The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [36]
Charles has many friendships beyond the studios of painters. Saturday evenings would be spent at the Louvre with colleagues, each collector or writer bringing a sketch or an object, or a problem of attribution for discussion: ‘anything could be brought to the table, save for pedantry! What we would learn there, and never need to doubt! What tireless voyages we made in those beautiful chairs in the Louvre, across all the museums of Europe!’ remembered the art historian Clément de Ris. Charles had stimulating colleagues working at the Gazette. He had friends for neighbours, the Camondo brothers and Cernuschi, men to whom you could happily show an acquisition.
Charles was becoming a public figure. In 1885 he had become the proprietor of the Gazette. He helped raise money for the purchase of a Botticelli for the Louvre. He had his writing. There was his curatorial work: he helped to organise exhibitions of Old Master drawings in 1879, and two of portraits in 1882 and 1885. It was one thing to be a covetous, vagabonding young man and quite another to have these responsibilities and this scrutiny. He had just received the Légion d’honneur for his contribution to the arts.
Most parts of this busy life were lived in the public view of colleagues, neighbours, friends, his young secretaries, his lover and his family.
Proust, a neophyte if not yet quite a friend, had become a regular visitor to the apartment, drinking in Charles’s empyrean conversation, the way he arranged his new treasures, his span across society. Charles knows the socially ravenous Proust well enough to tell him that it is time to leave a dinner after midnight, as the hosts are desperate for bed. For some long-buried slight, Ignace in the apartment next door pins him down as the ‘Proustaillon’ – a rather adept description of Proust’s butterfly flitting from one social occasion to another.
Proust has also become a presence in the offices of the Gazette in the rue Favart. He is diligent here: sixty-four works of art that will appear later in the twelve novels that make up À la recherche du temps perdu were illustrated in the Gazette, a huge proportion of the works’ visual texture. Like Laforgue before him, he has sent Charles his early writings on art and has received a tough critique and then a first commission. For Proust it is to be a study of Ruskin. The preface to Proust’s translation of Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens has as its dedicatee ‘M. Charles Ephrussi, always so good to me’.
Charles and Louise are still lovers, though I am not sure if Louise has another lover, or several other lovers. Charles, who has a quality of discretion, leaves no traces here, and I feel frustrated that I cannot find more. I note that Laforgue was the first of a number of much younger men who would work for him more as acolytes than as secretaries, and I wonder at this series of intense relationships in his heady cavern-like rooms lit by up by yellow satin and those Moreaus. The gossip in Paris was that Charles was entre deux lits, bisexual.
That spring of 1889 Ephrussi et Cie prospers, but family matters are exceedingly complicated. The robustly heterosexual Ignace, along with other wistful bachelors, was devoted to the Countess Potocka. This intriguing Countess, with looks that Proust described as ‘at once delicate, majestic and malicious’, her black hair pulled apart in a centre parting, held sway over a coterie of young men who would wear sapphire badges inscribed with the motto ‘À la Vie, à la Mort’. She holds ‘Maccabee’ dinners at which they would pledge to perform