by Adrien Goetz
I saw few members of the Institute at these parties: Monsieur Reinach was perhaps a little unwilling to show his fellow academics what a man of means he was. He bequeathed the villa to his colleagues with the idea that they would continue to nourish its spirit, but he wanted his children to be able to continue to visit. It was what Justine the cook called a “donation on condition that the juiciest part of the fruit was retained,” and evidently the best solution.
During King Léopold’s visit a huge storm broke out. Rain began to fall, all the doors were closed, and the storm grew stronger and stronger. I was an extra in a white jacket, and my job was to ensure that everything ran smoothly. The king stood up, made one toast to the Reinachs and another to Pericles, then requested that the windows be opened. The guests were invited to go outside to watch the roaring waves and the lightning in the night sky, as if it were a performance. The house proved that it could withstand a storm. All the guests in their evening dress were soaked, the women’s gowns looked like rags, it was like a ceremony in Africa for the return of the sun; mesmerized, the guests stood around the white-bearded sovereign, who looked like Poseidon and was pretending to control the elements. I have glorious memories of that night. A kind of lunacy had taken over the house. Seeing this room again, I can barely believe such scenes ever took place. Everything is so quiet now. Arrayed on console tables along the walls are bronze and plaster statues from the Naples archaeological museum, where they have been making copies for tourists for over a hundred years. One shows Alexander on horseback. I picked it up and inspected it—perhaps the horseman’s gaze was directed toward a slab of marble that would slide open. I found nothing. My first thought had been that the Andron would be the most appropriate place to hide Alexander’s crown. But I found nothing this afternoon. What if the Nazis had found it? Perhaps they had taken not only the Reinach papers but the crown as well? There were enough brilliant scholars in their ranks who might have imagined it crowning their terrible Führer, after he became master of the whole world.
There is one other possible hiding place, the throne, the always-empty chair, reserved for the ancestors. Pontremoli’s design is majestic and light, and Bettenfeld surpassed himself in its construction. I have always wondered if it was Homer’s throne—I could imagine his ghost seated upon it, bathing in the adulation of all the great writers who came after him, like in Ingres’s painting, The Apotheosis of Homer, which looks rather like a school class photograph. Adolphe, as a joke, used to call it Achilles’s chair, and he showed me a photograph of the painting by Léon Bénouville, The Wrath of Achilles, in which the hero, looking very fierce, sits naked and draped in a large white sheet. It was he who gave me the idea, later on, to sketch Ariadne in this chair. As soon as we became lovers she wanted to draw me all over the empty house. She kept Grégoire’s keys, and whenever she could she would come and find me here at night, during those weeks when the house was ours. I made her sit on the throne, she was so graceful looking, nestling there against the armrests. I outlined her figure in my sketchbook without taking my eyes off her. She insisted, “No, you have to sit there, Achilles.” I never loved Kerylos as much as when I looked at her drawings. She showed me the place I thought I knew better than anywhere else in the world—rooms that I could have drawn with my eyes closed—as if I were seeing them for the first time through her wide eyes. She showed me the embroidery on the russet-colored curtains: Pontremoli had given instructions to the seamstresses to change the reels of thread from time to time, so that the colors would never all be quite the same, depending on the dying lot, to leave something to chance, so that nothing would be too regular. I had never even noticed. What would Theodore have said if he had surprised the two of us naked in the dining room, in front of this ancient altar, with our sketchbooks and colored pencils in our hands?
My old body is deformed, I’m frail, I feel weak. I kept all our drawings, and I was right to. My grandchildren will surely wonder who this handsome hero was. I haven’t written anything on the back. I hesitated to undress in daylight in order to pose for her, but she insisted. In her first drawing of me she erased my scars. I asked her to do another one, this time with all my scars, and she kissed me and tore the first one up. Whoever finds these pages will see the most beautiful woman in the world. I never framed our drawings, though I ought to now. For years, when I was still searching for Ariadne, I wondered if she had kept the bunch of keys, whether sometimes she was tempted to come back to the house, which in a way belonged to her too. Perhaps the reason I used to go back when I knew no one else would be there was because I dreamed that she might have had the same idea, that I would bump into her in the Andron, as if she were waiting for me there. But fate was not that kind to me.
For the first time, standing in front of the chair that I couldn’t bring myself to sit on, I wanted to cry: I pictured Ariadne’s body, myself facing her, here, so many years ago. I put out my hand into empty space, placed my palm on the wood, my lips on the armrest. This was where she had sat. How had I let her leave, how had I never found her, after Grégoire told me that she had disappeared? Where is she now? For years I have refused to think about it. But here it’s no longer possible; grief seizes me like a kind of madness.
With some difficulty, I moved the imposing chair out of the way and began tapping my fingers over each stone tile to listen for one that sounded hollow. Nothing. Sitting on the floor, it occurred to me that I would never find it. When he was designing the windows in this room, Pontremoli studied Italian palazzi: he wanted the tiling to resemble vaguely what was done in Rome in the sixteenth century, and he put in bronze hinges and latches, interior shutters. It wasn’t Greek, but it looked “historic,” and at twenty I found it very beautiful. Today I found it gloomy, and it did not stop my tears.
The conversations I used to hear in this room took on a different meaning. I used to tell her what they spoke about. According to Pontremoli—and Reinach said he was right—it was not that there was a rupture between different eras, but that each period overlapped with the next; something of the fortifications at Troy and Mycenae could be detected in the shape of the Acropolis, some of the structures of its monumental doors survived in Orthodox monasteries, the houses of Athens and Delos had influenced the architecture of houses in the Mediterranean under the Roman empire, and the riads of north Africa and Andalucia, and one can see their traces in the palaces of Felix Arabia: even when the barbarians have destroyed everything, enemies have burned everything, sprinkled salt, every era men have rebuilt from memory, adapting, simplifying, transforming, finding new ideas. What mattered was that this chain had never been broken—and in a certain way, that was their greatest idea, that Greece was still here among us, even if we were not always able to see it.
The house altar stood at the other end of the room, with its inscription, “to the unknown god,” although this room had never been used for any religious rite. That was the Reinachs’ true religion: one god, who had made the world, but whom we do not know. A channel had been carved in the marble, for the blood to drain away after an animal was sacrificed. I doubt it was ever used for that purpose. I can’t imagine the cook coming up to the marble-clad Andron to cast a spell on a chicken according to rites determined by Orthodox priests. I passed my hand over the front, perhaps it would trigger a mechanism inside. Too obvious, I suppose. There was nothing there, no trace of a hiding place.
The mosaic in the middle of the room shows the Labyrinth: Theseus fighting the Minotaur. The postcard is still in my bag. I managed to find the strength to get down on my knees, but no stone shifted, no trapdoor sprang open like the one on the heraldic fireplace in the Chateau de Thibermesnil, nothing appeared to have been designed by the architect to conceal a secret. The only secrets here, I thought, were those rare moments of joy in my life that left no trace other than the absurd wounds that I came back to awaken. Why did I want to suffer anymore, when I have my children, my grandchildren, my paintings, my life, elsewhere and otherwise?
&n
bsp; The crown must have been in Theodore’s bedroom the day of our return. He would have unpacked it from his trunk, but then what happened to it? Did he plan to return it to the monks of Dionysiou? Was he really so afraid of rekindling the tiara scandal? I was losing myself in the geometrical labyrinth, staring at the ax striking the neck of the man-beast. The design of the floor in the Andron was like one of the false leads that Theodore was so fond of. Ariadne said, “See, you don’t even need a string to escape from the Labyrinth. You just need to be methodical.” The Kerylos labyrinth is too easy. It is not to Theseus’s credit that he is about to kill the Minotaur.
This morning I sat on a café terrace and read a long article in Paris Match about the new festivals springing up along the Côte d’Azur. One photograph showed a jazz club in Juan-les-Pins, the Minotaur. In front of the entrance three starlets posed in bikinis, along with the proprietress of the establishment, a playboy, and a saxophonist. Behind them was a large painted sign—it’s hard to believe—showing an exact copy of the Kerylos labyrinth. It’s so famous, this house—as for the Minotaur, for everybody else, it’s become synonymous with Picasso.
30
ATHENA ON THE STAIRCASE
Fanny Reinach used to place vases of old roses in the Amphithyros, the hallway that led to the staircase going up to the Reinachs’ private quarters, and the scent bloomed among the curtains, the marble, the beams, the paintings of ships that hung on the walls. The children used to race down the stairs two at a time. I loved this hall, dominated by a bronze-painted Athena wielding a lance beside a pierced brazier diffusing pinpoints of light that summoned the atmosphere of a temple. Theodore had placed another brazier at the top of the stairs in front of a small statue of Hermes; the staircase became shadowy and mysterious when they were lit and we scattered incense paper over them. Was Fanny aware that this helmeted statue, a reproduction, fit one of Furtwängler’s hypotheses? What had motivated her husband to put it there, where everyone would see it, almost in homage to his great rival? It was like a permanent “Remember you are mortal, and fallible,” whispered in the ear of a triumphant general at his moment of triumph at the Capitol in Rome. Theodore, like a good little Spartan who had learned how to suffer, liked the fact that a fox, hidden beneath his tunic, was constantly gnawing at his belly.
The Greek statues had made him dream; the fact that he possessed one that had been restored according to a German hypothesis, a plaster Athena that it was immediately apparent was unlikely to be genuine, was also, perhaps, the kind of irony he liked. The three brothers, at various ages, had dreamed of making great discoveries. This Athena was the goddess that none of them had found. They knew Greek culture better than anyone, better than Furtwängler. For so many years they had believed it would be logical and legitimate if antiquities were to reveal themselves to them—and yet their only major discovery was made by me. In 1878, Joseph, aged twenty-two, had been the first of the three to travel to Greece, never doubting for a minute that the first hole he dug would reveal a statue to rival the Venus de Milo. In reality that first trip lasted two weeks: he went to Athens, Mycenae, Corinth, and the Bay of Navarino, ending up at the Trieste opera house, where he saw Tannhäuser, and then Venice, still in pursuit of Wagnerian myths. From all this he had managed to extract enough for a book, his Voyage to the Orient, a youthful lapse that even his brothers teased him about. In Greece he met only politicians, for that was already his true passion. Theodore told me how he too, at twenty-two, had been obsessed with the Venus de Milo. The Marquis de Rivière, who gave it to Louis XVIII, was a simple man with his hands full: he didn’t know a great deal about anything, yet it fell to him to have the pleasure of bringing to Paris the most extraordinary of statues. Salomon said that she had similarities with the artistry of Phidias—he published this in Apollo—but Theodore thought she was from a later date, after Alexander. He was right. Before I became devoted to the Victory of Samothrace, I too was a young man besotted with the Venus de Milo: Adolphe and I used to try and draw her with arms to see what she might have looked like. It started innocently enough, we drew her with a trumpet, a mirror, a palm frond, then, unsurprisingly—we were only sixteen or seventeen—we’d invent horrors that we destroyed as soon as we drew them.
Theodore always wanted to make one of those discoveries that is due to genius rather than to chance. Maybe he thought my innocence would bring him luck. Schliemann, the fat provincial Kraut, excavated what he thought might be the site of Troy, and he landed on it, and then Mycenae, where he found the gold mask of Agamemnon. He felt his way toward treasure with the instincts of a fool. The photograph of Madame Schliemann wearing jewels dug up during these excavations made Madame Reinach laugh; she said that Theodore and his brothers were completely incapable of bringing anything like that out of the ground for their wives. Theodore parried by telling her about the fake Greek house that Schliemann had built himself in Athens, a great big meringue decorated in the spirit of Pompeii. He found it funny that the ceilings were painted with plump putti prospecting for archaeological finds and deciphering inscriptions. Theodore asked his wife which she preferred, the ridiculous Schliemann palace or the Villa Kerylos.
At twenty-two, in the same frenzy for discovery, Theodore, who had just qualified as a lawyer at the Paris bar—around the same time that Salomon had left Paris for the French School at Athens—left for Constantinople. He was overwhelmed with admiration when he saw the Hagia Sophia. He made no great discovery, but was merely happy to admire these famous places. In the library at Kerylos, he showed me the large round metal hanging lamp fitted with candleholders and discreetly electrified, “We don’t really know what lanterns would have looked like in antiquity, so I showed our architect a few photographs. This must remind you of something, no? You are Orthodox, are you not, in a way?” He didn’t tell me immediately about his intended voyage to the Greek monasteries—he had not yet decided it would be to Athos, and he was contemplating going instead to the Meteora monasteries or to Mystra. I didn’t tell him that I have detested the Orthodox religion since I was a child. He must have wanted to study me a little, to be sure I wasn’t deceiving him. One day, standing by the statue of Athena, he suddenly turned to me and said, “I was so happy when I first saw the coast of Thessali, from on board the Latouche-Tréville. So, to reward you for your progress, I am going to take you with me on a trip. It would be a terrible shame for you to lose your modern Greek.” The idea that he might try to learn modern Greek seemed not to have occurred to him. For him, the language that came second after archaic Greek, for its beauty and its nobility, the language of philosophers, poets, and orators, was French.
One day, not long after I arrived at Kerylos, I heard Theodore and Gustave speaking German on the little pointed outcropping I called the Tarpenian rock, and I was afraid. I only understood years later. Eiffel used to remind us at every opportunity that he was born in Dijon, but his family’s real name was Bönickhausen, they came from the Rhineland, a region called Eifel, from where they had taken their name. This was fairly widely known in Beaulieu, and the notary used to say that Eiffel too was Jewish— he wasn’t, I knew that he and his family were Catholic, and had been since the dawn of time. Though he was a believer in science only, I saw him at Mass several times. I had no idea he spoke German, and that day I was utterly taken aback; his parents’ generation must have still spoken it at home and he remembered it. As for Theodore, half the books in his library were in German and he spoke it as well as he spoke French.
At Beaulieu, the rumor spread among the more reactionary local families that Eiffel had made money from shares at the time of the Panama affair, with the complicity of the Reinach family, because they were “coreligionists”—although there wasn’t a word of truth in the story. The day I overheard them speaking German, I think they were having a slightly bawdy conversation that was not suitable for children’s ears—the priest’s housemaid saw it as proof that the two rich men were spies in the pay of the Kaiser.
Archaic Gree
k is a language that takes a long time to learn and a short time to forget. Today I can still read a few pages, but I have to stop all the time to look things up in my old Bailly dictionary. Like Latin, I remember almost nothing: the other day, with my grandchildren, I stood dumbly in front of the inscription on a sundial. Occasionally, entire pages of grammar come back to me without warning, absurdly. I would never have thought they were still there somewhere in this old head of mine. It took a good six months for the rules about accents to stick. They are not particularly useful for translating texts, but I wanted to learn to write archaic Greek as well. The first time Theodore gave me five simple lines to translate, he gave me minus thirty-five out of twenty. I lost all the points just because of the accents, all of which I put in the wrong places. I was extremely proud when I managed to get zero. I can remember a few scattered, intimidating rules, having spent weeks of my life, bound like a prisoner to my little table in the library, reciting and then applying them. Take the word oxyton: if it has an acute accent on the final syllable, it is paroxyton, proparoxyton, perispomenon, that is a circumflex accent on the final vowel, properispomenon, and barytone, when there is a grave accent on the final syllable. But as soon as you start using declensions and conjugations, all the accents move. I learned the rule—one among dozens of others—for when the vowel of the penultimate syllable has to have an accent and if it is long, this accent will always be a circumflex if the vowel on the last syllable is short. In the declensions, when the final long is accentuated, the direct cases are oxytons and the oblique cases are perispomenons. In an average aorist, all the imperatives are perispomenons. How did I not go mad? I forced myself, it was a question of honor. Sometimes I cried.