"Okay, I got a question for you," Calvin said from the sofa against the far wall.
"Mm?" I was squinting into the mirror over the bureau, trying to insert, hook, and cinch the last of the various studs, straps, and clasps involved in getting oneself into a black-tie outfit. The reason I was squinting was that the du Nord, despite its many virtues, had a French hotel's typical disdain for illumination. There was one 25-watt floor lamp (at the opposite end of the room from the mirror), and two miniature bedside "reading" lamps lit by thickly frosted little bulbs in the shape of candles and with about the same power. That was it. This garretlike gloom added a certain dusky charm to the room, but it didn't make finding yourself in the mirror any easier.
It was 5:25 p.m. At 6:00 we were due at an elaborate pre-opening dinner in the famous old kitchens of Dijon's ducal palace, rented by Vachey for the occasion. Afterward, the privileged guests were invited to a reception and private showing of the paintings at Vachey's gallery. Calvin had come to my room to pick me up, since my hotel was two blocks closer to the gallery than his was.
"Let's hear it," I said. "What's the question?"
"Okay, what are you going to do if you go look at it tonight, and then you spend all week looking at it, and you still don't know for sure if it's a forgery or not? You going to recommend we forget about it and drop the whole thing?"
"Oh, I don't think it's a forgery, Calvin. I think Vachey's too sharp for that."
"What? You didn't agree with me yesterday they were forgeries?"
"I agreed they might be fakes. There's a difference between a fake and a forgery."
Calvin looked at me, willing to be amused. "Ok, I'll bite. What's the difference between a fake and a forgery?"
"No, I'm serious. A forgery is something somebody does on purpose-paints a phony Rembrandt, doctors it to make it look old, and then palms it off as the real thing."
"And that's not a fake?"
"Well, sure, it's one kind of fake, but there are other kinds of fakes that aren't forgeries at all, and those are the tough ones. Look, Rembrandt had hundreds of students, and in those days, part of the training was to make copies of the master's paintings. The harder they were to tell from the original, the more pats on the back they'd get from Rembrandt. So there are thousands of copies-perfectly legitimate Rembrandt copies-still floating around. They also had to copy his techniques in their own paintings. So there are also a lot of pictures around that aren't really copies of anything he ever did, but that are in his style. These things are all the right age for Rembrandt, they're done on the right kind of canvas or panel, they use the right pigments and binders, they even use his brush strokes."
"Jeez," Calvin said.
"That's not all. Rembrandt would stand there, right at their shoulders, and make corrections, a lot of them, right on their work, so quite a few of these paintings really are five or ten percent genuine Rembrandt. Well, sort of."
"Maybe, but they don't have his signature on them."
"But they do. In those days, any decent piece that came out of a workshop could have the master's signature on it. So we're talking about a lot of paintings that were sold as Rembrandts not three centuries later, but right out of the studio, while they were still damp. They have 350-year-old provenances."
"Jeez," Calvin said.
"Jeez is right." I finally got the bow tie properly aligned and slipped into my jacket. "Let's go. We don't want to miss anything."
Out on the Rue de la Liberte, the main commercial street of the Old City, it was a mild evening and the sidewalks were filled with shoppers and strollers. The Rue de la Liberte was Tony Whitehead's kind of street, eclectic as they come. Rough, half-timbered buildings from the fifteenth century stood cheek-by-jowl with elegant, mansard-roofed, nineteenth-century townhouses. Even the shops at street level had some odd juxtapositions. At the corner of Rue de Chapeau, for example, was Moutarde Maille, busy purveyor of mustards, on the very premises where messieurs Grey and Poupon first got together for business in 1777. Two doors down was an equally thriving McDonald's, busy doling out beignets d'oignon and frites, along with the occasional hamburger.
Strolling along, our tuxedos and patent leather shoes not drawing a second glance, I continued giving Calvin the bad news about fake Rembrandts.
"And then, of course, you can't forget about the crooks who came along centuries later and forged his signature on some of the old student paintings that he hadn't signed. That's all they had to fake, was the signature. A lot easier than a whole painting. And a lot harder to detect, since the rest of the picture checks out technically."
"No, no, something's wrong here," Calvin said. "Okay, maybe they check out as far as the materials and stuff go, but these are just art students, right? And we're talking about Rembrandt here, right? I mean, the Rembrandt. You're telling me it's that hard to tell the difference?"
I laughed. "Rembrandt had some pretty fair students: Fabritius, Aert de Gelder, Hoogstraten, Dou, Bol, Maes…"
Calvin regarded me doubtfully, which was understandable. This was hardly a Who's Who of the world's great painters to most people. But to the educated person (you or me, for example), they were artists of the first rank.
"Take my word for it, Calvin, we're talking about some world-class painters here. And they didn't necessarily stop when they got out on their own. De Gelder was still turning out paintings in Rembrandt's style fifty years after Rembrandt died. I wouldn't want to bet my life, or yours either, on whether some particular painting was a Rembrandt, or a de Gelder in the style of Rembrandt. Not just from looking at it."
Calvin gave all this some thought. "Well, then," he said brightly, "I'd say you've got yourself a problem."
He didn't know the half of it. There are probably more dubious Rembrandts around than paintings by anyone else except maybe for Corot. According to Department of Customs records, 9,428 works by Rembrandt were imported into the U.S. from 1910 to 1950 alone. That works out to better than one every other day. Four a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for over forty years. Let it suffice to say that the figures are somewhat in excess of Rembrandt's actual rate of production. There is never a time when three or four of them are not the center of controversy. And that doesn't count the number, at least equal, in Europe. Or the U.S. Customs figures since 1950, which I didn't know and didn't want to know.
And even that wasn't the worst of it. To put it simply, these were not auspicious times to be too positive about Rembrandts. The Man with the Golden Helmet wasn't the only one that had run into trouble lately. The Art Institute of Chicago's well-known Young Woman at an Open Half-Door had recently been reattributed from Rembrandt to Hoogstraten.
Rembrandts, in truth, were the art world's equivalent of the African elephant and the mountain gorilla. "Endangered" was putting it mildly. Under the high-tech probings of modern science, formerly undisputed Rembrandts had been falling right and left. In 1921, there were 711; in 1968, 420. And by the time the international, fearsomely scholarly Rembrandt Research Project (referred to by grim curators behind closed doors as the Rembrandt Police) completes its long and unrelenting task of extirpation, it's expected there will be only 300 or so.
And only a little while ago came the dismaying news that even the beautiful, hauntingly evocative Polish Rider, pride of the Frick Collection, is apparently not what it seemed. It's not a happy period for those of us who used to be so sure we knew our Rembrandts.
"I'd say I had a problem too," I said.
"Okay, back to square one," Calvin said. "What do you do if you stare at this thing from now till Friday and you still can't make up your mind?"
I shook my head. "Calvin," I said, "you've got me."
We arrived a few minutes late at the Rue Rameau entrance to the palace courtyard in the midst of a swirl of dark, expensive cars dropping elegant couples at curbside like luminaries at a Hollywood premiere. A few tourists hung about on the sidewalk, not sure what they were watching. Across the street, more comfortably placed at outdoor cafe tables in the Place de la Liberation, locals observed the goings-on over carafes of burgundy or chablis. There was even a French TV team that coaxed aside some of the incoming guests (it didn't take much coaxing) for a few words on camera.
The pomp and ceremony came as no surprise. Calvin had spent some time that afternoon with Madame Guyot, Vachey's gallery manager, and learned that we would be dining with an illustrious crowd indeed. Among the hundred invitees were France's most influential art critics, editors, and reviewers, along with some high government officials, including the Minister of Culture himself.
The show, Calvin had told me, was a much bigger affair than we'd thought. In addition to the Rembrandt and the Leger, there were another thirty-four Dutch and French paintings on display; the cream of Vachey's collection. Many were familiar to me. Some were justly famous. As far as I knew, none of them had any controversy attached to them. And all thirty-four would be donated to the Louvre on Vachey's seventy-fifth birthday, the following year-his way of expressing gratitude to the splendid country that had allowed him, the son of an illiterate Lithuanian immigrant, to achieve success far beyond the most fantastic dreams his father had had for him.
Calvin and I, evoking no interest from onlookers or TV people, made it unimpeded through the courtyard to the palace wing that held the old kitchens. There our invitations were taken, and we were bowed through the massive oak door by a liveried flunky straight out of a Thomas Rowlandson drawing-knee britches, lace cuffs, and all.
"This," Calvin said with approval, "is going to be fancy."
Possibly it seems odd to you that a fancy dinner, thrown by a cultivated and flamboyant man like Vachey, for an exalted crowd like this, should be held in a kitchen, even a palace kitchen. If so, that's because you don't know the kitchens of le Palais des Dues et des Etats de Bourgogne.
These were probably the greatest kitchens the Western world has ever known, surpassing even those of Louis XIV at Versailles because the Sun King, whatever his other attributes, didn't come within miles of the dukes of Burgundy when it came to good eating. It was here, in these kitchens, that the great culinary traditions of Burgundy-of France, really-began in the fifteenth century, with the legendary banquets of Philip the Bold.
They didn't eat in the kitchens in those days, of course, but the old ducal dining rooms are gone now, or rather they, along with the rest of the palace, have been converted to the personal offices of the mayor of Dijon, which is a good deal for le maire, but a bad one for the rest of us. Fortunately, with proper French respect for gastronomic history, the kitchens have been preserved, and are still used as a reception and dining area for affairs of state and high society.
They were more than large enough for Vachey's hundred guests, consisting of a huge chamber with pitted stone columns, somber Gothic arches, and a floor of worn stone slabs that looked as if they'd been in place since Philip had laid them down in 1433, and probably had been. Back then, they had been able to roast not merely one but six whole oxen at the same time (and often did), but the six gigantic, vaulted fireplaces along the smoke-blackened walls, each with its own enormous chimney, had since been knocked down to open up even more space.
Inside, people were sitting down to tables of four or six, smooth and elegant in their gowns and tuxedos. Eyes shone, laughter trilled, voices were keen and excited-many of them raised in lively dispute. I heard Vachey ardently praised on one side of me, passionately damned on another. It was impossible not to feel the sense of anticipation in the air, and of privilege. This was the corps d'elite of the French art establishment; they knew it very well, and they also knew that they had been invited, almost by right, to an event that would be covered in the world press the next day, and possibly, given Vachey's reputation for dramatics, for some time to come.
Almost as soon as we got inside and paused to get our bearings, I noted a telltale, glittery bulge in Calvin's beady eyes. Following his line of sight, I saw a table at which sat a stern-looking middle-aged man and woman and a flashy younger woman with a wandering eye of her own-Calvin's type, all right-who looked as if she might be their daughter. The fourth chair was vacant.
"Go ahead, Calvin," I said.
He didn't bother pretending not to know what I was talking about. "Well, no, there's only one chair, Chris, and I wouldn't want to leave you-"
"Calvin, will you please go? There are bound to be some other people here I know. I can renew old acquaintances. Besides, I hate it when you drool."
"Well, if you really think so…"
And off he went. I didn't think he'd get very far right under mama's and papa's baleful gazes, but with Calvin you could never tell. I was on my way to join a French art professor I knew slightly when a snatch of conversation caught my ear over the general hubbub, probably because it was in English, not in French, and in heavily Italian-accented English at that.
"But aren't the very distinctions themselves simply the old, worn-out objectivist reifications?" the lilting, high-pitched voice was asking. "Surely you agree, ah-ha-ha, that terms such as 'real' and 'false,' 'authentic' and 'inauthentic,' are outmoded constructs whose validity was never more than contingent at best? Surely we can reject out of hand the notion that any field of existence has a 'reality' outside of its own system of reference?"
It may be that there were several people in the world who were capable of uttering such a statement, but I, personally, knew only one: the many-faceted Lorenzo Bolzano, collector-son of a collector-father, adjunct professor of the philosophy of art criticism at the University of Rome, and European editor of the staggeringly abstruse Journal of Subjectivistic Art Commentary (to which I had yet to encounter a single, solitary subscriber). The learned Lorenzo was surely the wackiest scholar I knew, with views ranging from mildly laughable to stupefyingly incomprehensible. Hearing his voice wasn't altogether a surprise. Lorenzo, like his father before him, was a longtime and no doubt highly valued client of Vachey's gallery, and I'd thought he might be on the invitation list for tonight's exclusive affair.
And here he was, astride, unless I was mistaken, one of his favorite metaphysical hobbyhorses, the mind-bending notion that there is no valid distinction between an original work of art and a forgery. If you're thinking, so what, that was merely the same thing Vachey had been telling me that morning, then you've missed the gist of Lorenzo's speech. (Don't blame yourself.) Vachey had been probing into the elements of perception that affect our attitudes toward art and forgery. An unsettling topic, considering the situation, but not unreasonable in itself. Lorenzo was carrying things a giant step further, maintaining that there was simply no difference-literally no difference-between authentic art and counterfeit art, and that any distinction we tried to impose was purely artificial, with no aesthetic, empirical, or other foundation.
Did he really believe it? As far as I could tell: yes. That and a lot of other equally goofy ideas. Or maybe he didn't quite believe them, but he was so in love with the words and the crazy, convoluted philosophical mazes they led through that it was the next best thing to believing them.
But if he was a crackpot, he was an amiable crackpot, fun to argue with, unfanatical, obsessed not so much with his cockeyed theories as with the pleasures of argument. He could even be lucid and down-to-earth for long periods-sometimes minutes at a time-and was, moreover, one of the gentlest, sweetest-tempered people I knew, always a pleasure to run into. And there he was, gesticulating over his plate, gawky and hollow-chested, bald and beaky-nosed, his button eyes shiny with the excitement of discourse.
He was at a table with two other men, both of whom I'd met before. One was the stout and self-important Edmond Froger, director of the Musee Barillot, and part-time art critic for the Revue Critique d'Art. The Barillot, you may remember, was the small Dijon museum from which Vachey had temporarily stolen-excuse me, had caused to be taken-six paintings, about a decade earlier. That incident, while amusing to many, had never struck Froger's funny bone, and his continuing antipathy to Vachey was no secret. What he was doing there as Vachey's guest was anybody's guess.
The other person was Jean-Luc Charpentier, a member of the Chambre des Experts d'Objets d'Art, one of several influential French societies of independent, certified art experts who valuated art objects and issued certificates of authenticity for dealers and auction houses. The Chambre des Experts was one of the more prominent of the chambres specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art, with Charpentier's specialty being the latter.
A resolutely crusty and sharp-tongued man, he was at this moment devoting his attention to the pate de campagne that had been laid out on the tables ahead of time, grumbling in an undertone to himself, or maybe to the pate, as he spread it on a slice of bread. Listening to Lorenzo for too long affected different people different ways, and talking to the chopped liver didn't really seem that extraordinary.
As always, a little inattention wasn't bothering Lorenzo. "If, on the other hand," he went blithely on, "we take as our starting point a postexistential, that is to say, a subjectivist and therefore multidimensional perspective, then we see, ah-ha-ha, that 'reality' is no more than a convenient metaphor for a many-layered… Christopher! Ha, I heard you would be here!"
He shouted this with a transparent joy that did my heart good, and jumped up, lanky arms outspread. After a clumsy Mediterranean embrace (Lorenzo wasn't any better at it than I was), he herded me to the one vacant chair. "Come, sit, join us!"
Froger grunted at me and extended a hand as I sat down. Charpentier merely grunted.
I watched regretfully as the waiters cleared away the pate before I'd had a chance to taste it, but cheered up when it was followed immediately by hefty but delicate salmon quenelles in a bearnaise sauce, with an artfully arranged border of curled, rosy shrimp. A round of Clos Blanc de Vougeot was poured-Vachey certainly wasn't cutting any corners-and we fell to. In Burgundy, one is expected to pay attention to the food.
But Lorenzo was one of those people who preferred talking to eating regardless of where he was, and in a minute or two he was back at it, gesturing with his fork as if to hurry the luscious dumplings down his gullet.
"Well, then, Christopher," he said, "you're just in time to settle an argument for us."
I laughed, not averse to a little Lorenzian hairsplitting. "What's the argument?" So far I hadn't heard any argument. Just Lorenzo.
"The issue is," he said, "do we defer to a false objectivist contextualism-"
"Objectivist contextualism," I heard Charpentier mutter, head down. Now he was talking to his quenelles.
"-contextualism that persists in confusing its own paltry, artificial system of reference with the universal dynamism of-"
"No, that's not the issue," Edmond Froger said with a burst of impatience. He leaned forward over the table, beefy and aggressive, perceptibly taking over the conversation. "The issue is, what is our friend Vachey up to?"
Lorenzo, who was actually quite easy to cut in on, once you found a place to do it, blinked and fell silent.
"Consider," Froger said. "This is a great day for France, yes? Everyone knows that tonight he will announce the donation of the greatest paintings of his collection to the Louvre. Unquestioned masterpieces all; I admit it freely. A magnificent gesture and worthy of unqualified admiration if that were all there was to it. But what does he do? He decides to use what should be an uncontroversial demonstration of generosity to 'reveal'-that is his word, gentlemen-two previously unknown 'masterpieces' that are by no means unquestioned. These he has kept a jealously guarded secret until tonight. Why has he kept them a secret?"
He paused to eye us all, one by one. No one offered an answer. We knew a rhetorical question when we heard one.
"And he refuses to permit any… scientific… testing of them whatsoever. Whatsoever. I ask you. Why?"
He lifted his wine to his mouth, drinking while he chewed. Small eyes watched us over the rim of the glass.
"I will tell you why," he said, as I hadn't doubted that he would. "They are inauthentic, that is why. Forgeries. I said so from the beginning, I say so now, and I do not doubt that I will say so after they are 'revealed.' I am not an underhanded man; I have said it openly, isn't that so, Jean-Luc?"
"Don't drag me into this, Edmond," Charpentier said crankily. "I'm not as accomplished as you are. I still find it necessary to see works of art before I judge them."
Charpentier's face went along with his manner: wild, beetling, devilish eyebrows that made him look as if he were scowling even when he wasn't; liverish lips that always seemed to be poised on the edge of ridicule or scorn; and a great, fierce, ruddy gunnysack of a nose, frequently used for contemptuous snorting. Despite all this, I must admit that I had always found him good company. Things rarely remained dull very long with Charpentier around.
Froger eyed him for a moment. "Pah," he said. "The trouble with me is that I say what I think, I don't pussyfoot around just because someone might be offended. Vachey knows very well what I think. It's a matter of public record."
So it probably was. Froger didn't miss many chances to denounce Vachey in the monthly columns he wrote for the Revue. I can't say that I blamed him, given the circumstances.
"And just what is he after, our man Vachey?" Froger went on. "Let me tell you what is in his mind." He finished his quenelles, swallowed some wine, and made some pontifical throat-clearing noises while he arranged his thoughts to tell us what was in Vachey's mind.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention: This was, of course, the same Froger Tony had referred to as a horse's ass the other day. One of his more acute assessments, in my opinion.
"To begin, he is an uneducated man, our Vachey," Froger instructed us. "Rich, of course, very rich, and admittedly self-taught to a certain extent, but deeply jealous of those, like ourselves, who have a more profound understanding of art, a better-trained and more disciplined eye. It is the natural envy of the self-made man toward those whose tastes have been developed and refined through the generations. What was his father?" He laughed. "A cutter in a belt factory. A Lithuanian belt cutter!"
Lorenzo, who saw no contradiction in being one of the wealthiest men in Florence and a full-fledged egalitarian at the same time, objected in his mild way. "Oh, well, I don't know that I would say-"
On flowed Froger, pompous and oracular. "And so he lays his plans, he licks his chops, he sets his snare. He will show the world who is the smarter. Gentlemen…" He paused dramatically. "… do not be fooled. Do not fall into his trap. It is you I address in particular, Mr. Norgren."
"I beg your pardon?" My attention had lapsed a bit. Like Charpentier, I was still concentrating on the quenelles. (I wasn't conversing with them yet, however.)
"This so-called Rembrandt," he said. "You're not seriously thinking of accepting it, I hope."
"I might," I said. "I'll decide after I have a chance to study it tomorrow."
He shook his head, writing me off as a lost cause. "And his so-called Leger, to whom is he donating that precious masterpiece? Has he told you?"
"Told me? No."
"You don't know?"
"No."
"I understand he intends to give it to a museum here in France," Lorenzo put in.
"Not if I have anything to say about it," Froger said grimly. "I will do everything I can to prevent it. What the Seattle Art Museum in America does is not my affair. It is France I care for, France, which has always been the custodian of the torch of civilization." His voice quavered with emotion. "I will not stand idly by and see the museums of France mocked and ridiculed. I will not stand by and see our nation's luster tarnished yet again by this buffoon Vachey." His heavy fist thumped the table. Dishes jiggled. Echoes of "La Marseillaise" throbbed in the warm air.
It was too much for Charpentier. "God in heaven," he muttered. "Torch of civilization"… "our nation's luster." He wiped his lips with a napkin. He wiped his fingers. He flung the napkin to the tablecloth.
Froger looked at him coldly. "You find the phrases objectionable?"
"My dear Edmond. Who, precisely, placed the torch of civilization in France's care? Where was France's luster' in 1940, when-"
"This," said Froger, turning redder, or rather purpler, "is no way to speak in front of… I'etrangers." He cocked his head toward Lorenzo and me, in case anyone wasn't sure who the "etrangers" at the table were.
Charpentier laughed indulgently. "Mr. Norgren, what is your symbol?"
"My symbol?"
"The symbol of your country, your national emblem, the living creature that represents America." "Oh. A bald eagle."
"An eagle. And yours, Mr. Bolzano?"
"Ah, well, that is not so easy to say, ah-ha-ha. The name 'Italia' derives in all probability from the ancient Romans' term for 'land of oxen'-"
"Yes, good. Eagles, keen of sight and fierce. Oxen, powerful and resolute. Of course. Naturally. And ours?" Charpentier asked Froger? "What is France's?"
Froger eyed him malevolently, his mouth clamped shut, but Charpentier waited him out.
"Le coq," Froger finally mumbled through set lips.
"Precisely," Charpentier said dryly. "Le coq." He picked up his napkin again, shook it out, and replaced it on his lap. "What I would like to know," he said, dropping his chin so that he peered out at us from under those tangled eyebrows, grumpy and droll at the same time, "is just how we can expect the world to take seriously a country that chooses a chicken as its national symbol?"
Lorenzo and I managed (just barely) not to laugh, but the conversation took a decided downturn anyway. Froger was miffed and stayed miffed. Charpentier had but one more contribution to make, informing us in a by-the-way tone that the term chauvinism derived from one Nicholas Chauvin, a patriotic nineteenth-century Frenchman. After that he dropped out of things too, to continue communing with his meal, and even the endlessly effervescent Lorenzo couldn't seem to figure out how to get things going again.
The main course didn't help any. Served with a show-stopping, velvety burgundy from the hallowed Romanee-Conti vineyards just down the road, it was Burgundy's best-known gift to fine cuisine, tender and fragrant with the thyme, shallots, and red wine in which it had been simmered.
Coq au vin, what else?