Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas's Masterpiece

by Camille Laurens

  Why Edgar Degas, a solid bourgeois well known for his moral severity and a man, by his own account, obsessed with order, should have become fascinated by the louche world of the dance at such an early stage in his career and stayed with it for so long — roughly from 1860 to 1890 — is unclear. Was he one of the paunchy, top-hatted swains so often caricatured by Forain and Daumier who hardly stayed for the performance but took up a stand in the foyer after the first break, drinking champagne and cognac while waiting for the ballerinas? No, although as a young man—before he became an outright misanthrope — Degas had had his share of libertine adventures. Or so he liked to claim. But the aims of the lustful habitués were not his aims. He painted them, the predatory regulars, showed them lying in wait in a corner of the canvas or gathered in a group, strutting roosters in the henhouse. Sometimes he adopted their perspective, focusing in close-up on the bodies of the ballerinas. He observed these men for years. It was his world, his time, the reflection of his own desire as well, and “one can only make art from what one knows.”16 Also, Degas had a passion for music — Mozart, Gluck, Massenet, Gounod — which supplied his original and main rationale for attending the opera. His discovery that, in subtly choreographed ballets, dance “turns music into drawing” would come later.17 Then too, Degas was a creature of the night. Unlike the other Impressionists, and probably in part because of his eye problems, he did not seek out daylight scenes or sun-dappled luncheon parties. He preferred nighttime settings, the artificial light of theaters and cabarets, shadowy places.

  That Degas should have been fascinated by dancers, independently of his male desires or his work as an artist, is not surprising. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the lives of dancers fascinated everyone, especially in Paris. Dancers belonged to the urban folklore that is so often braided into the history of great capitals. To understand the infatuation, one need only look at our contemporaries’ insatiable curiosity toward celebrities, which is characterized by a similar ambivalence. Objects of admiration and opprobrium, attraction and repellence, the “young ladies of the Opera” excited interest mostly for their sexual indiscretions and their romantic entanglements. Their tutus alone were a source of scandal and comment. Though longer than today’s tutus, they exposed a woman’s ankles and calves as no other garment of the period did. Two American ladies were reportedly so shocked that they walked out of a performance minutes after it started, seeing nothing in these short-skirted creatures but an attack on sober morals. Yet tales of the great heights to which dancers rose and the tawdry depths to which they sank inspired the work of artists, writers, and tabloid journalists. These stories were avidly followed in the popular quarters and the more cosseted precincts alike. Toward 1875, the renowned librettist Ludovic Halévy published a serial novel in La Vie parisienne about the adventures of the Cardinal family — an early avatar of the Kardashians — recounting the romantic adventures of Pauline and Virginie, two lovely ballerinas chaperoned by their mother, a cynical procuress, who was eager to sell her fourteen-year-old daughters to aging lechers; one of the girls eventually left the Opera to become a high-class cocotte. The novel was a huge success. Degas created an accompanying series of monotypes illustrating the life of the Cardinal sisters, but they were never published, as Halévy finally opted for a more conventional suite of images. Degas depicted the young girls in conversation with their admirers and shimmering before a mirror in the Opera’s foyer. He never showed them partnered by a male dancer, as though only feminine grace mattered — and men were only a foil. Other novels came out in the vein of Halévy’s, usually comical in tone. One such was the adventures of Madame Manchaballe and her three little rats (who lived on the rue de Douai, as the Van Goethems did), written by Viscount Richard de Saint-Geniès, a regular at the Paris Opera, hiding behind the jocular pseudonym of Richard O’Monroy. The penny press churned out potboilers with suggestive titles: Behind the Curtain, and The Young Ladies of the Opera. The sexualized, eroticized little rat inflamed the public imagination, appealing to men, of course, but also to women. Dance has always been the stuff of dreams, it is the romantic art par excellence, it personifies beauty, seduction, and perfection. People were riveted by the fact that it was possible to “pay 100,000 francs to a pair of ankles,” to a prima ballerina “whose name on the poster draws all of Paris, who earns 60,000 francs per year, and who lives like a princess,” as Balzac wrote, adding for the benefit of his visitor from the provinces: “If you sold your factory, the proceeds wouldn’t buy you the right to wish her ‘Good morning’ thirty times.”18

  These stories fascinated the bourgeois public and frightened it at the same time. Tales of beautiful ballerinas turning the heads of eminent men and ruining their health, reputation, and career were a staple of the scandal sheets. The heroine of Zola’s Nana, an exact contemporary of Degas’s Little Dancer — who was in fact nicknamed “Little Nana” — had no talent as an actress. She merely stood onstage scantily clad and struck suggestive poses, but her performance so maddened men that it destroyed their lives — and then her own. She ended up disfigured by smallpox just as France was being defeated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, as though she stood for all that threatened the French nation, which was hopelessly in thrall to sensuality and debauch. Among respectable families of that era, a woman who worked was already suspected of depravity: an honest woman stayed home. So what could you possibly say about an actress or a dancer? Did she not express “the imperious offer of sex, the mimed call of the need for prostitution”?19

  Ballet dancers, as the dubious cynosure of this shady world, were synonymous with corruption and degeneracy, linked with prostitutes who might bring crashing down a venerable genealogical tree. The dancer’s power was worrying: “The corps de ballet is the great power,” wrote Balzac. He cited the case of “a dancer who exists thanks entirely to the great influence of a newspaper. If her contract had not been renewed, the ministry would have found itself saddled with another enemy.”20 The “walkers” often ended up in houses of ill repute — the brothel was another common motif in painting and literature — but stars of the ballet and even third-tier ballerinas lived in “the high spheres of dandyism and politics.”21 Backstage and in the foyer of the Paris Opera, aristocrats, members of the Jockey Club, influential journalists, and politicians vied for the dancer’s attention. She might be mistress to a senator, or a peer of France, or a wealthy heir whose capital she was whittling away. Baron Haussmann, for instance, who masterminded the renovation of Paris, caused vast quantities ink to be spilled over his scandalous affair with a young ballerina. In that venal and hedonistic age, it was considered good form to “keep one’s dancer.” The sons of good families met ruin, committed suicide, or were ravaged by syphilis — all because of a dancer. In the “conspiratorial shadows” of the theater, evoked by Julien Gracq in his writings about Nana, the dancer had the terrifying power to destroy a noble line.22 Offering a point of contact between the lower depths and the elites of society, she braved “venereal fear,”23 she “sowed destruction, corrupting and disorganizing Paris between her snowy thighs,” she was “the fly that has escaped the slums, bringing with it the ferment of social rot,”24 and she was therefore a source of horror and fear, more even than of admiration and lust.

  Did Degas fall prey to these alternately enchanting and horrifying fantasies that held the collective imagination in thrall? It seems not. The absorbing world of ballet may have played in his mind the role that myth played in the minds of earlier painters, but we cannot reproach him for sublimating his subject or prettifying the everyday reality of ballerinas. Where Ludovic Halévy presents us with a flurry of charming imps, laughing as they fluff out their gauzy skirts, Degas rarely shows us dancers under a glamorous light. He sometimes painted performances, but his more usual perspective was from backstage. In his canvases, we see the wearying work of rehearsals, the dancer’s body bent and weighted down with effort, the face tense or blurred or cropped out entirely, leaving more space for th
e legs and arms. This “iconoclast,” wrote Huysmans, was indifferent to the shopworn image of the ravishing ballerina endowed with the flesh of a goddess, instead revealing “the mercenary, dulled by mechanical movements and monotonous leaps,”25 whose body was simply the tool she used in her work, and who ended up collapsed after a strenuous session, her muscles sore and her neck in pain. The Dancing Lesson, for example, painted in 1879, shows the ballerina Nelly Franklin sitting in exhaustion on a bench, and Degas’s annotation reads “Unhappy Nelly.” A little rat might often be unhappy, especially if she lacked aptitude for her vocation. In his sonnets, Degas made fun of the talentless student who flubbed a dance movement: “Jumping froglike into the ponds of Cythera.”26 And the poet Henri de Régnier, in a verse portrait of Degas, praised the painter’s disillusioning art: “You’ve painted gauze flounces in delicate washes, / The satin slipper as it lands on the stage, / And the body’s full weight on the heel that it squashes.”27 By choosing Marie van Goethem as his model, a little girl with a flat chest and pinched features, Degas drove home his point all the more. This dancer is neither seductive nor a seductress, she is wearing not a beautiful stage costume but a simple and unornamented bodice; her nose in the air, she does not look at those who look at her, she exudes no sensuality that might excite the male observer. Her position is not one of the classic positions of the ballerina, she displays no lightness, no virtuosic ease, no particular grace. She is not depicted in rehearsal or in performance but during an ill-defined break, in a practice room, making no effort to please. Paul Valéry accurately summed up Degas’s paradoxical method, noting that he tried to “reconstruct the body of the female animal as the specialized slave of dance.”28 “For all his devotion to dancers,” wrote Valéry, “he captures rather than cajoles them. He defines them.”29

  What Degas shows us, in fact, is not the mythical dancer but the humdrum worker; not the idol under the floodlights but the toiler in the shadows, once the oil lamps have been snuffed out; not the object of distraction and delight but the subject grappling with a sinister reality. As his friend the painter and author Jacques-Émile Blanche wrote, under Degas’s gaze, the dancers “stop being nymphs or butterflies…to fall back into their misery and betray their true condition.”30 Where Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, ten years earlier, sculpted the beautiful Eugénie Fiocre, a prima ballerina at the Opera, as a countess or a duchess, with a rose in the elegant folds of her décolletage, and Degas painted the same Mademoiselle Fiocre as a fascinating Persian princess surrounded by her intimates, here he is offering up an entirely different vision. Marie van Goethem is only a young worker in the world of ballet, a little girl who is alone and solitary. No one is concerned about her fate. Degas depicts her in all her simplicity and destitution. The sculpture allows the emptiness around her to be suggested: no scenery, no company. You walk around a sculpture, taking it in from all sides the way you might examine a question from every angle. The “little Nana” stands against a backdrop of nothingness. Degas wanted to undermine the stereotype, assert a truth that society ignores — wants to ignore. Dance is not a fairy tale, it’s a painful profession. The little rats are Cinderellas without fairy godmothers, they don’t become princesses, and their carriageless coachmen remain mice, as gray as the cotton ticking of their slippers. They are children who work, the likes of dressmaker’s apprentices, child-minders, and salesgirls, but they work harder than the others. In his way, Degas was amplifying and anticipating the denunciations that the writers of his day would level at the industrial nineteenth century, when poor children were treated like slaves or animals. In 1862, Victor Hugo published Les Misérables, a novel that decries the tragic fate of children through the stories of Gavroche and Cosette. The despicable Thénardiers, who brutalize Cosette, owe their name to a political adversary of Hugo’s, Senator Thénard, who had opposed a bill to reduce the workday for children from sixteen hours to ten. Zola would defend this cause in his novel Germinal, and in 1878, Jules Vallès dedicated his autobiographical novel L’Enfant “to all those who, during their childhood, were tyrannized by their masters or beaten by their parents.”

  But did Degas have such an overtly political end in mind when making the Little Dancer? Did he really want, as Huysmans would claim, “to throw in the face of his century” the outrages committed on the weak? There is one detail that might lead us to doubt it, hinting that the sculptor agreed at least in part with some of the prejudices of his time. Many of the detractors of this sculpture, on seeing Marie in her glass cage, thought she embodied “the rat of the Paris Opera…with her full store of evil instincts and depraved tendencies,”31 that she looked “thoroughly like a pervert”32 from the slums and had the features of a “criminal.” This last word, used by several critics, might surprise and shock today’s viewers. How could this young dancer in a tutu have anything criminal about her? And what is meant, in a concrete sense, by “features of a criminal”? How does one detect them? Do criminals share a facial type, different from a proper person’s? Can a propensity for evil, can moral degeneracy be discerned in a person’s visage — not, as in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, imprinted on it over time by the performance of criminal acts (itself an arguable concept), but in childhood, at the age of fourteen, as if one’s fate could be tattooed at the outset on one’s face? Can vice be “stockpiled” within the body, visible to the naked eye? We might as well be designated criminals at birth! Badness by nature! The idea is ridiculous.

  There was nothing absurd about it to thinkers of the nineteenth century. In fact, it was the prevailing belief. In the late 1790s, Johann Kaspar Lavater’s The Art of Knowing Men by Their Physiognomy was widely read in France and elsewhere. A German theologian, Lavater — whom some consider the father of anthropology — envisioned a link between physical appearance and a man’s moral and intellectual capacity. For example, a man with a large jaw and a full-lipped mouth could be recognized as animalistic, whereas a broad, high forehead designated superior intelligence. Scientists also had a deep interest in phrenology, a theory that purported to explain man by his physical and organic constitution. An Italian specialist in criminal ethnography, Cesare Lombroso, following in the path of the German neurologist Franz Joseph Gall, held that the degree of development of a man’s faculties could be determined by the shape of his cranium, specifically its bumps and hollows. Character therefore is entirely determined by physical conformation. In French, we still say that someone has “the math bump” or “the business bump,” the only remnant today of this spurious hypothesis, but during most of the nineteenth century the idea was taken very seriously. Scientists were particularly keen on its use in the context of criminology. F. J. Gall, for instance, believed he had found “the crime bump” hidden behind the ears of murderers. Scientists collected criminals’ skulls, studied the organs of executed inmates, calculated “facial angle” as an index of the danger the subject posed, and measured the degree of masculinity in the faces of prostitutes — the deviance with respect to a gentle and passive femininity would explain their degeneration. The concept of the “born criminal,” advanced by Lombroso, linked an inclination to murder with simian features and a sloping forehead. Other criteria in the inventory, including left-handedness, baldness, prominent cheekbones in women, and the size and shape of the ear, also offered disquieting revelations. Delinquents were considered savages, primitives. A typology of criminals was devised that considered a working-class man to be “depraved from the cradle,” a barbarian under restraint, and the slums were thought to be a breeding ground for jailhouse stock. The features of the ancient Greeks, on the other hand, represented the aristocratic ideal.

  These very materialistic theories, which fed into the ideas of Édouard Drumont and his French Anti-Semitic League as well as the racial classifications of the Nazis, were largely unopposed by any countervailing arguments. Only in the late nineteenth century did the thesis emerge that criminality does not originate in a physiological predisposition or an inherited trait. A few scientists,
Georges Cuvier’s disciple Jean Pierre Flourens among them, did take an earlier stand against determinism, citing the role of human freedom and the power of reason. Others, foreshadowing modern sociology, insisted on the influence of environment and education in countering the tyranny of biology. Their efforts were largely unavailing, and the determinist argument prospered among intellectuals and held sway in the public sphere. France was industrializing, and its working class was growing in importance. Paris, under the influence of Baron Haussmann, was seeing its heterogeneous population shuffled together in individual buildings — the rich on the lower floors and the servant class under the eaves. The ruling classes needed to be reassured about their privileges. Small wonder that they clung to theories that “proved” the natural superiority of the bourgeoisie over the working class, the rich over the poor, whites over blacks, and men over women. Man, according to this view, which is rife with racial and gender chauvinism, is not influenced so much by his social and cultural environment as he is determined by heredity and the laws of biology. Therefore workingmen, prostitutes, blacks, and women were naturally inferior by reason of genetic flaws or an incomplete development. Social hierarchy was justified by nature itself, with rich white men at the apex and other races, women, and the poor in the lower depths. Which is to say that Marie van Goethem, with her “Aztec” features and her young girl’s poverty, belonged at the bottom of the order. To a large extent, this explains the horror that the public expressed on first seeing the Little Dancer when it was exhibited in 1881. The bourgeois viewer looked at the work and saw his own antithesis. His preference was for Madonnas, for refined and elegant models, or for plump, healthy young women. He could not fathom why a common, hardworking Opera rat with the face of a “monkey” and a “depraved” aspect should be the subject of a work of art. Why would you represent someone from the dregs of society, what would be the point?