Gregory Curtis Read Online Free

rich, the landowners, and the Greek Orthodox priest, who was often wealthy himself, became the primates. They seem to have been an extralegal institution. Apparently, they chose their members at their own discretion and then shuffled themselves in and out of the official governing council of three men that enforced the local laws.
    The primates told Yorgos that they had the authority to choose the buyer he must sell to. That was a terrible development for Vice-consul Brest. What if the primates insisted that Yorgos sell to someone who wasn’t French? Brest’s position as the representative of France gave him a certain amount of respect on the island and, at his request, the primates promised not to sell the statue to anyone until he had received instructions from his superiors.
    Despite this promise, Brest feared that if he didn’t act quickly, the statue would surely slip out of French hands. Theobvious solution was for him to buy it himself. But if he did and it turned out to be worthless, he would have wasted his money. On the other hand, if it
was
a masterpiece and he allowed it to fall into the clutches of another nation, he would receive all the blame. At the very least he would never become full consul, a promotion and recognition he deeply coveted and believed he deserved. Why hadn’t he bought the thing from Yorgos when he’d had the chance!
    Brest was a French citizen and patriot who had never seen France. His grandfather and father had been vice-consul onMelos for decades before him. In 1780Charles-Sigisbert Sonnini, a young Frenchman traveling in Greece and Turkey at the behest of Louis XVI, encountered Brest’s grandfather, whom he described as an excellent man who had the esteem of the French navy, the European merchants in the region, and the Turks. The Greeks of Melos, Sonnini said, venerated him: “The flag of France, which flies above his house, however isolated and without any protection, was nowhere more respected.” And how had France repaid his service and fine character in the twilight years of his life? “He has the misfortune of seeing himself reduced to nothing more than an agent of the consul in Smyrna.”
    Forty years later his grandson was still under the authority of the French consul in Smyrna, a city far across the Aegean at the end of a bay on the coast of Turkey. Brest’s isolation on the island and the neglect of both him and his grandfather by the nation he loved had left him, like a spurned suitor, cautious at best and bitter at worst. And his life was often one of misery. Just a few years earlier, when he was in his late twenties, he had brought a young bride from Constantinople to live with him. When a pirate namedFranco Poulo and his fifty men landed on Melos to loot and kidnap young girls, the newlyweds had to run for their lives, and Brest’s bride came close to being captured. The comte de Forbin, who had just become director of the Louvre, happened to visit Brest and his wife at their home in 1817 while on a voyage in search of antiquities for the museum.Forbin was touched by their eager hospitality, but he recorded how people from the “miserable” town stared at him through the open doorway while he consumed “bad bread, fruit, and passable wine.”
    In his present dilemma about the statue, Brest could turn only to the few other Frenchmen in positions of authority onMelos. These were the captains and officers of the vessels in the harbor. On April 9, the day after Voutier made his discovery, Brest asked Robert the Devil from the
Estafette
andCaptain Duval d’Ailly of the
Lionne
, a ship that sailed with the
Estafette
, to come see the statue.
    To protect his treasure,Yorgos had carted the upper, more valuable half of the statue to his cowshed, along with the two herms and their inscribed bases, the arm fragments, and the hand with the apple. Brest and the two captains went to Yorgos’s farm and tramped past the animals and through the straw and thick manure in his