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Paul Morand: Venices

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Paul Morand Venices

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DIPLOMAT, WRITER AND POET, traveller and socialite, friend of Proust, Giraudoux and Malraux, Paul Morand was out of the most original writers of the twentieth century. He was French literature's globe-trotter, and his delightful autobiography is far from being yet another account of a writer's life. Instead it is a poetic evocation of certain scenes among Morand's rich and varied encounters and experience, filtered through the one constant in his life — the one place to which he would always return — Venice.

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At last we arrived within sight of the Dogana with its statue of Fortune on top, which, at that time, was golden; today Fortune has turned verdigris. 11

This triumphant procession along the Grand Canal, “that register of Venetian nobility”, as Théophile Gautier put it, led us to the Traghetto San Maurizio, where the small apartment rented by my parents awaited us. The narrow street was deserted; there was just a basket which, at the cry of “Bella uva!” (fine grapes), had been lowered on a rope down to the grape-seller below, and hoisted up again piled with muscat grapes for the lunch that had already been served. The mosquito nets had been folded parachute fashion above the beds, and the bedrooms smelled of dead gnats, killed by little triangles of beguiling but nauseating herbs; from the canal there rose up a reek of foul water, similar to the smell of vases from which someone has forgotten to remove the withered flowers.

In the morning, I was awoken by the hoarse voice of the vaporetto and by the striated reflections from the Canal on the almond green ceiling, with its plaster reliefs, or on the façades of the buildings that were flecked with light; for fifty centimes, the barber would come up and trim my beard (a marvellous attack on the bristles by the Italian razors, engraved in gold on steel, which each barber carried with him on weekdays). Nowadays, when I go around barefoot in espadrilles and without a tie all year round, I sometimes smile when I think of how I was attired at that time: white flannel trousers, white cotton socks, white felt hat, a butterfly knot and a stiff collar.

The rampino from the San Maurizio ferry greeted me with a cry of poppe!, waving his grubby hat (even poor people wore a hat; a hat they used to greet one with) as he held the gondola’s coupling hook with his other hand. He offered to carry me across the Canal, rather as Dandolo’s Serenissima offered to take the Crusaders as far as Byzantium. I did not make use of his services, but set off along the narrow street towards the Palazzo Pisani (painted at that time in that pale nacreous “coral” pink, the colour of scampi); I reached the Palazzo Morosini with its lofty ogives, and so Gothic in style that it looked English. Passing the churches of Santa Maria Zobenigo, San Stefano and San Vitale, I was on my way to meet my mother, after she had attended Mass, at San Moisè, whose façade, an assortment of overhangs and recesses, was white with the acidic droppings of the Venetian pigeons that can even eat into the stonework. Théophile Gautier was responsible for my love of this church, which, with its obelisks and astragals, is so perfectly reminiscent of the overture to Rossini’s Moisè. I drew back the red curtain (the same one as today, without those horrible doors with bars): there were more votive candles burning inside than in the Holy Sepulchre; the Jesuits’ confessional boxes, their baroque grilles as convoluted as a confiteor, buzzed with the whisper of sins; confessional boxes only came into existence, apparently, in the seventeenth century; that buttoned-up age was the first to feel that it should conceal its sins… I enjoyed stopping in front of the tomb of a Scotsman, John Law, the inventor of the banknote; this rococo monument was an apt one for the inventor of financial rococo (inflation is romantic, while deflation is classical).

Фото

Théophile Gautier photographed by Paul Nadar

“If Palférine had any money, he would spend his life in Venice, passing his days in museums, his evenings at the theatre, and his nights with beautiful women” (Balzac). The Fenice was not open; as for beautiful women, I was too frightened of imitating Jean-Jacques [Rousseau], who found little consolation in his loneliness from a courtesan who almost got him plastered, from another tart who only had one nipple, or from the young girl of twelve who was so sexually immature that he contented himself with fatherly affection and teaching her music. Depriving oneself of women was painful in the evenings, but I would never have dared approach, as President De Brosses did after consulting the Tariffa delle putane di Venezia, the Marianna or Fornarina of a republic of demi-beavers.

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.”

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