Paul Morand - Venices

In Padua there is a very old mansion, dating from 1256, which is still known as the Palazzo degli Anziani : it is the very image of my adolescence; I lived in the past; I dwelt among people from a bygone age; I even went so far as to view the world through the eyes of the “Ancestors”. I confided in my father: “When I gaze at the setting sun my sunsets are those of Turner; my clouds are Courbet’s skies, my ceilings those of Tiepolo; I can visualise no other thaws than those in paintings by Monet, and all my women have the belly of a Rodin or the legs of a Maillol; I should like to be able to take delight in a pink rose next to a green one, without having to thank Matisse; here we are at Saint-Séverin: I am unable to see it through my own eyes, I need those of your Huysmans. Where do I fit into all this?”

The famous generation gap never struck me as being hard to bridge, such was the natural understanding between my parents and myself, such the pleasure I took in following them along paths they never sought to impose upon me. Their pace of life was my own; when we were travelling, we would spend hours and days sitting side by side on deck-chairs, not attempting to make contact with the other hotel guests, and understanding one another without the need to speak. I was still out of touch with my own times; what I was experiencing was the world of my family, the air that I breathed was theirs.

Everything was owed to the Ancients, without one ever being able to match them; firstly, one owed them gratitude: I had always noticed my father avoiding walking on the Persian rug in the studio, out of respect for an object from the Middle Ages: “This rug has been handed down to me, I have a duty towards it,” he would say. Beauty alone mattered; exactly the reverse of modern times, when beauty will remain exiled until a man hungers for it once more.

I was responsible only to myself, without having any attachments or duties apart from very close blood ties. On my father’s side there was nobody left; I had no dead to mourn, no dead to share my life. My mother came from a family of pedigree bourgeoisie, from whom her love for her husband had drawn her apart, but who retained their position; once a week, to preserve the convention, I would go to Sunday dinner at my maternal grandmother’s house in the rue Marignan. (I can see the ritual still: decanted bottles of claret, with little heart-shaped pieces of filter paper around the neck of each carafe, on which you could read the growth and the vintage; fruit bowls heaped with cherries and strawberries, with not a single stalk showing; a few adages continue to hover in my memory such as: “It’s better reheated the next day.”) This section of my family populated the Cour des Gomptes6 with advisers, instructors and auditors: it was the provinces, but in Paris. I discovered the true Paris at our home; here people were classified only by their talents or their originality. On Wednesdays during the winter, there were dinner parties at home; I can see my father, as slim as a Valois, with his curled moustache and the ribbon of his monocle dangling against his starched dinner shirt. “Everybody should sit where they want” was the rule. Members of the Société des Artistes français and of the Institut were abhorred, exceptions being made for Gounod, Pierné and Massenet, who had composed the music for Drames sacrés (1893), Izeyl (1894) and other plays written by my father, as well as Grisélidis (1891), a neo-medieval mystery play, which had been a triumph for Bartet at the Comédie-Française and which in 1901 was made into a comic opera, with music by Massenet.

Certain Wednesdays were reserved for Italian music: Tosti, a sort of blue-eyed Prince of Wales, who wrote waltzes and ballads that were popular all over Europe, or the composer Isidore de Lara, a good-natured giant of a man, who came with Litvinne or Héglon, or with the celebrated tenor Tamagno; after dinner they made the glass cupboard in the studio vibrate with a song from Messaline , the libretto for which had been written by my father and Armand Silvestre:

Viens aimer les nuits sont trap brèves,

Viens rêver les jours sont trop courts …7

In Auguste Rodin’s case, he would only come to lunch (from about 1903–1908); peeping out of his yellow-white beard, his priapic nose seemed to me to emerge from his pubis; I would see his faun’s ears rising from above a mass of spindle trees in our garden, the earthly paradise of the marble depot, on the Quai d’Orsay; ever since 1880, the sculptor had had his studio there, lent to him by the State; we used to live in an adorable little house in the rue de l’Université; here Rodin found shelter from Camille Claudel’s demented screams and from the reproaches of Rose, who waited for him every evening at Meudon; this domestic hell was his true Porte de l’Enfer , the vast grey, dusty plaster maquette of which I can still see, in his studio, along with his Ugolin or his Enfant prodigue, which hung, untouched for a quarter of a century, from the double-doors, covered with spiders’ webs. The Rodin of the early years was already a distant figure; the one who took his leave, after lunch, would return to his studio, where Isadora Duncan, or those Americans who queued to have their bust sculpted at a cost of forty thousand gold francs, awaited him. I did not see Rodin again until July 1914, in London; he had come over for the day to open an exhibition, accompanied by the Comtesse Greffulhe; caught off guard by the mobilization, and with the ferry service interrupted, he had been obliged to spend the night there, without any underwear, he was wrapped up in two of the Comtesse’s nightdresses, looking very “Guermantes”, the sleeves tied about his Praxitelean chest.

Comtesse Greffulhe

THE RHÔNE VALLEY, 1906

THAT MORNING everything was frozen: the landscape, the sun, the sky, the hotel, mankind itself, at one in the ecstasy of no longer being merely a fragment of solidified joy, burning with cold; the swans, which had fallen asleep, awoke with their webbed feet cleft to the ice. So winter was not just sitting with one’s feet up, chilblains and stiff ears, but something which had been hidden from me until now: a sort of white summer, but so barren and unproductive that it was in total contrast to the other summer, which was alive with streams and harvests. The word hibernation did not yet exist for me, but I sensed already that the cold ensured a long life; on the thermometer the mercury had disappeared and had taken refuge in its little glass bulb; all that was left of the deciduous trees was their outline; the branches were nothing but airborne roots. I yearned for high places; for the life of a mountain guide, a timber sawyer, a botanist or a cowhand, anything, rather than going back down into the valley. I have never ever forgotten that sudden experience of the universal. Never had I existed so fully. What plenitude! I felt overcome with a simple joy; nothing other than complete harmony with nature, with the world and with the order of things. Now that I was certain that a single moment could be motionless, there was nothing else that I wanted; in a flash, I realised that true riches are priceless.

Much later, I would understand my wonderment at beholding these virgin peaks; thanks to them, I could escape from a prison; but what was this prison?

I had been brought up in the grimy Paris of Zola, along the tar-blacked streets of Whistler, among Maupassant’s gloomy peasants, in Flaubert’s sombre countryside, surrounded by hot-air stoves; and, all of a sudden, everything was white! This magical mirror enabled me to glimpse my future life; elemental forces which had hitherto been dormant radiated forth. In a trice, I was at the heart of my being.