Paul Morand: Venices

On the eve of war, these memories only served to remind one of the Slavs’ tête-à-têtes with Venice; the Slavonians, the ancestors of those on the Riva degli Schiavoni, opposite the Danieli, where Victor-Emmanuel prances; coming down from Bled, approaching Trieste, I could hear them growling about their former masters; from high on the Dinaric Alps, the old lion of St Mark was living out the last days of its Adriatic splendour.

I would not see Venice again for another twelve years.

NOTES

1. Journal d’un attaché d’ambassade (Gallimard).

2. See Guy Petrocini, Les Mutineries de 1917.

3. Georges Auric (1899–1983) was a composer. A friend of Darius Milhaud and Erik Satie, he was one of the celebrated Groupe des Six. [Tr.]

4. Saint-John Perse.

5. Every salon at that time had its socialist: at Mme Straus’s, it was Léon Blum; at Mme Ménard-Dorian’s, Albert Thomas; at the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre’s, Rappoport; at Princesse Eugene Murat’s, née Violette d’Elchingen, Bracke-Desrousseaux.

6. This was the title of Paul Morand’s second collection of short stories (after Tendres Stocks, 1921), published in 1922. It was followed by another collection, Fermé la nuit , in 1924. Both were very successful. When Morand writes of the Nuits , he is presumably referring to both these books. [Tr.]

7. A reference to Les Croix du bois , Roland Dorgelès’s novel about the First World War, which many believed should have been awarded the 1919 Prix Goncourt instead of Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes jilles enfieurs [Tr.]

8. October 1970 . Sheltering from an autumn storm in the Café de la Fenice, I perused the newspapers; I learned of the death of Dos Passos: “My ambition is to sing the ‘Internationale’,” Dos Passos used to say, as a young man; he was then the equal of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Faulkner; Sartre considered him the best novelist of the time. From 1930 on Dos Passos opposed the “New Deal”; he considered the Second World War to be a catastrophe. “We can only regret that such an accomplished literary technician should have adopted such a narrow viewpoint and that the brilliant constellation of 1920 now shines so dimly…” ( Herald Tribune , 29 September 1970). “In 1929, Dos Passos unleashed a virulent critique of capitalist society; his work had a considerable impact. The Second World War was to bring about a true conversion in the writer… At the same time as he altered his political views, Dos Passos seemed to lose his creative powers.” ( Le Figaro, 30 September 1970). Yesterday evening, on France-Inter, I listened to Le Masque et la Plume : “How can Ionesco still go on telling us about his death? He’s been dead for ten years.” I’m not very lucky with my friends who have advanced opinions.

9. The grand corps de l’État are senior civil servants recruited through the École Nationale d’Administration. [Tr.]

10. pantouflage is a term coined for those who leave the civil service to work in the private sector. [Tr.]

11. The Groupe des Six was a group of six young composers — Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, François Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre — that was centred around the figures of the composer Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau in the 1920s, and who became celebrated for their advanced ideas. [Tr.]

12. He kept open house, and at his table six blue angora cats would wander round among the plates.

13. Jacques Ange Gabriel (1698–1792). Celebrated French architect and interior designer. [Tr.]

14. At a banquet for three thousand guests, in the Grand Council chamber, the knives, forks, tablecloths and napkins were made from sugar, as were the epergnes and the statues of doges, planets and animals, modelled on drawings by Sansovino.

15. Morand was writing in 1970. Serge Lifar, Diaghilev’s choreographer, died in Lausanne in 1986; Boris Kochno, a man closely associated with the ballet and the theatre throughout his life, died in Paris in 1990. [Tr.]

16. That of 1900.

17. See also what Proust has to say about Venice in Cahier 50 (explored so cleverly by Maurice Bardèche in his Marcel Proust romancier, vol. I, 1971).

18. Just one, at a crossroads at Rio Nuovo.

19. A Sevillan never travels up to Madrid; an inhabitant of Lausanne doesn’t go to Geneva.

20. Daniele Manin (1804–57) Italian statesman who, after the Revolution of 1848, became the head of the Venetian Republic. He was active in the heroic Venetian resistance against Austria. [Tr.]

21. 1967. On the walls in Peking: “Kill the birds!”

22. 1970. The graffiti of the P.C. (il partito comunista) has returned: seen, yesterday, on a wall in the Brenta, the following invective, worthy of Alfieri: AMERICANI SERVI DELLA MORTE (Americans, lackeys of Death!).

MARIA P—, a Venetian friend whom I questioned about the end of the last war, in which she herself had been involved, told me: “Venice was a dismal place during that winter of 1945; everything was rationed; news, especially: the local press was full of details about other fronts, about the German advance in Alsace, but was silent about what was taking place on our own doorstep; there were maps of the Neisse front, but nothing about the Ravenna-Bologna one. I could hear the bombs destroying Padua. There was no more electricity; the vaporetti had no fuel; there were notices on the walls providing descriptions of all sorts of lethal contraptions that fell out of the sky, which the public should not touch.

“On the 26th of April, my Gazzettino appeared in a smaller format. On the 27th of April, it had become a single sheet of paper: Milan occupied, Mussolini arrested, Canadian troops at Mestre. On the 28th, my newspaper was nothing but a leaflet, in which the Volunteers for Freedom and its glorious fighters were restoring the glory of the Risorgimento to Italy, which had been darkened by twenty years of Nazi-fascist barbarism. The Canadian armoured-cars would not stay for long; once Venice was taken, the Allies sped off in great haste: intent on preventing Tito from spilling over into the Julian Veneto…”

SEPTEMBER 1951

A EUROPEAN FESTIVAL, twenty years old today… A man of taste hurled his joy at being alive into the Cannaregio. Did not Ludwig II of Bavaria drown himself in two feet of water?

It would be absurd to talk about this latest evening like a young girl discussing her first dance, but from the moment I arrived I knew that I was coming to say farewell to a certain world; a recluse through necessity and alone these past eleven years, from the top of my glacier I suddenly fell upon a delightful skirmish, into a death knell of the imagination. A ball? A ball in Italy, as in Stendhal!

In St Mark’s Square, there was what a Venetian Montaigne would call “the throng of foreign peoples”. It wasn’t a matter of hairdressers or make-up girls having missed their trains or planes, of “ticket-holders” jeopardised by last-minute defections — local politics, the American press, left-wing puritanism and the resentment of those who had been excluded were all blended together here.

On the terrace of Florian’s, which was littered with more feathers than an eiderdown, Churchill, his paintbox in a shoulder-bag, held up his fingers in a V-sign, but no one was interested; that day, V stood only for Venice.

Whether he was conscious of it or being challenging, it was pleasing to think that a great amateur painter was parading himself, just for the sake of bringing Venice back to life, of helping those characters painted by great or lesser masters — captive goddesses on their Gobelins tapestries, who had grown bored on their museum canvases — to emerge from their frames; others could have done so, but only he dared; in a world of yellow-bellies, he was a caballero .