Twilight of the Belle Epoque

by Mary McAuliffe

  Onlookers, especially those inconvenienced by the lengthy disruption that the digs imposed, were at first less than enthusiastic about this intrusive newfangled piece of technology. Yet as it began to revolutionize their lives, many would not be able to imagine life without it.

  Among the multitude of decisions involved in creating Paris’s new Métro system was the choice of the young architect Hector Guimard to design its many entrances—those small but important structures that would become the Métro’s most recognizable face above ground.

  The Hector Guimard “Dragonfly” Métro entrance at Porte Dauphine, Paris. © J. McAuliffe

  It was in many ways an audacious choice. Guimard had trained at Paris’s Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs as well as at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, where he earned a reputation as a rebel and, chafing at academic restrictions, failed to take his diploma. But his remarkable talent, coupled with a lively scorn for the mundane, soon attracted the attention of those with deep pockets and avant-garde taste. By the 1890s Guimard had emerged as a man to watch, with commissions to plan and build a number of mansions in Paris’s well-heeled sixteenth arrondissement. His most famous was the astonishing Castel Béranger (1895–1898), which its detractors referred to as the “Castel Dérangé—a daring and difficult concept and execution that placed him at the forefront of the Art Nouveau movement.

  What the Métro’s commissionaires wanted was something elegant but light, with iron (a nod to Eiffel’s famed constructions) and glass (including ceramics) as the preferred materials. Guimard had rivals for the job who were far more conventional and who had the support of the municipal council, but he seems to have benefited from wealthy and powerful backers within the Métro commission itself. Whatever actually happened behind the scenes, Guimard’s plans were finally approved in early 1900.

  Guimard’s models varied from simple enclosures to the full-scale stations at Etoile and Bastille (neither still in existence). In between was a type known as the “dragonfly,” because of its glassy resemblance to dragonflies’ wings. Two of these gauzy “dragonflies” still exist—at Porte Dauphine and the Abbesses station in Montmartre (the latter moved from its original placement at the Hôtel de Ville).

  But it was Guimard’s simple shelter that was most frequently used on the Métro’s earliest lines. This structure, with open walls of cast iron rather than of solid stone, adapted well to the narrow sidewalks and typical crowding of urban Paris. Today, with their sinuous organic lines, Art Nouveau lettering, and lights like floral pods that seem to sway at the end of their long cast iron stems, Guimard’s Métro entrances have become some of the most best-known images of Paris.

  By the end of 1900, eighteen stations on Line 1 had opened, and more would soon follow. It looked like a dream commission for young Hector Guimard. But his hair-trigger temper and keen sense of self-worth was about to get him in trouble, and a Paris Métro without Guimard would soon become a distinct possibility.

  One of the many visitors to the Paris exposition was twenty-five-year-old François Spoturno, a native of Corsica who had come to Paris to make his fortune. A born charmer, he already had proved his skills as a salesman in Marseilles. Now, using a connection he had cultivated during his military service, he found a position as attaché to the senator and playwright Emmanuel Arène. It was a tremendous coup. Young Spoturno may not have had money, but he now had access to the glittering upper reaches of 1900 Paris, with its salons, clubs, and fashionable gatherings. As he quickly realized, it was a world in which women played a key role, from the most elegant aristocrats to the grandest courtesans—a fact of great importance, as it turned out, since women would soon make Spoturno’s fortune.

  Spoturno’s interest was not in clothing but in perfume. At the opening of the new century, the perfect perfume was as essential to the well-dressed Parisian woman as was the latest fashion in dresses, and the French perfume industry was booming, with nearly three hundred manufacturers, twenty thousand employees, and a profitable domestic as well as export business.4 Naturally, perfume makers took the opportunity to display their wares at the 1900 Paris exposition, and Spoturno took the time to wander among their displays, including those of leading names such as Houbigant and Guerlain. Spoturno was not yet sufficiently knowledgeable to judge a perfume’s quality, but he did note that the bottles containing these perfumes were old-fashioned and uninspired. It would not be long before it would occur to him that perhaps their contents were also a trifle outdated.

  But first he had to find his way into the perfume business. After getting a job as a fashion accessories salesman and marrying a sophisticated young Parisian, Spoturno became acquainted with a pharmacist who, like other chemists at the time, made his own eau de cologne, which he sold in plain glass bottles. One memorable evening, Spoturno sniffed a sample of his friend’s wares and turned up his nose. The friend then dared him to make something better, and Spoturno went to work. He hadn’t the slightest idea of how to proceed, but in the end he managed so well that his friend had to admit that he was gifted.

  Yet natural gifts were not enough in the perfume business, and soon Spoturno decided to go to Grasse, the center of France’s perfume industry, to learn perfume-making from the experts. Along the way he would change his name to his mother’s maiden name. Only he would spell it “Coty.”

  The 1900 Paris exposition, which was sufficiently grand in itself, shared the stage, if in a minor way, with the 1900 Summer Olympics, which were held as part of the exposition. In contrast with present-day extravaganzas, these early games were quite simple and even crude in production and execution.

  The 1900 Paris games were the second in the history of the modern games (the first having taken place in Athens in 1896) and lasted from May through October. Track and field events took place on the far western side of Paris on a rough field at the Racing Club de France, in the Bois de Boulogne’s Pré Catelan. Rowing, swimming, and water polo contenders splashed about in the Seine, while cycling, football (soccer), gymnastics (including weightlifting), cricket, and rugby enthusiasts went at it on the far eastern side of the city, in the Bois de Vincennes. Shooters were relegated to the city outskirts, while fencers dueled on the Terrasse of the Jeu de Paume in the Tuileries gardens—reminding the more historically minded of the Three Musketeers’ derring-do near this very spot.

  Three women competed with men for croquet, and these women, sadly eliminated, were among the first to appear in modern Olympic games. Hélène de Pourtalès, a Swiss contender, became the first woman to win a medal, as part of the winning team (with her husband) in a yachting event on the Seine. Charlotte Cooper, a three-time Wimbledon champion, became the first woman to win an individual medal, defeating all comers in the women’s singles tennis competition, and then went on to win in mixed doubles. For the record, she wore an ankle-length skirt, corset, and long sleeves as she demolished her opponents with what was described as a “formidable backhand.” But Margaret Abbott, an American studying art in Paris who placed first among ten women golfers, credited her success to the fact that she wore sensible clothing, while her French competitors wore restrictive dresses and high heels.

  Alvin Kraenzlein of the United States won a glorious sweep of four individual gold medals in track and field, although this triumph may have been slightly diminished after he was punched in the face by a rival in the long jump. (In defense of the fellow who threw the punch, Kraenzlein had unexpectedly competed in this event after informally agreeing to stand solidly with other American contenders and not compete on a Sunday.)

  Croquet would not survive as an Olympic sport, nor would cricket, tug-of-war, or motorcycle racing. But the marathon, the starring attraction of all Olympic games since ancient times, has continued, despite some storms, weather and otherwise, along the way. The marathon course for the 1900 games took the runners from the Bois de Boulogne onto the winding streets of Paris. Thirteen runners (five French, two American,
three British, two Swedish, and one Canadian) braved a blisteringly hot July afternoon on what turned out to be a badly marked course. Runners became lost, wandered about, and had to contend with horses and buggies, occasional autos, and irate pedestrians. One of the American contenders claimed that a cyclist knocked him down just as he was about to overtake the lead runner.

  The French managed to take first and second place, although the lead American runner argued that they must have cheated and taken a short cut, since he never saw them pass him. Adding further to the confusion, the winner turned out to be from Luxembourg rather than France—although the Olympic Committee still credits this medal for France.

  The Renault family driving three of their earliest cars (Louis Renault in the middle car), 1899. France, Private Collection. Photo Credit: CCI / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. © Art Resource, NY.

  Montmartre’s Rue Lepic starts at the Moulin Rouge, on Place Blanche, and then climbs steeply before swinging westward and looping back again, in all likelihood following an earlier footpath that wound its way up the Butte. It is a street with a memory. Pablo Picasso, on his first day in Paris, carted his belongings up Rue Lepic to temporary housing on the western side of the Butte. In time, Gertrude Stein would climb Rue Lepic on a regular basis to Picasso’s Bateau-Lavoir studio, where she repeatedly sat for Picasso while he endlessly painted—and repainted—her portrait.

  But it was on a chill Christmas Eve in 1898 that twenty-year-old Louis Renault made a different kind of history on Rue Lepic. Driving an automobile of his own construction, made largely from bicycle parts, he won a race up the street’s steep (13-degree) slope, confounding those who thought it couldn’t be done in such a lightweight vehicle. Automobiles until then had been heavy, noisy, and expensive, widely regarded as eccentric and dangerous toys for the rich. Renault, who soon patented the direct drive that made his victory possible, held a very different vision for the automobile. His own little two-seater, which weighed only 550 pounds and could reach thirty miles per hour, ran quietly and had been cheap to build. He foresaw a future for motorized vehicles that would be light, fast, quiet, and inexpensive to purchase and maintain.

  Until now, Louis had been the black sheep of his family, the youngest of three surviving sons of a Parisian drapery dealer and button manufacturer. Born and raised in an atmosphere of bourgeois comfort and respectability (at 12 Place de Laborde, 8th, now Place Henri-Bergson), he found it difficult to persuade his father and brothers that his tinkering and puttering would ever amount to anything. But after his friends began to clamor for vehicles just like his, Louis’s brothers (who had taken over the father’s button and drapery business after his death) realized the potential of their little brother’s mechanical abilities and decided to back him financially. As a result, Renault Frères made its appearance in 1899, with its workshops on the Ile de Séguin at the southwest edge of Paris. Louis, who was as good a carpenter and builder as he was a mechanic, constructed much of the first Renault works himself.

  Germany’s Karl Benz may have invented the gas engine (in 1880) and another German, Gottlieb Daimler, patented his first gas engine soon after, but it was a Frenchman, Armand Peugeot, who can be said to have built the first motorcar, beginning its manufacture (with his cousin) in 1892, and in 1896 setting up his own company in Audincourt to build cars with internal combustion engines. In 1895, the first motorcar race took place, from Paris to Bordeaux and back, and by 1900, what has been called the “heroic period of the automobile” had begun,5 with the Renault brothers in the thick of it.

  The most glamorous aspect of motoring in the early years of the twentieth century was the road race, and here Louis and his brother Marcel excelled. In France, road races between cities and across the countryside drew crowds of enthusiasts, as the racers achieved hitherto unbelievable speeds of up to sixty miles per hour. This was a dangerous sport, and Louis Renault and his brother soon made their mark, first in the 1899 Paris–Trouville race, and then in the Paris–Toulouse–Paris race of 1900, which was part of that year’s Olympics.

  In that race, Louis Renault competed with a supercharged engine whose grease pump soon broke. Unable to mend it, he bought a funnel and soupspoon from a roadside peddler and continued the race, driving with one hand and using the other to spoon oil through the funnel into the grease-tube, which fortunately passed near the driver’s seat. Unfortunately he encountered other misadventures en route (including an encounter with a passing wine cart, which knocked him onto the road, temporarily unconscious), but he managed to complete the course—something that only two other light cars in his class, both of them Renaults, succeeded in doing.

  The publicity value of such races was tremendous, and the Renault brothers benefited greatly from this as they began to pile up victories. Unfortunately, though, road races were dangerous, and tragedy would eventually strike.

  Maurice Ravel loved automobiles—and factories. After all, his Swiss father was an engineer, and during Ravel’s youth the father played a major role at one of the fledgling automobile factories in Levallois-Perret, a manufacturing area just over the northwestern border of Paris.

  Maurice and his younger brother, Edouard, both enjoyed music, and the father—a music-lover himself—encouraged their musical interests and talents. Yet the father also took his sons to visit factories, which fascinated them. Later in life Maurice Ravel would say that it amazed him “that musicians have not yet captured the wonder of industrial progress.”6

  Maurice’s younger brother became an engineer, like their father, but Maurice—with the support of his parents—followed his love of music into a career. This meant attending the Paris Conservatoire, where he repeatedly failed to take the piano prize (which sunk his aspirations for a career as a pianist), and where his compositions ran into headwinds as he attempted to integrate his extraordinary sense of musical color with new harmonies and rhythms.

  Many of his compositions were and would continue to be rooted in his mother’s Basque heritage, but Ravel’s own musical vocabulary had by 1900 developed in a unique direction, one that startled many of his less venturesome colleagues. By this time, Ravel had gravitated to an avant-garde group of friends who called themselves the Apaches or Outcasts. Here among these young poets, painters, pianists, and composers, he was free to reach for new musical horizons.

  Yet Ravel, who dressed elegantly and showed little outer sign of his inner radicalism, still had dreams of glory that were defined by the conservative values of the Paris Conservatoire. In the spring of 1900 he prepared for the Prix de Rome, a hugely demanding and fundamentally restrictive competition with two stages, the first requiring the contestant to write, in the space of one week, a four-part fugue on a given subject in addition to setting a short text for mixed chorus and orchestra. The five or six contestants remaining after the first round had to compose (within a month of strict isolation) the setting for an extended cantata text for solo voices and orchestra. The winner received a four-year stipend and would spend at least two of the four years at the Villa Médicis in Rome. The promise of a stipend, not to mention the honor involved, seemed well worth the trouble, even to such a determinedly unconventional composer as Ravel was turning out to be. After all, even the pioneering Claude Debussy had somehow choked back his natural musical instincts and managed to jump through the required hoops.7

  Yet Ravel would not be able to duplicate Debussy’s feat. Earlier in the year, during a preliminary examination, he had “patiently elaborated” a scene given to him with music that was “rather dull, prudently passionate, and its degree of boldness was accessible to those gentlemen of the Institute.”8 The noted composer Gabriel Fauré, who by this time was Ravel’s composition teacher, understood Ravel’s talent and was warmly supportive, but to no avail. Ravel encountered a buzz saw in the person of Théodore Dubois, the powerful director of the Conservatoire, who gave Ravel’s composition a zero, commenting that it was “impossible, owing to
terrible inaccuracies in writing.” Ravel found it particularly disturbing that Dubois’ criticisms were not even directly addressed to the work under consideration, but to an earlier Ravel work (Overture to Shéhérazade) that Dubois had heard performed in 1899 and detested. “Will it be necessary,” Ravel added, “to struggle for 5 years against this influence?”9

  As it turned out, the answer most unfortunately was “yes.” Ravel was eliminated after the first round of the 1900 Prix de Rome competition, and he would endure other such defeats in the years to come—leading to a scandal that would shake Paris’s musical world and blast the hidebound Paris Conservatoire into the twentieth century.

  Like Claude Debussy, who was twelve years his senior and whom Ravel greatly admired, Ravel was influenced by the music of Mozart, Chopin, Chabrier, and the Russian composers, especially Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov. Both Ravel and Debussy held strong reservations about the music of Beethoven and Wagner as well as the works of those French turn-of-the-century composers led by Camille Saint-Saëns and Vincent d’Indy. It should be noted that although Saint-Saëns once extended a compliment to Ravel,10 this aging composer generally regarded the music of Debussy and Ravel as a serious threat to the future of music.

  In another respect like Debussy, Ravel was deeply influenced by the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Through his friendship with Misia Godebska Natanson, Ravel entered the cutting-edge literary and artistic milieu of Thadée Natanson’s Revue Blanche, while Gabriel Fauré provided entrée to the exclusive salons of Madame René de Saint-Marceaux and the Princesse Edmond de Polignac. Noted for his “ironic, cool humor,”11 twenty-five-year-old Maurice Ravel may have been encountering major roadblocks at the Conservatoire, but he was becoming known in the right artistic circles.