Servants’ Quarters, 1
IT’S A MAID’S ROOM on the seventh floor, to the left of the one right at the end of the corridor where the old painter Valène lives. The room is attached to the large flat on the second floor right, the one where Madame de Beaumont, the archaeologist’s widow, lives with her two granddaughters, Anne and Béatrice Breidel. Béatrice, the younger, is seventeen. A clever child, outstanding at school, she is studying for the entrance examination to the girls’ section of the Ecole Normale Supérieure at Sèvres. She has obtained the permission of her strict grandmother to use this independent room to study, but not to live in.
There are hexagonal red tiles on the floor, and the walls are papered with a design depicting various shrubs. Despite the tiny size of the flatlet, Béatrice has invited five of her classmates in. She is seated at her work-desk on a high-backed chair, which stands on feet carved in the shape of sheep bones. She is wearing a skirt with braces and a red top with slightly puffed cuffs; on her right wrist she wears a silver bangle and holds between the thumb and index finger of her left hand a long cigarette, which she is watching burn away.
One of her friends, dressed in a long white linen coat, is standing by the door and seems to be carefully studying a map of the Paris underground. The other four, uniformly dressed in jeans and striped shirts, are seated on the floor, around a tea-set on a tray, placed beside a lamp of which the base is a small barrel, of the sort Saint Bernard dogs are generally supposed to carry. One of the girls pours tea. Another opens a box of cheese packed in small cubes. The third is reading a novel by Thomas Hardy, on the cover of which can be seen a bearded character sitting in a rowing boat in the middle of a stream and fishing with rod and line, whilst on the bank a knight in armour appears to be hailing him. The fourth, with an air of profound indifference, is looking at an engraving depicting a bishop leaning over a table on which you can see one of those games called solitaire. It is made of a wooden board, trapezoidal in shape, much like a racket-press, in which twenty-five holes have been drilled so as to form a lozenge, deep enough to take the pieces which are in this case good-sized pearls, placed to the right of the board on a little black silk cushion. The engraving, which manifestly copies the famous painting by Bosch known as The Conjuror, in the Municipal Gallery at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, has a humorous – though not, apparently, very illuminating – title, handwritten in Gothic lettering:
The suicide of Fernand de Beaumont left his widow Véra with a daughter of six, Elizabeth, who had never seen her father, kept far from Paris by his Cantabrian excavations; nor had she seen much more of her mother, who had pursued her career as a singer in the Old World and in the New practically uninterrupted by her brief marriage to the archaeologist.
Born in Russia at the turn of the century, Véra Orlova – that is the name by which music-lovers still know her – fled in the spring of 1918 and settled first in Vienna, where she was Schoenberg’s pupil at the Verein für musikalische Privataufführung. She followed Schoenberg to Amsterdam, but their ways parted when he returned to Berlin and she came to Paris to give a series of recitals at the Salle Erard. Despite the sometimes sarcastic and sometimes tempestuous hostility of audiences clearly unfamiliar with the technique of Sprechgesang, and supported only by a small band of aficionados, she managed to insert into her programmes, mostly composed of operatic arias, lieder by Schumann and Hugo Wolf, and songs by Mussorgsky, some of the vocal pieces of the Vienna School, which she thus introduced to Parisians. It was at a reception given by Count Orfanik, at whose request she had come to sing Angelica’s last aria in Arconati’s Orlando –
Innamorata, mio cuore tremante
Voglio morire
– that she met the man who would become her husband. But she was in demand, everywhere, more and more insistently, and was dragged off on triumphant tours which sometimes lasted a full year, and hardly lived at all with Fernand de Beaumont, who, for his part, only ever left his study in order to check his speculative hypotheses in the field.
Born in 1929, Elizabeth was therefore brought up by her paternal grandmother, the old Countess de Beaumont, and saw her mother for scarcely a few weeks each year when the singer consented to resist her impresario’s ever-increasing demands and came to take a rest at the Beaumont castle at Lédignan. It was only towards the end of the war, when Elizabeth had just turned fifteen, that her mother, who had now given up concerts and touring to devote herself to teaching singing, brought her to Paris to live with her. But the girl soon rejected the guardianship of a woman who, when deprived of the glitter of boxes and gala performances, of the bunches of roses thrown at the end of her recitals, turned shrewish and domineering. She ran away one year later. Her mother would never see her again, and all the enquiries she made to track her down came to nought. It was only in September 1959 that Véra Orlova learnt, at the same time, what her daughter’s life had been, and how she died. Elizabeth had married a Belgian bricklayer, François Breidel, two years earlier. They lived in the Ardennes, at Chaumont-Porcien. They had two little girls, Anne, who was one year old, and Béatrice, who was a newborn baby. On Monday 14 September, a neighbour, hearing crying in the house, tried to break in. Unable to do so, she went to fetch the gamekeeper. They shouted, but the only reply they could get was the ever more strident crying of the babies; then, with the help of some other villagers, they broke down the back door and rushed to the parents’ bedroom, where they found them, lying naked in bed, their throats slit, swimming in blood.
Véra de Beaumont heard the news that same evening. Her wailing scream echoed through the whole building. Next morning, after being driven through the night by Bartlebooth’s chauffeur, Kléber, who when he was told of the business by the concierge spontaneously offered his services, she arrived at Chaumont-Porcien, and left almost straightaway with the two children.