Chapter V
The Cost of DiscipleshipThroughout the winter of 1985, John Forde constantly thought of leaving Christopher Noble-Nolan. Though he feared that he had no one and nowhere to leave him for – graduate school in New York having been precipitately abandoned and his parents in Rhode Island remorselessly forsaken – he felt incapable of remaining in the suffocating miasma that was his present position. In his bitterness and disappointment, John had convinced himself that Sir Christopher saw him not as his beloved disciple but as an Eckermann, an Eckermann as Sainte-Beuve described him:
Of a subservient nature, one of those men who is a born acolyte, and who, supported by a reserve of intelligence and devotion, by a youthful inclination to pious admiration, is destined to become the secr
