The Improbability of Love

by Hannah Rothschild

  Her name was the Marquise du Châtelet, Gabrielle Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil; he was François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, the great writer, historian, philosopher and champion of civil liberties. It was an unfortunate trick of timing that the Marquise Émilie was not only married but also pregnant. She had rejected Voltaire’s advances as improper, inappropriate. The good lady was a mathematician and physicist, not given, one imagined, to entertaining wild proclamations. Voltaire loved her instantly and told her that he would wait till her confinement ended. She rolled her eyes and looked thoroughly unconvinced. “You see, Monsieur Julienne,” the great man cried, “I need a message of love, something that will sit by her bed and remind her endlessly, romantically of me”.

  So it came to pass that I left Paris late in 1729 on a stagecoach with a designated handler. It was not my first trip away from the metropolis – we had been to London (hated it), Valenciennes, where my master hailed from, and had made the odd trip to the countryside. I was to learn that Émilie’s marriage to the Marquis Florent-Claude du Chastellet-Lomont had been arranged only four years earlier when she was just eighteen and he was thirty. Two children followed in quick succession and though she tried to prevent another, shortly before meeting Voltaire she fell pregnant again (raped, in case you were wondering). This might explain why Émilie decamped in haste to her husband’s seat in north-eastern France, leaving him to ravish mistresses and prostitutes in Paris.

  I admired but never warmed to Émilie. She was too serious. Her father, a minor noble and a salonnier in the court of Louis XIV, spotted his daughter’s intellect at an early age and trained her much as one might do a monkey. Her tricks were intellectual rather than physical. By the age of twelve she was fluent in Latin, Greek, Italian and German. Her idea of fun was translating foreign languages into French. Naturally her mother was horrified by these unladylike pursuits and threatened to send Émilie to a convent. As we all know, a fierce female mind is a passion-killer. Men prefer the breast to the brain. Émilie’s only suitor was the lame old marquis. Even Voltaire, writing to his friend Frederick II, said she was ‘a great man whose only fault was being a woman’. Perhaps he was a little harsh. She could dance, play a little harpsichord and sing in tune, but these were prerequisites for any lady.

  Émilie kept me by her bed. I like to think that I was the first and last thing she thought of. My magic worked. Within four years, Voltaire was her lover and installed at the family château. The old marquis didn’t mind too much; he found a buxom wench without a brain cell in her head. I can’t say it was my most exciting post. Voltaire and his mistress had a cerebral rather than a carnal relationship. When he stormed into her chamber, eyes aflame, nightdress akimbo, it was generally to discuss some libertarian theory or read from one of his pamphlets. While I hung around he completed 438 books, plays, letters, poems and pamphlets along with scientific and historical works. Émilie was almost as prolific: papers on kinetic energy, the science of fire, laws, algebra, and calculus. I am told that her translation of and commentary on Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica is still in print.

  I am not saying Voltaire was dull! Indeed he was probably my most amusing, learned and inspirational owner. Émilie, however, for all her intellectual prowess, wanted to sample eroticism. Perhaps for her it was another branch of learning or a human need but she yearned for passion, to be held, ravaged, taken from her mind into rapture. She began to take lovers, none satisfactorily (I should know – I witnessed). Voltaire did not mind; I am not sure he even noticed.

  It was a sunny afternoon in 1745 when she saw him, the poet Jean François de Saint-Lambert; finally Émilie had found her grand project. It was a ‘coup de foudre’, instant unbridled lust. It was also totally unrequited. Émilie was not used to being thwarted. As a rich, powerful and clever woman, there were few situations she couldn’t solve. It was the first time in her short life that her equations, hypotheses and theorems were rendered useless. In matters of love, the heart is illogical, the mind irrational. Émilie’s problem was called Madame de Bouffleurs, better known as ‘The Lady of Delights’, with whom Jean François was deeply, wildly, passionately in love.

  Poor Émilie tried everything. Dropping handkerchiefs, a bolting horse, sweetmeats, parties, sonnets, but nothing worked. Then one day, through a veil of tears, she saw me as if for the first time. Two hours later, on the afternoon of 22 January 1745, I was dispatched to the poet’s house. He understood my power but rather than keep me, I was immediately presented to the Lady of Delights. I must say life in her bedchamber was jolly interesting. A king, a poet, a lawyer and even an abbot passed through her boudoir in the same week.

  One evening, 28 February 1745, and I shall never forget this, a certain lady, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, appeared in my new mistress’s chamber. She had come for advice: how to catch a king. Introduced to Louis XV at the Royal Masked Ball on 26 February, she had tickled the monarch’s fancy. Recently his third official mistress had died, creating a vacancy. This was the greatest job opportunity for any woman west of Constantinople. However, she was not the only candidate.

  The Lady of Delights gave peerless advice: forget coquetry, be direct, and be passionate yet correct. Men need reassurance; they need to know that you love them. Casting her eye around the room, she lit on me and without further ado, I was handed to Jeanne Antoinette. Yet again my powers as an aphrodisiac and a Circe had been recognised. Ten days later, I was delivered to the King of France. One was pleased to finally make it into Versailles. Naturellement, with my powers of inspiration, it only took three weeks until Mademoiselle Poisson was proclaimed the official mistress (which, lucky her, was followed by ennoblement, estates, an apartment directly below His Majesty); the transformation of a Miss Fish to Madame de Pompadour; it was all down to moi.

  The problem was that you could take a girl out of a bourgeois upbringing, dress her, ennoble her, lavish love and art and jewels on her, but ultimately, she was still considered not one of us – and not just at court. The French are a horribly snobby race. It was fine for the King to have powerful consorts as long as they were posh. Madame de Pompadour was and continues to be much maligned on account of her lowly birth. There were many redeeming features: she loved the arts and, despite some of her more outrageous pronouncements, had a fondness for the masses. Indeed, la Pompadour was a perfect provincial mother. That, ultimately, was her undoing: men don’t want to make love to Mummy (unless they are English). After 1750, the King never again laid a finger on the lady. He installed a series of lovers in a small mansion at the Parc-aux-Cerfs. Madame de P shrugged most of these off until the arrival of Louise O’Murphy. At the age of thirteen she had already caught the eye of Casanova, who called her ‘a pretty, ragged, dirty little creature’. (Though I hate to give others credit, the most sensual painting in history is probably Boucher’s portrait of Louise.)

  Miss Louise got too big for her tiny boots and was dispatched after two years. When the little hussy left, she stole me, believing, as many at court did, that I was the magical element holding Louis and his mistress together.

  My next significant journey was to Russia, to the bedroom of Catherine the Great. Suffice to say that everything you hear (apart from the horse) was true. I have never ever in all my years met a woman or a man with such appetites. Even Monsieur Casanova didn’t come close. I was bought as a present by the Polish nobleman, Stanisław Poniatowski, for the Queen in 1755. Stanisław was the most important patron of the Polish Enlightenment, a purveyor of theatre, painting, literature and architecture – so, little wonder that I caught his eye. Of course their affair was doomed, although she gave him a daughter and the throne of Poland. She tired of him in 1759 and moved on to the Orlov brothers. Stanisław never married; he died of a broken heart. I would have loved to have stayed in St Petersburg, the capital of the developed world. If so I would now be with my erstwhile friends by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian and co. But evil Count Orlov had other plans. He could not stand my face, could n
ot bear to be reminded that his Empress had a past.

  Once again I was on my way. Francis I, the Holy Roman Emperor, bought me as a tool of seduction for the Countess Wilhelmina von Neipperg. After sixteen children with his wife Maria Theresa, he should have put away his tool. His young mistress was as brutal and ambitious as they come. When he announced his intention to leave her, she begged for one last date, a trip to the opera. Francis fell ill during the second act; by the time his carriage reached home, the emperor was dead. Poisoned by viper juice administered via the prick of her diamond brooch.

  The dainty-footed murderess sold me immediately. By a series of fortuitous circumstances, I ended up with the Count Gregory Velovitch. Now history has savagely etched his name from memory and it’s a singular shame that my master or anyone else of that stature never painted him. The count was a beautiful man, with long delicate limbs, a shock of golden curly hair and eyes as black as liquorice. He was also an extremely ambitious homosexual who had set his sights on Frederick the Great, the King of Prussia.

  Many assumed, wrongly, that Frederick loved men. There was one young man, many years before, Hans von Katte, but it was a cerebral, unconsummated love. After that Frederick only had one love: Watteau. Why else did Frederick build his utterly exquisite private palace at Sanssouci in the style that Watteau invented? How else can you explain that monumental paintings were kept elsewhere, in separate galleries, but in his own tiny house, he chose works by my master and his friends? Frederick accepted Count Velovitch’s present with great pleasure but had the man’s head cut off for suggesting a lewd and improper act.

  Of course, Frederick had whippets – but that is another story, for later.

  Chapter 20

  Long after her employees had left, as darkness slipped like a velvet cloak over the streets of London and street lights cast golden orbs on damp streaky pavements, Rebecca locked the door to her office and spread the company ledgers on the floor. Placing the oldest records nearest the fireplace, she put each of the massive tomes in chronological order. The last time she had studied them, only a few days earlier, she had not known what to look for. Now she was hoping to find evidence to disprove rather than confirm her theories. Rebecca wanted reassurance that her father was Memling Winkleman, Holocaust survivor, upstanding Jew, legitimate picture dealer, loving father and grandfather.

  For the first two hours, between 8 and 10 p.m., all the provenances checked seemed legitimate. Starting in 1940, Rebecca matched early acquisitions to invoices and felt her spirits rise until she found the Renoir, Filles avec parapluies et chien, bought for a thousand Marks from a family called Gandelstein. At first glance, the bill of sale seemed legitimate, but then Rebecca saw the address, Schwedenstrasse 14 and the date, 14 February 1944. Frau Danica Goldberg had told Rebecca that not one single family from Schwedenstrasse 14 had returned; all had been sent away on death trains, including every single member of the Winkleman family.

  Rebecca tried to compose another story. Perhaps her father had acted as a fence, a go-between, selling his Jewish friends’ paintings to Nazis, to give them the chance of escape. Rebecca liked this version, but it only bought her a few seconds’ respite. Deep down she knew that explanation was improbable.

  Pushing her chair back, she went over to the drinks cabinet. It was a fine Art Deco mahogany and gilt cupboard and had been presented to Memling on his seventieth birthday by a grateful client who frequented the same synagogue as the family. The client spent over £10 million a year with Winkleman Fine Art so the cabinet, hideous as it was, stayed. Part of the present was also an unlimited supply of the finest Cristal champagne. The client had died ten years ago but by then, his cabinet had become a feature of the room and, touchingly, the client, in the terms of his will, asked that Winklemans should be kept in Cristal until the day that any descendant of Memling’s was no longer active in the business. Rebecca looked at the neat rows of champagne bottles. She thought about opening one but immediately dismissed the thought – there was nothing to celebrate. She needed alcohol; there must be something else. At the back of one cupboard she found a dusty, half-drunk 1962 Scottish malt. She never drank whisky and hoped that it did not go off. Pouring a large slug, she swallowed it in three large gulps. The shock of the burning alcohol on an empty stomach made her splutter.

  Fortified, she returned to the vault. By 3 a.m., Rebecca had traced twenty-two paintings back to Schwedenstrasse 14. She cross-referenced her discoveries with Marty’s notebook. He had used, like Memling, the same VZW and NZW classifications but there were other initials that Rebecca did not understand: ERR or KH and a third, NC. She counted seventy references with one or another of these acronyms. Some entries had all three, others just one or two. The most common were the initials KH. Another aspect that troubled her was the whereabouts of certain paintings that Memling apparently owned but had not sold. According to Marty’s notebooks there were at least a hundred; Memling must have a secret store.

  Flipping between the official ledgers and Marty’s notebook, Rebecca tried to match paintings acquired between January 1940 and February 1947 to legitimate provenances. Most had minimal descriptions. ‘Shepherd with flock’ or ‘Allegory’. Next to each was the date of purchase. The vendors were mostly called Herr Schmidt or Herr Brandt and came with job descriptions such as ‘nobleman’ or ‘farmer’. Rebecca continued to bargain with the evidence. At that time, a clever dealer with a modest amount of capital could pick up scores of great paintings. But where would a young man, a survivor of Auschwitz, get hold of that kind of capital?

  Rebecca looked at her watch. It was now 4 a.m. Soon a pale sun would eke its way around the edges of the drawn curtains. Rebecca felt slightly faint and suddenly very tired. The office kitchen was downstairs and to get there she had to pass three security cameras and deactivate an alarm. The last thing she wanted was her father or employees asking questions about her unusual nocturnal activity. On her desk there was a box of marzipan flowers, a gift from a client. Rebecca loathed almonds but forced herself to eat. Sitting at her desk she bit into a petal and immediately chased it down with mineral water, waiting for the sugary surge of energy.

  To distract herself, Rebecca typed the initials ERR into her computer’s search engine. To her relief, the whole first page was devoted to the word’s definition. To ‘err’ is to be incorrect or to make a mistake. Perhaps Marty was using Google as a channel of comfort, telling her across time that Memling had done all this by accident. Biting into her second marzipan flower, Rebecca flicked on to the next page. Her eyes ran down the screen and stopped on the words Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. Putting the half-eaten sweet down on to the desk, she started to read: ERR was the abbreviation for the taskforce led by Nazi Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, the man in charge of confiscating all cultural properties belonging to Jews. Feeling a rush of nausea, Rebecca put her hand to her mouth and vomited a combination of whisky, bile and marzipan through her fingers. The computer screen blurred and her heart thumped in her chest. ‘No, no, no,’ Rebecca crooned softly, wiping the sick with the back of her hand as she double-clicked on the link and read a short description. ‘Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) was the “Special Task Force” engaged in the plunder of cultural valuables in Nazi-occupied countries during the Second World War, and up until October 1944, 1,418,000 railway wagons containing books and works of art (as well as 427,000 tons by ship) were transported to Germany. Many were bound for Hitler’s personal collection, to be housed in Linz.’

  Without stopping to tidy herself up, Rebecca punched KH into the search engine. Nothing relevant came up. She followed with NC. Again nothing. Stop panicking and think, she scolded herself. Narrow the search. Calling up a site devoted to information about Nazi looted art, she scanned the documents, looking for someone or somewhere with those initials. Within minutes she had two possibilities. Could KH be Karl Haberstock, Hitler’s personal art dealer, who advised the Führer on sales and helped the Nazi Party dispose of so called ‘degen
erate art’ to dissolute Europeans? Reading on, Rebecca learned that Haberstock had brokered more than a hundred sales to Hitler, including La Danse by Watteau for 900,000 Reichsmarks, bought from the Crown Prince of Hohenzollern. Looking down the list of Haberstock’s sales, Rebecca saw that another Watteau, unnamed, was also sold to Hitler for one million Reichsmarks in 1943 – it was identified solely as ‘The Love’ painting; Rebecca shuddered. Was this Memling’s missing picture?

  Rebecca discovered that although Haberstock was arrested and interrogated after the war, he was released and went on practising as a dealer until the late 1950s. Marty showed in his notebook entries between 1945 and 1956 that Winkleman had bought and sold forty works of art from a small Augsburg gallery identified as KH, including pictures by Rubens, Hals, Wouwerman, van Goyen and Tiepolo. Peppered through the same article were references to Neuschwanstein Castle. Was this Marty’s NC? Rebecca looked at images of the fantastical fairy-tale castle perched on a Bavarian hilltop, built for the reclusive King Ludwig in the 1880s. Alfred Rosenberg chose it as the safe house to store looted art. What were the links between her father, Rosenberg, Haberstock and the castle?

  Rebecca didn’t know quite how long she sat on the floor of her office rocking herself backwards and forwards, her thoughts careering from Marty to her father, trying to disentangle the facts from her feelings. Scores of stolen goods with fake invoices did not necessarily prove Memling was a Nazi Party member or a thief. Perhaps her father had helped these Jews by finding an unscrupulous dealer to buy their chattels when there were many who would have robbed them? Maybe he was a dupe working for Karl Haberstock, and Memling had never quite realised the part that art had played in Hitler’s cultural aspirations. Besides, Haberstock had been acquitted of wrong-doing and rehabilitated, becoming a leading light in Augsburg; the art that he had profited from financially seemed to exonerate him morally: a bequest bearing his name still hangs in the city’s museum. Future generations of visitors would surely praise the family for its generosity rather than enquire how those works got into Haberstocks’ hands.