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 for 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.)