Paul Morand - Venices

One never saw one’s hostess getting up from table between courses, taking photographs of her guests herself for some illustrated weekly, and then reclaiming her expenses. The prying snapshot, with the blackmailing photographer entering through the kitchens (as at the Labia), hiding beneath the bed and testing the very limits of the law, was unknown; this all stemmed from an American businesswoman who gave cut-price parties and, a few years later, fetched up in Europe.

Another difference was the police; the last nations to be highly civilized had not yet acquired police forces; there was Austrian surveillance in Stendhal’s time, Mosca hiding among the double basses at the theatre in Parma and the Italian gendarmerie, those brave carabinieri with their red plumes, but that was all; our information networks did not exist yet; neither did directories for each of the ministries, the “contacts” for the different weapons, the secret services attached to the most tropical of embassies, the investigation bureaux of the large banks, newspaper and magazine spies, syndicates on the look-out, files of casinos, jewellers and palaces. It is about our own time that Gérard de Nerval might have spoken of a “gang of privileged robbers”; it’s not Cosmopolis that Paul Bourget would have written today, but Interpol .

Having said this, there are a good number of similarities between a cruise in the 1920s and one today; you get away from the fogs, but become involved instead in disputes. Our voyage ended badly: as soon as we entered the Mediterranean, the family who had invited us began to quarrel among themselves; the poet on board had a premonition of a storm and disembarked at Bursa, and two other guests got off at Naples, so as not to have to take sides between the aunt and her niece. Left on their own, the members of the family locked themselves away in their cabins; as soon as they got back to Venice, they turned their backs on one another and never saw each other again; do they speak to one another from beyond the grave?

VENICE, SEPTEMBER 1930

ON THE 24TH OF SEPTEMBER 1930, I found myself sitting on a stone bench overlooking the lagoon. There where once the Bucintoro , its golden stern lighting up the primordial waters like the sun, and the Serenissima’s fleet lay at anchor — the ships flecked crimson, their long oars making them look like boiled lobsters — ten grey torpedo boats were lined up. The autumn sky trembled as the triangular shapes of the seaplanes approached; red, green and white tricolor pennants hung down to the ground (with all that ancient sense of “drapery” that flags have still retained in Italy); sailors from the Venetian battleships walked past, their eyes shining like copper. Officers wearing scarves and gold sword-knots passed with confident footstep to report for duty.

Venice, the city of Nietzsche, was instructing the new Italy: “Men must be given back the courage of their natural instincts”… “national narrow-mindedness, military strictness, a better physiology, space, meat…” I am back in front of St Mark’s, just as I was twenty years ago. Why did I buy La Volonté de puissance yesterday? What coincidence made me open it at the chapter entitled “ Contre Rousseau ”? “Unfortunately man is no longer wicked enough…” “It is lassitude and moralism that are the curse.”

The winged lion is proof that the future of Italy lies with the sea. St Mark versus the Orient, Manin20 versus Austria, Wagner and Nietzsche. In the Berliner Tageblatt, which I bought beneath the Procuraties, I read the words of Hitler, curt as a machine-gun: “If needs be, heads will fall.”

14–24 September: ten days were enough. Hitler’s voice once more, at Leipzig: “I shall introduce a vast spiritual upheaval”… and the National Socialists’ manifesto: “We shall use iron restraint against all who oppose the material and spiritual rebuilding of the nation.”

I look around me and I notice the blond creatures with bare knees who have descended from the Tyrol upon St Mark’s Square. The youth of 1930 are beginning to be seen everywhere and to make their loud voices heard. It is a Germany that no longer reads All Quiet on the Western Front , that speaks of “real wars, which will stop all forms of frivolity”; a hot-blooded age that has not experienced suffering: the students who have elected Hitler are former Communist sympathisers.

“We are entering a tragic period,” Nietzsche foretold, “a catastrophic age.”

1936

YESTERDAY MUSSOLINI brought Hitler to Napoleon’s headquarters at Stra. Behind them lay Treviso, the first foothills of the Dolomites and Mount Grappa. In front of them, the Euganean Hills that served Giorgione’s backdrop. Lichen-covered statues cast their drowning cries into the sea of shining magnolias. Ochre-coloured sails, pierced by an eye flushed red with conjunctivitis, pass by, Dutch style, at the level of the cornfields.

Twenty years ago, Padua was an ancient university city, drowsing over its degrees; today, she has come to life again and the surrounding marshland has been dried out; the Paduans are learning their good manners from the walls: “ Well brought-up people do not swear .” (I immediately make up a list of all the swear-words I can remember.) I also read: “ Spitting is a custom of the past ”; instantly, this leads me to wonder: why did our forebears spit? Is salivating any more unhealthy? Does expectorating get rid of phlegm any more effectively?

The education of the masses; ten years earlier, in Moscow, I watched schoolchildren being taught to brush their teeth up and down, and not from side to side.

1935

KILL THE FLIES!” (One of Mussolini’s recommendations.)21

1935

FOR THE FASCISTS, Othello was not a coloured man; he was a More , which does not mean a Moor, but a native of Morea. The original Othello was the Doge Gristoforo Moro.

On the Piazzetta, every male nowadays has the chin of Colleone and the look of a Guatamelata.

1937

RAIMONDO, the maître d’hôtel at the Splendid, has watched Europe parade along the Grand Canal for half a century; his stories would fill ten novels, with interruptions for seating new arrivals, distributing menus and taking orders.

Here is his plat du jour.

“I’m about to snuff it, Raimondo,” the Duke of N… said to me. “When you have closed my eyes, you must go down to the campo ; you will sit down by the well; you will wait until a pretty woman goes by; I want her to be very, very pretty… You will accost her civilly: ‘Madame, the Duke, my master, has just yielded up his soul to God… a few steps away from here… His last wish: that a very pretty woman who was passing by should come and say a little prayer for him… before he is taken away to San Michele…’

“I did not have to wait long, Monsieur. A beautiful girl walks past, eighteen years old, with good firm breasts, just as the Duke liked. I go up to her. She hesitates. ‘No one should disobey the wishes of a dead man, signorina … Povero ! The Duke said to me: ‘One of my family, my brother, my sister-in-law, I don’t mind… A stranger would do the thing best.’

“She followed me. We went upstairs. The letto matrimoniale , the curtains drawn, the lamps… The girl, tear drops in her eyes… it was worth all the family’s lamentations… It was the Bygone face to face with Today. It was il giorno vivente e la notte eterna.

“When she was about to leave, I presented her with a little casket… ‘The Duke lived only for ladies; my master wanted his last thought to be for one of them. I have been asked to give you this…’

“In the casket, Monsieur, was an emerald worthy of the treasure in St Mark’s, worthy of the Pala d’Oro.”