Ravel attended every one of the fourteen performances of Pelléas’s first run, applauding enthusiastically from the upper galleries along with his fellow students. By this time he and Debussy were friends, and although they were not and never would become close, Debussy seems to have appreciated Ravel’s deep admiration.
Ravel now was earning a small income by giving private lessons in harmony and composition, after spending the earlier months of the year competing once again for the Prix de Rome. Once again he was a finalist, but this time he failed to take any prize at all.
It was a maddening situation—and challenge—for the young composer, who continued to premiere his works. That April the brilliant young pianist Ricardo Viñes, who in the course of his career would introduce a panoply of contemporary music, including most of the piano works of Debussy and Ravel, premiered Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte and Jeux d’eau at a recital presented by the eminent Société Nationale de Musique.
Camille Saint-Saëns had been a major force in founding the Société in 1871, which he had hoped would help bring young French composers to public attention. It was a worthy ambition, but Saint-Saëns’s idea of appropriate music did not include the music of Ravel or Debussy. Vincent d’Indy subsequently took the lead at the Société, and although he embraced conservative musical (as well as political) traditions, he would become an active supporter of contemporary composers such as Debussy, Satie, and Ravel, even if he did not necessarily care for what they wrote.
This recital was an important one for Ravel, and he had placed his music in good hands. Viñes, a good friend whom Ravel had known from the Conservatoire, was a gifted pianist, and the critics enjoyed his performance of Ravel’s pleasant and accessible Pavane. But they did not like Jeux d’eau, which was altogether too challenging for them. Ravel had poured himself into the latter work, which today is considered a landmark in piano composition, but it would be years before his audience would understand what he had achieved.
Berthe Weill slid almost accidently into selling modern art, first with those three drawings by Picasso that she bought in 1900 from Picasso’s dealer Mañach, and then, in early 1902, with a show that included the still-unknown artist Henri Matisse. Nothing by Matisse sold, but a few months later Weill managed to sell one of his still lifes to the avant-garde collector Arthur Huc, who had previously bought Picasso’s Moulin de la Galette. Already Matisse and Picasso had begun to leapfrog one another in what would become an epic rivalry, although for now neither had an inkling of what was to come.
In June Matisse participated in another Weill show and this time did better, much to his own as well as Weill’s pleasure. Although new to the business and facing heavy competition from the likes of Vollard and Durand-Ruel, Weill had good instincts and an even bigger heart. Matisse became one of her “finds,” and she championed him, taking delight in the increasing audacity of his painting.
Amélie’s hard work in her hat shop was beginning to pay off and promised to help Matisse weather this seemingly interminable period while he was finding himself. It was a major misfortune, then, when a disaster on her side of the family soon removed that reliable prop from their lives. Her parents had for years been the major supporters and right-hand aides of Frédéric and Thérèse Humbert, an influential couple whose progressive politics meshed well with their own but whose massive borrowing, coupled with increasingly irregular financial schemes and influence-peddling, eventually led to disaster. The Humberts’ extraordinary access to money and power were based on Thérèse Humbert’s elaborately constructed claim to an enormous family inheritance. But when—after many years of high flying—this proved fraudulent, ruin and disgrace quickly followed. In 1902, when the sensational scandal finally broke, the Humberts immediately took to their heels, leaving the faithful and unwitting Parayres ruined and ostracized. Worse yet, the prestige of those elite members of government and society who were caught in the Humberts’ web was such that it threatened the very honor and stability of the Republic.
Matisse now used his own previously disregarded legal background to go to his father-in-law’s defense, and he succeeded in getting him acquitted of complicity in the Humberts’ schemes. Unfortunately Amélie’s health had failed, and her hat shop fell victim to the family disaster. With no other options, in early 1903 the Matisses finally left Paris to live with Henri’s parents, in the bleak and unforgiving regions of Henri Matisse’s birth.
For many months Matisse would produce little. Sleepless and ill, he was about to give up.
Unlike Matisse, Georges Braque was filled with hope. In 1902, after successfully serving his one-year term of military service (reduced on account of his artist-craftsman certificate), Braque decided that he wanted to return to Paris to become a real artist.
Unlike the parents of so many other aspiring artists, the Braques did not fuss, and even supplied Georges with a small allowance. Thus fortified, Braque headed off once more to Paris, where he studied painting and rented the proverbial dingy studio in Montmartre. He spent time at museums and at galleries, where he admired the Impressionist paintings of Monet, Renoir, and Sisley. He also found Seurat’s pointillism appealing, but in the end it was the work of Vincent van Gogh that moved him to the core.
Van Gogh had sold only one painting during his short lifetime, and although several small exhibits of his work had appeared during the 1890s, it was not until 1901 that a prominent Paris gallery, the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, held a major retrospective. Seen comprehensively, these van Goghs created a sensation and helped bring together Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, and André Derain in what would emerge as the color-drenched Fauve movement. Eventually Georges Braque would join them.
However, this still lay in the future, and none of the principals yet had any idea of what was coming. In the meantime Braque never suffered in the manner of van Gogh or Matisse or so many other artists. He attended classes at a local academy, where the director taught him nothing but at least allowed him to paint as he pleased. Braque then entered a feeder-academy for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but found it so stultifying that he left.
It was a great time for learning and for experimentation, and Braque was enjoying himself. Why anguish when one could be happy?
They were poor, they were overworked, and they were badly treated by those who should have known better and could have done something about it. Yes, there were occasional grants, but these were unpredictable and never addressed the Curies’ basic need for a good laboratory and the regular salaries (and freedom) that professorships would provide. Pierre Curie had a heavy and poorly paid teaching load at the Polytechnic School for Physics and Chemistry (operated by the City of Paris), while his brilliant young wife, Marie Sklodovska Curie—looking for additional ways to make ends meet—had found work at a teacher-training school, the Higher Normal School for Girls at Sèvres, west of Paris. At the same time both Curies were ardently committed to their research work—an ongoing and grueling business that they were carrying out in a rough wooden shed lacking heat or amenities. And they were just as ardently devoted to raising their young daughter, Irène.
Pierre Curie needed a professorship to live on and a laboratory to work in, but he had encountered repeated rebuffs in his attempts to attain either. A quiet and self-effacing man as well as a brilliant physicist, he had neither the ability nor the interest to promote himself. Firmly believing that his work should speak for itself, he repeatedly found that it could not and did not. The same year when he and Marie (with the assistance of Gustave Bémont) discovered polonium and were on the brink of discovering radium, the Sorbonne rejected him for a professorship in physical chemistry. According to his detractors—who turned up their noses at his unconventional, largely home-schooled education—Pierre Curie’s many discoveries and publications in crystallography, magnetism, and electricity did not qualify him for the post.
Soon after, based on his pioneering work in crystalline physics, Pi
erre Curie applied for a Sorbonne professorship in mineralogy and was similarly rejected. After the Academy of Sciences subsequently turned him down for membership, he refused to let his name be included on a list of candidates for the Legion of Honor. He had already wasted too much time in interviews, he said, and in the end he preferred a job and a laboratory over the Legion’s coveted red silk ribbon.
“You hardly eat at all, either of you,” a concerned friend wrote, as both Pierre and Marie raced between their research, jobs, and family obligations. “More than once I have seen Mme Curie nibble two slices of sausage and swallow a cup of tea with it,” the friend continued. “Do you think even a robust constitution would not suffer from such insufficient nourishment?”5
There was no good answer to such a question. Yet despite grinding poverty, Pierre and Marie early on decided against profiting from their discovery of radium and radiation. Instead of patenting the technique that Marie had developed to isolate it, they decided to publish the results of their research, in accord with the scientific spirit. As Marie Curie later wrote, “This was a great benefit to the radium industry, which was enabled to develop in full liberty.”6
The Curies had decided to forego wealth in the interest of science.
Emile Zola was old, but he still was thinking expansively. He had recently published Vérité (Truth), the third in his projected Evangelical series of novels, and he had told those grouped admiringly around him that “I should be allowed to dream a little in my old age.”7 Conscious of the dangers of war in an increasingly connected world, he saw his next and last book in the Evangelical series as a veritable hymn to international peace. One wonders what his acerbic friend, the late Edmond de Goncourt, would have made of these grand and inevitably self-inflating visions. There had always been an element of pomposity in Zola that Goncourt had been quick to skewer. After all, the great man could be more than a trifle irritating.
Still, Zola was basking in the afterglow of a triumphant career, capped by a political triumph that only an author such as Victor Hugo had previously managed. Zola the novelist had become a hero, and he was proud of it. He was at the head of a general movement of progress, and he had graciously accepted a place among its secular saints.
His home life still had its difficulties, but Zola was beginning to take his illegitimate children to public places, including a performance by Sarah Bernhardt in L’Aiglon. As his daughter, Denise, remembered, “He thought it important that we hear her because she had aged and might not, in his view, act much longer.”8 What never occurred to Zola was that he might die before—long before—Bernhardt.
It was in fact an odd and mysterious ending to a remarkable career—one that Zola himself could not have written better. Although a noted hypochondriac, he seemed in reasonably robust health when he retired to bed that chilly night of September 29, 1902, leaving a small coal fire burning and after carefully closing and locking the windows (he had, after all, received numerous death threats). But sometime during the night he became horribly ill and arose, awakening his wife, Alexandrine, who also felt nauseous and dizzy. She saw him reel and fall, but she was unable to pull the cord to summon the sleeping servants. Nor could either of them manage to open a window.
The next morning the servants found them there—Zola stretched out on the floor near the bed and Alexandrine, deadly pale, lying on her pillow. Alexandrine still showed faint signs of life and would survive, but the great novelist was dead.
The verdict was carbon monoxide poisoning. It had affected Zola more than his wife because he had fallen to the floor, where the poisonous gas had most heavily accumulated from what must have been a blocked chimney.
And yet the chimney was not blocked. Nor was there any residual evidence of carbon monoxide. Specialists tried to replicate the fatal incident but could not. They lit fires in the bedroom and shut the windows. They left guinea pigs overnight to test the air, but the little fellows survived. They took apart the flue but found nothing of note there. Despite this mystery, the coroner announced that Zola had died from natural causes and declined to pursue the matter further, ruling only that these reports be kept private.
Many, including Zola’s mistress, had their doubts, and whispers of “murder” began to circulate. Years later, a Parisian roofer confessed on his deathbed that he had been working on a nearby roof before that fatal night and, in revenge for Zola’s role in the Dreyfus Affair, had sealed his chimney. The following morning he unsealed the chimney before anyone noticed. It sounded plausible, but no one could substantiate the man’s claim, and the mystery remains.
The abruptness and the strangeness of Zola’s death created enormous shock, and the outpouring of grief was enormous. Flowers and tributes swamped his house on Rue de Bruxelles, arriving from as far away as San Francisco. Zola’s efforts on behalf of Dreyfus still resonated with vast numbers of people, great and small, and they wanted to express their grief in tangible ways.
One in particular was Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who quietly stood vigil with the body along with a round-the-clock procession of Zola’s closest friends. Although Alexandrine feared that Dreyfus’s presence might set off violent protests from the still-simmering ranks of anti-Dreyfusards, he joined the thousands of mourners on October 5 who followed the coffin and its honor guard to Montmartre Cemetery. Much to everyone’s relief the huge crowd was well behaved, and only the sound of shuffling footsteps broke the peace and quiet.
At the gravesite Anatole France—once an opponent, but since the Dreyfus Affair a friend and comrade—eulogized Zola as he would have wished to be remembered. “Let us envy him,” France concluded, for “he has honored his country and the world through an immense work and through a great action. Envy him his destiny and his heart, which made his lot that of the greatest: he was a moment of the conscience of man!”9
Throughout the Dreyfus Affair, right-wing Catholics’ scorching anti-Semitism and appeal to violence, as well as the absence of influential Catholic voices on Dreyfus’s behalf, had hardened anticlericalism throughout France and especially in Paris, where anticlericalism formed the basis for a political realignment that increasingly unified the political left. From the Dreyfusards’ point of view, the Dreyfus Affair in its largest sense had been a last-ditch attempt by the Catholic Church to overthrow the Republic. Even after passions over Dreyfus himself subsided, strong anticlericalism remained, ready to flair up as the struggle between Church and state intensified.
By the time elections were held in May 1902, the nation had solidly divided into two distinct camps of left versus right, with little between. It was an election marked by passionate polemics and vehement denunciations, whose outcome was a victory for the leftist coalition already in power.10
Now firmly in the saddle, the new prime minister, Emile Combes, used his parliamentary majority to take on the religious orders and close a large number of their schools. With the May elections, Georges Clemenceau also reentered politics, this time in the Senate—an institution he had previously condemned as undemocratic and whose abolition he had repeatedly called for. Yet though he now demonstrated a startling new ability to compromise—at least where his career was concerned—Clemenceau still was a tiger on the question of Church and state. In his first Senate speech (on October 30), after distinguishing between the Catholic religion and the Church as an institution, he strongly supported Combes’s decision to close so many Catholic schools. Addressing the Church as an institution, he called for an end to its legal privileges, most especially its financing by the state (which had been writ in stone ever since Napoleon’s time) and the privileges enjoyed by its religious orders.
Much like Charles de Gaulle’s Jesuit school on Rue de Vaugirard, most of France’s Catholic schools would find ways of surviving for a while longer.But anticlericalism was ascendant in France, and the fight to assert political supremacy over the Church was rapidly gaining strength.
During this year of high-decibel
elections and growing tension between Church and state, relations between labor and management also became acrimonious. Numerous strikes broke out, prompted by pockets of unemployment and reductions in wages. Miners in particular felt abused and took to the picket lines. Still, France’s general prosperity continued, and against this promising background new entrepreneurs such as André Citroën felt sufficiently confident to launch new and cutting-edge enterprises.
It was in 1902, after completing his military service, that Citroën invested everything he had in a small workshop in northern Paris, near the Gare du Nord. Citroën established his firm, André Citroën & Cie (Compagnie, or Company) in the expectation that he could do what others before him had failed to accomplish—figure out a way to manufacture the helical double chevron-shaped gears he had seen in Poland. If successful, the applications for such gears were mind-boggling. Citroën accurately envisioned uses in factories and generating stations as well as in the milling, mining, and metalworking industries. He also anticipated uses in printing and textile machinery—anything where great exactness as well as high operating speed, abrupt speed changes, and sudden reversing were necessary. The future looked bright, if only he could discover a way to manufacture such a complex gear.
The critical element was precision. So far it had proved impossible to manufacture such a gear with the high degree of exactness necessary; such gears could not be successfully cast or molded, as the Polish company had attempted, nor had anyone yet managed to cut such a pattern from a block of steel. Still, Citroën was aware that recent advances in the United States had opened up new possibilities, and within months he developed the machinery he needed, using special cutting tools that he imported from America.
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