He unquestionably had his supporters, including the music critic Jean Marnold—who in 1904 (following the String Quartet’s first performance) declared, “One should remember the name of Maurice Ravel. He is one of the masters of tomorrow.”18 Gabriel Fauré also believed in Ravel, and Ravel acknowledged Fauré’s courage in declaring “before the entire Institute that the [Prix de Rome] jury’s decision was scandalous and obviously prepared in advance.” It was especially courageous, Ravel noted, because in so doing, Fauré “permanently excluded himself from the Institute.”19
While Ravel was engaged in dueling with the musical establishment, Debussy by 1903 had attained sufficient acceptance that he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. It was a big moment for him, and afterward he went to show his ribbon to his father, who was speechless. Debussy loved to tell this story. “You see,” he would say, “in that brief moment I could feel pride at having been good for something.”20
In October, Debussy met Emma Bardac, the mother of his pupil Raoul Bardac and the former mistress of Gabriel Fauré. By this time Debussy was a married man, but not a happily married one. In 1899, after breaking with his longtime mistress Gaby Dupont, he had rather suddenly married a pretty but empty-headed clothing model named Lilly Texier, whom he thought “adorable” and courted passionately, but who soon bored him.
Emma Bardac was quite a different matter. Emma was about Debussy’s age (forty-one), the mother of two children, and an accomplished singer. Intelligent and sophisticated, she was everything that Lilly was not. Debussy had a weakness for women who were singers, and Emma—although still married to the father of her children—had an ongoing interest in music and in musical celebrities. Debussy was now a celebrity, and during the course of that autumn, the two were increasingly drawn together.
While Debussy and Emma Bardac were on the brink of shedding their respective spouses, across the Seine, Marie and her beloved husband, Pierre Curie, were hard at work under difficult circumstances in a double act of devotion—to their scientific research and to one another.
In June 1903, Marie Curie finally stood for her doctoral examination in physics. She had begun work on her thesis five years earlier, with the research that led to the discovery of radium. But the intensity of this quest, coupled with her teaching job and the care of her young daughter, had forced her to put off her oral examination. She simply could not find the time to prepare properly.
At last, though, she sent her examiners the text of her thesis: “Researches on Radioactive Substances, by Madame Sklodovska Curie.” She was ready.
The examination room was crowded when she appeared, with onlookers eager to see her and hear what she had to say. Her examiners, dressed in formal evening attire, sat behind a long table as they took turns asking questions, to which she answered calmly and quietly. Despite her announcement of the value of radium’s atomic weight and its position on the table of elements—a discovery of major importance—there was little overt drama; yet at the end, after her examiners formally conferred upon her the rank of “doctor,” one added: “And in the name of the jury, madam, I wish to express to you all our congratulations.”21
It was a moment to savor. There were other moments that year to savor as well, although the first, the Davy Medal from the Royal Society of London, came when Marie was ill. Pierre represented them both, bringing back a heavy medal on which their names were engraved. Not knowing quite what to do with it, he gave it to their six-year-old daughter, who promptly turned it into a plaything.
And then came the news that the Nobel Prize in Physics for that year would be jointly awarded to Marie and Pierre Curie, for their discoveries in radioactivity, and to Henri Becquerel, who had discovered the spontaneous emissions that the Curies had so successfully researched. Disturbingly, there appears to have been an effort early in the consideration process, on the part of several members of the French Academy of Sciences, to deprive Marie of her part of the prize, by willfully ignoring her contribution to the Curies’ discoveries. Fortunately, a prominent member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences got wind of this and notified Pierre, who insisted on the two being recognized together. In the end, the Swedish Academy of Sciences agreed to recognize the joint discoveries of both Curies.
It was overwhelming news, and apart from the welcome cash that accompanied their half of the prize, more of a problem than a benefit. “We are inundated with letters and with visits from photographers and journalists,” Marie wrote her brother, Joseph. “One would like to dig into the ground somewhere to find a little peace.”22
Nowhere did she mention that this was the first time the Nobel Prize had been awarded to a woman.23 Or, for that matter, that the Nobel committee came close to omitting her. But the money was needed and could be accepted because, in accord with the Curies’ strict principles, it would not be contrary to the scientific spirit to do so. With the money, and the creation of a professorship for him at the Sorbonne, Pierre could at last leave his job at the School for Physics and Chemistry, and the Curies could pay for a laboratory assistant. Marie kept her own teaching position but installed a new bathroom in their rented house and repapered one of the rooms. She also loaned and gave money to family members, Polish students, a childhood friend, laboratory assistants, one of Marie’s students in need, and an elderly Frenchwoman residing in Poland who had once taught Marie French, whom Marie invited to come to Paris for a visit, paying for her journey.
Neither Marie nor Pierre attended the ceremony in Stockholm. It was a long and difficult journey to make in winter, and neither could afford to be away for such a length of time. In addition, as Pierre informed the Swedish Academy of Sciences, his wife had been ill that summer and had not yet completely recovered.
It was a sufficiently serious illness that it had also prevented Marie Curie from traveling to London to receive the Davy Medal. The cause, as Marie told her sister Bronya in late August, was that she had suffered a miscarriage. “I am absolutely desperate,” she wrote, “and cannot be consoled. Write to me, I beg of you, if you think I should blame this on general fatigue—for I must admit that I have not spared my strength.” She had relied on her strength and now regretted this bitterly, “as I have paid dear for it.” She had wanted this baby “so badly!”24
Marie Curie had been several months pregnant when she stood for her doctoral examination in late June.25 Despite any satisfaction in having at long last received her doctorate, she was almost immediately plunged into grief and despair—“in such consternation over this accident that I have not the courage to write to anybody.”26
Marie Curie’s illness and depression following her miscarriage cast a shadow over all the year’s triumphs.
Chapter Six
Alliances and Misalliances
(1904)
By June 1904, Debussy’s marriage was disintegrating. He and Emma Bardac had become lovers, and in July Debussy dispatched his wife (who remained uninformed of what was going on) to her parents’ summer place in Burgundy. He then sent her letters hinting of trouble to come.
The first, addressed to “Petite Lily-Lilo,” told her that she “mustn’t think I got any pleasure out of putting you so deliberately on the train. It was hard for me! Only, for reasons I’ll explain to you later, it had to be done.” He signed it, “Yours passionately, tenderly, Claude.”1 Perhaps he should have signed it, “passionately, tenderly, and hypocritically,” but in any case, it was enough to send up warning signals.
If this communication was not enough to cause Lilly consternation, Debussy’s complete disappearance was. Only his publisher, Jacques Durand, knew his summer address in Jersey (where the composer had gone with Emma), and Debussy instructed Durand to “go on telling everybody [Debussy’s italics] you don’t know my address, including my dear family.”2 By his “dear family,” Debussy of course meant Lilly. He never had kept up much with the rest of his relations, and he was not about to begin now.
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nbsp; Portrait of Isadora Duncan dancing, 1904. Photo Credit: Universal Images Group / Art Resource, NY. © Art Resource, NY.
Debussy had a difficult meeting with Lilly in mid-September, about which he said little except (as he told his friend André Messager) that his life “these last months has been bizarre in the extreme, far more than one might have wished. I’d rather spare you the details, which I find tiresome.”3 When he returned to Paris at the end of September, he moved out of the apartment he had shared with Lilly and into quarters of his own.
Lilly was frantic and threatened suicide. Debussy paid little attention—after all, wasn’t this what forsaken lovers did in Belle Epoque Paris? And then, on October 13, Lilly shot herself in the stomach. She survived, but the surgeons were unable to remove the bullet, which remained with her for the rest of her life. Unmoved by this near brush with death (Debussy seems to have regarded Lilly’s failed attempt as little more than a bid for his attention and sympathy), Debussy proceeded into an acrimonious divorce.
In January 1904, Misia and Thadée Natanson divorced. The following July, Alfred Edwards and his wife followed suit. Edwards typically had pulled strings and twisted arms to get what he wanted. What he wanted was Misia, and although she had become his mistress, this was not a sufficiently binding arrangement to satisfy him. Edwards bought off Thadée, and soon he would wed Misia. Yet not surprisingly, this marriage—begun in scandal—would not end well.
During these months Rodin, who had never lacked female companionship, entered into a relationship with the English artist Gwen John, who had fallen desperately in love with him. Calling him her master and her god, she told him that her only wish in life was to serve him. Their lovemaking, she assured him, was an act of worship.
Rodin seemed to have taken this in stride and continued work on The Thinker, which he was enlarging for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis. When a group of his supporters took up a subscription to keep it in France, the state readily accepted the gift, agreeing to place it in front of the Panthéon, where it remained for several years. It now stands in the gardens of the Musée Rodin.
In the meantime, 1904 brought the marriage of Rodin’s dear friend Helene von Hindenburg to Count Alfred von Nostitz of Saxony. The marriage, which seems to have been a happy one, did not end Helene’s close friendship with Rodin. Letters between them would continue to flow until the outbreak of war in 1914.
Wedding presents for socially prominent Parisian couples during the Belle Epoque were expected to be over-the-top—in large part because the information of who gave what was regularly listed in the newspapers. In 1904, for example, when the Marquis Dadvisard married Geneviève Haincque de Saint-Senoch, their wedding gifts included bags of diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, as well as a diamond-encrusted bodice. Madame Perquer gave the lucky couple a Louis XVI table (carefully reported as “d’époque” rather than a copy), while the Duchesse de Trévise, not to be outdone, presented them with a solid gold vase, and the Marquise de Sers parted with a pear-shaped knot of diamonds and pearls.
Several years earlier, Amélie Parayre had received gifts of jewels from her parents’ employers, the high-flying Humberts, when she married Matisse. Yet her treasured emerald ring had long since disappeared, to pay for Cézanne’s inspirational Three Bathers, and the Matisses’ larder had been close to empty for some time. So it was a totally unfamiliar feeling when, following an unexpected visit from a wealthy young entrepreneur named André Level, Henri Matisse found himself counting out franc notes in large denominations.
Level, a previously conventional collector who had taken to modern art, had formed an art-buying syndicate called the Peau de l’Ours, and he was most interested in what he had seen at the Salon d’Automne the previous October. Gamely climbing the five flights to Matisse’s Quai St-Michel studio, Level picked out a still life and a landscape, leaving Matisse with four one-hundred-franc bills in exchange.
Dazed by this good fortune, Matisse was at a loss for words when, soon after, a colleague stopped by. Many years later Matisse recalled that the only response he could manage was to place a one-hundred-franc bill on the floor and step back. He then put down another bill and stepped back. Then a third, with an accompanying step, and then the fourth. At that, his friend dubiously asked him, “Have you killed someone?”4
That June, Matisse had his first one-man show, courtesy of the prominent art dealer Ambroise Vollard. Deciding to play it safe, Matisse selected paintings from his past, ones that were far more conservative than what he currently was creating. Given his financial situation, he felt that he had little choice. When the show was reasonably successful, once again Matisse seemed headed for the kind of acceptance that had appeared to be his all those years ago, before he deliberately threw it away to follow his artistic vision.
Yet once again, Matisse’s artistic integrity intervened. When a dealer agreed to pay him handsomely for every conventional still life he could produce, Matisse suddenly realized that he could not do it. This moment of truth struck him as he finished a still life that was reasonably good but very much like the one before it. “There was a temptation to deliver it,” he later told the New Yorker’s famed Paris correspondent, Janet Flanner, “but I knew that if I yielded it would be my artistic death.” On looking back, he realized that it took courage to destroy that picture, but he did it. With relief, he concluded, “I count my emancipation from that day.”5
Breaking away from that particular hack work may have made all the difference to Matisse the artist, but to Matisse the family man, it was quite a different matter. He had a wife and three children, and the sacrifice they all were making on his behalf was sometimes unbearable. Still, summer in a tiny cottage in St-Tropez opened up a world of light and color for the struggling artist.
In addition, two Americans who would become his staunchest supporters were about to arrive in Paris. Enticed by Gertrude and Leo Stein’s letters and prompted by his artistic wife, Sarah, Michael Stein retired from his position with the San Francisco cable car company and, in late 1903 or early 1904, moved with Sarah and his young son, Allan, to Paris.
Although this branch of the Stein family originally intended to stay in France for only a short time, they ultimately ended up remaining for three decades. In the years following their arrival in Paris, their apartment—at 58 Rue Madame, not far from 27 Rue de Fleurus—would become just as much a mecca for the avant-garde as was Leo and Gertrude’s.
In the meantime, Leo and Gertrude Stein began to collect. It was soon after Leo’s arrival that he bought his first Cézanne from Vollard, but it was not until 1904, following his more in-depth introduction to the artist via Charles Loeser, an extraordinary American collector in Florence, that Leo became a Cézanne enthusiast. As Gertrude recalled, she and Leo told Vollard that “what they wanted was one of those marvelously yellow sunny Aix landscapes of which Loeser had several examples.” Vollard, who had been trying to show them everything but landscapes, now came back with “a wonderful small green landscape. It was lovely,” Gertrude wrote, “it did not cost much and they bought it.”6 Leo regarded the transaction in far more revolutionary terms: “So now,” he recalled, “I was a Columbus setting sail for the world beyond the world.”7
Picasso returned to Barcelona in 1903 as a failure. Gertrude Stein later wrote, “There were things that at that time cut deeply into his spanish pride and the end of his Montmartre life was bitterness and disillusion, and there is nothing more bitter than spanish disillusion.”8
Gertrude Stein may have been referring to a slightly later period in Picasso’s life, but her observation certainly held true for this difficult phase. He returned to his old room in his parents’ apartment, dejected and—despite the back of the hand that the City of Light had showed him—longing for Paris.
Yet Picasso immediately took advantage of the security that Barcelona gave him to work through his demons. It was now, after a hiatus of mor
e than a year, that Casagemas’s image reappeared—in La Vie, the masterpiece of Picasso’s Blue period.9 Here the figure of a suffering Casagemas stands, naked, with a naked Germaine clinging mournfully to him. Facing them is an expressionless robed woman holding an infant.
La Vie has prompted endless debate. Does it represent sacred versus profane love, the cycle of life, or simply a recognition of human misery? No one knows. Perhaps its creator had many ideas in mind, possibly conflicting ones. X-rays have shown that Picasso originally painted himself as the masculine figure, then replaced it with Casagemas. There are also indications that Picasso, always superstitious, was responding to the Tarot readings that Max Jacob had taught him.
Complicating the already complex, Picasso painted La Vie over an earlier work, Last Moments, which he had stored in Barcelona after its showing at the 1900 Paris exposition. Although this offers myriad possibilities for analysis, what Picasso probably was doing was what any impoverished painter would have done in his place—utilizing the canvas from an outmoded painting he no longer valued.
More somber paintings in blue followed, all of pitiful subjects—from a blind beggar to a destitute family standing forlornly on the seashore. Yet by 1904, Picasso had begun to move beyond this somber mode. He had also decided to return to Paris. Although he publicly announced that he and a friend were leaving for an exhibition of their latest works in Paris, there was no such exhibition planned. Instead, Picasso had a more permanent removal to Paris in mind. A friend was moving out of his studio in a ramshackle building called the Bateau-Lavoir on the slope of Montmartre. This studio was Picasso’s, if he wanted it.
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 11