If we can speak of an overall failure, it is because Bartlebooth, in real terms, in concrete fact, did not manage to carry his challenge through to the end within the rules he had laid down: he wanted the whole project to come full circle without leaving a mark, like an oily sea closing over a drowning man; his aim was for nothing, nothing at all, to subsist, for nothing but the void to emerge from it, for only the immaculate whiteness of a blank to remain, only the gratuitous perfection of a project entirely devoid of utility; but though he did paint five hundred seascapes in twenty years, though Gaspard Winckler did saw the seascapes into puzzles each of seven hundred and fifty pieces, not all the puzzles were reassembled; and not all the reassembled puzzles were destroyed on the very site where the watercolours had been painted, roughly twenty years before.
It is hard to say whether the plan was feasible, or to know if it could have been completed without crumbling beneath the weight of its internal contradictions or falling to pieces as its constituent elements wore out. And even if Bartlebooth had kept his eyesight, perhaps, even then, he would not have managed to reach the end of the implacable adventure to which he had resolved to devote his life.
It was in the final months of nineteen seventy-two that he realised he was going blind. It had begun a few weeks before with headaches, a twisted neck, and disturbances of vision which gave him the sensation, at the end of a day spent working on a puzzle, that his eyes were clouding over, that the outlines of objects were acquiring a fuzzy halo. To begin with, he only needed to lie down in the dark to make it disappear, but soon the disorder grew worse, became more frequent and more intense, so that even in half-light it seemed that things were reduplicating themselves, as if he were constantly drunk.
The doctors he turned to diagnosed a double cataract, for which they operated on him, successfully. They fitted him with thick contact lenses and forbade him, obviously, to tire his eyes. In their mind that meant reading only the headlines in newspapers, not driving in the dark, not watching television for too long. It didn’t even occur to them that Bartlebooth might ever envisage starting on another puzzle. But after only a month Bartlebooth sat down at his table and tried to catch up on lost time.
The trouble came back very quickly. This time Bartlebooth thought he could see a fly for ever flitting somewhere to the side of his left eye, and he caught himself constantly wanting to raise his hand to swat it. Then his field of vision began to shrink; in the end it was no more than a tiny crack which let in a dim fringe of light, like a door ajar in the dark.
The doctors he called to his bedside shook their heads. Some mentioned amaurosis, others said pigmentary retinitis. In neither case could anything be done, and the inexorable outcome was blindness.
Bartlebooth had been handling the little puzzle pieces for eighteen years, and the sense of touch played almost as great a role for him as sight. He realised with exhilaration that he could carry on working: henceforth it would be as if he had to strive to reassemble blank watercolours. In fact, in this period, he could still distinguish shapes. In early 1975, when he began to see nothing save immaterial spots of brightness quivering and shifting far away, he decided to find someone to help him sort the pieces of the current puzzle into their dominant colours, their shadings, and their shapes. Winckler was dead, and anyway he would have refused; Smautf and Valène were too old; and the trial runs he did with Kléber and Hélène did not prove satisfactory to him. Finally he turned to Véronique Altamont because he had learnt from Smautf, who had got it from Madame Nochère, that she was studying watercolours and enjoyed doing puzzles. Since then, almost every day, the chit of a girl comes to spend an hour or two with the old Englishman, putting the little wooden pieces into his hand one by one, as she describes in her still, small voice the imperceptible differences of colour between them.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
Rorschach, 4
OLIVIA RORSCHACH’S BEDROOM is a bright, pleasant room hung with pale wallpaper patterned in Japanese style, and with furniture in agreeably light-coloured wood. The bed, covered with a patchwork-pattern cotton bedspread, stands on a broad woodblock platform which serves on each side as a bedside table: on the right-hand side, a tall alabaster vase filled with yellow roses; on the other side, a tiny night-light with a black metal cube for a base, a secondhand copy of The Valley of the Moon by Jack London, bought the day before for fifteen centimes at the flea market at Place d’Aligre, and a photograph of Olivia at the age of twenty: in a check shirt, fringed suede waistcoat, riding trousers, high-heeled boots, and cowboy hat, she is sitting astride a wooden fence with a bottle of Coca-Cola in her hand; behind her, a muscular streetseller waves a tray heavily laden with multicoloured fruit with a single strong sweep of his forearm: it is a rostrum photograph from her penultimate feature film – Right On Lads! – in which she starred in 1949, when she left Australia after her much-publicised separation from Jeremy Bishop and courageously attempted a new career in the United States. Right On Lads! didn’t last long. Her following film, entitled by cruel coincidence Don’t Leave the Cast, Baby!, in which she plays the part of a waitress (the fair Amandine) in love with a seventeen-year-old acrobat who juggles lighted torches, wasn’t even edited, since the producers reckoned after seeing the rushes that they wouldn’t be able to make anything out of them. After that Olivia became the star of a tourist serial, where she was the apple-pie American girl from a good home all full of good will off water-skiing in the Everglades, sunning herself in the Bahamas, the Caribbean, or the Canaries, having a ball at the Carnival in Rio, cheering the toreros in Barcelona, acquiring culture at the Escurial, spirituality at the Vatican, sipping champagne at the Moulin-Rouge, swigging beer at the Oktoberfest in Munich, etc., etc. From this she acquired a taste for travel, and she was doing her fifty-eighth short (Unforgettable Vienna …) when she met her second husband, whom she left on her fifty-ninth (The Magic of Bruges).
Olivia Rorschach is in her bedroom. She is a very short, rather podgy little woman with her hair in curls; she is wearing a beautifully tailored, severe, white linen two-piece, a raw-silk blouse, and a broad decorative neckscarf. She is seated next to her bed beside various things she will take with her – a handbag, a sponge bag, a light coat, a beret decorated with a medal bearing the old crest of the Order of Saint Michael, showing the Archangel slaying the Dragon, Time magazine, Le Film Français, What’s On in London – and she is rereading the list of instructions she is leaving for Jane Sutton:
– get in a delivery of Coca-Cola
– change the water for the flowers every other day, put in half an aspirin each time, throw them out when they wilt
– get the big crystal chandelier cleaned (call Salmon’s)
– take back to the municipal library the books that should have been returned two weeks ago and especially Love Letters of Clara Schumann, From Agony to Ecstasy, by Pierre Janet, and Bridge over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle
– buy cooked Edam for Polonius and don’t forget to take him once a week to Monsieur Lefèvre for his domino lesson1
– check daily that the Pizzicagnolis have not broken the blown-glass grapes in the entrance hall.
The pretext for this fifty-sixth world tour is an invitation to attend the world premiere, in Melbourne, of The Olivia Norvell Story, a film composed of old clips from most of her best performances, including film sequences made of her great stage hits; the voyage will begin with an ocean cruise from London to the West Indies, thence by air to Melbourne with stop-overs of a few days planned for New York, Mexico, Lima, Tahiti, and Nouméa.
1 Polonius is the 43rd descendant of a pair of tame hamsters which Rémi Rorschach gave Olivia as a present shortly after he met her: the two of them had seen an animal-trainer at a Stuttgart music hall and were so impressed by the athletic exploits of the hamster Ludovic – disporting himself with equal ease on the rings, the bar, the trapeze, and the parallel bars – that they asked if they could buy him. The trainer, Lefèvre, refused, but sold them instead a pa
ir – Gertrude and Sigismond – which he had trained to play dominoes. The tradition was maintained from generation to generation, with each set of parents spontaneously teaching their offspring to play. Unfortunately, the previous winter an epidemic had almost wiped out the little colony: the sole survivor, Polonius, could not play solo, and, worse, was condemned to waste away if he was prevented from indulging in his favourite pastime. Thus he had to be taken once a week to Meudon to his trainer, who, though now retired, continued to raise little circus animals for his own amusement.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
Gratiolet, 2
ISABELLE GRATIOLET’S BEDROOM: a child’s bedroom with orange-and-yellow-striped wallpaper, a narrow tubular bed with a Snoopy pillow, a tub chair with fringes and arms decked with tassels and bobbles, a small whitewood wardrobe with two doors decorated with a washable adhesive material imitating rustic tiles (Delft style: faintly crackled light-blue squares depicting alternately a windmill, a wine press, and a sundial), a school desk with a groove for pencils, and three bookcases. On the table is a pencil-case decorated with stencilled designs representing rather stylised Scotsmen in national dress blowing into their bagpipes, a steel ruler, a slightly dented, enamelled tin on which the word SPICES is written, filled with ballpoints and felt-tips, as well as an orange; and several exercise books in sleeve covers made of that mottled paper bookbinders use, a bottle of Waterman ink, and four blotters belonging to the collection Isabelle is building up, though much less seriously than her competitor Rémi Plassaert:
– a baby in a romper pushing a hoop (presented by Fleuret Sons of Corvol L’Orgueilleux, Stationers);
– a bee (Apis mellifica L.) (presented by Juventia Laboratories);
– a fashion print depicting a man wearing scarlet shantung pyjamas, sealskin slippers, and a sky-blue cashmere dressing gown with silver piping (NESQUIK: Another cup would be nice!);
– and lastly, No. 24 of the series Great Women of French History, presented by the weekly magazine La Semaine de Suzette: Madame Récamier; a little room with Empire furniture, where a few men in black evening clothes are sitting about on sofas, listening, while beside a cheval glass supported by a figure of Minerva, a chaise longue, with a curved and cradle-like interior, discloses the figure of a young woman lying at full length, whose relaxed pose contrasts with the tropical sunset of her spectacular, thick satin gown.
Over the bed there hangs – surprisingly, in a teenager’s bedroom – an oval-bellied theorbo, one of those double-necked lutes whose brief vogue began in the sixteenth century, reached its apogee in the reign of Louis XIV – Ninon de Lenclos, it seems, was an excellent player – and then declined as the bass guitar and ’cello came in. It is the only object Olivier Gratiolet took away with him from the horse farm after the murder of his wife and his father-in-law’s suicide. It was supposed to have always been in the family, but no one knew where it came from, and in the end Olivier showed it to Léon Marcia, who was able to identify it without too much trouble: it was probably one of the last theorbos made; it had never been played, and came from Steiner’s workshop in the Tyrol; it definitely did not date from the workshop’s high period, when Jacques Steiner’s violins were put on a par with Amati’s, but from its late period, probably the very beginning of the second half of the eighteenth century, a time when lutes and theorbos were more collectors’ curios than musical instruments.
At school no one likes Isabelle, and she does nothing, it seems, to be liked. Her classmates say she is completely bananas, and on several occasions parents have been to see Olivier Gratiolet to complain about his daughter, who, they say, tells scary tales to her classmates and sometimes, even, in the playground, to children much younger than she is. For instance, to get her own back on Louisette Guerné, who had spilt a bottle of Indian ink on her blouse during art, Isabelle told her there was a pornographic old man following her in the street whenever she went out of school and that he was going to attack her one day and take off all her clothes and make her do horrid things. Or again, that she convinced Dominique Krause, who is only ten years old, that ghosts really exist and that she had even seen her father appear one day dressed in armour like a medieval knight in the midst of terrified guards armed with halberds. Or yet again, that when given as a composition assignment: “Describe the best holiday you can remember”, she wrote a long, convoluted love story in which, wearing gold brocade and pursuing a Masked Prince whose face she had sworn never to set eyes on, she marched through halls flagged with veined marble, escorted by armies of pages carrying tarry torches and dwarves who poured her heady wines in silver-gilt goblets.
Her French teacher was at a loss and showed the script to the headmistress, who first consulted a counsellor and then wrote to Olivier Gratiolet, urging him most strongly to have his daughter seen by a psychotherapist and suggesting next year he put her into a school for disturbed children where her intellectual and psychological development could be monitored more closely, to which Olivier replied, somewhat curtly, that just because schoolgirls of his daughter’s age were almost without exception sheep-brained ninnies who could just about manage to parrot the cat sat on the mat and the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain, there was no need to treat Isabelle as abnormal or even just sensitive on the mere pretext that she had some imagination.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
Hutting, 3
HUTTING’S BEDROOM, ON the mezzanine, off the gallery he had put in when he converted his apartment, corresponds more or less to the old No. 12 maid’s room which was occupied up until the end of 1949 by a very aged couple whom people called the Honorés; in fact Honoré was the man’s forename, but no one, except perhaps Madame Claveau the concierge and the Gratiolets, knew their surname – Marcion – or used the woman’s forename, Corinne, and so she went on being called Madame Honoré.
Up until nineteen twenty-six, the Honorés were in service with the Danglars. Honoré was the butler, and Madame Honoré was the cook, a cook of the old kind, wearing all year round a cotton scarf, a bonnet over her hair, grey stockings, a red skirt, and a pinafore with a bib on top of her blouse. The Danglar’s staff included a third servant: Célia Crespi, taken on a few months before as a chambermaid.
On the third of January nineteen twenty-six, ten days or so after the fire that destroyed Madame Danglars’s boudoir, Célia Crespi, when she came in around seven a.m. to start her day, found the flat empty. The Danglars had apparently flung a few vital necessities into three suitcases and gone, without telling anyone.
The disappearance of a deputy chairman of the Court of Appeal could obviously not be considered an insignificant event, and the very next day rumours began to fly about what was immediately called the Danglars Affair: was it true the judge had been threatened? Was it true that plain-clothes policemen had been trailing him for two months? Was it true that his office at the Law Courts had been searched despite the police chief being notified of a formal prohibition by the Lord Chief Justice himself? Such were the questions, asked by the satirical press in the first place, and then by the national dailies with their usual nose for scandals and sensations.
Answers came a week later: the Home Office stated in a press release that Berthe and Maximilien Danglars had been arrested on the fifth of January trying to jump the border into Switzerland. And it was revealed to general stupefaction that this high-ranking judge and his wife had carried out, since the end of the war, thirty or so burglaries or unparalleled audacity.
The Danglars didn’t steal for gain, but rather, along the lines of the many cases described in abundant detail in the literature of psychopathology, because the risks they ran in carrying out these thefts gave them exceptionally intense feelings of exaltation and excitement of a basically sexual nature. This stiff, upper-class couple, who had always had relations à la Walter Shandy (once a week, after winding up the clock, Maximilien Danglars would perform his conjugal duty), had discovered that the act of purloining in public an object of great value released in each of th
em a kind of libidinal exhilaration which soon became their sole aim in life.
They had discovered their kink quite by chance; one day Madame Danglars took her husband to Cleray’s to help him choose a cigarette case and was seized by an irresistible feeling of desire and fear: looking straight in the eye of the girl who was serving them, she lifted a tortoiseshell belt buckle. It was only a luxury larceny, but when she confessed it to her husband that evening – he hadn’t noticed a thing – the narration of this illegal exploit unleashed a sexual frenzy normally lacking in their embraces.
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