CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

Moreau, 5

WHEN MADAME MOREAU began to feel her body failing her, she asked Madame Trévins to come to live with her, and gave her a room which Fleury had decorated as a rococo boudoir with flimsy draperies, violet silks screen-printed with great leaves, lace doilies, whorled candelabras, dwarf orange trees, and an alabaster figurine representing a child in a pastoral shepherd costume, holding a bird in his hands.

Of all these splendours, there remain: a still life depicting a lute on a table: the lute is placed face upwards, in full light, whilst underneath the table, almost drowned by the shadow, can be seen its black case, face down; a gilded wooden lectern, highly worked, bearing the controversial hallmark of Hugues Sambin, a sixteenth-century architect and woodcarver from Dijon; and three large hand-coloured photographs dating from the Russo-Japanese war: the first shows the battleship Pobieda, the pride of the Russian fleet, put out of action by a Japanese depth charge off Port Arthur on 13 April 1904; insets display four of Russia’s military leaders: Admiral Makharov, commander-in-chief of the Russian fleet in the Far East, General Kuropatkin, generalissimo of the Russian army in the Far East, General Stoessel, military commander of Port Arthur, and General Pflug, chief of staff of the Russian army in the Far East; the second photograph, the other’s twin, shows the Japanese battleship-cruiser Asama, built by Armstrong’s, with insets of Admiral Yamamoto, navy minister, Admiral Togo, the “Japanese Nelson”, commander-in-chief of the Japanese flotilla off Port Arthur, General Kodama, the “Kitchener of Japan”, commander-in-chief of the Japanese army, and General Viscount Tazo-Katzura, prime minister. The third photograph portrays a Russian military encampment near Mukden: it is evening; in front of each tent soldiers sit with their feet in bowls of tepid water; in the centre, in a taller tent with awnings in the form of a kiosk flanked by two Cossack guards, a most certainly high-ranking officer studies the plan of battles to come on charts heavily laden with pins.

The rest of the room is furnished in modern fashion: the bed is a foam mattress sheathed in black synthetic leather and placed on a podium; a low piece of furniture with drawers, made of dark wood and polished steel, serves as both a dressing table and a bedside table; on it stands a perfectly spherical bedside light, a wristwatch with digital display, a bottle of Vichy water with a special cap to stop it from going flat, a cyclostyled document 21cm × 27cm entitled French National Standards for Watchmakers’ and Jewellers’ Items, a pamphlet in the “Business” series with the title Employers and Workers, The Dialogue Is Still Open, and a book of some four hundred pages covered in a flambé dust jacket: The Lives of the Trévins Sisters, by Célestine Durand-Taillefer [available from the author, Rue du Hennin, Liège (Belgium)].

These Trévins sisters are supposed to be Madame Trévins’s five nieces, the daughters of her brother Daniel. The reader who wonders what in the lives of these five women made them deserve such a lengthy biography has his mind put at rest on page one: the five sisters were in fact quintuplets, all born in the space of eighteen minutes on 14 July 1943, at Abidjan, kept in an incubator for four months, and since then never ill.

But the fate of these quins goes a mile higher than the mere miracle of their birth: Adelaïde, after beating the French record for the sixty-metre sprint (juniors) at the age of ten, was seized, from the age of twelve, by a passion for the circus, and dragged her sisters into an acrobatic act which was soon famous throughout Europe: The Fire Girls jumped through flaming hoops, switched trapezes in midair whilst juggling lighted torches, or did the hula-hoop on a wire twelve feet above ground. The fire at the Hamburg Fairyland ruined these precocious careers: the insurers claimed that The Fire Girls were the cause of the disaster and refused henceforth to give cover to any theatres where they performed, even after the five girls had provide in court that they used perfectly harmless artificial fire sold by Ruggieri’s under the name of “jam” and specifically designed for circus artists and cinema stunt men.

Marie-Thérèse and Odile then became nightclub dancers; their impeccable shapeliness and their identical appearances ensured almost immediate and stunning success: the Crazy Sisters could be seen at the Paris Lido, at Cavalier’s in Stockholm, at Naughties in Milan, at the Las Vegas B and A, and at Pension Macadam in Tangiers, the Beirut Star, the Ambassadors in London, the Bros d’Or in Acapulco, the Berlin Nirvana, at Monkey Jungle in Miami, at Twelve Tones in Newport and Caribbean’s in Barbados, where they met two men of substance who took sufficient fancy to them to marry them on the spot: Marie-Thérèse wedded the Canadian shipowner, Michel Wilker, the great-great-grandson of one of Dumont d’Urville’s unlucky competitors, and Odile married an American industrialist, Faber McCork, the king of the diet delicatessens.

Both divorced the next year; Marie-Thérèse, who had become Canadian, threw herself into business and politics, founding and running a huge Consumer Defence Movement, of ecological and autarchic tendencies, simultaneously manufacturing and distributing on a massive scale a whole range of products suited to the return to nature and to the true macrobiotic lifestyle of primitive communities: canvas water bottles, yoghurt-makers, tent canvas, Pan pipes (kit form), bread ovens, etc. Odile, for her part, came back to France; taken on as a typist by the Institute for the History of Texts, she found that, although entirely self-taught, she had a taste for Late Latin, and for the next ten years did four hours’ unpaid overtime every evening at the Institute in order to establish a definitive edition of the Danorum Regum Heroumque Historia by Saxo Grammaticus, which is still considered the authoritative edition; later, she married an English judge and undertook a revision of Jerome Wolf and Portus’s Latin edition of the so-called Lexicon of Suidas, which she was still working on at the time the story of her life was written.

The three other sisters had destinies no less impressive: Noëlle became the right hand of Werner Angst, the German steel magnate; Roseline was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe solo, on board her thirty-six-foot yacht, the C’est si beau; as for Adelaïde, she became a chemist and discovered a method for splitting enzymes, allowing “delayed” catalyses to be obtained; this discovery led to a whole series of patents, now widely used in industry for making detergents, varnishes, and paints; since then Adelaïde has become an extremely wealthy woman and devotes her time to her two hobbies, the piano and the handicapped.

The exemplary biographies of the five Trévins sisters, unfortunately, do not stand up to closer scrutiny, and the reader who smells a rat in these quasi-fabulous exploits will soon have his suspicions confirmed. For Madame Trévins (who, unlike Mademoiselle Crespi, is called Madame despite being a spinster) has no brother, and consequently no nieces bearing her surname; and Célestine Durand-Taillefer cannot live in Rue Hennin in Liège because in Liège there is no Rue Hennin; on the other hand, Madame Trévins did have a sister, Arlette, who was married to a Mr Louis Commine and bore him a daughter, Lucette, who married someone called Robert Hennin, who sells postcards (collectors’ items only) in Rue de Liège, in Paris (VIIIth arrondissement).

A closer reading of these imaginary lives would no doubt lead to discovering the key and seeing how some of the events that have influenced the history of the building, some of the legends and semi-legends that go round about one or another of its inhabitants, some of the threads that connect them to each other, have been buried in the narrative and have given it its skeleton. Thus it is more than probable that Marie-Thérèse, the exceptionally successful businesswoman, represents Madame Moreau, who moreover bears the same forename; that Werner Angst is Hermann Fugger, the German industrialist friend of the Altamonts, and a client of Hutting’s and a colleague of Madame Moreau; and that Noëlle, Angst’s right hand, as the result of a very significant sideways shift, could be a figure for Madame Trévins herself; and though it is less easy to see what hides behind the other three sisters, it is by no means impossible to surmise that underneath Adelaïde, the chemist well disposed towards the handicapped, lies Morellet, who lost three fingers in an unfortunate experiment; that behind Odile, the autodidact, lies Léon Marcia; and that behind the solitary yachtswoman loom the very different profiles of Bartlebooth and Olivia Norvell.

Madame Trévins took many years to write this story, in the infrequent moments of respite that Madame Moreau allowed her. She took particular pains over her choice of pseudonym: a first name very faintly suggestive of something cultural, and a double-barrelled surname composed of a first part as banal and ordinary as Jones, and a second part alluding to a famous fictional character. That did not suffice to convince publishers, who didn’t want anything to do with a first novel written by an 85-year-old spinster. In fact Madame Trévins was only eighty-two, but that didn’t cut much ice with the publishers, and in the end Madame Trévins lost heart and had a single copy printed, which she dedicated to herself.