Saint Agatha

An enjoyable afternoon last week at the newly-reopened Musee Fabre in Montpellier. Someone said to me the night before that it had ideas above its station, and maybe it does. But if you ask me, that is what provincial museums are for. A reasonable provincial museum -- in terms of the absolute merit of its collection -- is far more interesting than a good national one. It is more intimate. The pictures were not the property of kings and princes -- but of bourgeois types like you or me. One somehow feels more involved -- and who cares if a lot of it is frankly second-rate? The Musee Fabre is a case in point. I found the eclectic mixture of good and bad wonderfully stimulating. I actually liked some of what was supposed to be bad and a lot of what was supposed to be good left me cold. Especially the modern stuff by Pierre Soulages -- in theory France's best-known modern artist. No doubt his black daubings mean something, but I am beggared if I know what. Prize for most tasteless picture: Zurbaran's Saint Agathe, showing her with severed breasts on a tin tray like a pair of blancmanges! Incidentally (as readers of the latest edition of Champs-Elysees will know) there is an interesting link between the Musee Fabre and the Young Pretender to the thrones of England and Scotland, Bonnie Prince Charlie. The good prince was married in later life to Princess Louise, Countess of Albany, a European aristocrat (exactly what country she was from is impossible to say in less than a full paragraph). When Charlie died, she took up with the Italian poet Vittorio Alfieri and after him with the French artist François Xavier Fabre. It was to Fabre that her inheritance went when she died, and he used the money to open the museum in Montpellier that bears his name. And that is how the Jacobite cause became a force for cultural improvement in the Herault!