PS Why can’t you lock yourself up ... and keep away from all the idle, lazy, good-for-nothing young men, who infest Cambridge, and steal your precious time, your good intentions and your energy away[?]
But academic credentials eluded this generation. At best Natty did not disgrace himself at Cambridge; his younger brothers did rather worse. Charlotte may have been anxious that Alfred “should visit Cambridge and distinguish himself there,” but after only a single year (1861-2) he was taken ill and never returned. Efforts were made to introduce Alfred to the world of philanthropy and politics: under Anthony’s supervision, he sat on a City committee “for the Relief of distress” in the hard winter of 1867. “I hope and believe that your brother will attend,” wrote his anxious mother. “It will do [Alfred] good to accustom himself to popular meetings, and, in time, he may perhaps become reconciled to the idea of entering parliament, which, at present, seems so repugnant to his tastes.” In 1868 he became the first Jew to be elected to the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, another appointment he owed entirely to his family rather than his ability. But he conspicuously failed to make this the position of influence which Alphonse made his role as regent of the Banque de France.11 Alfred lived the life of a fin de siècle aesthete, at once effete and faintly risque. Max Beerbohm’s cartoon—A quiet evening in Seymour Place. Doctors consulting whether Mr Alfred may, or may not, take a second praline before bedtime—captures the former quality (see illustration 7.i). So does Alfred’s somewhat feeble bon mot when another Bank of England director (reflecting on Anselm’s will) “suggested that in fifty years the Times would announce that your brother had left all Buckinghamshire. ‘You make a mistake’ was the reply to a very unseemly remark, ’believe me I shall leave a great deal more, I shall leave the world.‘ ”
7.i: Max Beerbohm, A quiet evening in Seymour Place. Doctors consulting whether Mr Alfred may, or may not, take a second praline before bedtime.
Leopold (Leo) was, if anything, an even greater disappointment, if only because Lionel and Charlotte pinned their last remaining hopes for academic success on him. Despite—perhaps because of—a relentless bombardment of parental exhorta- tions and reproofs throughout his Cambridge career, Leo had to postpone his Little Go, was marked down for his limited knowledge of Christian theology and scraped a third in his final exams. His mother feared that he would “pass for the most ignorant, most thoughtless, and most shallow of human beings” and was mortified to hear her friend Matthew Arnold say “that he cannot believe you are or ever will be a reading man, as you talked of going to Newmarket which he thought was a pity, as you seemed to him made for better things. I assure you I am not exaggerating—and that Mr. Arnold reverted three times to the race-course.” Lionel, who like Charlotte had hoped to see him in “Class I and very high up,” later commented acidly: “Your examiners were quite right in saying you were a good hand at guessing.” It is hard not to sympathise with Leo and his brothers. “Dear Papa does not expect any so-called news from your pen,” ran a typical letter from home in 1866,but he wishes to know how you spend your time, at what hour you separate yourself from your beloved pillow, when you breakfast, with a description of the breakfast-table and of the ingredients of that earliest meal, how many hours you devote to serious conscientious studies, divided into preparations and lessons, what authors you are reading in Greek and Latin, in prose and poetry, how much leisure you devote to lighter reading such as modern poetry and history, how much, on how little to still lighter literature, such as romances and novels, in French and English—how much exercise you take.
Any university teacher knows how counter-productive this kind of parental pressure can be. If Leo preferred to idle away his time in the company of “idle, lazy, good-for-nothing young men” like Cyril Flower,12 it may partly have been a reaction against his mother and father’s incessant lecturing. The more desperately Charlotte urged him to “study something—drawing, painting, music, languages”—the more his interests turned elsewhere, principally to horse-racing.13 In the end, the only “English” Rothschild of this generation to secure a university degree (in law) was Nat’s son James Edouard, who grew up and studied in France. It can hardly be claimed that he was an advertisement for higher education. An ardent bibliophile who accumulated a large collection of rare books, obsessively excluding volumes with the slightest blemish, he is said to have committed suicide in 1881 at the age of thirty-six, perhaps the first Rothschild in whom the desire to accumulate valuable objects took on a dysfunctional character.
Of course, Leo’s devotion to the Turf had a precedent. His uncle Anthony had been a keen racegoer in his youth and his uncle Mayer was even more of an equine enthusiast. Indeed, it was said of Mayer in the 1860s that he was “so constantly away and amusing himself that his partners’ and nephews’ ... softly modulated voices had become inaudible to him.” In “the Baron’s Year” of 1871, his horses won four of the five “classic” races: the Derby, the Oaks, the Thousand Guineas and the St Leger. Eight years later, Leo himself was the owner of the Derby winner when his little-known horse Sir Bevys beat the Earl of Rosebery’s Visconti into third place (though Leo had used the bogus name “Mr Acton” to conceal his identity). He nearly won the Derby again with St Frusquin in 1896 (the horse came second to the Prince of Wales’s Persimmon) and did win it a second time in 1904 with St Amant. This was a symbol more of continuity than of decadence, then; the fact that he could earn as much as £46,766 in prize money in a single season may even be taken as a sign of traditional acumen. At the same time, sport was now an integral part of City life—witness the cricket match between a Stock Exchange XI and Leo’s own XI in 1880, a classic example of late-Victorian corporate hospitality. Another novelty was Leo’s enthusiasm for motor cars, the supreme rich man’s toy of the fin-de-siècle. There was also something new about the extravagance of having a racehorse like St Frusquin modelled in silver by Fabergé (with twelve bronze replicas for friends).
The sons of Anselm evinced similar tendencies. The eldest, Nathaniel (b. 1836), studied at Brünn but quarrelled bitterly with his father, who considered him spendthrift and financially incompetent. Ferdinand (b. 1839) showed even less interest in the family business, preferring to spend his time in England, where both his mother and wife had been born and raised. He was quite candid about his lack of the most important of Rothschild traits. “It is an odd thing,” he wrote forlornly in 1872, “but whenever I sell any stock it is sure to rise and if I buy any it generally falls.” That left Salomon Albert (b. 1844), usually known in the family as “Salbert.” Albert had studied at Bonn as well as at Brünn “with great energy, perseverance, devotion and success” but, when his father was taken ill in 1866, seemed “overanxious, over-alarmed, dreadfully frightened at [the prospect of] his undivided responsibility” for the Vienna house. When Anselm finally died eight years later, he left most of his real estate and art collection to Nathaniel and Ferdinand and only his share of the family partnership to Albert, who regarded himself as having been “not very well treated.” In short, Albert had to be forced into the business, faute de mieux.
In Paris, of course, it was the third generation rather than the fourth which came to power after James’s death in 1868. Yet here too there seemed to be a falling off. Part of the problem was that James had been such a domineering father. Feydeau commented that James had “never delegated the smallest part of his enormous responsibility to his children or his employees.” “What submissiveness on the part of his sons,” he marvelled ironically. “What a feeling of hierarchy! What respect! They would not permit themselves, even with respect to the most minimal transaction, to sign—with that cabalistic signature which binds the house—without consulting their father. ‘Ask Papa,’ you are told by men of forty, who are almost as experienced as their father, no matter how trifling the inquiry you address to them.” The, Goncourts noticed the same tendency.
The eldest son Alphonse—who was forty-one when his father died—seems to have withstood t
he years of paternal dominance the best, suggesting once again that it was the first-born of the third generation who was most likely to inherit or imbibe the mentality of the Judengasse. Educated at the College Bourbon, Alphonse had an enthusiasm for art (and for stamp-collecting), but he never allowed these interests to distract him from the serious business of the bank. In March 1866, he was asked by a friend after dinner “why, when he was so rich, he worked like a negro to become more so. ‘Ah!’ he replied, ‘You don’t know the pleasure of feeling heaps of Christians under one’s boots.’ ” Like Lionel and Anselm, he took pleasure in austerity: when he was observed in 1891 taking the train from Nice to Monte Carlo (where he “played very little”) it was his very ordinariness which was remarkable: “He waits for the train sitting on a bench, like any common mortal, and smoking his cigar”—albeit watched like a hawk by the conductor who stood ready to open the door of his compartment as soon as he showed any sign of boarding. Gustave too shared many of the attitudes of the older Rothschilds. As Mérimée remarked wryly when he dined with him and his wife at Cannes in 1867, “he seemed to have a good deal of religion and to think on the subject of money like the rest of his house.” When he later heard that Gustave had impulsively left for Nice, he had no doubt he had sub-let his villa in Cannes at a profit.
It was James’s younger sons who struggled. The Goncourts observed in 1862 how imperiously Salomon James (b. 1835) was treated by his father. After losing a million francs at the bourse, he:received this letter from the father of millions: “Mr Salomon Rothschild will go to spend the night at Ferrières, where he will receive instructions which concern him.” The next day, he received the order to leave for Frankfurt. Two years passed in the counting house there; he believed his penance was over; he wrote to his father who replied: “Mr Salomon’s business is not yet finished.” And a new order sent him to spend a couple of years in the United States.
This was a caricature but one based on reality, as a letter from James to his elder sons in August 1861 indicates. Offering his sons 100,000 francs apiece of new Piedmontese bonds, he explicitly ordered that Salomon should have “nothing to do with realising them and should give the matter no thought at all, as I wish to avoid at any price giving him an opportunity to speak with brokers or coming once again into contact with the open market... I do not want to allow ideas of speculation to enter his head again.” He was never admitted into the partnership as an associé.
Just three years later, Salomon was dead—killed, so the Goncourts heard, “by the stress of speculating at the bourse—a Rothschild dead from the stress of money!” Alas for poetic justice, it seems to have been a horse rather than the bourse which precipitated his heart failure. As Charlotte reported:[P]oor Salomon’s uncontrollable love of excitement was the result of the ever agitated condition of his heart and circulation. He was at the races last Sunday, and came home much fatigued, from having driven a spirited horse, which nearly pulled his arms off. In the middle of the night he woke covered with cold perspiration, and seized with a great diffi-culty of breathing; he rushed to the window for air—but the indisposition passed off—and he was I believe tolerably well unto Wednesday, when the fatal attack seized him. From the beginning the Doctors declared that there was no hope, for the poor patient began to spit blood, and the fluttering of his heart was most distressing; he was conscious until within a few moments of his end, and did not seem to be aware of his condition.14
The youngest son, Edmond (b. 1845), fared better; but as late as 1864 his eldest brother dismissed him as “a child, who ought not to go into the bureau for the next five or six years.” A studious young man, Edmond passed his baccalaureate “not only satisfactorily but brilliantly” (to Charlotte’s envious chagrin) and was rewarded by being allowed to visit Egypt—the beginning of a lifelong interest in the Middle East.
In part, the seeming decadence of the new generation was a reflection of the sheer number of Rothschilds there now were, only a minority of whom were required to enter the partnership and work, but all of whom had the means to live like princes. Apart from anything else, that meant a great deal of work for architects. The acquisition of country estates and the building of country houses, as we have seen, predated the 1870s and 1880s by several decades. There was therefore nothing qualitatively new about the way that Natty and his wife Emma regarded their house at Tring; indeed, having been bought by Lionel for his newly married son, Tring in many ways represented a continuation of the older generation’s aspirations. Like Ferdinand’s Waddesdon and Alfred’s Halton—the other English properties bought or built on in this period—it seemed to contemporaries to represent just another addition to the family’s territorial empire in and around the Vale of Aylesbury.15 Nor could Natty resist the family habit of altering existing buildings beyond recognition: with the assistance of the architect George Devey, he managed to turn an elegant Wren house into a rather stolid, institutional Victorian pile. Leo did something similar to Ascott, which he acquired from his uncle Mayer, using the same firm of architects to remodel the house in the mock Tudor style. Both Natty and Leo also followed the fashion for building picturesque new cottages for tenants and employees on their estates; indeed, Natty took pains to create a kind of paternalistic “welfare state” at Tring.
It was the quantity rather than the quality of such Rothschild investments in real estate which was new. The more numerous French Rothschilds acquired, modernised or built from scratch at least eight new country houses in this period, including Edmond’s S-shaped chateau d‘Armainvilliers, built in the Anglo-Norman rustic style by Langlais and Emile Ulmann in the 1880s.16 In Austria Nathaniel bought two new country estates: one at Reichenau, where the architects Armand-Louis Bauqué and Emilio Pio built the polychromatic château Penelope, and another at Enzesfeld near Vöslau, which he acquired from Graf Schönburg. His brother Albert also bought Langau, an estate in the Kalkalpen mountains in Lower Austria, and their sister Alice had two houses built: Eythrope on the Waddesdon estate and a villa in Grasse in the south of France. Finally, in the late 1880s, the remaining Frankfurt Rothschilds, Wilhelm Carl and Hannah Mathilde, built a villa at Königstein in the Taunus hills, also using Bauqué and Pio. There were at least seven new town houses too.17 Mention should also perhaps be made of the reconstruction of the original Rothschild house “zum grünen Schild” in 1884 at the time the remainder of the Judengasse was torn down: the Rothschilds consciously sought to preserve it as a monument to their ghetto origins.18 As in the past, styles and architects were swapped within the family regardless of national borders. The only real difference between the third and fourth generations, perhaps, was the preference for French architects and styles of the 1870s and 1880s, compared with the Anglophilia of the 1850s—a trend exemplified by Destailleur’s work for both Ferdinand and Albert.
Similarly, more Rothschilds meant more art collections. In fact, the previous generation had probably made more numerous acquisitions and accumulated bigger collections; but the division of these between their heirs gave each an incentive to acquire more. This was without question the period when the Rothschilds became the world’s leading art buyers, driving up prices of the artists and genres they coveted to unprecedented heights at the major sales of the 1880s. The Blenheim, Leigh Court and Fountaine sales all saw big Rothschild purchases, to the disquiet of (among others) Sir James Robinson, Keeper of Queen’s Pictures—though Charlotte herself believed that the Marlborough collection should be bought for the nation. This mania for art had its grotesque side. In 1870 Ferdinand paid £6,800 for a dam ascened shield by George de Gys which had cost barely £250 twenty-eight years before. In 1878 Edmond paid between £24,000 and £30,000 for a Sèvres-clad commode designed for Mme du Barry, a mistress of Louis XV; it had cost her just £3,200. Two years later, Mayer Carl paid the Merkel family of Nuremberg £32,000 for a parcel-gilt and enamelled standing cup made in 1550 by the Nuremberg silver-smith Wenzel Jamnitzer, making it the dearest work of art that had ever been sold. Yet by 1911, whe
n much of his collection of silverware was sold, only fourteen out of eighty-nine lots fetched more than £1,500. Both Ferdinand and Gustave spent in excess of £7,000 on two oval enamel dishes at the Fountaine sale in 1884, while Ferdinand and Alphonse spent more than a quarter of a million pounds apiece for three (supposed) works by Rubens in the Duke of Marlborough’s collection. It was the first time any picture in history had fetched more than £20,000. Fifteen years later, Edmond went still further, spending £48,000 on the duc de Choiseul’s ludicrously ornate bureau (previous owners included Talleyrand and Metternich). Even Natty—reputedly uninterested in art—could not resist adding to the collection of eighteenth-century English works he had inherited from his father. In 1886 he paid around £20,000 for Reynolds’s Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy in the sale of the 2nd Earl of Dudley’s collection. Leo too added to the thirty-six paintings he inherited from his parents, though his tastes were more eclectic, ranging from Boucher to Stubbs, from Franz Snyders to Hogarth (The Harlot’s Progress: Quarrels with her Protector).
The House of Rothschild Page 41
