by Adrien Goetz
Theodore was still convinced that the tiara was authentic. He was going to fight for it. It was all he thought about. Salomon, on the other hand, was beginning to have doubts. Theodore had the idea of writing to his uncle, of using the members of his wife’s family who still lived in Odessa. The Ephrussi network in Odessa was still powerful. He wrote to the uncle that they had to find this “Razumovsky” immediately. The response was negative. All that the name evoked for them was Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartets, nothing else.
For years, every night in Kerylos’s interior courtyard, Theodore would go over all the details of this storm. It went on for years, and he was taken by surprise at the surge of violence from every direction that he had entirely failed to see coming. The red tip of his cigarette glowed in the darkness. He had loved the past, he had loved his contemporaries, had been a parliamentary deputy representing the Savoie region, the people had granted him a morsel of their sovereign power, he cherished Plato’s Republic and Athens, he believed in France and in liberty, he loved his wife, his children, he was contented, surrounded by his books, and when he looked out to sea from this rock, lines of verse from Homer came unbidden to his lips. He was the best of what this century had produced, and he knew it. Nothing had prepared him for this public humiliation. He was no more prepared for such ignominy than Dreyfus had been. He had never imagined that he and his family, devoted to art of every kind, to study, and to other people, could have provoked such hatred. Léon Daudet took to joking in literary salons about the winner of the “National Schools Circumcisiopetition.” Disgrace carried the day.
Theodore learned from the newspapers that the goldsmith from Odessa had decided to come to Paris. At what moment did my dear Monsieur Reinach begin to wonder if he had, perhaps, made a mistake?
25
“I HAVE, OCCASIONALLY, BEEN MISTAKEN”
I found myself standing facing Grégoire Verdeuil. He was in shirtsleeves, stooped, thin, his eyes ringed with fatigue. His office walls were covered in architectural drawings. “Ariadne?” he said. “She wanted to avenge all the abandoned Ariadnes of literature, opera, art, sculpture, so she abandoned her husband. I thought you knew. I even wondered if she left me for you.”
He was very open with me. Ariadne wanted children. They didn’t have any. Was it he or she who couldn’t? He blamed himself. He thought she must have fallen pregnant with someone else’s child, and hadn’t dared tell him, or had gone off with the father. He had no proof for any of this. He imagined it all and tortured himself with it.
Once the thought that a child might have been conceived in the steam bath at Kerylos, or in some other room—we made love all over the house—had stolen into the labyrinth of my unhappiness, I could not get it out of my mind. I had been sure that it was because she loved me like she had never loved anyone before, but now I wondered if the frenzy of the days we spent together was the passion of a woman desperate for a child. Had she conceived a child? It was possible. But she would have told me. We would have run away together to Nice, to Naxos, anywhere. Or maybe—and now I was torturing myself—she did have a child, but with a different person altogether, neither Grégoire nor Achilles.
She disappeared without leaving a note, without any money, without threats or anger, and she never contacted me again. Whom did she go with? Whom did she know, apart from me and her husband? I realized I knew nothing about her; I had never asked her anything about herself. Arrogant little fool that I was, I never wondered if she might have had other lovers, if she was lying to me as well; all I saw was our love, then I suffered from her silence, but it was because of my own hubris.
“I couldn’t bear working for the Reinachs any more,” Grégoire told me. “By superstition. Something about them invites betrayal. You must remember the story of the tiara.” The last time I saw Ariadne she was leaving for Paris, and I asked her, as a kind of provocation, if she was meeting one of her lovers there. I smiled as I said it. “But I don’t have any other lovers,” she replied. How happy those words made me. But there was too much pride—call it stupidity—mixed in with my happiness. Instinct told me I could trust her. I never asked her anything about her family, the sister she was so close to, her friends, who perhaps were not so fond of poor Grégoire. I never worried about Ariadne. I thought only of myself. I never looked at her drawings as anything other than gifts for me; I never acknowledged she was an artist, that she had an unusual talent, that perhaps she even wanted to be a free woman. I told Grégoire I knew nothing. He looked me in the eye as we shook hands. I hated him and I pitied him.
Adolphe told me that he had heard early on about the arrival of the goldsmith from Odessa, impatient to proclaim his pride at having executed the masterpiece that was on display in the Louvre. He submitted himself to a barrage of questions. He was interrogated five times in a row, once locked inside a room with paper and pencils. He had to describe the object, draw it from memory. He had brought photographs with him showing the tiara, but without the dents that made it look like an archaeological find. His story was that two strangers had come to his workshop bearing books and templates. He was able to describe in great detail these well-known books by experts and academics. They told him that they had been commissioned to make a gift for a professor from Kharkov. They said nothing about a forgery.
Doubts persisted: perhaps he was a pathological liar? They put him through a test that left no one in any doubt. He was locked up inside a building opposite the Louvre, the Paris Mint. For one week, Rouchomovsky found himself in the finest gold workshops in the world. He was allowed no contact with the outside world. He created fragments in gold leaf: an ornamental motif and a small beaded border, like the one on the tiara. Then he began the real work. I was troubled when Adolphe, who was as meticulous as Joseph, his beloved father, was in his interminable articles, told me: “He made a sleeping Ariadne, accompanied by a small goddess of love playing with her veils, an erotic scene, and a head of either Themistocles or Pericles, in profile, that looked like a large hallmark. His Ariadne was beautiful. It was all very well done, but bore no comparison to the tiara.” Had Adolphe seen me looking at Ariadne? He was quite capable of having understood long before me that I was in love with her, and that she would fall in love with me. I shall never know. Rouchomovsky asked for a large sheet of gold leaf. In a few days he produced a fragment with three bands of decoration, arranged in tiers, and part of an inscription.
“A slice of the tiara, like a piece of melon,” said Adolphe, “It was a terrible day for the family. June 6, 1903. Impossible to continue arguing, at the risk of destroying ourselves through our obsession. We had lost our Dreyfus affair: Rouchomovsky proved beyond doubt that he was the creator of the Saitapharnes tiara.”
Theodore wanted to carry on the fight. What if it wasn’t entirely fake? If a part of the object in the Louvre was the real tiara? Did he still really believe this was possible?
In March 1903, sixteen-year-old Adolphe clipped a report from the newspaper: “In the wake of new information regarding the authenticity of the Olbia tiara, and serious doubts expressed by Monsieur Héron de Villefosse, the curator of Greek and Roman antiquities requested authorization from the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Art to remove said object from the museum galleries until further expert opinion has been obtained. This authorization was accorded immediately.”
Rouchomovsky remained in the city, which he liked very much and where he had become quite a celebrity, discovering the glory of being an artist exhibited in Paris. He succeeded in convincing everyone of his honesty. The 1,800 rubles that he received for the tiara helped make his case: a decent price, for a nice piece of work, but quite implausible for a genuine antiquity. Nor was it the derisory sum that buys someone’s silence in a counterfeit transaction. He began to make it known that he had some pieces he would be willing to show, a rhyton for drinking wine, in high Scythian style, a pectoral, a relief on an embossed disk showing Achilles and Minerva. At the Academy of Fine Art, a prankster started the
rumor that Rouchomovksy had been nominated for one of the chairs of engraving that was waiting to be filled. At the 1903 Salon of French Artists, where he was awarded a medal, he was one of the highest profile artists to take part. He showed his masterpiece there: a skeleton in a tiny sarcophagus, as exquisite as the Fabergé eggs that were all the rage in the Russian court.
“Everyone knows this story except you, my poor Achilles. It’s incredible how well they kept it from you. You aren’t curious enough about the world around you. The tiara tarnished our family, and now it is being handed down to the next generation! In the November 1909 issue of La Revue Blanche, Apollinaire wrote a piece about art forgeries. He talked about the tiara. You must have read the Arsène Lupin story The Hollow Needle that was serialized that year in the newspaper. You remember? How we loved it! In his secret hiding place in Étretat, the gentleman-burglar had the real Saitapharnes. That’s what is written, the tiara, it’s Lupin who has it!” Adolphe stood on the table and laughed. The dog yapped at his feet, like in a play.
Theodore was deeply wounded. The attacks were directed at him, his family, his wife’s family. The anti-Semites had a field day and he was horrified. He began spending more time alone in his office. He even avoided his friends: he read in their eyes that the names of the Rothschilds and Camondos would be remembered by posterity for their important donations to the Louvre, while he was going to go down in history as the man who had cost the museum a fortune. He published incessantly. Everyone admired his books. In 1908, his name was cleared: he was elected a member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, finally joining Salomon there.
“We lost against those who hate the Jews, we lost against the Germans, can you imagine? They were all right and we were all wrong,” said Adolphe. After that how could they ever look again at Furtwängler’s compendium, his Griechische Vasenmalerei, on Greek vase painting, that Theodore used to spend hours reading, the sun playing over its pages. Salomon Reinach had begun an immense catalog of Greek sculpture, to stymie Furtwängler’s research—Furtwängler was everywhere they looked. They loathed the man, because he was German, but they also admired him, because he was a great scholar. The library at Kerylos, the holy of holies, contained his entire oeuvre. They had placed the devil’s tablets in their holy ark. He had trampled all over them during the Saitapharnes affair, while they continued to quote him politely in their own writing, even after his death in 1907. That was how they were. The three brothers were convinced that the tiara was authentic, because it was covered in motifs that Furtwängler had written about, proof of the great respect they had for him. He had no such scruples and called them ignoramuses and imbeciles, even though he had before his own eyes the very images that had inspired the forger. Adolphe told me that when he was at the French School at Athens, he saw a letter on the director’s desk from his uncle Theodore, which ended with the words, “I have, occasionally, been mistaken.”
Among the pile of records I have in Nice is a recording of Beethoven’s seventh symphony conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. I had no idea, when I found it at the record store, that he was Adolf Furtwängler’s son. I caught it on the radio: “Son of a great scholar and architect who led excavations at Aegina and Olympus.” The presenter said that his best recordings were made during the war, but that there was no way of judging this anymore, since the wax molds had been expropriated by the Soviets. He mentioned a recording of the Seventh, made in November 1943, and an Ode to Joy Furtwängler conducted on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday for an audience of wounded soldiers and leaders of the Reich. I was horrified. Reinach and Furtwängler both had a musician son. Léon Reinach was several years younger than Furtwängler’s son. November 1943: the month that Léon was deported. “Furt,” as my musician friends call him, must have offered a public apology because he makes recordings now with Yehudi Menuhin. I might buy them, but I’m not sure I could bear to listen to them.
The summer of 1914, Adolphe told me about that lost battle, and went even further: “That tiara was made for us, that’s the worst part of the story. It came from the very edges of the Greek empire. Look at the places where my uncle led excavations, all those huge sites about which he wrote so many articles: Myrina, near Smyrna, that’s where the statuettes were found; think about the islands, Thasos, my favorite, Imbros, Lesbos, facing the Turkish coast; on the other side there’s Assos, where Aristotle was born . . . He went to Carthage, to Djerba, then to Odessa. But he sidestepped Athens and Sparta—he never went there. Did you notice that, Achilles? During our first voyage to Greece, we didn’t see the Parthenon. You were so disappointed. You know why? Because we, the Reinachs, we are Bohemians when we travel. We come from the margins of the Great Book. That’s what we like, the mysterious city-state of Olbia, the steppes where Scythian horsemen rode, the kingdoms of Sudan, the monasteries on Mount Athos. Not Athens.”
All Adolphe needed was to listen to his father’s flamboyant and interminable perorations: he spent his time talking about democracy, fatherland, invoking the great men of the revolution who had brought equality, secularism, and brotherhood to France. Essentially, between 1789 and 1889, from the revolution to the Eiffel Tower, it was a new century of Pericles—while the brothers came from a barbarous tribe from the forests on the other side of the Rhine, who settled in French cities and ended up more Athenian than the Athenians, who felt like Romans in Rome, but who continued to appreciate borderlands. The Reinachs admired Alexander, they romanticized him, because he was from Macedonia, a rustic who raised horses, he was educated by Aristotle, and became the greatest of all the Greeks before dying at the very furthest edge of the empire. They liked the men who succeeded Alexander, the distillation of heroes and tyrants, Demetrius Poliorcetes, Eumenes of Cardia, Seleucus Nicator, Antigonos Monophthalmus, so many fabulous names, and Ptolemy Soter, who wanted to blend the heritage of the Pharaohs with the ideas of the Greeks.
That’s why they got the tiara so completely wrong: it was everything that they liked, original, unique, and composed of quotations. They liked Hellenism burnished by the East, the Bible, Carthage, barbarians, the shepherds who brought mare’s milk to Ovid when he was in exile on the banks of the Euxine. Adolphe told me that there is a painting of this somewhere by Delacroix, which Baudelaire praised to the skies.
“This is my heritage, Achilles. This is what I want to do: study how Greece spread across the whole of the Mediterranean, how it wasn’t simply a miracle, but a protracted phenomenon, it didn’t just bequeath us the Acropolis, but also, more importantly, all those forgotten temples, houses in composite styles, like ours, the last one to date. You feel it, don’t you, that there is something Gallic about Kerylos. You can sense the influence of the tribe of the Parisii, the tribe of people gathered around an iron temple that points a thousand feet into the sky, with elevators in every corner. Every other archaeologist has gone to Attica and the Peloponnese; I shall go to Palestine, to dig in Jerusalem with the most modern techniques. I shall go and live there—why not, it’s my land, though Papa and my uncles would be horrified to hear that; they have no other fatherland but France. I shall go to Crimea, I shall go to Africa, with my aunt Fanny and her piano— we will put it on wheels—that’s how I shall carry on their work, and avenge them. Why must beauty always be pure? I want to display masterpieces born of amalgams, hybrids, conjunctions of different things that breed rare and unexpected artifacts. I want to go to Afghanistan, to see what happens to Greek and Roman sculpture when it rubs up against the art of India.”
He thought he had his whole life ahead of him. His mustache was growing thicker and he was cheerful, serious, solid, clear-sighted, able to talk about his background and his family of marvelous visionaries in the same caustic tone that he used about himself.
He spent his life reading and writing. One of his cousins was like him, young Bertrand, the son of Léon and Béatrice; he was passionate about cabinet-making, intrigued by the mechanism of an eighteenth-century table à la Bourgogne made by Jean-Françoi
s Oeben that could be transformed into a low church chair or a desk with a shelf, which I always admired at his parents’ house. He wanted to become a craftsman and he had real talent, he was brilliant with his hands. I remember him playing with the dog he adopted. Poor, murdered Bertrand. The Germans were great humanists too—they loved the arts of antiquity, had admired Greece for centuries, they translated Plato—none of which stopped the Nazis from becoming executioners. That is the other reason why I have for so long hated to hear about those things that I once loved, that were part of my youth. It must be why I paint white and yellow squares on a blue background, a few geometrical shapes that are impossible to interpret, paintings that people like, I hope, that they remember, are perhaps even moved by, that they can linger in front of, could live with in their homes every day, even if they know nothing.
26
THE CLOGGED HEATING SYSTEM
In May 1920 I was passing through Paris. I stopped in front of an art gallery. The painting I saw in the window made me want to start painting again. It had been several months since I stopped drawing; I hadn’t been able to do it anymore. I forced myself to stop thinking about the daughter or son of Ariadne— it was too unbearable—and I chased away the image of Ariadne too, whom I had been drawing obsessively from memory. It was killing me.
I went inside. That day I met Kahnweiler, who told me about Picasso; three months later, he sold my first painting. I liked Picasso straightaway, I understood him, Picasso the Cubist as much as the Picasso who painted bodies of monumental women. He reminded me of what Adolphe had said about his family, the way Picasso combined classical rigor—that of the academic masters that Theodore had brought to Kerylos for the peristyle—with the art of African masks. A little barbarity, a kind of primitive force, was what was needed to brutalize and bring the dusty plaster casts to life. That’s what I learned at Kerylos, where I never dared show any of my paintings. I surprised them all during those years: a rough mountain peasant polished up with a bit of Greek grammar. I owe it to Adolphe more than to Theodore. They invite betrayal, all of them, Grégoire told me, advising me to flee, as he had fled—“There’s something about them.” There you have it, I betrayed them.
