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It was the concierge of their apartment building, M. Robert Durand, who first raised the alarm. Awoken (he would later recall) by a knock at his door, he opened it to investigate, found no one there, smelled smoke, and looked up to see an orange flickering behind the curtains of Oskar and Juliette’s fourth-floor apartment. By the time he had brought his wife to look, the curtains were on fire.
If there was a silver lining to the tragedy, it is that the apartment Oskar and Juliette shared was on the very top floor of the building. Thanks to the timely intervention of M. Durand and his wife, the lower floors were evacuated swiftly, the building’s inhabitants ushered into the courtyard, where they huddled on one side of it to watch in horror. There was no chance of rescuing either Oskar or Juliette.
Multiple neighbors later reported having seen Oskar return to the apartment at around ten that evening, seemingly a little tipsy. Whistling his way down the street, across the courtyard, up the stairs. Others recalled hearing raised voices from the apartment—a man and a woman, speaking loudly, in English—at around the same time. It would appear that the fire broke out a few hours later, when both Oskar and Juliette were sleeping.
The most likely cause of the blaze was a spark escaping from the stove, or a flammable item placed on top of it combusting in the heat. Given the typical contents of an artist’s studio—paper, canvas, tins of paints, bottles of white spirit—it is hardly surprising the fire spread as swiftly as it did.
According to eyewitness reports, M. Durand repeatedly tried to climb the stairs, calling Oskar and Juliette’s names, attempting a rescue. The third and final time he was forced back by the heat and smoke the sleeve of his shirt was smoldering. It took almost three hours to extinguish the blaze, innumerable gallons of water.
Word spread to the bars of Montparnasse, and the building’s inhabitants, mostly in pajamas with coats thrown over them, found themselves joined by Juliette and Oskar’s friends and contemporaries. Artists and models. Waiters and taxi drivers. All silently gathered to watch as the flames licked the sky, hoping perhaps for some unexpected miracle. For the apartment to have actually been empty, for the lovers to come arm in arm around the corner, alive and unharmed.
The word the official report used for the condition of the two bodies found on what remained of the iron bedstead was carbonisés. Two blackened skeletons fused by the heat of the room in which they died in a permanent embrace. Juliette’s body was identified by the gold pendant she wore around her neck, Oskar’s by his steel wristwatch.
It is said that someone in the crowd—a fellow artist? a hopeful buyer?—inquired, as the soot-blackened firefighters washed themselves down at the pump in the courtyard, if any of the paintings in the apartment had survived. There was an exchange of looks between the men at the pump, scrubbing hands that would nevertheless remain gray for days, a headshake, then the eventual answer: Non, tout a brûlé.
All the work, finished and unfinished, that once hung on the walls would have been the first to go. The paint. The canvas. The frames. All of it popping and hissing, cracking and sizzling, exploding into flames as the curtains danced in the updraft.
As one of the most brilliant artists of the era died at the age of forty-six in the arms of his beautiful young lover.
Chapter 3
CAROLINE, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
Sam Fadel, the PhD student tasked with cataloging the materials in the Willoughby Bequest, was tall, nervous-looking, and clearly only a few years older than me. He had a habit of poking his glasses up his nose for emphasis at the end of each sentence, an air of selecting every word precisely before he spoke. His voice was soft, his accent American—although his parents were both from Cairo, he explained, he had grown up in the States, majoring in ancient history as an undergraduate at NYU before moving to Cambridge. Like most PhD students I’d encountered, he seemed terribly kind, terribly earnest. He was obviously delighted to find someone he could talk to about his work.
We met for tea in the café on the ground floor of the Arch and Anth museum, where I explained my dissertation topic. He listened thoughtfully. There was an extraordinary amount of material, as I had probably gathered, he said. Not just the papers I had looked at yesterday but a whole room in the basement here was lined with shelves, dusty glass cases, crates, and boxes. He offered to show me around.
“What was it that Cyril actually collected?” I asked as Sam scanned us through a STAFF ONLY door.
“Mummies, funerary items, canopic jars. Lots of papyri. Many wealthy Europeans back then made a hobby of buying those items—legally or illegally—some of which the Egyptian government has been trying to repatriate for decades. But Cyril took collecting to an extreme—he was the sole heir of his father’s railway fortune, so money was no object.”
As he spoke, Sam led me down a flight of stairs and through a green-painted metal door. He pulled the string to turn the lights on, illuminating, after a couple of flickers, a very large room.
“All of these wooden drawers”—Sam indicated row after row of them, filling a wall from floor to ceiling—“contain Cyril’s papyri. He began to acquire them as a Cambridge undergraduate in the early 1900s and he was still amassing them right up until his death in 1952. My job here is to make sure all of this is correctly ordered and labeled.” He gave a wan smile.
I asked him if I could see one of the papyri. “Of course,” he said, carefully opening a folder to reveal a plastic sheath which encased a ragged little rectangle with three columns of hieroglyphics on it: a bird, an eye, three parallel waves.
“This is well over two thousand years old. From a tomb near Thebes.”
“What does it say? Some sort of curse?” I asked, half joking. Sam pulled a face.
“Actually,” he said, a note of weariness in his voice, “the idea of the ancient Egyptian curse is a Victorian invention, an orientalist fantasy from colonial times, later amplified by Hollywood. If anything, this is the exact opposite of a curse: it’s a blessing. This is a fragment of a funerary text—it would have been buried with a body, tucked into the bandages during the mummification—a scroll with sacred formulae on it, words of power and protection to help the deceased navigate the afterlife.”
“Sacred formulae? Like prayers?”
“Or spells. Invocations of assistance from the gods. This fragment, for instance, is addressed to the goddess Aukert, and means something like ‘open to me the enclosed place, and grant me pleasant roads upon which to travel.’ It is all quite practical stuff they are asking for, mostly. Which gives a fascinating insight into what they thought the afterlife was actually going to be like.”
“Which was?”
“More of the same, basically. Which is probably also why they thought they’d need so much stuff.”
Fascinating as all this was, it was the mystery of the journal I wanted Sam’s help getting to the bottom of.
IN WALTER LOFTUS’S BIOGRAPHY of Erlich, Juliette remained a cipher, simply Oskar’s young lover, her artistic ambitions a footnote to his achievements. I may only have deciphered her first diary entry so far, but it was clear Juliette’s journal covered the period she had spent working on her great lost masterpiece, Self-Portrait as Sphinx, those final, fiercely creative months of her tragically curtailed life. Ringing in my head as I read—or tried to read—Juliette’s handwriting was Alice Long’s insistence that it was the duty of scholarship to correct decades of contempt and forgetfulness and neglect. That was the opportunity this journal had handed me, that was the task which faced me, and it was hard not to think there was a reason for that.
How I wished, holding the thing, turning its pages, I still had something like it of my mother’s, one of the sketchbooks I watched her fill with exquisite, intricate drawings and watercolors when I was little. Some of my most treasured childhood memories are of waking up at night and slipping downstairs to find her at the kitchen table, illustrating one of the extraordinary stories she would make up for me at bedtime. Her transfixed expression. The way in which these projects seemed to transport her, to make everything else a little more bearable.
It was really in tribute to my mother I chose to study art history—if I could draw or paint or felt I had the imagination to write stories, I am sure I would have done that instead. It was the thought of how proud she’d be that had pushed me to work hard enough to get here and which made me want to take advantage of the opportunities I had now. My hope was that I was living up to her idea of what was possible in life, even if she was not around to see it.