Page 383 - Livre Beau Rivage Palace

REMINISCENCES

THE ANTIQUES FAIR

AROUND 1900

Maurice SANDOZ

‘I knew that the Hôtel Beau-Rivage at Ouchy had for the past two years served as a home
for the man who had been instrumental in discovering the ruins of Abydos and had unearthed
the shrine in the temple of Ammon from the heaps of sand which had accumulated during twenty
centuries. […] But the guest of the Beau-Rivage, who was getting on in years and who had had

a surfeit of experiences and perhaps of friendships, no longer wanted “to see fresh faces”. In view
of so clear a ruling, friends and relations bowed and did not insist. […] I was quickly
and unexpectedly rewarded by learning that the Marquis de Biron had invited me to take coffee

with him after lunch. When I knocked at his door and found my way into his room I was more
than a little surprised. The Hôtel Beau-Rivage is well known for the meticulous order and
absolute cleanliness which reign there. Here, no doubt by virtue of strict injunctions regretfully
obeyed, the floor was literally smothered with the stubs of Russian cigarettes which were hardly
begun before being thrown away. The bed had been hastily made, and the rugs were littered

with reviews and catalogues shut and open. I noticed that several of their pages were marked with
crosses and numbers in red and blue pencil.

‘In an armchair with a high back something was jerking about. It took me a minute to make out
what I was looking at, this something was so muffled up and the air so blue with cigarette smoke.
When he had left his armchair, I found that I had in front of me a little man, unshaved,
in a Greek bonnet, and wearing, in spite of the stifling heat in the room, a thick winter overcoat
and a knitted woollen scarf. […]

‘But could he have been said to be living in our midst? Surrounded by exquisite relics
of the past, familiar only with the artists of other days, he had already left this century to withdraw

to the shades of the departed.’

Maurice SANDOZ, The Crystal Salt Cellar, Guilford Press, London, 1954, pp. 89-91, 103

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