The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [18]
I find the traces of these intersections by hacking my way assiduously through the social columns of Parisian newspapers of the 1870s. I start this as a necessary clearing of the undergrowth, but it becomes strangely compelling and a relief from my dogged attempt to chart every single one of Charles’s exhibition reviews. There are the same labyrinthine lists of encounters and guests, the minutiae of who wore what, who is to be seen, each run of names a calibration of snubs and fine judgements.
I get particularly hooked by the listings of wedding-presents at society marriages, telling myself that this is all good research on cultures of gift-giving, and waste an embarrassing amount of time trying to work out who is being over-generous, who a cheapskate and who is just dull. My great-great-grandmother gives a set of golden serving dishes shaped as cockle shells at a society wedding in 1874. Vulgar, I think, with nothing to back this up.
And amongst all these Parisian balls and musical soirées, the salons and receptions, I start to find mentions of the three brothers. They stick together: the MM Ephrussi are seen in the box at a premiere at the Opéra, at funerals, at the receptions of Prince X, Countess Y. The Tsar has made a visit to the city and they are there to greet him as prominent Russian citizens. They give parties jointly, are noted for the ‘grand series of dinners they are hosting together’, have been spotted, along with other sportsmen, on the latest thing, the bicycle. One column of Le Gaulois is devoted to déplacements – who is off to Deauville and who to Chamonix – so I know when they leave Paris for their holidays in Meggen at Jules and Fanny’s baronial Chalet Ephrussi. From their golden house on the hill they seem to have become an accepted part of Parisian society within a few years of their arrival. Monceau, I remember, quick-going.
The elegant Charles has new interests apart from rearranging his rooms and perfecting his sinuous art-historical sentences. He has a mistress. And he has started to collect Japanese art. These two things, sex and Japan, are intertwined.
He owns no netsuke yet, but he is getting much closer. I am willing him on as he starts his collection, buying lacquer from a dealer in Japanese art called Philippe Sichel. De Goncourt writes in his journal that he has been to Sichel’s, ‘the place where Jewish money comes’; he goes into a back room in search of the latest objet, the newest album of erotic prints, a scroll maybe. Here he comes across ‘La Cahen d’Anvers, crouched over a Japanese lacquer box with her lover, the young Ephrussi’.
She is indicating to him ‘the time and place that he can make love with her’.
4. ‘SO LIGHT, SO SOFT TO THE TOUCH’
Charles’s lover is Louise Cahen d’Anvers. She is a couple of years older than Charles and very pretty, with red-gold hair. ‘La Cahen d’Anvers’ is married to a Jewish banker and they have four small children, a boy and three girls. The fifth child arrives and Louise calls him Charles.
I only know about Parisian marriages from the novels of Nancy Mitford, but this strikes me as extraordinarily sanguine. And rather impressive – I want to be bourgeois and ask how you find time for five children, a husband and a lover? The two clans are very close. In fact, as I stand in the place d’Iéna outside Jules and Fanny’s marital home, his initials floridly entwined with hers above the grander doors, I find that I am looking straight across the road to Louise’s equally baroque new palace at the corner of the rue Bassano. At this point I wonder if the clever, indefatigable