So I took the next carton of the Comtesse Labat-Poussin’s papers. It was similar to the first; I couldn’t find my mother anywhere. The third and fourth were just the same.
It was clear that the comtesse had been a much more prolific patron of the arts and letters than I had gathered from Bristol’s book or from the research I’d been able to do on my own back home. There were dozens of folders labeled with the name of this or that project, and with the help of my little dictionary I got the sense that the comtesse had dabbled in all manner of things, from financing operettas to the rehabilitation of historic sites that had been destroyed during the war. She seemed to have saved everything—train tickets, programs from amateur theaters, letters written in smudged ink on hotel stationary, all of them in little packets bundled together and labeled in the same tilting script. Of course I couldn’t understand most of it. I looked closely at all the photographs and the to and from lines on the letters, but there was no sign of Inga Beart.
I’d promised myself I would make it through carton number ten before I stopped for the day, but by the time I got to the sixth my eyes were having a hard time focusing. I still wanted to see the medical records, but the archivist I’d talked to that morning seemed to have gone home. It was just as well, I thought. I was tired and though I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast what should have been hunger was replaced by a kind of spinning feeling, the same mild vertigo I’ve experienced from time to time ever since that childhood case of scarlet fever locked me in a rocking delirium that the doctors said I was lucky to survive.
On my walk back to my hotel I turned again down the street with the shoe repair shop on it. The shop was still closed, but the man who had helped me clean the chewing gum was standing in front of his gallery, wiping his hands on a rag. I was hardly in the mood to talk, but I couldn’t just walk by without saying hello. I remembered that I’d made a note to find out more about his mother’s injury; I wondered if there might be old newspaper reports about people being hit by bricks falling from the tower. It was hardly a subject to begin a conversation with, but he seemed to be in a talkative mood, asking me about my trip and what I thought of Paris, and it was easy enough to bring the subject around to family history, since after all that was the reason for my visit.
He seemed politely interested in my project, but before I could find out about the newspaper clippings he was telling me that he too made a hobby of historical research. He had collected a number of pieces of memorabilia from the SS Hirondelle, which, I soon learned, was a luxury ocean liner built in 1914, with a mural by Marc Chagall painted on the ceiling of the dining room and a resident ballet.
“It was not the biggest of the great ships, or the fastest, but for style, it was something incredible,” he said. “There are stories—during the First World War it was made into a hospital ship. The dining room itself was used for this, and you can imagine the soldiers looking up from their cots to the chandelier—the Chagall, of course, was put in later, but the original chandelier was made with some six thousand pieces of crystal brought from Vienna. And these young men—from Provence, from the Massif Central—who would have seen nothing like it before or after, opened their eyes to this sight and believed they had passed over, you see, to heaven.”
“Goodness,” I said.
“Oh yes. The nurses had some trouble to convince them otherwise.”
We were standing outside the gallery. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Perhaps you would like some tea?”
“Thank you,” I said.
He took me through to a little room at the back of the shop, where he quickly arranged a bit of plastic sheeting to cover a canvas in the corner, then cleared a small table for us. “Sit, sit,” he said. He put water on to boil in an electric kettle and served me on an original Hirondelle tea service.
“Yes, a terrific vessel,” he said. “A reinforced hull quite advanced for its time—it survived several U-boat attacks and was taken for use by the British navy during the Second World War. And then, after all this, one day in 1959 while the sun is shining and the sea is calm, it sank not far from the port of Southampton. The reasons are not entirely understood, even to this day. Sugar?” he said, offering me a spoon shaped like the forked tail of a songbird. “Hirondelle,” he said. “I have forgotten this word in English. A delicate bird, she makes her nests in the eaves with bits of earth.”
“Might be a swallow,” I said. “I have them in my barn back home.”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “She has the weight of a handkerchief but she flies each autumn some ten thousand kilometers and returns with the spring. Lemon?” he asked. “I’m afraid I have no cream.”
“I’m fine, thank you,” I said.
There was paint underneath his fingernails and the room smelled faintly of turpentine. “I hope I’m not interrupting your work,” I said.
The man gave a little laugh in the direction of the canvas in the corner. “No, no, this is nothing. Some small adjustments to the current exposition.” He touched the corner of the plastic sheeting. “I try to be discreet.”
“Of course,” I said.
“A matter of perfecting the balance. The fellow I’m showing now, he has got such a very nice way with the light. But the subject, it slips from the eye.” He nodded to the canvas. “This one here has been hanging for months. Such potential, and yet I watch the customers—they look to the frame, then to the ticket with the price, then to their watches. Then they are gone.”
“So you’re repainting it?” I asked.
“Repainting, no, never this. I allow to be seen what was there before. Minimal rearrangements, nothing beyond the small correction of a line.” When I didn’t say anything he said, “You will understand, I’m sure. In our professions—you say you are a schoolteacher? What material do you teach?”
“English,” I said. “The middle grades.”
“Yes, yes, of course. So you will understand exactly. When one sees such possibility, hasn’t one a duty?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.
“To develop the potential. Of a painting, a student. One must give what one has.”
I had to smile at that. “I’m not sure my former employers would agree,” I said.
“Oh?”
“I’m retired,” I said. “The circumstances were, well, they were not what I’d expected. It was that,” I said, nodding toward the plastic sheeting. “Developing potential. But the school board didn’t see it that way.”
“Oh?” he said again.
I shrugged, wishing I hadn’t said anything at all. “That sort of thing can be misunderstood.”
He nodded. “Well, yes, for a schoolteacher there are always difficulties, I’m sure. An underappreciated profession. And the children now, one hears they can be quite difficult to manage.”