If being ‘taken up’ is always agreeable and exciting when one is young, at any rate for a while, the contrast now with the rawness of my recent life stepped it up tenfold. It had something of the zest of a barbarian padding wild-eyed with longing for luxury and corruption through the palaces and fountained courtyards of Diocletian, or of a Parthian in Antioch. Notice the significant change of ethical standpoint from the recoil of my first hours. This particular stratum of Rumania was by far the most civilized and sophisticated, and, in a way, the most idiosyncratic society that I had ever encountered. The strangest aspect, at first, of this great boyar world was the fact that the mother tongue of its denizens – although they were all, at the very least, bilingual – was not Rumanian but French, and, as even my rustic ear could detect, of a particularly pure, cool and charming kind, and had been so for six or seven generations. I had vaguely known that the French language had taken deep root at certain levels in pre-war Russia, Poland and Rumania, but in neither of the first two instances – judging by overheard conversations between the equivalent type of white Russians or Poles – to the virtual exclusion of the vernacular.
What had happened – impossible to avoid a few words on Rumanian history to make it comprehensible – was this. When Rumania emerged from the almost unchronicled chaos of its dark ages, as the two principalities Wallachia and Moldavia, its princes – the voivodes or hospodars – formed their rough courts and administrations, like those of the Bulgarian czars and the Kraj of Serbia, as miniature, semi-barbaric replicas of Byzantium, and administered their lands through the great boyars, the all-powerful warrior landowning feudal oligarchy to which they themselves belonged. Though the thrones were officially elective, the tendency was for them to remain in the same families; in Wallachia, for instance, in spite of intrigues, murders and palace revolutions, the throne remained in the Bassarab family for three centuries. All these princes – monarchs with strange sobriquets like Mircea the Old, Alexander the Bad, Peter the Cruel, Vlad the Impaler, Basil the Wolf – had to contend, with greater or lesser success, with the expansion of Turkey, particularly of the Murads and Bajazet.
Two tremendous figures stand out: Stephen the Great of Moldavia, who fought fifty battles and even defeated Mohammed, the conqueror of Byzantium; and Michael the Brave of Wallachia, who succeeded for a moment in uniting not only both principalities, but all the lands beyond their frontiers where Rumanians lived. But in the isolation after Bulgaria, Serbia and Byzantium had fallen to the Turks, Rumania too was forced to submit; not, however, as an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, but as vassal lands still reigned over by their Orthodox princes, paying tribute to a Sultan who was not their sovereign but their suzerain. But though for a while native boyars such as Brancovan and Cantemir sat on the two thrones, bribery at the Sublime Porte was already becoming the key to the principalities; their places soon began to be taken by Greeks from the Phanar at Constantinople, the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, who were often of Hellenized Albanian origin, and by the Cantacuzenes of the family of Emperor John VI. These, by intermarriage and assimilation, became, early, completely identified with Rumania. As the elections became more mercenary, the oppression more ruthless, the reigns shorter (they all too often ended on the block), the later Phanariots – the thrones interchanged between about a dozen families – remained Greek in sentiment and language, and Greek in the eighteenth century became the court language of the two princely divans at Bucharest and Jassy. The native boyars themselves became more or less Hellenized, to such an extent that the first active blow against the Turks in the Greek War of Independence was struck in Moldavia, by Prince Alexander Ypsilantis and his Phanariot kinsmen and friends.
When, early in the nineteenth century, the twin principalities, through the intervention of the great powers, put a stop to the Phanariot regime and secured the election of native princes once more – Ghikas (Rumanians now for centuries), Bibescos, Stirbeys and Sturdzas – with longer and more liberal reigns, the Greek tongue dropped away and the language of private, aristocratic conversation among the native boyars and Phanariot descendants (who, through intermarriage, had completely merged) became French. Turning away from the old evils of the East, they looked to France and to French liberalism as their beacon. Soaking in French civilization through every pore, the principalities began to emerge from despotism and its more villainous abuses, secured the abolition of serfdom, enlarged the suffrage, and prepared the path for a Western constitution and democratic institutions. After the union of the two principalities under Prince Cuza, and the final severance of all allegiance to the Sublime Porte, the emergence of modern Rumania took place – rather contradictorily – under a prince chosen from the house of Hohenzollern, who became King Carol I. Never, since the time of the Roman Empire, had the region’s cultural hegemony been so complete, with the result that the entire ruling elite spoke French. One outcome of the Westernization of Rumania was the eventual break-up, through agrarian reform, of the huge feudal estates of the boyars. Another was a class-separation in which – except in parliamentary speeches or addressing servants – the boyars, quite literally, spoke a different language.
I was fascinated, and slightly obsessed, by these voivodes and boyars as they appeared in frescoes on the walls of the monasteries they were always piously founding – crowned and bearded figures holding up a miniature painted facsimile of the church itself, with their princesses upholding its other corner, each with a line of brocaded, kneeling sons and daughters receding in hierarchical pyramids behind them. Still more fascinating, later portraits, hanging in the houses of their descendants – some by unknown local artists who travelled through the principalities early in the nineteenth century – showed great boyars of the princely divans, men who bore phenomenal titles, most of them of Byzantine origin, some of them Slav: Great Bans of Craiova, Domnitzas, Beyzadeas, Grand Logothetes, hospodars, swordbearers and cupbearers, all dressed in amazing robes with enormous globular headdresses or high fur hats with diamond-clasped plumes, festooned with necklaces, and jewel-crusted dagger hilts. Bearded like prophets, they loom from the shadows as remotely as potentates in a Persian fairy tale, the only hint of feudal Europe, perhaps, being a crowned escutcheon in which the black raven of Wallachia impales the Moldavian auroch. Their names, too, all seemed to carry a resonance of splendour and remoteness: Sherban Cantacuzene, Constantine Bassaraba, Furtuna Vacaresco, Alexander Mavrocordato, Scarlat Callimachi, Dimitri Cantemir, Duca, Racovitza, Sturdza, Soutzo, Karadja, Mavroyeni, Bibesco, Stirbey, Rosetti, Rosnovano, Moruzi, Balsh, Kretzulesco: strange resonances. The reader at this point might jump to the conclusion that I was suffering from an acute access of class feeling. So might I, though obviously with more reluctance. There’s probably worse to come.
• • •
Historians have been united in execrating the Phanariots. They have inherited the opprobrium that used to load the word ‘Byzantine’ with suggestions of flexibility, deviousness, lack of scruple, greed and tyranny. But there are signs that the Phanariots, too, are gradually being reassessed. It may be argued that their greed and corruption were laced by zeal for the Orthodox faith and that their share in the foreign affairs of the Ottomans, which the later sultans largely and most unwisely entrusted to them, was dictated as much, or almost as much, by anxiety for the Christian cause as it was by private ambition. It is possible that without their flexibility and genius for compromise, the principalities would have sunk into total subjection to the Ottoman yoke: that all the old national institutions, instead of degeneration, would have been obliterated completely, as they had been in the rest of south-eastern Europe. In nearly every family there was a prince with virtues to offset, in some measure, the vices of his kinsmen. Since the end of their long regime, many of their descendants have been prominent and devoted figures in Rumanian life, both in conservation and reform. But whatever their drawbacks may have been, in the period of their great ascendancy, the eighteenth century, in one thing they were pre-eminent:
they were the only civilized people in south-eastern Europe. The Phanar itself was the last surviving fragment of lost Byzantium, and the courts of Bucharest and Jassy the last, faint, scarcely audible echo of the empire’s death rattle.
It was not only on their wealth but on their knowledge of languages and their wider European horizons, in a world of fanatic barbarism, that their oligarchy was based. From the first, when they became Grand Dragomans of the Porte, they were friends of literature and art; the first Rumanian bible was translated by the orders of Sherban Cantacuzene of Wallachia, and with all his faults, a figure as polished as Alexander Mavrocordato, Byron’s and Shelley’s friend and a leader in the Greek revolt, could have sprung from no other East European soil. They studied in Venice, Padua, Vienna, Paris and St Petersburg and it was mainly due to their civilized and cosmopolitan influence that Western ideas penetrated Rumania. The influence of French ideas, and the total linguistic hegemony of France among the elite, may have gone too far; there were certainly regrettable social side effects; but it did bring a vivifying blast of the Western world, a sort of belated renaissance, into the stifling isolation of the Middle Ages which Rumania was only just sloughing off.
All these different influences, it occurred to me later on (for I knew little or nothing of such matters then), had evolved into a society which was a mixture of late Byzantium and Proustian France. The architectural mood of Bucharest, after it had arisen from its oriental beginnings, was an amalgam of Second Empire and the fin-de-siècle, with a dash of early twentieth-century opulence. The modern buildings were irrelevant postscripts. A strong whiff of the earlier period hung unmistakeably in the social air: a climate which had also been subtly modified, during the last few generations, by a stern army of English nannies and governesses. But it left the bedrock of French influence among the boyars undisturbed, the result of a hundred years of study in the lycées of France and the Sorbonne, and of inhabiting Paris as an alternative capital. In the unregenerate days of enormous estates before the agrarian reforms, many of these now almost mythical-seeming boyars lived in France, completely integrated, and they often intermarried in circles of extreme style and grandeur: a Montesquieu and Castellane existence, combined with a pleasure-loving bent that belongs to the world of cartoons, and, in many cases, to the plays of Feydeau and Flers et Caillavet: packs of staghounds in Normandy, whiskers, curly-brimmed top hats, monocles, and languidly lit cigarettes from gold Fabergé cases with enormous closed crowns and coronets, in the sort of carriages Constantin Guys and Lautrec drew so well. Their wives and daughters, in my mind’s eye and in reality, appear with the feathered languor and dash of sitters for Helleu and Boldini and Jacques-Émile Blanche, inhabiting the world of Longchamp, Le Grand Véfour, Maxim’s, Le Rat-Mort, and la tournée des Grands Ducs,[4] and evoking exotic figures like La Païva, La Belle Otero, Émilienne d’Alençon, Cléo de Mérode, Liane de Pougy.
The same life, in miniature, thrived in Bucharest; the most convincing relic of it was the plush, the brass and the chandeliers of Capșa’s restaurant. I could never tire of hearing tales of this not yet wholly evaporated epoch. Although it is the last period in history I would have liked to inhabit, there is an absorbing attraction about the robust, undoubting vulgarity and glitter which held Europe in its grip for these decades. The duels, too, which had played a large part in Rumanian, as well as the rest of European life, outside England – and, to a much lesser extent, still did – exercised a morbid, Dumas-bred fascination. Frequently fatal, they were fought with pistols or rapiers which made encounters with sabres in Austria and Hungary – where only slashing was allowed, but no lunging – sound much more innocuous. It was all frantically alien.
What distinguished these people then, and later, from the rest of pleasure-loving aristocratic Europe was their anti-philistinism: a fastidious passion for erudition for its own sake, for literature, painting, music, sculpture and the movement of ideas, that turned their houses into the haunts of Academicians. (Rather like France, again, Rumania has always been a country where a few women, through their brilliance, wit, beauty or hospitality, have played a more important role than in other countries.) The devotion to writing, in particular, went far beyond literary dilettantism and emerged, in many cases, in works of great distinction. Not alas, in Rumanian, a chauvinist might sigh. But at least these extra-territorial exploits released them from the wheel of patriotic nationalism, to which the poetic and literary genius of resurgent nations is indissolubly bound. Paris after all is no mean arena in which to shine. No wonder that Proust should have been so deeply intrigued by Rumanians in Paris and sought them out as friends. For me it was exciting and impressive to hear the name Marcel dropped so lightly and easily, and to realize that Anna, who seemed to be everyone’s cousin, was the Comtesse de Noailles; that Paul, if it was not Morand, who had married Hélène Soutzo, was Valéry; that ‘Jean’ was Cocteau and that Léon-Paul was Fargue: clues scattered in a paperchase that could be followed later.
I have gone on rather a long time about this because it was so different to anything I had come across in similar circumstances in the Danubian capitals further upstream. In Hungary the candlelit talk at the end of dinner would be more inclined to concern shooting or horses, a serious weighing of the comparative merits of bootmakers and saddlers in London or long discussions about mediatization, morganatic marriages, primogenitive quarterings, Hoffähigkeit, the exact degree of cousinage between the Festitich and Fürstenberg families and how many yokes of land the Esterházys owned. So it might, mutatis mutandis, in Bucharest, but not for long. But I don’t think it would often end up, in the Hungarian capital, with talk about Saint-Saëns and the Goncourt brothers, the points in common between Villiers de L’Isle-Adam and Barbey d’Aurevilly, the link between Lautréamont and surrealism, or what the Abbé Mugnier had told one of the guests about the conversation of Huysmans and what the author had left out in his portrait of him in En Route.
• • •
Bucharest was not really as big as it seemed when I first reached it. After a week or so, during which I must have met more people than ever in my life before, I felt I had lived there ages. It was also a time of entertaining and parties and tremendous luncheons and dinners, unless it was always like this; anyway, as part of the ‘taking up’ process or as a sharing of the burden, I found myself at a vast number of these gatherings. I was twice taken out to Mogoșoaia, the old Rumano-Byzantine palace of the Brancovans outside Bucharest that Marthe Bibesco had restored to its former magnificence: a tremendous backdrop for its astonishing owner. It stood on the edge of a wide, sad lake rustling with tall reeds, and flights of water birds settled or soared away over the reflected forest. I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. As I went back to Rumania several times, it is hard to remember whether most of these meetings occurred then or later; but thanks to returning several times, some of them I got to know really well and one in particular became my greatest friend. Under the wing of these benefactors, I would gaze with wonder at the figures flitting about the middle distance: Titulescu, the foreign minister, tall and mandarin-like, but with splendid histrionic gestures, and obviously a comic genius of the first order; Grigore Gafencu, one of the best-looking men I’ve ever seen, a person of enormous charm and courage, who succeeded Titulescu next year, with a funny and charming French wife called Nouchette (I quite saw why the absent owner of my room at Tania’s had cut out his picture and stuck it up); Antoine Bibesco, an aloof, Germanesque, leonine, sardonic figure, even, it seemed to me, a slightly sinister one, his wife Elizabeth Asquith, and an omniscient, piercing-eyed prodigy of about fourteen, their daughter Priscilla, who became a tremendous friend later, when she managed to escape from Rumania to Beirut during the war; the already half-mythical Maruca Cantacuzene, who married Enescu, the composer; Rose Covarrubias Nano – a beautiful, tragic, auburn-haired Mexican; Paul Zanesco, a brilliant, funny and very gifted and unconventional young diplomat (both of these last two, alas, died by suicide duri
ng the next few years) and his wife Hélène Yourievitch, who later settled in England; Elizabeth and Georghe Cantacuzene, the best architect in the country, hotfoot from a long journey through Persia, accounts of which made me wonder whether to change my itinerary after Constantinople; Dimitri Sturdza, with a nose, a chin and a frown like a Malatesta, a scorching lisp, a virtuosity in comic destruction and great kindness. There was M. Poklevski-Koziell, the Russian minister en poste in Bucharest during the war, whom the Revolution had cruelly stranded here; the polished and monocled Grégoire, brother of Ion Duca, who had been assassinated the year before by the Iron Guard.
I was about to mention beauty again, for as this catalogue lengthens, I am astonished by the stunning looks that surge into the lamplight in answer to their names: beautiful or good-looking for the most part, aquiline masks or engaging ugliness . . . There is always, in such societies, a favourite diplomatic couple. A year before it had been the Hauteclocques, the later General Leclerc’s brother and his wife. Now it was the Spaniards, Perico and Lily Prat, and understandably. On we go . . .
But, of course, I can’t. Not because it is too much like a list out of the Tatler. Quite the contrary, I would like it to continue a great deal longer. But it is best to stick to the rule: ‘either out [of Rumania] or dead’.[5] Of the above names, six belong to the first category, nine to the second. Of the names inside Rumania that should complete this list, one or two have disappeared into a limbo without tidings; the others, about whom their friends know all too well, exist in great distress and poverty, sentenced by geography and the post-war order, and by those that administer it. To enlarge on this pregnant theme would completely change the purpose of this narrative. Anyway, none of it had happened yet: all are still alive and free and holding glasses in their hands.
The Broken Road Page 20