Free Old Acquaintance by David Stacton Page B

chiffonier, behind a glass jar of white lilacs (a homage to Manet, he always chose his flowers from art, and had no sympathy with gardeners or with nature of any kind) was a sizable painting by Slabbinck, a Belgian whom he admired, of a blue table covered with a red cloth, on which sat two coffeepots and three yellow bowls. It was a good picture, but not what he wanted to see just then. He looked round the room in search of something more familiar.
    Those pictures Charlie dragged about with him were there not so much for themselves as for windows. They allowed him to peer out of the world in which he was trapped into other worlds which he preferred. They were good pictures:Charlie liked the glass in his windows clear; but that is what they were there for. Not being very happy with the present, he liked an eyeglass to the past. Hence the monocle. Hence the pictures. Like most of the rich, he was not really contemporary. The present does well enough, but for solace, there is nothing like a trip home, to the past, which is where all that money came from. It is difficult to prestidigitate the present without a few props, and pictures were his props, though the trick is not so much to take the rabbit out of the hat, as somehow to get it back in.
    He found what he wanted soon enough. Back in went the rabbit, long ears, shovel teeth, kick in the stomach, and all.
    Charlie did not have a Tiepolo or a Guardi. The best Guardis were in museums and a Tiepolo was beyond his means. That left Canaletto, but the Canalettos he liked were either too large or else in Dresden, in which case they were by Belloto. What he did have was a Maulpertsch. He didn’t like it much. Maulpertsch was too red, which reminded him of that wet baby smell the Germans knew so well how to paint. One thing about Reynolds’s children, they may have been sentimental, but at least they were dry. He would have preferred a Carlone, or even a Casanova, though he didn’t care for the Seigneur de Seingault much, and applied the prejudice to his more successful relatives, and abhorred Russia besides, but he had the Maulpertsch. It gave him access to eighteenth-century Venice, no matter who it was by.
    If all this had happened in eighteenth-century Venice, Charlie would have felt happier. The present excites. Only the past exalts. In the past we are all nobler than we are now. One of the real comedowns Charlie had experienced was to discover that the rich are not sui generis witty. He had expected, on joining that international fraternity, drawing-room comedy at the least. Alas, the rich prefer decorum and the milder less accurate talents of a Noël Coward, to Goldoni,E. T. A. Hofmann, or, at a pinch, Sheridan. Even about Offenbach, who scored them, the rich had a tendency to mutter charmant , charmant , mais bourgeois , bourgeois , a word they had picked up, despite themselves, from Karl Marx, and repeated with the assiduity of Oscar Wilde honing an epigram. Wit sets the fashion, but fashion, alas, is dead set against wit.
    He reached his own conclusions. We are public entertainers. That is why the rich won’t take us in. They prefer their own amateurs, or someone like Tom Moore, who never groveled, only because his life was one affable kowtow. Lord Byron, we must remember, came down out of Scotland by accident, and all the other scribbling peers, Platen, Raglan, Acton, to name a few, were recusant, including Berners (Charlie had had his Paris period, too).
    Come to think of it, Byron had not been in Venice in Charlie’s favorite era, which was a good twenty years before Napoleon.
    “I wish we were in Venice,” said Charlie.
    We are on the square before St. Mark’s. The first thing we notice is the silence. This is long before the vaporetto , Harry’s Bar, and Peggy Guggenheim. We are watching an opera at the Fenice . This means, of course, that, except during the arias, we are chiefly watching each other.
    I am the mysterious, rich, and enviable stranger, an English