Life: A User's Manual (21 page)

His merry vociferation soon roused from their beds, then from their respective flats, the occupants of the fourth and fifth floors: Madame Hébert, Madame Hourcade, grandfather Echard with his cheeks in lather, Gervaise (Monsieur Colomb’s housekeeper) in a zenana-cloth bedjacket, lace bonnet, and bobbled slippers, and finally, with his moustache bristling, Emile Gratiolet himself, the landlord, who lived at the time on the fifth floor left in one of the two flats Rorschach would knock into one thirty-five years later.

Emile Gratiolet was not exactly an accommodating man. In other circumstances he would certainly have evicted the four trouble-makers on the spot. Was it the spirit of Bastille Day that moved him to clemency? Or Raymond Albin’s trooper’s uniform? Or the delicious flush on Flora Champigny’s cheeks? Whatever the cause, the upshot was that he pulled the lever allowing the lift doors to be opened from the outside, helped the four merrymakers to clamber out of the narrow cage, and sent them to bed without even threatening to sue or fine them.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Marcia, 3

LÉON MARCIA, THE curio dealer’s husband, is in his bedroom. He is a thin, puny, sick old man, with an almost grey face and bony hands. He is sitting in a black leather armchair, dressed in pyjama trousers and a collarless shirt, an orange check scarf thrown over his skinny shoulders, faded felt slippers on his sockless feet, and a sort of flannel thing vaguely like a Phrygian bonnet on his skull.

This burnt-out, blank-eyed, slow-moving man is still considered even now by most valuers and art dealers to be the world authority in areas as diverse as Prussian and Austro-Hungarian coins and medals, Ts’ing ceramics, French Renaissance prints, antique musical instruments, and Iranian and Persian Gulf prayer mats. He made his reputation in the early 1930s when in a series of articles published in
The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute
he showed that the set of small engravings attributed to Léon Gaultier and sold at Sotheby’s in 1899 under the name of
The Nine Muses
in fact depicted Shakespeare’s nine greatest female roles – Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Portia, Rosalind, Titania, and Viola – and was the work of Jeanne de Chénany, an attribution which caused a sensation because at that time no works were known by this artist, who had been identified solely by her monogram and by a biography written by Humbert and published in his
Brief History of the Origins and Progress of Engraving, Woodcuts, and Intaglio
(Berlin, 1752, in-8°), which claimed – though unfortunately without quoting any sources – that she had worked in Brussels and Aachen from 1647 to 1662.

Léon Marcia – and this is what is certainly the most surprising thing – is completely self-taught. He left school at nine. At twenty he hardly knew how to read, and the only thing he did read regularly was a sporting daily called
Lucky Strike
; at that time he was working for a motor mechanic on Avenue de la Grande Armée who built racing cars, which not only never won, but almost always crashed. Thus it was not long before the garage closed down for good, and, with a small gratuity in his pocket, Marcia spent a few months resting; he lived in a cheap hotel, the Hôtel de l’Aveyron, rose at seven, drank a hot strong coffee at the bar whilst leafing through
Lucky Strike
, and went back up to his room (the bed had meanwhile been made up) where he lay back for a nap, but not before spreading the paper over the end of the bed so as not to dirty the eiderdown with his shoes.

Marcia, a man of very modest needs, could have lived like that for many years, but he fell ill the following winter: the doctors diagnosed tubercular pleurisy and strongly recommended mountain air: since he clearly could not afford a long stay in a sanatorium as a patient, Marcia solved the problem by getting a job as a room waiter in the most luxurious of them all, the Pfisterhof at Ascona, in the Ticino. It was there that in order to fill the long hours of compulsory resting, which he forced himself to observe once his work was done, he began to read, and grew to enjoy reading everything he could lay his hands on, borrowing book upon book from the wealthy international clientele – the owners of and heirs to corned-beef kingdoms, rubber empires, or tempered-steel syndicates – staying at the sanatorium. The first book he read was a novel,
Silbermann
, by Jacques de Lacretelle, which had won the Prix Fémine the previous autumn; the second was a critical edition with facing-page translation of Coleridge’s
Kubla Khan
:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree …

In four years Léon Marcia read a good thousand volumes and learned six languages: English, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese, which he mastered in eleven days, not with the help of Camoëns’s
Lusiades
through which Paganel thought he was learning Spanish, but with the fourth and last volume of Diego Barbosa-Machado’s
Bibliotheca Lusitana
, which he’d found, without the rest of the set, on the penny shelf of a Lugano bookshop.

The more he learnt, the more he wanted to find out. His enthusiasm seemed to have no practical limit, and was as boundless as his ability to absorb knowledge. He only needed to read something once to remember it for good, and he consumed treatises on Greek grammar, histories of Poland, epic poems in twenty-five songs, and instruction manuals on fencing and horticulture with as much speed, as much appetite, and as much intelligence as popular novels and encyclopaedic dictionaries, although admittedly he did have a marked predilection for the latter.

In nineteen twenty-seven, a group of residents at the Pfisterhof, on the initiative of Herr Pfister himself, subscribed to a fund to provide Marcia with an income for ten years to allow him to devote himself entirely to whatever studies he wished to pursue. Marcia, who was then thirty, spent a whole term hesitating between courses given by Ehrenfels, Spengler, Hilbert, and Wittgenstein, then, since he’d been to listen to Panofsky lecturing on Greek statuary, discovered that his true vocation was art history and left forthwith for London to enrol at the Courtauld Institute. Three years later he made his spectacular entry into the art world in the way we have seen.

His health remained delicate and made him housebound nearly all his life. He lived in hotels for a long time, first in London, then in Washington and New York; he scarcely travelled except to check this or that detail in a library or an art gallery, and he gave his increasingly sought-after opinions from his bed or his armchair. It was he who demonstrated, amongst other things, that the
Hadriana
at Atri (better known by their nickname of
Hadrian’s Angels
) were forged, and he who established the authoritative chronology of Samuel Cooper’s miniatures at the Frick Collection: it was this latter work which provided the occasion where he met the woman he was to marry: Clara Lichtenfeld, the daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants to the United States, who was on a course at the museum. Though she was fifteen years his junior, they married a few weeks later and decided to live in France. Their son David was born in 1946, shortly after they arrived in Paris and moved into 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, where Madame Marcia set up her antique shop in premises formerly used by a saddler. Oddly, her husband always refused to take any interest in it.

Léon Marcia – like some other occupants of the building – has not left his room for many weeks; all he eats any more is milk,
petitbeurre
, and raisin biscuits; he listens to the radio, reads or pretends to read old art reviews; there is one such on his lap, the
American Journal of Fine Arts
, and two others by his feet, a Yugoslav review,
Umetnost
, and
The Burlington Magazine
; on the cover of the
American Journal
there is a reproduction of a splendid, flamboyant, green, red, golden, and inky blue ancient American
estampe
– a locomotive with a gigantic smokestack, great baroque lamps, and a tremendous cow-catcher, hauling its mauve coaches through the stormy prairie night and mixing a lot of spark-studded black smoke with the furry thunder clouds. On the cover of
Umetnost
, hiding
Burlington Magazine
almost completely, there is a photograph of a work by the Hungarian sculptor Meglepett Egér: rectangular metal plates fixed to each other in such a way as to form an eleven-sided solid object.

Usually Léon Marcia is silent and still, plunged in recollections: one of which, surfacing from the depths of his prodigious memory, has been obsessing him for several days: it is a memory of a lecture which Jean Richepin, shortly before he died, went to give at the sanatorium; the subject was the Legend of Napoleon. Richepin recounted that in his youth the tomb of Napoleon had been opened once a year, and the embalmed face was displayed to disabled soldiers filing past in procession; the face was bloated and greenish, more a spectacle of terror than of admiration, which is why they later stopped opening the tomb. But nevertheless Richepin saw the face from the arms of his great-uncle, who had served in Africa and for whose sake the Commandant opened the tomb.

CHAPTER FORTY

Beaumont, 4

A BATHROOM FLOORED with large, square, cream-coloured tiles. On the walls, flower-printed washable wallpaper. No item of decoration complements the purely sanitary furniture and fittings, apart from a small round table with a moulded cast-iron centre pillar on whose veined marble top, lipped with a vaguely Empire-style rim, stands an ultraviolet lamp of brutally modernistic ugliness.

On a turned-wood clothes-stand hangs a green satin dressing gown with a cat silhouette and the symbol designating
spades
at cards embroidered on its back. Béatrice Breidel alleges that this indoor gown which her grandmother still occasionally uses was the match robe of an American boxer called Cat Spade, whom her grandmother must have met on one of her US tours and who had been her lover. Anne Breidel does not agree at all with this version. It is the case that in the nineteen thirties there was a black boxer called Cat Spade. His career was very short. In nineteen twenty-nine he won the Combined Forces Tournament, left the army to go professional, and was beaten successively by Gene Tunney, Jack Delaney, and Jack Dempsey, even though this last was on the way out. So he went back into the army. It’s not likely he moved in the same circles as Véra Orlova, and even if they had met, a white Russian with rigid prejudices would never have given herself to a black, even if he was a gorgeous heavyweight. Anne Breidel’s explanation is different but also based on the many anecdotes of her forebear’s love life: the dressing gown, she claims, was indeed a present from one of her lovers, a history professor at Carson College, New York, called Arnold Flexner, the author of a significant thesis on
The Voyages of Tavernier and Chardin and the Image of Persia in Europe from Scudéry to Montesquieu
, and, under various pseudonyms – Marty Rowlands, Kex Camelot, Trim Jinemewicz, James W. London, Harvey Elliott – of detective stories laced with quite explicitly sexy, not to say pornographic, interludes:
Murders at Pigalle, Hot Nights in Ankara
, etc. They met, so the story went, at Cincinnati (Ohio), where Véra Orlova had been engaged to sing Blondine in
Die Entführung aus dem Serail
. Quite apart from their sexual suggestiveness, which Anne Breidel mentions only in passing, the cat and the spade allude directly, in her view, to Flexner’s most famous novel,
The Seventh Crack Shot of Saratoga
, the story of a pickpocket working the racecourse, nicknamed “The Cat” because of his quick, light touch, who gets mixed up against his will in a police investigation which he solves with flair and cunning.

Madame de Beaumont is unaware of these two explanations; for her part, she has never made the slightest comment on the origin of her dressing gown.

On the rim of the bath, designed to be wide enough to serve as a shelf, there are some bottles, a sky-blue dimpled rubber bathcap, a purse-shaped toilet bag made of a spongy pink substance with a plaited string closing, and a shiny parallelepipedic metal box, with a long slit opening on the top side, out of which emerges, in part, a Kleenex.

Anne Breidel lies prone on the floor by the bath, on a green bath towel. She is wearing a white buckram nightdress pulled halfway up her back; on her stretchmarked buttocks there lies an electrical thermal massage vibrator, about fifteen inches in diameter, covered in a red plastic material.

Whilst Béatrice, her sister, younger by one year, is tall and slim, Anne is chubby and puffed with fat. As she is constantly preoccupied by her weight, she imposes Draconian diets on herself but never has the strength to keep them up to the end, inflicts on herself treatments of every variety, from mud baths to sweating suits, from saunas followed by twig-beating to anorexic pills, from acupuncture to homeopathy, and from medicine balls, home trainers, forced marches, foot treading, chest expanders, parallel bars, and other exhausting exercises to every kind of massage possible: hair-glove massage, dried-squash massage, boxwood rolling-pin massage, massage with special soap, pumice stone, alum powder, gentian, ginseng, cucumber milk, and coarse salt. The one she is going through now has a particular advantage over all the others: it allows her to get on with other things at the same time; specifically, she uses these daily seventy-minute sessions during which the vibrator cushion will bring its alleged benefit successively to her shoulders, her back, her hips, her buttocks, her thighs, and her stomach to tot up her dietary performance: she has in front of her a little brochure entitled
Complete Table of Energy Values of Customary Foods
, in which the foods whose names are printed in special characters are obviously those to avoid, and she compares the figures it gives – chicory 20, quince 70, haddock 80,
sirloin
220,
raisins
290,
coconut
620 – with those of the foods she took the previous day and of which she has noted the precise quantities in a diary obviously kept for this purpose alone: