At last, thought Roland, he’s finished. When Jacob had called him young Monsieur Roland, and asked if he knew the Cluny Museum, which in truth he’d never entered, although it was close to his home, he’d felt as if the antique dealer’s soft voice, in some insinuating way, was rebuking him for his ignorance, and putting him down. He hated Jacob for it.

But his father was gazing at the tapestry with admiration.

“My dear Jacob,” he said at last, “tell me what you want for it.”

The dealer wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to him. De Cygne glanced at it and nodded.

“The restoration?” he asked.

“If you will leave it to me …,” Jacob suggested.

“Of course.”

Roland had seldom seen his father so pleased as when he got into the carriage afterward.

“It’s perfect for the château,” he remarked. “Exactly the right date, the right spirit. Each generation, my son, should add something of beauty to a house like ours. That will be my contribution.”

They started back down the rue du Temple. His father stared ahead thoughtfully.

“Jacob didn’t have to do that, you know,” he suddenly remarked. “He could have sold it to a dozen rich collectors for more than I paid him.”

“Why did he offer it to you, then?” Roland asked.

“I did him a good turn some years ago, when I recommended him to the Comte de Nogent, who’s become one of his most valuable customers. Jacob must have been waiting for an opportunity to return the favor.” He nodded. “Certainly, his choice couldn’t have been better.”

“You think he really bought it the way he said?”

“Why not?”

Roland didn’t answer. But he knew exactly what he thought about the soft-voiced dealer who had tried to put him down.

Jacob had probably stolen it.

It wasn’t so strange for him to imagine such a thing. Whether seriously or in jest, it was the sort of thing that most of the boys he knew at school would have said. So would their parents. The presumption was general: the Jews were all in league together, and they were all conspiring to cheat the Christians. The first proposition would have come as a surprise to the Jewish community; the second dismissed as absurd.

But it was not a question of logic. It was a question of tribe. The Jews were not of the French tribe, for they had their own. Nor their religion. And therefore, tribal instinct declared, they could not be trusted—not even to obey the Ten Commandments that they themselves had given the world. Roland supposed this was something that everybody knew. And he would have been most surprised if anyone had told him he was prejudiced, it being the nature of a prejudice that those who possess it have no idea that it is prejudice at all.