by Adrien Goetz
It was in this room that he gave me the first edition of a dictionary he had just received, written by a teacher at the Lycée d’Orléans, a modest, scholarly man whom he knew a little, Anatole Bailly, an associate member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres—a formula that always sounded to me like an administrative post at the court of the Emperor of China. The idea that one might be acquainted with the authors of dictionaries in real life had never occurred to me. He explained that this doorstop might prove useful to me—it was very well done, even if he had spotted the odd imprecision— since I spoke neither German nor English. Adolphe had learned Greek with dictionaries compiled by Liddell-Scott and Wilhelm Pape. Monsieur Reinach was very emphatic about the fact that we would soon be able to hold our own without the help of the Rosbifs and the Fridolins.
I ended up rebelling against it all. It’s all so easy, this rhetoric, brilliant, fascinating, and seductive, when you’re rich. I was furious with him for squirreling away Alexander’s crown. My mother had taught my brother and me that we had to study things that would be “useful” to us later in life. It took me a while to grasp what that sentence really meant. It’s a little like when an insurance salesman says, “in case you get into an accident,” rather than, “when you die.” The formula “Study something useful,” really means, “Study something that will earn you money,” which is no less obscene than the insurer’s euphemism. Theodore used to quote Cyrano de Bergerac: “No! No! It is far more sweet when it is all in vain.” And I listened to him, which very nearly led me to disaster. By the time I was thirty I still didn’t have an occupation. He had stolen my youth. I was no good at anything. All I had harvested was books.
A friend of the Reinachs, passionate about Celtic languages and old Irish, told them how, when he was leaving for the trenches, he had searched for a copy of Homer to take with him. He realized that the only decent, well-produced editions with the Greek text alongside were in German. The Reinachs were fighters. Such a thing was intolerable to them. The consequence of this, so I was told, was that in 1917 the celebrated series of bilingual volumes now used by every student first appeared. Theodore observed this indulgently, though he needed no translation, and he actually preferred the small English editions that he could carry around in the pocket of his English jacket. The French translations, with Athena’s owl on the cover, were a huge help to me. At last I could access the marvelous world at the heart of domestic life at Kerylos: I understood Aristophanes, I read his tragedies, I thrilled to Antigone, and recited Oedipus’s woes out loud.
I have forgotten nearly everything now. I never open these books anymore. One evening, a few months after our return from Greece, here in the library, I plucked up the courage to ask a question alluding to Alexander’s crown. I wanted to see it again. I asked Theodore, out of the blue, if he thought he would ever write the book. I quoted Baudelaire, so that he would understand that my interest in “this beautiful diadem, so dazzling and clear” was above all that of a poet.
I had overstepped the mark. He dismissed me with a wave of the hand. I saw from his expression that I had offended him. His small eyes appeared even more sunken and shadowed than usual. He set down his new spectacles alongside one of the treeshaped bronze candelabras, from which dangled opals that imitated the gentle glow of oil lamps. In the tone of an exiled king he said simply, “A crown? Who would believe me?”
19
A SCHOLARLY CONVERSATION IN THE FRONT COURTYARD
One morning a statue appeared in the Proauleion, the entrance hall that opens out from the vestibule. A great man of antiquity leaped in a single bound out of a wooden crate stuffed with straw and scraps of fabric, bearded, draped, majestic, sandaled. No one dared utter a word. Fanny Reinach stared with astonishment at this white giant, then declared that they would have to get used to him:
“When you marry a Reinach, you have to be prepared for statues to turn up like this. I would probably have chosen to put him in the garden, myself. We would have watered him during the summer. I’d have preferred someone less austere for the entrance hall. Have you forgotten this is a vacation house? I was not even consulted. Apparently my opinion is worth nothing. Well, I shall hang garlands of flowers around his neck.”
It was going to be the first thing visitors would see as they came through the red front door. Theodore, with the air of a magus making a prophecy, lowering his voice and speaking with restraint, explained to Fanny how this serene figure, with perfect features and one arm draped in fabric, was one of his first victories. That was the reason he was important to him. A battle won.
They were addressing one another using tu, the familiar form in French, which happened rarely. They were having a minor altercation. I often listened at their door: when they had something pleasant to discuss they always used vous, the formal form of address, even when they were alone. They hadn’t noticed me in the gallery that overlooks the library, sitting cross-legged like the famous Egyptian statue of a scribe in the Louvre. I eavesdropped on the entire conversation. It was like being at the theater. I always liked to listen to them talk; I found it enthralling. From my hiding place overhead, through the large bay window I could see the calm sea extending all around us. “The thing is, the original statue, in the Lateran Palace in Rome—this is a copy, of course, which I commissioned—is held by the gentlemen of Berlin and Munich to be a statue of Sophocles. They think they see in his stance the poise of the tragedian, the author of Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Ajax, represented by the scrolls that you see at his feet.”
“And what extravagant sandals!”
“Scandalous sandals, indeed! One German scholar even presumed to write that such sandals are typical of a tragedian, as if anyone knows what kind of sandals old Sophocles wore! As if there were sandals for tragedians, and sandals for comic authors! But in fact, when the sculpture was dug up from the ruins of Terracina, the ancient city of the Volsci . . . ”
“Please, spare me the details.”
“. . . and then when the count Antonelli gave the statue to Pope Gregory XVI—in 1839, not even a century ago—it had no feet.”
“You mean someone smashed your Sophocles’s feet? That would indeed be poetic justice.”
Theodore explained that an Italian sculptor, whose name, as it happens, we know, a certain Tenerani, had taken it upon himself to restore the feet. “It is to him we owe these elegant sandals, the likes of which are unknown on any other statue. A pure invention, which would no doubt sell well in the boutiques of Menton. Nowadays such a creative artist would never be allowed to appropriate a statue and reconfigure it to his own taste, but this kind of thing happened again and again over the centuries. One day all the arms, feet, and ears that you find in museums everywhere will have to be removed. They will be packed away into little boxes and stored in museum reserves. Antique fragments are highly prized, they must never be meddled with. Imagine someone giving the Venus de Milo back her arms!”
“Your brother Salomon would rather like that. Did you see the creature he wanted to introduce to us? She’s playing an orphan on stage at Châtelet. She’s the Venus de Melodrama!”
“Can you not be serious for two minutes?”
“Of course. Anyway, if they say this is Sophocles, that must mean that they know what Sophocles looked like. Are there any pictures of him? Your marvelous German scholars must have thought of that . . . ”
Theodore was surely delighted at how clever he was to have married such a quick-witted woman. In his storyteller’s voice, he told her about a bust in the Vatican with a damaged inscription, on which it was just about possible to make out ocles, not even phocles, and definitely not Sophocles. This inscription had also been repaired by a heavy-handed restorer in order to bestow an illustrious but bogus identity on the figure. The resemblance was vague, even if the beard was similar. Archaeology is a precise science: everything must be constantly queried, examined, compared, one must arm oneself with all the reference books and almanacs such a
s the ones his esteemed brother Salomon wrote, the fundamental basis of this work. It is like a police inquiry. You must identify the suspects, which is not a straightforward task given that these people died 2400 years ago. It was clearly in the Germans’ interest to say that it was Sophocles. A great literary figure, so beloved of those pompous oafs; Hölderlin translated Sophocles, Germany adopted him as one of their own. And thus, voilà, the crime benefited the country.” Theodore was proud of lampooning the Germans with the story of the fake sandals. Yet just as the dear doctors of Berlin were the first to claim it was Sophocles, the poor, scorned, spluttering French specialists had such respect for the erudition of those boors that they repeated it in book after book. Even though the statue could just as well be Diocles or Empedocles . . . Theodore concluded his lecture with a laugh: “A bearded man whose name ends in ocles, it is not as if there is any lack of them in the agora.”
“He looks as if his arm has gotten caught in his cloak.”
“That is the classic pose of a fifth-century orator, it symbolizes that he has not wrought any trickery.”
According to Theodore, the power of a philosopher’s oratory and countenance had to be enough to persuade. Gesticulating only began in the fourth century. It was not until several years later that statues of orators began to show them waving their hands around. In his peroration entitled Against Timarchus, Aeschines, who maintained the traditions of the fifth century, mentions a statue on the island of Salamis of Solon the Athenian legislator, “with his arms inside his clothing.”
“When I came upon this reference, I jumped up, you can imagine—I immediately drew a connection with this statue.”
“It comes from Salamis? You mean the original one does? But I thought you said it had been dug up in Italy?”
“The one from Salamis would have been in bronze. With such a famous historical figure as Solon the Wise there would have been a good many marble copies in circulation right up to the Roman era.”
“Do we know what Solon looked like?”
“We do have one portrait of him. Here, you can see it in this book. All the pieces of the puzzle fit together. A head kept in a museum in Florence, this time with an unequivocal inscription, ‘Solon the legislator.’ See, they look like the same man.”
“Well, it’s a man with a beard who looks somewhat carried away, but from that to say that it is the same man . . . ”
“I am employing the same principles as Monsieur Bertillon: focus on what does not change in a face over the years, the distance between the eyes, the relationship between the base of the nose, the mouth, and the chin. Look, they’re exactly the same. I’ve measured them. The Sophocles of our German friends is in fact Solon of Athens, one of the seven sages of Greece.”
“Please don’t ask me to tell you the names of the others, I beg you.”
“I pulled off a decisive victory over those oafs in their spiked helmets. But that does not mean they are going to give us back Alsace and Lorraine. They simply keep going, writing more and more articles attacking me. Well, I am standing firm. And now every day when I arrive home I shall see him, the image of the man who gave us democracy, the greatest Athenian of all.”
Theodore had never wanted to have a “collection,” where the crown would have had pride of place. That was not his style. His wife was a little regretful because there were so many delightful, eclectic collections in her family and among her friends. The Bischoffsheims bought Rembrandts and Goyas. The Rothschilds were unbeatable; beautiful things seemed to find their way to them effortlessly. They could have filled Kerylos with authentic antiquities, tall glass cases displaying vases and rows of bronze figurines—they certainly had the means, like the Count de Camondo with his eighteenth-century furniture and dinner services. Theodore observed, smiling, as the Cahen d’Anvers family and their cousin Béatrice Ephrussi accumulated all sorts of lovely objects. He didn’t like living surrounded by ornaments; it made him ill at ease. He liked museums. He had grown up in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where his brother was now the director of the Museum of Antiquities, and he believed that the treasures of the past must be accessible to all. He was not a collector—he liked to be able to sit down heavily in a chair without fearing that it would break—but it was primarily because of his republican principles. The Marquis Campana, who collected Greek vases, ended up being convicted of fraud and sentenced to the galleys. The Duke of Aumale built a chateau at Chantilly to house his treasures, and he was quite clear from the start of the construction that it would be a museum open to the public. The time of princes and great connoisseurs was coming to an end: every child in France had the right to visit museums, the galleries of the Louvre were opened up for lectures held in front of great works of art, allowing everyone the opportunity to advance, discover history, learn to love beauty. The museum was the future, the cement of a great nation, enlightened through knowledge and moral rectitude. Kerylos was intended to be neither a gallery showing authentic works of Greek art, nor a museum. It was his home. It was for the pure pleasure of a passionate connoisseur, and also a tool for an even greater understanding of ancient Greece, about which he had amassed a fine collection of books, but which he wanted to comprehend from within. He explained to his beloved Fanny, as they stood looking at Solon’s sandals: “If I work hard enough, I hope I will, eventually, be able to enter the minds of the ancients, to understand them, by making the architecture of their language mine. Kerylos is my Trojan horse that will help me gain access to the interior of their citadel.” And so Theodore brought only a few works of art to Beaulieu: he purchased a fragment of a painting from Pompeii, but solely because he wanted to study it closely; at auction, he let the Louvre acquire the most beautiful piece. He had no interest in commissioning sculptures. It was too easy to spot a fake Greek goddess, with her resemblance to a garden nymph. It is a question of patina. He did own a few reproductions of sculptures.
When the Charioteer of Delphi was discovered beneath the sacred path that traverses Apollo’s temple, he wanted to own a copy, so that he could study the fine drapery, elegant features, and tranquil face of the charioteer holding a pair of reins in his hands. He displayed this statue, in his eyes more precious than any other, in the library. According to Plato, man is a coachman steering two horses, one a handsome and noble beast, the other a rebel.
20
SUNLIGHT ON THE FURNITURE
The furniture in the library was, to my twenty-year-old self, the most beautiful in the whole world.
Pontremoli designed the pieces as he went along. One day he gave me a couple of sketches for tables, wonderful to behold. It’s not easy to furnish an ancient villa. In Greece, apart from caskets, chairs, and beds, there was little furniture. Fanny Reinach drew up lists of what she needed and Theodore amused himself thinking up ideas for them. A dressing table? A chest of drawers? A small desk for keeping up with correspondence, where his wife could sit in the morning and reply to invitations? A little bell on the table? He took note of everything. He was making it up as he went along.
I sometimes went up to Paris, to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, to check on the progress of the furniture, which was being made in Louis-François Bettenfeld’s workshop. Bettenfeld crafted solid furniture from carefully chosen wood: lemon from Ceylon, wild olive from the Mekong Delta, plum from Australia, tamarind from the Indies . . . Pontremoli wanted inlays of mother of pearl, ilex, ivory, subtle touches of mahogany, nothing too elaborate. It was like watching Ariadne’s watercolor palette, the way she layered colors, waiting for the flat tints to dry before dabbing on a touch of purple or emerald in just the right place. Rays of sunlight pierce the curtains and sweep over the furniture, sketching new and unexpected lines, making me think of her, her delicacy, the way she explained everything to me so that my illustrations would be less dry and precise.
To have style is rather easy; to invent a style is more extraordinary. Theodore’s directives were straightforward. That requires talent. He knew what he didn’t want. He wanted to
avoid any variation of neo-classicism, a return to Grecian style as has been practiced for centuries. The warmth and pale wood of Austrian Biedermeier furniture could be kept; the main thing was to forget the Empire style, in spite of its straight lines, and the gracious style of Charles X. He wanted simple forms, occasionally broken up with turned feet, bronze scrolls, or huge nails, to give an impression of asceticism and refinement. The furniture in Kerylos is quite unlike any other. It was the kind of furniture that before the First World War people looked for, but didn’t find: imposing, solid, practical, comfortable, and elegantly crafted. Like the house, measurements were calculated in Athenian cubits and feet, the measurements of the Greeks— there was no question of using meters and centimeters. The most extraordinary pieces, in my eyes, were the chaises longues where Theodore liked to lounge and read, the fruit of a guilty romance between the English deckchair and the starkly virile Roman chair portrayed by David in his prerevolutionary paintings. When, several years later, I came across Art Deco furniture, I detected a family resemblance to those chairs: as is so often the case, it is by reinventing the past that one catches a glimpse of the future.
Cerberus died of old age. Theodore, for whom these daily walks were immensely important, replaced him with a watch-dog called Basileus. At last the villa would be guarded—one might have suspected that, on our return from Athos, Theodore wanted to dissuade prowlers and burglars. He did not dare ask Pontremoli to design a kennel, even though the architect hadn’t forgotten even the most trivial objects for the bathrooms—but those were for humans; it would not have been seemly to ask him to make something for the dog. The caretaker enjoyed the task, nailing together several planks in the shape of a temple with a pediment, designed according to the animal’s dimensions so that it could lie down comfortably inside. Theodore himself picked up a paintbrush and wrote Basileos, which could mean either the dwelling place “of the king,” or the kennel that belongs to Basileus. This folly, enlivened with small columns, sat proudly beneath the peristyle in front of the entrance to the library.