He stopped to catch his breath.
“What was I saying? I’ve forgotten.”
“You’re losing your ideas along the way,” Placide sniggered.
“I remember. Napoleon is not concise because he is the emperor, he’s the emperor because he is concise. If I hadn’t been concise, I wouldn’t have got the Mas Vieux or Hedwige. Placide, I’m leaving her with you, I have to go out. You must explain to her in what ways I resemble Napoleon.”
Sitting in her armchair, her hands crossed like a little girl waiting to be told a lovely story, Hedwige looked questioningly at Placide.
“Well, madame,” said Placide, “are you waiting for me to discuss the antique dealer with the nimble feet with you? It’s a joke. You know him better than I do!”
“I don’t know him,” said Hedwige simply. “Who can know Pierre?”
“Then why do you come to me?”
“Because you’ve followed his career for a long time and you can tell me about his life.”
The subject did not inspire Placide greatly, but he liked to hold forth and he could not have found a better audience. Already fascinated, she lapped up his words. He began in a light-hearted tone, mannered and slightly mocking, running through the school years, the successful exam results and the early days in what he called “business”.
“In art,” he said, “Pierre delved back in time with the same frenzy with which he approached everyday life. From the Gothic, which was his speciality, he hopped over, God knows why, to the Merovingian and from the Merovingian he dashed over to Iranian sources.”
With a condescendingly forgiving smile, he explained how Pierre had gained ground on everyone else and discovered, sometimes at excavation sites, sometimes in private collections, objects that were ten or fifteen centuries older than the steel trains or duralumin planes aboard which he took them away, and how this “treasure-hunt” satisfied his need for “irrational trips away”. He acknowledged generously, nevertheless, that Pierre, before any of his colleagues in either the old or the new world, had taken the trouble to study ethnography, popular art, linguistics, archaeology and aerial photography, helped by an aptitude and a prodigious memory, which enabled him to take part in excavations and to discover trails with a flair that tended to irritate the specialists.
“Ah! How many sleepless nights must this dabbler Pierre have cost the collectors!” exclaimed Placide.
He began to discourse on the subject, which for him was inexhaustible.
“The great collections are not forbidding piles of trinkets or featureless graveyards of remains as those who attend the famous auction houses imagine. They live, die, are reborn, they improve, they deteriorate. Some of them disintegrate in a day, like a theory. For the art of vanished ages, and especially the most ancient ones, is as inventive in renewing itself as is the brain of a man of genius; living in the earth and even at the bottom of the seas, buried deep down all over the globe, it bubbles upwards, emerges from the darkness, bursts forth, disconcerts people, shakes them up. It’s a constant revolution, a continuous refining. Each discovery is a provocation that demands a response. Such and such a top-quality Sassanid piece will be greeted in New York harbour like a diva; and it will have been enough for it to appear, not merely because of the pleasure it gives, but in order to downgrade what had given pleasure up till then. Solomon’s temple is rebuilt every day, and taste, which we have wrongly made synonymous with talent, is in a state of perpetual imbalance. It only takes a new site in the civilization of the Indus, or a tear in the centuries-old curtain that conceals the Hittite Empire from us, for a museum, until then highly regarded, to be relegated to the rank of an old second-hand dealer. It only needs a tomb opening up near Pretoria and for the small statue of a sleeping rhinoceros alongside a Bantu skeleton to emerge for telegrams to fly and for chapters of art history and market prices to fluctuate in Buenos Aires, London or Budapest. And, as it happens, Pierre was there in Pretoria,” Placide concluded as he stood up to drink a glass of water.
“Go on, go on,” begged Hedwige.
“But I’m thrilled to continue, madame. I am desirous of pleasing you. Would I not be making myself unworthy of your trust if I failed to retrace the stream of my memory as you have invited me to do?”
Placide listened to himself speaking with as much pleasure as he was listened to. Begun in a tone of amiable nonchalance, the biography was attaining epic status. Placide became so suitably aroused that he eventually managed to paint a portrait of Pierre designed to kindle an imagination that only required a spark. A portrait he regretted because he was jealous of Pierre, but, for once, truth was stronger than malice.
He paused again, but Hedwige pressed him with questions; Pierre had taken part in excavations; had he taken any risks?
“No more than the other archaeologists,” said Placide, screwing up his face. “Of course, in Tse-Kiang, for example, when he was working on the excavation of the famous city built of pieces of Sung pottery that had misfired — imagine that, a city built entirely of Sung vases! A band of Chinese generals captured Pierre and stole his bags of silver dollars. Those are some of the minor misfortunes of a profession that has many high points. In Luristan, for example, at the opening of a Neolithic tomb, when they discovered a funeral cart surrounded by a pack of hunting dogs and forty horses, all intact; a marvellous vision, but a fleeting one, because on contact with the air everything that was made of wood or bone turned to dust, leaving only the bits and pieces, the small bells, the wheel hub — in short, the metal… I also love his story of the skull. Do you know it?”
“No.”
“In a desert in Mongolia he discovered the huge skull of a horse — that of Genghis Khan’s horse, he immediately claimed — a malevolent skull that wreaked ruin and death and which eventually caused their plane to crash. That lucky Pierre was the only survivor of the accident.”
Hedwige shuddered. Delighted to have had such an effect, Placide continued:
“I should also like to tell you of another of our excellent Pierre’s juicy adventures: his forced landing in a district of Baluchistan on a day in Ramadan when any foreigner found out of doors was immediately butcherefd. Did Pierre know this or had he guessed it? — he doesn’t lack for intuition at times — in any case he walked through the entire town, bolt upright, staring straight ahead and as though turned in on himself, with such determination not to be seen or above all lynched, that he passed unnoticed!”
Placide stopped talking, his job was done; Hedwige was no longer listening to him, she was waiting for Pierre.
He entered the room in a whirlwind.
“Quick, Hedwige, I’m taking you with me.”
“What time is it?” asked Hedwige.
“Thanks to you, it’s four o’clock,” replied Pierre, proudly pointing to his watch.
Hedwige had given him as a wedding present a magnificent stopwatch chronometer, with nineteen markers for every hundredth of a second and with adjustable repeaters. It was a symbolic present that was not so much a reward as a good lesson.