The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [49]
But then again, no one could accuse them of being practical, either. They can certainly be thought of as ornamental, even as a sort of enchantment. I wonder at the appropriateness of Charles’s wedding-present once it reaches Vienna.
13. ZIONSTRASSE
When the netsuke arrived at the Palais, the house was almost thirty years old, built around the same time as the Hôtel Ephrussi in the rue de Monceau. The building is a piece of theatre, a show-stopping performance by the man who commissioned it, Viktor’s father, my great-great-grandfather Ignace.
There are, I am afraid, three Ignace Ephrussi in this story, stretching across three generations. The youngest is my great-uncle Iggie in his Tokyo flat. Then there is Charles’s brother, the duelling Parisian with his string of love-affairs. And here in Vienna we meet the Baron Ignace von Ephrussi, holder of the Iron Cross Third Class, ennobled for his services to the Emperor, Imperial Counsellor, Chevalier of the Order of St Olaf, Honorary Consul to the King of Sweden and Norway, Holder of the Bessarabian Order of the Fleece, Holder of the Russian Order of the Laurel.
Baron Ignace von Ephrussi, 1871
Ignace was the second-richest banker in Vienna, owning another huge building on the Ringstrasse and a block of buildings for the bank. And that was just in Vienna. I find an audit which notes that in 1899 he had assets in the city of 3,308,319 florins, roughly the current equivalent of $200 million; 70 per cent of this wealth was in stocks, 23 per cent in property, 5 per cent in works of art and jewellery and 2 per cent in gold. That is a lot of gold, I think, as well as a splendidly Ruritarian list of titles. You would need a façade with extra caryatids and gilding, if you had to live up to that list.
Ignace was a Gründer, a founding father, of the Gründerzeit, the founding age of Austrian modernity. He had come to Vienna with his parents and older brother Leon from Odessa. When the Danube flooded Vienna catastrophically in 1862, water lapping the altar steps of St Stephen’s Cathedral, it was the Ephrussi family who loaned money to the government for the construction of embankments and new bridges.
I own a drawing of Ignace. He must be about fifty, and he is wearing a rather beautiful jacket with wide lapels and a fatly knotted tie with a pearl stuck through it. Bearded, with his dark hair swept back from his brow, Ignace is looking straight back at me appraisingly and his mouth is set for judgement.
I have a portrait of his wife Emilie too, grey-eyed with a rope of pearls spun round and round her neck and sweeping down over a black shot-silk dress. She is also pretty judgemental, and every time I’ve hung this painting at home I’ve had to take it down, as she looks down on our domestic life in disbelief. Emilie was known in the family as ‘the crocodile’, with a most engaging smile – whenever she smiled. As Ignace had affairs with both of her sisters, as well as keeping a series of mistresses, I feel lucky that she is smiling at all.
Somehow I imagine that it was Ignace who chose Hansen as architect; he understood how to make symbols work. What this rich Jewish banker wanted was a building to dramatise the ascendancy of his family, a house to sit alongside all these great institutions on the Ringstrasse.
The contract between the two men was signed on 12th May 1869, with building permission granted by the city at the end of August. By the time he came to work on the Palais Ephrussi, Theophilus Hansen had been raised to the nobility; he was now Theophil Freiherr von Hansen, and his client – now knighted – was Ignace Ritter von Ephrussi. Ignace and Hansen started by disagreeing about the scale of the elevation: the plans record endless revisions as these two strong-willed men worked out how to use the