Laurel Berger

From family home to mausoleum: the Musée Nissim Camondo

Edmund de Waal revisits Paris to tell the story of the banker, collector and family friend Count Moïse de Camondo and his tragic progeny

The Musée Nissim de Camondo. Credit: Alamy 
issue 08 May 2021

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.

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