Letters to Camondo. By Edmund de Waal. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 192 pages; $28. Chatto & Windus; £14.99

The House of Fragile Things. By James McAuley. Yale University Press; 320 pages; $30 and £25

Göring's Man in Paris. By Jonathan Petropoulos. Yale University Press; 456 pages; $37.50 and £25

ON DECEMBER 21ST 1936 artistic luminaries gathered in the courtyard of an elegant town house in Paris, waiting for the speeches to begin. Number 63 rue de Monceau had belonged to a banker called Moïse de Camondo; his wife Irène, the daughter of another banking family, had as a girl been painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, her red hair tied with a blue ribbon. In wealthy middle-age Camondo had torn down the house his parents built when they emigrated to Paris from Constantinople, and sold or given away everything they brought with them, even the precious Judaica.

In its place, on the same plot, he built a new house, a French house, based on Marie Antoinette’s Le Petit Trianon at Versailles, which he filled with the finest French paintings, porcelain and 18th-century tapestries, “a decorative art that was one of the glories of France” from the “period I loved most among all others”, as he wrote in his will. He bequeathed the building and all its contents to the nation, with instructions that it be opened as a museum, and that nothing inside should be lent or changed, nor anything added.

Camondo’s daughter, Béatrice, was given Renoir’s portrait of her mother as a wedding gift. She was among those who gathered in 1936 for the museum’s grand opening. The Musée Nissim de Camondo was named after her brother, who had been killed fighting for his country in the first world war. It proved so popular that soon the opening hours were extended.

In “The Hare with Amber Eyes” (2010), Edmund de Waal recounted how his father’s family, the Ephrussis, had built their own house on rue de Monceau, a few doors from their friends, the Camondos. In a series of imaginary missives to Moïse, Mr de Waal’s slim new book, “Letters to Camondo”, brings to life the milieu of 19th-century upper-middle-class French Jewry, with its peculiar mix of inner wariness and dynastic chutzpah. In “The House of Fragile Things”, James McAuley sets the aesthetic created by the Ephrussis, Camondos, Reinachs and their Rothschild cousins in historical context. Together they form a moving portrait of a glittering, doomed world—of which both the house and Renoir’s painting are poignant emblems.

Children of the revolution

During its revolution France became the second European nation (500 years after Poland) to emancipate its Jewish population. Sophisticated families like the Camondos may have had relations across Europe and the Mediterranean, but many embraced the republic and French citizenship with passion. They served in parliament or supported France’s most beloved cultural institutions. As Mr McAuley puts it, they were “the careful architects of an identity that sought to present Frenchness and Jewishness as symbiotic, and perhaps even as natural extensions of each other”.

The revolution had prised France’s great art holdings out of the hands of the king and the aristocracy, so that in the 19th century collecting became a bourgeois affair. The collections of well-off Jewish families “bore special significance”, Mr McAuley says. They filled their homes with quintessentially French objects: Savonnerie carpets, Chardin engravings, the opulent cabinet-making of the master ébéniste Jean-Henri Riesner. Camondo had a weakness for anything of royal provenance, especially from the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. “These collections function as self-portraits,” Mr McAuley writes.

Yet these same collectors might have known an ominous Yiddish phrase: Frankraykh frest yidn (“France devours Jews”). The republic may sometimes have upheld the revolution’s values and embraced ardent adherents like the Camondos, but prejudice always shadowed the idealism. Anti-Semitism, sometimes a whisper, sometimes a shout, was perennial—not only among the rabid pamphleteers who supported the bogus conviction of the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, but among the very artists who numbered these families among their greatest patrons. Of the substantial payment he received for painting Irène and (separately) her two sisters, Renoir wrote: “I have to say I find it stingy.”

For French Jews, Mr McAuley says, the story’s ending “has always overshadowed the beginning and the middle”. Within weeks of France’s fall in 1940 Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring was determined to seize as much of its great art as he could for himself and Adolf Hitler. One of the first paintings he took was Renoir’s portrait of Irène, by then hanging in her daughter Béatrice’s apartment in Neuilly. As Mr de Waal explains—in a book that blends historical research with literary ruminations—Frau Emmy Göring found the picture enchanting. The Reichsmarschall chose it for his private collection.

Göring appointed Bruno Lohse, one of “the most prodigious art plunderers in history”, in the words of Jonathan Petropoulos in “Göring’s Man in Paris”, to oversee the wholesale theft and redistribution of more than 30,000 other art works, mostly from the private collections of French Jews.Not since Napoleon’s foray into Italy had so much European art been stolen to order. After the war it would take decades to be restituted, notes Mr Petropoulos, in a book that underscores the vulnerability of France’s Jewish collectors. Some works have never been found.

Although the Camondos and other 19th-century Jewish immigrants could not foresee the future, hindsight imbues their anxieties about belonging with tragedy. Irène survived the war (as did the museum named after her son). Eventually she recovered, then sold, the portrait of her much younger self. As Mr de Waal notes, Marshal Philippe Pétain, France’s collaborationist leader during the Occupation, personally intervened to save a friend of Béatrice’s—along with just two other French Jews.

With the help of some of their compatriots, around 80,000 others were murdered. Béatrice herself was among them. A convert to Catholicism, she wanted to believe that her wealth and dedication to the republic and the Virgin Mary would save her family. Yet less than a decade after the Musée Nissim de Camondo was left to the country, she, her two children and their father were arrested and sent to Auschwitz; they all perished. Her death certificate says she died for France. ■