The rampino from the San Maurizio ferry greeted me with a cry of poppe!, waving his grubby hat (even poor people wore a hat; a hat they used to greet one with) as he held the gondola’s coupling hook with his other hand. He offered to carry me across the Canal, rather as Dandolo’s Serenissima offered to take the Crusaders as far as Byzantium. I did not make use of his services, but set off along the narrow street towards the Palazzo Pisani (painted at that time in that pale nacreous “coral” pink, the colour of scampi); I reached the Palazzo Morosini with its lofty ogives, and so Gothic in style that it looked English. Passing the churches of Santa Maria Zobenigo, San Stefano and San Vitale, I was on my way to meet my mother, after she had attended Mass, at San Moisè, whose façade, an assortment of overhangs and recesses, was white with the acidic droppings of the Venetian pigeons that can even eat into the stonework. Théophile Gautier was responsible for my love of this church, which, with its obelisks and astragals, is so perfectly reminiscent of the overture to Rossini’s Moisè. I drew back the red curtain (the same one as today, without those horrible doors with bars): there were more votive candles burning inside than in the Holy Sepulchre; the Jesuits’ confessional boxes, their baroque grilles as convoluted as a confiteor, buzzed with the whisper of sins; confessional boxes only came into existence, apparently, in the seventeenth century; that buttoned-up age was the first to feel that it should conceal its sins… I enjoyed stopping in front of the tomb of a Scotsman, John Law, the inventor of the banknote; this rococo monument was an apt one for the inventor of financial rococo (inflation is romantic, while deflation is classical).
Théophile Gautier photographed by Paul Nadar
“If Palférine had any money, he would spend his life in Venice, passing his days in museums, his evenings at the theatre, and his nights with beautiful women” (Balzac). The Fenice was not open; as for beautiful women, I was too frightened of imitating Jean-Jacques [Rousseau], who found little consolation in his loneliness from a courtesan who almost got him plastered, from another tart who only had one nipple, or from the young girl of twelve who was so sexually immature that he contented himself with fatherly affection and teaching her music. Depriving oneself of women was painful in the evenings, but I would never have dared approach, as President De Brosses did after consulting the Tariffa delle putane di Venezia, the Marianna or Fornarina of a republic of demi-beavers.
Deprived! This word has no meaning for our children or for their impetuous age, which imposes no restraints on passions or on the insistence of desire; the young of today have the voracious weakness of unbridled crowds. It was this abstinence of the flesh that gave us a self-control that is rarely seen any longer; it was not until about 1920, when we decided that we were being deprived and that we would fast no longer, that we began to fling ourselves upon easy prey, whose fragrance lost in subtlety what it gained in abundance. Virgins, nowadays, await their boyfriends in their beds; in the early part of the century, all we had were prostitutes, and even then one had to be able to gain access to the brothel; that depended on the height of the client; the first of our classmates to be allowed inside was Baudelocque — the son of the well-known obstetrician — who was two heads taller than us; while waiting for him, we would plod up and down the pavement of the rue de Hanovre; when he came out, the questions rained down: “What does she look like, a woman?” “You enter her? How’s that possible!” We were thirteen years old; we would still have to wait a while… Today, I miss the old days and the time one spent waiting; the penitence and the continence that society imposed on us imparted an unbelievable flavour to the opposite sex, and they conferred something sacred that has been lost. It was still the Italy of the young Beyle, and of his “two years without a woman”; he wanted to remedy this: aged eighteen, he contracted syphilis.
As to the young ladies (whom at that time one did not refer to as “girls”), one was expected to make amends.
In those days, boys made amends, they took responsibility for anything that went wrong: compensation and penitence; it was all to do with the feudal code of honour, with Corsican revenge, with civil action. A young lady must not be compromised, a terrible word that suggested commitment, shady deals and law suits; having an illegitimate child was like contracting the most shameful of diseases. It was no laughing matter. Traps lay everywhere; in every invitation, even on the simplest of promenades the female body offered its stumbling-blocks; charms were lures; at the bottom of the slope of the thighs, so sweet a descent, lay the pot of glue.
I can still see my school friend Robert D—, sitting astride one of the porphyry lions in St Mark’s Square, telling me how he had had a narrow escape:
“I met her yesterday, in front of one of the Bellinis at the Accademia; I got rid of the mother and the sister. We agreed to meet this morning. I went to collect her at the Danieli.
“‘Mademoiselle is not quite ready; she asks you to go up…’”
“I find her dressed, wearing a broad-brimmed hat with cherries on top, with an embroidered parasol and a silk scarf round her neck. My dear, imagine the bedroom, with its smell of crumpled sheets, cold coffee and warm soap… I sit down beside her…”
“On the sofa?”
“Far worse! On the counterpane… My head is spinning. I start to stammer: ‘Your mother might come in… Impossible to finish my sentence, I couldn’t bear it any longer; every passing second made me want to curl up and die.”
“What can the tributary do when it encounters the river, apart from lose itself? So you’re engaged, congratulations.”
“… Her arms were encircling my neck, like a ring around this finger; her handcuffs…”
“… Her handcuffs?”
“Her breasts pressed against my chest; her stomach took on a strange life of its own, and there were convulsions, as if she were in labour…”
“You’re cutting corners!”
“Her elder sister walked in, with a curious look on her face, which expressed everything, envy, disgust, complicity… everything except naturalness… Just then, through the open window, beneath the Ponte della Paglia, I saw a gondolier pass by; ‘Oi,’ he shouted. You know what that means in gondoliers’ language: Watch out! It did not fall on deaf ears.”
Listening to Robert D., I swore that I would never become a lover.
I was extremely shy in the company of married women; if the initiative came from them, my mother’s sighs would grow increasingly unsubtle and her entreaties more frequent. Nowadays, that also raises a smile; every age has its misfortunes.
Adorned with rings and cooing like the pigeons of St Mark’s, the pederasts strutted past; Venice, “an unnatural city” (Chateaubriand), had always welcomed them; I spotted one of them there, a man who had become so well-known on account of a recent trial that we would point him out to one another as he was leaving the Carnot; it was the famous Fersen, who had just published a poem about Venice, Notre-Dame des Cendres. “I do not shake hands with pederasts,” my father would say (never suspecting that he was doing so all day long). “Yet another of those gentlemen of the cuff,” he would add (at the time, they could be recognized by the handkerchief issuing from their cuffs). The inverts, “that outcast section of the human community” as an unpublished letter of Proust’s puts it, constituted a secret society; one cannot appreciate Temps perdu unless one remembers that in those days Sodom represented a curse. Even in Venice, homosexuality was nothing more than the most subtle of the fine arts.