she should be standing immediately beneath a gigantic chandelier, which came from the famous workshop of Baucis at Murano. The chandelier snapped and caused the deaths of eight people, including Laurelle and the Duke’s father, old Marshal Crécy-Couvé, who’d had three horses shot under him during the Russian Campaign. Foul play could not be suspected. François de Dinteville, Laurelle’s uncle, who was present at the reception, put forward the theory of “pendular amplification produced by the conflicting vibratory frequencies of the crystal glass and the chandelier” but no one took this explanation seriously.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Servants’ Quarters, 5
Smautf
UNDER THE EAVES, between Hutting’s studio and Jane Sutton’s room, the room of Mortimer Smautf, Bartlebooth’s aged butler.
The room is empty. With eyes half-closed, with its front legs tucked in a sphynx-like posture, a white-furred cat drowses on the orange bedspread. Beside the bed, on a small bedside table, lie a cut-glass ashtray of triangular shape, with the word “Guinness” engraved on it, and a detective story entitled The Seven Crimes of Azincourt .
Smautf has been in Bartlebooth’s service for more than fifty years. Although he calls himself a butler, his services have been more those of gentleman’s gentleman or secretary; or, to be even more precise, both at the same time: in fact, he was above all his master’s travelling companion, his factotum, and if not his Sancho Panza at least his Passepartout (for there was indeed a touch of Phineas Fogg in Bartlebooth), in turns porter, clothes valet, barber, driver, guide, treasurer, travel agent, and umbrella holder.
Bartlebooth’s, and therefore Smautf’s, travels lasted twenty years, from 1935 to 1954, and took them in a sometimes fanciful way all around the world. From 1930 Smautf began to prepare for the journey, getting hold of all the papers necessary for obtaining visas, reading up on the formalities currently used in the different countries they would pass through, opening properly funded accounts in various appropriate places, collecting guidebooks, maps, timetables and fares lists, booking hotel rooms and steamer tickets. Bartlebooth’s idea was to go and paint five hundred seascapes in five hundred different ports. The ports were chosen more or less at random by Bartlebooth, who thumbed through atlases, geography books, travellers’ tales, and tourist brochures and ticked off the places that appealed to him. Smautf then studied how to get there and find accommodation.
The first port, in the first fortnight of January 1935, was Gijon, in the Bay of Biscay, not far from where the unfortunate Beaumont was carrying on trying to find the last remains of an improbable Arab capital of Spain. The last was Brouwershaven, in Zeeland, at the estuary of the Scheldt, in the second fortnight of December nineteen fifty-four. In between, there had been the little harbour of Muckanaghederdauhaulia, not far from Costelloe, in Ireland’s Camus Bay, and die even tinier port of U in the Caroline Islands; there were Baltic ports and Latvian ports, Chinese ports and Malagasy ports, Chilean ports and Texan ports; tiny harbours of two fishing boats and three nets, huge ports with several miles of breakwaters, with docks and quaysides, with hundreds of fixed and travelling cranes; ports cloaked in fog, sweltering ports, and ports locked in ice; deserted harbours, silted harbours, yachting harbours, with artificial beaches, transplanted palms and grand hotels and gaming halls fronting the waterside; infernal dockyards building liberty ships by the thousand; ports devastated by bombing; quiet ports where naked girls sprayed each other beside the sampans; ports for canoes and ports for gondolas; naval harbours, creeks, dry-dock basins, roads, cambers, channels, moles; piles of barrels, rope, and sponges; heaps of redwood trees, mountains of fertiliser, phosphates, and minerals; cages crawling with
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Servants’ Quarters, 5
Smautf
UNDER THE EAVES, between Hutting’s studio and Jane Sutton’s room, the room of Mortimer Smautf, Bartlebooth’s aged butler.
The room is empty. With eyes half-closed, with its front legs tucked in a sphynx-like posture, a white-furred cat drowses on the orange bedspread. Beside the bed, on a small bedside table, lie a cut-glass ashtray of triangular shape, with the word “Guinness” engraved on it, and a detective story entitled The Seven Crimes of Azincourt .
Smautf has been in Bartlebooth’s service for more than fifty years. Although he calls himself a butler, his services have been more those of gentleman’s gentleman or secretary; or, to be even more precise, both at the same time: in fact, he was above all his master’s travelling companion, his factotum, and if not his Sancho Panza at least his Passepartout (for there was indeed a touch of Phineas Fogg in Bartlebooth), in turns porter, clothes valet, barber, driver, guide, treasurer, travel agent, and umbrella holder.
Bartlebooth’s, and therefore Smautf’s, travels lasted twenty years, from 1935 to 1954, and took them in a sometimes fanciful way all around the world. From 1930 Smautf began to prepare for the journey, getting hold of all the papers necessary for obtaining visas, reading up on the formalities currently used in the different countries they would pass through, opening properly funded accounts in various appropriate places, collecting guidebooks, maps, timetables and fares lists, booking hotel rooms and steamer tickets. Bartlebooth’s idea was to go and paint five hundred seascapes in five hundred different ports. The ports were chosen more or less at random by Bartlebooth, who thumbed through atlases, geography books, travellers’ tales, and tourist brochures and ticked off the places that appealed to him. Smautf then studied how to get there and find accommodation.
The first port, in the first fortnight of January 1935, was Gijon, in the Bay of Biscay, not far from where the unfortunate Beaumont was carrying on trying to find the last remains of an improbable Arab capital of Spain. The last was Brouwershaven, in Zeeland, at the estuary of the Scheldt, in the second fortnight of December nineteen fifty-four. In between, there had been the little harbour of Muckanaghederdauhaulia, not far from Costelloe, in Ireland’s Camus Bay, and die even tinier port of U in the Caroline Islands; there were Baltic ports and Latvian ports, Chinese ports and Malagasy ports, Chilean ports and Texan ports; tiny harbours of two fishing boats and three nets, huge ports with several miles of breakwaters, with docks and quaysides, with hundreds of fixed and travelling cranes; ports cloaked in fog, sweltering ports, and ports locked in ice; deserted harbours, silted harbours, yachting harbours, with artificial beaches, transplanted palms and grand hotels and gaming halls fronting the waterside; infernal dockyards building liberty ships by the thousand; ports devastated by bombing; quiet ports where naked girls sprayed each other beside the sampans; ports for canoes and ports for gondolas; naval harbours, creeks, dry-dock basins, roads, cambers, channels, moles; piles of barrels, rope, and sponges; heaps of redwood trees, mountains of fertiliser, phosphates, and minerals; cages crawling with
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