Maybe I had explained it badly: it wasn’t Sylvia I should have been talking about, it was the Southern Cross. Compared to the long and bloody history of that diamond, what did our lives matter, our poor little personal affairs? Another episode in the life of the stone had been added to the rest, and it wouldn’t be the last.
When we first arrived in Nice, I had discovered, in the bookstore on Rue de France where we used to buy our used mysteries, a three-volume work written by a certain B. Balmaine: Biographical Dictionary of Precious Stones. This Balmaine, a diamond expert in the Paris Court of Appeals, had inventoried several thousand precious gemstones. Sylvia and I had looked up the Southern Cross.
Balmaine devoted a dozen lines to our diamond. It had been among the jewels stolen from the Countess du Barry on the night of January 10 to 11, 1791, then sold at auction by Christie’s in London on February 19, 1795. Nothing more was known about it until October 1917, when it was once again stolen, from a certain Fanny Robert de Tessancourt, 8 Rue de Saigon, Paris, 16th. The culprit, one Serge de Lenz, was arrested, but Fanny Robert de Tessancourt quickly dropped the charges, saying that Lenz was her close friend.
The stone did not “resurface”—Balmaine’s word—until February 1943, when a certain Jean Terrail sold it to one Pagnon, Louis. According to a later police report, the purchase was made in German marks. Then, in May 1944, Louis Pagnon sold the diamond to one de Bellune, Philippe, known as Pacheco, born in Paris on January 22, 1918, to Mario and Eliane Werry de Hults, place of residence unknown.
The Countess du Barry was guillotined in December 1793; Serge de Lenz was murdered in September 1945; Louis Pagnon was shot in December 1944. De Bellune, Philippe, disappeared like the Southern Cross itself until it reappeared on Sylvia’s black sweater and then disappeared again. Along with her . . .
But as night fell in Nice, I started to give the functionary credit. He would have been happy to try to trace her if I were a family member. And if he had taken the cover off his typewriter and started questioning me, how could I have told him Sylvia’s story and all the recent events in my life, which even to myself seemed too fragmentary and discontinuous to be understood? Besides, I can’t say everything. I need to keep some things for myself. I often think about the old movie poster I once saw scraps of on a fence: MEMORIES ARE NOT FOR SALE.
I went back to the Sainte-Anne Pension. There, in the silence of my room, I heard a noise that often came to me while I couldn’t sleep: a typewriter. The clattering of the keys, very fast and then gradually farther apart as if the person was typing with two hesitant fingers. And again I had that blond police functionary before me, questioning me in a muffled voice. It was so hard to know how to answer him.
I should have explained everything, from the beginning. But that was just the problem: there was nothing to explain. In the beginning, it was nothing but a matter of atmosphere, scenery . . .
I would have to show him the photographs I’d taken back on the banks of the Marne. Large black and white photos. I’d kept them, with all the contents of Sylvia’s bag. That night, in the room in the Sainte-Anne Pension, I had retrieved them from the bottom of the wardrobe, in the cardboard folder on which was written: “Riverside Beaches.”
I had not looked at those pictures for a long time. I now scrutinized their tiniest details and let the backgrounds, the scene of where it had all started, enter into me again. One of the pictures, which I hadn’t remembered, made my skin crawl with a feeling of fascination and terror made even more stark by the silence and solitude of my room.
It had been taken a few days before I met Sylvia. Outdoor tables at one of the restaurants along the Marne. Sun umbrellas. Pontoons. Weeping willows. I tried to remember: Was it Le Vieux Clodoche in Chennevières? Le Pavillon Bleu or Le Château des Îles Jochem in La Varenne? I had hidden with my Leica so that I could capture the people and the scene more naturally.
At one of the tables in back, near the pontoon, with no umbrella, two men were sitting side by side. They were having a friendly conversation. One of them was Villecourt. I immediately recognized the other: it was the man who had introduced himself to us as Neal and whose real name was Paul Alessandri. How strange it was to see him there, sitting on the banks of the Marne, as if the worm were in the apple from the beginning.
Yes, that was where I met Sylvia Heureaux, Villecourt’s wife, one summer morning: in La Varenne, at Le Beach. I had come to the banks of the Marne to take photographs a few days earlier. A small press had accepted my proposal for a book called Riverside Beaches.
I had showed the publisher the book I was taking as my model: a beautiful album of pictures of Monte Carlo from the late thirties, shot by a photographer named W. Vennemann. My book would be in the same format. The same pagination, black and white photos, most of them back-lit. Instead of the shadows of palm trees outlined against the Bay of Monte Carlo, or the dark, shimmering car bodies at night silhouetted against the lights of the Sporting d’Hiver, there would be the diving boards and pontoons of these beaches outside of Paris. But the light would be the same. The publisher hadn’t really understood what I meant.
“The idea is that La Varenne and Monte Carlo are the same?” he’d said.
In the end, he signed a contract with me anyway. People always believe in the young.
There were not many people at Le Beach in La Varenne that morning. In fact I think she was the only person sunbathing. Children were hurtling down the long slide into the pool, and you could hear their laughs and screams every time they splashed into the bluish water.
I was struck by her beauty and her languid gestures, the way she lit a cigarette or put the glass of orangeade she was sipping through a straw down next to her. And she lay down on the blue and white striped lounge chair so gracefully, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, that I remembered what my publisher had said. Monte Carlo and La Varenne may not have much in common, but I had just seen one thing: this girl. You could easily imagine her in the same indolent position on Monte Carlo beach, whose ambiance W. Vennemann evoked so perfectly in his black and white photographs. She wouldn’t have spoiled the scene, she would have added to its charm.
I was walking back and forth with my camera around my neck, trying to find the best angle.
She noticed what I was doing.
“Are you a photographer?”
“Yes.”
She had raised her sunglasses and was looking at me with her bright eyes. The children had left the pool. Only the two of us were left.
“You’re not too hot?”
“No. Why?”
I had kept my shoes on—which wasn’t allowed in the pool area—and was wearing a turtleneck sweater.
“I’ve had enough sun,” she said.
I followed her to the other side of the pool, where a large ivy-covered wall cast a cool shadow. We sat down on white wooden deck chairs, side by side. She had wrapped a white terry-cloth robe around her. She turned toward me.
“What are you photographing here?”
“The scenery.” And with a sweep of my arm I encompassed the pool, the diving board, the water slide, the bathing cabins, and the outdoor restaurant down below, its white arbor on orange posts, the blue sky, the ivy-covered wall green and shady behind us . . .
“I wonder if I shouldn’t take color photos after all. That would give people a better sense of the atmosphere here.”
She laughed. “You think Le Beach has atmosphere?”
“Yes.”
She stared hard at me with an ironic smile. “What kind of pictures do you usually take?”
“I’m working on a book I’m going to call Riverside Beaches.”
“Riverside beaches?”
She furrowed her brow. I was about to give her the explanation that had already mystified my publisher: the parallels with Monte Carlo, and so on. But it wasn’t worth it.
“I’m trying to find all the remaining bathing resorts in the outskirts of Paris.”
“Have you found a lot?”
>
She held out a gold cigarette case, which didn’t go with her natural and unaffected appearance. Then, to my surprise, she lit my cigarette for me.
“I’ve already photographed all the beaches of the Oise—L’Isle Adam, Beaumont, Butry-Plage—and the beach resorts along the Seine: Villennes, Élisabethville . . .”
She was clearly curious about these beaches, which were so nearby but which she had never suspected existed. Her bright gaze pierced me.
“But I think this is my favorite,” I said. “This has just the atmosphere I’m looking for. I think I’m going to take a lot of pictures of La Varenne and the area around here.”
She didn’t take her eyes off me, as though she were trying to tell whether I was joking with her. “You really think of La Varenne as a beach resort?”
“A little. Don’t you?”
She laughed again. A very light laugh. “So what do you plan to take pictures of in La Varenne?”
“Le Beach, the banks of the Marne, the pontoons . . .”
“Do you live in Paris?”
“Yes, but I’m staying at a hotel here. I need at least two weeks to take good pictures.”
She looked at her watch—a man’s watch on a large metal chain band that emphasized how slender her wrist was.
“I have to go back home for lunch,” she said. “I’m late.”
She had forgotten her gold cigarette case. I bent over to pick it up off the ground and held it out to her.
“Oh, right. I can’t forget that. It’s a present from my husband.”
She said this without conviction. Then she went into one of the cabins on the other side of the pool to change. When she came out, she was wearing a flowered sarong and carrying a large beach bag on her shoulder.
“That’s a pretty sarong,” I said. “I’d love to take a picture of you in it, here, at Le Beach, or on one of the landings on the Marne. It goes well with the scenery.”
“Really? But it’s more Tahitian, it’s a pareo . . .”
Tahitian, exactly. Vennemann, in his book on Monte Carlo, had included several pictures of the deserted beaches of Saint-Tropez in the thirties. A few women in sarongs were lying on the sand, among the bamboo.
“It is a bit Tahitian,” I said, “but that’s part of its charm, here along the Marne.”
“You’re saying you want me to be your model?”
“I’d like that very much.”
She smiled at me. We left Le Beach and walked down the middle of the La Varenne road parallel to the Marne. There were no cars. No one. Everything was silent and calm in the sunlight, and all the colors were soft: the blue of the sky, the pale green of the poplars and weeping willows. The water of the Marne, usually murky and stagnant, was light that day, reflecting the clouds, trees, and sky.
We passed the Chennevières bridge and were still walking in the middle of the road, bordered by plane trees, called Promenade des Anglais.
A canoe was floating on the Marne: an almost pink orange. She took my arm and pulled me onto the sidewalk next to the water so we could watch it go by.
She pointed to the gate of a villa. “I live here. With my husband.”
Even so, I had the courage to ask if we could see each other again.
“I’m at the pool every day between eleven and one,” she told me.
Le Beach was as empty as the day before. She was lying in the sun by the white cabins and I was still looking for the proper angle to take my picture from. I wanted to combine the slide, the cabins, the restaurant’s arbor, and the banks of the Marne in one picture. But the riverbanks and Le Beach were separated by the main road.
“It’s really too bad they didn’t build Le Beach right on the river,” I said.
She didn’t hear me. Maybe she had fallen asleep under her straw hat and sunglasses. I sat down next to her and put my hand on her shoulder.
“Are you asleep?”
“No.”
She took off her sunglasses. She looked at me with her bright eyes and smiled. “Well, have you taken your photos of Le Beach?”
“Not yet.”
“You work slowly.”
She held her glass of orangeade in both hands, the straw between her lips. Then she held out the glass to me. I took a sip.
“I’d like to invite you over to lunch at our house,” she said. “If it wouldn’t be too boring for you to meet my husband and mother-in-law . . .”
“That’s very nice of you.”
“Maybe it’ll inspire you, for your photographs.”
“Do you live at La Varenne year-round?”
“Yes. Year-round. With my husband and his mother.” She suddenly seemed pensive and resigned.
“Your husband works around here?”
“No. My husband doesn’t do anything.”
“And your mother-in-law?”
“My mother-in-law? She has horses she enters in harness races at Vincennes and Enghien . . . Are you interested in horses?”
“I don’t know much about them.”
“Me neither. But if you’re interested in them for your photographs, my mother-in-law would certainly be happy to bring you to the racetracks.”
Horses. I thought about W. Vennemann, whose book included photographs of the start of the Grand Prix de Monaco, and a bird’s-eye view of the cars racing alongside the harbor. Now I had found the equivalent of that sporting event here along the Marne: what could evoke the atmosphere of these riverside beaches that I was looking for better than the harness racehorses and sulkies?
She had taken my arm on the empty road running alongside the water, but when we got near her gate she let go.
“It really won’t be boring for you to come have lunch with us?” she asked.
“Not at all.”
“If you get bored you can always say you have work to do.”
The sweet, strange look she gave me was touching. I had the feeling that from that point on we would never be apart.
“I told them you were a photographer and that you were doing a book about La Varenne.”
She pushed open the gate. We walked across a lawn in front of a large Normand-style villa, half-timbered. We found ourselves in the living room, dark-wood paneling on the walls and filled with armchairs and a settee, upholstered in plaid.
A woman in beach pants came in through one of the French doors and headed toward us with a smooth and supple walk. She was around sixty, tall, with a mane of gray hair.
“My mother-in-law,” Sylvia said, “Madame Villecourt.”
“Don’t call me your mother-in-law. It depresses me.”
She had a husky voice and a slight accent from the outskirts of Paris. “So, you’re a photographer?”
“Yes.”
She sat down on the settee and Sylvia and I in the chairs. A tray of aperitifs was waiting on the coffee table.
A man with a shuffling walk, short like a jockey, came in. With his white jacket and navy blue pants, he might have been a crew member on a yacht team or someone who worked for a sailing club.
“Help yourself to a drink,” Madame Villecourt said.
I poured myself a little port. Sylvia and Madame Villecourt each took a whiskey. The man withdrew, shuffling his feet.
“I hear you’re taking pictures for a book about La Varenne?” Madame Villecourt said.
“Yes, La Varenne and all the other riverside beaches around Paris.”
“La Varenne has changed a lot . . . It’s completely dead now. Sylvia told me you were looking for information about La Varenne, for your book.”
I glanced at Sylvia, who was looking at me out of the corner of her eye. So this was the pretext she had used to bring me here.
“I came to La Varenne right after I got married. My husband and I lived in this house.”
She helped herself to a second glass of whiskey. She had an emerald ring on her middle finger.
“Back then, there were a lot of actors and filmmakers in La Varenne. René Dary, Jimmy Gaillard, Préjean. The Frate
llinis lived in Perreux—my husband knew them all. He used to bet on the races in Tremblay, with Jules Berry . . .”
She seemed happy sitting in front of me listing off these names, calling up these memories. What had Sylvia told her? That I was planning to write a history of La Varenne?
“Living here was practical for them, because Joinville Studios was nearby.”
I could tell that she was inexhaustible on the subject. Her cheeks were growing red, her eyes shining. Was it the second glass of whiskey she had downed, or the rush of memories?
“I know a very strange story that might interest you.”
She smiled at me and her face was suddenly smooth. A glow of youth had come into her eyes and her smile. She must have once been a very pretty woman.
“It’s about another movie person my husband knew well. Aimos, Raymond Aimos . . . He lived very near here, in Chennevières. He was supposedly killed during the liberation of Paris, on a barricade, by a stray bullet.”
Sylvia was listening and seemed surprised. Clearly she had never heard her mother-in-law talk in this way, nor, perhaps, ever seen her so relaxed and forthcoming with a stranger.
“In fact, it wasn’t that way at all. It’s a shady story . . . Let me tell you . . .” Then she shrugged her shoulders. “Do you believe in stray bullets?”
A dark-haired man around thirty-five, in sky-blue pants and a white shirt, came and sat down on the couch next to Madame Villecourt at the exact moment when she was about to reveal to me the secret of Aimos’s death.
“I can see you’re deep in conversation. I hope I’m not interrupting.” He leaned over toward me and held out his hand. “Frédéric Villecourt. Nice to meet you. I’m Sylvia’s husband.”
Sylvia opened her mouth to introduce me but I didn’t give her time to say my name. I merely said, “Nice to meet you too.”
Sundays in August Page 9