Excerpted from the novel Mona’s Eyes

Camille had decided: this time would be the one, she’d finally ask, at their check-up appointment with Dr. Van Orst, whether, yes or no, Mona risked temporarily going blind again, or worse, losing her sight permanently. For a month and a half, this question hadn’t been off her mind for more than an hour. She couldn’t focus on a task without this fear resurfacing after a few minutes. It was exhausting, especially since she’d promised herself not to look up anything on the internet, and the willpower needed to resist this temptation had ended up draining her. Camille thought that at least a doctor’s opinion would help her to channel this nagging obsession a little. She was walking fast, with her daughter by her side, through the corridors of the Châtelet metro station, endlessly repeating to herself a double question: “Does Mona risk losing her sight one day? What’s the likelihood?”

And then, in one of the station’s endless gray corridors, when Camille was speeding up again, Mona tried to warn her mother. Lost in her thoughts, impervious to the crowd and the surrounding din, feverish and determined, Camille suddenly felt her foot catching on an obstacle. She was sent flying. It was the leg of a homeless man lying on the floor, and Camille, her nerves shot, barked:

“Watch what you’re doing, for god’s sake!”

The man, perplexed, wasn’t sure how to react. He merely responded with embarrassing politeness:

“I’m blind, madame.”

Only then, Camille saw the word “blind” written in capitals, among a few other statements scribbled on a scrap of cardboard, appealing for generosity; she saw the dark glasses that had been knocked to the floor; she saw Mona’s blue trousers right beside them. She’d just crashed into a blind homeless man in a metro corridor at the very moment she was taking her daughter to hospital, fearing for her eyes. A cold shiver coursed through her. Without a word, almost panicked, she got up and rushed to the exit with Mona. After pretending to check her phone, she made up a work crisis and told her daughter:

“We won’t visit the doctor today, darling. I need to go back home.”

A Persian tale, from medieval times, recounts how, one morning in a Baghdad market, a vizier was horrified to encounter Death, emaciated and somberly clad, because it gestured towards him, in what seemed like an invitation, despite his being young and healthy. The vizier went to see his caliph and announced to him his immediate departure for the city of Samarkand, in order to escape from this sinister invitation. The caliph agreed to this, and away his man galloped. Nevertheless, the concerned caliph summoned Death and asked it why it had threatened a vigorous vizier, in his prime, in a Baghdad market. Death retorted: “I wasn’t threatening him, I merely made a gesture of surprise! I’d met him early in the morning, in the middle of a Baghdad market, and I was surprised because we were due to meet that very evening, in Samarkand . . . ”

Camille thought again of this legend, which had always terrified her. She had the feeling of wanting, in vain, to escape from fate, or more specifically, to clumsily shield her daughter from it; because canceling that appointment with the doctor to avoid a diagnosis was absurd and protected no one from misfortune. Yet she still called Dr. Van Orst’s office and, assuming a formal tone, moved the appointment to a later date, much later. When she hung up, she saw Mona looking somber.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine.”

“I know you inside out, Mona. Something’s bothering you. We’ll go see the doctor. You’ll see, it’ll all work out.”

“Mommy . . . It’s just the way you spoke to the poor man in the metro . . . ”

Mona was right. Ashamed, Camille went back to apologize and ask if the poor man was alright. He’d disappeared.

We teach children that it is wrong to lie. And Mona knew she was lying to her parents by pretending to visit the child psychiatrist every week when she was actually strolling around the museum with Dadé. She opened up to him about this, and spoke of Pinocchio. Was she herself changing a bit, every Wednesday when she deceived her mother, her father? Does it show on someone when they’re being misleading? Henry rubbed her nose: right here, at any rate, nothing’s budged, he reassured her. And he laughed heartily. But he didn’t want to compromise himself, either, by simply justifying the hoax, however irreproachable its aim. The issue was too serious, morally, to be dealt with hastily. How could you explain the betwixt and between, the interlacing of the true and the false to a child raised to be honest? How dilute the binary concepts of good and evil without upsetting her, disorientating her, or disappointing her? It was an impossible task, and Henry knew full well that only life experience could provide such moderations; trying to explain those hierarchies to Mona would be counterproductive. And, while pondering all this as they approached the Louvre, he decided that it was a good time to go up to the second floor of the Denon wing. The ideal moment to introduce the notion of chiaroscuro . . .

On a canvas that was a good meter tall sat a middle-aged man wearing a white indoor cap, in three-quarter view and lit from the upper-left corner of the composition. On either side of a bulbous nose, the eyes, looking straight at the viewer, seemed faraway and melancholy, while the deeply lined skin, sagging around the ruddy cheeks, glowed in the hazy light. He had a tragic furrow on his forehead, a more tender, and more ironic, crease at the corner of his mouth. A sparse, scruffy beard and messy curls gave this head a grizzled look, and below it everything was much darker. The model’s coat, while not indistinguishable from the murky background, gave the impression of at least struggling to detach itself from it, or even to disappear into it. The light reappeared, even further down, at waist level, to reveal one hand holding a maulstick—a light wooden baton with a pad at one end used to support an artist’s hand when painting details—and the other clutching a rag, some brushes, and a palette, on which three colors stood out: vermilion, bronze, and a dab of white with a suggestion of black in the middle. Finally, to the right, the side of a panel of wood appeared. It was the back of a painting this person was working on.

“Another portrait,” Mona commented after eleven minutes, “like that of the Gypsy girl, and here, too, you can clearly see the strokes of paint, I mean the really thick ones. The Gypsy girl was all cheery; he just looks sad. But there’s still something similar about the two of them.”

“Well, Mona, you do impress me! This is only the seventh work we’ve come to see and, hey presto, you’re starting to develop an eye. The Gypsy Girl was by Frans Hals, and this painting is a portrait of the artist Rembrandt by himself, so a self-portrait, a genre that was pretty new at the time, first emerging around 1500. Rare were the self-portraits in which the artist dared to depict himself in his studio, tools in hand. That’s the case in this one, which Rembrandt painted at the age of fifty-four. He was born two decades after Frans Hals—in 1606, to be precise—but the two men did know each other, and belonged, as you rightly spotted, to one and the same school: the Dutch school of the 17th century. Frans Hals spent his entire career in Haarlem, whereas Rembrandt, originally from the university town of Leiden, soon went up to Amsterdam, a bustling, prosperous port that received goods from all over the world, which thrilled the artist. You can’t see it here, but among the forty-odd self-portraits Rembrandt painted, from his youth to his death in 1669, there are many in which he dresses himself up in oriental costumes, finery, or armor—all outlandish accessories he’d buy at fairs or auctions and collect.”

“Rembrandt would have been a good customer for Daddy!”

“Absolutely. In fact, like your father, Rembrandt was also a dealer. On the ground floor of his large house in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, he had his own store, selling his own paintings and engravings, but also those by other artists. That house can still be visited today, you know.”

“I’d really love to go there!”

“You will, Mona, be patient. And you’ll see: Amsterdam is covered in canals; the city seems like it’s rocking on the water. In winter, the place is all misty and enigmatic. The atmosphere is mysterious, too, and you often find that mystery in the tones used by the painters of northern Europe. And by Rembrandt in particular.”

“I think I get it, Dadé! In Amsterdam it’s damp, cold, and it gets dark early. So, the painters over there, they had a style that resembled the city they lived in! And that’s why this painting by Rembrandt, it’s kind of murky. Am I right?”

“A respectable eight out of ten, Mona.”

She was pleased with her grade.

“But,” he hastily continued, “beware of thinking that a geographical location, with its typical landscapes and weather, determines the style of painting. People do, indeed, often contrast the sunny brightness of Italian Renaissance art with the more muted, chilly mood of Dutch paintings. Which isn’t wrong, but a little nuance is required in all that. Rembrandt was highly influenced by an Italian, who himself was a kind of master of the shadows. His name was Caravaggio. Until his death in 1610, he had a brief and dazzling career, marked by many scandals—he’d been a criminal, endured several stays in prison—but above all he had radically shaken up painting with a major innovation: the use of intense contrasts within a single composition. Chiaroscuro.”

“Oh, that’s a lovely word!”

“And it’s even lovelier with an Italian accent: il chiaroscuro.” Mona repeated the term to remember it. “With chiaroscuro, black was no longer offensive to color, or its negation; it became its loudhailer. And black started to invade the painting, to devour it.”

These words struck the little girl’s memory like lightning, and staring at Rembrandt’s self-portrait, she suddenly felt herself shudder. She huddled up to her grandfather, who continued with his explanation in a more soothing voice.

“Rembrandt would prepare his paintings by first applying an even layer of brown. That became his background. He’d then add some luminous areas; by that I mean, before even starting to depict anything at all, he’d decide on the areas that would glow more brightly on the surface of his picture. After which, his technique is like a slow revealing of the subject, as if it were emerging from the shadows. However—and this is the subtlety of chiaroscuro—everything isn’t revealed equally: the luminous areas chosen at the start of the composition will be much more intense and penetrating.”

“Seems to me that he’s lighting up his face there. He must have loved himself a lot!”

“Hold on, keep listening. And remember what I told you about Raphael: he was a prince among princes, and right across Europe, the status of painters would begin to change with the Renaissance. By the 17th century, Rembrandt was benefiting from that evolution, that new esteem: he was now no longer considered a simple artisan, good with his hands and with technical know-how; he became an artist recognized for his mind, his genius, his singularity. It was thus logical that Rembrandt should assert his own individuality by painting his own portrait. It was equally expected that collectors would desire an image of this man, who was a veritable star in Amsterdam.”

“Was Rembrandt like Raphael then? Was he very rich with loads of people in his studio?”

“Rembrandt did indeed have a good many collaborators, and he wasn’t short of money. But as you see him there, he’s a ruined man, who’s just been declared bankrupt in 1656, to be precise.”

Bankrupt! The word was familiar to Mona, who, during some conversation or other, would hear it shoot out of her father’s snarling mouth like steam.

“How did that happen to Rembrandt?”

“At first, he enjoyed enormous success, received many commissions from major guilds, that’s to say, the professional associations: doctors, judges, the military . . . And yet he was a very independent character; he didn’t always like his patrons, and mistreated his commissioners, demanding awfully long poses for his portraits for example, or delaying delivering his finished works until he was entirely satisfied with the result. And that could last for years! At a time when life was much shorter than it is now, you can imagine the anger of some clients, who sometimes ended up taking him to court! But Rembrandt sacrificed nothing to commercial success: each of his paintings had to conform to his vision. From then on, his way of life crippled him with debts, to the extent that, one day, he had to declare himself bankrupt. He sold—for next to nothing—all that he owned, moved out of his splendid home, had various tangles with the law. And on top of all that, he went through numerous personal dramas: first the death of three children, and, in 1642, of his wife Saskia; then, in addition to financial ruin, he lost his long-time lover Hendrickje to the plague. And then his son, Titus—”

“How’s it possible to carry on painting when your life’s so awful?”

“That’s just it, Mona, this self-portrait contains, within the image of the artist, that oscillation between glory and misfortune. It conveys a deep melancholy, and the chiaroscuro, with its bursts of color and depths of shadow, shows how conscious Rembrandt is of the years running away. Not only does he sign his own autopsy, but also dares to sign that of time passing, of the battle lost in advance between being and not being. ‘To be or not to be,’ asked Hamlet in Shakespeare’s tragedy of 1603. Half a century later, Rembrandt’s self-portrait whispers it, too. And another thing—”

“What, Dadé, what does it whisper? I want to hear it—”

“Listen carefully, Mona. Gnôthi seautón.”

“Gnoty whaty?”

“Gnôthi seautón . . . Know yourself. It’s Ancient Greek: the maxim inscribed above the entrance to the temple at Delphi, a maxim that the philosopher Socrates liked to remind people of, to show clearly the position of the Human . . . The Human, vague shadow of the gods, and yet believing himself to be a solar star. Know yourself, with all your strengths, but especially with your weaknesses and limitations; get the measure of what you are, with your fragile glories and your contingency. Rembrandt is aware of his genius, and he proudly shows this by painting himself in front of an easel with his head, hands, and palette in the light. He is also a tormented Christian, who knows he’s a wretched man, deserving of mercy. Look, Mona! On his very small palette—larger ones only came into use later—there’s vermilion, bronze, and white. Those are the colors required to paint the complexion, the flesh, the skin. Rembrandt is emphasizing this. What he paints is first and foremost his body, that body studied, seen, and seen again in those huge flat mirrors that appeared in the early 17th century, made of polished glass backed with mercury: that body that’s wearing out. What he’s painting is its uncertain truth. Gnôthi seautón . . .”

Outside, it being winter, the late afternoon was more like evening. The December solstice was imminent. And then the day would begin to regain ground on the night once more. Clarity would slowly hold sway over obscurity. And Mona wanted to see a hidden message in that, the idea that, anyhow, the light always triumphed. Because in Paris, the Christmas decorations were twinkling . . .