SERGE VALÈNE died a few weeks later, during the mid-August bank holiday. It was nearly a month since he had left his room. The death of his old pupil and the disappearance of Smautf, who had left the building the very next day, had dealt him a terrible blow. He hardly took any food anymore, lost his words, left sentences hanging. Madame Nochère, Elzbieta Orlowska, and Mademoiselle Crespi took turns caring for him, went up to see him two or three times a day, made him a bowl of clear soup, tidied up his bedclothes and pillows, did his laundry, helped him wash and change, and took him to the lavatory at the end of the corridor.
The building was virtually empty. Several of the people who usually didn’t go on holiday, or had stopped going on holidays, were away that year: Madame de Beaumont had been invited to be honorary president at the Alban Berg Festival held in Berlin to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the composer’s birth, the 40th anniversary of his death (and of the Concerto in Memory of an Angel) and the 50th anniversary of the world premiere of Wozzeck; Cinoc, overcoming his fear of flying and of US Immigration, which he thought still happened on Ellis Island, had finally responded to the invitations he had been getting for years from two distant cousins, a Nick Linhaus who owned a nightclub (The Nemo Club) at Dempledorf (Nebraska), and a Bobby Hallowell, a police doctor at Santa Monica (California); Léon Marcia had let his wife and son drag him off to a rented villa near Divonne-les-Bains; and Olivier Gratiolet, despite the very poor state of his leg, had insisted on spending three weeks with his daughter on the Isle of Oléron. Even those who had stayed on at Rue Simon-Crubellier for the month of August took advantage of the long weekend of the fifteenth to get away from Paris for three days: the Pizzicagnolis went to Deauville and took Jane Sutton with them; Elzbieta Orlowska went to see her son at Nivillers, and Madame Nochère left to go to her daughter’s wedding at Amiens.
On Friday the fourteenth of August, the only people left in the building were Madame Moreau, attended day and night by her nurse and Madame Trévins, Mademoiselle Crespi, Madame Albin, and Valène. And when Mademoiselle Crespi went up towards the end of the morning to take the aged artist two boiled eggs and a cup of tea, she found him dead.
He was resting on his bed, fully dressed, peaceful and puffy, with his arms crossed on his chest. A large square canvas with sides over six feet long stood by the window, halving the small area of the maid’s room in which he had spent the largest part of his life. The canvas was practically blank: a few charcoal lines had been carefully drawn, dividing it up into regular square boxes, the sketch of a cross-section of a block of flats which no figure, now, would ever come to inhabit.
END
PARIS, 1969–78