Paul Morand - Venices

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?