Free The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal Page A

snuff-boxes that, when opened, showed priapic fauns or startled nymphs, little stagings of concealment and revelation. These small things to handle and to be moved around – slightly, playfully, discerningly – were kept in vitrines.
    The chance to pass round a small and shocking object was too good to miss in the Paris of the 1870s. Vitrines had become essential to the witty and flirtatious intermittencies of salon life.

6. A FOX WITH INLAID EYES, IN WOOD
    And so Charles buys the netsuke. He buys 264.
    A fox with inlaid eyes, in wood
A curled snake on a lotus leaf, in ivory
A boxwood hare and the moon
A standing warrior
A sleeping servant
Children playing with masks, in ivory
Children playing with puppies
Children playing with a samurai helmet
Dozens of ivory rats
Monkeys and tigers and deer and eels and a galloping horse
Priests and actors and samurai and craftsmen and a bathing woman in her wooden tub
A bundle of kindling tied with a rope
A medlar
A hornet on a hornet’s nest, the nest attached to a broken branch
Three toads on a leaf
A monkey and its young
A couple making love
A reclining stag scratching his ear with a hind leg
A Noh dancer in a heavy embroidered robe holding a mask in front of his face
An octopus
A naked woman and an octopus
A naked woman
Three sweet chestnuts
A priest on a horse
A persimmon.

    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.