by Adrien Goetz
This injunction against “any female creature” was a source of perplexity: the absence of animals laying eggs or producing milk restricted the clerics to a diet of vegetable soup, and they were plunged into anguish every time a mosquito, its sex uncertain, settled on the edge of a caldron. It was rather comical to be talking about all this after we had made love. Ariadne sensed that I wanted to talk about it. She stayed silent. She understood: what I was going to tell her was almost as important as our embraces. She liked seeing me back among the living, without the need for someone to help me, acting of my own accord— for her. She had a soft, clear voice I found utterly lovely, and a simplicity in her choice of words. She never stumbled, while I tripped over my words whenever I became emotional. I sensed that she loved me, and though everything around us was so complicated, these few hours were simple, in this lovers’ half-light that enveloped us both. I was careful not to tell her that my spoken Greek still made people laugh, that the priests had little taste for my Ajaccio accent.
Upon our return to Saloniki after our stay in Athos, we went straight to the public baths, where we were massaged and perfumed, and slowly returned to civilization. Adolphe kept asking me if we still reeked, as we planned nocturnal excursions to houses of disrepute, while his uncle went to visit the synagogue and the old Jewish cemetery, as well as the great Roman gate and the basilica that dates back to the emperors of the Late Empire. The Jewish community of Saloniki was famous, and the renowned Monsieur Reinach was deemed worthy of a warm reception. One afternoon he took me aside and said, “Be very careful during your walks around the city; I don’t want Adolphe to discover a passion for the Late Empire, that’s the last thing I need! The arch of Emperor Galerius can exert a dangerously seductive appeal.” Needless to say, I followed his advice to the letter, and we did not spend more than an hour on curiosities, whether Roman or Judaic. Moreover, as far as antiquities were concerned, only one thing occupied our minds: the discovery that we had made a few days earlier in a monastery on Mount Athos, of which we were so proud and so stunned we hardly dared talk about it to each other. That day in the thermal baths I told Ariadne my biggest secret, the one that Theodore would never now reveal, that Adolphe had taken with him to the grave.
I was the one who had organized it all: in order to enter the territory of Athos, a diamonitirion was needed, an ecclesiastical pass, signed by three Orthodox cardinals. I wrote a beautiful letter to my metropolitan bishop in Cargèse—I distrusted the worldly prelates of the Russian Cathedral in Nice—and we received his answer, written with a quill pen, informing us that three passes would be waiting for us in a village named Ouranopolis—“the gateway to Heaven”—on the coast of Chalkidiki. A border wall sealed off the sacred peninsula, which could thus only be accessed by boat.
We left from Marseille. The region of Macedonia was in turmoil, and when we arrived in Piraeus, the entire population was in uproar. I was worried that we would not be able to reach Mount Athos. I bought a newspaper and translated it aloud: the Greek army had attacked the northern provinces, which were still under the yoke of Turkey. Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia had decided to liquidate “European Turkey” and divide it up between them. Greece, under the benevolent eye of Orthodox Russia, was eager to recover Alexander’s first kingdom, whose population had turned on the Ottomans in support of the Greek soldiers. The Turks, who had begun with dramatic flourishes and a great brandishing of scimitars, had, to widespread astonishment, surrendered. Greece had succeeded in carrying out an entirely unexpected conquest, without igniting the Balkan powder keg. Adolphe mimicked the voice of his father, the redoubtable Joseph Reinach: “The formidable Balkan powder keg, upon which the great powers sit like students smoking cigarillos.”
I didn’t realize that I had, for the first time, mimicked Adolphe. Ariadne burst out laughing. She had forgotten he was no longer alive. I took her in my arms and carried on talking. Water from the gushing bronze spigot washed over me, and she didn’t see that I was crying. I took a long moment before I spoke again. I gripped her two hands in mine.
On the first day of this second voyage to Greece, we went to the Acropolis. At last. I wanted to see everything. I wanted to embrace every passerby. I’d dreamed of it for so long. The site was crowded with modest houses and ruins from every era. At first sight, I was disappointed. Adolphe wondered whether one might inventory every chunk of stone and rebuild it. Theodore, standing on the stern of this great vessel, where years later young Greeks would raise the Nazi flag—I cut out a photograph, which I still have somewhere—recited a page of Chateaubriand that his father had made him learn by heart when he was ten years old: “From the summit of the Acropolis, I beheld the sun rise between the two peaks of Mount Hymettus; the crows which build their nests around the citadel, but never soar to its summit, hovered below us, their black and polished wings were tinged with roseate hues by the first radiant beams of Aurora; columns of light, blue smoke ascended in the shade along the sides of the Hymettus. Athens, the Acropolis, and the ruins of the Parthenon were colored with the most beautiful tints of peach blossom.” I cannot help thinking, as I copy out this beautiful passage, of Elsie de Wolfe, the society decorator, who when she first saw the Parthenon exclaimed, “Oh! It’s my beige!” She didn’t quote Chateaubriand, but she was quite as ridiculous as Theodore. It didn’t strike me at the time, I found it all very splendid, I was filled with awe and pride. I made drawings of caryatids and pretty nineteenth-century houses embellished with palmettes, their rooftops garnished with sphinxes and antique ornamentation—everything that Theodore refused to have at Kerylos, the papier-mâché and paste that would have its moment later on in the movies. On our first evening, we were greeted by fireworks: Adolphe told his uncle he always overdid things, he really didn’t need to. It was Athens celebrating its victory over the Turks. The next day, we began our long journey by horse and cart along unpaved roads, with soldiers in astrakhan toques that would have been the envy of the sanctimonious ladies of Beaulieu, and troops in pleated skirts as white as the dresses Suzanne Lenglen wore on the tennis court. The entire population had come out to take control of the villages, and we were swept along in a triumphant march. It remained to be seen what would become of the monasteries on Mount Athos. The Ottomans had always respected the Orthodox religion and the independence of the peninsula, but how would the King of Greece’s soldiers act?
Over the previous few years, Adolphe had taken several journeys alone, with the French School at Athens as his main residence. I hadn’t seen him for a long time. Kerylos remained a base where he could withdraw and work. He sent me his first published articles, after which he started to write so much— adopting the graphomaniac habits of his family—that he stopped communicating with me altogether. He accumulated brief notes in scholarly journals, scattering to the winds enough to fill one or two books—that was all I could tease from him, and I don’t think he cared at all what I thought about his research. Theodore had told me that Adolphe had barely arrived at the school in Athens, where his uncle Salomon had once been a resident, when he left again, fleeing the academic rigor and the opinions of his teachers—they knew that he had money, he was unpopular, he undertook travel at his own expense, never bothered with the necessary permits. The School at Athens is unique. Ariadne visited it once with the Pontremoli team; she briefly alluded to it, managing not to mention Grégoire’s name. She painted a pretty picture: it was a library in the middle of a garden. Amid a great deal of excitement, the “Great Excavation” at Delphi—the excavation of the Temple of Apollo—had been planned there. An entire village had been moved, while in Paris, the parliament had voted a one-off subsidy—who would imagine such a thing today?—and a trade agreement had been concluded with the Greek government, anticipating, inter alia, that France would import I don’t know how many tons of Corinth grapes every year. If only my mother had known the reason why so many recipes of the era called for grapes in such large quantities, in semolina, and all manner of desserts, even in the
custardy far breton! All French children were required to consume the surplus Greek grapes for tea, in order that the most beautiful sanctuary in the world might be unearthed. It was for the honor of our nation. Olive bread was now served in all good homes. Meanwhile, the Germans were scrabbling away at Olympia. Everyone spoke with immense respect of the French School at Athens.
A few years ago, I returned on vacation to show the garden to my children. The guardian opened the gate to me when I mentioned the Reinach name. He led us to the war memorial. I had found the names of all those I used to know on the memorial at the church in Beaulieu. But not that of my poor Adolphe. The words “God” and “Fatherland” are inscribed on the marble, as if not everyone had the same homeland and God. But his name is engraved at the entrance to the School at Athens. I saw the library too, which never closes. Young people work there day and night deciphering new inscriptions.
During this period, Adolphe wrote magnificent letters to his father from Egypt, in which he told him about his work but also about some other, secret, research that the two of them were hoping to undertake. For his book on the paintings of antiquity, he was analyzing some portraits that had been discovered in the area around Fayum, and he was still gathering all the quotations he could find by classical writers about the art of painting, even recipes for varnish. He had had the incredible epiphany, which surpassed his father’s brilliance and his uncles’ research, that to understand Hellenism he needed to travel to its borders. In Alexandria and Cairo he began surveys that would have occupied him for his entire life.
The librarian showed me an archive card on which was written “Notebooks left by Adolphe-Joseph Reinach.” I didn’t have time to look through them all. So that I could take something away with me, in a hasty scribble I copied out the first page that fell open, promising myself that I would come back to take notes on the rest: “Thasos. May 21, 1911. Went by boat this morning to Thassopoula. A rocky island with three promontories, mostly thorny vegetation overshadowed by a few olive trees and wild fig trees. Lots of birds and rabbits. We are going to nose around, there are so many legends about the treasures to be found there. At the end of the bay right next to the sea there’s a hot spring. It’s protected by a small house that opens straight onto the sea. It was built by a governor of Thasos who was doing a cure . . . ”
In his letters—where are they today? The Nazis took everything when they came to Kerylos—he wrote mainly about something that the two of them had kept secret until Theodore began to tell me some of it on our journey by horse and cart from Athens to Saloniki: the real reason for our journey to this country without women. That morning, in Kerylos’s thermal baths, I finally dared to reveal the secret to Ariadne, who could barely believe what I told her.
The truth is that Theodore had sent Adolphe to Egypt to realize the Reinach dream. He was going to make the crucial discovery that would relegate Schliemann’s extraordinary finds at Troy and Mycenae to the rank of the feats of the past, and would make it clear to all, and for centuries to come, how great French scholarship was, and also, of course, a little bit about the part our archaeological school owed to the family. It had nothing to do with discovering the cities Homer sang about, or the arms of that Aphrodite whom guides at the Louvre still call the Venus de Milo—and who, according to Salomon, was an Amphitrite, a goddess of the sea. Adolphe Reinach went to Egypt to look for something better than vestiges of the Iliad or the treasures of Agamemnon, better than the Cretan Labyrinth and the temples at Delphi, better even than the ruins of Atlantis that Plato wrote about. He wanted to find the tomb of Alexander the Great.
That was what I loved most about this family: this mix of seriousness and folly, the way they became so irrepressibly excited about the most outlandish projects, from the safety of their “small house that opens straight onto the sea.” Monsieur Eiffel could be like that too, when I’d see him exclaiming with delight, waving in his hand his weather reports or the plans for a new viaduct that he had been commissioned to design for some godforsaken region of Cochinchina. Something childlike remained unsullied within the spirits of these great men, and that’s why, I think, they enjoyed talking to me: I was a child too, and I hope, even at seventy, that I still am. I was a child, a wounded soldier, and in my arms my Ariadne was also a child. Kerylos had become our plaything.
Ariadne, who had draped herself in a linen robe that one of the maids had forgotten behind a small curtain at the back of the room, sat down to listen to me in the golden glow of the apse. She looked like a delicate statue. I plunged down under the water again and then came up and kept my eyes on her as I told her the whole story. Since ancient times, no one has known where the tomb of the conqueror was located, or even what it looked like. “But,” Adolphe had written, excitedly, “if anything remains of the paintings by Apelles—the greatest of all Greek artists, the favorite of the master of the ancient world—the only place they could possibly be located is in his tomb.” Apelles painted a portrait of Campaspe, Alexander’s favorite, and had the misfortune to fall in love with his model. The conqueror, delighted with the painting, gave him the young woman as an exchange, which was noble and beautiful, but also gave people plenty to ponder regarding Alexander’s tastes. Adolphe had jotted in the margin, “Campaspe’s nakedness was not unusual for the era. Anaxarchos, one of Alexander’s courtiers, always insisted on being served by a beautiful naked young girl.” He underlined another passage a little further on, an anecdote told by Pliny the Elder: “Alexander talked a lot about painting, though he lacked any knowledge. The artist discreetly encouraged him to hold his tongue, telling him he was provoking a great deal of amusement among the young boys who ground his pigments.”
The conqueror died in Babylon. A huge funeral cortège brought his body back to the Mediterranean. The generals who inherited the mantle of his empire quarreled over his corpse. They spirited the hero away and everyone thought that he had returned to his father and his ancestors in Pella, Macedonia, or that he had been buried in Athens or Delphi, or that he had been placed in a large carved sarcophagus like the ones Theodore had studied at the new museum in Istanbul. Most likely he was laid to rest in Egypt, near the oasis of Siloam, where the oracle of the god Amon had spoken to him and told him that from henceforth he was now equal to the gods.
Finding Alexander’s tomb was the holy grail of archaeology. Except that, since it was a grail, my beloved Adolphe did not find it. At least not in Egypt. He began mentioning it less often in his letters and writing more about pigments and paint-brushes. He stopped dreaming, became serious and methodical, not always the best methodology. But his uncle Theodore did not stop dreaming; impatient and restless, he became a long-distance researcher. He thought the answer was as likely to be found in books as in the desert sands. He had the most up-to-date German atlas, a large volume, always open on his desk; he experienced Adolphe’s expeditions from his bedroom.
One autumn day, late in the afternoon, he found it. In his bathroom on the second floor Theodore stood up in the carved marble bathtub copied from a Roman tub, which, according to my mother, looked just like the gravy boat she always saw at her mother-in-law’s. He let out a cry and yelled my name. I was in the gallery that ran the length of the master bedrooms, folding towels. I ran to him. He was standing up, completely naked, covered in foam, splashing water all over the red and ocher wall paintings, laughing and shouting in Latin, “Proh! Pudor!” then Greek, “Eureka!” then he sat back down in the water and said, “I know where it is! The tomb. We have to go, we can’t tell anyone, we can’t say where we are going. Guess who gave me the solution! What a genius. Actually, he wants to come with us, he says he’s still strong enough.”
“Who? Go where? We’re going back to Greece?”
“The one who figured it out is that very model of a modern man, our neighbor, your friend Monsieur Eiffel.”
“But he’s eighty years old!”
“He’s a genius.”
“He’s in no fit state for the roads of
Greece . . . ”
“It’s his idea. He found it. A streak of light, the lightning rod at the top of his tower.”
“He can’t come with us. That would be utter folly.”
“He told me the other day as he was smoking his cigar that the Greeks must have buried Alexander at the top of a high mountain.”
“It can’t be Olympus, that is reserved for the gods.”
“The other peak, in Macedonia, at the heart of the kingdom of Philip II, his father and all his ancestors. Mount Athos, Achilles, does that mean anything to you?”
And that is how we ended up taking a small boat from Ouranopolis, headed for Kharies, where there were mule tracks and boats to take us up to the monasteries. Fortunately Eiffel listened to me and did not come with us—he would have died along the way. Theodore found it hard walking in the sun. Adolphe had no real idea of where to begin our search. He told me to go and ask one of the monks in the harbor—who looked like the priests in Nice I hated so much—if there was anywhere in Athos where one could pray to Saint Sisoes. What plan was he hatching? The monk, who was very old, thought for a moment, and said, “Dionysiou.” It was good timing since a felucca was about to set sail for there. All the other monks were in a state of great agitation: they were reading the newspapers that had been brought over in our boat. Two Greek gendarmes were also on board, speaking to the Kharies authorities, confirming that an entire regiment was on its way to liberate Athos. Adolphe explained the situation to us: the Turks had always left the monks in peace, while the Greeks terrified them. These twenty monasteries are the hidden Vatican of Orthodoxy. The Russians wanted to get their hands on the priests by pretending to protect them and the Bulgarians too. Theological disputes had been fanned to divide the twenty communities—the debate that year was about the name of God, was it or was it not divine. Everyone had an opinion, the supporters of the Bulgarians were busy trying to drive out the supporters of the Russians, and it was just at that moment that the Greek government troops arrived unexpectedly. We thought no boats would be allowed to leave, and that the Greeks would block the ship we had spotted containing the hidden food supply of these backward monks, in the diabolical form of boxes of fresh-laid eggs. But the Reinach uncle and nephew each had a secret weapon: In passable modern Greek, Adolphe announced to our new friend the priest, who suddenly developed an obligation to accompany us, that he was ardently devoted to Saint Sisoes, an Egyptian hermit. Theodore handed over several tickets to the captain. I felt like I was in a Jules Verne novel, standing in front of Captain Hatteras or Professor Barbicane.
