John Fowles - The Magus

Her question took me by surprise.

“Do you love Maurice?” She made no attempt to anglicize the French pronunciation, but sounded it with a rather precious exactitude.

“This is only the third time I’ve met him.” She appeared to wait for me to go on. “I’m very grateful for his asking me over here. Especially now.”

She cut short my compliment. “You see, we all love him very much.”

“Who is we?”

“His other visitors and myself.” I could hear the inverted commas. She had turned to face me.

“'Visitor' seems an odd way of putting it.”

“Maurice does not like 'ghost.'”

I smiled. “Or 'actress'?”

Her face betrayed not the least preparedness to concede, to give up her role.

“We are all actors and actresses, Mr. Urfe. You included.”

“Of course. On the stage of the world.”

She smiled and looked down. “Be patient.”

“Willingly. I couldn’t imagine anyone I’d rather be more patient with. Or credulous about.”

Our eyes met. Once again she let the mask slip; for a fraction of a moment; a sincerity that begged.

“Not for me. For Maurice.”

“And for Maurice.”

“I will help.”

“Me? To do what?”

“To understand.”

“Then I certainly promise to obey the rules.”

Our eyes still met.

There was a sound from the table. She reached out and took my arm. We turned. Conchis was standing there. As we came towards him, her arm lightly but formally in mine, he gave us both his little interrogatory headshake.

“Mr. Urfe is very understanding.”

“I am glad.”

“All will be well.”

She smiled at me and sat down and remained thoughtfully for a while with her chin resting on her hand. Conchis had poured her a minute glass of crème de menthe , which she sipped. He pointed to an envelope he had put in my place.

“The manifesto. It took me a long time to find. Read it later. There is an anonymous criticism of great force at the end.”

“I still loved, at any rate still practiced, music. I had the big Pleyel harpsichord I use here in our Paris flat. One warm day in spring, it would have been in 1920, I was playing by chance with the windows open, when the bell rang. The maid came in to say that a gentleman had called and wished to speak to me. In fact, the gentleman was already behind the maid. He corrected her—he wanted to listen to me, not speak to me. He was such an extraordinary-looking man that I hardly noticed the extraordinariness of the intrusion. About sixty, extremely tall, faultlessly dressed, a gardenia in his buttonhole…”

I looked sharply at Conchis. He had turned and, as he seemed to like to, was looking out to sea as he spoke. Lily swiftly, discreetly raised her finger to her lips.

“And also—at first sight—excessively morose. There was beneath the archducal dignity something deeply mournful about him. Like the actor Jouvet, but without his sarcasm. Later I was to discover that he was less miserable than he appeared. Almost without words he sat down in an armchair and listened to me play. And when I had finished, almost without words he picked up his hat and his amber-topped stick…”

I grinned. Lily saw my grin, but looked down and refused to share it, as if to ban it.

“… and presented me with his card and asked me to call on him the next week. The card told me that his name was Alphonse de Deukans. He was a count. I duly presented myself at his apartment. It was very large, furnished with the severest elegance. A manservant showed me into a salon . De Deukans rose to greet me. At once he took me, with the minimum of words, through to another room. And there were five or six harpsichords, old ones, splendid ones, all museum pieces, both as musical instruments and as decorative objects. He invited me to try them all, and then he played himself. Not as well as I could then. But very passably. Later he offered me a collation and we sat on Boulard chairs, gravely swallowing marennes and drinking a Moselle that he told me came from his own vineyard. So began the most remarkable friendship of my life.

“I learnt nothing about him for many months, although I saw him often. This was because he had never anything to say about himself or his past. And discouraged every kind of question. All that I could find out was that his family came from Belgium. That he was immensely rich. That he appeared, from choice, to have very few friends. No relations. And that he was, without being a homosexual, a misogynist. All his servants were men, and he never referred to women except with contempt and distaste.

“De, Deukans’s real life was lived not in Paris, but at his great chateau in eastern France. It was built by some peculating surintendant in the late seventeenth century, and set in a park far larger than this island. One saw the slate-blue turrets and white walls from many miles away. And I remember, on my first visit, some months after our first meeting, I was very intimidated. It was an October day, all the cornfields of the Champagne had long been cut. A bluish mist over everything, an autumn smoke. I arrived at Givray-le-Duc in the car that had been sent to fetch me, I was taken up a splendid staircase to my room, or rather my suite of rooms, and then I was invited to go out into the park to meet de Deukans. All his servants were like himself—silent, grave-looking men. There was never laughter around him. Or running feet. No noise, no excitement. But calm and order.

“I followed the servant through a huge formal garden—Lenôtre had laid it out—behind the chateau . Past box-hedges and statuary and over freshly raked gravel, and then down through an arboretum to a small lake. We came out at its edge and on a small point some hundred yards ahead I saw, over the still water and through the October leaves, an Oriental teahouse. The servant bowed and left me to go on my way alone. The path led beside the lake, over a small stream. There was no wind. Mist, silence, a beautiful but rather melancholy calm.

“The teahouse was approached over grass, so de Deukans could not hear me coming. He was seated on a mat staring out over the lake. A willow-covered islet. Ornamental geese that floated on the water as on a silk painting. Though his head was European, his clothes were Japanese. I shall never forget that moment. How shall I say it—that mise en paysage .

“His whole park was arranged to provide him with such décors, such ambiences. There was a little classical temple, a rotunda. An English garden, a Moorish one. But I always think of him sitting there on his tatami in a loose kimono. Grayish-blue, the color of the mist. It was unnatural, of course. But all dandyism and eccentricity is more or less unnatural in a world dominated by the desperate struggle for economic survival.

“Constantly, during that first visit, I was shocked, as a would-be socialist. And ravished, as an homme sensuel . Givray-le-Duc was nothing more or less than a vast museum. There were countless galleries, of paintings, of porcelain, of objets d'art of all kinds. A famous library. A really unsurpassed collection of early keyboard instruments. Clavichords, spinets, virginals, lutes, guitars. One never knew what one would find. A room of Renaissance bronzes. A case of Breguets. A wall of magnificent Rouen and Nevers faience. An armory. A cabinet of Greek and Roman coins. I could inventory all night, for he had devoted all his life to this collecting of collections. The Boulles and Rieseners alone were enough to furnish six châteaux . I suppose only the Heriford Collection could have rivaled it in modern times. Indeed when the Hertford was split up, de Deukans had bought many of the best pieces in the Sackville legacy. Seligmann’s gave him first choice. He collected in order to collect, of course. Art had not then become a branch of the stock market.