by Adrien Goetz
The secret of the tiara was like an enormous roast that Adolphe drew out of the oven in front of me, not realizing that it would turn my world upside down. I wrote it all down in a small notebook that I still have, with a meticulousness worthy of Adolphe, who was incapable of leaving out a single detail. He told me about the scandal one morning after he came down to the kitchen in his flannel dressing gown followed by Basileus, carrying a pile of books and humming the ballad of the King of Thule from Gounod’s Faust. I can still hear him enunciating every syllable of the chorus, “a vessel of chiseled gold.” I was wearing espadrilles and beige linen trousers, having already spent an hour in the water. I served myself a second cup of coffee to keep him company.
The drama, as he recounted it to me, took place in 1896, the year of the first modern Olympics, and an otherwise excellent year for the family. Salomon had just been elected to the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres. He was advising the Louvre regarding the acquisition of a unique gold head-piece. At 200,000 francs, the price was not insignificant. The Saitapharnean tiara, made in the third century before Christ, was the most beautiful piece of ancient Greek gold work ever discovered, an exceptional find. This tragic, sorry episode took place just before my arrival, and I have often wondered if that was what they were talking about in hushed voices in the Eiffels’ garden, that famous day when Theodore recruited me. Perhaps I promised him a breath of fresh air at one of the worst moments of his life. Often some long-ago incident can only be properly understood many years later. It is undoubtedly the case that during that period, the “tiara affair” must have been the focus of a great many family conversations. I even wonder if he had not taken on the project to build Kerylos as a way of trying to forget the blasted Saitapharnes. Adolphe talked in the empty kitchen, knowing that no one would overhear us.
He told me how the tiara, on a scarlet silk cushion, was given pride of place at the Louvre, surrounded by the other treasures of the Apollo Gallery, the French Tower of London. Between the display case, where the Regent Diamond blazed alongside other huge diamonds bequeathed by the kings of France, on which was carved in large capital letters RF, for “République Française,” and the tall cabinets displaying carnelian ewers from Louis XIV’s bedchamber and snuffboxes belonging to Louis XV, was a small vitrine. The whole of Paris wanted to see it. In a few days it was more famous than the papal tiara. All the newspapers printed photographs of its intricacies. Even Marcel Proust left his house to go and gaze upon it, presumably wearing his legendary fur-lined overcoat, arm in arm with one of his friends.
At the top of the tiara a stylized serpent yawned; between a frieze of foliage and a band of tiny images of a hunt, scenes from the Iliad stood out in subtle relief. Achilles sitting on a chair, with basins and vases at his feet. Ulysses drawing toward him the beautiful captive Briseis, her head veiled, behind her a procession of servants and birds. A bearded athlete holding the reins of the deceased Patroclus’s horses and, on the other side, the funeral pyre of Achilles’s comrade-in-arms, made of huge tree trunks, on the shore of a wind-tossed sea where a dolphin swims. Boreas blowing into his conch shell, Zephyr carrying a lowered torch. An urn standing ready to receive the hero’s ashes. Achilles, inconsolable at having witnessed Patroclus’s death, holding up his arm in a gesture of farewell. In the photographs it looked splendid, it was as pleasing an object to me as the little lead soldiers of my childhood—the first clue that might have alerted me. Adolphe leaned toward me to point out all the details on the large photograph that he had gone to fetch from his bedroom.
His elbows resting on the oak table as he showed me the picture, he grew almost as impassioned as when he used to talk to me about the Dreyfus affair. At the beginning, many people found it hard to remember the name, “Saitapharnes,” instead calling it the “Olbia tiara,” after the archaeological site on the shore of the Black Sea. Engraved on this sublime object made of pure gold, beaten, hammered, and sculpted, was the inscription: “The Council and Citizens of Olbia honor the great and invincible King Saitapharnes.” Pericles, Demosthenes, Plato, those are names you can remember, but this name, Saitapharnes! A few people understood it to mean that it had belonged to the Farnese family, thinking that the tiara came from the Villa Farnesina in Rome. Some even said it was the antique tiara that had belonged to Pope Paul III, born Alessandro Farnese. Not everyone can know the names of all the Scythian kings.
The newspaper Le Figaro commissioned a series of articles from Salomon Reinach in which he recounted the exploits of the satrap of Olbia and described his regal headpiece as demonstrating the barbarian chief’s love for Homer’s epics. Adolphe had kept the articles. The tiara was fashioned during a period of antiquity that in a way resembled our own 1900s: the Greeks knew their glory days were behind them, the Parthenon was old. Other peoples existed beyond the borders of their world, who also loved gorgeously wrought precious metals, exotic fur, and jewelry. The Greeks had learned to admire the Persians, their enemies. They knew, deep down, that the peasants and the goldsmiths of the Black Sea were stealing their motifs and their poems to decorate their helmets and their shields, that they would soon be vanquished, but they also knew that they had conquered their fierce victors first.
That was Adolphe’s interpretation. It made the tiara seem even more seductive. The tiara of Saitapharnes was an object that came from the border, the border between two eras, between two worlds, and it had surfaced at just the right moment. For Joseph, Salomon, and Theodore, who had held it in their own hands, this fragile headpiece, pliable, dented and covered in light scratches, was the most beautiful object bequeathed to us by the ancient world.
23
A FAKE FROM ODESSA?
In the Mollien wing of the Louvre, in the meeting room of the Committee of National Museums, all of educated France had gathered for the first public appearance of this object.
“Most of the time the committee members don’t come to these meetings,” Adolphe told me. “Everything is decided by a small group of people, with a specialist in eighteenth-century furniture or Renaissance painting come to plead the cause for his acquisition. But that day the rumor of this treasure had spread like wildfire, and they were all there in the white wood-paneled room. There was a flurry of questions. This Saitapharnes, who was he? We already know of him, Uncle Salomon replied. His name has been verified. Uncle Theodore explained that an inscription, published in 1885 in Saint Petersburg, mentioned the Scythian king. What about the shape? Like a pointed bonnet? It is very similar to a headpiece discovered in the Ak-Burun barrow, near Kerch, in 1875 . . . ”
That day, the consulting committee was unanimous, and electrified. Someone said that the British Museum had expressed interest. It was expensive. On April 1, 1896—“Your birthday, Achilles!”—a memorable session was held in the Institute building. Héron de Villefosse presented the masterpiece to his colleagues from the Academy of Inscriptions. A little skeptical at first—it was so beautiful!—he had quickly recognized the object’s significance, and how important it was that it didn’t leave France. Two academicians, both newly elected, who perhaps wanted to make themselves popular with their new colleagues, advanced the necessary sum, half each. The first was Salomon. The second was a very prominent man, an architect and member of the Academy of the Arts called Édouard Corroyer. He was the man who restored Mont-Saint-Michel, who gave it an arrow and a gold archangel brandishing a sword over the shoreline. He invented a Middle Ages that was perhaps not entirely historically accurate, but which became so popular that most people now believe it to be true. His genius was to have given a recognizable silhouette to the island monastery, which until then did not have a clearly defined shape. There had even been an onion dome in the eighteenth century, on top of the medieval bell tower! The Reinachs knew and liked the great historian. Corroyer had a maid, filled with good cheer, called Mère Poulard; Adolphe remembered her well. He adored this woman, who would chatter away as she beat the eggs for her omelettes. He said to me, “She won�
�t make her fortune with her biscuits, but she loves what she does, she loves her hens, and she’s even quite fond of the tales and legends of the Middle Ages. She has served dinner to Clemenceau and the King of Belgium; you can’t imagine how worldly she is. I must take you to Mont-Saint-Michel, you’ll like it, it’s so gaudily inauthentic, worse than this place.” All his uncle Theodore’s friends seemed to come from a different era, as though they were escapees from some fantasy of centuries past, except Eiffel, who came from the future and extolled the virtues of “progress.” Mère Poulard would have been surprised and flattered that she was being talked about in a Greek villa on the beautiful French Riviera.
The entire region of Olbia, Adolphe told me, was a gold-mine of archaeological treasures. Excavations had been taking place there since the 1830s. The discovery of the Kul-Oba tomb stunned the West. In Russia, the finds were a cause of great pride. It had long been thought that these barbarians, mentioned by Herodotus in Book IV of his Histories, had invented nothing, that they were unsophisticated, without culture, knew nothing of the poets, lived in huts made of branches; and now suddenly these trophies had emerged, weapons, gold earrings, a sophistication that merited the word civilization.
The Hermitage museum was festooned with this treasure, all unearthed in Crimea. Under Napoleon III, war had made all those melodious names—Sebastopol, Odessa, Alma, Malakoff—familiar to the French, but conflict had interrupted the excavations. Hence the pillages, illicit business, and a trade in antiquities that eluded the grasp of curators. Theodore owned books in which the marvels in the Hermitage were reproduced, new pages in Greek history, unknown to historians until then. It was hardly surprising then when two dealers in antiquities called Vogel and Szymanski turned up in possession of the tiara, a necklace set with huge gemstones and crystal pendants, and a pair of earrings, all, they claimed, from the same grave. They had commissioned a mahogany display cabinet. They even had a shred of fabric from the inside of the tiara, discovered with it in the tomb. They knocked on all the doors of cultivated Europe. In Paris, they met with a man, somewhat brusque but with a considerable reputation, Monsieur Héron de Villefosse, a shrewd connoisseur of the art of the ancient world. Theodore had also been informed.
The first to express doubts was the great professor of the history of the art of the ancient world at the University of Saint Petersburg, Wesselowsky. The curator of the Odessa Fine Arts Museum went one further. He pronounced it a fake, and declared, as if he knew all about it, and with undisguised contempt, that the creator of the object was a “Lithuanian Jew.”
The great Furtwängler spoke next. He was the most celebrated of all the German archaeologists. His museum, in Munich, was the most splendid, his authority considerable. He did everything to shatter the pretensions of these naïve, idle men, who thought they knew everything there was to know about everything, these amateurs: the Parisian archaeologists.
The ingenuity of the forgers had reached an extraordinary peak; they were sometimes even cleverer than the curators. In Europe, from England to Russia, fakes were on the rise, and with them the market in counterfeits. Everyone knew that Crimea was not only a land of unauthorized excavations, but also a region where forgeries abounded. The backrooms of Odessa were known to everyone. The Reinach family, who had cousins there, could not have failed to get wind of them. Of all the French scholars, they were the best placed to know about it all. In the big kitchen Adolphe stood on the table, belting out “The Calumny” from the Barber of Seville.
24
NIGHTTIME IN THE PERISTYLE
“I talked to one of Furtwängler’s assistants,” Adolphe said to me. “He told me that literally everyone was laughing at us. They were damn well informed in Munich.”
“Bloody Krauts, they have spies everywhere.”
“It turns out the forgers all worked in the same place, a place called Ochakov, a small town on the Black Sea, not far from Odessa. The network was well known: the Hochmann brothers, grain merchants turned antiquities dealers, would commission goldsmiths to work on beautiful collector’s pieces, copies of objects discovered in tombs. The worst thing was that my poor uncle knew all about it—he even wrote about it in 1893 for the Archaeological Revue! I’ve got the article somewhere.”
“Which does not mean that the tiara is not a magnificent piece.”
“As beautiful as this house, you mean? There’s nothing authentic about this big ornament, except maybe the bronze rivets along the side, which make it look like it might have had a chinstrap. The rest is just a mishmash of antique forms, beautifully executed, but the whole thing is modeled on a template, all drawn from illustrations that we are quite familiar with. They are all here in the library, I’ll show you. That horrible Furtwängler’s attack was finely honed, don’t you think? This allegedly ancient tiara was, according to him, ‘ein wüstes Sammelsurium,’ a crazy hodgepodge, a trumpery, a whimsy, a bird with two heads.”
How had Theodore and his brother Salomon failed to suspect anything? To them, the engravings that had served as models were additional proof of authenticity. Furtwängler drew attention to one particular detail that had struck no one else: didn’t the family of Reinach’s wife also come from the Black Sea, in fact from Odessa itself? Surely she—or one of her relatives— was acquainted with all those little Jewish goldsmiths beavering away in secret? At the very least the international traders who had signed secret agreements with them . . . Was it not by selling grain harvested on the Ukrainian steppes that the Ephrussi family had built up the fortune that they spent in Paris, with all those chic people, their new friends? Furtwängler saw immediately how the trap would work. It needed no more than a flick of the finger for the whole thing to collapse, for the entire edifice of international Jewry, who had become erudite in a single generation, to sink into the abyss, he would get them all, he would make them eat dirt. Theodore’s primary enemies were not barbarians but scholars, his colleagues. I had never imagined that.
The ordeal lasted far longer than was rational. Adolphe stood turning the massive, empty spit, miming greed, basting an imaginary hen with an empty ladle, as he described what happened next. There was the poet of old Montmartre, a tramp really, who in 1903 caused a commotion at the Louvre when he stood before the tiara and cried out, “But it is I who made it, the famous crown of Semiramis!” The story appeared in all the newspapers, and made Theodore frown. Soon the editors started receiving letters. One, from a jeweler, triggered a cataclysm when it was published. He said he had been born in Odessa but had lived for many years in Paris, and was well informed regarding the activities of the forgers of gold treasures in his native Crimea. He named a well-known counterfeiter. The man was, in his own way, an artist, a creator of antique jewelry one might say, largely unconcerned with the distinction between real and fake. His name was Israel Rouchomovsky.
The Reinach brothers’ defense, backed by the entire French academic establishment, was precise and well argued. Héron de Villefosse wrote a detailed response to Furtwängler’s accusation. Other specialists focused on the inscription. Nothing betrayed a forgery better: this one was perfect in terms of grammar, and the shape of the letters conformed to everything that was known about practices in the region at the time. Salomon, speaking in his own name, though one sensed that he was also speaking for his brother Theodore, was convinced he would have the last word. “Frankly, another campaign of this type and the opinion of Herr Furtwängler will no longer count for very much.” Then he added, “The natural fate of beauty is to provoke slander.”
But the piece had already been taken down from display. Charles Clermont-Ganneau, a member of the Institute and professor at the Collège de France, was charged with carrying out a definitive expert assessment. This was worse than the graphologists’ analyses of the “note” during the Dreyfus affair. This scholar owed nothing to the Reinach clan. He was well acquainted with the arts of the East. He should have been able to produce an objective response. Theodore and Salomon did not doubt for a s
ingle second that he would do anything other than come out wholeheartedly in their defense. The affair was brought up in the Chamber of Deputies, and even the foreign press took an interest. The saga of the tiara delighted the journalists who traded in gossip. Caricatures were made, like the figurine of Theodore, a lorgnon perched on his nose, wearing a gold dunce’s hat—he found it in a novelty shop. Wisecracks circulated about Rashumovsky, Tripatovsky, Machinovsky . . .
Nonetheless it took several weeks for the rumors to reach the ears of Israel Rouchomovsky. He was a perfectly decent man who was not expecting this kind of notoriety. When he realized that he had been paid 1,800 rubles—he calculated that was the equivalent of 5,000 francs—for a piece that was later bought for 200,000 francs, he wondered if he shouldn’t head straight for Paris. He was afraid. Afraid that the Russian authorities would throw him in jail. In the Odessa Jewish community, everyone knew you had to keep your head below the parapet. He knew, deep down, that he had been making fakes. But because he was an observant Jew, respectful of tradition, of the laws of God and of the empire, he had never considered them as anything other than works of art inspired by the craftsmen of the ancient world, the glory of the region and of all Russia. Visitors from abroad liked to buy these reproductions of archaeological finds. All the aristocratic ladies wanted to wear jewelry like that worn by ancient Greek princesses. He loved his work, his family, his colleagues. He cared about his honor. He had been passionate about ancient art since his childhood at his father’s house in Mozir, south of Minsk, where he decided he would rather become an engraver than a rabbi. His wife bore him several children. He had not always had the means to live well. One day he met the Hochmann brothers, heaven-sent men ready to pay him in silver. When he got wind from an old newspaper of the Montmartre poet’s bizarre claim he was furious. No one was going to take credit for the Saitapharnes tiara as long as he lived! He alone, the finest of all Greek goldsmiths, was responsible for it.
