The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [11]
I’m standing outside Leon’s outpost on a honey-coloured hill in the 8th arrondissement. Actually I am leaning against the house opposite and thinking of that fiercely hot summer of 1871 when they arrived from Vienna to this newly built, golden mansion. It was a city still in trauma. The siege by the Prussian army had only ended a few months before with the defeat of France and the declaration of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. The new Third Republic was shaky, assailed by communards on the street and by factionalism in government.
The Hôtel Ephrussi in the rue de Monceau
Their house may have been finished, but all the neighbouring buildings were still under construction. The plasterers had only just left, the gilders were lying uncomfortably on the shallow stairs burnishing the finials on the handrail. Furniture, pictures, crates of crockery are shifted slowly up to their apartments. There is noise inside and noise outside, and all the windows are open onto the street. Leon is unwell with a heart complaint. And the family have a terrible start to their life in this beautiful street. Betty, the youngest of Leon and Mina’s four children, married to a young Jewish banker of unimpeachable suitability, dies within weeks of giving birth to a daughter, Fanny. They have to build a family tomb in the Jewish section of the cemetery in Montmartre in their newly adopted city. It is Gothic, large enough for the whole clan, a way of making it clear that they are staying here, whatever is going to happen. I finally find it. The gates are gone and it has caught drifts of autumn’s chestnut leaves.
This hill was the perfect setting for the Ephrussi family. Just as the Ringstrasse in Vienna, where the other half of the family lives, was acerbically known as Zionstrasse, so Jewish money was a key denominator of life here in the rue de Monceau. The area was developed in the 1860s by Isaac and Emile Péreire, two Sephardic brothers who had made their fortunes as financiers, railroad-builders and property magnates, creating colossal developments of hotels and department stores. They acquired the plaine de Monceau, a large nondescript area that was originally beyond the city limits, and set to work developing houses for the burgeoning financial and commercial elite, an appropriate landscape for the newly arrived Jewish families from Russia and the Levant. These streets became a virtual colony, a complex of intermarriage, obligation and religious sympathy.
The Péreires relandscaped the existing eighteenth-century park in order to improve the views of the new houses around it. New cast-iron gates with gilded emblems of the Péreires’ activities now led into it. There was an attempt to call the area around the parc Monceau le West End. If you are asked where the boulevard Malesherbes leads, a contemporary journalist wrote, ‘answer boldly: to Le West End . . . One could give it a French name, but that would be vulgar; an English name was far more fashionable.’ This was the park in which, according to a waspish journalist, you could watch ‘the great dames of the noble Faubourg . . . the female “illustrations” of “La Haute Finance” and “La Haute Colonie Israelite” promenade’. The park had sinuous paths and flowerbeds in the new English style with displays of colourful annuals that had to be constantly renewed, far removed from the grey, clipped formalities of the Tuileries.
As I walk down the hill from the Hôtel Ephrussi at what I consider to be a good flaneurial pace, slower than usual,