On Wednesday, I spoke about the significance of buildings and how our attachment to them often comes from a yearning to be part of something bigger. I picked three monumental and very old buildings.
However, there was one other building in Paris I visited, which was not at all monumental, or particularly old, that I wish to tell you about; because, in a different way, this building has real resonance for me and for many others who visit it. It is also personal, which may even get one or two of you thinking about buildings which matter to you personally. How do they appeal to you? Why do they appeal to you? What do they mean to you?
Just before Christmas, I read a book by Edmund de Waal called Letters to Camondo – if you like beautiful writing, then this, relatively short, book is for you. I will lend my copy to the first person who comes to my office to get it. Anyway, the book is a deliciously composed series of letters written by the author to one of his long dead relatives called Moise de Camondo. Camondo was a Jewish man, whose father (Nisim) made a lot of money banking in Turkey, in Constantinople (modern day Istanbul), and who moved to France at the end of the 19th Century, when banking in Turkey started to become more difficult. Moise followed him and they set up in Paris – a hugely wealthy immigrant family, determined to ingratiate themselves with the locals and contribute positively to their new country. For a while, give or take some awful antisemitism in the press, and despite living through the Dreyfus affair (which is maybe a talk for another day), they lived in peace and happiness, mixing with the good and the great, enjoying a life of prosperity and refined culture. Then, when the First World War struck, Camondo’s son, also Nisim, aged just 22, went off to fight for France. His relationship with his father was clearly strong and loving; in just three years of fighting, he sent home 268 letters and postcards. By 1917, a pilot for the most dangerous trips of all, low flying reconnaissance flights over German positions along the front, Nisim was dead. A couple of months later, he was posthumously awarded France’s very highest honour, the Légion d’honneur.
His father, Camondo, was completely heartbroken. “This catastrophe has broken me and changed all my plans” he wrote – and indeed he never recovered. The first thing he did was to turn Nisim’s bedroom into a shrine to him forever. Everything was made perfect. Everything is how Nisim would have liked it. The next thing was to start on the rest of the house. His passion for collecting the most amazing French art and furniture from the 19th Century continued apace, and he mixed with great company. Renoir’s painting of his wife remains a masterpiece. Over the years before he himself died, he steadily added to his home until it reached a state that he felt could do justice as a shrine to his son; when he finally did die, in 1935, he left his home to the French State as a museum, with the express instruction that nothing at all must be taken out, added in, or moved. It was to remain as it is for ever.
And that was how we visited it last week. It is the most lovely house, sited right in the heart of Paris, and it is beautifully kept by a staff who ensure that old furniture, rugs, curtains and paintings do not get too much sunlight and are kept immaculately clean.
However, one of the reasons it is so wonderful is for what happened next. In June 1940, the French Government declared Paris an open city, and four days later the Germans marched in unimpeded. A chilling chapter in de Waal’s book tells of the ensuing events. Over the next four years, Jews all over France were rounded up and sent to the camps where so many were systematically murdered. Camondo’s own family had thought that they might be spared. Not only had they friends in high places, but they had left a vast wealth to the French state, through not only the house but through all sorts of other museums and grants, and Camondo’s own son had received a Légion d’honneur fighting for France in the First World War. Yet, almost none of their French friends stood up for them, and by the end of the war, every single one of Camondo’s descendents had been murdered by the Nazis, his daughter Beatrice the last to be killed, at Auschwitz on 4 January 1945.
So, do go and visit la Musée Nissim de Camondo when you are next in Paris. It is lovely, and yet it also tells the most important and personal of stories – the story of an immigrant’s need for acceptance from his new country, and ultimately of the awful betrayal of that country towards his generosity.
You are very welcome to borrow the book that is in my office.