The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [44]
Swann catches resemblances in passing: Odette to a Botticelli, the profile of a footman at a reception to a Mantegna. And so did Charles. I cannot help wondering if my grandmother, so undishevelled, so very kempt in her white laundered frock on those gravel paths in the garden of the Swiss chalet, ever knew what made Charles bend down and ruffle her pretty sister’s hair and compare her to his Renoir of the gypsy girl?
And when I encounter Swann, he is funny and charming, but he has a quality of reserve ‘like a locked cabinet’. He moves through the world leaving people more alive to the things he loves. I think of how the young narrator, in love with Swann’s daughter, visits the household and is met with such courtesy, introduced to the sublimities of his collection.
That is my Charles, taking endless pains to show books or pictures to young friends, to Proust, writing about objects and sculpture with acuity and honesty, animating the world of things. I know. It is how I have come to see Berthe Morisot for the first time, how I learn to stand back and then move forward. It is how I have come to listen to Massenet, look at Savonnerie carpets, see that Japanese lacquer is worth spending time with. I pick up one after another of Charles’s netsuke and think of him choosing them. And I think of his reserve. He belongs in this glittering Parisian world, but he never stops being a Russian citizen. He always has this secret hinterland.
Charles had a poor heart like his father. He was fifty when Dreyfus was brought back from Devil’s Island to undergo his second farcical trial and be reconvicted in 1899. In the delicate engraving of him done in that year by Jean Patricot he is looking downwards, inwards, his beard still neatly trimmed, his cravat held by a pearl. He is more involved in music and is now a patron of the Comtesse Greffuhle’s Société des Grandes Auditions Musicales, ‘where his advice is greatly appreciated, and where he has put himself to work with ardour’. He had almost stopped buying pictures, except for a Monet of the rocks at low tide at Pourville on the Normandy coast. It is a beautiful painting, scumbled rocks in the foreground and strange calligraphies of the fishermen’s wooden poles emerging from the sea. It is, I think, rather Japanese.
Engraving of Charles Ephrussi by Patricot published with his obituary in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, 1905
Charles had slowed his writing too, though he was punctilious in his duties at the Gazette, clear about what should get published, ‘never ever late, ever diligent down to the very minutiae of every article, ever seeking perfection’, happy to bring on new writers.
Louise had a new lover. Charles was superseded by Crown Prince Alphonse of Spain, thirty years her junior and rather weak-chinned, but nonetheless a future king.
On the cusp of the new century, Charles’s first cousin in Vienna was to be married. Charles had known Viktor von Ephrussi since boyhood, when the whole family had lived together, all the generations under one roof, the evenings spent in planning their move to Paris. Viktor was the bored little boy, his youngest cousin, for whom Charles drew caricatures of the servants. The clan was close and they had seen each other at parties in Paris and Vienna, on holiday in Vichy and St Moritz, at Fanny’s summer gatherings at the Chalet Ephrussi. And they shared Odessa – the city they were both born in, the starting place that is not mentioned.
The three brothers in Paris all send a wedding-present to Viktor and his young bride, the Baroness Emmy Schey von Koromla. The couple will start their new life in the enormous Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse.
Jules and Fanny send them a beautiful Louis XVI desk of marquetry with tapering legs ending in small gilt hooves.
Ignace sends them an Old Master painting, Dutch, of two ships in a gale. Perhaps a coded joke about