Venices

by Paul Morand

  Once the meal was over, each of the guests kept their knives and was required to scrape down the walls in order to search for “Veronese frescoes” beneath the plaster. Had not some been found nearby, at the Villa Magnadola? I can remember José-Maria Sert, sunk into an armchair without springs, his two wives, Misia and Roussy, stretched out at his feet; I can see Diaghilev, a white lock detaching itself from his head of dyed hair, peering at the ceiling through a monocle attached by a ribbon, rather like a figure in Daumier’s engraving Les Amateurs de plafonds, while Serge Lifar and Boris Kochno scraped away at the whitewashed walls. Catherine, mobilising her children as well as her lovers, past, present and future, whom she was skilful enough to make get along together, would proclaim a Veronese with every scrape of the plaster. These invisible frescoes did appear eventually, but they were not painted by the great Paolo, the Sommo Paolo; they were merely the work of Zelotti and Franco: Aurora’s Chamber and Philemon and Baucis. I came across them again, restored and much as Henri III, the reluctant king, would have seen them on his visit to La Malcontenta on 17 July 1574. This was the occasion for the finest Venetian festival in History; the triumphal arches were painted by Veronese and Titian; since the sumptuary laws had been rescinded for the occasion, patrician ladies and courtesans could be seen, followed by their servants, carrying a hundredweight of their mistresses’ pearls. It was the moment when the Renaissance became the Baroque; in his Histoire de Venise, Daru depicts the king beneath the triumphal arch that Palladio, who was dressed as a Venetian senator, had erected to him. Glassmakers, aboard a raft, are at work at their blowing while the twenty-three-year-old monarch looks on, marvelling at a sea-monster spitting fire through its nostrils.14 Henri III was so impressed by the glassworkers of Murano that he ennobled their corporation and spent a fortune on mirrors and chandeliers; to pay for them, he borrowed one hundred thousand écus from La Serenissima, which caused the Pope to remark: “There go écus that the people of Venice will never see again.” You don’t have to go far to look at this triumphant Henri III; these days he is at the Jacquemart-André museum, having made the journey for you from La Malcontenta to Boulevard Haussmann.

  La Malcontenta was home to those dozen or so legendary men and women of whom, Jean-Louis, Lifar and Kochno apart, no one is left;15 they are gone forever, through the simulated doors of the drawing-room. Misia Sert (“When I was twenty, I used to see her at her father, the sculptor Godebski’s house,” my father used to say, “a beautiful panther, imperious, bloodthirsty and frivolous.”), Misia, not the woman who emerges from her flimsy Mémoires, but the one who existed: effervescing with joy or fury, eccentric, acquisitive and a collector of geniuses, all of whom were in love with her: Vuillard, Bonnard, Renoir, Stravinsky, Picasso… a collector of hearts and of Ming trees in pink quartz; whenever her latest fads were launched, they became instantly fashionable among all her followers, and were exploited by designers, written about by journalists and imitated by every empty-headed society lady. Misia, the queen of modern baroque, who organised her life around nacre, pearls and the bizarre; the sullen and deceitful Misia, who would bring together friends who did not know one another “in order to then make them quarrel”, according to Proust. Brilliant in her treachery and subtle in her cruelty, Philippe Berthelot used to say of Misia that one should never entrust her with anything: “Here comes the cat, hide your birds,” he would say whenever she rang the doorbell. In her boutique fantasque on the quai Voltaire, she kindled genius in the same way that certain kings can create victors, by her magnetic presence alone, through an unseen oscillation of a branch of her hazel tree. Misia was as strong as the life-force that smouldered within her; she was mean yet generous, she devoured people in their thousands, she was cajoling, mischievous, subtle, mercenary, even more of a Mme Verdurin than the original one, and she esteemed and despised men and women at a glance. There was the Misia of the Symbolists’ Paris, of Fauvist Paris, First World War Paris, the Paris of the Versailles Peace Treaty, the Paris of Venice. Dissatisfied Misia was as well padded as a sofa, yet if you craved rest, she was a sofa who was likely to send you packing. Misia dissatisfied had piercing eyes which laughed even though her mouth was already beginning to pout.

  Where this all-devouring creature was concerned, rapture was followed by disgust, a yes by a no, just as thunder follows lightning; with her, you had to perform quickly.

  Serge Lifar at the exhibition celebrating twenty years of the Ballets Russes at the Pavilion de Marsan, 1939

  1929

  AT THE SLUICE-GATES of Venetian houses you reveal all about yourself the moment you set foot in the doorway. “A slippery city,” D.H. Lawrence said of her. I had arrived there the day after Diaghilev had died. I thought once more about the life of this brilliant impresario whose love of art had been his driving force; he was much more of a sorcerer than an impresario and he had the wizardry of an electro-magnet; his intelligence was not sufficiently developed that it outshone his sense of discovery; his secret derived from the fact that he only ever thought of his own pleasure, requiring the approval of merely a handful of people, such as Picasso, Stravinsky, Lady Ripon, Misia… totally indifferent to the fashions of the day, he never took peeps through the hole in the stage curtain; and he never took a penny on the side. Only his somnambulism can explain his temerity, his inability to foresee obstacles, his crazy improvisations and the way he was blinded to all but his own destiny (the final act of Petrushka was created only ten minutes before the curtain went up at the dress rehearsal).

  I reflected on Serge’s career from that moment in 1904 when Prince Volkonsky, the director of the Imperial Theatres, parted with the services of the very young choreographer, criticising him for having staged Sylvia “with too many of his personal ideas”, up until his death in Venice; I thought about his revolutionary yet classical destiny, about this harbourer of monsters, who arrived in Paris and scattered his Muscovite seed there, giving new birth to painting, music, song and dance. I thought of the Ballets Russes which, as a humble soldier arriving by train at the Gare Saint-Lazare, I would watch from the gods at the Châtelet or the Opéra. Diaghilev slips through my past like a stag in the forest; “I caught sight of him,” say the stalkers; but how often did I catch glimpses of Serge! I had known the triumphant Diaghilev from the Châtelet in 1910 to London in 1913, before coming across him, four years later, reduced to poverty (he was never rich) in Spain; impervious to boos and catcalls, he had an Ancien Régime courtesy which storms would occasionally ruffle when some drama or other broke out in the seraglio; beneath the Russian demeanour, the Chinaman was always slumbering… Cosmopolitan in appearance, but Russian in his soul, everywhere he went he recreated that eschatological, Byzantine atmosphere of the eternal Russia; the triumphs, the downfalls, the debts, the harassment, the beloved bodies sewn into sacks and tossed into the Bosphorus; pitting Nijinsky against Fokine, Benoit against Bakst, Lifar against Massine, in a storm of champagne, delirious telegrams, fancy food and dried bread, accompanied by assurances of happiness and threats of suicide, and, finally, his fatal diabetes which was treated with ten dishes that were forbidden him; such was Serge, that tortured executioner. 1929 was not just the year of his death, but a year of wonderful immunity, of a certain freedom about the way one dressed, of the sort of pleasures that were greater than pleasure itself; it marked the end of that wandering chivalry, of that secret intelligence between members of a sect… one that never really existed. Diaghilev was forbidden a residence permit during the First World War; he was even treated suspiciously in the countries that were neutral, up until the moment when he charmed Alfonso XIII, to whom he introduced the young Picasso, who had painted the sets for Parade. In the spring of 1918, we used to lunch together daily at the “Palace” in Madrid; Massine had left him to go to Barcelona to be given lessons in Spanish dancing, and I was the only confidant Diaghilev had; I can still hear him recounting his unbelievable misfortunes; how the Ballets Russes’ costumes and stage sets had been sunk off Cadiz—the
sort of wreck that might have occurred in Candide; how what was saved from the wreckage had been destroyed in a fire in South America; how Clemenceau had barred his entry into France. (Powerless, for once, Misia had been unable to procure a visa for him; Philippe Berthelot was in disgrace and she had not yet won over Mandel.) In 1920, I came across Diaghilev again; he was back in Paris and he had already had time to explore the latest paintings and to have chosen the best of them, never making a mistake and never allowing a source to run dry.

  On the 19th of August 1929, a few days before my arrival, the ceremonial floating bier that is used for funeral processions in Venice ferried the magician’s mortal remains to the funeral island of San Michele. Lifar threw himself into the grave. Whenever I see a funeral procession on its way to San Michele, with the priest in charge of the ceremony standing behind the gondolier at the stern, the funeral director at the prow, and with the silver Lion of St Mark concealing its affliction beneath its folded wings, I think of Diaghilev, that indefatigable man, lying at rest.

  Serge Diaghilev’s tomb on the island of San Michele, Venice

  Death would not quell the storm in which Diaghilev lived; his death throes had imposed a truce upon irreconcilable passions; it was broken the moment he breathed his last; at the foot of his bed, the two friends who had looked after him immediately hurled themselves upon one another. I was given an account of his final moments by the three women who were present, Misia, Chanel and the Baronne Émile d’Erlanger.

  As Byron wrote to Murray, from Venice, on the 25th of November 1816: “Love, in this part of the world, is not a sinecure.”

  1929

  A FEW OF THE SURROUNDINGS had changed: on the Lido there were now a huge number of beach huts, those symbols of social prestige that are what the boxes at La Scala were in Stendhal’s time. The iron Accademia Bridge had been covered in a wooden construction, in the manner of Carpaccio or Bellini; the Palazzo Franchetti had acquired a lawn.

  From having struck their bell so frequently, in my absence, the arms of the two Moors—the Mori—who chime the hour at the Mercerie, had grown very stiff.

  THE ISLAND OF SAN LAZZARO

  EVER SINCE the Lido began to rival Saint-Tropez, the contrast of this beach with the island of San Lazzaro, a stone’s throw away, has become ever more striking. After the hell of the summer, one finds the calm of prayer; one savours every moment spent beneath the magnolia, at the centre of the cloister, which seems to repeat itself like the beads of a rosary. La Serenissima gave this little island to the Armenian Mekhitarist monks when they arrived from Crete, where they had been driven out by the Turks, and they found a refuge here, far from the sunburnt, shaven legs and those infra-red cooked chickens. An Armenian patron has just provided the monastery with a large octagonal building, shaped like a church dome and built with air-conditioning, in which to keep their manuscripts; all that remains of a very great civilization; we never realised that a civilization would be able to be conserved in a room half the size of the reading room in the Bibliothèque Nationale! The Armenian rite, like the Orthodox, knew and recognised the value of mystery: a curtain conceals the celebrant (a velvet curtain, woven in gold, a gift from the late Queen Margherita of Italy); thrice, at the Consecration, and before and after Communion, the priest disappears from the congregation’s view; God is the winner.

  I had not set foot in the Armenian monastery for fifty years; for such an ancient civilization, that was a mere flash. The cypress trees had grown taller and the sea breezes had turned them brown, while the Melchite Friars, their “beards the colour of meteors” (Byron), had grown white; their cemetery had doubled in size. This Eastern Catholic rite, divided as Venice is, and as I myself am, between East and West, between the Roman faith and Orthodoxy, was given refuge here after the defeat of Morosini in Morea, in the seventeenth century. Along with Vienna and Etchmiadzin, the home of these monks with their black habits remains a famous centre for Byzantine studies. Napoleon, who closed down the monasteries, respected these Venetian anchorites; was he preserving them for the fulfilment of his oriental dream?

  I feel grateful to them for being the first importers of angora cats to the West.

  PROUST AT THE ARMENIAN MONASTERY

  THREE TIMES A WEEK, Byron rowed from Venice to San Lazzaro, where he came to learn Armenian; in the visitor’s book, we read, alongside his signature: “Byron, English”. (He despised England, but he was proud of her when he was abroad.) Proust, in his turn, would come to add his name to the register in the spring of 1900; not being a nostalgic exile, he did not put “French” after his name.

  It is hard to believe that in late 1919 Proust still had difficulties in placing an article about Venice in the newspapers, hoping humbly that “it would be accepted”. Throughout his life, Proust promised himself trips to Venice; when the Great War was over, he used to say, he hoped to be able to return there with Vaudoyer or with me, once his book was completed; he had dreamt about the city for a long time, ever since childhood, just like his grandmother who, in her case, never went there; he thought about it when he spent the autumn at Evian, in early September, when the Lake of Geneva takes on a Lombardian softness and seems to grow more like the Borromée islands, from which it is barely separated by the once impassable mass of the Simplon, now easily crossed or tunnelled through; the same summer palaces, the same clarity of its shores, the same truite au bleu colour of its morning surfaces.

  Proust had a special feeling for Venice (and not just for those neckties from Au Carnaval de Venise, on the Boulevard des Capucines, which Charles Haas bought). How could he escape from the World Exhibition,16 he wondered, how could he travel to the magical city on his own, when he was so ill? He needed a companion, but he couldn’t find one; one of his letters, dated October 1899, is nothing but a cry from the heart for Venice. Why didn’t Emmanuel or Antoine Bibesco—the two nephews of the famous composer, at whose home, the Villa Bessaraba at Amphion, Proust so often stayed—why didn’t one of them go along as his guide? Italy was only three hours away… In early May 1900, Proust learnt that Reynaldo Hahn and his cousin Marie Nordlingen were in Rome and would be going on to Venice. He couldn’t stand it any longer and persuaded Mme Proust to accompany him; in the train, after they had passed Milan, she translated Ruskin for him…

  In the index to the Pléiade edition of À la recherche, there are a hundred listings for Venice; we see Proust so intoxicated by this city which he had finally conquered that he had forgotten his dreaded fevers: a young man exhilarated by the splendour of St Mark’s; a Marcel who astonished his mother because he found the strength to be up at ten o’clock in the morning, etc.17

  The month of May came and went; the Proustian acid combined marvellously well with the Venetian base. La Fugitive contains a hundred divers impressions in which Venice merges or fuses with Combray (the function of the houses in the Grand-Rue compared to that of the palaces, the relationship between the sunlight playing upon the awnings on the canal and those on the family drapery shop, the comparison of the Danieli Hotel and Aunt Léonie’s home, etc.). The Conversation avec Maman in Contre Sainte-Beuve reveals further recollections: “At lunchtime, when my gondola brought me back, I noticed Mamma’s shawl upon the alabaster balustrade”, etc.

  These memories from Contre Sainte-Beuve precede those in La Fugitive; what they have in common is that they both mention a tiff between mother and son that has always intrigued me, a curious quarrel which, considering that this disagreement was to have such lasting overtones, one would like to be able to shed some light upon; the odd thing about them is that Contre Sainte-Beuve, which was published first (although it is difficult to establish a firm date, since it is made up of fragments collected together between 1905 and 1909), tells us about “an evening when, spitefully, after a quarrel with Mamma, I told her that I was leaving (Venice)… I had given up my idea of leaving, but I wanted to spin out Mamma’s sadness at believing that I had left”. It is the son, therefore, who in this instance wants to return to P
aris (but since his mother has only come to Venice for his sake, one fails to understand why she did not yield to her son’s wish to return)… whereas, later, in La Fugitive, in which the visit to Venice is treated at greater length, the situation is reversed; this time, it is the Narrator who refuses to leave Venice and return to Paris with his mother: “My mother had decided that we should leave… my plea (to remain) aroused in my nerves, stimulated by the Venetian springtime, that old desire to resist… that determination to fight which once used to drive me to impose my own will brutally upon those I loved most.” We know what ensued: having allowed his mother to leave for the station, the Narrator rushes after her and catches up with her just before the train is about to depart; it’s a long way from the Danieli to the Stazione, but the surge of filial affection shortens the journey. The umbilical cord remains uncut once more.

  This new account of a conflict between mother and son seems closer to reality than the earlier one. For Proust, Venice is the city of his unconscious (1900 style).

  Each of us has his dead-weights; the best known are perhaps the least obscure, those one can get away from. Proust, the very image of the introvert, contrasted with that exemplar of the extrovert, Casanova.

  Where was the Venice of Proust if not within his own self? Throughout the whole of À la recherche, Venice continues to be the symbol of freedom, of his freeing himself from his mother, in the first place, and from Albertine later on; “Venice is the image of what passion prevents him from realising”; Albertine conceals Venice from him almost as if love was blocking out all other joys.