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 still 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”.
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.]