THROUGH SOME ASSOCIATION of ideas, I had suggested we meet the man from Christie’s at Pile ou Face, a little restaurant not too far from the Hôtel Drouot, the auction house. The Christie’s man was Piers Janely, large, plump, and affable. I immediately saw he was a shade too large for Pile ou Face, taking up too much space in a discreet little room. He had a high-colored English face, and his voice had a range between upper-class loudness and the dealer’s smooth, confidential croon. I had forgotten or never had noticed the almost affected inflections of English English, which sounded odd and stagey against our own flat California accents. Hearing French around you all the time makes you more conscious of the accents of English. Like Piers, Roger and I are tall. The three of us moved, stooping, up the circular stairway.
Chester was going to the Louvre with Margeeve, said he would come for dessert if he could but not to count on it. He said he trusted us. Neither he nor I was sure why we were meeting this Christie’s guy anyhow, but Roger had been corresponding with him.
“Let me say at once that your picture is fabulous, marvelously beautiful,” said Piers Janely. “What would an oeuf fermier be? Just a boiled egg? Only in France could they serve you a boiled egg with such panache. Such effrontery, one might say. And the price! I think I’ll try the egg, to start.” All this said in a voice perfectly audible downstairs, I was sure.
“I’ve explained the legal situation,” Roger said to me.
“Knotty, but by no means the worst we’ve had to deal with,” Janely remarked. “Of course things are always worse when the French are involved.”
“They’re not involved, in the largest sense,” said Roger. “As I wrote you, the Louvre is not interested, which clears the way for export.”
“Then the foie de veau, pommes mousseline,” said Janely.
“Oh, you should have something more cuisinée,” I suggested. “How often do you come to Paris? What they do wonderfully here is pintade au cerfeuil, with some chestnuts.” I felt Roger studying me oddly.
“Let me look at the wine list,” Janely said. “I used to do a bit of wine, before moving into Old Masters.”
“They say the real wine experts are all English,” Roger said.
“Undoubtedly, it’s absolutely true. The French have very faddish notions and often overlook some quite amazing vintages.” He studied the wine list and waited for us to order. I had the eggs myself, being fond of the puree of morilles that comes with them, and the croustade de poulet, reflecting that I might be eating another big meal that night with Edgar. When Roger had ordered, Janely asked the waiter to bring us a red Trévallon, which I thought was an interesting choice.
“Your picture, I must say, from La Tour’s best period, in my mind, though by no means the period he is best known for,” Janely said presently. “In my opinion, La Tour.”
He waited for us to absorb this astonishing news.
“That doesn’t seem to be the general opinion,” said Roger presently, his voice husky, as a man’s becomes when he is torn with desire. “The school of La Tour, or a follower of La Tour is the most anyone will say.”
“Of course,” said Janely. “What do you expect? If they tell you it’s a La Tour, the price will go out of sight and they’ll have to pay more for it. It’s that simple, frankly.”
“But the Louvre?”
“Suppose you were a museum,” Janely said. “You wanted to acquire, say, a Renoir some local people had found in their attic. I don’t say the Louvre would mislead in any way, I would never suggest—I mention the psychology of the situation. Before you proposed a price, would you go round first to tell them how valuable their Renoir was? Hardly.”
The simplicity, the obviousness of all this, struck me and Roger both.
“If they wondered whether it were really a Renoir at all, would you assure them it was? No, you would not. To preserve your own integrity, you might tell them you couldn’t be sure.”
“I see,” said Roger after a moment. “What do you think?”
“I think it is a very fine La Tour which in competitive bidding will achieve a very fine price. More than one person will know its value. Our catalog would state the case correctly.”
“What price range?” Roger asked, his voice husky with avarice.
“Perhaps a million pounds. We would advise a reserve of nearly that. That would mean it would not be sold under that sum.”
Roger and I both calculated the difference between a million pounds, even as split with the Persands, and the forty thousand of Stuart Barbee’s first estimate. I felt funny—the mere process of thinking about a huge sum of money introduces a kind of unpleasant excitement, a feeling of hectic interest, a hum in the brain. Tureens and beautiful clothes floated through unbidden. I tried to think of something more worthy, I imagined two million, split with the Persands leaving a million, split with Roxy and Judith—it would still come to five hundred thousand for Roger and me. A dizzying, empowering sum. It was to become Isabel the heiress instead of Isabel the dog-walker. I am detaching these thoughts from each other in order to put them down, but they occurred simultaneously, with the force of electric shock.
Either Roger was making the same calculations, or he was struck dumb by the mendacity of great institutions.
“Barbee, the guy who came for the Getty—wasn’t he an independent appraiser? He had nothing to gain or lose, that was just insurance.”
“Hmmm, rather,” said Janely.
“Who do we get to tell us, then?” Roger asked.
“We have, obviously, a point of view opposite to the museums and dealers. Like you, we want to sell at the maximum price. We don’t serve our own interests by overestimating, however, and most of the time we are close to predicting the actual sales price. Sometimes sales disappoint, sometimes they exceed our estimate—that is what happens most often. We are accurate because we are confident about our attributions and we know the market. We have to. There is no doubt in my mind that you have a good early La Tour and it could be worth as much as a million pounds.”
“Drouot would have more experience, surely, with French painting?”
Janely raised a brow. “I don’t pretend to know what liaisons prevail among the French institutions. It’s safe to say Drouot is playing it safe.”
“I would feel more comfortable at Christie’s,” Roger admitted.
“This is extraordinary,” said Janely of his soufflé. “The French really are matchless.”
Chester climbed the stairs just as we were finishing, so we had another coffee with him. Mr. Janely paid the bill.
“A million, Dad,” Roger told Chester. “Mr. Janely is sure it’s a La Tour.” At this, Chester just looked uncomfortable.
We were rocked, thrown, Roger and I, by this lunch, and didn’t have much to say to each other walking back toward the Place Maubert, each lost in thought, counting our riches, plotting our actions, trying to stifle those improper hopes now springing up that had so carefully been bred out of us by our parents and their strictures against greed. (Well, I never noticed that these had weighed much with Roger anyhow.) We didn’t at all disagree that Saint Ursula ought to be sold at Christie’s. After a discreet interval following its withdrawal from the sale at Drouot, it would come blazing out as a La Tour and the Louvre would have already signed off on it. We were each thinking of what the money would mean to us, and Roger was probably thinking of how we could get out of having to split it with the Persands. I agreed they had no right to it really.