De Potter's Grand Tour

by Joanna Scott

  She spent the rest of the afternoon walking. She walked beside the embankment and sat on a bench for a long while, looking out at the sea. She got up and walked along la Croisette so lost in thought that she walked right into an elderly woman, who would have fallen flat on her back if her husband hadn’t been holding her arm.

  Pardon, madame.

  She wanted to ask the old woman if she had spent her years so devoted to her husband that she’d had practically no life of her own. Was this what people thought when they saw Armand de Potter’s widow? The prospect filled her with bitterness.

  She walked up the hill of the avenue de Vallauris in a daze. Back at Grand Bois, she went straight up to her room. She had no one she could confide in, so she confided in her diary: “5,000 missing from account at SG. Could it mean that he—” She refrained from expressing the whole of her suspicion and instead wrote in code: “.… —..——… …” It was a mad idea, one that should only have come to her in the delirium of a fever. Five thousand francs were missing from their joint account. Five thousand francs.

  She spoke the rebuttal aloud. “Impossible!” Her husband wouldn’t have played such a terrible trick on his wife and son. She would mourn him, but she refused to accuse him of such an outrageous deceit. He had boarded the Regele Carol with the intention of throwing himself overboard, and that’s what he’d done. The stewardess had even said something about seeing Professor de Potter on top of the rail. On top! A man last seen on top of the rail of a ship does not climb down and walk away.

  She couldn’t keep herself from imagining the terror of his final moments. Walking along la Croisette in the rain, she looked out at the swells of the sea and thought of Armand’s body thrown about by the waves.

  She often wondered what he would want to say to her. One night that spring she dreamed once more of her husband. He was sitting beside her on the stone bench in the garden and began whispering to her, his voice barely audible as he explained why he hadn’t come home. When she woke, she was disappointed to find that she couldn’t recall his words. She would spend the rest of her life trying to remember what, for a moment in a dream, she had understood.

  The Columbian Exposition

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” he said in his introductory presentation on the first day of the Columbian Exposition in the spring of 1893, “I am honored to have this opportunity to present to you my little monuments, relics of the oldest known civilization. I trust you will agree with me,” he said, gesturing to the display, “that the figures in De Potter’s Egyptian Pantheon are as beautiful as they are rare.” He held up one of the bronze statuettes mounted on a pedestal, turned it round for his audience to admire. “Let me introduce you to the majestic Osiris, frozen in his regal stance for three thousand years. During his life, Osiris spread the influence of good. He was murdered by his brother Set, the god of evil, who trapped Osiris in a coffin and drowned him in the Nile. He appears to us as a mummy, with his hands uncovered, holding a scepter and scourge, emblems of sovereignty. He wears the crown of Egypt, ornamented with ostrich feathers, which symbolize truth.

  “And this sweet goddess here,” he said, gesturing down the row, “is Isis, sister and wife of Osiris, the mistress of all the elements, who represents that which has been and always will be. She is the mother of man, crowned by a vulture, the emblem of maternity.

  “And here is Horus, with the head of a sparrow-hawk, holding the ankh, the emblem of life. We have Ptah-Sokar holding the tat, emblem of stability. Here is Pasht, wife of Ptah, holding a lotus blossom. You see the wise Imhotep, with an open scroll of papyrus on his knees and his eyelids encrusted in gold. And if you look at the table to your right, you will see representatives of the sacred menagerie—a hawk, a cat, a crouching ox, an asp, a crocodile, a lion with the head of a man, a serpent with the head of a woman, a necklace of gilded bees, and, last but not least, a friendly monkey named Cynocephalus, who sits on the handles of the scales during the judgment of the soul and provides equilibrium.

  “As you linger over my Pantheon,” he said, stepping aside to let the visitors admire the whole of the display, “I urge you to consider that these treasures have been hidden in tombs for thousands of years. These are the possessions that the dead brought with them on their journey to the afterlife. Taken together, they are the equivalent of a shriek in the night, heard from a distance impossible to traverse. They convey a love of life and a fear of death and a desperate desire to be free. They are the expressions of an impulse that is both deeply personal and shared by everyone: they were crafted and stored in defiance of death. They invite us to admire their beauty and to stand in awe before the mystery of eternity.

  “Thank you, my friends,” he said with a bow. “Thank you for taking the time to hear about my exhibition … which,” he couldn’t resist adding, “is the result of careful selection by an amateur archaeologist, orientalist, and traveler and made without the aid of any government or association. I hope it will prove of interest in our great Columbian Exposition.”

  * * *

  He gave his first and only presentation in Chicago shortly after the doors of Department M in the Anthropological Building, where his Pantheon was housed, opened to the public. He was disappointed that he wasn’t asked by the administrators to give a second presentation or to participate in the formal lecture series in the days that followed. And although he always woke up in his fifth-floor suite in the Lexington Hotel excited about his prospects, his conviction that he was contributing something of universal value to the fair inevitably faltered. By the time he was boarding the tram outside the hotel with Aimée and Victor, he would start wondering whether his Egyptian Pantheon would go unappreciated, whether all the effort and money he had put into it had been for naught.

  His exhibit was eligible for a prize, which would certainly have helped garner interest for a sale. He wasn’t planning to sell everything—only the set of gods and goddesses. His asking price of five hundred dollars would not come close to covering the amount he’d paid for them, the shipping and travel costs, and the expense of the bronze pedestals, which he’d had custom-made in Paris. But it would be enough to replenish his savings so he could keep expanding his collection, acquiring bigger and more valuable treasures.

  He always headed straight to the Anthropological Building every morning, in case a medal had been attached to his card in his absence. For four days, no medal appeared.

  On the fifth day, Aimée woke with a fever and stayed behind at the hotel while Armand took little Victor to the fair. Instead of going directly to the Anthropological Building, they continued on the tram to the far end of Jackson Park. He’d thought they’d start the day with a visit to the Horticultural Building, but at the last minute he changed his mind, and he decided to take Victor to see the exhibits along the narrow strip of land known as the Midway Plaisance.

  Armand had been inclined to avoid the Midway Plaisance. The official guide to the fair warned that admission fees were charged at every booth along this mile-long stretch, and the exhibits there had “no connection with the Exposition proper excepting as side attractions.” Its promoters claimed that the Midway Plaisance “represented all foreign nations under the sun.” Its detractors called it the Church Annex and blamed it for draining visitors of time and money. It had been added as an afterthought to accommodate the “concessionaires and entertainers.” But within days, it had become so popular and the crowds so thick that, as one visitor testified, you could drop a rubber ball from a window and it would bounce off hats and bonnets without ever touching the ground. All the new arrivals to Chicago asked to be taken straight to the Midway Plaisance. That morning Armand decided to join them and see what all the hoopla was about.

  From all his traveling he was adept at dodging the prongs of parasols, the glowing ash of cast-off cigars underfoot. And he knew, of course, never to let go of his son in the crowd.

  There at the headwaters of the Great Fair’s sideshow, the mob was thick. But Armand wasn’t goin
g to let the smell of a thousand bodies sweating beneath the blazing spring sun on a humid May day in Chicago dissuade him. He lifted Victor onto his shoulders, and as soon as he saw a gap in the roiling mass, he pushed through, synchronizing his steps with the strides of the strangers on either side as he approached the entrance, where an announcer shouting through a bullhorn promised the public shows “so remarkable that one man could never hope to find them all in his lifetime were he compelled to search for them himself.”

  Armand stood Victor back on his feet when they reached the first exhibit—the International Dress and Costume Company, featuring forty-five lovely women, each wearing the costume of her country. Rumor had it that this was the most profitable exhibit along the Midway Plaisance. In the time that Armand and Victor were there, it also appeared to be the place where arguments broke out and friendships were lost forever simply because one man objected when another insisted that India was more beautiful than China, or that Ireland had hips promising more fecundity than Italy.

  Victor thought the fistfights were part of the show and wanted to stay to find out how they ended. Armand assured him that there were better things to see, and to prove it he led the boy to the next station, where workers spun threads of colored glass as thin as gossamer for napkins and lamp shades and even dresses that crinkled and sparkled as the girls modeling them sashayed across the stage.

  Victor squinted in wonder. He looked up at his father with an expression suggesting that he was trying to organize his thoughts into a question. But he gave up and just rubbed his nose vigorously and went on watching.

  After a few minutes they moved on, flowing with the crowd toward the entrance of the Electric Scenic Theater. “You sure don’t want to pass this one by, little mister,” the announcer said directly to Victor, leaving Armand with no choice but to buy two tickets to the show.

  “A Day in the Alps” had just started. Victor sat transfixed on his father’s lap as the sun rose over the highest peak, illuminating scenes of sloping meadows populated by herds of sheep. When shepherd boys danced with shepherd girls, and nine electric fans positioned around the room whipped up a refreshing breeze, the whole crowd sighed, Armand included. And when they heard the first harsh boom of thunder and saw a jagged shard of light suddenly crack the wall, Armand, like everyone else present, was inclined to take cover.

  Not until Victor started crying did his father consider how foolish he’d been to pay to sit in a dingy theater with three hundred people. He felt foolish for having brought his son to the Midway Plaisance at all. Yet since his goal was to show Victor as much as possible in the shortest time, he carried him from the Electric Scenic Theater and headed west toward the thatched huts and the banquet hall of Ireland, where the crowd thickened and slowed again, since everyone wanted to have a look at the stitched and embroidered underwear from the trousseau of the Duchess of Fife.

  He decided that the Duchess’s underwear wasn’t worth the wait, so he bypassed the banquet hall and headed directly to the Japanese Bazaar. To comfort Victor, he bought a paper fan and walked on. The shopkeepers called to them and tried to lure the boy with more toys, but Armand ignored them and continued westward to the Dutch settlements of Sumatra, Borneo, and Java, where lithe young girls were twirling in their red ballet skirts made of tree bark.

  When the girls stopped to rest, they left the Dutch settlements behind and went on to Germany, where a medieval castle stood at the top of a small rise. Dozens of people were waiting in a line to get inside. Victor wanted to see if there were swords on the walls—all castles should have swords on their walls! But Armand didn’t want to waste time in the line and pointed to a poster for a more tempting exhibition ahead: Cairo Street, said to be the one place at the fair that every visitor must go.

  He paid the two entrance fees of twenty-five cents and lifted Victor back on his shoulders, walking along in a daze. From a tower in the mosque, a muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Two obelisks were inscribed with the names of Ramses II and President Cleveland. Vendors sold candy and miniature wooden sphinxes. A belly dancer entertained a crowd outside the entrance to the bazaar, and on the steps of the Temple of Luxor a greeter called, “Come in and see the most ancient relics! Here everything is serene!”

  Who cared that the building was an imperfect copy of an actual temple in Luxor, and the displays were made up of replicas? The other visitors didn’t even seem to be aware that the gold wasn’t real gold, the twelve mummies were wax models, and the Egyptians milling about were Sicilian immigrants. The public didn’t know to be skeptical, and back on the street they were spellbound—Victor, too—when a procession passed led by a priest in a leopard-skin robe. The audience thought the whole scene dazzling and congratulated themselves on having made the effort to come to the fair. They agreed that Cairo Street on the Midway Plaisance must be as good as the real thing and maybe even better. There were no blind beggars or starving children. The walkways were swept clean multiple times a day. Germany was less than a hundred yards to the east, Algeria an equal distance to the west. A cup of tea was easily purchased, the toilets were modern, and the temple was lit with electric lights. If you stood there long enough, you would see two young lovers joined in a traditional Egyptian wedding. And if you remained even longer, you could count on overhearing one bystander say to another, as Armand did that morning, his heart sinking, “It sure beats traveling around the world!”

  * * *

  When Victor pleaded to return to the Midway Plaisance, he was taken there by his mother, who felt fine after a day of rest. Armand went instead to hear a series of lectures related to the archaeology exhibits in Department M.

  After the lecture by his fellow exhibitor Theodore Graf, a woman approached him. She was wearing a navy silk dress with lace trim, with a bunched waist and puffy arms that reminded him of a dress made for Aimée in a shop in Nice.

  “Mr. de Potter?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Mrs. Stevenson.”

  “Mrs. Stevenson!”

  Mrs. Stevenson of Philadelphia, one of the most famed curators in America and vice president of the jury of awards for ethnology! Armand had heard about her work in Egyptology at the University Museum, and he’d been eager to meet her since the fair opened. He’d even made the mistake after another lecture of introducing himself to a woman he thought was Mrs. Stevenson but who turned out to be a tourist from Canada.

  “I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Stevenson. I was so hoping we would have the chance to talk. I would like to tell you about some of my little monuments. If you have the time, Mrs. Stevenson, I would be honored to give you a grand tour—I mean, if I may, not a real grand tour, which is my other line of work, I’m engaged in the tourist business, you see, when I’m not borrowing around in Luxor for treasures.” Had he said borrowing? Good God, he’d meant burrowing! Should he correct himself or just continue as if nothing had happened? Either way, he felt helpless in the face of Mrs. Stevenson’s judgment. Mrs. Stevenson was steadfast, even, he would have gone so far as to say, rigid in the way she held her head, as though she meant to keep her eyes locked on his face so she wouldn’t miss anything and at the same time needed to hold herself level to balance her incongruously extravagant hat, which sported an arrangement of daisies and colorful feathers and some sort of furry thing—the tail of a chipmunk, or perhaps a squirrel?

  What was he going to say? He was going to say, I am an idiot, or plead for mercy, or invite Mrs. Stevenson of Philadelphia to join him for dinner. She surveyed him as though deciding whether to make a purchase; he stuttered and coughed into his fist and finally lifted out one of the pamphlets he’d been carrying in his coat pocket. He could offer no better description of his Pantheon than what was contained in those forty-four pages. He told Mrs. Stevenson the pamphlet was intended as a catalog, and only a few brief notes on the items were given. He added that he’d also written a “few remarks on the history of Egypt, her mythology and funerary rites,” which he hop
ed weren’t out of place.

  He had labored more than a month over the pamphlet in Paris, yet it felt so meager, nearly weightless, as he handed it over. And did he perceive her hesitating? Perhaps, for a moment, her hand floated above his while she assured herself that a bribe wasn’t involved.

  He didn’t have to bribe her. Mrs. Stevenson, head curator of the Egyptian Section of the Department of Archaeology and Paleontology at the University Museum in Philadelphia and a member of the awards jury for the Columbian Exhibition, thanked Armand for the pamphlet and declared that the Egyptian Pantheon was splendid. She attached a medal to the sign and said that the collection deserved to be on permanent display. Would Professor de Potter consider a loan to her museum?

  He would more than consider it—he would agree right there, on the floor of Department M, offering the loan of his entire collection to Mrs. Stevenson and her museum. His plan had been to expand the collection with new acquisitions, using the profit he made from the sale of his bronzes. Now he wasn’t sure he wanted to sell them anymore. Maybe he wasn’t finished adding to the group.

  Cairo to Philadelphia

  HE WOULD HAVE BEEN THE FIRST to admit that he was flattered by the award from Mrs. Stevenson and pleased to be affiliated with her museum. But when he had conversations with dealers behind closed doors, it wasn’t simply to earn favors with a lady Egyptologist. He remained dedicated to the effort of “bringing the magnificence of the past into the light of day,” as he liked to say—which was why it didn’t hurt to have the influential Mrs. Stevenson as a friend. With a word, she could put him in contact with members of the world’s most elite fraternities, who might someday invite Armand de Potter to join their powerful ranks.

  Since his previous source of antiquities had been cut off with the arrest of Ahmed Abd-er-Rasoul and the discovery of the cache at Deir-el-Bahari back in 1881, he had had no choice but to cultivate other connections. On Mrs. Stevenson’s recommendation, he wrote to Émile Brugsch, overseer of Deir-el-Bahari and conservator of the Bûlâq Museum in Cairo.