The Hare with Amber Eyes A HIDDEN INHERITANCE Edmund de Waal Chatto & Windus LONDON CONTENTS Cover Title Copyright Dedication Family Tree Preface Part One Paris 1871–1899 Le West End Un lit de parade ‘A mahout to guide her’ ‘So light, so soft to the touch’ A box of children’s sweets A fox with inlaid eyes, in wood The yellow armchair Monsieur Elstir’s asparagus Even Ephrussi fell for it My small profits A ‘very brilliant five o’clock’ Part Two Vienna 1899–1938 Die Potemkinische Stadt Zionstrasse History as it happens ‘A large square box such as children draw’ ‘Liberty Hall’ The sweet young thing Once upon a time Types of the Old City Heil Wien! Heil Berlin! Literally zero You must change your life Eldorado 5-0050 Part Three Vienna, Kövesces, Tunbridge Wells, Vienna 1938–1947 ‘An ideal spot for mass marches’ ‘A never-to-be-repeated opportunity’ ‘Good for a single journey’ The tears of things Anna’s pocket ‘All quite openly, publicly and legally’ Part Four Tokyo 1947–2001 Takenoko Kodachrome Where did you get them? The real Japan On polish Coda Tokyo, Odessa, London 2001–2009 Jiro An astrolabe, a menzula, a globe Yellow/gold/red Acknowledgements This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly. Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781407052472 www.randomhouse.co.uk Published by Chatto & Windus 2010 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Copyright © Edmund de Waal 2010 Edmund de Waal has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. All quotations from À la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust are from the translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, revised by Terence Kilmartin, 1981 We are grateful to the following for permission to use these images: Le Pont de l’Europe, Gustave Caillebotte © Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva; Une botte d’asperges, Edouard Manet © Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne; Schottentor, Vienna, 1885 © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek; Palais Ephrussi frontal view, plan from the Allgemeine Bauzeitung © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek; Vienna Anschluss, 1938 © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Chatto & Windus Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA www.rbooks.co.uk Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 9780701184179 The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace approved FSC certified paper carry the FSC logo. Our paper procurement policy can be found at www.rbooks.co.uk/environment Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc for Ben, Matthew and Anna and for my father THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES 264 wood and ivory carvings none of them larger than a matchbox: potter Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. Later, when Edmund inherited the ‘netsuke’, they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined . . . The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at one time were the largest grain exporters in the world; in the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi was part of a wealthy new generation settling in Paris. Marcel Proust was briefly his secretary and used Charles as the model for the aesthete Swann in Remembrance of Things Past. Charles’s passion was collecting, and the netsuke, bought when Japanese objets were all the rage in the salons, were sent as a wedding present to his banker cousin in Vienna. Later, three children – including a young Ignace – played with the collection as history reverberated around them. The Anschluss and Second World War swept the Ephrussis to the brink of oblivion. Almost all that remained of their vast empire was the netsuke collection, smuggled out of the huge Viennese palace (then occupied by Hitler’s theorist on the ‘Jewish Question’), one piece at a time, in the pocket of a loyal maid – and hidden in a straw mattress. In this stunningly original memoir, Edmund de Waal travels the world to stand in the great buildings his forebears once inhabited. He traces the network of a remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century. And, in prose as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves, he tells the story of a unique collection which passed from hand to hand – and which, in a twist of fate, found its way home to Japan. ‘Even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn’t grasp . . . Well, now that I’m a little too weary to live with other people, these old feelings, so personal and individual, that I had in the past, seem to me – it’s the mania of all collectors – very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of vitrine, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the world can know nothing. And of this collection to which I’m now much more attached than to my others, I say to myself, rather as Mazarin said of his books, but in fact without the least distress, that it will be very tiresome to have to leave it all.’ Charles Swann Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain