by Paul Morand
Pierre listened in total dismay.
“Maï! You’ve done a good deal, Monsieur Niox, God knows. Your land must be worth gold! And then the building sites, they’re gold in bars.”
In a flash, Pierre saw this five-act tragedy unfolding:
LE MAS VIEUX
Centre for Tourist Attractions
In a voice strangled with rage, he said:
“My house is my own. No one shall set foot here, you least of all. You will kindly get the hell out of here!”
“But Monsieur Niox, you haven’t understood a thing—rein comprès,” said the astonished old man indignantly. “Perhaps you think que van vous vola that your view is going to be stolen from you? Magali does not steal views, he’s an artist! He admires your cloister, reckons it’s a building of public utility! A national treasure! You’ll be awarded a decoration, monsieur, as a reward for vostre descouverto, your discovery!”
“Now listen to me, Magali,” said Pierre, foaming with rage, “Do you see this gate? By this evening it will have a door and a padlock, and tomorrow, behind this door, there will be a pair of mastiffs and not a single human being is going to go near them, if he values his life.”
“Then que prétendès? What are your intentions?” said the old man, who had gone pale.
“My intentions are to keep my cloister to myself alone, yes.”
Magali burst into a paroxysm of fury and poured out a hail of Niçois invective that came to an abrupt stop; an unctuous smile spread over his face.
“Fassès errour, you’re making a mistake, Monsieur Niox, your cloister is la proprietà dé la Francé. It’s French property, and if what you say is true you could have the Commission for Historical Monuments on to you.” He paused for a moment and added in a meaningful tone: “The Commission for Historical Monuments is on friendly terms with our lawyer, Maître Caressa.”
And, removing his beret in the sort of grand gesture of mock politeness associated with declarations of war, Magali shuffled away.
Pierre did not even have the choice between conceding and resisting; conceding meant three stars in the Guide Joanne,8 wardens in caps parading through his olive trees, coaches from Marseille, shrieks of delight from tourists; resisting meant enduring daily and multifaceted persecution, both spiteful and relentless. But resistance would become impossible if Caressa and the Beaux-Arts people got involved. Pierre had no choice but to leave… leave, yes, but taking his cloister with him (he wasn’t going to surrender it to this gang if it was the last thing he did), and doing so quickly, for he risked being listed.
Within a few minutes he had drawn up his battle plan.
He paid and dismissed his workers after he had made them put up a temporary door, which he locked tightly. At three o’clock in the morning, he left by car for Ventimiglia; at eight o’clock he employed some Italian builders; he hired a coach, filled it with his workers and provisions, took his entire staff to the Mas Vieux under the supervision of an energetic foreman whose silence he bought, and within a few days he had dismantled his cloister piece by piece like a clock. He himself ran around, telephoned, gabbled away in Italian, operated the roller and the hoist and distributed tips. Once the work was well under way and while the stones, all numbered and sorted, were being lined up one behind the other on the ground, Pierre rushed off to Cannes, dashed around Toulon, and went as far as Marseille. Ten-ton trucks hired by him toiled up to the Mas Vieux during the night, through woods, amid avalanches of gravel. Throughout the day they were filled with small columns, foundation stones, arches, capitals and tiles. The following night, a night with no moon, the convoy hurried down from the hills, escaped to the coast and unloaded material at different points; at Golfe Juan into a tartane, at Cannes into an old yacht, at Salins d’Hyères a trawler took the cargo on board. In the evening this fleet cast off and transported the charming little monument, which had not moved for ten centuries and which was now sailing the high seas, to Port-Vendres, and from there, two days later, to Barcelona with all the papers in order, the blessing of the customs, and a certificate of origin.
CHAPTER XII
“HELLO, is that Monsieur Niox? Is that Quick Silver?” said a woman’s voice over the telephone.
And because he groaned, not answering with either a yes or a no, the twittering interspersed with giggles of laughter allowed him to recognize Fromentine’s voice. She scolded him for having forgotten them and reminded him of his promise to take them to the Louvre. She suggested a rendezvous the following day, which Pierre accepted, delighted at the prospect of seeing Hedwige again. They agreed to meet at two o’clock at the square du Carrousel.
“The museum is only open until four o’clock,” said Pierre. “Try to arrive a little before closing time.”
He was waiting for them in front of the Pavillon Mollien, in the coldest spot in Paris. They approached him head-on, asserting their full height. Pierre saw six marvellous legs coming towards him, walking with an imperious spirit and sparkle. He was dazzled, horrified. “If these girls were determined enough and followed up their ideas, nothing could withstand them. They’ve got an amazingly powerful presence. Everything grows dim once they take charge.”
As they came up to him, the troupe of Mademoiselles Boisrosé detached themselves and surrounded him, all talking at the same time, then shortly afterwards individually, each doing their best to attract his attention. How could he possibly cope with three of them? “But lack of concentration and the inability to persevere will be their downfall,” he added to reassure himself. “They will remain children and will never generate anything.”
They began at the beginning, with the fifty-ton objects that were impossible to lift, with the granite sphinxes doomed to remain for all eternity amid the dampness of the ground floor, with the stone Molochs, with all the simulated gods that would never reach a higher floor in any gallery and that would break the floorboards were they to be moved upstairs. Pierre Niox and his flock walked at a goodly pace and the noise of the women’s heels echoed on the stone slabs. Angélique wanted to stop, saying that she “adored” these monsters, their solitariness and their impotence, and that she could understand lovers arranging to meet in their shade. She emphasized this point eagerly, which surprised Pierre.
They inspected the ranks of obsolete gods, arranged by the Beaux-Arts in an eternal and administrative symmetry.
“Whose idea was it to collect all this?” asked Hedwige.
“The Renaissance, the Convention and the Second Empire,” Pierre replied. “The Louvre owes everything to them. It’s the poor periods that make the best collections.”
Followed by his three Graces, he strode past the antique sculpture, made his way through the Middle Ages, talking a great deal all the while. Angélique thanked him for “adding so much to her artistic knowledge”, which irritated Pierre because she was hopeless, mistaking Trajan’s column for the Vendôme column, the Bols for the Rembrandts, and going into raptures over the plaster casts as though they were original work. To please her guide, Angélique exaggerated her enthusiasm, not wishing to miss a single drawing.
“There are forty-eight thousand of them,” said Pierre.
Angélique adopted a studiously stooping attitude and pretended to ponder over the masterpieces, which got on Pierre’s nerves, particularly as the only things she called masterpieces were either under glass or those immediately in front of the benches. She discovered resemblances in every painting: a Frans Hals reminded her of Uncle Rocheflamme; Guercino’s Faith, Hope and Charity at the Feet of God represented herself and her sisters grouped around Mamicha.
Pierre, beside himself, dropped her off at the Clock Pavilion counter.
Pierre preferred the other two sisters because of their passivity. He snatched them away as though they were succulent prey and began to pace through the Apollo Gallery. The Venuses, the Hercules, the marbles and the bronzes, the pots and the vases did their best to solicit them as they passed, but their charms were to no avail. Pierre would not
tolerate anyone liking what he disliked. He scanned the room with his eagle eye, trusting in his own dazzling good taste, and led his companions directly to the rare or perfect object. Hedwige followed, feeling rather irritated herself; firstly because she was not the object of any particular attention on Pierre’s part, and also because her foot was painful, due to a new inner sole. Her head was spinning. She had the feeling she was falling down a precipice of colours and draperies, into a pit of gilt frames writhing with school mythologies.
Pierre dismissed the minor Dutch masters and the effete Italians with all the disrespect due to them.
“Straight to the summits!” he cried, and despite Hedwige’s timid attempt to confess a liking for the Primitives, he dragged her off to the Spanish and French eighteenth-century schools. Scarcely had he reached Goya than she begged for mercy.
“Pierre Niox is the devil in person!” said Fromentine to Hedwige, laughing as she spoke.
“It was the devil who took Jesus Christ up the mountain and showed him the view,” replied Pierre, who had overheard.
Hedwige was not joking. She was in such pain that she felt she was being burnt on a slow flame. She would have preferred not to leave Pierre alone with Fromentine, who was following him at a brisk pace, having adopted his long stride. But her longing to take her shoes off was more powerful. She left them on their own. It was agreed they should meet in the Salon Carré, at closing time.
Fromentine glanced over her shoulder frequently: she could glimpse Hedwige in the distance, growing smaller and smaller, looking initially like a moving portrait, then like a character in an indoor painting, then like a miniature; eventually she disappeared entirely. Pierre and Fromentine set off together. The girl was determined to inflict unintelligible chatter on her companion, her gibberish spouting from a mouth buried in her fur, but he gazed only at her bottle-green eyes and the reddish curls trapped in between the silver-fox on her hat and that on her collar. The most spacious galleries opened up before them now like paths replete with gold and allegories. The Sabine women reached out their arms to them and the shipwrecked survivors of the Raft of the Medusa their fists; athletically, they sped past them. Pierre had finally met someone who could keep up with him; he led the way, but without walking ahead of Fromentine, who easily kept pace with him. She moved freely, proud of her conquest and happy to have the man entirely to herself and to be rid at last of all his paintings and statues, about which she understood nothing; it suited her youthfulness that this Louvre, intended for the study of fine arts, should be transformed into a playground; it struck her as normal to be the only working masterpiece there, the only living statue.
Pierre was fully aware of the attractions of this adaptable and supple companion, who followed him with obedient ease and wore low rubberized heels. Fromentine indulged his weaknesses.
“This is the way I like to visit museums,” she said, “you really do know how to see!”
“And choose,” Pierre replied.
She looked at him with a radiant and firm gaze, trying to give the verb that he had uttered without any ulterior motive a romantic, fateful meaning.
“You have to know a great deal to be able to choose,” she added with schoolgirl admiration. “You probably have to have loved a great deal and suffered a great deal.”
“I’m a good coach.”
“Most of all, you’re a good teacher. And not in the least weird, whatever people say. I pretend to move slowly because that’s how the family moves, but I never get tired. In the mountains, I scatter the hordes. Phew! I’m so hot!”
“Let me take your bag and your silver-fox.”
“I’d never allow a man to carry anything.”
She joked teasingly about gentlemen who offer to take your clothing and who, when you hand it to them, don’t forgive you.
They were now striding through the schools, the countries, the glories, the centuries. It was becoming a race, a splendid competition that left art-lovers astonished and wardens amazed. The partitions of the Louvre were turning into hedges and the polished staircases into rivers.
They were hardly speaking to one another any more, they were aiming purely to outdo each other, they “justified themselves through distance”, to use Fromentine’s words. She admired this tall fellow, who was energetic and efficient, as calm in his activities as he was sitting in an armchair; from time to time she asked him the odd opinion as she would a true friend, and when he gave it to her she would respond simply with pious silence and an earnest, thoughtful demeanour.
She certainly had a hold on him, this man in a hurry. With a sure instinct, she had seen through his weaknesses, and she was entering into his lively, perverse game with the innocent dishonesty of virgins.
“I’m not like Angélique,” she would say, “I don’t enjoy painting at all. All I enjoy is exercise. I seek whatever delights me, whatever uplifts me, what transports me!”
With that complete lack of discernment characteristic of men whose quirks are encouraged, Pierre considered Fromentine to be loyal, honest and natural.
“Do you know that you would make an excellent secretary?” he said.
This frantic canter through the necropolis of art, the sudden absence of her sisters, the irritating cries of “We’re closing, we’re closing”, this “marvellous” proposal that had just been made to her all had a dazzling effect on Fromentine. She, in turn, felt a childish need to provoke and astonish. She leant over to Pierre and told him in all seriousness:
“You are prolific.”
They found themselves in the Salon Carré just at the moment when the wardens were shutting up shop. The closing bell was ringing. The immortal masterpieces, warm, well protected and sure of a good night, would now be able to cohabit without any admirers other than firemen on their rounds.
Angélique, looking pale and weary, and Hedwige, hobbling like Ribera’s Clubfoot, were waiting for their sister, who arrived with five minutes to spare, the sole representative of the family left in the company of the space-gobbler. Pierre was very pleased to have loosened the Boisrosés’ ties. Fromentine looked radiant.
“Monsieur Niox has taken me on as a secretary!” she exclaimed.
“Now all you need is to learn how to spell,” said Angélique.
CHAPTER XIII
MADAME DE BOISROSÉ was shuffling cards as she waited for her daughters.
For some time now, she was occasionally on her own. In this bedroom, where four female existences used to unfold harmoniously, something had changed. Bonne felt it as an almost physical sensation, as though a strong draught from outside had blown away the warmth and the aroma of family virtues. She even gave this draught its proper name; but although she had figured everything out, she apportioned no blame, she said nothing and pretended she had not noticed anything, for, as monarch of this small state, she possessed that essential quality that monarchs have, that of not intervening until the last moment. This did not prevent her from getting dreadfully bored. And so, when the cleaning lady came to announce Madame de La Chaufournerie, she was delighted to welcome her.
Madame de La Chaufournerie was a tiny tinted and painted old lady, who scurried about in a self-effacing way, and who only took centre stage at tragic moments, just as the chorus occupies the proscenium arch while kings and queens are murdering one another in Mycenaean palaces. Bonne suspected her of having the evil eye and only proffered two fingers in the shape of a horn to greet her, but she happily put up with her because she could pour out her feelings freely in her presence, which is the only pleasant form of conversation; this confidante’s deafness and failing memory guaranteed discretion. Bonne treated her with disdainful indulgence; she simultaneously despised her and felt sorry for her for having married off her two daughters to officers who hadn’t a penny, which—though irritating in the circumstances—made them perfectly happy, since it meant being far away from their mother.
Madame de La Chaufournerie, though lifeless to herself, had not finished sacrificing herself
for her children, bequeathing them virtually her entire pension, doing without everything for their sake, wearing herself out doing their shopping and considering herself happy if her daily advice—which she lavished on them by letter (even though she lived in the same neighbourhood) and which covered the full range of a woman’s existence, from the shape of her hairstyle to what precautions to take against microbes—was, if not exactly followed, received without impatience. Her life was like a perpetual battle in which, claws splayed and holding her breath, she was ready to pounce on any dangers that might threaten her daughters. She had the heart of a soldier in the heat of battle, paying no attention to hunger, thirst, exhaustion, fear or what was impossible; in the heroic atmosphere in which she immersed herself, the amenities of life—pleasure, comfort, respect, politeness—played no part and even had no meaning; this fragile little old lady was tough as a trooper, she attacked and surmounted whatever obstacle lay in her path and made herself unbearable wherever she went. As a result, she had no friends, which did not matter to her since she had no need of them, and the only person she saw was Bonne de Boisrosé in whom she believed, quite incorrectly, she recognized a motherly love that resembled her own.
Barely had she entered the room than Madame de La Chaufournerie came, as was her wont, straight to the point.
“I no longer see your daughters,” she said, “or rather I no longer see them from my window. Fromentine, in particular. Where are they rushing off to like that?”
“What, Herminie,” Bonne drawled, “What! Didn’t you know that Fromentine has become secretary to a well-known antique dealer?”
Herminie, who, once she had asked her questions, was not bothered about the answers, launched into a long speech that had not the least connection with the Boisrosé girls. She jumbled her sentences together in a uniform vocal register that prevented one from remembering any of them. This monotonous verbiage plunged Madame de Boisrosé into an extremely pleasant sort of hypnotized doze in which she poured out her feelings aloud.