Excerpt taken from pages 15-19 of the paperback.
Arriving in Paris she made a brief stop at the hotel to drop off her bag, then straight to the Grand Palais where the exhibition was being held. She entered the great salon and was at once overwhelmed by its magnificence and the formidable presence of so many glitterati. They were dressed with the uniform chic and good taste only Paris could produce. At the centre of the room a group of people were gathered around a tall, distinguished-looking elderly man and she took a sharp intake of breath. It was Balthus.
It was clear from the attention of those surrounding him that the presence of Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, as he liked to be known, was as significant as the paintings that adorned the walls. He’d lost none of his charisma, nor, despite being in his eighties, his patrician good looks. He wore an immaculate dark suit and a white silk scarf wound round his throat. At his side, his Japanese wife, years younger and many inches shorter, was dressed in an embroidered kimono and carried a fan. Her heavily made-up face and stiff, formal gestures made her look like a doll or perhaps an actor from the Kabuki theatre. With them was their daughter, closely resembling her mother, and two charmingly handsome men whom Eli recognised as his sons from his first marriage, all of whom shared in the aura of glamour.
As Eli gazed at the group the Count turned as though to make for the main doors. A banquet was being held in another part of the palace, where no doubt he was guest of honour. Eli would not be allowed entrance and had therefore only seconds to grab him or lose perhaps the only chance she’d ever get to speak to him. For now the paintings must wait. She pushed her way through the crowd towards the exit doors and took up position, just as he turned in her direction and his hangers-on regrouped themselves into a fan-shaped wake. She waited until he was a few yards from the doorway then stepped out into his path.
He stopped, startled, then his expression softened as he took in a pretty young woman.
‘Excuse me, Count. I represent Art Today, a magazine based in London. We’re huge admirers of your work.’
She was doing her best not to sound breathless.
‘I am familiar with your journal. Indeed, its editor is an old friend of mine. One of the few critics in England whom I admire,’ he replied in precise English.
His wife shifted impatiently at his side and Eli knew her time was short.
‘I wanted to ask you… the atmosphere of your paintings is so thrilling but so disturbing. Did living in Berlin during such difficult times as the Great War contribute to their feeling of menace?’
She was aware he might dislike being reminded of such a troubled period, but it was a question she was certain had a bearing on the mysterious nature of his work.
His reply came quickly.
‘I was only very briefly in Germany. Switzerland, where I continue to live, was my childhood home.’
‘But I understood your family were stateless exiles, forced to return to Berlin from Paris in 1914. Rilke writes…’
He interrupted her. ‘My family like many others at that time suffered because we were Polish, despite the fact that my mother was a Poniatowski, related to the last king of Poland. Please excuse me, my dear, but we have a banquet to attend.’
His voice was icily polite.
Eli watched as his wife took his arm. The crowd opened then closed over their retreating figures, like the returning waters of the Red Sea. Humiliation was as nothing to her astonishment. What he’d said made no sense. Nowhere had she come across any reference to royal connections. There were even those who questioned whether he had a right to the title of Count. And if the grand lineage he claimed for himself was a fabrication, perhaps equally was his claim to having passed an affluent boyhood in Switzerland. His refusal to allow any biographical information about his life suddenly took on new meaning. Publicly he justified his embargo on personal information by claiming it to be irrelevant, even distracting, from a true understanding of his art. Now, it seemed, his real purpose might be somewhat different, though it was hard to see why such a distinguished painter should risk the humiliation of being unmasked as a fake.
That night in her hotel room she turned again to Rilke’s letters, searching for references to the young Balthus. There were several addressed to him, full of praise for his precocious talent and encouragement not to lose heart under the difficult conditions of his life. One of those conditions must surely have been his mother’s passion for a man who wasn’t his father. Had that given rise to the jealousy and repressed violence depicted again and again in his remarkable paintings? Rilke wrote to Merline:
I the ‘image hunter’ go up into my mountains, wild, taciturn, losing myself. But you, my delicious valley, my heart’s flute… you have the innate, imperturbable patience of the landscape and the flute and the holy chalice! Let us not be satisfied with recounting a fable of the heart; let us create its myth.
What would a sensitive young boy be expected to make of such an affair, she wondered as she lay awake, book in hand, until finally she lost consciousness in the early hours of the morning.