Letters to Camondo: Edmund de Waal and the house at no. 63

I resisted the book when it came out, because I had spent three seasons explaining the house to groups and did not want to be told about it. I was wrong. De Waal writes as a neighbour, which is what he is: the Ephrussi house at no. 81 and the Camondo house at no. 63 stand on the same short stretch of rue de Monceau, and the two families arrived in the quarter in the same decade, made their money in the same trade, collected with the same seriousness and ended in the same catastrophe.

The form

The book is a series of letters to a dead man. De Waal walks through the rooms and writes to Moïse about what he finds: the archive of bills and letters the count kept, the porcelain, the photographs of Nissim, the empty first floor. It is a way of writing about a house that respects the house’s own rule, which is that nothing may be moved. He does not rearrange anything; he looks, and asks.

The Ephrussi at no. 81

The Hare with Amber Eyes, the earlier book, followed a collection of Japanese netsuke through de Waal’s own family, the Ephrussi, from Odessa to Paris and Vienna and back. The Paris chapters take place at 81 rue de Monceau. Anyone who read that book and then walks down the street will find the Camondo house waiting at no. 63 like a second volume, which in effect it became.

Reading it while the house is closed

Since August 2024 the book has become something its author did not intend: the only way through the rooms. I would read it before the room-by-room page rather than after, and then walk rue de Monceau and the park with both in mind. For the wider story the book belongs to, the Jewish-history walk through the Marais, with the Shoah Memorial on its route, is the tour I would take; my notes on it are here.

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