Aaron Elkins: Old Scores

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.