The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [17]
Mme Lemaire’s Thursday salon is mentioned in an early essay of the young Marcel Proust. He evokes the scent of lilacs filling her studio and drifting into the rue de Monceau, crowded with the carriages of the beau monde. You could never get through the rue de Monceau on a Thursday. Proust notices Charles. There is a hubbub and he moves closer through the throng of writers and socialites. Charles is there in a corner talking to a portrait painter, their heads bowed and conversing so softly and intensely that, though he hovers nearby, Proust cannot overhear even a scintilla of their conversation.
De Goncourt, splenetic, is particularly furious that young Charles has become a confidant of his Princess Mathilde, the niece of Bonaparte. She lives nearby in a vast mansion in the rue de Courcelles. He records gossip that she has been seen at Charles’s house in the rue de Monceau along with the ‘gratin’, the upper crust, of the aristocracy, that the Princess had found in Charles ‘a mahout to guide her through her life’. It is an unforgettable image of the formidable, aged Princess in her black, an elephantine presence rather like Queen Victoria, and this young man in his twenties, able to guide her with the merest of suggestions, of touch.
Charles is starting to find a life for himself in this complex and snobbish city. He is beginning to discover the places where his conversation is welcomed, where his Jewishness is either acceptable or where it is overlooked. As a young writer on art, he goes to the offices of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in the rue Favart each day – taking in six or seven salons en route, adds the omniscient de Goncourt. From family house to these editorial offices is exactly twenty-five minutes’ brisk walk, or on my April morning forty-five minutes of flaneurial stroll. I suppose Charles might go in a carriage, I worry, but I can’t time that.
The Gazette, the ‘Courrier Européen de l’art et de la curiosité’, has a canary-yellow cover and on its title page an aesthetic display of Renaissance artefacts on top of a classical tomb surmounted by a furious-looking Leonardo. For your seven francs you get reviews of the different exhibitions jockeying for position in Paris, the Exposition des Artistes Indépendants, the official Salons hung floor to ceiling with paintings, the surveys at the Trocadéro and the Louvre. It is cuttingly described as ‘an expensive art-magazine which every great lady kept open but unread on her table’ and it certainly holds a reputation as an essential part of society life, a World of Interiors as well as an Apollo. In the beautiful oval library of the Camondo mansion down the hill from the Hôtel Ephrussi are shelves and shelves of its bound volumes.
Here at the offices are other writers and artists, and the best art library in Paris, full of periodicals from all over Europe and catalogues of exhibitions. It is an exclusive arts club, a place to share news and gossip about which painter is working on which commission, who is out of favour with the collectors or with the jurists for the Salon. It is also busy. The Gazette is published monthly and so it is a real place of work. There are all the decisions to be taken on who will be writing on what, the ordering of engravings and illustrations. You can learn a lot by being here day by day, watching the arguments.
When Charles, just back from his plundering of Italian art dealers, starts to write for the Gazette, it includes lavish engravings of the pictures of the day, artefacts