patient.
“But I’m due in Lyons day after tomorrow!” said M’sieu Breul. “I’m to meet friends there. It’s my birthday.”
“
“Never mind,” Braque and Picasso told him. “We will celebrate your natal day here.”
Although this would be the last summer that Picasso had to worry about money, the two artists had deliberately chosen Sorgues for two reasons: it was cheap and no one knew them there. But perhaps they missed Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Derain, Manolo, Juan Cris, Havilland and all the other friends with whom they socialized back in Paris. Or perhaps their kindness to the young American sprang from a combination of great personal and professional happiness just then. Not only did their work intoxicate them, so did their women.
Braque and his Marcelle still considered themselves newlyweds and Picasso had only that spring taken a new mistress, the lovely and delicate Eva, “
In any event, Picasso volunteered to nursemaid Chou-Chew and Braque arranged for Breul to stay with him and his wife at Villa Bel Air, a rather dreary and commonplace house that was more beautiful in name than in fact.
Shambley wished Erich Jr. had written less about Braques domestic arrangements and much more about Braque’s studio, the pictures he saw there, or the conversations that must have passed between the two artists when Picasso arrived the next morning with the monkey on his shoulder.
Instead, after a brief reference to Braque’s
Having seen the results, Shambley could use his imagination to fill in the details Erich Jr. so lightly touched upon. They made him sit in a chair all afternoon, gave him Braque’s violin to play and, while the monkey clambered at will over sitter and artists alike, began to devise a birthday portrait, using their new techniques. In the evening Marcelle and Eva produced a special dinner and Breul gave them most of his pocket money for wine. By midnight, the portrait was declared finished (even though it had taken on certain simian details as more bottles were emptied) and both artists had signed it on the back before making a formal presentation to the birthday boy.
In return, Erich Jr. had risen to the occasion with a speech about Spanish-French-American friendship, in token of which he now gave his bicycle to Braque and his monkey to Picasso. Early the next day, with his portrait tied up in brown paper, a slightly queasy young American-“I think it must have been the sausages,” he wrote his parents- caught the morning train to Lyons, where his
Except that it hadn’t quite, thought Shambley, turning to the letters written after Breul settled in Paris for what was to be his final six months before sailing home. He was discreet about his sorties into bohemia, and his assurances of studious application to conventional art and culture were probably written in response to pointed questions from home.
But the catalogs and Montparnasse menus, not to mention the two Legers hanging four floors down in that zoo of a janitor’s room, gave ample evidence that the junior Breul had spent as much time among the avant-garde of Paris as in the venerable Louvre.
Shambley returned the last letter to its envelope and blocked them between his small hands like a deck of cards. At that moment, Dr. Roger Shambley was a deeply happy man. All his life he’d chased those capricious goddesses, Fame and Fortune.
Native intelligence and dogged hard work had made him a well-regarded expert in nineteenth-century American art. His first two books had gained him tenure; his third confirmed his reputation for good solid scholarship, which translated into speaking engagements, magazine articles, even an occasional spot on the
Yet everyone dreams of immortality. No matter how competently and wittily written, few books survive their time if they only rehash previously known data; but the discoverer of new material will always be read simply because he was
With these letters and a description of how he found an unknown seminal work, Shambley knew he could write a monograph that would become a permanent appendage to the Picasso-Braque legend. Not only that, he would become a hero to everyone connected to the Breul House. Once it was made public that this dead-in-the-water museum contained the only documented example in the entire world of a Picasso-Braque collaboration, they’d have to put in a conveyor belt to keep the crowds moving.
Which took care of fame.
As for fortune…
Those two Leger canvasses presented interesting possibilities, none of which involved the Breul House. Today, he had gone to the Museum of Modern Art and bought two Leger posters as nearly like the two on Pascal Grant’s wall in size and composition as he could manage. He had already stashed them in one of the basement storage rooms. In the next day or so, as soon as he could substitute them for the real pictures, he would announce his discovery of the Picasso-Braque collage.
There would be such an instant uproar of excitement that even if the janitor noticed the difference between the posters and the authentic paintings, who would pay him any mind?
No one. He’d be home free with two Legers of his very own. Too bad he couldn’t openly offer them for sale at, say, Sotheby’s. Auctions always brought the highest prices. But Sotheby’s required a legal history of the artwork it put on the block: documents, canceled checks, and bills of sale; and the only provenance he could offer would be the 1912 catalog he’d found in Erich Jr.’s effects.
No, he’d have to find someone with a love of modern art, a streak of larceny, and the resources to indulge expensive tastes.
He looked at his watch. Time to put in an appearance downstairs. He started to put the letters back in his briefcase, then hesitated. Maybe it would be safer to leave the letters here for now. There were a million hiding places in this cluttered attic but, as most scholars knew, a misfiled letter is a lost letter.
Shambley opened a drawer marked “Miscellaneous Business Correspondence: 1916/1917” and craftily filed the packet under “August 1916.”
At that moment he felt positively gleeful, as if the ghost of Christmas Present had upended an enormous bag of toys at his feet. If the attic stairs had possessed a free-standing banister, he would have slid right down it, and it was all he could do to keep from chortling aloud. He stepped into the servants’ lavatory on the third floor, smoothed his unruly hair, and put his pugnacious face into a semblance of professorial dignity.
But as he walked downstairs to join the party, it occurred to Roger Shambley that perhaps he wouldn’t have to look very far for the buyer he needed.
The Breul dining room was the scene of many elaborate and festive dinners. Sophie Furst Breul’s mother was famous in Zurich for her brilliant dinner parties and her daughter brought the Furst touch with her to New York. Although extravagant, perhaps, by our 1950’s standards, Mrs. Breul’s dinners were considered small and select in their day and the guest list never exceeded forty, the number which could be comfortably seated at her table. Like Scrooge after his conversion, it could be said that the Breuls “knew how to keep Christmas well, if any [couple] alive possessed the knowledge”; and it was their custom to invite a few friends for “supper” on Christmas night. The following is from Mrs. Breul’s menu files and was dated “Christmas 1906.”
