The Folding Star (26 page)

‘It’s a wintry day, isn’t it, let’s have some wine.’

‘Yes please.’ This was almost slatternly by Paul’s standards. ‘I see the
Légendes flamandes
were published by Guillaume Alti-dore, who I now know was the great-grandfather of my other pupil.’

‘Of course, I’d forgotten that.’

‘He was telling me all about the family’s decline.’ And my hand shook as I lifted the glass from the table.

‘I suppose they have rather declined. I expect you’ve seen their old house, just near here? It’s offices now, no one could live in a house that big.’ He stuck a finger in something and licked it. ‘I’m afraid Martin Altidore’s no good – the boy’s father. And the mother’s rather pathetic, isn’t she? I had a difficult time over one of her altar-cloths. As secretary of the Antiquarian Society I had to write and say we
didn’t
think it appropriate.’

‘Poor woman. I’m not surprised though.’ I recalled her ironic first reactions to the name of Echevin.

‘The Altidores were always marked by eccentricity, or whimsicality. And I dare say the combination of that with immense wealth was not a very sound … recipe. Unlike this curried chicken salad, I suppose it is. Let’s eat.’ He went out into the hall and warbled ‘Marcel!’ up the stairs in a sweetly silly way. There was a distant impression of dropped objects and going to the lavatory.

‘I gather your last lesson went well?’ he said.

I was still thinking of the Altidores, and my last lesson with Luc came back to me with a twinge. Then ‘Oh, yes, fine. Yes, he’s getting much more confident.’ (Was he? Really he seemed much the same to me, but relations between the three of us depended on this pleasing fiction.)

‘What
is
the Altidore boy’s name?’ asked Paul when we had all sat down. As always I found it difficult just to bring it out – it was heralded by such inner flutterings and gongings.

‘He’s called Luc,’ said Marcel.

‘Now did Luc tell you about his much older forebears, in the sixteenth century, for instance? They were more interesting in a way. One sees how the family fortunes have gone up and down, very wealthy in the fifteenth century, then, as you know, the old sea-canal silted up and most of the money-makers moved out. They stayed on, living on the past, as their prosperity slowly declined. It was only with the Congo business that they suddenly shot up again, I believe, and that wasn’t for long.’

‘Luc’s father seems fairly well-heeled.’

‘Luc’s father sold a Memling. To Japan.’

‘Ah.’

‘A Nativity specially painted for his ancestor, for the altar of the private chapel of a guild, a kind of noble confraternity of which he was a member. There was an outcry – a private sale, no one knows how many millions. I’m sorry, my dear Edward, but the man is a barbarian.’

What an impressive and senior gust of anger. I tended to forget that Paul was twice as old as me, he had a lifetime’s lead on me. Still, I did rather lust for Martin, both in himself and in the reflected glow of my longing for his son.

‘She’s got lots of money,’ said Marcel, with his mouth full.

‘I’m wandering,’ said Paul. ‘Anthonis Altidore was the very odd one. He had the fantastic idea that he was a direct descendant of St James the Less, Our Lord’s brother – or, as I’ve always thought it should be, half-brother. Still, he went to great lengths to establish the thing historically, he was obsessed with genealogy and employed teams of antiquaries to draw up bogus family trees – at least I assume they were bogus, one imagines some pretty murky areas around, say, the third century. And he collected innumerable relics – the usual bones of course, you know, could be a bit of old dog, and I believe a tongue, and various memorabilia, part of his cloak and a wooden staff that is still in the Cathedral, if you know where to look.’

‘How very funny.’ I knocked back my wine, getting out of control on all this Altidore adrenalin. The thought that Luc might actually be related to Jesus Christ was slightly unnerving.

‘The obsession seems to have stuck too. When you go to Brussels you can see an early Van Dyck painted for it must be Anthonis’s grandson. Actually it’s a Holy Family, bringing in St James the Less, a little unconventionally – you can tell him by his very splendid moustaches, the head is apparently a portrait of Altidore, who was very proud of his bristly … excrescences.’

‘They’re all incredibly vain,’ I said, with a treacherous thrill.

‘The boy used to be very good-looking, I met him once,’ said Paul. I had to put down my knife and fork.

‘I suppose he is in a way,’ I conceded.

‘I felt so sorry for his poor mother, who was having to cope by herself, when that business blew up on the ship. I think that’s what may have turned her colour sense.’

‘
Arctic Prince
,’ said Marcel.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘
Arctic Prince
was the ship. Orgy on
Arctic Prince
.’

‘Darling, it didn’t say that. Actually Altidore managed to keep it out of the papers almost entirely.’ Paul looked with amused reproval at his son. ‘Marcel knows all about it from his, I’m not allowed to say girlfriend,
friend
, Sibylle de Taeye, the daughter of the Minister of Culture, who is something of an Egeria to young Luc, I gather.’ And Marcel blushed as he had weeks before when I’d blundered into this patch. Of course she wasn’t his girlfriend – he was up against some pretty stiff competition if that was his idea; he was blushing to have his fantasy disclosed.

‘She’s
not
my girlfriend,’ he said.

‘She is very sweet to you though, isn’t she?’ said Paul optimistically.

‘No she’s not!’ said Marcel, and a big tear gathered in his eye. I thought, just you wait till your next lesson. The vocabulary of the orgy. You’re going to tell me everything just as you had it from Sibylle.

Later I was reading about Edgard Orst’s now demolished villa, which had stood so conspicuous and so secretive on the edge of a suburban housing park. Paul had given me an English journalist’s account of a visit to it in 1904:

We were privileged last month to be received by M. Edgard Orst at the Villa Hermès, his splendid new residence-
cum
-atelier, whose designs our readers will no doubt recall from their publication in these pages some little while since. Indeed, the house has been three years in the building, and though M. Orst has regretted the delay, it cannot be denied that every detail of the structure and its appointments speaks of the most especial care in both design and execution; the artistic visitor will be bound to exclaim with us, ‘How should it have been done sooner?’

In external appearance the Villa is tall and somewhat forbidding, its severity of openings and the plainness of the elevations, however, being mitigated by the fine patterns that are scored into the stucco along the coigns and lintels, the whole being given the most delightful brightness by virtue of being painted a dazzling white. Atop the foremost gable, of course, stands the figure of the alert young deity whom M. Orst has invoked as the guardian of his house – an admirable piece in bronze gilt from his own studio.

Arriving a little before the appointed time, and having dwelt on the exterior, we rang the bell and were obliged to wait for some minutes before the opening of the door. This door itself, let it be said, is a thoroughly imposing one, massively enriched with nails and fine furniture; and it gave rise to not a few reflections on the solitude into which M. Orst has chosen to retire, and on the strength, so to speak, of the fortifications which he has thought necessary to protect that solitude from an undeniably curious world. For in M. Orst, unlike other artists of the ‘Symbolist’ school – we think of that exquisite dramatist of the impalpable, M. Maurice Maeterlinck, with his avowed enthusiasms for the beer-hall, the velodrome, and the ring – in M. Orst, we say, we find the aesthete
par excellence
. As we stood at his door on that April morning (and in a light rain that had just begun to fall) we were at once in possession of the gauge of his claim to be considered the
doyen
of all the artistic recluses of our time. It was for us to ponder at what cost to his seclusion, and so to his art, an invitation like our own might have been made.

Our readers will know something of the unhappy circumstances that have befallen this remarkable painter in the years since his last exhibitions in London, and will be in a position to understand the dictates, in his life as in his art, of a heart, and an eye, subjected to so violent a shock: his has been, in the words of one of his contemporaries, ‘un veuvage précoce’ – a premature widowhood, indeed; and one that has imposed upon him its own high and unwavering demands. There are those (a few in Belgium herself, though more, we admit, on our own neighbouring shores) who continue to question M. Orst’s standing in the first rank of modern artists; and some who are all too ready to consign his productions to the midden of depravity, along with those of M. Félicien Rops and one or two others, to be spoken of only as one speaks of the art of the criminal or the madman. To be sure, that M. Orst’s paintings – and his admirable sculpture in plaster and gesso, not to mention his abundant work on the stone – have value as testimony to a fertile mind subjected to pressures of exceptional severity, cannot be denied; what we do deny, absolutely, is the inherent unworthiness of his subjects or of the dark sensibility which all his work reveals.

Some thoughts such as these, as we say, passed through our mind as we waited at the doorway of the Villa Hermès; which, in due course, was opened by a young woman in a pale costume (reminiscent of the hygienic dress of Ancient Greek maidens, and styled according to M. Orst’s own design), who indicated to us to enter. We gave our name, and she withdrew soundlessly – we had already been apprised that all the servants of the house are encouraged not to speak, and to make themselves understood, as far as is possible, by gesture.

We found ourselves detained in the long and somewhat sepulchral vestibule, which runs to the full depth of the house, and off which open various small rooms. At a number of these a curtain was drawn back to reveal a fragment of an Attic frieze, displayed on a high plinth, or a drawing from the hand of Giovanni Bellini or Sir Edward Burne-Jones. In all the rooms of this ground floor, it should be said, the windows are either placed too high to permit one to see out or else are filled with coloured glass, which serves to create a magical play of symbolic light.

The young housemaid returning and beckoning to us, we left the hall and climbed an imposing flight of shallow stairs which brought us at once to a domed ante-chamber, in which a most beautiful bronze figure of Andromeda, chained to her rock, is reflected in a marble pool. Through an archway beyond we were able to glimpse, between curtains of fine old brocade, the lofty space of M. Orst’s studio. In front of these curtains runs a curious brass rail, somewhat like that in the sanctuary of a church, which ensures that no one enters unless at M. Orst’s express wish; in which case a mechanism causes the barrier to retract into the wall.

Being so favoured, we pressed forward into this principal room, which indeed occupies the full height of the back of the house, with the exception of the basement, which on that side is reserved for household offices. We can say at once that the impression of the studio, with its great north window and the accumulation of magnificent and exceptional works displayed on its walls against the sympathetic background of antique tapestry, was superlative. But our closer and more prolonged inspection of the pictures was deferred by the arrival of the painter himself, who stepped forward and greeted us most cordially, as a friend, he was pleased to say, from a country he had long held in especial regard. It was a sign of that regard that he wanted at once to have news of acquaintance of ours in England, and that he seemed content to talk of those bygone days quite as if we had no other purpose in being there. Our fear of disturbing him at his work proved groundless; he was finely dressed and did not, as so many artists do, advertise the nature of his craft by appearing in a pigment-daubed smock and with his palette on his thumb. Indeed, it is said that M. Orst has never been observed at the easel by any stranger.

He led us into the dining-room, whose white walls formed a fitting background to a cycle of his paintings on the theme of the Seasons of Life; it was here, over a generous collation, that he spoke to us of his feelings about the Villa he has built as a shrine to his own calling. It was only in the course of designing it, he said, in the incessant small changes to his plans, in the conjuring of the perfect solitude from light and space and the exact positioning of
objets d’art
, that he had worked out to his own satisfaction what it meant to him to be an artist, and what the life of an artist, once so impetuously embarked upon, might in the end demand of him. It was not hard, under the spell of his gently modulated delivery and pierced by the momentary glint of his sharp eye through a heavy pince-nez, surrounded, what is more, by some of the most striking products of his genius, to feel the incontrovertible hand of his particular destiny.

When we left the dining-room, in order to be shown M. Orst’s library, we were witness to a most surprising ritual, in which after every meal not only the various dishes and plates but also the table and chairs, and in fact the whole furniture of the room, were removed from it by the servants, leaving it as an unsullied temple of his vision.

The study of the Villa Hermès is a charming room, in which M. Orst conducts his business with those connoisseurs who follow and collect his work, and which contains the large cabinet in which he keeps his prints. We remarked that the drawers of this cabinet were somewhat cryptically labelled with Hebrew hieroglyphs; and it was with some humour that M. Orst, noticing our eyes upon it, declared ‘that no one would ever know what lay in there’, and that many a rich collector had offered him a fortune for a chance to choose some item from among its contents. He did, however, throw open a further door into his ‘dark room’, most magnificently equipped for the treatment of photographic plates, and which seemed to us indeed to be the dark crucible of his art.