by Adrien Goetz
2
MURMURINGS IN BEAULIEU
As they watched the walls beginning to go up, the residents of Beaulieu began talking about “Chateau Reinach,” what the Reinachs called “the villa,” “the house,” or simply “Kerylos.” In the small seaside town, the project of building a home in the style of the ancient Greeks was discussed by the dairywoman in erudite tones and by the postman with a vague air that suggested that he had seen it all before. Monsieur Theodore Reinach, “a highly distinguished Parisian” according to the notary, had chosen the finest architect, who had actually worked on ruins in Greece. Another mystery—an architect who had learned his trade “on ruins.”
A few people in town knew that Emmanuel Pontremoli was the grandson of the rabbi of Nice. The locals eyed him in his panama hat as he took his seat in the café and unfolded his plans. He had slender fingers, a drooping mustache, and always wore a light-colored jacket. When he spoke it was clear that he was an architect: he constructed his sentences so carefully that his interlocutors were tempted to repeat them verbatim, even as they realized they had completely forgotten what he had said. His tired eyes twinkled whenever he saw a pretty or well-dressed woman walk by. The notary, a dreary old fellow with round spectacles, who strung together clichés with the same attention he bestowed on certifying property deeds, had no idea about that. The Reinach family had “an enormous fortune,” was “highly influential,” and everything was being done with the most “opulent extravagance.” The “chateau” would outclass all the little palaces in the area that vied to be the most “playfully inventive,” the Moorish villas, the Palaces of Versailles in pink marble that made them look like powder rooms, and the Gothic castles concealing beach bungalows in their turrets. Everyone bet that it was going to be built in the Art Nouveau style, a “folly” that was just a little more outlandish than the others, like the Villa Gentil with its minaret—Monsieur Gentil was an art dealer—La Vigie, with its circular design—a friend of Gambetta and Waldeck-Rousseau commissioned it—Chateau Saint-Jean, the whim of an Italian-German banker—or the Villa du Parc, as big as the Prince’s Palace in Monaco, whose owner, Monsieur Peretmere, used to be a Freemason. On the promenade it was all anyone was talking about; they had seen this Reinach fellow, rather unfortunate looking, but it was his wife they really wanted to meet, dripping in emeralds, apparently, and his two brothers; everyone said the three were inseparable.
The arrival of the first slabs of marble provoked much excited commentary in this pond of babbling frogs. Gleaming white, the marble reflected the sun onto the faces of the curious onlookers. Several months later, during the second phase, the colored slabs arrived, for the dining room, and some tiger-striped marble for the thermal baths—thermal baths! The arrival at the railway station of the enormous polished columns was met with applause. They arrived by boat, then took the little train, like everybody else, and were taken down to the site in drays that nearly collapsed under their great weight. Pontremoli had chosen a quarry in Carrara that hadn’t changed since Michelangelo, from which was dug the purest stone. Those who had been imagining a brightly colored house were a little disappointed. The dairywoman knew: Greek temples were painted red, blue, and yellow, the statues in garish hues. She would take out her illustrated almanac, which she had had for years, stored in the lean-to behind the dairy, and show its engravings of Greek temples to anyone who betrayed the slightest interest. She had her own little library, its books covered with butter papers. That was how she was so knowledgeable about everything. She even looked a little like a librarian, orderly, methodical, with that hint of melancholy mixed with resentment born of a fate that had her cataloguing milk churns when she ought to have been dealing in first editions.
Since no one was allowed onto the Reinach site, and the workers were so well paid that they didn’t sit about gossiping in cafés, nobody knew exactly what was being built. People imagined silver bathtubs and salons overflowing with indecent statues, and more naked bottoms than in a museum. Ancient Greek bottoms, according to the postman, are always “ambiguous.” He preferred Fragonard and Boucher, or Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera, which was a great deal more suitable. A Greek villa, that would be an extraordinary spectacle, an orgy of pediments and staircases, and the priest, forgetting Christian charity, said at once: “What marvelous ruins it will make after those people are ruined.” Ruins: the word was on everyone’s lips. Hearing the words “Greek villa” it was impossible to imagine anything else. You could already see the signs: “Warning—rockfall.” It was an excellent opportunity for the naysayers, who mocked that it was going to be a pasteboard pastiche of the Temple in Nîmes, a hastily daubed theater set, or a picturesque curiosity with broken columns and collapsing arches, like a cemetery or a meringue, or it was going to look like a gigantic clock without a dome, facing out to sea. Without shutters the salt would destroy everything. As the house went up it was supported on a wave of rumors that ebbed, growing duller and fainter as the walls and terraces began to rise, then surged again with the arrival of the first crates of furniture. Even the pastry cook, the dairywoman’s rival, albeit not as cultured—the most vituperative Fury in this choir of ancients that included the shoemaker and the laundry supervisor from the Hotel Bristol—was stuck for anything new to say. She stood, silent and morose, attacking neat rows of eclairs with great swipes of her piping bag.
Monsieur Theodore Reinach sported a goatee, always wore a three-piece suit, and whenever he went for a walk among the tall, sloping olive trees that lined the beach at Beaulieu, he put on a wide-brimmed gray hat and tucked a white handkerchief with blue polka dots into his breast pocket. When he first appeared in town he was only forty-two years old, though everyone thought he must be at least sixty. He was graying at the temples and almost completely bald on the crown of his head. The local children made fun of him: a man who lived in the ancient world surely bathed in the sea every day, ran races naked, wore laurel wreaths, and threw the discus and the javelin—and then this portly man turned up, his face creased, dark circles under his eyes as if he’d been up several nights in a row reading and studying, looking nothing like a statue. In his shiny patent-leather ankle boots he was anything but Greek, though none of the grownups mocked him. He impressed them, because of his immense fortune and also because he was the very picture of a scholar. His dog followed him everywhere. He had two, one after the other: the gentle Cerberus, who never barked, and the ferocious Basileus, whose name was the Greek word for “king,” rather as Victor Hugo, when he lived in Guernsey, called his dog Senate; whenever he called the dog’s name, his voice carried the authority of the Republic. Theodore cared for his dog himself: the whole point of a dog in polite society was to accompany his master on his constitutionals.
The fishmonger claimed the servants “over there” had to wear white skirts and shoes decorated with pompoms, and be able to speak archaic Greek, which wasn’t easy, according to the priest. During the Third Republic, as during the time of Louis XIV, archaic Greek was terribly important. There were those who had studied it, and the others—well, everyone had learned more or less a little bit of Latin . . . and everyone could quote Molière mocking learned ladies. Greek was ridiculous, especially when spoken with the accent of the South:
Greek, O Heavens! Greek! He knows Greek, sister!
Ah, niece, he knows Greek! How sweet!
What, you know Greek? Oh, I beseech you sir, for the
love of Greek, allow me to embrace you.
The dairywoman wrapped her arms around the pastry cook. Occasionally their malice reconciled them.
Sometimes Theodore’s brother Salomon came to visit, his brother Joseph a little less frequently, they all wore a pince-nez and a hat. The first time, the rumor went all around town in less than an hour. Everyone came out to see, even the postman interrupted his round. They looked exactly like each other. They were almost the same height, had the same beard, the same pince-nez. Salomon was the least bald, Joseph the most corpulent, Theod
ore the only one who smiled. The spectacle of this triumvirate at the Réserve de Beaulieu, sitting at a table facing the sea, took place about once a year. The waiter claimed he always heard them arguing, and conversation swiftly grew heated between the three brothers, though he could never tell what about, while Marinette, the maid from Monaco, said the three Reinach gentlemen always agreed on everything, and if anyone would know, she would, since she was the one who starched their shirts, which she was most careful not to confuse, identifying them by their embroidered initials. “There they are, the three of them, Minos, Aeacus, and Rhadamanthys,” the priest said, and everyone made him say it again. They were the three judges of the Underworld. And then he added, his voice dripping with honey and gall: “Or perhaps they are actually Shem, Ham, and Japheth,” the three unfortunate sons of Noah in the book of Genesis. The pastry cook shrieked with laughter.
No one disputed that the Bay around La Réserve was the most beautiful breeding ground for crustacean species along the entire coast. The French Riviera saw the arrival of lobsters, scallops, spider crabs, and langoustines of all kinds: exiled kings, courtesans turned marquises, cardinals in plain clothes and French field marshals in grand uniforms, American writers trying to shake their alcoholism, half-veiled Russian ladies—but not many scientists, apart from those from the Nice observatory, financed with the largesse of Monsieur Bischoffsheim, and the Prince of Monaco’s oceanographers, who were always between two polar expeditions. Astronomy and the creatures of the seabed were very specific areas of knowledge, everyone knew exactly what they were about, even if one couldn’t understand a word. But this Theodore Reinach was a scholar in every field. No one dared open their mouth when he was around. At first everyone thought he was an expert only on ancient Greece. They soon realized that he read books in every language on every subject, he would leave a pile by his deckchair, and Marinette would carry them back up to his bedroom as though they were the Gospels. In his leisure time away from archaeology he devoted himself to chemistry, geometry, music, and the legend of Catherine Ségurane, who had beaten back the Turks during the siege of Nice at the end of the Middle Ages by showing them her bottom. It was intimidating.
Everyone agreed that this man, in spite of his woolen suits lined with red silk and his silver-knobbed cane, seemed happy. A greenhouse plant who was thriving out in the sun and the wind. He was no longer studying, he was composing. For the first time in his life, he was doing something other than reading and writing. He was like a musician, taking a theme, constructing variations, throwing himself into one movement then another, bringing in more and more instruments as he built up to the finale. Sitting on the pebbly beach and skipping stones, I listened. I watched. I amused myself with my harmonica. I bade my time. This building—with its dozens of laborers, diggers, draftsmen and surveyors, all working on the Anthill, the Pointe des Fourmis, as it had always been known, and which now suited it more than ever—was to be the culmination of his life’s work.
3
THE ARCHAEOLOGIST AND THE ENGINEER
I decided to breach the rocky perimeter and speak with this Monsieur Reinach, I was not entirely sure how, nor indeed about what. I had done my research, I had spoken to everyone, I was the boy who helped the postman and ran errands for the priest, I received kisses on the left cheek from the dairy-woman and on the right from the pastry cook, I was pleasant and helpful to everyone, I didn’t hang around the shoemaker that much, I was good-humored—that had always been my principal talent.
I had never met Monsieur Theodore Reinach. I had only seen him once, from a distance, entering a hotel. I wasn’t afraid of him. I waited calmly, watching for the right moment. I said nothing to my mother: I was too worried she would leap up like a devil and exclaim what an excellent idea it was and absolutely essential that her little genius be noticed by this brilliant and eminent scholar. I loathed the way she had of pushing me forward, in front of the other servants, as if she were trying to sell me at market: she made me recite the Fables of La Fontaine to the laundrywoman, the maid and the boys who came to help in the garden, for want of being able to make me perform in front of a public more worthy of me—or rather, of her. On the beach, I was always afraid that she would undress me to show everyone how well I’d turned out.
Everyone was talking about the house, at the end of Mass, standing outside the school gates. Greek antiquity posed problems for the elementary teacher: would it be like the Parthenon? Or to be more precise the Erechtheion, the dairywoman stipulated, with a lubricious air. Would there be caryatids, processions, animal sacrifices? “And cothurni,” added the shoemaker, referring to ancient Greek footwear; he saw a market opening up and carefully tore out the illustrations from the children’s encyclopedia so that the priest couldn’t show it to everybody. The baker, a dried out, stale old woman, was relieved to learn that the Greeks did not practice child sacrifice; the postmaster, who had read Flaubert, explained to her that that she was confusing them with the Carthaginians, whose land the baker struggled to find on the map. The postman wore a knowing look on his face. He liked to show off his erudition. He knew the people of Beaulieu were called Berlugans, the real name of the sea monsters on the margins of sixteenth-century nautical maps. The priest had the town’s coat of arms painted on his tabernacle: there was a sun and an olive tree, with the motto Pax in pulchritudine, which he may have come up with himself. This “peace in splendor” suggested tranquil contemplation by the sea, when in fact everyone spent their time in endless argument and discussion. The dairy-woman went off to get her giant atlas, the one that Folklore magazine—or perhaps it was the Family Museum—had given to all its subscribers. How beautiful was this France, which was just discovering compulsory and free public education. An entire generation had already learned a whole host of facts and was hungry for more; people kept dictionaries and books of grammar in their homes, which they handed down to their children. Nowadays, people in coastal towns read Cinémonde, and when anyone mentions the Minotaur, everyone knows they mean the jazz club in Juan-les-Pins, the favored haunt of starlets.
The priest, whose skull shone like an alabaster lamp in a chapel, said, “Greek is our language, the one in which the Gospels are written.” He added that not everyone could, and indeed not everyone should, read the Greek text—as opposed to what the Protestants recommended—but he was not very clear in his explanations. I understood nothing, and to tell the truth, I didn’t care. As far as the priest was concerned, Saint Jerome had translated everything into Latin, to be safe. I told myself, I who knew nothing, that the original was better. The Greek Orthodox hated Latin, and I still had within me something of my origins, a sort of irrational objection to what came from Rome and the Romans: I had always been told that my family had migrated from Greece to Corsica. I thought of myself as having noble origins, reaching far back into the past. “I’m Greek,” I would tell my friends in the harbor, which in all honesty did not particularly impress them. At thirteen, I rebelled against my mother. I couldn’t stand the interminable Masses at Nice Cathedral she dragged me to. The day I said, “I refuse,” was the day I got my first slap. I was bitterly resentful of the priests, with their dirty beards, their incense, and their soporific chanting. Yet in front of other people, I remained proud of this distinction. My father spoke French and Corsican, my mother Greek. I was trilingual, a thoroughly useless talent. The notary confidently proclaimed that modern Greek was nothing at all, barely a dialect; compared to the Greek of the Gospels, the Greek of the fishermen from Lake Tiberius, it was decidedly inglorious. The Greek spoken by the orators of Athens, now that was something else.
Whenever I tell my grandchildren about these discussions that took place in the evening, on the small green benches along the promenade, beneath the olive trees, they think I’m crazy, that I’m telling them about the time of Catherine de Medici and her court of great humanists and pious astrologers. But no, this was how things were in my youth!
Among the people I saw every day, there was one
man I venerated who was even more exceptional than the celebrated Monsieur Reinach. This was the brilliant man for whom my parents worked. He was, I later learned, among the few real friends of the Reinach clan. He was well known and highly respected in the town. An elderly, well-turned-out gentleman, puckish and rueful, with a short, pointed beard and white mustache, he was extremely attentive to his elaborate coiffure, which gave off the odor of brilliantine. He was the very embodiment of opulence and success and yet he spent his time lamenting his situation and telling me about all of his misfortunes.
As far back as I can remember, “grownups” always confided in me. I was no less fond of the domestic servants, with whom my mother played lotto into the night, than I was of the austere friends of the notary and the postman: I talked to everybody. I loved to laugh, and would mock them as soon as their backs were turned. They were like my family, all the people of Beaulieu. But this man was different.
