1938 DEATH OF D’ANNUNZIO
IN THE 1930S, a friend had obtained an audience for me; summoned back to Paris, I had to cancel my visit to Gardone, and returned from Venice to France. On arrival at the fork on the motorway at Lake Garda, a fascist guard handed me a packet: “From the Commandante”; at that period French cars were not very numerous; he had picked out mine. Inside I found a paper-knife made of inlaid gold, bearing these words uttered by the national hero: “I only possess that which I give.”
JUNE 1939
AT BLED, in Slovenia, by the lake shore, thirty kilometres from Ljubljana. An international tunnel is all that separates two worlds, the Latin and the Slav, Julian Veneto from Yugoslavia. One passes through fourteen centuries in twenty minutes.
My wife is in Trieste, at her uncles’ house. Mussolini has just seized their Stock Exchange shares in order to prepare for war, giving them in exchange state-headed notepaper and uncultivated land.
I was on my way to one of the Danube Commissions, two hours away, for the spring session; a reduced Europe: the Austrian admiral, a man of very noble blood and very tired; the Romanian, our president, a wily and devious diplomat on the brink of retirement; the Englishman, who drinks a bottle of whisky a day — he died of it; the Yugoslav, pettifogging, blunt and loathed; the Italian, a buffoon… Our assignment: to supervise the Danube, both technically, and a touch politically too, from Germany to the Black Sea. Our winter session was held in March, in Nice; the autumn one will take place in Galatz, at the mouth of the river, in an old Second Empire — the age of Romania — palace that is half-Turkish, half-Russian. Our old-fashioned yacht, flying the Commission’s flag, along with those of eight European nations, was berthed near Vienna. This very peaceful Commission’s only enemies were the rocks that studded the Iron Gates, the silt which obstructed the fluvial ports, or the fluctuations of the tributaries.
In this Slovenian countryside, that once formed the Austrian crown territories of Carinthia, Garniola and Styria, I was able to study at close quarters those Slavs who had been halted by the Alps on their march towards the Adriatic; they had rid themselves of Franz-Joseph’s jurisdiction only to find themselves confronted by the Italians, who had grown rich on Austrian booty as a result of the 1920 treaties; the Italians had gained Trieste, Istria, Dalmatia and Julian Veneto; their mandate was to prevent the Slavs descending on the Adriatic; fascism took care of this, depriving Trieste of its hinterland, denationalizing the towns, since they were unable to penetrate the countryside, dressing the Croats in black shirts and providing the Slovenes with boots.
With the end of the Serenissima, from 1814 onwards, Trieste, the Dominante, had prospered through the decline of Venice, which no longer needed to recruit slave oarsmen for their galleys. Trieste, once made wealthy by Vienna, the Greeks, the English and the Germans, prospered little after 1920, deprived of the two-headed eagle, the city thought only italianità and was indifferent to the miseries heaped upon priests and Slovenian teachers by the Irredentists, who purged the local administration and prohibited the Slav languages; after all, had not the Europe of the Treaty of Versailles been responsible for establishing the Italian presence, firstly in order to be rid of the Slavs, and then to contain them?
On the eve of war, these memories only served to remind one of the Slavs’ tête-à-têtes with Venice; the Slavonians, the ancestors of those on the Riva degli Schiavoni, opposite the Danieli, where Victor-Emmanuel prances; coming down from Bled, approaching Trieste, I could hear them growling about their former masters; from high on the Dinaric Alps, the old lion of St Mark was living out the last days of its Adriatic splendour.
I would not see Venice again for another twelve years.
NOTES
1. Journal d’un attaché d’ambassade (Gallimard).
2. See Guy Petrocini, Les Mutineries de 1917.
3. Georges Auric (1899–1983) was a composer. A friend of Darius Milhaud and Erik Satie, he was one of the celebrated Groupe des Six. [Tr.]
4. Saint-John Perse.
5. Every salon at that time had its socialist: at Mme Straus’s, it was Léon Blum; at Mme Ménard-Dorian’s, Albert Thomas; at the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre’s, Rappoport; at Princesse Eugene Murat’s, née Violette d’Elchingen, Bracke-Desrousseaux.
6. This was the title of Paul Morand’s second collection of short stories (after Tendres Stocks, 1921), published in 1922. It was followed by another collection, Fermé la nuit, in 1924. Both were very successful. When Morand writes of the Nuits, he is presumably referring to both these books. [Tr.]
7. A reference to Les Croix du bois, Roland Dorgelès’s novel about the First World War, which many believed should have been awarded the 1919 Prix Goncourt instead of Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes jilles enfieurs [Tr.]
8. October 1970. Sheltering from an autumn storm in the Café de la Fenice, I perused the newspapers; I learned of the death of Dos Passos: “My ambition is to sing the ‘Internationale’,” Dos Passos used to say, as a young man; he was then the equal of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Faulkner; Sartre considered him the best novelist of the time. From 1930 on Dos Passos opposed the “New Deal”; he considered the Second World War to be a catastrophe. “We can only regret that such an accomplished literary technician should have adopted such a narrow viewpoint and that the brilliant constellation of 1920 now shines so dimly…” (Herald Tribune, 29 September 1970). “In 1929, Dos Passos unleashed a virulent critique of capitalist society; his work had a considerable impact. The Second World War was to bring about a true conversion in the writer… At the same time as he altered his political views, Dos Passos seemed to lose his creative powers.” (Le Figaro, 30 September 1970). Yesterday evening, on France-Inter, I listened to Le Masque et la Plume: “How can Ionesco still go on telling us about his death? He’s been dead for ten years.” I’m not very lucky with my friends who have advanced opinions.
9. The grand corps de l’État are senior civil servants recruited through the École Nationale d’Administration. [Tr.]
10. pantouflage is a term coined for those who leave the civil service to work in the private sector. [Tr.]
11. The Groupe des Six was a group of six young composers — Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, François Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre — that was centred around the figures of the composer Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau in the 1920s, and who became celebrated for their advanced ideas. [Tr.]
12. He kept open house, and at his table six blue angora cats would wander round among the plates.
13. Jacques Ange Gabriel (1698–1792). Celebrated French architect and interior designer. [Tr.]
14. At a banquet for three thousand guests, in the Grand Council chamber, the knives, forks, tablecloths and napkins were made from sugar, as were the epergnes and the statues of doges, planets and animals, modelled on drawings by Sansovino.
15. Morand was writing in 1970. Serge Lifar, Diaghilev’s choreographer, died in Lausanne in 1986; Boris Kochno, a man closely associated with the ballet and the theatre throughout his life, died in Paris in 1990. [Tr.]
16. That of 1900.
17. See also what Proust has to say about Venice in Cahier 50 (explored so cleverly by Maurice Bardèche in his Marcel Proust romancier, vol. I, 1971).
18. Just one, at a crossroads at Rio Nuovo.
19. A Sevillan never travels up to Madrid; an inhabitant of Lausanne doesn’t go to Geneva.