Venices

II THE QUARANTINE FLAG A NIGHT IN VENICE, EARLY 1918

IT WAS NO LONGER a time for engraved mirrors or little Negro boys made from spun glass.

The Palace of the Ancients was in danger of collapse.

After a lightning visit to the borders of the Veneto, where the French general staff was trying to raise Italian morale, I was waiting for a train which didn’t arrive. Venice’s old railway station was illuminated by the beams of searchlights from the Anglo-French torpedo-boats that patrolled the Adriatic; bright flares fired from sixty Venetian forts had put an end to the Austrians’ rather ineffectual raids. What remains with me is the unreality of that autumn night, in which the dome of San Simeone Piccolo — as ever — loomed up, before dipping its head in the Grand Canal once more, while, in turn, San Simeone Grande was lit up, and then the Scalzi bridge and church, that solid, joyful setting out of some ecclesiastical operetta with its display of grandiloquent emblems on its façade (we forget that Bernini was also a playwright).

That night, as a crescent moon vainly awaited its next phase, in a sky that was very dark, I suddenly became aware of a transformation in the war; the wind of defeat was blowing over Rome, where Giolitti’s comfortable neutrality was already regretted; only burgeoning fascism swore loyalty to the Entente; its supporters were then no more than a handful of devotees ready to shout: Vive la France!

A year spent in Paris had just made me the astonished witness of the fallibility of our leaders. There was the swaggering Viviani (“they are destroyed”), the predictions of Joffre in 1914 (“it will be over by Christmas”), and of Nivelle (“this offensive will be the last”). Day by day the older generations were losing their glamour.

It was not for me to protest because two hundred thousand men had been sacrificed in trying to cross a river, and I was not entitled to speak on behalf of my brothers who were still at war; but being a non-combatant, did I not have a duty to help them, in some other way? Could I not express the mood I was experiencing in a different way? Perhaps, in this gloomy station, in this darkened Venice, my Nuits would be conceived? It would be my way of indicating that portents were appearing in the sky. My Nuits would speak not in the name of those who had died, but on behalf of the dead, to divert them, to show sympathy for them, to tell them that I never stopped thinking of them, and especially of those classmates of the years 1908–1913 who had been so effectively decimated.

“That shameful period from 1914 to 1918,” Larbaud dared to write at that time, in his Alicante Journal, speaking as a humanist and as an outraged European, seemed to us, in 1917, like a vague sort of liberation.

“1917, the year of confusion,” Poincaré would say later; for us, it was a disturbing year. A year of despair for the only truly cosmopolitan generation that had appeared in France since the Encyclopédistes.

Fourteen months spent on the fringes of power had taught me a great deal;1 I had seen some great Frenchmen, all of whom hoped for victory, grow suspicious of one another, tear each other apart and exclude one another in the name of the sacred union: Briand, who while approving Prince Sixte’s dialogues with Vienna, secretly pursued a policy of pacifism that was condemned severely by the Government; Ribot, who succeeded him, reckoned him to be suspect; and then this same Ribot was soon hounded out by Clemenceau who did not hesitate to let Briand go to the High Court; I admired Philippe Berthelot, who, single-handed, had been responsible for our foreign policy ever since the outbreak of war, refusing to set foot in the Élysée, where Poincaré awaited him in vain for four years and never forgave him for this insult. I had observed the unjust, but total disgrace of Berthelot, who was sacrificed by Ribot to a Parliament he openly despised, a Berthelot who was abruptly forgotten by all of those who had previously hung about at his heels, soliciting diplomatic assignments or extensions, until Clemenceau, having noticed how this great servant of the State had been slandered, took him back into his service. This same “Tiger” Clemenceau admitted to a weakness for Joseph Caillaux; he would have been sorry to have had him shot. I remember what Jules Cambon, at the end of his life, told me about Clemenceau: “Against my wishes, Clemenceau made me one of the five delegates to the Versailles Conference. The Anglo-Saxon delegates who were there worked together. For our part, we never had any meetings… I was never given any instructions at all. André Tardieu was the only one among us who had any idea what Clemenceau was thinking… The Tiger was still like some elderly student, fairly ignorant, not very intelligent, but generous and tenacious… As far as war is concerned, one has to admire his ability, for he succeeded, but what a pity that he took it upon himself to make peace!”

The treachery of office life, the effeteness of the salon, the treachery of the parliamentary corridor, the semi-blackmail that went on, the sound of the safe’s combination lock being opened for secret funds or for journalists’ “envelopes”: the whole complexity of political machinery had been paraded before the young and insignificant attaché I was in 1916 and 1917.

At that moment, on the eve of my departure for Rome, as 1917 gave way to 1918, I jotted down in the last pages of my Journal the impression that the war suddenly made on me: “It has a different stench, it’s a Luciferean conspiracy.” Europe was beginning to smell.

From the heart of Italy, life in Paris, where I had just come from, took on another aspect: I had witnessed the terrible year of 1917, when Europe, as we now realize, had almost collapsed; 1917 was the year of peace initiatives, of the Coeuvres and Missu rebellions, when General Bulot had been stripped of his general’s stars,2 of secret battles between the Sûreté Générale [the French criminal investigation department] and the Service des Renseignements aux Armées [the Army intelligence service], and the newspaper L’Action Franpaise, which had clashed with Le Bonnet rouge and Le Cornet de la semaine; the Daudet family offered a curious spectacle: at Mme Alphonse Daudet’s home, Georges Auric3 and I would listen to Léon Daudet preparing for Clemenceau to be given a triumphant welcome to Parliament, while his younger brother Lucien, a supporter of Aristide Briand, and dressed in the uniform of one of Étienne de Beaumont’s ambulance crews, yearned for a negotiated peace; every day in L’Action Française, Léon Daudet, who, like Philippe Berthelot, had been raised at Renan’s knee, called for the indictment of this sort of brother whom he clasped in his arms whenever he met him. (Proust observes this “split personality” in Contre Sainte-Beuve.)

Who will write the novel of 1917? Among historians, it is the geometrical turn of mind that simplifies and falsifies everything; only in works of the imagination can the truth be found.

Feverishly, Paris awaited the American troops. Would they arrive in time? In pacifist and Zimmerwaldien Zurich, Tristan Tzara opened the dictionary at random and hap pened upon the word dada. When Les Mamelles de Tirésias was performed, Montparnasse had heard Arthur Cravan, a precursor of the anti-establishment, summon “the deserters of seventeen nations”, while to the sound of an orchestra of nuts and bolts shaken in an iron box, André Breton, with his hint of a beard, yelled out: “Take to the roads!”

Henceforth, nothing was straightforward: the immobilization of the front lines, the increasingly obscure aims and origins of the war, the Russian revolution which changed people’s political stances; in short, everything that the young of 1970 discovered as they watched a film like Oh! What a Lovely War we had experienced already.

A golden age had ended; another was emerging, fringed in black.

For three years, my civilian’s clothes had weighed heavily on my conscience; the appalling suffering of those who fought had become intolerable to me; all of a sudden to be in Italy was to begin to live again, and this was true not just for me, but for the French troops who landed there and were able to forget the nightmare of trench warfare; it was a surprise to be thinking like Maréchal Brissac who, at the time of the Fronde, charged at a hearse, sword in hand, crying out: “That’s the enemy!” From now on, the one enemy was Death: the submerged forces of life surged up into our consciousness; we were no longer in control. The animal wanted to live and its animal nature carried all before it.

“I found Venice in a state of mourning” (Byron). Above St Mark’s the pigeons had been replaced by the Tauben (Austrian aircraft, known as pigeons).

In Venice, through the shattered dome of Santa Maria, one could see the blue sky; the Arsenal was damaged, the walls of the Doges’ Palace were cracked, St Mark’s was choking beneath fifteen feet of sandbags held in place by beams and wire netting; the horses of the Quadriga had vanished! The Titians had been wrapped up; the canals had been emptied of gondolas, the pigeons had been eaten.

These were the last days of the retreat to the Tagliamento; five hundred kilometres of front-line between Lake Garda and the Adriatic. Mestre was a military zone. In Brescia, in Verona and in Venice the French divisions (like the Germans, in 1943) were doing their best to infuse new courage into the Italians. On the quaysides, French officers were sampling long Virginia cigarettes that were perforated with straws; in the Red Cross lorries, wounded Senegalese soldiers sitting side by side with Neapolitans in their hospital gowns mingled with bersaglieri, shorn of most of their feathers, with Austrian prisoners of war, Tyroleans wearing grey-blue uniforms, and with carabinieri who had exchanged their cocked hats for a helmet rather like Colleone’s; Russian prisoners who had been returned by the Austrians were sweeping the docks with brooms made from leaves of maize; on walls, menacing posters ordered deserters from the Caporetto to rejoin the 4th Corps or risk being “shot in the back”.

Rome, upon my return there, resembled the France of 1940, a medieval city ravaged by a moral plague; muddy boots, drenched uniforms, bandaged heads that had been gashed by flints thrown up by exploding shells in the Alps; nobody was working, nobody was where they should be. Rome, as far as I was concerned, consisted of the chancellery, among whose green files I roamed, just as in dreams one strolls into a ball wearing one’s underpants… I have come across one of my letters to my mother, from the Palazzo Farnese, dated 31 December 1917: “Rome is teeming with refugees from Venice; yesterday I met G. who had left her palazzo on the Grand Canal, carrying her Giorgione in a hat box. St Anthony of Padua was taken to Bologna for safe keeping; the Colleone is here.”

Every day at lunch, at Barrère’s house, I listened to Foch and Weygand relating how that very morning they had explained to the Italian ministers that the Isonzo front was not the only stage of war and that the two hundred thousand prisoners and two hundred thousand captured Italian guns was not really very dreadful; was not Gabriele D’Annunzio dropping bombs on Trieste and Cattaro?

I was very lonely at the Palazzo Farnese. Before I had left, Proust, discussing Barrère, my future boss, had said to me: “He was a friend of my father’s; an old fool…”. In my mind I was still living in Paris, where Proust scarcely ever left his bed; Hélène had had an operation; Giraudoux was at Harvard; Alexis Léger4 in Peking; in the Champagne, Erik Labonne, an artillery officer, was aiming his guns at the Russian troops that had come to France as allies and who were now regarded as suspect; in London, Antoine and Emmanuel Bibesco confessed that they wanted a peace to be negotiated with all speed; “That would ruin things for everybody”, predicted Georges Boris, who astonished us with the audacity of his advanced views. At the Palazzo Farnese, I had come across a former colleague from before the war in London, François Charles-Roux, now a secretary at the embassy; our problems had made him more combative and intransigent than ever; it was as if he alone knew how to put the Italians back on a war footing; he thought me apathetic; our friendship was affected as a result; furthermore, the Caillaux affair had introduced a coolness between us.

Joseph Caillaux always amazed me, ever since my first visit to his home in rue Alphonse-de-Neuville in 1911, up until the last one, in 1926; his sudden rages, which made his polished skull turn pink, then crimson, his fiery gaze that was circumscribed by the diamond-studded ring of his monocle, his insolence and his haughty foolhardiness used to fascinate me; my father, whom Caillaux liked, admired him and defended him, as he did at his trial, even if that meant falling out with Calmette’s friends. The war had caused Caillaux to lose what little mental stability he had left. Those that succeeded him were glad to be rid of him and had showered him with missions to foreign countries; as he took stock of the world he forgot about all other considerations; the preposterous remarks he made in Argentina, the bad company he kept in Italy, his hopes of negotiating an unconditional peace, his childish gaffes and his daring opinions, the entire make-up of his character astonished me, including the way he mixed with comical rogues to whom he willingly entrusted his riches, “not that he particularly liked villains, but they served his particular policies”, as Poincaré said of him. Reconciling France and Germany in 1911 would have avoided the suicide of the white race; I had heard Caillaux say that “evicting the southern Europeans from our colonies in North Africa was madness”; he added: “The Arabs will throw us out if we do not henceforth open up Tunisia to the Italians and Orania to the Spanish; with them twenty million Europeans can stand shoulder to shoulder; alas! the blinkered attitude of your Quai d’Orsay is irreversible.” Time has passed; I think of Caillaux once more when I reread Clemenceau’s bitter reflections on his past life, when he addressed the Senate in October 1919: “The Germans are a great nation; we have to reach an understanding with them; for my part, I have hated them too much; this task is for others, those younger men who succeed me, to accomplish.” Is it not just as if Gaillaux were speaking?

I have always been attracted to lost causes: Fouquet, Caillaux, Berthelot, Laval. When they were sent to prison, dragged before the High Court, ignominiously removed from their duties or sent to the gallows, my affection for them grew all the more. What was it that linked such varied destinies? Would a psychoanalyst be able to explain this? It goes back a long way; when asked “Why are you a Dreyfusard?”, I had answered, aged eight, that it was because there were no others in my class, a reply that was to remain famous among members of my family, who actually saw it not so much as an indication of force of character, but rather of naïvety.

Success followed by failure would remain the theme of the books I wrote between 1950 and the sixties; after Fouquet, Le Flagellant de Séville, Les Clés du souterrain, Le Dernier Jour de l’Inquisition, Hécate… As a child, I slept with my thumbs pressed inside the palms of my hands; psychoanalysts saw this as a sign of introversion. Since 1917, one of my future wife’s brothers had lived in Zurich, where he was treated by Schmit Guisan, a pupil of Freud’s and Jung’s; this was how I knew of the existence of psychoanalysis five or six months before this attempt at liberation was known about in France; the contrast between the hidden sexual life and social life has always filled me with wonder. Gide says somewhere that he hovered around psychoanalysis; in my case, it was psychoanalysis that hovered around me, resoling my former Christian shoes along the path of penitence.

Those forms of peace that are enforced or negotiated, that are glorious or shameful, are to do with politics; for the writer as for the ploughman, there is only one form of peace, not several. I have only ever loved peace; though this fidelity has brought me some strangely disloyal strokes of luck; it has taken me from a very advanced left-wing position in 1917 to deposit me in 1940 in a Vichy upheld by the ideas of Charles Maurras, where I was no less ill at ease. It is not man himself who changes, it is the world that revolves around him; I have known England in Victorian times, when to use the word “trousers” was frowned upon, only to discover today nowadays an Albion that bathes naked in the fountains of Trafalgar Square; I have seen Russian officers in 1917 with their epaulettes ripped off, only to find a USSR that is concocting thousands of honorary distinctions and reinstating a mandarin form of hierarchy.

In between the two is that hemiplegic body that we nowadays call Europe…

The reason why these period portraits do not deserve to age too quickly is because, fifty years earlier, they prefigure our present times. In them I can identify that bitterness of someone like Scott Fitzgerald, writing in 1925: “Our parents have done enough of this damage; the old generation practically laid waste to the world before passing it on to us.” After 1917, I disassociated myself from my elders, without ever ceasing to accept their bequest; the heartbreak of the emancipated.

In 1917, Marcel Sembat, one of the leaders of the SFIO [the French Socialist party between 1905 and 1971] and a highly cultivated man, befriended me (the ground floor of the Berthelots’ home, on the boulevard Montparnasse, adjoined Léon Blum’s flat: domestic and foreign policy mingled there, in an atmosphere I associate with the last days of Symbolism, the former Revue blanche, Lugné-Poe and Claudel, and which did not survive after 1918). Sembat introduced me to the paintings that were being done by the new generation; I dared to contravene my father’s maxim: “As far as Cézanne, but no further”; Sembat, a gentle and tolerant man, humanised socialism; it was due to him that I came to understand that we had to overcome our dread of the working man, one of the legacies of 1848 and 1871.

That year, I met another Socialist leader, Bracke-Desrousseaux; it was at V.M.’s5 home (during supper, Claudel handed out hard-boiled eggs, on which he had written poems, to each of us). “I believe in socialism, but I can only think of it as national”, I remarked innocently to Bracke-Desrousseaux. (I little imagined that, twenty years later, these two words would cause Europe to explode.) He replied dryly: “Impossible; socialism is international in its essence.”

1919

AFTER TWO YEARS in Rome and Madrid, I returned to Paris bringing with me some poems that were those of an impatient young man; some were written in Venice, among them this:

Oh! Nous ne pouvons attendre davantage…

(Oh! We can’t wait any longer…)

or:

… Nous nous langons sur la mer sans routes…

(… We embark upon uncharted seas…)

or:

… Nos cadets, on lit dans leurs yeux

Qu’ils ne souffriront pas d’attendre…

… A quand un large et continuel don de tout à tous?

A quand une grande course, pieds nus, autour du globe?

(You can see in the eyes of our younger brothers / that they will not put up with waiting… /… When shall we all make generous, continuous sacrifices to one another? / When shall we race barefooted around the globe?)

A more distant note was struck there; it came from:

… Le Passé… avec ses

héros, histoire, expérience, en toi engrangés!

L’héritage total qui a convergé vers toi…

(… The Past… with its heroes, history and experiences that are stored within you! / Our entire inheritance which has converged on you…)

The note struck is that of Leaves of Grass. For many years the athletic, lush and elemental verse of Walt Whitman had made him my superman. Hugo? By the time I left the lycée I had got no further than Eviradnus (I would not discover his Bouche d’ombre until half a century later). It was in Whitman that I first inhaled the scents of the open road and of woman.

I had thought the itinerant American was unknown in France; I was wrong; translated in 1907, the lessons he preached had not been lost; I encountered them in unanimism and in the work of Duhamel and Romains; Whitman had inspired Cendrars’s Pâques à New York; following in his footsteps, Cocteau had just sailed down the Potomac; Whitman was assumed to be the inspiration for Supervielle’s Débarcadères and Gravitations, just as he had fascinated Barnabooth, the tramp dressed by Henry Poole: in the United States, Hemingway and Dos Passos had taken high altitude rest cures with Whitman.

I am for those who march abreast

with the whole world…

It was the last echo of an international romanticism, of the year 1848 stretched out on a planetary scale.

1920

OPENING OF HARRY’S BAR (before Orson Welles and Hemingway).

1922 OUVERT LA NUIT6

AFTER THE WAR of 1870, those attending Flaubert’s cénacle—his literary gatherings — were searching for an overall title for what was to become Les Soirées de Médan, made famous by Boule-de-Suif, and apparently almost called the anthology La Guerre comique; this casual reaction was not blasphemy, but rather a sigh in the wake of great danger; the same could be observed in 1918; this explains, and may perhaps excuse, my Nuits.

In the colourful language they used at the time, the critics were very easy-going about the superficiality of a book that cocked a snook at the vast wide world, the world of fifty years ago that still seemed immense. It was a cry of happiness at having survived, one that struck a false note in an age that was already impoverished; a happiness for which friends of mine, such as Proust or Larbaud, who were very ill, envied me; all I longed for was a little of their genius, whereas they used to say: “I should have liked to live like Morand.” (Without knowing each other, each of them said exactly that.) May they not envy me for the time I spent “living well”. How much time was lost in making up time! Larbaud, responding to my De la vitesse [“On speed”], dedicated his essay La Lenteur [“Slowness”] to me; he was the true voluptuary.

1921

ANOTHER HALT at this Venice railway station “which terminates at nothing, upon a large tank of shadow and silence” (Ouvert la nuit); thus begins “La Nuit turque”, which I completed yesterday.

That day, I continued my journey as far as Stamboul, travelling on a brand new Simplon-Express, the train with which the Allies intended to depose the old Orient Express, planned by Wilhelm II as the first section of his “Bagdadbahn”.

On terra firma, the trenches were being filled in, the children of Venice were fishing in the shell craters, and frogmen from the Arsenal were helping re-float the Austrian torpedo boats that had sunk or become silted up.

It was a Venice still drowsy after its wartime slumber…

In La Fausse Maîtresse, Balzac had written: “The carnival in Venice is no longer worthwhile; the real carnival is happening in Paris.”

That was true, too, of the 1920s.

It is not my intention to describe the Paris of those days; my purpose here is merely a tête-à-tête with Venice, the tempo of these pages being that of the ebb and flow of life on her shores.

Everything that took place in Paris during my years of absence confirmed the changes in social behaviour that had begun in 1917. A generation of people had returned from the war, disenchanted by the past and curious about the future, and about those who tried to explain it and unveiled the new world to them, providing them with a geographical assessment of their unexplored dwelling place, our planet. If my Nuits and Rien que la Terre were well received at the time, it was due to circumstances rather more than to the author: success is frequently nothing more than a man’s confrontation with the age in which he lives.

What is art, if it is not that which constitutes each age?

Quite unconsciously each one of our books seemed to be saying to everything that happened before the war: “This will help to bury you.” In every age, the fallow deer have moaned about the ten-pointer stags; all of a sudden, we were experiencing that miracle, repeated regularly since 1798, of not having anyone in front of us; our fathers and grandfathers had decamped and were fading into memory; everything was empty, wide open and available. We never knew that long period of youthful revolt, that stretches from the romantics to the post-1968 Leftists: “Advance or perish.”

It was a kind of instant, total freedom, a path that chance had unblocked and which one then discovers is — in every domain — bare, just as much in the art of Picasso and the dance of Massine, as in the parties thrown by Étienne de Beaumont (in his town house in the rue Masséran, situated, ironically, between the noble faubourg and Mont-parnasse) — parties that were described by Raymond Radiguet and that put the Persian balls of the pre-1914 era firmly back into the Musée Grévin. The public threw itself into the avant-garde with such passion that not only was there no rear-guard, but there were no troops either.

How did I come to find myself hurled from among the front ranks of the Ancients, how had a youth spent among the anchorites fitted me for the avant-garde? I still wonder. Was it the surge of the new generation carrying me along in its wake? Our publishers’ hysterical greed for publicity was never more than a turbo engine that exploited the force of a tide that launched talents as different as Montherlant or Breton into prominence.

What a stampede! Every snob wanted to be a part of it, to experience this new adventure and to belong to the perimeter of this literary Kamchatka of which Baudelaire speaks. The old generation asked for mercy and praised us to the skies, offering us reviews, honours, friendship and the hands of their daughters at comical lunch parties at which we were flanked at table by academicians who promised us the moon; most of them loathed us, just as people have always loathed those who come after them. “What should we think of you, Maître?” asked the members of Les Six of their senior, Maurice Ravel, who wittily replied: “Loathe me.” (They did nothing of the sort, incidentally; their loathing stopped with Wagner.)

For those of the pre-1914 era, we were insurgents, hungry for blood, members of a new sect of Carnivores who were derisively turning the Establishment upside down, forerunners of those “Barbarians” whose coming Barrès had long predicted; we took over Marinetti’s restaurant, howling at the death of Venice and making fun of the gondolas, “those idiot’s see-saws”; along the Champs-Élysées, Max Jacob and Cocteau called out to the children: “Hurry up and play, little casualties of the next war!” Literature’s old guard protested about this Proust “whose budding groves prevailed over the groves of the sacrificial heroes”; the “Wooden Crosses”7 denounced Le Diable au corps in which the poilus are cuckolds.

Jean Cocteau, 1934

Today those “années folles” shock us because of the number of victims they bequeathed us — the suicides, the hopeless, the deserters, the failures. How many Picassos may have been left behind! “I have cut through tradition like a good swimmer crossing a river”; what Picasso did not add was that Hans, the flute player, was followed when he swam by rats who, in their case, drowned.

Jean Cocteau, who had moved on from his Venetian poems of 1909, took risks which for anyone else would have been perilous; he always landed on his feet again. More acclaimed than ever, having acquired a new public and created a second youth for himself, he was everywhere at once; he couldn’t miss the bus because he ran in front of it; he was at the forefront of everything, the spiciest of metaphors on the nib of his pen, and because of his sarcastic turn of phrase he adopted a high-pitched voice; with his questioning chin, his gimlet-like expression and his fingers weaving in and out, he lived his life “at full tilt”. To have taken a rest would have blunted his talents. Electric sparks hissed from Cocteau-le-Pointu from all sides. Going down the Henri III staircase after visiting him in the block of flats in the rue d’Anjou where his mother lived, you felt foolish, retarded, stiff-jointed and slow-witted; only he was able to sleep as he danced, on the tips of his toes.

At the other extreme, confident of their genius and determined to flee from le Tout-Paris and its poison, Saint-John Perse (at that time known as Saint-Léger Léger), who was back from China, and Giraudoux held firm, deaf to all else but the very personal tones of Éloges (1911) and Provinciales (1908).

But the bell had tolled for them too; in their own way they would be induced to live in and occupy “the positions that had been relinquished”, as the recent official communiqués used to put it.

Here is an example: Round about the mid-1920s. A dinner-party at the home of Erik Labonne, in the flat in which he still lives in avenue Victor-Emmanuel; four young men on the staff of the Foreign Office, who had become friends while taking the competitive entrance examinations (even though they had sat their exams on different dates): Giraudoux, who was forty-four years old, Alexis Léger (Saint-John Perse), Erik Labonne and I, who were all thirty-five. Philippe Berthelot, our director, our boss and our friend, had just experienced one of those terrifying reversals of fortune which destroyed the end of his life; from now on it would be a matter of consolidating our administrative positions without him, and of maintaining continuity; let no one imagine us as over-excited young men eager to be in command; we had been through the war and had learnt how to control ourselves; we were simply obeying a “duty to be ambitious” (Stendhal). All of a sudden, we had become orphans; the great generation of French diplomacy — the Cambon brothers, Paléologue, Jusserand — had recently disappeared; between it and ourselves, there were only civil servants.

This is how fate would deal with us in that period when everything seemed to be in limbo and the future was abruptly turning into the present:

With the death of Berthelot, Alexis Léger, who was in the Far Eastern department, would gain direct access to his minister Briand, who was Président de Conseil; Briand was one of those intelligent but lazy men who knew how to make use of other people; Alexis Léger convinced his boss and even Parliament that Berthelot had alienated himself: for over ten years, serving under many ministers, he was to remain the master of French diplomacy; Erik Labonne, however, was a mystic: he had foreseen — almost through revelation, or inspiration, that our colonies in North Africa were overflowing with hidden oil; to begin with, nobody listened to him; with great tenacity he devoted his life to substantiating his beliefs: the results are well known. Here too, it was a case of tabula rasa. As for Giraudoux, he pursued two dreams: to serve in the government of his country, an illusion that was not so much incompatible with his genius, as with his character; it was fifteen years later that Daladier gave him his opportunity, at the Continental, in 1940; his other dream was the theatre: for a quarter of a century — ever since Maeterlinck or Claudel — there had been nobody; when his play Siegfried was acclaimed two years later, French theatres were empty.

And so what was the target of my own aspirations? For my friends, it was their work, their career, or both. All I dreamed of was complete freedom; and yet from a very young age I had been left unsupervised and been given a choice of careers; I had never felt I was being held back at the office, or if I was, only very gently so. So what did I think that total liberation or the sort of independence which only death can supply would give me? I still ask myself this question. Was it the sort of life of a “hippie”, before the term was invented, a journey towards some non-existent happiness, an abandonment to a lethargy which had more to do with illness than with good health? I search my memory trying to recall my state of mind at the time: being on this earth is a unique adventure; I had to make the most of it. To do what? To raise oneself up to man’s estate or satisfy one’s instincts? All of this, and simultaneously. Don’t think about it; forward march, head down! God will look after his own; let’s see what happens.

Two guardian angels, my mother and my wife, having a deep sense of tradition as well as being aware of my best interests, decided differently. A life was something you constructed like a house, according to their way of thinking.

All I longed for was independence, not knowing that it is in short supply. Everything, straight away! Unaware that we pay for being “quick”. How unfair to make us wait! I wanted the whole world, one without end (did I carry within me the seeds of that mania for evasion in which people delight today?). Recognizing that I was not very adept at controlling others and at getting what I wanted, I sought to shape my life as if it were some precious substance, to hew away all rough edges and restore it to all its prismatic power.

Everything was available, everything was waiting to be plucked; everything was; the larger obstacles would await us twenty years later. Another story… The time has not come to tell it.

Those who try to recreate that period of fifty years ago imagine it as some immense Bal des Quat’Zarts, parading before an astonished and uncomprehending Paris; that is to miss the point entirely. We were artists delighted at the acceptance we were given by an increasingly well-informed public. We were living through a veritable springtime of work, research, new inventions and of friendship between the arts; rather like the Impasse du Doyenné at the time of Nerval. Everything moved forward along the same axis, open to the road ahead, in an atmosphere of reciprocity, generosity and true camaraderie. The Muses fraternised; those who had previously been forgotten we restored to their true position: Georges Auric, at the age of fifteen, thought the world of Léon Bloy and used to visit him, Poulenc rescued Satie from the depths of Arcueil, and we brought back Valéry from out of the shadows; the theatre alone continued to snore away on the boulevard. Artists created backdrops for the stage, and Derain painted sets for Massine; Darius Milhaud and I spent the summer of 1920 together in Juan-les-Pins’s only hotel, a small boarding-house for travelling salesmen called the Hôtel de la Gare; Radiguet, in order not to have to return home to the suburbs, would spend the night among Brancusi’s blocks of polished metal; Reverdy wrote his poems in the rue Cambon, while another great artist was busy fitting her clients.

Romanticism had survived for so long that its last vestiges still existed half a century later; it constructed no more lasting temples to its gods, however, than the present age does to its idols of the 1920s; 1970 is still illuminated by the lamps they lit; from Picasso to Kisling, from Proust to Saint-John Perse, from Honegger to Satie, the masters of those days have never had their authority questioned; and Gabrielle Chanel, who dressed the Deauville of 1915 in her jerseys, was still dressing high society of the 1970s in her outfits. They represented the true portfolio of stocks and shares of their day, the real Suez, the real I.B.M. It is a phenomenon that has to do with the athletic qualities of the artists of the heroic age. The boulder has continued to gather pace, and a great number of trees have been felled: yet not one of the geniuses of the 1920s has been dislodged.

It’s a French phenomenon; you only have to transport yourself mentally to the Berlin of the expressionists, the England of Huxley, the Rome of Malaparte, or the New York of the Dial to compare how fortunate Paris was at that time. The other day (1970) I was in New York, in the same Algonquin bar where in about 1925 we used to meet Mencken, George Nathan, the Ernest Boyds, Carl Van Vechten, Walter Wanger and Scott Fitzgerald; seeing nothing but ghosts in the famous “roaring twenties” grill room and dining-room, I observed that whereas the force of the storm and the lust for life had toppled our American friends off their perches, we had been more fortunate or more wise, in this Paris in which Dos Passos used to relate how, after wild nights out, I used to protect him, Cummings and Gilbert Seldes from being beaten up.8

I can see myself opening an envelope from the N.R.F.: it’s my first cheque from Gallimard; I felt pleased, yet at the same time irritated; I had never been paid any salary except by the State; I had the feeling that I was betraying it, not freeing myself from it. Many civil servants, from Maupassant to Valery, have lived in this way, one that was honourable and accepted by everyone, but they had not belonged to the “grand corps”,9 the War Office, the Admiralty, the Treasury, the Audit Office, the Department of Transport, the Conseil d’Etat, the Foreign Office, etc…. the schools which trained you for these professions constituted bodies in whose eyes the State was sacrosanct; and the entrance examinations for them (the “Concours”) were a sort of gateway to the top. What did an entrance examination consist of, particularly in those days? A formality, in which one’s popularity rating and a sort of common law were what chiefly mattered; nevertheless, a man who wasn’t “a product of the Concours”, and who had entered these top careers through prefectural channels, through journalism or by political means, was never quite considered as an equal. State salaries were not generous, but this money was something special; it was not other people’s money; nobody had ever touched it; the six louis d’ors granted me each month for ten years were, at least until 1918, newly minted by the Banque de France.

This cult of the State still exists today, but people nowadays often become employed in the civil service as if for a training period, they branch out into the Banque de France (the slang term is pantouflage10), private interests come into play and the boundary lines separating a diplomatic ambassadress from an ambassadress of fashion have become blurred; the numerous international organisations, the way in which one’s colleagues are selected, the infiltration of large companies through side entrances, by publicity methods, by press or cultural attachés, all these must have altered the attitudes of the staff in the civil service, such as I knew it.

Parisian life and my stormy experiences among the varied milieux of the capital would gradually dampen the respect I felt for that unwritten code of honour and loosen the bonds that bound me morally just as tightly as the diplomatic corps had coerced an officer in the time of Alfred de Vigny. Seeing my name suddenly in bookshop windows felt like setting foot in another country; it was the end of that absolute anonymity that for so long had been the Civil Service’s golden rule. When I returned to the “office”, my former kingdom, on the eve of the last war, I did not find what I had relinquished twelve years previously; politics, the post-1936 trade union mentality, the new intellectual approach, the arrival of École Normale graduates in the profession, meant that it no longer had quite the same atmosphere; I sometimes came across the last vestiges of former days tucked away in the hotel rooms of Vichy.

I feel sure that there are just as many great civil servants as there were, perhaps more, for the country has grown smaller; they will probably get used to life within the hexagon that is France.

I can only think of a hexagon as something etched in the spheres.

1925

A LOVE ON THE ROAD

A PHOTOGRAPH that is often reproduced shows the composers known as Les Six,11 Valentine Hugo and myself in one of those fairground boats painted on canvas; I am leaning over the rails, throwing up, and Valentine is supporting my head; it is the very image of the way I felt in 1925; the post-war years gave me a sudden desire to be sick.

In Paris I was becoming the “cosmopolitan Parisian”, as sketched in crayon by Vlaminck in his Portraits avant décès. The “Boeuf’ in the rue Duphot had moved to a smart area, and our youth there was over. We left behind us newly published books, black velvet sofas, blue antimacassars, zebra rugs, Russian cabarets, fishnet stockings worn by sirens, claw-like and silver-painted nails, syncopated music, plucked eyebrows, everything to do with the Paris of Van Dongen that the artist was in the process of parading through the provinces, where it was being lapped up. Paris was the city of false life which simultaneously could throw a Katherine Mansfield into Gurdjief’s magnetic snare; people were fleeing towards every outlet, every religion, there were false conversions, instant tonsures, it was the very opposite of Heaven, call-up time for the guardian angels. Paris lost her moral control of the world; she has never regained it again. The “Coupole” in Montparnasse was no longer the universe. Salvation lay in flight! Henceforth, complimentary copies of books would be inscribed: “On behalf of the author, who is away from Paris.’” From then on “travelling became my only concern”.

The Groupe des Six (from left to right): François Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre, Louis Durey, Jean Cocteau, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger and a drawing of Georges Auric by Cocteau, 1931

In Bangkok, I rediscovered Venice; was it the water or the mainland? “Stretches of land that are so low that they seem to have escaped the sea as if by a miracle”, wrote the Abbé de Choisy; in those days Thailand still wore her tiara and called herself Siam. There were the same golden fishing boats, with fifty oarsmen, as on the Lagoon in the time of Guardi; the floating teak rafts and the sampans laden to the brim with paddy rice reminded me of the baskets of fruit along the meandering Brenta; the cabins in which the Siamese stored their dried palms resembled the huts built by the first Veneti, the stupas of the royal Wat Phra Kaew were just like Venice in the time of Marco Polo, and the sailing boats with their unfurled sails that looked like vampires’ wings bore the same eye painted on their prows as those of the fishermen in Malamocco.

1926

PHILIPPE BERTHELOT’s fall from grace gave me cause for reflection; the complete athlete, he had wanted to experience life to the full, serving the State under Poincaré, playing tennis with Giraudoux, frequenting the Paris of horse racing and dress rehearsals, the Opéra and Lugné-Poe’s plays; a man with the administrative orderliness and the intellectual anarchy of a Sturel, who both kept dangerous company and mixed in society,12 and who set off on journeys lasting two years; he was the author of a sonnet the lines of which rhymed with the syllable omphe; he knew the whole of Hugo by heart as well as the stud-book of the Jockey Club from the date of its foundation; he wore himself out both physically (he never slept) and mentally (despising everyone except his colleagues and friends). I realised that you could not serve the State as well as have other masters. There could be no second career. The State demands total dedication. I had to make a choice: I opted for happiness, for the open road, for lost time, that is to say time gained. I set off once more on the road to Venice.

Venice is but the thread of a discourse interrupted by lengthy silences in which, from time to time, different countries have occupied her, just as they have occupied me: twenty-five years in Switzerland, ten years in Tangiers or Spain, eight years in England; not to mention Paris.

Barrès wrote: “This image of my own being and this image of Venice’s being tally in a number of ways.” My credentials for expressing this are less imposing, but the time I have devoted to Venice may permit me to apply this remark to myself. It is mainly through my past that Venice, as well as Paris, continue to hover without sinking.

LA BRENTA, 1925–1970

HOW MANY TIMES, before the last world war, did I take the little road along the banks of the Brenta to return to Venice from the thermal baths at Abano, near Padua! The tedium of mud baths, which were over by nine o’clock in the morning, drove me away from the Orologio, where I had a room in which to spend the night, to Venice, where a room in which I could spend the day awaited me. At that time there was very little traffic between Venice and the mainland; today Padua has become an annexe of Venice, extending it as far as Verona and Vicenza; buses, coaches and lorries run every half-hour between the Eremitani and Piazzale Roma, swallowing up the Lagoon faster than any train; the sleepy, provincial town of Padua is now an important business centre, full of bustle and noise and the sound of gas explosions, and drowning in carbon monoxide fumes that mingle with the foul stench of the Mestre oil refineries, reminiscent of Maracaibo or Sainte-Adresse.

To avoid the autostrada, you can travel by water; the Brenta opens its five or six locks to the Burchiello, or passenger barge; leaving St Mark’s Square the river bank is approached from the west, from Fusina, thus avoiding Mestre and Porto Marghera, which are shrouded in a blackish haze. The Burchiello was once the only means of transport, that of Montaigne, of President De Brosses, of Goethe, and of Casanova, whose Memoirs open with such a pretty description of this type of horse-pulled barge, of which the Correr Museum possesses a model of the period; it’s a boat with painted panels, with mirrors and candles on the walls; travellers wearing masks would gossip away at the bows while the boatmen steered from the back; on the roof is an area surrounded by railings where the luggage is stored and where there is bedding (see the Tiepolo in Vienna).

A well-known passage by Philippe de Commynes, the most ingenuous and probably the oldest description of Venice in the French language, is devoted to Fusina; I’ve always had such a strong affection for it that I must quote it in passing: “The day lay before me on the morning I arrived in Venice and I went as far as Chafusine [Fusina] which is five miles from Venice; there you leave the boat on which you have come, along a river, from Padua, and you climb into little boats that are very clean and covered in fine tapestries with beautiful velvet carpets inside… The sea is extremely calm there… You have a view of Venice and a conglomeration of houses all surrounded by water…”

The Brenta is no longer the summer-time river whose Alpine waters cooled Venice’s holidaymakers; tatty huts replace the trees, the water is the colour of olive oil and on its surface float the bloated corpses of dead cats, discarded crates and empty tin cans: pylons and power lines form the dense vegetation of the new Italy; ducks attempt to swim among the plastic bottles, those latter-day water-lilies; next come a few willow trees (one understands why they weep), or reeds that resemble the plumes of the bersaglieri; over the water, swing bridges, looking haughty and poorly laminated, raise their metal arms for the present-day Burchiello, which has nothing in common with its ancestor (“Bucentaurus’s grandchild”, De Brosses used to say), a vessel with fifty seats, decked out in varnish, chrome and banners, and which sounds its siren impatiently from the bottom of the locks, where it is sometimes forgotten.

It is in winter that the Venetians of former times used to take refuge in the city, after the hunting season, when in November the bora had begun to blow from the heights of Grappa. The dances and public life continued until June; then people would return back along the Brenta, or go to their Palladian villas in the Euganean hills. It was in the sixteenth century that the Brenta became fashionable; each patrician family owned one or more villas there; the Pisanis had as many as fifty of them; the Contarini’s residence, at Piazzola, boasted five organs, two theatres into which five horse-drawn carriages, side by side, could be driven, a lake, and enough bedrooms to house one hundred and fifty guests, as well as their servants.

The earliest fourteenth or fifteenth century engravings depict fortified, crenellated houses without windows or staircases; two or three centuries later they have become quite different sorts of dwellings, such as those we see in the Tiepolos or Longhis in the Rezzonico museum, or those in the rustic scenes in the Papadopoli gallery. The atmosphere is one of indolence, with music, siestas, ladies prattling, their husbands chatting to their servants on horseback, surrounded by a horde of friends, parasites, clavichord players, all of them gazing intently at the tables upon which piles of pewter dishes await the arrival of the food.

I don’t know in what state the hundreds of villas I once visited are now in; they all used to be more or less the same, with their cast-iron gates that could not be opened because of the long grass, and their pilasters crowned with obelisks or statues of divinities wearing lichen for wigs; what has been left of them by the developers, by devaluation and by those who live in them? Only the Villa Pisani de Stra, which is maintained by the State, has its future assured. But what has become of the Psyche Room and the trompe l’oeil ceilings of the Villa Venier; those at the Casa Widmann; the chinoiserie at the Villa Barbariga; the games room at the Villa Giustiniani; the Juno room at the Villa Grimani; all those gardens of Armida or of The Dream of Polyphilus and all that enchantment of the houses I once knew, some of them intact after three centuries, while others lay in ruins? And of their almond-green or pale pink drawing-rooms, the walls cracked from top to bottom, filled with ploughs and harrows and carts into which Veronese’s goddesses, or the dancers of Tiepolo’s minuet, have fallen from the ceiling in great slabs, rotting with damp and dilapidation?

I have over-indulged in Palladio (one can get indigestion from lean fare); this dictatorship of antiquity over three centuries, from Stockholm to the Brenta, from Lisbon to St Petersburg, and these rigid façades of Greek temples encasing a block of bricks can sometimes offend the imagination; it needs all the genius of a Gabriel,13 allied to what is the most beautiful material in the world after Pentelic marble, Vaugirard stone, to dispel the tedium of the neo-classical.

LA MALCONTENTA

THE PRIVATELY OWNED gondolas at their moorings nod their iron prows sadly as we pass by; we disturb their slumber. The first villa at which the Burchiello stops is La Malcontenta. The origin of its name is obscure, it may be that a woman of the Foscari family, to whom the house belonged, was once confined there for bad behaviour, or possibly local people were unhappy about water being brought there, which meant it was taken from them.

I scarcely recognized the villa, so shaded was it by Italian poplars, those beautiful trees that grow so quickly; I had remembered a house that was dramatically isolated, and now I found it surrounded by formal lawns. It had been beautiful the way it was, its lines intact, purified by poverty and solitude, just as the centuries had left it, ever since 1560, far away from anything, in a bare landscape, haunted by ladri and rapinatori,

Balzac set a scene there, one in which Massimilla Doni holds the handsome Emilio by the hand; hidden away between the Lagoon and the mountains, Massimilla bemoans her over-respectful lover… Did Balzac know the Brenta, or did he have the same instinctive sense about the countryside that he had for people? His description of a Palladian palazzo has all the precision of those legal documents that are justifiably known as writs.

In about 1928, Catherine and Bertie had discovered La Malcontenta in the state in which it had been left after the Austrian bombardment during the siege of 1848. Bertie had decided to buy the villa and to restore it: an entire lifetime would not have sufficed; lying abandoned in the middle of cornfields, among willow trees that were not much more than stumps, and amid pools of stagnating waters, La Malcontenta dominated the flat river plain; initially a mountain stream, like the Isonzo, the Mincio, the Adda or the Tagliamento, and exhausted by its descent from the high Alps, the Brenta flattens out into pools as it approaches the Lagoon; its dull, lacklustre waters, the colour of engine oil and shimmering with rust, seem to be reluctant to reach Mestre; its banks of cracked mud, its bridges that cast no reflection, and the impervious surface of its waters have created an unspeakable stew that no wind can ruffle; the ancient maps trace its course: imitating the other rivers of the Dolomites, the Brenta displays the tentacles of an octopus encircling Venice.

With all the patience of the eager enthusiast, but with out any money, Bertie had lugged bedding, Brazilian hammocks and tents from the upper Amazon to La Malcontenta; Catherine, tireless, imperious, uncompromising, and intent upon her futile quest, supported him with her exuberance. At the centre point of a Latin cross at which four rooms converged, meals were served upon a ping-pong table that was weighed down with all the fruits of the Rialto, on china that came from the flea-market, while Catherine, the descendant of Vittoria Cappello doubling as a rag and bone woman, got on with the restoration of the building.

The parties at La Malcontenta were a bit like Plato’s Banquet and a bit like Rabelais’s Abbaye de Thélème. In rooms painted in a very soft, sometimes pinkish, light-straw colour, the guests made their way into the past through simulated doors. There was no furniture, just bales of straw for chairs, and crates. (As an anonymous visitor, yesterday I recognized the gigantic eighteenth-century maps of the world, and even a portrait of Bertie.)

Once the meal was over, each of the guests kept their knives and was required to scrape down the walls in order to search for “Veronese frescoes” beneath the plaster. Had not some been found nearby, at the Villa Magnadola? I can remember José-Maria Sert, sunk into an armchair without springs, his two wives, Misia and Roussy, stretched out at his feet; I can see Diaghilev, a white lock detaching itself from his head of dyed hair, peering at the ceiling through a monocle attached by a ribbon, rather like a figure in Daumier’s engraving Les Amateurs de plafonds, while Serge Lifar and Boris Kochno scraped away at the whitewashed walls. Catherine, mobilising her children as well as her lovers, past, present and future, whom she was skilful enough to make get along together, would proclaim a Veronese with every scrape of the plaster. These invisible frescoes did appear eventually, but they were not painted by the great Paolo, the Sommo Paolo; they were merely the work of Zelotti and Franco: Aurora’s Chamber and Philemon and Baucis. I came across them again, restored and much as Henri III, the reluctant king, would have seen them on his visit to La Malcontenta on 17 July 1574. This was the occasion for the finest Venetian festival in History; the triumphal arches were painted by Veronese and Titian; since the sumptuary laws had been rescinded for the occasion, patrician ladies and courtesans could be seen, followed by their servants, carrying a hundredweight of their mistresses’ pearls. It was the moment when the Renaissance became the Baroque; in his Histoire de Venise, Daru depicts the king beneath the triumphal arch that Palladio, who was dressed as a Venetian senator, had erected to him. Glassmakers, aboard a raft, are at work at their blowing while the twenty-three-year-old monarch looks on, marvelling at a sea-monster spitting fire through its nostrils.14 Henri III was so impressed by the glassworkers of Murano that he ennobled their corporation and spent a fortune on mirrors and chandeliers; to pay for them, he borrowed one hundred thousand écus from La Serenissima, which caused the Pope to remark: “There go écus that the people of Venice will never see again.” You don’t have to go far to look at this triumphant Henri III; these days he is at the Jacquemart-André museum, having made the journey for you from La Malcontenta to Boulevard Haussmann.

La Malcontenta was home to those dozen or so legendary men and women of whom, Jean-Louis, Lifar and Kochno apart, no one is left;15 they are gone forever, through the simulated doors of the drawing-room. Misia Sert (“When I was twenty, I used to see her at her father, the sculptor Godebski’s house,” my father used to say, “a beautiful panther, imperious, bloodthirsty and frivolous.”), Misia, not the woman who emerges from her flimsy Mémoires, but the one who existed: effervescing with joy or fury, eccentric, acquisitive and a collector of geniuses, all of whom were in love with her: Vuillard, Bonnard, Renoir, Stravinsky, Picasso… a collector of hearts and of Ming trees in pink quartz; whenever her latest fads were launched, they became instantly fashionable among all her followers, and were exploited by designers, written about by journalists and imitated by every empty-headed society lady. Misia, the queen of modern baroque, who organised her life around nacre, pearls and the bizarre; the sullen and deceitful Misia, who would bring together friends who did not know one another “in order to then make them quarrel”, according to Proust. Brilliant in her treachery and subtle in her cruelty, Philippe Berthelot used to say of Misia that one should never entrust her with anything: “Here comes the cat, hide your birds,” he would say whenever she rang the doorbell. In her boutique fantasque on the quai Voltaire, she kindled genius in the same way that certain kings can create victors, by her magnetic presence alone, through an unseen oscillation of a branch of her hazel tree. Misia was as strong as the life-force that smouldered within her; she was mean yet generous, she devoured people in their thousands, she was cajoling, mischievous, subtle, mercenary, even more of a Mme Verdurin than the original one, and she esteemed and despised men and women at a glance. There was the Misia of the Symbolists’ Paris, of Fauvist Paris, First World War Paris, the Paris of the Versailles Peace Treaty, the Paris of Venice. Dissatisfied Misia was as well padded as a sofa, yet if you craved rest, she was a sofa who was likely to send you packing. Misia dissatisfied had piercing eyes which laughed even though her mouth was already beginning to pout.

Where this all-devouring creature was concerned, rapture was followed by disgust, a yes by a no, just as thunder follows lightning; with her, you had to perform quickly.

Serge Lifar at the exhibition celebrating twenty years of the Ballets Russes at the Pavilion de Marsan, 1939

1929

AT THE SLUICE-GATES of Venetian houses you reveal all about yourself the moment you set foot in the doorway. “A slippery city,” D.H. Lawrence said of her. I had arrived there the day after Diaghilev had died. I thought once more about the life of this brilliant impresario whose love of art had been his driving force; he was much more of a sorcerer than an impresario and he had the wizardry of an electro-magnet; his intelligence was not sufficiently developed that it outshone his sense of discovery; his secret derived from the fact that he only ever thought of his own pleasure, requiring the approval of merely a handful of people, such as Picasso, Stravinsky, Lady Ripon, Misia… totally indifferent to the fashions of the day, he never took peeps through the hole in the stage curtain; and he never took a penny on the side. Only his somnambulism can explain his temerity, his inability to foresee obstacles, his crazy improvisations and the way he was blinded to all but his own destiny (the final act of Petrushka was created only ten minutes before the curtain went up at the dress rehearsal).

I reflected on Serge’s career from that moment in 1904 when Prince Volkonsky, the director of the Imperial Theatres, parted with the services of the very young choreographer, criticising him for having staged Sylvia “with too many of his personal ideas”, up until his death in Venice; I thought about his revolutionary yet classical destiny, about this harbourer of monsters, who arrived in Paris and scattered his Muscovite seed there, giving new birth to painting, music, song and dance. I thought of the Ballets Russes which, as a humble soldier arriving by train at the Gare Saint-Lazare, I would watch from the gods at the Châtelet or the Opéra. Diaghilev slips through my past like a stag in the forest; “I caught sight of him,” say the stalkers; but how often did I catch glimpses of Serge! I had known the triumphant Diaghilev from the Châtelet in 1910 to London in 1913, before coming across him, four years later, reduced to poverty (he was never rich) in Spain; impervious to boos and catcalls, he had an Ancien Régime courtesy which storms would occasionally ruffle when some drama or other broke out in the seraglio; beneath the Russian demeanour, the Chinaman was always slumbering… Cosmopolitan in appearance, but Russian in his soul, everywhere he went he recreated that eschatological, Byzantine atmosphere of the eternal Russia; the triumphs, the downfalls, the debts, the harassment, the beloved bodies sewn into sacks and tossed into the Bosphorus; pitting Nijinsky against Fokine, Benoit against Bakst, Lifar against Massine, in a storm of champagne, delirious telegrams, fancy food and dried bread, accompanied by assurances of happiness and threats of suicide, and, finally, his fatal diabetes which was treated with ten dishes that were forbidden him; such was Serge, that tortured executioner. 1929 was not just the year of his death, but a year of wonderful immunity, of a certain freedom about the way one dressed, of the sort of pleasures that were greater than pleasure itself; it marked the end of that wandering chivalry, of that secret intelligence between members of a sect… one that never really existed. Diaghilev was forbidden a residence permit during the First World War; he was even treated suspiciously in the countries that were neutral, up until the moment when he charmed Alfonso XIII, to whom he introduced the young Picasso, who had painted the sets for Parade. In the spring of 1918, we used to lunch together daily at the “Palace” in Madrid; Massine had left him to go to Barcelona to be given lessons in Spanish dancing, and I was the only confidant Diaghilev had; I can still hear him recounting his unbelievable misfortunes; how the Ballets Russes’ costumes and stage sets had been sunk off Cadiz — the sort of wreck that might have occurred in Candide; how what was saved from the wreckage had been destroyed in a fire in South America; how Clemenceau had barred his entry into France. (Powerless, for once, Misia had been unable to procure a visa for him; Philippe Berthelot was in disgrace and she had not yet won over Mandel.) In 1920, I came across Diaghilev again; he was back in Paris and he had already had time to explore the latest paintings and to have chosen the best of them, never making a mistake and never allowing a source to run dry.

On the 19th of August 1929, a few days before my arrival, the ceremonial floating bier that is used for funeral processions in Venice ferried the magician’s mortal remains to the funeral island of San Michele. Lifar threw himself into the grave. Whenever I see a funeral procession on its way to San Michele, with the priest in charge of the ceremony standing behind the gondolier at the stern, the funeral director at the prow, and with the silver Lion of St Mark concealing its affliction beneath its folded wings, I think of Diaghilev, that indefatigable man, lying at rest.

Serge Diaghilev’s tomb on the island of San Michele, Venice

Death would not quell the storm in which Diaghilev lived; his death throes had imposed a truce upon irreconcilable passions; it was broken the moment he breathed his last; at the foot of his bed, the two friends who had looked after him immediately hurled themselves upon one another. I was given an account of his final moments by the three women who were present, Misia, Chanel and the Baronne Émile d’Erlanger.

As Byron wrote to Murray, from Venice, on the 25th of November 1816: “Love, in this part of the world, is not a sinecure.”

1929

A FEW OF THE SURROUNDINGS had changed: on the Lido there were now a huge number of beach huts, those symbols of social prestige that are what the boxes at La Scala were in Stendhal’s time. The iron Accademia Bridge had been covered in a wooden construction, in the manner of Carpaccio or Bellini; the Palazzo Franchetti had acquired a lawn.

From having struck their bell so frequently, in my absence, the arms of the two Moors — the Mori—who chime the hour at the Mercerie, had grown very stiff.

THE ISLAND OF SAN LAZZARO

EVER SINCE the Lido began to rival Saint-Tropez, the contrast of this beach with the island of San Lazzaro, a stone’s throw away, has become ever more striking. After the hell of the summer, one finds the calm of prayer; one savours every moment spent beneath the magnolia, at the centre of the cloister, which seems to repeat itself like the beads of a rosary. La Serenissima gave this little island to the Armenian Mekhitarist monks when they arrived from Crete, where they had been driven out by the Turks, and they found a refuge here, far from the sunburnt, shaven legs and those infra-red cooked chickens. An Armenian patron has just provided the monastery with a large octagonal building, shaped like a church dome and built with air-conditioning, in which to keep their manuscripts; all that remains of a very great civilization; we never realised that a civilization would be able to be conserved in a room half the size of the reading room in the Bibliothèque Nationale! The Armenian rite, like the Orthodox, knew and recognised the value of mystery: a curtain conceals the celebrant (a velvet curtain, woven in gold, a gift from the late Queen Margherita of Italy); thrice, at the Consecration, and before and after Communion, the priest disappears from the congregation’s view; God is the winner.

I had not set foot in the Armenian monastery for fifty years; for such an ancient civilization, that was a mere flash. The cypress trees had grown taller and the sea breezes had turned them brown, while the Melchite Friars, their “beards the colour of meteors” (Byron), had grown white; their cemetery had doubled in size. This Eastern Catholic rite, divided as Venice is, and as I myself am, between East and West, between the Roman faith and Orthodoxy, was given refuge here after the defeat of Morosini in Morea, in the seventeenth century. Along with Vienna and Etchmiadzin, the home of these monks with their black habits remains a famous centre for Byzantine studies. Napoleon, who closed down the monasteries, respected these Venetian anchorites; was he preserving them for the fulfilment of his oriental dream?

I feel grateful to them for being the first importers of angora cats to the West.

PROUST AT THE ARMENIAN MONASTERY

THREE TIMES A WEEK, Byron rowed from Venice to San Lazzaro, where he came to learn Armenian; in the visitor’s book, we read, alongside his signature: “Byron, English”. (He despised England, but he was proud of her when he was abroad.) Proust, in his turn, would come to add his name to the register in the spring of 1900; not being a nostalgic exile, he did not put “French” after his name.

It is hard to believe that in late 1919 Proust still had difficulties in placing an article about Venice in the newspapers, hoping humbly that “it would be accepted”. Throughout his life, Proust promised himself trips to Venice; when the Great War was over, he used to say, he hoped to be able to return there with Vaudoyer or with me, once his book was completed; he had dreamt about the city for a long time, ever since childhood, just like his grandmother who, in her case, never went there; he thought about it when he spent the autumn at Evian, in early September, when the Lake of Geneva takes on a Lombardian softness and seems to grow more like the Borromée islands, from which it is barely separated by the once impassable mass of the Simplon, now easily crossed or tunnelled through; the same summer palaces, the same clarity of its shores, the same truite au bleu colour of its morning surfaces.

Proust had a special feeling for Venice (and not just for those neckties from Au Carnaval de Venise, on the Boulevard des Capucines, which Charles Haas bought). How could he escape from the World Exhibition,16 he wondered, how could he travel to the magical city on his own, when he was so ill? He needed a companion, but he couldn’t find one; one of his letters, dated October 1899, is nothing but a cry from the heart for Venice. Why didn’t Emmanuel or Antoine Bibesco — the two nephews of the famous composer, at whose home, the Villa Bessaraba at Amphion, Proust so often stayed — why didn’t one of them go along as his guide? Italy was only three hours away… In early May 1900, Proust learnt that Reynaldo Hahn and his cousin Marie Nordlingen were in Rome and would be going on to Venice. He couldn’t stand it any longer and persuaded Mme Proust to accompany him; in the train, after they had passed Milan, she translated Ruskin for him…

In the index to the Pléiade edition of À la recherche, there are a hundred listings for Venice; we see Proust so intoxicated by this city which he had finally conquered that he had forgotten his dreaded fevers: a young man exhilarated by the splendour of St Mark’s; a Marcel who astonished his mother because he found the strength to be up at ten o’clock in the morning, etc.17

The month of May came and went; the Proustian acid combined marvellously well with the Venetian base. La Fugitive contains a hundred divers impressions in which Venice merges or fuses with Combray (the function of the houses in the Grand-Rue compared to that of the palaces, the relationship between the sunlight playing upon the awnings on the canal and those on the family drapery shop, the comparison of the Danieli Hotel and Aunt Léonie’s home, etc.). The Conversation avec Maman in Contre Sainte-Beuve reveals further recollections: “At lunchtime, when my gondola brought me back, I noticed Mamma’s shawl upon the alabaster balustrade”, etc.

These memories from Contre Sainte-Beuve precede those in La Fugitive; what they have in common is that they both mention a tiff between mother and son that has always intrigued me, a curious quarrel which, considering that this disagreement was to have such lasting overtones, one would like to be able to shed some light upon; the odd thing about them is that Contre Sainte-Beuve, which was published first (although it is difficult to establish a firm date, since it is made up of fragments collected together between 1905 and 1909), tells us about “an evening when, spitefully, after a quarrel with Mamma, I told her that I was leaving (Venice)… I had given up my idea of leaving, but I wanted to spin out Mamma’s sadness at believing that I had left”. It is the son, therefore, who in this instance wants to return to Paris (but since his mother has only come to Venice for his sake, one fails to understand why she did not yield to her son’s wish to return)… whereas, later, in La Fugitive, in which the visit to Venice is treated at greater length, the situation is reversed; this time, it is the Narrator who refuses to leave Venice and return to Paris with his mother: “My mother had decided that we should leave… my plea (to remain) aroused in my nerves, stimulated by the Venetian springtime, that old desire to resist… that determination to fight which once used to drive me to impose my own will brutally upon those I loved most.” We know what ensued: having allowed his mother to leave for the station, the Narrator rushes after her and catches up with her just before the train is about to depart; it’s a long way from the Danieli to the Stazione, but the surge of filial affection shortens the journey. The umbilical cord remains uncut once more.

This new account of a conflict between mother and son seems closer to reality than the earlier one. For Proust, Venice is the city of his unconscious (1900 style).

Each of us has his dead-weights; the best known are perhaps the least obscure, those one can get away from. Proust, the very image of the introvert, contrasted with that exemplar of the extrovert, Casanova.

Where was the Venice of Proust if not within his own self? Throughout the whole of À la recherche, Venice continues to be the symbol of freedom, of his freeing himself from his mother, in the first place, and from Albertine later on; “Venice is the image of what passion prevents him from realising”; Albertine conceals Venice from him almost as if love was blocking out all other joys.

In reality, Proust returned to Paris in late May 1900, with his mother. In the autumn, he took his revenge; stubbornly determined, he went back to Venice, alone this time, just as he had wanted to do. He stayed there for ten days in October 1900, not at the Danieli, but at the Hôtel de l’Europe, opposite the Salute. “This mysterious visit,” writes Painter. Psychologically, perhaps, but not in a literary sense, since La Fugitive has given us some celebrated passages, describing the Narrator’s solitary wanderings “through humble campi and little abandoned rii”, in an ardent search for Venetian girls, “alone… in the middle of the enchanted city, like a character in the Arabian Nights’”.

Proust was the masked prince of a Serenissima that was far from serene, of a Venice that was very different to the city of banquets, ceremonies and fanfares that had greeted Adrien Proust, Marcel’s father, in October 1892, when as a professor of hygiene he had represented France at an international health conference that took place in Venice.

For peace of mind, I thought as I left San Lazzaro, better to choose another city to the androgynous Venice, “where you never know where the land ends, or where the water begins”, as Elstir tells Albertine.

THREE VENETIAN CAFÉS

OVER THE YEARS, three Venetian cafés have remained unchanged for me. In the mornings, it’s the one at the foot of the Accademia, under the shelter of the bridge; the glass of orange juice is on a level with the Canal. At about ten o’clock, the sun is facing you; the air is still fresh and its invigorating breeze is blown straight from the sea. Seated at this little café, almost beneath the arch of the bridge, I’m reading See Venice and Die by James Hadley Chase. It’s in the “Série Noire” series, that last refuge of the romantic… “With one hand, Don seized his adversary by the throat; with the other, he delivered a hook to the jaw; Curzio fell into the canal…”

In this secretive republic, where smothered bodies are found weighted down or are drowned discreetly off Sant’Ariano, such brutal uppercuts direct to the body ring a bizarre bell. There is a symmetry there that adds spice to the antithesis.

At night-time my café is at La Fenice. The little piazza contains two churches, the theatre, a large restaurant and the theatre bar. Something of everything has been performed in this square, from Carlo Gozzi to Georges Courteline. A thick curtain of white polygonums conceal the lanterns and filters the smoke from the bar full of hippies, with their vague, drugged expressions, looking like frogmen who have been forgotten beneath the water. The square is lit by projectors which darken the ribbon of sky and cause the sheen of the stone to dazzle and the columns to loom out of the shadow; it’s between God and the Muses as to who has most to boast about; everything here has been created by man, for man; everything is so well balanced, so well accommodated over the invisible water below and all the plans so harmoniously compatible that you feel as happy as you do when you’re drunk.

When the weather is scorching hot, there is another cafe, on the Campo San Zanipolo, where you can take a siesta behind the pages of the Gazzettino without being disturbed. Above you is the Colleone statue, and behind, the Ospedale; to left and to right is the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the Gothic pantheon of the most famous doges, Mocenigo, Morosini, Loredan, as well as the tomb of Sebastian Venier, who commanded the fleet at Lepanto, thus avenging that poor Bragadin to whom the Senate erected a monument, in this very nave, as consolation for his having been so badly treated by the Turks. In Eastern countries, there is no more unforgivable crime than to pose as a victor when one has been defeated. In the sixteenth century, Famagusta, exhausted by a lengthy siege, surrendered to the Turk. The Venetian admiral, Marcantonio Bragadin, the defender of the city, gave himself up to the pasha who very courteously invited him to dine. Bragadin, with an escort of great magnificence, arrived at the banquet beneath a red silk parasol, the Asiatic symbol of suzerainty. The pasha was so deeply offended that he had Bragadin arrested before he left the table; the admiral’s nose and ears were chopped off; his execution was postponed three times; for ten days running he was hauled before the pasha and made to kiss the ground; after which, he was flayed alive (scorticato vivo); his corpse, stuffed with straw, was paraded through the city on a cow, before being dried and shipped to the arsenal in Constantinople.

After the battle of Lepanto, the Venetians recaptured the city. Today, Bragadin lies in this beautiful Gothic nave of Santi Giovanni e Paolo.

In the seventeenth century, another Bragadin was caught slipping a note intended for the Spanish ambassador into a crack in a church bench and was hanged between two columns in the Piazzetta. A third and no less unfortunate Bragadin, an alchemist, had tried to sell the Doge a recipe for making gold; he was imprisoned, but escaped and fled to Bavaria, where he hoodwinked thousands of people and lived like a king. In Munich, the executioner decapitated him with a two-handed sword.

A century later, it was yet another Bragadin, a former Inquisitor, who became the young Casanova’s first guardian; on the pretext of teaching him the cabbala, Casanova used to hoodwink him.

From the corner of my little Zanipolo café I can see Colleone; at whom is this piercingly defiant gaze directed, at his contemporaries or posterity? How could such a resolute, well-established captain have managed to possess such unpredictable supporters that he exchanged them as often as he changed his shirt? (Even in his own time, it was said of the condottieri that they were splendid fighters, but that “they never got much blood on their shirts.”) The whole of this great rascal’s life was spent fighting for Venice against Milan, or for Sforza against the Council of Ten; they do not appear to have held this against him, because every time he deserted them the condottiere came back to renew his offers. It is hard to put oneself into the fifteenth-century frame of mind; (even in our age of mercenaries): how can those fine heads, whose images Donatello, Uccello, Antonello da Messina, La Francesca and Vinci have bequeathed to us, have been those of ordinary military leaders, without any of them being killed? Do they lie, this terrible face of the Bergamask, this supercilious head, these hawk’s eyes, this unforgiving mouth, this sly expression? Should the credit go to Colleone himself, or to his band of adventurers who were all the more loyal to him because he looked after his men and paid them well; better than he was himself; we can see from his accounts which survive that the Senate of Venice quibbled over his pay, ducat for ducat, only discharging their obligations after long delays, having first tried to obtain a reduction (each did his best to swindle the other).

These condottieri, whose fame has endured for three centuries, were worth their wages; in Northern Italy, at the end of the fifteenth century, there was a veritable market in bands, milizie who could be bought, gangs of adventurers that could be hired by the hour or at a flat rate and who priced themselves very highly, even abroad. Louis XI and Charles le Téméraire spent a long time fighting for Colleone’s assistance, offering more and more money to the doge to sub-contract him to them, which caused embarrassment to the Republic, for they did not want to offend such great princes.

Once upon a time, the Venice Gazzettino published a list of people who had fallen into the water during the day; this column was withdrawn. Are less people falling in?

Everything used to be original and different here: the Serenissima had her own calendar that began on the 1st of March; the days were counted from the time of the sunset.

The real enemy of Venice has not been the Turk, but the Italian from the mainland; the wars against the Infidel enriched the Republic; the wars against Milan or the Pope ruined her.

People rode on horseback in Venice up until the fourteenth century. On the piazza where Colleone gambols, there was once a riding school with seventy-five horses.

So as to ward off the Muslims, the two Christian merchants who stole the body of St Mark from Alexandria in Egypt in order to take it back to Venice had the idea of burying the relic in a carcass of salted pork.

That black little canal; at the far end, at the very top of the perspective, there is a house of a dull red colour; as the sun goes down, its beams suddenly alight on the façade and illuminate it just as one lights a candle.

Water lends a depth to the sounds, a silky retentiveness that can last for over a minute; it is as if one was sinking into the depths.

Emerging from the Sansovino Library, where the courtyard has been glazed and turned into a reading room, I go through a door which opens on to the Procuraties, between two giants whose knees are at the height of my face. The sun is setting on the Ponte della Paglia; in the background is San Giorgio Maggiore, which the big liners steaming hurriedly through the channels before nightfall look as if they will sweep away as they pass.

The Paris newspapers have just arrived; it is six o’clock. Caught in the light of the setting sun, the mosaics of St Mark’s glisten like a thousand-year-old set of kitchen utensils.

In Venice, man has discovered a new joy: not having a car, as once at Zermatt, and, once upon a time, in Bermuda, and he is happy in a city without pavements, without traffic lights,18 without whistles, where one walks along as smoothly as the flowing waters: as I set out, I feel just like a ball, without specific gravity.

The houses of Venice are buildings that have a nostalgic longing to be boats: this is why their ground floors are often flooded. They are satisfying their fondness for a permanent home as well as their nomadic instincts.

Venice is the most expensive city in Italy, but the true pleasures she offers cost nothing: one hundred lire for the vaporetto, from the Lido to the station, by the accelerato, that is to say by the slowest service.

Pretentious householders give each other trees here.

The troops of the Directoire planted a tree of Liberty at the entrance to the ghetto.

Midday; everyone stops talking; Venetian mouths are full of spaghetti; so much seafood accompanies it that the noodles turn into seaweed.

The shop selling seashells to collectors, at the corner of rue du Dauphin.

In Venice, una sposa is not a married woman, but the wife to be; they cut corners.

A person’s life frequently resembles those palazzi on the Grand Canal where the lower floors were begun with an array of stones carved in the shapes of diamonds, and whose upper floors were hastily completed with dried mud.

Like an old lady on crutches, Venice is dependent on a forest of posts; a million of them were needed just to underpin the Salute; and that was not enough.

In very bad weather, in St Mark’s Square, the waters rise up through the joints in the paving stones; it reminds me of the Nouveau circus, in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, which, once the show was over, became a swimming-pool.

At Chioggia, the sails of the fishing boats have the same red paintings on red backgrounds as on Inca shrouds…

The palazzi on the Grand Canal, with their belts of blackened seaweed and barnacles.

These Leicas, these Zeiss; do people no longer have eyes?

Of all the traghetti, the most charming is that of Santa Maria del Giglio, with its gondoliers who play cards beneath the red virgin vines in October. You have to wait until a hand of piquet is over before daring to climb on board.

Squeezed into the rii of Venice like a bookmark between the pages; certain streets are so narrow that Browning used to complain that he could not open his umbrella in them.

The finest location for a shoe-shine boy is at the exit from the Mercerie. While he polishes, this is what you see: the flight lines of St Mark’s, lined with the ogives of the Doges’ Palace; in the foreground, the two porphyry lions polished for a thousand years by the stirrup-less trotting of young Venetians; to the right, the Campanile casts its shadow over my foot. At the far end of the perspective, like a backdrop, San Giorgio Maggiore, immense… until an oil tanker interposes itself, reducing the scale to the image of a painting at the bottom of a plate; the bows of the tanker, which is more vast than the church, are already level with the Danieli, whereas the stern has scarcely passed the Dogana.

Venice has run herself aground in a place that was forbidden: therein lay her genius.

The Venetians invented income tax, statistics, state pensions, book censorship, the lottery, the ghetto and glass mirrors.

Montaigne called on a literary courtesan who read him an endless elegy on her work; Montaigne would have done better to catch the pox.

The cats are the vultures of Venice.

During the seventeenth century, following an earthquake, the Grand Canal ran dry for two hours.

Colleone’s horse: one might criticise Verrocchio for the tail, which is a little low. And how could the horseman have achieved that raising of the forearm when his spurs are so far from the horse’s girth?

That box for anonymous denunciations that was placed at the entrance to the Doges’ Palace, and which has a lion’s mouth at its opening, is famous; the inquisitors put those bocche di leone not just in the Palace, but in every district of the city. It is not lions that should figure on the Serenissima’s coat of arms, but vipers.

Duse’s first role was that of Cosetta… (Festival of Theatre, Venice, 1969).

Who was it who described Reynaldo Hahn in Venice thus: “An upright piano, a great deal of smoke, a little music”?

A Parisian man of letters. In 1834, as he disembarked at the Danieli, where did Alfred de Musset run off to? To the Missiglia reading room, to see whether La Revue des Deux Mondes had arrived.

Springtime: let others repaint the fronts of their houses; in March, a Venetian first of all scrapes the bottom of his gondola.

Where better than Venice can Narcissus contemplate himself?

Wagner, listening to his own music, at the Café Quadri…

A Venetian never visits the rest of Italy.19

The Venetian dialect is distinguished by the letter Z; the Grand Canal itself is shaped like a Z.

1934

“VENICE, the mask of Italy” (Byron).

In front of the Scuola San Marco, I come across Fulgence, accompanied by Bernardine, his wife; they are staying near the Accademia.

Taking me to one side:

“I’ve moved Françoise into the Lido and I’ve persuaded Coralie to conceal herself in Padua”, Fulgence confesses to me. “My two ladies don’t know one another, fortunately. As for me, I’m keeping Venice to myself, with Bernardine.”

The fire-guard of marriage…

1934

HEARD ABOUT the death of Stavisky in Venice. The USSR joins the UN. Death of King Albert and the assassination of Dollfuss. Night of the Long Knives. Hindenburg. Hitler master of Germany. Publication of L’Armée de métier, by de Gaulle, with an introduction by Pétain.

How does one find these facts in the treasury of History? The doge threw his ring into the sea; who would have thought that fisherman would discover this ring in a fish’s belly, and that one day we would be able to see it in the Treasury of St Mark’s?

At the Institut, I come across an ancient and delightful paper by the Comte de Mas Latrie: De l’empoisonnement politique dans la république de Venise; from which it emerges that people were assassinated at the Doges’ Palace up until the second half of the eighteenth century; not only did the Senate frequently appear to be interested in the proposals of the pirates, but it let it be known and discussed advance payments, which varied according to the person who was to be eliminated, a sultan or a simple Albanian chieftain. Who provided the poison, and what was it?

At which point, nineteenth-century Venetian scholars reply to French accusations: “What about your kings? What about Louis XI? Did not your François I wish for the death of Pope Clement VII? Our word potione (a potion) has a double meaning in French: it’s ‘poison’…”

THE RIALTO MARKET

DESPITE THE ROLLING and swaying, the peaches in their baskets do not move; they’re plump and inedible. As for the fish, they’re not very big, with the exception of the tuna and swordfish, but what a tang of the high seas! They were caught the previous day and are untouched by ice and gamma rays, and have not been brushed with penicillin; after Greece, England, La Rochelle and the Hanseatic ports, after Antwerp, Portugal and Venice, fish from anywhere else seems tasteless.

Herbs, little used elsewhere, play an important part in Italian cooking, and they are sold by toothless old herbalists; a fusion of plucked leaves, sedge from the marshes, sweet watercress, lemon balm, edible lichens; ten varieties of chervil, limitless amounts of mint, oregano, marjoram and little seasoning bags which, once they are crushed, make up the sauces, such as that salsa verde one adds to boiled dishes, that is unknown even in Provence.

In the years that I lived far away from Venice, Denise would bring me back gondolier’s shoes, made of black velvet and with rope soles; you could buy them at the Rialto for a few lire; her two Charles, both elegant creatures, would wear nothing else.

1931

IN 1816 Countess Albrizzi gave a ball here at which Byron fell in love with Teresa Gamba, Countess Guiccioli; he had first met her three months earlier; three months of incubation, then, on that evening, the mutual coup de foudre.

What followed is well-known: Guiccioli, in love and consumptive, took refuge in Ravenna, where her elderly husband (there were fifty years between them) took all the blame upon himself, and where the Countess’s father, Count Gamba, came to beg Byron not to abandon his beloved daughter, who was coughing herself to death. The reason I am recalling this famous affair is in order to repeat Byron’s final words; exasperated (particularly since he found himself dragged into a political conspiracy involving the Italian family) Byron sighed: “I only wanted to be her escort; how could I have known that this affair would turn into an English novel?” (that is to say domestic and tearful).

Lauzun and Ligne were merely witty; Byron transcribed Italian buffoonery into English humour; the epigrammatic retorts in Wilde’s plays are to be found in every line of the poet’s correspondence: “The women here have abominable notions about constancy…” and (departing for Missolonghi): “I prefer to love a cause than to love a woman.” When Cocteau, who was asked what he would like to take away with him if his house caught fire, replied: “I’d take away the fire,” he sounds just like the Byron of the Letters.

“Why were there ten thousand gondolas four centuries ago, and five hundred today?”

“The job’s a dead loss! (It’s as if you were listening to a Paris cab driver.) The season is too short… A gondola costs a million lire… Vaporetti and lance, they break your arms with the wash they make… You risk your life at every turning… On the Grand Canal they come at you like a bull in a china shop…”

“But you’re singing?”

“So as to forget…”

The gondolier tells me that ever since the seventeenth century a gondola’s blade has had five prongs; the gondola’s reflection quivers over the waters that are mottled with sunshine and oil.

Three o’clock in the morning.

At this hour, with no one about, Venice is like a Guardi painting.

No more funiculi.

Were it not for the television aerials, one could be in the eighteenth century.

Nothing ruffles the surface of the water apart from a foul-smelling gust from the direction of the Dogana, where the ripples are caused by a puff of wind which does not reach me.

In ten minutes the peotta, the large gondola that collects the rubbish, will pass by on its way to the Giudecca. Venice is creating new islands out of refuse, making the most of her waste material.

When the first motorboat speeds past, the reflections of mooring posts look like crooked, Solomonic columns.

1925–1969 A CRUISE IN VENICE

I CAN REMEMBER a farewell party at sea, some forty years ago. The Zara, a vessel of 500 tons, with its black hull and gold lines, and flying the American flag, was anchored off the Doges’ Palace, ready to take us to Asia Minor. There were not many of us, just five passengers; a wise choice. Half of Venice, then a small provincial town, flocked on board and stayed so late that we missed the tide; for a month we were obliged to drink water, since the ship’s cellars had run dry. The captain, an Englishman, almost died.

As I recall that noisily celebrated departure, I ask myself in what way did a rather fashionable cruise like that one differ from those that serve as the background to modern novels. (I don’t regret having mixed in the society of those times; it meant that I didn’t have to spend my later life doing so, as Valéry or Gide did; it’s all experience.)

The pleasures of life in the twenties were uninhibited, but one had to be well dressed and come from a good family; there was none of that American-inspired brutality, no cold wars or hot ones, no world of pressure groups, alcohol, drugs, machine guns and erotic films. Survival? We were still learning about good manners. It was the Americans who were Europeanised; not the other way round.

People knew how to behave, even when playing the most reckless of games, those that have always existed; the scandals that took place in certain of the palazzi on the Grand Canal didn’t even reach the hotel bars; during an evening on board ship, when local society had gathered, you wouldn’t find any political agents, or betting clerks, or well-connected antique dealers without a license, or young women filling out their monthly wages in the gossip columns of unsavoury newspapers; the likes of couturiers, perfume sellers and suppliers had scarcely begun to mix socially with their clientele. Everybody still wore the clothes of their profession: pederasts offered themselves exclusively to males, without earning bits on the side from elderly ladies; Whites were simply less dark than Blacks, debauched old witches, celebrated for their weaknesses, did not publish their edifying memoirs, priests did not look like Protestant pastors, sociology students did not disguise themselves as Kurdish shepherds, and Kurdish shepherds as parachutists. Never could the current expression “to be out of sorts” be better translated than by our contemporary transvestites.

One never saw one’s hostess getting up from table between courses, taking photographs of her guests herself for some illustrated weekly, and then reclaiming her expenses. The prying snapshot, with the blackmailing photographer entering through the kitchens (as at the Labia), hiding beneath the bed and testing the very limits of the law, was unknown; this all stemmed from an American businesswoman who gave cut-price parties and, a few years later, fetched up in Europe.

Another difference was the police; the last nations to be highly civilized had not yet acquired police forces; there was Austrian surveillance in Stendhal’s time, Mosca hiding among the double basses at the theatre in Parma and the Italian gendarmerie, those brave carabinieri with their red plumes, but that was all; our information networks did not exist yet; neither did directories for each of the ministries, the “contacts” for the different weapons, the secret services attached to the most tropical of embassies, the investigation bureaux of the large banks, newspaper and magazine spies, syndicates on the look-out, files of casinos, jewellers and palaces. It is about our own time that Gérard de Nerval might have spoken of a “gang of privileged robbers”; it’s not Cosmopolis that Paul Bourget would have written today, but Interpol.

Having said this, there are a good number of similarities between a cruise in the 1920s and one today; you get away from the fogs, but become involved instead in disputes. Our voyage ended badly: as soon as we entered the Mediterranean, the family who had invited us began to quarrel among themselves; the poet on board had a premonition of a storm and disembarked at Bursa, and two other guests got off at Naples, so as not to have to take sides between the aunt and her niece. Left on their own, the members of the family locked themselves away in their cabins; as soon as they got back to Venice, they turned their backs on one another and never saw each other again; do they speak to one another from beyond the grave?

VENICE, SEPTEMBER 1930

ON THE 24TH OF SEPTEMBER 1930, I found myself sitting on a stone bench overlooking the lagoon. There where once the Bucintoro, its golden stern lighting up the primordial waters like the sun, and the Serenissima’s fleet lay at anchor — the ships flecked crimson, their long oars making them look like boiled lobsters — ten grey torpedo boats were lined up. The autumn sky trembled as the triangular shapes of the seaplanes approached; red, green and white tricolor pennants hung down to the ground (with all that ancient sense of “drapery” that flags have still retained in Italy); sailors from the Venetian battleships walked past, their eyes shining like copper. Officers wearing scarves and gold sword-knots passed with confident footstep to report for duty.

Venice, the city of Nietzsche, was instructing the new Italy: “Men must be given back the courage of their natural instincts”… “national narrow-mindedness, military strictness, a better physiology, space, meat…” I am back in front of St Mark’s, just as I was twenty years ago. Why did I buy La Volonté de puissance yesterday? What coincidence made me open it at the chapter entitled “Contre Rousseau”? “Unfortunately man is no longer wicked enough…” “It is lassitude and moralism that are the curse.”

The winged lion is proof that the future of Italy lies with the sea. St Mark versus the Orient, Manin20 versus Austria, Wagner and Nietzsche. In the Berliner Tageblatt, which I bought beneath the Procuraties, I read the words of Hitler, curt as a machine-gun: “If needs be, heads will fall.”

14–24 September: ten days were enough. Hitler’s voice once more, at Leipzig: “I shall introduce a vast spiritual upheaval”… and the National Socialists’ manifesto: “We shall use iron restraint against all who oppose the material and spiritual rebuilding of the nation.”

I look around me and I notice the blond creatures with bare knees who have descended from the Tyrol upon St Mark’s Square. The youth of 1930 are beginning to be seen everywhere and to make their loud voices heard. It is a Germany that no longer reads All Quiet on the Western Front, that speaks of “real wars, which will stop all forms of frivolity”; a hot-blooded age that has not experienced suffering: the students who have elected Hitler are former Communist sympathisers.

“We are entering a tragic period,” Nietzsche foretold, “a catastrophic age.”

1936

YESTERDAY MUSSOLINI brought Hitler to Napoleon’s headquarters at Stra. Behind them lay Treviso, the first foothills of the Dolomites and Mount Grappa. In front of them, the Euganean Hills that served Giorgione’s backdrop. Lichen-covered statues cast their drowning cries into the sea of shining magnolias. Ochre-coloured sails, pierced by an eye flushed red with conjunctivitis, pass by, Dutch style, at the level of the cornfields.

Twenty years ago, Padua was an ancient university city, drowsing over its degrees; today, she has come to life again and the surrounding marshland has been dried out; the Paduans are learning their good manners from the walls: “Well brought-up people do not swear.” (I immediately make up a list of all the swear-words I can remember.) I also read: “Spitting is a custom of the past”; instantly, this leads me to wonder: why did our forebears spit? Is salivating any more unhealthy? Does expectorating get rid of phlegm any more effectively?

The education of the masses; ten years earlier, in Moscow, I watched schoolchildren being taught to brush their teeth up and down, and not from side to side.

1935

KILL THE FLIES!” (One of Mussolini’s recommendations.)21

1935

FOR THE FASCISTS, Othello was not a coloured man; he was a More, which does not mean a Moor, but a native of Morea. The original Othello was the Doge Gristoforo Moro.

On the Piazzetta, every male nowadays has the chin of Colleone and the look of a Guatamelata.

1937

RAIMONDO, the maître d’hôtel at the Splendid, has watched Europe parade along the Grand Canal for half a century; his stories would fill ten novels, with interruptions for seating new arrivals, distributing menus and taking orders.

Here is his plat du jour.

“I’m about to snuff it, Raimondo,” the Duke of N… said to me. “When you have closed my eyes, you must go down to the campo; you will sit down by the well; you will wait until a pretty woman goes by; I want her to be very, very pretty… You will accost her civilly: ‘Madame, the Duke, my master, has just yielded up his soul to God… a few steps away from here… His last wish: that a very pretty woman who was passing by should come and say a little prayer for him… before he is taken away to San Michele…’

“I did not have to wait long, Monsieur. A beautiful girl walks past, eighteen years old, with good firm breasts, just as the Duke liked. I go up to her. She hesitates. ‘No one should disobey the wishes of a dead man, signorina… Povero! The Duke said to me: ‘One of my family, my brother, my sister-in-law, I don’t mind… A stranger would do the thing best.’

“She followed me. We went upstairs. The letto matrimoniale, the curtains drawn, the lamps… The girl, tear drops in her eyes… it was worth all the family’s lamentations… It was the Bygone face to face with Today. It was il giorno vivente e la notte eterna.

“When she was about to leave, I presented her with a little casket… ‘The Duke lived only for ladies; my master wanted his last thought to be for one of them. I have been asked to give you this…’

“In the casket, Monsieur, was an emerald worthy of the treasure in St Mark’s, worthy of the Pala d’Oro.”

1937

SHOULD VENICE be illuminated with neon lights? Those who look to the past say no; the futurists reply: “Despite what you say, St Mark’s glistens in the light of our projectors; it’s a great success; the tourists love it.” The romantics hold firm; this morning they are parading on the square beneath a white banner: “WE WANT THE MOON.”

1937

MILITARY PLANES bearing the lion of St Mark on their wings. After the sea, the sky. The future of dictators is in the sky, the Duce has said so.

A procession of little girls, hundreds of ribbons streaming from their shoulders; the arditi surround the well-booted townsfolk; their black, silken tassels gleam in the sunlight. It is the summoning of civilians, the adunata that takes place at five o’clock in the afternoon; avant-gardists and balillas take their places in squares marked out in chalk upon the ground of the campi, like pawns on a chessboard. Drivers stop in the middle of the Paduan countryside to don their black shirts before returning to Venice.

1937

ANCIENT INSCRIPTIONS were carved in stone; with their backs to the wall they confronted oblivion; they took eternity as their witness; they penetrated the heart of the countryside and were an integral part of the architecture; slight but immortal shadows, they kept pace with glory, victory or death. Nowadays, we no longer devote much time to the fact, we bring it about; we don’t accredit the result, we call it up, we don’t inscribe it, we just write it down, hurriedly, preferably on the least durable materials.

In Italy the Ethiopian war exacerbated that academic passion for combining inscriptions with belles-lettres. No one race has left behind more marks upon walls than the Latin people; they covered everything with them; on catacombs, barracks, circuses, in streets and alleyways you can still make out election announcements, mortgage deeds, appeals to some famous gladiator or renowned retiarius; Ovid and Propertius are quoted on the walls of Pompeii, between a couple of caricatures or lovers’ dates; everywhere columns, tombs, aqueducts and statues still speak meaningfully to us over the centuries.

In our own time, one is scarcely past the Italian border than one is surprised to see that this remarkable dialogue between the State and its citizens continues. Who is it who writes? Who dictates? When did they cover the towns with the lapidary, heroic or familiar thoughts, which the Communists brought back into fashion here in about 1920?22

They are there, everywhere, those official phrases, daubed black on white, white on black. On the garage door of my hotel I read: Fascism is an army on the march. Above the municipal fountain: Fascism is a global development. At the entrance to the village: Fascism is politeness. The most current assertion is: We shall be proved right; and the death-head is seen everywhere, together with these simple words, which are hard to translate: Me ne frego (something like: Who the hell cares… but more obscene).

The statements are most frequently aimed at Britain: We shall not accept sanctions from anyone, or: British courtesy reeks of Abyssinian oil. The slogan: A noi, Duce! defaces the most venerable of monuments, the walls of the Procuraties, stained grey by pigeon droppings, that old scraped bone that is Milan Cathedral, the sombre palazzi of Genoa and the mellow Signoria in Florence. And there’s this one, which dates from the time of the call up: Better to live the life of a lion for one day than live as a sheep for a hundred years!

“Great poets need large audiences.” No square, no esplanade, not even St Mark’s would be able to contain the immense numbers of the public that Carlyle demanded. People stream past like water and the man in the street is obliged, however unwillingly, to listen to the strident, motionless cries that emanate from the walls of Venice, those talking walls of 1937. Of what interest are the bland affirmations, with their cold roman lettering, that are pasted up outside our town halls when compared to these exclamations? Their “no billstickers” doesn’t frighten a soul.

The entire life of a country can be read either on the front of houses, which for foreigners have become more instructive than a book, or at the rear, where they are transformed into notepads. It is readers who file past ideas, and not the reverse.

15 MAY 1938

AT THE NEWSPAPER KIOSK, Venice’s Il Gazzettino illustrato is advertising an article entitled: “The Fatal Heroes”. On the same page there is a photograph of Mussolini and Hitler at Stra. I buy the paper; the “fatal heroes”: a series of historical pieces; the hero for that day: Byron.

1938 DEATH OF D’ANNUNZIO

IN THE 1930S, a friend had obtained an audience for me; summoned back to Paris, I had to cancel my visit to Gardone, and returned from Venice to France. On arrival at the fork on the motorway at Lake Garda, a fascist guard handed me a packet: “From the Commandante”; at that period French cars were not very numerous; he had picked out mine. Inside I found a paper-knife made of inlaid gold, bearing these words uttered by the national hero: “I only possess that which I give.”

JUNE 1939

AT BLED, in Slovenia, by the lake shore, thirty kilometres from Ljubljana. An international tunnel is all that separates two worlds, the Latin and the Slav, Julian Veneto from Yugoslavia. One passes through fourteen centuries in twenty minutes.

My wife is in Trieste, at her uncles’ house. Mussolini has just seized their Stock Exchange shares in order to prepare for war, giving them in exchange state-headed notepaper and uncultivated land.

I was on my way to one of the Danube Commissions, two hours away, for the spring session; a reduced Europe: the Austrian admiral, a man of very noble blood and very tired; the Romanian, our president, a wily and devious diplomat on the brink of retirement; the Englishman, who drinks a bottle of whisky a day — he died of it; the Yugoslav, pettifogging, blunt and loathed; the Italian, a buffoon… Our assignment: to supervise the Danube, both technically, and a touch politically too, from Germany to the Black Sea. Our winter session was held in March, in Nice; the autumn one will take place in Galatz, at the mouth of the river, in an old Second Empire — the age of Romania — palace that is half-Turkish, half-Russian. Our old-fashioned yacht, flying the Commission’s flag, along with those of eight European nations, was berthed near Vienna. This very peaceful Commission’s only enemies were the rocks that studded the Iron Gates, the silt which obstructed the fluvial ports, or the fluctuations of the tributaries.

In this Slovenian countryside, that once formed the Austrian crown territories of Carinthia, Garniola and Styria, I was able to study at close quarters those Slavs who had been halted by the Alps on their march towards the Adriatic; they had rid themselves of Franz-Joseph’s jurisdiction only to find themselves confronted by the Italians, who had grown rich on Austrian booty as a result of the 1920 treaties; the Italians had gained Trieste, Istria, Dalmatia and Julian Veneto; their mandate was to prevent the Slavs descending on the Adriatic; fascism took care of this, depriving Trieste of its hinterland, denationalizing the towns, since they were unable to penetrate the countryside, dressing the Croats in black shirts and providing the Slovenes with boots.

With the end of the Serenissima, from 1814 onwards, Trieste, the Dominante, had prospered through the decline of Venice, which no longer needed to recruit slave oarsmen for their galleys. Trieste, once made wealthy by Vienna, the Greeks, the English and the Germans, prospered little after 1920, deprived of the two-headed eagle, the city thought only italianità and was indifferent to the miseries heaped upon priests and Slovenian teachers by the Irredentists, who purged the local administration and prohibited the Slav languages; after all, had not the Europe of the Treaty of Versailles been responsible for establishing the Italian presence, firstly in order to be rid of the Slavs, and then to contain them?

On the eve of war, these memories only served to remind one of the Slavs’ tête-à-têtes with Venice; the Slavonians, the ancestors of those on the Riva degli Schiavoni, opposite the Danieli, where Victor-Emmanuel prances; coming down from Bled, approaching Trieste, I could hear them growling about their former masters; from high on the Dinaric Alps, the old lion of St Mark was living out the last days of its Adriatic splendour.

I would not see Venice again for another twelve years.

NOTES

1. Journal d’un attaché d’ambassade (Gallimard).

2. See Guy Petrocini, Les Mutineries de 1917.

3. Georges Auric (1899–1983) was a composer. A friend of Darius Milhaud and Erik Satie, he was one of the celebrated Groupe des Six. [Tr.]

4. Saint-John Perse.

5. Every salon at that time had its socialist: at Mme Straus’s, it was Léon Blum; at Mme Ménard-Dorian’s, Albert Thomas; at the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre’s, Rappoport; at Princesse Eugene Murat’s, née Violette d’Elchingen, Bracke-Desrousseaux.

6. This was the title of Paul Morand’s second collection of short stories (after Tendres Stocks, 1921), published in 1922. It was followed by another collection, Fermé la nuit, in 1924. Both were very successful. When Morand writes of the Nuits, he is presumably referring to both these books. [Tr.]

7. A reference to Les Croix du bois, Roland Dorgelès’s novel about the First World War, which many believed should have been awarded the 1919 Prix Goncourt instead of Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes jilles enfieurs [Tr.]

8. October 1970. Sheltering from an autumn storm in the Café de la Fenice, I perused the newspapers; I learned of the death of Dos Passos: “My ambition is to sing the ‘Internationale’,” Dos Passos used to say, as a young man; he was then the equal of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Faulkner; Sartre considered him the best novelist of the time. From 1930 on Dos Passos opposed the “New Deal”; he considered the Second World War to be a catastrophe. “We can only regret that such an accomplished literary technician should have adopted such a narrow viewpoint and that the brilliant constellation of 1920 now shines so dimly…” (Herald Tribune, 29 September 1970). “In 1929, Dos Passos unleashed a virulent critique of capitalist society; his work had a considerable impact. The Second World War was to bring about a true conversion in the writer… At the same time as he altered his political views, Dos Passos seemed to lose his creative powers.” (Le Figaro, 30 September 1970). Yesterday evening, on France-Inter, I listened to Le Masque et la Plume: “How can Ionesco still go on telling us about his death? He’s been dead for ten years.” I’m not very lucky with my friends who have advanced opinions.

9. The grand corps de l’État are senior civil servants recruited through the École Nationale d’Administration. [Tr.]

10. pantouflage is a term coined for those who leave the civil service to work in the private sector. [Tr.]

11. The Groupe des Six was a group of six young composers — Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, François Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre — that was centred around the figures of the composer Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau in the 1920s, and who became celebrated for their advanced ideas. [Tr.]

12. He kept open house, and at his table six blue angora cats would wander round among the plates.

13. Jacques Ange Gabriel (1698–1792). Celebrated French architect and interior designer. [Tr.]

14. At a banquet for three thousand guests, in the Grand Council chamber, the knives, forks, tablecloths and napkins were made from sugar, as were the epergnes and the statues of doges, planets and animals, modelled on drawings by Sansovino.

15. Morand was writing in 1970. Serge Lifar, Diaghilev’s choreographer, died in Lausanne in 1986; Boris Kochno, a man closely associated with the ballet and the theatre throughout his life, died in Paris in 1990. [Tr.]

16. That of 1900.

17. See also what Proust has to say about Venice in Cahier 50 (explored so cleverly by Maurice Bardèche in his Marcel Proust romancier, vol. I, 1971).

18. Just one, at a crossroads at Rio Nuovo.

19. A Sevillan never travels up to Madrid; an inhabitant of Lausanne doesn’t go to Geneva.

20. Daniele Manin (1804–57) Italian statesman who, after the Revolution of 1848, became the head of the Venetian Republic. He was active in the heroic Venetian resistance against Austria. [Tr.]

21. 1967. On the walls in Peking: “Kill the birds!”

22. 1970. The graffiti of the P.C. (il partito comunista) has returned: seen, yesterday, on a wall in the Brenta, the following invective, worthy of Alfieri: AMERICANI SERVI DELLA MORTE (Americans, lackeys of Death!).