The Collector

Lemarque’s spacious and comfortable apartment overlooked a broad, leafy avenue in the centre of a city devoted to culture and learning, a city that successfully combined elements of Paris, Prague and Florence into one tasteful and harmonious whole.

Equipped with a small legacy, Lemarque had succeeded in preserving the habits of his student days into middle age (he was often described somewhat unkindly but not inaccurately as an ‘elderly youth’). A greying, velvet suited aesthete, he was a scribbler of small writings: catalogue notes and commentaries, reviews and feuilletons of various kinds – all noted for their combination of precise, almost pedantic, erudition with their bitingly elegant style. But, if truth be told, he remained an irredeemably minor figure in the cultural life of the city. 

He had only two friends: Bumby, a waspishly affected expatriate and Monique, a professor of art history at the city’s university. Given the limited radius of his social circle, Lemarque was dismayed one day to learn that Monique had consented to take up a position at some distant city, whose name Lemarque for some reason had difficulty remembering. He also felt it boded ill for the future of their friendship. He was not confident it was a position from which she would ever return.

However, in order to celebrate their friendship he decided to put together a small collection to take with her of objets of the sort that they had both relished in the heyday of their relationship. To this end he began to scour antique shops and flea markets in the city. But instead of the elegant bibelots he had envisaged, he found himself buying up a random assortment of junk: a brass door knob here, a broken section of a picture frame there, a ripped umbrella, the torn off cover of a lurid novelette, a bakelite pipe stand and a rusty bunch of keys for locks long forgotten. And the impulse to acquire such materials spiralled uncontrollably. The more he amassed the more he felt impelled to collect. Soon his apartment, despite its size, overflowed with his acquisitions. Keenly aware of the absurdity of his obsession, it became his guilty secret, a private shame of which he could not bring himself to speak openly.

Inevitably his secret was at length revealed. By chance Bumby dropped by unexpectedly one morning. To Lemarque’s surprise, rather than the appalled amazement he had anticipated, Bumby extended a cautious, condescending approval. ‘There is the odd interesting piece here but we will need to select,’ he said. Somewhat resenting Bumby’s proprietorial attitude, Lemarque nevertheless agreed, and they set to work sorting and arranging. But the task proved impossible such was the volume of material. And then again by what precise criteria were they to judge and rank the items?

In the midst of their labours Monique herself dropped by. She had come to bid them farewell, having been summoned unexpectedly early by her new employer. Stunned by what confronted her, when told of its motive, she was nevertheless gratified. But, she said, the effort and costs of crating and transporting such an Olympus would be overwhelming. Could they not, she asked, make an even smaller selection from the selection they were already making?

Again, though, the task proved fruitless, a solution came to Lemarque. ‘I will simply set aside part of the collection chosen at random and devote a single room to it and get rid of the rest. The room itself will serve as a sort of shrine.’ ‘A shrine!’ sniggered Bumby. ‘My, my, you do have it bad.’ Lemarque was stung. ‘You utterly misunderstand the nature of my relationship with Monique,’ he snapped. ‘It is a meeting of like-minded souls. Your remark is just what I might have expected from an American, a crude, superficial label applied to a culture more complex and sophisticated than you can possibly conceive!’ Bumby, offended in his turn, bowed and took his leave in high dudgeon.

In the weeks that followed, through many a sleepless night and anxious day Lemarque pondered the problem of what to do with the collection. Meanwhile his acquisitive impulse grew even more desperate as if to compensate for the loss of his friendships. Then, one morning an idea of brilliant simplicity dawned upon him. He would not get rid of anything. Instead, by restricting his own personal possessions to the barest minimum, he would convert his entire apartment into a museum. Entitled the Musée de l’Objet Trouvé’, it would act as a huge and surreal three-dimensional collage which spectators would not merely view but experience as they passed through. 

The Musée, he was certain, would mark the beginning of a new and revolutionary cultural direction, a repudiation of the hollow and exhausted traditions dominating the artistic life of the city. Its meaning would be its very lack of meaning – the meaningless chaos of life itself. It would hold up a mirror to an age in which modern man – global mass man – floated adrift on the swirling tides of subconscious impulse and rampaging commercial consumerism. But something of the past would remain. Bounded by the walls of the apartment, it would perpetuate the tradition of the domestic interior.

As for Lemarque himself, he would act not only as the collection’s creator but its curator, and in those role he achieve undoubted celebrity. In time his own publications might fall into obscurity but no matter. He had found his purpose. Of course in time he would die. But again that would not matter. A long line of professional curators would follow in his footsteps. A trust would doubtless be established to maintain the museum. Eventually it would of course overspill and occupy the other apartments in the block. A wing would need to be added to house other galleries illustrating the works and movements which the museum had spurred together with a specialist library and reading room for the use of scholars and researchers. Fired by his vision, Lemarque set to work day and night, furiously nailing and pinning objects to his walls, his floors and ceilings. 

He was still so engaged several weeks later when two white-coated orderlies, prompted by neighbours’ complaints about the noise, burst in, pinioned his arms and led him away.