CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Marcia, 3
LÉON MARCIA, the curio dealer’s husband, is in his bedroom.
He is a thin, puny, sick old man, with an almost grey face and bony hands. He is sitting in a black leather armchair, dressed in pyjama trousers and a collarless shirt, an orange check scarf thrown over his skinny shoulders, faded felt slippers on his sockless feet, and a sort of flannel thing vaguely like a Phrygian bonnet on his skull.
This burnt-out, blank-eyed, slow-moving man is still considered even now by most valuers and art dealers to be the world authority in areas as diverse as Prussian and Austro-Hungarian coins and medals, Ts’ing ceramics, French Renaissance prints, antique musical instruments, and Iranian and Persian Gulf prayer mats. He made his reputation in the early 1930s when in a series of articles published in The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute he showed that the set of small engravings attributed to Léon Gaultier and sold at Sotheby’s in 1899 under the name of The Nine Muses in fact depicted Shakespeare’s nine greatest female roles – Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Portia, Rosalind, Titania, and Viola – and was the work of Jeanne de Chénany, an attribution which caused a sensation because at that time no works were known by this artist, who had been identified solely by her monogram and by a biography written by Humbert and published in his Brief History of the Origins and Progress of Engraving, Woodcuts, and Intaglio (Berlin, 1752, in 8°), which claimed – though unfortunately without quoting any sources – that she had worked in Brussels and Aachen from 1647 to 1662.
Léon Marcia – and this is what is certainly the most surprising thing – is completely self-taught. He left school at nine. At twenty he hardly knew how to read, and the only thing he did read regularly was a sporting daily called Lucky Strike; at that time he was working for a motor mechanic on Avenue de la Grande Armée who built racing cars, which not only never won, but almost always crashed. Thus it was not long before the garage closed down for good, and, with a small gratuity in his pocket, Marcia spent a few months resting; he lived in a cheap hotel, the Hôtel de l’Aveyron, rose at seven, drank a hot strong coffee at the bar whilst leafing through Lucky Strike, and went back up to his room (the bed had meanwhile been made up) where he lay back for a nap, but not before spreading the paper over the end of the bed so as not to dirty the eiderdown with his shoes.
Marcia, a man of very modest needs, could have lived like that for many years, but he fell ill the following winter: the doctors diagnosed tubercular pleurisy and strongly recommended mountain air: since he clearly could not afford a long stay in a sanatorium as a patient, Marcia solved the problem by getting a job as a room waiter in the most luxurious of them all, the Pfisterhof at Ascona, in the Ticino. It was there that in order to fill the long hours of compulsory resting, which he forced himself to observe once his work was done, he began to read, and grew to enjoy reading everything he could lay his hands on, borrowing book upon book from the wealthy international clientele – the owners of and heirs to corned-beef kingdoms, rubber empires, or tempered-steel syndicates – staying at the sanatorium. The first book he read was a novel, Silbermann, by Jacques de Lacretelle, which had won the Prix Fémina the previous autumn; the second was a critical edition with facing-page translation of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree. . .
In four years Léon Marcia read a good thousand volumes and learned six languages: English, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese, which he mastered in eleven days, not with the help of Camoëns’s Lusiades through which Paganel thought he was learning Spanish, but with the fourth and last volume of Diego Barbosa-Machado’s Bibliotheca Lusitana, which he’d found, without the rest of the set, on the penny shelf of a Lugano bookshop.
The more he learnt, the more he wanted to find out. His enthusiasm seemed to have no practical limit, and was as boundless as his ability to absorb knowledge. He only needed to read something once to remember it for good, and he consumed treatises on Greek grammar, histories of Poland, epic poems in twenty-five songs, and instruction manuals on fencing and horticulture with as much speed, as much appetite, and as much intelligence as popular novels and encyclopædic dictionaries, although admittedly he did have a marked predilection for the latter.
In nineteen twenty-seven, a group of residents at the Pfisterhof, on the initiative of Herr Pfister himself, subscribed to a fund to provide Marcia with an income for ten years to allow him to devote himself entirely to whatever studies he wished to pursue. Marcia, who was then thirty, spent a whole term hesitating between courses given by Ehrenfels, Spengler, Hilbert, and Wittgenstein, then, since he’d been to listen to Panofsky lecturing on Greek statuary, discovered that his true vocation was art history and left forthwith for London to enrol at the Courtauld Institute. Three years later he made his spectacular entry into the art world in the way we have seen.
His health remained delicate and made him housebound nearly all his life. He lived in hotels for a long time, first in London, then in Washington and New York; he scarcely travelled except to check this or that detail in a library or an art gallery, and he gave his increasingly sought-after opinions from his bed or his armchair. It was he who demonstrated, amongst other things, that the Hadriana at Atri (better known by their nickname of Hadrian’s Angels) were forged, and he who established the authoritative chronology of Samuel Cooper’s miniatures at the Frick Collection: it was this latter work which provided the occasion where he met the woman he was to marry: Clara Lichtenfeld, the daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants to the United States, who was on a course at the museum. Though she was fifteen years his junior, they married a few weeks later and decided to live in France. Their son David was born in 1946, shortly after they arrived in Paris and moved into 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, where Madame Marcia set up her antique shop in premises formerly used by a saddler. Oddly, her husband always refused to take any interest in it.
Léon Marcia – like some other occupants of the building – has not left his room for many weeks; all he eats any more is milk, petit-beurre, and raisin biscuits; he listens to the radio, reads or pretends to read old art reviews; there is one such on his lap, the American Journal of Fine Arts, and two others by his feet, a Yugoslav review, Umetnost, and The Burlington Magazine; on the cover of the American Journal there is a reproduction of a splendid, flamboyant, green, red, golden, and inky blue ancient American estampe – a locomotive with a gigantic smokestack, great baroque lamps, and a tremendous cow-catcher, hauling its mauve coaches through the stormy prairie night and mixing a lot of spark-studded black smoke with the furry thunder clouds. On the cover of Umetnost, hiding Burlington Magazine almost completely, there is a photograph of a work by the Hungarian sculptor Meglepett Egér: rectangular metal plates fixed to each other in such a way as to form an eleven-sided solid object.
Usually Léon Marcia is silent and still, plunged in recollections: one of which, surfacing from the depths of his prodigious memory, has been obsessing him for several days: it is a memory of a lecture which Jean Richepin, shortly before he died, went to give at the sanatorium; the subject was the legend of Napoleon. Richepin recounted that in his youth the tomb of Napoleon had been opened once a year, and the embalmed face was displayed to disabled soldiers filing past in procession; the face was bloated and greenish, more a spectacle of terror than of admiration, which is why they later stopped opening the tomb. But nevertheless Richepin saw the face from the arms of his great-uncle, who had served in Africa and for whose sake the commandant opened the tomb.