The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [56]
Emmy was shown round her new apartment, the Nobelstock, by Viktor. Her comment was to the point. ‘It looks,’ she said, ‘like the foyer of the Opera.’ The couple decided to stay upstairs on the second great floor of the Palais, a floor with fewer painted ceilings, less marble around the doors. Ignace’s rooms were kept for the occasional party.
The newly married couple, my great-grandparents, have a balcony view onto the Ringstrasse, a balcony view for the new century. And the netsuke – my sleeping monk flat over his begging bowl and the deer scratching his ear – have a new home.
15. ‘A LARGE SQUARE BOX SUCH AS CHILDREN DRAW’
The vitrine needs to go somewhere. The couple have decided to leave the Nobelstock as a monument to Ignace; and Viktor’s mother Emilie, thank God, has decided to go back to her grand hotel in Vichy where she can take the waters and be horrible to her maids. So they have a whole floor of the Palais for themselves. It is already full of pictures and furniture, of course, and there are the servants – including Emmy’s new maid, a Viennese girl called Anna – but it is their own.
After a long honeymoon in Venice they have to make some decisions. Should these ivories go in the salon? Viktor’s study isn’t quite big enough. Or the library? He vetoes his library. In the corner of the dining-room next to the Boulle sideboards? Each of these places has its own problems. This is not an apartment of the ‘most pure Empire’, like Charles’s delicate calibrations of objects and pictures in Paris. This is an accumulation of stuff from four decades of affluent shopping.
The great glass case of beautiful things has a particular difficulty for Viktor, as it comes from Paris, and he doesn’t want it sitting and reminding him of an elsewhere, another life. The thing is that Viktor and Emmy are not quite sure about Charles’s gift. They are wonderful, these little carvings, funny and intricate, and it is obvious that his favourite cousin Charles has been exceedingly generous. But the malachite-and-gilt clock and the pair of globes from cousins in Berlin, and the Madonna, can be placed straight away – salon, library, dining-room – and this great vitrine cannot. It is too odd and complicated, and it is also rather large.
Emmy at eighteen, startlingly beautiful and fabulously dressed, knows her mind. Viktor defers to her concerning where all these wedding-presents should go.
She is very slim with light-brown hair and beautiful grey eyes. She has a sort of luminosity, that rare quality of someone who is at home in the way she moves. Emmy moves beautifully. She has a good figure and wears dresses that show off the narrowness of her waist.
As a beautiful young baroness, Emmy has the full hand of social accomplishments. She has been brought up in two places, in the city and in the country, and has the skills for both. Her childhood in Vienna was in the Scheys’ Palais, an austere piece of grand neo-classicism, a quick ten minutes’, walk away from her new home with Viktor, facing out across to the Opera over a statue of Goethe looking extremely cross. She has a charming younger brother called Philippe, universally known as Pips, and two little sisters Eva and Gerty, who are still in the nursery.
Until she was thirteen, Emmy had a meek and biddable English governess, who was keen to keep the peace in the schoolroom. And then nothing. Her formal education is full of terra incognita as a result. There are great swathes about which she knows practically nothing – history being one – and she has a particular laugh when these things are mentioned.
What she does know are her languages. She is charming in both English and French, which she speaks interchangeably at home with her parents. She knows any number of children’s poems in both languages and can quote great sections of The Hunting of the Snark and ‘Jabberwocky’. And she has her German, of course.
Every weekday afternoon in Vienna since she was eight has included a dancing hour, and she is now a wonderful