11. A ‘VERY BRILLIANT FIVE O’CLOCK’

In October 1891 Charles took the netsuke to a new home on the avenue d’Iéna. Number 11 is larger than the Hôtel Ephrussi on the rue de Monceau and more austere on the outside – no swags, no urns. It is so large that it is practically invisible. I stand and look. The spaces between the floors are greater: these are rooms with volume. Charles moved here with his brother Ignace three years after their widowed mother died. I chance my luck and ring a bell and explain my mission to a woman with a perfect and unwavering smile, who explains, quite slowly to me, that I am completely wrong about who lived here, that it is private and that she has never heard of this family. She watches me until I am back in the street.

I’m furious. A week later I find that the brothers’ house was torn down and rebuilt in the 1920s.

This new area is even grander than the rue de Monceau. It is only twenty years since the Ephrussi arrived in Paris, but this was a family that now felt secure. The bachelor brothers’ house was 300 yards down the hill from the grandeur of Jules and Fanny’s mansion, with its emblems of ears of corn above the windows and their entwined initials over the huge gateway into the courtyard. Louise’s palace was directly across the road in the rue de Bassano. The area is on the hill to the north of the Champ de Mars, where the Eiffel Tower had just been erected. It was the place to be: it was talked of as the ‘hill of arts’.

Charles’s taste was still changing. His passion for the Japanese was being slowly overtaken. The cult had become so widespread that everyone in the 1880s had houses full of japonaiseries: they were now regarded as bric-a-brac, settling like dust on every available surface. ‘Everything,’ said Alexandre Dumas in 1887, ‘is Japanese now’: Zola’s house outside Paris, awash with Japanese objets, was considered slightly risible. It had become much more difficult to make a claim for their special attributes when they had become mainstream, when the posters for bicycles or absinthe flapping off the hoardings now resembled Japanese woodblock prints. There were still serious collectors of Japanese art – including Guimet, who lived next door – and much more art-historical knowledge than in the melee of ten years before. Goncourt had published his studies of Hokusai and Utamaro, Siegfried Bing had his journal Le Japon artistique, but it was no longer followed with religious intensity in Charles’s fashionable circle.

Proust records this moment of transition in the drawing-room of Swann’s lover, the demi-mondaine Odette: ‘the Far East was retreating more and more before the invading forces of the eighteenth century…nowadays it was rarely in Japanese kimonos that Odette received her intimates, but rather in the bright and billowing silk of a Watteau housecoat’.

It was a change of exoticisms that was noticed in Charles, critic, collector and curator. A journalist wrote that Charles had begun ‘little by little to detach himself from…[Japan]…and to turn more and more towards the French XVIIIth century, the productions of Meissen and of the Empire, of which he has collected an ensemble of creations of the highest quality’. In his new house Charles hung on the walls of his study a suite of tapestries depicting children’s games, woven from silver thread. And he created a series of enfilade rooms, which he decorated with formal suites of pale Empire furniture with its bronze mounts, on which he placed garnitures of Sèvres and Meissen porcelain: there were careful rhythms here. And then he hung the Moreaus, Manets and Renoirs.

Proust has the Duchesse de Guermantes rhapsodising over this kind of neoclassical furniture, seen in the house of the Duc d’Iéna: ‘all those things invading our houses, the sphinxes crouching at the feet of the armchairs, the snakes coiled round candelabra…all the Pompeian lamps, the little boat-shaped beds which look as if they have been floating on the Nile’. A bed has a siren stretched out in relief, she says, that looks just like a Moreau.

It is in this new house that Charles replaces his lit de parade with an Empire bed. It is a lit à la polonaise hung with silks.

In a second-hand bookshop in Paris I find the sale catalogues of parts of Michel and Maurice’s art collections that were dispersed after they had died. A dealer had been bidding for the clocks, unsuccessfully, annotating every lot with the price as it had come up: 10,780 francs for a Louis XV astronomical clock inlaid with bronze signs of the zodiac. All this porcelain, the Savonnerie carpets, the paintings by Boucher, the boiseries and the tapestries speak of the need of the Ephrussi family to settle seamlessly into society. And I began to realise that Charles’s new taste for Empire paintings and furniture as he approached his mid-forties was more than just a way of creating an ensemble in which to live. It was also a claim on an essential Frenchness, on belonging somewhere properly. And perhaps a way of putting more space between those first, jostlingly heterodox rooms and his authoritative life as an arbiter of taste. Empire is not le goût Rothschild, not Jewish. It is patrician, French.

I wonder how the netsuke looked here: it is in these formal rooms that Charles begins to grow away from them. His rooms in the rue de Monceau had not ‘learnt their optical catechism’ they were cut through by the note of the yellow armchair. They were congeries of different things to pick up and handle. But I feel that Charles is becoming grander. He is now called ‘the opulent Charles’ by a Parisian wit. There is less to touch here: you would not dare to pick up those Meissen vases in their bronze mounts and hand them round for inspection. The furnishings of these rooms are described by a critic after Charles’s death as the very best of their kind: they are ‘pompeux, ingénieux et un peu froids’, grandiose, clever and a little cold. Cold is right, I think, as I surreptitiously reach a hand over a velvet rope to stroke the arm of an Empire fauteuil in the Musée Nissim de Camondo in the rue de Monceau, for research.

I find it harder to imagine the vitrine opening and a hand hovering over the netsuke in indecision between a scramble of ivory puppies and a girl soaping herself in a wooden tub. I’m not sure they fit in at all.

In their new house the brothers gave larger dinner parties and soirées. On 2nd February 1893 Le Gaulois records one in its column ‘Mondanités’. There was a ‘Very brilliant five o’clock last evening, at Messrs Charles and Ignace Ephrussi, in honour of the princess Mathilde,’ it records:

Her Imperial Highness, accompanied by the Baronesse de Galbois, arrived at the splendid salons of the avenue d’Iéna, where more than 200 people, the upper echelons of the Parisian and foreign world, gathered together.

Let us mention at random:

Comtesse d’Haussonville, in black satin; Comtesse von Moltke-Hvitfeldt, also in black; Princesse de Léon, in dark blue velvet; the Duchesse de Morny in black velvet; Comtesse de Louis de Talleyrand-Périgord, in black satin; Comtesse Jean de Ganay, in red and black; Baronesse Gustave de Rothschild, in black velvet…Comtesse Louise Cahen d’Anvers, in mauve velvet; Mme Edgard Stern, in green grey; Mme Manuel de Yturbe, née Diaz, in lilac velvet; Baronesse James de Rothschild, in black; Comtesse de Camondo, née Cahen, in grey satin; Baronesse Benoist-Méchin, in black velvet and fur, etc.

Among the men, notable men included:

The minister of Sweden, Prince Orloff, Prince de Sagan, Prince Jean Borghèse, Marquis de Modène, Messrs Forain, Bonnat, Roll, Blanche, Charles Yriarte Schlumberger, etc.

Mme Léon Fould and Mme Jules Ephrussi did the honours in greeting the guests, one in a gown of deep grey and the other in light grey.

The elegant apartments were much appreciated, notably the grand salon Louis XVI, where one admired the head of king Midas, a marvel by Luca della Robbia, and Charles Ephrussi’s rooms, of the most pure Empire.

The reception was very lively, and there was a very beautiful musical programme performed by the tziganes.

The Princesse Mathilde didn’t leave the avenue d’Iéna until 7 o’clock.

It was a good turn-out for the brothers. According to the paper it was a cold and bright evening with a fullish moon. The avenue d’Iéna is wide, with plane trees sweeping down the centre, and I imagine the carriages for the brothers’ party blocking the road, and the gypsy music coming from their apartments. I imagine Louise, red-gold and Titian-like in mauve velvet, walking the few hundred yards up the hill to her vast faux-Renaissance mansion and her husband.

A ‘very brilliant five o’clock’ would have been difficult to give the following year. In 1894, as the painter J. E. Blanche put it, ‘the Jockey club deserted the table of the Princes of Israel’.

It was the start of the Dreyfus Affair, twelve years that convulsed France and polarised Paris. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer on the French General Staff, was accused of being a spy for Germany on the forged evidence of a slip of paper found in a waste-paper basket. He was court-martialled and found guilty, though it was quite clear to the Army General Staff that the evidence was fabricated. Dreyfus was cashiered in front of a howling crowd demanding his execution. Toy gallows were sold on the streets. He was sent to Devil’s Island to serve life-imprisonment in solitary confinement.

The campaign to have him retried began almost immediately, provoking an intense and violent anti-Semitic backlash; the Jews were seen to be overthrowing natural justice. Their patriotism was impugned: by supporting Dreyfus they were proving that they were Jewish first and foremost, and French only second. Charles and his brothers, still Russian citizens, were typical Jews.

Two years later evidence emerged that another French officer, Major Esterhazy, was behind the forgery, but Esterhazy was exonerated on only the second day of his military trial, and Dreyfus was reconfirmed in his conviction. Additional forgeries were produced to back up the sham. Despite Zola’s impassioned plea to the President, ‘J’accuse…!’, published in the newspaper L’Aurore in January 1898, Dreyfus was brought back in 1899 and reconvicted for a third time. Zola was convicted of criminal libel and fled to England. It was not until 1906 that Dreyfus would finally be cleared.

There were seismic splits into bitter Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard camps. Friendships were curtailed, families separated and salons where Jews and veiled anti-Semites used to meet became actively hostile. Amongst Charles’s artist friends, Degas became the most savage anti-Dreyfusard, and stopped speaking to Charles and to the Jewish Pissarro. Cézanne, too, was convinced of Dreyfus’s guilt, and Renoir became actively hostile to Charles and his ‘Jew art’.

The Ephrussi family were Dreyfusard by faith and by inclination – and simply by living in the public eye. In a letter written to André Gide in the febrile spring of 1898, a friend recounts hearing a man catechising his children outside the Ephrussi house in the avenue d’Iéna. Who lives here? ‘Le sale juif!’ The dirty Jew! Ignace was followed back home from the Gare du Nord after a late dinner in the country, by inspectors of the police who had mistaken him for the exiled Zola. ‘Five agents,’ reported the anti-Dreyfusard Le Gaulois on 19th October 1898, ‘spent the night in surveillance. Inspector Frecourt arrived in the afternoon to convey the summons to court to M. Zola, whom he believed was taking refuge chez Ephrussi…When he dares to return M. Zola will not escape the vigilant eye of the police.’

And it was a family battle: Charles and Ignace’s niece Fanny, the adored daughter of their late sister Betty, had married Théodore Reinach, an archaeologist and Hellenist from a prominent Jewish family of French intellectuals. And Théodore’s politician brother Joseph was the principal mover in Dreyfus’s defence – and the later author of the magisterial Histoire de l’affaire Dreyfus. Reinach became a lightning conductor for anti-Semitism: much of Drumont’s ire was directed against this ‘personification of the counterfeit Frenchman’. The ‘Jew Reinach’ was stripped of his own military rank at a court martial, beaten up while leaving Zola’s trial and became the subject of a national campaign of vilification of great viciousness.

Paris changed for Charles. He was a mondain with doors shut in his face, a patron ostracised by some of his artists. I think of what it must have been like, and recall Proust writing of the Duc de Guermantes’s anger:

as far as Swann is concerned…they tell me now that he is openly Dreyfusard. I should never have believed it of him, an epicure, a man of practical judgement, a collector, a connoisseur of old books, a member of the Jockey, a man who enjoys the respect of all, who knows all the good addresses and used to send us the best port you could wish to drink, a dilettante, a family man. Ah! I feel badly let down.

In Paris I haunt the archives and pace my routes between old houses and offices, vagabonding in museums, aimless one moment and over-purposeful the next. I am charting a journey into memory. I have a netsuke of a brindled wolf in my pocket. It is almost too strange to find how interwoven Charles is with Proust’s figure of Swann.

I keep coming on the places where Charles Ephrussi and Charles Swann intersect. Before I started my journey I knew in the broadest terms that my Charles was one of the two principal models for Proust’s protagonist – the lesser, it was said, of the two. I remember reading a dismissive remark on him (‘a Polish Jew…stout, bearded and ugly, his manner was ponderous and uncouth’) in the biography of Proust published by George Painter in the 1950s and taking it at face value. The other model acknowledged by Proust was a charming dandy and clubman called Charles Haas. He was an older man, neither a writer nor a collector.

If there has to be a first owner of my wolf, I want him to be Swann – driven, loved, graceful – but I don’t want Charles to disappear into source material, into literary footnotes. Charles has become so real to me that I fear losing him into Proust studies. And I care too much about Proust to turn his fiction into some Belle Époque acrostic. ‘My novel has no key,’ Proust said, repeatedly.

I try to map the straightforward correspondences that my Charles and the fictional Charles share, the lineaments of their lives. I say ‘straightforward’, but when I start to write them out they become quite a list.

They are both Jewish. They are both mondain. They have a social reach from royalty (Charles conducted Queen Victoria round Paris, Swann is a friend of the Prince of Wales) via the salons to the studios of artists. They are art-lovers deeply in love with the works of the Italian Renaissance, Giotto and Botticelli in particular. They are both experts in the arcane subject of Venetian fifteenth-century medallions. They are collectors, patrons of the Impressionists, incongruous in the sunshine at a boating-party of a painter-friend.

Both of them write monographs on art: Swann on Vermeer, my Charles on Dürer. They use their ‘erudition in matters of art…to advise society ladies what pictures to buy and how to decorate their houses’. Both Ephrussi and Swann are dandies and they are both Chevaliers of the Légion d’honneur. Their lives traverse japonisme and reach into the new taste for Empire. And they are both Dreyfusards who find that their carefully constructed lives are deeply riven by their Jewishness.

Proust played with the interpenetration of the real and the invented. His novels have a panoply of historical figures who appear as themselves – Mme Straus and the Princess Mathilde, for instance – mingling with characters reimagined from recognisable people. Elstir, the great painter who leaves behind his infatuation with japonisme to become an Impressionist, has elements of Whistler and Renoir in him, but has his own dynamic force. Similarly Proust’s characters stand in front of actual pictures. The visual texture of the novels is suffused not just with references to Giotto and Botticelli, Dürer and Vermeer, alongside Moreau, Monet and Renoir, but, by the act of looking at paintings, by the act of collecting them and remembering what it was to see something, with a memory of the moment of apprehension.

Swann catches resemblances in passing: Odette to a Botticelli, the profile of a footman at a reception to a Mantegna. And so did Charles. I cannot help wondering if my grandmother, so undishevelled, so very kempt in her white laundered frock on those gravel paths in the garden of the Swiss chalet, ever knew what made Charles bend down and ruffle her pretty sister’s hair and compare her to his Renoir of the gypsy girl?

And when I encounter Swann, he is funny and charming, but he has a quality of reserve ‘like a locked cabinet’. He moves through the world leaving people more alive to the things he loves. I think of how the young narrator, in love with Swann’s daughter, visits the household and is met with such courtesy, introduced to the sublimities of his collection.

That is my Charles, taking endless pains to show books or pictures to young friends, to Proust, writing about objects and sculpture with acuity and honesty, animating the world of things. I know. It is how I have come to see Berthe Morisot for the first time, how I learn to stand back and then move forward. It is how I have come to listen to Massenet, look at Savonnerie carpets, see that Japanese lacquer is worth spending time with. I pick up one after another of Charles’s netsuke and think of him choosing them. And I think of his reserve. He belongs in this glittering Parisian world, but he never stops being a Russian citizen. He always has this secret hinterland.

Charles had a poor heart like his father. He was fifty when Dreyfus was brought back from Devil’s Island to undergo his second farcical trial and be reconvicted in 1899. In the delicate engraving of him done in that year by Jean Patricot he is looking downwards, inwards, his beard still neatly trimmed, his cravat held by a pearl. He is more involved in music and is now a patron of the Comtesse Greffuhle’s Société des Grandes Auditions Musicales, ‘where his advice is greatly appreciated, and where he has put himself to work with ardour’. He had almost stopped buying pictures, except for a Monet of the rocks at low tide at Pourville-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast. It is a beautiful painting, scumbled rocks in the foreground and strange calligraphies of the fishermen’s wooden poles emerging from the sea. It is, I think, rather Japanese.

Engraving of Charles Ephrussi by Patricot published with his obituary in the Gazette des beaux-arts , 1905

Charles had slowed his writing too, though he was punctilious in his duties at the Gazette, clear about what should get published, ‘never ever late, ever diligent down to the very minutiae of every article, ever seeking perfection’, happy to bring on new writers.

Louise had a new lover. Charles was superseded by Crown Prince Alfonso of Spain, thirty years her junior and rather weak-chinned, but nonetheless a future king.

On the cusp of the new century, Charles’s first cousin in Vienna was to be married. Charles had known Viktor von Ephrussi since boyhood, when the whole family had lived together, all the generations under one roof, the evenings spent in planning their move to Paris. Viktor was the bored little boy, his youngest cousin, for whom Charles drew caricatures of the servants. The clan was close and they had seen each other at parties in Paris and Vienna, on holiday in Vichy and St Moritz, at Fanny’s summer gatherings at the Chalet Ephrussi. And they shared Odessa – the city they were both born in, the starting place that is not mentioned.

The three brothers in Paris all send a wedding-present to Viktor and his young bride, the Baroness Emmy Schey von Koromla. The couple will start their new life in the enormous Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse.

Jules and Fanny send them a beautiful Louis XVI desk of marquetry with tapering legs ending in small gilt hooves.

Ignace sends them an Old Master painting, Dutch, of two ships in a gale. Perhaps a coded joke about marriage from a serial avoider of commitment.

Charles sends them something special, a spectacular something from Paris: a black vitrine with green velvet shelves, and a mirrored back that reflects 264 netsuke.