Paul Morand - Venices

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.