Yet by the turn of the century, new political voices were clamoring for admission to the ruling coterie. The Waldeck-Rousseau government had famously included a socialist—admittedly one of fairly moderate inclinations, but nevertheless representing a first for the Third Republic.21 Yet many French socialists condemned rather than praised “Millerandism”—this willingness to participate in a bourgeois government.
Of course the French socialist movement had never been united, and from the outset had splintered largely between revolutionary and reformist aims. Yet by the turn of the century, these diverse forces had begun to coalesce into recognizable parties, even if political participation was not their immediate (or even ultimate) goal. Loosely based on the unification of the proletariat as a class, these disparate organizations held their first French socialist congress in Paris in 1899. The outcome was a composite rather than a merger, and divisiveness remained. Then, at its 1900 congress, the militants walked out, and two years later the split became final. As a result, two separate and very different French socialist parties came into being. By 1902, one had emerged as the Socialist Party of France (PS de F), a party of militants with revolutionary aims and staunch opposition to participation in the bourgeois state. The other, the French Socialist Party (PSF)—also formed in 1902—sought social transformation but embraced defense of the Republic as well as participation in government.
Thus by the early years of the new century, two very different socialist parties had formed in France, with one on record as solidly opposed to the bourgeois state. Still, when the chips were down, both would support the Republic—especially when danger threatened la patrie.
Internal divisiveness could of course present as grave a danger to la patrie as external threats—a truth painfully illustrated by the Dreyfus Affair, which had created seismic ruptures within Paris and the entire nation.
The moral problem at the Affair’s heart still remained so long as Dreyfus—although pardoned—was not vindicated. Yet Parisians began to put this particularly painful episode behind them once the general amnesty went into effect early in 1901.
That June, Marcel Proust did his own bit to further the healing process. Determined to keep up his glittering social life despite his delicate health, he threw a series of grand dinner parties, including one for an array of sixty guests who had been virtually at knife-point during the recently concluded Dreyfus Affair. Notable among these was Léon Daudet, son of the novelist Alphonse Daudet. A virulent anti-Semite, Léon Daudet had been one of the most strident leaders of the anti-Dreyfus camp. Proust proceeded to seat Daudet next to a beautiful woman whom Daudet did not know and who—much to Daudet’s surprise—turned out to be the daughter of a prominent Jewish banker.
Increasing Daudet’s astonishment, Proust had arranged the rest of the large party similarly, with ardent Dreyfusards seated next to those who had bitterly attacked the Jewish captain and all who supported him. “Every piece of china was liable to be smashed,” Daudet realized, but to his amazement, the dinner party was a success. “The bitterest of enemies ate their chaud-froid [meat in aspic] within two yards of each other,” he marveled, and even he managed to behave himself for the evening. Only Proust could have pulled off such a feat, Daudet decided, attributing Proust’s accomplishment to a keen understanding of others’ feelings and to his great charm.22
Although Proust was an early and an avid supporter of Dreyfus—much to the dismay of his father, who was not—Proust had characteristically mended parental fences and managed to retain his friendship with even the most vehement anti-Dreyfusards, including Léon Daudet. In the course of time, when Proust wrote The Guermantes Way (his third volume of In Search of Lost Time), he would depict the impact that the Dreyfus Affair had on Parisian society during those tumultuous years. And he would dedicate this volume to his good friend Léon Daudet.
Yet despite his social triumphs, Proust was nagged by self-doubt. Soon after this triumphant June dinner party, he turned thirty (on July 10), much to his despair. Uncertain in health and unsuccessful at any career, he still lived at home and was dependent on his parents, especially his mother, for everything from financial to emotional support. “Today I’m thirty years old,” he told a friend from student days, “and I’ve achieved nothing!”23
Proust’s daring dinner party had been held in honor of Anna de Noailles, the frail and fabulous poetess whose first volume of poetry, Le Coeur innombrable (The Boundless Heart), had just appeared in print and was garnering exceptional praise. Delicate in health, plagued by insomnia and a fear of death, she had much in common with Proust, including a preference for sleeping (and working) in bed by day and reigning supreme at the best literary salons by night, where she transfixed those who hovered around her with an endless and impeccable stream of words.
Anna de Noailles may have been emerging as queen of the literary salons, but Isadora Duncan had already made a name for herself with important Parisian hostesses, and now was reserving most of her performances to invited audiences in her own studio.
The Duncans had recently moved from the Rue de la Gaîté in Montparnasse to an apartment on the other side of Paris, on the Avenue de Villiers, north of Parc Monceau. There Isadora performed for select groups and taught an unexpectedly large number of Parisian girls—so many that she had to divide them into three classes. These activities were exhausting, but they helped pay the rent. What inspired her were her efforts to discover what she called the driving principle, or essential theory, of dance. Here she stressed that truth came before technique: “Life is the root,” she insisted, “and art is the flower.”24 Bearing some similarity to Method acting, which emerged in Moscow a decade later, her approach rejected the artificiality of classical ballet for movement that deeply and truthfully expressed emotional concepts. She was hovering on the brink of a discovery that would change the history of dance.
She was also about to meet someone who would change her life.
Winnaretta Singer, the daughter of Isaac Merritt Singer, inventor of the sewing machine, had inherited a fortune from her American father and a love of music from her French mother. Yet despite these advantages, her early life had been unhappy, clouded by her father’s death and her mother’s self-absorption as well as by Winnaretta’s growing awareness of her own lesbianism. An attempt to escape her unhappy home led her into an even more unhappy marriage, which quickly disintegrated. Then a chance meeting with the elegant and elderly Prince Edmond de Polignac (they met in a bidding war over a Monet painting) led to a happy and companionable marriage of shared interests, while discreetly accommodating the sexual preferences of each.
Winnaretta, now the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, had since childhood displayed a sophisticated interest in the arts in addition to considerable talent as an organist and painter. Her marriage to a connoisseur of the visual as well as the performing arts led her to become a generous patron of the arts and the hostess of one of the foremost salons in Paris. From the Polignacs’ marriage in 1893, the Hôtel de Polignac—their lovely mansion on Avenue Georges-Mandel in the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement—became the center for exceptional musical evenings, whether of Bach and the baroque, or Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Fauré, and, eventually, Stravinsky.
It was Prince Edmond who first took a shine to Isadora Duncan. Winnaretta had been somewhat interested in Isadora’s performance at the Countess Greffulhe’s salon, but the prince had been fascinated. This prompted Winnaretta to arrive on Isadora’s doorstep (looking like a Roman emperor, in Isadora’s opinion), where she invited her to meet the prince and perform at a studio concert. Isadora readily agreed, and soon she and the prince became close friends.
It was thus a devastating loss for Isadora as well as for Winnaretta when the prince died. He had been in bad health for some time, yet had attempted to keep up his social obligations, including Proust’s post–Dreyfus Affair reconciliation dinner in June. This was one of the last times that the prince was
seen in public. He died that August, and among the mourners at his funeral was Isadora Duncan. It was then that she met Paris Singer, Winnaretta’s handsome, wealthy, and philandering younger brother. On this occasion they seemed to take little notice of one another. But when they met again, years later, sparks would fly.
It was at about this time that Isadora visited Rodin in his studio. She had seen his private pavilion the year before, just outside the exposition, but this time she came to his studio—presumably his spacious workspace at the state’s Dépôt des Marbres on the Rue de l’Université. She noticed that he “murmured the names of his statues” as he worked on them, “ran his hands over them and caressed them.” She remembered thinking that “beneath his hands the marble seemed to flow like molten lead.”25
Rodin seemed to have that effect on women. By this time he had met lovely young Helene von Hindenburg, who became another of his conquests, although a platonic one—her mother usually chaperoned her, which was not a bad idea—and Rodin settled in for a long and companionable friendship. In the meanwhile, Rodin’s faithful mistress, Rose Beuret, continued to do the cooking and the housework in their stark and uncomfortable house in Meudon, just outside of Paris.
Rodin built a pavilion on land adjoining the Meudon house, much like the pavilion where he had exhibited during the 1900 exposition, and he took to working and even sleeping there. He spent most of his time in this pavilion or in Paris, while he spent much of his money on his increasingly valuable collection of Egyptian bronzes, Roman marbles, and contemporary paintings.
Meanwhile, Rodin’s Meudon residence remained sparsely furnished, with little in the way of decoration or even heat. Rodin now seems to have thought of himself as a gentleman and had became correspondingly dandified, dressing fastidiously—at least in public—and hiring a hairdresser to visit him every morning. Yet in his private life he remained oblivious to discomfort or inconvenience, wearing his overcoat and beret in his chilly house in wintertime, and thinking little of it. All the while, Rose labored on.
It was now, in 1901, that the twentieth-century version of the Sorbonne emerged. The first phase of its reconstruction had been completed in 1889, and at last the final phase was completed. As a result, the very stones of Cardinal Richelieu’s seventeenth-century remodeling of the Sorbonne disappeared, with the single exception of his now secularized memorial chapel. During this makeover, the Sorbonne’s very entity had been transformed as well. Once the bastion of French Catholic theology, in 1885 it shed its centuries-old Faculty of Theology to become a thoroughly republican and secular institution.
The new Sorbonne’s remaining faculties of letters and sciences quickly established their preeminence, and students—now including young women—began to pour in. In fact, the Sorbonne’s major challenge in the years to come would be lack of space, making for increasingly crowded classrooms and a sprawling network of outlying annexes for its specialized institutes and research facilities.
La Lorraine, a café in the Rue des Ecoles in the heart of the Latin Quarter, was at this time a favorite gathering place for artists and students. Picasso often met his Catalan friends there, including Jaime Sabartès, a sculptor and writer who had believed in Picasso from the outset, and who would eventually become Picasso’s private secretary and biographer. If Picasso arrived at La Lorraine around midday, he and the group would lunch at a Turkish restaurant in the nearby Place de la Sorbonne. If he came later, they would spend the afternoon or evening at La Lorraine.
Picasso had returned to Paris in early June 1901 and promptly moved into the Boulevard de Clichy studio where Casagemas spent his last days. With Casagemas dead and Pallarès back in Spain, Picasso now shared the small premises with his art dealer, Mañach. In addition, Picasso now dumped his former mistress, Odette, for Casagemas’s Germaine Gargallo. This enraged Picasso’s friend Manolo, who had been sleeping with Germaine ever since Casagemas’s death, resulting in a fight that brought in the police.
Despite his frantic social life, Picasso managed to work fast (possibly as many as three pictures a day) for an upcoming exhibit that Mañach had arranged for him at the end of the month. Mañach had done well by Picasso, having lined up the show at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery on Rue Laffitte, in the heart of the ninth arrondissement, a street famous for its art galleries. Vollard, a sharp businessman with a good eye for art, specialized in the works of contemporary artists such as Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh. He agreed to show around sixty of Picasso’s pictures along with some large works from another young Spanish artist. The gallery was small and the pictures were unframed and crammed floor to ceiling or in folders, but the exhibition drew glowing reviews and (despite Vollard’s later recollection) was a success. “I really had a lot of money, but it didn’t last long,” Picasso later recalled.26 After all, why save if the future looked so bright?
Still, the pictures that Picasso exhibited at Vollard’s had celebrated modern French life—colorful, attractive subjects such as can-can dancers, horse racing, and playing children. This phase did not last long; by late summer and early autumn, Picasso had become preoccupied with the dark subjects of death and despair. He was deeply struck by what he saw in a visit to the women’s prison of Saint-Lazare, where forlorn women with venereal diseases were identified by white bonnets and isolated from the others. But it was the death of his friend Casagemas that now began to haunt him. Picasso was living in the very quarters where his friend had resided at the time of his death. More than that, Picasso had for a time become Germaine Gargallo’s lover.27
Moving from bright colors into darker and predominantly blue tones, Picasso began to work single-mindedly on a series of paintings and drawings in which Casagemas’s ghostly presence hovered—most especially in Casagemas in His Coffin and The Burial of Casagemas. It did not matter that Picasso had not been present for the latter event; perhaps this fact even intensified his obsession with the theme.
Collectors were not interested in purchasing such dark and dismal subjects, and Picasso’s income dramatically shrank.28 Winter set in, and his contract with Mañach came to an end, leaving him cold, desolate, and broke. Unlike his triumphant entrance into Paris the year before, he had to wire his father for money for the train fare back to Barcelona.
Picasso was twenty years old, and his Blue Period had begun.
Chapter Four
Dreams and Reality
(1902)
Debussy had envisioned a dream world in his opera Pelléas et Mélisande, one shrouded in mists and mystery. Unfortunately this dream world quickly collided with the real world when his artistic vision was transferred to the stage. His first major hurdle in bringing Pelléas to life turned out to be Maeterlinck’s insistence that his mistress, the French soprano Georgette Leblanc, play the part of Mélisande.
Leblanc was well qualified, and she indeed would sing the role in a Boston production in 1912, but Debussy preferred the Scottish American Mary Garden, who was a leading soprano at the Opéra-Comique. This grievously offended Maeterlinck, who stomped off in a rage and claimed that the permission he had granted to set his play to music did not give Debussy the sole right to determine the casting. Maeterlinck would eventually sue Debussy over this dispute, but in the meantime consoled himself by publically hoping that the opera would be “an immediate and resounding flop.”1
This unexpected flare-up unsettled an already exhausted and nerve-wracked Debussy, who wrote after the last performance that he was “suffering fatigue to the point of neurasthenia, a de luxe illness I never believed in till now.”2 After fifteen intense weeks of rehearsal, his worst fears were realized when, at the all-important dress rehearsal, the audience began to laugh. At first distraught that anyone could or would find Pelléas funny, Debussy soon heard that programs were being distributed that gave a wickedly salacious précis of the plot. Later, Mary Garden insisted that Maeterlinck himself was behind this malicious hoax.
Pierre and Marie Curie in their laboratory, 1904, Paris. Photo Credit: Album / Art Resource, NY. © Art Resource, NY.
Still, opening night on April 30—if not a complete triumph—was far from a disaster. Having heard about the dress rehearsal’s fracas, the opera’s supporters (including Maurice Ravel) packed the upper galleries, where young music-lovers such as themselves could afford seats, and made their enthusiasm heard. Even though the critics and Debussy’s fellow composers were predictably divided between the traditional and the more open-minded, Paris’s avant-garde quickly embraced this opera as a masterpiece.
Pelléas did sufficiently well that the Opéra-Comique scheduled a revival for that October and continued to present it during all but two of its subsequent prewar seasons. By January 1913 the Opéra-Comique had performed it one hundred times.
Suddenly Debussy had vaulted into the limelight.
Composer Erik Satie attended Pelléas’s opening night and afterward, according to Jean Cocteau, wrote: “Nothing more one can do in that area. . . . I’ve got to find something else or I’ve had it.”3
Satie was favorably astounded, but many others were deeply offended by Debussy’s achievement. Predictably, one of Pelléas’s severest critics was Camille Saint-Saëns, who claimed that he had not taken his usual holiday so he could stay in Paris and “say nasty things about Pelléas.”4 Similarly Théodore Dubois, the arch-conservative director of the Paris Conservatoire, forbade Conservatoire students to attend any Pelléas performance—a sure-fire way of guaranteeing that they would, indeed, clamber into those upper gallery seats and applaud and whistle their hearts out.
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