Villa of Delirium

by Adrien Goetz

  Pierre might have hung some modern art in the bedrooms at Kerylos, after all, why not? The villa, without the war, would certainly have changed its appearance in the next generation. Adolphe would also have changed some of the decor, but in a different way. He would have brought in authentic objects from antiquity. What is a house where you can’t move the furniture, can’t put anything else on the walls other than what the architect has chosen, where the children feel like they’re on show in their bedrooms, which are never the same from one stay to the next? I really believe that Theodore, in the single-minded pursuit of his vision, had never considered this. Adolphe did not suffer from it, at any rate less than his little cousins did, but that didn’t prevent him from bluntly criticizing what Pontremoli had done. He would have preferred more accuracy, he wanted to know if we were in a house from Athens, or from Delos, or a wealthy villa in Asia Minor at the time of Alexander’s successors. For me, Kerylos was simply a Greek villa. “Look at those terraces: do you think there was ever a similar kind of architecture in Greece? This house simply doesn’t make sense!”

  13

  “BRING NOTHING FROM THE WORLD”

  My first ride in an automobile was to Cambo-les-Bains, in the Basque country. At the last moment Madame Reinach told me there was a spare place in the car and that I should join them: in those days, taking a trip in a half-empty car was out of the question. It was extraordinarily exciting, the apotheosis of luxury, the chrome, the lacquer, the backfiring. And I was delighted to see the Basque country. I was going to meet a great writer, maybe even talk to him. I might buy myself a pair of the curiosities called “espadrilles.”

  In order to take one’s place in society, one had to build a house: during the same period that Kerylos was being built, Edmond Rostand raised what was known as the “Basque style” to a palatial level at his house Arnaga, extending his fantasy with French gardens that were quite out of place there, an orangery that recalled Versailles, and a literary henhouse extolling the glory of Chantecler, a play that unfortunately was rather less successful than Cyrano de Bergerac and L’Aiglon. Fanny was rather mystified at my lack of interest in the engine and mechanics during the journey. Surely a child of the people must dream of engine oil.

  I suppose there must have been as much gossip in Camboles-Bains—though perhaps a little less snark—as there was at Beaulieu, during the three years the locals watched this architectural monstrosity being built. The Reinachs took an interest and were invited to visit. Rostand was a national treasure, everybody loved him. Today, at the entrance to Arnaga, visitors can read on a plaque a few lines of verse that I copied down and learned by heart:

  You who come to share our golden light,

  And marvel at the glory of the ever-changing day,

  Bring nothing from the world, only your heart,

  And do not repeat what other people say.

  Everyone seemed to want their own dream house: in the vicinity of Nice and Monaco alone, there are a dozen extraordinary villas that have in one way or another made their mark on history. Adolphe scoffed at them all. Next door, on the Cap d’Ail, the Primavera was built in 1911, its fireplaces and furniture veneered with fake antique flourishes. I saw it just after it was finished, and had to admit that it was pretty, even if it lacked the attention to detail of “our” house. Some of these extravagant houses impressed me more than others. I visited many of them. They were nothing like the millionaires’ villas along the Riviera, which architects produced on demand without much thought. The Camondos had their mansion in Paris, less outrageous than Arnaga, completed at the very beginning of the Great War. The Reinachs wanted to know everything there was to know about this project, with its faux Louis XVI style, both luxurious and tasteful, furnished with marvels of royal provenance and a miscellany of ducal treasures, a lesson in the history of furniture crossed with the Almanac of French Chateau Owners and the Who’s Who of aristocratic families. I visited the Camondo house many times, delivering letters. One didn’t have the impression of traveling back in time to the era of Marie Antoinette, which was all the better. These houses were like daydreams. Cahen d’Anvers, a banker, spear-headed the fashion for flights of fantasy that were both timeless in design and incalculably expensive. He purchased the grand but shabby Chateau de Champs-sur-Marne, renovated and improved it. His eighteenth century was flawless, whilst also managing to accommodate a telephone and portraits of the children by Renoir. The Camondos came from Istanbul, the Reinachs from Germany, and the Cahen d’Anvers family from Antwerp, as their name suggests. The three families were linked: the paterfamilias Moïse de Camondo, whom I knew, married Irene Cahen d’Anvers; this apparently unhappy union produced two children, Nissim, an aviator the same age as I, who was killed in action in 1917 at the age of twenty-five; and Béatrice, born two years after her brother. She married Léon Reinach, my Theodore’s second son, who was born in 1893. Léon’s mother, Theodore’s second wife Fanny, whom I was so fond of, was an Ephrussi on her mother’s side. This made her a cousin of Béatrice Ephrussi, née Rothschild, who built the famous villa on Cap Ferrat, a ten-minute walk from Kerylos. Spelled out like that, it all sounds rather complicated. What was striking was that Béatrice and Léon Reinach were heirs to the history of these four houses, Kerylos, Champs-sur-Marne, the Camondo mansion in Paris, and the Ephrussi villa on Cap Ferrat. But these large, extravagant properties didn’t interest them: they loved music, animals, tennis, horses. They and their children, Fanny and Bertrand, were killed at Auschwitz.

  Between 1905 and 1912, residents of Beaulieu could observe from a distance the construction initiated by the whimsical Béatrice Ephrussi. The Ephrussis and the Reinachs saw each other socially, though they were not the close relatives that the postman and the dairywoman believed them to be: Fanny Reinach’s great-grandfather, Charles Joachim Ephrussi, born in 1793, the year that Louis XVI was beheaded, married twice. The elegant Charles Ephrussi, who may have inspired Proust when he created the character of Charles Swann, was descended from his son from his first marriage. His sister was Madame Reinach’s mother. The wealthy Maurice Ephrussi, whose wife Béatrice liked nothing more than to sit in her vulgar pink salon sipping pink champagne, was descended from his second marriage. Theodore said there was only one interesting thing in the house: the wooden paneling, which came from various mansions that had been knocked down. The villa was a catalog of fragments from other houses. Theodore recognized an eighteenth-century door that had come from Balzac’s house on Rue Fortunée. The great writer had bought many antique fixtures to impress Madame Hanska. Theodore loved the idea that in the middle of Cap Ferrat you could touch a doorknob that had once been turned by the author of La Comédie Humaine.

  Back at Kerylos, in low voices, we all disparaged the splendors of the Villa Île-de-France, as it was called. Béatrice Ephrussi had decided her maids would wear bonnets adorned with pompoms, to give the illusion of being perpetually on a cruise. Right at the beginning of the work, when the ground was being leveled, I learned from the dairywoman that this rival villa was going to be truly monumental. It had blue marble, black marble, cherry marble, marble from Siberia and even from China, marble that looked like wood, imagine that! Everyone in the port talked about it endlessly. The notary said, “It truly is the ne plus ultra, a quite spectacular property.” Everyone liked the Ephrussi villa. It was a strawberry macaron, sitting atop a raspberry macaron, reinforced with meringue and enriched with chantilly cream, with corollas of small violets made of marzipan and, all around, like spun sugar, fountains imitating Versailles. At Kerylos, after having once admitted that there were no fireplaces, only a forced-air heating system and palatial bathrooms, everyone learned to keep quiet, for fear of admitting that they did not know very much about how things should be done. I had a memory, from my visit to Arnaga to see Rostand, of a boudoir like in a fairy tale, with a painting of horses harnessed to a pumpkin taking a princess to the ball. Next door was Madame Rostand’s bedroom, with a view onto flowerbeds, the flowers
picking up the colors of the walls inside the house. From one villa to the next, all perpetuating the same enchanted world. I remember Theodore wondering what archaeologists in the year 4000 would say of the civilization of 1906 if the only traces they found were the houses of the Rostands and the Camondos.

  What the people of Beaulieu were most curious about was how we lived at “Chateau Reinach.” They wondered if the “fat Madame Reinach”—she wasn’t that fat, but she was always wrapped in several layers of lace—wore Grecian sandals and walked around the house bare breasted, whether Monsieur Theodore pranced around, wearing his pince-nez, in a papier-mâché breastplate and a short skirt. I’m not saying that they might not, once or twice, to amuse the children, have organized costume parties. Quite possibly the costumes are still in a closet somewhere. But that wasn’t at all the spirit of the house. The Greece of Kerylos was no masquerade; it was an attempt to recover the essence of beauty. Nothing less. I remember explaining that to the dairywoman. Similarly I doubt that Monsieur de Camondo, in his Paris mansion, ever put on a powdered wig to walk across Parc Monceau, or that the Marquis de Panisse-Passis, in his castle near Antibes, which he had restored beautifully after the small earthquake that nearly cost him his keep, dressed up as that ancestor of his who once welcomed Charles V and Francis I. But it made everyone in Beaulieu chuckle to imagine the Reinachs boarding their little boat moored down by the villa, draped in chlamyses and loincloths made of sheep’s wool to protect them from the winter cold. They preferred to summer in the Savoie region, Theodore’s electoral lands, if they didn’t stay in Paris. In 1917, not long before her death, Madame Reinach disappeared into her furs. From then on at Kerylos, she was never seen without them. It is true that clothes could be a topic of conversation: the cousin of Napoleon III, Prince Plonplon as he was nicknamed, built a house in the style of Pompeii on Avenue Montaigne—there used to be an album of old photos of this curiosity in the library at Kerylos, it may still be on the shelves somewhere—and held gatherings where guests were invited to don classical costumes to read poetry and engage in other neo-Roman activities. For Theodore this was the decadence of the Romans. The Second Empire did not get a good press: the disastrous defeat at Sedan and France’s humiliation were imputed to the excessive reveling of the period. Wearing ancient Greek and Roman costumes was seen as a kind of moral laxity. But Monsieur and Madame Reinach were wholly upstanding. Indeed, Theodore always stood when he wrote, just as in Guernsey the celebrated exile Victor Hugo, who by then had returned home with his liberty, used to stand facing the sea. As if behind him were the books he had read and before him those he was going to write.

  14

  MY FIRST PAINTINGS

  Theodore insisted that there be no fakery. He used to say this constantly to Pontremoli. Everything in the peristyle had to be true, the huge stones, the massive beams, the bronze, there was no question of using plaster briquettes and hoping that at a glance no one would notice the difference. If everything were authentic, it would make everything that they invented plausible. The inner courtyard was the part of the house Adolphe liked best, the most true. He liked to set out a small table where he would sit and go through the notes for his first major book. He would watch the painters as they worked. He liked talking to them. The antefixes, carved palm decorations that elegantly punctuate the edge of the tiled roof, were copied from one found on the Acropolis in Athens. Gargoyles used for evacuating rain-water were sculpted into marble lion muzzles, with the triglyphs below, large squares of stone, according to the rules, separating them from the metopes, which were not carved into mythological figures but left white, so that the three lines of each triglyph would stand out in their purity. It would have been a vulgar mistake to carve every detail, to show off how learned they were and how much money they had. Theodore remarked one day to Pontremoli that if the house had been built on the other side of the Rhine, the brash, uncivilized folk would, doubtless, have chiseled every metope and painted all the triglyphs, with the result that they would have been all anyone noticed. At Kerylos the roofline of the peristyle goes almost unremarked—it only appears when, after a day of reading in the shadow of the columns, one lifts one’s eyes up toward the sky and they linger briefly at the top of the walls. For nothing must interrupt the reader’s focus.

  Since I came in this morning I keep coming across all the elegant details that so pleased me in my youth. Three sides of the peristyle open onto the downstairs rooms, allowing a glimpse into their interiors, while the fourth is simply the other side of the entrance façade, leaving more room for the garden, and to enjoy the view over the bay of Beaulieu. The broad columns without a base are Doric. On the vestibule side are slender Ionic columns, with capitals that coil like reels of cotton. One of the most commonly repeated banalities in architecture studies, I once heard Grégoire explain to an attentive Ariadne, is that the Doric column, with its unadorned capital, represents virility, while the more graceful Ionic column represents femininity. Seeing her sardonic smile, he hastily added that he had no idea how true that was, but you read it everywhere. The ancients believed it, repeated it, but actually, said Ariadne, why might a woman not resemble a Doric column? She said she thought the painting by Cézanne of a cook in a blue apron was Doric. And why would the Ionic style not be used to describe the elegance of a young Zouave in a blue jacket embroidered with coils of red braid? That was the day that Ariadne showed me her sketchbook: the panthers and lions she used to sketch on Sundays at the Jardin des Plantes, the animals in motion, casting their hungry gazes beyond their cages.

  Pontremoli made some sketches for the walls, but Theodore rejected them. They looked too much like Napoleon’s cousin Prince Plonpon’s Pompeian villa, dramatic scenes in intense colors unfolding against a red background. He wanted the frescos to harmonize with the Carrara marble. Tinted plaster, very diluted colors applied with a brush—the aim was to evoke the lekythoi, the tall Greek white-ground vases that he was so fond of. The whole would form an open, covered passageway, not very long, not very high, a cloister where he could walk slowly up and down, philosophizing in a low voice. Theodore knew that one thinks better when one walks, writes better when one stands, and that there was no need to feel shame in eating lying down, if that’s what one felt like doing.

  Having rejected Pontremoli’s drawings, he didn’t want to call upon a great painter, which would upset the architect. Ariadne and Grégoire suggested the names of two artists. Gustave-Louis Jaulmes, a young student of Victor Laloux—Pontremoli’s first professor, to whom we owe the imposing Orsay train station that looks like a museum, just as the museums of that era looked like train stations. He excelled in ornamental pattern, waves traced with a steady hand, his palms seeming to sway because he preferred not to use a stencil, which gave them a certain flair and verve. Working with him was Adrien Karbowsky, who had been a student of Puvis de Chavannes, a man who had the habit of telling everyone that he was born in the year of the Great Exhibition in 1855, the one where Ingres and Delacroix were pitted against one another. A friendship immediately sprang up between him and Adolphe: together they pored over books about Greek vases and wondered what the ancient texts had to say about color preparation. Adolphe would call me over to look. Ariadne and Grégoire often took part in these discussions: together, like musicians in a small orchestra, they were reviving Greek painting. Greek writers bequeathed us descriptions of paintings, hundreds of artists, teachers and pupils, different schools, but no trace has ever been found. All we can do is imagine.

  Theodore wanted to retain the style of the vases, but enlarged, as if they had simply been unrolled straight onto the walls. The subjects were to be simple, but original, and above all were to avoid the Trojan War. In a niche, to the side, there was to be a bust of a bearded Homer, with his eyes closed. The strangest scene is the one that shows the death of Talos, after the discovery of the Golden Fleece. The hero looks like one of those monuments that would be put up a few years later in every village throughout France, wi
th a large cadaver in the center— that’s the one that everyone noticed, though no one remembers the story of Talos, or even knows who told it. Alongside, Apollo and Hermes—or is it Dionysius?—are having an argument. The bearded god has grabbed the arm of the god of the arts to try and force him to loosen his grip on the lyre he is holding.

  The frescoes on the lower part of the wall show stylized waves and a collection of Mediterranean seashells. I had been allowed to pick up a paintbrush, and these were my first attempts. That is the section I find most lovely.