Letters to a Rival
Where every wound arrives wrapped as a gift
Among the papers I recovered was a bound between Fournel and the Abbe Girard, the famous .
Girard was, by the 1740s, the most feared judge of in France, and his word could make or unmake a fortune.
The two men should have been enemies, and in every public respect they were.
Yet their letters reveal a relationship far stranger than , one of mutual and mutual need.
Girard's letters are models of eighteenth-century , every sentence polished to a cold and gleaming point.
He addresses Fournel as my dear and gifted friend, while accusing him, in the same breath, of poisoning the market.
The forger's replies are no less elegant and no less cruel, matching with and blade with blade.
I confess, Fournel writes in one letter, that I have learned more of taste from deceiving you than from any master.
The compliment is also an insult, for it implies that Girard's celebrated judgement is precisely what can be fooled.
This is the art of the letter as a duel, where the wound must always be wrapped in a gift.
Why did they write to each other at all, given that discovery would have destroyed them both?
The answer, I think, is that each was the only man who fully understood the other's art.
Girard alone could appreciate how good the forgeries were; Fournel alone knew how the critic's eye worked.
They were, in a sense, collaborators in a single enterprise, though each would have denied it with horror.
A needs forgeries to prove his skill, just as a forger needs a to be worth deceiving.
Their was real, but so was the hidden beneath it, and neither could exist without the other.
In one remarkable exchange, Girard hints that he has recognised a forgery yet chosen to authenticate it anyway.
Let us say, he writes, that I found the picture too beautiful to expose, and leave the rest unspoken.
The sentence is a masterpiece of , admitting a crime while committing nothing to the page.
Fournel understood the offer perfectly, and from that season his forgeries grew bolder and more numerous.
A single well-placed silence, it seems, can be more than any spoken agreement.
I have read many archives of crime, but few as as two clever men flattering each other into ruin.
Their was not a mask over their hatred; it was the exact shape their hatred had chosen to take.
The last letter in the bundle is brief, and its politeness has curdled into something close to fear.
Girard warns his dear friend that others have begun to ask questions he can no longer answer for him.
The ends there, unsigned on both sides, as though each had suddenly remembered the danger of ink.
What a letter conceals, I have come to believe, is often the truest record of what its writer felt.