Fabrice Mueller: an exclusive interview.

I thought it was a further canine dreck smear, there on my shoe sole,
despite weaving up the sidewalk, somewhat as an airliner dodges new world spring thunder, and perhaps relinquished by some thoughtful Parisian office worker, hurtling along the chaussée in hurried matinal walkies, on a potentially bruising collision path with such foolhardy piéton as might be bidding for the office, speedily to clock on for 35 additional hours of coffeebreaks, plus three seconds of labor, and, why not, botch a suite of fundamentally simple yet somehow inkily murky instructions issued by the lapidary, nursery-rhyme chanting boss, but it was only my camembert sandwich.

So I wolfed it down as I approached the café venue for my meeting with world-acclaimed art critic and valuation expert Fabrice Mueller; "Au Duc de Trévise".

Entering, I sight the gaunt, wispily white-coiffed figure poised with clasped hands and taught wrists, perched expectantly at the furthermost, most pitted, dull oaken table at the back, partially obscured by shadow. Now as I make to seat myself, a wan streak of pallid sunlight illuminates one gothically arched eyebrow, raised in hesitant distrust, fixated on my left lapel.

Glancing down I see the remnant crumbs from my expedited crust and whisk them off with the help of my Muji ballpen, posing this time self-consciously as crumber. "The owner is Vieran Matovina", hisses a rasping yet somehow tubular, brassily greased voice through dry and parched, orange-tinged lips. "He thinks he is in cahoots with the ghost of Jim Morrison. Appeared on TF1 (National Television), won some sort of story-telling contest. Culture populaire, you understand. A Croatian, naturally, and his mother, from the bas-bohème, really not up to it."

Fabrice Mueller pauses to wet his dark, ungreyed pencil moustache in a glass of port, before a fleeting, almost imperceptible, or yet quasi-infinitesimal flirtation between napkin and buccal cavity.

“Mais bon, that shouldn’t compare with my appearance for Claude Berri. La débandade. Ha, ha, ha! Not what you’re thinking." Steely, his catish blue eyes light up, and the mangy mane of hair whirls across temples in a movement that might intoxicate even the most assiduous student of Gulabgarnath. "La débandade, but I never used Viagra, in all my 78 years.”

I pursue: "Right. Perhaps then we could muse on your supposed amorous involvements with legendary French singer Edith Piaf?”

"Ah yes, I see what you’re getting to. The most beloved of sylphes. The sparrow of Grasse. But let me tell you, she gave a whole new meaning to La Vie en Rose. She had a gait like a horsewoman dismounting at the Château de Vincennes. Did you know, I was her first lover? Oh yes, before Leplée, Emer, and Glanzberg. By that time, her riding days were fully engendered. I would always tell her, she would never be my piaf à sauter. But like Catulle’s, it was in the end to be passer in sarcaphago. At that time, her sinuous kabyle cheeks were scarcely without the spreading seal of my authenticity. But so soon after, it was to be the refrain: Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque . . . ”

“So, what about the illustrious Maria Felix?”

“Who? Ah! Yes, they called her La Doña, but I eventually had to rename her La Garce, so far was she from her immaculate namessake. I remember the day when I took her to Vendôme, as if it were yesterday, with that little reptile I had acquired from the bestiary at the Pont Neuf, ho! She really thought she was the bee’s knees, when they told her at Cartier that the amulet would be made in alligator form, just as I had briefed. Much as she claimed to harbor, in that blushing bosom, the heart of a man, she was fully and always the representative of the fairer sex.”

“But she and La Môme crossed scents on the set of Can Can in ’55 with Renoir’s boy. It was almost overwhelming. Not a bad sort that one, but handier with the snaps than the animated celluloid. Like his father, the profundity was within the frame, diluted completely by its iteration. Mind you, he didn’t have the sly old badger’s touch with the ladies either.”

“It was said of your father, that his very presence at any auction guaranteed the genuineness of the works on sale, and systematically gave rise to exorbitance in the prime placements, and the most brazen flourishes of Shillings. But what was the rôle of your father in the collaborationist Vichy art confiscations during World War II?”

“What? Ha! I think you should mind your P’s and Q’s, young man. Those were dangerous times, and dangerous goes hand-in-hand with careless, encore carelessness cost lives. You wouldn’t know much about it. Nay, vade retro. I think we should talk more about “entrustments” than “confiscations”. The Branau architect’s boys were rife, and if it hadn’t been for the skits we shipped out for safe keeping, they would have been gone for good, and the ones we didn’t yet know about, too! The tidbits stuffed in the wall at the Elysée were just as Pierrefonds to Chambord, just like that, my young friend, and without even a hint of Chantilly. From the Auvers Aardvark, to the Tahitian Tickler.”

“And I hear you recently met the prominent American actress Charonne Stein in one of this city’s hauts lieux; what of that?”

“Aha . . . yes, but that was more than a month ago now. I stooped to pick her napkin from under the table, and a fine pair of knees she has, I can tell you. No ashen evidence to be found there, and a fine calf, poised ready for the caress like the cloven-hooved Bresaola on a butcher’s glinting kanter. She recognized me instantly, we kissed, briefly, and, too discreet to enquire of her accommodation arrangements, I could lower myself momentarily into rounding off the end of his month, our Marie-Jean, and so I was indeed able to send my compliments together with Orchidaceae to the Athenée; go lightly, my personal visit will be reserved for the next time. It’s all fox plum ice cream, really. Rome was not built in a day. I asked my assistant to ensure we will be taking tea in the dame’s vicinity on the occasion of her next passage, graceful among these lutetian ramparts, but . . . poof! What do you know, sweet in foppish balm, but feminarum speciae truly is she, how can you entrust like cumbersome charge thereto, in this day and age? In the time of De Laclos, voilà, a gentleman could count on his entourage to get the work done”.