by Adrien Goetz
Ariadne was very young when she married one of Pontremoli’s assistants, the one who helped him with his plans. She had been in love with Grégoire, an architect–designer. She was as gifted as he. Everywhere she went she took a block of paper and her box of watercolors. She filled in the colors for him. Pontremoli had several assistants: Mazet was the one with the most confident hand, who played around with axonometric cross-sections and elevations and was a virtuoso with Indian ink, but for color Pontremoli swore by Grégoire Verdeuil—he had no idea that everything in his palette had been done by his wife.
It took so many coincidences for Ariadne and me to meet! If I follow the chain of causes and consequences, it goes right back to the Great Exhibition of 1900, when Eiffel was driven to despair because his tower already looked like an antiquity, while Theodore Reinach thought himself rather modern for making the acquaintance of a brilliant architect named Pontremoli. They only met by chance. Theodore found in him an interlocutor who knew Greece in a different way. Pontremoli was not so knowledgeable when it came to classical texts, but he had been on excavations and come up with a design for the reconstruction of the Pergamon monuments, the city that reached the peak of its glory under Alexander’s successors, where an exuberant, unbridled artistic style developed: monuments laden with draperies and garlands, statues that were restless and tormented. In a small gallery, Pontremoli was exhibiting drawings that showed the citadel as it might look after restoration. They talked about the more austere temple of Apollo at Didymaion, the site the architect-archaeologist would be working on next. The subject fascinated the archaeologist, who had always dreamed of becoming an architect. They had found each other.
Pontremoli had been very ill, he’d contracted malaria, and as he was from Nice and well acquainted with the invigorating climate of the region, he had spent some days convalescing with the fishermen in the fresh air and sunshine of Cap Ferrat. In the neighboring town of Beaulieu, Reinach had recently purchased a piece of land on the Pointe des Fourmis. Pontremoli knew the Eiffel family. Everything was coming together. The architect was dazzled by the aura of the Reinachs. Grégoire, Ariadne’s husband, who had recently joined the practice, was sent to make the first surveys of the site to be conquered: the rocks, the crevasses to be filled in, the mature trees that Theodore insisted on keeping. I had already seen Grégoire in the village, though I didn’t know who he was: tall and dark-haired with a slender mustache and a smiling face, a handsome man with a slight belly who always wore a light-colored suit. I never suspected that one day I would come to hate him.
It was Grégoire Verdeuil, Ariadne’s husband, who suggested to Pontremoli that they build a terrace along the promontory overlooking the sea, to maximize the scope of the property and allow it to be extended. The physiognomy of the Pointe would be altered, but in keeping with the spirit of Grecian rocks, according to the plans, which Reinach and Pontremoli, using tracing paper, compared with peninsulas in Chalkidiki and the Peloponnese. If Viollet-le-Duc had dreamed of remodeling and improving Mont Blanc, there was no reason not to touch the pebbles in Beaulieu.
Ariadne and Grégoire soon moved into their own house in the town. Pontremoli visited regularly, and the major structural work was progressing rapidly. Often, when I returned from my morning swim Ariadne would be reading up on the rocks on a chaise longue—she gave no impression she was expecting me— and the three of us would have lunch together. I thought her a pleasant and very pretty woman, but the idea that I might fall in love with her never crossed my mind. She would look up from her book and smile at me. She was reading Zola’s novels, and she lent them to me one at a time; we laughed at Gervaise’s misfortunes, Nana’s innocence, and poor Claude Lantier, the cursed painter, our favorite character. She came from a world that I could barely imagine, the world of grand Parisian architects, and I never felt entirely at ease talking to them both. Usually I would ask Grégoire to explain something to me, or show him a sketch that Monsieur Reinach had asked me to send. I was impressed by Grégoire: he recognized when my drawings were weak, was brilliant and generous, it was obvious that his work satisfied him. He was very encouraging and he used to show me how to improve my drawings. Once or twice he even asked Ariadne if she might like to color them.
Once the building was finished I saw them less and less. Grégoire was responsible for the ongoing work there, but he didn’t always come up to the house with his wife. I began to be aware of my disappointment when I didn’t see her. I wasn’t in love: I was still having fun with my Russian and English vacationers; I was having an ongoing affair with a cousin of the dairywoman—who knew nothing about it—and years would go by before the belle dame with her box of watercolors became something more to me than an unattainable fantasy, a woman with a parasol, a woman I would have loved to have had to myself in another life, if I had only been born in an elegant part of Paris and had a little money to my name.
Several years later, wounded, desolate, and broken, I returned from the front. It was she who had suggested to me one evening at the Reinachs’ just before we left, when Adolphe and I turned up sporting the brick red pants of our soldier’s uniform, that she become my “wartime godmother.” She promised to send me letters and parcels. I accepted without thinking. Grégoire interrupted, “I give you my blessing, Achilles. I’m too old to take up my rifle, unless the war lasts a long time and my battalion is called up. But this is going to be a short war.” He could have signed up as a volunteer, as many others did. How my grandchildren will mock me when they read this: a love affair with my wartime godmother, against a backdrop of antique columns. And yet that is exactly what happened.
The letters we exchanged were brief. I dared not write too much. I told her about life at the camp and gave her news of Adolphe, of whom she was very fond. He was an officer. I was not. She asked me if, centaur that he was, he was continuing Achilles’s education: well versed as I was in mythology, I was flattered. She wrote to me in rhyme; I replied in prose. Playfully, I told her that I missed her eyes. I was courting her, in a lighthearted way. During the first months of the war, I realized as the weeks went by that I was thinking about her all the time. Distance had brought her close to me. She was becoming part of my life in a way that she had never been before, more than any of the other women who until then had never given me the time to fall in love with them. My love for her was growing, bit by bit, and I barely realized it was happening.
Instead of postcards written so as to facilitate the job of the military censors, she sent me drawings on which she stuck a postal stamp, with a note telling me that she had drawn herself onto the picture like a little greeting. She was easy to identify, a discreet figure in one of the galleries of the Louvre or the gardens of Versailles. She painted Nike, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, standing on her grand stone steps. She told me she had plucked a feather from her to use as a brush. When I looked at those outstretched wings, the folds of fabric draped over her body, I forgot the horrors and my mood lifted, I felt a little hopeful again.
Nike soared upward, the wind that plastered her tunic against her body not as powerful as the goddess’s momentum. A second after the moment was set in stone by the sculptor, away she flew, stark naked.
I stuck this watercolor inside my soldier’s canteen. She sent me another one: the statue protected inside a wooden crate, nailed together by the curators at the Louvre in anticipation of aerial bombardments. You couldn’t see her anymore, she had been packed away in anticipation of our eventual victory.
I read her letters in the camp, showing them to no one. She told me her husband had been conscripted to paint camouflage over the lawn of an old house in Fontainebleau. Cubists were making tarpaulins for tanks—at least this new style of painting served some purpose, she said—and it was through her that I first heard of Georges Braque, without ever imagining that he would one day become my friend.
I was allowed to sleep in Philemon while I was convalescing, after being wounded twice the day after the battle at Tyranes f
arm, before I left again for the front. The contrast between the straw mattresses in the trenches and the bed prepared at the Reinachs’ house made me cry. I pulled myself together. My mother wanted to stay with me all day, but I managed to convince her to leave me in peace. I told her the doctor had prescribed solitude and complete silence. I began reading one of the most famous books of the nineteenth century, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, in an edition stuffed with illustrations, scenes from antiquity that took place in porticoed houses, beneath latticed stone balconies, or in front of not unfamiliar-looking fountains. I was no longer the son of the Eiffels’ cook, that was the past. I had been Adolphe’s comrade-in-arms, and now everyone’s mission was to take care of me, nourish me, leave me alone to read and to rest. Pontremoli continued to come and work in the library. His assistant was there too, with his wife. I knew that when I came back I would see them, that I would see Ariadne again.
Grégoire had to go to Monaco for a couple of days to conduct a survey of the old palace that the prince wanted to modernize. The plan was to repair the floor of the chapel that leads out into the interior courtyard of the Grimaldi fortress. Grégoire looked a little older, but he was still attractive, he wore rimmed spectacles and often went home to sleep after lunch at La Réserve. He joked, “Whoever it was who designed the floor of the Sistine Chapel is the artist I pity more than anyone else in the world!” One day Ariadne remained behind at the hotel. I invited her to come up to the house, that is, to Kerylos. She accepted immediately. We had written each other hundreds of letters without ever saying anything. We had exchanged enough drawings to cover not only the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel but the Last Judgment too.
Ariadne came into my room. Nobody was occupying Baucis, the bedroom next door. There was no one in the house that afternoon at all, no noise except that of the waves. A few years ago this would have been unseemly; since the war, it didn’t matter at all. I was sick, I was healing slowly. There was a thrumming in my ears. I walked toward her. We shook hands, in the English way. She sat down on my bed, like a nurse; she inspected all the vials and ointments that the doctor had left on the nightstand. She played her role as a postwar godmother perfectly. She was beautiful. I was hopeless.
She talked about herself, which she had never done before. Or rather, for almost an entire hour she talked about her husband. She told me about everything that had brought them together, I had to listen to her talk about their future, about the drawings they did together. I stopped listening. She was erecting a line of fortifications between us. I brushed her hand as I handed her a glass of water; she pretended not to notice.
She loved Grégoire. She had never been unfaithful to him. She was piling up sandbags. I drew my head back into the trenches. At that moment, I stopped loving her. I chided myself—for at the front you become an adult, there is so much time to think. I told myself I had no right to seduce this woman. She was being honest. She understood the situation and felt she had to explain. My duty was simple: I had to respect what she said. I had to be able to hear her and stop thinking about her. I had been absurd. The trenches can drive you mad, give you crazy ideas. And what was it anyway, this love affair that wasn’t, that had gone on like this for years? It was grotesque. Who spends a whole year courting a woman? What woman would put up with that? It took me under an hour to renounce my love for her. I was happy to renounce it. I understood it meant that I was getting better.
We joked about the friends of Madame Reinach who usually slept in this room. She opened the window. I believed I was happy, pleased—almost—that in my mind I had stopped being in love with Ariadne, right there in front of her, with her, thanks to her, it was an excellent thing! I talked to her about The Last Days of Pompeii. She stood up. I quietly handed her her hat and her red silk scarf and draped her coat over her shoulders like a perfect gentleman.
We both stood facing the closed door. She was leaving. She didn’t say anything. I reached for the bronze latch to open the door. We looked at each other. We threw ourselves at each other.
I wanted to see every bit of her, her breasts, her hips, her feet, I wanted her to promise to pose naked for me whenever I asked, to swear to come back to this room every day to make love. She kissed my wounds, and every part of me that wasn’t injured. She bit my lips and my thighs. She lay down on my bed, she let me kiss her, caress her, love her as I had never loved anyone before. I didn’t care about Pompeii, about Romans or Greeks, I wanted only her, and she wanted only me.
It lasted. She came back. The drawings where she poses naked in the large chair, and where afterward she made me pose in the attitude of an enraged Achilles, date from that period. Since I had cradled the dead face of my brother-in-arms in my lap, I had not been able to touch a living body or hold anyone in my arms. She gave me back my life.
I remember this scene as the absolute essence of happiness, ecstasy. In that moment I was Everyman, a man for all seasons, made up of all the fragmented, chaotic images in my head, from the waves of my childhood smashing against the blue rocks to the artillery shells that had exploded next to me. If God exists, I’d like to ask him to let me experience that moment one more time, at the moment when I sense my death is near. I content myself with tracing one word with my finger on the wall of this room that no longer serves any purpose, because no one is coming back to live in Kerylos: Ariadne, Ariadne. The jealous women of Thrace hacked Orpheus’s body to pieces. His head lay on the beach, and when one of them picked it up his tongue was still moving, murmuring, “Eurydice, Eurydice . . . ”
12
THE PERISTYLE, A SEPULCHER FOR ADOLPHE REINACH, KILLED IN ACTION
There is a photograph somewhere—which I can still picture, although I haven’t seen it since the last war—in which the three brothers are posing under the peristyle, each leaning against a column. I don’t know when the picture was taken, although I was there. Maybe I tore it up at some point, when I could no longer bear Theodore Reinach.
It was a nightmare when the three Reinach brothers were together under the same roof. By the afternoon you couldn’t remember which of the three you’d talked to in the morning, you’d reply to one having forgotten that it was one of the others who had asked the question. They were like three goats pursuing me in my dreams, Jolomon, Sanodore, and Theoseph, I was going crazy, it was like having three bucket loads of science, philosophy, and grammar poured over my head, it was unbearable. This three-headed monster had undertaken to turn me into a fourth monster. I took refuge in the water, where they couldn’t get to me to teach me yet another thing. The year the work on the house ended was the year I first came across the cartoon “The Nickeled Feet” in the magazine L’Épatant, the characters Filochard, Ribouldingue, and Croquignol. It was them! I had the scholarly version, the one and the same loathsome Mister Know-It-All! It’s as if I’ve got this lost photograph right in front of my eyes and I’m exasperated and amused by it. Joseph is serious and frowning; Salomon is affable and smiling; Theodore stands a little apart from them, no doubt worried about having the two visitors whose judgment he fears the most in his house.
Joseph, the eldest, was the politician. In the early days, I didn’t like him very much. He was very dull. Within the family, everyone admired him. His brother Salomon, director of the museum in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, often consulted him about works of antiquity or Gallic remains; he said that Joseph was an expert, maybe the finest of the three, and that politics had kept him from a fine career as a classical scholar. The great man wrote articles like other people drink coffee—one or two a day, sometimes more—and produced several series of books in ten or twenty volumes on an infinite variety of subjects, which hardly anyone read. He wanted to recount every detail of the Dreyfus affair, to which he penned a monument in I don’t know how many volumes. His brother Theodore wrote a concise, clear book, A Brief History of the Dreyfus Affair, which was very convincing and very successful. During the First World War, Joseph, under the pseudonym Polybius, wrote d
aily accounts of the fighting that fatigued even the indefatigable General Nivelle, he of the famous “Nivelle offensive,” who once declared, “Either Polybius stops writing or I stop conquering.” The texts of the original Polybius, who recounted in Greek the wars of the Roman Republic, are already a little hard to follow, but the continuator surpassed the master. (Collected together, Joseph’s articles filled twenty volumes, becoming the masterwork of the brother who was known as “the Reinach who does not write,” because his brothers wrote so many books.) I didn’t understand at the time, and it wasn’t until years later that I realized it was an in-joke for history buffs; anyone who had studied at a good school would have recognized it as a play on an epithet by Boileau, the great historiographer of Louis XIV, who couldn’t keep up with the successes of his sovereign, and substituted satire for praise: “Great King, stop conquering, or I shall stop writing.” No one had taught me that.
