I had a sense, watching him, of the restless person he had once been, the highly intelligent person he still was; twenty years before, he would have been wandering around the room as he talked with me, touching the spines of his books, adjusting a painting, picking
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a dead leaf off a plant. Perhaps Aude had been as calm and poised as the two portraits of her I'd seen--an intense woman, full of dignity. I thought of them together, the energetic, alluring young man who might have filled her with a sense of activity, and the confident, rather aloof woman whom he had made a vocation of adoring. "Did Robert say anything else?"
Robinson shrugged. "Nothing that I can remember. But my memory is not what it was. He left soon after that. He thanked me very politely and told me that his visit to me would always be part of his art. I did not expect to see him ever again."
"But there was a second time?"
"That was a surprise and a much shorter visit, within the last two years, I think. He did not write to me before he came, so I did not know he was in Paris. One day the bell rang, and Yvonne went to answer it and brought Oliver in. I was astonished. He said he was in Paris to get background for his work, and he had decided to come see me. I was having more problems by then--I could not walk well and could not remember things sometimes. You know that I reached ninety-eight this year?"
I nodded. "Yes--congratulations."
"It is an accident, Dr. Marlow, not an honor. In any case, Robert came in, and we talked. Once, I had to get up to go to the bathroom, and he helped me walk there because Yvonne was talking on the telephone in the kitchen. He was very strong. But you see I remember all that because about a week after he left, I wanted to look at the letters, and they were gone."
"Where did you keep them?" I tried to ask it casually.
"In that drawer." He pointed with white fingers to a cabinet across the room. "You can look in it if you want. It is still empty except for one thing." He closed a hand over the letters in his lap. "Now I will be able to put them back. I knew it had to be Oliver, because I have few visitors and Yvonne would never touch them-- she knows how I feel about them. You see, I gave away all the paintings, all of Béatrice's paintings, some years ago. All except
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for The Swan Thieves. They are at the Musée de Maintenon. I know I could die at any time. Aude wanted us to keep them for ourselves, but also to protect them, so I made the best decision I could. The Swan Thieves is different. I am still waiting to know for certain what to do with it. For a few minutes during the first visit of Robert Oliver, I thought I might even give it to him someday. Thank God I did not. The letters were all I had from Aude's love for her mother. They are precious to me."
I felt rather than saw the old man's rage, couched in these delicate terms. "And did you try to get them back?"
"Of course. I wrote to Oliver at the address he had left me the first time, but my letter was returned after a month. Someone wrote on it that there was no person of that name at the address."
Kate, perhaps, in a rage herself. "And you never heard from him again?"
"I did. This made it worse, I think. He sent me a note. It is for now the only item in that drawer."
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C HAPTER 98 Marlow
With Henri Robinson's eyes on me, I rose and went slowly to the cabinet he had indicated. It seemed unreal to me that I was in this overstuffed apartment with a man nearly a century old, rummaging again through the past of a patient who had not only assaulted a work of art but also stolen private papers, as it turned out. And yet I couldn't quite bring myself to condemn Robert. Jet lag swept over me; I thought of Mary's arms and wanted suddenly to go home to her. Then I remembered that she wasn't at my home but at hers. What did four nights and one breakfast mean to someone young and free? I opened the drawer with weakening fingers.
Inside was an envelope dated before Robert's attack on Leda: no return address, a Washington postmark, international postage. Inside that, a folded slip of notepaper.
Dear Mr. Robinson,
Please forgive my borrowing your letters. I WILL get them back to you sooner or later, but I am working on some major paintings, and I must read them every day. They are wonderful letters, full of her, and I hope you agree with this. I have no excuse for myself, but maybe in the end they are safer with me. I remembered enough from them to do a series of paintings already that I think are my best so Jar, but I NEED TO BE ABLE to read them every single day. Sometimes I get up and read them at night. My new series, an important one, will show the world that Béatrice de Clerval was one of the great women of her time and one of the great artists of the nineteenth century. She stopped painting too young. I must continue for her. Someone must avenge her, since she might have
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continued to paint for decades if she had not been cruelly prevented. And by what? You and I know that she was a genius. You can understand how I have come to love and admire her. Perhaps you know what it is like not to be able to paint when you want to, even if you are not a painter yourself.
Thank you for your help and for the use of her words, and please forgive my decision. I will make it up to you a thousand times over.
Yours,
Robert Oliver
I cannot describe how this letter made my heart sink. It was the first time I'd heard Robert speak at length in his own voice, at least the voice of that moment. The repetitions in it, the irrationality, the fantasies about the importance of his mission, all indicated mania. The self-centered theft of another person's treasure saddened me as much as its significance seemed to elude him; at the same time I understood this as the loss of contact with reality that had culminated in his assaulting Leda. I started to put the letter back, but Henri Robinson stopped me with a gesture. "Keep it, if you like."
"Sad and shocking," I said, but I put it inside my jacket. "We must try to remember that Robert Oliver is a psychiatric patient, and that the letters have indeed come back to you. But I can't, and shouldn't, defend him."
"I am glad that you have returned my letters," he said simply. "They are very private. For the sake of Aude, I would never publish them. I was afraid Robert Oliver would do that."
"Perhaps in that case you should destroy them," I suggested, although I could hardly bear the thought myself. "They may one day be of too much interest to some art historian."
"I will think about that." He folded his hands together with interlaced fingers.
Don't think too long, I wanted to tell him.
"I'm so sorry." He looked up at me. "I have completely forgotten my manners. Would you like some coffee? Some tea, perhaps?"
"Thank you, no. You're very kind, and I won't keep you much
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longer." I sat opposite him again. "Could I ask you one more favor without trespassing on your hospitality?" I hesitated. "Could I see The Swan Thieves?"
He looked at me gravely, as if considering everything we had already said. Had he given me any inaccurate or invented information? I would never know. He put steepled fingers to his chin. "I did not show it to Robert Oliver, and I am glad now that I did not."
This took me by surprise. "Didn't he ask to see it?"
"I think he did not know I owned it. It is not well known. It is private information, in fact." Then his head snapped up. "How did you know? How did you know I have it?"
I would have to say what I should have said earlier, and I feared it might open old wounds. "Monsieur Robinson," I said, "I wanted to tell you before, but was uncertain--I went to see Pedro Caillet in Mexico. He was very kind to me, as you've been, and that was how I learned about you. He sent you warm greetings."
"Ah, Pedro and his greetings." But he smiled almost impishly. There was friendship still between these men, with their stale, long-forgiven rivalry across an ocean. "So he told you that he sold Aude The Swan Thieves, and you believed him?"
It was my turn to stare. "Yes. That's what he said."
"I think he really believes that, poor old
cat. In fact, he tried to buy it from Aude himself. They both considered it extraordinaire. Aude bought it from the estate of Armand Thomas, a gallery owner in Paris. It had never been exhibited, which is strange, and it has not been exhibited since then either. Aude would never have sold it to Pedro, or anyone else, because her mother told her it was the only important thing she had ever painted. I do not know how Armand Thomas got it." He closed his hands over the letters in his lap. "The Swan Thieves was one of the only paintings that remained from the failure of the Thomas business--Armand's older brother, Gilbert, was a good painter, but not a good businessman. They appear in Béatrice's and Olivier's letters, you know. I have always felt they must have been rather mercenary
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types. Certainly not great friends of painters, like Durand-Ruel. They also made far less money in the end. They did not have his taste."
"Yes, I've seen two of Gilbert's paintings in the National Gallery," I said. "Including, of course, Leda, the one Robert attacked."
Henri Robinson nodded. "You may go in to see The Swan Thieves. I think I will stay here. I see it several times a day." He gestured toward a closed door at the end of the sitting room.
I went to the door. Beyond it was a small bedroom, apparently Robinson's own, judging from the prescription bottles on the bureau and bedside table. The double bed wore a green damask spread. Matching drapes hung at the single window, and again there were shelves of books. The sunlight was dim here, and I turned on the light, feeling Henri's gaze but not wanting to close a door between us. At first I thought there was a window above the head of the bed, looking into a garden, and then I thought there was a painting of a swan there. But I saw at once that it was a mirror, hung to reflect the one painting in the room, on the opposite wall.
I have to stop here, to catch my breath. The Swan Thieves is not easily put into words. I had expected the beauty in it; I had not expected the evil. It was a largish canvas, about four feet by three, rendered in the bright palette of the Impressionists. It showed two men in rough clothes, brown-haired, one with strangely red lips. They were moving stealthily toward the viewer, and toward a swan that rose in alarm out of the reeds. A reversal, I thought, of Leda's fright: now the swan was victim, not victor. Béatrice had painted the bird with hasty, living strokes that made its very wing tips seem real; it was a blur, hastening up out of its nest, a suggestion of lily pads and gray water beneath, a curve of white breast, gray around its numb dark eye, a panic of failed flight, the water churning under a yellow-and-black foot. The thieves were too near already, and the larger man's hands were about to close
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over the swan's straining neck; the smaller man looked ready to heave himself forward and catch the body.
The contrast between the swan's grace and the coarseness of the two men shone clearly through the rapid brushwork. I had studied the face of the larger man before, in the National Gallery; it was the face of an art dealer counting coins, too eager now, intent on his quarry. If this was Gilbert Thomas, of course, the other man must be his brother. I had seldom seen such skill in a painting, nor such desperation. Perhaps she had given herself thirty minutes, perhaps thirty days. She had thought deeply about this image and then produced it with speed and passion. And after that, if Henri was correct, she had set down her brush and never picked it up again.
I must have stood rooted there a long time, staring, because I felt a sudden fatigue wash over me--the hopelessness of imagining other lives. This woman had painted a swan, it had meant something to her, and none of us would ever know what. Nor would it matter, beyond the vehemence of this work. She was gone and we were here, and someday we would all be gone, too, but she had left a painting.
Then I thought of Robert. He had never stood in front of this image and puzzled over its passionate misery. Or had he? How long had Henri Robinson, old and independent, been safely out of the way? I'd seen just one bathroom so far, near the entrance to the apartment, and there was none here, off the bedroom--the apartment was old, eccentric. Would Robert have stopped at opening a closed door? No--he had surely seen The Swan Thieves; why else would he have returned to Washington in a rage that would shortly after overflow in the National Gallery? I thought of his portrait of Béatrice in Greenhill, her smile, her hand clasping a silk robe over her breast. Robert had wanted to see her happy. The Swan Thieves was full of threat and entrapment--and perhaps revenge as well. Probably Robert understood her grief in a way that I, thank God, never could. He had not needed to look at this painting to understand it.
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I remembered Robinson, then, pinioned in his chair, and went back into the salon. I knew I would never see The Swan Thieves again. I had spent five minutes with it, and it had changed the look of the world.
"Ah, you are impressed." He made an openhanded gesture: approval. "Yes."
"Do you think it is her greatest work?"
"You would know better than I."
"I am tired now," Henri said--as Caillet had said to me and Mary, I suddenly remembered. "But I would like you to come back tomorrow, after you have seen my collection at the Maintenon. Then you can tell me if I have kept the best one for myself."
I went quickly to take his hand. "I'm sorry I've stayed so long. And I would be honored to come back. What time tomorrow?"
"I take my nap at three o'clock. Come in the morning."
"I can't thank you enough."
We shook hands and he smiled--those artificially perfect teeth again. "I enjoyed our talk. Perhaps I will decide to forgive Robert Oliver after all."
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C HAPTER 99 Marlow
The Musée de Maintenon was in Passy, near the Bois de Boulogne and perhaps near Béatrice de Clerval's family home, although I had no idea how to find that and had forgotten to ask Henri. Probably it wouldn't be a museum anyway; I doubted her brief career would have warranted a plaque. I took the metro and then walked a few blocks, crossing a park full of children in bright-colored jackets swarming over swings and modernist climbing structures. The museum itself was a tall, cream-colored, nineteenth-century building with heavily decorated plaster ceilings. I wandered around the first floor and through a gallery of works by Manet, Renoir, Degas, few of which I'd seen before, then into a smaller room that housed the Robinson gift, paintings by Béatrice de Clerval.
She had been more prolific than I'd realized, and she'd begun painting young; the earliest piece in the collection dated from her eighteenth year, when she had still been living in her parents' home and studying with Georges Lamelle. It was a lively effort, although without the skill of her later paintings. She had worked hard--as hard in her way as Robert Oliver had in his obsession. I'd imagined her as a wife, the young mistress of a household, and even as a lover; but I had forgotten about the strong workaday painter she must have been in order to complete all these pictures and to grow in technique from year to year. There were portraits of her sister, sometimes with a baby in her arms, and there were glorious flowers, perhaps from Béatrice's own garden. There were small sketches in graphite and a couple of watercolors of gardens
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and the coast. There was a cheerful portrait of Yves Vignot as a newly married man.
I turned away with reluctance. The third floor of the Musée de Maintenon was lined with enormous Monet canvases from Giverny, mainly of water lilies, most of them from very late in his career, executed almost abstractly. I had never understood before how many water lilies he had actually managed to paint--acres of them, spread all over Paris now. I bought a handful of postcards, some of them gifts for Mary's studio walls, and left the museum to stroll in the Bois de Boulogne. There was a boat with a canopy pulling up to the shore of a little lake there, as if expressly to ferry me across; it went to an island with a grand house on it. I paid and stepped in, followed by a French family with two small children, all dressed for a special occasion. The smaller girl stole a look at me and returned my smile before hiding her face in her mother's lap.
&
nbsp; The house turned out to be a restaurant, with shaded outdoor tables, blooming wisteria, frightening prices. I had coffee and a pastry and let the sun on the water lull me. No swans, I realized, although they would have been there in Béatrice's day. I pictured Béatrice and Olivier by the water with their easels, his quiet coaching, her attempts to catch the swan rising out of the reeds. Rising in flight or landing? And had I re-created their conversations too freely, in imagination?
In spite of my rest on the island, I was bone-weary by the time I reached the Gare de Lyon. The bistro near the hotel was open, and the waiter seemed to consider me an old friend already, exploding the myth that all Parisians mistreat foreigners. He smiled as if he understood what my day had been like and how badly I needed a glass of red wine; when I left, he smiled again and held the door for me and returned my "Au revoir, monsieur" as if I had been dining there for years.
I'd meant to find a place to call Mary with my new phone card,
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but on my return to the hotel I fell into bed and slept like the dead, without pretending to read first. Henri and Béatrice crowded my sleep; I woke with a start that had some connection to Aude de Clerval's face. Robert was waiting, and I was supposed to call him, not Mary. I woke and slept, and overslept.
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C HAPTER 100
It is an early morning in June of 1892, and the two people waiting on a provincial train platform wear the conscious, alert look of travelers who have been up since before dawn, neatly dressed and standing aloof from the stirring of the village. The taller one is a woman in her prime, the other a girl of eleven or twelve with a basket on one arm. The woman is dressed in black and wears her black bonnet tied firmly under her chin. The veil makes her see the world as sooty, and she longs to push it up, to replenish for herself the colors of the ocher station and the field across the track: gold-green grasses and the first poppies of the summer, which show cadmium even through her twilit netting. But she keeps her hands firmly on her purse, her veil over her face. Their village is strictly conventional, at least for women, and she is a lady among villagers.
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