by Joanna Scott
The banker is cannier than the steward and stewardess and less reluctant than they had been to close a deal he is sure to profit by. “Well, then, I accept,” he says, adding, if it isn’t too much trouble, that he would like a receipt, even though no money has changed hands. Armand obliges by writing out a bill of sale and signing it over to the banker. “I hope your wife enjoys it,” he says kindly. “Oh, and by the way, I wouldn’t declare it at customs if I were you. The Ottomans have strict rules about exporting antiquities.”
Armand offers the warning as helpful advice, not expecting that it would be enough to annoy the banker, who clearly prides himself on being impeccably virtuous in his business dealings. If he can’t declare it at customs, then he doesn’t want it. He snaps the lid closed and hands the box back to Armand with a grunt of displeasure. “Thank you,” he says, “but I prefer to find a gift for my wife on my own.”
As he takes possession again of his little bronze, Armand considers how difficult it is to be magnanimous in a world that rewards suspicion. The banker goes back to reading his book about Greece, leaving Professor de Potter stuck with a treasure so lacking in interest that he can’t even give it away.
Grand Bois
THE DAY SHE RETURNED from Greece—five weeks after her husband disappeared at sea—Aimée began to dream about him. In the first dream, he was in bed with her. The lamp was off, and the shutters of her window were closed tight. She couldn’t see him in the darkness, but she could feel him.
In the second dream, she was standing with a group of tourists outside the front door of the château in the Touraine they’d rented for the first half of 1887, the Château Montagland. The door opened, and Armand was there, ready to welcome the party and greeting his wife as if she were a stranger.
A servant stood nearby, playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the piccolo. American-flag bunting was draped from the corbels. The wall alongside the stairway was decorated with circular Toledo swords from Armand’s early collection. A plaque of hammered brass, with a portrait of the wife of Francis I, hung above the entranceway.
Armand led the group into the kitchen, where a servant Aimée had never seen before was arranging brioche on a plate. His expression was somber, but he had the ruddy, fat-cheeked face of a cherub. A rustic knotted-wool rug was on the floor, and a fire burned in the hearth.
Armand continued past the servant without a word, through the kitchen, down the hall, and pushed back a pair of pocket doors, revealing the room he called “the petit salon des arts,” which was identical to the salon in Grand Bois, except that there was no gilt cabinet.
Armand gestured toward the clock on the mantel, the one given to the de Potters by members of the Long Summer Tour of 1884, made of black Egina marble, with miniature pillars in imitation of a Greek temple. As if on command, the clock began to chime, and the sound woke the white marble Venus de Milo, who bent her head from one side to the other as though to stretch her stiff neck. The bronze Italian soldier across the room caught Aimée’s eye and winked at her lasciviously. The wooden Daughter of Madame Angot raised herself on her rosetted slippers and pointed first toward the miniature bronze Psyche, who was embracing her dying gladiator, and then toward the marble Moses, who thrust his fingers into the flowing billows of his white beard as if to search for something there.
It was wondrous and frightening and beautiful all at once. Even in the dream, though, Aimée was aware that some trick must be involved. Before she could ask their guide about the lights and mirrors he used to create the illusion, she woke up.
* * *
The day after this second dream, she went into her husband’s study, lifted the pedestal bowl, folded the embroidered runner, and carefully opened her husband’s desk, only briefly sifting through its contents before closing the lid.
“Gray day,” she wrote in her diary that night. “Opened A’s desk—like uncovering the face of a corpse—& his hand placed all these things as they are. How can I go through all this & live.”
Every day that week she had meetings with bankers, lawyers, and once with the Entrepreneur, as the consultant called himself. He’d been recommended by Edmond Gastineau, who knew of him only by reputation. He was famous, Gastineau said, for saving his clients unnecessary fees. But the famous Entrepreneur, who sat across from her veiled by the haze of his cigar smoke, had only one piece of advice on how to handle the debts Armand had left behind: Madame de Potter must, must, must avoid giving the impression that she was desperate.
She may have been desperate to find money to pay her bills; she would have no difficulty, though, disguising the reality of her finances. As Madame de Potter, she had learned to play her part with seemingly artless grace. Now as a widow, she had already developed a new confidence in her ability to hide the truth. All she had to do was tell people what she wanted them to believe.
She wanted them to believe that there was no crisis her husband hadn’t been capable of handling. That’s what he’d persuaded her to believe while he was still alive, successfully shielding her from the scope of his debts. Looking over the bank records, she wondered if there were investments he had made long ago that he’d forgotten to record. She doubted it, but the next day she opened her husband’s desk for a second time, knowing that among the stack of his passports and visas, she would find the key to his safe-deposit box, along with a copy of his will:
“In the name of God, Amen: I, Pierre Louis de Potter d’Elseghem, commonly known and subscribing myself as Armand de Potter, being of sound and disposing mind, memory and understanding, but realizing the uncertainty of human life…”
He indicated that he wanted all his just and legal debts to be paid as soon as possible after his death; he bequeathed to his wife all his stocks and bonds on deposit and his Paid Up Life Insurance Policy; he bequeathed to his wife and son the total value of his Tourist Business in New York and Paris, and his collection of Egyptian Antiquities. He requested, “In the event of my body being lost at sea that a monument be erected to my memory by my wife.”
She paused, rereading the stipulation he’d put in years ago. A monument be erected to my memory … A monument … How strange it was to read these words now. What sort of monument had he imagined for himself? A weeping angel? A pyramid?
They were supposed to grow old together and had already begun to enjoy a kind of retirement from the frenzy of the tourist business—reading, art study, travel, long walks in this beautiful country, returning to the home they called Paradise. She remembered asking her husband if it was possible to be too happy. How she regretted the comment.
Her regret was worsened by the mystery of his end, which made death insubstantial. A telegram or a ring at the gate in the evening would make her start. When a letter arrived containing a Kodak taken of Armand during his last weeks alive, she almost called out, as if to summon him from the next room: Come see, my love, come look at yourself! But her voice caught in her throat when she realized that in this photograph taken of her husband during his final tour, he had his own camera in his hand, as if he were preparing to take a picture of her as she looked at him, and he was seated on the base of a tombstone.
* * *
She tried to stay occupied in the days that followed. She went to the dressmaker’s in Nice and bought hyacinth bulbs at the market. She ordered mourning cards and wrote letters. Eventually she forced herself to open her husband’s desk once more.
Looking through his passports and visas, she was puzzled by certain inconsistencies. From the documents, she couldn’t be sure whether her husband first arrived in New York in 1871 or 1873, whether he was born in Belgium or France and stood five feet six inches or five feet eight inches tall. She attributed such mistakes to Armand’s accent. A news clipping dated September 18, 1875, announced that a man named “Mr. T. De Potter” would be in charge of the French Department at St. Agnes’s School in Albany. The T, she guessed, was misheard when Armand pronounced the initial P of his first name. In a later report, Mr. T. De Potte
r had become “Prof. Pierce L. De Potter, the French instructor in St. Agnes’s School,” who was praised for giving a “particularly vivid” lecture, “The History of France from Francis II to the Present Time,” with “choice selections from the poets” interspersed.
She preferred to read his own articles and lectures. He had spent so much of his time writing, even when he wasn’t in his study. If he didn’t have a journal with him, he wrote on the backs of envelopes. He used a pencil when traveling, a gold-banded Waterman fountain pen at home. Shortly after they’d moved to Cannes he had bought a Remington typewriter and taught himself to type. When he wasn’t making notes for a lecture or writing an essay about his travels, he wrote letters and postcards. Occasionally he wrote short skits, such as the one about Napoléon for the Tivoli Literary Society. He wrote about the Ottoman Empire, the ancient Greeks, the pharaohs of Egypt. He wrote a long essay about Egyptian techniques of embalming. He wrote about Dutch, German, Flemish, Neapolitan, Lombardian, and Florentine art. He wrote at length about Fra Angelico. He wrote about land ownership in Great Britain and the guilds of Bruges.
Some things didn’t fit, such as when he singled out Bacchus for special praise in his lecture on the Greek gods: “Nothing from mythology has been of more use to artists,” he wrote, than the “wild night Bacchanals”—this from a man who rarely allowed himself more than a single glass of wine at dinner. In his lecture on Constantinople, his remarks about the present sultan, Abdul Hamid, remained incomplete: “Though much is said against him, he has introduced many reforms in his empire—and I believe modern history will point to him as one of Turkey’s most enlightened rulers. —But!!!” And there were several pages of an unfinished story Armand had titled “The Little Corporal,” about a French cavalry officer named Louis Pierre d’Elseghem, who discovers at the age of twenty that he is the illegitimate son of a Belgian nobleman. Aimée found the story confusing, and Armand had apparently agreed, for he’d drawn a big X in red ink across every page. But he’d left unmarked a strange passage about the Belgian nobleman Antoine David Dupont, the father of Louis Pierre d’Elseghem, who after gambling away the family’s fortune flees from his disgrace to a farm in the Australian outback, where he lives out the rest of his life in obscurity, raising goats and making a sour, nearly inedible cheese.
It was a pointless digression in an ill-conceived story. Mostly, though, Armand’s personality was so vividly expressed in his writing that Aimée could think of no other response than to pray to God to return her husband to her. For a moment, while reading his reflections on the value of politeness in an essay he’d published shortly after they were married, she could almost be persuaded that he was there in the room, reciting for an audience: “Society is a masquerade, and with the invitation to participate comes the important responsibility of choosing a costume. Whatever may otherwise be the disguises worn by one’s associates, it must be agreed that the most appealing mask is that of politeness. A well-bred man should be polite to all from the grandest to the humblest; courtesy is the seal of a perfect education.”
Her darling gentleman, who fooled everyone, even his wife, with his civility. She’d assumed that together they buoyed each other enough to survive any troubles they encountered. And how insignificant their troubles seemed from inside the walls of Grand Bois. Even the threats from the travelers in the Jaffa accident lost their sting, or so Aimée thought. Weren’t she and Armand enjoying the masquerade together, whirling through high society hand in hand, disguised as royalty with their invented names, convincing tourists that they had to pay for the privilege of their company? Yes, her husband was polite to all. He had even doffed his hat to the steward on the Regele Carol.
She called to him; he didn’t reply. All she had to conjure him were these remnants: scribblings in his journals, lecture notes, unfinished essays, and the letters he had written to her over the years. It seemed there was nothing he hadn’t written about or was not planning to write about. And it amounted to no more than a pile of papers that anyone other than Aimée would have thrown away.
* * *
She was slow to begin the business of settling the estate and careful about keeping the manner of his death a secret. When she finally sent Armand’s will to G. A. Hereshoff Bartlett, her lawyer in Paris, she offered only the brief explanation that her husband had accidentally fallen overboard and drowned off the coast of Greece.
Bartlett’s response was equally brief: “I am this moment in receipt of your letter enclosing your husband’s will. If you leave the will with us, it will be for the purpose of our preparing all the papers.” He wanted to be sure that he had full charge of the probate work, for “this is no easy matter,” he wrote, “but on the contrary a most delicate undertaking.” He warned Aimée that he couldn’t predict what the legal costs would be. “They may be 1,000 francs and they may be 5,000 francs,” he declared. “It frequently happens that an apparently trifling and simple matter may involve very intricate questions of law and necessitate the most delicate and skillful handling.” As an example, he returned the copy of the most recent will, which included an addendum declaring that “such deposits” as his accounts at the Société Générale were all joint deposits with his wife, and requesting that the property due to his son be held in trust until Victor was twenty-five, “he to enjoy the income with his mother until that time.”
Armand had dated the addendum “Cannes, January 28, 1904” and signed it, but according to Bartlett, it was invalid because it hadn’t been witnessed. Yet even if it had been witnessed, it wouldn’t have made a difference in the settlement, Bartlett said, since there already were equivalent stipulations in the older will.
Aimée was left wondering why Armand had gone to the trouble of inserting the addendum without telling her. As she reread the paragraph, she lingered over the phrase such deposits. Why hadn’t he mentioned that he’d closed their account at the Crédit Lyonnais? Had her husband meant to put a portion of his wealth out of his wife’s reach so he could draw on it without her knowledge?
In the next moment she felt disgusted with herself for her suspicion. Armand had kept his debts secret to spare her from financial worries. Clearly, she saw now, Grand Bois had been beyond their means. Her husband had also been borrowing money to cover the debts associated with his antiquities. He had paid more for the treasures than he could afford. The addendum was evidence that as early as January 1904, he was trying to protect his estate from creditors.
Over the next two weeks, new questions arose. Bartlett wrote to say that the insurance company demanded additional proof of the death of Mr. de Potter before they would agree to pay the indemnity. They wanted bond in the form of collateral evidence, such as an affidavit by the captain of the vessel stating that Mr. de Potter went on board but did not leave the vessel. After receiving written testimony from Chorafas, the dragoman, they wanted an affidavit from the steward who had seen Mr. de Potter at the rail and the stewardess who had been with the steward. And they wanted an affidavit from the gentleman who talked with the two peddlers in Piraeus, and the statement of the peddlers, could they be found. Chorafas had referred to the peddlers and the unknown gentleman in his testimony. Why hadn’t Aimée mentioned them to Bartlett? He demanded to know if she might have forgotten to tell him anything else.
In the weeks that followed, Bartlett complained that he was experiencing great difficulty in locating the steward and stewardess of the Regele Carol—he was as far from getting a clue of their whereabouts as he was when he’d started. The best they could hope for was that the sworn statement of the U.S. consul at Athens should be sufficient to satisfy the incredulity of Mutual Life.
Bartlett kept after Aimée, demanding endless documentation and warning her that the case was growing ever more complicated. But after months of legal haggling she received an unexpected letter from him reporting that the insurance company had agreed to pay out the indemnity. Without bothering to explain how the delicate matter was resolved, he enclosed a final bill, c
harging seventy-five hundred francs for his services.
* * *
It took months for Mutual Life to send a check, and until then Aimée struggled to meet expenses. She resolved to sell the travel business to Edmond Gastineau, and with the money she borrowed against the forthcoming sale she was able to pay Victor’s tuition. She sold the pair of cane-mesh reclining chairs to Roland Berg, an American who had married a Frenchwoman and opened up a furniture store in Nice, and she was able to send Bartlett the first installment of his payment.
On the day she went to the bank to prepare a money order for Bartlett, she discovered a strange discrepancy in her account. According to her passbook, she should have had a little under twenty thousand francs, but according to the bank, a recent withdrawal had put the sum below fifteen thousand. She insisted that she hadn’t made any such withdrawal. The teller provided her with the record: five thousand francs had been withdrawn on January 10, 1906.
The account had been opened jointly, and she hadn’t gone through the trouble of removing her husband’s name. It was one of several accounts Armand used to draw from to pay his business expenses. But the five thousand francs had been withdrawn six months after his death.
Though Aimée was writing enormous checks almost daily, she couldn’t have forgotten a withdrawal of five thousand francs. The only plausible explanation was that Edmond Gastineau had drawn from the account to cover the agency’s bills. But why hadn’t he written ahead of time to warn her? He probably hadn’t wanted to bother her with the agency’s financial troubles. He would explain it all if she asked him. She didn’t want to ask him. She had no suspicions regarding Edmond Gastineau. But how to explain the five thousand francs that had gone missing from her and Armand’s joint account? Five thousand francs. Maybe Edmond Gastineau had nothing to do with the withdrawal. Maybe it was a mystery Madame de Potter should avoid trying to solve.