The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [16]
My eyes hurt. The type is eight-point, less for the notes. At least my French is returning. I begin to think that I can work with this man. He is not showing off about how much he knows, most of the time. He wants to make us see more clearly what is in front of him. That seems honourable enough.
3. ‘A MAHOUT TO GUIDE HER’
It is not yet time for the netsuke to enter the story. Charles in his twenties is always elsewhere, in transit to somewhere, sending regards and his apologies for missing family gatherings, from London, Venice, Munich. He is starting to write a book on Dürer, the artist he fell for in the collections of Vienna, and he needs to find every drawing, every scribble in every archive, in order to do him justice.
His two older brothers are safely ensconced in their own worlds. Jules is at the helm of Ephrussi et Cie in the rue de l’Arcade with his uncles. His early training in Vienna has paid off and he turns out to be very good with money. And he has got married in the synagogue in Vienna to Fanny, the clever, wry young widow of a Viennese financier. She is very rich, and it is all appropriately dynastic. The gossip in the papers in Paris and Vienna is that he danced with her every night until she wearied, gave in and married him.
Ignace has cut loose. He is prone to falling spectacularly, serially, in love. As an amateur de la femme, his particular skill is an ability to climb buildings and into high windows for assignations – something I later find recalled in memoirs of elderly society ladies. He is a mondain, a Parisian man of the world, living between love-affairs, evenings at the Jockey Club – the epicentre of bachelor society – and duelling. This is illegal, but occupies the time of wealthy young men and army officers, who resort to rapiers over issues of minute transgressions of honour. Ignace turns up in the duelling manuals of the day, one newspaper recording an accident where his eye is almost taken out in a bout with his tutor. Ignace is ‘relatively tall but a little under the average height . . . Gifted with energy which is also luckily backed up by steel muscles . . . Mr Ephrussi is one amongst the keenest . . . he is also one of the most friendly and frankest fencers I know.’
Here he is, posed nonchalantly with a rapier, like a Hilliard miniature of an Elizabethan courtier: ‘an untiring sportsman, you will find him in the forest early in the morning, riding a superb dapple-grey; he has already taken his fencing lesson . . .’ I think of Ignace checking the lengths of the stirrups in the stables in the rue de Monceau. When he rides, his horse is arrayed ‘in the Russian manner’. I’m not quite sure what this entails, but it sounds splendid.
It is in the salons that Charles first comes into view. He is noticed by the acidic novelist, diarist and collector Edmond de Goncourt in his journal. That people such as Charles were invited to salons at all disgusted the novelist: the salons had become ‘infested with Jews and Jewesses’. He comments on these new young men that he encounters: these Ephrussi were ‘mal élevés’, badly brought up, and ‘insupportables’, insufferable. Charles, he intimates, is ubiquitous, the trait of someone who does not know his place; he is hungry for contact, does not know when to shade eagerness and become invisible.
De Goncourt is jealous of this charming boy with the slightest of accents to his French. Charles has walked, seemingly without effort, into the formidable, fashionable salons of the day, each of which was a minefield of fiercely contested geographies of political, artistic, religious and aristocratic taste. There were many, but the three principal salons were those of Madame Straus (the widow of Bizet),