Chapter IX: The Pink House and Its Perfume
The house stood beyond the Seine as if ashamed to breathe the same air as the city that had grown vulgar about it. One reached it by a sycamore avenue too straight to be innocent, lined with lanterns taken from the Jardin du Roi’s fêtes of 1763—each still engraved with the Bourbon lily, though its glass was filmed with the kind of soot that even nostalgia cannot polish away. The gates, gilt and peeling, bore the crest of the old Dukes of Mallard: an oddly comic bird holding in its bill a rose and a flintlock.
When the revolution came, it is said a servant—one with a reputation for clever wrists—had fastened planks across the tall pink shutters, preserving the house as one preserves a scandal: too precious to forget, too dangerous to show. And thus it slept, swaddled in marble silence, for one hundred and thirty years.
I first saw it in the spring of 1922, when everyone was trying to forget the war by remembering how to dance. Mallard House, as the Parisians called it, had been stirred back to consciousness by the Sisters of Perpetual Succour, who decided, absurdly and beautifully, that penitence required parquet. In the brief interval before the Archbishop noticed, they flung its doors open to every excluded creature of the decade. Their chapel smelled of violet incense and theatre paint; their garden bloomed with boys who could quote Hildegard one hour and Cocteau the next.
To describe the house without seeming delirious is impossible. Even the servants’ bells were of crystal. The floors were pink marble veined with pale grey—the shade of distant gossip. Passing through the vestibule, one encountered mirrors that multiplied one’s reflection until the self appeared to be a small society, shimmering and slightly drunk. Everywhere one touched was silk, ormolu, silver or the accidental holiness of dust. The ceilings depicted saints so beautiful they could only have been painted by an unbeliever.
Sister Baptista, the most diverting of them all—a nun with an accent like a Neapolitan violin—once told me that the frescos had been retouched by a visiting Russian who refused to paint hands, claiming, “They are too articulate for heaven.” I adored her logic.
There were salons in every tone of the precious metals: the Gold Drawing Room with its Olympian furniture, and the Silver Dining Hall where the light fell like disbelief. The upper galleries looked down on a small orchard enclosed within high walls, an Eden for those bored of redemption. In blossom-time it was the setting for their “Evenings of Sympathetic Error,” recitals of Plato, Baudelaire, and bawdier things performed under fruit trees blushed pink as scandal.
Sir Denby Lowell wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that “walking through Mallard House was like being invited into a migraine.” He meant it kindly. There was art everywhere, but it seemed to have lost its memory. A Fragonard girl flirted with a clock that no longer kept time; a marble Psyche had her wings cut square. Even the chandeliers glittered as though aware that electricity, so modernly convenient, could never be aristocratic.
The Sisters’ charity was a legend. They opened supper kitchens for the veterans and the fashionable indigent alike. A duchess and a docker might find themselves spooning the same consommé, while Sister Agathe, the so-called “Abbess of the Apaches,” presided at the piano. Yet charity, for all its virtue, has a peculiar perfume when mixed with champagne and belief. And oh, the parties—those excesses of illuminated piety! Coco Chanel once arrived dressed as the Madonna of the Miraculous Medal, leading a white stallion through the ballroom as Diaghilev played God with the lighting.
Every guest swore the walls shimmered during those nights, though perhaps it was just the golden wallpaper refusing to sleep. One painter—Fevrier, I think—declared the entire mansion a “theological hallucination rendered in pink stone.” He meant it cruelly, but one mustn’t hold artists to their hangovers.
I, however, remained enamoured. From my corner in the mezzanine library (a room wallpapered in silver foliage, smelling faintly of candied ink and sanctity), I attempted to read Anatole France’s La Révolte des Anges while Alceste Villand, the operatic architect, explained the house’s structure to a coterie of critics. “Louis XVI proportions,” he drawled, “but designed by a woman who had read too much Fénelon.” He meant the late Duchess, of course, who reputedly had commissioned Italian workmen to carve allegories of Reason and Desire wrestling on the cornices. She died before deciding who should win.
By midnight, politics and prophecy would mingle with the cocktails. Everyone argued, with the candour of those who know their words will not alter a single thing. I once said, to considerable silence, “Democracy is a fine experiment so long as it does not expect results.” Baron M—— responded, “My dear Viscountess, you mistake amusement for conviction.” Perhaps he was right. Aristocratic candour has this advantage—it can be confused with philosophy.
It was there, amidst gold leaf and moral fatigue, that I began my sentimental education afresh. Mallard House offered no certainties: beauty misbehaved, holiness lingered after sin, and the senses proved more articulate than thought. I once touched a column of chilled marble and believed, stupidly, that I had finally understood moderation.
When the Sisters moved on—disbanded, displaced, or dissolved into marriages and martyrdoms—the mansion fell quiet again. Paris forgot. I returned years later and found workmen boarding up its windows once more. The varnish cracked like old laughter as they hammered the nails. I asked the foreman if he knew the story of the place. “Oui, madame,” he said, “it was a house for angels and their accidents.”
I could have corrected him, but what would be the use? The orchard had gone to seed; the grass, unshaven, dreamed of salons. Yet through the boards I caught one last glint of the silver ceiling. It trembled faintly, as though catching a note of music still trapped inside.
And that, perhaps, is how all splendour ends—not with decay, but with a whisper mistaken for proof.
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