Twilight of the Belle Epoque

by Mary McAuliffe

  Charles received a good education there, but he unquestionably was molded by the values—and fears—that surrounded him. As he grew to manhood he would exemplify the ramrod-straight values and upright life that had been instilled in him. Yet it would become increasingly apparent that these clear-cut values and unforgiving moral code would have an additional consequence, reinforcing a prominent authoritarian streak that he had displayed since childhood.

  In June 1900, the Third Republic’s Senate passed a bill of general amnesty to all the participants in the wrenching Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, in which the army had framed and court-martialed an innocent Jewish captain for treason.20 The problem, though, was that both the guilty and the innocent would be forgiven, thus denying justice to the innocent. An anguished Dreyfus—released from prison but only pardoned rather than cleared of all question of guilt—wrote the Senate that the proposed legislation would only protect the guilty and derail his own prospects for justice. Freedom without honor, he protested, meant nothing to him. Emile Zola, who had suffered greatly as a result of his own efforts on Dreyfus’s behalf, protested in a similar vein. But France’s prime minister, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, was looking for peace rather than justice, in the attempt to quiet the passions that had ruptured France for so long.

  “The view that one can save a people from the disease that gnaws it by decreeing that the disease no longer exists is myopic indeed,” Zola protested, in a public letter to the French president, Emile Loubet, and published in the newspaper L’Aurore.21 Yet the passions surrounding the Affair did in fact subside once Dreyfus was released from prison and amnesty took place. Indeed, most French quickly forgot. Unfortunately, as a consequence of these compromises, Captain Alfred Dreyfus would not receive justice for many more years.

  Marcel Proust, that delicate asthmatic with refined sensibilities, seemed to take no particular note of the new century. Instead, he immersed himself in an intensive study of the works of John Ruskin, England’s formidable nineteenth-century art, architecture, and social critic; this in turn directed Proust’s attention to France’s great cathedrals. That spring, in a kind of Ruskin pilgrimage, Proust visited the cathedral of Amiens, where he sketched in words the appearance of its great façade at different times and in different lights—much as Monet, in his great series, had painted the subtle differences in shadings of the cathedral of Rouen. Amiens’ façade, Proust wrote, was “blue in the mist, brilliant in the morning, sunsoaked and sumptuously gilded in the afternoon, rose and already softly nocturnal at sunset.”22

  Yet Proust, whose beloved mother was Jewish, had earlier taken what was for him an unusual degree of interest in the Dreyfus Affair. Although Proust was raised in his father’s Catholic faith,23 he and his brother were active in protesting Dreyfus’s conviction, circulating a petition for retrial that quickly received three thousand signatures. Eventually Proust would recall the terrible acrimony of these years, which he depicted in his masterwork In Search of Lost Time, especially in its third volume, The Guermantes Way. There he would skewer an assorted variety of the gratin, or upper crust, of Parisian society as his characters react—with anger, varying degrees of prejudice, and confusion—to this social and political earthquake.24

  Still, despite his brief fling at activism, by the opening years of the new century Proust was focusing on Ruskin rather than Dreyfus. During these years, despite his asthma, he would visit Venice and keep an active social life. It was now that he became a friend and ardent admirer of Anna de Noailles, the graceful, nerve-ridden, and fascinating young countess who was about to publish her first book of poems, and who already was becoming the toast of literary Paris. Early on, Proust had decided that her ardent pro-Dreyfusism was in her favor, but it was her poetry that won him over. “I was awaiting your poems with the anxious certainty of one who knows he will have new beauty to admire,” he wrote her one evening past midnight. “I was as sure of that as the prince in the fairy tale, for whom the bees who worked and made the rose bushes bloom, was sure of having honey and roses.”25

  Honey and roses were the last things on José-Maria Sert’s mind when he arrived in Paris just before the turn of the century. This Spanish painter, who unlike Picasso had a fortune at his disposal, soon discovered that his combined assets of wealth, flamboyance, and charm were sure tickets into the colorful and decadent core of the avant-garde. He briefly encountered Misia Godebska Natanson, but he did not realize at the time that this beautiful woman of Polish ancestry would eventually add “Sert” to her list of married names—en route to becoming one of the foremost Parisian patrons of the performing arts.

  As 1900 opened, Misia was in fact in the process of shedding one husband and acquiring another, a process that involved far more unpleasantness than she would have preferred. Whether or not she loved Thadée Natanson, her first husband and the editor of the influential Revue Blanche, was probably beside the point. He had rescued her from a difficult home life, complete with negligent father and unpleasant stepmother, and he had additionally provided her with a circle of literary and artistic friends over which she enjoyed presiding. Men adored Misia, and although she seems to have been indifferent to sex, she thrived on adoration. Natanson’s friends, including the painters Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, provided sufficiently worshipful attention, and it was only Natanson’s looming bankruptcy that threw a pall over what seems to have been an idyllic life.

  It was then that two interrelated events occurred that changed Misia’s world: Natanson’s money problems and the entrance of Alfred Edwards. Edwards was a boorish and even brutish man of murky background and enormous wealth who was accustomed to getting what he wanted, and Misia was what he wanted. A wife of his own and a husband of hers presented little difficulty, so far as he was concerned, and before long, Natanson’s financial difficulties provided exactly the leverage Edwards needed. Soon Natanson had the financial backing he required, and Misia became—at first unwillingly—Edwards’s mistress and then, eventually, his wife.

  It was in the exclusive salon of Madame René de Saint-Marceaux, during the autumn or winter of 1900, that Maurice Ravel found himself playing the piano for a young American named Isadora Duncan, who danced with uninhibited grace to his music.

  Isadora, who had recently arrived in Paris, was at first enchanted with the city, while the city—especially those artistic circles that gravitated to the most prestigious salons—was enchanted with her. She was young and charmingly innocent, making easy conquests of the sophisticated and the jaded, who found her irresistible.

  Raised in a carefree bohemian atmosphere in Oakland, California, Isadora had realized from an early age that she wanted to dance, and to dance in a special way—free from what she passionately believed were the affected and restrictive movements of classical ballet. She brought her close-knit family with her during the trying times of her early career, which included a humiliating stint in vaudeville. Now they were together in Paris, and Isadora was ecstatic. She felt on the brink of discovering the true essence of dance, and in pursuit of this knowledge she raced from one source of cultural enrichment to another, from the Louvre to the Museum of the History of Paris, from the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages to the Bibliothèque Nationale. She adored the Greek vases in the Louvre, and even the prospect of a visit there sent her dancing en route, through the Luxembourg Gardens. “I burned with apostolic fire for my art,” she later wrote.26

  And yet, despite this cultural banquet, she soon was dissatisfied with Paris. Rodin’s sculptures, which she first encountered at his private exhibition on Place de l’Alma, just outside the entrance to the Paris exposition, convinced her that she had at last encountered a fellow-being whose search for truth was akin to her own. But apart from Rodin, she was disappointed in the Parisians she had met. “I thought I might find some teacher, some help there,” she wrote a friend in London, “but it was all stupid, vanity and vexation.” As for the dancers at the Paris Opera, she was appalled.
“They do not dance for love,” she wrote. “They do not dance for the Gods.”27

  Great throngs had visited the Paris exposition by the time it closed on November 12. Most came for the excitement and the entertainment, although artists young and old, including Picasso, had come with the specific intent of locating their pictures and seeing how well (or how poorly) they were displayed. Monet, who was inundated with work and increasingly beset with eye problems, seems not to have found time to make the trip from Giverny, but Zola came and enjoyed playing the tourist, taking great delight in his camera and photographing the exposition in the kind of detail that he had previously reserved for his books. His daughter, Denise, later recalled that in October, “after dinner at the Eiffel Tower, we attended the electric light show and saw the illuminated fountains of the Château d’Eau.”28 Even the rapidly declining Toulouse-Lautrec attended, enthusing over the moving sidewalk that allowed him to move without the obvious aid of his wheelchair.

  For two attendees, at least, the exposition was a revelation. The American historian Henry Adams (of the renowned New England Adams family) was transfixed by the Gallery of Machines. Until the dynamo, he mused, the Virgin “had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt.” But now there was the magnificent and terrible dynamo, which for him became a symbol of infinity, “a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.”29

  Young Gabriel Voisin, trained as an architect and hired as a designer and draughtsman for the exposition, had a similar moment of revelation when he encountered a team of workmen setting up the Avion III, Clément Ader’s flying machine. It was a beautiful creation, built of linen and wood along the lines of an enormous bat, propelled by a four-blade propeller and run by a lightweight steam engine.30 Voisin, who had never before seen a flying machine, asked if he could sit in the cabin, and one of the workmen let him climb in. “Often I have been moved,” Voisin later wrote, “but on that day I was overcome by an enthusiasm which I had never known before. In my hands were the mysterious controls which could give life to this incomparable creation.”31 He now knew what he wanted to do with his life, and his decision would be momentous—for the French aircraft industry, and for the nation as a whole during the Great War.

  Yet despite the exposition’s undoubted success, its impact on most of those who attended was fleeting. Of the multitudes of buildings erected for the exposition, only the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais would most memorably remain, and even these would never attain iconic status. Despite all the hoop-la and expenditure, it would be Eiffel’s grand contribution to the 1889 exposition that would continue to capture the spirit of Paris and the hearts of those who visited it.

  Count Harry Kessler, the ultra-sophisticated and peripatetic German aristocrat who was as much at home in Paris as in Berlin, underscored this point. “The general impression of the unfortunate exhibition has become a blur for me,” he wrote in his diary, adding how disturbing he found the “disconnected, wild mishmash of the buildings’ profiles and ornamentation.” By contrast, he found the Eiffel Tower’s “calm majesty” reassuring.32

  As he fondly observed, from a misty nighttime vantage point on the Pont de Grenelle: “From here the picture of the Exhibition is most grandiose, most fantastic, a sea of light on the still river, out of which . . . the Eiffel Tower rises, immeasurably tall and bathed completely in light.”33

  Chapter Three

  Death of a Queen

  (1901)

  On January 22, 1901, Queen Victoria died, ending an era. Monarch of Great Britain for sixty-three years and Empress of India for twenty-five, her extended family of nine children and forty-two grandchildren linked England to virtually all the great royal and noble houses of Europe, most notably those of Germany and Russia.

  Claude Monet was present in London at the time of the queen’s funeral on February 2 and wrote his wife, Alice, that John Singer Sargent had invited him to view the funeral procession from the balcony of a friend’s house. Neither Monet nor Sargent had reckoned on the crowds, which made it nearly impossible to meet up, and so Monet proceeded alone on foot, having decided that it would be impossible to find a cab. Upon reaching his destination, Monet met “a great American writer living in England, who spoke wonderful French and was very kind to me, explaining everything.” The name of this gentleman, Monet informed Alice, was Henry James. Sargent let him know that James was “the greatest English writer,” but a clearly puzzled Monet asked Alice, “Does Butler [their American son-in-law] know him?”1

  Marcel Proust in the garden of Reynaldo Hahn, 1905. Photo Credit: Snark / Art Resource, NY. © Art Resource, NY.

  The house was crowded with people on every floor, and the streets were mobbed, but Monet reported that he was glad he had been there to see it, “for it was a unique sight.” He added with his artist’s eye that the “weather was superb, a light mist, with a glimpse of sunshine and St. James’s Park in the background.” Adding to the color, the red-coated cavalry officers stood out against the black of the crowd. Much to his surprise, instead of crepe or black, “every house [was] decorated with mauve fabric, the hearse . . . covered in gold and coloured drapes.” Exclaiming over what a feast of color it was, he added, “How wonderful to have been able to do a rapid sketch.”2

  Picasso returned to Barcelona with Carles Casagemas for Christmas, and then the two departed for a visit to Picasso’s birthplace, Málaga. But after a few days, Casagemas’s dependence on him was more than Picasso could handle, and he packed his friend off to family in Barcelona and headed for Madrid. This left the unstable and badly depressed Casagemas to return first to Barcelona, then to Paris, without him.

  Casagemas had spent his days away from Paris in binge drinking and writing passionate proposals of marriage to Germaine, who already was married and in any case was not interested in marrying or even living with him. During Casagemas’s absence their third roommate, Manuel Pallarès, had moved from their studio on Rue Gabrielle to a dingy apartment farther to the west, at 130 Boulevard de Clichy, where he agreed to put up Casagemas when he arrived in Paris in mid-February. Germaine was not in raptures over his arrival, and soon Casagemas announced that he had decided to return to his family in Barcelona. To celebrate his departure, he invited Pallarès and several others, including Germaine, to a dinner at the Hippodrome, a neighborhood hangout on the Boulevard de Clichy. It seemed a good solution to Casagemas’s imbroglio with Germaine, and it promised a free meal. Those invited enthusiastically agreed.

  Everyone at their table that evening seemed to be having a good time—although Casagemas seemed unusually nervous, giving an edge to the proceedings. Still, all was well until, after rising to give a brief speech, Casagemas suddenly took a pistol from his pocket and aimed it directly at Germaine. She promptly dived under the table and hid behind Pallarès. Casagemas fired, crying “This is for you!” and although Pallarès managed to deflect the gun, Germaine slid motionless to the floor. Thinking that he had killed her, Casagemas then cried, “And this is for me!” and shot himself in the head.

  It was ghastly, even though Germaine survived unharmed—either she had played dead to save herself, or the explosion had knocked her to the ground. But Casagemas died later that night at the nearby Hôpital Bichat. Later, his grieving friends buried him in Montmartre Cemetery.

  Picasso had not been present for this shocking event, but its impact on him was enormous. He was stunned. And for the next several years the tragic specter of Casagemas would haunt him.

  Another death in Montmartre’s artistic community, although not unexpected, caused a great deal of sadness that autumn. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the artist who had produced so many unforgettable images of the theaters, brothels, and dance halls of Montmartre, drank himself to death at the age of thirty-six.

  Although from an aristocratic family, Toulouse-Lautrec had sought and found acceptance among the artists and low-life of Montmartre, who took in stride h
is deformity (child-sized legs on an adult-sized torso) and his addiction to liquor and drugs. As his good friend Thadée Natanson later recalled, “what with his small stature, his sweet disposition, his laugh, his boyishness, his lisp, but especially his height,” his favorite prostitutes loved to mother him.3 In turn, Toulouse-Lautrec recognized the family-like aspects of these brothels, and he painted their inhabitants with humanity, although never with sentimentality.

  Yet as the years went by, his addictions and escapades escalated from the merely amusing to the frankly alarming. Stories abounded of Henri setting on fire petrol-soaked wads of rags in his landlady’s toilets, or of Henri concocting ever-more-lethal cocktails for his parties—most notably a shattering combination of cognac and absinthe appropriately dubbed “the Earthquake.” More disturbing were his hallucinations, his sudden attacks of rage, and his growing paranoia.

  The artistic set that revolved around Thadée and Misia Natanson counted themselves among Henri’s closest friends and worried extensively about him, especially after he began to experience unmistakable signs of syphilis as well as of advanced alcoholism. His temporary stay in a private asylum (which he referred to as his prison) led to a brief improvement, but once released he immediately reverted to his old ways.

  Toulouse-Lautrec had laughed heartily throughout his life, even at the cruel joke that life had played on him. But by the end, as Thadée Natanson recalled, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec no longer was laughing. By the end, “the old joy [was] no longer there.”4

  After failing to meet Conservatoire requirements by winning a prize in two consecutive fugue competitions, Ravel was expelled from Gabriel Fauré’s composition class—despite Fauré’s protests that his student was making excellent progress. After this humiliation, Ravel remained on as an auditor in Fauré’s class while he worked with Raoul Bardac, Debussy’s future stepson, on a transcription of Debussy’s Nocturnes for two pianos—“Debussy’s wonderful Nocturnes,” as he enthusiastically described them to a friend.5