“Well, no, not a friend,” I said. I wondered how much the archivist knew about the comtesse. “An acquaintance, if that. She and my mother may have known each other socially.”
The archivist looked at the page I’d marked in Bristol’s book and typed something into her computer. “I see,” she said, and if one of her eyebrows lifted higher than the other, it was very slight.
Lucette Labat-Poussin, heir to a copper fortune and comtesse by marriage, was something of a personality in her day. She was a generous patron and unpredictable lover, usually to the same people, and she openly preferred members of her own sex long before such things were done. Her attentions and her money went to dancers and actresses mostly, and though she took an interest in writers too, no one aside from Carter Bristol has ever suggested that one of them was Inga Beart.
I suppose Bristol is only taking his theory of my mother’s psychosis to its logical conclusion when he claims that Inga Beart’s final act of self-destruction was in fact aimed at destroying someone else. He’s done quite a job of gumming up history to make the comtesse play the part, claiming that what Inga Beart did to herself was meant to hurt the comtesse most of all. In my view, there is little evidence to support the idea that Lucette Labat-Poussin and Inga Beart even knew each other very well, let alone that they had the kind of passionate clandestine affair Bristol describes. In all my research I’ve found their names mentioned together just a handful of times, usually as guests at the same party, and Inga Beart didn’t seem to benefit from the kind of financial support that generally accompanied the comtesse’s affections. No other biography of Inga Beart contains more than a passing reference to Labat-Poussin, but this hardly troubled Bristol. According to him, if their relationship was more successfully kept secret than the comtesse’s other exploits, it was only because she was at that time entangled with at least two other younger women and took some pains not to offend a sense of propriety among her society friends.
The archivist handed Bristol’s book back to me and wrote out a card with the call number for the comtesse’s papers. Before I’d had a chance to ask about the medical records from the H?tel-Dieu hospital, she was motioning for me to follow her out of her office. Clearly our meeting was over.
The archivist pointed me to the main reading room, where I gave my form to the man at the requests counter, then waited until he called my number. The comtesse’s papers were in a cardboard box tied up with strings; almost certainly Carter Bristol had been the last to knot them in a little bow. Inside there was a pile of typewritten papers, some handwritten letters of odd sizes, and a stack of photographs. Naturally I looked at the photographs first. Many were of the Comtesse Labat-Poussin as a young woman.
In his book Bristol explains the supposed relationship between them as one of nostalgia on the part of the comtesse, who saw in Inga Beart a measure of the loveliness she herself had nearly attained in her youth. I had to agree with Bristol that in some of the pictures Lucette Labat-Poussin kept of her young self she does look a bit like my mother, though the resemblance is mostly superficial, in the hairline and the shape of the face. Her light eyes, though similar, are flat and direct, nothing like my mother’s, which from her earliest school pictures appear as twin wells reflecting a colorless sky at their depths.
The comtesse apparently told someone that they had been mistaken for sisters, and it was because of this physical resemblance, Bristol says, that Lucette took an interest in Inga Beart when she arrived in Paris. As a sort of vanity project she tried to stem the psychological as well as physical damage Inga Beart seemed intent on doing to herself with a combination of morphine, barbiturates, and bacchanalian soirées. But, according to Bristol, by the summer of 1954 Inga Beart’s mania had progressed to the paranoiac stage. She was afraid that the comtesse was getting too close, and so she ended the affair in the most effective way she could. By blinding herself she destroyed the very likeness the older woman was trying to preserve.
Of course these are only Bristol’s conjectures. Nowhere in all of Inga Beart’s correspondence, in gossip columns, or in the memoirs of their contemporaries is there a single mention of the two of them being seen together outside of social settings. Even on August 10, 1954, no one ever swore to anything. In essence, Bristol has based his entire claim on a bystander’s account that a dark-haired woman who matched the comtesse’s general description was seen bringing Inga Beart to the H?tel-Dieu hospital the day she lost her eyes.
Still, I’d assumed that Bristol was telling the truth when he wrote in his book that he’d found pictures of my mother among the Labat-Poussin papers, and I was honestly surprised when I got to the end of the comtesse’s stack of photographs without so much as a glimpse of Inga Beart. Most of the rest of the carton was taken up with drafts of the same typewritten document—all in French—which seemed to be the comtesse’s memoirs. I looked through it all carefully, scanning each page for my mother’s name, but I never found it. There were no love letters, no mention of the druggist, the falling bricks, or the glass of Pernod. Dispirited, but madder than ever at Bristol for having so clearly fabricated a relationship between the two of them, I packed the carton up again and returned it to the counter, where a man in a heavy apron took it and scanned my card. I thanked him and turned to go, but he said something to me and, seeing that I didn’t understand, he motioned for me to wait. So I waited and he came back with another carton.
“That’s not for me,” I said. “I only had the one.” But the man didn’t understand. He pushed the carton toward me and pointed to the card the archivist had given me.
“Vingt-trois,” he said.
I shook my head. “No, I think you already gave me the right box,” I said.
“Vingt-trois,” he said again. He pointed to the carton I’d just returned. “Un,” he said. He pointed to the new carton on the counter. “Deux.” He pointed to the shelf behind the desk where more cartons were waiting. “Trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, da, da, da, vingt-deux, vingt-trois,” he said, and showed me a list of numbers on the card.