Paul Morand - Venices

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

2. The École des Sciences Politiques.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. The Fortune was re-gilded in 1971.

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

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

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

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

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

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

18. In 1970.

19. In 1970.

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

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

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

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

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

25. Except for Edmondjaloux.

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!”