Paul Morand: Venices

Between the Quadri and Florian cafés an entire European society lived out its last days in Venice. And not just the French. Franz-Josef, the old forest tree, would bury them all in his fall. Austrian grandees descended on Venice while waiting for the stags to rut, before taking the road northwards to their dozen or more castles in Styria or the Tyrol; dressed in their jäger , their moss-green hats set on hareskin skulls, and loden capes, they left behind them a whiff of Russian leather and the magnolia scent of the Borromée islands, which did their best to imitate Pivert, the perfumer of Napoleon III, whose children were friends of ours. These Austrians, Gzernin, Palffy, or Festetics, in their reisekostüm , supplied titled Europe with their last stallions: Rocksavage, Howard de Walden and Westminster in London; Beauvau or Quinsonas in France; in Italy, Florio or Villarosa became their patrons, doing their best to match them in indolence, distinction and seduction. In the Procuraties all one could hear was: “I’ve just arrived from Pommersfelden, from Caprarola, from Arenenberg, from Knole, from Stupinigi, from Huistenbosch, from Kedelston…” Austria-Hungary was not one nation, but ten; it was the flower of Europe; England, with its lords, who for four centuries had been marrying coal merchants’ daughters, could not produce one tenth of the degrees of descent of the Austrian nobility; Bismarck’s Germany, enriched by the famous Jews who had made it wealthy, Italy, still trembling in the shadow of Rakowsky, and the Balkan nations, who came to Vienna to make up their minds about what Norpois would have called “the favoured of the Salon Bleu”, all had eyes only for Austria; Venice lived beneath the floodlights of the white steamships of Austrian Lloyd, the masters of the Adriatic, and it was Strauss whose tunes were still requested in the evenings, when we paced up and down the quadrangle of St Mark’s. Venice virtually belonged to these Austrians, through the Triplice, the triple alliance of Italy with Vienna and Berlin. Was not Bonaparte, at Campo Formio, the first to make Austria a present of Venice, in spite of the orders of the Directoire?

1909

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1909, my heart in a fury, I left Venice, taking with me to my regiment an old eighteenth-century guide-book, Les Délices de l’ltalie , by Rogissart, whose steel-plate engravings depicted a virtually deserted Venice in which, hidden in the corner of the campi , were some rare masks to provide scale. Even when I was under fire during the war, at the mouth of the River Orne, I thought of nothing but that of the Brenta.

After a period serving in the countryside, sheltering in an old house in the rue de l’Engannerie, where I had rented a squaddie’s room, I started to write a Venetian play that was inspired by my reading the Lettres à Sophie Volland : under pain of death it was forbidden for senators of the Serenissima to sleep with foreign representatives; a senator who was smitten had no other means of meeting his beloved than to traverse the French ambassador’s house; caught off guard and denounced, my hero chose decapitation rather than admit to a secret tryst; romanticism was not dead… I had hung above my bed the first map of the world, dating from 1457, a reproduction of Fra Mauro’s planisphere, and the map of Venice drawn by Jacopo Barbari in 1500. My heart had remained in Venice. I was envious of my Oxford friends, who were able to go back there without me; I compared my fate to theirs; the Channel relieved them of this duty to serve their country for two years; was not a European war unthinkable? Every single mental impulse carried me away from the barracks far from frontiers; I read The Times , or Les Conversations avec Eckermann in the mess-room, after roll-call, by the light of a candle stuck on to a bayonet. At the library in Caen, where I had just been appointed an auxiliary, I launched myself on the early travellers in Italy; I made some astounding discoveries; when I was young, no one had direct access to works of quality, you had to discover them and deserve them; there were no Carpaccios for sale on Uniprix calendars; liking Giorgione or Crivelli meant being introduced into any number of small secret societies; Antonello da Messina was a sort of place of ill repute, whose address was passed around among the initiated.

Instead of boldly accepting the fate that was common to those of my age, I turned my back on chores, vaulting the wall or leaving the barracks at daybreak in order not to have to answer the bugle’s call; having to get up at the sound of drums or having to stand stock-still at the blast of a whistle were like a slap across the face for me.

A little patience: the unpleasant young man would change his stripes; not immediately; it would only be at the end of his life that he would go to school; the way in which you fetch up in a certain period matters less than the period you are leaving behind; life is a slow business, a two-fold process, luck and oneself; that’s what gives a work its shape.

In the meantime, I was like the young Buddha whose family concealed the existence of death to him until he was thirty.

I was a very old gentleman, a little too dyed in the wool, but delighted to be so.

CAEN, 1910

AT THE ARCHIVES department of the Préfecture, Major Jaquet made me copy out lists of volunteers from Calvados in 1792; beneath the folders I concealed Fabert, Dupaty, De Brosses, La Lande, Amelot de La Houssaye, all those, in short, who were lovers of Venice. On the headed paper of the Conseil Général du Calvados, I wrote letters to my friends not unlike the following, which I recently came across; it is easy to see the extent to which Venice continued to matter to me:

From the Archives of the Généralité

Caen.

This Thursday 27th of October 176…

I have received from you, Abbé, a letter from Vicenza, informing me that you are already nearing Venice. A glance at the envelope, which the mail orderly of the Royal Normandy has delivered to me, and which bears the arms of the République, tells me that your journey has ended at last. Shall you come from Padua as the crow flies, by barge, or will you stop to visit a few friends on the Brenta? I had been affeared at the prospect of a disagreeable stay in the lazaretto for you, since there is cholera in the Duchy of Parma and in Lombardy; but I see that nothing has come of it. Are your rags and tatters at Scomparini’s house? And you yourself?

I trust, Abbé, that you are not bored to distraction in the absence of the two gentle ladies from Florence, whom we were accustomed to stroke and kiss last year?

Did you know that there are fifty-one references to Venice in Shakespeare, even though he never left England? At least this is what H.F. Brown maintains in his Studies in the History of Venice, which he published last year with Murray’s.

Saia sends you her kindest regards. We often reread the satires of Aretino, Mensius and Portier des Chartreux together. So vouchsafe to send me by the hand of our mutual friend, the Nuncio, a few aphrodisiac tablets which, so Juvenal says:

arouse desire as if by hand.

I envy you your travels; what with some Orvieto, a discreet casino at Murano, a nun with perfumed breasts and a letter of exchange payable at Milord Cook’s, there are no sad thoughts in Venice.

Farewell Abbé. I am strongly tempted to sell my commission to the army and leave by the next coach to join you.

P.S. — Do you like the epigram I have composed in the style of Martial, about Saia, who is unfaithful to me?

Candidior farina cutis,

Communior mola corpus.

“Your skin is whiter than flour