III
TWELVE
[T]he very society which you think is today rejecting you because you are not being very friendly to it over a sister who is behaving against the wishes of her family, that very same society will be just as friendly to you and will hold you in even greater esteem when they see that you stick to your principles . . .
—JAMES TO NAT, JULY 16, 1839
On April 29, 1839, a catastrophe befell the Rothschilds—or so it seemed to the family at the time. Less than three years after the unexpected death of Nathan at the very height of his powers, his second daughter, Hannah Mayer, renounced Judaism to marry a Christian.
In every other respect, the Hon. Henry Fitzroy might have been thought a perfectly suitable, indeed desirable, spouse for the daughter of a German-Jewish immigrant who owed his fortune to “trade.” True, he was the younger son of Lord Southampton, and therefore unlikely to inherit much in the way of a title or land; on the other hand, at the age of thirty-two he was already (after Magdalen, Oxford, and Trinity, Cambridge) Deputy Lieutenant for Northamptonshire and MP for Lewes, with realistic prospects of one day achieving political office. Not that this was a consideration in the mind of Hannah Mayer. At some point in 1838 she had fallen in love with the dark-haired, blue-eyed young man. It was an apostasy for which she would never wholly be forgiven.
The Crime and Punishment of Hannah Mayer
In the classic topos of the nineteenth-century novel, it is the aristocratic family which disapproves of the mercantile match. Fitzroy’s family undoubtedly did disapprove, cutting off his allowance. However, they did not disapprove nearly as violently as the Rothschilds. This was not, in fact, the first time Hannah Mayer had formed an attachment to a Gentile: before her father’s death, according to one account, Prince Edmond de Clary had proposed to her in Paris. Then Nathan had bluntly dismissed the idea; and when his brother James heard of her new affair with Fitzroy, he was no more sympathetic:
Well, my dear Lionel, your letters wherein you speak about the distressing circumstances and the love affair of your sister Hannah Mayer break our heart. You can imagine why this is so because nothing could possibly be more disastrous for our family, for our continued well-being, for our good name and for our honour than such a decision, God forbid. I hardly even dare mention it. To renounce our religion, the religion of our [father] Rabbi Mayer [Amschel] Rothschild of blessed memory, the religion which, thank God, made us so great.
Yet James was from the outset pessimistic about the likelihood of stopping her a second time. This was not so much because he felt he lacked Nathan’s patriarchal power; for Nathan had formally stated in his will that his younger daughters could marry only with the consent of their mother and brothers, with his own brothers having the final, binding word in the event of a disagreement. The real problem was that the financial sanctions intended to enforce this clause were an insufficient deterrent. On her father’s death, Hannah Mayer had received £12,500, having already been given the same sum on attaining her majority, as well as a further £50,000 which was invested in the family bank to yield 4 per cent per annum. Had she married with her family’s blessing, she would have received another £50,000 as a dowry; but this was money she evidently felt she could do without. James advised his nephews to inform their uncle Salomon of Hannah’s intentions, but was doubtful whether he would be able “to do any more good as far as this issue is concerned than I can.” He also agreed to come to London before February 20 to try to dissuade his niece in person. “But,” he wrote gloomily,
whether our trip will turn out to be successful and what kind of impression this will make on the public, this I can’t possibly predict, or whether Hannah Mayer will take any notice of our well-meaning advice when she well knows that the only purpose of our visit to London is to frustrate her love adventure. I am more inclined to believe that in view of this girl’s independent character we are more likely to exasperate her even more than convince her to abandon this ill-starred love affair. However, I want nothing more than the well-being of our family and nothing will prevent me from going to London . . . I am extremely concerned.
In fact, James was prevented from visiting England by a bout of illness. Instead, he suggested that Hannah Mayer—chaperoned by her mother—come to stay with him in Switzerland, where he planned to continue his convalescence. This suggested “diversion” came too late. The very day after James sent his invitation, the wedding took place at St George’s in Hanover Square. Only her brother Nat attended the service, the bride’s mother having escorted her no further than the church gates. A few weeks later the scandal made it into The Times:
It is confirmed that the condition imposed upon Miss Rothschild on her marrying the Hon. Mr. Fitzroy was that she should embrace the Christian religion. This is the first instance of a member of the Rothschild family abandoning the faith of their fathers, a circumstance which makes the deeper impression at their native place [Frankfurt], as they had hitherto distinguished themselves by their adherence to the Jewish creed. It is said that the bride’s uncles are by no means pleased with a match which renders a change of religion necessary.
This last was an understatement. “I admit quite frankly,” wrote an incandescent James from Paris,
that the story about Hannah Mayer made me so ill that I did not have the courage to pick up a pen and write about this matter. She has unfortunately robbed our whole family of its pride and caused us such harm that it can no longer be redressed. You say, my dear Nat, that she has found everything except for religion. However, I believe that [religion] means everything. Our good fortune and our blessings depend upon it. We shall therefore wipe her from our memory and never again during my lifetime will I or any other member of our family see or receive her. We now want to wish her all the best and banish her from our memory as if she had never existed.
Even her own mother echoed these sentiments. “The first impressions and regrets experienced on account of the recent Marriage,” she told her son Nat, “is [sic] only exceeded by a desire to avoid any similar circumstances so very much against the habits and inclinations of us all.” Although she confided that she would “be most happy to receive daily bulletins of Domestic as well as all other concerns in which I so strongly participate if there should be any news from an Individual who still so much interests me,” that individual had irrevocably “separated herself from me.” Nat—and he alone—stood by Hannah Mayer. In July he wrote to James arguing that his sister had done “no more than marry ‘a Christian in a Christian country.’ ” The response this elicited from his uncle deserves to be quoted at length for the light it sheds on the older generation’s attitudes to the subject. “From the beginning,” thundered James, who had evidently been nursing his wrath, “I correctly predicted that . . . this most unfortunate matter . . . would disrupt the unity of our family . . . and I can tell you that this event has made me so ill that I honestly think that I may not survive it”:
I would like to know what more one could do than to abandon one’s own religion and publicly declare that since the age of fifteen one never had any thought of doing anything else. My dear Nat, both as your friend and Uncle I want to give you my very frank and honest opinion . . . We are determined that, as long as the Almighty grants us good health, neither we nor my children will again come into contact with Hannah Mayer, for it is not only one thing [which has brought us to this decision] but so many that I could fill endless pages.
In part, James’s argument was about the structure of authority within the family and the obedience the younger generation owed to their elders:
What sort of an example will it set for our children when a girl says, “I will marry against the wish of my family?” I don’t even want to take the notion of religion into account . . . I should then be expected to welcome and entertain this girl as if nothing at all had happened? Why should my children, or my children’s children, ever follow the wishes of their parents if they don’t get punished?
But “the main point,” as he put it, was “religion”:
I and the rest of our family have . . . always brought our offspring up from their early childhood with the sense that their love is to be confined to members of the family, that their attachment for one another would prevent them from getting any ideas of marrying anyone other than one of the family so that the fortune would stay inside the family. Who will give me any assurance that my own children will do what I tell them if they see that there is no punishment forthcoming? What if my own daughter, after she has married, should say, “I am miserable because I didn’t marry a Duke although I had enough money to do so, and I see that, despite the fact that this woman renounced her religion, and despite the fact that [she] married against the wishes of her family, she is nevertheless accepted [by the family]. It would have been the same with me?” Do you really think that all the nicely conceived projects [will come to fruition]—that is, that Mayer will marry Anselm’s daughter, that Lionel’s daughter will marry the child of another member of the family so that the great fortune and the Rothschild name will continue to be honoured and transmitted [to future generations]—if one doesn’t put a stop to this?
Finally, James added some reflections on the social implications of the marriage (evidently in response to points made by Nat):
Of course, one could perhaps take some steps to prevent this from happening but society may well look askance at such measures. This may indeed be the case but I personally don’t entirely share this opinion . . . [T]he very society which you think is today rejecting you because you are not being very friendly to it over a sister who is behaving against the wishes of her family, that very same society will be just as friendly to you and will hold you in even greater esteem when they see that you stick to your principles and are not prepared to be upset by empty words. The honest and upright man will always value a man of similar character. Adieu.
Admittedly, James added a disclaimer to this impassioned outburst. Nat “should view this as my, and only my, thoughts and feelings and don’t think that I want in any way to influence your mother or any other member of the family. It would be unseemly and I don’t wish to do so. Everyone is entitled to do what he wants.” But these were empty words. He concluded by asking Nat to show his eldest brother Lionel his letter “and I am sure that he shares my opinion.” For the first time since his brother’s death, James was speaking in the unmistakable tone of the new head of the family, secure in the knowledge that the majority of its members were equally dismayed, if not more so. A letter dated the following day from Anthony—who was in Paris during the crisis—confirms this impression:
What they wish us to do is not to receive H[annah] M[ayer] for the present and that is easily understood. They say: a sister is married against the consent of one’s family; if after two months you will receive her—what example will it have upon the remainder part of the family[?] They say: will my daughter, who sees her cousin who married against the consent of all her family received by them, will she marry whom I like[?]—no, she will also fall in love with a Christian and God knows what the boys will also do . . . I recommend you . . . now for your own sake and also to keep the union amongst us—not to receive H. M. for the present.
Nat made a final effort to defend his sister, but was firmly sat on by his uncle.
The most striking point about James’s response is, of course, the way he equated “religion” with endogamy: “pride in religion” meant, if his words are to be taken literally, intermarriage within the Rothschild family “so that the fortune would stay inside the family.” We may well ask how much this eminently practical principle had to do with “religion” at all. For the thrust of James’s argument was not that younger Rothschilds should marry only other Jews; it was that they should marry only other Rothschilds. By encouraging other members of the family to follow their own inclinations, Hannah Mayer’s rebellion had jeopardised “all the nicely conceived projects . . . that Mayer will marry Anselm’s daughter, that Lionel’s daughter will marry the child of another member of the family.” In Disraeli’s Coningsby, it is said of the younger Sidonia that “no earthly considerations would ever induce him to impair that purity of race on which he prides himself ” by marrying a Christian. Yet in reality “earthly considerations” counted for as much in the eyes of some Rothschilds as any racial or religious exclusivity. James came close to admitting this in his letter: “Don’t imagine, my dear Nat, that I have taken to playing the role of a religious man, but I must admit that I take a lot of pride in my religion and very much wish that my children will do the same.” This tallies with what we know of his religiosity: as Nat was well aware, James was far from strict in his observance. Like his brothers, he dutifully played his part within the Jewish community, supporting the Society for the Encouragment and Aid of [Jewish] Indigents in 1843 and asking the Education Minister “why no Jews had been appointed to the academic council of Bordeaux” in 1847. He campaigned as energetically as any Rothschild to improve the civil rights of Jewish communities outside France (where full religious equality had been secured in 1830). But fundamentally his loyalty to his religion was clannish: few, if any, Jews were on a par with the Rothschilds; nevertheless, every Rothschild had to be a Jew.
James’s appeal was heeded. When—just months after Hannah Mayer’s marriage—Anthony was suspected of harbouring similar intentions, his uncle Amschel leant on him heavily to abide by the “nicely conceived project” that he marry one of his Montefiore cousins, Louisa (sometimes called Louise). This time the pressure was effective, not least because Anthony was at once less romantic and more biddable than his sister. “Uncle A. was a regular bother asking me about getting married,” he complained to his brothers, “and writing to Uncle S. that I only waited until his death to marry a Christian . . . I told him quite short that if Aunt Henrietta [Montefiore] would cash up, I was ready, when he said of course he would not advise me [to do so] without Louis[a] had the same fortune as Joseph and Nathaniel. So, I said very well, and I believe he wrote to that effect—for later we left much better friends.” James was apparently less worried about Anthony than Amschel. “I am absolutely convinced,” he wrote from Naples, in a letter which shows how much attention the uncles were now paying to the marriage question,
that Anthony does not intend to marry the girl. He is a very weak person but I don’t think that, even for a moment, such a silly idea could enter his head. He is weak and is easily led and I give you my word that I don’t treat this matter lightly and when I am back in Paris again I will do everything in my power to bring this affair to an end. When I was in Paris I often discussed this matter with him but as you well know, my dear Amschel, people would much rather lay down in a ready-made and warm bed. Regrettably, he considers the whole matter to be rather [?humorous]. Well, you can rest assured that one can no longer tell the youngsters what to do as one could previously. As our good [brother] Salomon is coming to Paris too, God willing, so we will deal with this matter then . . . I am delighted to see that the discussions with our brother Carl’s son have been successfully concluded and that everything will be well, God willing.
This last allusion was to the parallel project to marry Mayer Carl to Louise, Hannah Mayer’s younger sister.
In due course, James’s confidence was amply vindicated. “I am pleased to note, my dear Anthony, that you are so in love,” he was able to write approvingly in November 1839; a few days later came the announcement of his engagement to Louisa Montefiore; by February they were married and the recipients of pointedly warm congratulations. Three years later—as planned—Mayer Carl married his cousin Louise in London. In August of the same year Nat married another cousin, James’s daughter Charlotte. The contrast between this last, exuberant occasion and the miserable weddings of 1836 and 1839 could not have been more complete:
The ceremony was performed [at Ferrières] in a little temple erected for that purpose in the garden, the road to it strewn with rose-leaves. After the ceremony some went back to Paris, but the greater part remained, with whist, billiards, walking in the garden etc. . . . Billy & I had a bottle of champagne. At 7 we dined in the orangery, which was beautifully arranged. Lots of toasts were drunk. Your Uncle James proposed the King’s health in a very good speech.
A pattern had been established—or rather, re-established—which would be continued into the 1870s.
It is a moot point how far such arranged, endogamous marriages were happy. James’s marriage to Betty seemed to many contemporaries to have paired beauty with the beast: “She handsome—he vulgar,” was how the British diplomat Lord William Russell summed it up in 1843; others were struck by Betty’s more refined manners and cultural sophistication. (This was roughly the way Heinrich Heine saw the couple, though he never underrated James’s intellect; and it is not too far removed from the portrayal of Nucingen and his wife by Balzac—though he never underrated Madame. Nucingen’s fundamental toughness.) Yet Betty’s letters suggest a genuine and deep affection for her husband and there is no evidence whatever of marital strife.
In London, Lionel and his cousin Charlotte, who were married in 1836, also seemed ill matched to some outsiders. He was an industrious, conscientious man, dedicated to his father’s firm and to the cause of Jewish emancipation, but not passionate in his personal relations, nor sophisticated in his cultural tastes. When Disraeli says of Sidonia, “he was susceptible of deep emotions, but not for individuals,” we are perhaps not far from the true Lionel. She, by contrast, was not only very good-looking, but one of the most intellectually gifted Rothschilds of her generation. It is hard to believe, judging from the frequently mordant, not to say downright malicious tone of her voluminous letters and diaries—with their troubling subtext of frustrated boredom—that she was wholly fulfilled as “Baroness de Rothschild,” wife, mother, hostess and do-gooder. “Ever since I became your wife,” she wrote to her husband in a rare outburst, “I have had to do what others want, never what I would like to do. Pray that I shall be compensated in Heaven.” Disraeli gives some hints of this in his fictionalised relationship between the Neuchatels in Endymion:
Adrian had married, when very young, a lady selected by his father. The selection seemed a good one. She was the daughter of a most eminent banker, and had herself, though that was of slight importance, a large portion. She was a woman of abilities, highly cultivated . . . And yet Mrs. Neuchatel was not a contented spirit; and though she appreciated the great qualities of her husband and viewed him even with reverence as well as affection, she scarcely contributed to his happiness as much as became her. And for this reason . . . Mrs Neuchatel had imbibed not merely a contempt for money, but an absolute hatred of it . . . In one respect the alliance between Adrian and his wife was not an unfortunate one . . . Adrian . . . was so absorbed by his own great affairs, was a man at the same time of so serene a temper and so supreme a will, that the over-refined fantasies of his wife produced not the slightest effect on the course of his life.
Yet no matter what private miseries were inflicted as a consequence of the intermarriage strategy—and we can rarely do more than guess at them—all concerned felt or came to feel precisely the sense of clannish collective identity which it had been the intention of their elders to foster. Nothing illustrates this better than the subtly retributive way Hannah Mayer was subsequently treated by the rest of the family, and not least by Charlotte herself.
Hannah Mayer was not ostracised forever. By 1848, if not before, she and her husband were on good enough terms with her eldest brother to receive presents from him for their children, Arthur and Blanche, and to invite him to visit them at their house at Garboldisham. More surprisingly, Betty reported to her son in 1849 that she had “made my peace with HM” by “invit[ing] her to my place” when the Fitzroys visited Paris. But within the family circle Hannah Mayer was always regarded with that disdain generally reserved by the Victorians for “fallen women”; and, like good Victorians, her sister Louise and her cousin and sister-in-law Charlotte could not resist interpreting every misfortune that befell her as a kind of divine punishment. In 1852 they registered with grim satisfaction Hannah Mayer’s “fury” when her husband was passed over by Lord Aberdeen for the post of Secretary at the Admiralty. When the Fitzroys’ son Arthur died six years later (the victim of a fall from a pony), even their niece Constance—then just fifteen—could “not help thinking that all the misfortune and distress which have overwhelmed poor Aunt Hannah Mayer have been a punishment for having deserted the faith of the fathers and for having married without her mother’s consent. All the grief that she caused to that mother she now feels doubly herself.” The death of Henry Fitzroy himself the following year made the portrait of nemesis all but complete. All that was now lacking was a suitably wretched end for his widow and their daughter Blanche. Neither was long in coming—or so it seemed to Charlotte de Rothschild, whose letters to her youngest son Leopold chronicled with outward sympathy and inward relish each step of the Fitzroys’ decline and fall.
From February 1864 onwards, Hannah Mayer was seriously ill: Charlotte reported that she had “an enormous swelling on her back, like a hump of a camel” and “looked perfectly awful—her face white and shrunk, and furrowed with deep lines expressive of intense suffering. It made one’s heart break to see her in such pain. The swelling on her back is perfectly enormous, and quite hot. Yet shivering and trembling with pain, she would talk of nothing but parties . . . Her ideas are constantly running upon marriage.” Hannah Mayer’s sole preoccupation henceforth was to find a suitable husband for her daughter. As her Rothschild relatives could hardly fail to notice, all the “candidates” considered were Christians; moreover, there was an obvious discrepancy between her ideal—“she would not hear of” Lords Loughborough, Sefton and Coventry though the Marquess of Blandford was considered acceptable—and the realistic contenders. Blanche might be pretty and artistically talented but, cut off from her Rothschild relations and low in the Fitzroy pecking-order, she was no prize catch.
The successful suitor proved to be the artist and architect Sir Coutts Lindsay, a prosperous but Bohemian figure twice her age with a Scottish estate, ten thousand a year, a suspiciously close friendship with Lady Virginia Somers and a shady retinue of plebeian mistresses and bastards. When Charlotte paid one of her numerous half-patronising, half-prurient visits to her sister-in-law’s house in Upper Grosvenor Square—ostensibly to offer her congratulations—she:
found her very ill and completely overcome by her conflicting feelings; she had been crying and sobbing almost shrieking, and is indeed so much to be pitied that the congratulations died on my lips. The marriage itself, ceci entre nous, does not satisfy her completely, for the bridegroom elect is forty, and has grey locks, and perhaps her ambition would have soared higher, and selected a nobleman with a grand title for her daughter.
With poetic justice, Blanche had followed Hannah Mayer’s own example, set twenty-five years before, by choosing a husband for love and in spite of her mother’s wishes. Though the latter sought to make the best of a bad job—Sir Coutts, she insisted, was “the most fascinating person I ever met”—Charlotte omitted no defect in her back-handed descriptions of the bridegroom (he was “picturesque,” “one-sided,” his gifts to his fiancée were miserly, and so on).
Nor was this the end of Hannah Mayer’s “punishment.” From the moment of her engagement, Blanche appeared to distance herself from her ailing mother, and cut herself off almost completely from the Rothschilds. According to Charlotte—who poured pity over her sister-in-law while simultaneously kindling antipathy towards the new “Lady Lindsay”—she visited her mother’s bedside as infrequently as possible. She was (variously) “utterly heartless,” “the heartless bride,” “a heartless serpent,” “quite affected and namby pamby,” “an icicle,” “a horrible humbug and heartless hypocrite,” “that heartless, incomprehensible woman,” “the unnatural daughter” and “that horrible Blanche.” The object of this torrent of vituperation was “immensely happy at being Lady Lindsay, and far too much so, to feel deep anxiety for her suffering and perhaps dying mother.” When Charlotte paid a call on her, she found “the heartless staring creature giggling and grinning and simpering while she asked after her dying mother as if the poor sufferer had had a mere cold.”
By mid-November the end was in sight. “Poor Aunt H.M.’s married life and widowed existence have become one chain of such uninterrupted sorrow and suffering,” she told her son, “that, for her sake, one can hardly wish to see her days prolonged. As for Blanche—no one need waste a moment’s pity upon her.—She is either a monster or an enigma. It is less disagreeable to look upon her in the light of the latter, and not to un-riddle her character.” “I feel very sad,” she added the next day, “when I think of such a life of torture, and of a deathbed so lonely. Blanche arrives at 5 o’clock in the evening, stays five minutes, and then departs. Do not mention this heartless behaviour as it is a perfect disgrace to our family, and must shock the domestics from whom constant fidelity is expected.” And so it went on. “Upon the plea that the invalid is too weak to bear even her adored presence beyond five or six minutes in the course of the day, [she] never puts her foot into the house before 5 o’clock in the evening, viz not before the shades of evening put an end to her drawing, in Sir C. Lindsay’s studio; then she arrives novel in hand, while her unfortunate mother carries on the unequal battle with disease and death.”
On the night of December 1, 1864, Hannah Mayer finally expired. Her life had been, Charlotte reflected, using carefully chosen words, “a long martyrdom”; indeed, in her last weeks she had sometimes looked “like one of the lovely martyrs so much admired in Italian picture-galleries and churches.” But Charlotte, like her uncle James, did not interpret Hannah Mayer’s downfall in purely religious terms: it irked her that her sister-in-law’s will had omitted to dispose of £7,000 in a savings account, money which passed by default to the Lindsays. The idea of Rothschild money passing into other hands still rankled, a quarter of a century after Hannah Mayer’s initial lapse from grace. Retribution even followed her to the grave and beyond, for Charlotte missed no transgression on the part of Blanche Lindsay, notably her absence from her mother’s funeral (where “the Duke of Grafton, Lord Charles Fitzroy and Lord Southampton, who had known and seen the deceased so little . . . never alluded to her but talked of railroads, horses etc.”) and her attempt to sell the portraits she had inherited of her Rothschild grandparents (“To sell her grandmother and her grandfather; it is not to be believed”). Everything—her louche Pre-Raphaelite dresses, her widening girth, her deteriorating eyesight—could be construed as a consequence of her mother’s peculiar form of original sin. And when her marriage foundered on the rocks of Lindsay’s habitual infidelity, Anselm’s son Ferdinand could not resist predicting that she would “repent . . . in the long run” her decision to “leave the conjugal room.” Even as late as 1882, it seems, Hannah Mayer’s crime, though punished, had not been forgiven.
City and Country
Nothing tells us more about the nineteenth-century Rothschilds’ exceptionally acute sense of kinship than their treatment of Hannah Mayer. The paradox is that her persecution coincided with an acceleration in the pace of the family’s social and cultural assimilation. By not only marrying a Christian but converting to Christianity, she had crossed one of the few barriers which remained between the Rothschilds and the European social elite, and perhaps the only one which the Rothschilds themselves wished to preserve.
In his satirical “Book of Snobs,” published in Punch in 1846-7, Thackeray cited “the Scharlachschild family at Paris, Naples, Frankfort &c.” as the archetypes of the “Banking Snob,” who “receives all the world into his circle,” dispensing “princely hospitalities” and “entertain[ing] all the world, even the poor, at their fêtes.” This was not far wide of the mark. In the decade after Nathan’s death, the Rothschilds greatly increased the amount of time and energy they devoted to social and cultural pursuits, with James in the vanguard. To begin with, their residences grew grander and more numerous in both town and country. In 1836 James commissioned the architect, designer and theatre producer Charles-Edmond Duponchel to reconstruct and redecorate his rue Laffitte hôtel, with money no object. The result was the quintessential millionaire’s palace, combining extravagant historicist decoration with the latest modern comforts. Among Duponchel’s more spectacular touches was a wood-panelled salon in the Renaissance style which was dominated by Joseph-Nicholas Robert-Fleury’s series of Renaissance scenes (including Charles V in Spain, Luther preaching and Henry VIII hunting), but which also subtly juxtaposed the Rothschild arms with those of the Medici. (There was also a billiard room with a Pom peii-style mural by François-Edouard Picot.) But this was historicism with all mod cons. Central heating was provided for the ground floor salons and dining room by four brick ovens in the cellars, and all floors had running water from tanks on the top floor. There were also four large closed tanks for waste in the cellar, to say nothing of gas lighting in the form of moustached statuettes holding mock torches. Salomon’s house next door was given similar treatment, as was the new hôtel Talleyrand which James acquired in 1838 in the more fashionable rue Saint-Florentin in the 8th arrondissement.
The effect was evidently imposing. In 1836, after a post-theatre ball given by James to show off the redecorated rue Laffitte house, Heine admiringly described what he called “the Versailles of the absolute reign of money”:
Here everything comes together which the spirit of the sixteenth century could invent and the money of the nineteenth century could pay for; here the genius of the visual arts competes with the genius of Rothschild. The palace and its decorations have been continuously worked on for two years and the sums expended on them are said to be enormous. M. de Rothschild smiles when someone questions him about this . . . One must, however, admire the flair with which everything has been done, as much as the costliness.
A Parisian journal, the Bon Ton, was even more impressed: the two adjacent houses “appeared to realise the tales of the thousand and one nights. Such luxury is awesome to those who do not have at their command the bourses of Naples, Paris and London.” “The mantels are covered in gold-fringed velvet,” observed the vicomte de Launay admiringly. “The armchairs have lace antimacassars; the walls are concealed under marvellous embroidered, brocaded, spangled fabrics of such thickness and strength they could stand alone and, if needed, actually support what they cover, should the walls give way. The curtains are fabulously beautiful; they are hung double, triple, and all over the place . . . Every piece of furniture is gilded; the walls too are gilded.” The Austrian diplomat Apponyi, who attended the same ball as Heine, was less easily impressed: he found the Renaissance style of the new interiors “unsuitable for a hôtel in Paris; I would prefer it in a château.” But even he had to admit that it was “impossible to see a better imitation:”
The paintings are on a gold base, executed by excellent artists, the fireplaces are admirably carved. The chairs are of ormolu bronze, with very high backs, surmounted by figures holding the arms of the house of Rothschild in enamel. The carpets, the candelabras, the chandeliers, the material of the draperies with heavy tassels of gold and silver—in short, everything is in the same style; there are clocks inlaid and enamelled on azure base, solid gold vases encrusted with precious stones and fine pearls. In a word, it is a luxury which surpasses all imagination.
This was what became known as le style Rothschild—a style, in the words of a later critic, “which combined all the richest elements of those which had preceded it . . . The heavy golden cornices, the damask hung walls, the fringed and tasselled curtains of Genoese velvet, the marble and the parquet . . . Nothing in [it] . . . was new save the gasoliers.”
To a twentieth-century eye, all that gas-lit gilt is oppressive; at the time it was all the rage. “It is infinitely superior to the house of his daughter-in-law [sic],” reported the duchesse de Dino, after seeing Salomon’s “temple,” “because the proportions are more elevated and larger; the luxury of it beggars belief, but it is tasteful, pure Renaissance, without any admixture of other styles . . . In the main salon, the armchairs instead of being made of gilt wood are of gilt bronze and cost a thousand francs apiece.” The young Disraeli concurred. “Above all spectacles,” he reported to his sister Sarah from Paris in 1843, “was the ball at B[aron] Salomon de Rothschild [’s]—an hotel in decoration surpassing all the palaces of Munich—a greater retinue of servants & liveries more gorgeous than the Thuilleries [sic]—& pineapples plentiful as blackberries. The taste of this unrivalled palace is equal to the splendour and richness of its decorations.” He later paid a fictionalised tribute to the Rothschild hôtels in Coningsby, in a passage describing Sidonia’s Paris residence, which
had received at his hands such extensive alterations, that nothing of the original decoration . . . remained . . . A flight of marble steps, ascending from a vast court, led into a hall of great dimensions, which was at the same time an orangery and a gallery of sculpture. It was illumined by a distinct, yet soft and subdued light, which harmonised with the beautiful repose of the surrounding forms, and with the exotic perfume that was wafted about. A gallery led from this hall to an inner hall of quite different character; fantastic, glittering, variegated; full of strange shapes and dazzling objects.
The roof was carved and gilt in the honeycomb style prevalent in the Saracenic buildings; the walls were hung with leather stamped in rich and vivid patterns; the floor was a flood of mosaic; about were statues of negroes of human size with faces of wild expression, and holding in their outstretched hands silver torches that blazed with an almost painful brilliancy.
From this inner hall a double staircase of white marble led to the grand suite of apartments.
These saloons, lofty, spacious, and numerous, had been decorated principally in encaustic by the most celebrated artists of Munich. The three principal rooms were only separated from each other by columns, covered with rich hangings, on this night drawn aside. The decoration of each chamber was appropriate to its purpose. On the walls of the ball room nymphs and heroes move in measure in Sicilian landscapes, or on the azure shores of the Aegean waters. From the ceiling beautiful divinities threw garlands on the guests . . . A large saloon abounded in ottomans and easy chairs . . .
James also spent substantial sums on his château house outside Paris at Ferrières, turning it into a state-of-the art gentleman’s country retreat. Here the theme was English. A laundry was built by the architect Joseph-Antoine Froelicher in the mock-Tudor style and in 1840 James added a model farm, sending the estate manager to England to pick up tips. He later added an English-style dairy as well as a brick-kiln and British-made machinery to make water pipes for the estate. There were also stables, a riding school and riding track, not to mention an orangerie and a new garden laid out by Placide Massey. When his sister-in-law Hannah visited Ferrières in 1842 she found it “most imposing.” Once again, aristocratic guests like Apponyi and Princess Lieven, who came to stay two years later, were less easy to impress. According to Apponyi—though a hint of aristocratic irony is detectable here—the Princess was much impressed by “the superb laundry” James and Betty had built in the grounds, “a veritable chef-d’oeuvre of the genre, picturesque and very convenient.” However, when shown to her room—once reserved for the late duc d’Orléans—the Princess complained that the mattresses were “hard and damp,” so that they had to be “changed, dried, beaten, placed and replaced.” Apponyi himself ridiculed the stables James had built, “a superb and totally pompous construction in the style of Louis XIII.” “Perhaps it is a little too beautiful,” he mused, “as this palace somewhat overwhelms the château itself.” The supercilious diplomat also found fault with the pond, which he thought “too near the house,” and the absence of formal gardens and flowerbeds. “Park and garden are not separated,” he observed disapprovingly, “so that the game can come right into the court of the château.” Yet even this most discerning of guests had to concede that the interiors “left nothing to be desired”:
Everything is in good taste and is very magnificent. There are some beautiful pictures and an infinity of beautiful things of all descriptions, suits of armour, statuettes, ewers in silver gilt, ivory or gold, enriched by pearls and precious stones, consoles in bronze, iron, silver, in old lacquer, then vases of every kind, decorated with precious stones, then antique cabinets encrusted with ivory and silver, and Florentine mosaics. The guests’ rooms are comfortably furnished, without excessive luxury, but with good carpets, good settees, armchairs, mirrors, excellent beds, wash-hand basins with plenty of towels . . .
Guests could also be taken to see the gardens at the Rothschilds’ other châteaux at Boulogne and Suresnes. At the former, the gardens were steadily enlarged and the dining room combined with an orangerie for summer dining. James also added a mock farm with cows, chickens and exotic breeds of sheep. Despite the fact that he spent little time there, Salomon lavished money on Suresnes. The château was enlarged and redecorated, acquiring elaborate glass galleries round its sides. Like his younger brother, Salomon also played at farming, building a dairy and accumulating a large stock of wildfowl; but his real love was the garden, which he extended throughout his life, later adding greenhouses and a system of irrigation. As Lord William Russell reported when he visited Suresnes in 1843, “nature is made to yield to money, & produce the fruits & flowers of summer in the spring.” Two years later James was said to be “transplanting a great number of very large full-grown yew-trees” from Melun to Suresnes, presumably as a gift to Salomon. “Each tree,” marvelled The Times, “is a sufficient load to require 11 horses to draw it. It was thus that Louis XIV planted the grounds at Versailles.” The parallel, as we have seen, had already occurred to Heine, and was one to which he and others would return.
The English Rothschilds also invested in their residences in both country and town, though on a less Bourbon scale. When Disraeli attended a fête given by Nathan’s widow Hannah at Gunnersbury in 1843, it impressed him as “a most beautiful park and a villa worthy of an Italian Prince, though decorated with a taste and splendour which a French financier in the olden times could alone have rivalled . . . [with] beautiful grounds, temples and illuminated walks.” If the interior of Sidonia’s country house in Tancred (1847) was partly modelled on Gunnersbury, as seems likely, there were nevertheless points of contrast with the French Rothschilds’ residences:
Passing through a marble antechamber, Tancred was ushered into an apartment half saloon and half library; the choicely-bound volumes, which were not too numerous, were ranged on shelves inlaid in the walls, so that they ornamented, without diminishing, the apartment. These walls were painted in encaustic, corresponding with the coved ceiling, which was richly adorned in the same fashion. A curtain of violet velvet covering if necessary the large window, which looked upon a balcony full of flowers, and the umbrageous Park; an Axminster carpet, manufactured both in colour and design with the rest of the chamber; a profusion of luxurious seats; a large table of ivory marquetry, bearing a carved silver bell which once belonged to a pope; a Naiad, whose golden urn served as an inkstand; some daggers that acted as paper cutters, and some French books just arrived; a group of beautiful vases recently released from an Egyptian tomb and ranged on a tripod of malachite; the portrait of a statesman, and the bust of an emperor, and a sparkling fire, were all circumstances which made the room both interesting and comfortable . . .
If this was rather more cosy than the mock-Renaissance, five-star splendour of Paris, it was meant to be. To English eyes, the rue Laffitte hôtels seemed almost too grand. “When finished,” Louise told her father in 1830 (after a visit to the house at number 17 which Salomon had just bought), “I think it will be most magnificent, it is immense and could hold almost three families.” Lionel felt the same ambivalence when he took a similar house in Paris shortly before his marriage: the ground floor would, he told his bride-to-be, “rival . . . any palace; at Paris, a rich man whether Banker or Prince can act in the same way, but in every other place, such an establishment would appear ridiculous. The first floor, the daily habitation, is nearly as splendid, so much gold that for the first few days one is quite dazzled.” “The houses here are splendid,” Nat wrote to Lionel two years later, “you know about them. [Aunt] Betty’s rooms are very nice, indeed rather too fine.”
There were differences too between the English and French residences in the country. For most of his life James stuck close to Paris: neither Ferrières nor Boulogne was very far from the city. His English nephews, by contrast, began looking within five years of their father’s death for some more authentically rural seat than semi-suburban Gunnersbury. It still sufficed for certain social functions, and the family remained fond of it: Hannah added 33 acres to the 76 she inherited from her husband and Lionel extended the estate to no less than 620 acres between 1840 and 1873. But, as Disraeli said of its fictional analogue Hainault House (in Endymion), it was not “fashionable.” Above all, it was too close to the city for its owners to indulge in that favourite pastime of Victorian England: hunting. No sooner had they added to the Gunnersbury property than they began looking further afield, perhaps encouraged by their mother’s glowing descriptions of the Devonshire and Fitzwilliam estates in Derbyshire. Of course, it would have been quite impracticable for “City men” to have bought land so far from London; but Buckinghamshire seemed to offer all the advantages of genuine country life at a manageable distance. The first step in this direction came when Nathan rented Tring house in 1833 for the summer. Three years later Hannah bought some land near Mentmore, north-east of Aylesbury, and in 1842, alerted by a newspaper advertisement, Mayer bought a small group of farms in the parishes of Mentmore and Wing, laying the foundation of what would rapidly become a substantial Rothschild enclave in the county. Absent on duty in Paris, his elder brother Anthony was envious: “It is no harm to have your money in Land. I wish I knew of a nice place, I would do the same & I hope one of these days to have it.”
Contrary to what has sometimes been assumed, the purchase of rural land by the Rothschilds did not symbolise some kind of dilution of their capitalist “spirit” or compromise with the “feudal” old regime. Lionel was singularly unimpressed by the vast piles of the nobility when he visited them: Castle Howard he thought “rather a nice place but nothing wonderful. It is in fact just the same as Blenheim, only much smaller . . . altogether a place not worth putting oneself out to go to see.” What he and his brothers were doing in the 1840s was buying farmland, and it would have been uncharacteristic if they had not regarded their purchases at least partly as straightforward investments. There is no doubt that Lionel drove a hard bargain when the family sought to acquire another property at Creslow. “I should not mind having it,” he told his brothers in 1844, “as a 33 per cent purchase would pay me 3 per cent, and there are so many little places round it which might be bought worth the money, that the whole together might be made to pay a fair rate of interest.” Indeed, the estates he and his brother Anthony subsequently bought to the south of Mentmore following the bankruptcy of the Duke of Buckingham in 1848 and the death of Sir John Dashwood the following year, were typical Rothschild acquisitions: bought at the bottom of the market. There was also, as we shall see, a secondary and equally pragmatic rationale for buying several estates in one county: the British system of local government and parliamentary representation made such a concentration of land a useful source of political influence. (According to one account, this was why their land agents Horwood and James advised buying land in one area only.) It was not until the 1850s that the brothers began to indulge themselves by building their own “stately homes.”
Outside France and England, as we have seen, there were limits on how much property the Rothschilds, as Jews, could acquire. After 1830 these restrictions began to crumble. In 1841 Carl bought himself the Villa Pignatelli near Naples, which his daughter fondly remembered as “a paradise upon earth, with a view over the bay and the islands, over the celebrated Mount Vesuvius, the most animated street and the Villa Reale, the Neapolitan Kensington Gardens.” It was more difficult in Vienna, however, where Salomon continued to live in the rented Hotel zum Römischen Kaiser in the Renngasse. Of course, he owned property elsewhere, in Paris as well as in Frankfurt. But there was a principle at stake—or so Salomon argued in a “special appeal” he addressed to Metternich in January 1837 concerning “the destiny of my co-religionists . . . the hopes of so many fathers of families and the highest aspirations of thousands of human beings.” When the government once again refused to grant any general relaxation of discrimination—lest “the public . . . suddenly draw the conclusion that full emancipation of the Jews is contemplated”—Salomon faced a dilemma; for Metternich intimated that the Emperor was willing, at his own discretion and as a special privilege, to grant individual Jews permission to own houses in Vienna. This was the old story of the prince and the Hofjude, whereby the state “bought off ” the Jewish banker on whom it was dependent with special exemptions. Salomon did not rush to take advantage of this offer; but in 1842—five years later—he succumbed. His request to own real estate in the city was speedily granted, allowing him finally to buy the Renngasse hotel as well as the adjoining house, which he demolished and rebuilt. As he acknowledged, this—along with the grant of honorary citizenship which went with it—made him “a privileged exception in the midst of my fellow believers, who . . . [ought to] have the right to enjoy the same rights as those who belong to other religious confessions.”
It might be thought that this compromise ran counter to the stance taken on questions of Jewish civil rights by other members of the family; but, like Mayer Amschel before them, most Rothschilds seem to have seen general rights and individual privileges as complementary rather than dichotomous: if the former could not be had, the latter should be accepted. Salomon was not criticised for his decision to accept Metternich’s offer. Indeed, even before he did, one of his English nephews was urging him “to get permission from Prince Metternich to purchase an estate in Bohemia.” In 1843 Salomon took his advice, though it was in fact in neighbouring Moravia that he sought the Emperor’s permission not only to buy an estate but also to pass it on to his heirs. Once again he was obliged to adopt the tones of the humble but deserving court Jew, listing his various financial contributions to the Empire as “adequate proof of his unshakeable devotion to the Austrian monarchy” and expressing his “most ardent desire to own property in a country whose rulers have shown him so many signal marks of their favour.” Again the petition was granted, despite the reservations of the Moravian estates. As one official put it, Salomon’s “position in society is so exceptional that he has been entirely removed from the ordinary circumstances of his co-religionists; his remarkable qualities and rare intelligence make it entirely inappropriate to apply strictly in his case the regulations in force with regard to other Israelites.” The Lord Chancellor Count Inzághy was rather more candid: it was, he argued,
highly desirable that Baron Rothschild should be more closely bound to the Imperial State of Austria by the investment of his money in real property in this country; and . . . it would create a very strange impression abroad if his particular wish to settle permanently in that country, where he has been so actively engaged for a long period of years, and has been associated with the Government in more extensive and important transactions than has ever been the case before with a private individual, were to be refused after the special distinctions that have been conferred upon him.
In addition to the estate Salomon duly purchased at Koritschau in Moravia—which together with his property in Vienna gave him real estate in the Empire worth 2 million gulden—he also acquired property in Prussia, buying the castle of Schillersdorf in 1842. It was a dispute relating to the rights attached to this estate which prompted Heine’s warning in 1846 that “Prussian aristocrats would like to use the paw of the plebeian to stir up public opinion against the exceptional family (for that term is the one constantly used to describe the house of Rothschild in proceedings regarding the right of patronage over Schillersdorf and Hültschin).”
Surprisingly, in view of the protracted efforts of the town authorities to return the Jewish community to the ghetto in the years after 1814, “the exceptional family” encountered less of this sort of hostility when they sought to buy new properties in Frankfurt—a reflection perhaps of the changed political climate in the town after 1830. In 1831, after much hesitation, Amschel finally commissioned the Paris-trained Friedrich Rumpf to redesign and expand the house in his beloved garden on the Bockenheimer Landstrasse. Rumpf transformed the original and quite modest cube-shaped house into the central pavilion of a larger neo-classical villa, adding two wings with Corinthian three-quarter columns and remodelling the garden itself along strictly symmetrical lines. This mélange of Baroque and Renaissance styles was fairly typical of the houses favoured by the town’s Gentile elite in this period, suggesting a new self-confidence on Amschel’s part—in marked contrast to the mood of insecurity when he had first acquired the property. In the succeeding years, his attachment to it showed no sign of waning: during a visit to her married daughters Charlotte and Louise in 1844, Hannah was able to report that “a handsome and very large orangery and some magnificent trees of many sorts” had been added to the garden.
An even clearer signal of assumed equality with the Bethmanns and Gontards came in 1834, when Amschel bought the large, four-storey town house at number 34 on the prestigious street known as the Zeil. In the same year Anselm bought a similar “palais” (indeed, by the same architect) in the nearby Neue Mainzer Strasse (number 45), a much grander residence than the building at number 33 acquired by Carl in 1818 and made even more grand by Rumpf, who was commissioned to add a new façade in the Renaissance style. It was also Rumpf whom Mayer Carl commissioned to expand the house he bought on the banks of the Main in 1846; but by this time mere imitation was no longer the Rothschild objective. Untermainkai 15—which today houses the Frankfurt Jewish Museum—had been built in 1821 at the end of an elegant row of neo-classical houses for the banker Joseph Isaak Speyer, and was already distinguished from its neighbours by its Italian Renaissance style. Rumpf made it stand out even more. Although he preserved some original features, notably the polygonal vestibule projecting from the side wall, he doubled its length and added some distinctly Oriental features (notably two new oriels with Moorish corner pillars and arabesque balustrades). The effect was to dominate, albeit subtly, the rest of the street—a symbol of the Rothschilds’ now well-established dominance of the city’s economic life.
The Rothschilds also acquired rural retreats in the vicinity of Frankfurt during this period. In 1835 Amschel bought a country Schloss at Grüneburg and two years later Carl acquired a similar property, the Günthersburg. In fact, the literal translation (“castle”) somewhat exaggerates the size of the original houses, and at 150 acres or so their grounds were relatively modest. In one respect, however, the Frankfurt Rothschilds were more ambitious than their relatives, for they were the first members of the family to build their own country houses rather than merely renovate the existing buildings. This gave rise to an aesthetic debate within the family, in which the English (represented at Frankfurt by Anselm’s wife Charlotte and Mayer Carl’s wife Louise) emphatically lost.
In 1840 Mayer Carl commissioned Rumpf to build a new “country residence” at Günthersburg. The design was not dissimilar to that of the Untermainkai house, with Doric pilasters across the ground and first floors and Corinthian ones on the upper floors of the two side projections. “The house is large and when finished will be a magnificent residence,” reported his mother-in-law Hannah, “but the grounds and garden do not accord with English taste.” Her son shared her opinion: it would be “a most magnificent house, large enough to hold us all” and the garden would be “pretty,” “but it is a pity that such a large house is not in the middle of 10,000 acres about ten miles from the town.”1 The argument continued when Anselm resolved to build a new “garden house” on the Grüneburg estate.2 Doubtless remembering her childhood at Gunnersbury, his wife Charlotte insisted that the new house be “perfectly English” in style, and asked her brothers to supply designs from London. “I am hesitating between the Elizabethan and the cottage style,” she told her mother. “She wants some of the Gothic, Elizabethan and all sorts,” reported Lionel somewhat dismissively. “Not a palace but a good sized House.” But she was evidently overruled. The design she and her husband eventually agreed on was for a long rectangular house in the style of a Loire château. With its tower-like projections at the corners, its layers of sandstone on the ground floor, its balustrades, obelisks, volutes and chimneys, it was an eclectic edifice. The only concession to Charlotte was a tall neo-Gothic brick tower at the northern end of the park—a conspicuously English touch.
Elite Pursuits
Such arguments about architectural style are indicative of an important sea-change in Rothschild attitudes in the period which followed Nathan’s death. Before 1836, as we have seen, he and his brothers had tended to regard the acquisition of more spacious residences in an essentially functional light: apart from simply being more comfortable, they provided settings where the great and the good could be wined and dined—and pumped for useful news or lucrative business. After 1836, the endless round of dinner parties and balls continued. The ball in March 1836 which James threw to show off his refurbished hôtel was probably not untypical: “As at all Rothschild soirées,” Heine reported, the guests were “a strictly selected set of aristocratic illustrations, able to make an impression by reason of great name or high rank or (in the case of the ladies) beauty and finery.” Contemporaries generally agreed on this: whereas before 1830 there had been one or two Restoration grandees who had continued to decline James’s invitations, after the advent of the “bourgeois monarchy” the faubourg Saint-Germain had less cause to remain aloof. “The company all the elite of Paris,” was Disraeli’s succinct summary of the guests invited to the ball he attended at Salomon’s in 1843. The guest lists of dinners given by James tell much the same story.
In London too Rothschild hospitality became more lavish, more modish. In July 1838 Lionel hosted an extravagant summer ball at Gunnersbury to which he invited over 500 people, among them the dukes of Cambridge, Sussex, Somerset and Wellington. After a concert by leading musicians and singers, dinner was served followed by (according to Moses Montefiore) “a grand ball . . . in a magnificent tent erected for the purpose.” The Cambridges dined at Gunnersbury again that September; and five years later they were in attendance at another ball there, along with the Duchess of Gloucester and Ernst I of Saxe Coburg, Prince Albert’s father—an impressive trio of royal relations. Even in Frankfurt the last social constraints seemed to fall away. In 1846, for example, Lionel’s sister Charlotte gave “a magnificent ball” there. Among the Frankfurt Rothschilds’ dinner guests in this period were the King of Württemberg, Prince Loewenstein and Prince Wittgenstein. Disraeli is once again apposite (this time fictionalising in Endymion):
In a very short time it was not merely the wives of ambassadors and ministers of state that were found at the garden fêtes of Hainault, or the balls, and banquets, and concerts of Portland Place, but the fitful and capricious realm of fashion surrendered like a fair country conquered as it were by surprise. To visit the Neuchatels became the mode; all solicited to be their guests, and some solicited in vain.
As the frequency of such descriptions suggests, the scale and ostentation of Rothschild hospitality never ceased to fascinate contemporaries—especially socially ambitious men of letters like Disraeli. In Tancred, there is an exquisite dinner at Sidonia’s, “served on Sèvres porcelain of Rose du Barry, raised on airy golden stands of arabesque workmanship; a mule bore your panniers of salt, or a sea-nymph proffered it you on a shell just fresh from the ocean, or you found it in a bird’s nest; by every guest a different pattern . . . The appearance of the table changed as if by the waving of a wand, and as silently as a dream.” In Endymion, the same author caricatures what is unmistakably a weekend party at Gunnersbury. “Sunday was a great day at Hainault, the Royal and the Stock Exchanges were both of them always fully represented; and then they often had an opportunity, which they highly appreciated, of seeing and conferring with some public characters, MPs of note or promise, and occasionally a secretary of the Treasury, or a privy councillor.” At dinner a sycophantic writer named St Barbe—a caricature of Thackeray—holds forth in praise of his hosts:
“What a family this is!” he said; “I had no idea of wealth before! Did you observe the silver plates? I could not hold mine with one hand, it was so heavy. I do not suppose there are such plates in all the world . . . But they deserve their wealth,” he added; “nobody grudges it to them. I declare when I was eating that truffle, I felt a glow about my heart that, if it were not indigestion, I think must have been gratitude . . . He is a wonderful man, that Neuchatel. If I had only known him a year ago! I would have dedicated my novel to him. He is a sort of man who would have given you a cheque immediately . . . If you had dedicated it to a lord, the most he would have done would have been to ask you to dinner, and then perhaps cut up your work in one of the Quality reviews.”3
In truth, for the Rothschilds themselves these occasions continued to be more a duty—an early form of corporate hospitality—than a pleasure. “Here we have stinking balls night after night,” complained Nat to his brothers in 1843; “you have no idea how sweaty the old French ladies smell after a long waltz.” Nor were the nightly dinners for diplomats and politicians much more enjoyable: on April 30, 1847, when the guests included the Prince of Holstein-Glücksburg, the Duke of Devonshire and Lord and Lady Holland, Apponyi could not help noticing the “affreuses douleurs névralgiques à la tête” from which Nat’s wife was all too plainly suffering. As for the incessant games of whist which were such a characteristic feature of nineteenth-century elite socialising—and which seem to have been the main form of entertainment at Naples—these too palled after a time. Most members of the family also had decidedly mixed feelings about the time they spent each year “taking the waters” at spas like Aix, Gastein, Wildbad and Kissingen, a practice first adopted by James in the early 1830s. Though this was the “done” thing, James rarely enthused about taking aKur; indeed, he appears to have regarded it primarily as a medical necessity and often took the waters after illnesses or periods of intense and exhausting work. As he grew older, he tended to spend longer and longer periods of the summer recuperating in this way, but he generally continued to bombard his nephews or sons in Paris with peremptory letters, and insisted on being kept informed of any business developments. Salomon enthused about “the air and the mountains, the waterfalls [and] the good bath water” at Gastein in 1841, and Anthony joked that the waters were good for James’s libido; but Mayer’s reaction to Wildbad was more typical. “You have no idea,” he complained to Lionel in 1846, “how dull this place is and if I had not determined on taking the number of baths prescribed, how soon I would bolt.”
The image of bolting, however, was a hint at more enjoyable pastimes which, by the 1830s, James and his nephews were discovering. Of these, hunting was an early favourite. It is necessary to distinguish here between three separate, though related activities, all of which were to become staple Rothschild hobbies. Firstly, there was shooting, mainly of pheasants, which James was doing at Ferrières by the early 1830s. Secondly, there was stag-hunting, which was one of the things which attracted his English nephews to Buckinghamshire in the 1840s. Finally, there was horse-racing, an enthusiasm related to hunting, though requiring more carefully bred and trained horses—not to mention professional jockeys.
Of these pastimes, shooting was the most closely related to the pattern of social activity established in the 1820s. In September 1832, with the aftershocks of the July Revolution still reverberating, Lionel “accompanied Montalivet & Apponyi out shooting which in any other times than the present would be very amusing, but now one goes with these great personages to hear what is going on more than for the sake of the amusement.” That instrumental approach continued to inform his uncle James’s attitude throughout the decade, most obviously in 1835, when he staged an immense slaughter of 506 partridges, 359 hares and 110 pheasants in honour of the duc d’Orleans. This was corporate hospitality at its most grotesque, with the unfortunate birds and beasts being bought in specially for the occasion, and each of the eminent guests being provided with a servant, a dog and a gun. Inevitably, more discerning huntsmen looked askance at such carnage. Capefigue is quite vehement on the subject of the sport at Ferrières: “Bad kennels, bad hounds, horses dead-beat after the first gallop, greedy gamekeeper, game sold off, venison scrawny, servants scoffing and lacking in intelligence.” And even James’s own nephews were conscious that there was room for improvement. In 1843, in an ambitious bid to re-educate their uncle, they invited him to shoot grouse with them in Scotland. “The shooting is different to what we are accustomed to see and particularly to that which our good Uncle has at Ferrières where all the game is driven to him and he has but to fire away,” Lionel observed acerbically.
Here we have to walk after the dogs and to seek for the game, which is a much greater excitement and at the same time more fatiguing. In the beginning the Baron was very eager and followed the dogs very well, and was rather lucky in killing about 15, but he soon got tired, when I was then able to shoot a little and killed about as many . . . [T]he walking is a little fatiguing, as the heath in most places is nearly up to one’s knees.
The younger generation evidently relished the discomfiture of “the Baron”: both Nat and Anselm gleefully visualised James returning to Paris clad “as a real highlander, in a tartan dress, the claymore in his hand and exhibiting a flourishing view of stout legs and calves.”
The hunting preferred by James’s English nephews was stag-hunting on horseback with hounds. Probably at Mayer’s instigation, they began hunting with a pack of staghounds in the Vale of Aylesbury in 1839, renting stables and kennels at Tring Park. It was this new enthusiasm, more than anything else, which prompted the purchase of Mentmore three years later. By 1840, “turning out the stag” was a recreation attracting not only the male Rothschilds but their wives to Buckinghamshire, though it was not until five years later that they felt ready to hold a public hunt. The most passionate Rothschild testaments to the pleasures of the chase come, poignantly, from Nat, the exile in Paris, whose early letters abound with allusions to hunting. “What magic there is in a pair of leather breeches,” he wrote home in 1842. “I have half a mind to put a pair on and gallop round the bois de Boulogne—old Tup [Mayer] would exclaim, “Go it, you cockney!” Write more about hunting & whether old Tup manages to tumble into the dirty black ditches, how H. Fitzroy was induced to go out with the staghounds—everything is of interest to us poor fellows who can only hunt through the columns of Bell’s Life.” And in the same year: “We are going to Lady Ailesbury’s tonight. I’d sooner have a run for 40 minutes across the vale than look at her ugly face without a veil.” In 1841 Sir Francis Grant was commissioned to paint all four brothers at full tilt on their hunters, resplendent in matching scarlet coats and top hats. In fact, it was seldom that all four were able to ride to hounds together.
It is tempting to conclude from such evidence that the fad for stag-hunting was nothing more than the hedonism of wealthy youth, the stuff which would later be immortalised by Surtees and Siegfried Sassoon. Yet there is a phrase of Nat’s which hints at something more. “Ride like trumps,” he exhorted his brothers in 1840, “and do not let the Queen’s people fancy we are all tailors.” As in Paris, hunting inevitably had a social significance: it meant mixing with members of the aristocracy, including courtiers, men who would tend to be accomplished riders. It mattered to the sons of the textile merchant Nathan Rothschild to prove that they were not “all tailors” by acquitting themselves well over the hedges and gates of Buckinghamshire. And of course it was good exercise: something which their grandfather, confined in the Judengasse, had been denied and their father had scorned. It is not inconceivable that the older Rothschilds’ very sedentary lifestyles made them susceptible to the kind of ailment which killed Nathan. On the other hand, the fact that Nat suffered a serious injury as a result of a riding accident bore out his father’s warnings many years before about the incompatibility of bankers and horses.
The same was true of the brothers’ first forays into horse-racing. We know from Buxton that Nathan had whetted his sons’ appetites for Arab horses, and Lionel was self-confessedly “extravagant” in his expenditure on horses while serving his apprenticeship in Paris. It was not until around 1840, however, that Anthony began to own and compete racehorses: in that year one of his horses won the Champs de Mars in Paris. This was in some ways the height of Rothschild social pretension in the period, as the pre-eminent owner of the day in Paris was none other than the duc d’Orléans. His death in a carriage accident in July 1842 left the field to some extent open: as Disraeli wrote that October, “Anthony succeeds the Duke of Orleans in his patronage of the turf & gives costly cups to the course wh[ich] his horses always win.” Nat, still fondly dreaming of the Vale, was disapproving, and warned his youngest brother: “Race horses are ticklish things, very pleasant to have a lot when they win, quite the contrary when they lose . . . Dear Tupus stick to the scarlet coat, instead of the silk jacket, it is more beneficial to the health and less expensive.” But Mayer, evidently inspired by Anthony’s success, shortly afterwards established a racing stable at Newmarket; it was he who in 1843 (after toying with the more garish combination of amber, lilac and red) registered the Rothschild colours as dark blue and yellow.
Investing in Art
The pleasures of the field were not the only ones discovered by James and his nephews after 1830. An even more important new source of enjoyment—and prestige—was patronage of the arts; and here we see clearly that Rothschilds were doing much more than merely “aping” aristocratic mores.
Of course, there were those who erroneously took James de Rothschild for a philistine. “If only I had Rothschild’s money!” exclaims Gumpelino in a draft of “The Baths of Lucca” written by Heine in around 1828, three years before he left Germany for Paris:
But what use is it to him? He lacks culture and understands as much about music as an unborn calf, about painting as a cat, about poetry as Apollo—that’s the name of my dog. When men like that lose their money, they cease to exist. What is money? Money is round and rolls away, but education endures . . . But if I—God forbid—were to lose my money, I would still remain a great connoisseur of art, painting, music and poetry.
Fifteen years later, by which he time he knew James pretty well, he took a rather different view, though the compliments were—as so often with Heine—strictly back- handed. James, he now admitted, had
the capacity of finding (if not always of judging) the leading practitioners in every other sphere of activity. Because of this gift he has been compared with Louis XIV; and it is true that in contrast to his colleagues here in Paris, who like to surround themselves with mediocrities, Herr James von Rothschild always appears in association with the notabilities of any subject; even if he knew nothing about it himself, he still always knew who most excelled in it. He does not, perhaps, understand a single note of music; but Rossini was always a friend of the family. Ary Scheffer is his court painter . . . Herr von Rothschild knows not a word of Greek; but the Hellenist Letronne is the scholar he favours most . . . Poetry, whether French or German, is also very eminently represented in Herr von Rothschild’s affections; although it seems to me as if . . . the Herr Baron is not as wildly enthusiastic about the poets of our own day as he is for the great poets of the past, for example, Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe—pure, dead poets, enlightened geniuses, who are free from all earthly dross, removed from all wordly needs, and do not ask him for shares in the Northern Railway.
As we shall see, this last remark was a pointed allusion to Heine’s own relationship with James; but leaving that aside—and making due allowance for Heine’s satirical hyperbole—it is obvious that the above passage (published in 1843 in the Augsburger Zeitung) could hardly have been written of a man with no interest in the arts. Even if James himself was no expert, he admired expertise—and that is a very different thing from being a philistine. When another ambitious young man of letters (also, like Heine, a converted Jew) first met James at a dinner in Paris the year before, he hit the nail on the head. “I found him,” Benjamin Disraeli told his sister, “a happy mixture of the French Dandy & the orange boy. He spoke to me with[ou]t ceremony with ‘I believe you know my nephew.’ ” The “orange boy” in James was most strongly evident in the strong Frankfurt accent with which he spoke French, and in the peremptory manner which he shared with his brother in London; but the “French Dandy” was the man within, who always enjoyed the company of artists, musicians and writers. An English visitor to Paris in the 1850s noticed this too, when she called on “Mme. de Roth . . . whose poetic abode has more the air of the palace of a wealthy artist than the hôtel of a millionaire.” For all his rough manners, James was, in his heart, something of an aesthete—even a Bohemian—though he indulged this trait vicariously, surrounding himself with beautiful objects and introducing one or two of their more entertaining creators into his otherwise stuffy social round. Something similar could be said of his English nephews, whose love of hunting was only one facet of their wide-ranging activity beyond the walls of the counting house.
It was on other walls that the “acculturation” of the Rothschilds was perhaps most immediately obvious—specifically, on the walls of their houses, which gradually became covered with paintings of the very highest quality. The first picture of note bought by a Rothschild was French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s The Milkmaid —a typically rustic-romantic work of the late rococo—which James acquired as early as 1818. Greuze was a favourite Rothschild artist: James bought another of his paintings—Little Girl with Bouquet—from the auction of Cardinal Fesch’s estate in 1845, and his nephew Lionel began his collection by buying his Virtue Faltering at Phillips’ auctioneers in 1831; he later acquired four other works by the same artist, among them The Parting Kiss. His brother Anthony owned another two, including The Nursery. Such pictures complemented the numerous items of ancien régime furniture and ornamentation acquired by the family, like the Marie Antoinette secretaires and Sèvres porcelain owned by James. Another favourite artist was the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Bartolomé Estebán Murillo, whose work Lionel may have discovered when he went to Madrid in 1834, where, as he freely admitted, he spent “all my leisure time . . . in running about after pictures which are in very great number but few good ones.” By the end of the 1840s he, his uncle and his mother all owned Murillos.
But it was the art of seventeenth-century Holland which the family found most attractive. In 1840 James bought Rembrandt’s The Standard Bearer from George IV’s collection, which he hung in the grand salon at the rue Laffitte; he also owned the same artist’sPortrait of a Young Man (which was in the sitting room) as well as Franz Hals’s Portait of a Nobleman and works by Anthony van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob van Ruisdael and Philips Wouwermans. In 1836 Lionel bought Gerard ter Borch’s Young Lady with her Page in Frankfurt, and a year later added four paintings by Wouwermans from the sale of the duchesse de Berry’s collection as well as three by Jan van der Heyden, including Rosendaal Castle and his View of Haarlem . He bought two more Wouwermans works and a Pieter de Hooch from George Lucy’s collection in 1845. By the time the German art expert Gustav Waagen visited him in Piccadilly in around 1850, his collection included three paintings by Meindert Hobbema, three by van Ruisdael, a Paulus Potter, a Karel du Jardin, an Adam Pynacker, two Jan Wynants and an Isaac van Ostade. He later added two pictures by Nicolaes Berchem, five works by Aalbert Cuyp—including his View on a Frozen River—six paintings by the van Mieris, father and son, two by Gaspar Netscher, three by Gerard ter Borch and seven by David Teniers the Younger, as well as still-lifes by Jan David de Heem, Jan van Huysum, Rachel Ruysh, Jan Weenix and Peter Gysels. This taste was evidently shared by his brother Anthony: in 1833 he bought a picture of a nurse and child playing with a goat which appeared to bear Rembrandt’s signature (it was later reattributed to Nicolaes Maes when the signature was shown to be a forgery) and by 1850 had acquired works by Wouwermans, Teniers, Van Dyck, Rubens and van Ostade.
That something resembling a collective “Rothschild taste” developed in this period is not surprising, as to a large extent the family acted in concert, alerting one another to major sales and acting for one another in different markets. In 1840 James asked Anthony “to dispose of the Rembrandt if it could be done with advantage,” but “on reflection” decided against buying a Murillo through his nephew. He and his nephews sought to ensure that a major Roman collection was auctioned in Paris rather than London in 1841. “We want to do it together,” wrote James. “Perhaps we will get some nice paintings.” Typically, when two Murillos were offered for auction in Paris in 1843, Nat considered buying them for his mother, though in the end he left them to Salomon’s wife Caroline. By the time of her death, Hannah owned works by Murillo, Cuyp and Teniers, all probably bought for her by her sons. There was also a natural shared tendency to favour secular subjects over religious works—perhaps the best explanation for the over-representation of Dutch artists—though this was far from being a rule. Interestingly, the Rothschilds bought not only Old Testament scenes (such as Paul Delaroche’s Moses in the Bullrushes) but also some works of explicitly Christian iconography. In 1840 Lionel acquired Murillo’sInfant Christ as the Good Shepherd from a London dealer and he later purchased Domenichino’s Head of a Magdalene and Andrea del Sarto’sMadonna and Child; while James owned Jan van Eyck and Petrus Christi’s Chartreux Madonna and a Luini Virgin and Child. In 1846 Anthony was given Van Dyck’s The Abbot Scaglia Adoring the Virgin and Child by his father-in-law.
It would be wrong, however, to exaggerate the homogeneity of Rothschild collections even at this early period. When Nat bought Velazquez’s Lady with Fan, he observed that “pictures are something like ladies, everyone must please himself and select according to his taste . . . It would not please everyone as the face is not a pretty one, although very well painted.” His brother Lionel’s enthusiasm for eighteenth-century English artists was not shared by James (and was in many ways ahead of its time in Britain too). In 1846 he acquired Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Master Braddyl at Christie’s, the first of several Reynolds works (the others were his Portrait of Mrs Lloyd, Portrait of Miss Meyer as Hebe and Snake in the Grass: Love Unbinding the Zone of Beauty). Later he turned to Thomas Gainsborough, buying his Portrait of the Hon. Frances Duncombe for £1,500 in 1871 and his Portrait of Mrs Sheridan the following year at Christie’s. He also owned George Romney’s Portait of Emma, Lady Hamilton and works by Sir William Beechey and John Hoppner. This enthusiasm for relatively recent portraits of individuals quite unrelated (and in all probability unknown) to the Rothschilds is especially surprising, though later in the nineteenth century such works were all the rage. Lionel’s youngest brother Mayer owned a Gainsborough too—a fox-coursing scene—but he also bought works by Cranach and Titian, who are not represented in other Rothschild collections of the period.
The Frankfurt Rothschilds had rather different tastes again. It is hard to imagine Wilhelm Tischbein’s Goethe in the Campagna di Roma (which Mayer Carl bought in 1846) hanging in Paris or London, for example. In any case, Mayer Carl was a good deal more interested in gold and silver ornaments than in paintings. Although his English cousins collected objets d’art too—among Lionel’s prized possessions was the so-called “Lycurgus cup,” an ancient Alexandrian or Byzantine glass goblet—they were less systematic. By the 1870s Mayer Carl had accumulated a dazzling “Goldschatz” of 5,000 items, among them such treasures as Wentzel Jamnitzer’s Merkelsche Tafelaufsatz, a masterpiece of the German Renaissance, and an ivory horn on silver gilt in the same style—in fact a contemporary forgery by Reinhold Vasters, but a brilliant one.
Evidently, the Rothschilds were little interested in the art of their own day—although the myth-makers have exaggerated this indifference. The story that James antagonised two artists, Jadin and Horace Vernet, in his efforts to secure a cut-price portrait seems implausible; it cannot be right that Vernet took his revenge by depicting James as a cowardly Jew in On the way to Smala, because the figure in question bears no resemblance whatever to him or any other Rothschild. What is true is that, with very few exceptions, the only contemporary paintings the family owned were portraits they commissioned themselves: for example, Alfred de Dreux’s portait of Lionel driving a gig (1838), Sir Francis Grant’s portrait of the four brothers riding to hounds (1841), Ary Scheffer’s portrait of James’s daughter Charlotte and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ portrait of his wife Betty (1848)—not to mention the numerous family pictures painted by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim and the portraits of James by artists like Charles-Emile Champmartin, Louis-Amié Grosclaude and Hippolyte Flandrin.
It would be a mistake to explain all this solely in terms of family (or individual) “taste.” For the “Old Masters” were attractive to men like James and Lionel for reasons other than the strictly aesthetic. Quite apart from their value as “status symbols,” celebrated paintings were as much a form of investment in the nineteenth century as they are today. The fact that James’s entire collection was insured for 10 million francs (£400,000) is indicative of the scale of the investment undertaken in this period: in 1844 that sum was equivalent to a quarter of James’s share in the combined capital of the five houses. Moreover, the market was a lively one, still feeling the ripples generated by the French Revolution: by uprooting so much of the French aristocracy, the Revolution had made numerous private collections available to new buyers, and the practice of selling them en bloc at auction had continued into the nineteenth century. It was another revolution, that of 1830, which ultimately led to the sale of the duchesse de Berry’s collection, one of the most important early sources of Rothschild art; 1848 saw the great Stowe auction. Despite the frequency of such sales, the demand for Old Masters often tended to outstrip supply. It speaks for itself that a picture like Velazquez’s Lady with Fan could sell (to Nat) for 12,700 francs in 1843, more than three times more than the banker Aguado had paid for it just six years before.
Given their immense wealth, the Rothschilds could afford to outbid almost anyone, and some members of the family seemed inclined to do so. As Mayer said while shopping for Italian sculpture in 1846, “one ought always to buy the very best of everything and not to mind the price,” on the ground that “the very best” could only appreciate in value. But the political upheavals of 1848-9, when the art market slumped as steeply as the financial markets, called that bullish assumption into question. In later life, James was always content to let a picture go to another bidder if he felt the price was excessive. In 1860 he bid 3,000 guineas for a Rubens, only to see it go to someone else for 7,500. “Fabulous prices,” commented James; “I don’t have the money to pay 10,000 guineas for a Murillo” (especially when the artist’s Christ as the Good Shepherd had cost just over £3,000 twenty years before). Of course, he of all people did have the money; but, compulsive investor that he was, he hated the idea of buying at what might prove to be the peak of the market.
Piano Lessons
Art, then, was an investment as well as a form of decoration. The Rothschilds’ enthusiasm for music is perhaps less easily explained. That the Rothschilds patron ised some of the most famous composers and performers of the nineteenth century is well known; and the most obvious reason for this is that musicians were a prerequisite for a successful soirée or a ball. In January 1828, for example, Nathan was able to treat his dinner guests to a post-prandial performance by Ignaz Moscheles—Felix Mendelssohn’s tutor. Similarly, when the maréchal de Castellane had dined with James the year before, the star performer was Rossini, to whom Salomon had been introduced by Metternich at the Congress of Verona five years before. It is also said—though scholars debate the authenticity of the story—that Chopin’s career in Paris was launched by a performance he gave at the rue Laffitte in 1832. He played there again in 1843 alongside his pupil Karl Filtsch, whose playing James was reported to “adore.” Other notable performers who played at Rothschild houses included Mendelssohn himself, Franz Liszt, the pianist and conductor Charles Hallé and the violinist Joseph Joachim.
Even more important than their role as performers, however, was their role as teachers. This was especially important for female Rothschilds, who were encouraged from an early age to excel at the keyboard (the piano was perhaps the nearest thing the nineteenth century had to the television, with the difference that it required skill to operate). Not surprisingly, Nathan and his brothers gave them the best tutors money could buy. Charlotte’s livre d’or, in which she invited her teachers to jot musical mementoes, records many of their names: Moscheles appears there, as does Mendelssohn, Vincenzo Bellini (who inscribed the song “Dolente immagine di Fille mia,” which he had composed in 1821), Louis Spohr (who contributed a version of his song “Nachgefühl”), Rossini (who added one of his many settings of “Mi lagnero tacendo” from Metastio’s Siroe) and Giacomo Meyerbeer (who offered a song called “The Rare Flower”). In the 1840s Charlotte’s contributors included the elderly Luigi Cherubini (who wrote in the aria “Canto d’Armida” from his opera Armida abbandonata) and Chopin (who added a version of the Mazurka Op. 67 no. 4). Rossini also wrote a six page piano solo for her as a “Petit Souvenir.” Charlotte’s sister Hannah Mayer was also an accomplished harpist and took lessons from Parish Alvars, who dedicated his Serenade Op. 83 to her; and when the youngest sister Louise showed musical leanings, Rossini himself offered to give her singing lessons. He was, she reported to her father, “very good natured and always comes at the hour and day I like.” When the two were together in Frankfurt three years later, she had lessons with him every day. Chopin too gave lessons to a number of Rothschild women: not only to Nathan’s daughter Charlotte but also to her daughter Hannah Mathilde and to Betty’s daughter, another Charlotte. Indeed, he dedicated two pieces to members of the family: the Waltz, Op. 64, No. 2 and the Ballade, Op. 52. With such a source of inspiration, it is not surprising the girls themselves tried their hand at composition: the younger Charlotte published four short piano pieces while Hannah Mathilde composed piano pieces, an orchestral waltz and six sets of songs, including settings of Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Goethe and Longfellow—the most successful of which (“Si vous n’avez rien à me dire”) was performed at the Paris Opéra by the soprano Adelina Patti.
The Rothschilds not only employed musicians to perform and teach, however; they also mixed with them socially and enjoyed their company. Meyerbeer dined with Betty and James in 1833, for example, and Rossini was invited to Lionel’s wedding in 1836 primarily as a friend—“to add to the gaiety of our party”—rather than as an entertainer or teacher. As he himself put it, “the entire purpose . . . was to attend at Frankfurt the marriage of Lionel Rotschildt [sic], my very dear friend.” James and he remained friendly throughout their lives. Similarly, Chopin was said to have “loved the house of Rothschild and that this house loved him”; after his premature death in 1848, his pupil Charlotte preserved “a touching remembrance of him”—a cushion she herself had embroidered for him. Such intimacy with musicians was somewhat unconventional. When the Rossinis dined with Nathan at a fairly aristocratic gathering shortly before the wedding, Lady Grenville commented sniffily that it was “Madame Rossini[’s] . . . first appearance in decent company I believe.” But the composer and his wife were there partly in order to liven up the proceedings. Anthony’s account of the private recital he heard Liszt give in 1842 is illuminating, showing how the Rothschilds derived pleasure not only from the playing but also from the company of such stars of nineteenth-century romanticism. “The most extraordinary player in the world,” he reported to his wife, was
as curious to look at as to hear, with his long hair at times streaming over his face, at others completely thrown back by a violent toss of the head, his wild eyes which he now and then turns on every side as if to mean sometimes “Am I not wonderful?” at others that he is delighted with his own performance. Dearest, he is an agreeable and talkative man in society, and is no doubt a dear and pleasant companion.
Musicians educated and entertained—and not just by their playing. In return, the family were happy to give their favourites a measure of financial assistance—usually in the form of personal banking services. Johann Strauss senior’s tour of England in 1838 was partly financed by Lionel; after 1842 Rossini banked at de Rothschild Frères; Niccolo Paganini used the Rothschilds to relay a gift of 20,000 francs to Hector Berlioz; and Adelina Patti on one occasion borrowed more than £4,000 from the Paris house while on tour in Argentina. Even that most vociferous of musical anti-Semites, Richard Wagner—who demonised the influence of “Jewry in Music”—may be said to have banked with the Rothschilds as his second wife Cosima had an account with the Paris house. The beneficiaries were more privileged than they may have realised: the Rothschilds generally offered such facilities only to royalty and the political elite. It was a sign of the value they attached to their relations with the musical world; and perhaps this sprang from a certain sense of affinity. Like the self-made millionaire revered for his money, the musical star idolised for his (or her) virtuosity was a nineteenth-century invention. Both were to some extent parvenus (and foreigners): Nathan as much as the Rossinis at the dinner mentioned above. Indeed, many of the nineteenth century’s most gifted musicians—Meyerbeer and Joachim spring to mind—were, like the Rothschilds, beneficiaries of Jewish emancipation.
Men of Letters
Musicians gave private lessons and performances. Nineteenth-century writers, by contrast, wrote for a burgeoning public and were supposed to be freeing themselves thereby from the traditional constraints of patronage. Yet men of letters too were recipients of Rothschild favours—and two of the best-documented cases were Heinrich Heine and Honoré de Balzac, both of whom became closely associated with James in the 1830s and 1840s. (Because of its political significance, the analogous relationship between Lionel and Disraeli is discussed separately in volume II.)
On the face of it, it is amazing that the wealthiest banker in Paris, the confidant of kings and ministers, should have had anything to do with either. In political terms alone, they were extremists: Heine was exiled from Germany for his liberal views and remained a lifelong enthusiast for revolutionary and nationalist causes; Balzac, by contrast, was by temperament a romantic conservative who considered seeking election as a Bourbon legitimist in 1831-2, and devoted a lifetime to portraying the society of the July Monarchy in a less than flattering light. Financially, they were both feckless, and without question had mercenary motives for cultivating good relations with the Rothschilds. And above all they periodically depicted James in their writings in ways which would have sent a thinner-skinned man rushing to his lawyers. Yet James evidently liked both; and if the relationships he formed with them were not quite unalloyed friendships, it seems that he would have liked them to be. Nothing gives a better insight into James’s complex personality than this.
We have already encountered some of Heine’s most penetrating commentaries on the nature of Rothschild power before and after the 1830 revolution. It is now time to say something about his relationship to the family. The nephew of the Hamburg banker Salomon Heine, he had been intended by his mother for a career in banking and seems to have had some sort of encounter with Nathan—“a fat Jew in Lombard Street, St. Swithin’s Lane”—in London in 1827. Indeed, Nathan may have been the “famous merchant, with whom I wished to be an apprentice millionaire” who told him he “had no talent for business.” By 1834, however, he had struck up a very different relationship with the French Rothschilds. A number of anecdotes exist which cast Heine as a kind of licensed jester at the court of Baron James. When the Austrian playwright Grillparzer dined with Heine (and Rossini) at the Rothschilds’, he was shocked: “It was apparent that his hosts were afraid of Heine, and he exploited their fear by slyly poking fun at them at every opportunity. But it is not admissible to dine with people whom you don’t care for. If you despise a person you should not dine with him. In point of fact, our acquaintance did not progress after this.”
Barbs of the sort Grillparzer alluded to invariably cast James as Heine’s slow witted straight-man. “Dr Heine,” he asks, “could you tell me why this wine is called ‘Lachrymae Christi’?” “All you have to do is translate,” Heine answers. “Christ weeps when rich Jews can afford such good wines while so many poor folk go hungry and thirsty.” “Comment trouvez-vous mon chenil?” says James, welcoming some guests to his house. “Don’t you know that chenil means dog-kennel?” chips in Heine. “If you have so low an opinion of yourself, at least don’t trumpet it abroad!” Rothschild contemplates the filthy state of the River Seine and observes that its source is perfectly clear; Heine replies: “Yes, M. le baron; and I hear that your late father was a most honest man.” A third party expresses a desire to meet James. “He only wants to get to know him,” quips Heine, “because he doesn’t know him.”
Such anecdotes seem superficially plausible in the light of the more satirical passages about James in Heine’s journalism. Yet the surviving correspondence suggests a rather different relationship, in which Heine increasingly came to play the more or less humble supplicant to James’s indulgent patron. As we have seen, one of the first references Heine made to James was in Ludwig Börne, in which he suggested that James’s development of financial capital made him as much of a social “revolutionary” as Richelieu and Robespierre. Though a fairly outrageous parallel, this was far from insulting; if anything, it rather exaggerated James’s influence. Surprisingly, Heine felt nervous enough about the liberties he had taken—apparently quoting at length from a private conversation with James—that he took the precaution of sending a copy of the proofs to his wife Betty. “You now have in your hands the corpus delicti that gives me some anxiety,” he wrote. “May I still appear before you? . . . Perhaps you will forgive me with a merry smile. For my part I cannot reproach myself enough for having spoken, not with ill intent, but in an unbecoming manner, of a family that conceals so much nobility of feeling and so much good will.”
A few months before, he had publicly denied being the author of some malicious remarks about a ball given by James which had been attributed to him in the columns of the Quotidienne. In his Augsburger Zeitung articles of the early 1840s, he repeatedly went out of his way to praise James, comparing him favourably with other bankers like Benoît Fould, for example, and praising his philanthropic work. The most fulsome—if faintly facetious—praise of all came in the article published in June 1843 (later incorporated in his “Lutetia”) which likened James to Louis XIV for his ability to identify talent in others: “In order to make quite sure of not causing offence I will today compare M. de Rothschild to the sun. I can do this, firstly, because it costs me nothing; and secondly, I can well justify it at a time like the present because now everyone pays homage to M. de Rothschild in the hope of being warmed by his golden rays.” A few months later Heine was able to do more than merely praise James when his publisher Julius Campe sent him the manuscript of a highly critical history of the Rothschilds—the radical republican Friedrich Steinmann’s The House of Rothschild: Its History and Transactions. Heine wrote that if the manuscript were to be suppressed it would repay the service “which Rothschild has shown me for the past 12 years, as much as this can honestly be done.”
Many subsequent writers have assumed that the main reason for Heine’s kid-gloved treatment of James at this time was financial. But there is no record of any financial assistance from James to Heine until 1845, for the reason that before then Heine did not need such help. That, in fact, is the whole point of the passage in “Lutetia” which follows the comparison with Louis XIV, in which Heine explicitly denies wishing to join the horde of beggars who surround James:
If I may speak in confidence, this frenzied veneration is no small affliction to the poor sun which gets no respite from its adorers . . . I really believe that money is more a curse than a blessing to him; if he had a harder heart he would endure less discomfort . . . I counsel every man who is in dire need of money to go to M. de Rothschild; not in order to borrow from him (I doubt whether he would have much success in that endeavour!) but to comfort himself with the sight of the misery money can cause.
James, argues Heine, is tortured “because he has too much money, because all the money in the world has flowed into his gigantic cosmopolitan pocket and because he has to carry such a burden around with him while all around the great rabble of starvelings and thieves stretch out their hands to him. And what terrible, what dangerous hands they are!” And Heine then tells a very different kind of joke, in which he is the straight-man and James the wit: “ ‘How are you?’ a German poet once asked M. le baron. ‘I am going mad,’ the latter replied. ‘I won’t believe that,’ said the poet, ‘until you start throwing money out of the window.’ The baron interrupted him with a sigh. ‘That, precisely, is my madness: that I don’t throw money out of the window occasionally.’ ”
When Heine came to rework the original newspaper articles into “Lutetia” ten years later, however, he was able to add (in his “Retrospective Explanation”) a kind of postscript to this joke. Then he had been well off; but that was no longer the case.
The indigent men whom I had liberally aided laughed at me when I said that in future I would not have enough for my own needs. Was I not related to all sorts of millionaires? Had not [Rothschild], the generalis simo of all millionaires, the millionairissimo, called me his friend? What I could never make my clients understand was that this great millionairissimo called me his friend only because I never asked him for money. Had I done so, our friendship would soon have been at an end. The days of David and Jonathan, of Orestes and Pylades are past. The poor blockheads who wanted my help thought it was easy to obtain this commodity from the rich. They never saw, as I did, the terrible locks and bars with which their great money chests are secured.
To appreciate the significance of this, it is necessary to know a little of Heine’s financial circumstances. Before his uncle Salomon Heine’s death in December 1844, Heine had received an annual allowance from his rich relative of 4,000 marks. Salomon Heine’s will left Heine a lump sum of 8,000 marks, but his allowance was promptly halved by his cousin Carl, plunging the Heine family into a protracted and bitter wrangle which was not resolved until 1847. It was at this point that Heine for the first time began to need the Rothschilds for their money as well as their friendship. To begin with, he merely sought investment advice, but as his health deteriorated this gradually acquired a charitable dimension. In 1846 James involved Heine in a speculation in railway shares which earned him 20,000 francs. The following year he offered to give his “friend” “the most preferential treatment” in the new French government loan. By 1852, however, Heine’s tone was detectably that of the Schnorrer:
Whenever fortune smiled on your colossal business operations with particular favour, you allowed not only the closest friends of your house, but also that great child the poet to have a bite at the cherry. At this moment, when you are again taking the leading part in a tremendous enterprise and are emerging victorious and more of a millionaire than ever from the revolutionary storms, I take the liberty of reminding you that I have not yet died, although my condition hardly deserves to be called “life.”
When the request was granted, Heine was pathetically grateful for “this latest proof of your goodness . . . The blessing of God is clearly upon you, and any contact with you brings good luck.” Three years later he made a similar request to Anselm for shares in the new Austrian Creditanstalt; this too was granted, to the tune of 100 shares. Heine’s letters of thanks—alternately sycophantic and embarrassed—indicate how hard he found it to be reduced to begging. Less than two months later he was dead.
In all this, an important role was played by James’s wife Betty, with whom Heine had conducted what might be described as an elegant flirtation in the 1830s. They had met at James’s Boulogne château: looking back many years later, Heine recalled in a letter to Betty “the sunny day in Boulogne where you first appeared to me with all your magical charm.” The meeting must have taken place some time before 1834, when he sent her a copy of his new book Der Salon, signing himself as “Ihr ergebener Schützling”—“your faithful protégé.” A year later, he described her to a friend as his “earliest patroness in Paris.” When he wrote promising to visit her, he could not resist adding that her “pretty, smiling face” was “constantly in his memory.” Nor did he confine such expressions to private communications, praising her in one of his articles of the 1830s as “not only one of the best looking women in Paris but [one] who is also distinguished in intellect and knowledge.” Nothing is more futile than for the historian to try to infer the intensity of such an attraction, much less the real nature of such a relationship, from a few written remnants; but these seem more than merely formal compliments to the wife of a patron. “I discovered the other day by chance,” he wrote to her in 1840, enclosing the proofs ofLudwig Börne, “that the beautiful lady whom I took to be only intelligent and virtuous also possesses a great soul. Baron James is indeed the richest of men—but not because of his money . . . Please believe, Mme la baronne, that the interest I take in your house is of no common sort; and accept my assurance of complete devotion for the rest of my days.” Yet at some point in the 1840s the friendship began to fade. He continued to send her his books: in 1847 copies of Atta Troll and a poem called “The Angel” which may have been inspired by her; in 1852 a copy of Romancero; two years later the Vermischte Schriften and in 1855 his Poèmes et légendes. But they saw little of one another—she became, as he put it, “a doubting Thomas” towards him—perhaps because of Heine’s deteriorating health; perhaps because he disapproved of the Rothschilds’ role in the 1848 revolutions;4 most probably because, as Heine had foreseen, his need for money corrupted the relationship.
The contrast between Heine’s relationship with the Rothschilds and that of his French contemporary Balzac is pronounced; indeed, they are like mirror images of each another. While Heine fretted that James might take umbrage at his writings, Balzac blithely caricatured him with only the most perfunctory disclaimers. While Heine decorously flirted with James’s wife, Balzac sought to palm off one of his old mistresses on him. And while Heine agonised about accepting share options from the Rothschilds, Balzac happily borrowed from James and sought to avoid repaying him for as long as possible. In a famous aside, Balzac described encountering Heine and James in the street one day in 1837: “C’est-à-dire tout l’esprit et tout l’argent des Juifs.” It was the latter which interested him more, though with characteristic egocentricity he persistently misspelt James’s name, usually as “Rostchild.”
The two first met at Aix in the summer of 1832. James at once took to the mercurial writer, who combined the carnal appetites of Byron with the prose output of Dickens. He immediately offered to assist him with his plan to visit Italy, offering a letter of introduction to Carl and the use of his couriers to Naples. A few months later, having heard nothing more, James wrote to remind Balzac of his offer and to invite him to dinner, chiding him affably for not calling on them since his return to Paris. In Vienna two years later, Balzac took advantage of this goodwill by borrowing 500 francs from Salomon against a bill drawn on his unsuspecting publisher in Paris. He also seems to have asked Betty that same November for some kind of guarantee during negotiations with another publisher.
Relations were at their most cordial in the mid-1840s. In 1842 Balzac offered James tickets for his disastrous play Les Ressources de Quinola (appropriately enough, about the sinking of a steamship), and two years later dedicated Un Homme d’affaires to “Monsieur le Baron James de Rothschild / Conseil Général d’Autriche à Paris, Banquier.”5 In return, James forwarded his letters to the Polish Countess he was wooing and eased her passage through customs when she went to Naples. More importantly, he provided Balzac with 150 shares in the new Northern railway line in 1846; having paid the first instalment, the writer promptly borrowed 17,000 francs from James, offering the shares as security. He also borrowed a further sum—around 50,000 francs—by mortgaging his fiancée’s Polish estate in order to buy a large house in the rue Fortunée. As he prepared to leave for Poland in 1846, Balzac even asked James to help him establish his former housekeeper (and mistress) in a stamp shop, for which a licence was required. Balzac’s account of the negotiations is worth quoting for the light it sheds on James’s capacity for Rabelaisian banter:
Rotschild . . . asked me whether she was pretty, whether I had had her. “A hundred and twenty-one times,” I told him, “and, if you want her, I’ll give you her.”
“Does she have children?” he inquired.
“No, but give her some.”
“I’m sorry, but I protect only women with children.” This was his way of escaping. Had she had children he would have said he never protected immorality.
“Well now, do you actually believe, Baron, that you can split hairs with me? I’m a Northern shareholder! I am going to write you out a note, and you’ll take care of my business as if it were a railway with 400,000 shares.”
“How’s that?” he said. “If you can make me do it, I’ll admire you all the more.”
“And you shall do it,” I told him, “otherwise, I’ll turn your wife loose on you so she can keep an eye on you.”
He burst out laughing and fell back into his armchair saying: “I give in out of sheer exhaustion; business is killing me. Make out your note.”
I made it out and went to see Madame James.
Presumably Balzac considered the complete edition of his works which he sent to Betty that same year repayment enough for all these favours.
But the years after 1847 were not, as we shall see, a time when James could afford to be indulgent towards his debtors, no matter how trifling the sums involved, and no matter how amusing the debtor. In October 1848 Balzac—now ensconced in Wierzchownia—was appalled to hear from his mother that Rothschilds had refused to accept a draft for 2,500 francs drawn by one of his other bankers. Concluding that James now intended to call in the 17,000 francs he owed him, and fearing that he would accordingly deduct the money from any new remittances Balzac received, the author attempted a crude fraud: instead of having money paid to himself, he arranged for a payment of 31,000 francs to be made to his mother in her maiden name. The ruse evidently failed, and by February 1849 Balzac was frantically trying to meet the next payment due on the Northern shares by means of another banker’s draft. “You have no idea,” he wrote irascibly to his mother that March, “how much that debt of 17,000 francs to R[othschild] restricts me and restricts all my movements.” Not that Balzac took the matter personally: veteran spendthrift that he was, he could always see the creditor’s point of view. “The House of Rothschild,” he acknowledged, “like beavers after a thunderstorm, has to occupy itself with repairing the disasters which 1848 has wrought in all its finances.” By the time he returned to Paris in the summer of 1850, normal service had been resumed: on June 11, just two months before his death from a bewildering concatenation of ailments, Balzac was arranging with Rothschilds to invest in a hundred Banque de France shares. Behind his coffin, along with Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and a throng of Parisian hacks and literati, as if sprung from La Comédie humaine itself, walked James. The Rothschilds did Balzac one final favour thirty-two years later, when they bought the house in the rue Fortunée from his widow for ten times the original purchase price.
Literal-minded modern scholars tend to dispute the notion that James was the model for Balzac’s fictional banker Nucingen. They point to obvious dissimilarities: Nucingen is said to be from Alsace, he is the son of a convert from Judaism, he has no brothers, he is too old (at sixty in 1829) to be James, has only one daughter and so on. Yet Balzac himself told his future wife in 1844 that James—“the high Baron of financial feudalism”—was “Nucingen to the last detail, and worse.” And a careful reading of the relevant parts of Balzac’s great work shows how much of Nucingen was inspired by James. None of the other financiers of the day is more plausible as a model; fictionalised he may be, but Nucingen is James, to the extent that Balzac could never have created the former had he never known the latter.
Nucingen is first introduced in Le Père Goriot (1834-5) as the husband of one of the two self-centred daughters of the impoverished vermicellier Goriot. He is a “banker of German origin who had been made a baron of the Holy [Roman] Empire,” speaks with a thick, phonetically-spelt German accent (for example, “quelque chose” becomes “keke chausse”) and lives in the rue Saint-Lazare, “in one of those light houses, with thin columns [and] mean porches which are considered pretty in Paris, a true banker’s house, full of expensive elegance, ornaments [and] stair landings in marble mosaic.” In this early incarnation—as also in his second appearance in the Histoire de la Grandeur et de la Décadence de César Birotteau (1833-7)—Nucingen is portrayed as coarse and ruthless. When the bankrupt parfumier Birotteau finally secures an audience with him—again the “superb staircase” and “sumptuous apartments” are described—he is subjected to a baffling interview and referred back to another banker, du Tillet, who is in reality the architect of his destruction. Again, Balzac makes much of Nucingen’s atrocious pronunciation of French: “The shrewd baron, in order to be able to renege on promises given well but badly kept, had retained the horrible pronunciation of German Jews who flatter themselves that they can speak French.”
This suggestion of fraudulent practice is developed at great length in La Maison Nucingen (1837-8), in which Nucingen’s origins and methods are discussed. The key to Nucingen’s success, Balzac suggests, is a succession of bogus suspensions of payment, whereby he has forced his creditors to accept depreciated paper in payment. Having done this in 1804 and again in 1815, he is poised to unfold his third and most ambitious scheme, a swindle perpetrated at the expense of (among others) a young nobleman and the widow and daughters of the Alsatian banker from whom he had made his first fortune. Naturally, given the imputation of criminality, Balzac is careful to ensure that his character is formally distinguishable from Rothschild: thus Nucingen is described as “the son of some Jew who converted [to Christianity] out of ambition,” and is said “secretly to envy the Rothschild brothers.” But the resemblances are hard to miss. His second great coup involves a massive purchase of funds before the battle of Waterloo, for example. There is a description of Nucingen’s appearance which also has a familiar ring: “Cubic, fat, he is as heavy as a sack, as immobile as a diplomat. Nucingen has the heavy hand and a lynx look that never lights up; his depth is not apparent but concealed; he is impenetrable, and you never see him coming.” The sheer extent of Nucingen’s financial influence is also suggestive: “His genius embraces everything. This elephant of finance sells deputies to the ministers and the Greeks to the Turks. For him commerce is . . . the totality of varieties, the unity of specialities.” At one point Nucingen is even compared, as Nathan had been in his lifetime, with Napoleon. And, perhaps most tellingly, he is said to have been “created a peer by the July Revolution, and a grand officer of the Legion of Honour”—the latter of which honours, as we have seen, James did in fact receive from Louis Philippe.
La Maison Nucingen is not, of course, intended to be a realistic portrait of James de Rothschild. The book is primarily a satire on the volatile financial markets of the 1830s, which the character of Nucingen personifies ad absurdum. Its underlying “moral” is that “the debtor is stronger than the creditor,” and its most memorable passage summarising “the true principles of the age of gold in which we live” makes it easy to see why the political left sought to claim Balzac as one of their own after his death: “There are arbitrary acts which are criminal when committed by an individual against another individual, which are expunged when they are extended to a multitude, just as a drop of prussic acid becomes innocent in a bucket of water.”
Yet this was far from Balzac’s last word on Nucingen. In Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes (1838-47), he is cast in a wholly different light, as the world-weary vieil lard who falls in love with a prostitute he has glimpsed in the bois de Vincennes. In fact, she is the lover of the amoral, ambitious Lucien Chardon, who is himself in thrall to the Mephistophelean master-criminal Vautrin, and the three aim to extort a million francs from the lovesick Nucingen. Once again Balzac takes the opportunity to develop his romantic critique of capitalism: “All rapidly accumulated wealth is either the result of luck or discovery, or the result of a legalised theft . . . The 1814 constitution proclaimed the reign of money, and success became the supreme rationale of an atheistical epoch.” Once again, however, it is remarkable how many Rothschild allusions crop up. Nucingen is described here as “this Louis XIV of the counting house.” Indeed, Balzac describes Nucingen’s role as a patron in terms which are almost identical to those used by Heine in “Lutetia” (so much so that plagiarism seems possible):
M. de Nucingen, a pure banker, without any inventiveness beyond his calculations . . . only believed in certain values. As regards art, he had the good sense to turn, gold in hand, to the experts in such things, taking the best architect, the best surgeon, the most eminent connoisseur of paintings and statues, the most skilful lawyer, as soon as it was a matter of building a house, checking his health, acquiring some artefacts or a property.
It is also worth noting how much more sympathetically Nucingen is portrayed here, suggesting the influence of the growing friendship between Balzac and James. Nucingen knows he is making a fool of himself: “Hêdre hâmûreusse à mon hâche, cheu zai piène que rienne n’ai blis ritiquille; mai ké foullez-vû? za y êde!” (“Etre amoureux à mon âge, je sais bien que rien n’est plus ridicule; mais que voulez-vous? ça y est!”) And he manages to recover some dignity when she spurns his advances, writing her an elegant and sensitive letter—in perfect French.
By contrast, Nucingen’s final appearances in Un Homme d’affaires (1845) and La Cousine Bette (1846) are brief: here he is merely the last resort of desperate borrowers like Maxime de Trailles, the Balzac-like wastrel Desroches and Baron Hulot, the poor Bonapartist functionary in need of a dowry for his daughter. By this time, the exigencies of his own financial position were plainly uppermost in the writer’s mind: the dedication of a book about disreputable creditors to James on the eve of Balzac’s own request for financial assistance is thus revealed as a characteristic joke. Even the sum of money which Hulot tries to borrow from Nucingen is similar to the amount Balzac borrowed from James in the same year La Cousine Bette was published. Historians are usually nervous of using literature as evidence; but when art so closely imitates life, and in doing so sheds so much light on the otherwise obscure private life of a man like James de Rothschild, it would be a pity to ignore it.