Gratiolet, 2
ISABELLE GRATIOLET’S BEDROOM: a child’s bedroom with orange-and-yellow-striped wallpaper, a narrow tubular bed with a Snoopy pillow, a tub chair with fringes and arms decked with tassels and bobbles, a small whitewood wardrobe with two doors decorated with a washable adhesive material imitating rustic tiles (Delft style: faintly crackled light-blue squares depicting alternately a windmill, a wine press, and a sundial), a school desk with a groove for pencils, and three bookcases. On the table is a pencil-case decorated with stencilled designs representing rather stylised Scotsmen in national dress blowing into their bagpipes, a steel ruler, a slightly dented, enamelled tin on which the word SPICES is written, filled with ballpoints and felt-tips, as well as an orange; and several exercise books in sleeve covers made of that mottled paper bookbinders use, a bottle of Waterman ink, and four blotters belonging to the collection Isabelle is building up, though much less seriously than her competitor Rémi Plassaert:
– a baby in a romper pushing a hoop (presented by Fleuret Sons of Corvol L’Orgueilleux, Stationers);
– a bee (Apis mellifica L.) (presented by Juventia Laboratories);
– a fashion print depicting a man wearing scarlet shantung pyjamas, sealskin slippers, and a sky-blue cashmere dressing gown with silver piping (NESQUIK: Another cup would be nice!);
– and lastly, No. 24 of the series Great Women of French History, presented by the weekly magazine La Semaine de Suzette: Madame Récamier; a little room with Empire furniture, where a few men in black evening clothes are sitting about on sofas, listening, while beside a cheval glass supported by a figure of Minerva, a chaise longue, with a curved and cradle-like interior, discloses the figure of a young woman lying at full length, whose relaxed pose contrasts with the tropical sunset of her spectacular, thick satin gown.
Over the bed there hangs – surprisingly, in a teenager’s bedroom – an oval-bellied theorbo, one of those double-necked lutes whose brief vogue began in the sixteenth century, reached its apogee in the reign of Louis XIV – Ninon de Lenclos, it seems, was an excellent player – and then declined as the bass guitar and cello came in. It is the only object Olivier Gratiolet took away with him from the horse farm after the murder of his wife and his father-in-law’s suicide. It was supposed to have always been in the family, but no one knew where it came from, and in the end Olivier showed it to Léon Marcia, who was able to identify it without too much trouble: it was probably one of the last theorbos made; it had never been played, and came from Steiner’s workshop in the Tyrol; it definitely did not date from the workshop’s high period, when Jacques Steiner’s violins were put on a par with Amati’s, but from its late period, probably the very beginning of the second half of the eighteenth century, a time when lutes and theorbos were more collectors’ curios than musical instruments.
At school no one likes Isabelle, and she does nothing, it seems, to be liked. Her classmates say she is completely bananas, and on several occasions parents have been to see Olivier Gratiolet to complain about his daughter, who, they say, tells scary tales to her classmates and sometimes, even, in the playground, to children much younger than she is. For instance, to get her own back on Louisette Guerné, who had spilt a bottle of Indian ink on her blouse during art, Isabelle told her there was a pornographic old man following her in the street whenever she went out of school and that he was going to attack her one day and take off all her clothes and make her do horrid things. Or again, that she convinced Dominique Krause, who is only ten years old, that ghosts really exist and that she had even seen her father appear one day dressed in armour like a medieval knight in the midst of terrified guards armed with halberds. Or yet again, that when given as a composition assignment: “Describe the best holiday you can remember”, she wrote a long, convoluted love story in which, wearing gold brocade and pursuing a masked prince whose face she had sworn never to set eyes on, she marched through halls flagged with veined marble, escorted by armies of pages carrying tarry torches and dwarves who poured her heady wines in silver-gilt goblets.
Her French teacher was at a loss and showed the script to the headmistress, who first consulted a counsellor and then wrote to Olivier Gratiolet, urging him most strongly to have his daughter seen by a psychotherapist and suggesting next year he put her into a school for disturbed children where her intellectual and psychological development could be monitored more closely, to which Olivier replied, somewhat curtly, that just because schoolgirls of his daughter’s age were almost without exception sheep-brained ninnies who could just about manage to parrot the cat sat on the mat and the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain, there was no need to treat Isabelle as abnormal or even just sensitive on the mere pretext that she had some imagination.