by Paul Morand
In reality, Proust returned to Paris in late May 1900, with his mother. In the autumn, he took his revenge; stubbornly determined, he went back to Venice, alone this time, just as he had wanted to do. He stayed there for ten days in October 1900, not at the Danieli, but at the Hôtel de l’Europe, opposite the Salute. “This mysterious visit,” writes Painter. Psychologically, perhaps, but not in a literary sense, since La Fugitive has given us some celebrated passages, describing the Narrator’s solitary wanderings “through humble campi and little abandoned rii”, in an ardent search for Venetian girls, “alone… in the middle of the enchanted city, like a character in the Arabian Nights’”.
Proust was the masked prince of a Serenissima that was far from serene, of a Venice that was very different to the city of banquets, ceremonies and fanfares that had greeted Adrien Proust, Marcel’s father, in October 1892, when as a professor of hygiene he had represented France at an international health conference that took place in Venice.
For peace of mind, I thought as I left San Lazzaro, better to choose another city to the androgynous Venice, “where you never know where the land ends, or where the water begins”, as Elstir tells Albertine.
THREE VENETIAN CAFÉS
OVER THE YEARS, three Venetian cafés have remained unchanged for me. In the mornings, it’s the one at the foot of the Accademia, under the shelter of the bridge; the glass of orange juice is on a level with the Canal. At about ten o’clock, the sun is facing you; the air is still fresh and its invigorating breeze is blown straight from the sea. Seated at this little café, almost beneath the arch of the bridge, I’m reading See Venice and Die by James Hadley Chase. It’s in the “Série Noire” series, that last refuge of the romantic… “With one hand, Don seized his adversary by the throat; with the other, he delivered a hook to the jaw; Curzio fell into the canal…”
In this secretive republic, where smothered bodies are found weighted down or are drowned discreetly off Sant’Ariano, such brutal uppercuts direct to the body ring a bizarre bell. There is a symmetry there that adds spice to the antithesis.
At night-time my café is at La Fenice. The little piazza contains two churches, the theatre, a large restaurant and the theatre bar. Something of everything has been performed in this square, from Carlo Gozzi to Georges Courteline. A thick curtain of white polygonums conceal the lanterns and filters the smoke from the bar full of hippies, with their vague, drugged expressions, looking like frogmen who have been forgotten beneath the water. The square is lit by projectors which darken the ribbon of sky and cause the sheen of the stone to dazzle and the columns to loom out of the shadow; it’s between God and the Muses as to who has most to boast about; everything here has been created by man, for man; everything is so well balanced, so well accommodated over the invisible water below and all the plans so harmoniously compatible that you feel as happy as you do when you’re drunk.
When the weather is scorching hot, there is another cafe, on the Campo San Zanipolo, where you can take a siesta behind the pages of the Gazzettino without being disturbed. Above you is the Colleone statue, and behind, the Ospedale; to left and to right is the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the Gothic pantheon of the most famous doges, Mocenigo, Morosini, Loredan, as well as the tomb of Sebastian Venier, who commanded the fleet at Lepanto, thus avenging that poor Bragadin to whom the Senate erected a monument, in this very nave, as consolation for his having been so badly treated by the Turks. In Eastern countries, there is no more unforgivable crime than to pose as a victor when one has been defeated. In the sixteenth century, Famagusta, exhausted by a lengthy siege, surrendered to the Turk. The Venetian admiral, Marcantonio Bragadin, the defender of the city, gave himself up to the pasha who very courteously invited him to dine. Bragadin, with an escort of great magnificence, arrived at the banquet beneath a red silk parasol, the Asiatic symbol of suzerainty. The pasha was so deeply offended that he had Bragadin arrested before he left the table; the admiral’s nose and ears were chopped off; his execution was postponed three times; for ten days running he was hauled before the pasha and made to kiss the ground; after which, he was flayed alive (scorticato vivo); his corpse, stuffed with straw, was paraded through the city on a cow, before being dried and shipped to the arsenal in Constantinople.
After the battle of Lepanto, the Venetians recaptured the city. Today, Bragadin lies in this beautiful Gothic nave of Santi Giovanni e Paolo.
In the seventeenth century, another Bragadin was caught slipping a note intended for the Spanish ambassador into a crack in a church bench and was hanged between two columns in the Piazzetta. A third and no less unfortunate Bragadin, an alchemist, had tried to sell the Doge a recipe for making gold; he was imprisoned, but escaped and fled to Bavaria, where he hoodwinked thousands of people and lived like a king. In Munich, the executioner decapitated him with a two-handed sword.
A century later, it was yet another Bragadin, a former Inquisitor, who became the young Casanova’s first guardian; on the pretext of teaching him the cabbala, Casanova used to hoodwink him.
From the corner of my little Zanipolo café I can see Colleone; at whom is this piercingly defiant gaze directed, at his contemporaries or posterity? How could such a resolute, well-established captain have managed to possess such unpredictable supporters that he exchanged them as often as he changed his shirt? (Even in his own time, it was said of the condottieri that they were splendid fighters, but that “they never got much blood on their shirts.”) The whole of this great rascal’s life was spent fighting for Venice against Milan, or for Sforza against the Council of Ten; they do not appear to have held this against him, because every time he deserted them the condottiere came back to renew his offers. It is hard to put oneself into the fifteenth-century frame of mind; (even in our age of mercenaries): how can those fine heads, whose images Donatello, Uccello, Antonello da Messina, La Francesca and Vinci have bequeathed to us, have been those of ordinary military leaders, without any of them being killed? Do they lie, this terrible face of the Bergamask, this supercilious head, these hawk’s eyes, this unforgiving mouth, this sly expression? Should the credit go to Colleone himself, or to his band of adventurers who were all the more loyal to him because he looked after his men and paid them well; better than he was himself; we can see from his accounts which survive that the Senate of Venice quibbled over his pay, ducat for ducat, only discharging their obligations after long delays, having first tried to obtain a reduction (each did his best to swindle the other).
These condottieri, whose fame has endured for three centuries, were worth their wages; in Northern Italy, at the end of the fifteenth century, there was a veritable market in bands, milizie who could be bought, gangs of adventurers that could be hired by the hour or at a flat rate and who priced themselves very highly, even abroad. Louis XI and Charles le Téméraire spent a long time fighting for Colleone’s assistance, offering more and more money to the doge to sub-contract him to them, which caused embarrassment to the Republic, for they did not want to offend such great princes.
Once upon a time, the Venice Gazzettino published a list of people who had fallen into the water during the day; this column was withdrawn. Are less people falling in?
Everything used to be original and different here: the Serenissima had her own calendar that began on the 1st of March; the days were counted from the time of the sunset.
The real enemy of Venice has not been the Turk, but the Italian from the mainland; the wars against the Infidel enriched the Republic; the wars against Milan or the Pope ruined her.
People rode on horseback in Venice up until the fourteenth century. On the piazza where Colleone gambols, there was once a riding school with seventy-five horses.
So as to ward off the Muslims, the two Christian merchants who stole the body of St Mark from Alexandria in Egypt in order to take it back to Venice had the idea of burying the relic in a carcass of salted pork.
That black little canal; at the far end, at the very top of the perspective, th
ere is a house of a dull red colour; as the sun goes down, its beams suddenly alight on the façade and illuminate it just as one lights a candle.
Water lends a depth to the sounds, a silky retentiveness that can last for over a minute; it is as if one was sinking into the depths.
Emerging from the Sansovino Library, where the courtyard has been glazed and turned into a reading room, I go through a door which opens on to the Procuraties, between two giants whose knees are at the height of my face. The sun is setting on the Ponte della Paglia; in the background is San Giorgio Maggiore, which the big liners steaming hurriedly through the channels before nightfall look as if they will sweep away as they pass.
The Paris newspapers have just arrived; it is six o’clock. Caught in the light of the setting sun, the mosaics of St Mark’s glisten like a thousand-year-old set of kitchen utensils.
In Venice, man has discovered a new joy: not having a car, as once at Zermatt, and, once upon a time, in Bermuda, and he is happy in a city without pavements, without traffic lights,18 without whistles, where one walks along as smoothly as the flowing waters: as I set out, I feel just like a ball, without specific gravity.
The houses of Venice are buildings that have a nostalgic longing to be boats: this is why their ground floors are often flooded. They are satisfying their fondness for a permanent home as well as their nomadic instincts.
Venice is the most expensive city in Italy, but the true pleasures she offers cost nothing: one hundred lire for the vaporetto, from the Lido to the station, by the accelerato, that is to say by the slowest service.
Pretentious householders give each other trees here.
The troops of the Directoire planted a tree of Liberty at the entrance to the ghetto.
Midday; everyone stops talking; Venetian mouths are full of spaghetti; so much seafood accompanies it that the noodles turn into seaweed.
The shop selling seashells to collectors, at the corner of rue du Dauphin.
In Venice, una sposa is not a married woman, but the wife to be; they cut corners.
A person’s life frequently resembles those palazzi on the Grand Canal where the lower floors were begun with an array of stones carved in the shapes of diamonds, and whose upper floors were hastily completed with dried mud.
Like an old lady on crutches, Venice is dependent on a forest of posts; a million of them were needed just to underpin the Salute; and that was not enough.
In very bad weather, in St Mark’s Square, the waters rise up through the joints in the paving stones; it reminds me of the Nouveau circus, in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, which, once the show was over, became a swimming-pool.
At Chioggia, the sails of the fishing boats have the same red paintings on red backgrounds as on Inca shrouds…
The palazzi on the Grand Canal, with their belts of blackened seaweed and barnacles.
These Leicas, these Zeiss; do people no longer have eyes?
Of all the traghetti, the most charming is that of Santa Maria del Giglio, with its gondoliers who play cards beneath the red virgin vines in October. You have to wait until a hand of piquet is over before daring to climb on board.
Squeezed into the rii of Venice like a bookmark between the pages; certain streets are so narrow that Browning used to complain that he could not open his umbrella in them.
The finest location for a shoe-shine boy is at the exit from the Mercerie. While he polishes, this is what you see: the flight lines of St Mark’s, lined with the ogives of the Doges’ Palace; in the foreground, the two porphyry lions polished for a thousand years by the stirrup-less trotting of young Venetians; to the right, the Campanile casts its shadow over my foot. At the far end of the perspective, like a backdrop, San Giorgio Maggiore, immense… until an oil tanker interposes itself, reducing the scale to the image of a painting at the bottom of a plate; the bows of the tanker, which is more vast than the church, are already level with the Danieli, whereas the stern has scarcely passed the Dogana.
Venice has run herself aground in a place that was forbidden: therein lay her genius.
The Venetians invented income tax, statistics, state pensions, book censorship, the lottery, the ghetto and glass mirrors.
Montaigne called on a literary courtesan who read him an endless elegy on her work; Montaigne would have done better to catch the pox.
The cats are the vultures of Venice.
During the seventeenth century, following an earthquake, the Grand Canal ran dry for two hours.
Colleone’s horse: one might criticise Verrocchio for the tail, which is a little low. And how could the horseman have achieved that raising of the forearm when his spurs are so far from the horse’s girth?
That box for anonymous denunciations that was placed at the entrance to the Doges’ Palace, and which has a lion’s mouth at its opening, is famous; the inquisitors put those bocche di leone not just in the Palace, but in every district of the city. It is not lions that should figure on the Serenissima’s coat of arms, but vipers.
Duse’s first role was that of Cosetta… (Festival of Theatre, Venice, 1969).
Who was it who described Reynaldo Hahn in Venice thus: “An upright piano, a great deal of smoke, a little music”?
A Parisian man of letters. In 1834, as he disembarked at the Danieli, where did Alfred de Musset run off to? To the Missiglia reading room, to see whether La Revue des Deux Mondes had arrived.
Springtime: let others repaint the fronts of their houses; in March, a Venetian first of all scrapes the bottom of his gondola.
Where better than Venice can Narcissus contemplate himself?
Wagner, listening to his own music, at the Café Quadri…
A Venetian never visits the rest of Italy.19
The Venetian dialect is distinguished by the letter Z; the Grand Canal itself is shaped like a Z.
1934
“VENICE, the mask of Italy” (Byron).
In front of the Scuola San Marco, I come across Fulgence, accompanied by Bernardine, his wife; they are staying near the Accademia.
Taking me to one side:
“I’ve moved Françoise into the Lido and I’ve persuaded Coralie to conceal herself in Padua”, Fulgence confesses to me. “My two ladies don’t know one another, fortunately. As for me, I’m keeping Venice to myself, with Bernardine.”
The fire-guard of marriage…
1934
HEARD ABOUT the death of Stavisky in Venice. The USSR joins the UN. Death of King Albert and the assassination of Dollfuss. Night of the Long Knives. Hindenburg. Hitler master of Germany. Publication of L’Armée de métier, by de Gaulle, with an introduction by Pétain.
How does one find these facts in the treasury of History? The doge threw his ring into the sea; who would have thought that fisherman would discover this ring in a fish’s belly, and that one day we would be able to see it in the Treasury of St Mark’s?
At the Institut, I come across an ancient and delightful paper by the Comte de Mas Latrie: De l’empoisonnement politique dans la république de Venise; from which it emerges that people were assassinated at the Doges’ Palace up until the second half of the eighteenth century; not only did the Senate frequently appear to be interested in the proposals of the pirates, but it let it be known and discussed advance payments, which varied according to the person who was to be eliminated, a sultan or a simple Albanian chieftain. Who provided the poison, and what was it?
At which point, nineteenth-century Venetian scholars reply to French accusations: “What about your kings? What about Louis XI? Did not your François I wish for the death of Pope Clement VII? Our word potione (a potion) has a double meaning in French: it’s ‘poison’…”
THE RIALTO MARKET
DESPITE THE ROLLING and swaying, the peaches in their baskets do not move; they’re plump and inedible. As for the fish, they’re not very big, with the exception of the tuna and swordfish, but what a tang of the high seas! They were caught the previous day and are untouched by ice and gamma rays, and hav
e not been brushed with penicillin; after Greece, England, La Rochelle and the Hanseatic ports, after Antwerp, Portugal and Venice, fish from anywhere else seems tasteless.
Herbs, little used elsewhere, play an important part in Italian cooking, and they are sold by toothless old herbalists; a fusion of plucked leaves, sedge from the marshes, sweet watercress, lemon balm, edible lichens; ten varieties of chervil, limitless amounts of mint, oregano, marjoram and little seasoning bags which, once they are crushed, make up the sauces, such as that salsa verde one adds to boiled dishes, that is unknown even in Provence.
In the years that I lived far away from Venice, Denise would bring me back gondolier’s shoes, made of black velvet and with rope soles; you could buy them at the Rialto for a few lire; her two Charles, both elegant creatures, would wear nothing else.
1931
IN 1816 Countess Albrizzi gave a ball here at which Byron fell in love with Teresa Gamba, Countess Guiccioli; he had first met her three months earlier; three months of incubation, then, on that evening, the mutual coup de foudre.
What followed is well-known: Guiccioli, in love and consumptive, took refuge in Ravenna, where her elderly husband (there were fifty years between them) took all the blame upon himself, and where the Countess’s father, Count Gamba, came to beg Byron not to abandon his beloved daughter, who was coughing herself to death. The reason I am recalling this famous affair is in order to repeat Byron’s final words; exasperated (particularly since he found himself dragged into a political conspiracy involving the Italian family) Byron sighed: “I only wanted to be her escort; how could I have known that this affair would turn into an English novel?” (that is to say domestic and tearful).