De Potter's Grand Tour: A Novel

by Joanna Scott

Overview

A gripping novel about a seemingly charmed marriage and a mysterious disappearance at sea

In 1905, a tourist agent and amateur antiques collector named Armand de Potter mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Greece. His body is never recovered and his wife is left to manage his affairs on her own. But as she starts to piece together his life, she realizes that everything was not as he had said. Infused with details from letters and diary entries, the narrative twists forward and backward through time, revealing a lost world of fake identities, underground antiques networks, and a husband who wasn't what he seemed.
Originally from Belgium, young Armand de Potter comes to New York without a penny in his pocket. With cunning ambition, he quickly makes a name for himself as both a worldwide travel guide and a trusted—if illegal—antiques dealer. After marrying, he moves the family to a luxurious villa in Cannes and embraces an aristocratic life. But as he grows increasingly entangled in the antiques trade and his touring business begins to falter, Armand's control starts to fray. As the world closes in, he believes he only has one option left.
Told with masterful narrative agility, De Potter's Grand Tour is a tale as grand as the tour guide at its center. Drawing on real letters, legal documents, and a trove of diaries only recently discovered, Joanna Scott points delicately toward the story's historical basis and unfolds a detective tale of the highest order.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374710460
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/02/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Joanna Scott is the author of several books, including The Manikin, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Various Antidotes and Arrogance, which were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and the critically acclaimed Make Believe, Tourmaline, Liberation, and Follow Me. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Award.

Read an Excerpt

Constantinople

 

HE LEAVES EARLY on the morning of June 10, descending the carpeted stairs to the lobby of the Pera Palace Hotel. He rings the bell at the front desk. He is about to ring again when a clerk appears from the dark interior of a back office, looking freshly scrubbed, smelling of soap. The bill is settled swiftly, and the clerk is most obliging, despite his limited French, when Armand hands him two last letters addressed to Madame de Potter, care of the Hotel Royal in Toblach. The letters are to be held and posted, he specifies, on the twelfth. Does the clerk understand the instructions? “Oui, monsieur,” the clerk says, setting aside the letters and motioning to a porter. He hopes Monsieur de Potter’s most recent stay has been pleasant. The coach, he adds, is already in the drive.

Outside, Armand notices that the gas lamp above the entrance to the public garden is still lit, though the sky is already beginning to glow with dawn. He removes his spectacles and rubs the lenses with his handkerchief. After the porter has returned with his trunk and hoisted it onto the baggage rack, Armand tips him a handful of piastres and climbs into his seat. The driver slaps the reins to rouse his horses, and the carriage lurches forward.

Down they go from the summit of Pera, the wheels clattering over the uneven paving stones, the chassis rising and plunging, the horses moving so fast that a small dog doesn’t have time to get out of their path. The yelp the dog lets out has a chillingly human ring, and Armand thinks it must have been crushed, yet when he turns, he is relieved to see it scramble out from between the rear wheels and run off, disappearing around a corner. The horses trot briskly on, undeterred.

He resists calling out to the driver to order him to slow down. Pulling his hat on tighter, he sits back and observes the scenery, contemplating the familiar landmarks as if from a great distance—the banks and restaurants he knows so well, and the convent where, two days earlier, the members of his party were delighted to come upon the dervishes right when they were beginning to whirl.

As they pass one of the white mansions housing an embassy, he is reminded of his father, who had been stationed abroad for nearly a decade—first in Paris, then Dakar, and lastly Constantinople. He supposedly worked as a manager for a Belgian trading company, but Armand, who was stuck back in East Flanders with his brother and stepmother, believed that his father was a spy, appointed by King Leopold to pry into the secret affairs of foreign governments. He used to tell himself that he, too, would be a spy someday and travel around the world.

You could say that he did become a spy of sorts, on a self-appointed mission to gather antiquities instead of secrets, with his travel bureau providing an excuse to visit places that were out of reach for other collectors. De Potter Tours is in the business of leading wealthy tourists around the world, and the De Potter Collection is on display at the University Museum in Philadelphia. It has been an honorable arrangement, he believes. It worked for more than a quarter of a century and would have gone on working if he hadn’t grown so careless.

At least he managed to keep the Americans on his tour sufficiently entertained. They never guessed that he had anything else on his mind but their well-being as he shepherded them around the city. Even when he put them on the train and sent them off to Broussa without him, they were persuaded that he was sparing them a worse inconvenience. As far as they could tell, Professor de Potter was his usual amiable self, as reliable a guide as they’d been promised in the testimonials he included in his advertisements.

From Mrs. P. A. Saunders of Cincinnati: “It was a trip I shall ever remember with pleasure. Could I go abroad every year, my choice would be to go under the care of Prof. de Potter and with his party.”

From the late Henry W. Bellows, D.D., of Albany: “I have great pleasure in saying that I am acquainted with Prof. A. de Potter. I do not doubt his trustworthiness and competency to conduct foreign tours in the interest of education, and I can heartily recommend him.”

From HHW of Rome, New York: “There are various ways of traveling, many, as we do, independently and at the mercy of sharks, or in parties with a courier, or with a tourist agent. The only party that we have envied was that of Prof. Armand de Potter of New York, an unassuming gentleman, speaking nine different languages. To him we shall commend any friends in the future who wish to make a tour of the Old World.”

The friends of HHW would have to find another guide, since Professor de Potter won’t be conducting any more parties. Never again will he have to worry about making arrangements for packs of inexperienced tourists, keeping track of their tickets and explaining the sights. On this trip, he is traveling alone.

Down, down, down rolls the coach, past buildings fronted by broken terraces and wilted gardens, to the boulevard skirting the inlet of the Golden Horn. The low angle of the sun catches the top of a minaret on the opposite hill and turns the white to rose. On the surface of the water beside the road, the reflections of the plane trees look as though they are frozen in ice.

They reach the lot beside the customhouse, where Armand pays the driver and hires a handler for his trunk. The official greets him with a yawn, waving him through without asking him to open his satchel. On the quay, he takes out the gold-plated pocket watch his wife gave him on his thirty-ninth birthday and checks the time. It will be an hour or more until the ship is ready to receive passengers. There is nothing to do but wait.

 

Copyright © 2014 by Joanna Scott

Reading Group Guide

From the acclaimed novelist Joanna Scott comes a sumptuous tale of an enduring marriage—and the masquerade that sustained it. Armand de Potter left his Belgian homeland in the 1870s without a penny in his pocket. An ambitious, imaginative young man, he crafted a new life for himself in New York as an international tour guide and a trusted dealer in antiquities. His earnest wife joined him in these endeavors, helping him build a thriving tourism business. As the crowning achievement in his quest for prosperity, he moved his family to a luxurious village in Cannes, steeped in aristocratic refinements. But in 1905, Armand mysteriously disappears at sea off the coast of Greece. His body is never recovered, and his wife begins to piece together the truth about his identity, along with his financial entanglements. Transporting us to intriguing locales through intricately woven history, De Potter's Grand Tour is itself a grand voyage that raises as many provocative questions as it answers.

We hope that the following discussion topics will enrich your reading group's sojourn.

Editorial Reviews

08/01/2014
Starting with the morning on which he disappears from a boat off the coast of Greece, Scott (Follow Me) traces the life of Armand de Potter, a Belgian immigrant to Gilded Age America. Armand transforms himself from a man without money or credentials into a well-heeled and respected leader of luxury travel groups and an international antiquities dealer. Alternating between the perspective of de Potter and his wife, Aimee, and moving backward and forward in time between the 1870s and early 20th century, Scott slowly reveals the successes and failures of a man who is both more and less than he seems. Did he fall, commit suicide, or make himself disappear? VERDICT Scott's approach may alienate readers who are lured to her book through a love of travel or those who prefer linear storytelling, but readers who stick with the author's layered narrative will find a fascinating tale of the dark side of the rags-to-riches story, a husband and wife whose reality is so convoluted that they aren't entirely known to each other or even to themselves.—Neil Hollands, Williamsburg Regional Lib., VA

Library Journal

What a whirl of a book, full of secrets and surprises. I read De Potter's Grand Tour in a couple of days, losing myself in its pages, sorry to see the last words run like swift water under the bridge where I lingered, novel in hand. Joanna Scott is among the handful of American writers I will always want to read, and here she offers a capacious circumnavigation of a world tinged by melancholy, love, mystery, shimmering beauty, and unlikely passion. A lovely and strangely affecting read.” —Jay Parini, author of The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year

“Only one of our wisest, deftest, most knowing prose stylists at the height of her powers could have invented for readers the utterly beguiling experience that is De Potter's Grand Tour ... One of the most delightful books I've read in years.” —Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule

“While Aimée grieves, she also slowly discovers secrets from her husband's past. By switching between the two characters' perspectives and building tension in every chapter, Scott crafts a tale full of mystery and suspense.” —Real Simple

“Moving ... De Potter's Grand Tour is a descendant of the work ofPenelope FitzgeraldandW. G. Sebald, with their sensitivity to how unknowable life is, and yet how worth trying to know.” —USA Today

“De Potter's Grand Tour is a delicate, enchanting, utterly delicious text, melancholy at the heart and yet slyly funny. Scott is of course a fearlessly intelligent writer, and this book is surely one of her finest.” —Louise Erdrich, Birchbark Books Blog

“Joanna Scott is a writer to treasure and her beguiling new novel is an intrepid exploration of the world, of the past, and of the human heart.” —Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl

“Joanna Scott's writing is always a wonder, but this, with its hints of Hawthorne's ‘Wakefield,' is her best yet: a wizardly dialogue between fact and fiction, the known and the unknown. I'll be haunted by her elusive, touching, and deluded hero for a long time.” —Andrea Barrett, author of Archangel and Ship Fever

“Joanna Scott is the great tour guide of contemporary American fiction, navigating us across oceans of memory and longing. She doesn't sail around the reefs and shoals but steers us right for them, keeping every promise that we'll emerge on the other side intact, if not quite the same as before. In the company of Aimée de Potter as she intrepidly searches for her husband's ghost and secrets, Scott charts here one of her grandest tours yet, one more utterly singular story only she could have written.” —Steve Erickson, author of These Dreams of You

“Like some exquisite and mysterious tapestry that Armand de Potter himself might have admired on one of his journeys, Joanna Scott's new novel masterfully weaves an irresistible story of love, secrecy, ambition, and devastating folly. De Potter's Grand Tour coalesces history and imagination with such brilliant clarity that a world now long lost seems like a personal experience freshly remembered. Joanna Scott is a magician, a conjurer, one of the very best writers at work today.” —Bradford Morrow, author of The Diviner's Tale

From the Publisher

What a whirl of a book, full of secrets and surprises. I read De Potter's Grand Tour in a couple of days, losing myself in its pages, sorry to see the last words run like swift water under the bridge where I lingered, novel in hand. Joanna Scott is among the handful of American writers I will always want to read, and here she offers a capacious circumnavigation of a world tinged by melancholy, love, mystery, shimmering beauty, and unlikely passion. A lovely and strangely affecting read.

author of The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy Jay Parini

★ 2014-06-17
A dilettante, scholar manqué and artifact collector who may or may not be a member of the Belgian aristocracy reinvents himself in late-19th-century New York, embarking on a career as an international tour guide with the assistance of his devoted American wife.Arriving in New York in the 1870s, Armand de Potter is an ambitious immigrant who tries his hand at various business schemes before taking a position as a French teacher in an upstate girls school, where he impresses all with his erudition and patrician bearing. There, he meets his future wife, the genteel and competent Amy, whom he rechristens Aimée. The two found De Potter Tours, escorting wealthy American and British tourists to exotic locales, arranging all facets of the experience to minimize inconvenience for the travelers and enlightening them on the finer points of history and the former glories of fallen empires. Meanwhile, Armand seeks out looted antiquities and struggles to be recognized as a scholar and important collector by the academic establishment. His yearning for the approval and respect of high society, and his great fear of being exposed as an intellectual fraud, or worse, have tragic consequences. The story opens with a mention of Armand’s disappearance at sea in 1905, and the rest of the book sets about constructing the intriguing back story and sad aftermath of this calamitous event. Scott (Follow Me, 2009, etc.) builds the tale in layers, providing the perspectives of both the self-mythologizing Armand, who sees no escape from impending financial ruin and ignominy, and the perplexed Aimée as she attempts to come to terms with the sudden loss of her husband and solve the mystery of his disappearance. Though his motives are carefully laid out, Armand remains somewhat unknowable, perhaps by design; Aimée, with nothing to hide, is a more developed and fully realized character.Scott has crafted an understated, atmospheric historical novel as well as an artful mystery set in an era of steamer ships and steam trains, when tourism was new and world travel was a glamorous and sometimes-perilous adventure.

Kirkus Reviews