by Adrien Goetz
It took me one week to decide to become a painter and to forget all about classical inspiration. But I don’t disavow any of it, the paintings in the church in Cargèse, what Eiffel taught me, the Pointe des Fourmis, the frescoes on Mount Athos, my drawings of Ariadne naked. I created my own alphabet from it all, have inscribed my own clay tablets. Today, I exhibit alongside Braque, Picasso, Juan Gris. I suppose I wanted to shock the Reinachs, with whom I no longer have much of a connection. I find collectors who buy my work and a gallery in Nice exhibits them. I won’t say any more, it’s all in my catalogs anyway. When Picasso began to paint nymphs with pale thighs and boys playing panpipes, I realized that my revolt against Kerylos had been perhaps a little naïve, but I carried on. The master, the great Pablo, told me to my great surprise, when we met for the first time at Kahnweiler’s house, that he had always dreamed of Greece. He’s always been very generous to me, and owns several of my paintings.
After my early success, I moved to Paris. I still went to see the Reinachs from time to time. I bought books. And now suddenly here they are again, all my friends, so old now.
Sacrilegious thought: they were ignorant. They didn’t read novels; they said they were a waste of time. I would have liked to go to the bookshop in Nice and buy a Giraudoux or a Morand, something by André Gide or Valery Larbaud, but I didn’t dare because I was afraid of what they would think of me. They missed out on all the great writers of their time, one by one, stayed loyal to Demosthenes and Thucydides, and when they wanted to frighten themselves, they read their friend Rostand or one of Corneille’s brother’s forgotten plays. What might have happened if Theodore Reinach had invited Cocteau to visit Kerylos when he was staying on the coast at Lavandou with Georges Auric and Raymond Radiguet, when Radiguet was writing Count d’Orgel’s Ball ?
It’s unimaginable. Cocteau would have rather liked it, he would have turned up with his drawings of the Sphinx, perhaps he would have thought up Oedipus in The Infernal Machine in the 1920s, they could have talked about Sophocles and Euripides. But no, my poor Theodore would have quickly decided that he was wasting his time listening to this worldly illusionist, and he would, with his exquisite manners, have politely shown him the door.
One day, about a year after Theodore’s death, I bought a fat book. I didn’t know what it was, but I was taken by its white cover and blue lettering: Ulysses, by James Joyce. I read it in confusion, without understanding it, though I was entertained. I thought it was going to be a modern adaptation of the Odyssey, which it is in a way, but it’s a hundred other things as well. Theodore would have liked it, there was something of his spirit that I recognized, the art of laughter in books. I thought it was a comedy, a cabaret. I skimmed through some chapters because I didn’t understand a thing; I read every word of the brothel scenes. And then I began to underline entire passages. I still have it, it’s legendary now, and my first edition is worth a lot of money.
On page 150, a professor with owlish spectacles speaks. I imagined the delight of the three brothers if they had read it:
“I teach the blatant Latin language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination. Dominus! Lord! Where is the spirituality? Lord Jesus! Lord Salisbury. A sofa in a westend club. But the Greek!”
A few pages on is a pastiche of a play, with stage directions in italics, in a schoolboyish humor that is very Reinach: “Bloom explains to those near him his schemes for social regeneration. All agree with him. The keeper of the Kildare Street museum appears, dragging a lorry on which are the shaking statues of several naked goddesses, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and plaster figures, also naked, representing the new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.”
Greece continued to live, though the Reinachs had no role in it. Ariadne and I shut ourselves up in the house to draw, to draw each other. The evening that I turned on the hot water faucets in the thermal baths, she posed for me, naked, in the position of Ingres’s bather, in front of one of the great slabs of tiger-striped marble. The drawing looked a little like a Picasso, though at the time I had never heard of him. I loved Ariadne’s neck, her damp back, the tilt of her head. A preparatory drawing for a painting that I never finished, I never even sketched it, for this house was constructed to live out love affairs that never happened, for writers who were never invited, for artists who didn’t appreciate it until it was too late.
Back then all the artists were flocking to the Villa Noailles, in Hyères, which was the height of fashion in 1925. After my first exhibition, my paintings furnished me with a passport to this world. It took me a while to enjoy the Roaring Twenties; I had been badly wounded, I thought it was all over, so I did not plunge into this new era right away. Picasso I came to know in more recent years, after the Second World War. Whenever we meet we embrace. People do not dare approach him; he is very intimidating. After the Liberation I began again from scratch. I became the most radical of abstract painters. Now I make minimalist art. More and more collectors are buying my most recent paintings.
Meanwhile, I still have not found my treasure: Alexander’s crown. I decided that I had to unthinkingly obey the anonymous postcard’s tacit injunction; taking it home with me is the only real reason for my return. Or perhaps I am lying to myself and I wanted to see all this one last time. Nothing prevented me from trying to find the crown the day I came back to the villa after the Germans looted the house. But I didn’t dare. It’s taken me years to dare. In the adventures of Arsène Lupin there’s always a moment when the hero finds himself with an hour, not a minute longer, to locate an object. Instead of beginning methodically, with the tension mounting, he sits down on a chaise longue and smokes a cigar. At the last second, he gets up, adjusts his monocle, and goes straight over to the hiding place. I fear I don’t have that level of expertise. I’m an amateur. There are so many potential places to stash something away in this house: all the rooms have false ceilings concealing beams and secret hiding spaces. I know where the trapdoors are in the system Pontremoli invented for keeping the rooms cool in summer and warm in winter.
I had one idea left. The huge hot water balloon that Theodore was so proud of. He showed it triumphantly to Eiffel to prove that he really was the last of the Greeks, the most modern of men.
I descended the staircase to the laundry. The basement was full of old trunks holding clothes and toys—nothing had been moved. The Germans hadn’t touched a thing down here. The furnace was where it always was, painted white, with a lever and wide steel pipes. Hot air used to be pumped out from here and sent around the house, imprisoned by the marble.
I wondered if under the cover there might not be enough space to conceal a box with the conqueror’s crown inside. The hot water system doesn’t work very well anymore, which hardly matters since Kerylos is now a summer palace. I couldn’t unscrew the large metal disc, all clogged up with limescale. I tapped the tank, which sounded full. I didn’t have the strength. It would have to be taken apart, sawn into rings. If the last treasure of the Macedonian king really had been hidden there, it must be wedged right inside and I don’t know if it would even be possible to get it out. Pontremoli had warned me that the whole system needed to be serviced and the tank emptied every two or three years; it was done in the early days, then forgotten.
I still occasionally see Pontremoli, the dear man. He’s not in good shape, and I think he senses he is going to die soon. He has received every honor, not that he cares. I don’t know if Prince Rainier invited him to the wedding, though how apt it would be to have the creator of the Monegasque architectural style sitting in the nave of the cathedral. But probably nobody thought to invite him, and anyway he is too frail to go to such occasions.
He has one particular obsession. He can go on about it for hours at a time, in an utterly scathin
g tone as if he were lecturing his students at the Beaux-Arts: he detests Le Corbusier. He says that if one were to listen to this prophet, this dictator, this man who knows nothing about history or the major architectural movements, about ornamentation or formal restraints, of which Kerylos is in a way the most beautiful and simple expression, this man who knows nothing about the art of living in a beautiful house, everyone would end up living in rabbit hutches. Pontremoli is tireless on the subject. He sees that young architects are drawn to Le Corbusier, considering him to be the successor to the master builders of the Parthenon and Chartres. But every time he hears that, the old lion awakens and flies into a rage: “‘Corbu,’ as they call him, is an opportunist, a schemer, a friend to all the Vichy clique, a bloody Swiss man who’s only good for building prisons—he should have ended up in one himself . . . ” I have not dared to tell him that I am going to visit Le Corbusier in his little cabin in Roquebrune. He lives there as if he were on a boat, a naked, barrel-chested Diogenes, an old wise man with whom Monsieur Reinach would have had lots of lively disagreements. His monk’s cell is the most beautiful 150 square feet imaginable, with the sea and the trees right within reach.
27
ECHOES IN THE GARDEN AND AMONG THE ROCKS
Theodore and his brother Salomon were, in everybody’s eyes, the brothers behind the Louvre’s purchase of the most expensive forgery in history. When at last I understood this, it shed new light on the saga of this family. I sat down on a bench outside the front door and gazed at Beaulieu stretching out before me. I thought about what must have happened. Kerylos had been built after years of vilification, defamation, expert assessments. All their enemies, a great pack of mediocrities, crawled out of the undergrowth. Years later, I went with one of my girlfriends to the Nice carnival, trying to distract myself and forget Ariadne. Long after I would have thought that the scandal had become a distant memory, I saw a float with the tiara fashioned out of lemons, and an effigy of Monsieur Reinach wearing a large pair of spectacles and a ball and chain around his ankle, alongside the director of the Louvre in a pair of pajamas. Everyone was still talking about it: it was a curse, their crime, how unjust it was. Happily, the headland of Kerylos was a miniature version of the Athos peninsula; they could just close it off and the villa became an inaccessible cloister.
Theodore had wanted calm, the Mediterranean, music, and a not too large garden. In front of the house he had placed some statues, but not too many. He didn’t position them on pedestals overlooking the sea so that they could be seen from a distance— not because he was afraid of what people might say, but because he preferred them this way. His statues are set back, close to the house and almost hidden among the trees. They are copies of bronzes discovered at Herculaneum, bought at the archaeological museum in Naples. There is one I particularly like, a young woman with regular features and white enamel eyes, adjusting her cloak and hitching it up onto her shoulder. Just beyond her a faun dances among the tea roses.
The neighboring houses vied with each other, with their French parterres and their English gardens. Béatrice Ephrussi combined the two; the genius Rostand was unable to choose between them at Arnaga. Theodore contented himself with choosing plants that he liked, sowing them here and there and leaving them to grow. The gardener came once a week, and was instructed to do as little as possible. The Pointe des Fourmis gradually began to resemble a real Greek island. I don’t know whose idea it was to put down gravel, and I imagine someone comes to kill the weeds now as well. For Theodore there were only flowers, of all kinds, in all sorts of colors, and, in a corner, herbs for the kitchen.
We used to work out in the garden. I fixed a rope to one of the bars over the portico and we did our exercises every morning, with the children. Basileus barked like the devil. Fanny’s chambermaid, who was a little scared of him, missed Cerberus. I never thought of myself as living in a museum. This house was a folly, a considered work of delirium, but above all, it was an act of optimism, proof that one could travel back in time, just like resetting a clock, and resist the outside world. I have not visited all the Greek-style villas in existence, but I don’t think they installed ropes to stretch their limbs, or allowed plants of all kinds to grow wild. I would like to visit the Villa Stuck, in Munich, which I have heard is beautiful, if a little dull. I have been to Corfu, where I visited the house called the Achilleion, its slightly naïve Greek decor invented for Empress Sisi, with Achilles’s chariot painted, disturbingly, in the style of a Viennese café. The Empress of Austria’s villa—she would have been quite capable of putting up parallel bars and croquet hoops—later became the home of the Kaiser, and his ghost seemed still to haunt the place, guarded by young soldiers dressed like foot soldiers from the battle of Marathon. In Bavaria I visited the Glyptothek, in Munich, built by King Ludwig I to display the statues discovered on the island of Aegina, where, in a field of wildflowers, the most beautiful temple was found, dating to before the Parthenon. There in Munich, where ancient pediments had been restored in a slightly heavy-handed manner, the galleries were painted blue and red, faintly echoing the pompous study sheets made by the students at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Apparently Ludwig I—foreshadowing his descendant Ludwig II’s follies, the fairytale castle, the miniature Versailles, the Wagnerian forest sanctuary—built himself a Roman villa, the Pompeiianum, but I have never seen it.
These extravagant white elephants were nothing like Kerylos. Theodore appreciated subtle colors, pale walls juxtaposed with marble; he wanted butterflies and bees, ladybugs and beetles, to settle on the stones, a subtle symphony, nothing like the aggressive polychromy that was all the rage in the nineteenth century. He preferred Debussy’s version of antiquity to that portrayed in Verdi’s operas, with their trumpets and cymbals. His house would have fit in India or Japan.
My whole world changed, my whole life, my environment, I traveled and went to war, I matured rapidly. I had to be agile. Today, sitting on a red bench in the garden, I thought back to the age I was, to the person I was, to the paltry things I knew—it is all so hard to believe. I murmured some lines by Mallarmé, lines that no one ever told me to read, I found them for myself:
Nothing, nor ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes,
Shall hold back this heart that bathes in waters its delight.
The trees are overgrown, the soil has been dug up to plant idiotic new bushes, the bees and butterflies no longer come in such numbers, swimmers climb up onto the rocks, passersby can walk all the way around the peninsula, coming through the underground gallery that remains open day and night, hardly the kind of place where someone would hide a treasure. This is not the place I dreamed of.
Adolphe loved this garden that was allowed to grow wild. He loved its modest proportions, so unlike the parterres and fields of La Motte-Servolex. He didn’t like the Reinachs’ large chateau in the Savoie region, with its muddy English-style bridle paths. But many people thought Villa Ephrussi and La Motte-Servolex better reflected material success than Kerylos, which resembled nothing else.
Fanny Reinach had a chambermaid who complained endlessly: she didn’t like the house, it was too hot in summer, too cold in winter, the beds with their leather webbing weren’t comfortable, all those straight lines, it was all so austere. She didn’t dare say that she didn’t understand how anyone could have spent so much to build it. There was couch grass growing outside the front door. Her mistress was too proper to put up with her husband’s caprices. When you think of all the things Madame Ephrussi has done, now there’s a fine lady who built a proper palace, its fountains even more fabulous than the ones at Versailles, because they are by the sea! She ventured: “You know what would be pretty, if Madame liked the idea, would be a rose garden, with arches. I saw a flowerbed filled with dahlias in Nice, on the Promenade des Anglais—just think what lovely bouquets you could make.” She was only happy when the family decamped to the mountains, to the Savoie that Theodore had fallen in love with. He had bought a property near La Motte-Serv
olex, a charming village surrounded by cows and sheep, an array of cheeses, and during the years he was creating Kerylos he was also modernizing his “chateau.” The result was a horror.
La Motte-Servolex became a neo-Louis XIII iced cake, an indigestible fondue, a ghastly subprefecture surrounded by fields. It had more than fifty windows, mantelpieces, corniches, pediments everywhere; it was the apotheosis of excess. The architect was called Louis Legrand, and the long-running joke in the family was that no one was ever going to talk about the age of Louis Legrand. Several years after his death, the family decided to donate the chateau to the region. But Madame Reinach’s chambermaid loved everything about it: the mountain air, the fluffy eiderdowns, the huge grates, the delicate rococo furniture, the fringed curtains, the plush upholstered armchairs. One day she ran away from Kerylos, brave woman, and left a note in which she didn’t even ask for a reference for another job: “I can’t stand your house any longer. I don’t want to work here anymore. I hope Madame is not too angry with me.” They soon found someone else to take her place.
