Rather like the doges whose embossed velvet robes he wore at those Persian balls which were all the rage in Paris, Mariano Fortuny, emerging from his studio, would invite us to his mother’s house, opposite the miniature palazzo which had been rented by the actress Réjane; Mme Fortuny offered us teas that were worthy of Parmesan;16 her table, which was covered in Venetian crochet work, was a veritable fruit market, repoussé copper plates with peaches alternating with beribboned and gilded assortments of frilly pastries sprinkled with a powdered sugar, for which I have forgotten the Venetian name. Proust had been entertained there, eight years earlier; he had known Fortuny; later on he would provide a great number of dresses designed by this artist for The Captive; they have become part of the Proustian legend.
Occasionally, one of my father’s pupils would come from Paris at his invitation to join us, and was welcomed at their teacher’s home as he or she might have been in Renaissance times; it was the tradition set by Lecoq de Boisbaudran, whom my father had succeeded at the École des Arts Decoratifs, where the director’s office with its Louis XV panelling was decorated with a portrait of Van Loo, the first patron of the École Royale de Dessin, founded in 1765 by Bachelier, Madame de Pompadour’s protector; a vanished race of monocle-wearing fonctionnaires who kept well away from the management of the École des Beaux-Arts, who were indifferent to honours, had independent minds and advanced tastes, who couldn’t care less about the Prix de Rome and medals awarded by the jury, and who were opposed to the Institut; for those at the Quai Malaquais,17 Lecoq was “the accursed teacher” and the Arts Decoratifs the refuge of those whose talents were advanced or insane; Boisbaudran had had Renoir, Rodin, Monet, Degas, Fantin as pupils; my father had: Segonzac, Brianchon, Oudot, Legueult. That’s sufficient to commemorate these two men.
My father had Mallarmé’s physique: the same haughty profile, the same sharply pointed beard; he sported neither rosette nor tie; “a rose, yes, a rosette, no,” he used to say, although Jules Renard, in his Journal, was indignant that his Cross [of the Légion d’Honneur] should have been taken away from him, because of a promotion, in order for it to be given to my father. He was somewhat defensive in his courteousness, absurdly modest, constrained, self-doubting and admiring only of others; he spent his life tearing up manuscripts and repainting his canvases. When Mallarmé told him: “Even to write is to put black upon white,” he wrote no more; appointed as head of a grande école, his first utterance was: “I’ll be able to learn at last.”
Between the Quadri and Florian cafés an entire European society lived out its last days in Venice. And not just the French. Franz-Josef, the old forest tree, would bury them all in his fall. Austrian grandees descended on Venice while waiting for the stags to rut, before taking the road northwards to their dozen or more castles in Styria or the Tyrol; dressed in their jäger, their moss-green hats set on hareskin skulls, and loden capes, they left behind them a whiff of Russian leather and the magnolia scent of the Borromée islands, which did their best to imitate Pivert, the perfumer of Napoleon III, whose children were friends of ours. These Austrians, Gzernin, Palffy, or Festetics, in their reisekostüm, supplied titled Europe with their last stallions: Rocksavage, Howard de Walden and Westminster in London; Beauvau or Quinsonas in France; in Italy, Florio or Villarosa became their patrons, doing their best to match them in indolence, distinction and seduction. In the Procuraties all one could hear was: “I’ve just arrived from Pommersfelden, from Caprarola, from Arenenberg, from Knole, from Stupinigi, from Huistenbosch, from Kedelston…” Austria-Hungary was not one nation, but ten; it was the flower of Europe; England, with its lords, who for four centuries had been marrying coal merchants’ daughters, could not produce one tenth of the degrees of descent of the Austrian nobility; Bismarck’s Germany, enriched by the famous Jews who had made it wealthy, Italy, still trembling in the shadow of Rakowsky, and the Balkan nations, who came to Vienna to make up their minds about what Norpois would have called “the favoured of the Salon Bleu”, all had eyes only for Austria; Venice lived beneath the floodlights of the white steamships of Austrian Lloyd, the masters of the Adriatic, and it was Strauss whose tunes were still requested in the evenings, when we paced up and down the quadrangle of St Mark’s. Venice virtually belonged to these Austrians, through the Triplice, the triple alliance of Italy with Vienna and Berlin. Was not Bonaparte, at Campo Formio, the first to make Austria a present of Venice, in spite of the orders of the Directoire?
1909
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1909, my heart in a fury, I left Venice, taking with me to my regiment an old eighteenth-century guide-book, Les Délices de l’ltalie, by Rogissart, whose steel-plate engravings depicted a virtually deserted Venice in which, hidden in the corner of the campi, were some rare masks to provide scale. Even when I was under fire during the war, at the mouth of the River Orne, I thought of nothing but that of the Brenta.
After a period serving in the countryside, sheltering in an old house in the rue de l’Engannerie, where I had rented a squaddie’s room, I started to write a Venetian play that was inspired by my reading the Lettres à Sophie Volland: under pain of death it was forbidden for senators of the Serenissima to sleep with foreign representatives; a senator who was smitten had no other means of meeting his beloved than to traverse the French ambassador’s house; caught off guard and denounced, my hero chose decapitation rather than admit to a secret tryst; romanticism was not dead… I had hung above my bed the first map of the world, dating from 1457, a reproduction of Fra Mauro’s planisphere, and the map of Venice drawn by Jacopo Barbari in 1500. My heart had remained in Venice. I was envious of my Oxford friends, who were able to go back there without me; I compared my fate to theirs; the Channel relieved them of this duty to serve their country for two years; was not a European war unthinkable? Every single mental impulse carried me away from the barracks far from frontiers; I read The Times, or Les Conversations avec Eckermann in the mess-room, after roll-call, by the light of a candle stuck on to a bayonet. At the library in Caen, where I had just been appointed an auxiliary, I launched myself on the early travellers in Italy; I made some astounding discoveries; when I was young, no one had direct access to works of quality, you had to discover them and deserve them; there were no Carpaccios for sale on Uniprix calendars; liking Giorgione or Crivelli meant being introduced into any number of small secret societies; Antonello da Messina was a sort of place of ill repute, whose address was passed around among the initiated.