The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [60]
Proust writes his condolences to the obituarist. On reading this obituary in the Gazette, ‘those who did not know M. Ephrussi will come to love him, and those who did know him will be full of recollections’. Charles has left Emmy a golden necklace in his will. He has left a pearl collar to Louise, and his estate to his niece Fanny Reinach, who is married to the Hellenist scholar.
And, shockingly, Charles’s brother Ignace Ephrussi, mondain, dueller, amateur de la femme, has also died of a poor heart at the age of sixty. He is remembered as a perfect rider, to be seen on his grey early in the morning in the Bois de Boulogne saddled à la russe. Generous and punctilious, he has left the three young Ephrussi children, Elisabeth, Gisela and Iggie, 30,000 francs each in his will and he has even left Emmy’s younger sisters, Gerty and Eva, something too. The brothers have been buried together in Montmartre in the family tomb alongside their long-dead parents and their beloved sister.
Soon after visiting Paris – much emptier without the animation of Charles and Ignace – comes the summer. This starts in July with the Gutmanns, Jewish financiers and philanthropists, Viktor and Emmy’s closest friends. They have five children, so Elisabeth, Gisela and Iggie are invited for several weeks to their country house, Schloss Jaidhof, fifty miles from Vienna. Viktor stays put in Vienna.
August is Switzerland at the Chalet Ephrussi with the Parisian cousins Jules and Fanny. Take the children and Viktor. Do very little. Try to keep the children quiet. Hear about Paris. Take the boat out onto Lake Lucerne from the boathouse where the Russian imperial flag flies, with one of the footmen to do the rowing. Go to the Concours Hippique in Lucerne with Jules in the motor-car to see the show-jumping, with ices at Hugeni afterwards.
September and October are at Kövesces with the children and parents, Pips and lots of cousins. Viktor comes for a few days at a time. Swim, walk, ride, shoot.
At Kövesces there is an eccentric collection of people gathered together to educate Emmy’s sisters, Gerty and Eva, twelve and fifteen years junior to her. These now include a French lady’s maid to give them a proper Parisian accent, an elderly schoolmaster to teach them the three Rs, a governess from Trieste for German and Italian, and finally a failed concert pianist (Mr Minotti) to teach them music and chess. Emmy’s mother gives them English dictation and reads Shakespeare with them. There is also the elderly Viennese bootmaker who makes the white suede boots about which Evelina is so very particular. Struck low, he comes to convalesce on the estate, is given a pleasant sunny room and stays for the rest of his life, keeping her in footwear and taking charge of the dogs.
The traveller Patrick Leigh Fermor stayed in Kövesces on his walk across Europe in the 1930s and described it as still having the atmosphere of an English rectory, with piles of books in all possible languages and desks cluttered with odd objects made from antlers and silver. It was ‘Liberty Hall’, said Pips, welcoming him in his perfect English to the library. Kövesces radiated the sense of self-sufficiency that comes about when there are lots of children in a big house. In my father’s blue paper folder there is a yellowing manuscript of a play called Der Grossherzog (The Archduke) put on one summer before the First World War by all the cousins in the drawing-room. Babies under two and dogs