by Paul Morand
The auction began at midday, at the Palazzo Labia. Strapped tightly into his jacket, the forehead of an intellectual and slim as a sub-lieutenant, a precise, ingenuous look in his eye, a partaker of all the good things in life, M.R. had brought me along to the sale at the Labia, the last Venetian palace to disgorge its riches; he knew that all human possessions are nothing more than a warehouse…
Our munificent friend B. had decided to hold out against Time; to rebuild a palace was to reject the abyss, it was like writing the Temps perdu. Once his work was achieved, B. was no longer interested in it.
Even Proust, dreaming about what he would like to do once the Great War was over, imagined himself as the owner of a Venetian palace, where, “like Réjane”, he would have invited the Poulet Quartet to play Fauré for him “as the dawn rose over the Grand Canal”.
The frescoes in the palazzo were so famous in their day that Reynolds and Fragonard made the journey to Venice in order to make copies of them. In the old days, at the turn of the century Labia, when the guide was showing people the paintings on the celebrated ceiling, he used to say: “Signori, PEGASUS PUTS CHRONOS TO FLIGHT.”
Who will ever put Time to flight?
As we were walking along the canal, M.R. told me the history of the Labias: half a century of abusive power, of gold plates being hurled from the windows, of virgin walls being entrusted to the talents of Tiepolo, of Zugno, of Magno, of Diziani; ruined by Napoleon, the Labias had handed over the building to the Lobkowitz family, until a South African tycoon, who, extraordinarily enough, was also called Labia, bought back this house in which he wished he had been born. As they were negotiating the sale, he is said to have made the following play on words: L’abbia o non l’abbia, sarò sempre Labia.2
We had to clamber over barricades of paintings that looked even bigger now that they had been taken down, and over consoles, their gilt fading, which were being carried down the stairs as the rooms that had been laid waste by the auctioneers were cleared. Stripped of their chandeliers, the ceilings revealed rat holes and brickwork in a deplorable condition, its stucco chipped and flaking, held together by worm-infested pillars. Hollow footsteps echoed on the uncarpeted floors. Here, shorn of its former livery—Italian footmen trussed in gold like maritime proveditors—labourers were knocking back flasks of wine.
The Baroque, that exuberance of joy, cannot cope with neglect.
In the main courtyard, the international antique dealers, admired from a distance by the small traders from the alleys of Venice, had taken their places. Experts and dealers, who had flown in from Chelsea or Manhattan, magnifying glasses in hand, were swamped by a stream of noble effigies and horned doges, and mingled together amidst a Capernaum of off-stage operatics. Tax inspectors, Venetian fiscal authorities and spies from the Treasury and Customs and Excise departments watched the future bidders closely.
Beneath M.R.’s ivory hammer, an entire art-lover’s world would vanish; artefacts have no master.
Only the Tiepolos would remain, their fate bound to that of the walls of the empty building: The Negro with a Strawberry, The White Horse, The Musicians’ Gallery; The Embarkation of Antony and Cleopatra, The Greyhound with Centurions, the famous perspective of The Silver Dish. Above them was the throng of goddesses, painted as permanent frescoes, and who were now mistresses of a deserted Palazzo Labia, laughing for all eternity, like the Rhinemaidens.
Detached from their supports, in whose arms would these beautiful women now lie? Where would these Bacchuses parade their drunkenness, or these Ceres their harvests? Casting a dark glance at their bidders, ermine-cloaked doges on bituminous canvases no longer ascended the Giants’ staircase, but that of the auction house. Marshals clutching their batons, ordered the assault, but the voices of the auctioneers were louder. Removal men lolled about on sinuous settees, intended for voluptuous siestas; light from the chandeliers beamed down on the buyers; floating upon this ocean of highly-valued objects were squadrons of Chinese vases, candelabra, girandola, jugs and pots. To the highest bidder for prows of ships that would never see battle again would go the coats of arms, destined for the hallways of Greek shipowners.
“At a hundred thousand lire, no further bids?” Beneath the naked vaults, hewn from Istrian marble, the words echoed: No further bids…
These were the last rites for the life, not of a great collector, but of a great art lover… Italy has one camposanto fewer…
1964
JUST AS IN 1917 I had observed Venice cast its shadow over my exiled life, similarly, as I left that auction sale, the Venice of the 1960s was to open up a gulf between my mature years and old age. Something, or someone, leads me, has always led me, whenever I believed I was paving my own path.
I look upon that world of yesteryear without resentment, nor regret; quite simply, it no longer exists; for me, at least, since it continues, without any bother or fuss, in a universe that is a little more brutal, a little more doomed, and in which the average level of virtues and vices must have remained more or less constant. It is merely that its ways are no longer mine; the barber cuts my hair with a pair of clippers; at the restaurant I am obliged to sit opposite my guest, not next to him, on a stool; hotels refuse my dog; when I arrive, the porter no longer takes the keys of my car in order to park it; at restaurants it is only in Greece that I am allowed to go and choose what I want from the stove; in Paris there is no longer any difference between the pavement and the road; at parties, I don’t recognise people behind their beards and wigs, and I can’t keep pace with so many first names. In the old days, the Mediterranean was my swimming-pool; nowadays, if I want to swim in it, I need the permission of the Russian or American fleets. Rheumatism confines me to drinking Vittel; can one go out in the evening without a glass in one’s hand? It casts a chill on the evening and offends one’s hostess, who feels that her dinner party is thereby undermined. Paintings used to make me happy; today’s art is the painting of iconoclasts. “You’re a painter, why haven’t you continued painting?” I asked Robert Bresson. “Because I would have committed suicide,” he answered. As for dodecaphonic music, I only have to think of it to prefer death.
Awkward to look after, there’s nothing left for me to do down here except make way; I shall never accustom myself to electronic gadgetry, nor to living in a country whose fate is being determined six thousand kilometres from where I live.
Everything sets one’s teeth on edge in this world where it is always rush-hour and where children want to be Einsteins; the couples who go off to market clasping one another, as they see in the films, get on one’s nerves; their kisses in public, it’s no longer kissing, but eating; women’s flesh is treated like meat. To crown it all, the young are far better looking than we were.
Yesterday, during mass in a little Canadian chapel, I was handed a cardboard box which everyone dipped into: it contained the hosts; as a child I was taught that to touch a host, even if it was not consecrated, was a sacrilege; I excused myself, saying that I could not take communion, not having been to confession in the morning; they smiled; it was quite customary to receive God without going to confession.
I have been away for too long; at home they speak a foreign language I no longer understand; besides, no dictionary exists.
Old age is governed by the minus sign: one is less and less intelligent, less and less foolish.
Autumn; lying fallow until now, the dead leaves begin to stir, clinging to the rim, rolling on towards winter.
1963
SERENATA A TRE 196…
THIS PIAZZETTA reminds me of something… An earlier disappointment, some misadventure that lay dormant here, unperturbed by memory for years… I allude to it only because after such a long time it seems to me to take on a symbolic value.
Cats in Venice never disturb themselves either, having nothing to fear from cars; the only criticism I have of cats is that they never say good morning. Venetian cats look as if they are a part of the ground; they don’t wear collars; their bellies are
like deflated bagpipes, and in this treeless city they no longer know how to climb; they are weary of life, for there are too many mice, too many pigeons.
Here is one of them, painted on the outside of this little house. I am reminded of Tintoretto and of Giorgione, who both began life as house painters…
Here I am… so many years ago…
Beguiling C—. Even her ghost makes a fool of me! Who would not be led astray, beyond the grave? When she enraptured me, C— certainly did not corrupt my innocence, but how often did I leave her, raging at the confusion she brought to my emotions; and I was even more furious when her reappearance was enough to crush all resentment.
How to explain it? That insolent way she held her head, her enigmatic eyes, defiant and yellow as the deepest agate, her nose with its quivering nostrils, her unruly hair hat was like a fire no hat could extinguish. The centuries blended in her, she was proud like the Renaissance, as frivolous as the Baroque. A queen and a rag-and-bone woman; a sibyl and a little girl.
She travelled throughout her life, even within Venice, staying one year with aristocrats, another living among the women who threaded pearls or the boatmen on the Giudecca. She, who never opened a book, where did she gain a general knowledge that was often erudite? The key to that beautiful, fleshly enigma is not one to be unlocked easily.
She was so delectable that her mere presence was a veritable assault on one’s morals. Very tall, she would examine you thoroughly and with expertise from on high; you felt that even if you lay her on her back she would still pinch you, like a crab, that she would never ask for mercy, always consenting, but never giving of herself.
That was what I was suddenly reminded of by the little house in the Piazzetta, and the cat painted a tempera on the cartouche.
“Come this evening, after dinner… Don’t come in by the door to the canal, you’d be seen too easily. Go by the back door, the campo is always deserted.”
That evening, the door was ajar. The drawing-room was empty…
If she had changed her mind, C— would not have left the house unlocked; she would be expecting me, hoping that I would come, she would keep our appointment. I went straight to the bedroom, like a gourmand drawn to the kitchen. The door was unbolted.
“C—, it’s me!”
I could smell her behind the door.
I looked through the key-hole; a shirt was in the way. C— liked playing pranks, and I also knew she was a tease. But why leave me still yearning?
My ear at the door-frame, my hands on the cold marble mantel-piece. I hold my breath: there are two women. I can hear them satisfying one another; the pleasures of the eavesdropper; that lapping sound is not water splashing against the door of the house… I was granted the entire sequence, right up to the squealing of a rabbit carried away by rapaciousness…
Afterwards there was silence, total suspense. I knocked, hoping that it was just a curtain-raiser, C— was someone who liked to share. Nothing.
Every minute made me feel more foolish, more lonely, more excluded.
That evening, to my great disappointment, the door was not opened; everywhere Industry prevailed over Labour…
I never knew the secret of that evening. Later on, I heard tell of a family story, involving two female cousins. Who had insisted on that door being shut? C— , out of malice? The other person, out of jealousy or prudery, or because she liked secrecy? Or was it Man, in the person of myself, being pilloried?
Both of them are dead; they moan elsewhere, stoking the fires of hell. Above the entrance to the little house, I find the cartouche on the distempered wall: there one sees a cat lusting after two smoked herring…
I returned to the hotel, blaming myself and meditating bitterly on the role of men today, poor subjugated conquerors, routed by the feminist triumph that is breaking out everywhere; governors governed; one-time masters of the house doing the shopping, like Jouhandeau,3 whose slavery is the explanation for his wonderful portraits of Élise (like all men, Marcel is a coward; what redeems him is that at the last moment he reveals himself, through his sensitivity, to be more of a woman than women themselves…)
We are seeing the dawn of a primitive matriarchy, a post-nuclear one, it occurs to me. The despotic Don Juans and pimps, revealed to us in their majesty in so many cliché-ridden accounts, are nothing but poor submissive little girls who have surrendered. The recent strike by women in the USA, the republishing of Lysistrata; democracy, the blackmailer of the weak, brackets the Female with those who were once subjugated, the Blacks, servants, the working class, children and all those liberated people who have become the masters. The composition of the masses will change, but the masses will remain; that is what is meant by “revolution”, the etymology indicates the nature of the word: a return to the point of departure. Women, for their part, will recover from all this and will perfect their sensual aspirations. I can remember those handsome Berber farmers, who had come down from the Rif mountains and were being forcibly led to the souks by their wives; I used to come across them in Tangiers, being coaxed along by them into the shops and spending a fortune on useless necklaces, gaudy silks and hideous furnishing materials; once they were back home, they left all their fine apparel on their doorsteps and went back to their labours.
SEPTEMBER 1965 FROM THE TOP OF THE CAMPANILE
FROM THE TOP of the Campanile I survey the whole of Venice, which is as spread out as New York is vertical, as salmon-pink as London is black and gold. The whole place is bathed in showers, very much like a water-colour, with off-whites and dull beiges, picked out by the dark crimson shades of walls that look like the flesh of tuna. A violent breeze ripples through the Lagoon, driving clouds that are as light as those new nylon sails at the regattas on the Lido.
Through the iron bars on the top floor, which dissuade those contemplating suicide from doing so, I could see St Mark’s as if glued to the Doges’ Palace, at once a refuge, a treasury and an exit door from one of the wings of the theatre that is Venice. From this platform, one understands better the true role of St Mark’s, which was that of a private chapel to the Palace, not a public building as it is today, and not a basilica as is commonly believed.
At the entrance, I could make out the four figures on the porphyry relief with their broken boxer’s noses; the four Lysippus horses were leaping into the clouds, Venice’s only horses bowing their necks to which the gold still adheres, proud to be on view, but regretting, as former champions, that they could not challenge Colleone’s mount, or, if need be, Victor-Emmanuel’s prancing palfrey.
Perhaps the St Mark’s horses were nostalgic for their journey to Paris in 1798, their farewell to the tearful Venetians, their walk to the quayside and their embarkation aboard the French frigate La Sensible, their arrival at Toulon amidst all the paintings from the Italian campaign, their apotheosis on the Champ-de-Mars, behind the dromedaries and their installation on the Arc du Carrousel, to the accompaniment of formal addresses:
Et si de tes palais ils décorent le faîte
C’est par droit de vertu, non par droit de conquête.4
Anchored in front of San Giorgio Maggiore, the bulk of a British aircraft-carrier distorted the proportions, concealing the Lido which lay on the horizon, like a sleeping crocodile on the surface of the water. From on high I scanned the play of the currents, varying in shade accord ing to the salt content, where the antique green intersected the dirty green, the colour of excavated jade. Waterways marked out with stakes that are sunk into the mud, and slumbering dykes through which only the pilots and the old fishermen know how to find their way.
Goethe and Taine have described this view, from this very point; they saw those tables from Quadri’s café dotted in front of the Procuraties. Up there, I thought of Byron’s remark: “Nature alone does not lie”,… except for Venice, which does make nature lie and surpasses her; only man has dared put this challenge to the physical and architectural laws; what other creature—apart from the swallow building its nest—can make a soft
substance hard? Who would have dared slosh about in this mud?
“The object is never as dark as its reflection,” painters say; only the reflection of Venice in our memories is lighter than the reality.
Who would attempt to build her again?
1965
DISCOVERED IN Cassini’s bookshop in the Via 22 Marzo the Memoirs of the last doge, Ludovico Manin: “10 May 1797; the French are at Mestre, any resistance is useless; the Serenissima arranged to bring in Dalmatian troops, but not in sufficient number. Without any bounty, Venice runs the risk of pillaging and fire.” “Tonight,” adds the doge, “we shall not sleep in our beds.” Poor Manin, whose graphic coat of arms bore an Adonis asleep beneath a tree…
The Council of Ten decided to let the consul, Villetard, know that the government of Venice would welcome the French troops “in a friendly manner”. The words overdid it; let the Venetians keep their friendship for them selves, Villetard replied to the doge.
On the 12th of May, the Slavic troops re-embarked for Dalmatia from the Giudecca. The French arrived. Would it mean a bloodbath? No. Manin shed tears as nobody has shed them since Diderot. Seven days later, there was a masked ball at the Fenice; both French and Venetian guards at the doors. On the 22nd, a Te Deum at St Mark’s. Contributions to the war were raised; hostages; the Librod’oro delle nobiltà veneziana was burnt. Another party at the Fenice, not very successful; how was it possible not to be frightened when you knew that Bonaparte, a few leagues away from here, had exclaimed: “I shall be the Attila Venice”?…5 General Baraguay, who was staying at Palazzo Pisani, held a reception; co-operation was languida. A committee from the Directoire arrived and searched through the libraries, taking away five hundred rare books and manuscripts and thirty of the best paintings.
