Venices Read online

  I can hear myself saying and repeating: “You deny the past, you reject the present, you are hurtling towards a future that you will not see.” I want to speak plainly; this is why, overcoming my dislike of myself, I have taken Venice as my confidante; she will answer for me. In Venice I can think about my life, and do so more clearly than anywhere else; and it’s too bad if I can be spotted in the corner of the picture, like Veronese in Christ in the House of Levi.

  Marcel Proust in Venice

  The canals of Venice are black as ink; it is the ink of Jean-Jacques, of Chateaubriand, of Barrès, of Proust; to dip one’s pen into it is more than a Frenchman’s duty, it is a duty plain and simple.

  Venice did not withstand Attila, Bonaparte, the Hapsburgs, or Eisenhower; she had something more important to do: survive; they believed they were building upon rock; she sided with the poets and decided to be built on water.

  I have always thought of the railway station at Venice as a triumphal entrance; at that time it was not the present-day peristylar railway theatre of the Mussolini era. (“This is Venice, Venezia, Venedig: you’ll see what you shall see. Viva il Duce!”) Its predecessor consisted of three arcades which had turned green from the damp and had been blackened by the coal smoke. What has not changed is the green copper dome of San Simeone Piccolo; the bombs of two world wars, aimed at the railways lines, had spared it; to the left and in front of it are the trattorie where you dine, your head beneath the boxed bay trees and your feet in the water; there is less of a stench from the waters of these Fondamente Santa Lucia or dei Turchi than elsewhere; propelled through, the water is oxygenated here and does not give off the whiff of sulphurous hydrogen.

  In those days, the gondolier was still king; proud at having surprised us by taking the short cut along the Rio Nuovo upon leaving the station and emerging suddenly at the ACCADEMIA, our man, manipulating his curved oar like a foil, reeled off the dazzling names of the palazzi: FOSCARI, GUISTINIANI, REZZONICO, LOREDAN, VENIER, DARIO… (Some of them, bent over with age and rheumatic stress, looked as if they were bowing at us.) Along the way, the gondolier, hostile still to the outboard engine, cocked a snook at the steamships that passed. Only yesterday, the vaporetti, the masters of the canals, had gone on strike to prevent the last of the gondolas from using the Rio Nuovo; the calm waters have been replaced by con stant rough waves.10

  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).

  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 terrib
le 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.

  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.