Paul Morand - Venices

1914

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After this London detour, let us return to Venice.