With a canvas under one arm, his box of paints under the other and his easel on his back, in the tradition of Monsieur Courbet, my father crossed the waters and installed himself on the steps of the Salute, opposite the Abbey of San Gregorio; as a young man, he had rented this abbey, nowadays an American’s luxury pied-à-terre, but which at that time was in ruins; he dabbed his thumb in his palette and ground his knife on the rough cast of the walls. All painters have loved the votive basilica of the Salute; Guardi, Canaletto, the romantics and the impressionists, none has been able to resist the curve of its unfurled scrolls that resemble waves about to break, lured by the play of the sunlight around the grey-green dome, whose sphere reflects every nuance of broken colour.
The French in Venice used to meet in St Mark’s Square, having dined in their modest lodging-house, or princely dining-room, glad to have escaped from some titled hostess or other; some came from the Palazzo Dario, “bent over, like a courtesan, beneath the weight of her necklaces” (people adored D’Annunzio!); others from the Palazzo Polignac, or the Palazzo Da Mula, bringing with them from the house of Contessa Morosini (who dared to wear a doge’s hat) the latest news from the Court at Berlin, for which the Mula acted as a sounding-board. We would drink granite, coffee with crushed ice, in the company of Mariano Fortuny, the son of the Spanish Meissonier, who had become a Venetian by adoption, the interior decorator Francis Lobre and his wife, who was physician to Anna de Noailles (a famous name at that time), the designer Drésa, and Rouché, not yet in charge of the Opéra, who was editor of the Grande Revue, which launched Maxime Dethomas and Giraudoux; then there was André Doderet, who by dint of translating D’Annunzio had come to look like him; we would be joined by several officials from the École des Beaux-Arts, colleagues of my father: Roujon, Havard, Henry Marcel (Gabriel’s father), the head of the Beaux-Arts, the Baschet brothers and Roger Marx (father of Claude).
Gabriele D’Annunzio at the regatta on Lake Garda, 1930
These were real people, not international stars like those who would invade Venice later on, at the time of the Ballets Russes; this circle of friends was discreet, as French people were at that time; they were extremely fussy men, encyclopaedic in their knowledge, highly influential, very sure in their tastes, modest to a degree and disdainful of fashions, who talked with an inimitable accent, and no one “pulled the wool over their eyes”. None of them was garish, or popped the corks of champagne bottles, or motored about on the Lagoon making waves; there were no “relationships”; their wives’ necklaces were made of Murano glass.
They loathed all things commercial, and in Venice more so than elsewhere; this was reflected in the frightful Salviati shop, with its one thousand chandeliers that were lit in broad daylight, which still disfigures the Grand Canal to this day. They owned a few drawings by old masters, but not paintings (they had not the means); they were not theorists or intellectuals, their words did not end in isme; one could extend the list indefinitely of what they were not, of what they did not say or do, and yet they did not resemble anyone else; unlike people in society they did not talk for the sake of talking; the other day I heard someone admiring Léautaud’s free spirit, as if it were something odd; through his outspokenness, his culture and independence, each of these delightful fellows from the days of my youth was the equal of Léautaud; they seemed quite ordinary to me, for I had no one to compare them with; nowadays I realize that they represented more than Culture, they were Civilization.
They may not have known what they wanted, but they knew very precisely what they did not want; they might have forgiven a Ravachol;12 but bores (the word they used was “mufles”) never; like Jules Renard, they had very definite dislikes. None of them was mediocre (I only discovered mediocrity later on, in the Civil Service). Their remarks constituted a sort of santa conversazione. I can still picture the way they looked: black alpaca, black bamboo boater, grey cotton gloves, a white piqué cravat in summer, black crêpe-de-chine necktie in winter; starched shirt with stiff collar and cuffs; the vaporetti they called hirondelles, or pyroscaphes, or mouches; to save money, they went to read Le Figaro in the offices of the Querini-Stampalia Foundation; they never forgave Napoleon’s architects for the destruction of the exquisite San Giminiano church, built by Sansovino, at the entrance to the Procuraties; and they blazed with fury about that Palladio who had wanted to pull down St Mark’s in order to replace it with a neo-classical temple.
Politics did not exist for them. How distant was the Dreyfus affair already… Politics was something that had disappeared since the time of Loubet13 (1900); it would surface again until 1936. For them, Barrès was still the anarchist of his early novels, and Maurras was merely a poet; Boulanger, Dreyfus and Déroulède were champions of a sport that was outmoded, that of politics. They would scarcely have been able to name the Président du Conseil of the time; the Ancien Régime for them was neither Turgot, nor the Abbé Terray; it was Gouthière,14 or Gabriel; they did not say: “France regained a colonial empire under Vergennes”, but: “The bronzes have never been so well gilded as they were under Louis XVI.” They did not use the royal dynasties as reference points; the reigns that counted for them were those of Goya or Delacroix. Their Venice was still that of 1850, that of Théophile Gautier, the Salute and its “population of statues”, and the flaking mosaics.
I would come across them at our table, at home, seated around a perfect risotto, creamy with parmesan, or in front of a plateful of eels from the Laguna morta, grilled over a wood fire and dripping with garlic butter. Constantly smiling, but never laughing, my father was somewhat eclipsed by his so colourful guests. The past, for them, was the present; Armand Baschet, one of the first Casanova scholars, would announce the recent discovery of letters written by women at the Bohemian castle of Dux: “They thought Casanova was a braggart? He scarcely told the whole truth!” For me, Casanova was a bit like some disreputable uncle. Camille Mauclair would arrive for coffee; there would be an argument about which room Musset had occupied at the Danieli, formerly the Albergo Reale; was it number thirteen, as Louise Colet claimed, or the two rooms mentioned by Pagello? Emotions eclipsed cultural considerations: the Doges’ Palace was all very well, but should one not regret the old palace, the Byzantine one, with its drawbridge and its watch-towers that dated from the year 1000, on the site of a piazzetta which was then a port? The Venetian balustered bridges made of marble are certainly charming, but imagine those that preceded them, gently sloping and without railings, over which the procurators rode on horseback, leaving their mounts to eat hay afterwards on the Ponte della Paglia. Thus did our friends hark back to the past, rather like the trout that swims upstream and jumps the weir to obtain more oxygen.
The painter Toché, a character who had remained typical of the MacMahon15 era, used to ring our doorbell at the grappa hour; he continued to paint frescoes in the style in which they had been painted in Venice three centuries earlier; Toché was famous for having decorated the Chabanais in tempera; he had worked for a year, without setting foot outside this brothel, famous for its Edward VII room, and mixed quite openly with le Tout-Paris in this place of ill repute (at the Beaux-Arts, Toché was known by his pupils as Pubis de Chabanais); a good-looking man, he had seduced the owner of Chenonceaux and persuaded her to give Venetian festivals there — with gondolas brought over from the piazzetta—which Emilio Terry, the next owner, still remembered having seen in his youth, rotting beneath the arches over the River Cher. “I paint only at night,” Toché used to say; “Venice by day, I leave to Ziem!” After which, he would walk down our staircase humming some Ombra adorata of Crescentini’s (like the singer Genovese, in his C major so dear to Balzac), curling his handlebar moustache.