It was a very long time ago, so far back that my memory and my imagination have gotten mixed up in the story I’m about to tell. This story has a historic basis for me alone, and the only thing that matters to me is to relate what I experienced — there’s nothing objective about it. In fact, even in History with a capital H there’s nothing impartial. All that counts really are the traces that events have imprinted on our lives and those can only be communicated in one’s own particular way. I’m the only one who can tell you what happened to me, and I will tell it to you without hypocrisy or trickery. I’m not a liar, I’m a storyteller, and since I’m talking about my life, I would like to be trusted.
I must have been five or six, maybe seven or even eight, it doesn’t matter. I was a child, of that I’m certain because I still had intact the capacity to fully give myself up body and soul to the joys of life with the illusion that everything life offered needed to be seized gluttonously. It was Easter Sunday. On the order of my father, my brother, my mother, and I were looking out the tall windows of the living room to see signs of winter retreating slowly like a wolf. Between patches of old snow that still covered the lawn a few crocuses were beginning to come up. At the far end of the yard one could clearly see the orderly row of plane trees that bordered the allée leading to the main gate. The leafless rosebushes still looked like naked porcupines and the large potted hydrangea plants on either side of the entryway also looked rather sad. The stone bust of the pretty woman was covered with leaves, as though to protect her from hoarfrost. She looked rather fragile and miserably immobile in this setting of interminable waiting and expectations. Buds on the willow branches, a hint of new green in the brownish snow-damaged lawn, and a female blackbird frantically building her nest were lighter promises of better days to come. I always felt inside the cheerfulness of spring resonating like a harbinger telling of future surprises.
The car of Uncle Geoffroy and Aunt Bette glided between the plane trees, followed next by the car of Cousin Vincent and his wife Elodie. Aunt Bette was the widow of my mother’s brother, Uncle Enguerrand, who had died in the First World War. She later married the brother of Papyrus. Our mother didn’t care much for this double sister-in-law, whom she considered aloof, but Bette paid no mind and got along fine with the men in the family.
The joyful party entered the living room chatting gaily and I detected a whiff of excitement around my mother, even though she greeted each one in the group with the doleful reserve that was her way.
My brother Gabriel, two years older than me, had climbed atop a Louis XV trumeau, and though our mother insisted he get down immediately, he wiggled up there and made faces that caused me to burst out laughing.
“You little imp, come down from there this instant! You’re going to break your neck!” insisted our mother at the very moment Papyrus, looking disheveled, entered the room.
He gave an amused glance in the direction of my brother, which singularly annoyed my mother.
“Oh, Louis, say something! He’s going to fall and hurt himself!”
“Fly into my arms, my angel Gabriel, I will catch you in flight.”
My fearless brother did not need to be asked twice before launching himself toward my father, who broke his fall as they both fell to the floor with laughter that spread to everyone in the group except to my aggrieved mother. Our hilarity isolated her and further confirmed her role as the killjoy of the family. Papyrus and Gabriel rolled on the floor indifferent to her pinched stares. She then started for the door.
“Marguerite, where are you going?” asked my father out of breath.
“I’m leaving you to your fun.”
“Oh come on, don’t take it like that! Go to the window, all of you, and wait for me. The Easter bells seem to be on their way.”
“On their way where? Where, Papyrus?” yammered my brother.
“On their way here. Go to the window. I’m going to get something and I’ll be back. Wait for me and don’t budge.”
Aunt Bette and Uncle Geoffroy exchanged looks that I didn’t know how to interpret but that I remember to this day. We did exactly what Papyrus told us to do. I was standing between Aunt Bette and my brother when the bells started ringing — at first far off and gradually closer until they became deafening. Magnificent bells of every color rose and fell before our wondering eyes. We’d paid no attention to Papyrus’s absence as he now returned on tiptoe and witnessed our continued amazement at this whole production without either my brother or me realizing that he had engineered the whole thing. We were all worked up and continued to gaze at the horizon in the hope that some slowpoke bells were yet to arrive.
The family then filed off to the castle chapel, where the parish priest officiated at a mass for the whole village. On the way, my mother held a handkerchief over her face to prevent any grains of dust from fouling her mouth, which was about to receive the body of Christ. Since we were still laughing, she complained and ordered us to close our mouths with the aim of a similar Christian hygiene. But her scolding orders which sought to gag us only redoubled our laughter. Poor Mother — if only all her obsessions had helped her to be less unhappy. Aunt Bette held us by the hand smiling. The three men followed a few steps behind, speaking of things that did not interest me.
Gabriel and I were only invited to the grown-ups’ dinner table at major holidays. We were always happy on those occasions but would end up being horribly bored. We came to the table in our squeaky-clean Sunday clothes and were invariably welcomed by the angry stares of our mother, who could not bear a badly tied ribbon or an errant lock of hair. Once seated, we were forbidden to speak unless spoken to. The worst was that these meals went on forever. In fact they constituted my first experience of desire and the concomitant disappointment at its not being fulfilled. Gabriel would later call this form of emptiness after exaltation the post coitum sadness — but at the time we were too young to use such language.
If I’m talking about this memorable Easter Sunday meal, it’s because it was then that I first heard the name Rudolf Steiner and because it would seem that some family secret was inseparably linked to it.
“So Bette, how did you find the new Goetheanum?”
“Much less handsome than the former. The first was nicely round and welcoming, whereas the second appears to be on the defensive. It’s as though after the fire Rudolf wanted to ensure the safety of anthroposophy. It looks like an enormous concrete beetle, and yet there’s a spiritual atmosphere that’s reassuring if one’s mind doesn’t wander too much.”
“Did you see any interesting dance or theater?”
“Of course, I saw the entire four-play cycle, and Marie Steiner von Sivers informed me that she was working on staging a complete Faust.”
“And are they still performing demonstrations of eurythmy?”
“Nothing’s changed. Well, I suppose things have evolved a little bit, but always in the spirit of Steiner.”
This exchange took place between Aunt Bette and my father. My mother looked exasperated but Cousin Vincent and Uncle Geoffroy were listening attentively. Aunt Elodie was eating with gusto and paying no mind to the conversation around her. She raised her chin now and then and smiled nicely in a way that made adorable dimples appear on her pink cheeks.
What distinguished Bette from other women of her day was not simply her modern and sensual beauty. She was intelligent and knew all sorts of things that country squires in our neighborhood knew nothing about. She had grown up in a rich family in Basel and had met my mother’s brother at a ball in Paris. It was love at first sight. My mother’s family was not enthused, however, because Bette had absolutely no social rank. She was Swiss and her international manners probably frightened the local hicks in our area. She became a widow at a young age and then remarried Uncle Geoffroy, but she maintained total independence, traipsing wherever she liked. My mother, who loved but never understood her brother, also never accepted his widow’s unbridled ways. So much freedom unnerved and upset her. It should be added that Aunt Bette knew how to pour it on, and all the men in the family were spellbound. My mother had no notions about anything that had been said. She remarked only one thing: Bette traveled alone and that ought to have been considered scandalous instead of admired.
The discussion of the Goetheanum continued. This was the center for anthroposophy built by Steiner and ostentatiously named to honor Goethe, whose writings Steiner took as the main inspiration for his own thinking. Aunt Bette often spoke of Rudolf Steiner, Marie von Sivers, and eurythmy — and these new words had a sort of comic ring to our ears. Gabriel made a face every time one of our table guests uttered the words Steiner, Goetheanum, or eurythmy, and the grown-ups’ obliviousness of us made him bolder each time. It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. My mother noticed our antics and shot us a quick admonishing stare. She detested this topic of conversation and felt excluded, so she played her parental role but without conviction. After swallowing the last morsel of dessert, we were allowed to leave the table and did so quickly and noisily.
At the time of my birth, Papyrus had someone carve a baptismal font in the trunk of an ancient oak, and it was in the hollow of that large mass of wood that my baptism was celebrated. Gabriel and I used to run there and sit down panting and then discuss all that we’d heard and seen. That day I tripped him and he fell flat on his face and scraped his knee. He said it stung a bit. When I bent down to blow on it — imitating what the grown-ups did when we hurt ourselves — he slapped me hard. In tears, I slapped him back and we ended up fighting like two stray cats. When I finally pleaded with him to stop because he was hurting me, Gabriel stood up, threw a fistful of my hair at me, and said, “Scram, you dumb Rudolfsteiner!”
“I’m not talking to you anymore, you dumb Goetheanum!” I shot back.
“Get out of my sight and go cry in your corner!”
Which is what I did.
The men were smoking fat cigars while my mother and Aunt Bette played cards in her private sitting room, where a nice fire crackled in the fireplace. I slipped up the stairs unnoticed and ran to my bedroom. A short time later Gabriel knocked on my door. The bogey brother was bored.
“Hey, it’s Goetheanum, will you open up?”
“If you think you’re funny, think again.”
“I know I’m funny, now open up!”
I opened the door. Staring at my torn dress and mussed-up hair, he started laughing. He then got the idea of having me make an appearance in our mother’s sitting room. I always did what Gabriel told me to do. He was quite a sight too, with his soiled shorts and bloody knee. And so it was in that state that we burst in on Aunt Bette, Elodie, and my mother, shouting “Coal delivery!” and laughing hysterically as they looked on horrified. The three men were laughing too, which encouraged us further despite my mother’s crestfallen look. The poor woman — she really deserved better than us two little savages.
That evening my parents hosted a reception to celebrate Easter, and rooms were prepared for Uncle Geoffroy, Aunt Bette, Cousin Vincent, and Aunt Elodie to stay the night. Dinner parties like these were for us a real treat. We could eat delicious little things without having to sit at the table, we could hide at the top of the stairs and watch guests arrive without being seen, and we could criticize everyone and analyze every detail. It was like going to the movies.
Aunt Bette came up from behind and surprised us, patting our heads in a friendly gesture. She was magnificent in her long red dress, and I knew already that it was going to annoy my mother. She was always charming with us and yet we didn’t like her much. I don’t know how to explain it, but her every word and movement had something haughty about it that was exasperating to us rascals. Thinking back on it, I’m still surprised how much ascendancy she had over the men in my family. All three were crusty, impenitent cavalrymen, and their interest in her and her theories was probably based more on a primitive attraction for her physique than any real philosophical convictions. Although…
Everything started at the end of the First World War when Papyrus had been lightly wounded in combat, Vincent and Geoffroy survived the trenches, and Bette, newly widowed, took up spiritualism and a relatively new school of thought disseminated by a certain Rudolf Steiner: anthroposophy. My mother was only a girl then, ten years younger than my father, who would gallop under the windows of the boarding school for girls she attended, either alone or with other riders. They had fun performing acrobatic feats to this audience of wide-eyed virgins. My father met my mother at some ball in the area. She had grace and was of a good family but far too young for him to take notice of. Vincent, Geoffroy, and Louis were famous throughout the land for liking the ladies. Their high jinks were notorious, but they were considered charming, funny, worthy gentlemen.
When war erupted, the three hardy fellows, who were enrolled at the military academy Saint-Cyr, were called into combat. My grandfather organized a ball in their honor, and among the guests was the woman who would become my mother. She was a child and nothing happened between them, but she found the courage, most likely with cheeks flushed and legs trembling, to approach and bestow on him a silver medal of the Virgin, saying that it would protect him. And the rogue put it around his neck.