That summer, Lacan opened my eyes to Rome and I fell in love with it. I’d already been there, but nobody had opened its doors as he did. Of course, we saw all the Caravaggios in Rome, those in San Luigi dei Francesi, those in the Piazza del Popolo, and his many paintings in all the museums, in particular the Bacchus in the Galleria Borghese and the Penitent Magdalene in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery, which at that time was almost always empty, and where the canvases were hung in the old style, one above the other, so as to cover the walls.
He seemed to know Rome like the back of his hand and he took me everywhere. In the morning, he would study an Italian guide book with a red cover, Roma e Dintorni, and choose the places we would be visiting that day. In each church, museum or monument, he would stop to look at just a few works which he gazed at for a long time, always in silence. It was only when I subsequently discovered his seminars that I realized he commented, sometimes on several occasions, on this or that picture before which I had seen him linger. One example was Zucchi’s Amor and Psyche in the Galleria Borghese. He also paid sustained attention to Domenichino’s Diana and Her Nymphs, where you can make out Acteon hiding in the thickets, just before being transformed into a stag. The charm of the female figures, especially that of the two young girls in the foreground, lower left, makes the picture’s atmosphere of cruel, impetuous energy all the more disturbing. The version of femininity that is intimated here tallied with Lacan’s ideas on this question. The Apollo and Daphne, which represents another metamorphosis, also attracted his attention each time that we went to the Villa Borghese.
Lacan especially loved Bernini’s works. He never wearied of contemplating the Fountain of the Four Rivers and its marvellous bestiary in the Piazza Navona, near the Hotel Raphael where he liked to stay. He returned to it constantly, in the way one returns to a source – it was the starting point and the destination of all our wanderings.
In the same way, we would spend hours amid the austere magnificence of the Palatine or the Domus Aurea, which were as yet unspoiled by the restorations and the anachronistic illuminations. I also remember our visit to the basilica of San Clemente al Laterano, which contains within its depths another early Christian basilica and, beneath this, the remains of a temple dedicated to the cult of Mithras. These strata were reminiscent of the archaeological model of the unconscious in Freud’s image.
Lacan also took me to more secret places, showing me, for instance, an anamorphosis well known to specialists in the convent of Santa Trinità dei Monti. This is a fresco by Emmanuel Maignan which, when you face it directly, shows Saint Francis of Paola; but if you move aside, a whole landscape appears in the folds of the saint’s mantle: a tower, figures in a port, a boat.
This mural is located in a corridor of the convent that has housed the Sisters of the Society of the Sacred Heart ever since the disappearance of the order of Minims founded by Saint Francis of Paola. The members of this teaching community were not strictly enclosed. Lacan easily obtained the key giving access to the convent. In the evening, he took it from his pocket and showed it to me as a trophy. I don’t quite know how, but he had managed to leave the building without handing the key back. He didn’t like closed doors any more than he liked red traffic lights. Enclosure was a challenge he had accepted, maliciously suggesting that he could have violated the building’s privacy under cover of night if he had wanted to. The next morning, he returned the key to the extern sister, who was discreetly amused by his little joke.
Lacan really liked Catholic Rome. As a result, we went to see a cardinal he knew, to whom he had entrusted a copy of his Ecrits to deliver to the pope. This man, a French member of the Curia, was served by sisters who opened the door to us and took us into his apartment. From its open window, you could hear the noises of the neighbourhood, the shouts of children and brief bursts of women chattering, all the hubbub of life that seemed to charm this prelate, not without a touch of nostalgia.
Lacan introduced me to a restaurant frequented by bishops and cardinals in cassocks, and run by one of the religious orders. This restaurant was called L’Eau Vive. It still exists today. Customers were served by young and rather attractive girls from Africa or Asia wearing their national costumes, as well as by European girls in vaguely Roman tunics. The atmosphere was discreetly erotic. I imagined that these young girls had once been prostitutes but had seen the error of their ways. The reality, as is often the case, is worse than any fantasy. I recently learned that they come from former colonies and are recruited while still very young by a community called the ‘Missionary Family Donum Dei’ affiliated to the Carmelite Order and including both religious and secular members. Though they do not take final vows, these girls, who are required to be virgins, are committed to leading a ‘consecrated life’, which means they have to observe celibacy and chastity but also, in between praying, they have to perform unpaid work in restaurant chains throughout the world under the name of Eau Vive (‘living water’). There is a thin line in this case between religious life and slavery.
When John Paul II was Archbishop of Krakow, he frequented this restaurant whenever he was staying in Rome. When he became pope, he invited the young women working there to attend a special mass for them at the Vatican. I like to think that we unwittingly crossed paths with him (the dates coincide), in that place which had a certain charm, despite its ambiguity. At a certain time in the evening, in the middle of dinner, service stopped for prayer and hymns. Prelates, Christian Democrat politicians and diplomats at the Holy See rubbed shoulders or arranged to meet here, making this restaurant one of the most significant places in ecclesiastical high society. This amused Lacan as much as it did me, and we have often returned there over the years.
But his favourite Roman restaurant was the Ristorante Passetto near the Piazza Navona. This was the place in Rome where we first met up, or rather talked by phone. He was in Manarola at the time, while I was staying at my friend Paola Carola’s on the Gianicolo. He had invited me to lunch at the Passetto where I was to await his phone call. He was known to everyone there and had an account at a time when credit cards were not current. This little detail always impressed me, as well as this long-distance conviviality he had managed to arrange.
I soon joined him in Manarola and when, a few days later, he went to the car park to pick up his car and head to Rome, I followed suit without even asking what his destination was. I would have followed him anywhere.
In Rome, we often saw Paola, who I had got to know in Paris a few months earlier. She welcomed Lacan with her usual grace and simplicity. Lacan’s eruption into my life became a simple matter, too, an obvious fact, and it was one of the sources of my unfailing friendship for her.
She always remained associated with that summer of 1972, a magical summer for me. I discovered Rome and Lacan at the same time; I was constantly surprised by his freedom and his whimsicality, his indefatigable energy. He seemed to have that openness to everything which only belongs to young people, and the same insouciance. It was a moment of grace and innocence, the grace we need to open ourselves to chance, the grace that seemed to surround all those we met.
This was true of the beautiful and charming Jacqueline Risset, of whom Lacan was very fond; she had taken pains, that summer, to organize for him the showing of a film by Pabst, Secrets of a Soul, with a screenplay by Karl Abraham, a disciple of Freud. I remember one happy lunch, illuminated by Jacqueline’s blonde hair.
It was another form of innocence that I discovered in Lacan’s lack of prejudice in dealing with others: this made everyone feel freer. A whole set of potential obstacles to human relationships seemed to have been swept away by him. No doubt a certain psychoanalytic asceticism played a part in this, but it was also in his nature, that straightforward desire that gave him his zest for life and simplified everything.
Was it the same summer that he took me to visit Balthus at the Villa Medici, of which he was then the director? In any case, I remember the first time Balthus showed us the restorations of the villa on which he had been engaged for ten years. The kind of painting wiped or sponged over the walls was an original creation for which he was responsible, and it was amazingly appropriate to the premises, which emanated an atmosphere not unlike his paintings, especially in the apartment he had arranged. I fell under his charm, having already fallen for his work, in spite of the annoyance which his aristocratic pretensions inspired in me. At the villa, the employees called him ‘Monsieur le Comte’ at every turn. I could not help but think of his brother, Pierre Klossowski, who lived in a modest apartment in rue de la Glacière, Paris; Balthus made him look after their mother, Rilke’s great love. Balthus invited us to take tea with him, a strange ceremony attended by prelates, assorted old countesses and France’s ambassador to the Vatican.
Another time, we had been to visit him in the castle he had just acquired near Viterbo. Located above marble cliffs and dominating the countryside all around, the castle of Montecalvello was a mediaeval fortress so vast that it looked like a fortified village. Balthus had undertaken its restoration, entrusting it to young trainees from the Villa Medici who could be seen, perched on ladders, busily working on the frescoes. The lunch was served by a valet de chambre in white gloves.
Lacan obviously liked him a great deal. Balthus was practically a member of his family, having been involved in a relationship with Laurence Bataille3 for many years; he had met her at the age of sixteen, and painted several portraits of her. One of the most beautiful was at Guitrancourt.
Laurence told me that after the first sessions she had complained to her mother Sylvia and to her father-in-law that Balthus was being too attentive. They had pooh-poohed her, and told her she should be glad that such a great artist as Balthus was prepared to paint her portrait. She didn’t insist, and it was not long before she yielded to the great man, but she still felt bitter that she had not been given any support on that occasion.
We also visited Jacques Nobécourt, the Rome correspondent of the newspaper Le Monde who was married to a psychoanalyst of the École freudienne. He lived in an apartment whose windows opened onto the Piazza Navona, and which for me encapsulated, along with Paola’s terrace on the Gianicolo, all the charms of Rome in summer. It was August, but the heat was not oppressive and the city without its cars was divinely peaceful. Lacan seemed to feel completely at home, he knew all the museums, churches and fountains. We walked through the heart of the city, from the Piazza Navona to the Pantheon, or from the Piazza di Spagna to the Piazza del Popolo. I found the beauty of the place magical, I loved the sound of the fountains and the footsteps in deserted streets at night. I had fallen in love with Rome and this love lasted for a long time.
Love of food played a part in this. I discovered Roman cuisine, both in the Passetto, my favourite, and in the neighbouring Maiella, frequented by politicians and journalists. We also often went to Sabatini, opposite the charming Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, to Alfredo nella Scrofa, at the Quattro Fontane, and to Piperno’s in the ghetto for its famous artichokes. Paola frequently accompanied us and also invited us to eat spaghetti on her terrace from which you could see all of Rome.
It was as if the summer would never end.