Venices

III MORTE IN MASCHERA, 1950

MARIA P—, a Venetian friend whom I questioned about the end of the last war, in which she herself had been involved, told me: “Venice was a dismal place during that winter of 1945; everything was rationed; news, especially: the local press was full of details about other fronts, about the German advance in Alsace, but was silent about what was taking place on our own doorstep; there were maps of the Neisse front, but nothing about the Ravenna-Bologna one. I could hear the bombs destroying Padua. There was no more electricity; the vaporetti had no fuel; there were notices on the walls providing descriptions of all sorts of lethal contraptions that fell out of the sky, which the public should not touch.

“On the 26th of April, my Gazzettino appeared in a smaller format. On the 27th of April, it had become a single sheet of paper: Milan occupied, Mussolini arrested, Canadian troops at Mestre. On the 28th, my newspaper was nothing but a leaflet, in which the Volunteers for Freedom and its glorious fighters were restoring the glory of the Risorgimento to Italy, which had been darkened by twenty years of Nazi-fascist barbarism. The Canadian armoured-cars would not stay for long; once Venice was taken, the Allies sped off in great haste: intent on preventing Tito from spilling over into the Julian Veneto…”

SEPTEMBER 1951

A EUROPEAN FESTIVAL, twenty years old today… A man of taste hurled his joy at being alive into the Cannaregio. Did not Ludwig II of Bavaria drown himself in two feet of water?

It would be absurd to talk about this latest evening like a young girl discussing her first dance, but from the moment I arrived I knew that I was coming to say farewell to a certain world; a recluse through necessity and alone these past eleven years, from the top of my glacier I suddenly fell upon a delightful skirmish, into a death knell of the imagination. A ball? A ball in Italy, as in Stendhal!

In St Mark’s Square, there was what a Venetian Montaigne would call “the throng of foreign peoples”. It wasn’t a matter of hairdressers or make-up girls having missed their trains or planes, of “ticket-holders” jeopardised by last-minute defections — local politics, the American press, left-wing puritanism and the resentment of those who had been excluded were all blended together here.

On the terrace of Florian’s, which was littered with more feathers than an eiderdown, Churchill, his paintbox in a shoulder-bag, held up his fingers in a V-sign, but no one was interested; that day, V stood only for Venice.

Whether he was conscious of it or being challenging, it was pleasing to think that a great amateur painter was parading himself, just for the sake of bringing Venice back to life, of helping those characters painted by great or lesser masters — captive goddesses on their Gobelins tapestries, who had grown bored on their museum canvases — to emerge from their frames; others could have done so, but only he dared; in a world of yellow-bellies, he was a caballero.

As I walked around, I admired a Venice that was inflamed in red and saffron, and I was reminded of spiny rock-fish, with monstrous heads, emerging from a dish of bouillabaisse.

We wanted to be the first, so that we could see without being seen. The porter examined our invitation cards as carefully as a cashier might look at a large denomination banknote, so many were the forged invitations circulating.

It was too early. B. was not yet dressed; he received us with good humour, his brow beaded in sweat, and in shirtsleeves, for he had not yet donned his Gagliostro costume, being more concerned with decorating his palazzo.

Leaning over the main balcony, which was festooned with girandole, I looked out over the spectators who had been squeezed into the narrow embankments and were hanging on to the cornices along the length of the houses. Only the church of San Geremia, lit tangentially like a backdrop in a theatre, separated the Palazzo Labia from the Grand Canal. In neighbouring windows, rented out for a fortune, heads were leaning out from stacked floors over the empty space below.

All that Venice could muster in the way of boats and small craft was compressed into this junction of the city’s two biggest canals.

The windows of the palazzi were draped in tapestries, and the Aubusson carpets that ran down the steps were soaked in the waters of the Canal.

Through the exhaust fumes, the exhalations of tobacco and the smoke from the open-air rotisseries and burning torches, the projectors beamed down directly upon the first arrivals.

“Miracolo vivente di sogno e poesia!” cried a woman selling printed handkerchiefs beneath an open parasol, as she dashed off St Mark lions, one paw resting on the gospel.

Venice that evening added her own note of unreality to the illusions of a festival; the “guests” loomed out of the darkness into the falso giorno of a city that was herself a work of artifice. Lights concealed in corners beamed down as the caterpillar-like procession wended its way forward.

The theme of the spectacle: Marco Polo, the prodigal son, was returning home, bringing back with him to the Adriatic Chinese Chippendales or Turks painted by Liotard.1

Photographers from the world’s press directed their gleaming lenses at the principal performers.

Between two figures of Barbary apes flanked by a Mandarin court, on Tartary junks more gilded than the Bucintoro, a Catalan with waxed moustaches basked in the beams of light. Damascened in silver, the giants followed. And behind them came the goyescas, their roles performed by descendants of Goya’s models, who were given an ovation from the shops below to the roofs above.

The stream of fire that surged the length of these floating altars led towards the entrance to the Cannaregio, where those taking part in the procession set foot on a Savonnerie carpet drenched in the waters of the dark canal; upon disembarking, the women secured their footing with the help of Moorish porters who restored their delicate balance, flanked by two rows of yellow galley slaves, their oars held erect.

Chandeliers from Murano, decorated with real flowers, as delicate as those confections of threaded sugar that adorned Venetian festivals during the Renaissance, lit up the inner courtyard; there people were already bustling about preparing their tableaux vivants of the Beauvais tapestries that hung from the walls, the famous Parties du monde.

Without a care for the morrow, pleasure-loving Europeans, oil-rich Asians, bored Americans, kings from Candide, the jet-setters and a sea of shipowners continued to file past the church on the corner, where San Geremia did his best to restrain his lamentations: “You’re heading straight for the cemetery…” he cried. “Watch out for San Michele!”

The masked apotheosis of that night twenty years ago was a Catherine II, a sky-blue sash across her bust, adorned, like some glacier, with diamonds from the Urals: she is no longer alive. I can see a Louis XIV in gold and white and, like some intoxicating perfume, I can still sniff his victorious presence; his sumptuous garb upset a colleague dressed in designer clothes, his hair as golden as a comet, who followed behind: today they are both dead. A Parisian Petronius who afterwards towered above the crowd of onlookers from the top of his palanquin, the very image of the glorious life, now sleeps in the peace of the graveyard. A bacchante, the English queen of Paris, dressed only in a panther skin, was led along by little Caribs; her steely eyes and her frosty laugh were extinguished forever immediately after her triumph.

Venice is the very last refuge on earth for the curious stroller; the free spectacle is a legacy from the Romans; everything offers the opportunity for amusement, the woman at her doorway whipping up mayonnaise, the Englishwoman at her easel, the solitary singer sitting on a gondoliers’ bench, a child kicking his ball among the nibbling pigeons…

Leaving the Labia, the festival extended out on to the square. B— had wanted it to be so; in order to return to our hotel, in the direction of the station, we had to cross the Campo San Geremia; there everything danced, apart from the houses. Acrobats were reconstructing the famous pyramid, known as The Strength of Hercules, after the wooden model in the Correr Museum. The masked beauties had begun to mix with the crowd, who admired them without any envy; for the natural democracy of the Mediterranean people makes no distinction between the piano nobile and the pavement. (The first time I had observed this for myself was in the Appenines, at Vigoleno; the villagers had invaded the castle where Maria passed from the arms of her gardener into those of her chauffeur.)

Above our heads, a tight-rope walker dressed as a bear edged from one rooftop to another; tumblers and acrobats stood in pyramids, balancing at the level of the guttering; the prattle of the street salesmen and the jeers of the circus clowns drowned the splashing of the jousters on the canal and the shouts of the acrobats on their stilts. Jean de Castellane, emerging from a ball at the Hôtel de Ville would mutter wearily: “It’s like the street… with a roof on top.” In Venice, the street is like a palazzo without a roof.

It took twenty years for the Palazzo Labia, which was sold, to become a sad, peninsular administrative building.

Since these lines were written, the moving spirit of the resurgent Venice that evening has also passed on to the land of shadows.

After the tableaux vivants come the still-lifes.

1954 THE GIORGIONE EXHIBITION

GIORGIONE… When I was twenty, people swore by him alone; Berenson and D’Annunzio had just discovered him. Everything was suddenly attributed to this genius who died very young; works by Titian, Cima de Conegliano, Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma the Elder and Lotto were seized and ascribed to this great unknown artist. My earliest savings were spent purchasing books by B.B. in which one unexpectedly discovered in Giorgione pre-Poussin landscapes, picturesque music, romanticism (The Tempest), the sensitivity of chiaroscuro, the Debussy-like atmosphere, created by shepherds with their theorbos, and the veils that Isadora Duncan wore; I remember a devout pilgrimage to Castelfranco (not daring to admit my disappointment at seeing his Madonna), in one of the earliest Fords…

Today it is the Mostra in Venice. In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Pietro Zampetti barely conceals his disillusionment. What remains of Giorgione? Three authentic portraits! What a battleground it’s been! The critics can only agree about the Pala at Castelfranco, the Three Philosophers in Vienna and the Tempest from the Ospedale Civile; after one and a half centuries the Judith in Leningrad has been snatched by Raphael and restored to Giorgione for the time being, but doubts persist as to the Young Man in Berlin, the Young Woman in Vienna, the Madonna at the Ashmolean, the Sleeping Venus in Dresden, and the Man with an Arrow in Vienna. As for the Concert, there is talk of a collaboration with Titian… The Sick Man may be by Leonardo. Even the Three Ages in the Pitti Palace are ascribed to Lotto; the most famous paintings by Giorgione are lost… others are attributed to the friend who shared his studio, Titian, with whom he had collaborated when they were pupils of Bellini’s, and who, in his case, was lucky enough not to die at the age of thirty-three.

Everywhere, in Italian art criticism, one hears of nothing but confusione and terreno di nebulosità, of influsso giorgionesco, or derivazione giorgionesca. Giorgione is growing ever more distant…

Max Jacob

APRIL 1964 CRAZY BIDDING

ELEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning; it might have been dawn, the sky was so murky. This unwashed Venice reminds me of those postcards sent by Max Jacob, in which the cigar ash crushed into the gouache represented suburban fog. There was a biting north wind; we were walking along the Grand Canal, where the surface of the water was being pummelled by the wind, accompanied by the noise of those Italian motor engines that vibrate like a bowstring relieved of its arrow.

The auction began at midday, at the Palazzo Labia. Strapped tightly into his jacket, the forehead of an intellectual and slim as a sub-lieutenant, a precise, ingenuous look in his eye, a partaker of all the good things in life, M.R. had brought me along to the sale at the Labia, the last Venetian palace to disgorge its riches; he knew that all human possessions are nothing more than a warehouse…

Our munificent friend B. had decided to hold out against Time; to rebuild a palace was to reject the abyss, it was like writing the Temps perdu. Once his work was achieved, B. was no longer interested in it.

Even Proust, dreaming about what he would like to do once the Great War was over, imagined himself as the owner of a Venetian palace, where, “like Réjane”, he would have invited the Poulet Quartet to play Fauré for him “as the dawn rose over the Grand Canal”.

The frescoes in the palazzo were so famous in their day that Reynolds and Fragonard made the journey to Venice in order to make copies of them. In the old days, at the turn of the century Labia, when the guide was showing people the paintings on the celebrated ceiling, he used to say: “Signori, PEGASUS PUTS CHRONOS TO FLIGHT.”

Who will ever put Time to flight?

As we were walking along the canal, M.R. told me the history of the Labias: half a century of abusive power, of gold plates being hurled from the windows, of virgin walls being entrusted to the talents of Tiepolo, of Zugno, of Magno, of Diziani; ruined by Napoleon, the Labias had handed over the building to the Lobkowitz family, until a South African tycoon, who, extraordinarily enough, was also called Labia, bought back this house in which he wished he had been born. As they were negotiating the sale, he is said to have made the following play on words: L’abbia o non l’abbia, sarò sempre Labia.2

We had to clamber over barricades of paintings that looked even bigger now that they had been taken down, and over consoles, their gilt fading, which were being carried down the stairs as the rooms that had been laid waste by the auctioneers were cleared. Stripped of their chandeliers, the ceilings revealed rat holes and brickwork in a deplorable condition, its stucco chipped and flaking, held together by worm-infested pillars. Hollow footsteps echoed on the uncarpeted floors. Here, shorn of its former livery — Italian footmen trussed in gold like maritime proveditors — labourers were knocking back flasks of wine.

The Baroque, that exuberance of joy, cannot cope with neglect.

In the main courtyard, the international antique dealers, admired from a distance by the small traders from the alleys of Venice, had taken their places. Experts and dealers, who had flown in from Chelsea or Manhattan, magnifying glasses in hand, were swamped by a stream of noble effigies and horned doges, and mingled together amidst a Capernaum of off-stage operatics. Tax inspectors, Venetian fiscal authorities and spies from the Treasury and Customs and Excise departments watched the future bidders closely.

Beneath M.R.’s ivory hammer, an entire art-lover’s world would vanish; artefacts have no master.

Only the Tiepolos would remain, their fate bound to that of the walls of the empty building: The Negro with a Strawberry, The White Horse, The Musicians’ Gallery; The Embarkation of Antony and Cleopatra, The Greyhound with Centurions, the famous perspective of The Silver Dish. Above them was the throng of goddesses, painted as permanent frescoes, and who were now mistresses of a deserted Palazzo Labia, laughing for all eternity, like the Rhinemaidens.

Detached from their supports, in whose arms would these beautiful women now lie? Where would these Bacchuses parade their drunkenness, or these Ceres their harvests? Casting a dark glance at their bidders, ermine-cloaked doges on bituminous canvases no longer ascended the Giants’ staircase, but that of the auction house. Marshals clutching their batons, ordered the assault, but the voices of the auctioneers were louder. Removal men lolled about on sinuous settees, intended for voluptuous siestas; light from the chandeliers beamed down on the buyers; floating upon this ocean of highly-valued objects were squadrons of Chinese vases, candelabra, girandola, jugs and pots. To the highest bidder for prows of ships that would never see battle again would go the coats of arms, destined for the hallways of Greek shipowners.

“At a hundred thousand lire, no further bids?” Beneath the naked vaults, hewn from Istrian marble, the words echoed: No further bids…

These were the last rites for the life, not of a great collector, but of a great art lover… Italy has one camposanto fewer…

1964

JUST AS IN 1917 I had observed Venice cast its shadow over my exiled life, similarly, as I left that auction sale, the Venice of the 1960s was to open up a gulf between my mature years and old age. Something, or someone, leads me, has always led me, whenever I believed I was paving my own path.

I look upon that world of yesteryear without resentment, nor regret; quite simply, it no longer exists; for me, at least, since it continues, without any bother or fuss, in a universe that is a little more brutal, a little more doomed, and in which the average level of virtues and vices must have remained more or less constant. It is merely that its ways are no longer mine; the barber cuts my hair with a pair of clippers; at the restaurant I am obliged to sit opposite my guest, not next to him, on a stool; hotels refuse my dog; when I arrive, the porter no longer takes the keys of my car in order to park it; at restaurants it is only in Greece that I am allowed to go and choose what I want from the stove; in Paris there is no longer any difference between the pavement and the road; at parties, I don’t recognise people behind their beards and wigs, and I can’t keep pace with so many first names. In the old days, the Mediterranean was my swimming-pool; nowadays, if I want to swim in it, I need the permission of the Russian or American fleets. Rheumatism confines me to drinking Vittel; can one go out in the evening without a glass in one’s hand? It casts a chill on the evening and offends one’s hostess, who feels that her dinner party is thereby undermined. Paintings used to make me happy; today’s art is the painting of iconoclasts. “You’re a painter, why haven’t you continued painting?” I asked Robert Bresson. “Because I would have committed suicide,” he answered. As for dodecaphonic music, I only have to think of it to prefer death.

Awkward to look after, there’s nothing left for me to do down here except make way; I shall never accustom myself to electronic gadgetry, nor to living in a country whose fate is being determined six thousand kilometres from where I live.

Everything sets one’s teeth on edge in this world where it is always rush-hour and where children want to be Einsteins; the couples who go off to market clasping one another, as they see in the films, get on one’s nerves; their kisses in public, it’s no longer kissing, but eating; women’s flesh is treated like meat. To crown it all, the young are far better looking than we were.

Yesterday, during mass in a little Canadian chapel, I was handed a cardboard box which everyone dipped into: it contained the hosts; as a child I was taught that to touch a host, even if it was not consecrated, was a sacrilege; I excused myself, saying that I could not take communion, not having been to confession in the morning; they smiled; it was quite customary to receive God without going to confession.

I have been away for too long; at home they speak a foreign language I no longer understand; besides, no dictionary exists.

Old age is governed by the minus sign: one is less and less intelligent, less and less foolish.

Autumn; lying fallow until now, the dead leaves begin to stir, clinging to the rim, rolling on towards winter.

1963

SERENATA A TRE 196…

THIS PIAZZETTA reminds me of something… An earlier disappointment, some misadventure that lay dormant here, unperturbed by memory for years… I allude to it only because after such a long time it seems to me to take on a symbolic value.

Cats in Venice never disturb themselves either, having nothing to fear from cars; the only criticism I have of cats is that they never say good morning. Venetian cats look as if they are a part of the ground; they don’t wear collars; their bellies are like deflated bagpipes, and in this treeless city they no longer know how to climb; they are weary of life, for there are too many mice, too many pigeons.

Here is one of them, painted on the outside of this little house. I am reminded of Tintoretto and of Giorgione, who both began life as house painters…

Here I am… so many years ago…

Beguiling C—. Even her ghost makes a fool of me! Who would not be led astray, beyond the grave? When she enraptured me, C— certainly did not corrupt my innocence, but how often did I leave her, raging at the confusion she brought to my emotions; and I was even more furious when her reappearance was enough to crush all resentment.

How to explain it? That insolent way she held her head, her enigmatic eyes, defiant and yellow as the deepest agate, her nose with its quivering nostrils, her unruly hair hat was like a fire no hat could extinguish. The centuries blended in her, she was proud like the Renaissance, as frivolous as the Baroque. A queen and a rag-and-bone woman; a sibyl and a little girl.

She travelled throughout her life, even within Venice, staying one year with aristocrats, another living among the women who threaded pearls or the boatmen on the Giudecca. She, who never opened a book, where did she gain a general knowledge that was often erudite? The key to that beautiful, fleshly enigma is not one to be unlocked easily.

She was so delectable that her mere presence was a veritable assault on one’s morals. Very tall, she would examine you thoroughly and with expertise from on high; you felt that even if you lay her on her back she would still pinch you, like a crab, that she would never ask for mercy, always consenting, but never giving of herself.

That was what I was suddenly reminded of by the little house in the Piazzetta, and the cat painted a tempera on the cartouche.

“Come this evening, after dinner… Don’t come in by the door to the canal, you’d be seen too easily. Go by the back door, the campo is always deserted.”

That evening, the door was ajar. The drawing-room was empty…

If she had changed her mind, C— would not have left the house unlocked; she would be expecting me, hoping that I would come, she would keep our appointment. I went straight to the bedroom, like a gourmand drawn to the kitchen. The door was unbolted.

“C—, it’s me!”

I could smell her behind the door.

I looked through the key-hole; a shirt was in the way. C— liked playing pranks, and I also knew she was a tease. But why leave me still yearning?

My ear at the door-frame, my hands on the cold marble mantel-piece. I hold my breath: there are two women. I can hear them satisfying one another; the pleasures of the eavesdropper; that lapping sound is not water splashing against the door of the house… I was granted the entire sequence, right up to the squealing of a rabbit carried away by rapaciousness…

Afterwards there was silence, total suspense. I knocked, hoping that it was just a curtain-raiser, C— was someone who liked to share. Nothing.

Every minute made me feel more foolish, more lonely, more excluded.

That evening, to my great disappointment, the door was not opened; everywhere Industry prevailed over Labour…

I never knew the secret of that evening. Later on, I heard tell of a family story, involving two female cousins. Who had insisted on that door being shut? C—, out of malice? The other person, out of jealousy or prudery, or because she liked secrecy? Or was it Man, in the person of myself, being pilloried?

Both of them are dead; they moan elsewhere, stoking the fires of hell. Above the entrance to the little house, I find the cartouche on the distempered wall: there one sees a cat lusting after two smoked herring…

I returned to the hotel, blaming myself and meditating bitterly on the role of men today, poor subjugated conquerors, routed by the feminist triumph that is breaking out everywhere; governors governed; one-time masters of the house doing the shopping, like Jouhandeau,3 whose slavery is the explanation for his wonderful portraits of Élise (like all men, Marcel is a coward; what redeems him is that at the last moment he reveals himself, through his sensitivity, to be more of a woman than women themselves…)

We are seeing the dawn of a primitive matriarchy, a post-nuclear one, it occurs to me. The despotic Don Juans and pimps, revealed to us in their majesty in so many cliché-ridden accounts, are nothing but poor submissive little girls who have surrendered. The recent strike by women in the USA, the republishing of Lysistrata; democracy, the blackmailer of the weak, brackets the Female with those who were once subjugated, the Blacks, servants, the working class, children and all those liberated people who have become the masters. The composition of the masses will change, but the masses will remain; that is what is meant by “revolution”, the etymology indicates the nature of the word: a return to the point of departure. Women, for their part, will recover from all this and will perfect their sensual aspirations. I can remember those handsome Berber farmers, who had come down from the Rif mountains and were being forcibly led to the souks by their wives; I used to come across them in Tangiers, being coaxed along by them into the shops and spending a fortune on useless necklaces, gaudy silks and hideous furnishing materials; once they were back home, they left all their fine apparel on their doorsteps and went back to their labours.

SEPTEMBER 1965 FROM THE TOP OF THE CAMPANILE

FROM THE TOP of the Campanile I survey the whole of Venice, which is as spread out as New York is vertical, as salmon-pink as London is black and gold. The whole place is bathed in showers, very much like a water-colour, with off-whites and dull beiges, picked out by the dark crimson shades of walls that look like the flesh of tuna. A violent breeze ripples through the Lagoon, driving clouds that are as light as those new nylon sails at the regattas on the Lido.

Through the iron bars on the top floor, which dissuade those contemplating suicide from doing so, I could see St Mark’s as if glued to the Doges’ Palace, at once a refuge, a treasury and an exit door from one of the wings of the theatre that is Venice. From this platform, one understands better the true role of St Mark’s, which was that of a private chapel to the Palace, not a public building as it is today, and not a basilica as is commonly believed.

At the entrance, I could make out the four figures on the porphyry relief with their broken boxer’s noses; the four Lysippus horses were leaping into the clouds, Venice’s only horses bowing their necks to which the gold still adheres, proud to be on view, but regretting, as former champions, that they could not challenge Colleone’s mount, or, if need be, Victor-Emmanuel’s prancing palfrey.

Perhaps the St Mark’s horses were nostalgic for their journey to Paris in 1798, their farewell to the tearful Venetians, their walk to the quayside and their embarkation aboard the French frigate La Sensible, their arrival at Toulon amidst all the paintings from the Italian campaign, their apotheosis on the Champ-de-Mars, behind the dromedaries and their installation on the Arc du Carrousel, to the accompaniment of formal addresses:

Et si de tes palais ils décorent le faîte

C’est par droit de vertu, non par droit de conquête.4

Anchored in front of San Giorgio Maggiore, the bulk of a British aircraft-carrier distorted the proportions, concealing the Lido which lay on the horizon, like a sleeping crocodile on the surface of the water. From on high I scanned the play of the currents, varying in shade accord ing to the salt content, where the antique green intersected the dirty green, the colour of excavated jade. Waterways marked out with stakes that are sunk into the mud, and slumbering dykes through which only the pilots and the old fishermen know how to find their way.

Goethe and Taine have described this view, from this very point; they saw those tables from Quadri’s café dotted in front of the Procuraties. Up there, I thought of Byron’s remark: “Nature alone does not lie”,… except for Venice, which does make nature lie and surpasses her; only man has dared put this challenge to the physical and architectural laws; what other creature — apart from the swallow building its nest — can make a soft substance hard? Who would have dared slosh about in this mud?

“The object is never as dark as its reflection,” painters say; only the reflection of Venice in our memories is lighter than the reality.

Who would attempt to build her again?

1965

DISCOVERED IN Cassini’s bookshop in the Via 22 Marzo the Memoirs of the last doge, Ludovico Manin: “10 May 1797; the French are at Mestre, any resistance is useless; the Serenissima arranged to bring in Dalmatian troops, but not in sufficient number. Without any bounty, Venice runs the risk of pillaging and fire.” “Tonight,” adds the doge, “we shall not sleep in our beds.” Poor Manin, whose graphic coat of arms bore an Adonis asleep beneath a tree…

The Council of Ten decided to let the consul, Villetard, know that the government of Venice would welcome the French troops “in a friendly manner”. The words overdid it; let the Venetians keep their friendship for them selves, Villetard replied to the doge.

On the 12th of May, the Slavic troops re-embarked for Dalmatia from the Giudecca. The French arrived. Would it mean a bloodbath? No. Manin shed tears as nobody has shed them since Diderot. Seven days later, there was a masked ball at the Fenice; both French and Venetian guards at the doors. On the 22nd, a Te Deum at St Mark’s. Contributions to the war were raised; hostages; the Librod’oro delle nobiltà veneziana was burnt. Another party at the Fenice, not very successful; how was it possible not to be frightened when you knew that Bonaparte, a few leagues away from here, had exclaimed: “I shall be the Attila Venice”?…5 General Baraguay, who was staying at Palazzo Pisani, held a reception; co-operation was languida. A committee from the Directoire arrived and searched through the libraries, taking away five hundred rare books and manuscripts and thirty of the best paintings.

On the 14th of August, Masséna moved into the Palazzo Gradenigo. Families that owned more than one gondola had to relinquish them to the occupying forces, together with the gondoliers, who were expected to provide food for themselves; the conscripts fled. Nevertheless, five theatres remained open. Sérurier arrived, with a large general staff; the Arsenal was emptied; they set fire to the Bucintoro. The end of the Serenissima (Memoirs of L. Manin, Venice, 1886).

Mallet du Pan, at the time, Molmenti, later on, and Guy Dumas, in our own time, have persuaded us that Venice was corrupt and ridden with vice; she was no more so than the rest of Europe, this Serenissima that had endured for thirteen centuries, and whose disappearance was lamented by all her people.

Whether it was 1797 or 1945, any more the soldiers of the Directoire than the New Zealand armoured car troops under the command of the English General Freyberg, Venice has scarcely put up fierce resistance; she wanted to avoid pillage and fire; the names of the conquering generals are forgotten in a few months, treaties turn yellow after ten years, and empires will never be other than empires; the duty of a unique city is to survive.6

APRIL 196…

THE HEIGHTS and the depths of Venice, where human life fluctuated for so long between two extremes, between piombi and pozzi, between the drains up above, and the wells beneath; a town of poor fishermen and a golden city; along the same canal passed both the Wagner of the duet from Tristan and the man of the funebral gondola, his own. Non nobis, Domine…

1908–1970

THE THREE AGES OF MAN

HOW MANY YEARS, social circles, fashions, pledges and hopes have I seen pass by beneath these Procuraties, among these after-dinner strollers… The soldiers from the time of the Triple Alliance carrying their sabres that were never drawn, under their arms; their bulging riding britches and their loose-fitting boots, Tor di Quinto style, with wide regimental stripes, yellow, blue and cerise, and their huge kepis and their plumes, wearing a monocle and a curled-up Wilhelm II moustache; the Venetian women in their black shawls (and the noise of their clogs on the pavement, now nothing but a memory); the beautiful foreign women, with their feathered boas and their high collars drawn taut with stays, holding their dress in one hand, a tortoise-shell lorgnette or a fan in the other.

Next came the Allied armies in their green and bronze, or khaki uniforms, and their medals.

Then the blackshirts, the Balbo-like beards, the riding britches once more, but this time worn down to the knees, in the knickerbocker style, like the Guards; and still those boots, now very tight-fitting; the rhythmic march, the banners, the stacks of weapons and the commemorative crowns, followed by the ministers in gaiters (in morning coats and bowler hats); more ladies, sportswomen wearing eye-shades in the style of Suzanne Lenglen, or balillas… Workers’ marches… In about 1935, the Mussolini style gave way to uniforms in the Hitler mould: white tunics over tobacco-coloured trousers.

Pursuing History at a trot, it is now the Liberation, with American jackets everywhere and high-laced military boots; armbands bearing the letters MP, cowboy shirts and open collars, Kodak cameras with telephoto lens, and Lucky Strikes in their holsters.

And now here we are today: weeping willow hairstyles, bell-bottoms worn over oilskins, dresses cut from old curtains that drag along among the rubbish, sandals, bare feet, a sleeping-bag over the shoulder, the pilgrimages to the source. It’s a time of letting go, of “let’s crash down here, no point in going any further”.

I shall bring this procession of ghosts through St Mark’s Square to a halt, not being a Carpaccio; nor a Saint-Simon, who nevertheless wrote: “These trifles are scarcely ever included in the Memoirs; however, they give an accurate idea of almost everything one looks for in them.”

There’s a dispute between the Venice city council and the military authorities which, like their equivalents in every country, do not want to relinquish anything. Venice is still scattered with islands or islets which are no longer of any strategic importance: Santo Spirito, Lazaretto Vecchio, La Celestia, San Giacomo in Palude, La Certosa… Those old monasteries, those fortresses that have nothing to defend… The Italian empire is long past and the Office of Tourism requires hotels and more hotels.

PIAZZALE ROMA, 197…

WHAT THE railway line began, the pneumatic tyre has achieved. The land takes its revenge over the sea; ever since 1931 those who supported terra firma were the victors, having their way against Mussolini who, being artistically minded, wanted to cut off Venice from the Italian mainland.

Confronted with a garage for mammoths, Europe hurls herself upon Venice, hurriedly devours her, and then goes away again. Thieves who steal spare wheels, those who falsify police placards, money-changers, hitchhiking prostitutes and other knaves add to the confusion of the pilgrims in a Europe that is trying to patch together her different parts.

Bridges built of ancient brick are interspersed with foot bridges made of concrete, which are themselves overlooked by the multi-lane flyovers. The eurobuses and trains on rubber wheels holding eighty passengers pass minibuses setting off for Nepal. The whole of this Santa Croce district smokes with gas and carbon monoxide, Cinzano fumes and marijuana. Collapsing suitcases that have fallen off the top decks of buses like moraines from a moving glacier, the Japanese with their top-heavy Leicas, the 16mm film strewn over the ground, the mattresses and rolled-up sleeping-bags, bulging more with cooking utensils than with stuffing, everybody converges in this hotchpotch of humanity where people who have driven through the night try to glimpse Venice on a morning such as this, when the sun has not managed to pierce through the kilometres of dust.

Unlike the Basilica of St Mark’s, the Piazzale Roma is a cathedral of drivers. You have to choose between the museum and life.

NOTES

1. Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–89) was a Swiss artist and engraver widely admired for his precise and detailed portraits of Oriental people. [Tr.]

2. Which means broadly: “Whether I have the Palazzo Labia or not, I shall always be a Labia.” [Tr.]

3. Marcel Jouhandeau (1888–1979) was a prolific French novelist and essayist who in certain of his books (in particular, Chroniques maritales, 1935) provided a ruthless analysis of the difficulties of conjugal life and his relationship with his wife Élise. [Tr.]

4. And if they adorn the summits of your palaces / It is by right of virtue, not by right of conquest. [Tr.]

5. “lo sarò un Attila per lo stato veneto.”

6. This was what I tried to explain to Paul Reynaud, as gently as possible, one spring evening in London in 1940, when he maintained that not a stone should be left standing in Paris. There had been four of us dining at Ava Wigram’s house, with Hore-Belisha; the British Secretary of State for War had arrived late after making a speech in the House of Commons and had immediately wanted to hear himself again, insisting that a wireless set be placed on the table, thereby making all conversation impossible. Hore-Belisha approved of Reynaud. Both men are dead; Paris remains.