Not far from buoyant Olargues (one of Languedoc’s most beautiful villages, blessed with a medieval ‘devil’s bridge’) there is a hamlet called Ardouane. A narrow and almost vertical road leads up to the tiny church. It looks shabby and one doesn’t have to be an expert to see that it badly needs some love and some money to restore it. My guess is that the few inhabitants left in Ardouane will not be able to take care of this themselves.

Opposite the church there is a massive building, locked away behind a fence with an official warning to ‘keep out’. Compared to the deplorable state of advancing ruin this huge building finds itself in, the fading little church no longer seems to have the moral right to complain of neglect. After the roof of one of the building’s side wings has recently collapsed, the rain and wind can enter freely to speed up decay. The sign on the fence only tells us that this is the ancien collège of Ardouane. Entering the wrecked building is easy, since everything that could stop us is open or missing: the fence, the front door, the windows.

The many rooms of the collège are full of discarded stuff; the villagers obviously have decided to assemble all of their products that have lost their use in this sad and broken building, being the largest local symbol of the useless. This present state of futility is a sharp contrast to the elevated position and noble function the collège once had. Many children and young adults from all over the south of France – boys and girls – received their education here and in the process were saturated with the values of traditional Catholicism.

The useless has a strange aesthetic attraction. In decaying buildings and constructions of any kind (mansions, villas, castles, convents, towers, and bridges) resides a mystic beauty that is unique to their category. All over Europe photographers – more than any other species – are in love with the tragedy of crumbling stones and cracking arches. Their pictures show us how the trees that once were the building’s trusted green companions have now gone wild, their intruding branches pushing through a wall, their roots bursting the floor.

The situation of the ancien collège of Ardouane is not yet as dramatic as this. And we would be wrong in thinking that nobody cares. What to do with it has been much debated in the adjoining communities of Riols and St.-Pons de Thomières. The main reason for this seems to be that so many people in the region do not only remember the building in its former glory, but the institution as well. This used to be the ‘Ancien collège Saint-Benoît’, also called the ‘École libre’. In 2007 a plan was launched to restore the building and turn it into a complexe touristique: a hotel, a spa or an equestrian centre.

But a serious investor could not be found, which should not surprise us. This is a relatively poor region. Besides, the tourists would surely be disappointed that the Mediterranean is a one hour drive away. Even to get from here to the fashionable winegrowing area of St. Chinian will take you half an hour. The attraction of nearby picturesque Olargues seems, by itself, not enough to fill a large hotel for most of the year. Still, the council of Riols (of which Ardouane is a part) at the time believed the building could be sold for a very decent price.

Ten years later all hope seems to have gone. The building has much deteriorated and as a result the costs of a possible restoration have risen. The pessimist’s view is that even tearing it down would, because of its substantial size, be too expensive. Just leaving it there as it is and “let it in the hands of time to complete its job” (as a local website somewhat poetically suggests) seems the only way to go. Unless some kind of miracle will occur, the inevitable will happen: miles of cobweb will be woven in every corner of the old building, the mosses and the fungi will thrive, while stone and chalk will crumble to dust and wooden beams will, in the end, crack like match sticks.

In the old days a train connected Ardouane and the collège to the rest of the valley, but the track has been transformed into a route verte for hikers and bikers. That is a fine example of a useful transformation. But, of course, it cannot make the glorious past return to Ardouane. Nevertheless, as long as the remains of the collège are still standing, there will be a visual incentive to remember and to retell its history. Long ago, in 1823 to be precise, Monseigneur Fournier (the bishop of Montpellier) acquired a monastery in St.-Pons de Thomières in order to establish a seminary there. This seminary was later, in 1907, moved to Ardouane, to the abbey the Benedictines had founded here in 1860. That is how Ardouane came to its Catholic collège, devoted to “the holy heart of Mary”.

The abbey-collège had its own vineyards and cherry orchards and, enclosed in the middle of the square building, there used to be a wonderful monastery garden. Nothing of these wonders – engraved in the memories of thousands of pupils who had their education here – has survived. Even the many dairy farms for which the region was known, producing their own brand of cheese, have disappeared. Decline has been rather merciless in the case of Ardouane.

Rumour has it that, if anyone were interested, he or she could now buy the whole building for the symbolic price of one euro. But unless a useful and viable idea is formed on the building’s future destination, this bargain will not bring along the desired miracle. Even a basic restoration will need substantial funding of a million or more. After a short revival around 2011, the plans to restore and rebuild seem to have come to a complete standstill. The ancien collège is now in a time zone of its own, or rather in a zone of timelessness since it has no function left to connect it to time’s processes.

Ne me quitte pas, Jacques Brel sang. These could very well be the words of the ancien collège, moribund but, in a way, still speaking to us. Ne me quitte pas. Here is, from that great chanson, Brel’s ray of hope for the rekindling of a lost love: Don’t leave me now/We’ve so often seen/the rebirth of fire/in the ancient volcano/everyone believed to be too old/And is it not true/that the earth when scorched/will give more wheat/than April at its best?

As always, the original is to be preferred:

Ne me quitte pas/On a vu souvent/rejaillir le feu/de l’ancien volcan/qu’on croyait trop vieux/Il est, paraît-il/des terres brûlées/donnant plus de blé/qu’un meilleur avril.

For some time the French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) had believed she was a Mexican. He first met her on March 6, 1930, probably in the late afternoon, in Passy, Paris, when she crossed his path, wearing a parasol. He would nickname her ‘my parasol’. She made an impression; at twenty-six she was tall, slim, and elegant, with a slightly provocative style of her own.

The next evening he took her out to dance. When she made her entrance she wore a fur coat and long gloves. Her name was Renee Perle, she was a Jewish girl from Romania. Her long neck and ‘dark porcelain eyes’ fascinated him, and when they danced her hair, though short and slick in the Gay Twenties way, touched his mouth as well as hers. By now he must have learned that she worked as a fashion model for a Parisian couturier. That explained her looks and her self-assured manner of the coquette. Renee Perle would become Lartigue’s muse. She also was his mistress, for the next two years, but in the very first place she was his muse. If a camera can caress, his camera certainly caressed her. And if a camera can seduce, she certainly was seduced by his. In 1930 and 1931 she would, for many hours, be looking into Lartigue’s lens like a female Narcissus, as if that lens were a reflecting pond. She probably distracted him from making his usual, now iconic, photographs of dazzling car races, clumsy aeroplanes, lanky tennis players, and numerous people in free movement, jumping or diving as if they didn’t notice they were somewhat overdressed for the occasion. His photo’s seemed to freeze them in mid-air, just like they seemed to make the upper-class ladies float a few inches above the walks of the Bois de Boulogne.

Lartigue took his beautiful Renee to the beaches and the beau monde of Biarritz, Cannes, and Juan-les-Pins. These must have been endless summers of doing nothing in particular. In this sunny world of uncertain glamour, this Tender is the Night atmosphere, he created his pictures of her. We see her wearing enormous flapping hats, slim fit shirts, and baggy trousers that make her seem sporty in that particular female way. Then again she’s wrapped in fur, posing on a balcony not far from the sea. Or she sits in an open window, in white flannel, Riviera pines in the background. Other photographs, taken inside and therefore darker, show the mystique of her face, sometimes half covered by a sensual veil. Always there is this contrast between her large nightclub eyes and her small mouth with the peculiarly curved upper lip. To catch the camera’s attention, she performed as the femme fatale, or, stretching her long legs on a couch, as a Matisse odalisque, bringing out her feline qualities.

Her appearance was her artistic instrument, and purely by her looks she succeeded in creating a unique mixture of Parisian chic, bathing beauty, femme fatale, emancipated flapper, and avant garde muse. Especially the black nail varnish she used and the bracelets she heaped on her wrists added an exotic modernity to complete her style. She liked to paint, and when she took up the brush it was to create self-portraits. Obviously, she was herself fascinated by her appearance, no less than Lartigue.
These photographs are not the result of a creative man – Lartigue – registering the passive beauty of a woman. They are the result of co-creation. Maybe this is what a muse does: in her repeated posing it is her ongoing effort at self-creation and self-invention that inspires the artist. A pearl shines both out and in.

Today, Renee Perle is on Facebook. Her own process of self-creation has stopped, probably long before she died, in 1977. Whoever put her, posthumously, on Facebook must somehow have understood that our modern media open up the possibility to continue a person’s process of inventing his or her image, and of exposing it, brilliantly, in the name of that person.

Because of the First World War, the painter Oskar Kokoschka’s awareness has fundamentally changed. In the documentary Oskar Kokoschka: Ein Selbstporträt (1966) he explained how, living in the stinking trenches, he had felt trapped like a rat. In these terrible circumstances he made a pledge: when I will come out of these trenches alive, with my eyes and my right arm intact, I will climb the steepest hill to paint from there what I see; and I will observe from this elevated position what the people – all these insane people – are up to. Indeed, Kokoschka would make several paintings of cities, seen from a distance and from a high viewpoint. These paintings celebrate space. He intended them to be the opposite of the muddy holes that had enclosed him as a soldier.

When as a cavalryman he was shot in the head, his sense of balance had for some time been severely upset. One late evening in Vienna, after the war, when the white moonlight was stroking the cobble-stones in the street, he re-experienced that wartime sensation of completely losing his equilibrium. It felt as if he were elevated, floating above the street. Afterwards he knew it must have been a hallucination, but what really impressed him was the intense sensation of moving around in space freely, at least for some moments. Kokoschka is generally seen as an expressionist painter, who brought his inner feelings to the canvas. His own testimony, though, suggests that his work is mainly about regaining space.

It had to be regained, he felt, because modernity somehow seemed to fear space: the technological civilisation of modern times is a cage (Kokoschka explains in the documentary), because it shuts us up in a very limited repertoire of actions and things, which are all goal-oriented, subordinate to whatever is trendy, and tied to the simple and uniform truths of a surface reality. At this point Kokoschka connects his cultural analysis to the many portraits he painted: they were deliberate attempts to restore the classical view that a human being is intimately related to space. This ancient truth can be rediscovered when a man, like Kokoschka, climbs on a hill to paint a distant city, outstretching; or when that man paints the face or the body of another person, and tries to catch that person’s inner feelings, as well as his own. He then adds the space of the inner dimension to the body’s surface. Skin and traits become a manifestation of the inner space. Inner man is a dimension, our ‘deepest’ reality is space. Look again at Kokoschka’s famous ‘tiger-lion’ from 1926: you can see straight through it, right into the space in and behind it.

For nearly two hours I watched Horowitz play on Arte Channel, in a documentary from 1985 (The Last Romantic) and then in a concert given in Vienna somewhat later. He played from memory, not a sheet in sight. All went well in the complex coordination between his 82-year-old brain and his magical hands, same age. The old man and the Steinway, catching Liszt, Schumann, Scriabin, a Mozart sonata, a Chopin mazurka.

Once again the maestro seemed to own sound as if it were his private property. What fascinated me most, though, were these smooth hands releasing the piano’s poetry and revealing every key’s colour. In the intimacy of his New York apartment I found the opportunity to observe the little finger of his right hand, closest to the camera. What I saw was anticipation. His entire body, his hands, his little finger, anticipated every note just about half a second before it was actually played. Look at the slight twitching in the little finger that already knows, up front, what next note it has to play. I could see it was a tiny bit nervous, in anticipation, or was it just eagerness?

The little finger, all alone, proved this was not an automaton playing: it had to prepare itself to perform its weighty task, again and again, and it knew it could fail, being human. Robots, surely able to play a piano as facile as any man – in the near future anyway – don’t have anticipating little fingers. Mr Horowitz said he detested perfection. I perfectly understood what he meant.