De Potter's Grand Tour (15 page)

She preferred to read his own articles and lectures. He had spent so much of his time writing, even when he wasn't in his study. If he didn't have a journal with him, he wrote on the backs of envelopes. He used a pencil when traveling, a gold-banded Waterman fountain pen at home. Shortly after they'd moved to Cannes he had bought a Remington typewriter and taught himself to type. When he wasn't making notes for a lecture or writing an essay about his travels, he wrote letters and postcards. Occasionally he wrote short skits, such as the one about Napoléon for the Tivoli Literary Society. He wrote about the Ottoman Empire, the ancient Greeks, the pharaohs of Egypt. He wrote a long essay about Egyptian techniques of embalming. He wrote about Dutch, German, Flemish, Neapolitan, Lombardian, and Florentine art. He wrote at length about Fra Angelico. He wrote about land ownership in Great Britain and the guilds of Bruges.

Some things didn't fit, such as when he singled out Bacchus for special praise in his lecture on the Greek gods: “Nothing from mythology has been of more use to artists,” he wrote, than the “wild night Bacchanals”—this from a man who rarely allowed himself more than a single glass of wine at dinner. In his lecture on Constantinople, his remarks about the present sultan, Abdul Hamid, remained incomplete: “Though much is said against him, he has introduced many reforms in his empire—and I believe modern history will point to him as one of Turkey's most enlightened rulers. —But!!!” And there were several pages of an unfinished story Armand had titled “The Little Corporal,” about a French cavalry officer named Louis Pierre d'Elseghem, who discovers at the age of twenty that he is the illegitimate son of a Belgian nobleman. Aimée found the story confusing, and Armand had apparently agreed, for he'd drawn a big
X
in red ink across every page. But he'd left unmarked a strange passage about the Belgian nobleman Antoine David Dupont, the father of Louis Pierre d'Elseghem, who after gambling away the family's fortune flees from his disgrace to a farm in the Australian outback, where he lives out the rest of his life in obscurity, raising goats and making a sour, nearly inedible cheese.

It was a pointless digression in an ill-conceived story. Mostly, though, Armand's personality was so vividly expressed in his writing that Aimée could think of no other response than to pray to God to return her husband to her. For a moment, while reading his reflections on the value of politeness in an essay he'd published shortly after they were married, she could almost be persuaded that he was there in the room, reciting for an audience: “Society is a masquerade, and with the invitation to participate comes the important responsibility of choosing a costume. Whatever may otherwise be the disguises worn by one's associates, it must be agreed that the most appealing mask is that of politeness. A well-bred man should be polite to all from the grandest to the humblest; courtesy is the seal of a perfect education.”

Her darling gentleman, who fooled everyone, even his wife, with his civility. She'd assumed that together they buoyed each other enough to survive any troubles they encountered. And how insignificant their troubles seemed from inside the walls of Grand Bois. Even the threats from the travelers in the Jaffa accident lost their sting, or so Aimée thought. Weren't she and Armand enjoying the masquerade together, whirling through high society hand in hand, disguised as royalty with their invented names, convincing tourists that they had to pay for the privilege of their company? Yes, her husband was polite to all. He had even doffed his hat to the steward on the
Regele Carol
.

She called to him; he didn't reply. All she had to conjure him were these remnants: scribblings in his journals, lecture notes, unfinished essays, and the letters he had written to her over the years. It seemed there was nothing he hadn't written about or was not planning to write about. And it amounted to no more than a pile of papers that anyone other than Aimée would have thrown away.

*   *   *

She was slow to begin the business of settling the estate and careful about keeping the manner of his death a secret. When she finally sent Armand's will to G. A. Hereshoff Bartlett, her lawyer in Paris, she offered only the brief explanation that her husband had accidentally fallen overboard and drowned off the coast of Greece.

Bartlett's response was equally brief: “I am this moment in receipt of your letter enclosing your husband's will. If you leave the will with us, it will be for the purpose of our preparing all the papers.” He wanted to be sure that he had full charge of the probate work, for “this is no easy matter,” he wrote, “but on the contrary a most delicate undertaking.” He warned Aimée that he couldn't predict what the legal costs would be. “They may be 1,000 francs and they may be 5,000 francs,” he declared. “It frequently happens that an apparently trifling and simple matter may involve very intricate questions of law and necessitate the most delicate and skillful handling.” As an example, he returned the copy of the most recent will, which included an addendum declaring that “such deposits” as his accounts at the Société Générale were all
joint
deposits with his wife, and requesting that the property due to his son be held in trust until Victor was twenty-five, “he to enjoy the income with his mother until that time.”

Armand had dated the addendum “Cannes, January 28, 1904” and signed it, but according to Bartlett, it was invalid because it hadn't been witnessed. Yet even if it had been witnessed, it wouldn't have made a difference in the settlement, Bartlett said, since there already were equivalent stipulations in the older will.

Aimée was left wondering why Armand had gone to the trouble of inserting the addendum without telling her. As she reread the paragraph, she lingered over the phrase
such deposits.
Why hadn't he mentioned that he'd closed their account at the Crédit Lyonnais? Had her husband meant to put a portion of his wealth out of his wife's reach so he could draw on it without her knowledge?

In the next moment she felt disgusted with herself for her suspicion. Armand had kept his debts secret to spare her from financial worries. Clearly, she saw now, Grand Bois had been beyond their means. Her husband had also been borrowing money to cover the debts associated with his antiquities. He had paid more for the treasures than he could afford. The addendum was evidence that as early as January 1904, he was trying to protect his estate from creditors.

Over the next two weeks, new questions arose. Bartlett wrote to say that the insurance company demanded additional proof of the death of Mr. de Potter before they would agree to pay the indemnity. They wanted bond in the form of collateral evidence, such as an affidavit by the captain of the vessel stating that Mr. de Potter went on board but did not leave the vessel. After receiving written testimony from Chorafas, the dragoman, they wanted an affidavit from the steward who had seen Mr. de Potter at the rail and the stewardess who had been with the steward. And they wanted an affidavit from the gentleman who talked with the two peddlers in Piraeus, and the statement of the peddlers, could they be found. Chorafas had referred to the peddlers and the unknown gentleman in his testimony. Why hadn't Aimée mentioned them to Bartlett? He demanded to know if she might have forgotten to tell him anything else.

In the weeks that followed, Bartlett complained that he was experiencing great difficulty in locating the steward and stewardess of the
Regele Carol
—he was as far from getting a clue of their whereabouts as he was when he'd started. The best they could hope for was that the sworn statement of the U.S. consul at Athens should be sufficient to satisfy the incredulity of Mutual Life.

Bartlett kept after Aimée, demanding endless documentation and warning her that the case was growing ever more complicated. But after months of legal haggling she received an unexpected letter from him reporting that the insurance company had agreed to pay out the indemnity. Without bothering to explain how the
delicate matter
was resolved, he enclosed a final bill, charging seventy-five hundred francs for his services.

*   *   *

It took months for Mutual Life to send a check, and until then Aimée struggled to meet expenses. She resolved to sell the travel business to Edmond Gastineau, and with the money she borrowed against the forthcoming sale she was able to pay Victor's tuition. She sold the pair of cane-mesh reclining chairs to Roland Berg, an American who had married a Frenchwoman and opened up a furniture store in Nice, and she was able to send Bartlett the first installment of his payment.

On the day she went to the bank to prepare a money order for Bartlett, she discovered a strange discrepancy in her account. According to her passbook, she should have had a little under twenty thousand francs, but according to the bank, a recent withdrawal had put the sum below fifteen thousand. She insisted that she hadn't made any such withdrawal. The teller provided her with the record: five thousand francs had been withdrawn on January 10, 1906.

The account had been opened jointly, and she hadn't gone through the trouble of removing her husband's name. It was one of several accounts Armand used to draw from to pay his business expenses. But the five thousand francs had been withdrawn six months after his death.

Though Aimée was writing enormous checks almost daily, she couldn't have forgotten a withdrawal of five thousand francs. The only plausible explanation was that Edmond Gastineau had drawn from the account to cover the agency's bills. But why hadn't he written ahead of time to warn her? He probably hadn't wanted to bother her with the agency's financial troubles. He would explain it all if she asked him. She didn't want to ask him. She had no suspicions regarding Edmond Gastineau. But how to explain the five thousand francs that had gone missing from her and Armand's joint account? Five thousand francs. Maybe Edmond Gastineau had nothing to do with the withdrawal. Maybe it was a mystery Madame de Potter should avoid trying to solve.

She spent the rest of the afternoon walking. She walked beside the embankment and sat on a bench for a long while, looking out at the sea. She got up and walked along la Croisette so lost in thought that she walked right into an elderly woman, who would have fallen flat on her back if her husband hadn't been holding her arm.

Pardon, madame.

She wanted to ask the old woman if she had spent her years so devoted to her husband that she'd had practically no life of her own. Was this what people thought when they saw Armand de Potter's widow? The prospect filled her with bitterness.

She walked up the hill of the avenue de Vallauris in a daze. Back at Grand Bois, she went straight up to her room. She had no one she could confide in, so she confided in her diary: “5,000 missing from account at SG. Could it mean that he—” She refrained from expressing the whole of her suspicion and instead wrote in code: “.… —..——… …” It was a mad idea, one that should only have come to her in the delirium of a fever. Five thousand francs were missing from their joint account. Five thousand francs.

She spoke the rebuttal aloud. “Impossible!” Her husband wouldn't have played such a terrible trick on his wife and son. She would mourn him, but she refused to accuse him of such an outrageous deceit. He had boarded the
Regele Carol
with the intention of throwing himself overboard, and that's what he'd done. The stewardess had even said something about seeing Professor de Potter on top of the rail. On top! A man last seen on top of the rail of a ship does not climb down and walk away.

She couldn't keep herself from imagining the terror of his final moments. Walking along la Croisette in the rain, she looked out at the swells of the sea and thought of Armand's body thrown about by the waves.

She often wondered what he would want to say to her. One night that spring she dreamed once more of her husband. He was sitting beside her on the stone bench in the garden and began whispering to her, his voice barely audible as he explained why he hadn't come home. When she woke, she was disappointed to find that she couldn't recall his words. She would spend the rest of her life trying to remember what, for a moment in a dream, she had understood.

 

The Columbian Exposition

“L
ADIES AND GENTLEMEN,”
he said in his introductory presentation on the first day of the Columbian Exposition in the spring of 1893, “I am honored to have this opportunity to present to you my little monuments, relics of the oldest known civilization. I trust you will agree with me,” he said, gesturing to the display, “that the figures in De Potter's Egyptian Pantheon are as beautiful as they are rare.” He held up one of the bronze statuettes mounted on a pedestal, turned it round for his audience to admire. “Let me introduce you to the majestic Osiris, frozen in his regal stance for three thousand years. During his life, Osiris spread the influence of good. He was murdered by his brother Set, the god of evil, who trapped Osiris in a coffin and drowned him in the Nile. He appears to us as a mummy, with his hands uncovered, holding a scepter and scourge, emblems of sovereignty. He wears the crown of Egypt, ornamented with ostrich feathers, which symbolize truth.

“And this sweet goddess here,” he said, gesturing down the row, “is Isis, sister and wife of Osiris, the mistress of all the elements, who represents that which has been and always will be. She is the mother of man, crowned by a vulture, the emblem of maternity.