Venice has run herself aground in a place that was forbidden: therein lay her genius.
The Venetians invented income tax, statistics, state pensions, book censorship, the lottery, the ghetto and glass mirrors.
Montaigne called on a literary courtesan who read him an endless elegy on her work; Montaigne would have done better to catch the pox.
The cats are the vultures of Venice.
During the seventeenth century, following an earthquake, the Grand Canal ran dry for two hours.
Colleone’s horse: one might criticise Verrocchio for the tail, which is a little low. And how could the horseman have achieved that raising of the forearm when his spurs are so far from the horse’s girth?
That box for anonymous denunciations that was placed at the entrance to the Doges’ Palace, and which has a lion’s mouth at its opening, is famous; the inquisitors put those bocche di leone not just in the Palace, but in every district of the city. It is not lions that should figure on the Serenissima’s coat of arms, but vipers.
Duse’s first role was that of Cosetta… (Festival of Theatre, Venice, 1969).
Who was it who described Reynaldo Hahn in Venice thus: “An upright piano, a great deal of smoke, a little music”?
A Parisian man of letters. In 1834, as he disembarked at the Danieli, where did Alfred de Musset run off to? To the Missiglia reading room, to see whether La Revue des Deux Mondes had arrived.
Springtime: let others repaint the fronts of their houses; in March, a Venetian first of all scrapes the bottom of his gondola.
Where better than Venice can Narcissus contemplate himself?
Wagner, listening to his own music, at the Café Quadri…
A Venetian never visits the rest of Italy.19
The Venetian dialect is distinguished by the letter Z; the Grand Canal itself is shaped like a Z.
1934
“VENICE, the mask of Italy” (Byron).
In front of the Scuola San Marco, I come across Fulgence, accompanied by Bernardine, his wife; they are staying near the Accademia.
Taking me to one side:
“I’ve moved Françoise into the Lido and I’ve persuaded Coralie to conceal herself in Padua”, Fulgence confesses to me. “My two ladies don’t know one another, fortunately. As for me, I’m keeping Venice to myself, with Bernardine.”
The fire-guard of marriage…
1934
HEARD ABOUT the death of Stavisky in Venice. The USSR joins the UN. Death of King Albert and the assassination of Dollfuss. Night of the Long Knives. Hindenburg. Hitler master of Germany. Publication of L’Armée de métier, by de Gaulle, with an introduction by Pétain.
How does one find these facts in the treasury of History? The doge threw his ring into the sea; who would have thought that fisherman would discover this ring in a fish’s belly, and that one day we would be able to see it in the Treasury of St Mark’s?
At the Institut, I come across an ancient and delightful paper by the Comte de Mas Latrie: De l’empoisonnement politique dans la république de Venise; from which it emerges that people were assassinated at the Doges’ Palace up until the second half of the eighteenth century; not only did the Senate frequently appear to be interested in the proposals of the pirates, but it let it be known and discussed advance payments, which varied according to the person who was to be eliminated, a sultan or a simple Albanian chieftain. Who provided the poison, and what was it?
At which point, nineteenth-century Venetian scholars reply to French accusations: “What about your kings? What about Louis XI? Did not your François I wish for the death of Pope Clement VII? Our word potione (a potion) has a double meaning in French: it’s ‘poison’…”
THE RIALTO MARKET
DESPITE THE ROLLING and swaying, the peaches in their baskets do not move; they’re plump and inedible. As for the fish, they’re not very big, with the exception of the tuna and swordfish, but what a tang of the high seas! They were caught the previous day and are untouched by ice and gamma rays, and have not been brushed with penicillin; after Greece, England, La Rochelle and the Hanseatic ports, after Antwerp, Portugal and Venice, fish from anywhere else seems tasteless.
Herbs, little used elsewhere, play an important part in Italian cooking, and they are sold by toothless old herbalists; a fusion of plucked leaves, sedge from the marshes, sweet watercress, lemon balm, edible lichens; ten varieties of chervil, limitless amounts of mint, oregano, marjoram and little seasoning bags which, once they are crushed, make up the sauces, such as that salsa verde one adds to boiled dishes, that is unknown even in Provence.
In the years that I lived far away from Venice, Denise would bring me back gondolier’s shoes, made of black velvet and with rope soles; you could buy them at the Rialto for a few lire; her two Charles, both elegant creatures, would wear nothing else.
1931
IN 1816 Countess Albrizzi gave a ball here at which Byron fell in love with Teresa Gamba, Countess Guiccioli; he had first met her three months earlier; three months of incubation, then, on that evening, the mutual coup de foudre.
What followed is well-known: Guiccioli, in love and consumptive, took refuge in Ravenna, where her elderly husband (there were fifty years between them) took all the blame upon himself, and where the Countess’s father, Count Gamba, came to beg Byron not to abandon his beloved daughter, who was coughing herself to death. The reason I am recalling this famous affair is in order to repeat Byron’s final words; exasperated (particularly since he found himself dragged into a political conspiracy involving the Italian family) Byron sighed: “I only wanted to be her escort; how could I have known that this affair would turn into an English novel?” (that is to say domestic and tearful).
Lauzun and Ligne were merely witty; Byron transcribed Italian buffoonery into English humour; the epigrammatic retorts in Wilde’s plays are to be found in every line of the poet’s correspondence: “The women here have abominable notions about constancy…” and (departing for Missolonghi): “I prefer to love a cause than to love a woman.” When Cocteau, who was asked what he would like to take away with him if his house caught fire, replied: “I’d take away the fire,” he sounds just like the Byron of the Letters.
“Why were there ten thousand gondolas four centuries ago, and five hundred today?”
“The job’s a dead loss! (It’s as if you were listening to a Paris cab driver.) The season is too short… A gondola costs a million lire… Vaporetti and lance, they break your arms with the wash they make… You risk your life at every turning… On the Grand Canal they come at you like a bull in a china shop…”
“But you’re singing?”
“So as to forget…”
The gondolier tells me that ever since the seventeenth century a gondola’s blade has had five prongs; the gondola’s reflection quivers over the waters that are mottled with sunshine and oil.
Three o’clock in the morning.
At this hour, with no one about, Venice is like a Guardi painting.
No more funiculi.
Were it not for the television aerials, one could be in the eighteenth century.