by Adrien Goetz
This genius of the Republic lived in the most beautiful house in the entire area, a house built like a strongbox. He had taken a liking to me and always used to tell me his life had been a failure: he had made the whole world dream, was the embodiment of the twentieth century even before the nineteenth was over; but for himself and his family he wanted one of those big old-fashioned houses, in beautiful brick and stone, with classical arcades. He had come upon this sliver of nature well before the Reinach family, and perhaps it was he who suggested that the Pointe des Fourmis would make a delightful site for a house. That I never knew. Later on Theodore Reinach used to mimic the great man’s monologues, beating time with his cane like a conductor desperately trying to hold back the waves. The dairy-woman would bow slightly when she pronounced his name: “Monsieur Gustave Eiffel.”
He used to tell me, fiddling with his heavy watch chain that gleamed in the sun, how every night he dreamed his masterpiece was going to be demolished on account of its lack of utility: “I asked Monsieur Reinach, of whom I am so fond, if, in antiquity, about which he is one of the most learned specialists in the world, great monuments had to have a purpose. The lighthouse of Alexandria, yes, I agree, it did have a purpose, but what about the Pyramids? The temple of Zeus at Olympia? What was it really for? Their villa, you shall see, it will be a marvel in the Greek style, and they will use it every day. But my tower. Did you go and see it, in Paris, my tower, my poor tower? No? You must go to Paris, you who are as handsome as the day. I suggested it to mark the anniversary of the Revolution, I wanted there to be 1,789 steps. All the big names established a petition opposing it, from Maupassant to Gounod, not forgetting Charles Garnier, chocolatier-in-chief, with whom I worked very happily all the same on the Nice observatory.” I answered, bravely, but the conversation marked me. “If I had built my tower in 1870, during the Prussian siege, you know we would have been able to observe the movements of the troops, we might have pushed back, we probably would not have suffered such humiliation and defeat, the loss of our beloved provinces. By the 1900 Great Exhibition, nobody even mentioned it anymore, even though it was still standing; all anyone cared about was the tunnels built by that mole, Fulgence Bienvenüe, their cursed, stinking subway trains and moving walkways. Surely a tower is more impressive than a walkway! It is a terrible thing to survive one’s masterpiece, to live long enough to see oneself go out of fashion. Who will remember the Eiffel Tower? It shall end up being scrapped. The future, you’ll see, I wonder if Greek art won’t be . . . ”
My ignorance, contrary to what the sour dairywoman told me, didn’t prevent me being taken on by the Reinachs. Eiffel the engineer led me to the archaeologist. I had read no Plato or Aristotle, nor any of the ancient historians whose names I didn’t know, and didn’t miss. When I arrived at the Reinach house, I knew nothing about anything. I had only one weapon: many young people used to come to see Eiffel, to take notes and draw; for my tenth birthday Monsieur Eiffel gave me some thick sketchbooks and pencils. He taught me how to draw perspective with a central vanishing point, make diagrams, create a sectional view, and as he saw that I was becoming rather good, he continued to furnish me with paper and sketchbooks to practice.
The first time I met Monsieur Reinach I had a sketchbook in my hand, in the Italian landscape format, in which I had amused myself by drawing the new villas that were going up. He looked through it attentively. In the Eiffels’ garden, the conversation fell silent. For a long time I thought, not a little conceitedly, that it was because everyone was looking at my drawings. Years later, I realized they must have been talking of unmentionable things—secrets. It’s all come back to me today, on my final visit to Kerylos. I will set down my memories in this notebook, the name of the woman I still love, the names of friends who have died, and also clues that I shall leave behind for how to locate the extraordinary object I have come to find, I hope, in this empty house. I’ve put it off for too long, I should have done this a long time ago. Yesterday I felt as though my heart was going to fail me at any moment—I could hardly breathe—and I resolved to visit Kerylos one last time today.
4
SKETCHES OF VILLAS BY THE SEA
The shape of the house follows the headland and the sweep of the rocks where algae cling. Its long, whitewashed walls lounge in the sun, the mortar between the foundation stones painted red, the large balconies adorned with bronzes, terraces meeting at an angle. There is nothing regular about it and yet there is a harmony to it that no other villa possesses. The wind caresses it as if it were a beautiful, streamlined yacht.
From a distance it looks like three sugar cubes on a saucer at the beach café. Olive trees grow by the water’s edge, the cove protecting them from the mistral. Through the branches, the sun blazes over Kerylos; lattices of sunlight on the sea isolate this mysterious principality perched on the rocks.
Guests entered by the wooden gate—if it were in Ithaca, it could be the gate to Ulysses’s palace, but here it used to swing open for the first automobiles—and immediately fell under the spell of the place. Up a flight of steps, at the top of which the door is painted a beautiful antique red, the color of Minos’s labyrinth at Knossos. The first striking thing was the sound of the fountain, the coolness, the square courtyard with columns, an oleander bush sloping over the ornamental basin, the soft colors. They would wander over to the library that looks out onto the Mediterranean, discover stairs, corridors, bedrooms.
An umbrella pine made an edifice for the birds, stirring gently in the breeze. Theodore Reinach never wanted a proper garden around the house. He left the most beautiful trees that were already there and planted others here and there—cypresses for shade, roses, succulents, and palm trees from the Riviera. A few wooden benches placed at random for reading and meditation, looking like they came from Japan. Inside the porch there is a fragment of a painting from Pompeii, protected by a pane of glass, its colors changing according to the time of day. It could almost have been discovered here. It’s not a picture of anything, just some beautifully executed garlands. It lends just the right note, like a quotation cut out and pasted onto the first page of a novel.
It glows. Other villas built in that era were eye-watering, suffocating, cluttered with furniture, sideboards with balusters and gilded chairs in the Louis XVI style, padded like elderly society ladies. Colors were aggressive—fuchsia, Empire green, bordeaux, standing out against a stained walnut background like the walls in prefectures and town halls. Some were cavernous, dark and bronze, with lampshades rustling in every corner, flounces, glass globes filled with birds from the tropics, lacquered tea caddies from Japan and Coromandel screens. Others resembled wedding dresses, in the Louis XV style, white on white, chandeliers tinkling with crystals. Local society went from one to the next, evincing a vague disgust. The heady smell of kerosene lamps. Even burglars were tired of it all, only bothering with the jewelry, and still suspicious it might be gold plate and paste.
But at Kerylos the visitor, gaze drawn far out to sea, could breathe. Guests awoke in rooms flooded with sunshine, pure white light dancing on ocher stone, the sea sliced into large rectangles. There was the smell of salt, freshly starched sheets, olive oil, and resin. There was no reason to be discontented.
The omniscient dairywoman was sure she knew all the crimes of the Reinach family, though she got tangled up in her explanations. She claimed that Monsieur Eiffel too was a convicted thief—it was no accident that the two fat, wealthy bastards got along so well. She was talking about the scandal in Panama, “like the hat,” a terrible case that tarnished the name of Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had brilliantly pulled off the Suez Canal during the reign of Empress Eugenie, only to find himself mired in a sticky financial situation. Eiffel, she claimed, received millions. She talked about the suicide of the banker Jacques de Reinach, though she couldn’t say if it was the same family as “our” Reinach from Beaulieu, but she believed it was. Her best customer, a shrewish woman of the parish, responded that the planet was horrible, dis
honest, and that humanity only cared for money. With the fishwife and the butcher’s wife, they formed a circle that was worthy of the empress’s ladies in waiting. They were duchesses.
When the house, blindingly white, began to rise up, the dairywoman repeated to anyone who would listen that it was proof that this Monsieur Reinach was an imposter, for he clearly was less of an expert on the monuments of Greece than she. The postman, helping himself to another glass of rosé, confirmed that on envelopes Monsieur Reinach was never “Monsieur de Reinach,” though it could be a different branch of the same family: “Some took the noble ‘de,’ a mistake they clearly thought was neither here nor there.”
The postman did his rounds of gossip, telling everyone about Chateau Amicitia, with its columns and grand staircases, which made a great impression and into which an American diplomat had just moved. There were dramas and goings-on all over the place, and the priest, sweating gobbets on his bicycle, started on about the Dreyfus trial again, making the point that no one really knew if the captain, now exonerated, was really as innocent as all that. This holy priest was received at the Eiffel residence, where he prattled endlessly, saying whatever came into his head. Monsieur Eiffel could renovate his church! Some solid metal girders, but plastered over on the inside! My mother had to listen to them for hours. Madame Eiffel, whose name was Marguerite, died young, at thirty-two. In a way Monsieur Gustave never stopped mourning, though they had five children, three girls and two boys, which could have made for a lively household. But they didn’t laugh much. There were always pretty women. Eiffel instilled in them all a certain rigor and reserve, and a grand Louis XIV style in their house in Paris, Rue Rabelais, a veritable palace, with a salon like the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. It bore no resemblance to his famous tower. The priest, who visited once—to ask for a Christmas payment— remembered it as a fairy tale; at the home of the king of riveted steel he saw lace-canopied four-poster beds, finely woven Persian rugs, and chimneys carved like the high altar of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.
What really dazzled the priest was that Monsieur Eiffel had achieved it all so young: at the age of twenty-six, he had been in charge of the construction of Bordeaux’s metal footbridge. For those who are intelligent and “capable,” there’s no reason to wait fifty years to prove oneself. And, as he explained to the postman, that is called progress.
5
THE BARBARIANS AT THE GATE
I ought to have left Kerylos and tried for a place at the École des Beaux-Arts. Pontremoli encouraged me to do it, they still taught “good architecture” there—the kind he practiced himself—I might have become an artist sooner, in any case I would have been free. I should have left with the love of my life, instead of leaving with someone else; I should have left with what I had found in Greece, with my own hands, which was taken from me—I would be a famous archaeologist today—without feeling the slightest gratitude to the Reinachs, without regret; I should have left when I failed to bring my best friend’s corpse home with me, I should have left without saying thank you, rather than being chased away like Candide from the Chateau of Thunder-ten-tronckh, with hefty kicks up the backside. But I stayed, like Ulysses spellbound in Calypso’s cave, Ulysses among the Phaeacians, Ulysses drugged by Circe, Ulysses dazed and unable to escape from the belly of the Trojan horse. And today, I have tiptoed back inside.
It took the last war for this sanctuary to be desecrated. After 1914, I thought I had seen the worst. During that war, I saw monsters who wanted to destroy civilization, who sought the opposite of all that the Reinachs had taught me. When the Germans burned down the cathedral in Reims, I was sure that we had reached the apogee of horror. My friend André Pézard told me about the months he spent living like a mole in the subterranean passageways of the Vauquois hill, crawling among the rats in the dirt and filth, to lay mines beneath the tunnels dug by the Germans. Whole months without seeing the sky, breathing death. He survived; he was lucky. He has lived in Italy ever since, he never wants to see anything beautiful again, he translates poets of the Middle Ages as a way of healing himself, and as much as he can, avoids talking about the things he saw.
I never imagined that just a few years later I would witness the absolute triumph of the barbarians; that I would see people I loved, people I knew, die in a way that is impossible to say, impossible to describe, in the wake of which would be an echoing silence. A silence that is just beginning to be broken, just a little, not quite yet.
A moment ago, going up the stairs, I noticed something I’d never paid attention to before: the sun falling on the altar at the far end of the Andron, the most beautiful of all the rooms in the house, in such a way that only the inscription on it could be seen: “To the unknown god.” I wondered if it was the villa’s epi-graph. I understood it in my own way: God remains unknown to me. I prayed to Him occasionally, that He might help me find my Ariadne, lost forever—I am a simple man, impoverished in my spirit—He never heard me, and He left me desolate.
The first thing I learned about the Reinach brothers was that they were all three very close, and that there was a simple way to remember their first names. Joseph, Salomon, Theodore: their initials formed a kind of motto in French, Je Sais Tout, meaning “I know everything.” They were the embodiment of science, art, literature, politics—everything that made the France of that era.
Joseph was a politician who also wrote for the newspapers. If he had wanted to, he might have become a great teacher, an inventor, a curator at the Louvre—even the presidency of the Republic was not beyond his reach. Salomon and Theodore were members of the illustrious Institute of France, they wore the elaborate embroidered green suit, the uniform of the category of men known as “Immortals,” who were addressed with the words “Cher Maître” twice in every sentence. They were members of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres.
I was the son of a cook, who began as a maid, and a gardener, not even head gardener. I quickly discovered that in France there had been, since the era of Colbert—I knew about him, my schoolmaster had spoken of him—a kind of parliament of learned men who elected each other. On the list of famous names that the notary had given me, the only one who had been mentioned at school was Champollion, but that was enough for me. Theodore was also a politician.
The priest, with a smile, used to talk about “the brothers ‘I-know-everything-and-even-more-than-that,’” and then wander off, chuckling like a Boy Scout. Over the years I heard all kinds of jokes: “The Reinach brothers know all there is to know about everything, but they don’t know anything about anything else!” “Those three know-it-alls, grimacing like monkeys.” “This is Orang, this is Utan, and this is Orang-Utan, the youngest,” “Monkeys, yes, but terribly learned, they marry goats who are terribly learned too,” “At night, we put them away in jars on a shelf”. . . These were the kinds of things people said in Paris, they made fun of them in the cabarets in Montmartre, just because they were famous. I saw caricatures, horrid little figurines that turned my dear Monsieur Reinach into a monkey, with a sign around his neck on which was written Theo dort, “Theo’s sleeping,” another one I didn’t immediately understand, because it was related to one of the great mysteries of the house, where he was applying something to a sort of sleeping cap with a paintbrush: Theo dore, “Theo’s gilding.” They were the focal point of jealousy, not because they were erudite, powerful, brilliant at everything, but simply because they had inherited a fortune, something people would have willingly forgiven if they had been a little dimwitted. At the time, I confess that these jokes amused me, I saw nothing terribly wrong in them. It was I who was a little stupid.
“Je sais tout”—I know everything—was an insult I didn’t understand at the time. Like all true geniuses, the three Reinach brothers wrote many pages in which they made clear what they did not know, in which they acknowledged their mistakes—I found this note by Theodore, for example, in the margin of a Greek book by the historian who cited the name of Christ, Flavius Josephus: “I
take back my criticism, in favor of my original assessment.” There are many such passages in their works, and this was indeed one of the lessons Theodore taught me: anyone who says “I know everything” cannot be a truly great scholar. How many times did I hear him end an explanation with: “I know only one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” In their youth there was still the possibility that one could know everything, unlike today, when we will soon be sending men to the moon. It was not until much later I understood what “Je sais tout” signified: malice, ignominy, contempt.
Before I came to know the Reinach family, I understood nothing about the Dreyfus affair. Adolphe Reinach, Joseph’s son—he was, almost to the day, the same age as me, and passionate about politics—became my best friend. He had undertaken to write down the details of the affair in a large scrapbook, with illustrations of the protagonists. At fifteen, I had vaguely heard about it, like everyone else, nothing more, all the uproar was so far away. I didn’t even really know what it meant “to be Jewish.” I am not sure if I understand much more what it means today, but what I do know is that none of the jokes from that era make me laugh anymore.
All these taunts and caricatures were nothing but hatred. The hatred that was used against Captain Dreyfus, the same hatred that later spread everywhere. People lowered their voices as much to praise them as to slander them: they were geniuses, benefactors, men of taste and talent; they were thieves, imposters, counterfeiters, “foreigners.” They were implicated in a scandal in Paris. I sensed that I was not being told the whole story. I asked my mother, who reassured me: “The fine upstanding people here know nothing at all. I have made my enquiries. There are no people better than this family. If you go to work for them it will be with my blessing, my child.”
I couldn’t possibly have imagined what Villa Kerylos would become for me—and for them—at the threshold of hell. I entered the house because I was determined to. The rock was so close, right beneath my eyes, it took me barely any time to get past the gate. I was still barely more than a child, yet already a small, rather self-assured young man. In the early months of the construction project Monsieur Reinach used to visit frequently, usually staying at the hotel opposite the railway station, signposted, in capital letters, Le Palais des Anglais, or occasionally at the Métropole or the Bristol. An entire floor would be reserved for him, he would turn up with his wife and children, English and German governesses, chambermaids and butlers, dogs and cats in baskets. Impossible to imagine such a thing today. He was more famous than a movie star. His arrival would be written up in the newspapers, along with that of all the other bigwigs who set up residence for several weeks in winter—the Côte d’Azur in the summertime was only for the poor, or for workers doing repairs on the villas. It was said that each of his six children had their own valet and tutor, as Joseph, Salomon, and Theodore used to have, until they entered the lycée. I used their school-books when Monsieur Reinach was helping me catch up: they were given written lessons, which they studied on their own, then their tutors would spend hours taking them through everything to ensure that they had understood. It was their father who had invented this convoluted way of learning. It meant he gave them a great deal of freedom, but in such a way that he was able to control them, his three geniuses. You have to imagine my education, in 1902, in this sort of peasant village, invaded by royalty, rich ladies and stars, next door to Villefranche—the fishing village, that my mother despised—where not everyone went to Nice every week. The people who lived there worked in the big houses and the hotels, which produced a small consortium of poor, snobbish gossips. In ten years, said my mother, the fishmonger had more than tripled the price of mullet and sole.
