by Adrien Goetz
The books were hidden away. Theodore arranged them in wall cabinets, trunks, and behind the curtains in the gallery above the library. It was unthinkable to display modern bindings; he wanted people to imagine scrolls, as numerous as those that had been found in the ashes of the volcano at Pompeii, in the Villa of the Papyri. Theodore was a genius. He didn’t flaunt quotations like his brother Joseph. He didn’t bludgeon other people with his knowledge. Joseph, when he read about a discovery in the Journal des savants, would cry, “Well now, this is absolutely extraordinary! I shall have to write about it!” One day, during lunch, Fanny Reinach burst out laughing when she heard this familiar phrase. Joseph didn’t understand, but he fell silent.
Theodore, rather than responding to my question about the golden crown, took down from a shelf a volume published by Hachette, the translation of a dialogue attributed to Lucian of Samosata, who composed dialogues with the dead and voyages to the moon as if they were true stories. He hastily assured me that this was not the work of the great poet himself, but probably of a certain Leon, one of the academic philosophers, about whom nothing more is known.
“It is called Halcyon, or the Metamorphosis. Look.”
I have since got hold of another copy. I remember reading to him:
“‘What voice is that, Socrates, a good way off from the shore? How sweet it is to the ear. I wonder what creature it can be, for the inhabitants of the deep are all mute.’
“‘It is a sea fowl, called the kerylos, or Halcyon, always crying and lamenting. It is very small, but the gods, they say, bestowed on her a recompense for her singular affection: while she makes her nest, the world is blessed with Halcyon days, such as this is, placid and serene, even in the midst of winter. Observe how clear the sky is, and the whole ocean tranquil, without a curl upon it.’
“‘This indeed is, as you say, a Halcyon day, and so was yesterday; but how, Socrates, can we believe the tales you spoke of, that women can be turned into birds, and birds into women? Nothing seems to me more improbable.’”
According to myth, the halcyon built its nest upon the Aegean Sea. The seven days that precede and the seven days that follow the winter solstice mark the period when the seas are flat, everything is calm, and, according to legend, the halcyon’s eggs were protected. During those days of calm between two storms is a time of quiet, for doing nothing, thinking about nothing, eyes wide in the light of the day.
21
THE MORNING WHEN THE MOST ANCIENT MUSIC IN THE WORLD WAS HEARD IN THE OIKOS
As the day turns around the house, the sun travels from one sundial to another. The first overlooks the peristyle, the other the gardens, each one inscribed with one half of a single phrase composed by Theodore: on the side where the sun rises is carved, “I designed this monument for the sun, in twelve parts, six facing the Levant, six facing the Zephyr,” and on the other, the side of the setting sun, “so that everyone, seeing the wall from afar, knows the hour of work and the hour of rest.”
The pink curtains—the same shade as Homer’s dawn, Fanny used to say—which I saw being hung after they were delivered from Lyon by the embroiderer Écochard in large cardboard boxes, have faded to ocher, the washed out color against the pale whitewashed walls like a sepia photograph left too long in the sun.
At Kerylos, I liked to listen. On evenings when the house was empty, it creaked like an old sailing ship: wooden doors swollen with damp, bronze curtain rings agitated by the wind, beams shifting; sometimes I could even hear, over the sound of the waves, the cries of the birds perched on the roof tiles.
By contrast, from the terrace at the top, the Bay of Beaulieu looks like an animated maquette, but without any noise: the boats returning to port, the swimmers and walkers in the far distance, the little train chugging silently through the palm trees with its tiny cottonwool plume.
All the sounds of Kerylos composed a kind of silence. Today they are here again because the house is empty, the murmur of ghosts as they cross each other’s path. The sounds that remain when no one is left—and Ariadne’s clear voice. I pine for her still.
At the heart of this silence is the piano, the most famous object in Kerylos; even those who were never invited to visit the Reinachs, but who wanted to suggest they were on familiar terms, used to talk about it, the only ancient Greek upright piano.
Because all the furniture in the house was designed in the pure Hellenic style, Fanny Reinach grew desperate during her first winter there, thinking that she would never be allowed a piano. Her cousin Béatrice Ephrussi, in her neighboring villa— whose comforts Fanny would laud out loud to annoy her husband—had all the pianos she wanted! Fanny reproached her husband for depriving her of her greatest pleasure, of stifling the thing she loved, of sacrificing her on the altar of his archaeological obsession—she even threatened not to come back to Beaulieu. She needed those hours at a piano, no doubt, as an escape. Then Theodore realized that she wasn’t joking, her face grew hard, she shut herself up and wrote letters all day. And one fine day in 1912 she saw the instrument arrive, with, in Greek letters, the words Pleielos Epoiesen, “Pleyel made it,” inlaid in dark wood against the pale lemonwood, an idea her husband had to make their literary friends laugh when they saw the inscription. Folded up and closed, it looked like a sort of tall chest. It would be opened in the evening, revealing the invisible keyboard as the sheet music was taken out. Obviously Fanny would have liked to arrange family portraits in silver frames on top, but she understood there were limits.
She liked to play with the window open. In the garden, where I could listen without being seen, I heard Ravel’s Waltz, and Debussy’s Six épigraphes antiques. I liked one section in particular, “For the invocation of Pan, god of the summer wind,” and another, more mysterious, called “For a grave without a name.” I think of Adolphe whenever I hear that piece. I make no distinction between thinking about him and praying for him. I think of Léon too, Fanny and Theodore’s son, a musician who might have become a great composer—two names without graves.
I could sing quite well, but I only ever learned to play the harmonica, and that not very well. I had so many things to learn, I didn’t devote the necessary time to music. Madame Reinach loved Bach, his sarabandes and fugues. She had charming ideas, poetic and unexpected; she would take on a dreamy air and say, “How I would love to go to the Congo and play this piece in a village for some little African children,” and her husband would smile, because he loved her.
When Theodore himself sat down at his “Pleielos,” he played riotous pieces, like the carillon from Offenbach’s The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein, which would cause quite a stir among the bathers down on the rocks. Orpheus in the Underworld, of course, was one of his favorites: he loved Public Opinion’s main aria, and the Infernal Galop, better known as the cancan. Sometimes I would hear him singing in his bathtub, “When I was king of the Boeotians . . . ” The line he especially liked in The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein was, “And we, what luck, we are three!” which he often sang, reminding the assembled company that there were only two Montgolfier brothers and two Goncourt brothers, unlucky for them. He could have become a pianist, a virtuoso even, he could resolve any technical difficulty, just as he might have become a chemist or a mathematician: that was why he always chose pieces from comic operas, as a way of mocking himself and his multiple talents. His slender fingers raced over the keys as he beat time with his feet. On the wall, among the motifs in light relief that contrast with the painted details, is a depiction of Ariadne’s nuptials, after she has been abandoned by Theseus on Naxos, then seduced and saved by Dionysius, who consoles her with wine, festivities, folly, centaurs, and music. Eros is pouring perfume over the head of the young woman. It was inspired by a famous vase in the museum at Orvieto. The stucco artist applied it to the wall in less than a day. I turn my head: there is Ariadne, standing with Grégoire on the terrace, applauding, my Ariadne, enraptured, so lovely, her hair loose around her shoulders. I have the feeling she is watching me, surr
eptitiously.
One sunny morning Theodore invited me into the music salon—with its perfect proportions, barely large enough for all the family, there was certainly not enough room to hold the small concerts that he so loathed—“Listen closely, Achilles, I am going to play for you the earliest music of humanity. No music older than this has ever been found. It is the Delphic hymn to Apollo, which I managed to decipher. There are not many things I am proud of, but this, yes: enabling people to hear the sounds of ancient Greece. Gabriel Fauré, a friend of ours, as you know, arranged the hymn and played it on this very piano—you weren’t here, you must have been in Nice, at school. Since then I have transcribed another piece, less lovely, slower. There were some mistakes in the notation that I was wrong to correct; they were, perhaps, after all, the fantasies of this musician of antiquity whose name we shall never know.”
I was still a young man with no culture, but I found this Monsieur Reinach, who claimed, with the aplomb of some marvelous mandarin, that he had managed to correct the spelling errors of the ancient Greeks, quite incredible.
“Listen to them both, and tell me which one you prefer. The first was played in the Grand Amphitheater at the Sorbonne, during the first International Olympic Congress, after the games were revived. You know the frieze by Monsieur Puvis de Chavannes, The Sacred Wood, with all those pretty girls in nightgowns? I showed you a reproduction in one of those books that my dear brother Salomon writes for young ladies—and older ladies—who attend the École du Louvre. Have you heard of the Olympic Games? They are very new and very old. You are a consummate athlete, you ought to take part, you might even win a chocolate medal. I saw the Baron de Coubertin seated in the front row, weeping when he heard it, tears dripping into his mustache.”
I was intrigued by this story. I asked him how he had managed to decipher such ancient music. He explained that no one knew why, but in the chiseled inscription there were symbols that appeared above certain letters. He realized that this was the Greek way of writing musical notation before musical scoring was invented. Much has been written on the subject, but he approached the problem with a fresh and uncomplicated perspective. I was fascinated.
I listened as each note rose as if a temple were being built before me. The music was beautiful, solemn, full of mystery. I played it on the harmonica that night, looking out at the sea. I wanted the sea to hear this music that it had heard two thousand years before, to hear it respond with the crash of waves and wavelets, for neither had the sea changed. I detected a similarity between the music’s slow rhythm and the Corsican songs of my childhood, intoned by the mountain people at wedding Masses, before the statue of the Virgin, just as the harp used to be played for the victorious Athena on the Acropolis. The second or third phrase was particularly lovely, and I could have started it over ten times in a row, like a snake charmer.
I will never forget the first time I heard this music. I walked over to the window, opened it, and looked out toward the horizon, listening to each second of the hymn to Apollo. When it was finished, I asked Theodore to play it for me again. He did.
I found the second hymn, though very lovely, more repetitive, more rhythmed, like a ritual dance, perhaps more real. Fauré hadn’t altered it at all. I had been an avid reader of Theodore’s book, Greek Music, which, he said with a malicious little smile, would be useful to two sorts of people: musicians who knew a little Greek and Hellenists who knew a little music, two categories of whom there were not very many at all.
I met the famous Gabriel Fauré here, in 1919. He had been to Monaco to perform his composition Masques et bergamasques, in the pretty little chocolate box in the shape of an opera house built by Garnier, and afterward he came to perform his pieces in the Oikos at Kerylos, surrounded by stucco masks recalling those in the theater of Pergamon. Fauré was a charming old man, fond of art, and sculpture in particular—he was married to the daughter of Emmanuel Frémiet, the man to whom we owe the statue of Joan of Arc riding her horse on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris and, scaled down, upon many a Catholic home’s mantelpiece. Fauré, the son of a schoolmaster from Pamiers, had done very well for himself. The Countess Greffulhe, taking herself for Ludwig II of Bavaria, made him her domestic Wagner, though he was not very Wagnerian at all, in spite of a piece he wrote called Souvenirs de Bayreuth. Like many great composers, he was hard of hearing. He insisted that every compliment he received be repeated. Theodore much admired the score of his opera Pénélope, and requested that he arrange several abbreviated sections for the piano. Fanny had been dead for two years, and I think the music must have helped him hold on to his memories of her.
I don’t recall if Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, ever came to see the Reinachs at Beaulieu, or if I caught sight of this pontificating personage at the Reinach mansion in Paris. I’ve never understood why he was so indulged by everyone, the beau monde especially, with his Boy Scout ideas that culminated in a eulogy to the strongest, the humiliation of the hopeless, for whom “the most important thing is taking part,” and the exaltation of physical strength. In ancient times, the Olympic games were also the occasion for contests of poetry, song, and drama . . . His gimcrack games would have horrified the Reinachs, if they had taken a closer look at what the prophet of the “modern Olympic games” wrote, but they were so naïve, sometimes, my great men. Hitler understood, he saw straight away how he could exploit the so-called “Olympic ideal,” and vulgar supermen in singlet tops and athletic gear.
22
ALL THAT REMAINED OF PERICLES IN THE BIG KITCHEN (WHERE AT LAST WE DARED TALK ABOUT THE GOLD TIARA OF SAITAPHARNES, KING OF OLBIA)
What became of Ariadne? I looked for her for a long time. After my injuries, Adolphe’s death, my forced leave, my convalescence at Kerylos, I returned to the front and fought right up to November 11. I was still in uniform when I heard the trumpet sounding the ceasefire, three days after I received another shrapnel wound.
In 1918, not immediately in the wake of the Armistice parade but two or three weeks later, I was still in Paris, left arm in a sling and medals on my chest. I could not get Verdun out of my mind. It was said at the time that “everyone went through Verdun,” and I would think: apart from those who had already died. What I had seen did not seem real. I thought about it all the time; I tried to give narrative form to what I had experienced; I read what was written about it in the newspapers; I forced myself to say that it was like the Battle of Marathon, so that it would become an episode in history; I forged an account that I could bear to tell. At night, the real images returned.
One day I was wandering the streets of Paris, not knowing where I was going, when I found myself at the Louvre. I sat down in the Cour Napoleon, at the foot of the statue of Lafayette. On one of the doors in the courtyard someone had scrawled in white paint the word Victory. I went inside. I wanted to see, poised atop her stone steps, free of her anti-bombardment defenses, my statue with her wings spread wide. But before I got to the Winged Victory of Samothrace, I found myself at the postal station of the Louvre—that glorious Parthenon of the Third Republic, where there are more pretty girls walking up and down than you can see on Phidias’s friezes. There was a directory hanging from a piece of string. Inside it I found the address of Monsieur Grégoire Verdeuil’s architectural practice. He even had a telephone number. He denied himself nothing.
I noted down his details so I could go and stand on the other side of the street from his office, to try and catch a glimpse of Ariadne, perhaps try to talk to her, understand why she had decided, quite out of the blue, to cut ties with me. We had been so happy, had that frightened her? I wanted to tell her she had nothing to fear, I would be a discreet lover, I wanted to talk to her without knowing quite what I wanted to say, I wanted her not to forget me, to know that whatever happened, I would never forget her. It took me weeks to pluck up the courage. It’s always the same: I let too much time go by before allowing myself to love, to learn, to hate . . . I’m afraid to rush toward the ver
y thing I want, afraid of getting hurt, being disillusioned, causing sorrow.
When it came to the affair of the Reinach tiara, though I could have pieced the story together quite easily, in the end it took me several years to find out all the details. This episode was the hidden face of Kerylos. I first heard about it in the one room that was never shown to guests, the kitchen: with its modern tiling and stovetop worthy of the Ritz, its indestructible burners and spits that looked like complicated watch mechanisms. It had a cold room, enormous serving trolleys, metal sinks; it was a whole new world. My mother often came by, filled with admiration, to gossip with sweet little Justine, who still cooked for me rather more than was reasonable.
In the kitchen, Pericles had abdicated. And Aspasia too, his mistress and servant, who must have cooked him up many a delicious treat. There was no question of being satisfied with some traditional Spartan broth, or with olives, garlic, bread, grilled lamb, and sheep’s cheese with honey, as though this were the Parthenon. Monsieur and Madame Reinach’s chef came from Paris. Justine deferred to his orders. After Madame Reinach had been for a swim, she would clamber back up onto the rocks where she was served four grilled cutlets: that was the sporting diet recommended by the omniscient Coubertin.
