The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [43]
Paris changed for Charles. He was a mondain with doors shut in his face, a patron ostracised by some of his artists. I think of what it must have been like, and recall Proust writing of the Duc de Guermantes’s anger:
as far as Swann is concerned . . . they tell me now that he is openly Dreyfusard. I should never have believed it of him, an epicure, a man of practical judgement, a collector, a connoisseur of old books, a member of the Jockey, a man who enjoys the respect of all, who knows all the good addresses and used to send us the best port you could wish to drink, a dilettante, a family man. Ah! I feel badly let down.
In Paris I haunt the archives and pace my routes between old houses and offices, vagabonding in museums, aimless one moment and over-purposeful the next. I am charting a journey into memory. I have a netsuke of a brindled wolf in my pocket. It is almost too strange to find how interwoven Charles is with Proust’s figure of Swann.
I keep coming on the places where Charles Ephrussi and Charles Swann intersect. Before I started my journey I knew in the broadest terms that my Charles was one of the two principal models for Proust’s protagonist – the lesser, it was said, of the two. I remember reading a dismissive remark on him (‘a Polish Jew . . . stout, bearded and ugly, his manner was ponderous and uncouth’) in the biography of Proust published by George Painter in the 1950s and taking it at face value. The other model acknowledged by Proust was a charming dandy and clubman called Charles Haas. He was an older man, neither a writer nor a collector.
If there has to be a first owner of my wolf, I want him to be Swann – driven, loved, graceful – but I don’t want Charles to disappear into source material, into literary footnotes. Charles has become so real to me that I fear losing him into Proust studies. And I care too much about Proust to turn his fiction into some Belle Epoque acrostic. ‘My novel has no key,’ Proust said, repeatedly.
I try to map the straightforward correspondences that my Charles and the fictional Charles share, the lineaments of their lives. I say ‘straightforward’, but when I start to write them out they become quite a list.
They are both Jewish. They are both mondain. They have a social reach from royalty (Charles conducted Queen Victoria round Paris, Swann is a friend of the Prince of Wales) via the salons to the studios of artists. They are art-lovers deeply in love with the works of the Italian Renaissance, Giotto and Botticelli in particular. They are both experts in the arcane subject of Venetian fifteenth-century medallions. They are collectors, patrons of the Impressionists, incongruous in the sunshine at a boating-party of a painter-friend.
Both of them write monographs on art: Swann on Vermeer, my Charles on Dürer. They use their ‘erudition in matters of art . . . to advise society ladies what pictures to buy and how to decorate their houses’. Both Ephrussi and Swann are dandies and they are both Chevaliers of the Légion d’honneur. Their lives traverse Japonisme and reach into the new taste for Empire. And they are both Dreyfusards who find that their carefully constructed lives are deeply riven by their Jewishness.
Proust played with the interpenetration of the real and the invented. His novels have a panoply of historical figures who appear as themselves – Mme Straus and the Princess Mathilde, for instance – mingling with characters reimagined from recognisable people. Elstir, the great painter who leaves behind his infatuation with Japonisme to become an Impressionist, has elements of Whistler and Renoir in him, but has another dynamic force. Similarly Proust’s characters stand in front of actual pictures. The visual texture of the novels is suffused not just with references to Giotto and Botticelli, Dürer and Vermeer,