Twilight of the Belle Epoque

by Mary McAuliffe

  The oldest of these walls belonged to the mansion called the Maison de Rose de Rosimond (now the Museum of Old Montmartre). Located on Rue Cortot, behind Sacré-Coeur and near the top of the Butte, this splendid old house had by the turn of the century become a haven for impecunious artists. Renoir lived here during the early years of his career, when he painted his Dance at the Moulin de la Galette. He later recalled that his only belongings there were “a mattress (which was put on the floor), a table, a commode, and a stove—to keep the model warm.”8 It was also on Montmartre that Renoir painted Suzanne Valadon, the free-spirited former circus performer, who modeled for his famous Dance at Bougival. Valadon went on to become a respected artist in her own right, breaking hearts along the way—especially that of Erik Satie, who never offered his heart to another woman. She had affairs with Renoir and others, and after one of these gave birth to a son, Maurice Utrillo, whose paternity she never acknowledged, but whose paintings of Montmartre would in turn bring him fame.

  Unlike Picasso, Henri Matisse was tired and dejected as he gazed on the Paris exposition. The exposition had turned down his one submission for the contemporary painting section, and he was reduced to taking a job gilding a kilometer-long swag of laurel leaves for the Grand Palais.9 Even this job did not last very long, for after three weeks his resentment boiled over and he was fired for insubordinate behavior.

  Floundering for direction, Matisse turned to sculpture, using the same model that Auguste Rodin had used for his Walking Man and St. John the Baptist. In the course of this work (The Serf), Matisse visited Rodin at his Rue de l’Université studios, bringing several drawings with him. This meeting was not a success; Rodin was not impressed with Matisse’s work, which he found insufficiently realistic. For his part, Matisse was put off by what he regarded as Rodin’s assembly line production methods and commitment to an exterior rather than an internal reality. Matisse never returned.

  The life of an artist most typically was a hard one, as Matisse had discovered. Born in 1869 in an area of northeastern France dominated by textile mills and sugar beet refineries, Matisse was the son of a hard-working grain and seed merchant. His father’s family were weavers, and by the 1870s the town of Bohain in which he was raised had become famous for its luxury textiles. Matisse would always retain his love for beautiful fabrics, but his parents—especially his father—had little time for or interest in beauty.

  It was only by chance that Matisse discovered his artistic ability, in a school art class, and given his stern upbringing he promptly rejected any possibility that he could develop it. It took many years of false starts, including a stint at law, before he again encountered a paint box—this time in a hospital, where he was recovering from a breakdown. “From the moment I held the box of colours in my hand, I knew this was my life,” Matisse later wrote. “I dived in, to the understandable despair of my father.”10

  Secretly enrolling in art classes at a nearby free art school (founded for training impoverished weavers), Matisse progressed rapidly and soon outstripped the school’s capabilities. Eventually his mother coaxed his father to give him an allowance for a year’s study in Paris. Once there, Matisse enrolled in the Académie Julian, in preparation for admission to the all-important Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but found the Académie tradition-bound and stultifying. Despairing that he never would be able to paint, because he did not paint like anyone else, he nevertheless persevered. En route to self-discovery, he discovered Goya, whose work convinced him that he could become a painter. He also discovered a pretty model, Caroline Joblaud, with whom he began to live and who bore him his beloved daughter, Marguerite.

  By this time Matisse had twice failed his entrance exams to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and had long overstayed the original year that his father had allowed him. The illegitimate child and the shame it brought to Matisse’s deeply religious and conventional parents served as the breaking point with Matisse père, but life gradually began to change for the better as Matisse learned to paint in the accepted way and experienced some success. On his third try he passed his Beaux-Arts entrance exam, and around the same time he successfully submitted several paintings to the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, where he was elected an associate member. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts awarded him a third prize for composition, and the state was beginning to buy his work. Suddenly fame and fortune seemed possible.

  And then in the late 1890s, under the influence of van Gogh’s friend John Peter Russell and the grand old Impressionist Camille Pissarro, Matisse made fundamental changes in his technique, adopting simplified shapes and bright color—a breakthrough that would influence his work for the rest of his life. Unfortunately this new direction earned him no plaudits among the traditionalists, and all possibility for commercial success quickly evaporated. His relationship with Caroline grew correspondingly rocky. She and his friends thought he had gone mad, and Matisse in turn had bouts of severe self-doubt.

  It was after Caroline’s departure that Matisse met and married Amélie Parayre. Amélie, who was from a politically and culturally progressive family of some prominence (although little wealth) in Toulouse and Paris, had always dreaded a conventional marriage. She need not have worried; her marriage to Matisse was hardly conventional. Not only did he have an illegitimate child, but his art was radically different and unlikely to sell. Yet Amélie believed in him, and her parents approved. Even Matisse’s parents were pleased by the connection. The newlyweds honeymooned in London, where they viewed the Turner paintings, and then spent many months in Toulouse and Corsica, where Matisse painted with increasingly vibrant color—paintings that he did not show to any but his closest friends. Despite his fastidious appearance (complete with neatly manicured beard and gold-rimmed spectacles), Matisse was making a radical departure into the unknown.

  Their son Jean was born early in 1899, after which the couple returned to Paris, where Matisse encountered the same old problems—no work and no sales. Still, despite his poverty he managed to buy a wonderful painting by Cézanne (Three Bathers) after Amélie, understanding the painting’s importance to him, let him pawn a treasured ring. Many years later, when he gave this painting to the City of Paris, he said that it had “supported him morally at critical moments in my venture as an artist; I have drawn from it my faith and my perseverance.”11

  Amélie went to work by starting a hat shop, and she agreed to take in Marguerite when Caroline could no longer care for the child. In addition, their second son, Pierre, was born in the summer of 1900. Fortunately Amélie and Marguerite soon became close, and the six-year-old managed to help her stepmother significantly. Yet even though the babies stayed with their grandparents (Jean with Matisse’s mother, and Pierre with Amélie’s family), Amélie was greatly overworked and Matisse was at the end of his rope as the new century began.

  Unlike Matisse, by 1900 Auguste Rodin had achieved worldwide artistic renown. Reinforcing this at the Paris exposition, he set up a well-attended private exhibit of his own works, located right outside the exposition’s main gates.

  By this time Rodin had also acquired a well-earned reputation of another sort. His great love, the sculptor Camille Claudel, no longer was part of his life and, indeed, was rapidly sinking into paranoia, but there were many others eager to take her place. As Rodin’s hundreds of erotic drawings showed, he had a huge appetite for sex and thoroughly enjoyed watching and drawing women in the most explicit poses. The Countess Anna de Noailles, who posed for her portrait bust, wrote that she was worn out “from the way he looks at me, the way he imagines me nude; from the necessity of fighting for my dignity before this hunter’s gaze.”12

  Some have seen Rodin’s intense and overwhelming love for women as a celebration of women’s strength rather than as a declaration of their weakness and dependence. Others, like the keenly perceptive Anna de Noailles, sensed the dangers of his gaze—even though he seems to have maintained a prudent hands-off policy with upper-class wome
n. The future fashion king Paul Poiret, who frequently took the Paris commuter boat with Rodin (Poiret going between Paris and Billancourt, Rodin between Paris and Meudon), described the famed sculptor as “a little thickset god.”13

  Whatever the correct view of Rodin, it was clear by the early years of the century that women found him exceptionally attractive. In 1900, at the age of sixty, he was involved with an appealing young artist and model named Sophie Postolska, who was his first lover after the end of his affair with Claudel. But Postolska was not the only woman in his life: Isabelle Perronnet, the former mistress and model of the sculptor Alexandre Falguière, made herself available to Rodin soon after Falguière’s death in the spring of 1900,14 and there were many more, including, of course, Rodin’s first mistress, who had remained with him all these years—the much-neglected Rose Beuret.

  While Rodin had his own personal triumph at the Paris exposition, the Impressionists at long last received official recognition by being included along with the traditional artists of the Salon in a huge exhibit of French art.15

  It amounted to a significant breakthrough, but at the moment Claude Monet had other concerns. In arranging for his departure to London in February 1900, he left explicit instructions for his gardener at Giverny: to sow about three hundred pots of poppies, sixty of sweet pea, sixty of white agrimony, and thirty of yellow agrimony, in addition to blue sage and blue water lilies (the latter in beds in the greenhouse). From February 15 to 25 the gardener was to “lay the dahlias down to root,” planting those with shoots before Monet returned. “Don’t forget the lily bulbs,” Monet added.16

  Monet’s garden at Giverny was a focal point of his life, and he never overlooked any detail of its welfare and appearance, even when preparing for a major journey. Once in London, Monet painted from the balcony of his room at the Savoy Hotel and from nearby Charing Cross Hospital, delighting—and just as often despairing—at the fluctuations of the light, the mists’ varying colors, and the abrupt changes in the weather.

  Monet had been a penniless exile when he first visited London thirty years before, at the time of the Franco-Prussian War. Now he was a celebrity, and London society treated him as such. He enjoyed the adulation, but his first concern was for his painting, which he approached with a volatile mixture of joy and trepidation. His wife, the patient Alice, was accustomed to receiving letters from him that veered as rapidly from one mood to another as did the weather, and usually were directly related. Writing to Alice in late March, Monet told her that he had been productive—he would be bringing back eight full crates of his work, containing eighty canvases—but that she should not expect to see finished products. “If I’d had the right idea in the first place and had started afresh each time the effect changed, I would have made more progress,” he wrote her. Instead, he added, “I dabbled around and altered paintings that were giving me trouble which as a result are nothing more than rough drafts.”17

  He badly wished to complete his unfinished work, but Monet, now sixty years old, was exhausted. Day after day of unrelenting painting on his feet, and the constant anxiety over whether he could correctly capture the fleeting effect, had taken their toll. The subtle light of the short days of winter now changed into the brighter light and longer days of spring, and he could do no more. He returned to Giverny in early April, where his wife and family—and his garden—awaited him.

  Another indefatigable worker was Sarah Bernhardt. In 1899 the playwright Edmond Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac as well as of La Princesse lointaine, in which Bernhardt starred, gave a description of a typical day for this phenomenon, who by then was well into her fifties.

  Rostand takes Bernhardt from her fur-covered entrance to the theater, where she energizes a crowd of theater folk, arranges scenes, erupts in anger, insists on “everything being done over again,” and then smiles, drinks tea, and “draws tears from case-hardened actors” before retiring to her dressing room, where the decorators are waiting. There she upends their plans, collapses, and then rushes to the fifth floor, where she startles the costumer by making up a costume before returning to her room and teaching the awe-struck extras how to arrange their hair. Not wasting a moment, she busies herself with various tasks while someone reads a proposed play and multitudes of letters to her, weeps over some of them, and consults with the wig-maker before returning to the stage and reducing the electrician to “a state of temporary insanity.” From there she proceeds to demolish a blundering super, returns to her dressing room for dinner (which she does not have time to finish), and then dresses for the evening performance while listening to the manager’s sales report from the other side of the curtain. She gives her all to the performance, while conducting business between acts, remains at the theater until three in the morning to make arrangements, and then returns home where, to her infinite amusement, someone is waiting to read her a five-act play. She listens, weeps, accepts it, and retires to bed. But then, finding that she cannot sleep, she gets up and studies the part.18

  For almost twenty years this dynamo had managed a series of her own theaters, culminating in the Théâtre des Nations on the Place du Châtelet, which she unhesitatingly renamed the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt. After all, why not? It was her theater, and as a star of her magnitude, she had no reason in the world not to name it after herself.

  At an age when others would have been winding down their careers, Bernhardt continued to set new challenges for herself, including taking on the role of Hamlet—a most controversial role for a woman, and especially one well past her youth. There were critics who pointed out that she was twice the age of the young man whom Shakespeare envisioned, and added that the Bard most certainly had not contemplated a woman in the role. But audiences loved her, and the production was a huge success; she then took it on tour.

  With the new century Bernhardt reached for yet more challenges and found them in Rostand’s most recent play, L’Aiglon, the tragic tale of the son and heir of Napoleon—the young Eaglet, or L’Aiglon—who died at the age of twenty-one. Like Hamlet, this was a trouser role, requiring Bernhardt to dress in the tight-fitting jacket and breeches of the era. She did not hesitate, and in anticipation of the role wore her costume (designed by Paul Poiret), complete with boots and sword, for weeks before the play opened. She had always been slim, and to her credit she still managed to look creditable as a young man. Again audiences loved her, and the play was a hit, opening in March 1900 and continuing for 250 performances.

  The family of young Charles de Gaulle was not accustomed to visiting the theater—any theater. It was a straight-laced family with roots in the dour textile town of Lille, in northern France. Charles’s mother did not allow dancing in their home and considered the theater an invention of the devil. Any sort of frivolity ran counter to the family dictates of stern morality and conservative Catholicism. And yet, for his tenth birthday, young Charles’s father took him to see Sarah Bernhardt in L’Aiglon.

  The son of devout Catholics and monarchists, Charles was born in 1890, the third child of what would become a family of four sons and one daughter. Although France had not had a monarch for decades,19 Charles’s parents were among a staunch minority that yearned for the monarchy’s return. Along with this brand of politics came a large helping of nationalism, patriotism, and respect for the military. All of these elements came together in L’Aiglon, which Bernhardt milked for all its worth of drum-rolling patriotism. In addition, L’Aiglon had a terrific death scene, Bernhardt’s specialty. Charles’s father, at least, must have been convinced that it would be worth seeing, and so little Charles de Gaulle saw Sarah Bernhardt in L’Aiglon as a birthday treat.

  The de Gaulle family lived in the fifteenth arrondissement, near the border of the seventh arrondissement—not far from the Eiffel Tower, Les Invalides, and the Ecole Militaire, the elite military school that Bonaparte himself had attended. Charles’s father often took the family to Les Invalides for outings, and Charles’s life
revolved around his parish church, Saint-François-Xavier (a substantial church in the 7th arrondissement), and his schools. Given his parents’ ardent Catholicism, the first school he attended had been run by the Brothers of the Christian Schools of St. Thomas Aquinas. When he turned ten—about the time that he attended the performance of L’Aiglon—Charles began to attend the far-more-rigorous Jesuit Collège de l’Immaculée-Conception, on Rue de Vaugirard (15th), where his father was a teacher.

  Despite the efforts of the Third Republic to oust the Jesuits and secularize education, nearly all of France’s former Jesuit collèges, or secondary schools, were back to full strength by the time young Charles was entering their halls. They drew their support from those who, like the de Gaulle family, appreciated their staunch opposition to secularism and republicanism as well as to the more liberal and socially conscious Catholicism that was beginning to emerge. As the twentieth century opened, right-wing Catholics and fervent monarchists viewed the social order with increasing contempt and alarm. In their eyes, the Third Republic’s anticlericalism was undermining the Christian faith and everything it supported. Consequently, the rigorous and conservative education that the Jesuits offered appealed mightily to those who appreciated the discipline and the tough moral code that it enforced.

  The school that Charles was about to enter had managed to evade the Third Republic’s attempts to eradicate it by clever maneuvering within the letter of the law. The Collège de l’Immaculée-Conception (often simply referred to as Vaugirard, after its street address) turned itself into a private company with sympathetic laymen in charge. This new company hired the administrators and teachers, and by the time Charles arrived, it was as if nothing had changed. Or almost nothing, since the memory of what had happened left a perceptible shadow over this endangered community.