Venices Read online

  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.”

  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 les
s 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

  Your body more banal than a mill.”

  Is it Latin?

  (Late 1910)

  And here is another letter, still in mock-scholarly vein:

  The Archives

  Caen

  This Thursday the 3rd of November 1910

  My Dear Friend,

  You are truly the pride of French and Ultramontane clergy; Abbé Galiani should bow low, he has a master! You are piquant, reproving and smutty, but never obscene, even when you are describing the Nuncio’s love affairs, “on the other side of the coin”. Is la Morosina susceptible to your signals? Why don’t you look at her through a telescope, as Lord Queensberry did from his Piccadilly window?

  I have been reading a lot lately: Amiel’s Journal, Italian Women in the Renaissance by Rodocanachi; the letters of Pliny, The Dream of Polyphilus, in a fine 1599 edition, the Memoirs of the Princesse Palatine, Müntz’s Vinci, etc. I have heard very good reports of The Woollen Dress by Henry Bordeaux, which has even been compared to Bovary.

  Wednesday 21 June 1911

  Another letter, postmarked Caen, 36th Infantry Division, contains this childlike cry: “My freedom, for G’s sake! I feel nostalgic for the universe, I’m homesick for every country!”

  1911

  THIS YEAR, all I had to do to remind myself of Venice was to take a look at the famous floods that occurred in Paris in the spring; on leave, I went by boat from Saint-Germain-des Prés to the Champ-de-Mars, by way of the rue de l’Université.

  MASTER CORVO

  AS I WAS on the point of leaving Venice, one of the most eccentric of Englishmen had just arrived, that strange Corvo, whose existence was only disclosed to me forty years later. I was narrowly to miss, alas, the two most inexplicable islanders of those days, T.E. Lawrence and Corvo; in 1917 Georges-Picot, the French High Commissioner in a Holy Land not yet recaptured from the Turks, had invited me to accompany him to the siege of Jerusalem: it would have meant my spending over a year in the company of Colonel Lawrence; I turned down the position.

  I remain equally upset not to have known Rolfe, who, during that summer of 1909 when we were both in Venice, was known as “Baron Corvo”; the poet, Shane Leslie, who wrote Corvo’s epitaph, and with whom I was on friendly terms, would have been able to introduce us. Why did he adopt the name “Corvo”? Why that never more? Out of romanticism? Rolfe always loved heraldry; as a seminarist, he dreamt up coats of arms and devised banners, and he would walk into the refectory with a stuffed crow perched on his shoulder. Corvo was a mixture of Léon Bloy and Genet, of Max Jacob and Maurice Sachs. Poor and lonely in his lifetime, he was unstable and eccentric in character, as well as being litigious, spiteful, devious and vindictive; he had a talent for all the arts; he was constantly angry with his friends; he read horoscopes, and he was intoxicated with the Church’s past and with the Renaissance; he adored Catholic pomp and ceremony, but he had no vocation for the priesthood and he was expelled from every school, as well as from sinecures, salons and asylums; he let people down, deceiving both Cardinal Vaughan and Hugh Benson, those two pillars of English Catholicism, who were initially attracted to him, but very soon grew exasperated.

  A.J.A. Symons in his celebrated The Quest for Corvo, a posthumous investigation among all those who had known this character, retraces his life from his time in the seminary up until his time in Venice. Master Corvo must have been unable to find anywhere to perch in this city without trees. In that summer of 1909, Corvo stayed at the Hotel Bellevue, paid for by his friend, Professor Dawkins.

  A member of the Bucintoro sailing club, Corvo actually learned to steer a gondola, a highly difficult skill at which I have only seen a woman, Winnaretta de P., excel, for a misdirected blade, as President De Brosses has pointed out, can cut off someone’s head “like a turnip”; or cleave a gondolier’s in two, beneath a bridge. When Corvo fell into the water, he continued to smoke his pipe, just like Byron, who when he floated on his back in the middle of the Grand Canal kept his cigar in his mouth in order (he said) “not to lose sight of the stars”; his man-servant would follow behind, in a gondola, with his master’s clothes on his arm.

  Corvo, the author of the famous Hadrian VII, which dates from 1904 and which only became successful after the war—while waiting to be revived on stage—has left us a letter about his impressions of Venice that is as beautiful as a page from the Confessions: a sleepless night on the Lagoon. Here is Corvo, beneath the stars, accompanied by his two gondoliers, on whose knees he is dreaming: “A twilight world of cloudless sky and smoothest sea, all made of warm, liquid, limpid heliotrope and violet and lavender, with bands of burnished copper set with emeralds, melting, on the other hand, into the fathomless blue of the eyes of the prides of peacocks.” Every bit the:

  Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy

  of Shakespeare’s thirty-third sonnet.

  Chateaubriand wrote that “nobody has penetrated the gondoliers’ way of life”; this was something that was reserved for Corvo, as he presents himself to us, taking his revenge on those who barred his way to the priesthood, rejecting honours while at the same time eager for them, and imagining himself seated on a pontifical throne from which he could spit upon the evil World; it is almost as if we can see him, this Corvo, ejec
ted from every inn, his tattered clothes lying in a dirty linen basket at the bottom of his boat, knocking at every door, constantly on the verge of suicide, sitting just above the surface of the water, in the middle of winter, writing, in a huge exercise-book, his Letters to Millard which no one would ever be able to read, a Corvo who was the shame of the British community whose charity he had exhausted, who was deprived by the winter of his wealthy English clientele for whom he procured a few of the little beggar boys who, dumbstruck with admiration, used to follow him around, before he set off, the earliest hippy, to the Lido, where he slept on the beach, powerless against attacks from rats and crabs…

  1913–1970 LITTLE VENICE

  IN LONDON, I only encountered Venice in the district to the north of Paddington station, which was not yet the sought-after area it is today,18 and which artists had nicknamed “Little Venice”. At the end of the Edgware Road, the endless four-mile avenue that stretches from Marble Arch to Maida Vale, there is a mournful waterway, the Grand Union Canal, which links the River Thames to Birmingham. Once upon a time, it was countryside; the famous Mrs Siddons died there, far from the stage; Hogarth was married at St Mary’s Church, and beneath a tree here the Brownings became engaged. Regent’s Park was extended by Nash who, at the end of the Napoleonic wars, and to the greater glory of George IV, designed this park and those noble neo-classical residences; being a promoter of the new canal, he planted it with trees, embellishing it with some delightful temples painted in ivory, with black doors and windows; along its quays, they have survived the bombs and the demolition men.