The House of the Prophet

by Louis Auchincloss

“What good will a league do you if it’s run by the old guard? Will there be a single representative of the Russian government in Paris?”

  “Of the Soviets? Of course not. Why should there be?”

  Frances was one of the many American liberals who had great hopes for the Russian experiment. It was the first of what, alas, were to be our many basic differences. The Bolshevik slaughter of the upper and middle classes, including the brutal butchery of the imperial family, had given me a distaste for radical solutions that has lasted to this day. Frances tended to palliate these crimes as the regrettable but unavoidable excesses of a population too long repressed. She believed that bloodshed would disappear under a stable Communist government. I should add here in her defense that her faith did not survive the Soviet purges of the 1930s.

  “Look at the make-up of your Peace Commission!” she exclaimed scornfully. “Who has Wilson chosen to go with himself and Lansing? Three old mossbacks: an Army general, a Texas millionaire and a social registrite ambassador. Do you think they are going to do over the world? Thank you very much, they like it the way it is!”

  “Ah, but look who’s going with them!” I replied with a smile that was meant to conceal a fatuity of which even I was then vaguely conscious.

  I shall not describe the glowing ovation that greeted Wilson in Paris except to say that I was quite carried away by it. But at that time I still believed that the enthusiasm would be amply justified by the treaty that would follow. I shall also not bother to describe the work of the Peace Conference, which is now history. Suffice it to say that at a very early date I began to take cognizance of the massive roadblocks that lay in the path of a just and lasting peace—particularly in the nature of the agreements made by the other powers before we had even entered the war.

  It was picky, frustrating work, with long hours of sessions, sometimes icily polite, sometimes merely time wasting, sometimes seething with rancor. My one relief and single recreation was in the companionship at meals and at an occasional quick visit to the Louvre, of a brilliant if opinionated French girl, an expert translator assigned to our staff, Mireille de Voe.

  “I have read The Causes of War, Monsieur Leitner,” she told me at our first meeting. “I found it brilliant. But, of course, I thought you were hard on my poor France. It is not our fault, surely, that le bon Dieu placed us to the south of the Hun!”

  “I suppose the Hun may have felt the same way in the days of Napoleon. Not to speak of Louis XIV.”

  “Let us hope that those days have come again!”

  Mireille took it upon herself to convert me to the French concept of la gloire. She was very well read and always good-tempered, but she could never understand that la gloire was not attractive to a non-Frenchman. After all, it could never really belong to him. She intrigued me because she seemed the very soul of la vieille France, convinced as she was that an ordered, clipped and formal Gallic civilization was the only true one on earth, and that the “lesser tribes without the law” should somehow concede this, even if they were the victims of dirty tricks by a Richelieu, a Bonaparte—or a Clemenceau.

  “Your Monsieur Weelson is a very fine man,” she would say. “But he cannot see that the Hun is never going to use a league of nations as anything but a device to disarm his neighbor while he secretly arms himself.”

  Mireille belonged to an old French family (“noblesse de robe,” she used to say with a deprecating smile) which, for the purposes of this narrative, I have called de Voe. She is no longer living, but no doubt she has relatives who are, and it is needless to hurt feelings. She was a pale, dark-haired, handsome woman, probably in her early thirties ( I never determined her exact age ) whose pleasant appearance and constant equanimity somehow detracted from what might otherwise have been a considerable sex appeal and may have explained her single state. She was one of those faithful and efficient civil servants who is a “treasure” in any foreign office, and she lived alone in a tiny jewel of an apartment, with some first-class eighteenth-century things, on the Place François I. She was a type of woman more commonly met in Europe than in America: one who had emancipated her own life from the restrictions of an upper-class background without in the least abandoning her faith in the family lares and penates. She was perfectly content to live as an acknowledged exception to an accepted system.

  There was enough of the old maid about her to blind me, in the beginning of our friendship, to the idea that it would ever become anything else. My first suspicion should have been aroused when I saw how disconcerted she was at the discovery that I was half Jewish.

  “I suppose it doesn’t mean as much in America,” she said.

  “That’s right,” I replied, laughing. “We’re a melting pot. You can never be quite sure who’s black or white or red or yellow.”

  “It must be so odd,” was her pensive reply to this.

  “Yes, if we had a Dreyfus case, you might not know whom to cut.”

  “Ah, now you’re laughing at me, Felix. I think you laugh at everything.”

  “I don’t laugh at your Monsieur Clemenceau.”

  “I should hope not!”

  If she minded my being Jewish, it was probably only because it pained her to imagine how her family would react to this. She had no prejudices herself except insofar as a respect for the prejudices of others might create one. She seemed to like and admire me as an individual utterly apart from her own background—as she might have regarded an attractive creature from outer space.

  She was an expert on the Château de Versailles, where some of the conference took place, and we had frequent opportunities to explore the royal chambers.

  “You are so set on your league,” she told me once as we stood before the bed of Louis XIV, in the room toward which all of André Le Nôtre’s vast network of alleys and waterways seems to converge. “But don’t you see that Versailles, too, is a kind of universal concept? Everything here implies the ultimate world rule of order. The genius of man has subdued a whole countryside to this harmonious and symmetrical composition. It is only thus that true peace can come. By waves undulating outward from a center where government is seen as the ultimate art.”

  “A French government, you mean. Don’t you see that everything in Versailles is sham? It is all curlicues and gilt and shields and medallions to hide from the observer that this gloire, as you call it, is nothing but a French military boot planted on the neck of a prostrate neighbor. Not to speak of a prostrate French peasant! That is why I abominate this palace as the site for our peace. It is the worst possible omen.”

  I think Mireille was a little bit thrilled, in spite of herself, when I spoke so forcefully. She was too intelligent, after all, to believe in all of what she professed. And I see now, in retrospect, that she may have already come to care enough for me to be a bit apprehensive about the effect of the disillusionment that she knew was in store for me. For she had enough Gallic realism to see that Clemenceau was certainly going to get the lion’s share of the ugly peace for which he was so stubbornly striving.

  For a long time I refused squarely to face the horrid probability that any treaty or league of nations that did emerge from the discussions at Versailles would be rejected by the United States Senate. Of course, it was always in the back of my mind. Poor old kind and wise Mr. White was haunted by the idea, and he was in constant correspondence with his friend Senator Lodge, in a vain effort to keep the latter from boiling over. Wilson had made a fatal error in putting only one Republican on the Peace Commission—and that one an elderly diplomat far removed from the fray of politics—and nobody was more aware of this than the humble but high-minded Harry White. He did his best, working day and night, to make the Republican leaders in Washington feel that they were abreast of what was going on, even that their opinions, as forwarded by himself, were receiving due consideration, but I sometimes wondered if the irritating reminder to Lodge—implied in this correspondence—of Wilson’s arrogant assumption that he could deal with Republican opinion thr
ough a political nonentity, a dear old gentleman of affable manners and unimpeachable respectability, did not do more harm than good.

  When White told me himself, on the eve of a trip to Washington, that he despaired of persuading “Cabot” of any concept of a league of nations, I at least recognized that everything I had done in the past two years had been in vain. I suppose that I must have been preparing myself subconsciously, because the picture of what was going to happen—and what of course did happen—sprang up suddenly in my mind in a sickening but vivid glare of blacks and whites. It was not the loss of my own work that bothered me; it was the loss of my whole faith in the future. It was the vision that the Versailles treaty was going to do more to produce another war than the war itself; that it might have been better for mankind had the conflict ended in a stalemate; that it might even have been better had the Germans won!

  The extent of the blow to my psyche can only be understood if it is conceived in religious terms. I had never had any conventional religious faith. But I had believed passionately in man and in his ability to create a good life on this planet. My morals were the morals of a man seeking this good life. What contributed to a serene and contented society was good; what threatened its serenity and content was bad. I even believed that my capacities and labors toward this better world were such as to make me a contributor of more value than others. I hoped that I was not vain in that belief. Such talents as I had, had come to me as naturally and inevitably as the scent to the rose or the blue to the sky. I was a part of the world, that was all.

  But a good world. That was the point. A potentially good world. And now I had awakened to a realm of horror, a dark sewer where black grubby pieces of insect life dug in and out of the mud and slime to eat each other. What a vision to have in Paris! But not all the beauty of the City of Light could veil it from me. I suppose what I suffered at this time was a kind of nervous breakdown.

  I couldn’t work. Oh, I appeared in the office at the Crillon; I shuffled papers; I attended conferences. I tried to look wise. Mr. White was away; nobody paid much attention to me. Paris was full of people, anyway, who only wanted to hear themselves talk. I spent more time with Mireille. She even took a week off to be free to take me on tours of Paris. Needless to say, she was an excellent guide.

  It was now that she became my mistress. I use this essentially European term advisedly. It seems truer to put it so than to say that we became lovers. Mireille was basically obliging me, as she did in all things. She sensed my desperation and wanted to help. Our affair might best be described as tranquil. Mireille was what many American husbands would consider the perfect mistress: discreet, cooperative, unpossessive. But although it is ungallant of me to say so, even in these antiseptic, quasi-historical pages, it may have been the very fact that she was the “dream girl” of timid, erring husbands that kept her from being a real woman. One can’t have fire and passion without jealousy and anger.

  In my strange, desperate state of mind I tried to intensify what should have been a pleasant interlude. I persuaded myself that I felt a Byronic love for Mireille, and I would accuse her bitterly of lack of feeling. I made believe that I was jealous and that she had another lover; I sought vainly to be introduced to her old parents who lived in Chartres; I told her that she was a snob and ashamed of me. I must have caused the poor woman endless pain, for actually I am afraid that she was in love with me. And finally, one evening at her apartment, when her maid was out and she was preparing dinner for us herself, I suggested that we marry. There was a clatter of a dish from the little kitchen. Mireille turned from the stove, removed her apron, brushed back her hair and came to the door.

  “There!” she said. “I’ve spoiled the casserole. It’s all your fault, mon cher. Now you’ll have to take me out. A restaurant, in any event, is a better place for the little talk that you and I must have.”

  At Maxim’s, sitting very straight beside me on the banquette after we had ordered, Mireille stared across the room.

  “Have you contemplated the sort of life that you and I should lead after we have entered into this marriage that you so precipitately suggest?”

  How I remember her use of that adverb! Mireille’s English was almost too good. Nine out of ten Americans would have said “precipitously.” But I plunged ahead with my self-indulgence. “Certainly I’ve thought of it. We’d live here. Well, in France anyway. Maybe in Chartres. I wouldn’t dream of taking you to America. French women, like some wines, don’t travel.”

  “Merci du compliment! But American men do? I can see you in Chartres, in what one of your compatriots so elegantly called our ‘constipated’ provincial society. A divorced man married to a renegade Catholic! We’d be very popular. My dear, you can’t imagine how bored you’d be.”

  “You’re quite wrong. I want to give up the world. I want to be a scholar. A kind of monk.”

  “A monk! That would be amusing for me.”

  “Well, not that much of a monk. Do you know something, Mireille? I think I could be content, for a year at least, just living near your incomparable cathedral. Perhaps I could write a book about it. A beautiful book, like Henry Adams’s. Or like that man whose work you so admire... what’s his name?”

  “Huysmans. Well, I suppose it might last a year. No more. And a year is not enough, my friend. But let us put it on higher grounds. What about your wife? What about your little daughter?”

  “Would they be happy with a man shackled to them who wanted to be free?”

  “Oh, that is such an American argument. Of course, they’d be happy. As much as anyone is. But, Felix, let me come to the real point. Even if I felt that in the very bottom of your heart you wished to divorce Madame Leitner and marry me—which I don’t—I could never contemplate it. No, my friend, I am not a home breaker. Marriage to us is a sacrament.”

  “But I was not married in your church!”

  “I know there are Catholics who take that point of view. But I am not one of them. I believe that God sanctioned your marriage, Felix, and that if I were to have any part in sundering you and your wife, my very soul would be in danger.”

  “Mireille, you can’t be serious! What about what you and I have been doing in the past four weeks?”

  “It has been a sin, bien entendu. But a sin that I intend to expiate by confession and penance. Oh, yes! When you have gone back to Madame Leitner and your child.”

  “You mean you really believe that what you and I have done is wicked?”

  “I do, indeed. And I’ll tell you something more, mon cher. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where what you and I have done wasn’t wrong!”

  I had run into a French impasse, and I was to go no further. But the idea that Mireille regarded our love as sinful did not have the effect that it might have had on other men: to make it more exciting. On the contrary, it appalled me, and I abruptly ended our affair. It was time, anyway, for I came down with a late case of the terrible influenza and almost died. While I was delirious, I learned afterward, it was Mireille who, fearless of contagion, came to my hotel room and nursed me. It was she, too, who had the wisdom to send for my Aunt Renata, who was then in Madrid. What passed between the two women, I never knew, but my aunt took complete charge of my case, and when I became sensible again there was no Mireille to be seen. When I asked for her, Auntie soothed my brow and murmured:

  “She’s not here now, dear. She had to go to her father in Chartres. It appears that he, too, is ill. You are going to get well in my care, and when you’re strong enough I’m going to take you to Spain, where it will be warm and lovely. After you’ve quite recovered, you can come back to Paris and thank Mademoiselle de Voe for the wonderful care she has taken of you. She is a most charming person. You were very fortunate to have a friend like that in such a crisis.”

  So that was how it was. Of course, when I went home, through Paris, two months later, I did not see Mireille. I wrote her to give her my heartfelt thanks, and she answered, politely, charmingly, noncommitall
y. Two years later, when Frances and I were in Paris, Mireille gave a little dinner party for us. Everything went off very smoothly. I never knew if Frances suspected anything. If she did, she was smart enough to perceive that it was over.

  ***

  Aunt Renata, now a widow and aging, wanted to crown her collection with an El Greco, and, as Toledo was the city for that, to Toledo we went. She was late for what she was after; Mrs. Havemeyer, a dozen years before, had carted away her Grand Inquisitor and her View of Toledo, and Maurice Barrès had refuted forever the silly theories that the great painter had been mad or astigmatic. But there were still a few of his saints and virgins to be had within my aunt’s means, and she had taken a floor of a little palace on a narrow gray street, where we lived in quiet luxury, visiting churches and other palaces with our distinguished old guide—a count, no less—and going to bed soon after a sumptuous dinner with three wines.

  I had recuperated to the point of taking a mild, passive interest in things around me. For the first time that I could remember I had no desire to read. I felt utterly removed from all my former life. Frances and the baby seemed creatures in a dream; Mireille had ceased to exist for me. I found this state of detachment vaguely intriguing.

  Auntie was wonderful. She made no reference to the past or to my family. She was careful to cultivate only what was present to my fancy. When after two weeks of this placid existence, some of my natural curiosity began to revive, it attached itself, quite naturally, to her intense interest in El Greco.

  “Do you really think he’s the greatest painter of all?” I asked her.

  “Oh, great, greater, greatest—what’s the use of those terms? He excites me. That’s all I care about. Next year someone else may excite me more. I hope so.”

  “What is it that excites you in him?”

  “His vision. His sense of another world. All around us. With cloudier clouds and fierier fires and wonderful, elongated, emaciated saints.”

  “You make it sound like a nightmare.”