by Joanna Scott
They celebrated Christmas with roast goose and plum pudding. In the early spring they began visiting properties for sale in the area. On Easter of 1903, wearing a spring costume made by a dressmaker in Nice, a pink, lacy affair with a tulle skirt and silk jacket and a hat crowned by a magnificent white feather that might have been plucked from the same bird the porter on the Noordland had almost dropped into the water, Aimée announced to the friends who had gathered for dinner that the de Potters would finally have a permanent home. After looking all across Cannes, they had purchased a seventeen-room villa on the avenue de Vallauris.
The Villa du Grand Bois had a swooping marble staircase leading to the front entrance, a white stucco façade crowned by a bracketed cornice, and two flanking towers, one encircled with three tiers of wrought-iron balconies. It had been closed up for two years and would need a good airing out. The garden was overgrown with borage and nettles. The basin of the fountain had cracked in half, and a stone nymph had fallen from its pedestal. But the top floor had a view of the sea, the perfume from the thick wisteria vines hung in the air, and when the de Potters first came through the front gate, the splash of afternoon light gave the villa the sheen of fine marble. They knew at once that they had to make this magnificent estate their own. They thought themselves especially lucky when the owner agreed to lower the price.
They moved in September, and by their anniversary in October they had the help of a full-time staff that included a cook, a maid, and a gardener. On November 20, the furniture and boxes they’d left in storage back in New Jersey arrived, and Aimée and Armand devoted themselves to unpacking. They set out the crystal, sorted through clothes, and repacked their woolens in their steamer trunks. While Armand organized his curios on the shelves of the fine gilt cabinet that had traveled with them from France to America and back to France, Aimée put their books and photograph albums in order in the library.
On November 26, Armand had a meeting at the bank all morning. As planned, Aimée met him for lunch at La Réserve in the center of Cannes. He was uncharacteristically late and arrived disheveled, with his coat open and his hat in his hands, as if he’d run all the way from the bank. But he said grandly, “Ma chérie, one day I shall prove myself worthy of your affection,” kissing her gloved hand in his courtliest fashion. And later, when they were at Galleotti’s furniture shop, he sprang out from behind a set of bureaus on display, swinging her into his arms. They’d come to look over the Stevens cane-mesh reclining chairs that were for sale, and they had a laugh trying them out, kicking their feet up and testing the levers.
It was a pleasant day all in all, though not until evening, when she was writing a note in her diary, did Aimée remember that it was a holiday. Back in America, friends were sitting down to their Thanksgiving feasts. Here in Cannes, the de Potters were quite too busy to celebrate.
* * *
Aimée was a farmer’s daughter and used to waking early. She didn’t think it strange to work right alongside the servants. She would go after a clogged drain with a plunger while Felicie prepared dinner, or she’d follow Ernestine from room to room with a second feather duster, chattering about anything in an effort to practice her French.
After finding a drawing of the original plan in the cellar, she turned her attention to the garden. She hired a local mason to repair the broken fountain and bought huge terra-cotta pots to place around the perimeter of the grass terrace. She planted clumps of lavender around the fountain and filled the pots with carnation plants. She had François spread gravel and repair the steps of the paths that curved out from the terrace, and she helped him thin brush from a little orchard of apricot and cherry trees on the west side of the garden. Once he’d trimmed the box hedge, she filled the flower beds with rosebushes and geraniums and more carnations. She bought a stone bench to set beneath the gnarly branches of a grand old magnolia. For the boundary just inside the back wall, already partly established with tall cypresses, she brought in a dozen saplings. For the final touch, she had a plumber lay a new pipe to the fountain, and soon water was spilling from the pitcher being tipped by the nymph.
With so much rewarding work to be done at Grand Bois, she was grateful to be free from the demands of set itineraries. The de Potters could travel when they wished and stay at home for as long as they pleased. Armand took a short trip to Cairo in April, and in May he and Aimée joined the Old World Tour in northern Italy. With Victor they spent a week in June at Baden-Baden and the rest of the summer in Cannes. Time passed too quickly. In the long letters Aimée wrote to her friends back in America, she liked to say that the only thing she lacked was a means to slow the hours so she could fully savor the pleasures of life in the south of France.
On the twenty-first of October 1904, the eve of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, they hired a car, picked up Victor from his school in Mandelieu, and drove to the mountain village of Auribeau-sur-Siagne, coming as close to the top as the narrow street permitted. They had lunch at a café and lit a candle in the chapel. On their way down, the chauffeur drove so fast that Aimée’s scarf blew right off her head.
Lightning and thunder kept them awake that night. Armand joined Aimée in her room, his feigned fear of the storm his pretext for diving under the covers. Oh, she’d let the whole household know what a clown he was if she couldn’t stifle her giggles. “Stop, please stop,” she begged, but of course he knew she meant don’t stop, and he didn’t.
By the time they came downstairs the next day, Felicie had already prepared a lamb stew. After the meal, they walked with Victor into town, where they treated themselves to chocolate ice cream topped with marshmallow parfait. Back inside the front hall of Grand Bois, they found the servants waiting with a basket of flowers. Armand opened a bottle of champagne to share with everyone—even Victor was given a thimbleful. Armand presented Aimée with a silver bread basket and platter, along with a Limoges ceramic head of a peasant girl. Aimée gave Armand a silver coffeepot.
“Is it possible to be too happy?” she murmured later, when they found themselves alone for a moment. She interpreted the short laugh he offered in response as fondly conspiratorial. She playfully straightened his bow tie before giving him a kiss.
Such a perfect day deserved a record, and that evening, after Armand had left to take Victor back to school, Aimée headed out to the garden to write in her diary. Stopping in her husband’s study to find a pencil, she noticed an envelope on the desk. It was from the University Museum in Philadelphia, where her husband had his collection of Egyptian treasures on loan. She felt curious. Since the letter had already been opened, Armand surely wouldn’t mind if it was opened again.
The letter turned out to be nothing more remarkable than a handwritten note from Mrs. Stevenson, the curator in Philadelphia, who was writing in response to Professor de Potter’s recent inquiry to tell him that she would not have time to compose a comprehensive catalog of the De Potter Collection in the near future—news that Armand would hardly have felt compelled to share with his wife. She did not expect him to report to her on every piece of business related to his collection. The only surprising element was that he had so successfully hidden his disappointment.
She couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken of his collection at the museum in Philadelphia. Why hadn’t she thought to ask? She knew he was as sensitive about his antiquities as if he’d made them himself. He might as well have made them. It had taken him nearly thirty years and dozens of trips to North Africa to acquire treasures that included not just rare jewels and sepulchral bronzes but also a painted sarcophagus that contained a mummified high priest of Thebes. And though he could have sold his antiquities long ago, he had chosen instead to deliver them at his own expense to the University Museum, where they were on display in the Egyptian Section—the same section overseen by Mrs. Stevenson, who had failed to keep the promise she made years ago to write a catalog that would confirm the importance of the De Potter Collection.
Aimée turned the envelope
over and examined the postmark. The letter must have arrived that morning. Her husband had been nursing the wound all day, and she’d been oblivious.
Unless, she considered, he hadn’t been wounded at all—a far likelier possibility, she decided. He hadn’t told her about the letter from Mrs. Stevenson because it wasn’t important to him. What did a catalog matter when they could fly in an auto down the hill from Auribeau-sur-Siagne? Here in the south of France, Armand had grown newly carefree. Disappointment belonged to the past, along with the headaches that used to plague him during a crisis. He didn’t need recognition from distant universities. It was impossible not to be content now that they were comfortably settled at Grand Bois.
She brought her diary out to the garden and sat on the stone bench beneath the magnolia. Small, cream-colored moths flitted about in the weak light of a kerosene lamp. A cart clattered by up the road. A nightingale started to sing. As she waited for the gate to open and her husband to return, she made an entry in her diary. She didn’t mention the letter she’d found in the study. Instead, she wrote about walking into town for ice cream, listed the gifts they’d exchanged, and noted that the carnations were still in bloom.
New York to Tivoli
IN THE BEGINNING, the day he stepped from the gangway onto the Battery embankment in New York, he was tongue-tied in his conversation with the immigration official, and when the official wrote his name as Pierce L. A. Depotter Elsegern, he didn’t dare to correct him. Nor did he object when, in the customs line, he was asked to step aside and make room for a Polish count, the same count, he recalled, who had refused to return his greeting early in the voyage, when they’d found themselves alone together in the ship’s saloon.
It was dreadfully warm, and the air was thick with the stink of manure and steam and tar. He felt self-conscious in his old-fashioned waist-jacket and his rough cotton cravat. Yet the Polish count’s fine black cape was wool. Wool on a hot summer’s day! Which was worse, Armand asked himself as he followed the count toward the street—to be dressed humbly or to be unprepared for the local climate? He had his answer soon enough. If you were a count, it didn’t matter if you were wearing a winter cape on a late summer’s day, for there would be an official to meet you and direct you to a nearby carriage, and there would be servants to save you from the trouble of having to locate your trunk in the jumble of luggage that had been dumped by the stevedores.
Someday, Pierre Louis Armand de Potter d’Elseghem would have his own coach with red velvet seats waiting for him when he arrived in New York. His name would be recorded correctly, and he wouldn’t have to use the forename Pierce on official documents for the next twenty years. Someday, he would have plenty of money to spend on amenities and wouldn’t have to heave the trunk into the cab himself while the driver finished sealing the roll of his cigarette, drawing his tongue along the edge of the paper with a long lick and then facing his passenger with a wink that Armand thought obscene.
As he rode in the cab along Broadway, he dreamed of the day when he would be the guest of honor at a dinner and would find himself sitting next to the same Polish count who had snubbed him on their transatlantic voyage. It would be one of those rare moments of comeuppance, and Armand would relish it in private while politely chuckling at the count’s tasteless jokes. The future, he was sure, would make up for all the humiliations of the past. He promised himself that he would be heureux au jeu et heureux en amour: lucky at cards and lucky in love.
* * *
He would tell his wife that he’d come to America to teach French at a private school, though no position was waiting for him when he arrived in New York. He would describe himself as a knight of the Order of Melusine, never admitting that he had to pay a considerable sum for the privilege. He would claim to be the grandson of a renowned Belgian writer and political leader named Louis de Potter, eliding that his grandmother had been the mistress of Louis and worked as a cook. He would speak of his relatives who owned the Castle of Loppem in Belgium without revealing that the de Potters of Loppem refused to recognize the illegitimate de Potters of the hamlet of Melle. At Loppem, he said, he had fallen down a spiral staircase and had to have a silver plate put in his skull. But the truth was, he had never set foot inside the Castle of Loppem.
Truth was a worthy goal, yet it was as swift as time itself, and one had to hurry to keep up with it. He was always in a hurry, even on that first day at the Gilsey Hotel, when he had no appointments on his calendar, nothing but blank days ahead. After finishing his steak and draining, against his better judgment, the watery liquid the waiter called coffee, he procured a local newspaper. He skimmed it from front to back, paying special attention to the notices of new businesses and real estate transactions. Then he set out walking.
He walked down Water Street to Fulton and across to Wall Street. He rested in Trinity Church and listened to a choir rehearsing. In the late afternoon he took the ferry to Brooklyn, where he heard a lecture at the Brooklyn Institute. Titled “Dullness and Viciousness in the Home and School,” it was delivered by an ancient clergyman who, despite his decrepit appearance, was so inspired by moral indignation that whenever he roared out his favorite phrase, “a blessed paragon of virtue,” he’d spray a shower of spittle over the ledge of the podium.
Armand was impressed by the man’s vigor, as well as by the variety of topics listed in the institute’s weekly schedule. He decided to make the long trip to Brooklyn the following day for a lecture titled “The Clam—a Study in the Survival of the Fittest.” The lecture was scheduled to begin at five. By half past the hour the speaker still hadn’t appeared, and most of the audience left. But a small group stayed behind to talk among themselves. After Armand overheard one of the men claiming that Darwin’s ideas were considered blasphemous in Europe, he intervened to offer a gentle correction. He announced that he was from Belgium, and he could say with certainty that Professor Darwin’s influence was widespread among his countrymen—as evidence he cited a popular new book about parasites by Professor van Beneden of Louvain. The Americans were pleased to hear it and wanted to hear more. Introductions were exchanged. Armand learned that the men were all members of the Dredging Club—an organization dedicated to dragging New York Harbor in search of, as they explained, “rare fish, zoophytes, and odd crustaceans previously unknown to man.” Finding the foreigner to their liking, they invited him to join them for an excursion the following Saturday.
He kept busy during the week, and by Wednesday he had leased a small furnished apartment at 5 Barclay Street. He found a framer to mount a portrait print of Louis de Potter that he’d brought from Belgium. On a whim, he purchased a pair of authentic-deerskin moccasins to wear as bedroom slippers. In Central Park, he ate his first popcorn ball covered in caramel.
On Saturday he woke before dawn and made his way by train and ferry to a trawler at a Brooklyn pier. The other members of the club were already on board, and as he hurried to join them, he slipped and almost tumbled into the water but managed to throw himself forward onto the deck. For this he was immediately labeled “the flying Belgian,” a name that stuck through the following Saturdays when he and his fellow club members crisscrossed the New York Harbor.
Armand had been looking forward to the social aspects of the jaunt and forging new ties. He believed that to prosper he needed good, loyal, well-connected friends. The more people he knew in America the better. But that first morning he spent with the other members of the Brooklyn Institute’s Dredging Club, he found himself so riveted by the muddy haul in the net that he stopped listening to the conversations going on around him. He was startled by the intensity of the suspense as the dripping net was being lifted from the water. He felt as though he were watching an image sharpen inside a crystal ball. What was there to find in the putrid scrapings from the bottom of the New York Harbor? Why, nothing less than relics from the forgotten history of the world.
Everything that came up in the net was potentially interesting. But while the club members were
most excited at finding natural curiosities, the flying Belgian was fascinated by the items the others preferred to discard: the waterlogged handbags and boots and pieces of timber from shipwrecks.
He stood off to the side of the deck, studying a square piece of ashwood that had broken from a mast and was so soggy from its decades underwater that the splinters bent like rubber. With the tip of his knife he scraped away the slime and revealed the mark where the boom had been ripped off during what must have been a terrible storm. Where was the ship coming from? he wondered. What was its cargo? Who perished in the wreck and who survived?
The following Saturday he brought a knapsack and was allowed to take away whatever he could carry. After a month he had enough to constitute the beginnings of a collection: pieces of driftwood and sea glass, a woman’s leather pump, the speared tip of a wrought-iron curtain rod, and, the greatest treasure of all, a pair of rusted handcuffs that Armand liked to imagine had once pinned a murderer to a bailiff.
* * *
To his collection of refuse from the New York Harbor he added glassware he bought at flea markets. Soon he graduated to broadswords and rapiers he found in antiques shops around the city. But he was forced to admit to himself that a collector can’t live on air. After having little success trying to resell a sword with a cracked handle, he became convinced that a fortune could be made in real estate, and he began collecting buildings. He came across an advertisement announcing the auction of a warehouse in Orange, New Jersey. With the letter of credit an uncle on his mother’s side secured for him in Brussels, he convinced the Island City Bank to loan him two hundred dollars, and he bought the warehouse, then resold it three months later for a small profit. He used the money to purchase another property in nearby Montrose, though this one turned out to be his albatross. Of the four families living in the building, only three paid their rent on time. A couple with several small children didn’t bother to pay rent at all.