Venices

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The Groupe des Six (from left to right): François Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre, Louis Durey, Jean Cocteau, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger and a drawing of Georges Auric by Cocteau, 1931

Serge Lifar at the exhibition celebrating twenty years of the Ballets Russes at the Pavillon de Marsan, 1939

Serge Diaghilev’s tomb on the island of San Michele, Venice

Max Jacob

The Grand Canal, Trieste

Self-portrait of Cecil Beaton at the Marco Polo Ball, Venice 1951

ALL OF OUR LIVES are letters posted anonymously; my own bears three postmarks: Paris, London and Venice; fate, often unwittingly, though certainly not thoughtlessly, has decreed that I should have settled in these places.

Within her restricted space, Venice, situated as she is in the middle of nowhere, between the foetal waters and those of the Styx, encapsulates my journey on earth.

I sense a disillusion with the entire planet, apart from Venice, apart from the Basilica of St Mark’s, whose blistered, declivitous paving looks like prayer mats set side by side; the fact that I have known St Mark’s all my life thanks to a watercolour that used to hang in my bedroom as a child: it was a large wash-drawing painted by my father in about 1880—bistre and sepia, and sketched in Chinese ink — a piece of late romanticism, in which the red of the altar lamps pierces through the domes of golden dusk, and in which a turbanned throne is illuminated in the Western light. I also possess a little oil painting that belonged to my father, a view of the Salute on a grey day, which is of unusual delicacy and which has always been with me.

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