“Do you know that I am receiving some friends at six o’clock this afternoon, Mlle. Duhamel?” Lucien said with an unwonted awkwardness as she came closer. “I should be honored if you would join us.”
Mlle. Duhamel accepted with pleasure.
“Come a little early, if you will.”
“Five million two hundred and fifty thousand francs for a counterfeit,” Mlle. Duhamel whispered with awe. She sat on the edge of a chair in the salon of Lucien’s suite, gazing at the picture Lucien had leaned against the divan.
Lucien strolled back and forth before her, smiling, smoking a Turkish cigarette. François had gone out a few moments before to fetch Cinzano and pâté and biscuits, and now they were alone. Mlle. Duhamel had been surprised, but not overly surprised, when he told her the Giotto was a forgery. Her reaction had been exactly right. And now she regarded the picture with the respect that was due it.
“One usually pays more dearly for the false than for the true, mademoiselle,” Lucien said, feeling expansive in his hour of triumph. “This hair I touch, for instance,” he said, patting the top of his light brown, gently waving hair, “is a toupee, the finest that Paris can make. Grown by nature, it would have cost nothing. Strictly speaking, it would have been worthless. It is worthless, to a man with hair of his own. But when I must buy it to hide a deficiency of nature, I must pay a hundred and fifty thousand francs for it. And it is a just price, when one thinks of the skill and labor that went into its creation.” Lucien swept off his toupee and held it in his hand, lustrous side uppermost. His bald crown was a healthy pink-tan, like his face, and really detracted little from the liveliness of his appearance, which was extraordinary for his age. The bald head was a surprise, that was all.
“I had no idea you wore a toupee, M. Montlehuc.”
Lucien eyed her sharply. He thought he saw amusement in her tilted head. She had one element of charm, he conceded: she had humor. “And applying this same principle to the false Giotto,” Lucien continued, inspired by Mlle. Duhamel’s attention, “we might say Giotto’s genius was a thing of nature, too, a gift of the gods, perhaps, but certainly a faculty which cost him nothing, and in a sense cost him no effort, since he created as every artist creates, out of necessity. But consider the poor mortal who created this almost perfect imitation. Think of his travail in reproducing every stroke of the master exactly! Consider his effort!”
Mlle. Duhamel was absorbing every word. “Yes,” she said.
“You understand then why I value the imitators so highly, or rather give them their proper value?”
“I understand,” she answered.
Lucien felt perhaps she did. “And you, Mlle. Duhamel, may I say that is why I find you so valuable? You have a superb talent for deceiving. Your performance of Scarlatti this afternoon was by no means inferior to the best—technically. It was inferior in only one respect.” He hesitated, wondering if he dared go on.
“Yes?” Mlle. Duhamel prompted, a little fearfully.
“You hated it, didn’t you?”
She looked down at her slim, tense hands in her lap, hands that were still as smooth and flexible as a young girl’s. “Yes. Yes, I hated it. I hate music. It’s—” She stopped. Her eyes had grown shiny with tears, but she held her head up and the tears did not drop.
Lucien smiled nervously. He was not good at comforting people, but he wanted to comfort Mlle. Duhamel and did not know how to begin. “What a silly thing to cry about!” he burst out. “Such a talent! You play exquisitely! Why, if you could endure the boredom—and I really admire you for not being able to endure it—you might play in concerts all over the world! I daresay not a music critic in a thousand would recognize your real feelings. And what would he do if he did? Make some trifling comment that’s all. But your playing would enchant millions and millions of people. Just as my forgeries could enchant millions and millions of people.” He laughed and, before he realized what he did, put out his hand and pressed her thin shoulder affectionately.
She shuddered under his touch and relaxed in her chair. She seemed to shrink until she was nothing but that small, unhappy core of herself. “You are the only one who has ever known,” she said. “It was my father who made me study music as a child and as a young girl, study and study until I had no time to do anything else—even to make a friend. My father was organist of the church here in Aix. He wanted me to be a concert pianist, but I knew I never could be, because I hated music too much. And finally—I was thirty-eight when my father died—it was too late to think of marriage. So I stayed on in the village, earning my living in the only way I could, by teaching music. And how ashamed I am! To pretend to love what I hate! To teach others to love what I hate—the piano!”
Her voice trailed off on “piano” like a plaintive sob itself.
“You fooled Gaston,” Lucien reminded her, smiling. An excitement, a joy of life was rising in him. He could not stand still. He wanted—he did not know exactly what he wanted to do, except to convince Mlle. Duhamel that she was wrong to feel ashamed, wrong to torture herself inwardly. “Don’t you see it isn’t at all logical,” he began, “to take seriously something you were never serious about in the first place?—Look, mademoiselle!” With a graceful movement, Lucien removed his right hand. He held the detached and perfectly natural-looking right hand in his left. His right arm ended in an empty white cuff.
Mille. Duhamel gasped.
“You never suspected that, did you?” asked Lucien, grinning like a schoolboy who has brought off a practical joke with success.
“No.” Obviously, Mlle. Duhamel hadn’t suspected that.
“You see, it’s exactly the mate of the left, and by certain movements which have now become automatic, I can give the impression that my useless hand cooperates with the other.” Lucien replaced his hand quickly.
“Why, it’s like a miracle!” Mlle. Duhamel said.
“A miracle of modern plastics, that’s all. And my right foot, I might add, too.” Lucien pulled up his trouser leg a few inches, though there was nothing to be seen but a normal-looking black shoe and sock. “I was wounded once, literally blown apart, but should I have crept about the world like a crab, disgusting everyone, an object of horror and pity? Life is to be enjoyed, is it not? Life is to give and take pleasure, is it not? You give pleasure, Mlle. Duhamel. It remains only for you to take it!” Lucien gave a great laugh that was so truly out of his heart, that rolled so solidly from his broad chest, Mlle. Duhamel began to smile, too.
Then she laughed. At first, her laugh was no more than a feeble crack, like the opening of a door that had been closed for an incalculable length of time. But the laugh grew, seemed to reach out in all directions, like a separate being taking form, taking courage.
“And my ear!” Lucien went on with delight. “It wasn’t necessary to have two ears to hear what I heard in your music, mademoiselle. An excellent match, is it not, of my left ear? But not too perfect, because ears are never exactly alike.” He could not remove his grafted right ear, but he pinched it and winked at her. “And my right eye—I will spare you that, but suffice it to say that it’s made of glass. People often speak of my ‘magic monocle’ when they mention my uncanny judgments. I wear the monocle as a joke, by way of adding an insult to an injury, as the English would say. Can you tell the difference between my eyes, Mlle. Duhamel?” Lucien bent forward and looked into her gray eyes that were beginning to glow behind the tears.
“Indeed, I cannot,” she told him.
Lucien beamed with satisfaction. “Did I say my foot? My entire leg is of hollow plastic!” Lucien struck his thigh with a pencil he picked up from the table, and it gave a hollow report. “But does it stop me from dancing? And did anyone ever suggest that I limp? I don’t limp. Shall I go on?” His affirmative clap of laughter came again.
Mlle. Duhamel looked at him, fascinated. “I’ve never—”
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br /> “Needless to say, my teeth!” Lucien interrupted her. “I had scarcely three whole teeth left after my injury. I was a young man then. But that doesn’t matter, I saved my employer’s life, and he rewarded me with a trust fund that enables me to spend my life in luxury. Anyway, my teeth are the product of an artist in deception, a Japanese whose ingenuity and powers of depiction certainly rank him with the great Leonardo. His name is Tao Mishugawa, but few on earth will ever hear of him. My teeth are full of faults, of course, like real ones. Every so often, just to deceive myself, I go to Tao and have some more fillings or an inlay put in. Tell me, mademoiselle, did you suspect?”
“I certainly did not,” she assured him sincerely.
“If I could remove every artificial part of myself including the silver shin of my other leg and my plastic ribs, there wouldn’t be much left of me, would there? Except the spirit. There would be that even more than now, I think! Does it seem strange to you that I speak of the spirit, Mlle. Duhamel?”
“Not at all. Of course it doesn’t.”
“I knew it wouldn’t. There was no need to ask. You, too, are among the great in spirit, who respond to challenge and make nature appear niggardly. Your hours of tortured practice at the piano are not lost, mademoiselle. Not because of these words I say to you, but because you gave pleasure to a score of people this afternoon. Because you are able to give pleasure!”
Mlle. Duhamel looked down at her hands again, but now there was a flush of her own pleasure in her cheeks.
“The critics and the art dealers call me a dilettante, the idiots! That I am an artist escapes them, of course. Let it! They are the real dilettanti, the do-nothings. You understand me because you are like me, Mlle. Duhamel, but all those who sneer, who stare, who laugh at me and envy and admire me at once because I am not ashamed to confess what I love— And here they are now!”
Someone had rapped on the door.
Lucien glanced at his watch. François was having trouble finding the right kind of pâté, perhaps. Lucien did not like to answer his door himself.
Mlle. Duhamel stood up. “May I open the door for your guests?”
Lucien stared at her. She looked taller than before, and almost—he could hardly believe it—happy. The glow he had seen in her gray eyes seemed to have spread through her entire body. Lucien, too, felt a happiness he had never known before. Perhaps the kind of happiness an artist feels after creating something, he thought, an artist whose talent is given by nature.
“I should be honored,” Lucien said.
Gaston had come, and with him four other dealers, one of whom carried a picture which Lucien recognized as Giotto’s Magi in Bethlehem from a private collection. Lucien greeted them hospitably. Then more people arrived, and finally François with the refreshments. The man with the picture set it next to Lucien’s against the divan, and all got out their magnifying glasses.
“I assure you, you possess an original,” Gaston said cheerfully to Lucien. “Not that you didn’t pay a fitting price for it.” All of Gaston’s confidence had returned.
Lucien gestured with his false hand at the group beside the divan. “The experts have not said so yet, have they? Let their magnifying glasses discover what I can see with my naked eyes.” He strolled off toward Mlle. Duhamel and M. Palissy, who were talking in a corner of the room. How charming she looked, Lucien thought. A half hour ago, she would have been afraid to use her beautiful hands to gesture as she spoke.
Gaston intercepted Lucien before he reached Mlle. Duhamel. “You agree that this picture is genuine, Lucien?” he said, pointing to the picture the dealer had brought.
“Certainly,” said Lucien, “That Magi—a careless piece of work, I’ve always thought, but certainly genuine.”
“Examine the brushstrokes, Lucien. Compare them with the brushstrokes on your picture. It’s so obvious, a child could see it. There is a fault in the brush that he used to paint the backgrounds of both pictures, a couple of bristles that made a scratch here and there. Evidently these pictures were painted at about the same time. It’s the general opinion that they were, you know.” Gaston stooped down beside the pictures. “One doesn’t even need a magnifying glass to see it. But I had some photographs made and enlarged, just to be sure. Here they are, Lucien.”
Lucien ignored the photographs on the divan. He could see it, with his good eye; a hair-line scratch here and there with an even finer scratch beside it, the scratches of a single brushstroke, made by the same brush. It was the same in both pictures, like a pattern, obvious enough when one looked for it, yet not obvious enough to be worthy of forging. Lucien’s head grew swimmy. For an instant, he felt only a keen discomfort. He was aware that the eyes of everyone in the room were upon him as he bent over the two pictures. Most painfully of all, he was aware of Mlle. Duhamel. He felt he had failed her. He had been proven fallible.
“Now you see,” said Gaston calmly, without malice, merely as if he were pointing out something that Lucien might have seen from the first.
Lucien felt as if a house of cards were tumbling down inside him, all that was himself, in fact. He could see now, looking at the picture he had believed to be false, that a misconception—a quick, initial misconception—was possible. Just as it would have been equally possible to judge the picture correctly, as he did now, and to sense that it was genuine. But he had made the misjudgment.
Lucien turned to the room. “I admit my error,” he said, his tongue as dry as ashes.
He had expected laughter, but there was only a murmur, a kind of sigh in the room. He would rather they had laughed at him. No, at least there was one exchange of smiles, one nod of satisfaction from Font-Martigue that Lucien Montlehuc could be wrong. Lucien would have felt quite lost if he had not seen it. Yet no one seemed to realize the catastrophe that was taking place inside him. The great cardhouse was still falling. For the first time in his life, he felt near tears. He had a vision of himself without his artifices, without his arrogant faith in his infallibility—a piece of a man, unable even to stand upright, a miserable fragment. For a few moments, Lucien’s spirit bore the full weight of reality, and almost broke beneath it.
“If you’d like to sell it back, of course, Lucien,” Gaston’s voice said kindly, distantly, whispering into the false ear, “I’ll pay you the same price—”
“No. No, thank you, Gaston.” Now he was being unreasonable to boot! What did he want with a genuine painting? Lucien stumbled toward Mlle. Duhamel. He stumbled on his artificial leg.
Mlle. Duhamel’s face was as calm as if nothing had happened. “Why don’t you tell them you were pretending?” she asked him, out of hearing of the others. “Why don’t you pretend the whole afternoon was a great joke?”
Her face was even victorious, Lucien thought. He looked at it for a long moment, trying to draw strength from it, and failing. “But I wasn’t joking,” he said.
Then the guests were gone. Only he and Mlle. Duhamel remained. And the genuine Giotto. François, who had witnessed his master’s defeat, standing in the background like a silent tragic chorus, had excused himself last of all and gone out.
Lucien sat down heavily on the divan.
“I shall keep the painting,” Lucien said slowly, and with quiet, profound bitterness. He did not recognize his own voice, though he recognized that it was his real voice. It was the voice of the fragment of a man. “It will be the one original that will spoil the purity of my forgeries. Nothing in life is pure. Nothing is one thing and nothing more. Nothing is absolute. When I was a young man, I believed no bullet would ever touch me. And then one day I was struck by a grenade. I thought I could never misjudge a painting. And today a public misjudgment!”
“But didn’t you know that nothing is absolute? Why, even my kitten knows that much!”
Lucien glanced at Mlle. Duhamel with the fiercest impatience. He had scarcely been aware of
her the past few moments. Now he resented her presence as much as he had when she had spoken to him first in Gaston’s salon.
She was standing by the little three-legged console table where lay her green string gloves and her big square pocketbook that was as flat as her own body. She looked at him anxiously, as if she were puzzled for a moment as to what to do. Then she came toward him, sat down beside him on the divan, and took his hand in hers. It happened to be his false hand, but she betrayed no surprise, if she felt any. She held his hand affectionately, as if it were real.
Lucien started to take his hand away, but only sighed instead. What did it matter? But then, with the touch he could not feel, he realized another misjudgment, a much older one. He had thought he could never feel close to any human being, never allow himself to be close. But now he did feel close to Mlle. Duhamel. He felt closer to her than François, the only other person who knew of the great cardhouse that was Lucien Montlehuc. François had not suffered as Mlle. Duhamel had suffered, the idiot. It was a tenderness he felt for Mlle. Duhamel, and admiration. She lived within a cardhouse, too. Yet, if nothing was absolute, a cardhouse was not absolute, either. He might rebuild it, but it would never be perfect, and had never been perfect. How stupid he had been! He who had always prided himself that he knew the imperfections of everything, even art. Lucien looked down in wonder at his and Mlle. Duhamel’s clasped hands. It had been so many years since he had had a friend.
His heart began to thump like a lover’s. How pleasant it would be, Lucien thought suddenly, to have Mlle. Duhamel in his home, to have her play for him and his guests, to give her luxuries that she had never been able to afford. Lucien smiled, for the thought had only flitted across his mind like the shadow of a bird across the grass. Marriage, indeed! Hadn’t he just realized that nothing was ever perfect? Why should he try to better what couldn’t be bettered—the happiness he felt with Mlle. Duhamel at this instant?
“Mlle. Duhamel, would you consider being my friend?” Lucien asked, more seriously, he realized abashedly, than most men ask women to be their wives. “Would you consider friendship with a man who is sincere only at the core of his ambiguous heart and in the way he wishes to be a friend to you? A man whose very right hand is false?”
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