Affairs of Art Read Free

back, with those who represent the literary crowd rather than those in the plastic arts, who were closer to the great critic and historian who was François Dubeau. She continues nonetheless to assign to Madame Dubeau sorrow both atrocious and masterfully repressed. That, no doubt, is why they have all been for­bidden to accompany her to the cremation that will follow immediately after the funeral. Marianne Dubeau has decided to attend that alone, absolutely alone. The flames of Hell. Hélène will never find the words to get near them.
    She does not know why she has instead been invited to François’s apartment, along with a few others, an hour after the cremation. Madame Dubeau spoke vaguely about something he had prepared to be read to them. Hélène did not dare ask any questions. She finds it hard to imagine François writing some sort of spiritual testament; he wrote enough, some of it quite splendid, to have no need of repeating himself. Everything is known about his theoretical apparatus, which is not one, since he pushed iconoclasm to the point of always declaring his subjectivity in a ritual last paragraph wherein he professed (confessed) his love of art. Another would have been unable to extricate himself from this marshmallow. Not him. In the beginning he had been able to count on the protection of one of the big names in international criticism. Later, he himself became untouchable because he protected others in his turn. And exploited it to the full.
    Hélène assumes she was invited because of that last conversation in March, which touched him perhaps. But she is not happy to be here among the chosen. She would rather go home to Van Home Street, have a coffee on her narrow balcony overlooking the woods that belong to the Sanctuary, and allow the notion of death, which will perhaps come to her in words, to seep in. She wonders if there was one who loved François, of the lovers who were known and who dot the nave now nearly full. It is they, most likely, whom she will see shortly, in the Outremont apartment, so near yet so remote, where she has never before set foot. She has no desire to absorb the discomfort of those boys whom she has never seen as men, a guilty thought that makes her smile. All sins are permitted in this place where the organ is hissing the first tremors of a false Mass for the dead intended for a bright spirit that has already taken flight.
    A latecomer, the cultural affairs critic for the Opposition, has slipped in behind the gang from Parallèle, who are ostentatiously isolated on a side-aisle. Their prayerful attitude is the sum of all appearances, intended to be bare of pomp and ceremony.
    No whisper, no shudder greets an adolescent altar boy who makes his way down the aisle to the bare coffin with the incongruous stride of a mercenary. On it he lays a fern whose forked root still drips damp earth, which leaves a mark on his surplice. Then on top of the fern he places an oblong engraving, a simple vellum picked out with gold leaf on which has been overprinted in black a thick question mark. Executed by brass-rubbing, a technique for tourists borrowed from Protestantism. Conceptual mockery. Interrogation of the living. Signifying and signified, farewell, through a sign. Crucifixion reinterpreted. Insult.
    The adolescent altar boy also reads the epistle, a single paragraph without God, surely chosen by François Dubeau, as if he had wanted the harsh timbre of that changing voice. “For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” (Second Corinthians 4: 16-18)
    From it the Abbé of the Arts takes a