One day I set off from Tremezzo to Bellagio, swimming the two kilometres across the lake through water so viscous that as I moved through it I felt as if I were stroking a fish.
During the last days of August, I took refuge in the chestnut groves of the Tremezzina, which were as chill as a marble by Thorvaldsen; I can see myself in the slow train that brought me back from some trip to the Ticino where I had gone to stock up with cigarettes, looking down upon the wonderfully phosphorescent stars formed by the chestnut blossom. I have never forgotten the smell of that chestnut grove in the Tremezzina, the same forest that Fabrice crossed9 on his way to Waterloo. It was in Tremezzo that I acquired a liking for chestnuts, for those wonderful hedgehogs, and for the tree’s sickle-like leaves. I was to live in a chestnut grove again in 1944; in Montreux, for three years, I lived off chestnuts that had been piled up, their burrs still on, in a bath that had fallen into disuse because the gas bills had not been paid; the chestnut grove of “Maryland” sloped down from the deserted villa as far as the first roofs of Territet, before disappearing into Lake Geneva; chestnut trees like those which La Nouvelle Héloïse places at Clarens, almost wholly destroyed today to make way for vineyards. As soon as September arrived, we set off for Venice; the surroundings changed; the cypress trees by Lake Como gave way to the factory chimneys of the Lombardy plain; all along the railway lines the vines were no longer being cut by hand; from the carriage window, Milan was paving the way for a new industrial Italy; what was the point of so many tyres, ball-bearings and idiotic industries? I lived with my back turned to the future; could the future be anything other than an immanent past?
A stop-over in Milan; in those days the favourite hotel of French visitors was the Albergo di Francia; my father walked into the bedroom; standing on the chimney-piece was a hideous group of bronze statues decorating the top of an Italian clock of the worst Victor-Emmanuel I period: “I could never get to sleep in the presence of such a horror! Let’s be on our way!” my father exclaimed. So we set off again for Venice, without eating or sleeping. It wasn’t a pose: my father was a true product of the age of Ruskin; he had known William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, and the concept of liberty, which invested the most everyday object with the dignity of a work of art; for him, putting up with ugliness in our home was to sully oneself. I have seen Lalique, adopting Tolstoy’s example, sewing slippers for himself, and Gallé building his own ovens, as did later Brancusi, who cooked steaks for us in them. My father designed the costumes and the scenery for his plays; he even painted a medieval stage curtain, in the style of Burne-Jones, for the Comédie Française.
1908,
VENICE SEEN THROUGH A
REAR-VIEW MIRROR
VENICE, which Proust called “the Mecca of the religion of Beauty”. Eight years earlier, Proust, whom I did not know at the time (although my father used to meet him at Madeleine Lemaire’s, as I would discover from Proust himself ten years later) had seen Venice through Ruskin’s eyes, but already he was aware how exacting this religion of Beauty was. “Ruskin did not conceive of Beauty as an object of pleasure, but as a reality that was more important than life…” Had Proust stopped at Jean Santeuil, he would have been nothing more than a hedonist; but he suffered, he searched beyond Beauty, he produced Swann. This is why our stern age forgives him for his duchesses. Naïve and foolish, it never occurred to me that we have duties towards Beauty; for me, she was just a way of evading the moral code; and Ruskin, as Bloch says, was a frightful bore.
I can hear myself saying and repeating: “You deny the past, you reject the present, you are hurtling towards a future that you will not see.” I want to speak plainly; this is why, overcoming my dislike of myself, I have taken Venice as my confidante; she will answer for me. In Venice I can think about my life, and do so more clearly than anywhere else; and it’s too bad if I can be spotted in the corner of the picture, like Veronese in Christ in the House of Levi.
Marcel Proust in Venice
The canals of Venice are black as ink; it is the ink of Jean-Jacques, of Chateaubriand, of Barrès, of Proust; to dip one’s pen into it is more than a Frenchman’s duty, it is a duty plain and simple.
Venice did not withstand Attila, Bonaparte, the Hapsburgs, or Eisenhower; she had something more important to do: survive; they believed they were building upon rock; she sided with the poets and decided to be built on water.
I have always thought of the railway station at Venice as a triumphal entrance; at that time it was not the present-day peristylar railway theatre of the Mussolini era. (“This is Venice, Venezia, Venedig: you’ll see what you shall see. Viva il Duce!”) Its predecessor consisted of three arcades which had turned green from the damp and had been blackened by the coal smoke. What has not changed is the green copper dome of San Simeone Piccolo; the bombs of two world wars, aimed at the railways lines, had spared it; to the left and in front of it are the trattorie where you dine, your head beneath the boxed bay trees and your feet in the water; there is less of a stench from the waters of these Fondamente Santa Lucia or dei Turchi than elsewhere; propelled through, the water is oxygenated here and does not give off the whiff of sulphurous hydrogen.
In those days, the gondolier was still king; proud at having surprised us by taking the short cut along the Rio Nuovo upon leaving the station and emerging suddenly at the ACCADEMIA, our man, manipulating his curved oar like a foil, reeled off the dazzling names of the palazzi: FOSCARI, GUISTINIANI, REZZONICO, LOREDAN, VENIER, DARIO… (Some of them, bent over with age and rheumatic stress, looked as if they were bowing at us.) Along the way, the gondolier, hostile still to the outboard engine, cocked a snook at the steamships that passed. Only yesterday, the vaporetti, the masters of the canals, had gone on strike to prevent the last of the gondolas from using the Rio Nuovo; the calm waters have been replaced by con stant rough waves.10
At last we arrived within sight of the Dogana with its statue of Fortune on top, which, at that time, was golden; today Fortune has turned verdigris. 11
This triumphant procession along the Grand Canal, “that register of Venetian nobility”, as Théophile Gautier put it, led us to the Traghetto San Maurizio, where the small apartment rented by my parents awaited us. The narrow street was deserted; there was just a basket which, at the cry of “Bella uva!” (fine grapes), had been lowered on a rope down to the grape-seller below, and hoisted up again piled with muscat grapes for the lunch that had already been served. The mosquito nets had been folded parachute fashion above the beds, and the bedrooms smelled of dead gnats, killed by little triangles of beguiling but nauseating herbs; from the canal there rose up a reek of foul water, similar to the smell of vases from which someone has forgotten to remove the withered flowers.
In the morning, I was awoken by the hoarse voice of the vaporetto and by the striated reflections from the Canal on the almond green ceiling, with its plaster reliefs, or on the façades of the buildings that were flecked with light; for fifty centimes, the barber would come up and trim my beard (a marvellous attack on the bristles by the Italian razors, engraved in gold on steel, which each barber carried with him on weekdays). Nowadays, when I go around barefoot in espadrilles and without a tie all year round, I sometimes smile when I think of how I was attired at that time: white flannel trousers, white cotton socks, white felt hat, a butterfly knot and a stiff collar.