The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter, page 10
Finished with his rounds, Rey scanned Vernet from head to toe.
“You know, you resemble him.”
“The beard?” Vernet darted a look at me.
“The eyes. Full of questions. You’re not a relative, are you?”
I felt vindicated in my opinion. Vernet let a smile wander across his lips.
“Come!” With Rey it seemed more of an order than an invitation. We followed him downstairs to a small surgery. Over the examining table hung a wooden crucifix. On the wall opposite hung a portrait of Dr. Rey himself, showing eyes as piercing as arrows. It didn’t take an expert to recognize Vincent’s hand. Its roughness suited its subject.
Rey threw on a coat and hat. Then he took a rather curious item out of a cabinet, an old straw hat with blots of white wax set round the rim. He handed it to Vernet.
“That was the hat he wore at night, when he wanted to paint under the stars.”
Vernet examined the hat minutely, as if it were a sacred relic. “Candles?”
Rey nodded. “He would light the candles and paint for hours, till the candles guttered. Anyone seeing him working like that would be convinced he was mad. Try it on.”
Vernet set the hat on his crown. “Ingenious. But surely dangerous?”
“Extremely so. Shall we take a stroll?”
It was an odd suggestion. The wind outside still marched up and down angrily. But Rey seemed to have some object in mind, and Vernet was willing to humor him.
“Keep the hat on, please, monsieur.” Odder still.
Dr. Rey was obviously an old hand at navigating the mistral. He led us through back streets and alleyways where the wind’s searching fingers could barely find us. Along this route we would run into the occasional locals going about their business, railway workers making their way to the yards, boys trotting along making deliveries for various shops, doffing their caps to the doctor, staring at the strangers with naked curiosity.
Then the attack came, just as Dr. Rey must have anticipated when he lured us out of doors. We were in a narrow lane where the spume blown off the river flung itself over the rooftops, wetting our shoulders. Then, as if from nowhere, a crowd of boys surrounded us. Rey grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into a doorway. A flurry of missiles was launched: cabbages, aubergines, potatoes, stale heels of bread, even a few stones, all aimed at Vernet, with practiced and demonic accuracy.
The detective reacted as anyone would under such an assault, shielding himself with his arms while trying to chase off his attackers, shouting and cursing heaven’s thunder at them. He got hold of one urchin by the collar and was bitten for his troubles, which made him curse all the more. The boy tore free, and the next boy slipped his grasp as well. Then a gendarme broke in upon the scene, laying about liberally with his baton, shouting, “Hooligans! I’ll have you all behind bars!” The boys broke ranks and fled pell-mell down the street, laughter and catcalls floating down the wind.
Vernet stood rasping, mortified, trying to brush the debris from his clothes. The gendarme, whom I recognized as our friend Monsieur Auguste, whipped out a clean handkerchief and wiped Vernet’s spattered face.
“A thousand pardons, monsieur. The ragtag of the streets. Vicious and ignorant.”
Vernet frowned across at Dr. Rey, who had held me back from giving any assistance. Not that I had put up too vigorous a struggle. Rey’s dark eyes twinkled.
Vernet’s face broke into a smile, like a ragged light through the clouds. “Quite the demonstration, Doctor. Did I look like a madman?” He handed the straw hat back.
Rey took the hat and gave a little bow, his work done. “If you’ll pardon me gentlemen, I’m only allowed an hour for my midday meal.”
“One question before you go, Doctor,” I begged. “Can you tell us anything about the man Paul Gauguin?”
I knew Dr. Rey for a man of science, else I’d swear it was the sign against the evil eye that he arrested midgesture. “That gentleman was never a patient of mine. For which I am grateful.”
And there he left us, strolling away down the street as if basking in the sun rather than battling the mistral.
Auguste seemed pleased to see him depart. “May I have your ear for a little minute, gentlemen?” he asked.
We fell in walking on either side of the gendarme, ready for whatever news he might divulge.
“You were surprised to see that we had Vincent’s ear?” he asked.
“Quite surprised,” replied Vernet carefully. For my part, I might have used the word “flabbergasted.”
“But you were not shocked. I could see that. You’ve met Monsieur Vincent, then?”
“We’ve seen him,” Vernet answered.
“And you observed what the superintendent never bothered to. That the lobe of Vincent’s left ear had been severed, but otherwise the ear was intact.”
“It therefore follows the ear you have in evidence—” Vernet began.
“—that does not resemble Vincent’s ear in the slightest—” I added.
“—could not belong to him,” Auguste agreed. Quod erat demonstrandum. “Yet, I assure you, this was the ear delivered to the prostitute. Have you asked him about that night?”
“Vincent is dead,” Vernet answered.
“Ah! Poor fellow. We’ll never know.”
“Did you not ask him yourself?”
“He would tell me nothing. But this I will swear on my honor: he was as shocked to see this ear as the girl was.”
“You think perhaps this ear was substituted for some trinket he had purchased for her? As some kind of macabre prank?” I asked.
“He and the other fellow, that Gauguin, they were both mad for her,” Auguste said, and shrugged. “I requested permission to inspect the bodies in the mortuaries, but, alas, I am not the chief of police!”
“Vincent had nothing to say about all this? Surely it would have saved him a world of suffering,” Vernet suggested.
“They were friends. He hung on to his friends like a bulldog.”
Vernet nodded. We had heard this sentiment voiced before. “The boy who actually delivered the ear to the brothel. Did you question him?”
“Boy?” Auguste stopped. “Ah, you mean Poulet. A simpleton. We could learn nothing there.”
“Might we interview him?”
“He’s not here. He went with Vincent.”
“Went with him?” Vernet’s voice was electric.
“Yes, when he went to the madhouse in St. Remy. To help look after him.”
The alarm was plain in Vernet’s countenance.
“Yes, that concerned me, too,” said Auguste. “But what would you? Vincent needed help. Few were willing to supply it.”
Our steps had taken us back to the police station in the Place Lamartine. We were facing Ginoux’s café and the tobacconist’s. The shutters of the shop were open now. Business as usual. What truly had happened inside that house at Christmas a year and a half ago? Had Vincent van Gogh gone mad and taken a razor to his own ear, as the police record told it? Or had there been some quarrel that caused Paul Gauguin to attack his friend with a saber, leaving him bleeding on the floor, as Vernet seemed to hint? I realized my head was throbbing, and had been for some time.
Vernet turned to Auguste. “Monsieur, you’re a man of acute perception and intellect. You’ve restored my faith in the French constabulary.”
The gendarme blushed prettily. “You’ve been a model for me for years, monsieur. I’ve read every account of your cases—in the English! Good hunting to you!”
He stood on tiptoe and planted an immaculate kiss on each of Vernet’s cheeks. Now it was the detective’s turn to blush. Auguste made an about-face to me. “And the good doctor! One must not forget the Boswell, eh?” Auguste had mistaken me, I think, for a fellow named Watson. He shook my hand vigorously, sparing me the kisses. Then he marched away down the street with a firm grip on his baton, keeping an eagle eye out for all the malefactors in the world.
In that moment I caught a glimpse of how those stories in the Strand might shape a certain kind of man—not boys, but boys at heart, knights of the Grail, celibate as monks, who viewed life as a gantlet to be dared, with a horde of foes lining either side, jabbing at their sides with long sharp spears, vying to bring them down before they came to Calvary. Was Vernet one of those boys himself? Were we engaged upon a commission, or a quest?
At all events, our business with the good citizens of Arles was concluded. At last, we were on our way to Montpellier.
Chapter Seven
Strictly speaking, we were on our way to Al Hambra. That was what Monsieur Lecomte had christened the chateau he had reimagined in the Moorish style on the outskirts of Montpellier, on an eminence east of the town. “He’s a dedicated Orientalist, my cousin Michel,” Vernet explained.
“A modern Marco Polo?”
“Quite the opposite. For forty years he rarely strayed more than twenty miles from Paris. Then, when Grévy ascended to the presidency, he journeyed into exile here. During the last ten years he’s never left Al Hambra.”
“Exile? You’re joking.”
“Self-imposed. Lecomte always considered himself a servant of the crown of France, even after France had toppled the crown. But Grévy’s ascendancy finally convinced him that his hopes were dashed; there will be no restoration of the monarchy in his lifetime. So, he retreated to our one-time family estate and tricked it out in Moorish costume. I think he fancies it the last outpost of a faded empire.”
“From what post did he retire?”
Vernet looked out the window. We had bid the mistral farewell, and opened the windows of our compartment to the lazy breezes from the sea. Hillsides garlanded in woad and madder rolled past, tiny yellow flowers massed together in streams of gold. “He used to audit the books in some of the government departments. Extraordinary head for figures.”
I will confess I felt certain misgivings at the prospect of facing Lecomte and his consortium without any of the proofs I had worked so diligently to accumulate. But Montpellier was also the home of the Musée Fabre, that had grown from a gift to the city fifty years earlier to one of the finest collections in France outside of Paris. Once I had discharged my commission, I hoped to have the opportunity of viewing their collection for the first time. That opportunity would present itself sooner than I expected, and in a most unusual fashion.
If Lecomte had made a career as a minor government functionary, then he must have inherited a dragon’s horde of money somewhere along the way. Al Hambra was more than just a name. Turning off the main road into the park, we rode the station diligence up the drive through groves of orange and tamarind. The camphorous scent of eucalyptus lulled our senses. A blink of the eye and we were in the Andalusian gardens of antiquity.
The estate had been far larger when the chateau was first built by Horace Vernet, an immensely popular painter of battle scenes and mythological tableaux, great-grandfather to Lecomte and Vernet both. Then, when the family’s fortunes dwindled, Eugene Dupuis’s father, a budding industrialist, had purchased the land along with the chateau, devoting half its acreage to industry. Fields run wild with madder and woad were replaced by mills dedicated to processing them into dyes. Then, with the burgeoning development of the new aniline dyes, the mills had been largely supplanted by chemical plants, with laboratories devoted to the birthing of an ever-increasing number of synthetic dyes. (I recalled Titian’s dictum that a real painter needed only three colors: black, white, and red. God knows what he would think of the carnival colors of modernity.) On Lecomte’s retirement, he had somehow persuaded Dupuis to sell back part of the estate. But the soot-blackened chimneys of the dye plant still loomed in the east, marring the Edenic prospect.
Our first sight of the chateau was akin to the Moor’s last sight of Granada. The stoic melancholy of old Spain oozed through every ruddy brick of the facade. The three wings of the chateau, originally shaped in the Baroque style, must have put Lecomte in mind of the Palace of the Lions. The courtyard, once a greensward, had been tiled over and a splashing fountain anchored in the center, guarded by sleepy stone lions. The facades were bolstered with horseshoe arches, the lintels incised with Arabic script. The motto above the entrance, however, though Arabic in style, was in fact Latin: Ego autem non movebor—“But I shall not be moved.”
No sooner had we arrived than Vernet turned the household upside down. Dupuis and General Normand, the other two members of the so-called consortium, had come down earlier in the week and had been waiting impatiently several days for this conclave. They had waited lunch for us. But then lunch had begun to get cold, and then they had not waited. The heat of the day was coming on, and they were grown lethargic in the still air.
But Vernet, fresh off the train, even before proper introductions were made, insisted we at once pay a visit to the Musée Fabre, which lay in the heart of the city. He had the diligence still waiting in the court. He promised it would “prove instructive,” which he seemed to think was ample reason for all and sundry to abandon their plans for naps and bow to his whim. And, of course, in the end, everyone did, for no one ever had such an iron whim as Vernet. But no one was cheerful about it. Mutiny was threatened every minute.
Heaven forbid I should object to the chance to see such a collection of paintings for the first time! But I suspected this would not be the pleasure visit I had looked forward to. Ars gratia artis doesn’t require the kind of punctilious examination implicit in the Morelli method. I could only assume I was the show pony Vernet wanted to put through his paces before our clients. With most of my studies still blowing in the wind over the valley of the Rhône, we undoubtedly needed another means of winning the gentlemen’s confidence. Not that I expected to find forgeries in Montpellier, but the process of authentication must ever be systematic and rigorous, no matter the circumstance.
Thus was I crammed inside the diligence with the gentlemen of the consortium, once again mourning a missed lunch, while Vernet sat up free and easy on the box with the driver. Worse, I was placed next to Michel Lecomte himself, a gentleman whose girth encompassed a considerable amount of real estate. He was nearer seventy than sixty, a tuft of white hair hanging on to his scalp, with a bulldog demeanor and boiled-gooseberry eyes enlarged by wire-rimmed spectacles.
Across from us sat Dupuis, whom I have mentioned before in connection with the Louvre and the Valadon woman. Next to him was General Victor Normand, whose discoveries, I was told, had somehow been the spark for our investigation. One could hardly fault Dupuis for his patrician good looks or his meticulously fashionable dress, and yet I overcame all obstacles to manage it. An air of superiority is even more grating when paired with a mordant sense of humor that seeks only to milk every sacred cow. He quickly became tedious.
Normand’s reputation and complexion had both been burnished in the French campaigns in North Africa. He was gaunt and rugged, with a fierce white moustache ensuring that no one would ever mistake him for a frivolous man. He had retired only a few years earlier; one could imagine phantom epaulettes upon his shoulders and a cutlass dangling by his side. Except for the occasional flippant remark from Dupuis, that fell on stony ground, there was no conversation in the offing with such men. We might have been packed into a tumbril rattling through the streets of Paris to the Place de Revolution, rather than a four-wheeler rolling through the palm-lined boulevards of Languedoc—a view which I would have thoroughly enjoyed in better company. The city put me in mind of Florence with its medieval architecture, or Bologna, with its ancient university. Still, I breathed a sigh of relief when we were delivered to our destination.
The Musée Fabre is not the Louvre, and for that I was thankful. Though it had grown tremendously from the thirty paintings bequeathed by its original patron, the painter Francois-Xavier Fabre, over sixty years ago, it was still a collection one could view comfortably in a single day. No trudging from one echoing gallery to another, to be mesmerized by the sheer number of canvases on display. It was hardly an intimate gallery, but at least one did not feel oneself unmoored and cast out on an endless sea of objets d’art.
But many of the painters whose works I had scrutinized in Paris were also represented in this museum, so I couldn’t help my eyes being drawn to the Poussins, the Ingres, the Davids. As we moved through the galleries, I sensed the other men looking over my shoulder, as if I were a carnival conjurer and they were waiting for me to produce a flock of doves from up my sleeve.
Vernet stopped in a corner to admire a painting. I stopped as well. Was he trying to signal to me that there was something suspect about this painting? The caravan hove to behind us, in a clump. Since there was already a student planted at his easel in front of the painting, and since it was by no means a work of great size, we were quite as rucked together as we had been in the coach.
The painting was a depiction of a southern seacoast in a golden morning mist, and a ship becalmed in the shadow of a promontory; the day promised to be hot and windless. Admirably executed, but certainly nothing unusual about it. Who was the artist, then? Ah! The signature was Vernet—whether Carl or Claude or Horace hardly mattered. Only one of them had specialized in these naval tableaux, but paintings in similar style had been the lifeblood of three generations of Vernets and their in-laws and cousins, uncles and nephews and probably even nieces. The detective’s interest was probably no more than familial vanity, shared by his cousin, whose eyes rested upon the scene with an abiding affection. I wondered idly whether Vernet’s mother in her youth might have been one of those copyists in the Louvre, and even whether he daubed in watercolors in the privacy of his chambers when he wasn’t tracking down safecrackers and blackmailers and second-story men. He and the copyist (no sylph with milk-white complexion, but a small, middle-aged man with alarming blue eyes behind thick spectacles and a long, waxed moustache like a meat skewer) traded comments extolling the painting’s virtues as if it were a newfound Correggio. I moved on, and my caravan shuffled behind me.
