by Adrien Goetz
Other interesting works include Gustave Glotz, “Éloge funèbre de M. Théodore Reinach, membre de l’Académie,” in Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 72e année, no 4, 1928, pp. 321–326; and Rene Cagnat, “Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Théodore Reinach,” in Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 75e année, no 4, 1931, pp. 374–393.
For those who would like to know more about Théodore Reinach, it is still possible, even today, to read his work. Among his copious publications, the book that undoubtedly gives the best idea of the subtlety of his analysis and his style is his Mithridate Eupator, roi de Pont (Firmin-Didot, Bibliothèque d’archéologie, d’art et d’histoire ancienne, 1890). His erudition here is put to the service of a deep understanding of the ancient world, with a true geopolitical vision: the archaeologist and numismatist make way for the great historian, unjustly forgotten and misjudged today. This book—inaccessible today except online, on gallica.bnf.fr—also testifies to the appeal the banks of the Black Sea held for him, from where the tiara of Saitapharnes was supposed to have come.
The best book available about the Reinach family is the collection of conference papers entitled Les Frères Reinach, edited by Sophie Basch, Michel Espagne, and Jean Leclant, Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, De Boccard, 2008. The volume teems with fascinating articles, and the foreword by the much-missed Jean Leclant, as well as the contributions by Alexandre Farnoux, Dominique Mulliez, Jacques Jouanna, Annie Bélis, Agnès Rouveret, Élisabeth Décultot, Roland Recht and Antoine Compagnon, I found particularly helpful.
To understand the milieu of the Reinach family, there are two immensely useful books, one by Pierre Birnbaum, Les Fous de la République, Fayard, 1992, which devotes a chapter to the family entitled, Au coeur de la République républicaine, les Reinachs (pp. 13–28), (available in English as The Jews of the Republic: A Political History of State Jews in France from Gambetta to Vichy, Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture, Stanford University Press, October 1996), and one by Cyril Grange, Une élite parisienne: les familles de la grande bourgeoisie juive (1870-1939), CNRS Editions, 2016.
Two other books bring this social milieu to life: Pierre Assouline’s Le Dernier des Camondo, Gallimard, 1997, and Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, London / New York: Chatto & Windus / Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010.
In order to describe the construction of the villas in Beaulieusur-Mer and its environs I used the book by Didier Gayraud, Belles démeures en Riviera (1835–1930), preface by Georges Lautner, Éditions Giletta-Nice-Matin, 2010.
To describe Villa Eiffel, I turned to the catalogue of the exhibition Les Riviera de Charles Garnier et Gustave Eiffel, edited by Jean-Lucien Bonillo, with contributions from Béatrice Bouvier, Andrea Folli, Jean-Louis Heudier, Françoise Le Guet Tully, Jean-Michel Leniaud, and Gisella Merello, Imbernon, 2004.
Readers curious to know more about Edmond Rostand’s villa in Cambo-les-Bains can turn to the book by Jean-Claude Lasserre, Arnaga, Le Festin, 1998.
Those interested in finding out more about Villa Ephrussi may turn to La Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, edited by Regis Vian des Rives, with contributions by Jean-Pierre Demoly, Alain Renner, Michel Steve, Pierre-François Dayot, Christina Ulrike Goetz and Guillaume Seret, and photographs by Georges Veran, Éditions de l’Amateur, 2002.
For more about Villa Primavera, which, although it is mentioned only in passing in the novel, and was built a little later than Kérylos, offers an interesting example of construction in the Greek style, there is a remarkable study by Henri Lavagne, “La villa Primavera à Cap-d’Ail (1911–1914): témoignage d’une culture ou déclaration de grécité,” in Monuments et mémoires de la fondation Eugène Piot, Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, De Boccard, 2013, t. 92, pp. 177–247.
The life of Léon Reinach, musician, composer, and husband of Béatrice de Camondo, is told by the Italian novelist Filippo Tuena in Le variazioni Reinach, Rizzoli, 2005.
The most valuable source on Adolphe Reinach for me was the excellent edition introduced and annotated by Agnès Rouveret, of his posthumous work, first published by Klincksieck Editions in 1921, Textes grecs et latins relatifs à l’histoire de la peinture ancienne (Recueil Milliet), and republished with a commentary, under the patronage of the Association des études grecques, with a foreword by Salomon Reinach, Éditions Macula, 1985.
The account of the 1908 cruise comes from a letter by Hervé Duchêne, “En Mediterranée orientale avec les frères Reinach : Joseph, Salomon, Théodore,” reproduced in the papers from the conference La Grèce antique dans la littérature et les arts, de la Belle Époque aux années trente, under the direction of Michel Zink, Jacques Jouanna and Henri Lavagne, Cahiers de la villa Kérylos, no 24, Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, De Boccard, 2013, pp. 19–36.
The descriptions of the restoration of archaeological sites in Crete were inspired by the excellent catalogue that accompanied the exhibition La Grèce des origines, entre rêve et archéologie, published under the direction of Anaïs Boucher, National Museum of Archaeology, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, RMN, 2014. The Phaistos disc was in reality discovered a few months after the sea voyage that the Reinachs undertook in August 1908, but it is highly revealing of the era’s taste for spectacular discoveries that were almost immediately controversial.
At the French School at Athens, Alexandre Farnoux, the director, spoke to me at length about the Reinach family, about whom he is a specialist. He showed me the documents kept in the library, including the lengthy rough draft of the letter from Théodore concerning the affair of the tiara of Saitapharnes, which Dominique Mulliez refers to in his article “Les Reinach et l’École française d’Athènes,” in the collection of papers from the conference Les Frères Reinach, op. cit., p. 56.
The voyage made by Théodore and his nephew Adolphe to Mount Athos is entirely imaginary, as is the search for the grave of Alexander the Great. I owe a great deal to Olivier Descotes, director of the Benaki Museum, and David Levi, who is passionate about the holy mountain, who took me along with them for a memorable Holy Week.
I searched in vain for the description of the fresco representing Saint Sisoes discovering the tomb of Alexander the Great and the inscription that accompanies it in the learned work of reference by G. Millet, J. Pargoire and L. Petit, Recueil des inscriptions chretiennes de l’Athos, 1re partie, Paris, Albert Fontemoing, 1904, republished in Thessaloniki in 2004. Yet the painting certainly exists (a panel conserved at the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens also shows this rare iconographic theme); the fresco is located where I describe it, and I have a photograph I took of it there. The chapter about the Dionysiou monastery (pp. 456–495), however, is somewhat sketchy. The treasures of the Athos monasteries remain highly mysterious and largely inaccessible. The best of the recent books on the subject is without doubt Ferrante Ferranti’s Athos: La sainte montagne, Desclée de Brouwer, 2015.
To gain a sense of what Mount Athos might have been like at the beginning of the twentieth century, before it was discovered by the travelers who made it popular, alongside works by Jacques Lacarrière (Mont Athos, montagne sainte, Seghers, 1954) and François Augiéras (Un voyage au mont Athos, Flammarion, 1970, and Grasset, “Les Cahiers rouges,” 2005), I also drew on an older account, a magnificent book that would be worth republishing, by Francesco Perilla, Mount Athos (Thessaloniki, published by the author, 1927), that the intrepid author illustrated with his own drawings and watercolors, much as Achilles, the hero of my novel, does.
The Greek-Corsican village of Cargèse is well known, and its story is told in the classic book by Count Colonna de Cesari-Rocca and Louis Villat, Histoire de Corse, Furne, Boivin et Cie, 1916, and by Patrice Stephanopoli, in Histoire des Grecs de Corse, Ducolet brothers, 1900. The story of this episode was told to me by Monsignor Florent Marchiano, Archimandrite of the Greek parish of Cargèse and priest of the Latin paris
h, prelate of His Holiness, whom I was fortunate to meet before his death in 2015.
The story of the Saitapharnes tiara is known thanks to the work of Alain Pasquier, who published an early article on the subject in the catalogue of the exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Jeunesse des musées, under the direction of Chantal Georgel and Catherine Chevillot, Musée d’Orsay, RMN, 1994: “La tiare de Saïtapharnès: histoire d’un achat malheureux” (pp. 300–311) with an additional essay, “La tiare de Saïtapharnès, description et analyse” by Catherine Metzger and Veronique Schiltz (pp. 312–313). Other valuable information can be found in the article by Dominique Mulliez, “Les Reinach et l’École française d’Athènes,” in the collected papers from the conference Les Frères Reinach, op. cit., pp. 21–40. Veronique Schiltz continues her research to this day. She has published “Du bonnet d’Ulysse à la tiare de Saïtapharnès,” in Kazim Abdullaev (ed.), The Traditions of East and West in the Antique Cultures of Central Asia, Papers in Honor of Paul Bernard, Tashkent, “Noshirlik yog’dusi,” 2010, pp. 217–234, as well as “Le savant et l’orfèvre,” in Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 2012, I (January–March), pp. 585–618. Thanks are due to Christine Flon-Granveaud, who introduced us; I was able to interview Veronique Schiltz on the lesser known aspects of the history of the era’s predilection for a Greek world far from that of Pericles.
Some of Israel Rouchomovsky’s pieces still exist. He was a great artist whom posterity continues to call a forger: thanks to Nicolas and Alexis Kugel I had the opportunity to hold in my hands one of the pieces he made in Paris after the affair of the tiara and it is impossible not to think of Fabergé when you see it.
The president-director of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez, has long loved Kérylos and Beaulieu-sur-Mer—it was he who conceived, with Alain Pasquier, the gallery of plaster casts of antique sculptures found in the interior walkway that surrounds the villa. Françoise Gaultier and Cécile Giroire showed me the famous gold tiara, which is kept in the museum’s vault, certainly the most famous and valuable fake in France’s national collections.
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the people who first took me to Kérylos, Marike Gauthier, Bruno Foucart, and Roselyne Granet—who told me the story of the Eiffel and the Salles families—as well as those who later on, during various conferences at Villa Kérylos, encouraged me and gave me ideas; Madame Jean Leclant first and foremost, Lory Reinach, who shared with me memories of her husband Fabrice Reinach, Théodore’s grandson, Thomas Hirsch-Reinach, Théodore’s great-grandson, and his family, whom I met by chance, quite as if it was fated, while I was in the middle of writing this book. I must also thank Hervé Danesi, secretary general of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, who is also a champion of the house.
I was welcomed to Kérylos by Vassiliki Mavroidakou-Castellana, head of development, who told me about the photographs of ancient Greece at the time of Théodore Reinach. I enjoyed long conversations with Paulo Chavez, who has known the villa for a long time and is responsible for its maintenance. I am deeply grateful to them both for having shared their love for this unique place.
For the final scene, I had in my head the lecture given by Erwin Panofsky entitled “The ideological antecedents of the Rolls Royce radiator,” a sixteen-page pamphlet published by the American Philosophical Society in 1963. For the idea that Achilles became an abstract painter after 1945, I was inspired by the thrilling exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon: 1945–1949. Repartir à zero. Comme si la peinture n’avait jamais existé, with a catalogue under the direction of Eric de Chassey and Sylvie Ramond, Hazan, 2004.
I also owe thanks to those with whom I have had so many conversations in France and in Greece: Lucile Arnoux-Farnoux, Sophie Basch, my dearly missed friend Laure Beaumont-Maillet, Christophe Beaux, Violaine and Vincent Bouvet, Marine de Carne, Laurence and Cécile Castany, Adelaïde de Clermont-Tonnerre, Valérie Coudin, Mathieu Deldicque, Bertrand Dubois, Béatrice de Durfort, Côme Fabre, Olivier Gabet, Annick Goetz, Elisabeth and Cyrille Goetz, Mickaël Grossmann, Constance Guisset, Aline Gurdiel, Matthieu Humery, Barthélémy Jobert, Jacques Lamas, Laurent Le Bon, Isabelle le Masne de Chermont, Jean-Christophe Mikhaïloff, Christophe Parant, Paul Perrin, Polissena and Carlo Perrone, Alain Planès, Nicolas Provoyeur, Jules Régis, Bruno Roger-Vasselin, Brigitte and Gérald de Roquemaurel—thanks to whom I first encountered Cargèse and its Orthodox church—and Béatrice Rosenberg.
I must of course thank my editor at Éditions Grasset, Charles Dantzig, himself a writer with deep knowledge of the history, art, and literature of antiquity.
My thoughts turn to my uncle, Jean Goetz, a classics teacher, who gave me my first Greek lessons—I was not a good student—and played for me when I was in middle school the Delphic hymn to Apollo. How I wish he could have read this novel, which is dedicated to his memory, on one of the Cretan beaches he loved.
And finally my thanks go to Marie, Julie, and Lucile, for whom every pleasurable holiday must include a swim in the sea at Beaulieu-sur-Mer, the most beautiful of all the resorts on the Côte d’Azur.
PLAN OF THE VILLA
Terrace
Third Floor
1 Daedalus
2 Icarus
Second Floor
1 Hermes gallery
2 Ornithes (birds, the name of Fanny Reinach’s bedroom)
3 Ampelos (grapevine, a bathroom)
4 Triptolemus (sitting room)
5 Nikai (The Victories, bathroom)
6 Erotes (Cherubim, Theodore Reinach’s bedroom)
7 Euormos (guest quarters)
First Floor
1 Main entry
2 Thyroreion (vestibule)
3 Proauleion (entrance hall)
4 Peristyle
5 Amphithyros (stairwell)
6 Triklinos (dining room)
7 Andron (reception room)
8 Oikos (music room)
9 Library
10 Naiads (thermal baths)
11 and 12 Philemon and Baucis (guest rooms)
Basement
1 Lower gallery
2 Kitchen
3 Hot water heater
4 Service rooms
ADRIEN GOETZ is a novelist who teaches art history at the Sorbonne in Paris. He is the editor of Grande Galerie, the quarterly magazine of the Louvre Museum.
NATASHA LEHRER has translated books by Georges Bataille, Robert Desnos, Victor Segalen, Chantal Thomas, and the Dalai Lama.