The Truest Signature
The one name no one wanted was the only true one
The last document I found was not a letter or a record, but a small painting in a private collection.
It had been catalogued for two centuries as the work of an unknown and minor provincial hand.
No one had wanted it, and it had passed from sale to sale at prices that steadily declined.
The picture shows a candlemaker's workshop at dusk, ordinary, unglamorous, and painted with immense care.
In the lower corner, in a hand I had by now learned to know better than my own, was a single word.
The word was not Auberon, nor any of the borrowed names Fournel had spent his life perfecting.
It was, simply and without , his own: Jean Fournel, written plainly, as if for the first time.
I have handled many signatures in my career, and I have never seen one so , so undefended.
Every forged name he made had been an argument, a performance calculated to persuade a buyer.
This one persuaded no one, sold for almost nothing, and asked to be believed by no authority at all.
It is, by the ordinary measures of the market, the least valuable object in this entire story.
And it is, by any measure that seems to me worth keeping, the most thing he ever made.
Here at last was a picture that claimed to be exactly what it was, and nothing more.
The subject, I noticed with a small shock, was almost certainly the workshop of his own dead father.
The forger who could any hand had come home, in the end, to the one room that made him.
There is no cleverness in the picture, no argument, no revenge upon a market that had scorned him.
There is only a boy's memory of candlelight, set down at last under his own name.
I do not know when he painted it, and no record tells me whether he ever tried to sell it.
Perhaps he kept it by him through everything, the one thing he never intended anyone else to buy.
It is a strange that the only picture he signed truly is the only one no one wanted.
The market, so easily fooled by his lies, had no use whatever for his one .
Value, it seems, attaches itself to the and turns away, embarrassed, from the naked face.
I have spent four years learning to tell his forgeries from the truth, and here the two had traded places.
The false signatures were the ones the world called real; the real one, the world had called .
I closed my notebook and sat for a long time before the little painting, saying nothing at all.
Somewhere a man had spent a lifetime perfecting other people's names, and had signed his own only once.
And that single true signature, unwanted and , is where at last I have chosen to end his story.