Instead of boldly accepting the fate that was common to those of my age, I turned my back on chores, vaulting the wall or leaving the barracks at daybreak in order not to have to answer the bugle’s call; having to get up at the sound of drums or having to stand stock-still at the blast of a whistle were like a slap across the face for me.
A little patience: the unpleasant young man would change his stripes; not immediately; it would only be at the end of his life that he would go to school; the way in which you fetch up in a certain period matters less than the period you are leaving behind; life is a slow business, a two-fold process, luck and oneself; that’s what gives a work its shape.
In the meantime, I was like the young Buddha whose family concealed the existence of death to him until he was thirty.
I was a very old gentleman, a little too dyed in the wool, but delighted to be so.
CAEN, 1910
AT THE ARCHIVES department of the Préfecture, Major Jaquet made me copy out lists of volunteers from Calvados in 1792; beneath the folders I concealed Fabert, Dupaty, De Brosses, La Lande, Amelot de La Houssaye, all those, in short, who were lovers of Venice. On the headed paper of the Conseil Général du Calvados, I wrote letters to my friends not unlike the following, which I recently came across; it is easy to see the extent to which Venice continued to matter to me:
From the Archives of the Généralité
Caen.
This Thursday 27th of October 176…
I have received from you, Abbé, a letter from Vicenza, informing me that you are already nearing Venice. A glance at the envelope, which the mail orderly of the Royal Normandy has delivered to me, and which bears the arms of the République, tells me that your journey has ended at last. Shall you come from Padua as the crow flies, by barge, or will you stop to visit a few friends on the Brenta? I had been affeared at the prospect of a disagreeable stay in the lazaretto for you, since there is cholera in the Duchy of Parma and in Lombardy; but I see that nothing has come of it. Are your rags and tatters at Scomparini’s house? And you yourself?
I trust, Abbé, that you are not bored to distraction in the absence of the two gentle ladies from Florence, whom we were accustomed to stroke and kiss last year?
Did you know that there are fifty-one references to Venice in Shakespeare, even though he never left England? At least this is what H.F. Brown maintains in his Studies in the History of Venice, which he published last year with Murray’s.
Saia sends you her kindest regards. We often reread the satires of Aretino, Mensius and Portier des Chartreux together. So vouchsafe to send me by the hand of our mutual friend, the Nuncio, a few aphrodisiac tablets which, so Juvenal says:
arouse desire as if by hand.
I envy you your travels; what with some Orvieto, a discreet casino at Murano, a nun with perfumed breasts and a letter of exchange payable at Milord Cook’s, there are no sad thoughts in Venice.
Farewell Abbé. I am strongly tempted to sell my commission to the army and leave by the next coach to join you.
P.S. — Do you like the epigram I have composed in the style of Martial, about Saia, who is unfaithful to me?
Candidior farina cutis,
Communior mola corpus.
“Your skin is whiter than flour
Your body more banal than a mill.”
Is it Latin?
(Late 1910)
And here is another letter, still in mock-scholarly vein:
The Archives
Caen
This Thursday the 3rd of November 1910
My Dear Friend,
You are truly the pride of French and Ultramontane clergy; Abbé Galiani should bow low, he has a master! You are piquant, reproving and smutty, but never obscene, even when you are describing the Nuncio’s love affairs, “on the other side of the coin”. Is la Morosina susceptible to your signals? Why don’t you look at her through a telescope, as Lord Queensberry did from his Piccadilly window?
I have been reading a lot lately: Amiel’s Journal, Italian Women in the Renaissance by Rodocanachi; the letters of Pliny, The Dream of Polyphilus, in a fine 1599 edition, the Memoirs of the Princesse Palatine, Müntz’s Vinci, etc. I have heard very good reports of The Woollen Dress by Henry Bordeaux, which has even been compared to Bovary.
Wednesday 21 June 1911
Another letter, postmarked Caen, 36th Infantry Division, contains this childlike cry: “My freedom, for G’s sake! I feel nostalgic for the universe, I’m homesick for every country!”
1911
THIS YEAR, all I had to do to remind myself of Venice was to take a look at the famous floods that occurred in Paris in the spring; on leave, I went by boat from Saint-Germain-des Prés to the Champ-de-Mars, by way of the rue de l’Université.
MASTER CORVO
AS I WAS on the point of leaving Venice, one of the most eccentric of Englishmen had just arrived, that strange Corvo, whose existence was only disclosed to me forty years later. I was narrowly to miss, alas, the two most inexplicable islanders of those days, T.E. Lawrence and Corvo; in 1917 Georges-Picot, the French High Commissioner in a Holy Land not yet recaptured from the Turks, had invited me to accompany him to the siege of Jerusalem: it would have meant my spending over a year in the company of Colonel Lawrence; I turned down the position.
I remain equally upset not to have known Rolfe, who, during that summer of 1909 when we were both in Venice, was known as “Baron Corvo”; the poet, Shane Leslie, who wrote Corvo’s epitaph, and with whom I was on friendly terms, would have been able to introduce us. Why did he adopt the name “Corvo”? Why that never more? Out of romanticism? Rolfe always loved heraldry; as a seminarist, he dreamt up coats of arms and devised banners, and he would walk into the refectory with a stuffed crow perched on his shoulder. Corvo was a mixture of Léon Bloy and Genet, of Max Jacob and Maurice Sachs. Poor and lonely in his lifetime, he was unstable and eccentric in character, as well as being litigious, spiteful, devious and vindictive; he had a talent for all the arts; he was constantly angry with his friends; he read horoscopes, and he was intoxicated with the Church’s past and with the Renaissance; he adored Catholic pomp and ceremony, but he had no vocation for the priesthood and he was expelled from every school, as well as from sinecures, salons and asylums; he let people down, deceiving both Cardinal Vaughan and Hugh Benson, those two pillars of English Catholicism, who were initially attracted to him, but very soon grew exasperated.
A.J.A. Symons in his celebrated The Quest for Corvo, a posthumous investigation among all those who had known this character, retraces his life from his time in the seminary up until his time in Venice. Master Corvo must have been unable to find anywhere to perch in this city without trees. In that summer of 1909, Corvo stayed at the Hotel Bellevue, paid for by his friend, Professor Dawkins.
A member of the Bucintoro sailing club, Corvo actually learned to steer a gondola, a highly difficult skill at which I have only seen a woman, Winnaretta de P., excel, for a misdirected blade, as President De Brosses has pointed out, can cut off someone’s head “like a turnip”; or cleave a gondolier’s in two, beneath a bridge. When Corvo fell into the water, he continued to smoke his pipe, just like Byron, who when he floated on his back in the middle of the Grand Canal kept his cigar in his mouth in order (he said) “not to lose sight of the stars”; his man-servant would follow behind, in a gondola, with his master’s clothes on his arm.