Venices Page 5

  I often used to take a breath of fresh air in Blomfield Road, strolling beneath the hundred-year-old plane trees that sheltered the occasional barge. No one else ventured this far out.

  Nowadays,19 barges, narrow-boats (including the Jason, which takes children to and from the Zoo) and sailing boats are moored beneath willow trees swarming with seagulls: you can even see a Bucintoro anchored there, with a floating art gallery. Amateur sailors come here in summer, sleeping on board their boats and seeking sustenance in places with names like Ristorante Canaletto or Trattoria Adriatica, where black women supply campers with Chinese take-away dishes; the waters are steeped in silence, the quite breathable air is no longer that of London, and the water-buses that a century and a half ago used to sail up and down the route to Limehouse, on the Thames, no longer pass through the mouldy brick walls of the locks; Little Venice remains one of the last secret corners of London. It helps those who are yearning to escape to the Lagoon to be patient.20

  1914

  AS A FRENCHMAN living in England, I continued to dream of myself as a Venetian. In London, Paul Cambon21 peered at the orange and black curtains of my window at the embassy, which might have been painted by Bakst; “One of my cubist attaché’s notions,” he sighed. I have come across a letter written from London, to my mother, shortly before the war, on the 11th of July 1914:

  “Yesterday evening we had a terrifically impressive Longhi party, given by a Mrs C. On the terrace, on the rooftop, in the middle of town, a lake had been constructed upon which gondolas floated. This lake was festooned with some marvellous Japanese lanterns that looked like huge luminous oranges; a bizarrely shaped hump-backed bridge, orange-coloured too, crossed over it, a real Rialto from Yokohama, brought back by some Marco Polo or other. The dining-room was Venetian rococo, painted by JM. Sert, in the same style as his silver and gold designs for the ballet Joseph, which Diaghilev has just put on at Covent Garden. A large table was arranged in a horse-shoe and laid for a hundred people; in front of each guest a silver plate and a candle had been placed: pheasants and peacocks, adorned with feathers, served as display pieces; the table was covered in gold cloth; in the centre of the horse-shoe was a carpet made from the skin of a polar bear, upon which Egyptian dancers and jugglers performed. The servants were dressed in dark tunics with wide white collars. Everybody wore the bauta over their full-length Longhi coats; masks and three-cornered hats were obligatory. I was dressed in the caftan of a Turk from the Riva degli Schiavoni. Baron de Meyer (the foremost photographer of our time) was dressed as Louis XV, in gold lame, with a silver wig and a bauta in black point de Venise. It was the first time that I had seen a private entertainment done with such bold taste and such sumptuousness in London. As a social gathering, we were on the confines of the real world.”

  I had first discovered London in 1902 or 1903; the last of the troops that had been demobilized after the Boer War were gradually returning from South Africa: what a proud conquest of the world it was, by Jingo!

  Since my wandering mind has led me to London once more, I shall make a detour, through time and space. London, in any case, was the Venice of the universe at that time. One after another, without interruption, the little omnibuses with their brightly coloured advertisements passed by; you climbed aboard even when it was raining, on double-deckers, your legs covered with horse blankets beneath black wax-cloths. The “cabbies”, who drove the cabs, those “London gondolas”, as Disraeli called them, sported pink carnations in the button-holes of beige overcoats with mother-of-pearl buttons. I was taught that when accompanying a lady, I should proffer my left hand to assist her on to the cabriolet’s high running board, while the right arm should be interposed between her dress and the cab’s large wheel to protect her from the mud; the horse flew off, for the cab weighed no more than the prow of a gondola, and you felt as if your protecting hand would never ever touch the ground again. Leicester Square was then the hub of the music halls, those places of perdition to which those under the age of fifteen were forbidden. Pubs, too, were places where ladies were never seen, being frequented only by cleaning women, costermongers, and, once dusk had fallen, the whores. Around Covent Garden, where the fruit and vegetables were piled high, as far as the Opera House, flower-sellers would offer buttonholes of gardenia to gentlemen in tails, as in Pygmalion. On the damp pavements, minstrels, smeared in soot, played upon an entirely new instrument, the banjo; you might have imagined yourself to be at the Fondaco dei Turchi, by the Rialto.

  I was taken to pantomimes at Drury Lane, London’s Châtelet; to the “Chamber of Horrors” at Mme Tussaud’s, the English Musée Grévin, or to the Maskelyne Theatre, the Robert-Houdin22 of the period. It was the age of the great Edwardian actors, of whom there were then a good dozen including Irving, Beerbohm Tree (my father wrote a socialistic play for Tree that took place in the sulphur mines of Sicily, which Tree never performed), Charles Wyndham and George Alexander. Frank Harris told me about his last visit to Maupassant, at the time that Maupassant was staying with Doctor Blanche, behaving like an animal and walking about on all fours. All these gentlemen wore shiny top-hats and frock coats; in the evening they never wore dinner jackets, but rather tails, and instead of white waistcoats, black ones, together with what were known as “opera hats”, which were sold by Gibus, the hat shop, near Trafalgar Square.

  In the City, one heard a great deal of German spoken, while much of England’s wealth was being made in the East, in South Africa, in the first Russian oil wells, and in South America, which had been snatched from the Spanish a hundred years earlier and which, just like Venice’s wealth which lasted until the time of Christopher Columbus, was an inexhaustible source of riches up until 1914.

  It was the era of Kipling’s empire, of Wells’s science fiction; the figure of Oscar Wilde, wearing a green carnation on the lapel of his grey frock coat, his chest bursting out of his waistcoat, had only recently disappeared from the Burlington Arcade (Cavendo tutus); my father had accompanied his funeral procession as far as the Bagneux cemetery. Filling O.W.’s favourite place at the Café Royal, that London version of Florian’s, which had originally been a café frequented by French refugees from the Commune, the great Italian singers held sway, presided over by Isidore de Lara: la Tettrazini, la Melba and Caruso. Sherlock Holmes had just made his first appearance with The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was serialised in translation in Le Temps. Sandow, the strongest man in the world, flaunted his swollen torso on posters in Regent Street and Piccadilly. Railway stations were covered in advertisement hoardings, such as those for Stephens’s Ink, which, with their great splashes of blue ink, were already heralding abstract painting. Devonshire House, next door to the newly opened Ritz, was still a brick-built castle, in the middle of London. “A Bicycle Made for Two” was hummed at Henley regattas. Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas were playing to packed houses at the Savoy: Iolanthe or The Mikado. Sickert and the artists from the English colony had returned from Dieppe, under the patronage of George Moore or Jacques-Émile Blanche, while Sargent and Laszlo portrayed the great beauties of the Edwardian or Roosevelt age. Loti, Bourget and Maupassant had had open invitations to dine at the Paris homes of Princess Alice of Monaco or Lady Brooke, the Ranee of Sarawak, to whom I had been introduced by my father, for ten years or more; I had mine in London or Ascot for a further eight years, from 1908 to 1916. At table you could see the maître d’hôtel standing to attention behind his mistress, attending to her alone, and behind each guest stood a servant in a white wig. The same sights could be seen aboard the yacht Princesse Alice, which would sometimes lie at anchor in front of St Mark’s, on its way from Madeira or Monaco: the governess dressed in black from head to foot, the first chambermaid wearing a hat and veil, the footman in morning coat, the kitchen-maids in aprons, the maids who served in the drawing-room wearing lace bonnets, the chambermaids in black silk, the laundry-maids attired in white, as in the novels of Mrs Humphrey Ward. At the Savoy Grill or the Carlton, it was the age of “conv
ersationists”, of “raconteurs”, of “bons viveurs”.

  After this London detour, let us return to Venice.

  1913

  VENICE HAD BECOME the most glittering city in Europe, a sort of summer extension of the Ballets Russes; each of them had their origins in the East. Diaghilev allowed himself to be followed around here by his favourites, and his favourites hung around here, ever ready to extricate him from financial situations that were so desperate that at eight o’clock in the evening he was never sure that he would be able to see the curtain rise at his shows, one hour later. How often have I heard his rich female admirers get up from the table: “Serge is on the phone; there won’t be any performance this evening, nobody has been paid.” In London, at Cavendish Square, I saw the conductor Beecham, the future Sir Thomas, dashing off to see Sir Joseph, his father, to bring back some money; Emerald got away with a bit of a fright.

  La Pavlova opened a ballet school; Grand-Duke Michael entertained on Sundays at Kenwood, Oxford educated the youth of Russia, from Youssoupoff to Obolensky.

  1913

  I NO LONGER BREATHED the air of Venice except through intermediaries.

  That October, I watched the girls I went out with in London returning to England, thrilled to have been able to get close to Nijinsky or Fokine in St Mark’s Square; already they were calling them by their first names. They brought back rich spoils, having stripped Venice, that great highway-woman, emptied the Merceria of its last lengths of velvet adorned with golden pomegranates, its green lacquer cabinets, and its glassware. I still think of them as young girls, forgetting that my companions are, or will be, in their eighties: one of them has died from a life of dissipation, too fragile for the alcoholic lures of surrealism and for handsome Blacks; she was the purest of creatures, the most damaged by life; another, the most beautiful, has experienced everything, the triumphs of stage and society, the thrills of historic moments, the most prominent of embassies; Time seems unable to wear down the marble of this statue…; a third lived a long and spectacular life, before falling into the inkwell, where she is still writing her memoirs; the fourth, the poorest of them, seeing that her youth was coming to an end, spent her last guinea on hiring an evening dress for the night; at the party, she would make the acquaintance of a South African magnate, who married her and made her happy.

  1914

  IN VENICE, the little French circle I had known in my youth had become a literary coterie. “Here comes the Muhlfeld salon,” they used to say in St Mark’s Square upon spotting Henri de Régnier. I possess many books of his that were inscribed to my father, I was mad about his La Cité des eaux and I lapped up his Esquisses vénitiennes, never expecting that a few years later Henri de Régnier would submit my first story to the Mercure de France. He stayed at the Palazzo Dario, the home of a Frenchwoman; behind his proud profile would appear Edmond Jaloux, Vaudoyer, Charles du Bos, Abel Bonnard, Émile Henriot, the brothers Julien and Fernand Ochsé, who had transported their mother’s coffin (Cocteau confirmed this) into their Second Empire dining-room at Neuilly. To me they all looked alike; you could imagine them dancing a farandole on some hump-backed rialto, made of tarred wood, such as the one in the Miracle of the True Cross, a bridge linking Paris to Venice, leading them from the Fenice to the new Théâtre des Champs-Élysees, which had been opened by Astruc the day before. Excepting myself, I used to call them the LONG MOUSTACHES; moustaches from which with the help of a magnifying glass you might have plucked a few tufts of Vercingétorix’s hair, some of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s whiskers, two or three hairs belonging to Flaubert’s BOYS, and last of all, one snatched from the Lion of St Mark’s Square. For these sensitive souls, Venice was their Mecca. Jaloux brought along his Marseilles accent, Marsan his cigars, Miomandre his talent as a dancer, Henri Gonse his rough and ready knowledge, and Henri de Régnier his look of a poplar tree that has shed its leaves in autumn; a delightful man, whose sense of humour maintained a close watch over his love life, the curves of his body ran counter to one another in a backwash of counter-curves, rather like the gilt wood or stucco of a piece of Venetian rococo.

  Henri de Régnier

  They all rallied to the celebrated war-cry of their master Henri de Régnier: “Vivre avilit” (Living debases), pursuing a Walpolesque, Byronic or Beckfordian dream; they were like disillusioned Princes de Ligne, austerely gentle, full of witty sayings in the manner of Rivarol,23 easily bored, quick to anger, chivalrous, and irritated by everything which life had denied them; they would gather at Florian’s, in front of a glass-framed painting, “beneath the Chinese one” as they used to say; they collected “bibelots”, a word that no longer has any meaning nowadays, lacquer writing cases, engraved mirrors or jasper walking-canes.

  They passed around the best addresses among one another: those for point de Venise laceware, for chasubles and stoles; Jaloux would spend his literary prize money at these places; the only wealthy one among them, Gonse, bought himself a wardrobe that was supposed to have belonged to Cardinal Dubois; in order not to melt the lacquer, Gonse never lit a fire in his studio on the Plaine Monceau, but sat in his pelisse, blowing on his fingers to keep warm.

  The older ones among them dressed in black; only Jean-Louis Vaudoyer dared wear English cloth.

  They knew their Venice like the back of their hands:

  “I still remember St Mark’s Square when it had its campanile,” Régnier explained; “do you know that at nine fifty-five, when the building fell down, my gondolier came out with this admirable remark: ‘This campanile disintegrated without killing anybody; it collapsed like a man of honour, è stato galantuomo.’”

  “And what is more honourable still,” added Vaudoyer, “is that it collapsed on the 14th of July, as a tribute to the Bastille.”

  The English have perhaps never loved Florence, nor the Germans Rome, as much as those Frenchmen loved Venice; if Proust dreamed Venice, they lived and relived her, in her glory as well as in her decadence.

  “At the Palazzo Grimani…” Gilbert de Voisins, Taglioni’s grandson, began.

  “Sorry… Specify your surroundings, my friend; to which Palazzo Grimani do you refer, there are eleven; the one in Santo Polo?”

  “Or the one at San Tonia?”

  “… Is it the one at Santa Lucca?”

  “… Or the one at Santa Maria Formosa?”

  “Or do you mean the Palazzo Grimani that’s known as ‘della Vida’?”

  At the time of day when they met for their mysterious “ponche à l’alkermès”,24 the ritual drink that is mentioned on every page of Heures or L’Altana, these fanatical pilgrims would consult one another, their renowned moustaches yellowing from the smoke of their Virginia cigars. Where would they dine? At which osteria (that was the word they used)?

  “At the Capello Nero…”

  “At the Trovatore…”

  “At the Bonvecchiati.”

  “At the taverna at the Fenice?”

  “At Colombo’s, in the Goldoni district?”

  “Bottegone’s, in Calle Vallaresso?”

  They had not been Rimbauds; none of them would ever be a Gide, whom they loathed, nor a Giraudoux, whom they preferred, nor Proust, whom they scarcely knew.25 Gide, Giraudoux and Proust had also worn their moustaches long; from now on they would shave them off, or trim them.

  These were very charming men, who had little self-confidence, they were embittered and sweet-natured dandies, easily amused or driven to despair, who made fun of inverts such as Thomas Mann’s hero, that Herr von Aschenbach who was bothered by the naked shoulder that a young man bathing at the Lido had dared to reveal beneath his bathrobe!

  Women had brought them pain (they were unlucky, they had had to deal with the last generation of women who would make men suffer). They were proud creatures, refined to a degree, whose nerves were made of Murano spun glass; they were refugees in the City of Refuge, who had been jostled about by life, by a vulgar public, that was not yet well-informed or snobbish, and by publishers who were s
till tight-fisted; they cared not for riches except at the homes of the Rothschilds, where they dined, but not for the sake of wealth alone.

  “You look the spitting image of your father,” Vaudoyer told me, on the day before he died. As I grow older, I feel even closer to them than I did at the age of twenty; without the monocle, that is; their own monocles, already literary appurtenances, would be bequeathed to Tzara, who would arrive shortly from Zurich, and later to Radiguet (his was so big that it pulled out his lower eyelid when it eventually reached it). Nobody wore a monocle with such hauteur, his head thrown back, as did Henri de Régnier; his was a sort of bull’s eye hollowed out of the dome of his polished skull, rather like a sixth cupola at St Mark’s. Their winter drug was tea; Jaloux, Abel Bonnard and Du Bos served it to the ladies with full Mandarin rites; authors’ royalties, had they had any, would have been repugnant to them. They were all more or less poor.

  As far as the art of good living was concerned, their time was badly chosen; they might have said, as did Paul Bourget to Corpechot, on the 11th of November 1918: “It is now that disaster begins.”

  Rather like the campanile that was so dear to Henri de Régnier, at the end of their lives these great lovers of Venice simply collapsed, without a sound, and became “men of honour”.