Venices

I THE PALACE OF THE ANCIENTS

ALL OF OUR LIVES are letters posted anonymously; my own bears three postmarks: Paris, London and Venice; fate, often unwittingly, though certainly not thoughtlessly, has decreed that I should have settled in these places.

Within her restricted space, Venice, situated as she is in the middle of nowhere, between the foetal waters and those of the Styx, encapsulates my journey on earth.

I sense a disillusion with the entire planet, apart from Venice, apart from the Basilica of St Mark’s, whose blistered, declivitous paving looks like prayer mats set side by side; the fact that I have known St Mark’s all my life thanks to a watercolour that used to hang in my bedroom as a child: it was a large wash-drawing painted by my father in about 1880—bistre and sepia, and sketched in Chinese ink — a piece of late romanticism, in which the red of the altar lamps pierces through the domes of golden dusk, and in which a turbanned throne is illuminated in the Western light. I also possess a little oil painting that belonged to my father, a view of the Salute on a grey day, which is of unusual delicacy and which has always been with me.

“One must see Venice after it has been raining,” Whistler used to say: it is after experiencing life that I have returned here to think about myself. Like the tarred spars that stake out her lagoon, Venice has delineated my life; yet she is merely one among other points of perspective; Venice has not been my entire life, but she constitutes a few fragments of it that are otherwise disconnected; her tide marks fade away; mine do not.

I remain impervious to the absurdity of writing about Venice, at a time when even the primacy of London and Paris is no more than a memory, at a time when the nerve centres of the world are remote spots such as Djakarta, Saigon, Katanga and Quemoy, where Europe can no longer make her authority felt, and where only Asia matters. Situated at the gates of that continent, Venice had understood this, and had penetrated as far as China; it is to Marco Polo that St Mark’s should be dedicated, not the other way round.

In Venice, my insignificant being had its first lesson on this planet, as I emerged from classrooms in which nothing had been learnt. School for me was nothing but endless boredom, exacerbated by justified reprimands; if there was still ink on my fingers, nothing remained in my head, and the weight of those books! Lugging the Quicherat dictionary from the Champs-Élysees to the Lycée Monceau, along a route which those who have not climbed the rue de Courcelles each morning reckon to be flat crushed my narrow city-dweller’s shoulders. The tarmac was hard beneath my feet; I was already thinking of Venice, and I was determined to celebrate that aquatic city, in which every street was the Seine.

The classic authors did not appeal to me; they had written for the courtiers of Versailles, or for teachers; nothing about our great writers intrigued, gripped or shocked me; what connection was there between the Atreids with their golden masks, which Schliemann had just excavated, and the bewigged Atreids of the seventeenth century? Starting one’s life with Bérénice! Appreciating Bérénice at the age of thirteen! First I would have had to have fallen in love with someone who loved Racine; who could explain Racine to me, explain this heart of a woman grafted on to a man’s body? No one provided me with a key to words, every other one of which meant something different to what it does today; I went from one misinterpretation to another: la gloire? reasons of State? A king who cried? Nuances are not children’s toys. How could a woman be both gentle and violent? On the other hand, I became thoroughly involved in Shakespeare, with his crimes and his ghosts, as I listened to Marcel Schwob and my father, who were translating Hamlet together for Sarah Bernhardt — an infinitely more appetising translation than Gide’s — searching among the English for some old French word, rather as one might discover a primitive painting beneath a later work. Shakespeare, that towering puppet-master, in whose plays everything, instead of being sliced into four parts, was reconciled and overcome.

I have never learnt grammar;1 it’s nothing to be proud of, but it seems to me that if I were to learn it today, I should no longer be able to write; my eye and my ear were my only teachers, the eye especially. Good writing is the opposite of writing well. “There are not enough words to express what I think…”: that’s because instead of thinking, you were searching for words; it’s up to the words to search for you, up to them to find you. You should be able to say of any one of your sentences: “it’s the spitting image of its father.” A writer should have his own wavelength.

The philosophy classes of my youth were merely the annexe of some miserable psychiatric hospital; geography merely provided me with a catalogue of gulfs and islands, an inventory of mountain tops and rivers, a repertory of peaks as bare as the mountains of the Moon; apparently no human being had ever lived there; as for History, its artificial discontinuities, its famous “turning-points” and the arbitrary divisions of its reigns precluded me from appreciating anything apart from battles, or treaties that were destined to pave the way for further battles.

As I look back with hindsight over the long years, what astonishes me are the curious omissions and the possibly tendentious silences of the early instruction I was given. I was taught nothing about pre-history, Byzantium, China and the Far East, the United States or Russia, about religions or music; I left my lycée knowing neither the names nor the voyages of the famous explorers, being totally ignorant about economic geography, the history of art, biochemistry and astronomy; not having read Montaigne, Hugo or Baudelaire, or the poets of Louis XIIV’s reign, not Dante, Shakespeare or the German Romantics… Colonna d’Istria, my philosophy teacher, who was fascinated by malfunctions of the will, devoted six out of nine months to this subject, before dashing off logic, morals, metaphysics and the history of philosophy in a few hours; at Sciences Po,2 Émile Bourgeois made us spend two years dozing over the King’s dusty secret. Who was responsible for these Ubuesque gaps which life had been unable to fill, for this inadequate instruction, wedged in between primary school certificate and the final degree, for this pit-ridden educational landscape through which I stumbled: the syllabus, the teachers, or my lapses of application and intelligence?

I hungered for nothing.

It may seem scarcely credible that I should speak of being uncivilised and narrow-minded. On top of my instinctive pessimism, education came and added the books that I was surrounded with, those from the family library: the Renan of the post-1870 years, Schopenhauer, Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans, the grinding of their teeth, their grim laughter.

I was an only son, a solitary child, and the first adages my father taught me were the following, so typical of Mérimée: Remember to mistrust yourself3 or Your friends may one day be your enemies; he was a father whose philosophy could be summed up as follows: “The Creator failed with this world; why should he succeed with the next one? Everything has been bungled, and always will be. It is only Art that does not lie.”

This may explain my anxious, withdrawn temperament, for during my first fifteen years, although not shy, I kept myself very much to myself and I was unaffectionate and unsociable; my childhood was not the precocious state of wonderment at the outside world that it was for the majority of writers, from Gide to Alain-Fournier, from Proust to Montherlant. I remained on my guard. As a result, I was late developing.

I have always felt that childhood was an inferior form of existence. I was sensible, accustomed to a quiet life, and respectful of the God-given virtue of thrift. I had reached my student years never having loved, understood, seen or experienced anything. Are the great dis coveries of life reserved for old age?

Venice is the backdrop to the finale of the grand opera that is an artist’s life: Titian died there after his Deposition, Tintoretto after San Marziale, Verrocchio after the Colleone. The one consolation is that one lives to a great age there: Giovanni Bellini was eighty-six years old, Longhi eighty-two, and Guardi eighty-one.

Is it fate, or is the fault to do with me: I always arrive when the lights are being switched off; no sooner had it started than it was over; I have witnessed the end of the nineteenth century; the end of a secondary education system that had lasted forever (1902); of one-year military service (1906); of the disappearance of the gold exchange (1914); I have seen several Republics die as well as one État; and two empires expire; beneath my gaze I have witnessed a whole herd of staunch or foolish famous men disappear, as well as a few moments of glory. I am drawn towards that which is ending; it is not merely the fact that I have attained a great age, it is also a curse, the burden of which I can feel.

I am bereft of Europe.

I have inherited my father’s physique, a robust one what is more; as well as almost everything else. My energy stems from further back. Did I love him, or was it what I saw of myself in him? Even today, I cannot manage to make the distinction. As a child, I had the sense that my existence depended on him, and that if he were to disappear, the house would collapse.

When famous men extol the virtues of their mothers, they describe them to us as exceptional people, as victorious athletes in the dedication stakes, breaking all records of selflessness, as monsters of magnanimity or phenomena of goodness. My mother was so united to my father, so serene a soul, so self-contained, and so perfectly Christian that she would have hated to be held up as an example. She was a Jansenist, but one possessed of such charm! Her patience, tolerance and her good humour were very much in evidence, and it was these very qualities that made for such an equable home life. Her gentle virtues, her natural reserve and her moral qualities were a challenge to no one, and were not put forward as an example, as was the case with Proust’s mother, or Gide’s; her cultural background was a humble one, neither Jewish nor Protestant, but one appropriate to the religion, country and class to which she had been born, in the heart of the Marais. She wore very flowing clothes, known at the time as kasha, their muffled beige colours, like her blonde hair, relieved only by her black gloves or the veil of black chiffon that fell from her hat and wrapped itself around her neck.

I was a non-believer, more in imitation of my father and in order to become a man than to upset my adorable mother; the men in my family would set off to meet their wives after Mass, but they ventured no further than the entrance to the church. The State was hostile to religion, silent, not anti-clerical, but extremely radical. I was unable to understand the catechism, a dialogue in which I was interrupted without obtaining the answers to the questions I wanted to ask. It was not the unknown that disoriented me in matters of religion, but the way the subject was presented to me: this far-off oriental land, with its bearded kings, dressed in sandals and robes, its women in baggy trousers, its water-towers, its unleavened bread, its donkeys and palm trees, its Hebrew names, its circumcised males, the gourds attached to the staffs of those anchorites you could see in the stained-glass windows at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, that sad church outside which well-to-do gentlemen expressed their dissatisfaction with the government, their shiny “huitreflet” top hats perched above their walking-sticks, as they poured scorn on the Jews, without seeing that it was they themselves who were the true Pharisees.

At the age of seventeen, I opened the window; the air of the stadium blew in; the springy turf, the cinder tracks, the mud of the rugby field in which so many statues were instantaneously sculpted, the diving boards in the rare swimming-pools, the sound of swords echoing in fencing halls… Suddenly, I felt alive! Up until then, I had lived like a robot assembled by some stranger; I could only escape this vertical sleepwalking through exercise, and it was thanks to this that I came to understand that we have only one life and that we must give it all the attention we can.

Muscular energy stimulated strength of mind; physical effort and work suddenly became enjoyable; my cavorting found a rhythm; conserving one’s breath meant that I developed a horror of chattering; I learnt that gentleness could go hand in hand with firm muscles; all that education, religious instruction and civic training ought to have taught me, I acquired in a curiously roundabout way through sport; I came to terms with laws and rules, I discovered the collective conscience, a liking for teamwork, and love of one’s neighbour, things which nobody had ever spoken to me about. I had only ever seen duty in an abstract, off-putting way; sport allowed me to feel it, to experience it and to love it; I understood that you had to pass the ball.

It doesn’t do to be young in France, for this beautiful country does not lend itself to love at first sight; who was there to explain to me how one loved one’s country, or even that I had one? I loved my family, my city, my classmates, my neighbourhood, my home; in 1900, my country was the universe. At the time it would have been unthinkable, and even indecent, to have to comment on the good fortune of having been born in France; who, after all, would have considered being born anywhere else? The miraculous survival of the nation over the centuries was something that went without saying, by some divine gift; in any case, la patrie had recently given far too much service to the “scoundrels on the General Staff”; the Théâtre-Libre, the Sorbonne and the Naturalist novels were making sure it did not begin again. France was so powerful, so unique, so vast, filling double-pages of the atlases in pink, that she did not need anyone to love her: to love someone was to be afraid for them: this France which the world took under its protection, shored up on her right by the Tsar, resting on the arm of Edward VII on her left, nothing could happen to her; nothing does happen to the rich. Such was the charming ethical nineteenth-century view, when the centre of the universe was the Earth, and that of the planet, Europe, with Paris as its hub; so many nuclei created in order to sustain the pulp of a matchless fruit offered to mankind by God: France.

I realise how astonishing this state of mind may seem today; there was very little miserableness around in 1900. Yesterday, in Geneva, I heard Marcuse4 denouncing happiness “as objectively reactionary and immoral”; the happiness of the turn of the century, with its three-franc restaurants and its belief in progress, was radical. It was a carefree period, in which no one had a bad conscience, and in which those who suffered did not protest. The word “culpability” was nowhere to be found in the old dictionaries; the Christian-Democrats had scarcely begun to graft social conscience on to the tree of religious remorse. In improving my mind I thought only of enjoying myself, and from the moment I left school each day, this became one and the same thing for me. The nation states scarcely existed then, though they made a pretence of doing so; there was no spider at the centre of the web to mastermind the captive flies; tax collectors wore the blank expression of indirect taxation. Only the Tsar required a passport. My days were empty and were not filled with meetings, so no hours were lost. There was space to breathe between people (something unimaginable today when a Guide to Deserted Villages—that really takes the biscuit — can be published); there was no “demographic pressure”; political parties were like provincial rallies; no one bothered and there was no commitment; high-rise flats and public examinations were still a thing of the future. Time was unimportant, wealth was not measured, it was like sunshine or oxygen. Our currency retained its purchasing power, which only began to slide after 1918, a date when the government was controlled by Treasury executives; ever since then, by a curious coincidence, it has not stopped dwindling. Earning money meant you had to spend money, talking about money was ill-mannered. My father was considered to be “comfortably off’; this was due to the fact that he had no needs; “it’s easier to do without things than to waste time acquiring them”, he liked to say; his only riches being a small Breughel, a tiny Trouville by Boudin, a Renoir Head, and a Crozant by Guillaumin. Eugène Morand never entered a bank, and if he needed a pair of shoes, he wrote to Noren, his bootmakers in the rue Pierre-Charon;5 every year, Jamet, his tailor in the rue Royale, would send him, without a fitting, the same navy-blue serge suit; my father roamed tirelessly around Paris on foot, leaving the hired coupé known as the SENSATION to my mother; he never had a penny on him; occasionally, in the evening, I would hear him say to my mother: “I’m going to the Opéra, in Mme Greffulhe’s box; put some money (he never counted in louis d’or, that was mundane) in my waistcoat pocket, in case she asks me to take her to supper at Paillard’s.”

In Padua there is a very old mansion, dating from 1256, which is still known as the Palazzo degli Anziani: it is the very image of my adolescence; I lived in the past; I dwelt among people from a bygone age; I even went so far as to view the world through the eyes of the “Ancestors”. I confided in my father: “When I gaze at the setting sun my sunsets are those of Turner; my clouds are Courbet’s skies, my ceilings those of Tiepolo; I can visualise no other thaws than those in paintings by Monet, and all my women have the belly of a Rodin or the legs of a Maillol; I should like to be able to take delight in a pink rose next to a green one, without having to thank Matisse; here we are at Saint-Séverin: I am unable to see it through my own eyes, I need those of your Huysmans. Where do I fit into all this?”

The famous generation gap never struck me as being hard to bridge, such was the natural understanding between my parents and myself, such the pleasure I took in following them along paths they never sought to impose upon me. Their pace of life was my own; when we were travelling, we would spend hours and days sitting side by side on deck-chairs, not attempting to make contact with the other hotel guests, and understanding one another without the need to speak. I was still out of touch with my own times; what I was experiencing was the world of my family, the air that I breathed was theirs.

Everything was owed to the Ancients, without one ever being able to match them; firstly, one owed them gratitude: I had always noticed my father avoiding walking on the Persian rug in the studio, out of respect for an object from the Middle Ages: “This rug has been handed down to me, I have a duty towards it,” he would say. Beauty alone mattered; exactly the reverse of modern times, when beauty will remain exiled until a man hungers for it once more.

I was responsible only to myself, without having any attachments or duties apart from very close blood ties. On my father’s side there was nobody left; I had no dead to mourn, no dead to share my life. My mother came from a family of pedigree bourgeoisie, from whom her love for her husband had drawn her apart, but who retained their position; once a week, to preserve the convention, I would go to Sunday dinner at my maternal grandmother’s house in the rue Marignan. (I can see the ritual still: decanted bottles of claret, with little heart-shaped pieces of filter paper around the neck of each carafe, on which you could read the growth and the vintage; fruit bowls heaped with cherries and strawberries, with not a single stalk showing; a few adages continue to hover in my memory such as: “It’s better reheated the next day.”) This section of my family populated the Cour des Gomptes6 with advisers, instructors and auditors: it was the provinces, but in Paris. I discovered the true Paris at our home; here people were classified only by their talents or their originality. On Wednesdays during the winter, there were dinner parties at home; I can see my father, as slim as a Valois, with his curled moustache and the ribbon of his monocle dangling against his starched dinner shirt. “Everybody should sit where they want” was the rule. Members of the Société des Artistes français and of the Institut were abhorred, exceptions being made for Gounod, Pierné and Massenet, who had composed the music for Drames sacrés (1893), Izeyl (1894) and other plays written by my father, as well as Grisélidis (1891), a neo-medieval mystery play, which had been a triumph for Bartet at the Comédie-Française and which in 1901 was made into a comic opera, with music by Massenet.

Certain Wednesdays were reserved for Italian music: Tosti, a sort of blue-eyed Prince of Wales, who wrote waltzes and ballads that were popular all over Europe, or the composer Isidore de Lara, a good-natured giant of a man, who came with Litvinne or Héglon, or with the celebrated tenor Tamagno; after dinner they made the glass cupboard in the studio vibrate with a song from Messaline, the libretto for which had been written by my father and Armand Silvestre:

Viens aimer les nuits sont trap brèves,

Viens rêver les jours sont trop courts…7

In Auguste Rodin’s case, he would only come to lunch (from about 1903–1908); peeping out of his yellow-white beard, his priapic nose seemed to me to emerge from his pubis; I would see his faun’s ears rising from above a mass of spindle trees in our garden, the earthly paradise of the marble depot, on the Quai d’Orsay; ever since 1880, the sculptor had had his studio there, lent to him by the State; we used to live in an adorable little house in the rue de l’Université; here Rodin found shelter from Camille Claudel’s demented screams and from the reproaches of Rose, who waited for him every evening at Meudon; this domestic hell was his true Porte de l’Enfer, the vast grey, dusty plaster maquette of which I can still see, in his studio, along with his Ugolin or his Enfant prodigue, which hung, untouched for a quarter of a century, from the double-doors, covered with spiders’ webs. The Rodin of the early years was already a distant figure; the one who took his leave, after lunch, would return to his studio, where Isadora Duncan, or those Americans who queued to have their bust sculpted at a cost of forty thousand gold francs, awaited him. I did not see Rodin again until July 1914, in London; he had come over for the day to open an exhibition, accompanied by the Comtesse Greffulhe; caught off guard by the mobilization, and with the ferry service interrupted, he had been obliged to spend the night there, without any underwear, he was wrapped up in two of the Comtesse’s nightdresses, looking very “Guermantes”, the sleeves tied about his Praxitelean chest.

Comtesse Greffulhe

THE RHÔNE VALLEY, 1906

THAT MORNING everything was frozen: the landscape, the sun, the sky, the hotel, mankind itself, at one in the ecstasy of no longer being merely a fragment of solidified joy, burning with cold; the swans, which had fallen asleep, awoke with their webbed feet cleft to the ice. So winter was not just sitting with one’s feet up, chilblains and stiff ears, but something which had been hidden from me until now: a sort of white summer, but so barren and unproductive that it was in total contrast to the other summer, which was alive with streams and harvests. The word hibernation did not yet exist for me, but I sensed already that the cold ensured a long life; on the thermometer the mercury had disappeared and had taken refuge in its little glass bulb; all that was left of the deciduous trees was their outline; the branches were nothing but airborne roots. I yearned for high places; for the life of a mountain guide, a timber sawyer, a botanist or a cowhand, anything, rather than going back down into the valley. I have never ever forgotten that sudden experience of the universal. Never had I existed so fully. What plenitude! I felt overcome with a simple joy; nothing other than complete harmony with nature, with the world and with the order of things. Now that I was certain that a single moment could be motionless, there was nothing else that I wanted; in a flash, I realised that true riches are priceless.

Much later, I would understand my wonderment at beholding these virgin peaks; thanks to them, I could escape from a prison; but what was this prison?

I had been brought up in the grimy Paris of Zola, along the tar-blacked streets of Whistler, among Maupassant’s gloomy peasants, in Flaubert’s sombre countryside, surrounded by hot-air stoves; and, all of a sudden, everything was white! This magical mirror enabled me to glimpse my future life; elemental forces which had hitherto been dormant radiated forth. In a trice, I was at the heart of my being.

Opposite me, on the frontier of Savoy, were sheer ridges that were repelling the North with all their might; at my feet was the blue vapour of the lake, nestling against the Jura, that long snake-like spine, scaled with ice and fir forests; to my right, the terraced promontories of Vevey, Clarens and La Tour, their headlands plunging into the water below which sparkled in the sunlight; behind me were Les Avants, Sonloup and Jaman, their brecciated steps sloping away, snatching up their crumbling soils in order to hurl them into the Rhône, despite the efforts of the chalets and the stony spurs to cling to the horizontal.

Did I know what threatening footsteps I was trying to escape from? Running away, but to do what? To do nothing. I can recognize this wild indolence among young people today; recent surveys among sixteen-year-old boys confirm that, for them, leisure comes before food, where they live, or household appliances… That day, I was already experiencing what they would feel later, in their millions; I was so light-headed that I felt I could fly away from the thick soup of smoke that stifled the Rhône valley and polluted the lake.

My indecisive character gave way to a resounding faith: I would escape; I did not know what I would do, but I could sense that my life would veer towards abroad, towards elsewhere, towards the light; not tomorrow, immediately; which explains this readiness to seize the moment and this haste of a man in a hurry that have been with me for so long; to escape from man was to escape from Time; I could feel an animal power within me which death alone would cure. “You’re a brute,” Giraudoux used to tell me. At the same time there began that beat of a pendulum whose rhythm has never left me, a liking for drawing closer, that is in contrast to this passion for space that was ushered in by puberty; the happiness that living in a narrow bedroom gives as opposed to the intoxication of the desert, the sea and the steppes.

I loathed doors and enclosures; frontiers and walls offended me.

ITALY, 1907

WHEN I RAN AWAY for the first time, not yet twenty years old, I threw myself upon Italy as if on the body of a woman. At Cap-Martin, my grandmother encouraged me to admire from afar her idol, the Empress Eugénie, as she went out for her walks (“What shoulders!”); I would follow her to the roulette tables at Monte Carlo, managing to get into the gaming rooms by slipping beneath the balustrade, since I was under the legal age. With four or five gold coins in my pocket, my first and last winnings, I took advantage of a reduction in fares to mark the opening of the recently completed Simplon tunnel, and I set off for Naples to meet the Italian steamship on which Giraudoux was sailing, as he arrived back from Harvard.

At Naples I would rediscover the same physical and moral euphoria I had experienced at Caux; it was during a solitary lunch beneath an arbour, above San Elmo, I watched as the sounds of men working rose up from below me. There was nothing happening, I was expecting nothing. I was giving nothing, and yet I was receiving everything. Millions of years had stood in wait in order to offer me this sublime gift: a morning beneath an arbour. There was no reason why this should not continue. A tradition of very long standing ensured that everything, myself included, had a predestined place. I was embarking on life intending to obtain what was my due: Titian and Veronese, who had only painted in order to be admired by me, awaited me; Italy had been preparing for my visit for centuries.

It seemed to me only natural to reap what others had sown. High above the lines of washing that draped the Neapolitan streets, I floated in the unreality of a sky that gulped in the smoky fumes of Vesuvius. This detachment, this contemplative egoism and this passivity did not spare me from boredom; short-cuts have very much extended my travels, even if laziness has lengthened my life. I flitted about among people, I fluttered around things, I ricocheted off hard surfaces, fleeing all attachments, somewhat unsure of my feelings and entirely devoted to myself. A fervent pilgrim, I was dazzled by everything. “I shall have to return to France, UNFORTUNATELY” reads a postcard I came across, sent to my mother at the time. Later on, I used to feel ashamed about such things, up until the day last year when my eye fell upon an interview with the year’s top student at the Centrale8 in Le Figaro, and I read the following: “Your plans for the future?” “I’m leaving to spend a year in the United States, at Berkeley.” “And afterwards?” “After that… France, UNFORTUNATELY.” Yesterday’s blasphemy is an everyday remark nowadays. My offspring agreeing with me, sixty years later.

LOMBARDY, 1908

DISCOVERING NAPLES was like giving the sun its real name; living in Lombardy, there to await our entry into the Veneto, was something entirely different, it was like the transition from friendship to love.

In the summer, my parents descended upon Italy as if they were visiting the Holy Land, ready to receive the Law there. It was a world of museums, art galleries and libraries, among which could be found certain buildings that served the public — factories, railway stations, or farms — necessary for life’s commodities. On our travels we encountered a different kind of humanity, one which spoke in a strange language that was to do with insolvencies, profits, strikes, salaries and yield per hectare. All these were meaningless to us.

We spent a few weeks at Tremezzo, where the lake was flecked with water-lily leaves. In these summer gardens, stretched out under the shade of magnolia trees with their lemon-scented flowers, we followed in the footsteps of Milanese cardinals who had walked here since the sixteenth century; by Lake Como we awaited the end of the Canicula, of those days of hellish heat, which in Lombardy, along the shores of the Po, cause even the leaves of the willows to become scorched.

One day I set off from Tremezzo to Bellagio, swimming the two kilometres across the lake through water so viscous that as I moved through it I felt as if I were stroking a fish.

During the last days of August, I took refuge in the chestnut groves of the Tremezzina, which were as chill as a marble by Thorvaldsen; I can see myself in the slow train that brought me back from some trip to the Ticino where I had gone to stock up with cigarettes, looking down upon the wonderfully phosphorescent stars formed by the chestnut blossom. I have never forgotten the smell of that chestnut grove in the Tremezzina, the same forest that Fabrice crossed9 on his way to Waterloo. It was in Tremezzo that I acquired a liking for chestnuts, for those wonderful hedgehogs, and for the tree’s sickle-like leaves. I was to live in a chestnut grove again in 1944; in Montreux, for three years, I lived off chestnuts that had been piled up, their burrs still on, in a bath that had fallen into disuse because the gas bills had not been paid; the chestnut grove of “Maryland” sloped down from the deserted villa as far as the first roofs of Territet, before disappearing into Lake Geneva; chestnut trees like those which La Nouvelle Héloïse places at Clarens, almost wholly destroyed today to make way for vineyards. As soon as September arrived, we set off for Venice; the surroundings changed; the cypress trees by Lake Como gave way to the factory chimneys of the Lombardy plain; all along the railway lines the vines were no longer being cut by hand; from the carriage window, Milan was paving the way for a new industrial Italy; what was the point of so many tyres, ball-bearings and idiotic industries? I lived with my back turned to the future; could the future be anything other than an immanent past?

A stop-over in Milan; in those days the favourite hotel of French visitors was the Albergo di Francia; my father walked into the bedroom; standing on the chimney-piece was a hideous group of bronze statues decorating the top of an Italian clock of the worst Victor-Emmanuel I period: “I could never get to sleep in the presence of such a horror! Let’s be on our way!” my father exclaimed. So we set off again for Venice, without eating or sleeping. It wasn’t a pose: my father was a true product of the age of Ruskin; he had known William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, and the concept of liberty, which invested the most everyday object with the dignity of a work of art; for him, putting up with ugliness in our home was to sully oneself. I have seen Lalique, adopting Tolstoy’s example, sewing slippers for himself, and Gallé building his own ovens, as did later Brancusi, who cooked steaks for us in them. My father designed the costumes and the scenery for his plays; he even painted a medieval stage curtain, in the style of Burne-Jones, for the Comédie Française.

1908,

VENICE SEEN THROUGH A

REAR-VIEW MIRROR

VENICE, which Proust called “the Mecca of the religion of Beauty”. Eight years earlier, Proust, whom I did not know at the time (although my father used to meet him at Madeleine Lemaire’s, as I would discover from Proust himself ten years later) had seen Venice through Ruskin’s eyes, but already he was aware how exacting this religion of Beauty was. “Ruskin did not conceive of Beauty as an object of pleasure, but as a reality that was more important than life…” Had Proust stopped at Jean Santeuil, he would have been nothing more than a hedonist; but he suffered, he searched beyond Beauty, he produced Swann. This is why our stern age forgives him for his duchesses. Naïve and foolish, it never occurred to me that we have duties towards Beauty; for me, she was just a way of evading the moral code; and Ruskin, as Bloch says, was a frightful bore.

I can hear myself saying and repeating: “You deny the past, you reject the present, you are hurtling towards a future that you will not see.” I want to speak plainly; this is why, overcoming my dislike of myself, I have taken Venice as my confidante; she will answer for me. In Venice I can think about my life, and do so more clearly than anywhere else; and it’s too bad if I can be spotted in the corner of the picture, like Veronese in Christ in the House of Levi.

Marcel Proust in Venice

The canals of Venice are black as ink; it is the ink of Jean-Jacques, of Chateaubriand, of Barrès, of Proust; to dip one’s pen into it is more than a Frenchman’s duty, it is a duty plain and simple.

Venice did not withstand Attila, Bonaparte, the Hapsburgs, or Eisenhower; she had something more important to do: survive; they believed they were building upon rock; she sided with the poets and decided to be built on water.

I have always thought of the railway station at Venice as a triumphal entrance; at that time it was not the present-day peristylar railway theatre of the Mussolini era. (“This is Venice, Venezia, Venedig: you’ll see what you shall see. Viva il Duce!”) Its predecessor consisted of three arcades which had turned green from the damp and had been blackened by the coal smoke. What has not changed is the green copper dome of San Simeone Piccolo; the bombs of two world wars, aimed at the railways lines, had spared it; to the left and in front of it are the trattorie where you dine, your head beneath the boxed bay trees and your feet in the water; there is less of a stench from the waters of these Fondamente Santa Lucia or dei Turchi than elsewhere; propelled through, the water is oxygenated here and does not give off the whiff of sulphurous hydrogen.

In those days, the gondolier was still king; proud at having surprised us by taking the short cut along the Rio Nuovo upon leaving the station and emerging suddenly at the ACCADEMIA, our man, manipulating his curved oar like a foil, reeled off the dazzling names of the palazzi: FOSCARI, GUISTINIANI, REZZONICO, LOREDAN, VENIER, DARIO… (Some of them, bent over with age and rheumatic stress, looked as if they were bowing at us.) Along the way, the gondolier, hostile still to the outboard engine, cocked a snook at the steamships that passed. Only yesterday, the vaporetti, the masters of the canals, had gone on strike to prevent the last of the gondolas from using the Rio Nuovo; the calm waters have been replaced by con stant rough waves.10

At last we arrived within sight of the Dogana with its statue of Fortune on top, which, at that time, was golden; today Fortune has turned verdigris. 11

This triumphant procession along the Grand Canal, “that register of Venetian nobility”, as Théophile Gautier put it, led us to the Traghetto San Maurizio, where the small apartment rented by my parents awaited us. The narrow street was deserted; there was just a basket which, at the cry of “Bella uva!” (fine grapes), had been lowered on a rope down to the grape-seller below, and hoisted up again piled with muscat grapes for the lunch that had already been served. The mosquito nets had been folded parachute fashion above the beds, and the bedrooms smelled of dead gnats, killed by little triangles of beguiling but nauseating herbs; from the canal there rose up a reek of foul water, similar to the smell of vases from which someone has forgotten to remove the withered flowers.

In the morning, I was awoken by the hoarse voice of the vaporetto and by the striated reflections from the Canal on the almond green ceiling, with its plaster reliefs, or on the façades of the buildings that were flecked with light; for fifty centimes, the barber would come up and trim my beard (a marvellous attack on the bristles by the Italian razors, engraved in gold on steel, which each barber carried with him on weekdays). Nowadays, when I go around barefoot in espadrilles and without a tie all year round, I sometimes smile when I think of how I was attired at that time: white flannel trousers, white cotton socks, white felt hat, a butterfly knot and a stiff collar.

The rampino from the San Maurizio ferry greeted me with a cry of poppe!, waving his grubby hat (even poor people wore a hat; a hat they used to greet one with) as he held the gondola’s coupling hook with his other hand. He offered to carry me across the Canal, rather as Dandolo’s Serenissima offered to take the Crusaders as far as Byzantium. I did not make use of his services, but set off along the narrow street towards the Palazzo Pisani (painted at that time in that pale nacreous “coral” pink, the colour of scampi); I reached the Palazzo Morosini with its lofty ogives, and so Gothic in style that it looked English. Passing the churches of Santa Maria Zobenigo, San Stefano and San Vitale, I was on my way to meet my mother, after she had attended Mass, at San Moisè, whose façade, an assortment of overhangs and recesses, was white with the acidic droppings of the Venetian pigeons that can even eat into the stonework. Théophile Gautier was responsible for my love of this church, which, with its obelisks and astragals, is so perfectly reminiscent of the overture to Rossini’s Moisè. I drew back the red curtain (the same one as today, without those horrible doors with bars): there were more votive candles burning inside than in the Holy Sepulchre; the Jesuits’ confessional boxes, their baroque grilles as convoluted as a confiteor, buzzed with the whisper of sins; confessional boxes only came into existence, apparently, in the seventeenth century; that buttoned-up age was the first to feel that it should conceal its sins… I enjoyed stopping in front of the tomb of a Scotsman, John Law, the inventor of the banknote; this rococo monument was an apt one for the inventor of financial rococo (inflation is romantic, while deflation is classical).

Théophile Gautier photographed by Paul Nadar

“If Palférine had any money, he would spend his life in Venice, passing his days in museums, his evenings at the theatre, and his nights with beautiful women” (Balzac). The Fenice was not open; as for beautiful women, I was too frightened of imitating Jean-Jacques [Rousseau], who found little consolation in his loneliness from a courtesan who almost got him plastered, from another tart who only had one nipple, or from the young girl of twelve who was so sexually immature that he contented himself with fatherly affection and teaching her music. Depriving oneself of women was painful in the evenings, but I would never have dared approach, as President De Brosses did after consulting the Tariffa delle putane di Venezia, the Marianna or Fornarina of a republic of demi-beavers.

Deprived! This word has no meaning for our children or for their impetuous age, which imposes no restraints on passions or on the insistence of desire; the young of today have the voracious weakness of unbridled crowds. It was this abstinence of the flesh that gave us a self-control that is rarely seen any longer; it was not until about 1920, when we decided that we were being deprived and that we would fast no longer, that we began to fling ourselves upon easy prey, whose fragrance lost in subtlety what it gained in abundance. Virgins, nowadays, await their boyfriends in their beds; in the early part of the century, all we had were prostitutes, and even then one had to be able to gain access to the brothel; that depended on the height of the client; the first of our classmates to be allowed inside was Baudelocque — the son of the well-known obstetrician — who was two heads taller than us; while waiting for him, we would plod up and down the pavement of the rue de Hanovre; when he came out, the questions rained down: “What does she look like, a woman?” “You enter her? How’s that possible!” We were thirteen years old; we would still have to wait a while… Today, I miss the old days and the time one spent waiting; the penitence and the continence that society imposed on us imparted an unbelievable flavour to the opposite sex, and they conferred something sacred that has been lost. It was still the Italy of the young Beyle, and of his “two years without a woman”; he wanted to remedy this: aged eighteen, he contracted syphilis.

As to the young ladies (whom at that time one did not refer to as “girls”), one was expected to make amends.

In those days, boys made amends, they took responsibility for anything that went wrong: compensation and penitence; it was all to do with the feudal code of honour, with Corsican revenge, with civil action. A young lady must not be compromised, a terrible word that suggested commitment, shady deals and law suits; having an illegitimate child was like contracting the most shameful of diseases. It was no laughing matter. Traps lay everywhere; in every invitation, even on the simplest of promenades the female body offered its stumbling-blocks; charms were lures; at the bottom of the slope of the thighs, so sweet a descent, lay the pot of glue.

I can still see my school friend Robert D—, sitting astride one of the porphyry lions in St Mark’s Square, telling me how he had had a narrow escape:

“I met her yesterday, in front of one of the Bellinis at the Accademia; I got rid of the mother and the sister. We agreed to meet this morning. I went to collect her at the Danieli.

“‘Mademoiselle is not quite ready; she asks you to go up…’”

“I find her dressed, wearing a broad-brimmed hat with cherries on top, with an embroidered parasol and a silk scarf round her neck. My dear, imagine the bedroom, with its smell of crumpled sheets, cold coffee and warm soap… I sit down beside her…”

“On the sofa?”

“Far worse! On the counterpane… My head is spinning. I start to stammer: ‘Your mother might come in… Impossible to finish my sentence, I couldn’t bear it any longer; every passing second made me want to curl up and die.”

“What can the tributary do when it encounters the river, apart from lose itself? So you’re engaged, congratulations.”

“… Her arms were encircling my neck, like a ring around this finger; her handcuffs…”

“… Her handcuffs?”

“Her breasts pressed against my chest; her stomach took on a strange life of its own, and there were convulsions, as if she were in labour…”

“You’re cutting corners!”

“Her elder sister walked in, with a curious look on her face, which expressed everything, envy, disgust, complicity… everything except naturalness… Just then, through the open window, beneath the Ponte della Paglia, I saw a gondolier pass by; ‘Oi,’ he shouted. You know what that means in gondoliers’ language: Watch out! It did not fall on deaf ears.”

Listening to Robert D., I swore that I would never become a lover.

I was extremely shy in the company of married women; if the initiative came from them, my mother’s sighs would grow increasingly unsubtle and her entreaties more frequent. Nowadays, that also raises a smile; every age has its misfortunes.

Adorned with rings and cooing like the pigeons of St Mark’s, the pederasts strutted past; Venice, “an unnatural city” (Chateaubriand), had always welcomed them; I spotted one of them there, a man who had become so well-known on account of a recent trial that we would point him out to one another as he was leaving the Carnot; it was the famous Fersen, who had just published a poem about Venice, Notre-Dame des Cendres. “I do not shake hands with pederasts,” my father would say (never suspecting that he was doing so all day long). “Yet another of those gentlemen of the cuff,” he would add (at the time, they could be recognized by the handkerchief issuing from their cuffs). The inverts, “that outcast section of the human community” as an unpublished letter of Proust’s puts it, constituted a secret society; one cannot appreciate Temps perdu unless one remembers that in those days Sodom represented a curse. Even in Venice, homosexuality was nothing more than the most subtle of the fine arts.

With a canvas under one arm, his box of paints under the other and his easel on his back, in the tradition of Monsieur Courbet, my father crossed the waters and installed himself on the steps of the Salute, opposite the Abbey of San Gregorio; as a young man, he had rented this abbey, nowadays an American’s luxury pied-à-terre, but which at that time was in ruins; he dabbed his thumb in his palette and ground his knife on the rough cast of the walls. All painters have loved the votive basilica of the Salute; Guardi, Canaletto, the romantics and the impressionists, none has been able to resist the curve of its unfurled scrolls that resemble waves about to break, lured by the play of the sunlight around the grey-green dome, whose sphere reflects every nuance of broken colour.

The French in Venice used to meet in St Mark’s Square, having dined in their modest lodging-house, or princely dining-room, glad to have escaped from some titled hostess or other; some came from the Palazzo Dario, “bent over, like a courtesan, beneath the weight of her necklaces” (people adored D’Annunzio!); others from the Palazzo Polignac, or the Palazzo Da Mula, bringing with them from the house of Contessa Morosini (who dared to wear a doge’s hat) the latest news from the Court at Berlin, for which the Mula acted as a sounding-board. We would drink granite, coffee with crushed ice, in the company of Mariano Fortuny, the son of the Spanish Meissonier, who had become a Venetian by adoption, the interior decorator Francis Lobre and his wife, who was physician to Anna de Noailles (a famous name at that time), the designer Drésa, and Rouché, not yet in charge of the Opéra, who was editor of the Grande Revue, which launched Maxime Dethomas and Giraudoux; then there was André Doderet, who by dint of translating D’Annunzio had come to look like him; we would be joined by several officials from the École des Beaux-Arts, colleagues of my father: Roujon, Havard, Henry Marcel (Gabriel’s father), the head of the Beaux-Arts, the Baschet brothers and Roger Marx (father of Claude).

Gabriele D’Annunzio at the regatta on Lake Garda, 1930

These were real people, not international stars like those who would invade Venice later on, at the time of the Ballets Russes; this circle of friends was discreet, as French people were at that time; they were extremely fussy men, encyclopaedic in their knowledge, highly influential, very sure in their tastes, modest to a degree and disdainful of fashions, who talked with an inimitable accent, and no one “pulled the wool over their eyes”. None of them was garish, or popped the corks of champagne bottles, or motored about on the Lagoon making waves; there were no “relationships”; their wives’ necklaces were made of Murano glass.

They loathed all things commercial, and in Venice more so than elsewhere; this was reflected in the frightful Salviati shop, with its one thousand chandeliers that were lit in broad daylight, which still disfigures the Grand Canal to this day. They owned a few drawings by old masters, but not paintings (they had not the means); they were not theorists or intellectuals, their words did not end in isme; one could extend the list indefinitely of what they were not, of what they did not say or do, and yet they did not resemble anyone else; unlike people in society they did not talk for the sake of talking; the other day I heard someone admiring Léautaud’s free spirit, as if it were something odd; through his outspokenness, his culture and independence, each of these delightful fellows from the days of my youth was the equal of Léautaud; they seemed quite ordinary to me, for I had no one to compare them with; nowadays I realize that they represented more than Culture, they were Civilization.

They may not have known what they wanted, but they knew very precisely what they did not want; they might have forgiven a Ravachol;12 but bores (the word they used was “mufles”) never; like Jules Renard, they had very definite dislikes. None of them was mediocre (I only discovered mediocrity later on, in the Civil Service). Their remarks constituted a sort of santa conversazione. I can still picture the way they looked: black alpaca, black bamboo boater, grey cotton gloves, a white piqué cravat in summer, black crêpe-de-chine necktie in winter; starched shirt with stiff collar and cuffs; the vaporetti they called hirondelles, or pyroscaphes, or mouches; to save money, they went to read Le Figaro in the offices of the Querini-Stampalia Foundation; they never forgave Napoleon’s architects for the destruction of the exquisite San Giminiano church, built by Sansovino, at the entrance to the Procuraties; and they blazed with fury about that Palladio who had wanted to pull down St Mark’s in order to replace it with a neo-classical temple.

Politics did not exist for them. How distant was the Dreyfus affair already… Politics was something that had disappeared since the time of Loubet13 (1900); it would surface again until 1936. For them, Barrès was still the anarchist of his early novels, and Maurras was merely a poet; Boulanger, Dreyfus and Déroulède were champions of a sport that was outmoded, that of politics. They would scarcely have been able to name the Président du Conseil of the time; the Ancien Régime for them was neither Turgot, nor the Abbé Terray; it was Gouthière,14 or Gabriel; they did not say: “France regained a colonial empire under Vergennes”, but: “The bronzes have never been so well gilded as they were under Louis XVI.” They did not use the royal dynasties as reference points; the reigns that counted for them were those of Goya or Delacroix. Their Venice was still that of 1850, that of Théophile Gautier, the Salute and its “population of statues”, and the flaking mosaics.

I would come across them at our table, at home, seated around a perfect risotto, creamy with parmesan, or in front of a plateful of eels from the Laguna morta, grilled over a wood fire and dripping with garlic butter. Constantly smiling, but never laughing, my father was somewhat eclipsed by his so colourful guests. The past, for them, was the present; Armand Baschet, one of the first Casanova scholars, would announce the recent discovery of letters written by women at the Bohemian castle of Dux: “They thought Casanova was a braggart? He scarcely told the whole truth!” For me, Casanova was a bit like some disreputable uncle. Camille Mauclair would arrive for coffee; there would be an argument about which room Musset had occupied at the Danieli, formerly the Albergo Reale; was it number thirteen, as Louise Colet claimed, or the two rooms mentioned by Pagello? Emotions eclipsed cultural considerations: the Doges’ Palace was all very well, but should one not regret the old palace, the Byzantine one, with its drawbridge and its watch-towers that dated from the year 1000, on the site of a piazzetta which was then a port? The Venetian balustered bridges made of marble are certainly charming, but imagine those that preceded them, gently sloping and without railings, over which the procurators rode on horseback, leaving their mounts to eat hay afterwards on the Ponte della Paglia. Thus did our friends hark back to the past, rather like the trout that swims upstream and jumps the weir to obtain more oxygen.

The painter Toché, a character who had remained typical of the MacMahon15 era, used to ring our doorbell at the grappa hour; he continued to paint frescoes in the style in which they had been painted in Venice three centuries earlier; Toché was famous for having decorated the Chabanais in tempera; he had worked for a year, without setting foot outside this brothel, famous for its Edward VII room, and mixed quite openly with le Tout-Paris in this place of ill repute (at the Beaux-Arts, Toché was known by his pupils as Pubis de Chabanais); a good-looking man, he had seduced the owner of Chenonceaux and persuaded her to give Venetian festivals there — with gondolas brought over from the piazzetta—which Emilio Terry, the next owner, still remembered having seen in his youth, rotting beneath the arches over the River Cher. “I paint only at night,” Toché used to say; “Venice by day, I leave to Ziem!” After which, he would walk down our staircase humming some Ombra adorata of Crescentini’s (like the singer Genovese, in his C major so dear to Balzac), curling his handlebar moustache.

Rather like the doges whose embossed velvet robes he wore at those Persian balls which were all the rage in Paris, Mariano Fortuny, emerging from his studio, would invite us to his mother’s house, opposite the miniature palazzo which had been rented by the actress Réjane; Mme Fortuny offered us teas that were worthy of Parmesan;16 her table, which was covered in Venetian crochet work, was a veritable fruit market, repoussé copper plates with peaches alternating with beribboned and gilded assortments of frilly pastries sprinkled with a powdered sugar, for which I have forgotten the Venetian name. Proust had been entertained there, eight years earlier; he had known Fortuny; later on he would provide a great number of dresses designed by this artist for The Captive; they have become part of the Proustian legend.

Occasionally, one of my father’s pupils would come from Paris at his invitation to join us, and was welcomed at their teacher’s home as he or she might have been in Renaissance times; it was the tradition set by Lecoq de Boisbaudran, whom my father had succeeded at the École des Arts Decoratifs, where the director’s office with its Louis XV panelling was decorated with a portrait of Van Loo, the first patron of the École Royale de Dessin, founded in 1765 by Bachelier, Madame de Pompadour’s protector; a vanished race of monocle-wearing fonctionnaires who kept well away from the management of the École des Beaux-Arts, who were indifferent to honours, had independent minds and advanced tastes, who couldn’t care less about the Prix de Rome and medals awarded by the jury, and who were opposed to the Institut; for those at the Quai Malaquais,17 Lecoq was “the accursed teacher” and the Arts Decoratifs the refuge of those whose talents were advanced or insane; Boisbaudran had had Renoir, Rodin, Monet, Degas, Fantin as pupils; my father had: Segonzac, Brianchon, Oudot, Legueult. That’s sufficient to commemorate these two men.

My father had Mallarmé’s physique: the same haughty profile, the same sharply pointed beard; he sported neither rosette nor tie; “a rose, yes, a rosette, no,” he used to say, although Jules Renard, in his Journal, was indignant that his Cross [of the Légion d’Honneur] should have been taken away from him, because of a promotion, in order for it to be given to my father. He was somewhat defensive in his courteousness, absurdly modest, constrained, self-doubting and admiring only of others; he spent his life tearing up manuscripts and repainting his canvases. When Mallarmé told him: “Even to write is to put black upon white,” he wrote no more; appointed as head of a grande école, his first utterance was: “I’ll be able to learn at last.”

Between the Quadri and Florian cafés an entire European society lived out its last days in Venice. And not just the French. Franz-Josef, the old forest tree, would bury them all in his fall. Austrian grandees descended on Venice while waiting for the stags to rut, before taking the road northwards to their dozen or more castles in Styria or the Tyrol; dressed in their jäger, their moss-green hats set on hareskin skulls, and loden capes, they left behind them a whiff of Russian leather and the magnolia scent of the Borromée islands, which did their best to imitate Pivert, the perfumer of Napoleon III, whose children were friends of ours. These Austrians, Gzernin, Palffy, or Festetics, in their reisekostüm, supplied titled Europe with their last stallions: Rocksavage, Howard de Walden and Westminster in London; Beauvau or Quinsonas in France; in Italy, Florio or Villarosa became their patrons, doing their best to match them in indolence, distinction and seduction. In the Procuraties all one could hear was: “I’ve just arrived from Pommersfelden, from Caprarola, from Arenenberg, from Knole, from Stupinigi, from Huistenbosch, from Kedelston…” Austria-Hungary was not one nation, but ten; it was the flower of Europe; England, with its lords, who for four centuries had been marrying coal merchants’ daughters, could not produce one tenth of the degrees of descent of the Austrian nobility; Bismarck’s Germany, enriched by the famous Jews who had made it wealthy, Italy, still trembling in the shadow of Rakowsky, and the Balkan nations, who came to Vienna to make up their minds about what Norpois would have called “the favoured of the Salon Bleu”, all had eyes only for Austria; Venice lived beneath the floodlights of the white steamships of Austrian Lloyd, the masters of the Adriatic, and it was Strauss whose tunes were still requested in the evenings, when we paced up and down the quadrangle of St Mark’s. Venice virtually belonged to these Austrians, through the Triplice, the triple alliance of Italy with Vienna and Berlin. Was not Bonaparte, at Campo Formio, the first to make Austria a present of Venice, in spite of the orders of the Directoire?

1909

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1909, my heart in a fury, I left Venice, taking with me to my regiment an old eighteenth-century guide-book, Les Délices de l’ltalie, by Rogissart, whose steel-plate engravings depicted a virtually deserted Venice in which, hidden in the corner of the campi, were some rare masks to provide scale. Even when I was under fire during the war, at the mouth of the River Orne, I thought of nothing but that of the Brenta.

After a period serving in the countryside, sheltering in an old house in the rue de l’Engannerie, where I had rented a squaddie’s room, I started to write a Venetian play that was inspired by my reading the Lettres à Sophie Volland: under pain of death it was forbidden for senators of the Serenissima to sleep with foreign representatives; a senator who was smitten had no other means of meeting his beloved than to traverse the French ambassador’s house; caught off guard and denounced, my hero chose decapitation rather than admit to a secret tryst; romanticism was not dead… I had hung above my bed the first map of the world, dating from 1457, a reproduction of Fra Mauro’s planisphere, and the map of Venice drawn by Jacopo Barbari in 1500. My heart had remained in Venice. I was envious of my Oxford friends, who were able to go back there without me; I compared my fate to theirs; the Channel relieved them of this duty to serve their country for two years; was not a European war unthinkable? Every single mental impulse carried me away from the barracks far from frontiers; I read The Times, or Les Conversations avec Eckermann in the mess-room, after roll-call, by the light of a candle stuck on to a bayonet. At the library in Caen, where I had just been appointed an auxiliary, I launched myself on the early travellers in Italy; I made some astounding discoveries; when I was young, no one had direct access to works of quality, you had to discover them and deserve them; there were no Carpaccios for sale on Uniprix calendars; liking Giorgione or Crivelli meant being introduced into any number of small secret societies; Antonello da Messina was a sort of place of ill repute, whose address was passed around among the initiated.

Instead of boldly accepting the fate that was common to those of my age, I turned my back on chores, vaulting the wall or leaving the barracks at daybreak in order not to have to answer the bugle’s call; having to get up at the sound of drums or having to stand stock-still at the blast of a whistle were like a slap across the face for me.

A little patience: the unpleasant young man would change his stripes; not immediately; it would only be at the end of his life that he would go to school; the way in which you fetch up in a certain period matters less than the period you are leaving behind; life is a slow business, a two-fold process, luck and oneself; that’s what gives a work its shape.

In the meantime, I was like the young Buddha whose family concealed the existence of death to him until he was thirty.

I was a very old gentleman, a little too dyed in the wool, but delighted to be so.

CAEN, 1910

AT THE ARCHIVES department of the Préfecture, Major Jaquet made me copy out lists of volunteers from Calvados in 1792; beneath the folders I concealed Fabert, Dupaty, De Brosses, La Lande, Amelot de La Houssaye, all those, in short, who were lovers of Venice. On the headed paper of the Conseil Général du Calvados, I wrote letters to my friends not unlike the following, which I recently came across; it is easy to see the extent to which Venice continued to matter to me:

From the Archives of the Généralité

Caen.

This Thursday 27th of October 176…

I have received from you, Abbé, a letter from Vicenza, informing me that you are already nearing Venice. A glance at the envelope, which the mail orderly of the Royal Normandy has delivered to me, and which bears the arms of the République, tells me that your journey has ended at last. Shall you come from Padua as the crow flies, by barge, or will you stop to visit a few friends on the Brenta? I had been affeared at the prospect of a disagreeable stay in the lazaretto for you, since there is cholera in the Duchy of Parma and in Lombardy; but I see that nothing has come of it. Are your rags and tatters at Scomparini’s house? And you yourself?

I trust, Abbé, that you are not bored to distraction in the absence of the two gentle ladies from Florence, whom we were accustomed to stroke and kiss last year?

Did you know that there are fifty-one references to Venice in Shakespeare, even though he never left England? At least this is what H.F. Brown maintains in his Studies in the History of Venice, which he published last year with Murray’s.

Saia sends you her kindest regards. We often reread the satires of Aretino, Mensius and Portier des Chartreux together. So vouchsafe to send me by the hand of our mutual friend, the Nuncio, a few aphrodisiac tablets which, so Juvenal says:

arouse desire as if by hand.

I envy you your travels; what with some Orvieto, a discreet casino at Murano, a nun with perfumed breasts and a letter of exchange payable at Milord Cook’s, there are no sad thoughts in Venice.

Farewell Abbé. I am strongly tempted to sell my commission to the army and leave by the next coach to join you.

P.S. — Do you like the epigram I have composed in the style of Martial, about Saia, who is unfaithful to me?

Candidior farina cutis,

Communior mola corpus.

“Your skin is whiter than flour

Your body more banal than a mill.”

Is it Latin?

(Late 1910)

And here is another letter, still in mock-scholarly vein:

The Archives

Caen

This Thursday the 3rd of November 1910

My Dear Friend,

You are truly the pride of French and Ultramontane clergy; Abbé Galiani should bow low, he has a master! You are piquant, reproving and smutty, but never obscene, even when you are describing the Nuncio’s love affairs, “on the other side of the coin”. Is la Morosina susceptible to your signals? Why don’t you look at her through a telescope, as Lord Queensberry did from his Piccadilly window?

I have been reading a lot lately: Amiel’s Journal, Italian Women in the Renaissance by Rodocanachi; the letters of Pliny, The Dream of Polyphilus, in a fine 1599 edition, the Memoirs of the Princesse Palatine, Müntz’s Vinci, etc. I have heard very good reports of The Woollen Dress by Henry Bordeaux, which has even been compared to Bovary.

Wednesday 21 June 1911

Another letter, postmarked Caen, 36th Infantry Division, contains this childlike cry: “My freedom, for G’s sake! I feel nostalgic for the universe, I’m homesick for every country!”

1911

THIS YEAR, all I had to do to remind myself of Venice was to take a look at the famous floods that occurred in Paris in the spring; on leave, I went by boat from Saint-Germain-des Prés to the Champ-de-Mars, by way of the rue de l’Université.

MASTER CORVO

AS I WAS on the point of leaving Venice, one of the most eccentric of Englishmen had just arrived, that strange Corvo, whose existence was only disclosed to me forty years later. I was narrowly to miss, alas, the two most inexplicable islanders of those days, T.E. Lawrence and Corvo; in 1917 Georges-Picot, the French High Commissioner in a Holy Land not yet recaptured from the Turks, had invited me to accompany him to the siege of Jerusalem: it would have meant my spending over a year in the company of Colonel Lawrence; I turned down the position.

I remain equally upset not to have known Rolfe, who, during that summer of 1909 when we were both in Venice, was known as “Baron Corvo”; the poet, Shane Leslie, who wrote Corvo’s epitaph, and with whom I was on friendly terms, would have been able to introduce us. Why did he adopt the name “Corvo”? Why that never more? Out of romanticism? Rolfe always loved heraldry; as a seminarist, he dreamt up coats of arms and devised banners, and he would walk into the refectory with a stuffed crow perched on his shoulder. Corvo was a mixture of Léon Bloy and Genet, of Max Jacob and Maurice Sachs. Poor and lonely in his lifetime, he was unstable and eccentric in character, as well as being litigious, spiteful, devious and vindictive; he had a talent for all the arts; he was constantly angry with his friends; he read horoscopes, and he was intoxicated with the Church’s past and with the Renaissance; he adored Catholic pomp and ceremony, but he had no vocation for the priesthood and he was expelled from every school, as well as from sinecures, salons and asylums; he let people down, deceiving both Cardinal Vaughan and Hugh Benson, those two pillars of English Catholicism, who were initially attracted to him, but very soon grew exasperated.

A.J.A. Symons in his celebrated The Quest for Corvo, a posthumous investigation among all those who had known this character, retraces his life from his time in the seminary up until his time in Venice. Master Corvo must have been unable to find anywhere to perch in this city without trees. In that summer of 1909, Corvo stayed at the Hotel Bellevue, paid for by his friend, Professor Dawkins.

A member of the Bucintoro sailing club, Corvo actually learned to steer a gondola, a highly difficult skill at which I have only seen a woman, Winnaretta de P., excel, for a misdirected blade, as President De Brosses has pointed out, can cut off someone’s head “like a turnip”; or cleave a gondolier’s in two, beneath a bridge. When Corvo fell into the water, he continued to smoke his pipe, just like Byron, who when he floated on his back in the middle of the Grand Canal kept his cigar in his mouth in order (he said) “not to lose sight of the stars”; his man-servant would follow behind, in a gondola, with his master’s clothes on his arm.

Corvo, the author of the famous Hadrian VII, which dates from 1904 and which only became successful after the war — while waiting to be revived on stage — has left us a letter about his impressions of Venice that is as beautiful as a page from the Confessions: a sleepless night on the Lagoon. Here is Corvo, beneath the stars, accompanied by his two gondoliers, on whose knees he is dreaming: “A twilight world of cloudless sky and smoothest sea, all made of warm, liquid, limpid heliotrope and violet and lavender, with bands of burnished copper set with emeralds, melting, on the other hand, into the fathomless blue of the eyes of the prides of peacocks.” Every bit the:

Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy

of Shakespeare’s thirty-third sonnet.

Chateaubriand wrote that “nobody has penetrated the gondoliers’ way of life”; this was something that was reserved for Corvo, as he presents himself to us, taking his revenge on those who barred his way to the priesthood, rejecting honours while at the same time eager for them, and imagining himself seated on a pontifical throne from which he could spit upon the evil World; it is almost as if we can see him, this Corvo, ejected from every inn, his tattered clothes lying in a dirty linen basket at the bottom of his boat, knocking at every door, constantly on the verge of suicide, sitting just above the surface of the water, in the middle of winter, writing, in a huge exercise-book, his Letters to Millard which no one would ever be able to read, a Corvo who was the shame of the British community whose charity he had exhausted, who was deprived by the winter of his wealthy English clientele for whom he procured a few of the little beggar boys who, dumbstruck with admiration, used to follow him around, before he set off, the earliest hippy, to the Lido, where he slept on the beach, powerless against attacks from rats and crabs…

1913–1970 LITTLE VENICE

IN LONDON, I only encountered Venice in the district to the north of Paddington station, which was not yet the sought-after area it is today,18 and which artists had nicknamed “Little Venice”. At the end of the Edgware Road, the endless four-mile avenue that stretches from Marble Arch to Maida Vale, there is a mournful waterway, the Grand Union Canal, which links the River Thames to Birmingham. Once upon a time, it was countryside; the famous Mrs Siddons died there, far from the stage; Hogarth was married at St Mary’s Church, and beneath a tree here the Brownings became engaged. Regent’s Park was extended by Nash who, at the end of the Napoleonic wars, and to the greater glory of George IV, designed this park and those noble neo-classical residences; being a promoter of the new canal, he planted it with trees, embellishing it with some delightful temples painted in ivory, with black doors and windows; along its quays, they have survived the bombs and the demolition men.

I often used to take a breath of fresh air in Blomfield Road, strolling beneath the hundred-year-old plane trees that sheltered the occasional barge. No one else ventured this far out.

Nowadays,19 barges, narrow-boats (including the Jason, which takes children to and from the Zoo) and sailing boats are moored beneath willow trees swarming with seagulls: you can even see a Bucintoro anchored there, with a floating art gallery. Amateur sailors come here in summer, sleeping on board their boats and seeking sustenance in places with names like Ristorante Canaletto or Trattoria Adriatica, where black women supply campers with Chinese take-away dishes; the waters are steeped in silence, the quite breathable air is no longer that of London, and the water-buses that a century and a half ago used to sail up and down the route to Limehouse, on the Thames, no longer pass through the mouldy brick walls of the locks; Little Venice remains one of the last secret corners of London. It helps those who are yearning to escape to the Lagoon to be patient.20

1914

AS A FRENCHMAN living in England, I continued to dream of myself as a Venetian. In London, Paul Cambon21 peered at the orange and black curtains of my window at the embassy, which might have been painted by Bakst; “One of my cubist attaché’s notions,” he sighed. I have come across a letter written from London, to my mother, shortly before the war, on the 11th of July 1914:

“Yesterday evening we had a terrifically impressive Longhi party, given by a Mrs C. On the terrace, on the rooftop, in the middle of town, a lake had been constructed upon which gondolas floated. This lake was festooned with some marvellous Japanese lanterns that looked like huge luminous oranges; a bizarrely shaped hump-backed bridge, orange-coloured too, crossed over it, a real Rialto from Yokohama, brought back by some Marco Polo or other. The dining-room was Venetian rococo, painted by JM. Sert, in the same style as his silver and gold designs for the ballet Joseph, which Diaghilev has just put on at Covent Garden. A large table was arranged in a horse-shoe and laid for a hundred people; in front of each guest a silver plate and a candle had been placed: pheasants and peacocks, adorned with feathers, served as display pieces; the table was covered in gold cloth; in the centre of the horse-shoe was a carpet made from the skin of a polar bear, upon which Egyptian dancers and jugglers performed. The servants were dressed in dark tunics with wide white collars. Everybody wore the bauta over their full-length Longhi coats; masks and three-cornered hats were obligatory. I was dressed in the caftan of a Turk from the Riva degli Schiavoni. Baron de Meyer (the foremost photographer of our time) was dressed as Louis XV, in gold lame, with a silver wig and a bauta in black point de Venise. It was the first time that I had seen a private entertainment done with such bold taste and such sumptuousness in London. As a social gathering, we were on the confines of the real world.”

I had first discovered London in 1902 or 1903; the last of the troops that had been demobilized after the Boer War were gradually returning from South Africa: what a proud conquest of the world it was, by Jingo!

Since my wandering mind has led me to London once more, I shall make a detour, through time and space. London, in any case, was the Venice of the universe at that time. One after another, without interruption, the little omnibuses with their brightly coloured advertisements passed by; you climbed aboard even when it was raining, on double-deckers, your legs covered with horse blankets beneath black wax-cloths. The “cabbies”, who drove the cabs, those “London gondolas”, as Disraeli called them, sported pink carnations in the button-holes of beige overcoats with mother-of-pearl buttons. I was taught that when accompanying a lady, I should proffer my left hand to assist her on to the cabriolet’s high running board, while the right arm should be interposed between her dress and the cab’s large wheel to protect her from the mud; the horse flew off, for the cab weighed no more than the prow of a gondola, and you felt as if your protecting hand would never ever touch the ground again. Leicester Square was then the hub of the music halls, those places of perdition to which those under the age of fifteen were forbidden. Pubs, too, were places where ladies were never seen, being frequented only by cleaning women, costermongers, and, once dusk had fallen, the whores. Around Covent Garden, where the fruit and vegetables were piled high, as far as the Opera House, flower-sellers would offer buttonholes of gardenia to gentlemen in tails, as in Pygmalion. On the damp pavements, minstrels, smeared in soot, played upon an entirely new instrument, the banjo; you might have imagined yourself to be at the Fondaco dei Turchi, by the Rialto.

I was taken to pantomimes at Drury Lane, London’s Châtelet; to the “Chamber of Horrors” at Mme Tussaud’s, the English Musée Grévin, or to the Maskelyne Theatre, the Robert-Houdin22 of the period. It was the age of the great Edwardian actors, of whom there were then a good dozen including Irving, Beerbohm Tree (my father wrote a socialistic play for Tree that took place in the sulphur mines of Sicily, which Tree never performed), Charles Wyndham and George Alexander. Frank Harris told me about his last visit to Maupassant, at the time that Maupassant was staying with Doctor Blanche, behaving like an animal and walking about on all fours. All these gentlemen wore shiny top-hats and frock coats; in the evening they never wore dinner jackets, but rather tails, and instead of white waistcoats, black ones, together with what were known as “opera hats”, which were sold by Gibus, the hat shop, near Trafalgar Square.

In the City, one heard a great deal of German spoken, while much of England’s wealth was being made in the East, in South Africa, in the first Russian oil wells, and in South America, which had been snatched from the Spanish a hundred years earlier and which, just like Venice’s wealth which lasted until the time of Christopher Columbus, was an inexhaustible source of riches up until 1914.

It was the era of Kipling’s empire, of Wells’s science fiction; the figure of Oscar Wilde, wearing a green carnation on the lapel of his grey frock coat, his chest bursting out of his waistcoat, had only recently disappeared from the Burlington Arcade (Cavendo tutus); my father had accompanied his funeral procession as far as the Bagneux cemetery. Filling O.W.’s favourite place at the Café Royal, that London version of Florian’s, which had originally been a café frequented by French refugees from the Commune, the great Italian singers held sway, presided over by Isidore de Lara: la Tettrazini, la Melba and Caruso. Sherlock Holmes had just made his first appearance with The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was serialised in translation in Le Temps. Sandow, the strongest man in the world, flaunted his swollen torso on posters in Regent Street and Piccadilly. Railway stations were covered in advertisement hoardings, such as those for Stephens’s Ink, which, with their great splashes of blue ink, were already heralding abstract painting. Devonshire House, next door to the newly opened Ritz, was still a brick-built castle, in the middle of London. “A Bicycle Made for Two” was hummed at Henley regattas. Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas were playing to packed houses at the Savoy: Iolanthe or The Mikado. Sickert and the artists from the English colony had returned from Dieppe, under the patronage of George Moore or Jacques-Émile Blanche, while Sargent and Laszlo portrayed the great beauties of the Edwardian or Roosevelt age. Loti, Bourget and Maupassant had had open invitations to dine at the Paris homes of Princess Alice of Monaco or Lady Brooke, the Ranee of Sarawak, to whom I had been introduced by my father, for ten years or more; I had mine in London or Ascot for a further eight years, from 1908 to 1916. At table you could see the maître d’hôtel standing to attention behind his mistress, attending to her alone, and behind each guest stood a servant in a white wig. The same sights could be seen aboard the yacht Princesse Alice, which would sometimes lie at anchor in front of St Mark’s, on its way from Madeira or Monaco: the governess dressed in black from head to foot, the first chambermaid wearing a hat and veil, the footman in morning coat, the kitchen-maids in aprons, the maids who served in the drawing-room wearing lace bonnets, the chambermaids in black silk, the laundry-maids attired in white, as in the novels of Mrs Humphrey Ward. At the Savoy Grill or the Carlton, it was the age of “conversationists”, of “raconteurs”, of “bons viveurs”.

After this London detour, let us return to Venice.

1913

VENICE HAD BECOME the most glittering city in Europe, a sort of summer extension of the Ballets Russes; each of them had their origins in the East. Diaghilev allowed himself to be followed around here by his favourites, and his favourites hung around here, ever ready to extricate him from financial situations that were so desperate that at eight o’clock in the evening he was never sure that he would be able to see the curtain rise at his shows, one hour later. How often have I heard his rich female admirers get up from the table: “Serge is on the phone; there won’t be any performance this evening, nobody has been paid.” In London, at Cavendish Square, I saw the conductor Beecham, the future Sir Thomas, dashing off to see Sir Joseph, his father, to bring back some money; Emerald got away with a bit of a fright.

La Pavlova opened a ballet school; Grand-Duke Michael entertained on Sundays at Kenwood, Oxford educated the youth of Russia, from Youssoupoff to Obolensky.

1913

I NO LONGER BREATHED the air of Venice except through intermediaries.

That October, I watched the girls I went out with in London returning to England, thrilled to have been able to get close to Nijinsky or Fokine in St Mark’s Square; already they were calling them by their first names. They brought back rich spoils, having stripped Venice, that great highway-woman, emptied the Merceria of its last lengths of velvet adorned with golden pomegranates, its green lacquer cabinets, and its glassware. I still think of them as young girls, forgetting that my companions are, or will be, in their eighties: one of them has died from a life of dissipation, too fragile for the alcoholic lures of surrealism and for handsome Blacks; she was the purest of creatures, the most damaged by life; another, the most beautiful, has experienced everything, the triumphs of stage and society, the thrills of historic moments, the most prominent of embassies; Time seems unable to wear down the marble of this statue…; a third lived a long and spectacular life, before falling into the inkwell, where she is still writing her memoirs; the fourth, the poorest of them, seeing that her youth was coming to an end, spent her last guinea on hiring an evening dress for the night; at the party, she would make the acquaintance of a South African magnate, who married her and made her happy.

1914

IN VENICE, the little French circle I had known in my youth had become a literary coterie. “Here comes the Muhlfeld salon,” they used to say in St Mark’s Square upon spotting Henri de Régnier. I possess many books of his that were inscribed to my father, I was mad about his La Cité des eaux and I lapped up his Esquisses vénitiennes, never expecting that a few years later Henri de Régnier would submit my first story to the Mercure de France. He stayed at the Palazzo Dario, the home of a Frenchwoman; behind his proud profile would appear Edmond Jaloux, Vaudoyer, Charles du Bos, Abel Bonnard, Émile Henriot, the brothers Julien and Fernand Ochsé, who had transported their mother’s coffin (Cocteau confirmed this) into their Second Empire dining-room at Neuilly. To me they all looked alike; you could imagine them dancing a farandole on some hump-backed rialto, made of tarred wood, such as the one in the Miracle of the True Cross, a bridge linking Paris to Venice, leading them from the Fenice to the new Théâtre des Champs-Élysees, which had been opened by Astruc the day before. Excepting myself, I used to call them the LONG MOUSTACHES; moustaches from which with the help of a magnifying glass you might have plucked a few tufts of Vercingétorix’s hair, some of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s whiskers, two or three hairs belonging to Flaubert’s BOYS, and last of all, one snatched from the Lion of St Mark’s Square. For these sensitive souls, Venice was their Mecca. Jaloux brought along his Marseilles accent, Marsan his cigars, Miomandre his talent as a dancer, Henri Gonse his rough and ready knowledge, and Henri de Régnier his look of a poplar tree that has shed its leaves in autumn; a delightful man, whose sense of humour maintained a close watch over his love life, the curves of his body ran counter to one another in a backwash of counter-curves, rather like the gilt wood or stucco of a piece of Venetian rococo.

Henri de Régnier

They all rallied to the celebrated war-cry of their master Henri de Régnier: “Vivre avilit” (Living debases), pursuing a Walpolesque, Byronic or Beckfordian dream; they were like disillusioned Princes de Ligne, austerely gentle, full of witty sayings in the manner of Rivarol,23 easily bored, quick to anger, chivalrous, and irritated by everything which life had denied them; they would gather at Florian’s, in front of a glass-framed painting, “beneath the Chinese one” as they used to say; they collected “bibelots”, a word that no longer has any meaning nowadays, lacquer writing cases, engraved mirrors or jasper walking-canes.

They passed around the best addresses among one another: those for point de Venise laceware, for chasubles and stoles; Jaloux would spend his literary prize money at these places; the only wealthy one among them, Gonse, bought himself a wardrobe that was supposed to have belonged to Cardinal Dubois; in order not to melt the lacquer, Gonse never lit a fire in his studio on the Plaine Monceau, but sat in his pelisse, blowing on his fingers to keep warm.

The older ones among them dressed in black; only Jean-Louis Vaudoyer dared wear English cloth.

They knew their Venice like the back of their hands:

“I still remember St Mark’s Square when it had its campanile,” Régnier explained; “do you know that at nine fifty-five, when the building fell down, my gondolier came out with this admirable remark: ‘This campanile disintegrated without killing anybody; it collapsed like a man of honour, è stato galantuomo.’”

“And what is more honourable still,” added Vaudoyer, “is that it collapsed on the 14th of July, as a tribute to the Bastille.”

The English have perhaps never loved Florence, nor the Germans Rome, as much as those Frenchmen loved Venice; if Proust dreamed Venice, they lived and relived her, in her glory as well as in her decadence.

“At the Palazzo Grimani…” Gilbert de Voisins, Taglioni’s grandson, began.

“Sorry… Specify your surroundings, my friend; to which Palazzo Grimani do you refer, there are eleven; the one in Santo Polo?”

“Or the one at San Tonia?”

“… Is it the one at Santa Lucca?”

“… Or the one at Santa Maria Formosa?”

“Or do you mean the Palazzo Grimani that’s known as ‘della Vida’?”

At the time of day when they met for their mysterious “ponche à l’alkermès”,24 the ritual drink that is mentioned on every page of Heures or L’Altana, these fanatical pilgrims would consult one another, their renowned moustaches yellowing from the smoke of their Virginia cigars. Where would they dine? At which osteria (that was the word they used)?

“At the Capello Nero…”

“At the Trovatore…”

“At the Bonvecchiati.”

“At the taverna at the Fenice?”

“At Colombo’s, in the Goldoni district?”

“Bottegone’s, in Calle Vallaresso?”

They had not been Rimbauds; none of them would ever be a Gide, whom they loathed, nor a Giraudoux, whom they preferred, nor Proust, whom they scarcely knew.25 Gide, Giraudoux and Proust had also worn their moustaches long; from now on they would shave them off, or trim them.

These were very charming men, who had little self-confidence, they were embittered and sweet-natured dandies, easily amused or driven to despair, who made fun of inverts such as Thomas Mann’s hero, that Herr von Aschenbach who was bothered by the naked shoulder that a young man bathing at the Lido had dared to reveal beneath his bathrobe!

Women had brought them pain (they were unlucky, they had had to deal with the last generation of women who would make men suffer). They were proud creatures, refined to a degree, whose nerves were made of Murano spun glass; they were refugees in the City of Refuge, who had been jostled about by life, by a vulgar public, that was not yet well-informed or snobbish, and by publishers who were still tight-fisted; they cared not for riches except at the homes of the Rothschilds, where they dined, but not for the sake of wealth alone.

“You look the spitting image of your father,” Vaudoyer told me, on the day before he died. As I grow older, I feel even closer to them than I did at the age of twenty; without the monocle, that is; their own monocles, already literary appurtenances, would be bequeathed to Tzara, who would arrive shortly from Zurich, and later to Radiguet (his was so big that it pulled out his lower eyelid when it eventually reached it). Nobody wore a monocle with such hauteur, his head thrown back, as did Henri de Régnier; his was a sort of bull’s eye hollowed out of the dome of his polished skull, rather like a sixth cupola at St Mark’s. Their winter drug was tea; Jaloux, Abel Bonnard and Du Bos served it to the ladies with full Mandarin rites; authors’ royalties, had they had any, would have been repugnant to them. They were all more or less poor.

As far as the art of good living was concerned, their time was badly chosen; they might have said, as did Paul Bourget to Corpechot, on the 11th of November 1918: “It is now that disaster begins.”

Rather like the campanile that was so dear to Henri de Régnier, at the end of their lives these great lovers of Venice simply collapsed, without a sound, and became “men of honour”.

NOTES

1. Writing prose without realising I was doing so, I discovered implicit grammar, the very latest thing today.

2. The École des Sciences Politiques.

3. Or again, Mistrust when you don’t know, suspect when you do.

4. Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) German-born, American writer and philosopher, influenced by both Marx and Freud; a fierce critic of affluent Western society, he became something of a hero to the youth culture of the 1960s. Morand, of course, was writing in 1970. [Tr.]

5. Now avenue Pierre-I^er-de-Serbie.

6. The office which supervises the finances of local authorities and monitors the use of public funds. [Tr.]

7. Come, let us love, the nights are too fleeting, Come, let us dream, the days are too short… [Tr.]

8. The École Centrale, the Paris grande école for highly qualified engineers. [Tr.]

9. In Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. [Tr.]

10. The battle between the vaporetti and the gondoliers has been going on for sixty years, with the gondoliers’ trade union trying to suggest that its rivals be diverted by the Giudecca.

11. The Fortune was re-gilded in 1971.

12. Nom de plume of the celebrated French anarchist François Koenigstein (1859–92), who was condemned to death and executed. [Tr.]

13. Émile Loubet (1838–1929) was elected as President of the Republic on the death of Félix Faure in 1899. It was he who reprieved Dreyfus. [Tr.]

14. Pierre Gouthière (1732–1813). One of the most famous ornamentalists of the late eighteenth century. He was the inventor of matt gilding. [Tr.]

15. Edmé Patrice Maurice MacMahon (1808–98) was descended from an Irish Jacobite family. He was appointed Marshal of France and Duke of Magenta after the Italian campaign of 1859, but was captured at Sedan in the Franco-German war of 1870–71. He later commanded the Versailles army that sup pressed the Commune and was elected President of the Republic in 1873 for a period of seven years. [Tr.]

16. Or Il Parmigianino (1503–40), as he was known in Italy.

17. The École des Beaux-Arts is situated on the corner of the rue Bonaparte and the Quai Malaquais. [Tr.]

18. In 1970.

19. In 1970.

20. Unlike Paris, London has direct flights to Venice throughout the year.

21. Paul Cambon (1843–1924) was French Ambassador to London from 1898–1920 and helped bring about the Entente Cordiale of 1904. [Tr.]

22. Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805–71) achieved legendary fame as a conjuror and magician. [Tr.]

23. Antoine Rivarol (1753–1801) was a French writer famous for his conversational wit. He was the author of Le Petit Almanach des grands hommes, in which he directed his caustic sarcasm at Parisian society. [Tr.]

24. A punch distilled from cinnamon, cloves and various aromatic herbs, that was dyed red with kermes. [Tr.]

25. Except for Edmondjaloux.