Villa of Delirium

by Adrien Goetz

  15

  THE LAST PAINTER OF ANCIENT GREECE

  When Adolphe got married, at the age of twenty-five, it almost seemed fated. For years, Mathieu Dreyfus had been coming to see Adolphe’s father; he would read the Reinachs letters his imprisoned brother had sent from Devil’s Island. Adolphe and little Magui Dreyfus, Mathieu’s daughter, had witnessed together all the twists and turns of the affair. I once found a poem he wrote for Magui when he was eleven, telling the story in his own way, rhyming “Dreyfus” with “Jesus.” Magui was very pretty, with her round face, black hair and a childlike smile. Her private tutor was a wag: the famous Christophe, the pen name of a brilliant chemist called Marie-Louise-Georges Colomb, who created some of the earliest French cartoon characters, Firefighter Camember and the Fenouillard family. This gave her considerable prestige among children her own age.

  Whenever she came to visit the Reinachs, she played a game where she pretended to be the humble yet verbose servant of another of Christophe’s characters, Professor Cosinus: “The footbath you requested to aid your reflections awaits you, sir.” Theodore used to beg her to perform it over and over again. Much later, she gave me one of the Cosinus books that had belonged to Adolphe, his name inscribed in purple ink on the frontispiece, with a dedication from Christophe himself.

  All the Reinach clan supported Mathieu Dreyfus in his fight for his brother. They knew that everyone held against Captain Dreyfus the fact that he was too rich, had married too well, he seemed cold and aloof. That was what was said in the army too, and it took a long time for everyone in the village, from the notary to the dairywoman, to finally acknowledge that it was right that he be rehabilitated; the priest was one of the last to concede it, which the Reinachs were quite aware of, though they rarely mentioned it. “That man,” Adolphe said, “shows Carthaginian levels of bad faith.” Mathieu Dreyfus was a good deal warmer than his brother, and Magui took after him.

  Magui and Adolphe spent hours together under the peri-style. They always knew they would live together. This is what the evening breeze murmurs to me as it stirs around the marble columns and the frescoes: my friend, the last of the painters of Greece, did not return from the war.

  Because of him, and her, I began to criticize Kerylos. They dared to say out loud that the mattresses were uncomfortable, there were no clocks; they wanted to bang nails in the walls, repaint, there wasn’t even a swimming pool, it was all very well being authentic from an archaeological point of view . . . I didn’t exactly share Magui’s criticisms. I was sure I wasn’t going to end up spending my life among them all. I didn’t know yet what I wanted to do. I lived on the Pointe des Fourmis as if it was an independent principality, my own private Monaco, but it was no longer enough for me. I didn’t see many people in the village any more; I’d had enough of their gossip. But there were long periods when the Reinachs weren’t there, and then I spent time at the Eiffel villa, with my mother, who was nagging me to get a proper job, and the domestic staff. Soon I couldn’t listen to their stories anymore. In Beaulieu, people who had known me as a child must have found me rather stuck-up; the café owner asked if he was still allowed to talk to me, and I ended up retreating into the company of the postman, the bookish dairywoman, and the notary, who were all very fond of me and whom I found easy to talk to—apart from the fact that I could not bear the finely honed cruelty in the tone they took when they talked about Jews. The notary once said to my face, “This Reinach is the perfect example of one of those fine Jewish minds, quite brilliant, but who, ultimately, has contributed nothing.” What he meant was that Theodore, Salomon, and particularly Joseph might in theory have ended up as famous as the greatest minds of the Third Republic, but that it would never happen. Did that mean that Kerylos was worth nothing at all? What about the books and the thousands of articles the three brothers had written, were they worth nothing either? And Adolphe, who by the time he died at the age of twenty-seven had published 180 articles? My fancy checked jackets and linen pants made me look like an affluent student and my mother said that my father would not have recognized me. I’m not sure that the thought pleased her. Now I took the train to Nice, I accompanied Fanny Reinach to the opera—in Monaco I discovered a world that no one in the Eiffels’ kitchen could have ever imagined.

  For centuries, archaeologists have dug deep to find and understand the past. Theodore’s genius was to build in order to understand the past. He taught me, without actually saying it out loud, always to do the opposite of what people expect. Adolphe told me that you had to hold a paintbrush in your hand to have an idea of what painting in ancient Greece was like. When the painter Jaulmes mixed his pigments in front of us, scraped them on to his palette, he was an archaeologist, creating, inventing—it was a brilliant way of doing an excavation back to front. That was what interested Adolphe. Magui was no less fascinated. Adolphe’s idea was to gather together everything that the ancient texts tell us about painting. His work was a summation, which I believe remains influential to this day. He had the very innovative idea of not only looking at the lives of artists, but of collecting together all the technical evidence. He had inherited a jumble of scattered sheets from a scholar who hadn’t completed the project, and embarked on revising and annotating these texts. Even his uncle, the wise Salomon, who was himself perfectly capable of spending a year or two on some dry academic labor, tried to persuade him not to take on such a thankless task, but Adolphe crosschecked everything with enthusiasm and told me about the latest discoveries: in the ruins of ancient Demetrius some painted steles dated back to the Hellenistic era had been found entombed inside a brick rampart, offering a hint for imagining the paintings of the ancient Greeks. Decorated ossuaries were discovered in Sidon, and fragments of paintings in ancient tombs in southern Russia. Adolphe wanted to go and see them, but at the very word Crimea his uncle grimaced, and Theodore fell silent—I didn’t yet know why. They had not shared every detail about their lives with me.

  Unlike his uncle, who valued written texts above all else, Adolphe wanted to work with photographs of sites, for potential new excavations. He dreamed of setting off to search for Greek paintings from Macedonia to Egypt, convinced he would discover some. He told me he would take me with him and we would travel around the Mediterranean sweeping up images the likes of which these dusty old intellectuals had never seen. He was planning one volume on mosaicists, another on vase painting, and he would have written ten or twenty volumes on Greek art in ten years. That was his plan.

  This great monument remained unfinished, and in the end, only his book on painting would be completed. When the war broke out, he had just begun to correct the galley proofs he had been sent from the printer. There were plenty of mistakes, misprints everywhere, for the typographers knew no Greek. The book was published seven years after his death at the front, with the help of the hundreds of index cards he had created.

  I was moved to see the name of my friend resurrected on the cover of a book. He would have liked that. It was Theodore who completed the work; it was as if he were building a sepulcher for Adolphe, here, beneath the peristyle. With Adolphe, everything was premised on his enthusiasm. He used to borrow Monsieur Jaulmes’s palette, help him grind crystals and measure out pigments. I saw how his eyes shone. He would sneak down to the scullery for some scorpion fish and come back up with a bottle of white wine.

  Occasionally we went up to Paris together, to Rue Hamelin, to bring the mail and settle accounts, but the Reinachs’ house in this beautiful neighborhood felt very foreign to me. Like the whole city, of course: my first trip up to the capital I got so lost that I got in a taxi and said to the driver, “To the station!”

  My first courtesy call on that trip was to the Eiffel Tower. I was thrilled to see the elevator—I’d known for years how it worked and I wanted to cry out to the small group of Italians there with me that I was a friend of the remarkable inventor of this machinery—and at the top I spent hours trying to name all the monuments, spires, cupolas, I dreamed
about a journey in a hot air balloon, it made me happy to be so close to the sky. Then I went down and made my way to the Louvre to lose myself among the Greek vases, thousands of them displayed on high shelves of dark wood. I sat down on one of the large benches in the center of the gallery and looked at all the visitors who weren’t looking at anything. Mothers were explaining to their daughters that Zeus was Venus’s husband, then they left the Louvre quite thrilled at having seen nothing at all. Middle-aged matrons sped past the Greek vases, and even the aging connoisseurs sat wiping their pince-nez. I went into the Apollo Gallery with its many treasures, and I too saw nothing much. When I spoke to Theodore about the painting by Delacroix, in which the snake, which looks like some prehistoric monster, is slain by the god of the arts, I didn’t understand why his expression grew clouded. I thought he didn’t appreciate Delacroix, or that he thought that this scorching image didn’t correspond to what he loved about Greek refinement.

  It was the words “Apollo Gallery” that seemed to displease him; he changed the subject and began telling me about the excavations at Miletus, how whatever was found there would belong to the museum, how the Rothschilds were financing the entire mission. He asked me if I had seen the Ergastines and I stammered. It was Adolphe who explained to me that it was the name of the most beautiful of all the marble fragments of the Parthenon frieze that had not fallen into the hands of the English, who had stolen almost all the rest. This fragment had been given to a Frenchman, and was now displayed in Paris: a cohort of young girls, their dresses falling to their feet, walking slowly, one behind the other, on their way to pay homage to the goddess of Athens. I didn’t go back until many years later, and when I looked at this carving, trying to see it through the eyes of my friend Adolphe, I couldn’t remember what he had told me. This is how it is: I forget the important sentences and I only remember the nonsense spouted by Professor Cosinus’s servant. The Louvre, Paris, it wasn’t for me: I needed the sea and the sun. Not that I felt the need to go back to my family, my uncles and aunts in Corsica—however much my mother insisted that I go more often, I just let her say it. I wanted to travel. I felt imprisoned inside the maze of Kerylos. Theodore understood. He too wanted to get away. One night there was a huge storm at sea, and I watched him, without uttering a word to anyone, open, one by one, every single window in the house.

  PART TWO

  Ode to Apollo

  “By me, by my love, the Labyrinth opens . . . ”

  THOMAS CORNEILLE, ARIADNE

  16

  THE MOSAIC ANCHOR

  My first expedition with Theodore and Adolphe was a sailing trip around Greece, before the house was finished, in 1904. This meant we were able to extricate ourselves from the conversations with the builders and masons, about which Theodore was rather less enthused than his lengthy discussions with Pontremoli—he wanted to be au fait with all the details of the design of his house, for it was his project.

  At last I was going to visit Greece! I was beginning to know it well, without ever having been. While we were at sea, Theodore talked incessantly about the building work. My memories of this expedition are filled with images, views of the rooms being painted after the marble washbasins had been installed, designs for wooden towel racks and furniture for concealing the bidets. Sometimes, to show me what he meant, he would sketch them himself on the small forecastle at the back of the boat where we had our living quarters. The villa was becoming part of us.

  The Reinachs traveled but gave the impression they never went anywhere. In a cabinet in the library, huge albums of photographs displayed their expeditions to Turkey, the Levant, Egypt. Where are they now? In heavy black leather bindings, Salomon’s travels got mixed up with those of Theodore, and the less frequent journeys undertaken by Joseph. They all piled up in the house. Even when he went away, Theodore never seemed to leave Kerylos behind. Souvenirs of his voyages were stacked here, in this ship of his. He loved to cry, “Raise the anchor!” and then recite in a loud voice the poem by André Chénier, “Let us go now, the sails are ready, Byzantium calls!” before falling back into his chair.

  Today, I realized that this first trip to Greece was the great adventure of my life, though I had long forgotten it. I only recalled the beaches, the ruins, the anxieties of leaving, this morning, as I stood before the mosaics at the front door. As if I had never left Kerylos, as if this sailing trip had been no more than a dream, like the stories I made up for myself, where I pretended that I was with Dreyfus on Devil’s Island or inside a rocket that was going to puncture the eye of the moon goddess. All the reality of my youth was deposited on the windows and walls of this house; everything I had seen elsewhere had remained a sequence of images glimpsed from the other side of the windows. The villa is a sphinx with claws. I too was immobile, even during my travels—and then all these tours around Greece, these departures, I made them with the Reinachs, I was never alone, never free. I only began to leave Kerylos when I decided to run away from them.

  With their father, the three Reinach brothers had visited Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. I believe they had also seen the castles of England, and the brothers wanted to continue this tradition. An initial voyage was scheduled in 1902 aboard a ship called the Niger. I was not expected to be part of the expedition—I had barely arrived—but I heard plenty of talk about it. Monsieur Eiffel himself had said that he would join the expedition. In the kitchen people talked of Beirut, Damascus, Jerusalem, Crete . . . Except that there was an outbreak of the plague on board. Monsieur Reinach, believing in the virtues of hygiene, was in favor of going anyway: everything had been disinfected. But a lack of bravado among the others meant that he had to resign himself—and then he learned that the ship had been wrecked off the coast of Thessaly. I imagined myself captain, aged fifteen, saving everyone on board and being decorated by the president of the republic. When we finally left two years later, it was better: I was old enough to appreciate it.

  On board ship, Monsieur Reinach became Theodore again. He liked to play like a child, something I had already noticed about him. He used to take me to the cinema with the entire family, and he was always the one who laughed the loudest. A projection was once organized in Cannes, which at the time was entirely unfamiliar with this new form of entertainment. At home, in Beaulieu, we knew about the Lumière brothers’ invention. At Cap d’Ail their father had built three huge villas, one for him and one for each of his children, and everyone mocked him; Papa Lumière thought himself an architect and filled the houses with miniature columns and festoons everywhere. After the movie, Theodore explained with a learned air that the dialogue cards—white writing on a black background that narrated what was happening to the characters—were like the carved inscriptions of antiquity. We hadn’t even noticed, all we had seen was the moving images. We made fun of him— which he rather liked.

  We embarked upon the Île-de-France—a solid vessel that bore no resemblance to the floating palace that would bear this name between the two world wars—in April, which turned out very windy. I shared a cabin with Adolphe, we did our exercises on the bridge every morning. Between each port of call we would write and perform plays, or rather cabaret revues. I will never forget Theodore on the bridge, transformed into a stage, in front of an audience lounging on deckchairs, playing himself, the archaeologist. He didn’t need to get dressed up. The other people he had brought with him were rather more serious: Monsieur and Madame Louis Merle, he was a mining engineer, the head of French aluminum, who had married the daughter of another industry baron, Albert Massé. So many names, so famous back then . . . They all appear in the pamphlet we published immortalizing our onboard exploits. The title was thought up by Theodore, and I don’t believe any other members of the Institute ever got wind of it: Herewego, published “by a Society of experts and ignoramuses.” Herewego was a play on the word Cerigo, the ancient name of Kythera, the isle of lovers, which we sailed to after our stay on Malta. For the show, Maurice Feuillet, an illustrator who had published his
drawings in the satirical pamphlet L’Assiette au beurre, and Le Figaro artistique, designed Cretan-style costumes—who would have guessed that this cabaret compère who sang at the top of his voice would two years later become editor of the Gazette des beaux-arts? The story was of Homeric simplicity: an archaeologist makes land on Cerigo and finds an advertisement for Lombart chocolate and another for Dijon mustard. Theodore put on his pince-nez, frowned, and began reading. Then he discovers some ancient sheet music, whose first notes appear to be “Come on, baby!” He complains a great deal about a certain Jason who insisted on reserving in his name all the cabins on the Argonaut. The vainglorious man pretended he was leaving with some friends of his to find some flamboyant golden fleece. Adolphe, his eyes made up like those of a Khmer dancer, swayed in his leotard in his role as the “Vasophore,” a Greek servant who brought a huge krater of punch from which the half-reclining guests served themselves more alcohol with a ladle. Maurice Feuillet kept calling him back, shouting: “Over here, cupbearer to the gods!” I was slathered in green paint and told to stand on a pedestal: I was the statue of Heracles offered for the admiration of all. Alice Fougères appeared as a snake charmer, and did not dance only for her husband. Charles de Galland, who had not yet become mayor of Algiers, and who garnered the respect of everyone for his classical erudition, officiated as King Minos who understood nothing about anything. At the end they all left the stage together on “their petrol-driven ark,” as though in a trance, intoning, “Bon voyage, Monsieur Dumollet,” which Adolphe had translated into biblical Hebrew in my honor, for I was of course Heracles Dumollet.

  Four years later, that same Adolphe became a member of the French School of Athens, and I have always wondered if he would have had this passion if it hadn’t been for the Herewego voyage. He might well have turned his back on all his father’s passions. Yet I watched him at archaeological sites, the most serious of everyone, taking notes on the thick invitation cards that he always used to stuff into his pockets rather than handing them over at receptions, and I imitated him, as far I could, sketching and photographing all the things I was interested in.