the Psalms and Genesis, and have taken Shulamite’s “ashen hair” (here) from Paul Celan’s poem “Death Fugue,” which was itself borrowed from the Song of Songs.

Without Daniel Istria’s help I should never have been able to picture what a fifth-century African cathedral might have looked like, nor how sermons were preached there.

Jean-Alain Huser helped initiate me into the twin mysteries of French colonial administration and tropical diseases, the symptoms of which I have ventured to modify somewhat, according to criteria which I hesitate to qualify as aesthetic.

My warm thanks are due to both of them.

There are so many ways in which I am indebted to my great-uncle Antoine Vesperini that, rather than listing them all, it seemed to me simpler and more appropriate for me to dedicate this novel to him, for it could not have existed without him.

J.F.

Contents

Cover

The Sermon on the Fall of Rome

Also by Jérôme Ferrari

Title Page

Dedication

Translator’s Note

Author’s Note to the Original French Edition

Epigraph

“If Romans are not perishing

perhaps Rome has not perished”

“Then do not feel reluctance, my brothers,

toward the chastisements of God”

“You, see yourself for what