Life
Page 8
Emmanuel de Dinteville (1810–1849): a friend of Liszt and Chopin, known particularly as the composer of a waltz, fittingly entitled The Spinning Top.
François de Dinteville (1814–1867): came top in the final examination at the Ecole Polytechnique at the age of seventeen, spurned the brilliant career he could have had in engineering or in industry, and devoted himself to research. In 1840 he believed he had discovered the secret of making diamonds from coal. On the basis of what he dubbed “crystal duplication theory”, he succeeded in making a carbon-saturated solution crystallise by cooling. The Academy of Sciences, to which he submitted his samples, declared his experiment interesting, but inconclusive, since the diamonds obtained were dull, brittle, easily scored by a fingernail, and sometimes even friable. This refutation didn’t deter Dinteville from patenting his method, nor from publishing, between 1840 and his death, thirty-four original articles and technical reports on the subject. Ernest Renan mentions his case in one of his chronicles (Miscellany, 47, passim): “Had Dinteville truly manufactured diamond, he would thereby no doubt have pandered, in some measure, to that crude materialism which must now be reckoned with evermore by any man who makes so bold as to concern himself with the business of humanity; to souls aspiring to the ideal, he would have given nary a molecule of that exquisite spirituality upon which we have lived so long, and do still.”
Laurelle de Dinteville (1842–1861) was one of the unfortunate victims and probably the cause of one of the most horrible news stories of the Second Empire. During a reception given by the Duke of Crécy-Couvé, whom she was to have married a few weeks later, the young lady drank a toast to her future in-laws, emptying her champagne glass in a single draught, and then flung the glass in the air. Fate determined that she should be standing immediately beneath a gigantic chandelier, which came from the famous workshop of Baucis at Murano. The chandelier snapped and caused the deaths of eight people, including Laurelle and the Duke’s father, old Marshal Crécy-Couvé, who’d had three horses shot under him during the Russian Campaign. Foul play could not be suspected. François de Dinteville, Laurelle’s uncle, who was present at the reception, put forward the theory of “pendular amplification produced by the conflicting vibratory frequencies of the crystal glass and the chandelier” but no one took this explanation seriously.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Servants’ Quarters, 5
Smautf
UNDER THE EAVES, between Hutting’s studio and Jane Sutton’s room, the room of Mortimer Smautf, Bartlebooth’s aged butler.
The room is empty. With eyes half-closed, with its front legs tucked in a sphynx-like posture, a white-furred cat drowses on the orange bedspread. Beside the bed, on a small bedside table, lie a cut-glass ashtray of triangular shape, with the word “Guinness” engraved on it, and a detective story entitled The Seven Crimes of Azincourt.
Smautf has been in Bartlebooth’s service for more than fifty years. Although he calls himself a butler, his services have been more those of gentleman’s gentleman or secretary; or, to be even more precise, both at the same time: in fact, he was above all his master’s travelling companion, his factotum, and if not his Sancho Panza at least his Passepartout (for there was indeed a touch of Phineas Fogg in Bartlebooth), in turns porter, clothes valet, barber, driver, guide, treasurer, travel agent, and umbrella holder.
Bartlebooth’s, and therefore Smautf’s, travels lasted twenty years, from 1935 to 1954, and took them in a sometimes fanciful way all around the world. From 1930 Smautf began to prepare for the journey, getting hold of all the papers necessary for obtaining visas, reading up on the formalities currently used in the different countries they would pass through, opening properly funded accounts in various appropriate places, collecting guidebooks, maps, timetables and fares lists, booking hotel rooms and steamer tickets. Bartlebooth’s idea was to go and paint five hundred seascapes in five hundred different ports. The ports were chosen more or less at random by Bartlebooth, who thumbed through atlases, geography books, travellers’ tales, and tourist brochures and ticked off the places that appealed to him. Smautf then studied how to get there and find accommodation.
The first port, in the first fortnight of January 1935, was Gijon, in the Bay of Biscay, not far from where the unfortunate Beaumont was carrying on trying to find the last remains of an improbable Arab capital of Spain. The last was Brouwershaven, in Zeeland, at the estuary of the Scheldt, in the second fortnight of December nineteen fifty-four. In between, there had been the little harbour of Muckanaghederdauhaulia, not far from Costelloe, in Ireland’s Camus Bay, and die even tinier port of U in the Caroline Islands; there were Baltic ports and Latvian ports, Chinese ports and Malagasy ports, Chilean ports and Texan ports; tiny harbours of two fishing boats and three nets, huge ports with several miles of breakwaters, with docks and quaysides, with hundreds of fixed and travelling cranes; ports cloaked in fog, sweltering ports, and ports locked in ice; deserted harbours, silted harbours, yachting harbours, with artificial beaches, transplanted palms and grand hotels and gaming halls fronting the waterside; infernal dockyards building liberty ships by the thousand; ports devastated by bombing; quiet ports where naked girls sprayed each other beside the sampans; ports for canoes and ports for gondolas; naval harbours, creeks, dry-dock basins, roads, cambers, channels, moles; piles of barrels, rope, and sponges; heaps of redwood trees, mountains of fertiliser, phosphates, and minerals; cages crawling with lobsters and crabs; stalls of gurnard, brill, lasher, bream, whiting, mackerel, skate, tuna fish, cuttlefish, and lampreys; ports stinking of soap or chlorine; ports tossed by storms and deserted ports crushed by heat; battleships repaired in the dark by thousands of blow lamps; festive liners surrounded by fire-tenders pumping jets of water in the air amidst a hubbub of hooting sirens and ringing bells.
Bartlebooth allowed two weeks for each port, inclusive of travelling time, which usually gave him five or six days on site. The first two days he spent walking on the sea front, looking at boats, chatting with the fishermen if they spoke one of Bartlebooth’s five languages – English, French, Spanish, Arabic, and Portuguese – and sometimes going to sea with them. On the third day he would choose his place, and sketch a few drafts which he tore up straight away. On the penultimate day he would paint his watercolour, usually towards the end of the morning, unless he sought or expected some special effect – sunrise, sunset, the build-up to a storm, drizzle, high or low tide, a flight of birds, fishing boats leaving, a ship arriving, women washing clothes, etc. He painted extremely fast, and never corrected himself. Scarcely was the watercolour dry than he tore the sheet of Whatman paper from the pad and gave it to Smautf. (Smautf was free to wander as he pleased for the rest of the time, to visit the souks, temples, brothels, and dives, but he had to be there when Bartlebooth was painting and to stand behind him holding steady the large parasol which protected the painter and his fragile easel from rain, sun, and wind.) Smautf wrapped the seascape in tissue paper, slipped it into a stiffened envelope, and packed the parcel in kraft paper with string and sealing wax. That same evening, or at the latest next day, if there were no post office nearby, the parcel was dispatched to:
The site was identified with great care and entered by Smautf in an ad hoc register. The next day Bartlebooth would call on the British Consul if there was one thereabouts, or on some other local notable. The day after, they departed. The length of the leg of voyage sometimes modified this timetable slightly, but in general it was scrupulously adhered to.
They didn’t proceed necessarily to the nearest port on their itinerary. Depending on the most convenient means of travel, they would perchance come back on their tracks or make fairly large detours. For example, they went by rail from Bombay to Masulipatnam, then crossed the Bay of Bengal to the Andaman Islands, went back to Madras, whence they reached Ceylon, and set off again towards Malacca, Borneo, and the Celebes. Instead of going thence directly to Puerto Princesa on Palawan Island, they went first to Mindanao, then Luzon, and up to Taiwan be
fore coming back down to Palawan.
Nonetheless it is fair to say that in practice they explored the continents one after another. After visiting large parts of Europe from 1935 to 1937, they moved on to Africa and toured it clockwise from 1938 to 1942; from there they reached South America (1943–1944), Central America (1945), North America (1946-1948) and finally Asia (1949-1951). In 1952 they covered Oceania, in 1953 the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. In the last year they crossed Turkey and the Black Sea, crossed into the USSR, and went up as far as Dudinka, beyond the Arctic Circle, at the mouth of the Yenisei, crossed the Kara and the Barents Seas on a whaler and, from North Cape, came down the Scandinavian fjords before ending their long circular tour at Brouwershaven.
Historical and political circumstances – the Second World War and all the regional conflicts before and after 1939 and 1945: Abyssinia, Spain, India, Korea, Palestine, Madagascar, Guatemala, North Africa, Cyprus, Indonesia, Indochina, etc. – had virtually no influence on their travels, except that they had to wait a few days in Hong Kong for a visa for Canton, and a bomb exploded in their hotel when they were at Port Said. It had a small charge and their trunks hardly suffered at all.
Bartlebooth returned from his travels almost empty-handed: he had only gone in order to paint his five hundred watercolours, and had dispatched them to Winckler as each one was done. Smautf, for his part, had built up three collections – of postage stamps, for Madame Claveau’s son, of hotel stickers, for Winckler, and of postcards, for Valène – and brought back three objects which are now in his room.
The first is a magnificent sea chest of soft coral (gummiferous pterocarpous, he likes to specify) with brass fittings. He found it at a ship chandler’s at St John’s, Newfoundland, and entrusted it to a trawler which brought it back to France.
The second is a carved curio, a basalt statue of the tricephalous Mother-Goddess, about fifteen inches high. Smautf obtained it in the Seychelles in exchange for another sculpture, similarly tricephalous, but of an entirely different design: it was a crucifix on which three wooden figurines had been fastened by means of a single thick bolt: a black child, a tall old man, and a life-size dove, once white. That object he’d found in the souk at Agadir, and the man who sold it to him explained that they were the movable figures of the Trinity, and that each took yearly turns “on top” of the others. The Son was then foremost, the Holy Ghost (almost out of sight) against the cross. It was a cumbersome object, but apt to fascinate Smautf’s particular cast of mind for a long while. Thus he bought it without haggling and lugged it around with him from 1939 to 1953. The day after he got to the Seychelles, he went into a bar: the first thing he saw was the statue of the Mother-Goddess, standing on the counter between a beat-up cocktail shaker and a glass full of little flags and champagne mixers shaped like miniature shepherds’ staves. His stupefaction was such that he returned forthwith to his hotel, came back with the crucifix, and engaged the Malay barman in a long conversation in pidgin concerning the statistical near-impossibility of coming across two statues with three heads twice in fourteen years, at the end of which conversation the barman and Smautf swore undying friendship cemented by the exchange of their works of art.
The third object is a large engraving, a kind of primitive woodcut. Smautf found it at Bergen in the last year of their peregrinations. It depicts a child receiving a book as a prize from an old dominie. The child is seven or eight years old, wearing a sky-blue jacket, short trousers, and polished slip-on shoes; a laurel wreath crowns his head; he is climbing the three steps of a parquet-floored platform adorned with succulents. The old man wears an academic gown. He has a long grey beard and steel-framed spectacles. In his right hand he holds a ruler of boxwood and in his left a large folio volume in a red binding on which can be read Erindringer frå en Reise i Skotland (it was the account, Smautf learnt, of the Danish pastor Plenge’s journey to Scotland in the summer of 1859). Near the schoolmaster there is a table covered in a green cloth with other volumes placed on it, as well as a globe and an open, oblong musical score. A narrow engraved brass plate attached to the print’s wooden frame gives its title, apparently unrelated to the represented scene: Laborynthus.
Smautf would like to have been this prize-winning good schoolboy. His regret at having had no schooling has turned over the years into an unhealthy passion for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Right at the start of their travels, he had seen a prodigious mental arithmetician performing at a music hall in London, and over the twenty years of his world tour, by dint of reading and rereading a well-thumbed treatise on mathematical and arithmetical diversions which he’d picked up at a secondhand bookshop at Inverness, he took up arithmetic; on his return he was capable of extracting square and cube roots of nine-digit numbers with relative speed. When that began to get a bit too easy for him, he was seized by a fever for factorials: 1 ! = 1; 2 ! = 2; 3 ! = 6; 4 ! = 24; 5 ! = 120; 6 ! = 720; 7 ! = 5,040; 8 ! = 40,320; 9 ! = 362,880; 10 ! = 3,628,800; 11 ! = 39,916,800; 12 ! = 479,001,600; […]; 22 ! = 1,124,000,727,777,607,680,000, that is to say more than a billion times seven hundred and seventy-seven billions.
So far Smautf has got up to 76! but he can no longer find paper of sufficient width, and even if he could no table would be big enough to lay it out on. He has less and less confidence in himself, which means that he is for ever doing his sums over again. A few years ago Morellet tried to discourage him by telling him that the number written 9(99), that is, nine to the power of nine to the ninth, which is the largest number you can write using only three figures, would have, if written out in full, three hundred and sixty-nine million digits, which at the rate of one second per digit would keep you busy for eleven years just in writing it, and at the rate of four digits per inch would be one thousand one hundred and fifty-four and one eighth miles long! But that hasn’t deterred Smautf from filling backs of envelopes, notebook margins, and butcher’s wrappers with columns and columns of numbers.
Smautf is now nearly eighty. Bartlebooth offered him retirement long ago, but Smautf has always refused. To tell the truth, he doesn’t have much to do anymore. In the morning he prepares Bartlebooth’s clothes and helps him dress. Until five years ago, he shaved him – with a cut-throat that had belonged to Bartlebooth’s great-great-grandfather – but his sight has dimmed a lot and his hand shakes a little, so he was replaced by a lad sent up every morning by Monsieur Pois, the hairdresser on Rue de Prony.
Bartlebooth no longer ever goes out, he scarcely leaves his study all day. Smautf stays in the next room with the other servants, who don’t have much more work than he does and spend their time playing cards and talking of times past.
Smautf stays for long periods each day in his bedroom. He tries to make some little progress with his arithmetic; for relaxation he does crosswords, reads detective stories which Madame Orlowska lends him, and spends hours stroking the white cat, which purrs whilst massaging the old man’s knee with its claws.
The white cat doesn’t belong to Smautf but to the whole floor. At times it goes to live in Jane Sutton’s room or at Madame Orlowska’s, or goes down to Isabelle Gratiolet or Mademoiselle Crespi. Three or four years ago it came in from the roof. It had a large wound on its neck. People noticed that its eyes were different colours, one was as blue as Chinese porcelain, the other was gold. A little later, people realised that it was completely deaf.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Servants’ Quarters, 6
Mademoiselle Crespi
OLD MADEMOISELLE CRESPI is in her room on the seventh floor, between Gratiolet’s flat and Hutting’s maid’s room.
She is lying in bed, beneath a grey woollen blanket. She has a dream: an undertaker, eyes gleaming with hatred, stands opposite her in the doorway; in his half-raised right hand he proffers a pointed, black-edged card. His left hand supports a round cushion on which two medals lie, one of which is the Stalingrad Hero’s Cross.
Below him, beyond the doorway, lies an Alpine scene: a lake, a frozen and snow-co
vered round, bordered with trees; the mountains seem to slope directly down to its further shore, while beyond there again show unfamiliar peaks, all in full snow, overtopping each other against the blue sky. In the foreground, three young people are climbing a path which leads to a cemetery, in the middle of which a column surmounted by an onyx basin rises from a clump of oleander and aucuba trees.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
On the Stairs, 2
ON THE STAIRS the furtive shadows pass of all those who were there one day.
He remembered Marguerite, and Paul Hébert and Laetizia, and Emilio, and the saddler, and Marcel Appenzzell (with two z’s, unlike the canton or the cheese); he remembered Grégoire Simpson, and the mysterious American girl, and the not at all nice Madame Araña; he remembered the man in yellow shoes with a pink in his buttonhole and his malachite-handled stick who came every day for ten years to see Dr Dinteville; he remembered Monsieur Jérôme, the history teacher whose Dictionary of the Spanish Church in the Seventeenth Century had been turned down by 46 publishers; he remembered the young student who lived for a few months in the room now occupied by Jane Sutton and who had been kicked out of a vegetarian restaurant where he worked in the evenings after being caught pouring a big bottle of beef extract into the pot of simmering vegetable soup; he remembered Troyan, the secondhand book dealer whose shop was in Rue Lepic and who found one day in a pile of detective novels three letters from Victor Hugo to Henri Samuel, his Belgian publisher, about the publication of Les Châtiments; he remembered Berloux, the air-raid warden, a fumbling cretin in a grey smock and a beret, who lived two houses up the road and who, one morning in 1941, in virtue of God knows what ARP regulation, had had put in the hallway and in the back yard, where the rubbish bins were kept, barrels of sand which never had any use at all; he remembered the time when Judge Danglars gave grand receptions for his Appeal Court colleagues: on these occasions, two Republican Guards in full regalia would stand sentry at the door of the building, the porch would be decorated with big pots of aspidistra and philodendron, and a cloakroom was set up to the left of the lift: it was a long tube mounted on casters and fitted with coat hangers which the concierge draped as required with minks, sables, broadtails, astrakhans, and big cloaks with otter-skin collars. On those days Madame Claveau wore her black, lace-collared dress and sat on a Regency chair (hired from the same caterers as the coat hangers and the indoor plants) beside a marble-topped sideboard on which she put her box of tokens, a square metal box decorated with little cupids armed with bows and arrows, a yellow ashtray praising the virtues of Cusenier Bleach (white or green), and a saucer equipped in advance with five-franc coins.