Venices Page 6

  NOTES

  1. Writing prose without realising I was doing so, I discovered implicit grammar, the very latest thing today.

  2. The École des Sciences Politiques.

  3. Or again, Mistrust when you don’t know, suspect when you do.

  4. Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) German-born, American writer and philosopher, influenced by both Marx and Freud; a fierce critic of affluent Western society, he became something of a hero to the youth culture of the 1960s. Morand, of course, was writing in 1970. [Tr.]

  5. Now avenue Pierre-Ier-de-Serbie.

  6. The office which supervises the finances of local authorities and monitors the use of public funds. [Tr.]

  7. Come, let us love, the nights are too fleeting, Come, let us dream, the days are too short… [Tr.]

  8. The École Centrale, the Paris grande école for highly qualified engineers. [Tr.]

  9. In Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. [Tr.]

  10. The battle between the vaporetti and the gondoliers has been going on for sixty years, with the gondoliers’ trade union trying to suggest that its rivals be diverted by the Giudecca.

  11. The Fortune was re-gilded in 1971.

  12. Nom de plume of the celebrated French anarchist François Koenigstein (1859–92), who was condemned to death and executed. [Tr.]

  13. Émile Loubet (1838–1929) was elected as President of the Republic on the death of Félix Faure in 1899. It was he who reprieved Dreyfus. [Tr.]

  14. Pierre Gouthière (1732–1813). One of the most famous ornamentalists of the late eighteenth century. He was the inventor of matt gilding. [Tr.]

  15. Edmé Patrice Maurice MacMahon (1808–98) was descended from an Irish Jacobite family. He was appointed Marshal of France and Duke of Magenta after the Italian campaign of 1859, but was captured at Sedan in the Franco-German war of 1870–71. He later commanded the Versailles army that sup pressed the Commune and was elected President of the Republic in 1873 for a period of seven years. [Tr.]

  16. Or Il Parmigianino (1503–40), as he was known in Italy.

  17. The École des Beaux-Arts is situated on the corner of the rue Bonaparte and the Quai Malaquais. [Tr.]

  18. In 1970.

  19. In 1970.

  20. Unlike Paris, London has direct flights to Venice throughout the year.

  21. Paul Cambon (1843–1924) was French Ambassador to London from 1898–1920 and helped bring about the Entente Cordiale of 1904. [Tr.]

  22. Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805–71) achieved legendary fame as a conjuror and magician. [Tr.]

  23. Antoine Rivarol (1753–1801) was a French writer famous for his conversational wit. He was the author of Le Petit Almanach des grands hommes, in which he directed his caustic sarcasm at Parisian society. [Tr.]

  24. A punch distilled from cinnamon, cloves and various aromatic herbs, that was dyed red with kermes. [Tr.]

  25. Except for Edmondjaloux.

  II

  THE QUARANTINE FLAG

  A NIGHT IN VENICE, EARLY 1918

  IT WAS NO LONGER a time for engraved mirrors or little Negro boys made from spun glass.

  The Palace of the Ancients was in danger of collapse.

  After a lightning visit to the borders of the Veneto, where the French general staff was trying to raise Italian morale, I was waiting for a train which didn’t arrive. Venice’s old railway station was illuminated by the beams of searchlights from the Anglo-French torpedo-boats that patrolled the Adriatic; bright flares fired from sixty Venetian forts had put an end to the Austrians’ rather ineffectual raids. What remains with me is the unreality of that autumn night, in which the dome of San Simeone Piccolo—as ever—loomed up, before dipping its head in the Grand Canal once more, while, in turn, San Simeone Grande was lit up, and then the Scalzi bridge and church, that solid, joyful setting out of some ecclesiastical operetta with its display of grandiloquent emblems on its façade (we forget that Bernini was also a playwright).

  That night, as a crescent moon vainly awaited its next phase, in a sky that was very dark, I suddenly became aware of a transformation in the war; the wind of defeat was blowing over Rome, where Giolitti’s comfortable neutrality was already regretted; only burgeoning fascism swore loyalty to the Entente; its supporters were then no more than a handful of devotees ready to shout: Vive la France!

  A year spent in Paris had just made me the astonished witness of the fallibility of our leaders. There was the swaggering Viviani (“they are destroyed”), the predictions of Joffre in 1914 (“it will be over by Christmas”), and of Nivelle (“this offensive will be the last”). Day by day the older generations were losing their glamour.

  It was not for me to protest because two hundred thousand men had been sacrificed in trying to cross a river, and I was not entitled to speak on behalf of my brothers who were still at war; but being a non-combatant, did I not have a duty to help them, in some other way? Could I not express the mood I was experiencing in a different way? Perhaps, in this gloomy station, in this darkened Venice, my Nuits would be conceived? It would be my way of indicating that portents were appearing in the sky. My Nuits would speak not in the name of those who had died, but on behalf of the dead, to divert them, to show sympathy for them, to tell them that I never stopped thinking of them, and especially of those classmates of the years 1908–1913 who had been so effectively decimated.

  “That shameful period from 1914 to 1918,” Larbaud dared to write at that time, in his Alicante Journal, speaking as a humanist and as an outraged European, seemed to us, in 1917, like a vague sort of liberation.

  “1917, the year of confusion,” Poincaré would say later; for us, it was a disturbing year. A year of despair for the only truly cosmopolitan generation that had appeared in France since the Encyclopédistes.

  Fourteen months spent on the fringes of power had taught me a great deal;1 I had seen some great Frenchmen, all of whom hoped for victory, grow suspicious of one another, tear each other apart and exclude one another in the name of the sacred union: Briand, who while approving Prince Sixte’s dialogues with Vienna, secretly pursued a policy of pacifism that was condemned severely by the Government; Ribot, who succeeded him, reckoned him to be suspect; and then this same Ribot was soon hounded out by Clemenceau who did not hesitate to let Briand go to the High Court; I admired Philippe Berthelot, who, single-handed, had been responsible for our foreign policy ever since the outbreak of war, refusing to set foot in the Élysée, where Poincaré awaited him in vain for four years and never forgave him for this insult. I had observed the unjust, but total disgrace of Berthelot, who was sacrificed by Ribot to a Parliament he openly despised, a Berthelot who was abruptly forgotten by all of those who had previously hung about at his heels, soliciting diplomatic assignments or extensions, until Clemenceau, having noticed how this great servant of the State had been slandered, took him back into his service. This same “Tiger” Clemenceau admitted to a weakness for Joseph Caillaux; he would have been sorry to have had him shot. I remember what Jules Cambon, at the end of his life, told me about Clemenceau: “Against my wishes, Clemenceau made me one of the five delegates to the Versailles Conference. The Anglo-Saxon delegates who were there worked together. For our part, we never had any meetings… I was never given any instructions at all. André Tardieu was the only one among us who had any idea what Clemenceau was thinking… The Tiger was still like some elderly student, fairly ignorant, not very intelligent, but generous and tenacious… As far as war is concerned, one has to admire his ability, for he succeeded, but what a pity that he took it upon himself to make peace!”

  The treachery of office life, the effeteness of the salon, the treachery of the parliamentary corridor, the semi-blackmail that went on, the sound of the safe’s combination lock being opened for secret funds or for journalists’ “envelopes”: the whole complexity of political machinery had been paraded before the young and insignificant attaché I was in 1916 and 1917.

  At that moment, on the eve of my departure f
or Rome, as 1917 gave way to 1918, I jotted down in the last pages of my Journal the impression that the war suddenly made on me: “It has a different stench, it’s a Luciferean conspiracy.” Europe was beginning to smell.

  From the heart of Italy, life in Paris, where I had just come from, took on another aspect: I had witnessed the terrible year of 1917, when Europe, as we now realize, had almost collapsed; 1917 was the year of peace initiatives, of the Coeuvres and Missu rebellions, when General Bulot had been stripped of his general’s stars,2 of secret battles between the Sûreté Générale [the French criminal investigation department] and the Service des Renseignements aux Armées [the Army intelligence service], and the newspaper L’Action Franpaise, which had clashed with Le Bonnet rouge and Le Cornet de la semaine; the Daudet family offered a curious spectacle: at Mme Alphonse Daudet’s home, Georges Auric3 and I would listen to Léon Daudet preparing for Clemenceau to be given a triumphant welcome to Parliament, while his younger brother Lucien, a supporter of Aristide Briand, and dressed in the uniform of one of Étienne de Beaumont’s ambulance crews, yearned for a negotiated peace; every day in L’Action Française, Léon Daudet, who, like Philippe Berthelot, had been raised at Renan’s knee, called for the indictment of this sort of brother whom he clasped in his arms whenever he met him. (Proust observes this “split personality” in Contre Sainte-Beuve.)

  Who will write the novel of 1917? Among historians, it is the geometrical turn of mind that simplifies and falsifies everything; only in works of the imagination can the truth be found.

  Feverishly, Paris awaited the American troops. Would they arrive in time? In pacifist and Zimmerwaldien Zurich, Tristan Tzara opened the dictionary at random and hap pened upon the word dada. When Les Mamelles de Tirésias was performed, Montparnasse had heard Arthur Cravan, a precursor of the anti-establishment, summon “the deserters of seventeen nations”, while to the sound of an orchestra of nuts and bolts shaken in an iron box, André Breton, with his hint of a beard, yelled out: “Take to the roads!”

  Henceforth, nothing was straightforward: the immobilization of the front lines, the increasingly obscure aims and origins of the war, the Russian revolution which changed people’s political stances; in short, everything that the young of 1970 discovered as they watched a film like Oh! What a Lovely War we had experienced already.

  A golden age had ended; another was emerging, fringed in black.

  For three years, my civilian’s clothes had weighed heavily on my conscience; the appalling suffering of those who fought had become intolerable to me; all of a sudden to be in Italy was to begin to live again, and this was true not just for me, but for the French troops who landed there and were able to forget the nightmare of trench warfare; it was a surprise to be thinking like Maréchal Brissac who, at the time of the Fronde, charged at a hearse, sword in hand, crying out: “That’s the enemy!” From now on, the one enemy was Death: the submerged forces of life surged up into our consciousness; we were no longer in control. The animal wanted to live and its animal nature carried all before it.

  “I found Venice in a state of mourning” (Byron). Above St Mark’s the pigeons had been replaced by the Tauben (Austrian aircraft, known as pigeons).

  In Venice, through the shattered dome of Santa Maria, one could see the blue sky; the Arsenal was damaged, the walls of the Doges’ Palace were cracked, St Mark’s was choking beneath fifteen feet of sandbags held in place by beams and wire netting; the horses of the Quadriga had vanished! The Titians had been wrapped up; the canals had been emptied of gondolas, the pigeons had been eaten.

  These were the last days of the retreat to the Tagliamento; five hundred kilometres of front-line between Lake Garda and the Adriatic. Mestre was a military zone. In Brescia, in Verona and in Venice the French divisions (like the Germans, in 1943) were doing their best to infuse new courage into the Italians. On the quaysides, French officers were sampling long Virginia cigarettes that were perforated with straws; in the Red Cross lorries, wounded Senegalese soldiers sitting side by side with Neapolitans in their hospital gowns mingled with bersaglieri, shorn of most of their feathers, with Austrian prisoners of war, Tyroleans wearing grey-blue uniforms, and with carabinieri who had exchanged their cocked hats for a helmet rather like Colleone’s; Russian prisoners who had been returned by the Austrians were sweeping the docks with brooms made from leaves of maize; on walls, menacing posters ordered deserters from the Caporetto to rejoin the 4th Corps or risk being “shot in the back”.

  Rome, upon my return there, resembled the France of 1940, a medieval city ravaged by a moral plague; muddy boots, drenched uniforms, bandaged heads that had been gashed by flints thrown up by exploding shells in the Alps; nobody was working, nobody was where they should be. Rome, as far as I was concerned, consisted of the chancellery, among whose green files I roamed, just as in dreams one strolls into a ball wearing one’s underpants… I have come across one of my letters to my mother, from the Palazzo Farnese, dated 31 December 1917: “Rome is teeming with refugees from Venice; yesterday I met G. who had left her palazzo on the Grand Canal, carrying her Giorgione in a hat box. St Anthony of Padua was taken to Bologna for safe keeping; the Colleone is here.”

  Every day at lunch, at Barrère’s house, I listened to Foch and Weygand relating how that very morning they had explained to the Italian ministers that the Isonzo front was not the only stage of war and that the two hundred thousand prisoners and two hundred thousand captured Italian guns was not really very dreadful; was not Gabriele D’Annunzio dropping bombs on Trieste and Cattaro?

  I was very lonely at the Palazzo Farnese. Before I had left, Proust, discussing Barrère, my future boss, had said to me: “He was a friend of my father’s; an old fool…”. In my mind I was still living in Paris, where Proust scarcely ever left his bed; Hélène had had an operation; Giraudoux was at Harvard; Alexis Léger4 in Peking; in the Champagne, Erik Labonne, an artillery officer, was aiming his guns at the Russian troops that had come to France as allies and who were now regarded as suspect; in London, Antoine and Emmanuel Bibesco confessed that they wanted a peace to be negotiated with all speed; “That would ruin things for everybody”, predicted Georges Boris, who astonished us with the audacity of his advanced views. At the Palazzo Farnese, I had come across a former colleague from before the war in London, François Charles-Roux, now a secretary at the embassy; our problems had made him more combative and intransigent than ever; it was as if he alone knew how to put the Italians back on a war footing; he thought me apathetic; our friendship was affected as a result; furthermore, the Caillaux affair had introduced a coolness between us.

  Joseph Caillaux always amazed me, ever since my first visit to his home in rue Alphonse-de-Neuville in 1911, up until the last one, in 1926; his sudden rages, which made his polished skull turn pink, then crimson, his fiery gaze that was circumscribed by the diamond-studded ring of his monocle, his insolence and his haughty foolhardiness used to fascinate me; my father, whom Caillaux liked, admired him and defended him, as he did at his trial, even if that meant falling out with Calmette’s friends. The war had caused Caillaux to lose what little mental stability he had left. Those that succeeded him were glad to be rid of him and had showered him with missions to foreign countries; as he took stock of the world he forgot about all other considerations; the preposterous remarks he made in Argentina, the bad company he kept in Italy, his hopes of negotiating an unconditional peace, his childish gaffes and his daring opinions, the entire make-up of his character astonished me, including the way he mixed with comical rogues to whom he willingly entrusted his riches, “not that he particularly liked villains, but they served his particular policies”, as Poincaré said of him. Reconciling France and Germany in 1911 would have avoided the suicide of the white race; I had heard Caillaux say that “evicting the southern Europeans from our colonies in North Africa was madness”; he added: “The Arabs will throw us out if we do not henceforth open up Tunisia to the Italians and Orania to the Spanish; with them twent
y million Europeans can stand shoulder to shoulder; alas! the blinkered attitude of your Quai d’Orsay is irreversible.” Time has passed; I think of Caillaux once more when I reread Clemenceau’s bitter reflections on his past life, when he addressed the Senate in October 1919: “The Germans are a great nation; we have to reach an understanding with them; for my part, I have hated them too much; this task is for others, those younger men who succeed me, to accomplish.” Is it not just as if Gaillaux were speaking?

  I have always been attracted to lost causes: Fouquet, Caillaux, Berthelot, Laval. When they were sent to prison, dragged before the High Court, ignominiously removed from their duties or sent to the gallows, my affection for them grew all the more. What was it that linked such varied destinies? Would a psychoanalyst be able to explain this? It goes back a long way; when asked “Why are you a Dreyfusard?”, I had answered, aged eight, that it was because there were no others in my class, a reply that was to remain famous among members of my family, who actually saw it not so much as an indication of force of character, but rather of naïvety.

  Success followed by failure would remain the theme of the books I wrote between 1950 and the sixties; after Fouquet, Le Flagellant de Séville, Les Clés du souterrain, Le Dernier Jour de l’Inquisition, Hécate… As a child, I slept with my thumbs pressed inside the palms of my hands; psychoanalysts saw this as a sign of introversion. Since 1917, one of my future wife’s brothers had lived in Zurich, where he was treated by Schmit Guisan, a pupil of Freud’s and Jung’s; this was how I knew of the existence of psychoanalysis five or six months before this attempt at liberation was known about in France; the contrast between the hidden sexual life and social life has always filled me with wonder. Gide says somewhere that he hovered around psychoanalysis; in my case, it was psychoanalysis that hovered around me, resoling my former Christian shoes along the path of penitence.