The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [29]
The ‘Benedictine-dandy of the rue de Monceau’: a self-portrait with Charles, by Jules Laforgue, 1881
Laforgue wishes to be remembered to ‘our’ room, signs off with ‘good wishes to the Monet – you know which’. His summer with Charles was an encounter with Impressionism, an encounter that would challenge him to find a new kind of poetic language. He tries out a kind of prose-poem, calls it ‘Guitare’, and dedicates it to Charles. But surely these descriptions of Charles’s study are prose-poems themselves: there are the mixtures of the exact markings of colour – ‘la tache colorée’ – the yellow armchair, the red lips and blue jersey of Renoir’s girl. The letters, pell-mell with sensation, high on ideas, are close to Laforgue’s description of Impressionist style as one in which spectator and spectacle are knitted together: ‘irrémédiablement mouvants, insaisissables et insaissants’.
Charles was very attached to Laforgue. After the long summer in Paris he arranged for the young poet to get a job in Berlin as reader of French to the Empress – Charles had a casually impressive social reach – and wrote to him, sent him money, advised him, critiqued his reviews and then helped Laforgue to get published. Charles kept more than thirty letters from Laforgue from this time, publishing them in the journal La Revue blanche after the poet’s early death from tuberculosis.
In these letters you feel the room. I wanted to be here with the netsuke, and have worried that I would never get beyond a connoisseurial inventory of the grand furnishings of Charles’s apartment. I’ve worried how I could construct a life entirely through objects. The room overflows, like Laforgue’s writings, with unexpected conjunctions and disjunctions. I can hear their digressive night-time conversations and am here at last.
Everything in this salon is heightened emotion. It is difficult not to feel alive in a place saturated with images of freedom and lassitude, days out in the countryside, young women, a gypsy girl, bathers in the Seine, a loafer in a lane with nowhere to go, a gorgeous faun framed amongst the broderies and all those curious, funny, tactile netsuke.
8. MONSIEUR ELSTIR’S ASPARAGUS
I am in the library again, hesitating. Dürer’s self-portrait – Christ-like, long-haired and bearded – stares back at me as I open Charles’s Albert Dürer et ses dessins. There is a challenge in this stare. I have spent ages thinking about how this careful, delicate skein of thinking, and all these properly edited tables and lists, could have been written in a study with Monet’s breezy summer day there on the wall.
When I read of Charles’s animation as he describes his search for Dürer’s lost drawings, I can hear the catch of his voice: ‘We traced the drawings of our master wherever we suspected they might be hidden: museums of capital cities and secondary towns abroad, of Paris and the provinces, famous collections and little-known private ones, the cabinets of amateurs and of forbidding people, we rummaged and raked up, we examined everything.’ Charles might be a flâneur, might take his time in the salons, be seen at the races and the Opéra, but his ‘vagabonding’ is done with real intensity.
Vagabonding was his phrase. It sounds recreational rather than diligent or professional. As an extremely rich Jewish mondain, it would have been contrary to social practice to be seen to work. He was an ‘amateur de l’art’, an art lover, and his phrase is carefully self-deprecating. But it does get the pleasure of the searching right, the way you lose your sense of time when you are researching, are pulled on by whims as much as by intent. It makes me think of the rummaging that I am doing through his life as I track the netsuke, the noting of other people’s annotations in the margins. I vagabond in libraries, trace where he went and why. I follow the leads of whom he knew, whom he wrote about, whose pictures he bought. In Paris I go and stand outside his old offices