by Adrien Goetz
I would watch, captivated, the illustrious Joseph taking his breakfast in the gentle morning air, just outside the music room we called the Oikos. Everyone—Theodore and his sons first— laughed at his impeccable technique for buttering his toast, sometimes on both sides. In his articles he repeated things he had already said, explained what he meant, and detailed what he would not say while specifying what he had not said. He told me about his first encounter with Dreyfus, whom he had not met before. Neither expressed the slightest emotion. Dreyfus merely held out his hand and said, “Thank you,” and I can still hear Joseph’s pompous observation, “That was all. Just those two words. I had the audacity to deem the exchange a credit to us both.” I learned to dread his war stories even more: “That day our men certainly merited a mother country that, though exceedingly forgetful, nonetheless managed . . . ” They were never-ending. When he came to the villa, Joseph relaxed, was natural and open, he admired everything, he was always given the same large bedroom on the second floor and he had conversations with his brother that lasted entire afternoons. He used to say, “When I am here, I am in my safe harbor.”
Joseph and Theodore sprawled, one facing the other, in the low chairs in the library, blowing smoke rings with their cigars toward the inscriptions on the wall extolling the glory of Demosthenes and Plato. Floating in the air, they looked like the spiritus asper and the spiritus lenis, those accents in archaic Greek like little broken circles placed over the initial vowels, or over the letter rho. One of the defects of modern Greek is that “it no longer has spirit”—one of Theodore’s jokes I must have heard a hundred times.
I took most of my meals in the big kitchen, but afterward I would go up to the library to talk a little with my “master,” and, when they were there, Salomon and Joseph. I wasn’t their servant, it wasn’t my job to remove the breakfast tray. One of them might say, “The right-wing newspapers won’t stop mocking this ironic attempt to link the Socialists with a policy of law and order. The world of business gains confidence as soon as it senses a steady hand holding the reins, don’t you see, Theodore?” I didn’t know which of them I felt more sorry for. But they all got on terribly well. They were heroic in the way that they supported each other. Their wives never ventured to join their conversations. The one I never really got was Salomon. I suspected he was the most amusing, people said he was a seducer, a hedonist—a word I didn’t know then—he had a knack for making conversation with the maids, whose names he remembered from one year to the next. He never asked me questions, as if he didn’t see me. Years later I came to know him better when I worked for him, and even today I still wonder about him. The blend of jocularity and seriousness, the way he paid no attention to detail, made him seem the most aristocratic of the three, but perhaps also the least intellectually serious. He had a tendency to show off, was never bored, he made his brothers laugh and dared to laugh at them. In every family, there is always one whom the parents forgive everything. Salomon and his wife would leave after a couple of days, before I had a chance to get to know them. Salomon was the only one who understood that at the seaside you’re allowed to wear a seersucker suit, swap gray for blue, take off your boots and wear comfortable English shoes instead. None of these details escaped me, but I couldn’t imagine what Joseph and Theodore made of him.
In Joseph’s house in Paris there was an engraving inspired by a painting by Fragonard (I don’t know where the painting is) called The Bolt. It had a frame that would have been more fitting in Moïse de Camondo’s mansion: eighteenth-century style was now taken seriously, an indication of both a large fortune and impeccable taste. For a long time the engraving seemed to me a vision of another world, a fragment from a different, happy, strange planet, an instant of joy that didn’t mean much to a young Corsican shepherd. I always thought it would be wonderful to experience a scene like that, but it was so far from my life it was like a dream, like furtively reading a poem by Verlaine. Later, after I had fallen madly in love, I would walk down the corridor to look at The Bolt again and think about my Ariadne. The intensity of the young man, the woman who is resisting but looks very much as if a moment later she will stop pretending to resist. Exactly what I had experienced in the bedroom where I had spent my convalescence. I kept picturing her about to cross the threshold, then turning back to kiss me. I have never forgotten that closed door, except its bolt was made of bronze and looked as if it might have come from Alcibiades’s house. Even at Joseph’s house, I found myself thinking about her.
In the years that followed, Joseph grew very fond of me, because I had gone off to war with his son, because I was so valiant that even after being wounded twice I returned to the front, then was demobilized with a formal recognition and a military medal. The dullest of the three brothers became my protector, though I had no desire to be his child, to take the place of his fallen son. Adolphe and I left school in 1907. We did our military training in Mourmelon. Joseph used to take me aside for brief conversations, just the two of us; I was, he knew, his son’s only real friend. He loved me, though he might just as well have hated me or at least wanted never to see me. Because I had seen Adolphe—my comrade, the boy I’d grown up with— die. And because I, son of nothing, knowing nothing, serving no purpose, inheritor of nothing—I was the son who was still alive. Yet in spite of that he loved me. I let him, in memory of the evenings in the camp when Adolphe used to tell me that he was never sure that his father, so intimidating and serious, really loved him.
When I told my grandchildren about this, they dared to make vulgar jokes about Achilles and Patroclus. Masculine friendship, the camaraderie of soldiers—in the years since 1918 we have dared to give it another name. Homer is very clear: Achilles and Patroclus were united by an unbreakable bond, they had been inseparable since childhood, they were cousins. Adolphe and I—how ridiculous to write this today—were united by our patriotism. My grandchildren don’t understand. We only ever talked of victory. There was nothing going on between us. I was never able to confess to Adolphe my epistolary love affair with Ariadne; I barely even admitted it to myself. I would have loved to tell Adolphe how, without planning to, I had experienced my own version of The Bolt with her. I wanted to. But he was no longer here. I’m certain I would have gone to find him, to tell him, and that he would have asked me the most intimate details that I wouldn’t have shared with him, not this time. The moment when I kissed Ariadne was the moment when I understood, after four years of war, “I’m alive. I’m going to live.”
The evening of The Bolt, alone again, convalescing, I was afraid. I thought Ariadne would be angry, would refuse to talk to me. But she came back the next day, with a drawing of the two of us. We made love at every opportunity, until I was better. We sketched each other twenty times or more. I thought only of her, and less and less of the war.
Then she disappeared. Grégoire and she stopped coming to the villa. I never really understood why. Pontremoli told me that Grégoire, his right-hand man as he called him, had opened his own architectural practice. It was high time he became independent. She stopped writing to me. All I had left were a few drawings—Adolphe, the only person to whom I might have confided, was dead. A year after the armistice, I met the woman who became my wife; my children know the rest of the story by heart. We danced at the wedding of a friend from my regiment, went for a walk along the road to Villefranche, and the same evening decided to get married.
The bond that Adolphe and I had is sacred, nothing can change it. Time has passed: Adolphe’s son, born after his father’s death, is dead now too. When his son died I mourned my friend a second time. They were truly brave. I wasn’t cowardly or spineless, I’m not ashamed of myself, but I wasn’t a hero and I survived only by chance. In mythology, I recall, Theseus, in error, hoisted black sails on his ship; his father Aegeus, believing he had died, threw himself into the sea. It was I who hoisted the black sail, but not in error. Aegeus wept on my shoulder for his son.
My generation knows by heart the citations
for friends who died for France. Whenever I repeat these brief, sober words, like an inscription on a marble stele, I weep: “Reinach (Adolphe), cavalry lieutenant, on assignment from the Forty-Sixth Infantry Regiment (liaison officer). In all circumstances, he distinguished himself by his sang-froid and his exceptional bravery. On August 30, at the Tyranes farm, at a time of great difficulty, he grouped about him some ten men, and, all the while remaining on horseback, led them in the assault, thus allowing a battalion to remain in position.”
Adolphe’s body was never found. I would have taken him with me, dragged him through the mud. There was shelling from every direction, explosions and screaming. I didn’t hesitate. I began to run. In his office in Paris, a sumptuous apartment on Avenue Van Dyck filled with chandeliers, paintings, and eighteenth-century engravings, Joseph asked me how his son had died. He wanted to know where his child’s body was, of course he did. I recounted everything, minute by minute. We had ended up abandoning our position to the enemy. If I’d been weighed down with Adolphe’s body, the Germans would have shot me too. Joseph looked at me, and I knew that he understood, agreed that I had done the right thing. He didn’t say, “I would have done what you did,” but that is what I understood.
In Villefranche-sur-Mer the famous Villa Leopolda had been transformed into a hospital for the wounded. All anyone was talking about was the ravaged faces of the disfigured soldiers. Wooden huts had been erected in the gardens, and the young Belgians who slept there gave their accounts of life at the front. This colony of survivors, just a few minutes from Kerylos, intensified the terrible grief of the Reinach families. In his preface to my friend’s posthumously published monograph about painting in ancient Greece, Salomon wrote that no one knew what had become of his nephew’s remains. They had planned to go together to Tyranes farm to open the mass graves and look at the faces of the dead one by one. They were told that the bodies had been almost completely pulverized. I can’t read Salomon’s words without trembling. I had held Adolphe’s “remains” to my breast. But I’ve never regretted having fled with the others in order to save my life. Three hours later I was fighting again. I killed three Germans in hand-to-hand combat, with my sidearm. I had never killed a man before that day. My hand didn’t tremble. This morning though, it is trembling, I’m too hot, I’m not used to this movie camera, my fingers keep moving, my film will be blurry, jumpy, it will show Kerylos in disorder, a kaleidoscope of shaky images that follow on from each other haphazardly and make no sense. Joseph, after the death of his son, was also adrift, suddenly losing the thread in the middle of one of his endless, rambling, pompous speeches—but I think I began to love him then, this man who sat with his hands on his knees, saying less and less.
Poor Joseph never became a minister of state, the thousands of pages he wrote have been forgotten, his name means nothing to anyone anymore. He believed in the glory of literature and his duty as a parliamentarian; he would be heartbroken and extremely surprised to learn today that he survives in the collective memory, unhappy man, because Marcel Proust turned him into a character: Brichot, who bores all the guests at Madame Verdurin’s dinner parties. I took my time to read Á la recherche du temps perdu. I found it amusing, so similar to the world I knew before the Great War. Proust was not fond of the Reinachs. He knew Pontremoli a little. He wrote to Joseph to ask him to send a letter requesting he not be called up to fight. One can only imagine Joseph’s reaction. Not to mention Proust’s embarrassment, in the years that followed, at what he’d done. To make things even more complicated, in 1914 Theodore had just lost the elections in the Savoie, to a certain Paul Proust, who bore the same surname as Marcel, though they were not, I believe, related—and this Paul Proust died gloriously at the hand of the enemy, on October 14 that year. His name is inscribed on the monument to the dead at the Assemblée Nationale. We were not permitted to utter the name of Marcel Proust at the villa, which is why it took me so long to discover this.
Proust must have envied the worldly status of the Reinachs and the connections they had, that his own parents didn’t have, and the three brothers’ talents for serious things. He came from a similar milieu, albeit a little less impressive: a family with Jewish origins, talent, a passion for libraries, museums, and art. He had managed to shorten his military service by putting off his call-up, and, in the famous questionnaire (which people who don’t know better call the “Proust Questionnaire,” as if he had invented it), in answer to the question “the military fact that I admire the most,” he replied: “My volunteering.” Many of his friends were killed in the war, some of whom I had glimpsed from afar, like Bertrand de Fénelon and Robert d’Humières, and he might perhaps in the end have shown courage if he had ever been under fire. No one knows how they will react when they hear shots being fired. When I left for the front I asked myself that very question. We all did, though we never talked about it. At the first shot, I got my answer: I wasn’t afraid. I took no pride in this. That’s how it was. I didn’t need to drink brandy. I didn’t think that I would be killed. Had Proust been killed by the enemy, he might have been entitled to a military citation: “Proust (Marcel), with tireless courage . . . ” I figured all this out when I read him. I never met him. He certainly took his revenge. The Reinachs were always writing, but the only real writer in their world, the only one they would have rubbed shoulders with, would have been Proust, though I doubt that any of the three brothers would ever have guessed it.
My Adolphe was much funnier than his Brichot-like father, which wasn’t difficult, and as talented a Hellenist as his uncle Theodore, which was quite a feat. Although he was the same age as me he was of a rather more “scholarly disposition,” as people used to say, subjected from birth to having his “head stuffed,” an expression that was all the rage in 1914. He didn’t give a damn about any of it: “They’ve raised me like a well-trained animal,” he said to me once, “But you’ll see, I’ll surprise them.” He would have been the one who continued the three brothers’ research, wrote even longer books, the child in front of whom Gaspard, Melchior, and Balthazar would have prostrated themselves. We journeyed to Greece together. I was thrilled by our voyage, which allowed me at last to leave Beaulieu. Without Adolphe I would have withered at home; it was thanks to him that I discovered my love of travel—in my family no one ever traveled, we moved from one place to another, but it never occurred to us to go on expeditions to far off places, or even to go on vacation. Greece may have been far back in history, but he showed me that we were just a few days away by boat.
I’d been enlisted to keep him company and help him learn his lessons. For young Adolphe, the family tradition was to continue: a mathematics teacher, an English tutor, and I, whose role was to help him learn some useful bits of knowledge. In reality, it was I who got an education. Adolphe, in the early days, distrusted me. I was his uncle’s new recruit, the less scholarly monkey who pronounced Greek all wrong, who distinguished “eta” and “epsilon,” instead of reading both as “e” like every school-child in Europe since Erasmus. Perhaps he thought I was some little social climber from the village who God knows how had somehow attracted the master’s good graces and was trying to escape my destiny in domestic service. I was of negligible value, epsilon. But he very quickly realized I was the ideal companion for staving off his solitude—these interminable lessons had been inflicted on him for years. He told me that as a child he had hardly ever played. His sister Julie, two years older than us, was also very serious. Julien, their cousin, the future member of the Council of State, Theodore’s son, was five years younger, and his brother Léon was only six, which at that age is a vast gap. They were hardly going to play together in the garden. Fanny and Theodore’s two younger sons, Paul and Olivier, had always been “the little ones,” whom I pretty much ignored. Their siblings didn’t waste their time playing with them either. Theodore’s only living descendants are the children of Julien and little Paul. Paul was charming, the best looking of them all. I’ve all but lost contact with th
em, though we still send each other holiday cards. As for Salomon, he and his wife had had no children to play with Adolphe. Rose, Madame Salomon Reinach, was a doctor, and ran a children’s home in Neuilly. She devoted herself during the war to treating wounded soldiers. In the early 1920s her husband Salomon himself pinned the Legion of Honor medal to her chest. I was at the ceremony.
So, as the only person of his age, I was the ideal accomplice for Adolphe, as Theodore no doubt realized. He enjoyed being with his nephew, but he knew only too well how much of a burden the family style of education could be, and the idea of him having someone to play sports with, someone ordinary, willing, and good humored, was far from absurd . . . One day he told Adolphe, who in turn told me, that I was certainly not his equal, and that he was going to need to forge some relationships in Paris; all that was required to annoy his uncle, Adolphe promptly declared, was for me to remain his best friend for all time. Theodore’s ruse had succeeded.
When war broke out, somehow Joseph Reinach arranged for us to be assigned to the same regiment—it reassured everyone to know that Adolphe was, in a way, under my protection, I would be, after a fashion, his orderly, his aide-de-camp. I can still hear these words, spoken by a friend of the Reinachs; I thought of them so often after the attack.
Joseph was the only one of the three brothers to know true suffering: five days before his Adolphe’s death, Pierre Goujon, second lieutenant (reserves) fell on the field of honor, in Méhoncourt. He too was born in 1875, and was called up at the same time as we were. Pierre was married to Joseph’s daughter Julie, and loved by the whole family. We used to see each other from time to time. He was serious and fastidious, with a neat little mustache and the beginnings of a paunch. His father was senator for the Ain department; Pierre thought it was time to inject a little youth into politics and was elected a parliamentary deputy, also representing the Ain. He loved good food, and was very brave. Julie fell in love with him because he shared his family’s passion for art. Renoir had painted his portrait when he was a child. They were planning to start a collection of modern paintings. Julie bought some beautiful works after his death in his memory. At her house I saw a magnificent Degas and a water-color by Cézanne. Kindly, she purchased my first Cubist still life. She lent it out for my exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, when people were just beginning to know my name. She never remarried. Pierre Goujon was the first deputy to be killed in combat in 1914. He could have avoided joining up—he would have easily obtained a deferment—but he requested to join a regiment, the 123rd Infantry. He was wounded early on. He fashioned himself a makeshift dressing so as to quickly return to battle, and was shot dead with a bullet to the head on August 25.
