CHAPTER XII
“HELLO, is that Monsieur Niox? Is that Quick Silver?” said a woman’s voice over the telephone.
And because he groaned, not answering with either a yes or a no, the twittering interspersed with giggles of laughter allowed him to recognize Fromentine’s voice. She scolded him for having forgotten them and reminded him of his promise to take them to the Louvre. She suggested a rendezvous the following day, which Pierre accepted, delighted at the prospect of seeing Hedwige again. They agreed to meet at two o’clock at the square du Carrousel.
“The museum is only open until four o’clock,” said Pierre. “Try to arrive a little before closing time.”
He was waiting for them in front of the Pavillon Mollien, in the coldest spot in Paris. They approached him head-on, asserting their full height. Pierre saw six marvellous legs coming towards him, walking with an imperious spirit and sparkle. He was dazzled, horrified. “If these girls were determined enough and followed up their ideas, nothing could withstand them. They’ve got an amazingly powerful presence. Everything grows dim once they take charge.”
As they came up to him, the troupe of Mademoiselles Boisrosé detached themselves and surrounded him, all talking at the same time, then shortly afterwards individually, each doing their best to attract his attention. How could he possibly cope with three of them? “But lack of concentration and the inability to persevere will be their downfall,” he added to reassure himself. “They will remain children and will never generate anything.”
They began at the beginning, with the fifty-ton objects that were impossible to lift, with the granite sphinxes doomed to remain for all eternity amid the dampness of the ground floor, with the stone Molochs, with all the simulated gods that would never reach a higher floor in any gallery and that would break the floorboards were they to be moved upstairs. Pierre Niox and his flock walked at a goodly pace and the noise of the women’s heels echoed on the stone slabs. Angélique wanted to stop, saying that she “adored” these monsters, their solitariness and their impotence, and that she could understand lovers arranging to meet in their shade. She emphasized this point eagerly, which surprised Pierre.
They inspected the ranks of obsolete gods, arranged by the Beaux-Arts in an eternal and administrative symmetry.
“Whose idea was it to collect all this?” asked Hedwige.
“The Renaissance, the Convention and the Second Empire,” Pierre replied. “The Louvre owes everything to them. It’s the poor periods that make the best collections.”
Followed by his three Graces, he strode past the antique sculpture, made his way through the Middle Ages, talking a great deal all the while. Angélique thanked him for “adding so much to her artistic knowledge”, which irritated Pierre because she was hopeless, mistaking Trajan’s column for the Vendôme column, the Bols for the Rembrandts, and going into raptures over the plaster casts as though they were original work. To please her guide, Angélique exaggerated her enthusiasm, not wishing to miss a single drawing.
“There are forty-eight thousand of them,” said Pierre.
Angélique adopted a studiously stooping attitude and pretended to ponder over the masterpieces, which got on Pierre’s nerves, particularly as the only things she called masterpieces were either under glass or those immediately in front of the benches. She discovered resemblances in every painting: a Frans Hals reminded her of Uncle Rocheflamme; Guercino’s Faith, Hope and Charity at the Feet of God represented herself and her sisters grouped around Mamicha.
Pierre, beside himself, dropped her off at the Clock Pavilion counter.
Pierre preferred the other two sisters because of their passivity. He snatched them away as though they were succulent prey and began to pace through the Apollo Gallery. The Venuses, the Hercules, the marbles and the bronzes, the pots and the vases did their best to solicit them as they passed, but their charms were to no avail. Pierre would not tolerate anyone liking what he disliked. He scanned the room with his eagle eye, trusting in his own dazzling good taste, and led his companions directly to the rare or perfect object. Hedwige followed, feeling rather irritated herself; firstly because she was not the object of any particular attention on Pierre’s part, and also because her foot was painful, due to a new inner sole. Her head was spinning. She had the feeling she was falling down a precipice of colours and draperies, into a pit of gilt frames writhing with school mythologies.
Pierre dismissed the minor Dutch masters and the effete Italians with all the disrespect due to them.
“Straight to the summits!” he cried, and despite Hedwige’s timid attempt to confess a liking for the Primitives, he dragged her off to the Spanish and French eighteenth-century schools. Scarcely had he reached Goya than she begged for mercy.
“Pierre Niox is the devil in person!” said Fromentine to Hedwige, laughing as she spoke.
“It was the devil who took Jesus Christ up the mountain and showed him the view,” replied Pierre, who had overheard.
Hedwige was not joking. She was in such pain that she felt she was being burnt on a slow flame. She would have preferred not to leave Pierre alone with Fromentine, who was following him at a brisk pace, having adopted his long stride. But her longing to take her shoes off was more powerful. She left them on their own. It was agreed they should meet in the Salon Carré, at closing time.
Fromentine glanced over her shoulder frequently: she could glimpse Hedwige in the distance, growing smaller and smaller, looking initially like a moving portrait, then like a character in an indoor painting, then like a miniature; eventually she disappeared entirely. Pierre and Fromentine set off together. The girl was determined to inflict unintelligible chatter on her companion, her gibberish spouting from a mouth buried in her fur, but he gazed only at her bottle-green eyes and the reddish curls trapped in between the silver-fox on her hat and that on her collar. The most spacious galleries opened up before them now like paths replete with gold and allegories. The Sabine women reached out their arms to them and the shipwrecked survivors of the Raft of the Medusa their fists; athletically, they sped past them. Pierre had finally met someone who could keep up with him; he led the way, but without walking ahead of Fromentine, who easily kept pace with him. She moved freely, proud of her conquest and happy to have the man entirely to herself and to be rid at last of all his paintings and statues, about which she understood nothing; it suited her youthfulness that this Louvre, intended for the study of fine arts, should be transformed into a playground; it struck her as normal to be the only working masterpiece there, the only living statue.