Villa of Delirium

by Adrien Goetz

  My grandchildren are only studying English at school. I am worried it won’t be very useful. When I was young you needed money to learn English or German, and it’s still the case today. I soon realized, even in elementary school, that those who got a place at the Lycée Masséna to learn English or German— “living” languages, as the teachers called them, and they are very welcome to that life of theirs—didn’t learn their languages solely in school. Their parents had to be able to pay for language exchanges, study trips abroad. I was just a poor kid, and I still am in a way. Modern Greek wasn’t offered by these teachers, nor was Italian, even though many of the children of foreign workers spoke that or Spanish at home. In 1891, the government attempted to bring in a reform to replace the teaching of Latin and Greek with that of living languages. Joseph Reinach wrote a thundering editorial: German and English might allow these young people to get to know other countries, but it would imprison them inside the particular, while studying the great texts of antiquity is an education in universalism. He wrote, and Theodore repeated it to me, “To understand Sophocles and Virgil, it is sufficient to be a man.” Afterward, he went on, in a second phase, they can learn languages that could be useful for travel, business, industry. But first of all they had to learn how to think. Theodore claimed that if any more ancient music was discovered, we would one day be able to replicate its performance—if future scholars were still interested in such things.

  “You have heard all those who say that the study of Greek is pointless, Achilles, that it serves no purpose. That in the world of today one must know how to drive an automobile, or build a bridge—I don’t mean to be unkind to our friend Eiffel— everyone is supposed to be able to speak some vague and hazy English, which has only a distant relationship to the language of Shakespeare. (In my youth, you know, I translated Hamlet.) But it is precisely with what serves no purpose that one achieves great things.”

  31

  “GET OUT!”

  I see myself again insulting Monsieur Reinach. And him showing me the door, saying he never wanted to see me again in this house that, for several months already, without admitting it to myself, I had already begun to hate.

  Directly above the statue of Athena, the staircase led to the Hermes gallery on the second floor. It was here, between Theodore’s rooms and the servants’ quarters, at the foot of the flight of stairs that went up to the roof, that Theodore chased me.

  I almost snatched out of its niche the bronze copy of the statue discovered in the sea off the coast of Tunisia, to throw at his head. I was overcome by a fit of madness. He was stooped, leaning against the wall and talking to me. Basileus snoozed by his master’s feet.

  If the brazier had been lit, I would have tipped it over and set the house on fire. I wanted to. How pretty it would have been to watch from the beach as the Greek villa blazed. The curtains on the landing would have caught fire, the window frames turned into torches, the wind fanning the flames as the beams cracked and all the wooden furniture kindled into a single conflagration, papers and books feeding the inferno. The glow would have lit up the whole town.

  I stopped to think for a moment. I knew that there was only one weapon capable of wounding him, a single word. I made my decision. I looked at him and said, “Thief.” He stared at me. I think he understood very well what theft I was alluding to. I thought for a moment that he was about to salvage the situation, that he would give me back the gold crown, or tell me that I was the one who stole it from Dionysiou, and then he whispered, “Get out!”

  I had been behaving very awkwardly around him for several weeks, without meaning him any ill. I knew what I owed him, but I resented that he was growing old and yet still held me in his thrall. The previous week, I had sold my first three paintings, received my first enthusiastic reviews in the newspapers, and it was intolerable to hear him talk to me like that. I didn’t want to have to be modest any more. If I didn’t dare show him my paintings, it was because I knew what he was going to say and that his condescension would be painful to hear. He was incapable of talking to me about them, or asking me any questions. For the previous year or two, I had much preferred the company of his brother Salomon, who was more open, more lighthearted—I even contemplated inviting Salomon to the dinner after my next exhibition opening. I would have asked him not to mention it to his brother.

  The root of my ferocious disagreement with my “benefactor” had nothing to do with my new career as an artist. The quarrel was triggered by a difference of archaeological opinion that had been festering since the immediate aftermath of the Armistice. I had changed so much, and it seemed that he had remained exactly the same as he had been in 1914. At Eiffel’s funeral at the cemetery in Levallois, after his death at the age of ninety-one, Theodore looked as though he had shrunk, and his gaze was blank as he watched his friend being lowered into a grave set slightly on a slant so as to be on the same axis as his tower. Theodore had no idea how his family mocked and mimicked him, albeit with affection. His children dared to find this man, the most brilliant of his generation, a little bit of a fool. I think he really didn’t see any of that. He was publishing fewer articles, he was withdrawing a little, but he never admitted how much of his former glory he had lost. This didn’t make me feel sad for him; he annoyed me. I could no longer stand listening to him going on about Greek history and numismatics when I had expected so much more from him. I remember how excited I was the day that Salomon, in his dingy office in the Museum of National Antiquities, said to me, “Look at these photographs, Achilles. Does this not look like the Phoenician alphabet, the inscriptions discovered on King Ahiram’s sarcophagus at Byblos? Did you read the report by the French team in Lebanon? Can you guess when these date from and where they were found?” I shook my head.

  “In a hamlet called Glozel.”

  “In Iran?”

  “In France. Just outside a village of Ferrières-sur-Sichon, a few minutes’ drive from Vichy. The finds include carved bone, arrowheads, terracotta urns painted with faces, definitely from the Neolithic era. Do you realize what this means?”

  “That the alphabet—if it is an alphabet . . . ”

  “It certainly looks like one! And if it is, it means that the alphabet did not come into being 700 years before Christ on the shores of Lebanon, but 15,000 years ago in France!”

  “Ferrières-sur-Sichon, cradle of civilization—that’s going to come as something of a surprise!”

  Salomon remained, nonetheless, skeptical. I helped him sort through the photographs and organize his papers, all densely covered in his untidy scrawl. Theodore’s handwriting was fine and regular, with letters that sloped neatly upward. I was unsettled when I looked at the photographs Salomon handed to me. More so than I had been by the collection of pornographic images I had once come across: vases, sculptures, mosaics, statues . . . This time there were only geometric figures. I copied them into my sketchbook, comparing the various sequences of signs. I was sure it could be deciphered. I tried to match each sign with a syllable. Salomon was won over by my conviction, and from then on that was all we talked about. He borrowed me from his brother, as he put it, and we went down to see the trove—it was quite an adventure. That was what I loved about the three brothers: Joseph’s passion when it came to defending Captain Dreyfus, Salomon’s when he intuited a discovery—he became passionate about Glozel—the childish joy on Theodore’s face when he played me the notes of the Delphic hymn to Apollo, which he had deciphered, like Champollion and the Rosetta Stone.

  In 1926 Salomon and I spent two days talking to the country folk in Glozel, surveying the field, and weighing the clay tablets in our hands. On our return, with all the authority of an influential member of the Academy of Inscriptions, he announced that he believed the discovery to be genuine. He even published a short book of reproductions of the alphabetical signs.

  Without suspecting a thing, I returned shortly afterward to Beaulieu. The success of my first exhibition had been a dream: I began tracing signs in
my paintings, images of the past layered over fragments of the future, which helped me make the transition from my early Cubist period. I was creating my own style, simpler, more elementary, somewhat primitive. On the train back I imagined new paintings, with rectangles, arrows, triangles, little watercolors, a whole new world that would be my home. I returned to the silent, gloomy villa, which no longer meant anything to me.

  The moment he saw me Theodore flew into a rage. I had never seen him like that before. He swore at me. An alphabet! What next! Clearly someone had faked an entire archaeological site, perhaps there were a few authentic objects alongside these fragments of clay that were undoubtedly shoddy fakes. A whole alphabet invented for use in just one village? Only to be completely forgotten until it reappeared in Phoenicia, after a hiatus of over ten thousand years? Usually so calm, now he screamed and shouted. Because of me, his brother’s career was going to end up a farce. Eventually he stopped shouting. His voice grew icy. I tried to defend myself:

  “You made yourself ridiculous because of your own recklessness when the tiara was acquired, and now you are going to make yourself ridiculous again, but this time because of your excessive prudence.”

  I had never even alluded to the Saitapharnes affair before. He answered me in oily tones. He had heard such wonderful things about my paintings. His implication was that I might have set out intentionally to hoodwink them, I might have been the artist who . . . He was going to accuse me of being the author of the clay tablets discovered at Ferrières-sur-Sichon. That was the moment I realized I had to leave, at once. I walked away from him. My luck was that at last I was able to live on my own means. Glozel was just a pretext. I followed the advice that Ariadne’s husband once gave me; he too had stopped coming to the house. But only a few weeks later I wept when I heard that Theodore had died. I joined the funeral procession to the Montmartre cemetery. His final resting place for all eternity—an eternity he perhaps did not believe in—was designed by Pontremoli. Greek in style, adorned with bronze palm trees, it was located near the graves of the Cahen d’Anvers, the Camondos, the Pereires, the Bischoffsheims, the Koenigswarters, and not far from the bust of his beloved Offenbach.

  Theodore seemed to have come back to Kerylos with the sole purpose of going after me. He had long preferred the comforts of Paris, since he moved out of Rue Hamelin and into an apartment inherited from his wife on the corner of the Place des États-Unis, in the mansion that had once belonged to Jules Ephrussi. He went for slow walks with Basileus, also no longer very lively, on a leash. He lived down the street from a whole row of monuments, the mansions of the Deutsch de la Meurthe family, the Cahen d’Anvers family, the Bischoffsheims—theirs was the most sumptuous, and it became famous some time later for the legendary parties thrown by Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles. The Glozel affair dragged on. People still occasionally talk about it even today. No forger was ever discovered.

  I could never have imagined the oration at Theodore’s funeral, even less that of his brothers. They were cultivated, brilliant—too brilliant, no doubt—too easy to hoodwink, ridicule, humiliate, yet they were still the best, they always had been, they couldn’t help it, the best at chemistry, mathematics, geography, history, philosophy. And above all in the subject that was their greatest passion: Greece, its history, its language, its ruins, its statues, its tombs, its temples, and its houses. If Latin was the church and its priests, Greek was democracy and thus it signified France. They truly believed that. I often used to think about this when I was living with them, when I swam—that was when my brain functioned best, when my joints still supported me. They knew everything there was to know about Jewish history, were passionate about all religions, but their France was secular France, the kingdom that belonged to one and to all. With hindsight, I wonder if it was Theodore’s fault I was so excited by Glozel: how could I resist the idea that the world’s first alphabet had been born in France? Our only thought at the time was to serve our fatherland. Between the two wars, public opinion changed; nowadays, since the Liberation, the kinds of ideas that were born after 1870 are once more conceivable.

  In 1898, in the middle of the Dreyfus affair, Theodore published the text of the speech he presented at the prize-giving ceremony for a Jewish charitable organization, which Adolphe gave me and I still have in my archives:

  “Never confuse France with the agitation that sometimes disturbs its surface, temporarily, but with impunity. Continue to love this France, with all your strength, all your soul, as one loves a mother, even when she is unjust, or even wrong, because she is your mother and you are her children.”

  During the years after the victory, I became for him and for Salomon—I spent less time with Joseph, who died in 1921—I think I can say this with pride, a true friend, whom they could always count on. The moment of rupture, though it came as a relief, was also extremely painful. I had grown bored of seeing Theodore standing in the library, garbed in a white cloak that made him look like a prophet, where he would spend the entire morning writing. I could no longer bear to sit with him on a bench facing the blue rocks, listening to him recite his most recent articles or the ones that Salomon had sent him. He read out loud to me the whole of Apollo, his brother’s short book, growling into his beard when, in the chapter on Greek art, Salomon cites Professor Furtwängler’s theories about Phidias’s sculptures. I’ll never forget that. And yet, in the 1930s, I didn’t want to remember. I went to all three funerals, I remained on good terms with the children, though I saw them less and less, and I never really wanted to renew the ties that had been broken in front of the statue of Hermes. I had my own house and my own family. For my wedding they sent a gift “from the whole family, with our best wishes.” I had been expecting a gold Breguet watch, but I opened a box filled with straw and the full battery of copper pans from Kerylos, the ones that my mother had always admired. They must have changed over to aluminum.

  They might have known everything, or almost everything, my beloved Reinach brothers, but in the end it was I who astonished them, when I discovered the greatest secret in the whole of Greek history. During our expedition to Dionysiou, I felt like Jason with his Argonauts, certain of finding the Golden Fleece in the kingdom of Colchis—one of the themes of the frescos on the walls of the peristyle. But it turned out that my golden fleece was not Alexander’s crown, it was my art, created with my own hands after I escaped from the Labyrinth.

  32

  MADAME REINACH’S BEDCHAMBER AND HER SHOWER WITH ITS MULTIPLE JETS

  For years I searched everywhere for Ariadne. It was my only purpose. I wondered if she ever came back to the coast, I went to visit all the ladies who offered drawing and watercolor classes, I wondered if she might have married the notary and taken on a different name—he had sent me an announcement of his rather late marriage—which would have been truly terrible. I explored all the brothels of Nice and Toulon during the war, I went to Mass at Matisse’s chapel in Vence, the opening of which was the major event of 1951—I was sure that she would be there. I even used to peer at the faces of nuns who were about her age. When I bought my first car, when I developed my first color photograph, when I went for my first long vacation to Italy, when I bought my first 78 record—every time I thought of Ariadne, who wasn’t there with me. I finally gave up looking for her several years ago. I realized that I wasn’t mourning her anymore. Thinking about her made me happy, whether she was still alive or whether she had died. I had managed to banish the idea that she had a child who might have been mine, once I had my own two sons, like a proper father who asks no questions. It was when I used to swim that the images of Ariadne would return, taking me by surprise; later, drying off on the beach, I would forget her again, wholly occupied by my grandchildren.

  Like many Corsicans of my generation, I never really liked the sea. It was Theodore who taught me to look at it, to call it thalassa, the sea of the Greeks, to see in it the “wine-dark” waves of Ulysses. Since then I have learned to enjoy boats, taken vacations to
the real Greece, sailed around the islands with my family, I even thought about buying a bolthole in Thasos and ending my days there. Today I know the names of every seabird, I love the smell of kelp. I no longer swim.

  Weep, gentle halcyons, sacred birds,

  Birds beloved of Thetis, gentle halcyons, weep.

  These lines by André Chénier—the author of Odes to Fanny— always make me think of the Reinachs. I lay down on the floor, fully dressed, with my sketchbook and pen, my white canvas trousers, my old American moccasins, a washed out blue polo shirt from before the war; if my children saw me they would tell me I looked like a tramp. Some days I make an effort, I shave and take out from my closet a white shirt and a pair of trousers the color of crushed strawberries; in Nice, once you’re over fifty, you have nothing to lose by dressing like an old playboy, sitting on a bench on the promenade, eyes closed, soaking up the sun in silence. Today I have eschewed all elegance, lying on the ground on this Halcyon terrace making notes in silence, at the center of the wind diagram that has been half erased by the salt from the sea. I did my morning gymnastics here with Adolphe just a few weeks before his death. It was so unjust; I was a head taller than him, I could do fifty pushups where he could only manage fifteen, I built up muscle twice as fast as he—he blamed his scholarly heritage and inbreeding, congratulating me on my shepherd ancestors. I asked him what his great grandfather the cattle dealer had looked like, if he too was passionate about Latin, Greek, and Aramaic. He answered that being a cattle broker was already a step up from being a shepherd, and that he had ended up becoming the most successful dealer in Frankfurt, but that I needn’t worry, things could go very fast, and no doubt my children would become professors of Sanskrit at the Collège de France, if I eased off the gymnastics a little to work on my language skills. Today I am the only person left who knows about this wind tower, this observation post, where you can forget the faded architecture of the house, a place where one feels free, happy. A place that makes you want to travel, do somersaults and stretches, drink champagne in evening dress, read, think.