The early morning hours were the most difficult. Lying in bed in the rented room next to the funeral parlor, I listened to the engines of the limousines lining up in the adjacent driveway, ready to convey their coffined loads to the town’s periphery. 

Thoughts drifted. It was difficult enough to get started on drizzly days, but even more so 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, where I was to meet my class. I had already been late several times, and as a teaching graduate student I was vulnerable to occasional unannounced inspections. Yet I looked forward to facing my students. I had overheard senior professors talk enviously of sabbaticals. For me, those were at that point only distant mirages. In 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, our textbook in  this intensive language course. 

That was more than six decades ago. Presently, the emeritus professor seated on a bench with a missing slat in Parc Monceau, at the edge of the 8th Arrondissement, muses on the actual 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 employees 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 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 witches’ sabbath, it carried distinct perverse and therefore seductive undertones, referring as it does to demonic nocturnal revels. Somehow sabbatical had become for me a metaphor evoking the broader enticements 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 the immediate post–World War II years, 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 Thief. 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 US Embassy and suppressing turbulent left-wing street protests 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, was 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 writings about Rome as guide and inspiration. 

Our walks often led us up to the church of San Pietro in Montorio on the Janiculum. There was decidedly no escape from Stendhal. As I directed my view toward the multilayered monuments of Rome, and beyond them, to the Pincio and the gardens of villa Borghese, I recalled vividly the opening pages of Stendhal’s autobiographical Life of Henry Brulard, which I had recently examined with pencil in hand. In this magical overture, the author finds himself on a sunny and slightly windy fall day near the same San Pietro in Montorio, perhaps on the same spot where we stood. At a great distance, he distinguishes Monte Albano and Castel Gandolfo, but his eyes focus on the topography and the monuments of the great city, the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, the Tiber, Monte Cavallo, the orchard of a monastery, the Appian Way—a vast panorama with its architectural layers of time blending in his imagination with the vistas of his own life, which he sets out to survey with bemusement and quasi-paternal affection while fully aware of aging and mortality. The historical times of ancient and modern Rome blend with the temporal layers of his personal history in these lyric reminiscences that come to the surface in their transient simultaneity. Memory and reveries exchange their riches, while he begins to see himself as a fictional character.