I Was Wrong in 1981, and Again in 1996

From the fourth English edition of Odile Brassart's The Chosen Year, published this month by Ostler Books.

The publisher asked me for a new foreword to mark this edition and suggested, kindly, that the previous three might now be retired. I have declined. They are printed below as they first appeared, including the sentence on page xi of the first which Mme Brassart underlined twice and returned to me by post. A book that has argued since 1974 that one must not scrape off the earlier layers and call what is left the original cannot decently be introduced by a man who has scraped off his own. I have added notes; they are dated, as she would have required.

P.V., Leiden, September 2026

Foreword to the first English edition (1981)

It is given to few translators to introduce a mind of the first rank, and I am sensible of the honour. Odile Brassart is the first philosopher of time to have held a scalpel. In these pages she dissolves, in a single limpid argument, the old quarrel between those who would restore our monuments and those who would let them decay with dignity; after her, I venture to say, that quarrel cannot be resumed. I have laboured to preserve the crystalline quality of her French. Where English offered me a choice I have chosen the plainer word, though I confess I pleaded with the publisher for The Elected Year, which seemed to me to carry the gravity of the original, and was overruled. The reader who finishes this book will not look at an old wall again without asking its age, and then asking which one.

Note, 2026. I was thirty-two. I had met her once, in 1979, when I spent an afternoon in the studio in Liège holding a lamp while she examined an area of paint about the size of a postage stamp. It took four hours and she spoke twice. Both times she said "higher".

On that acquaintance I called her a philosopher of time. The page came back within the week, underlined, with a card: "Monsieur, I am not a philosopher of anything. I am a woman with a scalpel and a tax number." Her French is not limpid, nor crystalline; it is like being handed tools in the order you will need them. The quarrel was resumed almost at once, and is going on now. The Elected Year would have been a disaster, and I thought about it resentfully until about 1990.

I must also record that on page 43 of that edition I rendered colle de peau, which is the hide glue restorers have used for centuries, as "flesh-coloured paste". It stood for fifteen years. A reader in Hull wrote to ask where it could be bought.

Foreword to the second edition (1996)

Fifteen years have altered the standing of this book and, I must own, of its translator's confidence in it. Since Mr Gideon Farr's Against the Scar (1992) it is no longer possible to present the declared year as a simple honesty. Mr Farr has shown, to my mind unanswerably, that the restorer who names her date takes to herself an authority the object never gave her, and the careful reader will want his book open at the elbow. I visited Marchevaux in the spring of 1994 and am bound to say that I did not care for what I saw. Mme Brassart has now retired from practice, and it is perhaps a fitting moment to read her work as a document of its period: brilliant, partial, and of 1974. I have taken the opportunity to correct a number of errors in the translation.

Note, 2026. "A number of errors" is the glue.

The rest is a young man's bravado turned inside out, which at forty-seven I mistook for maturity. I had read Farr on a train and been frightened by him; he is frightening; I resolved to be seen to be fair, and gave him the whole field before anyone had asked me for it. Unanswerably was a word I had no business using about a book I had finished nine days before.

As to Marchevaux: I did not care for it, and I do not now. Lejoly's sinners look like a town council. But I wrote as though my not caring were an argument, and it was the very one she had spent a book dismantling. She had not liked the painting either. She said so in the report, in the second paragraph, which I had not then read.

She had also not retired. She was working six days a week with a magnifier on a headband. She telephoned, which she never did. "I see you have buried me," she said. "Was it well attended?"

Foreword to the third edition (2009)

This book has outlived its critics, and I mean to say so plainly. For seventeen years it has been fashionable to repeat Mr Farr's witticism about Mme Brassart's grandmother, and to forget that Mr Farr has never, so far as I can discover, held a brush. Against the Scar is a sneer of three hundred pages. It mistakes a working method for a pose, because its author, who has only ever looked at walls, cannot conceive that anyone might touch one without wishing to be admired for it. Mme Brassart's sight no longer permits her to answer him. I do so on her behalf, and with her full confidence.

Note, 2026. I did not have her full confidence. I had not asked.

Farr wrote to me within the month. I give the letter entire, with his permission, since it is better than anything of mine in this volume: "Dear Vahl, I have held a brush. I restored a rood screen in Suffolk in 1971, badly, and signed the report 'returned to its original appearance'. That is how I know. Yours, G.F." We have exchanged cards at Christmas since. He has never told me which church, and I have stopped asking.

As for Mme Brassart, she had the foreword read to her by her assistant, Colette Maes, and sent a message back through the same channel. "Tell Pieter I was never as nice as that."

Foreword to the fourth edition (2026)

She died in March 2014. I have now been wrong about her in print in three decades, each time in a new direction, and I notice that each foreword was written to repair the last. In 1981 I thought I had found a philosopher. In 1996 I was ashamed of that and handed her to her opponent. In 2009 I was ashamed of that and defended a woman who had never once in her life asked to be defended, least of all by me.

What I think today is smaller. I think the argument of the book is the least important thing about it; anyone can see, once told, that a restorer must pick a date. The important thing is the line at the top of the form. She typed it on every job for thirty-seven years, including jobs where the year she typed was one she disliked, and she let the commission, the parish and Mr Farr say what they pleased about it. That is a practice and not a theory, and I was slow to see the difference because I am a person who writes forewords.

I should add a word about the present revival of interest. Ms Ilse Marrow has lately been telling the readers of a magazine that what France has done at Notre-Dame is best described in Brassart's terms, and that it chose well. On the first point she is right. On the second I can only say that I knew Odile Brassart for thirty-five years and she would have loathed that spire. She would have chosen 1859 regardless. She would then have been impossible until Christmas.

I saw her last in the autumn of 2013. She could no longer read, and she asked me to read her the first foreword aloud. I begged off; she insisted; I read it. At "philosopher of time" she laughed until Mme Maes came in from the next room. When I said that I had always meant to have it taken out, she put her hand flat on the page, as I had seen her put it on a wall.

"Leave it," she said. "It is the only place in the book where one can see how young you were."

So it stays, with the others. The glue has been corrected.