Chapter 1
Lower East Side.
Broome Street, Manhattan 2017
Saturday 9 a.m.
The beautiful marquetry box was right where I had left it last night, when I got home from work. There it was, resting in the middle of the dining room table. Its air of timelessness dominated the room and especially contrasted with the stark black and white minimalism of my apartment.
It was not at all my style. I am a minimalist at heart. It’s not just that I don’t like clutter, I truly like to be surrounded by contemporary furniture and abstract art.
And yet, as I was passing a bric-a-brac store not too far from my apartment in LES[1], Manhattan, something big and brown in the widow caught my eye. Although at first, I wasn’t sure what it was, it interested me enough to take a second look.
There it was, in the corner of the window display surrounded by an endless quantity of dust gatherers. In spite of my minimalist preferences in decoration, I thought it was a beautiful ‘object of art.’ Well, I’m not that naïve. I realized right away it was a fake, a replica of a very expensive antique, which, for sure, I could not afford on my salary.
I stepped back to look at the shop’s sign. In faded blue letters it said Saul’s Bric-a-Brac. It was one of those dilapidated shops you can find in any big city where everything is piled up one on top of the other. There were three angels with broken wings, next to a pile of medals thrown pell-mell in a cigar box, and a stack of missorted dinner plates that were once distributed in movie theaters on dish nights.[2] A thick coat of dust covered all these item. . . including, of course, the marquetry box that had caught my eye. Whatever the price of the box, it couldn’t be much.
I entered the shop, and a smallish man of about sixty, sitting behind a cluttered desk at the back of the room looked up.
“May I help you?” he asked me with a strong Eastern European accent.
“Well, yes. I would like to have a closer look at something I saw in the window,” I said pointing in the general direction of the window.
“Yes, what did you see?” He asked adjusting his John Lennon glasses on his nose.
“The brown box in the corner.”
He walked over to the window and pushed the curtain that made up the back drop aside. I could hear him moving things about and then with a gasp, he lifted the box out. “It’s a little dusty,” he said with a lopsided apologetic smile.
“That’s ok. A little dust never hurt anybody,” I answered smiling.
He returned my smile and said, “No, but a lot of dust has!”
We both laughed.
The box looked in perfect condition. “How big is it exactly?”
He took a tape that was hanging around his neck tailor style, and measured it. “Length 8 inches. Width an even 13 inches. Height 5 inches. And as you can see no scratches, no pieces missing, no discolorations.”
“May I see inside, please? Is the interior in as good a condition as outside?”
“Oh, there I can’t help you. It’s locked and I have no key. That’s the way I got it. The person who brought it to me assured me it was empty.”
“How much is it?” I asked sure that if it were more expensive than I had anticipated, I could haggle it down because it was locked and no key was available.
He didn’t answer me right away. Instead, he started talking to me about the quality of the marquetry box. With each word he said, I mentally saw the price go up even though I was in a dusty old bric-a-brac.
“This is a good quality marquetry box. It is not inlaid work. With Marquetry the pieces of wood, ivory, metal or whatever are used to form a complicated design that is applied as veneer to a wood surface. On the other hand, with inlaid work, cut-outs are made….”
“How much is it?” I asked again interrupting him.
“Only five dollars. But a marquetry box in this condition is worth much more than five dollars. However, as I told you it is locked, and there is no key.”
I didn’t bother haggling over the price. Fake or not it was, as the man had said, worth more than five dollars. Anyway, I could try to open it, maybe replace the lock and if the inside was deteriorated, nothing would stop me from putting in a new lining.
As I fumbled in my handbag for a five-dollar bill, I asked him, “Do you know anything of its provenance. You seem to know a lot about that kind of work.”
His face suddenly brightened. “Ah, there I can help you a little. It was brought to me about a year ago along with a quantity of other small objects. The man told me he was emptying his great aunt’s apartment. According to what the man told me, she had recently died. He claimed the box itself was brought over from Belgium. Now whether it was made there or not, I have no idea.”
That was yesterday.
It is 9 am. I am sitting at my dining room table looking at it. I like it even more here than surrounded by all the bric-a-brac in the store. The shopkeeper was right. There are no scratches, no dents, no discolorations, and once I dusted it off and applied some pledge on it, it looked as good as new. The sides are highly polished and shiny, but what really makes it special is the lid covered with small pieces of wood creating an intricate abstract design.
I love it!
What does it matter if it is locked or not? It will look perfect on my buffet. But still I would have liked to be able to open it and maybe use it as a jewelry box or whatever.
Not quite resigned to leaving it at that, I decide to google ‘How to open a lock with a bobby pin’. I saw that in a film once. I figured, if you can get directions on how to make a Molotov cocktail on the Internet, I might end up being lucky with the bobby pin thing.
To my surprise, I found quite a lot, including several videos. What’s the worst thing that could happen? I could totally break the lock. So, what! I didn’t have the key anyway. If I managed to open it, I could then have a new lock put in…with a key!
Wikihow.com had a simple procedure I could easily follow in an article entitled ‘How to open a locked door with a bobby pin in 11 easy steps’ There were also two videos. In spite of watching the videos several times, it took me an hour to open the box. Just as I was ready to give up, I felt the lock give and I was able to open the box.
And that’s when I got a big surprise. Not only was the box not empty, but it was full of documents. I started emptying the box of its treasures. I was giddy like a little kid. Certainly, all these documents were once important for the owner, although now most probably worthless.
I took everything out and started sorting them: documents, loose sheets, a sealed envelope, photos, and what looked like two diaries.
The documents were in French. I am not fluent in French and I am not able to write a sentence correctly, but thanks to my French-Canadian grandmother my reading and understanding are reasonably ok. I used to spend all my summers with her in Quebec until I left for the university.
I started making a list.
There were all types of documents which seemed to be all about three separate persons. The main person was notably a man named Valentin Hurlet. The second person was a woman named Marie Victoire Lejeune, and the third person, a man called Jacques Hurlet.
One of the documents was a birth certificate from 1888 for a Valentin Hurlet.
Military papers pertaining to the Belgian army concerning a desertion dated December 1906, also concerning a Valentin Hurlet were in a blue plastic sleeve.
A list of clothes.
A sad looking post card, carefully wrapped in a polyester sleeve, sent from France to Jacques Hurlet in Liège. It had no return address and was simply signed Valentin. I looked at the front of the card again. What is it that made it look so sad? For sure, it was not because of its deteriorated state. It was not deteriorated; it was simply old. I took out a magnifier from my desk drawer and tried to make out the date.
1906!
The card was over one hundred years old. I thought about the nephew who had brought the marquetry box to the bric-a-brac shop. Was he the one who had placed it in the protective sleeve? No, it couldn’t have been him. He thought the box was empty. It must have been the aunt.
A strange looking document again concerning the same Valentin Hurlet, signed by someone called Beauva, in a place called El H’arrach. Never heard of that place! I quickly put it aside as I could not make heads or tails of it.
I unsealed the brown envelope. It was full of handwritten papers. The name Jacques Hurlet was written on the outside of the envelope in a neat, businesslike handwriting
There were also a couple of pictures.
The bigger of the two pictures showed a group of boys, and I guess their families at a sports club. The date 1895 was scrawled on the back.
The other picture was that of an elderly lady sitting in a garden. On the back in the same scrawled handwriting was: Marie Victoire Lejeune, Sanatorium Sainte-Agathe, Liège. This was followed by a cross and the year 1932. I presumed it was the year of her death.
Something made me look up the sanatorium on internet, although deep down I didn’t think I would find anything.
Surprise! Surprise! [3] I found it. Although no longer a hospital, the building still stands. In 1932 it was psychiatric hospital for women.
I continued to look at the contents of the box.
I picked up what at first glance were two diaries. In reality, there was only one real diary, and it belonged to Marie Victoire Lejeune.
The last item in the box was a thick reddish pencil with ‘Chaussures LA MEUSE’ printed on it along with a telephone number 200.07.
I had no idea what all this was about. For sure these documents, and pictures had meant something to the person who had gathered them, and placed them in this marquetry box.
I was starting to get interested in all these old papers.
[1] LES = Lower East Side
[2] Dish Night was a gimmick used to help movie theaters stay in business in the 1930s. It continued into the early 1950s. A handful of dinnerware manufacturers struck a deal with theaters across the United States. The theaters bought their dinnerware at wholesale and gave them away as premium with each ticket sold.
[3]https://histoiresdeliege.wordpress.com/2021/12/23/lancien-hospice-sainte-agathe/
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