The Magus - John Fowles [41]
�rs, 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. Greyish-blue, the colour 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 armoury. 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 _ch�aux_. I suppose only the Heriford Collection could have rivalled 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. "On a later visit he took me to a locked gallery. In it he kept his company of automata--puppets, some almost human in size, that seemed to have stepped, or whirled, out of a Hoffman story. A man who conducted an invisible orchestra. Two soldiers who fought a duel. A prima donna from whose mouth tinkled an aria from _La Serva Padrona_. A girl who curtseyed to a man who bowed, and then danced a pallid and ghostly minuet with him. But the chief piece was Mirabelle, _la Maltresse-Machine_. A naked woman who when set in motion lay back in her faded four-poster bed, drew up her knees and then opened them together with her arms. As her human master lay on top of her, the arms closed and held him. But de Deukans cherished her most because she had a device that made it unlikely that she would ever cuckold her owner. Unless one moved a small lever at the back of her head, at a certain pressure her arms would clasp with vicelike strength. And then a stiletto on a strong spring struck upwards through the adulterer's groin. This repulsive thing had been made in Italy in the early nineteenth century. For the Sultan of Turkey. When de Deukans demonstrated her 'fidelity' he turned and said, '_C'est cc qui en elle est le plus vraisemblable_.' 'It is the most lifelike thing about her." I looked at Lily covertly. She was staring down at her hands. "He kept Madame Mirabelle behind locked doors. But in his private chapel he kept an even more--to my mind--obscene object. It was encased in a magnificent early mediaeval reliquary. It looked much like a withered, dusty sea cucumber. De Deukans called it, without any wish to be humorous, the Holy Member. He knew, of course, that a merely cartilaginous object could not possibly survive so long. There are at least sixteen other Holy Members in Europe. Mostly from mummies, and all equally discredited. But for de Deukans it was simply a collectable, and the religious or indeed human blasphemy it represented had no significance for him. This is true of all collecting. It extinguishes the moral instinct. The object finally possesses the possessor. "We never discussed religion or politics. He went to mass. But only, I think, because the observance of ritual is a form of the cultivation of beauty. In some ways, perhaps because of the wealth that had always surrounded him, he was an extremely innocent man. Self-denial was incomprehensible to him, unless it formed part of some aesthetic regimen. I stood with him once and watched a line of peasants labouring a turnip field. A Millet brought to life. And his only remark was: _It is beautiful that they are they and that we are we_. For him even the most painful social confrontations and contrasts, which would have stabbed the conscience of even the vulgarest _nouveau riche_, were stingless. Without significance except as vignettes, as interesting discords, as pleasurable because vivid examples of the algedonic polarity of existence. "Altruistic behaviour--what he termed _le diable en puritain_--upset him deeply. For instance, since the age of eighteen I have refused to eat wild birds in any form at table. I would as soon eat human flesh as I would an ortolan, or a wild duck. This to de Deukans was distressing, like a false note in a music manuscript. He could not believe things had been written thus. And yet there I was, in black and white, refusing his _p