L'Inconnue est arrivee

 Le Concert Etranger

Coming to the end of the busiest and best of times; the MA Festival and many friends here from Cologne and Holland; one staying chez moi but the meetings, lunches, brunches etc somehow fitted in to the normal week, can be challenging but fun. The energy runs out more quickly these days but the spirit remains high.


 La Sollazzo Ensemble

The title of this year's Early Music Festival has been La Divina Commedia: Tussen Hemel en Hel and the music has perforce echoed that virtual journey through the afterlife. Dante's masterpiece has him travelling through Hell [Purgatorio] and Paradise [Paradiso], accompanied by the immortal Beatrice and includes the distressing metaphor of war as an inferno. Great scope here for many splendid concerts then! And there have been. My own two favourites were Conversations Avec Dieu by Le Concert Etranger with the incomparable alto, Lucile Richardot,  on Monday evening and on Friday morning, the Sollazzo Ensemble in Dante's Troubadors. These two were the closest possible to perfection.,

Strolling with my house guest vaguely en route home one afternoon, we crossed the lovely Sint Bonifacius bridge, so beloved of the tourists with its mediaeval shape and colour [actually a replacement built in 1911] and the early mediaeval house at one end of the bridge was open for an exhibition. I have often longed to see the architecture inside so we took the opportunity presented. The art display was absolutely not to my taste, but the house belonged to the artist, and that WAS so deliciously perfect in its mediaeval

 A mediaeval view to die for!
Onze Lieve Vrouw in the background

charms. The bottle glass everywhere with a tiny roundel of a coloured glass portrait in two windows; the window shutters and the lower half of a cupboard, all ancient linen-fold; the old wooden arch leading to a small garden with a background of the stately Onze Lieve Vrouw church beyond. Just perfection, as was the old studded wooden door used as a table laid on modern legs. To live there means daily hours of noisy tourist traffic virtually touching the building as it flows over Sint Bonifacius and beyond, a modern unwanted counterpoint to the mediaeval simplicity and beauty of the little house.

A quiet smoke in a rain-sodden garden

One day the German boys gave a super lunch, intended for the garden, but rain, rare in Brugge for months, chose to make a vigorous intervention so we dined inside by candle light. My brunch later in the week, suffered a similar fate, so somehow we seated thirteen at tables inside my flat, while I, mainly unseated, did valiant service as waitress. Both events were such fun and a real expression of friendship. A parcel arrived during my brunch which I had collected and hastily stowed away for later. Then, much later, after the great clearing up, I opened the box, excited to see the contents. I had read a most touching article in the New York Times in July about 'the most famous person to have died in the River Seine who has no identity at all." In the late 19th century, the body of a young girl was pulled from the Seine, without blemishes and presumed, therefore, to have committed suicide. The pathologist at the morgue was so struck by her beauty that he spontaneously called in a mouleur, a moulder, to preserve the image of  her face in a death mask.


 L'Inconnue de la Seine.

In the following decades the mask was mass-produced for sale and became a muse for poets, artists, writers like Picasso, Man Ray, Rilke, Nabokov. Albert Camus had her mask in his studio and he called her 'the drowned Mona Lisa'. Today it continues to be reproduced and sold by L'Atelier Lorenzi  in the southern Paris suburb of Arcueil. Founded in 1871, by the Tuscan great-grandfather of the present owner, l'Atelier Lorenzi has a nineteenth century mold of the face; it may be the original; no one knows but no other atelier makes the mask. I found the Lorenzi email address online et, eventually, voila, the box I received contained my plaster cast of L'Inconnue.  A coup de foudre followed the unveiling!  She really IS stunning; round cheeks, smooth skin, eyes closed with eye lashes still apparently wet, hair parted in the middle and drawn towards the nape of the neck in a typical nineteenth century style. There is the suggestion of a half-smile on her face as she lies there, half sleeping.

Her identity was never discovered and she has been imagined as a victim; an orphan who drowned herself in the Seine after an English aristocrat seduced, then abandoned, her. Other stories have her as a witch who destroyed a young poet, and as a seductress who witnesses a robbery and a murder in a clockmaker's shop. With no surviving documents in the police archives, we have just this extraordinary glimpse of a tragically short life which has nevertheless, brought beauty and a poignant narrative to countless subsequent lives.

And I must mention the so-called Zandfeest on August 6th; always the first Sunday of the MA Festival. A rommelmarkt of large proportions, stretching from t'Zand, down side streets, behind the Concertgebouw almost to the station. An event not to be missed by even people like me who have no need of any more objects in their lives! This did not stop me bargaining for, and buying, two African masks and six wine glasses. My guest accompanied me and obviously could not understand how SO many people could be excited about sifting through piles of less-than-necessary, less-than-beautiful, objects.