by Michel Déon
It was just after lunchtime. Business was slack. Jean was cataloguing his drawings in hell. Louis-Edmond was shut in his office, supposedly working, but in reality asleep with his feet on his desk, trousers and waistcoat unbuttoned, revealing a triangle of rumpled, dirty shirt and a waistband of grey cotton underpants. Blanche stood up as a German officer came into the gallery. She had learnt to recognise the ranks: this one was a colonel. He nodded to her, put his cap under his arm and glanced around at the canvases hanging from the picture rail, a smile of distaste curling his lips. Blanche was about to summon Jean when the officer asked in almost unaccented French, ‘You haven’t anything of interest apart from these horrors, have you? I’m looking for a Utrillo.’
The rule laid down by La Garenne was to make it clear that the gallery possessed many valuable reserves, far from the public’s vulgar gaze.
‘I’m sure we have. I’ll have to ask Monsieur de La Garenne. He’s an unusual proprietor and a very bad dealer. When he finds a picture he likes, he refuses to sell it. He’d like to keep everything for himself. But he can be persuaded … if you’re a genuine lover of art.’
The German smiled.
‘In that case I’ll leave you my name. You can call me in the mornings at the Hôtel Continental.’
Removing his black leather glove, he wrote in the visitors’ book ‘Rudolf von Rocroy’.
‘Von Rocroy!’ Blanche exclaimed, her heart beating fast. ‘My name’s Rocroy too, Blanche de Rocroy. I was always hearing my father talking about the German branch of our family …’
‘Yes, we do come from France originally; we emigrated to Germany after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. My father used to keep in touch with a cousin of his: Adhémar de Rocroy—’
‘That was my father.’
‘So we’re cousins too.’
Blanche clasped her hands together. Fortune was smiling on her at last, in the shape of this cousin with clean-cut features, piercing blue eyes and manners she had straightaway identified as perfect. The last of the French Rocroys, the pitiful straggler of a once great line, had rediscovered her pride in the family name. All was not lost. The younger branch had kept the flame firmly alight, and its representative was both a dashing officer and a victor.
‘Do you have children? I do hope so!’ she innocently exclaimed.
‘Four. Two little Rocroy boys to be on the safe side, and two girls.’
Praise be! The Rocroy line was indeed assured.
‘In that case, come and see me tomorrow at the Continental instead. We’ll lunch together and you can tell me what interesting things you have in your secret reserves … I’ve already forgotten your owner’s name.’
‘Louis-Edmond de La Garenne. He doesn’t awfully look like it, but he’s descended from a crusader.’
Rudolf von Rocroy raised an eyebrow in silent approval. He kissed his cousin, as cousins do in well-born families, and the following day over lunch he even addressed her as tu and Blanche, who had only addressed three people as tu in her entire life, was clearly required to respond in kind. She had brought von Rocroy good news: La Garenne owned a number of paintings of the sort that interested him – Utrillos, Derains, Braques and Picassos – although it would take a little time to have them brought to Paris from the country where they had been stored since the outbreak of war.
‘We are very interested,’ he said, so archly discreet that his interest was glaringly obvious. Even Blanche felt that his royal ‘we’ was a bit too much, and it took her until lunch was over to realise that her cousin was in fact acting on behalf of a German organisation that wished to add to the collections of contemporary painters in a number of German museums. The new Germany, he told her, needed French art just as the new France needed German order. The two countries were bound in a common hope, the birth of a united Europe, which in future would be the only conceivable way to bring peace to the world.
By now Blanche was no longer listening. She was thinking of La Garenne, who, after what she had told him about Rudolf von Rocroy, had scented a big client and big business. But who would ever have imagined that that diabolical man possessed such unexpected treasures? That he had modern masters hidden away that he had never mentioned before? In her blindness Blanche decided it must be because of his genius for discovery, and she rejoiced to think that he would now have a chance to sell at inevitably astronomical prices canvases he had shrewdly bought for peanuts when their artists were unknown names. She made her way back to the gallery, her cheeks flushed after an over-rich lunch that had finished with champagne. La Garenne was waiting impatiently.
‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Is he serious, your Roc-of-my-arse-roy?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘Did you pin him down?’
‘I did not pin him down. He is a Rocroy and his motto is the same as ours: “My word and my God”.’
‘What blasted use is your motto to me? “My word!” Only one? Like the poor! And “my God”! When the ancients had thirty-six …’
‘Your ancestor would not be at all pleased to hear you talk like that, Louis-Edmond!’
‘Well, that twit … instead of copping a dose of the clap in Jerusalem he’d have done a lot better for himself, and made a lot more money, if he’d stayed at court. Then I wouldn’t be here selling filth to perverts and ruining myself dragging artists out of the gutter and having them repay me with their contempt and ingratitude. When does your Rudolf want his paintings?’
‘As soon as you’ve brought them to Paris.’
Louis-Edmond beat the air with his arms, like a wounded duck.
‘Oh I see! I’m at his beck and call, am I? Art on a plate for the Fritzes! They open their mouths, they require, they decide. Monsieur the colonel would like his Utrillo with his breakfast. Thinks we’re at his feet, does he! Well, he can forget it! He can wait, like everyone else. Join the queue, Messieurs Boches …’
‘In that case, perhaps he’ll go somewhere else!’ Blanche said, more mischievously than she would have believed herself capable of.
‘Oh, no! No! No, he’ll be robbed blind if he does. Explain that to him. It’s your job from now on. Go out with him, show him round, talk to him about your family, and make him wait, patiently. He’ll get his blasted pictures.’
*
Jean observed this scene without saying a word. He knew where La Garenne would find his Utrillos and Picassos. It would depend on Jesús’s skill and whether he was in a good mood, but Blanche was not to know that. With a gesture that he considered dashing, La Garenne swept up his battered broad-brimmed felt hat with its grubby ribbon and clamped it on his head, apparently heedless of his wig, though in reality he knew it was in no danger, thanks to a new gum. In his black cape he resembled an elderly portrait photographer, despite lacking any of the courtesy of such a person and gesticulating madly with his arms as if, like some horrible plucked bird, he was trying to take off over Montmartre and dive down onto the city below to peck out its heart with his beak. From the direction in which he strode off, Jean guessed that he was on his way to Jesús, and was sorry he could not be a fly on the wall.
Blanche, left behind, radiated happiness that afternoon: to have, all in the last twenty-four hours, discovered a noble cousin and possibly secured a fortune for her persecutor supplied her with all the reason she needed for existing.
That evening Jesús recounted the arrival of the grotesque but skilful La Garenne, who had come as a supplicant and left with the promise that in a week’s time the Spaniard would deliver a fake Utrillo and two fake Picassos.
‘You understand,’ he said, ‘’e’s more ’ard to make an Utrillo. I ’ave to forget I knows ’ow to pain’. Picasso, ’e knows but ’e doesn’ want, so you make a Picasso the same way you smok’ the cigarette or you fuck the girl. But an Utrillo, an Utrillo …’
To help him make up his mind, La Garenne had also left with one of his canvases under his arm.
‘We goin’ to be rich, my young friend. Rich. And then one day we sa
y fuck to them all, to that crook La Garenne, to the dealers, to the painting. Fuck, you ’ear me, the biggest fuck in the ’istory of the art.’
Jean lamented the disappearance of the canvas La Garenne had taken, a red-brown bull in the Andalusian light, a sublime bull in sublime light, a vision that on the mornings when he woke up in the studio was waiting at the foot of his bed, splendid and overlooked, a door open onto a landscape that gradually, as Jesús talked it into life in his stories, he wanted to get to know. What would La Garenne do with it? The bull was destined for his toilet wall. Jean said nothing. Yet again he had the uncomfortable feeling of being, if not implicated in something crooked, then at least a witness to it in a way that pained him. Was he not making himself an accessory by staying silent? He had to put it out of his mind.
Going to Claude’s that evening, to the taste of her cool cheek and to her mysteriously indulgent smile, put an end to his remorse. He continued to long to take her in his arms and bury his face in her neck so that he didn’t have to think of anything but the smell of her hair and the tang of her skin that drove him mad with hunger. So why did it have to be on this evening that he noticed two half-smoked Virginia cigarettes, stubbed out carelessly or nervously, in an ashtray? Claude did not smoke. Jean was so preoccupied by what he saw that, since he did not dare say anything, dinner passed very glumly, despite Claude’s efforts and Cyrille’s questions.
‘What do you do to earn money? Why don’t you live with us all the time? I’ll tell Papa when he comes home that you’re my best friend.’
The absent husband was suddenly between them. When Cyrille was in bed Jean finally turned to Claude.
‘For the first time since we’ve been together, I’m not happy.’
‘I can tell … Have I said or done something to upset you?’
‘You couldn’t if you tried.’
‘Then it must be because of Cyrille. But I can’t stop him talking about his father. The longer the war goes on, the more he’ll forget him. It’s a horrible situation but it’s not my fault.’
‘I’m jealous!’ he burst out.
She smiled, reassured and reassuring.
‘Well, that’s something new, and on the whole rather nice to hear. I was a bit afraid you might not be. Although I know someone else who has much more reason to be jealous of you. But why talk about it?’
He knew she was thinking of Georges Chaminadze, whereas he was simply suffering from not knowing who had smoked two cigarettes in her apartment that afternoon. Curiously he had to acknowledge that the idea of a husband aroused no animosity in him. There were few signs of Chaminadze’s former presence at Quai Saint-Michel, as if time had already erased this man of whom only a snapshot remained, a photograph of a tall, blond man with a rugged face and short hair in tennis whites. The picture could not come to life; it fixed its subject for ever as someone who would never grow old, a tennis player who had not even met Claude when it was taken, who spoke Russian and French, who, born at Makhachkala on the shore of the Caspian Sea in 1910, had fled to France in 1919 in the great Russian emigration. That was all Jean knew; he had no idea how Georges and Claude had first met, where they had got married and Cyrille had been born, what Georges did. They had apparently lived without material hardship, but not in any luxury either, and Claude knew how to do everything for herself. Jean had found her several times with a pattern on the table, a dress she was cutting out and sewing from pieces of cloth she had kept from before the war, a precaution that had appeared full of foresight since rationing had been introduced. She made Cyrille’s clothes too. When she cooked she had that discreet, subtle way of making ingredients go a long way that has to be admired for its dignity. Jean remembered his adoptive mother’s exhausting attitude to thrift: matches split in two, one lamp for the whole house every evening, the leftovers from Sunday lunch served up cold two or three times on Monday and Tuesday, socks darned to death, bed sheets sewed edge to middle (how that seam in the middle of his bed had rubbed him!), and yet they could have lived better, but Jeanne went without from a feeling that she ought to, saving up her sous at the savings bank the way people did when a lifetime’s thrift guaranteed one’s old age. She had not understood or even noticed how money had collapsed, and had been distressed by what she had called the ‘folly’ of her little Jean when he had bought himself a bicycle with the prince’s first postal order. Albert, with the soul of a contrarian, though at heart he lived by the same strict principles of ‘a sou is a sou’, let Jean spend his money, recognising perhaps unconsciously that the younger generation no longer relied on the same values to ensure their future. In the era ushered in by their defeat in June 1940 the French were about to rediscover Jeanne’s virtues, the stubs of candles, the meanness of locked cupboards. Claude had adapted without complaint to privations that her grace dispelled. She was a strange person; her character appeared too simple and too decent for one to dare believe that she was real. Yet there were those two cigarettes in the ashtray, which, by the way, she made no attempt to hide as she emptied it after dinner.
With the butts out of sight Jean felt calmer. They belonged to a bad dream, whose scenes Claude had swept away in a single gesture. Her power was very great.
‘It’s over!’ Jean said. ‘You’re with me again.’
‘Was I not with you?’
‘No. I’m an idiot, aren’t I?’
She was silent for a moment, absorbed in thought that she tried, as she always did, to articulate with a precision and clarity that gave her more serious conversations a faintly bookish tone.
‘Do you somehow imagine,’ she said at last, ‘that this situation is only hard for you?’
It was true that he had never thought about it from her point of view. In fact the truth seemed to him so glaring and his egotism so awful that he felt ashamed and threw himself at her feet, burying his face in her lap. And could she have made a sweeter indirect confession? He looked up at her. Her eyes were wet with tears, and she smiled with the same indulgence she showed when Cyrille had done something silly.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I truly don’t know what we should do. Perhaps we shouldn’t see each other any more.’
There was so little conviction in her voice that Jean regained his courage and the sense of humour that had saved them from awkward situations before.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s definitely the solution. It’s such a clever idea, only you could have come up with it. I suggest we put it off a bit – only because to start this evening would be too easy – and definitely start in ten years’ time, when we’re completely used to each other and the separation would be really heart-rending … yes, heart-rending … and so romantic it would make a gravedigger weep.’
She offered him her cheek, laughing.
‘Go and sleep!’
In the stairwell, happy again, he ventured to ask the question.
‘Who came to see you this afternoon?’
‘My brother!’ she said. ‘How do you know?’
‘He smokes, doesn’t he?’
‘Ah, that’s what it was about, was it? Well, you’ll meet him one day.’
He jogged as far as Place Clichy before slowing down. His fitness was returning. Jesús had lent him his weights. They had a punchball and took turns at it, ten minutes each, wearing wool vests. Jesús insisted that it allowed him to do without women. There were, of course – at least for others if not for them – a variety of ways of solving that particular problem. La Garenne, seeing the fame of his gallery spread far and wide as whole coachloads of uniformed tourists began arriving to visit, intended to satisfy every taste, but despite his best efforts had not been able to find a painter who knew his way around homosexual subjects. A hissed word from a diminutive, baby-faced major with a glass eye had put him on the right track. ‘Photos!’ Why had he not thought of that? He instantly set about adding the new line to his gallery.
‘Photography is an art!’ he explained to Jean. ‘A new art. The only new art invented since
Phidias’s time. Yes indeed, Monsieur Arnaud, Nicéphore Niepce is as great an artist as Phidias, the divine Leonardo and the genius Picasso. The philistines think you just have to press a button, click!, and there’s a photo of Grandpa and Grandma and little Zizi with his hoop. The morons! When I say “morons” I’m being polite. As much composition goes into a photograph, Monsieur Arnaud, as into a still life by Chardin, and light plays as important a role in a photograph as it does in a Rembrandt. There is no phrase more absurd than the term “objective lens” when applied to the eye of a camera. Nothing is less objective than an objective lens. That transparent glass, which one imagines to be inert, is both a third eye and a brain but that eye, that brain must have a spiritual motor, which is the genius of the photographer, his vision of the world, his culture, his sensibility, his responsiveness. Painting is perhaps an expression of the human; photography is an expression of life …’
Jean assumed that this speech was a prelude to some new mischief-making by La Garenne, who always felt the need to dignify his muckiest transactions with the name of art. Thus his erotic drawings became, as he saw it, a means of psychological liberation for sexual misfits. He was even armed with a fine quote on that very subject by Freud that made of him, the purveyor, a benefactor of humanity, a saviour of inhibited couples and a generous supplier to lonely masturbators. His glibness, which never lacked conviction, was in every respect a match for his greed. The only question that remained was how he would spend the piles of money he had been amassing since the beginning of the occupation. There was no danger of it being wasted on women. Blanche de Rocroy was enough for that very restrained libertine, too stingy even to treat himself to a tart. He was not a betting man and he spent nothing at his tailor’s, being always dressed in the same black suit of the tenth-rate painter who has called himself a bohemian for far too long, on top of grubby shirts that he wore until they fell apart with, for a necktie, a greasy black ribbon that might once, in its long-distant youth, have been an ascot. In the mornings he would appear in his shiny, crumpled, dust-flecked suit as if he had slept under a bridge the night before. In his office, on the door of which he had inscribed in large capital letters the only play on words he had ever deserved credit for – ‘The bosom of bosoms’ – he would remove his trousers and throw them at Blanche, who piously set to ironing them in the stockroom, as if this garment, rigid with unnameable grime, represented some sort of thaumaturgical vessel for the Holy Grail, while her master (what other word can we use?), in his long grey-coloured cotton drawers, scratched his crotch and explained his grand designs to Jean. No one knew where he called home. Did he even have one? It was doubtful.