by Michel Déon
‘What is your passion, dear child?’
Teddy did not have passions yet, or if he did, they were fads soon to be replaced by others. Blanche came to his rescue.
‘He loves books.’
It was true, although it would never have occurred to him. Two days later a large parcel arrived that was addressed to him: three books by Jules Verne, in the Hetzel edition. It was a beginning.
It took him months to discover the principality. An enclave nestled beneath a mountain and lapped by the sea, it was a genuine reservation, like the territories provided for Native Americans in the USA. A community lived there, left home and came back at regular times, in accordance with a ritual that was always respected. At midday a cannon was fired, announcing the changing of the guard at the gates to the prince’s palace. As handsome as tin soldiers, helmets bedecked in the white and red plumes of the national colours, the riflemen paraded across the square to entertain the tourists. Half an hour later, from the Hôtel de Paris, Berry Wall would emerge in a tweed suit in winter, raw silk in summer, white spats and gloves, a beige bowler or a panama hat, a carnation in his buttonhole, walking stick in hand and sporting the impressive moustache of an English officer. Trotting along behind him came a chow that lifted its leg on the flower beds of a circular garden that people called ‘le Fromage’. At one o’clock he sat down on the terrace at the Café de Lutèce, where he was invariably served the same dish, the same wine, the same brandy with his coffee. This avoided anyone saying anything unnecessary. At five o’clock he returned to have tea and toast at the same table, this time dressed in grey. In the evening he sat alone, in a dinner jacket, in the dining room of the Hôtel de Paris. When people greeted him, he would respond by raising his hat or nodding his head.
If the spectator happened to miss Berry Wall, there was another ritual. At 1 p.m. precisely a chauffeur-driven car would pull up outside the Hôtel de Paris. In the open cab were a black-gloved chauffeur and a liveried footman. In the passenger compartment, behind smoked-glass windows, sat an old man with a short white beard trimmed to a point. The hotel porters rushed forward with a wheelchair into which the footman would, with the sort of care reserved for a poorly dowager, help the old man, a frail creature in a coat with a sealskin collar, a muffler and a grey felt hat. In the lobby of the hotel people stepped respectfully aside, the men raising their hats, the women dipping in a sort of bow. A silence would fall as everyone followed him with their eyes as far as the lift, where the footman would turn the wheelchair fully around before the lift doors shut. Facing the onlookers, the old man would raise his felt hat with a trembling hand to greet them, or bless them, and the lift would bear the sickly invalid up, perhaps to heaven, if not to an apartment on the fourth floor.
Papa takes his son’s hand and walks him towards the exit.
‘Who’s that man?’ Teddy asks in a loud voice.
‘Be quiet!’
This is a command he often hears. Once they are outside, Papa stops.
‘Listen to me, Teddy, and never forget. That man, whom people bow down in front of, knighted by the King of England and Emperor of India, that man is a shark and a vulture. There isn’t one dead man, one maimed war veteran like our dear friend Pat, whose fate has not paid him his commission. He sells guns and military equipment, and his name is Sir Basil Zaharoff. You’re still a bit young to understand these things, but just remember: wherever you find misery and dead people, you’ll find vultures enriching themselves.’
It was a lengthy speech for an eight-year-old boy to take in. It would not be forgotten.
On fine afternoons an old woman would come and sit on a bench in the part of the terraces below the casino that overlooked the clay-pigeon shoot and the sea. In an extravagant hat decorated with artificial flowers, her hands in fingerless gloves of embroidered gauze, she wore a black skirt that finished at her knees, revealing a pair of still shapely legs. If someone asked to photograph her, she would say, ‘You may. I was Edward’s mistress. You can’t imagine how sweet he was to me.’
If anyone wanted to know more she would just nod, making the flowers stitched to the brim of her hat wobble. The toothless mouth, whose lipstick had bled a little at the corners, moved silently in contemplation of an invisible sceptre. She would raise her short veil, revealing a terribly wizened face that might have possessed a certain beauty in the days when Edward VII had been Prince of Wales. On days when she was in a good mood, she would sometimes slide the hem of her skirt halfway up her thighs and kick her legs, saying, ‘Who wouldn’t go mad for a pair of pins like these?’
The Duke of Westminster, the richest man in England, walked past, a cigar clamped between his teeth, in an out-at-elbow suit with corkscrewing trousers and his jacket pockets stuffed with tokens he had forgotten to cash in on his way out of the gaming room. A woman walked a step ahead of him, not turning round. She had an imperious expression and a very mobile face and wore a boater with a black ribbon. She was dripping with jewellery.
Blanche said to her son, ‘Look. That’s Mademoiselle Chanel. Thanks to her we can cut our hair short without looking like servants.’
And how had the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich escaped the massacre of the imperial family? He was there too, as proud as a grenadier of his regiment, drinking champagne for breakfast, holding open house for exiled Russians, and signing bills that the hotelier would settle from his own pocket.
Of the White Russians who lived in the principality and were selling off the last jewels they had saved from the debacle, there was one who had found a position that enabled him to remain the great man he had been before and during the First World War. This was General Peter Polovtsov, who ran the public relations for the casino and the private beaches. When he became friends with Papa and Blanche he showered them with signed photos that ended up pasted to the walls of Teddy’s bedroom. Teddy couldn’t stop wondering about the pictures: was that handsome moustachioed giant, the one in the uniform of a Tartar general with a yataghan hanging from his belt, the same man as the suave host of the Sporting and the Beach? The same one who was served a tray of cakes for an hors d’oeuvre, a second tray instead of the roast main course, and yet more cakes for dessert, and throughout was poured only vodka to drink? How – the question had to be asked – had he, on a diet like that, been able to scale the Karakoram Pass at an altitude of six thousand metres on a yak’s back? And was he also the person who had been photographed in full dress uniform on a barracks square, inspecting rows of women at attention in their boots, tunics and helmets, their thrust-out chests bedecked with medals? Teddy had heard the general tell the story of how in 1917 in St Petersburg he had formed and commanded a regiment of women to fight the Germans. Their bravery had humiliated their male comrades and stopped entire battalions deserting.
His wife, Madame Polovtsov, was rarely seen during the day. She kept herself to herself in order to paint. Working in pastels, as a portraitist, her pictures, which she rarely exhibited, were disturbingly exact and disquietingly penetrating. Her best-known portrait was of Barbara Hutton, the world’s richest woman.
‘A sylph,’ Papa said admiringly. ‘When she’s at home there has to be an attendant nearby at all times, making sure the doors and windows are kept shut to stop her flying away at the slightest gust of air.’
The news that this glacial, hieratic beauty, her face always shaded by a broad-brimmed hat and her body entirely swathed in silk, had commissioned a portrait from Madame Polovtsov had started a stampede of the Côte’s most snobbish and wealthy inhabitants to her door. But Madame Polovtsov had turned them all down in her soft Russian voice that hardly rolled its r’s.
‘I’m just an amateur. I enjoy it … I enjoy it all too much.’
So when she suggested doing a portrait of Teddy, Papa and Blanche could hardly believe it. For two weeks of summer afternoons, then, Teddy is condemned to wear the same orange shirt and beige shorts and sit perfectly still on an uncomfortable chair. The only parts of him that are free to move ar
e his eyes, which wander from the open window (with its restricted view of the Rock and the harbour entrance) to Madame Polovtsov in her white blouse, grey-blond hair held in place by a bandeau, sitting half turned away behind her easel. Almost from the first day, this person’s noble features radiate such serenity that Teddy has barely taken his place on his chair, feeling faintly sullen at the idea of spending two hours immobilised and daydreaming, forbidden to give in to the all-round drowsiness of a summer afternoon, before he experiences a kind of pleasant giddiness at being alone with her. If she bends over her easel to fiddle with a detail, he can no longer see her and can relax and wriggle his hands, but the moment she reappears their eyes meet, and she smiles with a heartbreaking sweetness that wipes away every trace of the torments of her past life. Teddy knows from his parents what she had to endure before she succeeded in escaping from Russia with the general. She never speaks about it. Her pale eyes, which look as if her ordeals and sorrows have faded them, subdue the ten-year-old boy. In her serene face they are all he sees. Her lips are only just pink, her nose straight, her cheekbones slightly prominent. He feels he ‘owns’ Madame Polovtsov’s face as much as she ‘owns’ his. The painter and her model are one creature from now on. After he has sat for an hour, there is a break. She stands up, goes and washes her hands, and comes back with a bowl filled with muscat grapes, and a glass of fruit juice. They nibble their snack together.
She asks, ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’
Teddy is dumbstruck. Blanche would never ask him such a question. The very word ‘girlfriend’ conceals all sorts of forbidden words and gestures. Without giving himself away, he nevertheless answers, ‘I haven’t got a girlfriend, but I’ve got a special friend. She’s called Katie.’
‘Is that Katie H.? I know her, she’s a tomboy. And do you want to marry her?’
‘Me? Oh no! That’s impossible. She’s two years older than me.’
Madame Polovtsov, saying nothing, goes back to her easel. Teddy wants the floor to open up and swallow him. How could he have said something so stupid? And talking about age to this lady who is ageless, whose attractiveness is all in her crystalline silence and whose beauty is a gradual revelation, irradiating the drawing room where they are sitting and over a period of days, without his being aware of it, taking over his heart to the point where he feels despair welling up at the thought of the sittings coming to an end. How can he cope with this unbearable sadness that he carries around inside him and that will perhaps haunt him for the rest of his life? The worst thing is that, just when he would most like to be able to turn his back on her, he must bravely get through the sitting without melting with bliss at the light from Madame Polovtsov’s blue eyes as she scrutinises him closely to correct an eyebrow or a strand of hair. Distracted, no longer of this world, she is utterly perfect as she knits her eyebrows, purses her lips, rubs out and redoes a reflection in his eye. A wrinkle appears on her brow and runs down to the base of her nose, between eyes of a blue so weak that when she turns towards the window she looks almost blind. Teddy overcomes his urge to call out to her that she must be very careful the sun doesn’t make her lose her sight.
‘Actually,’ he says, ‘two years between Katie and me isn’t very much at all. When two people love each other, age doesn’t matter.’
Madame Polovtsov does not react. She has a more important problem with Teddy’s hands and asks him to separate them.
‘Thank you. That’s much better. Don’t move for two or three minutes, and then I’ll let you go, I promise you. It’s the last time. If I have any second thoughts about a detail, I’ll call your maman and I hope you won’t mind coming back to pose for five minutes, no more. But I think I’ve finished.’
That’s it … the curtain has come down, brutally, as it always does. He knew perfectly well that the blow was about to fall, at the precise moment when it would wound him the most. He grits his teeth and stands.
‘You can kiss me,’ she says. ‘I hope you haven’t been too bored. When I draw or paint I concentrate very hard and I won’t have any noise, not even the sound of my own voice. One day, when we have time, we’ll talk, you and I. A lot. Yes, a lot …’
He brushes her cheeks with a timid kiss and leaves without turning back.
Having exhibited the portrait in Paris and London, Madame Polovtsov presented it to Teddy’s parents as a gift. The pastel drawing has survived the vicissitudes of war, migrations and house moves, and when Édouard looks at it today, it is not himself he sees (he has got used to all his other faces) sitting well-behaved on a chair facing the window open to the sea, the port and the bobbing boats. It is Madame Polovtsov who comes alive again in his mind’s eye, her china complexion, her pale-blue gaze, the taste of muscat grapes, their skin bursting open between his teeth, and the memory of those first waves of unspeakable suffering that one somehow learns, one day, to associate with the idea of love.
Before we leave the White Russians, with their attacks of melancholy and terrible bouts of depression, there is one last specimen who Teddy often meets, at the bottom of the steep stairs that run down from the Observatoire district to the railway station. It is only a fifty-metre slope, but the gradient is as sheer as a ladder. The steps themselves are particularly narrow and high. An iron handrail in the middle runs from top to bottom. Because too often children have used the handrail to slide all the way down to the street and in the process have broken an arm or a leg – even in one case fracturing a skull – the practice of such acrobatics has been stopped by welding iron pegs to the rail. This was ill conceived, as it seriously underestimated the intense pleasure children take in doing things that are forbidden, especially those that involve grave risks. A new game replaced the old one: they called it ‘two at a time’ or ‘four at a time’. The aim was to hurtle down the fifty metres and roughly two hundred steps by landing on as few of them as possible. The ringleader, N., was an Italian boy of about twelve years old, stocky and as muscular as a bodybuilder, with a stormy temperament and the thick slurring voice of a drunk. He hardly touched the ground as he flew from landing to landing, emitting Tarzan-like cries. Without quite possessing N.’s visual accuracy or reflexes, Teddy succeeded, by restricting himself to ‘four at a time’, in excelling at a speciality in which he had no rivals: on every second leap he would execute an aerial half-turn and so jump four steps without seeing the one he would land on (or not land on). After a few harmless falls, everyone had worked out their technique and the troupe – about ten of them every morning, before they went into lessons – would deploy its talents for the few spectators who appeared at the landings that led from the buildings bordering the terrifying steps.
For several weeks the show attracted a loyal fan, a tall man who, leaning with his elbows on the ledge at the foot of the steps, wore a suit of black shantung that had seen better days (N. was adamant he slept in it) and a white open-necked shirt. His swept-back hair was unkempt and he smoked one cigarette after another. More precisely, he would take three quick puffs in succession, throw the long unsmoked part away, then grind it furiously under his heel, his face screwed up as if he were exterminating a vicious insect. When he had been there for a while (you could measure how long by the heap of cigarettes piled at his feet), a tic would start up in his white face with its black eyes ringed with purple, his chin would lift, and two deep furrows would be inscribed in his brow. His luxuriant eyebrows were jet-black and his lips crimson, deep crimson.
N. said, ‘He’s Frankenstein.’
Not everyone agreed. Everyone had his idea of Frankenstein. It was hard to understand what the stranger said. His French was poor and he mumbled, with an accent so coarse that Teddy was immediately able to place it.
‘Monsieur, are you Russian?’
‘No more Russia! No more Russians!’
He pulled a handful of ancient sweets out of his pocket. N. and Teddy shook their heads, but others said yes and the sweets disappeared in a twinkling. Teddy knew a few words.
‘Boz
he, tsara xhrani!’
The putative Frankenstein stamped his foot.
‘No more God, no more tsar, no more Russia!’
A sudden wide smile, open and innocent, spread across his features and he held out his hand to N. and then to Teddy.
‘You first, you second! You two boys very good.’
After this encounter they did not see Frankenstein for a week. A downpour flushed away the heap of cigarette butts that had accumulated where he usually sat. Had he gone back to deepest Russia? Papa, rarely for him, came home for lunch and, even rarer, had a sheaf of local and Paris newspapers under his arm that he read at the table. This was a serious breach of protocol. Between Teddy and his father rose the barrier of the Excelsior. Blanche, suspecting a scandal, did not dare say anything. Today the Excelsior, whose editorials by Maurice Colrat were frequently read aloud at table, had a back page made up entirely of photographs. Teddy’s mouth fell open as he studied them.
