From family home to mausoleum: the Musée Nissim Camondo

The potter and author Edmund de Waal revisits familiar terrain at an angle in his third book, Letters to Camondo. Ten years after the publication of his debut memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, he is once again in Paris, lurking about the rue de Monceau, ruminating on dust, trying to make the dead speak.

He’s particularly keen to elicit a word from Count Moïse de Camondo (1860-1935), the last patriarch of a clan of absurdly rich French Jewish bankers with roots in Constantinople. The count was a friend and neighbour of de Waal’s cousin, the art historian Charles Ephrussi, whose collection of Japanese netsuke played such a large role in The Hare with Amber Eyes. The wary reader may ask: hasn’t de Waal had quite enough of the rue de Monceau? It seems he shares family ties and an appreciation of what Proust called ‘the life of still life’ with the obsessive, exacting Camondo whose main passion was collecting 18th-century decorative art.

His other passions were his children, Nissim and Béatrice, the fruit of a short-lived dynastic union with Irène Elise Cahen d’Anvers (the eldest daughter of Charles Ephrussi’s mistress). When Nissim was killed during an aerial mission in the first world war, Camondo bequeathed his hôtel particulier to France in memory of his boy. The Musée Nissim de Camondo was inaugurated in 1936, a year after the count’s death, the priceless objects in its rooms frozen in place. When people tell the Camondo story, they always begin at the end, with the Nazi death camps, where Béatrice, her daughter Fanny, her son Bertrand and her estranged husband Léon Reinach (of the Dreyfusard Reinachs) were murdered. Today the museum that carries Nissim’s name is a marker of widespread absence and dispersal.

By the time de Waal began to write his book he had spent ‘quite a few years’ nosing about the great house on the rue de Monceau, studying the porcelain and tapestries and digging in the family archives.