Gregory Curtis (6 page)

Marcellus accepted his victory calmly, even though just twenty-four hours earlier his task had seemed impossible. He told the primates he was very satisfied with their decision. To protect them from any reprisals, he gave them a letter for the dragoman, Prince Morousi, whom it happened that Marcellus knew well in Constantinople. They were the same age. During the previous few years they had spent long hours together sharing confidences while they hiked across the countryside and
climbed the walls of ancient cities. In his letter Marcellus told his old friend of the complete devotion of the primates toward him and how they had treated him, Marcellus, with great decency.

He also addressed a letter to the French ambassador to ask that he protect the people of Melos if they should ever suffer harm because of the sale of the statue. He added that he had arrived on a warship and would have been within his rights to use force, but he had used reason rather than arms.

Marcellus then paid
Yorgos 750 francs, the price the farmer had agreed upon with Oconomos, and gave another third, or 250 francs, to the primates. The sale was concluded on May 23, 1820.

The next day a lifeboat from the
Estafette
commanded by Voutier set out to take the statue from the Russian ship. He and his complement of young officers and sailors were determined to take the statue by force if necessary. In fact, they were spoiling for a fight. But they were disappointed, since the Russian captain received them politely and had his own sailors help them load the statue onto their boat.

Back at the
Estafette
, a hoist raised the statue from the lifeboat and lowered it gently onto the deck. At last Marcellus was able to see the thing he had worked so hard to buy. He was overcome with relief and admiration almost to the point of giddiness. He quoted
Homer aloud before resorting to words of his own. “What superhuman beauty,” he rhapsodized. “What sweet majesty. What shape divine.”

After some moments of awestruck gazing, he supervised as the pieces of the statue and the other finds from the niche were sewed into sacks of canvas. He put the bust in one sack and the lower part in another. In a third sack he wrapped the two herms and their inscribed bases, the bun of hair, a left foot, a fragment of an arm, and the hand holding an apple. The sacks were then placed on padding and tightly moored in the ship’s steerage.

The next morning, May 25, the
Estafette
sailed away, but not before Marcellus had had time to indulge in what he called his
“caprice.” He fulfilled his longing to see the girl in the painting who had been his real reason for coming to
Melos.

O
N
M
ELOS
, where it was difficult to earn more than a subsistence living, the men often turned to doing business with pirates, and women became prostitutes. The men signed on to pirate vessels as sailors, or they worked as pilots guiding the pirates through the difficult passages between the islands. Sometimes these pirates were bold renegades, but just as often they were French corsairs or English privateers whose adventures were, in theory at least, sanctioned by their respective governments. Since the pirate ships used the harbor as a refuge, Melos developed a healthy economy in trading supplies needed for the ships and crews in return for pirate booty. Everything could be bought on the island, including a virgin bride.

The reputation of the women of Melos was that their beauty was matched only by their immorality. There were prostitutes and pimps of the usual kind. But there was another form of prostitution, one sanctioned by custom on the island and accepted there as hardly prostitution at all. A pirate—or an honest seaman, for that matter—who was at anchor at Melos for an extended time and saw a young unmarried woman he liked could go to her parents and ask to marry her. They would strike a bargain. The parents would certify that she was a virgin, and the sailor would agree to pay a certain amount immediately and a larger amount when he left. The more beautiful and accomplished the girl, the higher the price. The sailor agreed to pay more still if the girl was pregnant at his departure.

With the agreement made, the couple would go to the Greek Orthodox priest and be married. Later, when the sailor had gone, the marriage was annulled. The girl got a share of the money to use as a dowry to attract one of the island boys, often
sailors themselves, who seemed not to mind at all. The girl had approximately the same status as a widow.

Brides could be bought this way on several other Aegean islands besides Melos, but not all.
Lord Charlemont, a worldly British traveler who visited the Greek archipelago in 1749 and who was not above contracting with a prostitute himself, wrote, “These islands in which it is practiced are, unluckily, in every other respect the least worthy of a traveler’s notice.”

We do not know what, if anything, the painter
Johann Ender told Marcellus about these customs or about the lovely girl in his portrait. But we know from the count himself that after successfully concluding his negotiations over the statue, he lost no time in turning toward his “caprice.” He made inquiries and learned that the girl, whose name was Maritza, lived in a house at the highest point in Castro. He climbed up there immediately. The girl herself, who had been told he was coming, answered his knock at the door. She was surrounded by several of her sisters. Then, as if on cue in a well-rehearsed ritual, the girl’s mother appeared and led Marcellus inside, where he sat on a bench while the mother talked.

Across the room was a bed. Maritza leaned against it and teased Marcellus by taking the exact pose as in Ender’s painting. He stared at her and she stared at him. The mother said the girl was seventeen and was betrothed to a sailor from another island.

Maritza asked Marcellus about his ship, about Constantinople, about the distant places he had visited. He couldn’t keep from exclaiming over her beauty, even in front of her. She stopped him, left, and returned with a cousin whom, as it happened, Ender had also painted. But Marcellus preferred Maritza. He asked her a few questions and was charmed by her simple answers. As he left, he gave her a coral necklace and a cake.

Or that is what he says took place. Certainly, he must have paid for the privilege of looking. According to the customs of the island, and judging by the eagerness of the mother to welcome him, Marcellus might have paid to do more than look. Perhaps
he did; perhaps he did not. His infatuation was so public that the men on the
Estafette
teased him about it after they left Melos. The pilot performed an elaborate practical joke whose point was that Marcellus had left the statue behind and it was really the girl Maritza who was wrapped in the canvas belowdecks. Marcellus did not publish his account of the voyage until 1840, twenty years after the event, and even then the girl still burned in his memory. He had found two women on Melos. He appreciated the beauty of the statue, but his description of seeing it for the first time feels a little obligatory. His writing about Maritza vibrates with his lust. She was the woman he had come to the island to see.

M
ARCELLUS
then continued on the diplomatic tour that had been his original assignment from Rivière, the French ambassador. For five months ship and crew wandered the Aegean with the Venus wrapped in her canvas. They landed at many other islands, including
Crete and
Cyprus, and visited
Palestine,
Egypt, and
Libya. All in all, everyone had a prodigiously good time. Voutier had a talent for singing and for improvising funny songs. Once at the mouth of the Nile they were out of rations and facing starvation, but a contrary wind kept them from landing. They sacrificed their last chicken to Neptune while Voutier chanted a mock-epic burlesque. Soon enough the wind changed.

In late September the ship anchored in Piraeus, the port of
Athens, where
Louis-François-Sébastien Fauvel, the venerable French consul, came aboard. Fauvel was both a connoisseur of art and a fervent antiquarian whose apartment near the Acropolis in Athens was filled with antiquities. Every French dignitary who visited the region stopped to see him and his collection.

Marcellus assembled the statue on the bridge of the
Estafette
. It was a warm, clear night with a full moon. Everything was quiet since there were no other ships around, and even the
crew fell under the spell of the moment. For a long time Fauvel and Marcellus watched the moonlight glimmer on the marble as the ship lolled gently on the calm water of the harbor. Then they lit torches and Fauvel, who had celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday only the week before, studied the statue closely. The men spent practically the whole night that way. At last Fauvel proclaimed that it was the finest statue he knew of and came from either the school of
Phidias or from the chisel of
Praxiteles himself. And what was it worth? “Oh, my,” Fauvel said calmly, “fifty thousand, one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand francs. A million. Anything you wish. She is priceless.”

That morning, September 22, the
Estafette
sailed for Smyrna, where it arrived two days later. There it waited for the
Lionne
, a larger ship that would take the Venus and ambassador Rivière to France. On September 26 Brest arrived in Smyrna. He told Marcellus he had been looking all over the Aegean for him. The dragoman had been incensed by the sale of the statue. He had had the primates arrested and brought to him. Then, in front of officials from the other islands, he had forced the primates to their knees and whipped them himself. He also assessed a fine of seven thousand piasters, about five thousand francs at that time. He refused even to look at the letter Marcellus had written him. In a rage he fumed that it would have been better to cast the statue to the bottom of the sea rather than cede it to Marcellus and France. Marcellus told Brest that he would bring the news of this outrage to Rivière.

The
Lionne
arrived. Marcellus made sure the statue was safely transferred from the
Estafette
before leaving by land for Constantinople to report to Rivière. “In Smyrna,” he remarked unsentimentally, “I left my servant, the Venus de Milo, and my dog.”

In Constantinople, Marcellus told Rivière about the outrages the dragoman had committed. Rivière took the primates’ complaints to the kaptan pasha, the dragoman’s patron. The kaptan pasha claimed to sympathize completely with the primates, ordered restitution, and summoned the dragoman to
him. Marcellus couldn’t understand the conduct of his old friend Prince Morousi, but he had to leave Constantinople before he could see him again and solve the riddle. In the following months the Greek revolt began. Morousi was captured almost immediately and summarily beheaded.

O
N
O
CTOBER
24 the
Lionne
arrived in Constantinople with the statue on board. Marcellus formally presented it to the ambassador.

The marquis de Rivière was the kind of aristocrat who, a generation earlier, had made the Revolution inevitable. He was imperious toward those below him in rank and servile toward those above. Louis XVIII had consented to be the godfather of Rivière’s son, but once on the throne he sent Rivière as far away as he could—to Constantinople. Rivière (his full name was Charles-François de Riffardeau de Rivière) had wavy black hair, oval eyes, and a long nose to look down. He was unkind, unfeeling, and resentful of any criticism or even any advice. Still, he had certain admirable qualities. He was recklessly brave, and he was loyal. During the Revolution he attached himself to the comte d’Artois, who was the brother of Louis XVI and Louis XVIII, and would later assume the throne as Charles X. Rivière followed the count across Europe during his exile but during Napoleon’s rule frequently returned to France in disguise with messages to royalists still in the country. He was captured twice, imprisoned twice, and escaped twice. After being captured yet again, he was imprisoned until the fall of the empire.

As ambassador to Turkey, he was a complete failure. He began by dismissing everyone in the embassy who had served the empire no matter how devoted or experienced they were. Thus, at one stroke he deprived himself of anyone who knew anything about dealing with the
Turks. That was in 1815. By 1820 he had mishandled affairs so badly that French traders in the
Ottoman Empire were taxed at a rate two and a half times that of any other nation. The
Chamber of Commerce of Marseilles, which was the association that represented the French foreign traders, was apoplectic and demanded his recall.

Rivière, for his part, hated Constantinople. The life of the French court went on while he languished halfway around the globe. He wrote letters pleading to be relieved. In late March 1820, just twelve days before the discovery of the statue, he had written, “It would be better to die in France than to be living here, always anxious, unable to concentrate.… What a dreadful night! What a tomorrow!”

He wasn’t interested in art and wasn’t interested in the statue on Melos when he first heard about it. Marcellus had seemed so enthusiastic that it was easier to let him go than to prevent him. But when Rivière was finally presented with the statue in Constantinople, and when he finally listened to the rapturous opinions of its beauty, and when he looked at it himself, he saw that this statue could provide what was missing in his life: not art, not beauty, and not a woman, but a passage back to France. With the Venus as a gift to the king, he could leave immediately without seeming to have abandoned his post and could return to France in triumph rather than in disgrace for having botched the job he had been sent to do.

He sailed for France on the
Lionne
on October 29. Both the upper and lower halves of the statue arrived at the Louvre unharmed. So did the herms and the other pieces Marcellus had tied in the third sack. But something turned up in that third sack, something inconvenient and unwanted that no one had paid much attention to until now. It was a piece of marble that had apparently broken off the base of the statue. An inscription in Greek was carved on this broken piece, and in this inscription was the name of a sculptor, a name the Louvre hoped the world would never see.