by Adrien Goetz
I didn’t really understand. No one spoke the Greek of Homer anymore. I had enough wit to see, at least, that Theodore did not intend to turn me into a scholar. He saw that I had difficulty learning and I was much slower than his nephew Adolphe. So what was the point? If I eventually became, through great effort, reasonably good at Greek grammar—at one point I even understood oddments like the “oblique optative” and the “second aorist”—it was because I couldn’t bear looking stupid. And also to impress Monsieur Theodore. I wanted to turn cartwheels before these people who were in the process of adopting me. Today, I can only remember a few snippets of all the things I learned back then. I remember Theodore once giving me a book by Saint-Marc Girardin, and quoting him: “I do not ask that an honest man should know Latin. It is enough for me that he has forgotten it.” Of course now no one remembers Monsieur Saint-Marc Girardin either. I am a relic.
I forgot everything. How delicious it is. The cool breeze on the tip of my nose this morning. I escaped from Kerylos. Theodore fashioned me. And then I ran away. Greek, the language of peace: what a beautiful notion that was, except it wasn’t true. All the Greek texts I liked, once I began to understand them, were about warfare, sieges, battles, heroes who killed, massacred, broke the bodies of their enemies by tying them to the back of their chariots. The Reinachs, peaceful scholars, weaponized their articles to fight German specialists. Universities were at war with each other. There was an archaeologist from Munich called Furtwängler about whom they spoke with deep respect, they owned all his books, and yet at the same time, it was very curious, deep down they seemed to hate him, a strange blend of resentment and admiration. All French people felt like this about the Germans.
On the terrace of the restaurant of La Réserve hotel, the Reinachs always sat together as a family. Nobody dared approach them. Everyone watched them and there were always the same comments: “Those girls are not pretty in the least, they inherited their looks from their father, look at their bulging eyes, and look at those boys, as serious as little Orthodox priests!” They didn’t have extravagant things, gold-topped canes or fancy dresses, which bellboys and snooty old crones alike were swift to note. They were quite content with their English parasols, gray jackets and ankle boots made in London, imperceptible luxuries. It was impossible to know anything about them. They were never seen at the Great Synagogue in Nice, which did not go unremarked. It would have been preferable, in terms of gossip, for them to take their places in the first row. They fell into no obvious category: the nabob with his courtesans, the marquis trailed by his pageboys, the gentleman from Paris ruined by gambling, the English dandy, smoking slim cigarettes and wafting around like Oscar Wilde, all so easy to describe, you could talk about them endlessly, while not actually saying anything at all. When it came to the Reinachs, everything anyone said in town was wide of the mark. It never crossed anyone’s mind to pick up one of the books they’d written. The only clue to them that anyone could find, which was endlessly repeated, was the rather limited observation, in any case rather to their credit: “They are great friends with Monsieur Eiffel, a man of judgment, and not at all pompous. Do you really believe he made money from the Panama affair? Personally I don’t think so, though that said, there is no smoke without fire . . . ”
There was one story, however, that no one told me, and even the dairywoman knew only snippets of it. The notary, polishing his loupe, said: “They were a little crooked, I think. They paid out a small fortune on behalf of the Louvre for some pieces that didn’t belong there.” He said it in a pontificating tone of voice, but went no further. It wasn’t until much later that I found out the affair had been in every newspaper and had provided inspiration for multiple caricaturists. But you have to imagine what passed for news at the time in a village like ours: the notary barely lifted his nose from his deeds and was so careful with money he didn’t even subscribe to Le Figaro, and the dairywoman whipped up everything she heard, while distrusting the few actual facts that passed within her reach. I soon found myself locked up in the heart of the Reinach citadel, studying all day every day, where no one ever alluded to anything that might upset the master of the house, at least in my presence. It took me several years to untangle the skein, when I could have just gone to the public library in Nice to request the bound volumes of Le Figaro, or Le Temps, which had reported daily on all the various affairs in which the Reinach name was mentioned. But I was so busy with all the new books that I’d been given. At the age of fifteen or sixteen I developed a passion for classical authors and their tales of tormented and sometimes tragic love affairs, I would read the same page three times to understand what was going on, or skip ten to get straight to what happened with Daphnis and Chloe. My mother was a little taken aback to see me like this, but she gradually softened—after having started off saying to me, “Don’t you see, if everyone acted like them, no one would ever get anything done.”
The main topic of conversation was still the “Affair,” and at Kerylos we used to talk about it late into the night. I was obsessed. I knew all the details, down to the most minuscule twist. Dreyfus was innocent. Adolphe knew his entire story; his father, Joseph, Theodore’s highly respected elder brother and head of the family, had written hundreds of pages about it. They were all in awe of the family of the wretched prisoner on Devil’s Island. Joseph became the self-appointed official historian of the case. At that point I hadn’t met him yet, I had only seen him from a distance. I found his books interminably long, but I read them all the same; they were less demanding than Greek grammar. But I preferred to listen to Adolphe telling me about Commander Esterhazy and the French maid at the German embassy going through the wastepaper baskets.
These mysteries, which I didn’t fully understand, concealed another one, of which I wasn’t aware at the time. There was one question I never asked myself: what did they want from me? I enjoyed an unusual status. I was the only person who could eat whenever I wanted with the domestic staff in the big kitchen below, where everyone knew my mother, and who was also allowed to eat with the Reinach children and their cousins upstairs when they came down for the holidays. Nobody was shocked by this. I was aware that I had been taken in by a broadminded family, where progressive and philanthropic ideas reigned. In England or Germany, in a grand Italian family, such a thing would never have been allowed.
A few years later I happened to be walking past the room that separated Monsieur and Madame’s bedrooms, where they would meet to read and talk together, and I heard Madame Reinach ask, “And what about young Achilles, my handsome, clever friend, who’s so agreeable to everyone? When are you finally going to let him play the role you’ve been secretly preparing him for? He wants to get out, you know, you can’t keep him locked up at Kerylos at his age. You’re holding him captive; when Adolphe isn’t here, he’s bored, and he’s bound to escape from your gilded cage eventually. Now is the moment, believe me.” I kept what I heard to myself. It had never occurred to me that I was not in this house by chance, or by a simple act of kindness. Theodore was, apparently, planning something in which I was to have a starring role, I knew nothing about it and no one had ever mentioned it to me.
Alas, nobody could have guessed what was going to happen. The tragedy that eventually played out had no single perpetrator. Adolphe, my one true friend, was killed in 1914, in the Ardennes, right before my eyes. He didn’t live to see the birth of his son, Jean-Pierre. I met the child when I came back from the front. He too died in combat. In 1942 he joined the Free French, went underground with the Resistance, and was captured. He managed to escape and get to England, where he married Naomi Rothschild at the Great Synagogue in London. Their daughter Jocelyne was born the same year he was parachuted into Occupied France with Jean Moulin. She never knew her father either, because he too, like his father, died for France. The same story played out again. I knew them all so well, loved them so much, their story is part of my own. Today the peeling walls of Kerylos stand empty, telling me how utopian were their
dreams, how much better they might have done spending their money more practically, how unaware, how blind they were, how they understood nothing of their times. They toyed with me; I amused them and I was too much under their influence to rebel. Joseph was too selfish to help me get into politics when he could have made me an attaché in some ministerial cabinet; Salomon could have given me a job at the museum in Saint-Germain-en-Laye where he was the director; Theodore could have encouraged me to try for the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris—I blame all three of them, but I will always revere Adolphe and his family.
I was not going to become, as my mother had thought in the early days, Monsieur Reinach’s secretary. According to Monsieur Eiffel, he dictated texts filled with quotations in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Coptic, languages that his secretary would need to know in order to be able to follow. Some months earlier, a filmmaker had wanted me to act in a film about the kings of Spain, but my mother put her foot down. The director had seen me at the beach. He told me I would wear a black doublet with slashes in the sleeves, he thought I looked like an infante. My mother responded with a single sentence: “No one in our family makes money because he has a nice smile.” I’d been picturing myself on a big screen, wearing a uniform with a golden chain, my name on the posters . . . And in one week I was at the Reinachs’, having done nothing but stammer, I had a job, a salary, a second family—with my mother and my father nearby, it was ideal. When my little brother Cyrille was born—there was a large age gap between us—Theodore said: “Cyrille? I hope he’s going to work methodically.” He went on to become one of the most brilliant engineers at the Eiffel shipyards. Gustave Eiffel gave him a reference for Sainte-Barbe College, in the shadow of the Pantheon in Paris—where he himself had once been a student—and then helped him prepare for the competitive examination to enter the prestigious Central School of Arts and Manufacturing, where he had also studied. At the time, the Republic functioned as smoothly as the elevators in Eiffel’s eponymous tower: two intelligent boys were given a chance, and two highly distinguished men did not think it was beneath them to facilitate their chances. Things worked out better for my brother. His protector was more efficient than mine and less of a dreamer. Between the two wars the system fell apart; today, as the country rebuilds itself, such a trajectory is once again conceivable for grandsons of a mountain shepherd, like us. Long may it last.
A short time before her death, Fanny Reinach took me up in a hot air balloon. She was very frail by then, but she couldn’t deny herself the pleasure. I think we children provided an alibi for her. Theodore didn’t come. She organized everything; it was to be a surprise for Adolphe and me and the little ones, Julien, Léon, Paul, and Olivier. We were ecstatic. The balloon lifted up from the gardens of the neighboring property. We could see Kerylos from the air. I can still picture her slender, gloved hand as she waved farewell in the breeze.
8
FACING THE RED FRONT DOOR
The house wasn’t ready yet, but the front door had been fitted, two imposing leaves with massive hinges that made me think of a historical monument. I must film it today, before I take my leave for the very last time. There’s nothing Greek about it. It’s lacquered like a Japanese box. The heavy bolts, which look a little Egyptian, were made to order by Bricard, the best locksmith in Paris. The huge studded hinges look like ones I’ve seen on cathedral doors in Chartres and Amiens, or the ones in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris that drove Biscornette to despair (he was, I believe, a medieval locksmith who has a street named after him near the Place de la Bastille). The gate through which you could see visitors as they arrived looks like ones I saw at the monasteries on Mount Athos. The massive handles are imposing enough for the coffers of a Roman emperor. I’m still impressed today. Kerylos is a fortress. At the very moment the doors were mounted a ray of sunlight broke through the cloud. We were standing around in a semicircle, watching in silence. The dog strolled across, as languid as a cat.
The red paint, stark against the white walls and the little gravel-lined esplanade, was the color of our wounds. I can picture the summer day in 1914, twelve years later, Adolphe and me showing off our new uniforms. Again we were all standing around in a semicircle, this time in the salon of the Reinach residence in Paris. I stood there in my blue tunic and red pants looking at the old, heavy furniture in the rococo style, a symbol of worldly success, a large painting by Gustave Moreau framed by purple curtains, the women in dresses by Worth, the glasses of champagne, and all of a sudden I realized it was all over. Yet for the family it was just the beginning. They were completely confident that they would be joining the great French legends like Carnot and Casimir-Perier. The sons craved glory. The three brothers were the second generation of a family that had made their fortune and finally gained entry to Olympus, and they wanted to go even further. Maybe one of their grandchildren would become head of state, as Joseph had once dreamed of being, but he had the intelligence to realize that it was too soon in the family history—their name needed another generation or two before it would be celebrated all over the world, before it became universally known, like those of Pasteur and Poincaré. But I, who knew nothing at all, standing there in my brick-red pants, in a split second I knew that it was all over, so much sooner than expected. The Reinach era had only just begun and it was already coming to an end. The era when the very wealthy could also be intellectuals. Nowadays the rich are never scholars, and scholars are never rich. The end took several more years, till the next war. I witnessed it all. I saw them suffer, die, wiped out. Somehow I avoided the bullet that could have killed me too. I owed them everything, not least that moment when, at the age of twenty-seven, I suddenly understood the concept of time. I could hear voices that I’d heard a dozen years before. In the empty house today, I picture again the years of construction and this image:
Theodore at the Pointe des Fourmis, telling me all the things I have to learn, teasing me. I must be fifteen or sixteen. He pushes me into the water. Don’t tell me you’re going to spend your life chasing vipers among the rocks, or learning to swim, or studying music, or history and geography, or translating Homer when you’re fifty—you have to do it all now. I’ve grazed my knees on the rocks, he pushes me back into the water, miming the breaststroke from the shore, newspaper in hand. In the December sun, the house rises up behind him and as I grow taller it grows taller too.
9
THE MOSAIC IN THE ENTRANCE HALL THAT REVEALS NOTHING ABOUT THE FUTURE
I once heard Theodore telling someone that the mosaic in the vestibule dated from antiquity. He was making very free with the facts. Fanny listened, her eyes lowered. When he spoke it was impossible not to believe him. He had bought it in Rome, he was saying, but it was as exquisite as Alexandrian-era decoration. He went into great detail describing the antiquities store where this particular fragment came from, recalling how he had hesitated a little, for the pleasure of haggling, having been offered an asking price that was clearly too high: he couldn’t help coming across as a very rich man, his manners betrayed him, even when he dressed like some middle class gentleman of leisure. The subject pleased him, it was ideal for the entrance to the house: a rooster, a hen, and some chicks. A modest family portrait. He embroidered his story in the certainty that none of his guests would contradict him. He had indeed found it in Italy, but it came from a mosaicist who worked at the Vatican museum. It was a fake. Of course he would never have let a genuine antique chef d’oeuvre under visitors’ boots, ladies’ heels, Cerberus’s water bowl. It does look entirely authentic: the beautiful rooster with red, blue, and white feathers is the image of Theodore, it is him, it is the singing Gallic rooster, his back arched, like Edmond Rostand’s Chantecler, it is France.
In Greek houses, the vestibule, or porter’s lodge, was called the Thyroreion. Which is what I always called it. When I was seventeen, as far as I was concerned, this was perfectly normal. I wasn’t aware of the monstrous anomaly that was my everyday life with the Reinachs. “I left my umbrella i
n the Thyroreion,” I would say, straight-faced. I adopted the words they used and kept my accent. I loved their house so much, a love that grew slowly, was built up stone by stone, piece by piece, becoming more beautiful with the first floor and then the second. I can still see myself as the young man I once was. But when I came in this morning, I couldn’t believe I had ever been taken by this architecture. As an artist, I’ve done the opposite. From my very first painting, I tried to kill everything in me that was Greek.
At the age of fifteen I wanted to look like an ancient Greek athlete. The only work of art that interested me was myself. I grew very fast, and all through the time the house was being built, I carried on exercising. I learned the butterfly and the “Australian” crawl, as we called it then, with the retired non-commissioned officer who gave swimming lessons at the Hotel Bristol, one of the last men who still cultivated a resemblance to Napoleon III. Every night I went down to the sea to swim; I wanted muscles like those of Hercules in the huge books of paintings I found in the library—nothing like the athletes of 1910, hybrids of cavalrymen and funfair wrestlers. It took time, but I had few other leisure activities aside from eating like a wolf. I was Greek, and I had to prove it. The essence of Greek was first and foremost the body. The fat Orthodox priests were horrible Greek decadence. I understood this instinctively long before I was able, through endless recitation, to understand the fragments of Plato’s dialogues given to me by Theodore, who pushed me toward the baccalaureate and the love of truth.
