The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [65]
There is a picture of Emmy taken in the salon soon after she married Viktor. She must be pregnant with Elisabeth already, but not showing. She is dressed like Marie Antoinette in a cropped velvet jacket over a long white skirt, a play between severity and nonchalance. Her ringlets conform to what is au courant in the spring of 1900: ‘coiffure is less stiff than it was formerly; fringes are prohibited. The hair is first crimped into large waves, then combed back and twisted into a moderately high coil . . . locks are allowed to escape onto the forehead, left in their natural ringed form,’ writes a journalist. Emmy has a black hat with feathers. One hand rests on a French marble-topped chest of drawers and the other holds a cane. She must be just down from the dressing-room and off to another ball. She looks at me confidently, aware of how gorgeous she is.
Emmy has her admirers – many admirers, according to my great-uncle Iggie – and dressing for others is as much a pleasure as undressing. From the start of her marriage she has lovers, too.
This is not unusual in Vienna. It is slightly different from Paris. This is a city of chambres séparées at restaurants, where you can eat and seduce as in Schnitzler’s Reigen or La Ronde: ‘A private room in the restaurant “zum Riedhof”. Subdued comfortable elegance. The gas fire is burning. On the table the remains of a meal – cream pastries, fruit, cheese etc. Hungarian white wine. The HUSBAND is smoking a Havana cigar, leaning back in one corner of the sofa. The SWEET YOUNG THING is sitting in an armchair beside him, spooning down whipped cream from a pastry with evident pleasure . . .’ In Vienna at the turn of the century there is the cult of the süsse Mädel, ‘simple girls who lived for flirtation with young men from good homes’. There is endless flirtation. Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier with its text by Hofmannsthal – in which changing costumes, changing lovers and changing hats are all held in suspended amusement – is new in 1911 and is wildly popular. Schnitzler has problems, he confides in his journal of his sexual congresses, in keeping up with the demands of his two mistresses.
Emmy dressed as Marie Antoinette in the salon of the Palais Ephrussi, 1900
Sex is inescapable in Vienna. Prostitutes crowd the pavements. They advertise on the back page of Die Neue Freie Presse. Everything and everyone is catered for. Karl Kraus quotes them in his journal Die Fackel: ‘Travelling Companion Sought, young, congenial, Christian, independent. Replies to “Invert 69” Poste Restante Habsburgergasse’. Sex is argued over by Freud. In Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, the cult book of 1903, women are, by nature, amoral and in need of direction. Sex is golden in Klimt’s Judith, Danae, The Kiss, dangerous in Schiele’s tumbled bodies.
To be a modern woman in Vienna, to be comme il faut, it is understood that your domestic life has a little latitude. Some of Emmy’s aunts and cousins have marriages of convenience: her aunt Anny, for instance. Everyone knows that Hans Count Wiltschek is the natural father of her cousins, the twin brothers Herbert and Witold von Schey von Koromla. Count Wiltschek is handsome and extremely glamorous: an explorer, the funder of Antarctic expeditions. A close friend of the late Crown Prince Rudolf, he has had islands named after him.
I’ve delayed my return to London – I’m finally on the track of Ignace’s will and want to see how he divided his fortune. The Adler Society, the genealogical society of Vienna, is only open to members and their guests on Wednesday evenings after six o’clock. The society offices are through a grand hall on the second floor of a house just down from Freud’s apartment. I duck through a lowish door and into a long corridor hung with portraits of Vienna’s mayors. Bookcases with box-files of deaths and obituaries to the left, aristocrats, runs of Debrett’s and the Almanach de Gotha