De Potter's Grand Tour Read Free Page B

inquiry to tell him that she would not have time to compose a comprehensive catalog of the De Potter Collection in the near future—news that Armand would hardly have felt compelled to share with his wife. She did not expect him to report to her on every piece of business related to his collection. The only surprising element was that he had so successfully hidden his disappointment.
    She couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken of his collection at the museum in Philadelphia. Why hadn’t she thought to ask? She knew he was as sensitive about his antiquities as if he’d made them himself. He might as well have made them. It had taken him nearly thirty years and dozens of trips to North Africa to acquire treasures that included not just rare jewels and sepulchral bronzes but also a painted sarcophagus that contained a mummified high priest of Thebes. And though he could have sold his antiquities long ago, he had chosen instead to deliver them at his own expense to the University Museum, where they were on display in the Egyptian Section—the same section overseen by Mrs. Stevenson, who had failed to keep the promise she made years ago to write a catalog that would confirm the importance of the De Potter Collection.
    Aimée turned the envelope over and examined the postmark. The letter must have arrived that morning. Her husband had been nursing the wound all day, and she’d been oblivious.
    Unless, she considered, he hadn’t been wounded at all—a far likelier possibility, she decided. He hadn’t told her about the letter from Mrs. Stevenson because it wasn’t important to him. What did a catalog matter when they could fly in an auto down the hill from Auribeau-sur-Siagne? Here in the south of France, Armand had grown newly carefree. Disappointment belonged to the past, along with the headaches that used to plague him during a crisis. He didn’t need recognition from distant universities. It was impossible not to be content now that they were comfortably settled at Grand Bois.

    She brought her diary out to the garden and sat on the stone bench beneath the magnolia. Small, cream-colored moths flitted about in the weak light of a kerosene lamp. A cart clattered by up the road. A nightingale started to sing. As she waited for the gate to open and her husband to return, she made an entry in her diary. She didn’t mention the letter she’d found in the study. Instead, she wrote about walking into town for ice cream, listed the gifts they’d exchanged, and noted that the carnations were still in bloom.

 
    New York to Tivoli

    I N THE BEGINNING , the day he stepped from the gangway onto the Battery embankment in New York, he was tongue-tied in his conversation with the immigration official, and when the official wrote his name as Pierce L. A. Depotter Elsegern, he didn’t dare to correct him. Nor did he object when, in the customs line, he was asked to step aside and make room for a Polish count, the same count, he recalled, who had refused to return his greeting early in the voyage, when they’d found themselves alone together in the ship’s saloon.
    It was dreadfully warm, and the air was thick with the stink of manure and steam and tar. He felt self-conscious in his old-fashioned waist-jacket and his rough cotton cravat. Yet the Polish count’s fine black cape was wool. Wool on a hot summer’s day! Which was worse, Armand asked himself as he followed the count toward the street—to be dressed humbly or to be unprepared for the local climate? He had his answer soon enough. If you were a count, it didn’t matter if you were wearing a winter cape on a late summer’s day, for there would be an official to meet you and direct you to a nearby carriage, and there would be servants to save you from the trouble of having to locate your trunk in the jumble of luggage that had been dumped by the stevedores.
    Someday, Pierre Louis Armand de