He was about to embark on many years of great creativity, which would last until the outbreak of war. He also was about to receive regular and substantial remuneration, since he now began a professional relationship with Auguste and Jacques Durand of Durand and Company, who agreed to publish his works in return for a twelve-thousand-franc annuity. All in all, as Ravel told another friend, “I have never been so happy to be alive, and I firmly believe that joy is far more fertile than suffering.”29
Unlike Ravel, by the summer of 1905, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke was in poor health, broke, and drifting. Yet he continued to regard Rodin as the lodestar of his life, and from Germany wrote him: “What moves me, Master, is the need to see you again and feed for a brief while on the glowing vitality of your beautiful works.”30 Rodin was flattered and sent a letter expressing his affection and admiration. Reassured by this vote of confidence, Rilke decided to return to Paris.
The upshot was a happy one—at least at first. Rodin effusively welcomed Rilke and invited him to stay at Meudon as his secretary, an offer that Rilke enthusiastically accepted. After all, as Rilke wrote his wife, “He is so alone and there are hundreds and hundreds of things that take up his time, and he never finds the right secretary to take care of the correspondence.”31
At first Rodin treated Rilke like a son—unlike Auguste Beuret, Rodin’s despised illegitimate son by Rose Beuret, whom the sculptor refused to acknowledge. The autumn months of 1905 were rich and relaxed, filled with walks, talks, and expeditions. Yet Rodin was accustomed to tyrannizing those who served him, and soon gentle Rilke would discover “what it was like to live at close quarters with a moody and autocratic giant.”32
In the meantime, Isadora Duncan was beginning to learn what it was like to live with her own moody and autocratic giant. In late 1904 she had gone to St. Petersburg, where she upended the dancing world and made an indelible impression on devotees and dancers alike—including the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and a young dancer by the name of Michel Fokine.33 She took a brief time-out to open her school in Gruenwald, but then returned to St. Petersburg in February 1905, soon after the Bloody Sunday massacre. Gordon Craig, who accompanied her, seems not to have noticed the aftermath of this tragedy, but Isadora—who would become a passionate supporter of the pre-Stalin Soviet regime, and who eventually dedicated one of her dances to the victims of Bloody Sunday—recalled the deep impression made on her by one of the funeral processions on the dawn of her arrival.34
This tour was not as successful as her first Russian tour; traditionalists had anticipated her return and rallied to criticize her dancing and her use of concert music to dance to. In addition, Isadora’s relationship with Gordon Craig was beginning to fray. By now, she was fully paying for everything, including his support, for which he seemed quite pleased with himself. “I’m not making a penny but living like a Duke,” he bragged to his friend, the composer and musicologist Martin Shaw.35 Worse, in March Isadora discovered that Craig’s English mistress (Elena Meo) had given birth to a son (Edward A. Craig, who already had two sisters by Craig, one of whom had died). Isadora may not have known at the time that Craig was sending Elena money—Isadora’s money—and had promised to return to Elena as soon as he was financially able to do so. Yet the shock of this baby was great enough on its own, especially since Craig had talked of marriage with Isadora, and she so desperately wanted a baby of her own.
Despite this, Isadora remained hopelessly in love with Gordon Craig. She adored him, she believed in him, and after she erupted in anger upon learning of his deception, she abjectly apologized. “Dear,” she wrote him, “I feel awfully ashamed—ashamed is not the word. I feel dust & ashes—it was an awful kind of rage that took possession of me—let my pain atone for it.”36
Confronted with his perfidy, Craig played the puzzled innocent,37 a role at which he was especially adept, despite his three children by Elena and five other offspring by his wife, May Gibson, and his common-law wife, Jess Dorynne. It is unclear whether Isadora yet knew of Craig’s marriage or his common-law wife, or even the number of children he had fathered. The new baby was enough, and she was desolate.
By 1905, Paul Poiret had prospered. His atelier on Rue Auber, well located by the Paris Opera, had become too small for his growing business, and he was about to move again, this time to a private house on Rue Pasquier (8th). There he would elegantly refrain from shop signs or window displays. He needed neither, having already established a loyal clientele by challenging the established dressmaking conventions of the day.
He already had jettisoned the corset—“this abominated apparatus,” as he called it, that divided its wearer into two masses, with the bust stuck prominently out in front and the behind projecting just as prominently to the rear, “so that the lady looked as if she were hauling a trailer.”38 Dispensing with this unforgiving and uncomfortable understructure made new concepts in draped designs possible, starting with Poiret’s famous kimono that had so shocked a Russian princess at the House of Worth that it prompted his original decision to strike out on his own. From then on the kimono, in various versions, would be a Poiret staple.
Poiret was not the only denizen of the Belle Epoque attuned to Greek and Far Eastern influences, as Isadora Duncan and the Spanish designer Mariano Fortuny clearly showed, but Poiret would also revolutionize fashion’s color palette. It probably was no coincidence that at this time he was living near the Fauvist painters Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain in Chatou, a former Impressionist haunt just west of Paris. Poiret later wrote that when he began to do what he wanted to do in dress-designing, the only colors being used were “washed-out and insipid.” Given to metaphorical bomb-throwing, he “threw into this sheepcote a few rough wolves; reds, greens, violets, royal blues, that made all the rest sing aloud.”39
Dramatic to the core, this wild beast of fashion would soon find his inspiration in some of the most striking theatrical events of the Belle Epoque.
André Citroën’s company had expanded and prospered so much by 1905 that he decided to move to larger premises in a new industrial area on the Seine’s left bank, beyond the Eiffel Tower, on what now is the Quai André-Citroën. It was at this time that Citroën first became involved with the fledgling automobile industry, producing five hundred engines for the Paris-based Sizaire-Naudin auto manufacturers. An old friend, Jacques Hinstin, headed the Sizaire-Naudin firm, and Citroën would soon be seeing a lot of him.
François Coty was also doing well in new quarters, which he had shrewdly taken in an affluent part of town, just north of the Champs-Elysées. Space there was limited, but the address (on Rue La Boétie) was a good one and worth the effort to cram showroom, shop, laboratory, and packaging department under one small roof. Much as Coty expected and desired, his perfume business continued to surge. The year 1905 was a big one for him, during which he presented two new hits: Ambre Antique and, especially, L’Origan, which according to perfume aficionados was an exceptionally daring blend, suitable for those daring Fauvist times.
It was while Coty was launching his seductive new perfumes that an ambitious young woman by the name of Helena Rubinstein was studying dermatology in Paris. Born in Krakow’s Jewish ghetto, by her late teens she had fled to an aunt and uncle in Vienna to escape an arranged marriage. From Vienna she then decamped for Australia, where she began to make and sell face cream—Crème Valaze, as she called it, billed as containing herbs imported from the Carpathian Mountains but largely composed of sheep lanolin, one of Australia’s most accessible but least glamorous products. Rubinstein found a backer, sold pots of the stuff at steep prices, and soon could afford to open a salon in Melbourne that melded the beauty-care business with the trappings of scientific and medical techniques, diagnosing the patron’s skin and prescribing proper treatment.
Rubinstein’s 1905 stay in Paris was little more than a way-stop (spent with one of her sisters, who resided there) as she burnished her reputation by studying
skin treatment with specialists throughout Europe. She soon returned to Australia and to her booming business; but given the nature of that business, Paris would inevitably beckon again.
Paris had long held the crown in culture, fashion, and style, but staunch French Catholics still prayed for a reversal of the materialism and secularism that so blatantly flourished around them. In 1905, as work began on its bell tower, the basilica of Sacré-Coeur rose white and shining from its pinnacle on the Butte of Montmartre, holding the light of morality and spirituality high above the benighted masses below. Despite the efforts of anticlerical republicans, who saw Sacré-Coeur as a flagrant symbol of the superiority of Church over state, and despite the fury of former Communards, who resented Sacré-Coeur’s most certainly intentional placement on the very spot where the 1871 Commune uprising had burst forth, the basilica had overcome a host of physical as well as political obstacles and by now was a permanent if still incomplete presence overlooking Paris.40
Simmering for years behind the pristine whiteness of Sacré-Coeur was the rumble of anticlerical discontent with the Church’s power, its invasiveness in political affairs, and its dominance in education. Still, for years all but the political far left were wary of attacking the Church head-on, and since the 1880s anticlericals had chipped away at secularizing French life only in those areas most likely to receive public support, mainly in the realm of education. Education meant the Jesuits, who had long dominated French secondary education (the collèges) and who for just as long had stirred up suspicion, hatred, and suppression in several nations, including France, which had abolished them even before a pope formally dissolved the order in 1773. Following the revival of the French monarchy, another pope reestablished the order, and the Jesuits staged a sturdy comeback in France until, in the 1880s, the Third Republic removed the clergy from the schools and once again dissolved the order in France. Despite this setback, the Jesuits managed to return to their roles as schoolmasters through legal loopholes and the staunch support of conservative Catholics like the de Gaulles, who comprised a sufficiently vocal and prickly minority that they were for the moment allowed their way.
Relations between Church and state in France had a long and tangled history, complicated during the opening years of the twentieth century by the agreement struck a century before between Napoleon Bonaparte and the Church—the agreement known as the Concordat. This defined Roman Catholicism as the religion of the majority of the French people, and stated that the state would henceforth pay the clergy and nominate bishops. In return, the Church agreed to renounce its claims to the extensive property it had lost during the Revolution. The Concordat lasted for more than a century, but its life now looked in peril. In 1902, a commission was established to examine propositions regarding the separation of Church and state and the elimination of the Concordat, and by 1905 the combination of a strongly anticlerical prime minister (Combes, followed by his successor, Maurice Rouvier), backed by the Assembly and goaded by Clemenceau, brought the long-simmering problem to a head.
To separate Church and state would be “as foolish an act as to release wild beasts from their cages in the Place de la Concorde to pounce on pedestrians,” one fervent Catholic warned,41 but by December 1905 both Senate and Assembly had accepted the law ending the Concordat and promulgating the separation of Church and state during the year to come.
Standing apart from the fray, Abbé Mugnier quietly declared—in the privacy of his journal—that this frantic concern about religious associations and organizations completely missed the point of what religion should be about. “What about justice,” he asked, “and charity, and resignation, and courage, and everything which makes the human soul to live!” Religion, he continued, “is a spirit, a movement of the heart. You make of it a power, a society, an exterior force, something which struggles with other powers and other societies. To love God and one’s fellow man, is it necessary to have so much materiality?”42
Yet Abbé Mugnier was a rarity among the clergy. In a year that had begun with the rebellion of the Fauvist “wild beasts,” the break-up of Church and state seemed, to the apprehensive faithful, to signal the end of the world as they knew it and a tide of revolutionary secularism to come.
Chapter Eight
La Valse
(1906)
Early in 1906 Maurice Ravel began work on a grand waltz, which he called “a sort of homage to the memory of the great Strauss.” Not Richard Strauss, he clarified, but “the other one, Johann.” Writing to his friend, the music critic Jean Marnold, he added: “You know of my deep sympathy for these wonderful rhythms, and that I value the joie de vivre expressed by the dance.”1
At first Ravel simply called the work “Vienna,” and several months later he wrote Misia Edwards: “Perhaps I’ll make up my mind to undertake ‘Vienna,’ which is intended for you, as you know.”2 Yet Ravel put his waltz aside and would not complete it until after the war, by which time it had taken on far darker tones. No longer “Vienna,” it became simply La Valse, and instead of expressing the joie de vivre of the dance, it summoned up memories of a vanished world spinning out of control.
Ravel would indeed dedicate the work to Misia in 1920, after it emerged as La Valse. He had valued Misia’s support during the Prix de Rome and was grateful for the much-needed summer respite she had given him on her yacht, the Aimée. There was little that he could give her in return except for this dedication; her new husband, the wealthy Alfred Edwards, gave her everything she wanted, and much more. She had piles of jewels, a yacht of her own, and a husband who seemed desperate to please her. And then, quite suddenly, all of this changed.
Maurice Ravel at the piano. Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France. Photo Credit: Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. © Art Resource, NY.
Not surprisingly, this total reversal occurred because of another woman. Edwards had recently renovated his Théâtre de Paris for Bernhardt’s great rival, Réjane, and he and Misia presided over the opening gala. It was the same theater where Misia had first caught Edwards’s eye, but on this occasion a beautiful and ambitious young actress and demimondaine by the name of Geneviève Lantelme caught Edwards’s eye. Quite abruptly he forgot Misia and set off in pursuit of Geneviève.
From Edwards’s point of view, Geneviève’s lurid reputation only enhanced her desirability, and he deluged her with jewels and flowers. Much as Misia had done, Geneviève first ignored him. Then Edwards wrote a play for her and cast her in the leading role. Soon they became lovers, and Misia discovered, too late, that she was jealous. Worse, Edwards now was beginning to treat Misia as he had treated his former wife. It was unbearable.
Edwards installed Geneviève in an expensive town house on Rue Fortuny, just north of Parc Monceau. As it happened, Geneviève was cheating on Edwards with a handsome operetta star, and one day Edwards’s detective caught them in flagrante. Yet instead of cooling Edwards’s ardor, this offense merely intensified it. Edwards wanted most what he could not get, and Geneviève was playing hard to get. Misia had been hard to get, too, but she had not been playing at it. Now, she discovered that for the first time in her life she was lowering herself to chase a man she had already lost.
Despairing, she escaped for the fashionable Grand Hôtel, Cabourg, in Normandy. Unfortunately there was no escape from her social set, which traveled to all the same places she did. In the Grand Hôtel’s dining room, Marcel Proust was amused to see Misia in the center of what he described as a stage set for the third act of a farce. Near the unfortunate Misia were her husband, Edwards, and his beloved, la belle Lantelme. Nearby was Edwards’s former brother-in-law (“first husband of the last Mme Edwards,” Proust slyly explained, and “the fourth of the species because before the present one he had already married two Americans, a Frenchwoman and a Greek”). Worse yet, Misia’s first husband, Thadée Natanson, was among this jolly throng. Proust, who witnessed and thoroughly enjoyed the
scene, wrote to his friend and former lover, Reynaldo Hahn, that “yesterday evening there was a rumor circulating that Mme Edwards (Natanson) had killed Edwards (the Englishman who is in fact a Turk), but there was nothing in it, nothing happened at all.”3
While Ravel was starting on his waltz, which would eventually summon up images of a world whirling dangerously near the edge, Misia Natanson Edwards’s world was about to fall apart, while Isadora Duncan’s was entering a daunting new phase. Isadora was pregnant, and although deliriously happy about it, she fully realized the financial sacrifice that this would involve. She would have to stop dancing before and after the baby’s arrival, and to make up for this, she took on a frantic schedule during the first part of 1906, taking on as many engagements as she could despite the physical challenges of her pregnancy. During these months, Craig’s friend Martin Shaw, who had agreed to serve as Isadora’s conductor, was impressed with Isadora’s endurance as well as her calm (“Her serenity made me think of a still, deep lake over which no breeze made the faintest ripple”). Isadora, as usual, danced the entire program: “This in itself is remarkable,” he wrote. “I doubt whether any other dancer has ever been able to carry through a whole evening’s entertainment unaided.”4 Discreetly unmentioned was the fact that she was doing this during her early months of pregnancy.
The baby was due in late August, and the doctor had told her that she could dance until the end of May, which she managed for a while without overt comment from dance critics or audience (this at a time when strictures against unwed mothers were harsh). Yet despite the flowing robes in which she danced, it became impossible to disguise the obvious. Word of her pregnancy spread, creating a scandal. No longer an image of purity, Isadora became the embodiment of a woman with loose morals. All the while, despite the arduous physical challenge, she danced and danced, earning enough money to support her dependent family, her school, and her lover. “Often, in spite of myself,” she later wrote, “I felt very miserable and defeated. This game with the giant Life was too much.”5 As for Craig, he showed no interest in the baby and little in Isadora, while he continued to indulge his expensive tastes.
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 15