CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN
Bartlebooth, 4
THE GREAT DRAWING ROOM of Bartlebooth’s flat, a huge square room with pale-blue wallpaper, contains what is left of the furniture, objects, and knickknacks with which Priscilla had liked to surround herself in her town house at 65 Boulevard Malesherbes: a divan and four armchairs all in carved and gilded wood, upholstered with an old Gobelins tapestry depicting on a yellow latticed ground archways with flourishes laden with foliage, fruit, and flowers adorned with birds on the wing – doves, parrots, parakeets, etc.; a large four-leafed Beauvais tapestry screen, with arabesque designs and, lower down, costumed monkeys in the style of Gillot; a large seven-drawer chiffonier, a Louis XVI period piece, in mahogany with coloured-wood mouldings and piping; on its veined marble top stand two ten-branched candelabras, a silver trencher, a little shagreen writing case with two gold-stoppered inkpots, a golden penholder, a gold erasing knife and a gold spatula, a carved-crystal seal, and a tiny little rectangular fly-box of gold machined and enamelled in blue; on the big black stone mantelpiece, a pendulum clock of white marble and chased gold with a dial, marked Hoguet, à Paris, held up by two kneeling, bearded men; on each side of the clock, two porcelain pharmacy jars in Chantilly pâte tendre; the right-hand one bears the inscription Ther. Vieille, the left-hand one Gomme Gutte; finally, on a little oval rosewood table with a white marble top stand three Saxony porcelains: one represents Venus and a cupid seated in a flower-decked chariot drawn by three swans; the other two are allegorical figures of Africa and America: Africa is personified by a Negro boy sitting on a lion; America is a plumed woman riding side-saddle on a crocodile and clutching a horn of plenty to her left breast; a parrot sits on her right hand.
Several pictures are hanging on the walls; the most awe-inspiring is to the right of the fireplace; it is a Groziano, a gloomy, harsh Descent from the Cross; to the left, a seascape by F. H. Mans, Fishing Boats Coming in to a Dutch Beach; on the rear wall, over the big divan, a cartoon study for Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, two large engravings by Le Bas of Chardin’s L’Enfant au toton and Le Valet d’auberge; a miniature of a priest with a face all puffed up with pride and contentment; a mythological scene by Eugène Lami depicting Bacchus, Pan, and Silenus accompanied by hordes of satyrs, aegipanes, agripanes, sylvans, fauns, lemurs, lares, elves, and hobgoblins; a landscape entitled The Mysterious Island, signed L. N. Montalescot: it portrays a seashore the left-hand half of which presents a pleasant prospect with a beach and a forest behind, the other half, all rocky walls broken up into towers and only a single entrance in them, suggesting an invulnerable fortress; and a watercolour by Wainewright, the painter, collector, and critic who was a friend of Sir Thomas Lawrence and one of the most famous “Bloods” of his day, and who, it was learnt after he died, had murdered eight people out of dilettantism; the watercolour is called The Carter: the carter is seated on a bench in front of a whitewashed wall. He is tall and broad, wears brown canvas trousers tucked into crackled boots, a grey open-neck shirt, and a gaily coloured neckerchief; on his right arm he wears a studded leather wristband; a tapestry bag hangs over his left shoulder; his plaited rope whip, with its tip separating out into several rough tails, lies to his right, alongside a jug and a round loaf.
The divans and armchairs are draped in transparent nylon dust covers. For ten years at least, this room has been used only as an exception. The last time Bartlebooth came into it was four months ago, when the developments that occurred in the Beyssandre affair forced him to have recourse to Rémi Rorschach.
In the early 1970s two major hotel chains – MARVEL HOUSES INCORPORATED and INTERNATIONAL HOSTELLERIE – decided to join forces so as to compete more effectively with the two rapidly expanding young giants of the hotel industry: Holiday Inn and Sheraton. Marvel Houses Inc. was a North American firm well-established in the Caribbean and in South America; as for International Hostellerie, it was a holding company registered in Zürich and managed funds originating in the Arab Emirates.
The top management of the two companies met for the first time at Nassau, in the Bahamas, in February 1970. Their joint analysis of the world situation convinced them that the only way to stem the rise of their two rivals was to invent a style of tourist hotel without any equivalent anywhere else in the world: “a conception of hotel management”, declared the chairman of Marvel Houses, “based not on rabid exploitation of the kiddy cult [clapping], nor yet on management subservience to charge-account shysters [more clapping], but on respect for three fundamental values: leisure, relaxation, and culture [continuous applause].”
Several subsequent meetings at the head offices of the two companies over the following months filled in the outline which the chairman of Marvel Houses had sketched so brilliantly. When one of the directors of International Hostellerie made the witty point that the registered names of both firms had the same number of letters, 24, the publicity offices of both outfits seized on the idea and proposed a selection of twenty-four strategic sites in twenty-four countries where they could locate twenty-four hotel complexes of a totally new kind; with supreme sophistication, the list of the twenty-four selected sites displayed, from top to bottom and side by side, the registered names of the two parent companies (fig. 1).
In November 1970, the chairmen and managing directors assembled in Kuwait to sign a joint document which stipulated that Marvel Houses Incorporated and International Hostellerie would jointly establish twin subsidiary companies: a hotel investment company, to be called Marvel Houses International; and a hotel service banking company, dubbed Incorporated Hostellerie. These companies, duly endowed with capital by the two parent firms, would be responsible for designing, organising, and completing construction of the twenty-four hotel complexes in the places hereinafter specified. The chairman and managing director of International Hostellerie became chairman and managing director of Marvel Houses International, and deputy chairman of Incorporated Hostellerie; whilst the chairman and managing director of Marvel Houses Incorporated became chairman and managing director of Incorporated Hostellerie, and deputy chairman of Marvel Houses International. The registered office of Incorporated Hostellerie, with specific responsibility for the financial management of the operation, was set up in Kuwait itself; as for Marvel Houses International, destined to take on site preparation and supervision, it was registered, for tax purposes, in Puerto Rico.
The total budget of the operation was well over a billion dollars – more than five hundred thousand francs per hotel room. The aim was to create hotel centres with a degree of luxury unmatched by anything but the centres’ own self-contained autonomy. In fact, the key idea of the promoters was that, whilst it is admissible for a hotel – that special locus of relaxation, leisure and culture – to be sited in a climatic zone suited to some specific demand (for warmth when it is cold elsewhere, for pure air, for snow, for iodine, etc.) and in proximity to a place with a particular avocation in tourist terms (sea bathing, skiing, spa waters, museums, cities, curiosities, natural features [reserves, etc.] or artificial attractions [Venice, Matmata, Disney World, etc.], etc.), it was by no means necessary that it should be so located. A good hotel, they believed, was one where a client can go out if he wants, and not go out if going out is a burden for him. Consequently, the primary characteristics of the hotels Marvel Houses International planned to build was that they would include intra muros everything that a demanding, wealthy, and lazy clientele could wish to see or to do without having to go outside, which could not fail to be their wish in the case of the majority of North American, Arab, and Japanese visitors who feel obliged to do Europe and its cultural treasures from end to end but who do not for all that necessarily have any wish to foot-slog along miles of museum corridors or to be carted uncomfortably around the lung-damaging traffic jams of Saint-Sulpice or Place Saint-Gilles.
This idea had been fundamental to modern tourist-hotel management for many years: it had given rise to the creation of private beaches, to the increasing privatisation of seashores and ski slopes, and to the rapid development of entirely artificial clubs, villages, and holiday centres having no essential relationship with their physical and human environments. But in their plan, Marvel Houses took this idea to a spectacular degree of systematisation: clients of any one of the new Marvel Hostelleries would have at their disposal not only their beach, their tennis court, their heated pool, eighteen-hole golf course, riding stable, sauna, marina, casino, nightclub, boutiques, bars, newsstands, cigarette shop, travel agency, and bank, as in any run-of-the-mill four-star, but they would also have access to their very own ski slope, chair-lift, skating rink, sea bed, surf waves, safari, giant aquarium, art gallery, Roman ruins, battlefield, pyramid, Romanesque church, Arab market, desert fort, cantina, Plaza de Toros, prehistoric cave, Bierstube, street party, Balinese dancers, etc., etc., etc., and so on and so forth.
Figure 1. Site locations of Marvel Houses Incorporated & International Hostellerie’s 24 hotel complexes.
To achieve such truly dizzying availability, which alone would justify the rates they envisaged charging, Marvel Houses International employed three concurrent stratagems: the first was to find isolated sites, or sites that could easily be made isolated, offering abundant tourist facilities that were not yet fully exploited; it is significant, in this connection, that five of the twenty-four sites selected – Alnwick, Ennis, Ottok, Soria, Vence – were in the immediate proximity of national parks; that five others were on islands: Aeroe, Anafi, Eimeo, Oland, and Pemba; and that the operation also called for the creation of two artificial islands, one off Osaka in the Osaka-Wan, the other facing Inhakea off the coast of Mozambique, as well as the conversion of an entire lake, Lake Trout, in Ontario, where it was planned to build a totally sub-aqua leisure centre.
The second stratagem was to offer local, regional, and national authorities, in the places where Marvel Houses International wished to build, the full cost of constructing “culture parks”, against an eighty-year concession (the original forecasts showed that in most cases costs would be recouped in five years and three months, and become genuinely profitable for the remaining seventy-five years); such “culture parks” would either be built from scratch, or would encompass existing remains and buildings, as for example at Ennis, in Eire, a few miles from Shannon International Airport, where the ruins of a thirteenth-century abbey would be included within the hotel perimeter; or they would be integrated into existing structures, as at Delft, where Marvel Houses made the city an offer to save a whole neighbourhood of the old town and to revive Old Delft with potters, weavers, carvers, and blacksmiths living in, dressed in traditional costumes, working by candlelight.
Marvel Houses International’s third stratagem was to plan to make their attractions profitable by developing – at least for the European sites, which comprised half of the total project – the possibilities for rotating features from one site to another; but this idea, initially designed only for staff (Balinese dancers, ragamuffins for the street parties, Tyrolean waitresses, bullfighters, ringside fans, sports instructors, snake-charmers, foot-jugglers, etc.), soon came to be applied to the equipment itself and resulted in what no doubt constituted the true originality of the entire project: the pure and simple negation of space.
Indeed, comparisons of fixed investments and running costs soon demonstrated that it would cost more to build sea beds, mountains, castles, canyons, rock-art caves, and the Pyramids twenty-four times over than to transport gratis any customer wishing to ski on the August bank holiday whilst in Halle, or to go tiger-hunting when in deepest Spain.
Thus the notion of a standard contract was born: for a minimum stay of four days of twenty-four hours, each night could be spent, at no extra charge, in any one of the hotels in the chain. Each new customer would be given on arrival a kind of calendar offering some seven hundred and fifty tourist and cultural events, each one having a specified weighting in hours, and the customer would be free to tick off as many as his envisaged length of stay at Marvel Houses entitled him to, the management guaranteeing to meet ninety percent of the desiderata at no extra charge. To take a simplified example, if a client checking in at Safad ticks off in any old order events such as: skiing, taking the waters at a chalybeate spa, a tour of the Kasbah at Ouarzazate, a Swiss wine and cheese tasting, a canasta tournament, a tour of the Hermitage, a sauerkraut dinner, a tour of the château at Champs-sur-Marne, a concert given by the Des Moines Philharmonic conducted by Laszlo Birnbaum, a tour of the Bétharram caves (You travel right through a mountain wonderland lit by 4,500 electric bulbs! Its huge wealth of stalactites and the wonderfully varied wall paintings are enhanced by a ride in a gondola that takes you back to Venice the Fair! Nature’s most Unique creation!), etc., the hotel management, after linking into the company’s huge mainframe, will immediately plan transport to Coire (Switzerland) where glacier skiing, the Swiss wine and cheese tasting (Valteline wines), the chalybeate spring water, and the canasta tournament will be laid on, and then another transit from Coire to Vence, for the reconstruction of the Bétharram caves (You travel right through a mountain wonderland, etc.). The sauerkraut dinner could take place at Safad itself, as could the touring of the gallery and the château, provided by slide lectures which allow the traveller, comfortably seated in a club armchair, to discover, with the assistance of an intelligent commentary putting things in a proper perspective, the artistic marvels of every period and every land. On the other hand, the management would not provide transfer to Artesia, where a fabulous replica of the Ouarzazate Kasbah was located, nor to Orlando–Disney World, where the Des Moines Philharmonic had been hired for the season, unless the customer signed up for an extra week, and as a possible substitute would suggest a tour of genuine Safad synagogues (at Safad), an evening with the Bregenzer Kammerorchester conducted by Hal Montgomery, with the soloist Virginia Fredericksburg (Corelli, Vivaldi, Gabriel Pierné) (at Vence), or a lecture by Professor Strossi, of Clermont-Ferrand University, on Marshall McLuhan and the Third Copernican Revolution (at Coire).
It goes without saying that the directors of Marvel Houses would always do their best to equip each of their twenty-four culture parks with all the features promised. Where they ran into a major obstacle, they would restrict this or that feature to a single site and replace it everywhere else by a quality replica: so there would be, for instance, only one Bétharram cave, and the other caves elsewhere would be more like those found at Lascaux or Les Eyzies, maybe less spectacular but just as moving and intellectually stimulating. This flexible and well-thought-out policy was the key to unlimitedly ambitious projects, and by late 1971 architects and planners had achieved veritable miracles, on paper at least: Exeter College, Oxford, was to be dismantled, shipped over stone by stone, and rebuilt in Mozambique, the Château de Chambord to be reconstituted at Osaka, the Ouarzazate medina rebuilt at Artesia, the Seven Wonders of the World (1:15 scale model) at Pemba, London Bridge at Trout, and Darius’ Palace in Persepolis replicated at Huixtla (Mexico), where the full glory of the Persian kings would be restored down to the smallest detail, including the authentic number of slaves, chariots, horses, and palaces, the beauty of their concubines, and their sumptuous concerts. It would have been a pity to consider reduplicating these masterpieces, given the degree to which the system’s originality was based on the geographical uniqueness of such wonders, combined with the lucky customer’s ability to have immediate enjoyment of them all.
Market research and attitudinal surveys banished backers’ hesitations and doubts by showing irrefutably that there was a potential clientele of such size that it was perfectly reasonable to expect to recoup the investment not in five years and three months, as the preliminary estimates had suggested, but in a mere four years and eight months. Capital came flooding in; in early 1972 the project went operational, and construction work was started on two pilot complexes, Trout and Pemba.
According to Puerto Rican legislation, Marvel Houses International had to spend 1% of its total cash flow on the purchase of contemporary works of art; in most cases, compulsions of this kind in the hotel business usually result in each bedroom having an Indian-ink drawing touched up with watercolour depicting an Atlantic beach resort or a Mediterranean cliff, or else provide the main lobby with some sculptural mini-monument. But Marvel Houses International considered itself duty-bound to devise a more original solution, and after roughing out three or four ideas on paper – building an international museum of modern art in one of the hotel complexes, purchase or commission of twenty-four major works by the twenty-four greatest living artists, establishing a Marvel Houses Foundation giving grant aid to young creators – the directors of Marvel Houses got what was for them a minor problem off their plates by handing it over to an art critic.
Their choice alighted upon Charles-Albert Beyssandre, a Swiss critic of French mother-tongue, a regular columnist for the Feuille d’Avis de Fribourg and the Gazette de Genève, and Zürich correspondent for half a dozen French, Belgian, and Italian dailies and periodicals. The chairman and managing director of International Hostellerie – and thus of Marvel Houses International – was one of his faithful readers and had taken his advice several times on art investments.
Summoned by the board of Marvel Houses and told of their problem, Charles-Albert Beyssandre had no difficulty in convincing the developers that the solution best fitted to their policy of prestige would be to collect a quite small number of major works: not a museum, nor a rag-bag, certainly not a litho over every bedhead, but a handful of masterpieces jealously secreted in a single spot, which art lovers the world over would dream of gazing at at least once in their lives. Excited at such a prospect, the directors of Marvel Houses entrusted Charles-Albert Beyssandre with the task of collecting these ultraselect items over the following five years.
Beyssandre thus found himself sitting on a budget that was theoretical – final settlements, including his own three percent commission, were not due until 1976 – but, notwithstanding, colossal: more than five billion old francs, enough to buy the three most valuable paintings in the world, or, as he played around with figuring out in his first few days, enough to buy fifty Klees, almost every single Morandi, almost all of Bacon or practically every Magritte, maybe five hundred Dubuffets, a good score of the best Picassos, a hundred or so Staëls, almost the entire output of Frank Stella, almost every Kline and every Klein, all the Rothkos in the Rockefeller collection with all the Huffings in the Fitchwinder and all the Huttings of the haze period (which Beyssandre did not appreciate overmuch anyway) thrown in on the side.
The somewhat puerile exaltation aroused by these calculations soon subsided, and Beyssandre quickly found that his task would be far harder than he had thought.
Beyssandre was a sincere man who loved painting and painters, an attentive, scrupulous, and open man who was happy when, at the end of a session of many hours in a studio or a gallery, he managed to let the unchanging presence of a painting invade his soul, to be filled by the work’s calm and fragile existence, as its concentrated clarity imposed itself on him little by little, transforming the canvas into an almost living thing, a thing bodied forth, a thing there, both simple and complex, bearing the signs of a past history, of a labour, and of a craft finally brought into a shape transcending its difficult, tortuous, and maybe even tortured path of becoming. The task the directors of Marvel Houses had given Beyssandre was clearly mercantile; but at least it might allow him, as he reviewed the art of his time, to have many more of those “magic moments” – the phrase belonged to his Parisian colleague Esberi – and he thus undertook the task with a feeling not far short of enthusiasm.
But news travels fast in the art world, and often gets twisted; it was soon an open secret that Charles-Albert Beyssandre had become the agent of a formidable patron who had hired him to build up the richest private collection of living painters in the world.
After a few weeks Beyssandre realised he wielded power beyond even the size of his budget. The mere idea that the critic might, in certain circumstances, at some unspecified future date, consider purchasing some canvas or other for his super-rich client sent dealers crazy, and the least established talents shot up overnight to the rank of a Cézanne or a Murillo. Just as in the story of the man who had absolutely nothing apart from one hundred-thousand-pound banknote and managed to live on it for a month without touching a penny, so the presence or absence of the critic at an art-world event began to have sensational consequences. As soon as he came into an auction room the bids would begin to climb, and if he left after a quick look around, prices would soften, weaken, slump. As for his column, it became an event awaited with feverish impatience by investors. If he mentioned the first showing of some new painter’s work, the artist would sell the lot in the day, and if he failed to mention an exhibition by a recognised master, collectors would suddenly turn away, resell at a loss, or take down the scorned canvases from their drawing-room walls to hide them in armourplated safes until the day their ranking moved up again.
Very quickly pressure began to be exerted on him. He was smothered in champagne and foie gras; liveried chauffeurs were sent to fetch him in black limousines; then dealers began to mention possible percentages; several reputable architects offered to build him houses, and several interior designers offered to decorate them for him.
For several weeks Beyssandre persevered with his column, believing that the scares and sensations it caused would necessarily subside. Then he tried using various pseudonyms – B. Drapier, Diedrich Knickerbocker, Fred Dannay, M. B. Lee, Sylvander, Ehrich Weiss, Guillaume Porter, etc. – but it was almost worse, because dealers now thought they could identify him behind any unfamiliar signature, and inexplicable turmoils continued to rock the art market long after Beyssandre had entirely given up writing and had announced the fact in full-page displays in all the papers he had ever worked for.
The following months were the hardest for him: he had to stop himself going into sale rooms and attending private views; he took elaborate precautions to visit galleries, but each time his incognito was blown it set off disastrous repercussions, and he ended up choosing to abandon all public appearances; henceforth he visited only artists’ studios; he would ask the artist to show him what he reckoned to be his five best works and to leave him alone with them for at least an hour.
Two years later, he had visited more than two thousand studios dotted around ninety-one cities in twenty-three countries. His problem now was to reread his notes and to make his selection: one of the directors of International Hostellerie generously gave him free use of a chalet in the Grisons, and he went there to think over the strange task he had been given, and the curious side effects that had ensued from it. And it was at about this time, as he gazed on a landscape of glaciers with only cows ringing their low-pitched bells for company and reflected on the meaning of art, that he heard of Bartlebooth’s adventure.
He learnt of it quite by chance as he was preparing to light a fire with a two-year-old issue of the St Moritz Latest News, a local rag giving resort gossip twice a week during the winter season: Olivia and Rémi Rorschach had spent ten days at the Engadiner hotel, and each of them had been entitled to an interview:
– Rémi Rorschach, can you tell us what your current projects are?
– I’ve been told the story of a man who went round the world to paint pictures, and then had them scientifically destroyed. I think I’d quite like to make a film about it. . .
The résumé was thin and erroneous, but just the thing to arouse Beyssandre’s interest. And when the art critic got wind of the thing in greater detail, the Englishman’s project fired his enthusiasm. Then, very quickly, Beyssandre made his decision: those very works which their author absolutely wished to destroy would be the most precious jewels in the rarest collection in the world.
Bartlebooth received Beyssandre’s first letter in early April 1974. By then all he could read were banner headlines, so Smautf read the letter to him. In it, the critic told his own story in detail, explaining how he had reached the view that those watercolours cut into so many jigsaws should be treated as works of art, a destiny which their begetter wished to deny them: whereas artists and their dealers the world over had been dreaming for months of getting one of their products into the fabulous Marvel Houses collection, he was offering the only man who wanted neither to show nor to keep his own work the sum of ten million dollars for the purchase of what he had left!
Bartlebooth asked Smautf to tear up the letter, to return any more that might come without opening them, and not to let the signatory enter if perchance he were to turn up.
For three months Beyssandre wrote, rang in, and rang on the doorbell to no avail. Then on 11 July he called on Smautf in his bedroom and instructed him to warn his master that he was making a declaration of war: Bartlebooth might think art consisted in destroying the works he had brought into being, but he, Beyssandre, considered that art consisted of saving one or more of these works at any price, and he defied the stubborn Englishman to stop him doing so.
Bartlebooth was sufficiently aware, if only from having experienced it himself, of the havoc that passion may wreak on the most sensible people, to know that the critic’s words were no idle threat. The simplest precaution would have been to avoid any risk with the reconstituted watercolours by abandoning their systematic destruction on the very site where they had been painted long ago. But that would be to misjudge Bartlebooth: when challenged, he would face the challenge, and the watercolours would continue to be conveyed, as they always had been conveyed, to their place of origin to return to the blank whiteness of their original non-being.
This final phase of the great plan had always been carried out with much less rigidity than the prior stages. In the early years, Bartlebooth himself would deal with the operation when the sites were no more than a couple of plane or train rides away; a little later, Smautf took over, and then, when the places concerned became more and more distant, the custom arose of mailing the watercolours to the correspondents in situ whom Bartlebooth had contacted at the time, or to their successors; each watercolour was sent with a phial of special solvent, a detailed map showing exactly where the thing was to be done, an explanatory note, and a signed letter from Bartlebooth kindly requesting the said correspondent to be so good as to perform the destruction of the enclosed watercolour in accordance with the instructions contained in the explanatory note and, on completion of the operation, to send back to him the sheet of paper returned to its blank virginity. Up until then the procedure had worked as planned, and ten or fifteen days later Bartlebooth would receive his blank sheet, and it had never even occurred to him that anyone might have just pretended to destroy the watercolour and sent him back another sheet, which he checked up on nonetheless by making sure that all these sheets – especially made for him – did indeed bear his watermark and the tiny traces of Winckler’s cutting lines.
Bartlebooth contemplated several answers to Beyssandre’s attack. The most efficient would no doubt have been to entrust an associate with the task of destroying the watercolours and to give him a bodyguard escort. But where could he find such a trustworthy associate, now he was up against the almost unlimited power the critic had at his disposal? Bartlebooth trusted only Smautf completely, and Smautf was much too old; and what was more, the billionaire had neglected his inheritance for fifty years in favour of ensuring the success of his project and had left it more and more in the hands of his business advisers, and so he would not even have had the resources to provide his old servant with such costly protection.
After long hesitation, Bartlebooth asked to see Rorschach. No one knows how he got him to collaborate, but it was at all events through the producer’s good offices that he was able to entrust television crews leaving on assignments in the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, or the Persian Gulf with the task of destroying his watercolours in the customary way, and of filming the destruction.
For several months this system worked without too much trouble. On the eve of departure, the cameraman would receive the watercolour to be destroyed and a sealed box containing one hundred and twenty metres of reversible film, that is to say celluloid producing a positive image when developed without an intermediate negative stage. Smautf and Kléber would go to the airport to collect from the returning cameraman the now blank watercolour and the exposed celluloid which they would take directly to a laboratory. The same evening or, at the latest, next day Bartlebooth would view the film on a 16mm projector set up in the antechamber. Then he would have the film burnt.
Various incidents that could not easily be ascribed to chance proved nonetheless that Beyssandre had not given up. He was definitely responsible for the burglary that occurred in the flat of Robert Cravennat, the chemistry lab technician who had been dealing with the resolidification of the puzzles since Morellet’s accident in 1960, and for the attempted arson which nearly caused a devastating fire in Guyomard’s studio. Bartlebooth’s sight had been getting worse and worse, and he was getting even further behind in his schedule, so Cravennat had no puzzle in his flat that fortnight; as for Guyomard, he extinguished the petrol-soaked rags which were intended to start the fire, before whoever lit them could take advantage of the situation to steal the watercolour the restorer had just received.
But it would take much more than that to put Beyssandre off. Just over two months ago, on the twenty-fifth of April 1975, in the same week that Bartlebooth lost his eyesight for good, the inevitable finally happened: the documentary crew that had gone to Turkey, and whose cameraman was due to go to Trabzon to perform the destruction of Bartlebooth’s four hundred and thirty-eighth watercolour (the Englishman was now sixteen months behind schedule), failed to return: two days later news came that the four crewmen had died in a mysterious car accident.
Bartlebooth decided to give up his ritual destructions; henceforth, completed puzzles would no longer be reglued, separated from their backing, and soaked in a solvent from which the sheet of paper would emerge entirely white, but simply put back in Madame Hourcade’s black box and thrown into an incinerator. This decision came too late in the day to be of any use, for Bartlebooth would never complete the puzzle he began that week.
A few days later, Smautf read in a newspaper that Marvel Houses International, a subsidiary of Marvel Houses Incorporated and International Hostellerie, was being wound up. Fresh estimates had shown that in view of increased construction costs, amortisation of the twenty-four culture parks would take not four years and eight months, nor even five years and three months, but six years and two months; the major backers had taken fright and withdrawn their capital, to invest it in a gigantic scheme to tow icebergs. The Marvel Houses programme was suspended sine die. As for Beyssandre, he was never heard of again.
* The USA seems to have been selected twice – Artesia and Orlando – contrary to the decision to build the twenty-four centres in twenty-four different countries; but, as one of the directors of Marvel Houses pointed out very relevantly, Orlando is only superficially located in the United States, in the sense that Disney World is a world of its own, a world in which Marvel Houses and International Hostellerie had a duty to be represented.
