Paul Morand - Venices

Deprived! This word has no meaning for our children or for their impetuous age, which imposes no restraints on passions or on the insistence of desire; the young of today have the voracious weakness of unbridled crowds. It was this abstinence of the flesh that gave us a self-control that is rarely seen any longer; it was not until about 1920, when we decided that we were being deprived and that we would fast no longer, that we began to fling ourselves upon easy prey, whose fragrance lost in subtlety what it gained in abundance. Virgins, nowadays, await their boyfriends in their beds; in the early part of the century, all we had were prostitutes, and even then one had to be able to gain access to the brothel; that depended on the height of the client; the first of our classmates to be allowed inside was Baudelocque — the son of the well-known obstetrician — who was two heads taller than us; while waiting for him, we would plod up and down the pavement of the rue de Hanovre; when he came out, the questions rained down: “What does she look like, a woman?” “You enter her? How’s that possible!” We were thirteen years old; we would still have to wait a while… Today, I miss the old days and the time one spent waiting; the penitence and the continence that society imposed on us imparted an unbelievable flavour to the opposite sex, and they conferred something sacred that has been lost. It was still the Italy of the young Beyle, and of his “two years without a woman”; he wanted to remedy this: aged eighteen, he contracted syphilis.

As to the young ladies (whom at that time one did not refer to as “girls”), one was expected to make amends.

In those days, boys made amends, they took responsibility for anything that went wrong: compensation and penitence; it was all to do with the feudal code of honour, with Corsican revenge, with civil action. A young lady must not be compromised , a terrible word that suggested commitment, shady deals and law suits; having an illegitimate child was like contracting the most shameful of diseases. It was no laughing matter. Traps lay everywhere; in every invitation, even on the simplest of promenades the female body offered its stumbling-blocks; charms were lures; at the bottom of the slope of the thighs, so sweet a descent, lay the pot of glue.

I can still see my school friend Robert D—, sitting astride one of the porphyry lions in St Mark’s Square, telling me how he had had a narrow escape:

“I met her yesterday, in front of one of the Bellinis at the Accademia; I got rid of the mother and the sister. We agreed to meet this morning. I went to collect her at the Danieli.

“‘Mademoiselle is not quite ready; she asks you to go up…’”

“I find her dressed, wearing a broad-brimmed hat with cherries on top, with an embroidered parasol and a silk scarf round her neck. My dear, imagine the bedroom, with its smell of crumpled sheets, cold coffee and warm soap… I sit down beside her…”

“On the sofa?”

“Far worse! On the counterpane… My head is spinning. I start to stammer: ‘Your mother might come in… Impossible to finish my sentence, I couldn’t bear it any longer; every passing second made me want to curl up and die.”

“What can the tributary do when it encounters the river, apart from lose itself? So you’re engaged, congratulations.”

“… Her arms were encircling my neck, like a ring around this finger; her handcuffs…”

“… Her handcuffs?”

“Her breasts pressed against my chest; her stomach took on a strange life of its own, and there were convulsions, as if she were in labour…”

“You’re cutting corners!”

“Her elder sister walked in, with a curious look on her face, which expressed everything, envy, disgust, complicity… everything except naturalness… Just then, through the open window, beneath the Ponte della Paglia, I saw a gondolier pass by; ‘ Oi ,’ he shouted. You know what that means in gondoliers’ language: Watch out! It did not fall on deaf ears.”

Listening to Robert D., I swore that I would never become a lover.

I was extremely shy in the company of married women; if the initiative came from them, my mother’s sighs would grow increasingly unsubtle and her entreaties more frequent. Nowadays, that also raises a smile; every age has its misfortunes.

Adorned with rings and cooing like the pigeons of St Mark’s, the pederasts strutted past; Venice, “an unnatural city” ( Chateaubriand ), had always welcomed them; I spotted one of them there, a man who had become so well-known on account of a recent trial that we would point him out to one another as he was leaving the Carnot; it was the famous Fersen, who had just published a poem about Venice, Notre-Dame des Cendres. “I do not shake hands with pederasts,” my father would say (never suspecting that he was doing so all day long). “Yet another of those gentlemen of the cuff,” he would add (at the time, they could be recognized by the handkerchief issuing from their cuffs). The inverts, “that outcast section of the human community” as an unpublished letter of Proust’s puts it, constituted a secret society; one cannot appreciate Temps perdu unless one remembers that in those days Sodom represented a curse. Even in Venice, homosexuality was nothing more than the most subtle of the fine arts.

With a canvas under one arm, his box of paints under the other and his easel on his back, in the tradition of Monsieur Courbet, my father crossed the waters and installed himself on the steps of the Salute, opposite the Abbey of San Gregorio; as a young man, he had rented this abbey, nowadays an American’s luxury pied-à-terre, but which at that time was in ruins; he dabbed his thumb in his palette and ground his knife on the rough cast of the walls. All painters have loved the votive basilica of the Salute; Guardi, Canaletto, the romantics and the impressionists, none has been able to resist the curve of its unfurled scrolls that resemble waves about to break, lured by the play of the sunlight around the grey-green dome, whose sphere reflects every nuance of broken colour.

The French in Venice used to meet in St Mark’s Square, having dined in their modest lodging-house, or princely dining-room, glad to have escaped from some titled hostess or other; some came from the Palazzo Dario, “bent over, like a courtesan, beneath the weight of her necklaces” (people adored D’Annunzio!); others from the Palazzo Polignac, or the Palazzo Da Mula, bringing with them from the house of Contessa Morosini (who dared to wear a doge’s hat) the latest news from the Court at Berlin, for which the Mula acted as a sounding-board. We would drink granite , coffee with crushed ice, in the company of Mariano Fortuny, the son of the Spanish Meissonier, who had become a Venetian by adoption, the interior decorator Francis Lobre and his wife, who was physician to Anna de Noailles (a famous name at that time), the designer Drésa, and Rouché, not yet in charge of the Opéra, who was editor of the Grande Revue , which launched Maxime Dethomas and Giraudoux; then there was André Doderet, who by dint of translating D’Annunzio had come to look like him; we would be joined by several officials from the École des Beaux-Arts, colleagues of my father: Roujon, Havard, Henry Marcel (Gabriel’s father), the head of the Beaux-Arts, the Baschet brothers and Roger Marx (father of Claude).

Gabriele D’Annunzio at the regatta on Lake Garda, 1930

These were real people, not international stars like those who would invade Venice later on, at the time of the Ballets Russes; this circle of friends was discreet, as French people were at that time; they were extremely fussy men, encyclopaedic in their knowledge, highly influential, very sure in their tastes, modest to a degree and disdainful of fashions, who talked with an inimitable accent, and no one “pulled the wool over their eyes”. None of them was garish, or popped the corks of champagne bottles, or motored about on the Lagoon making waves; there were no “relationships”; their wives’ necklaces were made of Murano glass.