The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [50]
I stand outside. This is the last moment when I can choose to turn away, cross the road, take the tram and leave this dynastic house and story alone. I breathe in. I push the left door, cut into the huge oak double gates, and am in a long, high, dark corridor, a gold coffered ceiling above me. I go on and I am in a glazed courtyard five storeys high, with internal balconies punctuating the huge space. There is a life-size statue of a rather muscle-bound Apollo half-heartedly strumming his lyre in front of me, held on his pedestal.
There are some small trees in planters and a reception desk, and I explain, poorly, who I am and that this is my family house, and that I would love to look around if it is not too much of a problem. It is certainly not a problem. A charming man emerges and asks me what I would like to see.
All I can see is marble: there is lots of marble. This doesn’t say enough. Everything is marble. Floor, stairs, walls of staircase, columns on staircase, ceiling over staircase, mouldings on ceiling of staircase. Turn left and I go up the family stairs, shallow marble steps. Turn right and I go into another entrance hall. I look down and the patriarch’s initials are set in the marble floor: JE (for Joachim Ephrussi) with a coronet above them. By the grand stairs are two torchères, taller than me. The steps go on and on, trippingly shallow. Black marble frames to the huge double doors – black and gold – I push, and I enter the world of Ignace Ephrussi.
For rooms covered in gold, it is very, very dark. The walls are divided into panels, each delineated by ribbons of gilding. The fireplaces are massive events of marble. The floors are intricate parquet. All the ceilings are divided into networks of lozenges and ovals and triangular panels by heavy gilded mouldings, raised and coffered into intricate scrolls of neoclassical froth. Wreaths and acanthus top the heady mixture. All the panels are painted by Christian Griepenkerl, the acclaimed decorator of the ceilings of the auditorium of the Opera. Each room takes a classical theme: in the billiard-room we have a series of Zeus’s conquests – Leda, Antiope, Danae and Europa – each undraped girl held up by putti and velvet draping. The music-room has allegories of the muses; in the salon, miscellaneous goddesses sprinkle flowers; the smaller salon has random putti. The dining-room, achingly obvious, has nymphs pouring wine, draped with grapes or slung with game. There are more putti, for no good reason, sitting on doorway lintels.
Everything in this place, I realise, is very shiny. There is nothing to grip onto with these marbled surfaces. Its lack of tactility makes me panic: I run my hands along the walls and they feel slightly clammy. I thought I’d worked through my feelings about Belle-Epoque architecture in Paris, craning my neck to see the Baudrys on the ceilings of the Opéra. But here it is all so much closer, so much more personal. This is aggressively golden, aggressively lacking in purchase. What was Ignace trying to do? Smother his critics?
In the ballroom, with its three great windows looking across the square to the Votivkirche, Ignace suddenly lets something slip. Here, on the ceiling – where in other Ringstrasse Palais you might find something Elysian – there is a series of paintings of stories from the biblical Book of Esther: Esther crowned as Queen of Israel, kneeling in front of the Chief Priest in his rabbinical robes, being blessed, with her servants kneeling behind her. And then there is the destruction of the sons of Hamam, the enemy of