CHAPTER FOUR

Marquiseaux, 1

AN EMPTY DRAWING ROOM on the fourth floor right.

On the floor there is a woven sisal mat, its strands entwined in such a way as to form star-shaped designs.

On the wall, an imitation of Jouy cretonne wallpaper depicts big sailing ships, Portuguese four-masters, armed with cannon and culverins, making ready to put into a harbour; the headsails and spankers billow in the wind; sailors have climbed up the rigging to clew up the others.

There are four paintings on the wall.

The first is a still life that despite its modern manner is strongly reminiscent of those compositions constructed on the theme of the five senses which were so common throughout Europe from the end of the Renaissance to the eighteenth century: on a table, there is an ashtray with a lighted Havana, a book of which the title and subtitle can be seen – The Unfinished Symphony: A Novel – though the name of the author is hidden, a bottle of rum, a cup-and-ball, and, in a shallow bowl, a pile of dried fruit, walnuts, almonds, apricot halves, prunes, etc.

The second depicts a street on the edge of a city, at night, alongside wasteland. To the right, a metal pylon with crossbars supporting at each point of intersection a large, lighted electric lamp. To the left, a constellation of stars reproduces precisely the inverse image of the pylon (base in the sky, apex towards the ground). The sky is covered in a flower pattern (dark blue on a lighter background) identical to the shapes made by frost on glass.

The third is of a legendary beast, the tarand, first described by Gelon the Sarmatian:

A tarand is an animal as big as a bullock, having a head like a stag, or a little bigger, two stately horns with large branches, cloven feet, hair long like that of a furred Muscovite, I mean a bear, and a skin almost as hard as steel armour. The Scythian said that there are but few tarands to be found in Scythia, because it varieth its colour according to the diversity of the places where it grazes and abides, and represents the colour of the grass, plants, trees, shrubs, flowers, meadows, rocks, and generally of all things near which it comes. It hath this in common with the sea-pulp, or polypus, with the thoes, with the wolves of India, and with the chameleon; which is a kind of lizard so wonderful, that Democritus hath written a whole book of its figure, and anatomy, as also of its virtue and property in magic. This I can confirm, that I have seen it change its colour, not only at the approach of things that have a colour, but by its own voluntary impulse, according to its fear or other affections: as for example, upon a green carpet, I have certainly seen it become green; but having remained there some time, it turned yellow, blue, tanned and purple, in course, in the same manner as you see a turkey-cock’s comb change colour according to its passions. But what we find most surprising in this tarand is, that not only its face and skin, but also its hair could take whatever colour was about it.

The fourth picture is a black-and-white reproduction of a painting by Forbes called A Rat Behind the Arras. This painting was inspired by a true story which took place at Newcastle-upon-Tyne during the winter of 1858.

Old Lady Forthright had a collection of watches and clockwork toys of which she was very proud; the jewel in this crown was a minute watch set in a fragile alabaster egg. She had entrusted the keeping of her collection to her oldest servant. He was a coachman who had been in her service for more than sixty years and who had been madly in love with her ever since he had first had the privilege of driving her. He had transferred his silent passion to his mistress’s collection, and, since he was particularly clever with his hands, he maintained it with ferocious care, and spent his days and his nights keeping these delicate mechanisms in good order, or restoring them, for some of the pieces were more than two centuries old.

The finest items of the collection were kept in a small room used only for that purpose. Some were locked away in glass-fronted cases, but most were hung on the wall and protected from dust by a thin muslin curtain. The coachman slept in an adjacent boxroom because a few months previously a solitary scientist had settled not far from the castle, in a laboratory where, like Martin Magron and Vella in Turin, he was studying the contradictory effects of strychnine and curare on rats: whereas the old lady and her coachman were convinced that he was a brigand drawn to the area by greed alone and was plotting some diabolical stratagem for getting hold of these precious jewels.

One night the old coachman was woken by tiny mewings that seemed to come from the collection room. He imagined that the demon scientist had trained one of his rats and taught it to fetch the watches. He got up, took a hammer from the toolbag he never let out of his sight, went into the room, approached the curtain as silently as he could, and hit hard at the place where the noise seemed to be coming from. Alas, it was not a rat, but only that magnificent watch set in its alabaster egg; its works had got a little out of adjustment, and had given it an almost imperceptible squeak. Lady Forthright, woken in a start by the hammer-blow, ran thereupon to the room, where she found the old servant dumbfounded, openmouthed, holding in one hand the hammer and in the other the broken jewel. Without giving him time to explain what had happened, she called her other servants and had her coachman locked away as a raving lunatic. She died two years later. The old coachman learnt of her death, managed to escape from his far-distant asylum, returned to the castle, and hanged himself in the very room where the drama had taken place.

In this early work over which the influence of Bonnat still hangs heavily, Forbes has made very free use of the original story. He shows the room with its clock-covered walls. The old coachman is dressed in a uniform of white leather; he has climbed onto an elaborately shaped, dark-red lacquered Chinese chair. He is hanging a long silk scarf onto one of the ceiling rafters. Old Lady Forthright stands at the doorway; she is looking at her servant with an expression of great anger; in her right hand she is holding, with outstretched arm, a silver chain at the end of which hangs a shard of the alabaster egg.

There are several collectors in this building, and they are often more maniacal than the characters in the painting. Valène himself kept the postcards Smautf sent him from each place they stopped off at. He had one such from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in fact, and another from the Australian Newcastle, in New South Wales.