The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

by Edmund de Waal

  Emmy was shown round her new apartment, the Nobelstock, by Viktor. Her comment was to the point. ‘It looks,’ she said, ‘like the foyer of the Opera.’ The couple decided to stay upstairs on the second great floor of the Palais, a floor with fewer painted ceilings, less marble around the doors. Ignace’s rooms were kept for the occasional party.

  The newly married couple, my great-grandparents, have a balcony view onto the Ringstrasse, a balcony view for the new century. And the netsuke – my sleeping monk flat over his begging bowl and the deer scratching his ear – have a new home.

  15. ‘A LARGE SQUARE BOX SUCH AS CHILDREN DRAW’

  The vitrine needs to go somewhere. The couple have decided to leave the Nobelstock as a monument to Ignace; and Viktor’s mother Émilie, thank God, has decided to go back to her grand hotel in Vichy, where she can take the waters and be horrible to her maids. So they have a whole floor of the Palais for themselves. It is already full of pictures and furniture, of course, and there are the servants – including Emmy’s new maid, a Viennese girl called Anna – but it is their own.

  After a long honeymoon in Venice they have to make some decisions. Should these ivories go in the salon? Viktor’s study isn’t quite big enough. Or the library? He vetoes his library. In the corner of the dining-room next to the Boulle sideboards? Each of these places has its own problems. This is not an apartment of the ‘most pure Empire’, like Charles’s delicate calibrations of objects and pictures in Paris. This is an accumulation of stuff from four decades of affluent shopping.

  The great glass case of beautiful things has a particular difficulty for Viktor, as it comes from Paris, and he doesn’t want it sitting and reminding him of an elsewhere, another life. The thing is that Viktor and Emmy are not quite sure about Charles’s gift. They are wonderful, these little carvings, funny and intricate, and it is obvious that his favourite cousin Charles has been exceedingly generous. But the malachite-and-gilt clock and the pair of globes from cousins in Berlin, and the Madonna, can be placed straight away – salon, library, dining-room – and this great vitrine cannot. It is too odd and complicated, and it is also rather large.

  Emmy at eighteen, startlingly beautiful and fabulously dressed, knows her mind. Viktor defers to her concerning where all these wedding-presents should go.

  She is very slim with light-brown hair and beautiful grey eyes. She has a sort of luminosity, that rare quality of someone who is at home in the way she moves. Emmy moves beautifully. She has a good figure and wears dresses that show off the narrowness of her waist.

  As a beautiful young baroness, Emmy has the full hand of social accomplishments. She has been brought up in two places, in the city and in the country, and has the skills for both. Her childhood in Vienna was in the Scheys’ Palais, an austere piece of grand neoclassicism, a quick ten minutes’, walk away from her new home with Viktor, facing out across to the Opera over a statue of Goethe looking extremely cross. She has a charming younger brother called Philippe, universally known as Pips, and two little sisters Eva and Gerty, who are still in the nursery.

  Until she was thirteen, Emmy had a meek and biddable English governess, who was keen to keep the peace in the schoolroom. And then nothing. Her formal education is full of terra incognita as a result. There are great swathes about which she knows practically nothing – history being one – and she has a particular laugh when these things are mentioned.

  What she does know are her languages. She is charming in both English and French, which she speaks interchangeably at home with her parents. She knows any number of children’s poems in both languages and can quote great sections of “The Hunting of the Snark” and ‘Jabberwocky’. And she has her German, of course.

  Every weekday afternoon in Vienna since she was eight has included a dancing hour, and she is now a wonderful dancer, a favourite partner at balls for ardent young men, not least for that waist tied with a bright sash of silk. Emmy can skate like she dances. And she has learnt how to smile with interest as her parents’ friends talk about opera and theatre at the late suppers they give, this being a household where business is not to be discussed. There are lots of cousins in their lives. Some of them, like the young writer Schnitzler, are rather avant-garde.

  Emmy knows how to listen with a particular animation, sensing when to ask a question, when to laugh, when to turn away with the tilt of her head to another guest and leave her interlocutor looking at the nape of her neck. She has a lot of admirers, some of whom have experienced her sudden squalls. Emmy has a considerable temper.

  For this life in Vienna she needs to know how to dress. Her mother, Evelina, only eighteen years older, also dresses impeccably and wears only white. White all year round: from her hats to the boots that she changes three times a day in the dusty summer. Clothes are a passion that her parents have indulged her in, partly because Emmy has an aptitude for them. Aptitude is too flat a description. It is more driven, more vocational, this way she has of changing one part of what she is wearing to make herself look different from other girls.

  There was a lot of dressing up in Emmy’s youth. I found an album from a weekend party where the girls had been photographed dressed up as characters from Old Master paintings. Emmy is Titian’s Isabella d’Este in velvet and fur, while other cousins are pretty Chardin and Pieter de Hooch servant-girls. I make a note of Emmy’s social dominance. Another photograph shows the handsome young Hofmannsthal and the teenage Emmy dressed up as Renaissance Venetians at a wedding masque. There was also a party where they all dressed up as characters from a Hans Makart painting, the perfect opportunity for wide-brimmed hats with feathers.

  Before and after marriage Emmy’s other life is in Czechoslovakia, at the Schey country house in Kövecses, two hours by train from Vienna. Kövecses was a very large and very plain eighteenth-century house (‘a large square box such as children draw’, in the words of my grandmother) set in a flat landscape of fields, with belts of willows, birch forests and streams. A great river, the Váh, swept past, forming one of the boundaries to the estate. It was a landscape in which you could see storms passing far away and never even hear them. There was a swimming lake with fretted Moorish changing huts, lots of stables and lots of dogs. Emmy’s mother Evelina bred Gordon setters – the first bitch arriving in a slatted crate on the Orient Express, the great train stopping at the tiny halt on the estate. And there were her father’s German pointers for the shooting – hares and partridge. Her mother enjoyed shooting and, as the time of a confinement grew nearer, used to go out on the partridge shoots with her midwife following her as well as the gamekeeper.

  In Kövecses, Emmy rides. She stalks deer and shoots and walks with the dogs. As I struggle to bring the two parts of her life together, I am also slightly aghast. My picture of Jewish life in fin-de-siècle Vienna is perfectly burnished, mostly consisting of Freud and vignettes of acerbic and intellectual talk in the cafés. I’m rather in love with my ‘Vienna as crucible of the twentieth century’ motif, as are many curators and academics. Now I am in the Vienna part of the story, I am listening to Mahler and reading my Schnitzler and Loos, and feeling very Jewish myself.

  My image of the period certainly doesn’t stretch to include Jewish deer-stalking or Jewish discussion of the merits of different gun-dogs for different game. I am at sea, when my father rings me up to tell me that he has found something else to add to the growing file of photographs. I can tell that he is rather pleased with himself and his own vagabonding on this project. He comes down to my studio for lunch and produces a small white book from a supermarket bag. I’m not sure what it is, he says, but it should be in your ‘archive’.

  The book is bound in very soft white suede, sunned and worn away on the spine. The cover bears the dates 1878 and 1903. It is closed with a yellow silk ribbon, which we untie.

  Inside are twelve beautiful pen-and-ink images of members of the family on separate cards, each edged with silver, each with its own carefully designed frame in Secessionist patterns, e
ach with a cryptic quatrain in German or Latin or English, part of a poem or a snatch of a song. We work out that it must be a present for Baron Paul and Evelina’s silver wedding anniversary from Emmy and her brother Pips. White suede for their mother, who was always so particular about white: hats, gowns, pearls and white suede boots.

  One of the silver anniversary pen-and-ink cards is of Pips in uniform playing Schubert at the piano: he has received the education that Emmy never had, with proper tutors. He has a wide circle of friends in the arts and the theatre, is a man around town in several capitals and is as impeccably dressed as his sister. A childhood memory of my great-uncle Iggie’s was seeing into Pips’s dressing-room at a hotel in Biarritz where they all spent a summer. The door of the wardrobe was open, and hanging on a rail were eight identical suits. They were all white: an epiphany, a vision of heaven.

  Pips playing the piano. An image from Joseph Olbrich’s Secessionist album, 1903

  Pips appears as the protagonist of a highly successful novel of the time by the German Jewish novelist Jakob Wassermann, a sort of Mitteleuropa version of Buchan’s Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps. Our aesthetic hero is a pal of archdukes and manages to outshoot anarchists. He is erudite about incunabula and Renaissance art, rescues rare jewels and is loved by everyone. The book is viscous with infatuation.

  Another pen-and-ink sketch in this album shows Emmy dancing at a ball, leaning back as a slim young man leads her round the floor. A cousin, I presume, as this willowy dancer is most certainly not Viktor. One drawing shows Paul Schey almost obscured by the Neue Freie Presse, an owl sitting in deep reserve behind him on his chair. Evelina skating. A pair of legs in striped bathing shorts disappearing into the swimming lake at Kövecses. Each picture also contains a little image of a bottle of eau-de-vie or wine or schnapps and a few bars of music.

  The cards are the work of Josef Olbrich. He was the artist at the heart of the radical Secession movement and designer of its pavilion in Vienna with an owl relief and a golden dome of laurel leaves, a quiet, elegant place of refuge with walls that he described as ‘white and gleaming, holy and chaste’. Since we are in Vienna, where everything is subject to intense scrutiny, it also receives vitriol. It is the grave of the Mahdi, say the wags, the crematorium. That filigree dome is ‘a head of cabbage’. I give Olbrich’s album suitable scrutiny, but it is a lost acrostic puzzle, utterly unknowable. Why the eau-de-vie, why that piece of music? It is very Viennese, an urbane view of their country life in Kövecses. It is a window into Emmy’s world, a whole warm world of family jokes.

  How could you possibly not know you had this? I ask my father. What else have you got in the suitcase under your bed?

  16. ‘LIBERTY HALL’

  I feel confident that there will be less to puzzle over in Emmy von Ephrussi’s married life in Vienna. This is city life with a very different kind of family and with its own unshakeable rhythm, just ten minutes’ walk away from her childhood home in the other Palais.

  The new rhythm started soon after the return from honeymoon, when Emmy discovered she was pregnant. Elisabeth, my grandmother, was born nine months after the wedding. Viktor’s mother Émilie – in my portrait, suave and implacable in her pearls – died in Vichy soon after, at the age of sixty-four. She was buried in Vichy, rather than returning to Ignace’s great mausoleum, and I wonder if she planned this final separation.

  After Elisabeth comes Gisela, born three years later, and Ignace – young Iggie – is the third. They are carefully named Viennese children from careful Jewish parents. Elisabeth is named after the late adored Empress, Gisela after Archduchess Gisela, the Emperor’s daughter. Iggie is the son and that is straightforward. Ignace Léon is named after his late grandfather and after his rich, childless, duel-list Parisian uncle, and after his late great-uncle Léon. The Parisians have only had daughters. Thank God there is a son for the Ephrussi at last. And that the Palais is big enough to have nurseries and schoolrooms out of earshot.

  The Palais has its diurnal pace, quickening and slackening for the servants. There is lots of carrying up and down the corridors. Endless carrying of hot water to the dressing-room, coals to the study, breakfast to the morning-room, the morning newspaper to the study, covered dishes, laundry, telegrams, post three times a day, messages, candlesticks for dinner, the evening newspaper delivered to Viktor’s dressing-room.

  There is a pattern too for Anna, Emmy’s lady’s maid. It starts when she brings the silver can of warm water at half-past seven and the tray of English tea to Emmy’s bedroom. It only ends late at night when she has brushed Emmy’s hair and fetched her a glass of water and a plate of charcoal biscuits.

  In the courtyard of the Palais a fiacre stands attendant all day with a coachman in livery. There are two black carriage horses, Rinalda and Arabella. A second carriage waits to take the children to the Prater or Schönbrunn. The coachmen wait. The porter, Alois, stands by the huge doors to the Ringstrasse ready to open the gates.

  Vienna means dinner parties. There are endless discussions of placement. Every afternoon the butler and an assistant footman lay the table with a tape measure. There are discussions of whether it is safe to get ducks from Paris, if they come crated the day before on the Orient Express. There are florists, a dinner with a row of small orange trees in pots bearing hollowed-out oranges filled with parfait. The children are allowed to watch through a peephole as all the guests arrive.

  There are afternoons at home receiving guests, with a tea table on which a silver samovar steams on a large silver tray: teapot, cream jug and sugar basin to hand, and trays of open sandwiches and iced cakes from Demel, the palace of confectionery in Kohlmarkt near the Hofburg. Ladies leave their furs in the hall, and the officers their képis and swords, and gentlemen carry their top hats and their gloves and place them on the floor next to their chairs.

  There is a pattern to the year too.

  January is a chance to get away from wintry Vienna. Nice or Monte Carlo with Viktor. The children are left behind. They visit Viktor’s uncle Maurice and aunt Béatrice Ephrussi in the new pink Villa Île-de-France in Cap Ferrat – now the Villa Ephrussi-Rothschild. Admire the collections of French pictures, French Empire furniture, French porcelain. Admire the improvements in the gardens, where parts of the hillside are being removed and a canal is being dug in imitation of the Alhambra. The twenty gardeners all wear white.

  April is Paris with Viktor. The children are left behind. They stay chez Fanny in the Hôtel Ephrussi in the place d’Iéna, and there is lots of shopping for Emmy and days at the offices of Ephrussi et Cie for Viktor. Paris is not the same.

  Charles Ephrussi, beloved owner of the Gazette, Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, supporter of artists, friend of poets, collector of the netsuke, Viktor’s favourite cousin, has died on 30th September 1905 at the age of fifty-five.

  The notice in the newspapers begs those who have not received an invitation not to come to the funeral. The pall-bearers – his brothers, Théodore Reinach, Marquis de Cheveniers – were in tears. There have been numerous obituaries, talking of his ‘délicatesse naturelle’ and his uprightness and sense of propriety. The Gazette has published a memorial obituary surrounded by a black border:

  It was with stupor and profound sorrow that all those who knew him learnt – at the end of last September – of the sudden illness and then the death of the lovable and good man, of the highest of intelligence that was Charles Ephrussi. In Parisian society, particularly in the world of arts and letters, he had developed numerous friendships with people who succumbed quite naturally to the charm and certainty of his manner, the elevation of his spirit and the gentleness of his heart. Anybody who knocked at his door witnessed his good charming grace, welcoming young artists as he did their elders, he had befriended – we can affirm it without a single demur – all those who had approached him.

  Proust writes his condolences to the obituarist. On reading this obituary in the Gazette, ‘those who did not know M. Ephrussi wi
ll come to love him, and those who did know him will be full of recollections’. Charles has left Emmy a golden necklace in his will. He has left a pearl collar to Louise, and his estate to his niece Fanny Reinach, who is married to the Hellenist scholar.

  And, shockingly, Charles’s brother Ignace Ephrussi, mondain, dueller, amateur de la femme, has also died of a poor heart at the age of sixty. He is remembered as a perfect rider, to be seen on his grey early in the morning in the Bois de Boulogne saddled à la russe. Generous and punctilious, he has left the three young Ephrussi children, Elisabeth, Gisela and Iggie, 30,000 francs each in his will and he has even left Emmy’s younger sisters, Gerty and Eva, something too. The brothers have been buried together in Montmartre in the family tomb alongside their long-dead parents and their beloved sister.

  Soon after visiting Paris – much emptier without the animation of Charles and Ignace – comes the summer. This starts in July with the Gutmanns, Jewish financiers and philanthropists, Viktor and Emmy’s closest friends. They have five children, so Elisabeth, Gisela and Iggie are invited for several weeks to their country house, Schloss Jaidhof, fifty miles from Vienna. Viktor stays put in Vienna.

  August is Switzerland at the Chalet Ephrussi with the Parisian cousins Jules and Fanny. Take the children and Viktor. Do very little. Try to keep the children quiet. Hear about Paris. Take the boat out onto Lake Lucerne from the boathouse where the Russian imperial flag flies, with one of the footmen to do the rowing. Go to the Concours Hippique in Lucerne with Jules in the motor-car to see the show-jumping, with ices at Hugeni afterwards.