Free Portrait of a Man by Georges Perec, David Bellos

trembling in the awful, futile illusion of recovery.
    His wrinkled and calloused hands lay on the arm of the chair and sometimes shook a little. He would tense them abruptly, digging his nails into the upholstery. “I am very glad to see you, Gaspard. It’s been quite a time, hasn’t it?” The banality of the expression, its indifference, the mechanical way it was said. It was in Paris, the night of the party, his last time in Paris. And also the last time he’d spoken to him. Rufus was leaving next morning for Geneva and would drop him off at Annemasse …
    Now he loitered on the streets and in the empty rooms of his villa. He was sixty-two. He looked eighty. He had been a pupil of Joni Icilio. He had had a truly distinguished career. One da Vinci, seven Van Goghs, two Rubens, two Goyas, two Rembrandts and two Bellinis. Fifty-odd Corots, a dozen Renoirs, thirty or more Degas, exported in bulk to South America and Australia in 1930 and 1940, a number of Metsys and Memlings and whole cartloads of Sisleys and Jongkinds, done between 1920 and 1925 at the start of his association with Rufus and Madera. Until 1955 he had worked twelve hours a day and often more, accumulating knowledge, techniques and tricks of the trade, and with every artist achieving indisputable perfection, often with startling speed. Then he had stopped and hung around Place du Cirque, giving advice, setting things up, making bibliographies, collecting documentation, as if he were still trying at whatever cost to make himself useful, and gradually, withoutsaying anything at first, stopping completely, and as if he could not envisage carrying on living in idleness while remaining in the very place where he had spent his working life, confessing to Rufus (who had not dared bring up the subject himself) that he wished “to end his days” in peace and quiet, and so settled with obviously simulated delight and a sad little smile on his face in the detached house that Rufus had bought him at Annemasse, only a few hundred metres from the gates of Geneva, and there, with a sour housekeeper, a decent pension and a precious library, begun to experience the appallingly slow agony of living a life that was no longer any use. Two years. Seven hundred and thirty days. Seven hundred and thirty days of boredom only too rarely relieved by a visitor or a trip. A few days in Paris, Venice or Florence, and then he was on his own once again, alone with his oddly gentle pain, a kind of vaguely nostalgic, vaguely anaesthetising comprehension of the self, among his books and paintings, alone in his sparsely furnished living room and, beyond that, a small street lined with identical houses, a silent and empty little street. All his life he had lived in the ceaseless jostle of Rue Rousseau and Place du Cirque or else in Paris, in Rue Cadet, in a small studio on the seventh floor of a block of apartments. A livid, scrawny little street. A clean little suburban street? A cramped living room that he had not summoned up the courage to organise, as if he had been convinced that it was not worth the trouble, as if he had wanted to prove every minute of the day that he was already dead and living in his grave, in these alien and altogether unknown and indifferent surroundings where he was obliged nonethelessto walk and look and see every day …
    On 17 November 1958, Rufus had called Dampierre: Jérôme was dying. That same evening, Otto drove him to Orly and he landed in Geneva. There was a chilly drizzle. When they reached Annemasse Jérôme was already dead. A doctor and the housekeeper were standing by his bed. An extraordinary jumble of open books, reproductions and unfolded lithographs was strewn around the bedroom, surrounding him like battle colours …
    Do you recall? You bent down and picked up a book that had fallen close by Jérôme. Do you recall?
Let four captains bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;… and, for his