Paul Morand: Venices

They loathed all things commercial, and in Venice more so than elsewhere; this was reflected in the frightful Salviati shop, with its one thousand chandeliers that were lit in broad daylight, which still disfigures the Grand Canal to this day. They owned a few drawings by old masters, but not paintings (they had not the means); they were not theorists or intellectuals, their words did not end in isme ; one could extend the list indefinitely of what they were not, of what they did not say or do, and yet they did not resemble anyone else; unlike people in society they did not talk for the sake of talking; the other day I heard someone admiring Léautaud’s free spirit, as if it were something odd; through his outspokenness, his culture and independence, each of these delightful fellows from the days of my youth was the equal of Léautaud; they seemed quite ordinary to me, for I had no one to compare them with; nowadays I realize that they represented more than Culture, they were Civilization.

They may not have known what they wanted, but they knew very precisely what they did not want; they might have forgiven a Ravachol;12 but bores (the word they used was “ mufles ”) never; like Jules Renard, they had very definite dislikes. None of them was mediocre (I only discovered mediocrity later on, in the Civil Service). Their remarks constituted a sort of santa conversazione . I can still picture the way they looked: black alpaca, black bamboo boater, grey cotton gloves, a white piqué cravat in summer, black crêpe-de-chine necktie in winter; starched shirt with stiff collar and cuffs; the vaporetti they called hirondelles , or pyroscaphes , or mouches ; to save money, they went to read Le Figaro in the offices of the Querini-Stampalia Foundation; they never forgave Napoleon’s architects for the destruction of the exquisite San Giminiano church, built by Sansovino, at the entrance to the Procuraties; and they blazed with fury about that Palladio who had wanted to pull down St Mark’s in order to replace it with a neo-classical temple.

Politics did not exist for them. How distant was the Dreyfus affair already… Politics was something that had disappeared since the time of Loubet13 (1900); it would surface again until 1936. For them, Barrès was still the anarchist of his early novels, and Maurras was merely a poet; Boulanger, Dreyfus and Déroulède were champions of a sport that was outmoded, that of politics. They would scarcely have been able to name the Président du Conseil of the time; the Ancien Régime for them was neither Turgot, nor the Abbé Terray; it was Gouthière,14 or Gabriel; they did not say: “France regained a colonial empire under Vergennes”, but: “The bronzes have never been so well gilded as they were under Louis XVI.” They did not use the royal dynasties as reference points; the reigns that counted for them were those of Goya or Delacroix. Their Venice was still that of 1850, that of Théophile Gautier, the Salute and its “population of statues”, and the flaking mosaics.

I would come across them at our table, at home, seated around a perfect risotto, creamy with parmesan, or in front of a plateful of eels from the Laguna morta , grilled over a wood fire and dripping with garlic butter. Constantly smiling, but never laughing, my father was somewhat eclipsed by his so colourful guests. The past, for them, was the present; Armand Baschet, one of the first Casanova scholars, would announce the recent discovery of letters written by women at the Bohemian castle of Dux: “They thought Casanova was a braggart? He scarcely told the whole truth!” For me, Casanova was a bit like some disreputable uncle. Camille Mauclair would arrive for coffee; there would be an argument about which room Musset had occupied at the Danieli, formerly the Albergo Reale; was it number thirteen, as Louise Colet claimed, or the two rooms mentioned by Pagello? Emotions eclipsed cultural considerations: the Doges’ Palace was all very well, but should one not regret the old palace, the Byzantine one, with its drawbridge and its watch-towers that dated from the year 1000, on the site of a piazzetta which was then a port? The Venetian balustered bridges made of marble are certainly charming, but imagine those that preceded them, gently sloping and without railings, over which the procurators rode on horseback, leaving their mounts to eat hay afterwards on the Ponte della Paglia. Thus did our friends hark back to the past, rather like the trout that swims upstream and jumps the weir to obtain more oxygen.

The painter Toché, a character who had remained typical of the MacMahon15 era, used to ring our doorbell at the grappa hour; he continued to paint frescoes in the style in which they had been painted in Venice three centuries earlier; Toché was famous for having decorated the Chabanais in tempera; he had worked for a year, without setting foot outside this brothel, famous for its Edward VII room, and mixed quite openly with le Tout-Paris in this place of ill repute (at the Beaux-Arts, Toché was known by his pupils as Pubis de Chabanais); a good-looking man, he had seduced the owner of Chenonceaux and persuaded her to give Venetian festivals there — with gondolas brought over from the piazzetta —which Emilio Terry, the next owner, still remembered having seen in his youth, rotting beneath the arches over the River Cher. “I paint only at night,” Toché used to say; “Venice by day, I leave to Ziem!” After which, he would walk down our staircase humming some Ombra adorata of Crescentini’s (like the singer Genovese, in his C major so dear to Balzac), curling his handlebar moustache.

Rather like the doges whose embossed velvet robes he wore at those Persian balls which were all the rage in Paris, Mariano Fortuny, emerging from his studio, would invite us to his mother’s house, opposite the miniature palazzo which had been rented by the actress Réjane; Mme Fortuny offered us teas that were worthy of Parmesan;16 her table, which was covered in Venetian crochet work, was a veritable fruit market, repoussé copper plates with peaches alternating with beribboned and gilded assortments of frilly pastries sprinkled with a powdered sugar, for which I have forgotten the Venetian name. Proust had been entertained there, eight years earlier; he had known Fortuny; later on he would provide a great number of dresses designed by this artist for The Captive ; they have become part of the Proustian legend.

Occasionally, one of my father’s pupils would come from Paris at his invitation to join us, and was welcomed at their teacher’s home as he or she might have been in Renaissance times; it was the tradition set by Lecoq de Boisbaudran, whom my father had succeeded at the École des Arts Decoratifs, where the director’s office with its Louis XV panelling was decorated with a portrait of Van Loo, the first patron of the École Royale de Dessin, founded in 1765 by Bachelier, Madame de Pompadour’s protector; a vanished race of monocle-wearing fonctionnaires who kept well away from the management of the École des Beaux-Arts, who were indifferent to honours, had independent minds and advanced tastes, who couldn’t care less about the Prix de Rome and medals awarded by the jury, and who were opposed to the Institut; for those at the Quai Malaquais,17 Lecoq was “the accursed teacher” and the Arts Decoratifs the refuge of those whose talents were advanced or insane; Boisbaudran had had Renoir, Rodin, Monet, Degas, Fantin as pupils; my father had: Segonzac, Brianchon, Oudot, Legueult. That’s sufficient to commemorate these two men.

My father had Mallarmé’s physique: the same haughty profile, the same sharply pointed beard; he sported neither rosette nor tie; “a rose, yes, a rosette, no,” he used to say, although Jules Renard, in his Journal , was indignant that his Cross [of the Légion d’Honneur] should have been taken away from him, because of a promotion, in order for it to be given to my father. He was somewhat defensive in his courteousness, absurdly modest, constrained, self-doubting and admiring only of others; he spent his life tearing up manuscripts and repainting his canvases. When Mallarmé told him: “Even to write is to put black upon white,” he wrote no more; appointed as head of a grande école , his first utterance was: “I’ll be able to learn at last.”