The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [59]
The Palais has its diurnal pace, quickening and slackening for the servants. There is lots of carrying up and down the corridors. Endless carrying of hot water to the dressing-room, coals to the study, breakfast to the morning-room, the morning newspaper to the study, covered dishes, laundry, telegrams, post three times a day, messages, candlesticks for dinner, the evening newspaper delivered to Viktor’s dressing-room.
There is a pattern too for Anna, Emmy’s lady’s maid. It starts when she brings the silver can of warm water at half-past seven and the tray of English tea to Emmy’s bedroom. It only ends late at night when she has brushed Emmy’s hair and fetched her a glass of water and a plate of charcoal biscuits.
In the courtyard of the Palais a fiacre stands attendant all day with a coachman in livery. There are two black carriage horses, Rinalda and Arabella. A second carriage waits to take the children to the Prater or the Schönbrunn. The coachmen wait. The porter, Alois, stands by the huge doors to the Ringstrasse ready to open the gates.
Vienna means dinner parties. There are endless discussions of placement. Every afternoon the butler and an assistant footman lay the table with a tape measure. There are discussions of whether it is safe to get ducks from Paris, if they come crated the day before on the Orient-Express. There are florists, a dinner with a row of small orange trees in pots bearing hollowed-out oranges filled with parfait. The children are allowed to watch through a peephole as all the guests arrive.
There are afternoons at home receiving guests, with a tea table on which a silver samovar steams on a large silver tray: teapot, cream jug and sugar basin to hand, and trays of open sandwiches and iced cakes from Demel’s, the palace of confectionery in Kohlmarkt near the Hofburg. Ladies leave their furs in the hall, and the officers their képis and swords, and gentlemen carry their top hats and their gloves and place them on the floor next to their chairs.
There is a pattern to the year too.
January is a chance to get away from wintry Vienna. Nice or Monte Carlo with Viktor. The children are left behind. They visit Viktor’s uncle Maurice and aunt Beatrice Ephrussi in the new pink Villa Ile-de-France in Cap Ferrat – now the Villa Ephrussi-Rothschild. Admire the collections of French pictures, French Empire furniture, French porcelain. Admire the improvements in the gardens, where parts of the hillside are being removed and a canal is being dug in imitation of the Alhambra. The twenty gardeners all wear white.
April is Paris with Viktor. The children are left behind. They stay chez Fanny in the Hôtel Ephrussi in the place d’Iéna, and there is lots of shopping for Emmy and days at the offices of Ephrussi et Cie for Viktor. Paris is not the same.
Charles Ephrussi, beloved owner of the Gazette, Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, supporter of artists, friend of poets, collector of the netsuke, Viktor’s favourite cousin, has died on 30th September 1905 at the age of fifty-five.
The notice in the newspapers begs those who have not received an invitation not to come to the funeral. The pall-bearers – his brothers, Theodore Reinach, the Marquis de Cheveniers – were in tears. There have been numerous obituaries, talking of his ‘délicatesse naturelle’ and his uprightness and sense of propriety. The Gazette has published a memorial obituary surrounded by a black border:
It was with stupor and profound chagrin that all those who knew him learnt – at the