Paul Morand - Venices

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 pantouflage 10), 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).