Venices

by Paul Morand

  In this Slovenian countryside, that once formed the Austrian crown territories of Carinthia, Garniola and Styria, I was able to study at close quarters those Slavs who had been halted by the Alps on their march towards the Adriatic; they had rid themselves of Franz-Joseph’s jurisdiction only to find themselves confronted by the Italians, who had grown rich on Austrian booty as a result of the 1920 treaties; the Italians had gained Trieste, Istria, Dalmatia and Julian Veneto; their mandate was to prevent the Slavs descending on the Adriatic; fascism took care of this, depriving Trieste of its hinterland, denationalizing the towns, since they were unable to penetrate the countryside, dressing the Croats in black shirts and providing the Slovenes with boots.

  With the end of the Serenissima, from 1814 onwards, Trieste, the Dominante, had prospered through the decline of Venice, which no longer needed to recruit slave oarsmen for their galleys. Trieste, once made wealthy by Vienna, the Greeks, the English and the Germans, prospered little after 1920, deprived of the two-headed eagle, the city thought only italianità and was indifferent to the miseries heaped upon priests and Slovenian teachers by the Irredentists, who purged the local administration and prohibited the Slav languages; after all, had not the Europe of the Treaty of Versailles been responsible for establishing the Italian presence, firstly in order to be rid of the Slavs, and then to contain them?

  On the eve of war, these memories only served to remind one of the Slavs’ tête-à-têtes with Venice; the Slavonians, the ancestors of those on the Riva degli Schiavoni, opposite the Danieli, where Victor-Emmanuel prances; coming down from Bled, approaching Trieste, I could hear them growling about their former masters; from high on the Dinaric Alps, the old lion of St Mark was living out the last days of its Adriatic splendour.

  I would not see Venice again for another twelve years.

  NOTES

  1. Journal d’un attaché d’ambassade (Gallimard).

  2. See Guy Petrocini, Les Mutineries de 1917.

  3. Georges Auric (1899–1983) was a composer. A friend of Darius Milhaud and Erik Satie, he was one of the celebrated Groupe des Six. [Tr.]

  4. Saint-John Perse.

  5. Every salon at that time had its socialist: at Mme Straus’s, it was Léon Blum; at Mme Ménard-Dorian’s, Albert Thomas; at the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre’s, Rappoport; at Princesse Eugene Murat’s, née Violette d’Elchingen, Bracke-Desrousseaux.

  6. This was the title of Paul Morand’s second collection of short stories (after Tendres Stocks, 1921), published in 1922. It was followed by another collection, Fermé la nuit, in 1924. Both were very successful. When Morand writes of the Nuits, he is presumably referring to both these books. [Tr.]

  7. A reference to Les Croix du bois, Roland Dorgelès’s novel about the First World War, which many believed should have been awarded the 1919 Prix Goncourt instead of Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes jilles enfieurs [Tr.]

  8. October 1970. Sheltering from an autumn storm in the Café de la Fenice, I perused the newspapers; I learned of the death of Dos Passos: “My ambition is to sing the ‘Internationale’,” Dos Passos used to say, as a young man; he was then the equal of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Faulkner; Sartre considered him the best novelist of the time. From 1930 on Dos Passos opposed the “New Deal”; he considered the Second World War to be a catastrophe. “We can only regret that such an accomplished literary technician should have adopted such a narrow viewpoint and that the brilliant constellation of 1920 now shines so dimly…” (Herald Tribune, 29 September 1970). “In 1929, Dos Passos unleashed a virulent critique of capitalist society; his work had a considerable impact. The Second World War was to bring about a true conversion in the writer… At the same time as he altered his political views, Dos Passos seemed to lose his creative powers.” (Le Figaro, 30 September 1970). Yesterday evening, on France-Inter, I listened to Le Masque et la Plume: “How can Ionesco still go on telling us about his death? He’s been dead for ten years.” I’m not very lucky with my friends who have advanced opinions.

  9. The grand corps de l’État are senior civil servants recruited through the École Nationale d’Administration. [Tr.]

  10. pantouflage is a term coined for those who leave the civil service to work in the private sector. [Tr.]

  11. The Groupe des Six was a group of six young composers—Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, François Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre—that was centred around the figures of the composer Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau in the 1920s, and who became celebrated for their advanced ideas. [Tr.]

  12. He kept open house, and at his table six blue angora cats would wander round among the plates.

  13. Jacques Ange Gabriel (1698–1792). Celebrated French architect and interior designer. [Tr.]

  14. At a banquet for three thousand guests, in the Grand Council chamber, the knives, forks, tablecloths and napkins were made from sugar, as were the epergnes and the statues of doges, planets and animals, modelled on drawings by Sansovino.

  15. Morand was writing in 1970. Serge Lifar, Diaghilev’s choreographer, died in Lausanne in 1986; Boris Kochno, a man closely associated with the ballet and the theatre throughout his life, died in Paris in 1990. [Tr.]

  16. That of 1900.

  17. See also what Proust has to say about Venice in Cahier 50 (explored so cleverly by Maurice Bardèche in his Marcel Proust romancier, vol. I, 1971).

  18. Just one, at a crossroads at Rio Nuovo.

  19. A Sevillan never travels up to Madrid; an inhabitant of Lausanne doesn’t go to Geneva.

  20. Daniele Manin (1804–57) Italian statesman who, after the Revolution of 1848, became the head of the Venetian Republic. He was active in the heroic Venetian resistance against Austria. [Tr.]

  21. 1967. On the walls in Peking: “Kill the birds!”

  22. 1970. The graffiti of the P.C. (il partito comunista) has returned: seen, yesterday, on a wall in the Brenta, the following invective, worthy of Alfieri: AMERICANI SERVI DELLA MORTE (Americans, lackeys of Death!).

  III

  MORTE IN MASCHERA

  1950

  MARIA P—, a Venetian friend whom I questioned about the end of the last war, in which she herself had been involved, told me: “Venice was a dismal place during that winter of 1945; everything was rationed; news, especially: the local press was full of details about other fronts, about the German advance in Alsace, but was silent about what was taking place on our own doorstep; there were maps of the Neisse front, but nothing about the Ravenna-Bologna one. I could hear the bombs destroying Padua. There was no more electricity; the vaporetti had no fuel; there were notices on the walls providing descriptions of all sorts of lethal contraptions that fell out of the sky, which the public should not touch.

  “On the 26th of April, my Gazzettino appeared in a smaller format. On the 27th of April, it had become a single sheet of paper: Milan occupied, Mussolini arrested, Canadian troops at Mestre. On the 28th, my newspaper was nothing but a leaflet, in which the Volunteers for Freedom and its glorious fighters were restoring the glory of the Risorgimento to Italy, which had been darkened by twenty years of Nazi-fascist barbarism. The Canadian armoured-cars would not stay for long; once Venice was taken, the Allies sped off in great haste: intent on preventing Tito from spilling over into the Julian Veneto…”

  SEPTEMBER 1951

  A EUROPEAN FESTIVAL, twenty years old today… A man of taste hurled his joy at being alive into the Cannaregio. Did not Ludwig II of Bavaria drown himself in two feet of water?

  It would be absurd to talk about this latest evening like a young girl discussing her first dance, but from the moment I arrived I knew that I was coming to say farewell to a certain world; a recluse through necessity and alone these past eleven years, from the top of my glacier I suddenly fell upon a delightful skirmish, into a death knell of the imagination. A ball? A ball in Italy, as in Stendhal!

  In St Mark’s Square, there was what a Venetian Montaigne would call “the throng of foreign peoples”.
It wasn’t a matter of hairdressers or make-up girls having missed their trains or planes, of “ticket-holders” jeopardised by last-minute defections—local politics, the American press, left-wing puritanism and the resentment of those who had been excluded were all blended together here.

  On the terrace of Florian’s, which was littered with more feathers than an eiderdown, Churchill, his paintbox in a shoulder-bag, held up his fingers in a V-sign, but no one was interested; that day, V stood only for Venice.

  Whether he was conscious of it or being challenging, it was pleasing to think that a great amateur painter was parading himself, just for the sake of bringing Venice back to life, of helping those characters painted by great or lesser masters—captive goddesses on their Gobelins tapestries, who had grown bored on their museum canvases—to emerge from their frames; others could have done so, but only he dared; in a world of yellow-bellies, he was a caballero.

  As I walked around, I admired a Venice that was inflamed in red and saffron, and I was reminded of spiny rock-fish, with monstrous heads, emerging from a dish of bouillabaisse.

  We wanted to be the first, so that we could see without being seen. The porter examined our invitation cards as carefully as a cashier might look at a large denomination banknote, so many were the forged invitations circulating.

  It was too early. B. was not yet dressed; he received us with good humour, his brow beaded in sweat, and in shirtsleeves, for he had not yet donned his Gagliostro costume, being more concerned with decorating his palazzo.

  Leaning over the main balcony, which was festooned with girandole, I looked out over the spectators who had been squeezed into the narrow embankments and were hanging on to the cornices along the length of the houses. Only the church of San Geremia, lit tangentially like a backdrop in a theatre, separated the Palazzo Labia from the Grand Canal. In neighbouring windows, rented out for a fortune, heads were leaning out from stacked floors over the empty space below.

  All that Venice could muster in the way of boats and small craft was compressed into this junction of the city’s two biggest canals.

  The windows of the palazzi were draped in tapestries, and the Aubusson carpets that ran down the steps were soaked in the waters of the Canal.

  Through the exhaust fumes, the exhalations of tobacco and the smoke from the open-air rotisseries and burning torches, the projectors beamed down directly upon the first arrivals.

  “Miracolo vivente di sogno e poesia!” cried a woman selling printed handkerchiefs beneath an open parasol, as she dashed off St Mark lions, one paw resting on the gospel.

  Venice that evening added her own note of unreality to the illusions of a festival; the “guests” loomed out of the darkness into the falso giorno of a city that was herself a work of artifice. Lights concealed in corners beamed down as the caterpillar-like procession wended its way forward.

  The theme of the spectacle: Marco Polo, the prodigal son, was returning home, bringing back with him to the Adriatic Chinese Chippendales or Turks painted by Liotard.1

  Photographers from the world’s press directed their gleaming lenses at the principal performers.

  Between two figures of Barbary apes flanked by a Mandarin court, on Tartary junks more gilded than the Bucintoro, a Catalan with waxed moustaches basked in the beams of light. Damascened in silver, the giants followed. And behind them came the goyescas, their roles performed by descendants of Goya’s models, who were given an ovation from the shops below to the roofs above.

  The stream of fire that surged the length of these floating altars led towards the entrance to the Cannaregio, where those taking part in the procession set foot on a Savonnerie carpet drenched in the waters of the dark canal; upon disembarking, the women secured their footing with the help of Moorish porters who restored their delicate balance, flanked by two rows of yellow galley slaves, their oars held erect.

  Chandeliers from Murano, decorated with real flowers, as delicate as those confections of threaded sugar that adorned Venetian festivals during the Renaissance, lit up the inner courtyard; there people were already bustling about preparing their tableaux vivants of the Beauvais tapestries that hung from the walls, the famous Parties du monde.

  Without a care for the morrow, pleasure-loving Europeans, oil-rich Asians, bored Americans, kings from Candide, the jet-setters and a sea of shipowners continued to file past the church on the corner, where San Geremia did his best to restrain his lamentations: “You’re heading straight for the cemetery…” he cried. “Watch out for San Michele!”

  The masked apotheosis of that night twenty years ago was a Catherine II, a sky-blue sash across her bust, adorned, like some glacier, with diamonds from the Urals: she is no longer alive. I can see a Louis XIV in gold and white and, like some intoxicating perfume, I can still sniff his victorious presence; his sumptuous garb upset a colleague dressed in designer clothes, his hair as golden as a comet, who followed behind: today they are both dead. A Parisian Petronius who afterwards towered above the crowd of onlookers from the top of his palanquin, the very image of the glorious life, now sleeps in the peace of the graveyard. A bacchante, the English queen of Paris, dressed only in a panther skin, was led along by little Caribs; her steely eyes and her frosty laugh were extinguished forever immediately after her triumph.

  Venice is the very last refuge on earth for the curious stroller; the free spectacle is a legacy from the Romans; everything offers the opportunity for amusement, the woman at her doorway whipping up mayonnaise, the Englishwoman at her easel, the solitary singer sitting on a gondoliers’ bench, a child kicking his ball among the nibbling pigeons…

  Leaving the Labia, the festival extended out on to the square. B— had wanted it to be so; in order to return to our hotel, in the direction of the station, we had to cross the Campo San Geremia; there everything danced, apart from the houses. Acrobats were reconstructing the famous pyramid, known as The Strength of Hercules, after the wooden model in the Correr Museum. The masked beauties had begun to mix with the crowd, who admired them without any envy; for the natural democracy of the Mediterranean people makes no distinction between the piano nobile and the pavement. (The first time I had observed this for myself was in the Appenines, at Vigoleno; the villagers had invaded the castle where Maria passed from the arms of her gardener into those of her chauffeur.)

  Above our heads, a tight-rope walker dressed as a bear edged from one rooftop to another; tumblers and acrobats stood in pyramids, balancing at the level of the guttering; the prattle of the street salesmen and the jeers of the circus clowns drowned the splashing of the jousters on the canal and the shouts of the acrobats on their stilts. Jean de Castellane, emerging from a ball at the Hôtel de Ville would mutter wearily: “It’s like the street… with a roof on top.” In Venice, the street is like a palazzo without a roof.

  It took twenty years for the Palazzo Labia, which was sold, to become a sad, peninsular administrative building.

  Since these lines were written, the moving spirit of the resurgent Venice that evening has also passed on to the land of shadows.

  After the tableaux vivants come the still-lifes.

  1954 THE GIORGIONE EXHIBITION

  GIORGIONE… When I was twenty, people swore by him alone; Berenson and D’Annunzio had just discovered him. Everything was suddenly attributed to this genius who died very young; works by Titian, Cima de Conegliano, Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma the Elder and Lotto were seized and ascribed to this great unknown artist. My earliest savings were spent purchasing books by B.B. in which one unexpectedly discovered in Giorgione pre-Poussin landscapes, picturesque music, romanticism (The Tempest), the sensitivity of chiaroscuro, the Debussy-like atmosphere, created by shepherds with their theorbos, and the veils that Isadora Duncan wore; I remember a devout pilgrimage to Castelfranco (not daring to admit my disappointment at seeing his Madonna), in one of the earliest Fords…

  Today it is the Mostra in Venice. In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Pietro Zampetti barely c
onceals his disillusionment. What remains of Giorgione? Three authentic portraits! What a battleground it’s been! The critics can only agree about the Pala at Castelfranco, the Three Philosophers in Vienna and the Tempest from the Ospedale Civile; after one and a half centuries the Judith in Leningrad has been snatched by Raphael and restored to Giorgione for the time being, but doubts persist as to the Young Man in Berlin, the Young Woman in Vienna, the Madonna at the Ashmolean, the Sleeping Venus in Dresden, and the Man with an Arrow in Vienna. As for the Concert, there is talk of a collaboration with Titian… The Sick Man may be by Leonardo. Even the Three Ages in the Pitti Palace are ascribed to Lotto; the most famous paintings by Giorgione are lost… others are attributed to the friend who shared his studio, Titian, with whom he had collaborated when they were pupils of Bellini’s, and who, in his case, was lucky enough not to die at the age of thirty-three.

  Everywhere, in Italian art criticism, one hears of nothing but confusione and terreno di nebulosità, of influsso giorgionesco, or derivazione giorgionesca. Giorgione is growing ever more distant…

  Max Jacob

  APRIL 1964 CRAZY BIDDING

  ELEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning; it might have been dawn, the sky was so murky. This unwashed Venice reminds me of those postcards sent by Max Jacob, in which the cigar ash crushed into the gouache represented suburban fog. There was a biting north wind; we were walking along the Grand Canal, where the surface of the water was being pummelled by the wind, accompanied by the noise of those Italian motor engines that vibrate like a bowstring relieved of its arrow.