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 “conversationists”, 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.