The Swan Thieves

Chapter 96-97

Chapter 96 Marlow
De Gaulle Airport was noisier than I remembered, and somehow larger, more bleakly institutional. Three years after this, arriving on a delayed honeymoon, I would see the same terminal cleared by police and hear the explosion from a safe vantage behind some shops: they were detonating a suitcase left unattended in the middle of one of the great halls. The noise went through our nerves, an echo of the bomb that turned out not to be inside. But in 2000, nerves were quieter and I was alone.
I took a cab to the hotel Zoe had recommended: my room there was little more than a concrete box, one window looking down the central building shaft, my bed hard and creaky; but it was steps away from the Gare de Lyon and just up the street from a bistro with the requisite awning, which the manager rolled up in the mornings by means of a large crank. I dropped my bags and went there for the first of many meals, this one satisfying beyond belief after the plane flight, the coffee steaming and strong, with plenty of milk. Then I returned to my box of a room and slept through even the caffeine for a drugged hour. When I woke, the day seemed half gone. I showered under hot water, groaning with the pleasure of it; I shaved, walked around the city a little with a pocket guidebook.
Henri lived in Montmartre, but I wouldn't visit him until tomorrow morning anyway. A few minutes after leaving the hotel, I glimpsed the domes of Sacre-Coeur against the sky. I remembered landmarks from my previous visit, a good twelve or thirteen years earlier. The guidebook reminded me that the dreamlike white church had been built as a symbol of government power, after the decapitation of the Paris Commune. I couldn't bring myself to sightsee, however, and I wandered instead; the book stayed in my pocket most of the rest of the day, except once when I lost my way far from the hotel, along the Seine, looking at bookstalls. It was damp weather, somewhere between warm and cool, sunlight breaking through now and then to make the water shine. I wished I had not stayed away so long, when all this was a mere plane ride from Washington. On a stairway leading down to the surface of the river, I spread my handkerchief over the slimy stone and sat sketching the boat--a restaurant edged with pots of flowers-- moored on the other side.
I was also eager to see the Beatrice de Clerval paintings at the Musee d'Orsay before closing time; those at the Musee de Maintenon could wait until tomorrow, after my visit to Henri Robinson. I followed the river to the Musee d'Orsay; I had missed it when I was last in Paris, and it had been newly open then. I won't try to describe the effect of the huge glass-roofed hall, its array of sculpture, the splendid ghost of a train station that had once served Beatrice de Clerval's generation and others. It was stunning--I lingered there for several hours.
I went first to Manet and the heady sensation of standing in front of Olympia, meeting her challenging gaze. Then I stumbled on a beautiful surprise--a Pissarro canvas showing a house in Louveciennes in winter. I didn't remember ever having seen this anywhere, the reddish house and sinuous trees laden with snow, the snow underfoot, the woman and little girl hand in hand and bundled up against the cold. I thought of Beatrice and her daughter, but this painting was dated 1872., years before Aude's birth. There were other winter scenes in the gallery, too--Monet and Sisley, more Pissarro, effets d'hiver, snow and carts and fences, trees and more snow. I saw heavy skies above the church towers of their adopted villages--Louveciennes, Marly-le-Roi, and others--and over the parks in Paris. Like Beatrice, they had loved their gardens in winter.
With Sisley and Pissarro, I found two Beatrice de Clervals, one a portrait of a golden-haired girl sewing--she must have been the maid described in the letters. The other was a painting of a swan floating pensively on brown water, an everyday swan, not divine. Beatrice had practiced that form with rigor, I thought, perhaps in preparation for the painting I would see tomorrow at Henri Robinson's. I found a landscape by Olivier Vignot, a bucolic scene, cows grazing, a field, a row of poplars, lazy fertile clouds. Perhaps Beatrice had respected his work more than I'd imagined; it was a skillful painting, although hardly innovative. The plaque dated it to 1854. Beatrice, I thought, had been three years old at the time.
When I'd finished my tour, I found a steak and frites for dinner and went back to the hotel. There, despite my efforts to read a Chapter from an excellent history of the Franco-Prussian War, I slept for thirteen hours, waking the next morning at a reasonable time and to the equally reasonable explanation that I was no longer a young traveler.
Chapter 97 Marlow
Henri Robinson's street in Montmartre was steep--not narrow but picturesque anyway, with wrought-iron balconies. I found the address and stood in the street for a few minutes before ringing--the bell sounded audibly, although his apartment sat on the second level of the building. I made my way up; the stairs were dark and dusty, and I wondered how a man of ninety-eight could negotiate them. The only door on the second floor opened before I could touch it; an old woman stood there, a woman in a brown dress, heavy stockings and shoes. For a weird moment, I thought I was looking at Aude de Clerval. The woman wore an apron and a quick smile, and she used a few words I didn't understand to show me into the sitting room. Aude, had she lived until now, would have been 120.
Henri Robinson held court in a jungle--plants filled the space, in orderly profusion. The room was sunny, at least on the street side, the light filtering in between bands of rose-colored silk. The walls were a soft pale jade, as were a pair of closed doors. There were paintings everywhere, not in the kind of careful display I'd seen at the home of his old friend Caillet, but crowded into every available space. Near Henri's chair was a head in oils that I thought must be Aude de Clerval, a long-faced, blue-eyed, aging woman with a coiffure from the 1940s or '50s. I wondered if that was the portrait of her Pedro Caillet claimed to have painted; I saw no signature. There were also some little pieces that might have been by Seurat--pointillist work anyway--and a host of paintings from between the wars. I didn't see anything that looked like the work of Beatrice de Clerval, and no sign of a painting that might be called The Swan Thieves. The niches and shelves that did not sag with books displayed a collection of celadon ceramics, which could have been Korean, and old. Perhaps I could ask him about them later.
Henri Robinson sat in an armchair nearly as worn as himself. When I entered, he got up slowly, despite my attempts at protest, my clumsy few words of French, and extended a transparent hand. He was a little shorter than I, skeletal in frame but able to stand upright once he straightened. He wore a striped dress shirt, dark trousers, and a red cardigan with gold buttons. His remaining wisps of hair were combed back, his nose as transparent as his hands, his cheeks chafed red, his eyes brown but fading behind glasses. It would have been a striking face in youth, dark-eyed and with high cheekbones, a fine, straight nose. His hands and arms trembled, but his handshake was decisive. It went through me like a chill that I was touching a hand that had caressed Beatrice's daughter, whose own hand Beatrice had once no doubt held and stroked.
"Good morning," he said in accented but clear English. "Please come in and sit down." The blue-veined hand again, pointing to a chair. "Too many newspapers." His smile showed teeth startlingly young and orderly--dentures. I cleared the papers from a second chair and waited until he'd lowered himself on skinny arms into his own seat.
"Monsieur Robinson, thank you for seeing me."
"It is a pleasure," he said. "Although, as I told you, the name of the man you mentioned is not a favorite with me."
"Robert Oliver is ill," I told him. "I suspect he was ill when he took these from you, because his condition is a cyclical one, and chronic. But I know it must have been upsetting to you." I drew the letters carefully from the inside pocket of my jacket; I had enclosed them in a folded envelope, from which I removed them before placing the bundle in his hands.
He looked down in astonishment, then at me. "They are yours?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. His face worked a little, his nose reddening and twitching, his voice breaking, as if the ghost of tears had invaded him for a moment. "They belonged, in fact, to Aude de Clerval, with whom I lived for more than twenty-five years. Her mother gave them to Aude when she was dying."
I thought of Beatrice, not young and earnest but middle-aged, perhaps white-haired, wracked by illness, consumed in what should have been her prime. She had died in her late fifties. My age, more or less, and I didn't even have a daughter to take leave of.
I nodded soberly to show my sympathy for the outrage he had endured. Henri Robinson's eyesight seemed sharp enough through the gold-rimmed glasses. "My patient--Robert Oliver--probably didn't realize the hurt he might cause by this theft. I can't ask you to forgive him, but perhaps you can understand. He was in love with Beatrice de Clerval."
"I know that," the old man said rather sharply. "I, too, know about obsession, if that is what you mean."
"I've read the letters, I should tell you. I had them translated. And I don't see how anyone could avoid loving her."
"She was apparently very sweet, tendre. You know that I loved her also, through her daughter. But how did you come to be interested in her, Dr. Marlow?"
He had remembered my name.
"Because of Robert Oliver." I described Robert's arrest, my struggles to get to know him during his first weeks with me, the face he sketched and later painted in place of any speech, my need to understand the vision that drove him. Henri Robinson listened with his hands together, sweatered shoulders hunched, simian and absorbed. Now and then he blinked but said nothing. I went on to tell him, with a strange feeling of relief, about my interviewing Kate, about Robert's paintings of Beatrice, about Mary and the story Robert had told her of encountering Beatrice's face in a crowd. I did not mention that I had been to see Pedro Caillet. I could deliver his greetings later, if that seemed right.
He listened in silence. I thought of my father--a young man, complete with car and girlfriend, by contrast with Henri Robinson. Robinson, like my father, would guess a great deal even if I didn't tell him everything. I spoke slowly and clearly, wondering a little about the extent of his English, and ashamed that I wasn't even attempting to air my rusty French. He seemed to understand me, in all senses. When I'd finished, he tapped his fingers against the bundle of letters that lay in his lap. "Dr. Marlow," he said, "I am deeply grateful to you for returning these. I understood that Robert Oliver must have stolen them--it was after his second visit that I could not find them. You know, he kept them for years."
I remembered crouching on the office floor at Kate's, reading a word: etretat.
"Yes. Well, I suppose he did not tell you that either, if he does not talk anymore." Henri Robinson arranged his bony knees in front of him. "He came here the first time in the early nineties, after he read in an article about my relation to Aude de Clerval. He wrote me, and I was so touched by his enthusiasm and his evident seriousness about art that I consented to let him visit me. We talked quite a lot--yes, he was certainly speaking then. And he listened well. He was very interesting, in fact."
"Can you tell me what you talked about, Monsieur Robinson?"
"Yes, I can." He put a hand on each armrest. There was something remarkably strong about this man, with his fine nose and chin, his cobweb hair. "I have never forgotten the moment when he walked into my apartment. As you know, he is very tall, Robert Oliver, a real presence, like an opera singer. I could not help but feel a little intimidated--he was a complete stranger, and I was alone at that time. But he was charming. He sat in the chair, I think where you are sitting now, and we talked first about painting and then about my collection, which I had given to the Musee de Maintenon, except for one piece. He had gone to see it the same afternoon, and he was very impressed."
I said, "I haven't been to the Maintenon yet, but I plan to."
"In any case, we sat here and we talked, and finally he asked me if I could tell him what I knew about Beatrice de Clerval. I told him a little about her life and work, and he said that he knew much of that already from his research. He wanted to know how Aude spoke about her mother. I could see clearly that he loved Beatrice's paintings, if 'loved' is the correct word. There was something very warm in him--I felt... drawn to him, in fact."
Henri coughed. "So I began to tell him what I remembered from Aude--that her mother had been gentle and lively, always a lover of art but completely dedicated to her, Aude. She said that her mother never painted or sketched in all the years that Aude knew her. Never. And that she never talked about her painting with regret--she would laugh if Aude asked her about it, and say that her daughter was her happiest work and she no longer needed anything else. When she was a teenager, Aude began to draw and paint a little, and her mother was always helpful, enthusiastic, but she would never join her. Aude told me once that she begged her mother to sketch with her, and her mother said, 'I have done my last drawings, dear, and they are waiting for you.' And she refused to explain what she meant and why she did not draw anymore. It always troubled Aude."
Henri Robinson turned toward me, his dark eyes glossy with a sheen like soap on water, which might have been cataracts or might have been the reflection of his glasses. "Dr. Marlow, I am an old man, and I loved Aude de Clerval very much. She has never left me. And Robert Oliver seemed deeply interested in her story and in the story of Beatrice de Clerval, so I read him the letters. I read them to him. In retrospect, I think Aude would have wanted me to. She and I read them aloud to each other once or twice, and she said she thought they were for people who could appreciate their story. That is why I have never published them or written about them."
"You read the letters to Robert?"
"Well, I know now that I certainly should not have, but I thought he needed to hear them because he was so interested. A mistake."
I imagined Robert, propped forward on big elbows, listening while the frail man in the other chair read out Beatrice's words, and Olivier's. "Did he understand them?"
"You mean the language? Oh, I gave him a translation when he needed it. And his French is quite good, you know. Or do you mean the content of the letters? I do not know what he understood about that."
"What was his reaction?"
"When I came to the end, I saw that his face was very--how do you say?--grim. I thought he might cry. Then he said a strange thing, but to himself. 'They lived, didn't they?' And I said yes, that when one reads old letters one understands that people in the past really did live, and it is very touching. I myself was moved by reading them aloud to this stranger. But he said no, no--he meant that they had really lived, but he had not." Henri Robinson shook his head, his eyes on me. "Then I began to think he was a little odd. But I am accustomed to artists, you know. Aude was terribly strange about her history and her mother's paintings--it was a thing I liked in her." He was silent. "Before we said good-bye, Robert told me the letters had helped him to know better what Beatrice would have wanted him to paint. He said he would dedicate himself to painting her life, to her memory and her honor. He talked like a man in love with the dead, as you say--I know what that means, Doctor. I sympathize."
I had a sense, watching him, of the restless person he had once been, the highly intelligent person he still was; twenty years before, he would have been wandering around the room as he talked with me, touching the spines of his books, adjusting a painting, picking a dead leaf off a plant. Perhaps Aude had been as calm and poised as the two portraits of her I'd seen--an intense woman, full of dignity. I thought of them together, the energetic, alluring young man who might have filled her with a sense of activity, and the confident, rather aloof woman whom he had made a vocation of adoring. "Did Robert say anything else?"
Robinson shrugged. "Nothing that I can remember. But my memory is not what it was. He left soon after that. He thanked me very politely and told me that his visit to me would always be part of his art. I did not expect to see him ever again."
"But there was a second time?"
"That was a surprise and a much shorter visit, within the last two years, I think. He did not write to me before he came, so I did not know he was in Paris. One day the bell rang, and Yvonne went to answer it and brought Oliver in. I was astonished. He said he was in Paris to get background for his work, and he had decided to come see me. I was having more problems by then--I could not walk well and could not remember things sometimes. You know that I reached ninety-eight this year?"
I nodded. "Yes--congratulations."
"It is an accident, Dr. Marlow, not an honor. In any case, Robert came in, and we talked. Once, I had to get up to go to the bathroom, and he helped me walk there because Yvonne was talking on the telephone in the kitchen. He was very strong. But you see I remember all that because about a week after he left, I wanted to look at the letters, and they were gone."
"Where did you keep them?" I tried to ask it casually.
"In that drawer." He pointed with white fingers to a cabinet across the room. "You can look in it if you want. It is still empty except for one thing." He closed a hand over the letters in his lap. "Now I will be able to put them back. I knew it had to be Oliver, because I have few visitors and Yvonne would never touch them-- she knows how I feel about them. You see, I gave away all the paintings, all of Beatrice's paintings, some years ago. All except for The Swan Thieves. They are at the Musee de Maintenon. I know I could die at any time. Aude wanted us to keep them for ourselves, but also to protect them, so I made the best decision I could. The Swan Thieves is different. I am still waiting to know for certain what to do with it. For a few minutes during the first visit of Robert Oliver, I thought I might even give it to him someday. Thank God I did not. The letters were all I had from Aude's love for her mother. They are precious to me."
I felt rather than saw the old man's rage, couched in these delicate terms. "And did you try to get them back?"
"Of course. I wrote to Oliver at the address he had left me the first time, but my letter was returned after a month. Someone wrote on it that there was no person of that name at the address."
Kate, perhaps, in a rage herself. "And you never heard from him again?"
"I did. This made it worse, I think. He sent me a note. It is for now the only item in that drawer."