E.In Stranger, a relative, a friend: Edmund de Waal writes him letters as if Comte Moïse de Camondo were still present in his city palace at 63 rue de Monceau, the Parisian home of a family, a bank, a dynasty. And isn’t Camondo, who died in 1935, actually present in the absence?
The house modeled on the Petit Trianon in Versailles, in which the four winds on the baroque carpet of the salon blow their cheeks; the round library in which the “Histoire de la poésie des Hébreux” stands alongside the classics; the porcelain room with its ornithological collection of Meissen treasures; Finally, the son’s bedroom, which has been ennobled into a shrine of memory: the arrangement of the objects in the artfully furnished rooms by Camondo, which De Waal describes with words, preserves the outlines of the existence that once unfolded in them. It tells of the assimilation of a wealthy Jewish family from Constantinople, striving for cultural perfection, of a passion for collecting, patriotism and the Enlightenment, of the longing for duration and belonging in the land of the Dreyfus Affair, which could be satisfied for the span of a lifetime.
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