by Paul Morand
In Padua there is a very old mansion, dating from 1256, which is still known as the Palazzo degli Anziani: it is the very image of my adolescence; I lived in the past; I dwelt among people from a bygone age; I even went so far as to view the world through the eyes of the “Ancestors”. I confided in my father: “When I gaze at the setting sun my sunsets are those of Turner; my clouds are Courbet’s skies, my ceilings those of Tiepolo; I can visualise no other thaws than those in paintings by Monet, and all my women have the belly of a Rodin or the legs of a Maillol; I should like to be able to take delight in a pink rose next to a green one, without having to thank Matisse; here we are at Saint-Séverin: I am unable to see it through my own eyes, I need those of your Huysmans. Where do I fit into all this?”
The famous generation gap never struck me as being hard to bridge, such was the natural understanding between my parents and myself, such the pleasure I took in following them along paths they never sought to impose upon me. Their pace of life was my own; when we were travelling, we would spend hours and days sitting side by side on deck-chairs, not attempting to make contact with the other hotel guests, and understanding one another without the need to speak. I was still out of touch with my own times; what I was experiencing was the world of my family, the air that I breathed was theirs.
Everything was owed to the Ancients, without one ever being able to match them; firstly, one owed them gratitude: I had always noticed my father avoiding walking on the Persian rug in the studio, out of respect for an object from the Middle Ages: “This rug has been handed down to me, I have a duty towards it,” he would say. Beauty alone mattered; exactly the reverse of modern times, when beauty will remain exiled until a man hungers for it once more.
I was responsible only to myself, without having any attachments or duties apart from very close blood ties. On my father’s side there was nobody left; I had no dead to mourn, no dead to share my life. My mother came from a family of pedigree bourgeoisie, from whom her love for her husband had drawn her apart, but who retained their position; once a week, to preserve the convention, I would go to Sunday dinner at my maternal grandmother’s house in the rue Marignan. (I can see the ritual still: decanted bottles of claret, with little heart-shaped pieces of filter paper around the neck of each carafe, on which you could read the growth and the vintage; fruit bowls heaped with cherries and strawberries, with not a single stalk showing; a few adages continue to hover in my memory such as: “It’s better reheated the next day.”) This section of my family populated the Cour des Gomptes6 with advisers, instructors and auditors: it was the provinces, but in Paris. I discovered the true Paris at our home; here people were classified only by their talents or their originality. On Wednesdays during the winter, there were dinner parties at home; I can see my father, as slim as a Valois, with his curled moustache and the ribbon of his monocle dangling against his starched dinner shirt. “Everybody should sit where they want” was the rule. Members of the Société des Artistes français and of the Institut were abhorred, exceptions being made for Gounod, Pierné and Massenet, who had composed the music for Drames sacrés (1893), Izeyl (1894) and other plays written by my father, as well as Grisélidis (1891), a neo-medieval mystery play, which had been a triumph for Bartet at the Comédie-Française and which in 1901 was made into a comic opera, with music by Massenet.
Certain Wednesdays were reserved for Italian music: Tosti, a sort of blue-eyed Prince of Wales, who wrote waltzes and ballads that were popular all over Europe, or the composer Isidore de Lara, a good-natured giant of a man, who came with Litvinne or Héglon, or with the celebrated tenor Tamagno; after dinner they made the glass cupboard in the studio vibrate with a song from Messaline, the libretto for which had been written by my father and Armand Silvestre:
Viens aimer les nuits sont trap brèves,
Viens rêver les jours sont trop courts…7
In Auguste Rodin’s case, he would only come to lunch (from about 1903–1908); peeping out of his yellow-white beard, his priapic nose seemed to me to emerge from his pubis; I would see his faun’s ears rising from above a mass of spindle trees in our garden, the earthly paradise of the marble depot, on the Quai d’Orsay; ever since 1880, the sculptor had had his studio there, lent to him by the State; we used to live in an adorable little house in the rue de l’Université; here Rodin found shelter from Camille Claudel’s demented screams and from the reproaches of Rose, who waited for him every evening at Meudon; this domestic hell was his true Porte de l’Enfer, the vast grey, dusty plaster maquette of which I can still see, in his studio, along with his Ugolin or his Enfant prodigue, which hung, untouched for a quarter of a century, from the double-doors, covered with spiders’ webs. The Rodin of the early years was already a distant figure; the one who took his leave, after lunch, would return to his studio, where Isadora Duncan, or those Americans who queued to have their bust sculpted at a cost of forty thousand gold francs, awaited him. I did not see Rodin again until July 1914, in London; he had come over for the day to open an exhibition, accompanied by the Comtesse Greffulhe; caught off guard by the mobilization, and with the ferry service interrupted, he had been obliged to spend the night there, without any underwear, he was wrapped up in two of the Comtesse’s nightdresses, looking very “Guermantes”, the sleeves tied about his Praxitelean chest.
Comtesse Greffulhe
THE RHÔNE VALLEY, 1906
THAT MORNING everything was frozen: the landscape, the sun, the sky, the hotel, mankind itself, at one in the ecstasy of no longer being merely a fragment of solidified joy, burning with cold; the swans, which had fallen asleep, awoke with their webbed feet cleft to the ice. So winter was not just sitting with one’s feet up, chilblains and stiff ears, but something which had been hidden from me until now: a sort of white summer, but so barren and unproductive that it was in total contrast to the other summer, which was alive with streams and harvests. The word hibernation did not yet exist for me, but I sensed already that the cold ensured a long life; on the thermometer the mercury had disappeared and had taken refuge in its little glass bulb; all that was left of the deciduous trees was their outline; the branches were nothing but airborne roots. I yearned for high places; for the life of a mountain guide, a timber sawyer, a botanist or a cowhand, anything, rather than going back down into the valley. I have never ever forgotten that sudden experience of the universal. Never had I existed so fully. What plenitude! I felt overcome with a simple joy; nothing other than complete harmony with nature, with the world and with the order of things. Now that I was certain that a single moment could be motionless, there was nothing else that I wanted; in a flash, I realised that true riches are priceless.
Much later, I would understand my wonderment at beholding these virgin peaks; thanks to them, I could escape from a prison; but what was this prison?
I had been brought up in the grimy Paris of Zola, along the tar-blacked streets of Whistler, among Maupassant’s gloomy peasants, in Flaubert’s sombre countryside, surrounded by hot-air stoves; and, all of a sudden, everything was white! This magical mirror enabled me to glimpse my future life; elemental forces which had hitherto been dormant radiated forth. In a trice, I was at the heart of my being.
Opposite me, on the frontier of Savoy, were sheer ridges that were repelling the North with all their might; at my feet was the blue vapour of the lake, nestling against the Jura, that long snake-like spine, scaled with ice and fir forests; to my right, the terraced promontories of Vevey, Clarens and La Tour, their headlands plunging into the water below which sparkled in the sunlight; behind me were Les Avants, Sonloup and Jaman, their brecciated steps sloping away, snatching up their crumbling soils in order to hurl them into the Rhône, despite the efforts of the chalets and the stony spurs to cling to the horizontal.
Did I know what threatening footsteps I was trying to escape from? Running away, but to do what? To do nothing. I can recognize this wild indolence among young people today; recent surveys among sixteen-year-old boys confirm that, for
them, leisure comes before food, where they live, or household appliances… That day, I was already experiencing what they would feel later, in their millions; I was so light-headed that I felt I could fly away from the thick soup of smoke that stifled the Rhône valley and polluted the lake.
My indecisive character gave way to a resounding faith: I would escape; I did not know what I would do, but I could sense that my life would veer towards abroad, towards elsewhere, towards the light; not tomorrow, immediately; which explains this readiness to seize the moment and this haste of a man in a hurry that have been with me for so long; to escape from man was to escape from Time; I could feel an animal power within me which death alone would cure. “You’re a brute,” Giraudoux used to tell me. At the same time there began that beat of a pendulum whose rhythm has never left me, a liking for drawing closer, that is in contrast to this passion for space that was ushered in by puberty; the happiness that living in a narrow bedroom gives as opposed to the intoxication of the desert, the sea and the steppes.
I loathed doors and enclosures; frontiers and walls offended me.
ITALY, 1907
WHEN I RAN AWAY for the first time, not yet twenty years old, I threw myself upon Italy as if on the body of a woman. At Cap-Martin, my grandmother encouraged me to admire from afar her idol, the Empress Eugénie, as she went out for her walks (“What shoulders!”); I would follow her to the roulette tables at Monte Carlo, managing to get into the gaming rooms by slipping beneath the balustrade, since I was under the legal age. With four or five gold coins in my pocket, my first and last winnings, I took advantage of a reduction in fares to mark the opening of the recently completed Simplon tunnel, and I set off for Naples to meet the Italian steamship on which Giraudoux was sailing, as he arrived back from Harvard.
At Naples I would rediscover the same physical and moral euphoria I had experienced at Caux; it was during a solitary lunch beneath an arbour, above San Elmo, I watched as the sounds of men working rose up from below me. There was nothing happening, I was expecting nothing. I was giving nothing, and yet I was receiving everything. Millions of years had stood in wait in order to offer me this sublime gift: a morning beneath an arbour. There was no reason why this should not continue. A tradition of very long standing ensured that everything, myself included, had a predestined place. I was embarking on life intending to obtain what was my due: Titian and Veronese, who had only painted in order to be admired by me, awaited me; Italy had been preparing for my visit for centuries.
It seemed to me only natural to reap what others had sown. High above the lines of washing that draped the Neapolitan streets, I floated in the unreality of a sky that gulped in the smoky fumes of Vesuvius. This detachment, this contemplative egoism and this passivity did not spare me from boredom; short-cuts have very much extended my travels, even if laziness has lengthened my life. I flitted about among people, I fluttered around things, I ricocheted off hard surfaces, fleeing all attachments, somewhat unsure of my feelings and entirely devoted to myself. A fervent pilgrim, I was dazzled by everything. “I shall have to return to France, UNFORTUNATELY” reads a postcard I came across, sent to my mother at the time. Later on, I used to feel ashamed about such things, up until the day last year when my eye fell upon an interview with the year’s top student at the Centrale8 in Le Figaro, and I read the following: “Your plans for the future?” “I’m leaving to spend a year in the United States, at Berkeley.” “And afterwards?” “After that… France, UNFORTUNATELY.” Yesterday’s blasphemy is an everyday remark nowadays. My offspring agreeing with me, sixty years later.
LOMBARDY, 1908
DISCOVERING NAPLES was like giving the sun its real name; living in Lombardy, there to await our entry into the Veneto, was something entirely different, it was like the transition from friendship to love.
In the summer, my parents descended upon Italy as if they were visiting the Holy Land, ready to receive the Law there. It was a world of museums, art galleries and libraries, among which could be found certain buildings that served the public—factories, railway stations, or farms—necessary for life’s commodities. On our travels we encountered a different kind of humanity, one which spoke in a strange language that was to do with insolvencies, profits, strikes, salaries and yield per hectare. All these were meaningless to us.
We spent a few weeks at Tremezzo, where the lake was flecked with water-lily leaves. In these summer gardens, stretched out under the shade of magnolia trees with their lemon-scented flowers, we followed in the footsteps of Milanese cardinals who had walked here since the sixteenth century; by Lake Como we awaited the end of the Canicula, of those days of hellish heat, which in Lombardy, along the shores of the Po, cause even the leaves of the willows to become scorched.
One day I set off from Tremezzo to Bellagio, swimming the two kilometres across the lake through water so viscous that as I moved through it I felt as if I were stroking a fish.
During the last days of August, I took refuge in the chestnut groves of the Tremezzina, which were as chill as a marble by Thorvaldsen; I can see myself in the slow train that brought me back from some trip to the Ticino where I had gone to stock up with cigarettes, looking down upon the wonderfully phosphorescent stars formed by the chestnut blossom. I have never forgotten the smell of that chestnut grove in the Tremezzina, the same forest that Fabrice crossed9 on his way to Waterloo. It was in Tremezzo that I acquired a liking for chestnuts, for those wonderful hedgehogs, and for the tree’s sickle-like leaves. I was to live in a chestnut grove again in 1944; in Montreux, for three years, I lived off chestnuts that had been piled up, their burrs still on, in a bath that had fallen into disuse because the gas bills had not been paid; the chestnut grove of “Maryland” sloped down from the deserted villa as far as the first roofs of Territet, before disappearing into Lake Geneva; chestnut trees like those which La Nouvelle Héloïse places at Clarens, almost wholly destroyed today to make way for vineyards. As soon as September arrived, we set off for Venice; the surroundings changed; the cypress trees by Lake Como gave way to the factory chimneys of the Lombardy plain; all along the railway lines the vines were no longer being cut by hand; from the carriage window, Milan was paving the way for a new industrial Italy; what was the point of so many tyres, ball-bearings and idiotic industries? I lived with my back turned to the future; could the future be anything other than an immanent past?
A stop-over in Milan; in those days the favourite hotel of French visitors was the Albergo di Francia; my father walked into the bedroom; standing on the chimney-piece was a hideous group of bronze statues decorating the top of an Italian clock of the worst Victor-Emmanuel I period: “I could never get to sleep in the presence of such a horror! Let’s be on our way!” my father exclaimed. So we set off again for Venice, without eating or sleeping. It wasn’t a pose: my father was a true product of the age of Ruskin; he had known William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, and the concept of liberty, which invested the most everyday object with the dignity of a work of art; for him, putting up with ugliness in our home was to sully oneself. I have seen Lalique, adopting Tolstoy’s example, sewing slippers for himself, and Gallé building his own ovens, as did later Brancusi, who cooked steaks for us in them. My father designed the costumes and the scenery for his plays; he even painted a medieval stage curtain, in the style of Burne-Jones, for the Comédie Française.
1908,
VENICE SEEN THROUGH A
REAR-VIEW MIRROR
VENICE, which Proust called “the Mecca of the religion of Beauty”. Eight years earlier, Proust, whom I did not know at the time (although my father used to meet him at Madeleine Lemaire’s, as I would discover from Proust himself ten years later) had seen Venice through Ruskin’s eyes, but already he was aware how exacting this religion of Beauty was. “Ruskin did not conceive of Beauty as an object of pleasure, but as a reality that was more important than life…” Had Proust stopped at Jean Santeuil, he would have been nothing more than a hedonist; but he suffered, he searche
d beyond Beauty, he produced Swann. This is why our stern age forgives him for his duchesses. Naïve and foolish, it never occurred to me that we have duties towards Beauty; for me, she was just a way of evading the moral code; and Ruskin, as Bloch says, was a frightful bore.