Villa of Delirium

by Adrien Goetz

  Theodore was happy at La Motte-Servolex, as if, from time to time, he grew tired of Greece. I found him in good spirits there, in his four-poster bed, surrounded by bourgeois furniture, relaxed, reading aloud the regional newspaper that he financed, Le Démocrate savoisien, which adorned his silver-plated breakfast tray every morning without fail. Over the mantelpiece there was a play on words in Latin: Servo lex, “I serve the law,” the motto that every parliamentarian had to adopt, except that it wasn’t even kitchen-sink Latin—it should have read Servo legem. He loved this silly little schoolboy joke, he was very proud of it. Was he trying to impress the locals? He was a different person there, an opulent potentate, a satrap in his satrapy, the Republic personified, all perfectly suited to this Louis XIII style. He was a democrat who acted like an aristocrat and became a tyrant, a lover of Greece who was agoraphobic, a monogamous man who was a seducer, a sophisticated museologist who was taken in by forgers, the creator of Kerylos who slept so well surrounded by this appalling decor. Basileus ran free in the woods, happy as a hunter.

  “Do you think that we’re obsessed with nobility?” Adolphe asked me. “I always found it quite absurd that Adolf Reinach, whose name I share—without an f at the end though, thank goodness—went to collect his baron’s title in Italy. My father’s first cousin, Baron Jacques de Reinach, who changed his name from Jacob, saw himself in competition with the Camondo and the Cahen d’Anvers clans—that’s the snobbish side of the family. The Cahens became counts and changed their name to Cahen d’Anvers because they were pouring money into Italian royalty. The Camondos became counts in 1860, the year of Theodore’s birth. And that’s not to mention my cousin Viktor von Ephrussi! They wanted to be like the Rothschilds, that’s what I think. The “Baron de Reinach” was actually my grandfather, because Papa married his daughter you know, we are like royal dynasties, we intermarry, did you know that I am half noble, I am Reinach y Reinach, Reinach squared. It’s all completely ridiculous.”

  Nobility, as far as he was concerned, meant having the right to do everything differently than ordinary people. In his family, they all managed that quite well, not to mention the pleasure they took in not doing things to please other people, and their disdain for idle chatter. Kerylos was a manor house without a single pack of cards; there was no embroidering around the fireplace, or boredom dissipated by charades and board games, no suicide on the way home from the casino—an invention that brought the suffering and febrility of the aristocracy within reach of the merely wealthy.

  I always wondered what the parents of the three brothers must have been like. I did find out in the end, but there too the history of this lineage, without being a secret, was not a topic of conversation. Hermann Reinach’s family was originally Swiss—from the town of Reinach—and went to Germany in the eighteenth century. He was born in Frankfurt. His grandfather, from Mayence, served Napoleon and his brother Jérôme, King of Westphalia. These souvenirs of empire pleased Adolphe, there was something thrilling about it, adventure, the elegant cut of the hussar’s jacket. Hermann Reinach came to Paris under the July monarchy. From his beginnings as a courtier he ended up branching out and setting himself up as a banker, becoming involved in the world of politics. Theodore told me that his father was a close acquaintance of Thiers, and indeed, Joseph gave the little bespectacled man a good place in his anthology of French oratory, one of his more successful books. I think they admired him, their family owed him a great deal—though for many people, Thiers was the man responsible for violently crushing the Paris Commune.

  Little by little the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place; it had taken me a while, but now I thought I could put the whole thing together. The Reinachs made good investments, in the Spanish railways and other innovations, and they were wealthy and discreet, living in their large house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Adolf was Hermann’s twin brother, the father of Baron Jacques de Reinach, who committed suicide at the time of the Panama scandal. Hermann had a beautiful house that testified to his great wealth, a minute’s walk from the birthplace of Louis XIV, on the royal esplanade in Saint-Germain-en-Laye; it is still there, you can’t miss it. There is even a plaque on the house today, I believe.

  At his death in 1899, I read in a newspaper I found in Theodore’s bedroom, Hermann had amassed a fortune of fourteen million gold francs. An enormous sum, abstract—at least for me, a Corsican shepherd. For the three brothers it meant that money would never be an issue. They had a private income from stocks and shares and property, which allowed them to devote themselves to serious things, politics, the Louvre, which interested them more than hunting—the passion of Béatrice de Camondo, the wife of Theodore’s son Léon—and joining the Jockey Club—something that appealed to that dilettante, Proust’s Charles Swann. A similar thing occurred in a family of German bankers, the Warburgs, whose eldest son was passionate about the study of art history: Aby Warburg, it was said, exchanged his birthright with his brothers not against a bowl of lentils, like Esau in the Bible, but against the promise that during his lifetime his brothers would buy him all the books he needed for his studies.

  In the Reinach family, the banking vocation had died out. The brothers kept their eyes on their well-managed fortune while devoting themselves entirely to the allure of true wealth for those who have everything: books. I took a while to understand: for my mother, who was poor, the daughter of people who were even more impoverished, money was the only thing that mattered. She would doubtless have been happy if Theodore had landed me a job in a bank instead of giving me grammar lessons. She would have loved if I had married one of those daughters of millionaires who accompanied their mothers on visits to the Reinachs. The cost of the tiara was irrelevant to Joseph, Salomon, and Theodore; money meant little to them. They were denounced for their greed, the way this scandalous acquisition had contributed to the ruin of France. Their fortune, which they were only distantly involved with, collapsed between the wars. I’ve seen a new generation of Reinachs boast that they always travel third class, because “when you have a book in your hand you are comfortable anywhere.” This lack of interest in money is the result of three or four generations of great wealth. Adolphe was already like that: “This garden, Achilles, is all I need if I want to get some fresh air and look at the sea, do a little exercise, listen to the piano through the open window. Do you find orchids chic? This fashion for black flowers, dreary tulips, blue hydrangeas forced to grow in slate. In Papa’s house in Paris that’s all there is, in Sèvres vases—he has no taste. Uncle Theodore pretends he has no time for the garden, but you can’t imagine how much he loves it: he forbids cut flowers inside the house, and he is absolutely right. Papa thinks it makes him look like an elegant, worldly man to have orchids on the mantelpiece. But we don’t need these relics of the nobility, these salons for old dowagers or the little court of swooning young pages who follow the old Empress Eugénie whenever she comes to Menton. Did you know she is still alive? Nobility is science, arts, letters, Rostand’s panache. Do you think I’d be any good at writing plays?”

  And he jumped off the parapet, made three balletic leaps on the stones, and dived fully clothed from the top of the biggest rock, all the time watched by Madame Reinach’s chambermaid, who threw up her hands and then ran to fetch him a towel.

  28

  THE ART OF DINING LYING DOWN

  A day like any other, during the last war. The shelves in the dining room knocked down, smashed plates all over the floor. It was raining in the courtyard, in front of the frescoes. I didn’t linger there.

  I was the first to go in, I happened to be in the area, a few days after the house had been looted by the Nazis. The caretaker had rushed to Nice and asked me to come to the house right away. The dairywoman’s daughter—a beauty who was going to find herself facing a lot of problems after the Liberation—had already warned me over the telephone.

  I swept everything up, the pieces of plates and bowls that could be salvaged, anything that was still intact. The vi
lla had been turned upside down, but not destroyed and not emptied. They had gone through all the closets. All the papers had been taken away. The worst wreckage was in the dining room. I picked up the shards one by one, instinctively, respectfully, because I didn’t know what else to do.

  Ariadne always admired these plates and bowls when she was invited with the Pontremolis for dinner in the Triklinos. Theodore had wanted to avoid copies. He couldn’t see himself eating meals out of fake Greek vases. Those in museums are often ornate pieces, luxury objects, offerings to be placed in graves. He imagined everyday Greek tableware, the kind that potters took out of the kiln and then perfunctorily daubed with a few garlands, the Greek equivalents of the ones discovered in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

  There are several cupboards in the kitchen. I went downstairs but the Germans had emptied them out as well. There was nothing to save. I pocketed a little shard. In the same way that they had chosen different woods for their color, perfume, and density, from countries that the ancient Greeks hadn’t known, they had taken inspiration from Korean potters. The ceramicist had elected to use stoneware rather than terracotta, sometimes adding a little kaolin. His pieces used limited colors to complement the palette of the house: beige, ocher, and black, simple and elegant.

  In the dining room, daybeds suggested that they took their meals lying down. One was higher than the others; it was, according to the classical Greek way, reserved for the master of the house. For effect, it was perfect, but I never saw Theodore perching there. He used to sit facing his wife at one of the little tables, the woven leather daybeds serving simply as decoration.

  The dining room, with its offset angles, was, to his eyes, perfect, because it was too small for large festive meals. I decided not to bother poking around the ceiling with its flaking blue paint, and I couldn’t see anywhere that could serve as a hiding place in this room. The pictures on the walls, copied from those in the museum in Naples, suggest easel paintings, which already existed in ancient times. The Germans had left them hanging on the walls. I peered closely at them, lifting each one by one: behind them there was only plaster. I took the few remaining plates and dishes down from the shelves for the pleasure of looking at them, holding each piece in my hand, feeling the slightly rough surface.

  In the Triklinos, my principal memory is of the person who had the biggest appetite, who liked to stay at the table the longest, Salomon. He had two scholarly passions. Beside his articles, his enormous notebooks, and his indexes—his greatest joy, his treat, was doing the index for a book, a task that he refused to delegate to anyone else—he liked to write the kind of books that anyone could understand. I liked that very much, because he tried them on me first, in the form of long after-dinner conversations, and he always gave me a copy as soon as it was published. I have kept them all, dedicated to me in his lively handwriting. He published short, well-written digests, written in the tone of a discussion between friends, that one could carry around in one’s pocket, and they were very successful. The best known was Apollo, with its green cover decorated with a gold coin in relief, which told the story of art from cavemen to modern American sculptors. He also wrote Cornélie, or Latin without Weeping; Sidonie, or French without Suffering; and Eulalie, or Greek without Tears, my favorite. These books ought to have been handed out in all the schools in France, and perhaps if they had been, we wouldn’t be where we are today. I—the person who ended up intentionally forgetting everything I ever knew about Latin and Greek—wonder now if the people who know nothing are having the last laugh. For Salomon, a scientific truth was one that could be explained. The course he taught at the Louvre was very popular; he used to tell us about it over dinner at Kerylos, describing the oppressed women of the world sitting in the first row, drinking in his every word, while he sat preening himself in his pulpit, like the cockerel in the lower courtyard. Joseph laughed, not realizing that his brothers teased him for the same manner, the way he had of bringing into the conversation the tall silhouette of Léon Gambetta, whom he had worked for as a top advisor. Occasionally, when he came down to Beaulieu, he would go to visit Gambetta’s grave in Nice. I once heard him say in this very room, “the great minister,” as if he had a partridge in his mouth.

  One day, in my presence, Joseph and Theodore brought up the subject of Salomon’s affairs; in lowered voices they described his relationship with the scandalous Liane de Pougy, who was not accustomed to erudition but who never erred in matters of great wealth. Salomon, permitting himself a fling with the most intelligent of the demimondaines, had brought the Reinach clan into the closed circle of those who ruin themselves for disreputable ladies, from Ludwig I of Bavaria with Lola Montès, to Count Henckel von Donnersmarck with La Païva.

  Eiffel often came for dinner in the Triklinos, and, using his aches and pains as a pretext, he would immediately lie down, sighing as he was served a haunch of venison or some iced delicacy. He always seemed to me to be both incredibly young and terribly old: he was born in 1832, at the beginning of the reign of Louis-Philippe. His father, Alexandre, whom he used to tell me about, had been an officer in Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Monsieur Eiffel was also called Alexandre, as Theodore liked to remind him, pointing out that he was Greek too in his own way, but everyone else used his second name, Gustave. When I was thirteen or fourteen he was always traveling, even though he had been told to rest in Beaulieu: he wanted to know the results of his meteorological laboratory at the top of his tower, he wanted to position a wireless transmitter there, he was conducting experiments in aerodynamics and he claimed that he would be able to study the law of free fall from the top of his 984-foot tower better than Galileo from the top of the tower of Pisa. He told the coachman, the cooks, the chambermaids, my mother, me, my little brother, that the Eiffel Tower would soon be used for everything: it was going to light up Paris, become a military observatory, a beacon for dirigible balloons, it was his obsession, his fixation—he wanted to die safe in the knowledge that his monument would live on.

  And I, at fifteen, had the luck to see them together in this room. I compared them, of course. On one side the brilliant engineer who had built himself a house worthy of the Renaissance, overflowing with crystal and silver, on the other the man who embodied ancient history and had turned instinctively toward purity of line, simplicity of form and central heating. On the one side, stone balustrades, on the other metal balconies, as if the two men had swapped places. “My dear old Eiffel, you were right, before your time!”

  “And you, young Reinach, you understood that ancient Greece is the future, whereas I, thanks to my dear father and mother, never learned Greek, and now it’s too late.”

  “Well, do you think I studied your pneumatic problems?”

  “Reinach, you are too modest, you won the prize for physics in the national competition. You wrote, I seem to recall, on Archimedes’s screw and Pythagoras’s theorem.”

  These after-dinner conversations went on for hours. Never with any ill will, the conversation rarely focused on people; they preferred to talk about what they had read. They had memories of books the way other people recall stories of hunting and fishing, or love affairs. After dinner they would go and sit in the Andron to smoke and drink cognac, while the women settled in the Oikos and opened up the piano.

  On our return from Athos, a lunch was held here, with Eiffel, who wanted to hear about it all. I was invited. I heard Theodore lie, while Adolphe and I remained silent: we had not found anything, it was a false lead, Alexander’s grave was not there. He described the monks’ filthy food, their Masses in the middle of the night. Eiffel joked, “If I had been there, I would have looked harder! You thought you didn’t need my services, that was a great shame!”

  As the years went by I found myself less and less able to bear being at these meals, but if I do not write about them now there will be nothing left but a handful of dust and a few broken plates.

  29

  THE ANDRON, WHERE THE REINACHS ENTERTAINED KINGS ON STORM
Y NIGHTS, AND WHERE THESEUS FOUGHT THE MINOTAUR

  A party at Kerylos was not a frequent occurrence. The house was visible to all from the beach, but few had ever visited, simply because it wasn’t very accessible. Some evenings the house was lit up, but it was impossible to hold large receptions there. The largest room is the Andron, in ancient Greece the part of the house reserved for men, although the Reinachs permitted women to enter. I was allowed to be involved when gala dinners were held there, and I helped move the heavy furniture and set up round tables with vases of flowers, to stunning effect: the red marble, called “peach blossom” marble, harmonized with the fabric on the doors, and candlelight reflected in the silver vases glowed against the south-facing windows that looked out onto the sea. Serviettes embroidered with the letter R were emphatically not Grecian: they were the same ones used for republican banquets at the family chateau in La Motte-Servolex. Theodore refused to allow the library to be used for these dinners, although that would have meant more tables could be laid and more people invited: no impious guests were permitted to enter the sanctuary.

  The Belgian King Léopold II once attended a party here, looking extremely smug about owning the colossal Villa Leopolda a short walk away. Theodore was entirely unmoved by his presence. He had known more than a few kings in his time. Several had been his guests at the house, and he would welcome them humming, “Here comes the King,” from La Belle Hélène. King Gustaf V of Sweden thought the garden would have been improved with the addition of a tennis court—tennis was his passion—but they would have had to invent one worthy of the Olympics, a challenge that Pontremoli had failed to take up. George I of Greece borrowed some ideas from Kerylos to render the royal family’s residence, the Tatoi Palace, more authentically Greek. The president, Armand Fallières, on vacation in Monaco, was keen to visit out of democratic curiosity. He greeted Basileus, who barked ferociously as he always did, as an equal. He asked if his name was Argos, Odysseus’s dog who was the first to recognize Ulysses upon his return to Ithaca, and the assembled company chuckled appreciatively at this witticism— which it wasn’t, really. In his strong accent of the southwest, he demanded to know every last detail about the gratings that separated the Andron from the peristyle—he was the grandson of a blacksmith. Theodore congratulated him in front of everyone for the decision to move Zola’s body to the Pantheon, and they discussed whether Captain Dreyfus, too, might one day take his place in the temple of great men.