The Hare with Amber Eyes (5 page)

It is not yet time for the netsuke to enter the story. Charles in his twenties is always elsewhere, in transit to somewhere, sending regards and his apologies for missing family gatherings, from London, Venice, Munich. He is starting to write a book on Dürer, the artist he fell for in the collections of Vienna, and he needs to find every drawing, every scribble in every archive, in order to do him justice.

His two older brothers are safely ensconced in their own worlds. Jules is at the helm of Ephrussi et Cie in the rue de l’Arcade with his uncles. His early training in Vienna has paid off and he turns out to be very good with money. And he has got married in the synagogue in Vienna to Fanny, the clever, wry young widow of a Viennese financier. She is very rich, and it is all appropriately dynastic. The gossip in the papers in Paris and Vienna is that he danced with her every night until she wearied, gave in and married him.

Ignace has cut loose. He is prone to falling spectacularly, serially, in love. As an
amateur de la femme
, his particular skill is an ability to climb buildings and into high windows for assignations – something I later find recalled in memoirs of elderly society ladies. He is a
mondain
, a Parisian man of the world, living between love-affairs, evenings at the Jockey Club – the epicentre of bachelor society – and duelling. This is illegal, but occupies the time of wealthy young men and army officers, who resort to rapiers over issues of minute transgressions of honour. Ignace turns up in the duelling manuals of the day, one newspaper recording an accident where his eye is almost taken out in a bout with his tutor. Ignace is ‘relatively tall but a little under the average height…Gifted with energy which is also luckily backed up by steel muscles…Mr Ephrussi is one amongst the keenest…he is also one of the most friendly and frankest fencers I know.’

Here he is, posed nonchalantly with a rapier, like a Hilliard miniature of an Elizabethan courtier: ‘an untiring sportsman, you will find him in the forest early in the morning, riding a superb dapple-grey; he has already taken his fencing lesson…’ I think of Ignace checking the lengths of the stirrups in the stables in the rue de Monceau. When he rides, his horse is arrayed ‘in the Russian manner’. I’m not quite sure what this entails, but it sounds splendid.

It is in the salons that Charles first comes into view. He is noticed by the acidic novelist, diarist and collector Edmond de Goncourt in his journal. That people such as Charles were invited to salons at all disgusted the novelist: the salons had become ‘infested with Jews and Jewesses’. He comments on these new young men that he encounters: these Ephrussi were ‘
mal élevés
’, badly brought up, and
‘insupportables’
, insufferable. Charles, he intimates, is ubiquitous, the trait of someone who does not know his place; he is hungry for contact, does not know when to shade eagerness and become invisible.

Goncourt is jealous of this charming boy with the slightest of accents to his French. Charles has walked, seemingly without effort, into the formidable, fashionable salons of the day, each of which was a minefield of fiercely contested geographies of political, artistic, religious and aristocratic taste. There were many, but the three principal salons were those of Madame Straus (the widow of Bizet), of the Countess Greffulhe, and of a rarefied painter of watercolours of flowers, Madame Madeleine Lemaire. A salon consisted of a drawing-room full of regularly invited guests, meeting at a set time in the afternoon or evening. Poets, playwrights, painters, ‘clubmen’,
mondains
would meet under the patronage of a hostess to engage in conversation around issues of note, or purposeful gossip, or to listen to music or see a new society portrait unveiled. Each salon had its own distinct atmosphere and its own acolytes: those who offended Mme Lemaire were ‘bores’ or ‘deserters’.

Mme Lemaire’s Thursday salon is mentioned in an early essay of the young Marcel Proust. He evokes the scent of lilacs filling her studio and drifting into the rue de Monceau, crowded with the carriages of the beau monde. You could never get through the rue de Monceau on a Thursday. Proust notices Charles. There is a hubbub and he moves closer through the throng of writers and socialites. Charles is there in a corner talking to a portrait painter, their heads bowed and conversing so softly and intensely that, though he hovers nearby, Proust cannot overhear even a scintilla of their conversation.

Goncourt, splenetic, is particularly furious that young Charles has become a confidant of
his
Princess Mathilde, the niece of Bonaparte. She lives nearby in a vast mansion in the rue de Courcelles. He records gossip that she has been seen at Charles’s house in the rue de Monceau along with the ‘
gratin
’, the upper crust, of the aristocracy, that the Princess had found in Charles ‘a mahout to guide her through her life’. It is an unforgettable image of the formidable, aged Princess in her black, an elephantine presence rather like Queen Victoria, and this young man in his twenties, able to guide her with the merest of suggestions, of touch.

Charles is starting to find a life for himself in this complex and snobbish city. He is beginning to discover the places where his conversation is welcomed, where his Jewishness is either acceptable or where it is overlooked. As a young writer on art, he goes to the offices of the
Gazette des beaux-arts
in the rue Favart each day – taking in six or seven salons en route, adds the omniscient Goncourt. From family house to these editorial offices is exactly twenty-five minutes’ brisk walk, or on my April morning forty-five minutes of flaneurial stroll. I suppose Charles might go in a carriage, I worry, but I can’t time that.

The
Gazette,
the ‘
Courrier européen de l’art et de la curiosité
’, has a canary-yellow cover and on its title page an aesthetic display of Renaissance artefacts on top of a classical tomb surmounted by a furious-looking Leonardo. For your seven francs you get reviews of the different exhibitions jockeying for position in Paris, the
Exposition des artistes indépendants
, the official Salons hung floor to ceiling with paintings, the surveys at the Trocadéro and the Louvre. It is cuttingly described as ‘an expensive art-magazine which every great lady kept open but unread on her table’ and it certainly holds a reputation as an essential part of society life, a
World of Interiors
as well as an
Apollo
. In the beautiful oval library of the Camondo mansion down the hill from the Hôtel Ephrussi are shelves and shelves of its bound volumes.

Here at the offices are other writers and artists, and the best art library in Paris, full of periodicals from all over Europe and catalogues of exhibitions. It is an exclusive arts club, a place to share news and gossip about which painter is working on which commission, who is out of favour with the collectors or with the jurists for the Salon. It is also busy. The
Gazette
is published monthly and so it is a real place of work. There are all the decisions to be taken on who will be writing on what, the ordering of engravings and illustrations. You can learn a lot by being here day by day, watching the arguments.

When Charles, just back from his plundering of Italian art dealers, starts to write for the
Gazette
, it includes lavish engravings of the pictures of the day, artefacts mentioned in the scholarly reviews and key pictures from the Salon represented in careful reproduction. I pick out an issue at random from 1878. It includes, amongst other things, articles on Spanish tapestry, Greek archaic sculpture, the architecture of the Champ de Mars, and Gustave Courbet – all, of course, with illustrations interleaved with tissue mounts. It is the perfect journal for a young man to write for, a calling-card into those places where society and art intersect.

I find the traces of these intersections by hacking my way assiduously through the social columns of Parisian newspapers of the 1870s. I start this as a necessary clearing of the undergrowth, but it becomes strangely compelling and a relief from my dogged attempt to chart every single one of Charles’s exhibition reviews. There are the same labyrinthine lists of encounters and guests, the minutiae of who wore what, who is to be seen, each run of names a calibration of snubs and fine judgements.

I get particularly hooked by the listings of wedding-presents at society marriages, telling myself that this is all good research on cultures of gift-giving, and waste an embarrassing amount of time trying to work out who is being over-generous, who a cheapskate and who is just dull. My great-great-grandmother gives a set of golden serving dishes shaped like cockle shells at a society wedding in 1874. Vulgar, I think, with nothing to back this up.

And amongst all these Parisian balls and musical soirées, the salons and receptions, I start to find mentions of the three brothers. They stick together: the MM. Ephrussi are seen in the box at a premiere at the Opéra, at funerals, at the receptions of Prince X, Countess Y. The Tsar has made a visit to the city and they are there to greet him as prominent Russian citizens. They give parties jointly, are noted for the ‘grand series of dinners they are hosting together’, have been spotted, along with other
sportsmen
, on the latest thing, the bicycle. One column of
Le Gaulois
is devoted to
déplacements
– who is off to Deauville and who to Chamonix – so I know when they leave Paris for their holidays in Meggen at Jules and Fanny’s baronial Chalet Ephrussi. From their golden house on the hill they seem to have become an accepted part of Parisian society within a few years of their arrival.
Monceau
, I remember, quick-going.

The elegant Charles has new interests apart from rearranging his rooms and perfecting his sinuous art-historical sentences. He has a mistress. And he has started to collect Japanese art. These two things, sex and Japan, are intertwined.

He owns no netsuke yet, but he is getting much closer. I am willing him on as he starts his collection, buying lacquer from a dealer in Japanese art called Philippe Sichel. Goncourt writes in his journal that he has been to Sichel’s, ‘the place where Jewish money comes’ he goes into a back room in search of the latest
objet
, the newest album of erotic prints, a scroll maybe. Here he comes across ‘la Cahen d’Anvers, crouched over a Japanese lacquer box with her lover, the young Ephrussi’.

She is indicating to him ‘the time and place that he can make love with her’.

Charles’s lover is Louise Cahen d’Anvers. She is a couple of years older than Charles and very pretty, with red-gold hair. ‘La Cahen d’Anvers’ is married to a Jewish banker and they have four small children, a boy and three girls. The fifth child arrives and Louise calls him Charles.

I only know about Parisian marriages from the novels of Nancy Mitford, but this strikes me as extraordinarily sanguine. And rather impressive – I want to be bourgeois and ask how you find time for five children, a husband
and
a lover? The two clans are very close. In fact, as I stand in the place d’Iéna outside Jules and Fanny’s marital home, his initials floridly entwined with hers above the grander doors, I find that I am looking straight across the road to Louise’s equally baroque new palace at the corner of the rue de Bassano. At this point I wonder if the clever, indefatigable Fanny arranged this affair for her best friend.

There was certainly something very intimate about the whole arrangement. They met constantly at the round of receptions and balls and the two families often holidayed together at the Chalet Ephrussi in Switzerland or at the Cahen d’Anvers chateau at Champs-sur-Marne just outside Paris. What was the etiquette of meeting your friend on the way up the stairs to your brother-in-law’s apartment? These lovers might have needed the back rooms of dealers just to get away from all this smothering, knowing amiability. And the children.

Charles, this increasingly adept and helpful young man of the salons, arranged for his society friend Léon Bonnat to do a pastel portrait of Louise. She is pictured in a pale dress, looking down demurely, her hair half-hiding her face.

In fact, Louise was far from demure. Goncourt records her with his novelist’s eye, on Saturday 28th February 1876, in her salon:

The Jews retain, from their oriental origin, a peculiar nonchalance. Today, I was charmed as I observed Mme Louise Cahen fishing in the bottom of her vitrine of porcelain and lacquer ware, wanting to hand me some; she moved like a lazy cat. And when they are blond – these Jews – there is, at the heart of their blondness, something golden, like the painting of the
MISTRESS OF TITIAN
. Her search completed, the Jewess dropped onto a chaise longue, her head flung back to one side and revealing at the head, a coil of hair that resembled a nest of snakes. Pulling various amused, questioning expressions, and, wrinkling her nose, she complained of the unreasonableness of men and of novelists expecting women not to be human creatures and not to have, in love, the same disgust as men.

It is an unforgettable image of eroticised langour: the mistress of Titian is indeed very golden and very naked, one hand loosely covering herself. You sense Louise’s power over the famous writer, her control of the situation. She is, after all, ‘
ma muse alpha
’ for Paul Bourget, another popular novelist of the day. In the portrait she commissioned of herself for her own salon from Carolus-Duran,
the
society painter of the moment, she is barely contained in her swirling gown, her lips slightly parted. There is a lot of drama in this muse. It makes me wonder why she wanted this aesthetic young man as a lover.

It may have been his lack of histrionics, the deliberative pace of an art historian. Or it may have been due to her having two huge households, a husband and a run of children, whilst Charles was unencumbered, perfectly free to entertain her when she needed distraction. It is certain that the lovers shared a real interest in music, art and poetry – and in musicians, artists and poets. Louise’s brother-in-law, Albert, was a composer, and Charles and Louise went with him to the Opéra in Paris, and to the more radical premieres in Brussels to hear Massenet. They were both passionate about Wagner, a kind of passion that is hard to dissemble, but good to share. Wagner’s operas, I imagine, also give the couple plenty of time to themselves in one of those deep, plush boxes at the Opéra. They were present at a small and select dinner party (
sans
the husband) followed by a recital of poetry by Anatole France, hosted by Proust.

And they buy Japanese black-and-gold lacquer boxes together for their parallel collections: they start their love-affair with Japan.

It is with Louise, weary after an argument with her husband or with Charles, indolently fishing in her vitrine of Japanese lacquer bibelots, then falling back on to her chaise longue, that I know that I am getting closer to the netsuke. They are coming into focus, part of a complex, fractious Paris life that really existed.

I want to find how these nonchalant Parisians, Charles and his lover, handled Japanese things. What was it like to have something so alien in your hands for the first time, to pick up a box or a cup – or a netsuke – in a material that you had never encountered before and shift it around, finding its weight and balance, running a fingertip along the raised decoration of a stork in flight through clouds? There must be a literature on touch somewhere, I think; someone must have recorded in a diary or a letter the fugitive moment of what they felt when they picked one up. There must be a trace of their hands somewhere.

Goncourt’s aside is a good place to start. Charles and Louise bought their first pieces of Japanese lacquer from the house of the Sichel brothers. It was not a gallery where each collector was reverently shown
objets
and prints in separate booths, as at the up-market gallery of Siegfried Bing, the Oriental Art Boutique, but an over-flowing morass of everything Japanese. The quantities were overwhelming. Philippe Sichel sent forty-five crates with 5,000 objects back from Yokohama after one buying trip in 1874 alone. This created a febrile atmosphere. What was here, and where was it? Would other collectors find the treasure before you?

This mass of Japanese art inspired reverie. Goncourt recorded a day spent at the Sichels soon after a delivery had arrived from Japan, surrounded by ‘
tout cet art capiteux et hallucinatoire
’ – all this intoxicating, mesmerising art. Since 1859 prints and ceramics had begun to seep into France; by the early 1870s this had become a flood of
things
. A writer looking back on the very earliest days of this infatuation with Japanese art wrote in the
Gazette
in 1878:

One kept oneself informed about new cargoes. Old ivories, enamels, faience and porcelain, bronzes, lacquer, wooden sculptures…embroidered satins, playthings, simply arrived at a merchant’s shop and immediately left for artists’ studios or writers’ studies…They entered the hands of…Carolus Duran, Manet, James Tissot, Fantin-Latour, Degas, Monet, the writers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Philippe Burty, Zola…the travellers Cernuschi, Duret, Emile Guimet…The movement was established, the amateurs followed.

Even more extraordinary was the occasional sight of:

young men in our great faubourgs, on our boulevards, in the theatre, whose appearance surprises us…They wear top hats or small rounded felt ones resting on fine and lustrous black hair, long and straight back, the cloth frock coat is correctly buttoned, clear grey trousers, fine shoes and with a cravat of some dark colour floating on the elegant linen. If the jewel that fixes this cravat was not too visible, the trousers not splayed by the instep, the top boots not too glossy, the cane not too light, – these nuances betray the man who submits to the taste of his tailor instead of imposing his taste on them, – we would take them to be Parisians. You cross them on the pavement, you look at them: their skin is lightly bronzed, the beard rare; some of them have adopted the moustache…the mouth is large, conformed to open squarely, in the fashion of masks in Greek comedy; the cheek-bones become round and the forehead protuberant on the oval of the face; the external angles of the small bridled eyes, but black and alive, with a piercing gaze, lift towards the temples. They are the Japanese.

It is a breath-catching description of being a stranger in a new culture, almost imperceptible except for your meticulous dress. The passer-by takes a second look, and it is only the completeness of your disguise that gives you away.

It also reveals the strangeness of this encounter with Japan. Though the Japanese were extremely rare in Paris in the 1870s – there were delegations and diplomats and the odd prince – their art was ubiquitous. Everyone had to get their hands on these
japonaiseries
: all the painters Charles was starting to meet in the salons, all the writers Charles knew from the
Gazette
, his family, his family friends, his lover, all were living through this convulsion. Fanny Ephrussi records in her letters shopping trips to Mitsui, a fashionable shop in the rue Martel that sold Far Eastern objects, to buy Japanese wallpaper for the new smoking-room and guest bedrooms in the house that she and Jules had just finished building in the place d’Iéna. How could Charles, the critic, the well-dressed
amateur d’art
and collector,
not
buy Japanese art?

In the Parisian artistic hothouse it mattered when you started your collection. Earlier collectors,
japonistes,
had the edge as they were men of superior appreciation and creators of taste. Goncourt, naturally, managed to suggest that he and his brother had actually seen Japanese prints
before
the opening up of Japan. These early adopters of Japanese art, though fiercely competitive with each other, shared their discernment. But, as George Augustus Sala wrote in
Paris Herself Again
in 1878, the collegial atmosphere of earlier collecting soon disappeared. ‘
Japonisme
has become to some very artistic amateurs, the Ephrussi, the Camondos, like a sort of religion.’

Charles and Louise were ‘
néojaponistes
’, young and rich artistic latecomers. For with Japanese art there was an exhilarating lack of connoisseurship, none of the enmeshed knowledge of art historians to confound your immediate responses, your intuitions. Here was a new Renaissance unfolding and the chance to have the ancient and serious art of the East in your hands. You could have it in quantity and you could have it now. Or you could buy it now and make love later.

When you held a Japanese
objet
, it revealed itself. Touch tells you what you need to know: it tells you about yourself. Edmond de Goncourt offered his view: ‘here, in respect to politeness, gentleness, unctuousness so to speak, of perfect things in one’s hands: an aphorism. Touch – it is the mark by which the amateur recognises himself. The man who handles an object with indifferent fingers, with
clumsy
fingers, with fingers that do not envelop lovingly is a man who is not passionate about art.’

For these early collectors and travellers to Japan, it was enough to pick up a Japanese object to know whether it was ‘right’ or not. Indeed, the American artist John La Farge on his trip in 1884 made a pact with his friends ‘that we should bring no books, read no books, but come as innocently as we could’. Having a
feel
for beauty was enough: touch was a kind of sensory innocence.

Japanese art was a brave new world: it introduced new textures, new ways of feeling things. Though there were all those albums of wood block prints to buy, this was not art simply to hang on walls. This was an epiphany of new materials: bronzes of a depth of patina that seemed far greater than those of the Renaissance; lacquers of an unequalled depth and darkness; folding screens of gold leaf to bisect a room, throw light. Monet painted
La Japonaise
(
Camille Monet in Japanese Costume
); Camille Monet’s robe had ‘certain gold embroideries several centimetres thick’. And there were objects that were unlike anything seen in Western art, objects that could only be described as ‘playthings’, small carvings of animals and beggars called ‘netsuke’ that you could roll in your hands. Charles’s friend and editor of the
Gazette
, the collector Louis Gonse, described a particular boxwood netsuke beautifully as ‘
plus gras, plus simple, plus caresse
’ – very rich, very simple, very tactile. It is difficult to beat this cadence of response.

This was all stuff to have in your hands, stuff to add texture to your salon or your boudoir. As I look at the images of Japanese things, I see that the Parisians are layering one material on another: an ivory is wrapped in a silk, a silk is hanging behind a lacquer table, a lacquer table is spread with porcelain, fans fall across a floor.

Passionate touch, discovery in the hands, things enveloped lovingly,
plus caresse
.
Japonisme
and touch were a seductive combination for Charles and Louise, amongst many others.

Before the netsuke comes a collection of thirty-three black-and-gold lacquer boxes. It was a collection to place with Charles’s other collections in his apartment at the Hôtel Ephrussi, something to sit near his burgundy Renaissance hangings and his pale Donatello sculpture in marble. Charles and Louise put this collection together from Sichel’s chaotic house of treasures. It was a stellar group of seventeenth-century lacquers, as good as any in Europe: to choose them they must have been regular visitors to Sichel’s. And very pleasingly for me as a potter, alongside these lacquers, Charles also had a sixteenth-century stoneware covered jar from Bizen, the Japanese pottery village in which I studied when I was seventeen, excited to finally get my passionate hands on those simple, tactile tea-bowls.

In
Les lacques japonais au Trocadéro
, a long essay published in the
Gazette
in 1878, Charles describes the five or six vitrines full of lacquer on exhibition at the Trocadéro in Paris. This is his fullest writing about Japanese art. As elsewhere, he is in turn academic (he is exercised about dating), descriptive and ultimately lyrical about what he sees in front of him.