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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
'This is the story of about the strangest thing that I've ever encountered, old art dealer that I am.'It is perhaps the finest art collection of its kind, acquired through a lifetime of sacrifice - but when a dealer comes to see it, he finds something quite unexpected, and is drawn into a peculiar deception of the collector himself...Stefan Zweig was a wildly popular writer of compelling short fiction: in this collection there are peaks of extraordinary emotion, stories of all that is human crushed by the movements of history, of letters that fill a young heart or drive a person towards death, of obsession and desire. They will stay with the reader for ever.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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‘For far too long, our links with Zweig… have been broken. Pushkin Press’s phenomenal, heartbreaking collection is a reminder that it’s time to forge them again’
Los Angeles Review of Books
‘One of the joys of recent years is the translation into English of Stefan Zweig’s stories. They have an astringency of outlook and a mastery of scale that I find enormously enjoyable’
Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes
‘The rediscovery of this extraordinary writer could well be on a par with last year’s refinding of the long-lost Stoner, by John Williams’
Simon Winchester, Daily Telegraph
‘The Updike of his time… Zweig is a lucid writer, and Bell renders his prose flawlessly’
New York Observer
‘Zweig belongs with those masters of the novella—Maupassant, Turgenev, Chekhov’
Paul Bailey
‘One of the masters of the short story’
Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
‘Stefan Zweig… was a talented writer and ultimately another tragic victim of wartime despair. This rich collection… confirms how good he could be’
Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
‘An unjustly neglected literary master’
The Times
‘Zweig is at once the literary heir of Chekhov, Conrad, and Maupassant, with something of Schopenhauer’s observational meditations on psychology thrown in’
Harvard Review
‘Zweig is the most adult of writers; civilised, urbane, but never jaded or cynical; a realist who nonetheless believed in the possibility—the necessity—of empathy’
Independent
‘Zweig, prolific storyteller and embodiment of a vanished Mitteleuropa, seems to be back, and in a big way’
The New York Times
‘He was capable of making the reader live other people’s deepest experience—which is a moral education in itself. My advice is that you should go out at once and buy his books’
Sunday Telegraph
‘[During his lifetime] arguably the most widely read and translated serious author in the world’
John Fowles
‘The stories are as page-turning as they are subtle… Compelling’
Guardian
‘Stefan Zweig’s time of oblivion is over for good… it’s good to have him back’ Salman Rushdie,
The New York Times
STEFAN ZWEIG
THE INVISIBLE COLLECTION
Tales of Obsession and Desire
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell
CONTENTS
THE INVISIBLE COLLECTION
An episode from the time of German inflation
TWO STATIONS AFTER DRESDEN an elderly gentleman got into our compartment, passed the time of day civilly and then, looking up, expressly nodded to me as if I were an old acquaintance. At first I couldn’t remember him; however, as soon as he mentioned his name, with a slight smile, I recollected him at once as one of the most highly regarded art dealers in Berlin. In peacetime I had often viewed and bought old books and autograph manuscripts from him. We talked of nothing much for a while, but suddenly and abruptly he said: “I must tell you where I’ve just come from—this is the story of about the strangest thing that I’ve ever encountered, old art dealer that I am, in the thirty-seven years I’ve been practising my profession.” And the story as he told it follows.
You probably know for yourself what it’s like in the art trade these days, since the value of money started evaporating like gas; all of a sudden people who have just made their fortunes have discovered a taste for Gothic Madonnas, and incunabula, old engravings and pictures. You can’t conjure up enough such things to satisfy them—why, you have to be careful they don’t clear out your house and home. They’d happily buy the cufflinks from your sleeves and the lamp from your desk. It’s getting harder and harder to find new wares all the time—forgive me for suddenly describing as wares items that, to the likes of you and me, usually mean something to be revered—but these philistines have accustomed even me to regard a wonderful Venetian incunabulum only as if it were a coat costing such-and-such a sum in dollars, and a drawing by Guercino as the embodiment of a few hundred franc notes. There’s no resisting the insistent urging of those who are suddenly mad to buy art. So I was right out of stock again overnight, and I felt like putting up the shutters, I was so ashamed of seeing our old business that my father took over from my grandfather with nothing for sale but wretched trash, stuff that in the past no street trader in the north would have bothered even to put on his cart.
In this awkward situation, the idea of consulting our old business records occurred to me, to look up former customers from whom I might be able to get a few items if they happened to have duplicates. A list of old customers is always something of a graveyard, especially in times like the present, and it did not really tell me much: most of those who had bought from us in the past had long ago had to get rid of their possessions in auction sales, or had died, and I could not hope for much from the few who remained. But then I suddenly came upon a bundle of letters from a man who was probably our oldest customer, and who had surfaced from my memory only because after 1914 and the outbreak of the World War, he had never turned to us with any orders or queries again. The correspondence—and I really am not exaggerating!—went back over almost sixty years; he had bought from my father and my grandfather, yet I could not remember him ever coming into our premises in the thirty-seven years of my personal involvement with the family business. Everything suggested that he must have been a strange, old-fashioned oddity, one of that lost generation of Germans shown in the paintings and graphic art of such artists as Menzel and Spitzweg, who survived here and there as rare phenomena in little provincial towns until just before our own times. His letters were pure calligraphy, neatly written, the items he was ordering underlined in red ink, with a ruler, and he always wrote out the sum of money involved in words as well as figures, so that there could be no mistake. That, as well as his exclusive use of blank flyleaves from books as writing paper and old, reused envelopes, indicated the petty mind and fanatical thrift of a hopeless provincial. These remarkable documents were signed not only with his name but with the elaborate title: Forestry and Economic Councillor, retd; Lieutenant, retd; Holder of the Iron Cross First Class. Being a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War, he must therefore, if still alive, be at least eighty. However, as a collector of old examples of graphic art this ridiculously thrifty oddity showed unusual acumen, wide knowledge and excellent taste. As I slowly put together his orders from us over almost sixty years, the first of them still paid for in silver groschen, I realized that in the days when you could still buy a stack of the finest German woodcuts for a taler, this little provincial must have been assembling a collection of engravings that would probably show to great advantage beside those so loudly praised by the nouveaux riches. For what he had bought from us alone in orders costing him a few marks and pfennigs represented astonishing value today, and in addition it could be expected that his purchases at auction sales had been acquired equally inexpensively.
Although we had had no further orders from him since 1914, I was too familiar with all that went on in the art trade to have missed noticing the auction or private sale of such a collection. In that case, our unusual customer must either be still alive, or the collection was in the hands of his heirs.
The case interested me, and on the next day, that’s to say yesterday evening, I set off for one of the most provincial towns in Saxony; and as I strolled along the main street from the station it seemed to me impossible that here, in the middle of these undistinguished little houses with their tasteless contents, a man could live who owned some of the finest prints of Rembrandt’s etchings, as well as engravings by Dürer and Mantegna in such a perfectly complete state. To my surprise, however, when I asked at the post office if a forestry or economic councillor of his name lived here, I discovered that the old gentleman really was still alive, and in the middle of the morning I set off on my way to him—with my heart, I confess, beating rather faster.
I had no difficulty in finding his apartment. It was on the second floor of one of those cheaply built provincial buildings that might have been hastily constructed by some builder on spec in the 1860s. A master tailor lived on the first floor, to the left on the second floor I saw the shiny nameplate of a civil servant in the post office, and on the right, at last, a porcelain panel bearing the name of the Forestry and Economic Councillor. When I tentatively rang the bell, a very old white-haired woman wearing a clean little black cap immediately answered it. I gave her my card and asked if I might speak to the Forestry Councillor. Surprised, and with a touch of suspicion, she looked first at me and then at the card; a visitor from the outside world seemed to be an unusual event in this little town at the back of beyond and this old-fashioned building. But she asked me in friendly tones to wait, took my card and went into the room beyond the front door; I heard her whispering quietly, and then, suddenly, a loud male voice. “Oh, Herr R. from Berlin, from the great antiques dealers there… bring him in, bring him in, I’ll be very glad to meet him!” And the little old lady came tripping out to me again and asked me into the living room.
I took off my coat and followed her. In the middle of the modest little room an old but still-vigorous man stood erect. He had a bushy moustache and wore a frogged, semi-military casual jacket, and he was holding out both hands in heartfelt welcome. But this gesture, unmistakably one of happy and spontaneous greeting, contrasted with a curious rigidity in the way he held himself. He did not come a step closer to me, and I was obliged—feeling slightly alienated—to approach him myself in order to take his hand. As I was about to grasp it, however, the way he held both hands out horizontally, not moving them, told me that they were not searching for my own but expecting mine to find them. And the next moment I understood it all: this man was blind.
Even from my childhood I had always been uncomfortable facing someone blind; I was never able to fend off a certain shame and embarrassment in sensing that the blind person was entirely alive and knowing, at the same time, that he did not experience our meeting in the same way as I did. Now, yet again, I had to overcome my initial shock at seeing those dead eyes, staring fixedly into space under bushy white brows. However, the blind man himself did not leave me feeling awkward for long; as soon as my hand touched his he shook it powerfully, and repeated his welcome with strong and pleasingly heartfelt emotion. “A rare visitor,” he said, smiling broadly at me, “really, it’s a miracle, one of the great Berlin antiques dealers making his way to our little town… however, it behoves us to be careful when one of those gentlemen boards the train. Where I come from, we always say: keep your gates and your purses closed when the gypsies are in town… yes, yes, I can guess why you seek me out… business is going badly these days in our poor country; now that our unhappy land of Germany’s come down in the world, there are no buyers left, so the great gentlemen of the art world think of their old customers and go in search of those little lambs. But I’m afraid you won’t have much luck here, we poor old retired folk are glad if we can put a meal on the table. We can’t match the crazy prices you ask these days… the likes of us are finished with all that for ever.”
I told him at once that he had misunderstood me; I had not come to sell him anything, I just happened to be in this neighbourhood, and didn’t want to miss my chance of calling on him, as a customer of our house over many years, and paying my respects to one of the greatest collectors in Germany. As soon as I said, “one of the greatest collectors in Germany”, a remarkable change came over the old man’s face. He was still standing upright and rigid in the middle of the room, but now there was an expression of sudden brightness and deep pride in his attitude. He turned towards the place where he thought his wife was, as if to say, “Did you hear that?” and his voice as he then turned to me was full of delight, with not a trace of the brusque, military tone in which he had spoken just now; instead it was soft, positively tender.
“That’s really very, very good of you… and you will find you have not come here in vain. You shall see something that can’t be seen every day, even in the grandeur of Berlin… a few pieces as fine as any in the Albertina in Vienna or in that damn city of Paris… yes, if a man collects for sixty years he comes upon all kinds of things that aren’t to be found on every street corner. Luise, give me the key to the cupboard, please!”
But now something unexpected happened. The little old lady standing beside him, listening courteously and with smiling, quietly attentive friendliness to our conversation, suddenly raised both hands to me in an imploring gesture, at the same time shaking her head vigorously, a sign that at first I failed to understand.
Only then did she go over to her husband and lightly laid both hands on his shoulder. “Oh, Herwarth,” she admonished him, “you haven’t even asked the gentleman if he has time to spare to look at your collection. It’s nearly lunchtime, and after lunch you must rest for an hour, you know the doctor expressly said so. Wouldn’t it be better to show our visitor your things after lunch, and Annemarie will be here as well then, she understands it all much better than I do, she can help you!”
And once again, as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she repeated that urgently pleading gesture as if over her husband’s head, leaving him unaware of it. Now I understood her. I could tell that she wanted me to decline an immediate viewing, and I quickly invented a lunch engagement. It would be a pleasure and an honour to be allowed to see his collection, I said, but it wouldn’t be possible for me to do so before three in the afternoon. Then, however, I would happily come back here.
Cross as a child whose favourite toy has been taken away, the old man made a petulant gesture. “Oh, of course,” he grumbled, “those Berlin gentlemen never have time for anything. But today you’ll have to find the time, because it’s not just three or five good pieces I have, there are twenty-seven portfolios, one for each master of the graphic arts, and all of them full. So come back at three, but mind you’re punctual or we’ll never get through the whole collection.”
Once again he put out his hand into the air, in my direction. “I warn you, you may like it, or you may be jealous. And the more jealous you are the better I’ll be pleased. That’s collectors for you: we want it all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else!” And once again he shook my hand vigorously.
The little old lady accompanied me to the door. I had noticed a certain discomfort in her all this time, an expression of anxious embarrassment. But now, just before we reached the way out, she stammered in a low voice, “Could you… could you… could my daughter Annemarie join you before you come back to us? That would be better for… for various reasons… I expect you are lunching at the hotel?”
“Certainly, and I will be delighted to meet your daughter first. It will be a pleasure,” I said.
And sure enough, an hour later when I had just finished my lunch in the little restaurant of the hotel on the market square, a lady not in her first youth, simply dressed, came in and looked enquiringly around. I went up to her, introduced myself and said I was ready to set out with her at once to see the collection. However, with a sudden blush and the same confused embarrassment that her mother had shown, she asked if she could have a few words with me first. I saw at once that this was difficult for her. Whenever she was bringing herself to say something, that restless blush rose in her face, and her hand fidgeted with her dress. At last she began, hesitantly, overcome by confusion again and again.
“My mother has sent me to see you… she told me all about it, and… and we have a request to make. You see, we would like to inform you, before you go back to see my father… of course Father will want to show you his collection, and the collection… the collection, well, it isn’t entirely complete any more… there are several items missing… indeed, I’m afraid quite a number are missing…”
She had to catch her breath again, and then she suddenly looked at me and said, hastily: “I must speak to you perfectly frankly… you know what these times are like, I’m sure you’ll understand. After the outbreak of war Father went blind. His vision had been disturbed quite often before, but then all the agitation robbed him of his eyesight entirely. You see, even though he was seventy-six at the time he wanted to go to France with the army, and when the army didn’t advance at once, as it had in 1870, he was dreadfully upset, and his sight went downhill at terrifying speed. Otherwise he’s still hale and hearty: until recently he could walk for hours and even go hunting, his favourite sport. But now he can’t take long walks, and the only pleasure he has left is his collection. He looks at it every day… that’s to say, he can’t see it, he can’t see anything now, but he gets all the portfolios out so that he can at least touch the items in them, one by one, always in the same order; he’s known their order by heart for decades. Nothing else interests him these days, and I always have to read the accounts of all the auction sales in the newspaper to him. The higher the prices he hears about the happier he is, because… this is the worst of it, Father doesn’t understand about prices nowadays… he doesn’t know that we’ve lost everything, and his pension will keep us for only two days in the month… in addition, my sister’s husband fell in the war, leaving her with four small children. But Father has no idea of the material difficulties we’re in. At first we saved hard, even more than before, but that didn’t help. Then we began selling things—we didn’t touch his beloved collection, of course, we sold the little jewellery we had, but dear God, what did that amount to? After all, for sixty years Father had spent every pfennig he could spare on his prints alone. And one day there was nothing for us to sell, we didn’t know what to do, and then… then Mother and I sold one of the prints. Father would never have allowed it, after all, he doesn’t know how badly off we are, how hard it is to buy a little food on the black market, he doesn’t even know that we lost the war, and Alsace and Lorraine are part of France now, we don’t read those things to him when they appear in the paper, so that he won’t get upset.
“It was a very valuable item that we sold, a Rembrandt etching. The dealer offered us many, many thousands of marks for it, and we hoped that would provide for us for years. But you know how money melts away these days… we had deposited most of it in the bank, but two months later it was all gone. So we had to sell another work, and then another, and the dealer was always so late sending the money that it was already devalued when it arrived. Then we tried auctions, but there too we were cheated, although the prices were in millions… by the time the millions reached us they were nothing but worthless paper. And so gradually the best of his collection left us, except for a few good items, just so that we could lead the most frugal of lives, and Father has no idea of it.
“That’s why my mother was so alarmed when you came today—because if he opens the portfolios and shows them to you, it will all come out… you see, we put reprints or similar sheets of paper in the old mounts instead of the prints we had sold, so that he wouldn’t notice when he touched them. If he can only touch them and enumerate them (he remembers their order of arrangement perfectly), he feels just the same joy as when he could see them in the past with his own eyes. There’s no one else in this town whom Father would think worthy of seeing his treasures… and he loves every single print so fanatically that I think his heart would break if he guessed that they all passed out of his hands long ago. You are the first he has invited to see them in all these years, since the death of the former head of the engravings department in the Dresden gallery—he meant to show his portfolios to him. So I beg you…”
And suddenly the ageing woman raised her hands, and tears gleamed in her eyes.
“…We beg you… don’t make him unhappy… don’t make us all unhappy… don’t destroy his last illusion, help us to make him believe that all the prints he will describe to you are still there… he wouldn’t survive it if he only suspected. Maybe we have done him an injustice, but we couldn’t help it. One must live, and human lives, the lives of four orphaned children as well as my sister, are surely worth more than sheets of printed paper. To this day, what we did hasn’t taken any of his pleasure from him; he is happy to be able to leaf through his portfolios for three hours every afternoon, talking to every print as if it were a human being. And today… today would perhaps be the happiest day of his life; he’s been waiting years for a chance to show a connoisseur his darlings. Please… I beg and pray you, please don’t destroy his happiness!”
My account of her plea cannot express the deep distress with which she told me all this. My God—as a dealer I have seen many such people despicably robbed, infamously deceived by the inflation, people who were persuaded to part with their most precious family heirlooms for the price of a sandwich—but here Fate added a touch of its own, one that particularly moved me. Of course I promised her to keep the secret and do my best.
So we went back to the apartment together—on the way, still full of my bitter feelings, I heard about the trifling amounts that these poor women, who knew nothing of the subject, had been paid, but that only confirmed me in my decision to help them as well as I could. We went up the stairs, and as soon as we opened the door we heard the old man’s cheerfully hearty voice from the living room. “Come in, come in!” With a blind man’s keen hearing, he must have heard our footsteps as we climbed the stairs.
“Herwarth hasn’t been able to sleep at all, he is so impatient to show you his treasures,” said the little old lady, smiling. A single glance at her daughter had already set her mind at rest: I would not give them away. Piles of portfolios were arranged on the table, waiting for us, and as soon as the blind man felt my hand he took my arm, without further greeting, and pressed me down into an armchair.
“There, now let’s begin at once—there’s a great deal to see, and I know you gentlemen from Berlin never have much time. The first portfolio is devoted to that great master Dürer and, as you’ll see for yourself, pretty well complete—each of my prints finer than the last. Well, you can judge for yourself, look at this one!” he said, opening the portfolio at the first sheet it contained. “There—the Great Horse!”
And now, with the tender caution one would employ in handling something fragile, his fingertips touching it very lightly to avoid wear and tear, he took out of the folio a mount framing a blank, yellowed sheet of paper, and held the worthless scrap out in front of him with enthusiasm. He looked at it for several minutes, without of course really seeing it, but in his outstretched hand he held the empty sheet up level with his eyes, his expression ecstatic, his whole face magically expressing the intent gesture of a man looking at a fine work. And as his dead pupils stared at it—was it a reflection from the paper, or a glow coming from within him?—a knowledgeable light came into his eyes, a brightness borrowed from what he thought he saw.
“There,” he said proudly, “did you ever see a finer print? Every detail stands out so sharp and clear—I’ve looked at it beside the Dresden copy, which was flat and lifeless by comparison. And as for its provenance! There—” and he turned the sheet over and pointed to certain places on the back, which was also blank, so that I instinctively looked at it as if the marks he imagined were really there after all—“there you see the stamp of the Nagler collection, here the stamps of Remy and Esdaile; I dare say the illustrious collectors who owned this print before me never guessed that it would end up in this little room some day.”
A cold shudder ran down my back as the old man, knowing nothing of what had happened, praised an entirely blank sheet of paper to the skies; and it was a strange sight to see him pointing his finger, knowing the right places to the millimetre, to where the invisible collectors’ stamps that existed only in his imagination would have been. My throat constricted with the horror of it, and I didn’t know what to say; but when, in my confusion, I looked at his wife and daughter I saw the old woman’s hands raised pleadingly to me again, as she trembled with emotion. At this I got a grip on myself and began to play my part.
“Extraordinary!” I finally stammered. “A wonderful print.” And at once his entire face glowed with pride. “But that’s nothing to all I still have to show you,” he said triumphantly. “You must see my copy of the Melancholia, or the Passion—there, this one is an illuminated copy, you won’t see such quality in one of those again. Look at this—and again his fingers tenderly moved over an imaginary picture—“that freshness, that warm, grainy tone. All the fine dealers in Berlin, and the doctors who run the museums there, they’d be bowled over.”
And so that headlong, eloquent recital of his triumphs went on for another good two hours. I can’t say how eerie it was to join him in looking at a hundred, maybe two hundred blank sheets of paper or poor reproductions, but in the memory of this man, who was tragically unaware of their absence, the prints were so incredibly real that he could describe and praise every one of them unerringly, in precise detail, just as he remembered the order of them: the invisible collection that in reality must now be dispersed to all four corners of the earth was still genuinely present to the blind man, so touchingly deceived, and his passion for what he saw was so overwhelming that even I almost began to believe in it.
Only once was the somnambulistic certainty of his enthusiasm as he viewed the collection interrupted, alarmingly, by the danger of waking to reality; in speaking of his copy of Rembrandt’s Antiope (the print of the etching was a proof and must indeed have been inestimably valuable), he had once again been praising the sharpness of the print, and as he did so his nervously clairvoyant fingers lovingly followed the line of it, but his ultra-sensitive nerves of touch failed to feel an indentation that he expected on the blank sheet. The suggestion of a shadow descended on his brow. His voice became confused. “But surely… surely this is the Antiope?” he murmured, with some awkwardness, whereupon I immediately summoned up all my powers, quickly took the mounted sheet from his hands, and enthusiastically described the etching, which I myself knew well, in every detail. The tension in the blind man’s expression relaxed again. And the more I praised the merits of the collection, the more did a jovial warmth bloom in that gnarled old man’s face, a simple depth of feeling.
“Here’s someone who understands these things for once,” he rejoiced, turning triumphantly to his family. “At last, at long last a man who can tell you what my prints are worth. You’ve always been so cross with me for putting all the money I had to spare into my collection, that’s the truth of it: over sixty years no beer, no wine, no tobacco, no travelling, no visits to the theatre, no books—I was always saving and saving for these prints. But one day, when I’m gone, you’ll see—you two will be rich, richer than anyone in this town, as rich as the richest in Dresden, then for a change you’ll be glad of my folly. However, as long as I live not a single one of these prints leaves the house—they’ll have to carry me out first and only then my collection.”
And as he spoke, his hand passed lovingly over the portfolios that had been emptied of their contents long ago, as if they were living things—I found it terrible, yet at the same time touching, for in all the years of the war I had not seen so perfect and pure an expression of bliss on any German face. Beside him stood the women, looking mysteriously like the female figures in that etching by the German master, who, coming to visit the tomb of the Saviour, stand in front of the vault, broken open and empty, with an expression of fearful awe and at the same time joyous ecstasy. As the women disciples in that picture are radiant with their heavenly presentiment of the Saviour’s closeness, these two ageing, worn, impoverished ladies were irradiated by the childish bliss of the old man’s joy—half laughing, half in tears, it was a sight more moving than any I had ever seen. As for the old man himself, he could not hear enough of my praise, he kept stacking the portfolios up again and turning them, thirstily drinking in every word I said, and so for me it was a refreshing change when at last the deceitful portfolios were pushed aside and, protesting, he had to let the table be cleared for the coffee things. But what was my sense of guilty relief beside the swelling, tumultuous joy and high spirits of a man who seemed to be thirty years younger now! He told a hundred anecdotes of his purchases, his fishing trips in search of them, and rejecting any help tapped again and again on one of the sheets of paper, getting out another and then another print; he was exuberantly drunk as if on wine. When I finally said I must take my leave, he was positively startled, he seemed as upset as a self-willed child, and stamped his foot defiantly: this wouldn’t do, I had hardly seen half his treasures. And the women had a difficult time making him understand, in his obstinate displeasure, that he really couldn’t keep me there any longer or I would miss my train.
When, after desperate resistance, he finally saw the sense of that, and we were saying goodbye, his voice softened. He took both my hands, and his fingers caressed the joints of mine with all the expressiveness conveyed by the touch of a blind man, as if they wanted to know more of me and express more affection than could be put into words. “You have given me the greatest pleasure—at long, long last I have been able to look through my beloved prints again with a connoisseur. But you’ll find that you haven’t come to see me, old and blind as I am, in vain. I promise you here and now, before my wife as my witness, that I will add a clause to my will entrusting the auction of my collection to your old-established house. You shall have the honour of administering these unknown treasures”—and he placed his hand lovingly on the plundered portfolios—“until the day when they go out into the world and are dispersed. Just promise me to draw up a handsome catalogue: it will be my tombstone, and I couldn’t ask for a better memorial.”
I looked at his wife and daughter, who were holding each other close, and sometimes a tremor passed from one to the other, as if they were a single body trembling in united emotion. I myself felt a sense of solemnity in the touching way the old man, unaware of the truth, consigned the invisible and long-gone collection to my care as something precious. Greatly moved, I promised him what I could never perform; once again his dead pupils seemed to light up, and I felt his inner longing to feel me physically; I could tell by the tender, loving pressure of his fingers as they held mine in thanks and a vow.
The women went to the door with me. They dared not speak, for his keen hearing would have picked up every word, but their eyes beamed at me, warm with tears and full of gratitude! Feeling dazed, I made my way down the stairs. I was in fact ashamed of myself; like the angel in the fairy tale I had entered a poor family’s house, I had restored a blind man’s sight, if only for an hour, by helping him with what amounted to a white lie, when in truth I had gone to see him only as a mean-minded dealer hoping to get a few choice items out of someone by cunning. But what I took away with me was more: I had once again felt a sense of pure and lively enthusiasm in a dull, joyless time, a kind of spiritually irradiated ecstasy bent entirely on art, something that people these days seem to have forgotten entirely. And I felt—I can’t put it any other way—I felt a sense of reverence, although I was still ashamed of myself, without really knowing why.
I was already out in the street when I heard an upstairs window open, and my name was called; the old man had not wanted to miss looking with his blind eyes in the direction where he thought I would be standing. He leant so far forwards that the two women had to support him, waved his handkerchief and called, “Bon voyage!” with the cheerful, fresh voice of a boy. It was an unforgettable moment: the white-haired old man’s happy face up at the window, high above all the morose, driven, busy people in the street, gently elevated from what in truth is our dismal world on the white cloud of a well-meant delusion. And I found myself remembering the old saying—I think it was Goethe’s—“Collectors are happy men.”
TWILIGHT
MADAM DE PRIE, returning from her morning drive on the day when the King dismissed her lover the Duke of Bourbon from his position as prime-minister in charge of the affairs of state, thought, as the two footmen at the door bowed low to her, that she caught them suppressing a smile at the same time, which vexed her. She did not let it show for the moment, and walked past them and up the steps with composure. But when she reached the first landing on the stairs she abruptly turned her head back, and she saw a broad grin on the lips of the garrulous pair, although it rapidly disappeared as they bowed again in alarm.
Now she knew enough. And up in her salon, where an officer of the royal bodyguard with much gold braid about his person was waiting for her with a letter, she appeared to be in as serene and almost exuberant a mood as if this were merely a conventional call on a friend. Although she noticed the royal seal on the letter and the rather awkward manner of the officer who was aware of the embarrassing nature of his message, she showed neither curiosity nor concern. Without opening the letter or even examining it more closely she made light conversation with the aristocratic young soldier, and on recognising him as a Breton by his accent told him the story of a lady who could never stand Bretons, because one of his countrymen had once become her lover against her will. She was in high spirits and made risqué jokes, partly from a deliberate intention of showing how carefree she was, partly from habit, for in general a careless and easy levity made all her dissimulations seem natural, even transforming them into sincerity. She talked until she really forgot the royal letter, which she creased as she held it in her hands. But finally, after all, she broke the seal.
The letter contained the royal order, expressed briefly and with remarkably little civility, for her to leave court at once and retire to her estate of Courbépine in Normandy. She had fallen into disfavour, her enemies had won at last; even before the King’s message arrived she had known it from the smiles of her footmen at the door. But she did not give herself away. The officer carefully observed her eyes as they ran along the lines. They did not flicker, and now that she turned to him again a smile sparkled in them. “His Majesty is very anxious about my health, and would like me to leave the heat of the city and retire to my château. Tell his Majesty that I will comply with his wishes immediately.” She smiled as she spoke, as if there were some secret meaning in her words. The officer raised his hat to her and left, with a bow.
But the door had hardly closed behind him before the smile fell from her lips like a withered leaf. She angrily crumpled up the letter. How many such missives, each sealing a human fate, had been sent out into the world under the royal name when she herself had dictated their contents! And now, after she had ruled all France for two years, her enemies dared to banish her from court with a sheet of paper like this! She hadn’t expected so much courage from them. To be sure, the young King had never liked her and was ill-disposed towards her, but had she made Marie Leszczynska Queen of France only to be exiled now, just because a mob had rioted outside her windows and there was some kind of famine in the country? For a moment she wondered whether to resist the King’s command: the Regent of France, the Duke of Orléans, had been her lover, and anyone who now held power and a high position at court owed it all to her. She did not lack for friends. But she was too proud to appear as a beggar where she was known as a mistress; no one in France was ever to see her with anything but a smiling face. Her exile couldn’t last more than a few days, until tempers had calmed down, and then her friends would make sure she was recalled. In her mind, she was already looking forward to her revenge, and soothed her anger with that idea.
Madame de Prie went about her departure with the utmost secrecy. She gave no one a chance to feel sorry for her and received no callers, to avoid having to tell them she was going away. She wanted to disappear suddenly, in mysterious and dashing style, leaving a riddle calculated to confuse the whole court permanently linked to her absence, for it was a peculiarity of her character that she always wished to deceive, to veil whatever she was really doing with a lie. The only person she herself visited was the Count of Belle-Isle, her mortal enemy and the man behind her banishment. She sought him out to show him her smile, her unconcern, her self-confidence. She told him how she welcomed the opportunity of a rest from the stress of life at court, she told blatant lies that clearly showed him the depth of her hatred and contempt. The Count only smiled coldly and said he thought that she would find it hard to bear so long a period of solitude, and he gave the word “long” a strange emphasis that alarmed her. But she controlled herself, and civilly invited him to come and hunt on her estate.
In the afternoon she did meet one of her lovers in her little house in the rue Apolline, and told him to keep her well informed about everything that went on at court. She left that evening. She did not want to drive through the city in her open chaise during the day, because the common people had been hostile to her since the riot that cost human lives, and in addition she was determined to keep her disappearance a mystery. She intended to leave by night and return by day. She left her house just as it was, as if she were going away for only a day or so, and at the moment when the carriage began to move off she said out loud—knowing that her words would find their way back to court—that she was taking a short journey for the sake of her health and would soon be back. And she had schooled herself to wear the mask of dissimulation so well that, genuinely reassured by her own lie, she soon fell into an easy sleep in the jolting carriage, and woke only when she was well outside Paris and past the first posting station, surprised to find herself in a carriage at all, bound for something new, not knowing yet whether it would be good or bad. She felt only that the wheels were turning under her and she had no control over them, that she was gliding into the unknown, but she could not feel any serious anxiety, and soon fell asleep again.
The journey to Normandy was long and tedious, but her first day in Courbépine restored her cheerfulness. Her restless, fanciful mind, always lusting after novelty, discovered an unaccustomed charm in giving itself up to the crystalline purity of a summer’s day in the country. She lost herself in a thousand follies, amused herself by walking down the avenues of the park, jumping hedges and trying to catch fluttering butterflies, clad in a dress white as blossom with pale ribbons in her hair, like the little girl she had once been and whom she had thought long dead in her. She walked and walked, and for the first time in years felt the pleasure of letting her limbs relax in the rhythm of her pace, just as she delightedly rediscovered everything about the simple life that she had forgotten in her days at court. She lay in the emerald grass and looked up at the clouds. How strange it was: she hadn’t looked at a cloud for years, and she wondered whether clouds were as beautifully outlined, as fluffily white, as pure and airy above the buildings of Paris. For the first time she saw the sky as something real, and its blue vault, sprinkled with white, reminded her of the wonderful Chinese vase that a German prince had recently given her as a present, except that the sky was even lovelier, bluer, more rounded, and full of mild, fragrant air that felt as soft as silk. After hurrying from one entertainment to the next in Paris, she delighted in doing nothing, and the silence around her was as delicious as a cool drink. She now realised, for the first time, that she felt nothing for all the people who had flocked around her at Versailles, she neither loved nor hated any of them, she felt no more for them than for the peasants standing there on the outskirts of the wood with their large, flashing scythes, sometimes shading their eyes with a hand to peer curiously at her. She became more and more exuberant; she played with the young trees, jumped in the air until she could catch the hanging branches, let them spring up again, and laughed out loud when a few white blossoms, as if struck by an arrow, fell into the hand she held out to catch them or the hair she was wearing loose for the first time in years. With the wonderful facility of forgetfulness available to women of no great depth throughout their lives, she did not remember that she was in exile and before that had ruled France, playing with the fate of others as casually as she played now with butterflies and glimmering trees. She cast aside five, ten, fifteen years of her life and was Mademoiselle Pleuneuf again, daughter of the Geneva banker, playing in the convent garden, a small, thin, high-spirited girl of fifteen who knew nothing of Paris and the wide world.
In the afternoon she helped the maids with the harvest: she thought it uncommonly amusing to bind up the big sheaves and fling them exuberantly up to the farm cart. And she sat among them—they had been awestruck at first and behaved shyly—on top of the fully loaded wagon, dangling her legs, laughing with the young fellows and then, when the dancing began, whirling around with the best. It all felt to her like a successful masquerade at court, and she looked forward to telling everyone in Paris how charmingly she had spent her time, dancing with wild flowers in her hair and drinking from the same pitcher as the peasants. She noticed the reality of these things as little as she had felt, at Versailles, that the games of shepherds and shepherdesses were only pretence. Her heart was lost to the pleasure of the moment, it lied in telling the truth and was honest even while it intended to deceive, for she only ever knew what she felt. And what she felt now was delight and rapture running through her veins. The idea that she was out of favour was laughable.
But next morning a dark vestige of ill humour seeped in, mingling with the crystalline merriment of her hours. Waking itself was painful; she tumbled from the black night of dreamless sleep into day as if from warm, sultry air into icy water. She didn’t know what had woken her. It was not the light, for a dull, rainy day was dawning outside the tear-stained windows. And it was not the noise either, for there were no voices here, only the fixed, piercing eyes of the dead looking down at her from their pictures on the wall. She was awake and didn’t know why or what for; nothing appealed to her here or tempted her.
And she thought how different waking up in Paris had been. She had danced and talked all evening, had spent half the night with her friends, and then came the wonderful sleep of exhaustion, with bright images still flickering on in her excited mind. And in the morning, with her eyes closed and as if still in a dream, she heard muted voices in the anterooms, and no sooner did her levée begin than they came streaming in: the royal dukes of France, petitioners, lovers, friends, all vying for her favour and bringing the suitor’s gift of solicitous cheerfulness. Everyone had a story to tell, laughed, chattered, all the latest news and gossip came to her bedside, and her moment of waking carried her straight from those bright dreams into the full tide of life. The smile she had worn on her sleeping lips did not vanish but remained at the corners of her mouth, hovering there in high spirits like a bird swinging in its cage.
The day led her on from these images of her friends to those friends themselves, and they stayed with her as she dressed, as she drove out, as she ate, until far into the night again. She felt herself constantly carried on by this murmuring torrent, restless as the waves, dancing in never-ending rhythm and rocking the flowery boat of her life.
Here, however, the torrent cast her moment of awakening upon a rock, where it lay stranded on the beach of the hours, immobile and useless. Nothing tempted her to get up. Yesterday’s innocent amusements had lost their charm; her curiosity, used to being indulged, was of the kind that quickly wore off. Her room was empty, as if airless, and she felt empty too in this solitude where no one asked for her: empty, useless, washed out and drained; she had to remind herself slowly why and how she had come to be here. What did she expect of the day that made her stare so hard at the clock, as it paced indefatigably through the silence with its gentle, tremulous gait?
At last she remembered. She had asked the Prince of Alincourt, the only one of her former lovers for whom she felt any real affection, to send her news from court daily by a mounted messenger. All yesterday she had forgotten what a sensation her disappearance must have been in Paris; now she longed to enjoy that triumph. And the messenger soon arrived, but not the message. Alincourt wrote her a few indifferent banalities, news of the King’s health, visits from foreign princes, and let the letter peter out in friendly wishes for her well-being. Not a word about herself and her disappearance. She was angry. Hadn’t the news been made public? Or had no one really believed her pretence that she was coming to this tedious place for the sake of her health?
The messenger, a simple, bull-necked groom, shrugged his shoulders. He knew nothing. She concealed her annoyance and wrote back to Alincourt—without showing her displeasure—to thank him for his news and urge him to continue writing to her, telling her everything, all the details. She hoped not to stay in the country long, she said, although she liked it here very well. She didn’t even notice that she was lying to him.
But then the rest of the day was so long. The hours here, like the people themselves, seemed to go at a more sedate pace, and she knew no means of making them pass any faster. She didn’t know what to do with herself: everything in her was mute, all the brilliant music of her heart dead as a musical clock when the key has been lost. She tried all kinds of things, she sent for books, but even the wittiest of them seemed to her mere printed pages. Disquiet came over her, she missed all the people among whom she had lived for years. She sent the servants hither and thither to no good purpose with imperious commands: she wanted to hear footsteps on the stairs, to see people, to create an illusion of the busy hum of messages, to deceive herself, but like all her plans at present, it didn’t work. Eating disgusted her, like the room and the sky and her servants: all she wanted now was night and deep, black, dreamless sleep until morning, when a more satisfactory message would arrive.
At last evening came, but it was dismal here! Nothing but the coming of darkness, the disappearance of everything, the extinction of the light. Evening here was an end, whereas in Paris it had been the beginning of all pleasures. Here it let the night pour in, there it lit gilded candles in the royal halls, made the air sparkle in your eyes, kindled, warmed, intoxicated and inspired the heart. Here it only made you more anxious. She wandered from room to room: silence lurked in all of them, like a savage animal sated with all the years when no one had been here, and she feared it might leap on her. The floorboards groaned, the books creaked in their bindings as soon as you touched them; something in the spinet moaned in fright like a beaten child when she touched the keys and summoned up a tearful sound. Everything joined in the darkness to resist her, the intruder.
Then, shivering, she had lights lit all over the house. She tried to stay in one room, but she was constantly impelled to move on, she fled from room to room as if that would calm her. But everywhere she came up against the invisible wall of the silence that had ruled this place by right for years, and would not be dismissed. Even the lights seemed to feel it; they hissed quietly and wept hot drops of wax.
Seen from outside, however, the château shone brightly with its thirty sparkling windows, as if there were great festivities here. Groups of villagers stood outside, amazed and wondering aloud where so many people had suddenly come from. But the figure that they saw flitting like a shadow past first one window and then another was always the same: Madame de Prie, pacing desperately up and down like a wild beast in the prison of her inner solitude, looking through the window for something that never came.
On the third day she lost control of her impatience and it turned violent. The solitude oppressed her; she needed people, or at least news of people, of the court, the natural home of her whole being with all its ramifications, of her friends, something to excite or merely touch her. She couldn’t wait for the messenger, and early in the morning she rode for three hours to meet him. It was raining, and there was a high wind; her hair, heavy with water, pulled her head back, and the wind blew rain in her face so hard that she saw nothing. Her freezing hands could hardly hold the reins. Finally she galloped back, had her wet clothes stripped off, and took refuge in bed again. She waited feverishly, clenching her teeth on the covers. Now she understood the Count of Belle-Isle’s menacing smile as he said that she would find so long a period of solitude hard to bear. And it had been only three days!
At last the courier came. She did not pretend any longer, but avidly tore the seal off the letter with her nails, like a starving man tearing the husk off a fruit. There was a great deal about the court in it: her eye ran down the lines in search of her name. Nothing, nothing. But one name did stand out like fire: her position as lady-in-waiting had been given to Madame de Calaincourt.
For a moment she trembled and felt quite weak. So it was not a case of fleeting disfavour but permanent exile: it was her death sentence, and she loved life. She leaped suddenly out of bed, feeling no shame in front of the courier, and half-naked, shaking with the cold, she wrote letter after letter with a wild craving. She abandoned her show of pride. She wrote to the King, although she knew he hated her; she promised in the humblest, most pitifully grovelling of terms never to try meddling in affairs of state again. She wrote to Marie Leszczynska, reminding her that she was Queen of France only through the agency of Madame de Prie; she wrote to the ministers, promising them money; she turned to her friends. She urged Voltaire, whom she had saved from the Bastille, to write an elegy on her departure from court and to read it aloud. She ordered her secretary to commission lampoons on her enemies and have them distributed in pamphlet form. She wrote twenty such letters with her fevered hand, all begging for just one thing: Paris, the world, salvation from this solitude. They were no longer letters but screams. Then she opened a casket, gave the courier a handful of gold pieces, told him that even if he rode his horse to death he must be in Paris tonight. Only here had she learned what an hour really meant. Startled, he was going to thank her, but she drove him out.
Then she sought shelter in bed again. She was freezing. A harsh cough shook her thin frame. She lay staring ahead, always waiting for the clock on the mantelpiece to reach the hour and strike at last. But the hours were stubborn, they were not to be hounded with curses, with pleas, with gold, they went sleepily around. The servants came, she sent them all out, she would show no one her despair, she did not want food, or words, she wanted nothing from anyone. The rain fell incessantly outside, and she was as chilly as if she were standing out there shivering like the shrubs with their arms helplessly outstretched. One question went up and down in her mind like the swing of a pendulum: why, why, why, why? Why had God done this to her? Had she sinned so much?
She tugged at the bell-pull and told them to fetch the local priest. It soothed her to think that someone lived here to whom she could talk and confide her fears.
