In a fascinating essay on the Garsins’ British connections, the art historian Kenneth Wayne has established that Eugénie’s oldest brother, Joseph Évariste Garsin, moved to London in 1877 and married Jessie, a girl from Plymouth; they had three children. Amedeo’s father and uncles also had British connections in the development of zinc mines since their partner was another Englishman, William Gerard Gibson of the Crown Smelter Company in London. Eugénie, born in Marseille, has little to say about the turbulent times through which she lived. But since the Garsins were doing business in Livorno in the nineteenth century they were bound to be affected by this most chaotic of periods in Italian history. That country, used for years as a battleground and subjected to periodic invasions by Austria and France, did not become unified until 1870. Livorno was a major port on the Mediterranean, and wars, bringing about plunging markets, currency exchange disruptions, and a tendency to wipe out speculative investments, are the kinds of events no businessman wants to deal with. When times were good the Garsins played the stock markets, took leisurely vacations, and bought houses. When they were bad they cut costs and moved in together, sometimes sheltering four generations at a time. Eugénie called it “our smala,” or circus.
The Garsin home base in Marseille was at 21 rue Bonaparte, a four-story house fronting on a large square, the Place du Palais de Justice. The house was bought in 1852, three years before Eugénie was born, and she grew up there. Her parents, Isacco and Regina (actually his first cousin, daughter of his uncle Isacco), eventually had seven children. After Évariste, the firstborn, came Eugénie, then Amédée, Clémentine, Laure, Gabrielle, and Albert. These brothers and sisters would figure, one way or another, in the life of Amedeo Modigliani. Eugénie has an early memory, when she was four, of going to meet her parents across the square as they returned from a holiday in Italy. Waiting at the door was her uncle Giacomo, wearing “his invariable red handkerchief half out of his back pocket, his gold-framed glasses on the end of his nose, and with his perpetual thin-lipped smile, always kindly but a little foolish,” she wrote. Giacomo had a modest career as a dealer in men’s furnishings before joining the family firm. He became the accountant, spending his days in a kind of cage with barred windows, which for some reason filled Eugénie with fear. Her uncle had saved a little money and wanted desperately to marry Nonnina, Eugénie’s grandmother, who lived in the house with them. She, however, remained true to the memory of her husband Isacco, who took skirt chasing as his personal sport and died—of shock, or pneumonia—after having been discovered wearing only a shirt in the bed of somebody else’s wife.
Her grandfather Giuseppe, “Nonno,” head of the family, was blind and seldom left the house. He would wake every morning before dawn and, despite his blindness, open the shutters of the windows to their office, lifting the heavy iron bars himself. Then he would dictate three simultaneous letters in three different languages, keeping an effortless train of thought in each. Outside of office hours, Nonno was ready to talk on all kinds of subjects, and was particularly interested in philosophical and religious issues. In memory of his wife, who died of cholera a few years before, Nonno kept the old traditions; he fasted, prayed, and observed the holidays. But his was the most benign form of Judaism, revolving around celebrations, special cakes—the Livornese kind were his favorites—and vast holiday feasts at which the welcome mat was out to any passing stranger, provided he or she was Jewish. He would tell the younger family members that tradition was “all a bunch of nonsense,” no doubt with a wink, and if Nonnina recited the Sh’ma, or daily morning prayer, it was only the first few verses.
Papa, who worked in the bureau with Nonno, was his equal as a linguist, speaking Greek fluently and Spanish without flaw, in contrast to the kind of patois affected by most Sephardim. He was his mother’s favorite, very handsome, not particularly tall but well proportioned and with clear, expressive eyes. Most of all, he had the air of a natural aristocrat that, combined with beautiful manners and elegant gestures, gave him an effortless distinction and social success into old age. His only failing was his darting intelligence. He was too ready to be distracted by worldly interests, for which his father, matter of fact and scholarly, acted as a natural brake. Both were regarded with awe in the household and Papa, Eugénie wrote, was practically considered an oracle.
One of Eugénie’s aunts, named for her great-grandmother, was “Regina Grande” to distinguish her from Eugénie’s mother, called “Reginetta.” Eugénie does not describe the fate of Regina Grande, but her daughter Margherita appends a note in which she sets down Nonnina’s memories of the woman she knew. Regina Grande was, according to Nonnina, not particularly beautiful, because she had red hair (an interesting comment) and her skin was blotchy. But, like Eugénie’s Papa, she had a natural air of command. She carried herself regally, and a certain intimidation in her manner concealed, according to Nonnina, a loveless childhood and an understandable hope for a happier future. This seemed to offer itself in the shape of a wealthy Livornese, who courted her assiduously. But then the Garsins went bankrupt in one of their periodic financial reversals and the suitor vanished. Regina Grande, much too proud to refer to the matter publicly, was, she confessed to Nonnina, terribly humiliated.
After the family moved to Marseille she received another offer: marriage to a dealer in wholesale jewelry with a promising future. The engagement went smoothly even if Nonnina wondered just how enthusiastic Regina Grande was about this marriage. Certainly no one in the family suspected that a close cousin was, it seemed, in love with the young jewelry dealer. The evening before her marriage Regina Grande, who suffered from an irregular heartbeat, had palpitations and said she felt ill. The next day she was vomiting. The family doctor being unavailable, a substitute was called, and he recommended some herbal teas. That night, Regina Grande died.
As she told the story Nonnina shook and tears rolled down her face. From the beginning the family suspected that Regina Grande had either taken poison herself or been poisoned, but nothing could be proved. Years later, when she was on her own deathbed, the cousin in question confessed to the crime.
Murder may be considered distinctly eccentric for most families, but for the Garsins, living in nineteenth-century Marseille, sudden death was all too frequent. One of the most important figures in Eugénie’s childhood was her uncle Félix, then a medical student. He was the one who spoiled her, made her sing songs, showered her with presents, and called her “my good, dear, and tender friend.” He had finely drawn features and a smile that transformed his face, very black hair, reddish side whiskers, and a gentle, almost embarrassingly hesitant manner, Eugénie wrote. After Uncle Félix married and opened a practice on the rue Sylvabelle, he continued to visit them at the rue Bonaparte so often that “he is at the centre of my childhood memories,” she wrote. In one of their prosperous moments the family bought a house in a small French village. Eugénie was staying there with her grandmother in the summer of 1867 when there was an epidemic of cholera in Marseille and Uncle Félix fell ill. Eugénie later remembered that her mother took over the major share of nursing him back to health and how worried the rest of the family was about that. Many people died. Félix survived but never quite recovered, suffering from continuing intestinal problems and anemia. He had lost his old verve, Eugénie wrote. A kind of pervasive sadness would be interspersed by a typically bitter Jewish humor.
All of them knew what chances they took whenever they set out to minister to diseases that struck without warning and for which there were no cures. Successive waves of cholera had swept through Europe since ancient times; in the nineteenth century, with increasing travel, the epidemic that almost took Félix’s life in 1867 reached Europe by overland routes via Mecca and Egypt and spread as far as North America. Three decades later, in 1897, another outbreak took an even worse toll in the Mediterranean ports of France, Spain, and Italy.
The cholera bacillus had been identified as early as 1849, but its exact cause was not isolated or stud
ied until the 1880s. It took years for the relationship between its spread and the contamination, by human waste, of water, food, and especially seafood such as oysters and shellfish, to be understood. Just how sanitary the house was at 21 rue Bonaparte, and where its waste went, is unknown. But even on the Right Bank in Paris, water on the upper floors was a rarity until 1865, and it was a decade later than that arriving on the Left Bank. Bathrooms hardly existed. As for flush toilets, these certainly existed, but people continued to think of human waste as a useful fertilizer, and night-soil men went on, as they had done for centuries, hauling their fetid loads out of the city. In A History of Private Life, Roger-Henri Guerrand notes, “In Marseille, 14,000 of 32,653 buildings in the 1886 census had no system for human waste disposal. Waste was simply accumulated in a potty on each floor and then disposed of in the gutter.” City sewers were rare, wells became contaminated, and reforms took decades. This was still 1867. The arrival of a cholera epidemic must have looked like the vicissitudes of fate as families succumbed to the cumulative effects of diarrhea, vomiting, and prostration.
Inside its dark, picturesque old houses and along its labyrinthine, steep back streets, the ancient port of Marseille was also a fertile breeding ground for other illnesses. Diphtheria was common, babies died in infancy, and in 1850 the average life expectancy was thirty-eight for men and forty-two for women. Typhoid fever was such an ordinary, everyday kind of calamity that Eugénie’s memoir refers to it without comment. Here again the culprit is raw sewage that contaminates water, milk, vegetables, and shellfish. Typhoid fever’s symptoms are particularly nasty, its convalescence usually prolonged, and before the availability of vaccines and modern medicines the only recourse was devoted nursing care. That, of course, was the role of the Garsin women.
Eugénie wrote, “Each of the Garsins was simultaneously a doctor and a pharmacist. Each of them had a personal remedy which he or she applied to certain criteria as absolute as those of the Faculté [de Médicine].” For instance, there was a horrible concoction containing camphor used on cuts and scratches, but it hurt so much the children never complained about injuries for fear of being subjected to this particular remedy. Digestive upsets were Eugénie’s particular “specialty” since orchards surrounded their country house and she loved fruit. She would blame her stomachaches on the air coming in from the Mediterranean. Uncle Félix, with his best smile, would reply, “Yes my darling, it’s the sea air, but next time, don’t eat so many figs.”
Then there was Nanette, a hairdresser who came to stay in the Garsin household, bringing her own homemade skin and hair preparations along with a great many folk remedies. She had the added skill of being able to set bones and deal with sprains. She had successfully healed a bad cut sustained by Évariste, Eugénie’s older brother, who had scratched himself on a prickly branch and neglected to keep the wound clean. She knew how to make medicines from certain bitter herbs to cure indigestion and colic. Her most spectacular cure involved Eugénie’s father, who developed an eye malady that was causing a rapid and disturbing loss of eyesight. The nightmare possibilities of having Papa become blind as well as Nonno roused the family to desperate measures. A specialist was consulted; he said nothing could be done. Nanette made up her magic potion of herbs and instructed Papa to sniff the liquid up his nose every day. Papa dutifully took his morning dose, and in the days that followed had violent fits of sneezing and all the other symptoms of an acute cold. Then his eyesight returned; it was as good as new. From that day on, Nanette was their miracle worker.
Despite, or because of, their faith in miraculous cures, a strain of superstitious belief ran through this proud, emotionally distant family of intellectuals. All of them had, Eugénie wrote, “[t]he credulity of ignorance and the blind obedience of the simplest folk. I shall never be able to enumerate all that was tradition and an article of faith.” One never cut one’s hair during a waning moon, or nails on a Friday, and never in sequence. One should never sew a button on a garment one was wearing (a sensible precaution), and as for black-letter days, the list of obligatory rituals designed to mitigate its gods was endless.
Bernard Berenson, who came from the Pale of Settlement, was subject to the same curious propitiations. He felt compelled to look at the new moon, but never through glass, to make three bows and turn over the loose cash in his pockets, and did not seem to connect the observance with the broche, or blessing, that was a ritual of his early training. (For observant Jews, the broche must be recited on a host of occasions, including the first sighting of a new moon.) To Berenson the act remained an inexplicable quirk of his nature, “a drag towards superstition in any and every one who was brought up … in a magical world.”
In 1870, the year of the Franco-Prussian War, Paris was under siege, and Napoleon III, having sustained heavy losses against Bismarck’s fighting machine, had been deposed. Eugénie was just fifteen. Although Marseille was out of the direct fighting it was another of those moments for businessmen to make a prudent retreat. The Garsins, who had constantly shuttled between Marseille and Livorno, turned back toward Italy. After decades of struggle, Italy was finally unified, and Livorno presented fresh opportunities. It seems that Papa and Nonno put their heads together and came up with a future for Eugénie: marriage. The groom-to-be was a member of a prominent Livornese family.
As with art dealers into the twentieth century, who negotiated marriages between each other like minor principalities, the Garsins were always looking for ways to place their daughters in advantageous business unions; the younger and more pliant they were, the better. There was, of course, a dowry to be paid in yearly installments, but at the end there would be those lucrative and rock-solid business ties. The joke is that both families thought they were marrying for money at a moment when the fortune of each might take a disastrous downward plunge. Neither, for the moment, was aware of it.
Physically the Garsins were small and dark with “alert, expressive, changeable faces,” Eugénie wrote. They were subject to illnesses: liver disease (which suggests alcoholism), tuberculosis, and psychological disorders, as well. The Modiglianis were taller and well built, held themselves well, were of “phlegmatic temperaments,” were robustly healthy, and lived into old age. Whereas the Modiglianis were “more inclined to enjoy life than strain their intellects,” Eugénie wrote with her usual acerbity, the Garsins were almost fanatically well-read, eager scholars.
Eugénie might have noted, but did not, that despite her family’s superior cultural sophistication, they never seemed able to hold on to money. In that respect they were at a disadvantage when compared with the culturally illiterate Modiglianis, who had a genius for business. The legend was that an earlier generation had made a fortune in banking and lent money to cardinals; they boasted of being “bankers to the Pope.” Jeanne Modigliani’s view was that the Modiglianis were never bankers (banca means bank) but ran an agency (banco). Pierre Sichel, Modigliani’s tireless investigator, believed the family made money selling wood, coal, and hides.
Given the scale on which the Modigliani family lived, neither explanation is satisfactory, and, indeed, neither is correct. Recent research has established that the family’s fortunes were based on shrewd business dealings in lead and zinc in Sardinia and Lombardy. As early as 1866 the Modigliani brothers, Isacco, Alberto, and Flaminio, were managing a lead mine in Sardinia. Then new prospecting in the province of Bergamo, where silver, copper, and iron had been mined since Roman times, established that there were still fresh veins to be exploited. The Modiglianis investigated and found some extremely pure deposits of calamine (hydrous zinc silicate), which they began to extract and export in the early 1870s. They built modern shaft furnaces, constructed cableways, and were soon employing large numbers of workers.
This, then, was the basis for the lifestyle that Eugénie Garsin described. The Modiglianis inhabited two palazzette, or large villas, presumably containing a maximum of space with a minimum of comfort. The house on the via Roma was “crawling”
with servants, the meals were gargantuan, and there were receptions “en grand tralala” in and out of the suites of rooms (enfilades) and the ground-floor salon, its heavy doors opening onto flowering terraces. Guests and family members came and went according to strict social ritual under the control of the family’s head. Eugénie described Emanuele, her future father-in-law, as “very tall, very fat and short of breath.” His authority was absolute; even married sons had to address him in the third person and ceremoniously kiss his hand. Eugénie’s first visit came the year she was engaged, and her sharp little eyes missed little. The contrast between the elegant, cultured, and freethinking Garsins and this family of rich businessmen with their orthodox observances and empty minds was marked.
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