Free Caravaggio's Angel by Ruth Brandon Page B

Whatever I’d been expecting, it was not this.
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘No reason,’ I assured her, feeling foolish. How old would she have been then? Eighteen, at the very most. But why should an eighteen-year-old not mastermind an art robbery? ‘It’s just that your name was never mentioned in connection with it, as far as I know.’
    ‘Mentioned by whom?’
    ‘The press. The literature. What I mean is, I’ve never seen it mentioned.’
    ‘Probably not. The Surrealists were strange about women. They liked to fuck them, of course,’ (how strange that word sounded, coming from those fissured lips) ‘but that was about it. That and typing. If some act took place, and two men were involved, it was inconceivable a girl could have thought of it.’
    ‘What made you think of it?’
    She looked at the tape recorder. ‘It’s a long story. But why not? I’d rather think about the past than the present, any day.’

7
    La Jaubertie, July
    All that morning I listened while Juliette told her story. How outraged she felt when her parents forbade her to see any more of Arnaud Peytoureau (‘Peytoureau?’ I interrupted. ‘I’m staying with a family called Peytoureau at Les Pruniers – would they be related?’
    ‘Les Pruniers?’ Juliette thought a minute. ‘That must be Olivier. Arnaud would have been, let’s see, his great-uncle.’)
    Would have been . So Arnaud was dead.
    Juliette resumed her tale. After the break with Arnaud, she felt she could never live the life her parents had mapped out for her. When they drove her to Libourne to catch the train, as usual, to the convent school in Bordeaux after the 1936 Christmas holidays, she noticed the Paris train waiting on the next platform. Her mother had a dentist’s appointment, so her parents, having put her on the Bordeaux train, did not wait to see her off. As soon as they were safely departed, she jumped off and boarded the one for Paris, as she was in her school uniform and wrapped up in her mother’s old beaver coat, which she used as a coverlet in the icy convent dormitory. She would join her brother Robert who was supposedly studying law but in fact (as she knew) spent his life among the Surrealists, devising puns and producing trance-writings. His horror when she arrived at the little house his godfather had left him, his fury when she refused to leave, even when her parents came to Paris especially to fetch her, her beloved father taking her part against her outraged dévote mother. By then Robert’s friend and fellow Surrealist Emmanuel Rigaut had fallen in love with her – convent girls, after all, being the embodiment of every Surrealist fantasy – and had persuaded her to let him share her bed. Robert, mean-while, was sunk in misery because André Breton, the charismatic Surrealist leader, was no longer interested in him, but had moved on, as he always did, to new favourites and obsessions. Juliette, mazed in the enchantment of first love, had felt for him – had wanted to help him, to devise a way of reawakening Breton’s interest. And had devised a plan: they would steal Caravaggio’s St Cecilia from the Louvre.
    Why that particular plan, I asked her.
    She explained that she had found a job as secretary to a relative – one of the ubiquitous Beaupré cousinhood – who was Head of Pictures at the Louvre, had seen and of course recognized the St Cecilia and at once felt the Surrealist push of chance and coincidence. She remembered, from a book of Robert’s that she’d read at La Jaubertie, a trick of the great Houdini’s: when he wanted to vanish onstage from behind some piece of apparatus, he would slip on a stagehand’s white overall and become instantly, to all intents, invisible. In the same way, if Emmanuel and Robert became brown-coated porters, they could (she reasoned) remove any picture unquestioned. If anyone asked, it was off to be cleaned, or on loan. She identified a time when the guard was invariably absent from the Caravaggio room,