Villa of Delirium

by Adrien Goetz

  Ornithes, birds, was the name of Fanny’s bedroom, with its midnight blue paintings and its black and gold arabesques. I remember seeing Madame Reinach, with her bird-like profile against the clouds, standing by the open window in an evening dress and a turquoise silk cape, her cousins and sisters-in-law thronging around her in their bathing costumes. I didn’t know quite how to relate to her, how to address her. It did not take long for me to begin calling Theodore by his first name, but I never dared call her “Fanny.” I was never entirely sure to what extent I might tease them, about their obsessions, their taste, the way they had of only talking to each other about books, their conversations sprinkled with quotations as they unfolded their newspapers. But because I wasn’t overly intimidated by them, I found a way to be natural. There were some things I didn’t like: the first time I went to visit Salomon in Paris, I found everything hideous, which I told Theodore, thinking that he would send me packing, when in fact I think that it was one of the reasons he adopted me. Salomon very much liked his mansion on Avenue Van Dyck, the work of an architect called Alfred-Nicolas Normand. He had designed Prince Napoleon’s Roman villa, which must have been one of the examples that they had considered, before Theodore decided on his own project. This palace, with its white and gilded wooden paneling, was palpably designed to dazzle.

  The book chest in Fanny’s bedroom was empty—what happened to all her Marivaux, Molières, the books by the two Corneille brothers and by Rostand, signed by the author? All her music scores have disappeared as well. Only a few photographs remain. The construction of this house was part of the rivalry between the three geniuses that had existed since their childhood. Had Madame Reinach been involved in the decoration of this bedroom, the most beautiful in the house, where the attributes of Hera, the wife of Zeus, alternate with floral motifs? Among the figures on the uppermost frieze her husband is visible—Adolphe once climbed a stepladder to give him a pipe and fix his beard, and the joke stayed. If he had been allowed, he would have liked to chisel on the walls some fake ancient graffiti, like the graffiti found at Pompeii . . . Lying on her bed reading, his adored aunt must have felt like a Trojan princess. I can’t imagine how happy this must have made her.

  Unkind gossips said that the beautiful Fanny, the first cousin of the first Madame Theodore Reinach, was the heir to the fortunes of her two uncles, Charles and Jules Ephrussi. Charles Ephrussi was a very important man, editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, collector of Manet’s asparagus paintings and the golden apples of Puvis de Chavannes, he loved ancient art and all that was modern, and knew everyone there was to know in Paris. Madame Reinach was not in the slightest bit worldly. She was entirely uninterested in any rivalry with the grandes dames of the region, among whose ranks figured her cousin Béatrice. She had no interest in receiving her neighbors. Egbert Abadie, who made his fortune in cigarette papers, had bought the Marquis de Rochechouart’s boat and cultivated a friendship with the Prince of Monaco. She avoided him on principle. There were also the people who lived at the Chateau Marioni, descendants of a brigadier of the police who had explained to his children how to get rich, who were seen with the “Sun President” Félix Faure during his triumphal visit to the coast in 1896, even today a subject of conversation.

  At Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, there was a love nest: Paris Singer—of the sewing machine Singers, and Isadora Duncan’s lover—had the villa “Mes Rochers” renovated, it was as beautiful as a Tuscan castle. All the talk there was of the Venetian palazzo owned by their great rivals, the fashionable American Curtis family, the owners of Villa Sylvia, whose garden Claude Monet once came to paint. They received the whole world at their residence on the Grand Canal. Madame Reinach saw them from afar at musical evenings and couldn’t care less about them. She visited Èze a few times; the amiable nephew of the great poet Tennyson invited her to stay at his Chateau Aïguetta—a medieval fortress built for him—but I think she ceased to frequent him when she realized that he was ruining his family at the casino in Monte-Carlo.

  At Èze, she liked to walk the path that Nietzsche used to take. She gave me The Birth of Tragedy, the essay where he splits beauty in two, inspired as much by Apollo as by Dionysius. She spoke to me of the sober architecture of Athens facing that of the great altar of the Pergamon, and I didn’t dare admit to her she was telling me nothing I didn’t already know. The philosopher stayed on the Riviera in the early 1880s, at a time when he was isolated and in despair, before he became a famous writer.

  There was one couple who would have loved to be acquainted with the Reinachs and whom Fanny kept at a distance. Around the time that Kerylos was being built, the Villa Mirasol was also going up on the Cap d’Ail, where Gabrielle Réval reigned as a woman of letters. Suffice it to say that I was forbidden to read her books, whose very titles set me astir: The Schoolgirl, The Trainer, The Fountain of Love, The Child with the Rose. She had a husband who wrote historical novels with titles like At the Time of True Love, and Checkmate. After it was discovered that they had had the impudence to organize an evening in honor of the gods of Olympus, their names were no longer mentioned.

  Theodore had two daughters from his first marriage. Inconsolable when he was widowed at the age of twenty-nine, he soon found consolation: Fanny said, “You’re mad,” and he replied, “Mad for you.” I think Theodore truly loved her. He asked her to marry him straight away. They had four children together, Julien, Léon, Paul and Olivier. It was said that after all the children were born, they grew used to living separate lives, and that she found her own consolation, always with exceptional men. I don’t really know what that means, nor if it was true. She was always charming with me, always ready with a word of encouragement and a smile. When she died in 1917, far too soon, Theodore was not even able to attend her funeral. The government had sent him to the United States to try and persuade politicians in Washington to join the war. Which is what happened, and the war was won. But he had lost the taste for happiness. He never remarried. He took refuge more and more in his reading, which I suppose must have taken him back to his adolescence. He used to stare at the clouds, as I am doing today.

  During the days here when Ariadne and I loved one another, we slept several nights in Fanny’s bedroom. It was the most beautiful of all the Kerylos bedrooms. I was looking after the house, and no one disturbed us. I told her how I wanted to paint, and she was the first to tell me not to put it off; if I wanted to be an artist I had to forget about everything else, devote every day to it. We could just make out the coast of Italy from the windows. The sun woke us. We ran naked to the shower that Theodore had designed for Fanny. It was shaped like a niche hollowed out for a statue. Standing on the slatted floor, raised like a pedestal, we posed like antique statues, Paris and Helen, Mars and Venus, Psyche receiving her first kiss from Cupid, now us. Very modern, worthy of a London hotel, the “cabin” possessed three jets, each with its own hot and cold faucet. Mosaic inscriptions in Greek explained everything. You turned the Perikulas and water gushed out in a circle, the faucet marked Krounos flowed with a fine mist, and then there was Kataxysma, a very unusual word which in Greek signifies only one thing: a sauce to pour on meat. Ariadne burst out laughing. It was just the kind of joke that Theodore would play on his wife, and which, at the time, made me so happy to be living at Kerylos.

  33

  ULYSSES’S QUARTERS

  Next to the shower there was a bathroom called Ampelos, which is the name of a constellation, but more importantly that of a young satyr inspired by Dionysius. During those days when we were alone in the house, Ariadne would spend hours in the marble tub. On the walls was a stucco vine peopled by chaste-looking young girls staring at bunches of grapes, though not, apparently, tempted to pick them; it was very amusing. She talked to me, told me about how bored she was in her marriage, about miserable Grégoire’s periods of depression, and then how intelligent he was when faced with a plan, his instinct for architecture, and I understood that she admired him and would never leave him. She also ta
lked briefly about her desire for independence, for travel, parties, music; how she imagined herself opening a bookstore, a hotel, a boutique. I should have realized then that she was going to leave him.

  The room next door, between Fanny’s and Theodore’s bedrooms, served as both a study for reading and the couple’s private sitting room. In Greek it was called the Triptolemus, after the son of Gaia and Oceanus, born of the union between land and sea. Theodore didn’t bother to go down to the dining room for every meal. Someone would bring him up a few plates of food that he would store in a specially made cupboard. Triptolemus once said, “Honor the gods by offering them fruits and not killing animals,” but that was no reason to become a vegetarian. Theodore would eat his lunch in a hurry, on a pedestal table with a surface of polished silver, like the mirrors of the ancients. The walls were painted to suggest a garden, trees dancing among white columns.

  Greek and Latin were the useless studies that have served me the most in my career. Without Greek and Latin I would have become an apprentice cook scouring caldrons in a restaurant kitchen; the children of my mother’s peers all found jobs in luxury hotels catering to the whims of the nouveau riche. I cast all that aside. If I had followed the Reinach example, I would have become a literature professor. With my painting, I was able to establish myself on my own. I dined with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, I was invited to the ballet rehearsals of the Marquis of Cuevas at Monte Carlo, I went yachting with Fulco di Verdura and the Viscount of Noailles, I own a nice house filled with antiques, two Picassos, and a Puvis de Chavannes, which I have hung alongside each other. I have a studio with a glass roof; it is not great riches, does not compare to the worldly success of captains of industry and bankers, I don’t get talked about in the gossip columns, thank goodness, but it isn’t too bad for a boy whose parents didn’t finish school, whose grandfather was a shepherd and didn’t read three books in his whole life. My whole life, I owe to Greek. If I hadn’t known how to conjugate the aorist, where to put the stresses, how to recite mi-verbs, I would never have been able to escape my menial little existence. Declensions proved to be the instrument of my ascent. Charles de Noailles once showed me around his property, the Chateau Saint-Bernard, which was quite the opposite of a chateau in fact, a modern, functional house, “interesting to live in,” according to this worldly gentleman who could not quite get over the fact that I knew Theocrites’s Idylls as well as he. Theodore, back then, understood this too: living in a house is not a game. At the Villa Noailles there was a covered swimming pool and a gymnasium: at the age of seventeen I would have been much happier there than at Kerylos—if only I had been born twenty years later! But then again I might easily have never left the Eiffels’ house, I would have never met anyone, and I would have remained poor. I don’t think that would have been a terrible thing, but the life I have made for myself pleases me more. I know hundreds of ridiculous things. I have read hundreds of books that serve no useful purpose. I have learned rare languages that I will never speak with anyone. That is the debt I owe to the Reinach family. They did not teach me; they showed me.

  “You see, Achilles, little tortoise”—I was barely sixteen, I was already a head taller than him—“Listen to me, I am quite fed up with telling people that the study of Greek will, in spite of everything, be useful: if they are politicians, it will enable them to think about democracy. If they are pharmacists, to understand the labels on their bottles. If they are tourists, to imbibe more from the monuments at Delphi and Olympia. It all sounds very nice, but it isn’t true. Greek has nothing to prove. I like it precisely because it serves no purpose. Nothing is truly beautiful unless it cannot be used for anything, in the words of that old romantic Théophile Gautier. Have you read The Romance of a Mummy? I shall give it to you. Even Monsieur Eiffel’s tower serves no real purpose, which upsets him terribly; it is the measure of his future success. He is incapable of realizing it: he is not an architect; he is an engineer. Students ought to be encouraged toward the useless. Is music useful? Is running useful? Discus throwing, archery, are they useful? Are the rules of chess useful? Yet I shall always prefer those who play chess or the violin, if I have to choose whom to invite into my house.”

  “Because you like your guests to play the violin? You wouldn’t stand it for five minutes. And you hate board games.”

  “You rascal. Those people would be able to talk to me about other things, they would understand allusions, be able to talk about things without naming them. I would be on the same level as those who had learned such things purely for pleasure. A long, difficult, tedious apprenticeship, but that is part of the fun.”

  “You mean the person who came first in the Beaulieu athletics? You would make him a cup of tea?”

  “Insolent young man, you really are unique. Greek serves literally no purpose, but the fact of having learned it is what distinguishes us from the barbarians.”

  “And Madame Reinach, who is so distinguished, how much Greek does she know?”

  “You are being most impertinent. She knows quite enough. And that is my business, not yours.”

  The master of the house’s bathroom was baptized Nikai, the Victories, presumably because it was during his ablutions that Theodore came up with his most dazzling and implausible ideas. All at once the entire household would hear, from the “gallery” that led to these rooms—the elegant Grégoire banned the word corridor for being too prosaic; to annoy him I always said corridor—the master of the house talking to himself, ratiocinating in the hot water: “This braggart Barrès understands nothing about Greece! He should reread his own Voyage from Sparta! Ridiculous! Pontremoli met him once on a voyage, posing with his umbrella in the middle of the columns, the old fool!”

  The stucco and the mosaics were particularly well done, rather more polished than those in Madame Reinach’s bathroom, which tended dangerously toward the style of the Empress Josephine. The decor of the walls exalted swimming, to unintended comic effect. Pontremoli designed most of the mosaics himself, inspired by various antique vases that Theodore suggested. But I saw the stucco being applied by one of his old friends from the Villa Medici, called Jean-Baptiste Gascq. It involved a complicated process of mixing marble powder with plaster and then sculpting it as though it were a coin. Who else is here? Anatomical figures, copied from the famous vase known as the Euphronios krater, transposed into a subtle relief. Their muscles quiver as the light plays over their bodies. I used to wonder what chubby old Theodore must have thought as he climbed smiling out of his stone tank, when he caught sight of these naked men, with the broad shoulders and massive biceps of bodybuilders, being teased by their slaves. Perhaps he simply thought that with this morsel of bravura, he had surpassed the artists of antiquity—reflecting wryly that no one would ever know, for no one ever glimpsed inside his bathroom. For Pontremoli this taste for secrecy was not amusing: word was spreading that Kerylos was his masterpiece, the last word in modern-day architecture, the ultimate reconciliation of history and modernity, but, like Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece, it was impossible to see.

  The master bedroom was called Erotes, which I translate not as Cupids, which sounds a little too romantic, but as Cherubim, for the throng of tiny winged figures painted on the walls against the red background bordered by a wide frieze. Theodore liked his children and his nephews and nieces to come and find him in his bedroom. He had Athena painted in there too, not the most loving of goddesses. He liked to read on his balcony, or daydream in front of the mosaic circle enclosing a boat with full sails surrounded by fish. As a gift for Adolphe’s seventeenth birthday—a lot of people, but not me, called him Ado, as if he were an eternal adolescent—his uncle gave him a box camera with a shoulder strap, the latest craze. And, wonder of wonders, he bought one for me too. We were about to leave for Greece, and he thought we might take some interesting snapshots. Maybe he was having fun playing the prince and the pauper with Adolphe and me, paying me compliments in front of everyone to incite little Adolphe, the great hope
of the family, and no fool, to work even harder. Theodore believed in using photography to serve archaeology. Salomon thought that only engravings, even etchings without any chiaroscuro, showing only the outlines, enabled one to see what inscriptions and sculptures really looked like. But since Salomon was not particularly inclined one way or the other, many of his books—particularly his works for the general public, rather than his scholarly articles—included a large number of photographs. When we got to Greece, I found I was not allowed to take photographs. The monks even threatened to confiscate my photographic plates. It is a great regret to me that I have no pictures to prove what we found in Athos.

  The three brothers always got on well, in spite of the inevitable rivalry. It was as though they had divided up all human knowledge: one a scientist, one a historian, one an explorer. Theodore must have been the last man on the planet who knew everything. He did not do it to impress, but to put his knowledge at the service of those who, like me, understood nothing. They were people who had not been to elementary school, but believed that there should be elementary schools everywhere. They believed that after the fall of Napoleon III, France would become the new Athens. They believed that showing men the world would lead to their emancipation. In the Chamber of Deputies, Joseph continued to laud the Revolution. At a secondhand bookstall in Nice, I stumbled across a collection of articles by Salomon in three volumes called Amalthea, after the goat who nurtured the infant Zeus, with an amusing subtitle: A Jumble of Archaeology and History. It includes studies of Dutch goldwork, Renaissance painting, African fauna, medieval trials, the Serbian Neolithic period, Mycaenean Crete, Greek statues, late Latin literature.