The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [90]
The beautiful Gisela is next. She marries well, a lovely Spanish banker from a rich Jewish family called Alfredo Bauer. The couple are married in the synagogue in Vienna, which causes confusion for the secular Ephrussi, who are unsure of what to do, where to sit or stand. There is a party for the young couple and the great floor of the Palais is opened up for a proper reception in the gilt ballroom under Ignace’s triumphant ceilings. Gisela is effortlessly stylish in a long cardigan and a silver belt low over a print skirt, a dark black-and-white dress with a string of dark beads for going away in. She has an open smile and Alfredo is handsome and bearded. The couple move to Madrid in 1925.
Then Elisabeth sends the young Dutchman, Hendrik de Waal, a note to say that she has heard he is coming through Paris on Friday week and might they meet? Her phone number is Gobelius 12–85, if he could ring. Henk was tall with slightly thinning hair and wore very good suits – grey with the slightest of charcoal stripes – and a monocle and he smoked Russian cigarettes. He had grown up in Amsterdam on the Prinzengracht, the only son of a merchant family that imported coffee and cocoa. He was well travelled and played the violin and was charming and very funny. And he also wrote poetry. I’m not sure if my grandmother, who at twenty-seven was wearing her hair drawn back in a severe bun and had round black spectacles worthy of a Baronin Doktor Ephrussi, had ever before been wooed by such a man. She adored him.
I find their wedding notice in the archives of the Adler Society in Vienna. It is rather elegantly printed. We are gemeinde (compelled/led to/unable not to) announce, it reads, that Elisabeth von Ephrussi has already married Hendrik de Waal. And then Viktor and Emmy’s names in one corner and the de Waal parents in the other. My grandparents – one Dutch Reformed Church, the other Jewish – were married in the Anglican church in Paris.
The genealogists are amused by this notice and this use of this word gemeinde, with its undercurrents of familial complexity.
Elisabeth and Henk bought an apartment in Paris in the rue Spontini in the 16th arrondissement and furnished it in the newest Art Deco taste, with armchairs and carpets by Ruhlmann and rather excitingly moderne metal lamps and glassware of impossible lightness from the Wiener Werkstätte. They hung large reproductions of paintings by Van Gogh and, briefly, housed a Schiele landscape in the drawing-room that they bought in Vienna from Fanny’s gallery. I have a couple of photographs of this apartment, and you can sense the complete delight this couple took in creating it, the pleasures of buying new things, rather than inheriting stuff. No gilt, no Junge Frau, no Dutch chests. And no family portraits at all.
When things were going well, they lived in this apartment with Henk’s son Robert and their two little boys, born soon after their marriage, my father Victor – known, like his grandfather Viktor, by his Russian patronymic Tascha – and my uncle Constant Hendrik. They played every day in the Bois de Boulogne. When things were going well there was a governess and a cook and a maid, and even a chauffeur, and Elisabeth wrote poetry and articles for Le Figaro and improved her Dutch.
Sometimes, when it was wet, she would take the boys to the gallery of the Jeu de Paume on the edge of the Tuileries gardens. Here in the long, bright rooms they would look at the Manets and Degas and Monets coll. C. Ephrussi, left to the museum in memory of her uncle Charles by Fanny and her husband Theodore Reinach, the clever scholar who had married into the family. There are cousins in Paris, but Charles’s generation has gone, trailing benefactions to the country it adopted. The Reinachs have left the Villa Kerylos, a fabulous re-creation of a Greek temple, to France, and great-aunt Beatrice Ephrussi-Rothschild has bequeathed the rose-pink villa in Cap Ferrat to the Académie française. The