Paul Morand - Venices

Opposite me, on the frontier of Savoy, were sheer ridges that were repelling the North with all their might; at my feet was the blue vapour of the lake, nestling against the Jura, that long snake-like spine, scaled with ice and fir forests; to my right, the terraced promontories of Vevey, Clarens and La Tour, their headlands plunging into the water below which sparkled in the sunlight; behind me were Les Avants, Sonloup and Jaman, their brecciated steps sloping away, snatching up their crumbling soils in order to hurl them into the Rhône, despite the efforts of the chalets and the stony spurs to cling to the horizontal.

Did I know what threatening footsteps I was trying to escape from? Running away, but to do what? To do nothing. I can recognize this wild indolence among young people today; recent surveys among sixteen-year-old boys confirm that, for them, leisure comes before food, where they live, or household appliances… That day, I was already experiencing what they would feel later, in their millions; I was so light-headed that I felt I could fly away from the thick soup of smoke that stifled the Rhône valley and polluted the lake.

My indecisive character gave way to a resounding faith: I would escape; I did not know what I would do, but I could sense that my life would veer towards abroad, towards elsewhere, towards the light; not tomorrow, immediately; which explains this readiness to seize the moment and this haste of a man in a hurry that have been with me for so long; to escape from man was to escape from Time; I could feel an animal power within me which death alone would cure. “You’re a brute,” Giraudoux used to tell me. At the same time there began that beat of a pendulum whose rhythm has never left me, a liking for drawing closer, that is in contrast to this passion for space that was ushered in by puberty; the happiness that living in a narrow bedroom gives as opposed to the intoxication of the desert, the sea and the steppes.

I loathed doors and enclosures; frontiers and walls offended me.

ITALY, 1907

WHEN I RAN AWAY for the first time, not yet twenty years old, I threw myself upon Italy as if on the body of a woman. At Cap-Martin, my grandmother encouraged me to admire from afar her idol, the Empress Eugénie, as she went out for her walks (“What shoulders!”); I would follow her to the roulette tables at Monte Carlo, managing to get into the gaming rooms by slipping beneath the balustrade, since I was under the legal age. With four or five gold coins in my pocket, my first and last winnings, I took advantage of a reduction in fares to mark the opening of the recently completed Simplon tunnel, and I set off for Naples to meet the Italian steamship on which Giraudoux was sailing, as he arrived back from Harvard.

At Naples I would rediscover the same physical and moral euphoria I had experienced at Caux; it was during a solitary lunch beneath an arbour, above San Elmo, I watched as the sounds of men working rose up from below me. There was nothing happening, I was expecting nothing. I was giving nothing, and yet I was receiving everything. Millions of years had stood in wait in order to offer me this sublime gift: a morning beneath an arbour. There was no reason why this should not continue. A tradition of very long standing ensured that everything, myself included, had a predestined place. I was embarking on life intending to obtain what was my due: Titian and Veronese, who had only painted in order to be admired by me, awaited me; Italy had been preparing for my visit for centuries.

It seemed to me only natural to reap what others had sown. High above the lines of washing that draped the Neapolitan streets, I floated in the unreality of a sky that gulped in the smoky fumes of Vesuvius. This detachment, this contemplative egoism and this passivity did not spare me from boredom; short-cuts have very much extended my travels, even if laziness has lengthened my life. I flitted about among people, I fluttered around things, I ricocheted off hard surfaces, fleeing all attachments, somewhat unsure of my feelings and entirely devoted to myself. A fervent pilgrim, I was dazzled by everything. “I shall have to return to France, UNFORTUNATELY” reads a postcard I came across, sent to my mother at the time. Later on, I used to feel ashamed about such things, up until the day last year when my eye fell upon an interview with the year’s top student at the Centrale8 in Le Figaro, and I read the following: “Your plans for the future?” “I’m leaving to spend a year in the United States, at Berkeley.” “And afterwards?” “After that… France, UNFORTUNATELY.” Yesterday’s blasphemy is an everyday remark nowadays. My offspring agreeing with me, sixty years later.

LOMBARDY, 1908

DISCOVERING NAPLES was like giving the sun its real name; living in Lombardy, there to await our entry into the Veneto, was something entirely different, it was like the transition from friendship to love.

In the summer, my parents descended upon Italy as if they were visiting the Holy Land, ready to receive the Law there. It was a world of museums, art galleries and libraries, among which could be found certain buildings that served the public — factories, railway stations, or farms — necessary for life’s commodities. On our travels we encountered a different kind of humanity, one which spoke in a strange language that was to do with insolvencies, profits, strikes, salaries and yield per hectare. All these were meaningless to us.

We spent a few weeks at Tremezzo, where the lake was flecked with water-lily leaves. In these summer gardens, stretched out under the shade of magnolia trees with their lemon-scented flowers, we followed in the footsteps of Milanese cardinals who had walked here since the sixteenth century; by Lake Como we awaited the end of the Canicula, of those days of hellish heat, which in Lombardy, along the shores of the Po, cause even the leaves of the willows to become scorched.

One day I set off from Tremezzo to Bellagio, swimming the two kilometres across the lake through water so viscous that as I moved through it I felt as if I were stroking a fish.

During the last days of August, I took refuge in the chestnut groves of the Tremezzina, which were as chill as a marble by Thorvaldsen; I can see myself in the slow train that brought me back from some trip to the Ticino where I had gone to stock up with cigarettes, looking down upon the wonderfully phosphorescent stars formed by the chestnut blossom. I have never forgotten the smell of that chestnut grove in the Tremezzina, the same forest that Fabrice crossed9 on his way to Waterloo. It was in Tremezzo that I acquired a liking for chestnuts, for those wonderful hedgehogs, and for the tree’s sickle-like leaves. I was to live in a chestnut grove again in 1944; in Montreux, for three years, I lived off chestnuts that had been piled up, their burrs still on, in a bath that had fallen into disuse because the gas bills had not been paid; the chestnut grove of “ Maryland ” sloped down from the deserted villa as far as the first roofs of Territet, before disappearing into Lake Geneva; chestnut trees like those which La Nouvelle Héloïse places at Clarens, almost wholly destroyed today to make way for vineyards. As soon as September arrived, we set off for Venice; the surroundings changed; the cypress trees by Lake Como gave way to the factory chimneys of the Lombardy plain; all along the railway lines the vines were no longer being cut by hand; from the carriage window, Milan was paving the way for a new industrial Italy; what was the point of so many tyres, ball-bearings and idiotic industries? I lived with my back turned to the future; could the future be anything other than an immanent past?

A stop-over in Milan; in those days the favourite hotel of French visitors was the Albergo di Francia; my father walked into the bedroom; standing on the chimney-piece was a hideous group of bronze statues decorating the top of an Italian clock of the worst Victor-Emmanuel I period: “I could never get to sleep in the presence of such a horror! Let’s be on our way!” my father exclaimed. So we set off again for Venice, without eating or sleeping. It wasn’t a pose: my father was a true product of the age of Ruskin; he had known William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, and the concept of liberty , which invested the most everyday object with the dignity of a work of art; for him, putting up with ugliness in our home was to sully oneself. I have seen Lalique, adopting Tolstoy’s example, sewing slippers for himself, and Gallé building his own ovens, as did later Brancusi, who cooked steaks for us in them. My father designed the costumes and the scenery for his plays; he even painted a medieval stage curtain, in the style of Burne-Jones, for the Comédie Française.