Beaumont, 1
MADAME DE BEAUMONT’S drawing room is almost entirely filled by a concert grand, on the stand of which sits the closed score of a famous American melody, “Gertrude of Wyoming”, by Arthur Stanley Jefferson. An old man with his head covered with an orange nylon scarf sits in front of the piano, preparing to tune it.
In the left-hand corner of the room there is a large modern armchair made of a huge hemisphere of steel-ringed Plexiglass on a chromed metal base. Beside it an octagonal block of marble serves as a low table; a steel cigarette lighter stands on it, as does a cylindrical pot-holder from which there emerges a dwarf oak tree, one of those Japanese bonsai plants whose growth has been so controlled, arrested, and altered that they show all the symptoms of maturity and even of old age almost without having grown at all, and about which growers say that their perfection depends less on the material care given to them than on the concentrated quality of meditation devoted to them.
Lying directly on the light-coloured woodblock floor, slightly to the front of the armchair, is a wooden jigsaw puzzle of which virtually all the edges have been assembled. In the lower right-hand third of the jigsaw some additional pieces have been put in place: they depict the oval face of a sleeping girl, whose blonde hair is wound in plaits around her head and held over her forehead by a double band of plaited cloth; she leans her cheek on her cupped right hand as if in her dream she were listening to something.
To the left of the puzzle, a decorated tray carries a coffee jug, a cup and saucer, and a silver-plated sugarbowl. The scene painted on the tray is partly masked by these objects, but two details can be made out nonetheless: on the right, a boy in embroidered trousers leans over a river bank; in the centre, a carp out of water twists on a line; the fisherman and the other characters remain invisible.
In front of the puzzle and the tray, several books, exercise books, and folders are spread out on the floor. The title of one of them is visible: Safety Regulations in Mines and Quarries. One of the folders is open at a page partly covered with equations written out in a small, fine hand:
If f ∈ Hom (υ, μ) (resp. g ∈ Hom (ξ, υ) is a homogeneous morphism whose degree is the matrix α (resp. β), fog is homogeneous and its degree is the product matrix αβ.
Let α = (αij), 1 ≤ i ≤ m, 1 ≤ j ≤ n and β = (βkl), 1 ≤ k ≤ n, 1 ≤ l ≤ p (|ξ| = p) be the given matrices. Suppose that f = (f1, . . ., fm), g = (g1, . . ., gn), and let h: π→ξ be a morphism, (h = (h1, . . ., hp)).
Finally let a = (a1, . . ., ap) be an element of Ap. For each index i between l and m (|μ| = m) we compute the morphism.
xi = fiogo (a1h1, . . ., aphp).
First we get
xi = fio (a1βi1, . . ., apβipg1, . . ., a1βi1, . . ., apβipgp)
then
xi = a1αi1βi1 + . . . + αijβj1 + . . . + αinβn1, . . ., ajαi1βij + . . . + αinβnj, . . ., apαi1β1p, . . ., fiogoh.
Thus fog satisfies the homogeneity condition of degree αβ([1.2.2]).
The room’s walls are painted in white gloss. Several framed posters are hanging on them. One of them depicts four greedy-looking monks sitting at table around a Camembert cheese on the label of which four greedy-looking monks – the very same – are again at table around, etc. The scene is repeated distinctly four times over.
Fernand de Beaumont was an archaeologist as ambitious as Schliemann. He tried to find the traces of the legendary city called Lebtit by the Arabs and which was supposed to have been their capital in Spain. Nobody disputed the existence of such a city, but most specialists, be they Arabists or Hispanists, agreed that it should be identified either as Ceuta, on African territory opposite Gibraltar, or as Jaén, in Andalusia, at the foot of the Sierra de Magina. Beaumont wouldn’t agree to these identifications, on the grounds that none of the excavations made at Ceuta and at Jaén had displayed some of the features attributed to Lebtit by the literature. Stories told in particular of a strong castle “with leafed gates meant neither for going in nor for going out but only to be kept locked. Whenever a king died and another took the high throne after him, he set with his own hands a new lock to the gate, until these locks numbered twenty-four – one for each of the kings.” There were seven rooms in the castle. The seventh was “so long that the ablest archer shooting from the threshold could not get his arrow to fix in the end wall”. In the first, there were “perfect figures” representing Arabs “mounted on their swift horses and camels, with turbans hanging down their shoulders and scimitars dangling from their belts and bearing long lances in their right hands”.
Beaumont belonged to that school of medievalists which described itself as “materialist” and which prompted a professor of the history of religion, for example, to go through the accounts of the Vatican chancery with the sole aim of proving that in the first half of the twelfth century the consumption of parchment, lead, and sigillary ribbon so far exceeded the amount justified by the number of officially declared and registered bulls that even allowing for possible meltings and probable muddles one had to conclude that a relatively large number of bulls (and we are talking about bulls, not briefs, since only bulls were sealed with lead, briefs being sealed with wax) had been kept confidential if not clandestine. Whence the thesis, justly famous in its time, on Secret Bulls and the Question of the Antipopes, which shed new light on the relations between Innocent II, Anaclete II, and Victor IV.
In a roughly similar manner Beaumont showed that if you took as a yardstick not Sultan Selim’s 1798 world record of 888 metres but the good though not outstanding performance of the English bowmen at Crécy, the seventh room in the castle at Lebtit could not have been less than two hundred yards long and, taking account of the angle of projection, could scarcely have had less than thirty yards’ ceiling height. Neither the excavations at Ceuta nor those at Jaén nor any others had uncovered a room of the requisite dimensions, which allowed Beaumont to state that “if the legend of this city has its origins in some real fortress, then it is not any one of those whose remains we know of to date”.
Beyond this purely negative argument, another fragment of the legend of Lebtit seemed destined to give Beaumont a hint of the citadel’s site. On the unreachable end wall of the archers’ room, so the legend went, the following sentence was carved: “If ever a King opens the door of this castle, his warriors will turn to stone like the warriors of the first room, and his enemies shall lay his kingdom to waste”. Beaumont saw this metaphor as a translation of the upheavals which shook the Reyes de taifas and provoked the Reconquista. More exactly, in his view, the legend of Lebtit described what he called the “Cantabrian débâcle of the Moors”, that is to say, the battle of Covadonga in the course of which Pelage defeated the emir Alkhamah before having himself crowned King of Asturias on the battlefield. And with an enthusiasm that brought him the admiration of even his sharpest critics, Fernand de Beaumont decided that it was at Oviedo, in the heart of the Asturias, where the remains of the legendary fortress were to be found.
The origins of Oviedo were obscure. Some believed it was a monastery built by two monks to escape from the Moors; others saw it as a Visigoth citadel; still others held it to be a Hispano-Roman oppidum sometimes called Lucus asturum, sometimes Ovetum; and finally there were those who said that it was Pelage himself (called Don Pelayo by the Spaniards, who believed him to have been King Rodriguez’s old lance-bearer at Jerez, and Belaï al-Roumi by the Arabs since he was supposed to be of Roman extraction) who had founded the city. So many contradictory hypotheses served to support Beaumont’s argument: he took Oviedo to be the fabled Lebtit, the most northerly of the Moorish strongholds in Spain and by that token the symbol of their domination over the peninsula. Its loss would have signalled the end of Islamic hegemony over Western Europe, and it would have been to assert this defeat that the victorious Pelage settled there.
Excavations began in 1930 and lasted more than five years. In the final year Beaumont was visited by Bartlebooth, who had come to nearby Gijon, also an ancient capital of the Asturian kings, to paint the first of his seascapes.
A few months later, Beaumont returned to France. He drew up a 78-page technical report on the conduct of the excavations, in which, in particular, he proposed a system for exploiting the results based on the Dewey Decimal Classification, and which is still regarded as a model of its kind. Then, on 12 November 1935, he committed suicide.