by Adrien Goetz
I suspect that Theodore, in his heyday, had rather more lofty ambitions: he wanted to understand mankind, all the things that had remained unchanged in the human brain since ancient times, that were found from Brazil to India, that might have been found in the skulls of cave painters. He was a little surprised when he read one of Sigmund Freud’s books in which Freud quotes Salomon on the history of religion. Theodore looked at me and said, “Do not ever read that man’s books. I have discussed it with my dear, respected brother, and he is mortified to find himself quoted in his book. These so-called Freudian doctors are like Cubist painters, or free-verse poets: they will soon be forgotten. Occasionally it can be interesting, but fundamentally it is improper. We must learn to order things according to our understanding. Do you really believe that the ego is not master of its own dwelling place? The doctors of this new school, led by this charlatan who believes himself the Copernicus of the mind, are going to do more harm than the Catholic confessors or the restorers of ancient paintings! Would you mind handing me my dressing gown? It will take a century or even two to repair the damage, while they make fortunes out of their new cult. When I consider that all this mumbo jumbo came about from our books, our studies, which required such effort from us . . . You see, paramount in the human brain is grammar, then architecture . . . ”
Epilogue
DAEDALUS, ICARUS, AND ARIADNE
The dark wood staircase that leads up from the top floor bedrooms to the roof resembles nothing so much as a fitting from a yacht. Daedalus and Icarus, with their balconies, offer the best views. I always used to go upstairs feeling as if I were taking my place on the topmast of a ship. From the upper terrace, the human figures below blend with the landscape. Daedalus, the architect of Minos’s Labyrinth, which we had visited in Crete, was Pontremoli. Did that mean that Icarus, with his loosely attached wings, was Theodore? Icarus’s dream was to fly without burning his wings. Theodore got burned rather frequently. These two rooms, where Fanny used to put up her friends, were empty when there were no visitors. I liked to lean out and look at the blue rocks, like a cartographer locating reefs—I would look for them later when I went swimming.
Today I went up to the terrace to see the sun, low in the sky. I couldn’t take the risk of staying until nightfall, for fear that the caretaker might find me there while doing his evening rounds of the house, or that he might decide on an impulse to go up to the terrace to watch the fireworks over in Monaco. It took me ten years to be able to watch fireworks again after the Great War. The noise was intolerable. It no longer bothers me now. I am cured.
I came back down and found my way out through the alleyway.
I had hoped to leave with Alexander’s crown. It was almost dusk. I hadn’t found the finely wrought olive leaves, so light and delicate, the masterpiece of the Macedonian goldsmiths, which I had once held in my hands and not dared to place on my head. I might go on another voyage to the monastery of Dionysiou. Perhaps I should stay there and end my days in that landscape of ordinary peace, a holy man walking in sandals on his way to night Mass, over the pebbled terrace that perhaps conceals the mortal remains of the great hero. In Dionysiou, when a man dies he is buried without a coffin, facing the sea. The gardener monk waters him every day for two years. Then the bones are exhumed, scrubbed cleaned, and piled up in the chapel. The name of the deceased brother is marked in red upon his skull. I am not sure that this is what I want, or if I would really have the courage to leave everything behind. The crown must still be somewhere. One thing is certain: Theodore did not give it to a museum, for fear that some so-called expert would insist that it dated from the Renaissance, or prove without doubt that it had been fabricated in a Byzantine monastery, and then it would be locked up with the tiara in the museum reserves, or in a cupboard in Saint-Germain-en-Laye alongside Salomon’s research on the clay tablets from Glozel. I suppose that the Germans took the crown, but how did they know it was here? I never told anyone about it—except once, one person, in the room named for the Naiads. Ariadne was incapable of betrayal, of betraying me. Or was I too naive? I have no idea what she did during the last war, if she was even still alive. This evening I left, without the crown, without being sure I will return to Kerylos before I die, without having filmed everything I wanted to or have room for on the film reel. I went back to the café, exhausted, the crumpled copy of Paris Match in my camera bag, and this strange postcard of the Labyrinth. I note—because I must recount every detail of how this day ended—the attention with which I flicked through the magazine in the heat, to keep myself from thinking, as if in a trance. I looked at every photograph of the future princess in her enormous hat arriving in Monaco on the SS Constitution. A few pages on I read an article about a world I knew barely anything about, a club called the Minotaur, half-cabaret half-jazz cellar, a photo of a woman dancing barefoot who welcomed “young men with long hair, spirited young women, and cinema producers in white dinner jackets. Some evenings you might even see Jean Cocteau, who is currently decorating a sailors’ chapel in Villefranche-sur-Mer.” I haven’t yet seen the Villefranche chapel, though I would like to go and see him at work. Apparently he has assistants and doesn’t spend every day up on the scaffolding. Nothing scandalous, but the fine upstanding people who spread this news concluded that Cocteau was an imposter, no more than a beachgoing Michelangelo.
I spent an hour or so flicking through the whole magazine, skimming articles about this new Côte d’Azur that was like a foreign land to me. I am only seventy, younger than Clemenceau was in 1914, and who knows, maybe the greatest role of my life lies ahead of me. This is what I tell myself, to furnish the echoing rooms of my soul. I read a gossipy report from Grace Kelly’s home in Philadelphia by a “special correspondent” to the principality. The old café I used to know is now a restaurant. I ordered sea bream, which I enjoyed.
According to one article, which was accompanied by photos of the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc and La Croisette, the Côte d’Azur is the stuff of dreams because it is “so international.” The Reinachs were patriots; they loved Gambetta and the Republic and Clemenceau as much as they loved Monet; they would have been surprised to hear the priest, the pastry cook, the blacksmith, and the waiters from the various hotels, the dairywoman who knew everything there was to know about anything, and nothing at all—they too were France of course—discussing in detail all their comings and goings, pointing at them and calling them “foreigners.” The Reinachs were wealthy and generous, which led to the other despicable thing that was said about them: they left excellent tips. The people who pocketed them felt humiliated. I am not sure that the producers in their white dinner jackets give anything to the doorman when they leave the Minotaur.
The little port of Beaulieu had never understood this family. They would have preferred them to talk about the latest ballets in Monaco, about the dancers they kept, they would have liked to mock them for buying Renoir and Degas paintings, but from what planet could these bespectacled men have fallen, with their pleasant, reserved wives, who spent the afternoon walking along the jetty and debating aloud how the walls of the city of Metaponto had been built, if they had arrow slits, and how the defensive system was designed. The cheese monger overheard a conversation on the different forms that the cult of a certain Isis in Alexandria took, and he initially thought this Isis must be an opera singer, until he heard the unfamiliar words “inscriptions,” “epigraphy,” “minting,” from which he concluded that they must be a couple of engineers discussing the telegraph, though he instinctively realized that he had failed to grasp the logic behind it all. Choreography yes, epigraphy, no. The young lady at the post office, when she was quizzed about whom these people corresponded with, defended them; it was quite clear that they were doctors, important medical doctors, who had made major discoveries, and she once asked Monsieur Theodore if he would mind vaccinating her little boy. He had laughed and sent one of his colleagues from Nice, who did the vaccination for free: these Reinachs were benefactors of all manki
nd.
No one had understood a thing. Kerylos itself was a misunderstanding. The Reinachs believed they were becoming part of the very lifeblood of France, its culture. Among the better-educated people of Beaulieu—the doctor, the horrible notary, and a retired clerk of the court—they were called snobs, spoken about with contempt; the local lords and ladies who held court between Antibes and Menton did not even bother to invite them, since as it happened they held the same opinion as the dairywoman. Once they learned that the Reinachs came from Saint-Germainen-Laye, they concluded that they had been rattled for no good reason—it was not as if they came from the real Saint-Germain, in the heart of Paris!
The Reinachs could have sufficed with the Minotaur club and a jazz soundtrack. Had Fanny and Theodore been born thirty years later, they would have been photographed with Giulietta Masina and Marcel Pagnol sitting in front of a platter of fried calamari, then left in peace. Theodore had loved the Saitapharnes tiara with a solid gold passion, he had loved his villa, and he had loved his books. His wife should have acted jealous and stopped him before it was too late. At the end of the ravine down which he was rushing headlong was the fall—and as in every Greek poem, he foresaw nothing. Daedalus loses, Icarus falls.
This evening, because I didn’t know what else to do, and because I had read this article on the fashionable places on the “new Riviera,” I decided I wanted to get drunk. I got in the car and drove here, to the Minotaur club, parking my Peugeot by the sign that had caught my attention, just behind a Rolls-Royce. A young American, slightly tipsy, came out of the club and began bending my ear. He was perfectly pleasant, like a golfer on vacation, the scion of a well-to-do East Coast family in a cotton polo shirt and deck shoes. He spoke French.
“Will you look at that masterpiece, the Rolls-Royce radiator, the very quintessence of British style? It took centuries to achieve such balance. Face on, with those columns, it looks just like a Greek temple, from the side, with the radiator plug, the energy of the woman with her outspread wings, it’s like an antique statue, Dionysius poised above Apollo, utter perfection, I could look at her for hours.”
“Yes,” I said, “You’re quite right. The harmonious rigor of Athens combined with the controlled energy of the Pergamon sculptors gives you this cross between Westminster and Miss Liberty.” He opened his eyes wide, then enfolded me in an embrace: “Let me buy you a drink.” And together we went into the club.
At the entrance to the long room, a pair of revolving postcard stands, like geometric steles, were filled with postcards of a single image, the same one as on the sign outside: the Labyrinth of Kerylos. The same card I had bought at the tobacconist in Beaulieu, the same one I had been mysteriously sent. A hundred of them for customers to help themselves to. “Who hasn’t got their Minotaur?” said my American, laughing a little too loudly. This talkative dandy was the same age as my eldest grandson, and I would have liked them to meet. The American was finishing his PhD, on Pindar’s poems, at Yale, in Connecticut. I have never been there. I told him I thought that of all the Greek poets, Pindar was the most difficult to understand. He said that Pindar’s odes are first and foremost melody; he always reads them out loud. Archaic Greek, he told me, was all the rage in the United States. We ordered two gin and tonics and he asked me if I preferred the Olympic or the Pythic Odes, we drank and I answered that I couldn’t remember very well, and then I ordered two more gins.
The sound of the music swelled like a wave, drowning out our conversation, then ebbed away. The bar was in a former boathouse, and the designer had seen fit to leave the ropes and sails as decorations. I was not the oldest person there. Wrinkled yachtsmen sat drinking champagne. All the tables were occupied. Young people were sitting around the tiny dance floor, others on the stairs that led to a little stage where a pianist and saxophonist, whom I could hardly make out at first in the fog of cigarette smoke, were playing some improvised jazz. Next to them, right at the back—I took a little while to notice, because the loquacious American was now lecturing me about ceremonies of initiation into the mysteries of Eleusis and the ruins of Phidias’s workshop that had been discovered near the site of Olympus—I saw the elegant figure of the proprietress whom the article had mentioned. The musicians stopped playing, and a few people at the tables applauded. She leaned down to the pianist, and then he began playing a melody that I didn’t immediately recognize. After a few minutes, I picked out a little phrase that anchored itself in my head, then was swallowed up in a variation, then repeated. I parted my lips to sing. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, it was like a dream: the Delphic hymn to Apollo.
“Call me Erwin, by the way. Gee, will you look at that crazy little temple, looks like a kennel. It’s even got an inscription: ‘Basileus’! It’s for us! Do you think it means the kennel belongs to the king? I’d like one like that, if you please!”
I had not set eyes on this object for over thirty years. I had not even noticed its absence at Kerylos. Nor had I ever interpreted “belongs to the king” so simply. What this box contains belongs to the king. It was as simple as that. I stood up and walked over toward her. She didn’t dye her white hair; according to the journalist, that was part of her legend. In the picture in the magazine, it was hard to make out her features. Now, among the sculpted neon lights, standing in front of a wall of mirrors, I saw her beautiful braids and her blue eyes. I could hardly bring myself to believe that it was she who had sent me the postcard.
She took my hand and rolled up my sleeve to reveal the little goggle-eyed octopus done for me long ago by an old tattoo artist in the port of Thessaloniki. From the top of the staircase, Ariadne had come down to greet me, smiling, her arms wide, dressed in a blue linen tunic that fell to her feet, a gold crown upon her head, my Victory.
A FEW HISTORICAL CLARIFICATIONS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the president of the Fondation Théodore Reinach, Michel Zink, professor at the Collège de France, permanent secretary of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, and novelist, who first invited me inside Villa Kérylos, which is owned today by the Institut de France. During several wonderful conferences in which I was invited to take part, Odile and Michel Zink showed me that the freedom of spirit and the wonderful imagination of the Reinach family was still alive on the Pointe des Fourmis. Every year, the Académie, of which Salomon was a member and Théodore was what is called an independent member, organizes scholarly celebrations in their memory.
When I first began writing this novel—several chapters of which were written at the villa itself, looking out to sea—I was indebted to the always affable and marvelously well-read Bruno Henri-Rousseau, for his unwavering courtesy and efficiency. He showcases the site to its best advantage and with great respect for its spirit. I had the great fortune to live at Kérylos for several days. Today, the Center for National Monuments, with the support of its president Philippe Bélaval, maintains and is restoring the villa, which is open to the public all year round. Bernard Le Magoarou, the administrator, takes magnificent care of Kérylos.
I would like to thank the participants of the annual conference at Kérylos, who have all offered me ideas: Antoine Compagnon, Philippe Contamine, Xavier Darcos, Jacques Jouanna (to whom I owe the story of the supposed statue of “Sophocles,” with which I took a few liberties, by siting it during the lifetime of Madame Reinach), Béatrice Robert-Boissier, Arlette and Jean-Yves Tadié, Monique Trédé, Benoît Duteurtre, and Henri Lavagne, who filled me in on many details regarding the villa’s decoration and furniture, and will forgive, I hope, my occasional novelistic license.
For the reader who wishes to find out more about Villa Kérylos, several books are available:
Joseph Chamonard and Emmanuel Pontremoli, Kérylos, la villa grecque, Editions des bibliothèques nationales de France, 1934. Republished (with a preface by Jacqueline de Romilly), Marseille, Éditions Jeanne Laffitte, 1996.
André Laronde and Jean Leclant (editors), Un siècle d’architecture et d’humanism
e sur les bords de la Mediterranée. La villa Kérylos, joyau d’inspiration grecque et lieu de mémoire de la culture antique, Actes du XIXe colloque de la Villa Kérylos, 10–11 octobre 2008, Cahiers de la villa Kérylos, no 20, Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, De Boccard, 2009.
Georges Vigne, La Villa Kérylos, Éditions du patrimoine, collection “Itinéraires,” 2016.
Regis Vian des Rives (dir.), La Villa Kérylos, preface by Karl Lagerfeld, photographs by Martin D. Scott, Éditions de l’Amateur, 2001.
Jerôme Coignard, La Villa Kérylos, Connaissance des arts, hors-série, 2012.
Françoise Reynier, “Archéologie, architecture et ébénisterie: les meubles de la villa Kérylos à Beaulieu-sur-Mer,” In Situ [online], no 6, 2005.
Anne Sarosy wrote a remarkable dissertation in 2015 as a student at the Sorbonne on the sources of Villa Kérylos, which I hope will soon find a publisher.
Théodore Reinach is still awaiting his biographer. The most recent study of this complex figure, by Michel Steve, Théodore Reinach, Nice, Serre éditeur, 2014, combines excellent architectural analyses with dialogues imagining conversations between Reinach and Pontremoli.
