Life: A User's Manual (17 page)
In the fifties, long before Gratiolet sold Rorschach the two superimposed apartments that would become his duplex, an Italian family called Grifalconi lived for a while on the fourth floor to the left of the stairs. Emilio Grifalconi was a cabinet-maker from Verona. His speciality was repairing antiques, and he had come to Paris to restore the furnishings in Château de la Muette. He was married to a young woman fifteen years his junior; her name was Laetizia; three years before, she had borne him twins.
The building, the block, and the neighbourhood were captivated by Laetizia’s severe, almost sombre beauty. Every afternoon, in the Monceau Gardens, she used to walk her children in a double perambulator built especially for twins. No doubt it was during such an outing that she met one of the men most troubled by her beauty. His name was Paul Hébert. (He also lived in the building, on the fifth floor to the right.) He had been arrested on 7 October 1943, when he was barely eighteen, in the big roundup on Boulevard Saint-Germain that followed the assassination of Captain Dittersdorf and Lieutenants Nebel and Knödelwurst. Paul Hébert was sent to Buchenwald. He was liberated in forty-five. After spending seven years in a sanatorium in the Grisons, he had only recently returned to France and found a job teaching physics and chemistry at Collège Chaptal, an independent school. Naturally, his students at once nicknamed him pH.
Their affair – not intentionally platonic, but probably limited by circumstance to furtive hand-holding and an occasional embrace – had been going on for four years when, in the autumn of 1955, pH was transferred to Mazamet. His doctors had insisted he be moved to a dry climate near the mountains.
For several months he wrote letters to Laetizia begging her to join him; each time she refused. By chance a draft of one of her replies was found by her husband:
I am depressed, troubled, a mass of nerves. I feel the way I did two years ago, horribly on edge. Everything wounds me, tears me to pieces. Your last two letters made my heart beat almost to bursting. They move me so, when I unfold them and the scent of your writing paper rises to my nostrils and the fragrance of your caressing words penetrates me to the heart. Spare me; you make me giddy with your love! We must convince ourselves, however, that we cannot live together. We must resign ourselves to a flatter, more pallid existence. I wish that you would accustom yourself to this; I want the thought of me to comfort you, not consume you; to console you, not drive you to despair. What can we do, darling? It must be so. We cannot continue with these convulsions of the soul. The despondency that follows is a kind of death. Work, think of other things. You have so much intelligence: use a little of it to become more serene. I am at the end of my strength. I had plenty of courage for myself: but for two! My role is to sustain everyone, and I am exhausted. Don’t distress me with your outbursts, which make me curse myself, without seeing any remedy….
Emilio naturally could not know for whom this unfinished draft was intended. He so trusted Laetizia that he thought at first that she must have copied a passage out of some novelette; and Laetizia could have made him believe this, had she so wanted. But if, during those long years, she had been able to leave the truth unspoken, she was incapable now of disguising it. When Emilio questioned her, she confessed with appalling calm that her dearest wish had been to live with Hébert, and that she had decided against doing so only for his sake and the twins’.
Grifalconi let her go. He did not commit suicide or become an alcoholic but instead devoted all his attention to the care of the twins. Each morning before going to work he took them to school, and in the evening he brought them home. He did the shopping, he cooked for them and washed them. He cut up their meat, helped with their homework, read them bedtime stories, took them on Saturday afternoons to Avenue des Ternes to buy them shoes, duffel-coats, and jumpers. He made sure they went to Sunday school and were confirmed.
In 1959, at the termination of his contract with the Ministry of Cultural Affairs (the agency overseeing the work at Château de la Muette), Grifalconi returned with his children to Verona. A few weeks earlier, he called on Valène to commission a picture. He wanted the painter to portray him in the company of his wife and their two children. The four of them would be in the dining room. He would be seated; she would be standing behind him in her black skirt and flowered blouse, her left hand resting on his left shoulder in a gesture of serene trust; the twins would be wearing their handsome sailor suits and their confirmation armbands. A photograph of his grandfather, who had visited the Pyramids, would be set on the table; and on the mantel Laetizia’s bridal wreath would appear between the two pots of rosemary she so loved.
Instead of a painting, Valène executed a coloured pen-and-ink drawing. With Emilio and the twins posing for him, making use for Laetizia of several photographs that were none too new, he lavished the greatest care on all the details the cabinet-maker requested of him – the little blue and purple flowers on Laetizia’s blouse, his forebear’s spats and pith helmet, the laborious gilding of the bridal wreath, the damask folds of the twins’ armbands.
Emilio was so pleased with Valène that he insisted not only on paying him but on presenting him with two objects that were incomparably dear to him. He brought the painter to his apartment and laid an oblong case of green leather on the table. Having turned on a ceiling spotlight to illuminate the case, he opened it. A weapon rested on the brilliant red lining, its smooth handle of ash, its bill-shaped flat blade of gold. “Do you know what this is?” he asked. Valène raised his eyebrows to express his perplexity. “It’s a golden billhook – the kind the Gallic druids used for harvesting mistletoe.” Valène looked at Grifalconi incredulously, but the cabinet-maker seemed sure of himself. “I made the handle, of course, but the blade is original. It was discovered in a tomb near Aix-en-Provence. It’s said to be typical Salian workmanship.” Valène examined the blade more closely. Seven minute engravings were delicately chased on one of its sides, but he was unable to make out what they represented, even with the aid of a powerful magnifying glass. All he could see was that in several of them there apparently figured a woman with very long hair.
The second object was even stranger. When Grifalconi extracted it from its padded case, Valène thought at first that it was a large cluster of coral. Grifalconi shook his head. In one of the attics in Château de la Muette he had found the remains of a table. Its oval top, wonderfully inlaid with mother-of-pearl, was exceptionally well preserved; but its base, a massive, spindle-shaped column of grained wood, turned out to be completely worm-eaten. The worms had done their work in covert, subterranean fashion, creating innumerable ducts and microscopic channels now filled with pulverised wood. No sign of this insidsted n workmanship.” Valène examined the blade more closely. Seven minute engravings were delicately chased on one of its sides, but he was unable to make out what they represented, even with the aid of a powerful magnifying glass. All he could see was that in several of them there apparently figured a woman with very long hair.
The second object was even stranger. When Grifalconi extracted it from its padded case, Valène thought at first that it was a large cluster of coral. Grifalconi shook his head. In one of the attics in Château de la Muette he had found the remains of a table. Its oval top, wonderfully inlaid with mother-of-pearl, was exceptionally well preserved; but its base, a massive, spindle-shaped column of grained wood, turned out to be completely worm-eaten. The worms had done their work in covert, subterranean fashion, creating innumerable ducts and microscopic channels now filled with pulverised wood. No sign of this insidsted n workmanship.” Valène examined the blade more closely. Seven minute engravings were delicately chased on one of its sides, but he was unable to make out what they represented, even with the aid of a powerful magnifying glass. All he could see was that in several of them there apparently figured a woman with very long hair.
The second object was even stranger. When Grifalconi extracted it from its padded case, Valène thought at first that it was a large cluster of coral. Grifalconi shook his head. In one of the attics in Château de la Muette he had found the remains of a table. Its oval top, wonderfully inlaid with mother-of-pearl, was exceptionally well preserved; but its base, a massive, spindle-shaped column of grained wood, turned out to be completely worm-eaten. The worms had done their work in covert, subterranean fashion, creating innumerable ducts and microscopic channels now filled with pulverised wood. No sign of this insidsted n workmanship.” Valène examined the blade more closely. Seven minute engravings were delicately chased on one of its sides, but he was unable to make out what they represented, even with the aid of a powerful magnifying glass. All he could see was that in several of them there apparently figured a woman with very long hair.
The second object was even stranger. When Grifalconi extracted it from its padded case, Valène thought at first that it was a large cluster of coral. Grifalconi shook his head. In one of the attics in Château de la Muette he had found the remains of a table. Its oval top, wonderfully inlaid with mother-of-pearl, was exceptionally well preserved; but its base, a massive, spindle-shaped column of grained wood, turned out to be completely worm-eaten. The worms had done their work in covert, subterranean fashion, creating innumerable ducts and microscopic channels now filled with pulverised wood. No sign of this insidsted n workmanship.” Valène examined the blade more closely. Seven minute engravings were delicately chased on one of its sides, but he was unable to make out what they represented, even with the aid of a powerful magnifying glass. All he could see was that in several of them there apparently figured a woman with very long hair.
The second object was even stranger. When Grifalconi extracted it from its padded case, Valène thought at first that it was a large cluster
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Beaumont, 3
MADAME DE BEAUMONT IS in her bedroom, sitting in her Louis XV-style bed, propped up by four pillows in finely embroidered slips. She is an old woman of seventy-five with a lined face, snowy white hair, and grey eyes. She is wearing a white silk bedjacket and on her left ring finger has a ring whose stone is a topaz cut into a lozenge. A folio artbook, entitled
Ars vanitatis
, lies open on her lap at a full-page reproduction of one of the celebrated
Vanities
of the Strasbourg school: a skull set amongst attributes symbolising the five senses, not at all the canonical symbols in this instance, but easily recognisable: taste is represented not by a fattened goose or a fresh-killed hare, but by a ham hanging from a rafter, and a fine white porcelain tea-urn takes the place of the standard glass of wine; touch is figured by dice and by an alabaster pyramid topped with a diamond-shaped cut-glass stopper; hearing by a small finger-stopped (not valve-stopped) trumpet of the sort used for sounding flourishes; sight, which is also, in the symbolic system of these kinds of pictures, the perception of inexorable time, is figured by the skull itself and, in dramatic contrast, by a wall-clock in a fretwork case; and lastly, smell is suggested not by the traditional bunches of roses or pinks, but by a succulent, a sort of dwarf anthurium whose biannual inflorescences give off a strong smell of myrrh.
An inspector from Rethel was given the task of elucidating the events that had led to the double murder at Chaumont-Porcien. He took barely a week to complete his investigation, and succeeded only in deepening the mystery surrounding this murky business. It was established that the murderer had not broken into the Breidels’ bungalow, but had probably entered by the back door, which was almost never locked, even at night, and that he had left in the same way, locking the door behind him. The murder weapon was a razor or, to be more precise, a scalpel with a replaceable blade, which the murderer had no doubt brought with him and in any case taken away, since there was no trace of it in the house; nor were there any fingerprints or other clues. The crime had taken place in the night of the Sunday; the exact time could not be ascertained. Nobody had heard a thing. No shout, no noise. It was very probable that François and Elizabeth were killed in their sleep so quickly that they didn’t have time to resist: the murderer slit their throats with such dexterity that one of the first police hypotheses was that the criminal must have been either a professional killer, or a meat butcher, or a surgeon.
Obviously, all these points proved that the crime had been carefully premeditated. But nobody, at Chaumont-Porcien or anywhere else, could imagine why anyone would have wanted to murder somebody like François Breidel or his wife. They had settled in the village a little more than a year before; it wasn’t known exactly where they came from; maybe from the South, but nobody knew for certain and it seemed that before settling down they had led a rather nomadic life. The interrogations of the Breidel parents, at Arlon, and of Véra de Beaumont, produced no new information: like Madame de Beaumont, the Breidel parents had lost touch with their child many years earlier. Appeals for information, with photographs of the two victims, were posted widely in France and abroad, but they too led to nothing.