I want to get up. They tell me to relax and stay where I am but I’m not staying there, so as I stagger to my feet Abbi and Sam take my arms to support me. I walk over to the sinks and splash some water on my face. I look a wreck but that’s the least of my worries. They help me back to my office and sit me on the sofa. They bring me a glass of water and someone’s found a bucket from one of the cleaners which they place next to me. Kim takes charge telling the others they can go back to work and she’ll stay with me until the paramedics get here. I try again to tell them I don’t need them, but I don’t have the strength to protest. When the paramedics arrive they look me over thoroughly. They’re concerned about a possible concussion but I reassure them that I feel okay. After ten minutes or so of observation they’re happy to leave me, but tell me to take the rest of the day off as long as there’s someone at home with me. I tell them my brother will be there.
The team are relieved when they see the paramedics okay to leave me. They come in again to check on me, they still don’t understand what happened. I tell them I had skipped breakfast and just felt light-headed, low blood sugar or something. They seem to buy that excuse. If only that were the reason.
The Painting
The Prince in the Gardens of Harlois by Albert Polignac, or as it has come to be known the Portrait of the Lost Child, is an oil on canvas painting that was commissioned by Robert de Harlois as a gift for King Louis XIII of France following a visit that the King and his family made to the Harlois chateau in 1635. It depicts the young Prince Alexander, aged four, playing in the parterre at Harlois. It is the only known portrait of the young prince and one of the few certified documents proving his existence. Its value today in an open market would be in the region of four to five million pounds.
Polignac was an artist interested in creating an intimate realism in his portraits. The faces of his subjects were not idealised in any way but instead were portrayed as he found them in life, expressing personality and character, typically in scenes of gaiety and liveliness. In this regard, the intimacy of the subject, the Portrait of the Lost Child is particularly notable. While it had increasingly become the fashion of the time for wealthy merchants to commission paintings in this more informal style, it was still very unusual for a future monarch to be painted in anything other than a formal portrait, even if the subject was still only a young child. The choice of style and setting was radical, modern and progressive and so was its purpose. It is an immensely personal and private work. This was not a painting intended for public display, but rather as a personal memory for the Royal family.
The brushwork of the painting is fine and intricately detailed. The painting itself measures only about eighty by sixty centimetres. Polignac had travelled in the Netherlands and was heavily influenced by the Dutch masters that were his contemporaries, including Frans Hals, Bartholomeus van der Helst and Rembrandt. The painting is without question the artist’s masterpiece.
The precision and detail in the painting contrast strongly with the character of the artist himself. Polignac was a known drunk, opiate addict and frequenter of whore houses. It is generally acknowledged that he had killed a man in a brawl. Robert de Harlois however appears to have overlooked these qualities in order to procure the finest painter available to him for the purposes of his gift to the King. It is here that the importance of the painting begins to be drawn into focus, the gift for a King and a Prince for the portrait’s subject.
King Louis XIII was married to Anne-Marie of Austria. It’s well documented that the couple struggled to produce an heir with Anne-Marie suffering several stillbirths. But in April 1631 Anne-Marie finally gave birth to a boy. He was however small and weak having been born prematurely and the attending physicians did not expect him to survive. However, survive he did and he was named Prince Alexander, the future heir to the French throne.
The young prince was always by his parents’ side and by all accounts he was a sweet boy with a kind nature and brought great happiness to the King and Queen who now had both a son and heir. The King in particular it is said developed a deep love and affection for him. The Prince however continued to suffer health issues in his early years and was under constant supervision by the royal physicians.
In the summer of 1635 the King, accompanied by his wife and son, visited Brittany, partly as a result of a suggestion from the King’s chief physician that the fresh sea air would be beneficial for the young prince’s health. During their time in Brittany they stayed primarily at the Harlois chateau, a great honour for the Harlois family, who were only considered to be a minor French aristocratic family.
The visit was a great success and the Prince returned to Paris with his parents refreshed and healthier than his parents had ever seen him. However a few months after their visit, as the cold winter began to set in, the prince developed a fever while attending court in Paris with his parents. He did not recover and died shortly after, a few days before his fifth birthday. The King and Queen were grief stricken with the loss, the pain compounded all the more by the memory of the stillbirths the Queen had suffered before, making the King and Queen think they were cursed and condemned to die without an heir to survive them.
While the King and Queen mourned the Prince in Paris, word had not yet reached Brittany of his death and Robert de Harlois had not yet presented his gift to the King. Polignac had taken several months to complete his painting, aware of who the recipient was and it was only now ready to be presented. The painting was en route to Paris when news of the Prince’s death reached the Harlois family. When the courtier who had been tasked with delivering the painting reached Paris he of course became fully aware of the Prince’s death too. But with no way to speak to his master and under strict instruction to deliver the painting to the King, he was worried and fearful about what he should do.
In the end after much deliberation and hesitation he concluded that he must present the painting to the King. The story goes that upon being presented with the painting the King stared at it in silence for over an hour, his whole court in attendance, before breaking down in tears. But the King was not angry. He cried tears of happiness. Some say the painting let the King see his lost son again and reminded him of the happy time his son spent playing in the gardens, a window in time back to this happy day. Others have taken another interpretation, that the King saw the painting as a vision of his son playing happily in the afterlife. Whatever the true thoughts of the King, the painting provided him with much comfort and held an enduring place in both the King and Queen’s hearts. And while their grief could never completely leave them, as history tells us Anne-Marie gave birth to another son three years later, Prince Louis, who went on to become Louis the Great, the Sun King, and France’s longest reigning monarch.
Maybe Prince Alexander was never meant for the French throne. But for a time that was his future. The painting is a marker for a fork in history, for a lost future for the boy, the family, for France and for what might have been had he survived to become King. It is a painting of a prince, but it has come to symbolise all lost futures, and so over time has become known within art circles as the Portrait of the Lost Child.
Because of his illustrious younger sibling history has somewhat forgotten the young Prince Alexander. He is destined to forever sit in the shadow of the great Sun King. However his father never did forget him. He kept the portrait of Prince Alexander in his private rooms in the Chateau de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the King’s principal residence, until his death in 1643. And then in his will the King bequeathed the portrait to the Harlois estate, to be hung above the fireplace in the Grand Salon of the Harlois chateau in Brittany, overlooking the parterre. A final resting place for his son, where he shared his happiest moments.
The painting served as a calling card for the artist for the rest of his life. Polignac’s reputation grew significantly through France following the King’s reaction to it at court and while Polignac’s other works have not stood the test of time with the same success, he is s
till widely credited with helping popularise the Dutch realism style in France in the 1600s.
Prince Alexander’s life has been the subject of some debate, in no small part due to the significance of his younger sibling, the future Louis XIV. These debates are part of the colourful tapestry of conspiracy theories out there, including that Prince Alexander was the man in the iron mask, who survived his childhood illnesses but was subsequently cast aside to make way for the more impressive Louis and imprisoned in a mask to conceal his identity. There is however no evidence to support any such theories and they can be dismissed as enjoyable dalliances and fantasies, though they do succeed in creating another thread of intrigue in the portrait for those who think it holds some secret in its brushstrokes.
These are the reasons the painting is so significant and would command such a large price at auction. It however holds an even greater significance to me, because it once belonged to my father.
6
After the paramedics have left and the others have seen that I’m sufficiently okay, I stay a little while longer in the office to regather my strength before I head home, doctor’s orders. Whatever it was they gave me has given me some energy back, but my exhaustion has started to be replaced instead by the fear that brought all this on in the first place. I need to speak with my brother immediately and it can’t be over the phone, I’m worried someone may be listening.
The quickest way home is by tube. At this time of day the roads will be jammed so there’s no point taking a cab. It’s not rush hour yet so I manage to get a seat on the Piccadilly line. As I sit there looking at the hypnotic lines streaming along the wall just beyond the window, my body begins to twitch with unused adrenaline.
My brother is waiting for me when I get home. I texted him en route telling him to be there when I get back but it looks like he hasn’t left the apartment today, he’s still in the same clothes he slept in. When I arrive he’s in his dressing gown cooking a stir fry of some sort.
“Busy day?” I ask. I don’t need to be a bitch but I’m on edge. I sit down and let the silence hang for a moment, fully aware of the chain reaction that I’m about to set in motion.
“We have a problem.”
“Just the one?”
“A man from Interpol came to my work today wanting to commission me to find the Portrait of the Lost Child.”
Jack looks at me, suddenly alert, the luxury of hearing this news without having to hide his reaction. His attempts to rationalise it fail him and he erupts, “What the fuck?!!! Were you followed?”
“Calm down.” I tell him, “It’s okay. He’s just trying to find the painting, at least that’s all it seems to be.”
“Who came to you? What was his name?”
“His name was Joseph Masoud, he’s a lawyer for an investment fund but they’re working with Interpol. Interpol are trying to step up their efforts on old cases but they haven’t got the resources, so they’re trying to outsource it to private contractors like Roth.”
Jack pauses, focusing and considering.
“No, that can’t be all, it’s too weird, too much of a coincidence. Of all the paintings someone commissions you to find, this is what you get? No.”
“I agree there is cause for concern. I was then and I still am. But if there was more to what he wanted why wait? And why admit to being with Interpol? It would have been easy enough for him to just come and arrest me. But he’s not tried to hide anything, he’s been completely open.”
Jack pauses to think about this a moment. He seems ever so slightly comforted by this.
“I assume you said no to the commission?”
“I’ve taken it.”
“What?! Why?”
“Because I need to stay close to the search, and I need to make sure it’s never found. I can do that if I take the commission. But if Roth isn’t commissioned to look for the painting then another organisation will be, and I can’t control where they look and what they find. Whoever it is will bring Interpol closer to the painting, and the closer they get to the painting, the closer they get to all of us.”
My name has not always been Eloise Witcham. Until the age of fourteen my name was Eloise de Harlois. I grew up in France with my mother Bella, my brother Jack and my stepfather Arnaud. Arnaud was the direct descendent of Robert de Harlois, the man who commissioned the Portrait of the Lost Child for Louis XIII.
I’ve worked very hard to forget my past. But it seems the past has a habit of catching up with you in the end and today is the day it’s caught up with me.
My mother, brother and I lived with Arnaud in his ancestral home, a beautiful chateau in southern Brittany. Jack and I never knew our birth father, he left when we were very young. Arnaud was the only father we ever knew and we never thought of him as anything else. My earliest memories are the four of us running around in this grand baroque chateau in France playing tag.
My mother was a free-spirit. I have to say ‘was’ because there’s nothing about her life now that feels that way, but when she was young that’s what she was. She would always say she was born in the wrong time, that she was supposed to have lived in the Sixties as a peace and free-lovin’ hippie chick but something got mixed up somewhere along the way. Whatever the reason she was right about one thing, she was of another time. She wandered through life with a sort of childish innocence to it all. She didn’t care about anything except the people around her. She was also very beautiful. I don’t think she consciously traded on it, but I think life just came that little bit easier to her because of it. In that way, Arnaud and her were alike, they both had their worlds handed to them on a plate. He had never worked, instead spending most of his time either idling around the family estate with his friends or exploring new far flung parts of the world.
They met on a beach in Goa, my mother told us the story dozens of times. She had been staying in a commune for a few weeks on a spiritual retreat. Arnaud was travelling through India and had found his way to the towns of Calangute and Baga to sample the Goa nightlife. When Arnaud saw my mother he shouted across the whole beach that he’d just seen the most beautiful woman in the world and that he had to meet her. My mother said when he appeared in front of her he was completely captivating, this force of nature with seemingly endless energy and life. Her retreat had only amplified the dark and heavy thoughts she had gone there to get away from, but here was a man who wherever he went just tore through the place like a tornado. He didn’t care about anything except having a good time. He was the perfect distraction and they seemingly hit it off straightaway. They had only been together a few weeks but he was so enamoured with my mother that Arnaud asked her to come back with him to France (apparently unperturbed at the prospect of her two very young children joining them also) and the care-free, bohemian nature of my mother said yes.
And that’s how my brother and I found ourselves growing up in the north west corner of France with a French aristocrat for a father and living in a fifteenth century chateau. It was a privileged life, I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t. We didn’t want for anything. The chateau was set in several hundred hectares of beautiful woods and parkland and it was our own personal playground. I loved to run through the fields in spring when they were filled with thousands of daffodils, poppies, bluebells and buttercups.
Our parents threw grand parties which my brother and I would sometimes be allowed to attend, and when we weren’t we smuggled ourselves out of our bedrooms to the first floor gallery so we could look down at the guests below. They were very happy years for all of us.
When there wasn’t a party to hold or something to celebrate, Arnaud wasn’t around much. He travelled a lot and was somewhat restless, but when he was with us he was like any other father. He was old-fashioned in many ways. He believed passionately in preserving the old traditions that had been handed down to him. The chateau had a long history of hunting and he held regular shoots for his friends, hunting for pheasant and deer. It was an important moment for him the day he took
Jack out for his first hunt, just as his own father had done for him.
He would tell us stories about his illustrious ancestors and the important parts they had played in the history of France. And of all the stories he told, the one he treasured above all the others was the story of Prince Alexander and his portrait.
The portrait hung above the fireplace in the Grand Salon of the chateau, overlooking the parterre just as King Louis XIII’s will had commanded. My father knew a great deal about art, it’s from him I think that I found my love for it. He took great pride in the art that he had filled the chateau with, but of course the Portrait of the Lost Child was the prized piece of his collection. It was by all accounts the most important and recognised painting in the collection, but more than that it allowed him a connection to his family’s past and the brightest days of the family’s history.
It’s strange looking back on that time now, it seems like another life. As I said, they were very happy years for all of us. But it wasn’t to last. And when my father finally started to realise that, it was too late.
The grand estates of the old aristocracy do not belong in the world today. They are a legacy from a bygone era, a remnant of the past that the families who still have them want to cling on to. The estates that remain have had to adapt to the new order if they want to survive. Most are no longer family homes but hotels or tourist attractions. The few that do still exist as private residences are inevitably newly acquired and supported by some new source of wealth unconnected with the estate. No longer an ancestral home, for their new owners they amount to just another object to be acquired much like the art on auction at Roth.
Lost Children Page 4