The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

For me, the place des Vosges has another important dimension. Occupying one of its corners is the house where Victor Hugo lived (and where Charles Dickens visited him in 1847). I have only a sketchy knowledge of Hugo’s life and work, but for no very discernible reason I have always thought of him – along with Degas and Proust, Giacometti and Beckett – as one of my protectors in the city. That corner house and Hugo have given me bearings ever since I read the extraordinary diary he kept called Choses vues (Things Seen). As the dust jacket to the Gallimard edition boasts, he was the reporter of his century, and his ability to go from the grandest to the most abject, from a tête-à-tête with Louis-Philippe to the plight of an outrageously wronged prostitute while describing a daisy sprouting from between the stones of a prominent historical monument, is a constant tour de force that I admire deeply. Hugo’s account of the Paris he knew and engaged with so closely, at every level from peer of the realm to passing flâneur, is lit up by moments of deep compassion and infectious humour. There is a description I particularly prize of Madame de Staël coming across a bent, gouty old gentleman who had played a significant role in her life and exclaiming: ‘To think that I once loved that!’

  Art International continues to swallow every ounce of energy and every last centime we can give it, like some ravening beast that demands regular sacrifice. Idly I wonder whether Albert Skira had anything like that in mind when he called his magazine Minotaure, although he was lucky enough to have the richissime English collector, Edward James, as his backer; and Skira lived through a period when artists like Picasso and Matisse would have thought little of donating a painting for sale to help an ailing art publication that regularly reviewed their progress. I suspect Dubuffet might have helped Jim Fitzsimmons in that way, just as Tàpies suggested elegantly that I keep the small painting he did especially for the cover of the issue we have devoted to him. The only artist I know who would help significantly in this way is Francis who, being generosity itself sometimes, has not only given us a signed edition of prints but told me I should feel free to sell the Three Studies for a Portrait of Peter Beard that he gave me many years ago if I want to.

  This has put a renewed boost into our house search, while giving me an unreal sense of power, as if I traded important pictures for attractive apartments every day. One of the dangerous things about being with Francis is that you tend – or I certainly tend – to imitate his mannerisms and style after a time, particularly once you’ve rolled round the restaurants and bars with him, putting away incalculable amounts of expensive booze. Up until now, the prices of property in the Marais have seemed pretty much out of reach, and against my instinct Jill and I had also been looking further east, beyond the Bastille – and, in my view, beyond the pale. But now we should be able to afford something that’s liveable, although smaller than Archives, as well as acceptably historic. I go through Le Figaro’s property columns every morning until I come across a two-bedroomed flat with a ‘double’ sitting room tucked back on a second courtyard on rue Michel le Comte, just a few minutes’ walk from the office on the other side of rue du Temple. The price is high but still just about affordable. I go flying out of the office and am rather disappointed to find a dingy side street with a couple of façades possibly betokening impressive houses behind but not much else of interest; the joke I’ve been having with myself that I’m ‘Michel le Comte’, coming home to roost, pales. Nevertheless I call the owner, who I notice has a prominent ‘de’ in her name, and arrange a visit.

  The unpromising exterior leads to an unkempt and apparently uninhabited courtyard. Jill gives me an apprehensive look as a feral cat shoots out of one open doorway into another. We come to a smaller, second courtyard, filled with bushes and flowering plants, that we can just make out through the bars of a huge, wrought-iron gate. The gate swings open, and we walk through, noting the canopied well and the sundial overhead on the inner façade. When we get to the second floor, another door swings open and Jill and I enter a mirage of pink. The walls are pink, the beams high overhead are pink, the curtains are silkily pink, and the lady who emerges from behind the door is pink-cheeked, plump, and dressed entirely in pink. We refrain from commenting on the obvious and are led through the double sitting room, divided into two distinct spaces by vertical beams, which I assume originally formed a wall before the plaster between them was hacked out to create the see-through colombage effect. The room is impressive, with tall windows looking out on the courtyard, a massive stone fireplace, and a mirror running up most of one wall from where it augments not only the space but the profusion of pinkness contained within. I also note several objects and pieces of furniture – an elegant Régence console table, a bergère armchair upholstered in magenta-coloured velvet, a looking-glass framed in carved ebony – that I covet instantly.

  Before we even go through the exiguous kitchen to the nondescript bedrooms connected by a narrow, pink-tinged corridor, my mind is made up. Arise Comte Michel and come home! I do some quick historical research while the mood is on me and find that the street name has been unchanged since the end of Saint-Louis’ reign in 1270. Nobody, I learn with genuine satisfaction, has been able to identify who the original Michel was (we know who you are!). In the fifteenth century our building served as an inn, ‘A l’enseigne de l’Ours et du Lion’ (‘At the sign of the Bear and the Lion’), for pilgrims on their way to Compostela, then it belonged to various, boring dignitaries, mostly tax-collectors and financiers, before losing its cachet along with the whole of the Marais after the Revolution. We have a remarkable stone staircase, with an intricate, wrought-iron balustrade, the oldest sundial in Paris (dated 1623 on its stone tablet), and plenty of dismounting posts and tethering rings for your horse dotted around the courtyard. Living here will bind me closely to the history from which I believe I sprang. Other considerations, like Jill’s seeking a home to bear and bring up children (a concept I have taken loftily on board, but without much subsequent consideration), can be seen as peripheral. Although ‘Madame de’ has named a high price and told me she will not bargain ‘like a Marocaine’, she is not above removing whatever she can prise out of the apartment, including the sooty fireback with its elaborate coat of arms. When I tell her that if she takes that family crest, which is not hers (could it be Michel le Comte’s?), we will withdraw, she backs off immediately. I realise that I could now parlay the price down and that she would probably accept, but I am still on my Bacon high and grandly decide not to bother, as if money no longer counted.

  Luckily, enough of that money remains for us to undertake a complete renewal of the apartment. The corridor’s flimsy walls disappear, opening up sorely needed extra space in the bedrooms, the kitchen is enlarged and expertly redesigned, and soon the only vestige of the Pink Lady’s presence are the silk curtains, which suit the big room perfectly, particularly once we find some stylish, tasselled tiebacks that allow them to billow voluptuously over the windows’ upper panes. We bring the few good pieces of furniture that we have at rue des Archives, notably the imposing African chair, two slender trestle tables made out of Versailles parquet, some gilt Baroque candlesticks, acceptably distressed and transformed into bedside lamps, as well as a set of Thonet bentwood dining chairs that I picked up in a single lot at Hôtel Drouot. The paintings range from Dados and Adzaks to delicate watercolours by Music and Arikha’s powerful portrait of me, while on the best-lit wall in the big room we’ve hung our recently acquired Tàpies between a landscape in bas-relief by Raymond Mason and a big charcoal head by Auerbach.

  On one of my daily visits to the apartment to make sure the workmen were moving forward, I saw the main door of another hôtel particulier on rue Michel le Comte standing open. The distinctly neo-classical façade had already intrigued me because it looked so modern in this context, but I’ve since found out it was the last big town house to be built before the Revolution, and the only example of domestic architecture by the visionary Claude-Nicolas Ledoux still standing in Paris (his Royalist connections led to his imprisonm
ent and financial ruin). Inside, the courtyard is monumentally pure, with an almost aggressive absence of decoration. But, as everywhere else in the Marais, Ledoux’s severely beautiful building is only the topsoil of this ancient site, where the records show not only a famous jeweller in residence during the Middle Ages but, centuries later, Madame de Staël, who was born here. A few doors down, I find to my delight, no. 25 was a real-tennis court, the Jeu de Paume de la Fontaine, first mentioned in 1480. Did any of the pilgrims staying at our Auberge de l’Ours et du Lion, I wonder, find time for a quick hit before continuing their journey to Compostela? After the Revolution, when this primarily aristocratic game fell into disgrace, the spacious courts were frequently redeveloped as theatres, as previously noted. The one at no. 25 was no exception, and the theatre that replaced it became so successful that people living nearby made a public complaint about the number of carriages blocking the street and the insolent behaviour of the lackeys who attended them and their pleasure-loving, theatre-going masters.

  This last piece of information gives me particular satisfaction as I walk back to the office and am forced off the narrow pavement by a waiter shooting out of his café as if no one else in the world existed. Nothing much in Paris has changed, I reflect, with the inestimable benefit of historical hindsight. Insolent lackeys still abound…

  It’s been years since I felt so optimistic. Rather than expect the worst, as my temperament habitually inclines me, I look to the future buoyantly. I have come out of a deep depression to re-launch a respected art magazine, fall in love, marry, move into a fine apartment and now – the cherry on the cake! – become a father just before I turn fifty and waddle complacently into middle age. I should have preferred not to have fallen so low before being swung to such exalted heights; indeed, my cautious nature would choose fewer triumphs so as to avert the envy of the gods: the story of Polycrates’ ring impressed me indelibly. But at least I’m going to try to temper my exultation so that it doesn’t irritate other people. I’m fully aware that if events now seem to be going my way, it’s less thanks to me than to blind fate and the help of a few friends. Mariella has been consistently supportive (so much so that I would never dare to suggest that the magazine needs regular, dependable injections of cash rather than the irregular cheque, however munificent). Several friends, notably our lawyer, have given us their support, and our staff, which has hardly changed since the beginning, continues to make daily sacrifices for the cause. But there is no doubt as to who my main benefactor is, mercurial and treacherous as he can be. As I sell off a lithograph to pay a few wages and prance about our new apartment, which he has indirectly bought for us, I know how beholden I am, and I take a plane ticket to London to deliver my thanks in person.

  Francis is looking older and frailer than usual when I meet him for dinner at the well-upholstered Bibendum restaurant in South Kensington, a short walk from his studio. We don’t talk about his health, because I sense that at the moment this is one of those no-go areas that often surround him like quicksands awaiting the unwary. He seems withdrawn, with none of the rosy expansiveness I had unconsciously expected. I chatter on, dropping in bits of Parisian gossip as I gratefully devour my dressed crab, but Francis barely responds. Now that I know that our daughter Clio (we’ve even chosen the name!) is on her way, I, on the contrary, am feeling unusually exuberant, and it occurs to me that, since Francis has always been well-disposed towards my girlfriends and even my marriage, he might well like to share in our joy; at worst, he’ll make some bitter little comment about ‘the pram in the hall’ and leave it at that. So I drop the news casually into the conversation and Francis doesn’t react at all. Then, as the wine waiter uncorks a new bottle of the Montrachet we’ve been drinking, I notice that Francis has grown paler and started to tug at his collar as if it’s choking him.

  ‘Well, I suppose a child is a kind of immortality,’ he says, dismissively. ‘A kind of immortality.’

  I go back to my turbot and try to head any further conversation on the subject off by telling him enthusiastically about a new Breton fish restaurant I’ve found in Montparnasse. Then, on the spur of the moment, I describe my last visit to Michel Leiris, living alone surrounded by extraordinary Picassos and Bacons.

  But Francis appears to be elsewhere, his body taut and his head averted. He has loosened his collar, and I can hear him struggling to breathe.

  ‘I just hope that if this child of yours is a monster or something, or if it doesn’t have what’s called all its five fingers and its five toes,’ he says, ‘you’ll just do it in and get rid of it.’

  Francis turns to me, his face cold and white with fury. His venom goes like a bolt to the core of my being.

  ‘Do you see? Do you see what I mean?’ he repeats, his pale eyes boring into mine. ‘Just do it in and get rid of it altogether.’

  When I return to Paris, I am still numbed with terror by the ferocity of Francis’s attack. But other shocks are to come. I turn fifty and I struggle to take on board not only being half a century old but having spent a full twenty-five years of it in Paris. In terms of experience, of life lived, this makes me as French as I am English, particularly since the English side is already peppered with Alsatians and Swabians. Now that I have an English wife, however, my eagerly awaited child will be more English than French, and I wonder whether we will want to make her more French by sending her to a school where one day, inevitably, she will learn that her forebears (albeit on orders from the French Bishop of Beauvais) burnt Joan of Arc at the stake. I begin to daydream about going back to London, where Jill has kept her attractive flat overlooking a leafy square in Holland Park. There’s a good old rough-and-tumble primary school nearby and a few courts for me to pursue real tennis…

  The dilemma seems best solved by throwing a party, but on the very day that we have planned to celebrate, I receive a call from the French tax authorities to come in for a ‘little chat’. If anything chills me to the bone as much as Bacon’s basilisk stare (although I don’t take it as personally), it is the French tax authorities, since, with my hyperactive sense of guilt, the slightest peccadillo or oversight in filling out my annual return makes me want to throw myself on their mercy; and many is the time when I pass by their local office that I want to fling myself in, my hands bound, crying out: ‘Take me, for I have sinned.’ In the event, with my heart in my scuffed boots and wearing a suitably old, shiny suit, I present myself for the interrogation. It all goes with eerie ease, since not only can I prove how I bought our new flat but I have chapter and verse on all taxes paid. Nevertheless as I thank my unexpectedly amiable interlocutors and make for the door, I still expect to hear ‘Just one last question, Monsieur Peppiatt…’ aimed at my rapidly retreating back.

  Our party goes with a swing, and we realise that although the post-Gulf War economic downturn has made serious inroads into the art world, with galleries closing and auction forecasts dwindling, Paris’s round of festivities continues. We are invited to sumptuous cocktail parties at the Hôtel de Crillon and the Meurice, to official celebrations in embassies and themed suppers organised by Hermès or Vuitton in anonymous mansions. But the next shock, although a joyous one, is just around the corner, and when Clio is born, Jill and I instinctively realise that our life has changed forever. I carefully count Clio’s tiny fingers and toes and wonder again how this miracle sparked off such rage in Francis.

  Everyone else has feted Clio’s arrival, with Mariella outdoing even her usual bountiful self with silver spoons and engraved silver mugs from Cartier as well as miniature clothes from the most chic Paris boutiques. I wonder if she has the slightest inkling that this event also probably heralds the end of Art International, which she supports so loyally and values so much. Jill’s recent absence from the office has put increased pressure on a staff that was already showing the strain of too much work coupled with minimal pay. As we cobble one more issue together, I sense a generalised disillusionment: the essays and reviews appear less well written and certain
ly not as keenly edited, while circulation stagnates and, the real nail in the coffin, advertising has plummeted. Where once we could rely on a plump section of paid space announcing interesting shows and art events in colour at both the beginning and the end of the magazine, we are now reduced to a few pages in black and white; and I suspect that if we were approached by those galleries of dubious quality whose advertising we used loftily to spurn, we might now see our way to a compromise. But even they appear to have gone quiet, making the outlook appear even more forbidding.

  The writing is on the wall. If we have succeeded in coming this far, however precariously, without running up losses, one further issue with all its printing and staff costs will tip us definitively into the red. Somehow, for all the goodwill and energy that has gone into getting us on the road, I am going to have to slam on the brakes in order to avoid bankruptcy. I lie awake at night in a cold sweat until Clio’s lusty bawling reminds me of my other responsibilities and helps me to square up to the situation. Whenever I can find an hour or two, I walk over to I. M. Pei’s once-contested ‘Pyramid’ and go down to the quietest, least visited parts of the Louvre, where the masterly vestiges of one outstanding civilisation after another allow me to get some perspective on my own, tiny predicament. Staring into the blank stone eyes of antique sculpture, I make a mental list of the bigger publications that might snap Art International up and relieve me of my financial obligations, possibly even retaining me as editor and allowing me to go back to a role I know and perform better. But I am swiftly disabused: other magazines are folding, and those that haven’t are not in the least interested in taking on a chancy venture, however admirable its quality and its aims. Taking a deep breath, I tell Mariella of our plight and earnestly advise her not to put any further capital into our depleted account, even though she has the wit to remark that we cost less than the Swiss clinics she used to frequent to treat her depressions. Later that day, I inform our staff, who in any case appear to be already halfway out the door, and cancel all further subscriptions.