The Hare with Amber Eyes (7 page)

And so Charles buys the netsuke. He buys 264.

And over 200 more, a huge collection of very small things.

Charles bought them, not piece by piece like his lacquers, but as a complete and spectacular collection from Sichel.

Had they just come in, each one folded in its square of silk, then placed in wood-shavings, then crated from Yokohama on one of those four-month shipments by way of the Cape? Had Sichel recently put them out in a cabinet to tempt his rich collectors, or did Charles unwrap them one by one, finding my favourite tiger turning in surprise on a branch of bamboo, carved in ivory at the end of the eighteenth century in Osaka; or the rats looking up as they are caught on the husk of a dried-out fish?

Did he fall in love with the startlingly pale hare with amber eyes, and buy the rest for company?

Did he order them from Sichel? Were they put together over a year or two from the newly impoverished, by some canny dealer in Kyoto, and sold on? I look carefully. There are a very few that have been made for the Western market, knocked up in a hurry ten years before. The plump boy, simpering with his mask, is definitely one of these. It is crudely done, vulgar. The vast majority are netsuke that were carved before the coming of Commodore Perry, some from a hundred years before. There are figures and animals and erotica and creatures from myth: they cover most of the subjects that you could expect in a comprehensive collection. Some are signed by famous carvers. Someone with knowledge has put this group together.

Did he just happen to be there at Sichel’s with Louise, amongst the landslide of silks, the folders of prints, the screens and the porcelain, before the other collectors could spot the trove? Did she turn to him or did he turn to her?

Or was Louise elsewhere? And was it intended as a surprise for her when she next came up to his rooms?

How much did they cost this young man, this capricious, charming collector? His father Léon had just died of heart failure, aged only forty-five, and had been buried next to Betty in the family grave in Montmartre. But Ephrussi et Cie was doing very well indeed. Jules had recently bought the land on the Lake Lucerne for his holiday chalet. His uncles were buying chateaux and running racehorses at Longchamps in the Ephrussi colours of blue-and-yellow polka dots. The netsuke must have been very expensive indeed, but Charles could choose to afford this extravagance as his fortune went on growing year by year with that of his family.

There are things I cannot know. But I do know that Charles bought a black vitrine to put them in, wood polished like lacquer. It was taller than him, just over six foot high. You could see in through the glass door at the front and through the glass at the sides. A mirror at the back let the netsuke slide away into infinities of collecting. And they were all placed on green velvet. There are many different subtle variations of colours in netsuke, all the colours of the ivory, the horn and the boxwood: cream, wax, nut-brown, gold in this field of dense dark green.

They are in front of me now, Charles’s collection within a collection.

Charles places the netsuke on the green velvet in their dark vitrine with the mirrored back, in this, their first resting-place in the story. They are near the lacquer boxes, near the great hangings he brought back from Italy, close to the golden carpet.

I wonder if he could resist going out onto the landing and turning left to tell his brother Ignace about his new acquisition.

Netsuke cannot knock around your salon or your study unprotected. They get lost or dropped, dusty, chipped. They need a place to rest, preferably in company with other bibelots. This is why vitrines come to matter. And in this journey towards the netsuke, I became more and more intrigued by vitrines, glass display cases.

I kept coming across them in Louise’s salon. I had seen them preserved in Belle Époque mansions, read about them in Charles’s exhibition reviews in the
Gazette
and in descriptions in Rothschild inventories. And now that Charles has one of his own, I realise they are part of the performance of salon life, not just part of the furnishings. A collector friend of Charles is described in the act of placing Japanese objects in a vitrine, ‘like a painter applying a stroke to his canvas. The harmony is complete and the refinement exquisite…’

The vitrines exist so that you can see objects, but not touch them: they frame things, suspend them, tantalise through distance.

This is what I realise now I failed to understand about vitrines. I spent the first twenty years of my life as a potter earnestly trying to get objects out of the glass cases in which my pots were often placed in galleries and museums. They die, I’d say, behind glass, held in that airlock. Vitrines were a sort of coffin: things need to be out and to take their chances away from the protection of formal display, to be liberated. ‘Out of the drawing-room and into the kitchen!’ I wrote in a sort of manifesto. There was too much in the way. There was
trop de verre
, too much glass, as a great architect commented on seeing a rival Modernist’s house of glass.

But the vitrine – as opposed to the museum’s case – is for opening. And that opening glass door and the moment of looking, then choosing, and then reaching in and then picking up is a moment of seduction, an encounter between a hand and an object that is electric.

Charles’s friend Cernuschi had a great collection of Japanese art just down the road next to the gates to the parc Monceau, displayed on radical white walls. It made the Japanese objects ‘look unhappy’, as if they were in the Louvre, a critic remarked. Displaying Japanese art as Art made it problematic, over-serious. But Charles’s salon up the hill, a place for a strange encounter between old Italian things and new Japanese things, is not a museum.

Charles’s vitrine is a threshold.

And these netsuke are perfect for the life of Charles’s salon. The golden Louise opening up her vitrine of Japanese things, fishing, handing things out to be looked at and handled, to be caressed, shows that Japanese things are made for digressive conversation, made for distraction. These netsuke add something very particular to Charles’s way of living, I think. They are the first things that have any connection to everyday life, even an exotic everyday life. They are wonderful and highly sensual, of course, but they are not princely like his Medici bed or his Marie Antoinette lacquers. They are for touching.

Above all, they make you laugh in many different ways. They are witty and ribald and slyly comic. And now that I have finally got the netsuke up the winding stairs and settled in Charles’s salon in the honey-coloured hotel, I find I am relieved that this man whom everyone liked so much had enough of a sense of humour to enjoy them. I don’t have just to admire him. I can like him too.

The netsuke – my tiger, my hare, my persimmon – have settled in Charles’s study where he was finally finishing his book on Dürer. It is a room lit up in a breathless letter to Charles from the young poet Jules Laforgue:

Every line of your beautiful book recalled so many memories. Especially the hours spent working alone in your room where the note of a yellow armchair bursts out! And the Impressionists! Two fans by Pissarro, solidly constructed of painstaking small strokes. The Sisleys, the Seine and the telegraph wires and the sky in springtime. The barge near Paris, with that loafer in the lanes. And Monet’s flowering apple trees scaling a hill. And Renoir’s dishevelled little savage and Berthe Morisot’s deep and fresh undergrowth, a seated woman, her child, a black dog, a butterfly net. And another Morisot, a maid with her charge – blue, green, pink, white, dappled with the sun. And the other Renoirs, the Parisienne with red lips in a blue jersey. And that carefree woman with a muff and the lacquer rose in her buttonhole…And the bare-shouldered dancer by Mary Cassatt in yellow, green, blond, rust on the red fauteuil. And the nervous dancers by Degas, Duranty by Degas – and of course Manet’s
Polichinelle
with Banville’s poem!…Ah! The tender hours spent there, losing myself in the catalogue of
Albert Dürer
, dreaming…in your bright room where bursts the note of the yellow armchair, yellow, so yellow!

Albert Dürer et ses dessins
was Charles’s first proper book, a book that had taken him ‘vagabonding’ across Europe. Laforgue, twenty-one years old and new to Paris, had been recommended as a secretary to sift the lists, emendations, notes of ten years of study into appendices, tables and indices for publication. For Laforgue, Charles in his Chinese dressing-gown was an intoxicating patron in an intoxicating setting.

I’m pretty excited too, because I had no idea that Laforgue had worked for him, before coming across a footnote in a book on Manet. Laforgue is a wonderful poet of cities, park benches dripping wet, telegraph wires on roads that no one passes.

Charles is no longer the rushing young man. He has become the ‘Benedictine-dandy of the rue de Monceau’, a black-coated scholar, but flaneurial, whose top hat is tilted at an angle; someone who carries his cane under his arm with a sense of correctness and
amour propre
. Someone who has a valet to make sure that his hat is brushed. Someone, I am sure, who never carried things in his jacket pockets and spoilt the fall of the cloth. We see him here at thirty, with his mistress and his new role as the recently appointed editor of the
Gazette
, and find that he has grown into himself. He is a
mondain
art historian with a secretary. And a collector now not only of netsuke, but of pictures.

And he is so alive in this room. These colours – the black of his coat, and the black of his top hat, and the slightly reddish tinge to his beard – against the stream of fantastic paintings, set alight by this fierce clarity of the note of the yellow armchair. A study, you think, of a man who not only needs colour, but constructs his life around it. A man who wears the perfect uniform of rabbinical black in the rue de Monceau, and who has this other life behind this study door.

What kind of study could possibly go on in a room like this?

Jules Laforgue started work for Charles on 14th July 1881. He worked all summer in this study, staying up half the night. He was, I note with some severity, very badly paid by this Jewish Maecenas. It is through his eyes that we see Charles completing his book: ‘stone by stone you slowly and solidly build the pyramid which supports your beautifully bearded monument’. In a throwaway bit of marginalia Laforgue scribbles a picture of the two of them together. Laforgue, tiny with bouffant hair, walks in front, arms and legs akimbo blowing clouds of smoke, while the debonair, upright, tall, monumental, Assyrian-profiled Charles walks behind him. He has filled out splendidly.

Laforgue adores him, teases him. He is anxious to prove himself in this his first job. ‘And now, oh dandy-scholar of the Rue de Monceau, what are you up to? I always see the summaries of the
Gazette
and
Art
. What are you plotting between Monet’s
Grenouillère
, Manet’s
Constantin Guys
, and the…strange archaeologies of Moreau – tell me.’

The ‘Benedictine-dandy of the rue de Monceau’: a self-portrait with Charles, by Jules Laforgue, 1881

Laforgue wishes to be remembered to ‘our’ room, signs off with ‘good wishes to the Monet – you know which’. His summer with Charles was an encounter with Impressionism, an encounter that would challenge him to find a new kind of poetic language. He tries out a kind of prose-poem, calls it ‘Guitare’, and dedicates it to Charles. But surely these descriptions of Charles’s study are prose-poems themselves: there are the mixtures of the exact markings of colour – ‘
la tâche colorée
’ – the yellow armchair, the red lips and blue jersey of Renoir’s girl. The letters, pell-mell with sensation, high on ideas, are close to Laforgue’s description of Impressionist style as one in which spectator and spectacle are knitted together: ‘
irrémédiablement mouvants, insaisissables et insaissants
’.

Charles was very attached to Laforgue. After the long summer in Paris he arranged for the young poet to get a job in Berlin as reader of French to the Empress – Charles had a casually impressive social reach – and wrote to him, sent him money, advised him, critiqued his reviews and then helped Laforgue to get published. Charles kept more than thirty letters from Laforgue from this time, publishing them in the journal
La revue blanche
after the poet’s early death from tuberculosis.

In these letters you
feel
the room. I wanted to be here with the netsuke, and have worried that I would never get beyond a connoisseurial inventory of the grand furnishings of Charles’s apartment. I’ve worried how I could construct a life entirely through objects. The room overflows, like Laforgue’s writings, with unexpected conjunctions and disjunctions. I can hear their digressive night-time conversations and am here at last.

Everything in this salon is heightened emotion. It is difficult not to feel alive in a place saturated with images of freedom and lassitude, days out in the countryside, young women, a gypsy girl, bathers in the Seine, a loafer in a lane with nowhere to go, a gorgeous faun framed amongst the broderies and all those curious, funny, tactile netsuke.