“Boucher?” asked Steve incredulously. “Not the fellow who painted that ‘Holy Family’ I saw this afternoon?”
Lamont said quickly, “Tom means a pupil of Boucher, not Boucher himself.”
“Well, that’s more like it,” said Steve. “I didn’t see how an artist who painted anything so beautiful as that big picture could paint smutty things like these.”
The Holy Family to which he referred was a sensitive and tender representation. Steve’s point was well taken. The fact that he had not seen much eighteenth century French painting didn’t alter the validity of his argument.
On our way up from the Kammergrafen that afternoon we stopped at the Kapelle. This was one of the mine chambers which I had visited only long enough to take out some of the cases used in packing the Bruges Madonna. In addition to the Münz Kabinett collections, the Kapelle contained the magnificent collection of Spanish armor—casques, breastplates, full suits of armor, and a great number of firearms—which had been gathered together at Schloss Konopischt by the late Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Most of it was of sixteenth century workmanship, exquisitely inlaid with gold and silver. Formerly Austrian, it had been the property of the Czech government since the last World War. Nonetheless, the Germans had carried it off, using some flimsy nationalistic argument to justify their action. While the atmosphere of the mine was excellent for paintings, it was not satisfactory for metal objects. Consequently, every piece in the Konopischt collection had been heavily coated with grease to keep it from oxidizing.
Their storage room, the Kapelle, was—as the name indicates—a chapel, dedicated to the memory of Dollfuss, the Austrian Chancellor. It had an electrically illuminated altar, hewn from a block of translucent salt crystal, which was one of the sights of the mine.
That night when Steve and Shrady returned from their outing we all had hot chocolate and cheese and crackers in the comfortable kitchen on the ground floor of the main building. They had had a wonderful day. Maria, Shrady’s interpreter-secretary, had been with them. They had gone first to St. Wolfgang. There a sentry had tried to prevent them from driving up the road leading to the little church. Leopold, the Belgian king, was living near there with his wife, and motorists were not allowed on that road. But they had got around the sentry and gone into the church to see the wonderful carved altarpiece by Michael Pacher. Steve had brought us some colored photographs of it. Afterward they had had a swim in the lake and a picnic lunch. And in the afternoon—this had been the high spot of the day—they had gone over to Bad Ischl and called on Franz Léhar. The old fellow had been delighted to see them, had played the Merry Widow waltz for them and given them autographed photographs. It sounded like fun. Our day at the mine had been very prosaic in comparison. Mention of Bad Ischl reminded Lamont of his scheme for the next day. He proposed to Steve and Shrady that they should call for the Altdorfer panels. They fell in with the suggestion at once, and before we could explain that we thought we’d take the day off, Steve was telling us about some of the things we should see in the neighborhood.
We slept late and when we got up the sky was gray and threatening. It was no day for an outing. In fact it was so cold that we decided we’d be warmer down in the mine. There was still one series of chambers which we had not explored. This was the Mondsberg, and it took us almost three-quarters of an hour to reach it. The pictures were arranged on racks as in the Kammergrafen and the Springerwerke, only in the Mondsberg there were a great many contemporary paintings. It didn’t take us long to run through them. They were all obviously German-owned and, judging from the labels, the great majority of the canvases had been included in the annual exhibitions at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich.
Ranged along one side of the main chamber was a row of old pictures. These were of high quality, and we went through them carefully. I came to a canvas which looked vaguely familiar. It was the portrait of a young woman dressed in a gown of cherry brocade. I guessed it to be sixteenth century Venetian, perhaps by Paris Bordone. I said to Lamont, “I’m sure I’ve seen that picture somewhere, but I can’t place it.”
“Let’s see if there’s any mark on the back that might give you a lead,” said Lamont.