In Germany, Isadora’s friends tried to convince her to abort the baby or give it up for adoption, leading her to consider getting away and spending the summer near Lake Como, until she began to fear that Italy might be even more oppressive. Craig was usually somewhere else, and at times Isadora did not even know where to find him. “You might ring me on the telephone now & then & say Hello,” she wrote him from Germany, followed by, “Dearest Love—Where are you?—No letter since a century.”6 By this time it was clear that Isadora would have the full responsibility for rearing the child, a baby girl, who was born in late September after a long and grueling labor.7
For Isadora’s last months of pregnancy, and for the delivery itself, she chose to hide out in a cottage on the coast of the North Sea, near Leiden, with only a cook for company until Isadora’s young niece, Temple Duncan, and Isadora’s friend, the sculptress Kathleen Bruce, arrived. Despite Isadora’s determined cheerfulness in writing to Craig, Kathleen was appalled to find her friend “pitiful, helpless, . . . nothing more than a frightened girl.” According to Bruce, Isadora even contemplated suicide, walking one night into the waves. “So loudly and arrogantly had I proclaimed that complete independence for a lass was fraught with no dangers whatever, given character and intelligence to back it,” Bruce later wrote. “I was very young.”8
During these difficult months, Isadora begged Craig to visit and even offered to share her abode with one of Craig’s women, if that would make him happy (“If there is anyone you care for very much who feels unhappy and wants to come with you she can have half my little house with all my heart. It will give me joy—and Love is enough for all”).9 He appeared once during the long wait and was treated (as Bruce later said) “as the Messiah.”10 Surprisingly, he was briefly present for the birth, although he rapidly took off again after telling Isadora that she could call the baby “anything you damn please—Sophocles, if you like.”11 Eventually, Isadora would name her daughter Deirdre, or “Beloved of Ireland.”
“I have already been living here with Pablo for six months,” Fernande Olivier wrote in her journal in February/March 1906. When she first began living with him, the Bateau-Lavoir had been brutally hot inside; now, in midwinter, it was “so cold that if we leave a little tea in the bottom of our cups it’s frozen by morning.” This did not stop Picasso from working through the night—his preferred time to work, free from disturbance. “We have no coal, no fire, no money,” Fernande wrote, “but I’m happy in spite of this.” She added, with a burst of enthusiasm, “I don’t know how I could have resisted Pablo for so long. I love him so much now!”12
Fernande Olivier, by her own account an unwanted illegitimate child brought up by a family who never accepted her, had married young, run away from her brutal husband, and spent the years before she met Picasso as an artist’s model. She was beautiful and had lived with a series of artists—including the sculptor with whom she currently was living at the Bateau-Lavoir when she first met Picasso. “He [the Spanish painter] looks at me with his huge deep eyes,” she told her journal in August 1904. “I don’t find him particularly attractive, but his strangely intense gaze forces me to look at him in return.” One memorable late summer afternoon, as a thunderstorm broke, she dashed for shelter and found Picasso laughingly blocking her way and holding out a kitten to her. “He seemed to give off a radiance, an inner fire,” and suddenly she “couldn’t resist this magnetism.”13 She went with him to his studio, and their on-again-off-again affair began.
“Picasso is sweet, intelligent, very dedicated to his art, and he drops everything for me,” she wrote a short while later. “He’s asking me to come and live with him, and I don’t know what I should do.” For a while she managed to cheat on her sculptor lover, but she had a problem with Picasso: “He’s jealous, he has no money at all, and he doesn’t want me to work. It’s ridiculous! And besides, I don’t want to live in that miserable studio.” At the root of her indecision was her fear of yet another botched love affair. “You see, I’m not in love with him—it’s another mistake.”14
Other men were pursuing her and even proposing marriage, but she disliked them—and anyway, she couldn’t marry without finding her husband and asking for a divorce, “and nothing in the world would persuade me to confront my husband again.”15 And so she ricocheted from one man to another, resisting Picasso’s pleas to move in with him, loving his attention and fearing his jealousy. And then, on a Sunday in early September 1905, after a heady seduction enhanced by opium, she moved in with him.16
They managed on fifty francs a month, with Picasso sweeping out the studio and doing the shopping while Fernande did the cooking—and a great deal of reading. They ate out only at places like the Lapin Agile, where they could eat for a pittance, or places where they could eat on credit. By springtime, Fernande happily recorded in her journal that although they had fights, “our love for one another has not diminished in any way. On the contrary, the ties between us seem to be getting stronger and stronger.”17
Still, Picasso was jealous. He would not let Fernande leave the studio without him, and he even took the key whenever he left her there alone. That spring they had a bad fight at the Lapin Agile, when Picasso accused her of flirting with one of the other diners, and she retorted that he had been behaving overly familiarly with one of the women there. She ran out, he chased after her, and before it was over she had blurted out that she was wasting the best years of her life in abject poverty with a man whose jealousy was set off by “the slightest involuntary gesture.” She told him that he was forgetting that she was entitled to a more comfortable way of life. He said nothing, but when she woke up the next morning he had disappeared, only to return with a few banknotes and a small parcel of perfume. She fairly melted.
By this time Leo and Gertrude Stein had arrived in their lives, and Fernande noted that “they’re rich and intelligent enough not to worry about looking ridiculous and are so self-assured they wouldn’t care what other people think anyway.”18 Picasso was in the midst of painting Gertrude Stein’s portrait when the art dealer Ambroise Vollard bought twenty paintings from him for a windfall of two thousand francs. It was then that Picasso decided to return for the summer to Barcelona, taking Fernande with him.
A certain amount of tension was beginning to enter the relationship between Ravel and Debussy, largely—as others later pointed out—because of efforts by music critics to stir up trouble between them. Although Ravel’s musical setting of five animal sketches from Jules Renard’s Histoires naturelles would be jeered in early 1907, his Miroirs, Sonatine, and Noël des jouets (1906) were all well received. Ravel had become the music scene’s latest enthusiasm.
Yet with that, he now found himself being held in comparison with Debussy—sometimes, he felt, unfairly. Following the introduction of Miroirs (played by Ricardo Viñes at the Société Nationale), the influential music critic Pierre Lalo complimented Ravel for being “one of the most finely gifted [musicians] of his generation”—praise immediately diminished by the qualification, “despite [his] several very apparent and rather annoying faults.” The most salient of these faults, wrote Lalo, was “the strange resemblance of [Ravel’s] music to that of M. Claude Debussy”—a resemblance that was both “extreme” and “striking.”19 Ravel, deeply stung, immediately pointed out that his Jeux d’eau “was published at the beginning of 1902, when nothing more than Debussy’s three pieces, Pour le piano, were extant.” Despite Ravel’s avowed admiration for these Debussy pieces, “from a purely pianistic point of view, they contained nothing new.”20
While Ravel and Lalo would spar for the next three decades, critics such as Jean Marnold were unstinting in their praise of Ravel, terming the entire suite of Miroirs as “exquisite” and two pieces in particular (“Oiseaux tristes” and “Une Barque sur l’océan”) as “absolute masterpieces.”21 Ravel hastened to tell Marnold how much his review had consoled him in the wake of Lalo’s criticism, but Ravel’s new promine
nce—especially after all the Prix de Rome coverage the year before—put him in the limelight, with its attendant discomforts. Jules Renard, author of the Histoires naturelles that Ravel set to music, wrote in his journal that Thadée Natanson had initiated the contact between them by describing Ravel as “an avant-garde musician who is dependable, and for whom Debussy is already an old fogey.”22 Somehow the remark became public and made the rounds, despite the fact that Ravel never would have considered Debussy as such. But the rumor stuck and spread.
Following the premiere of Ravel’s Histoires naturelles, Debussy wrote his friend Louis Laloy (who had written an enthusiastic review) that he agreed “in acknowledging that Ravel is exceptionally gifted.” Still, Debussy was irritated by Ravel’s “posture as a ‘trickster,’ or better yet, as an enchanting fakir, who can make flowers spring up around a chair.” Unfortunately, Debussy added, a trick “can astonish only once!”23
Adding to the tension, Ravel’s antagonist Pierre Lalo published an article in Le Temps in late March 1907 in which he attributed to certain “young musicians” the view that they owe Debussy nothing, and that “it is completely erroneous and unjust to claim that they resemble M. Debussy; one could just as well say that M. Debussy resembles them.”24 Ravel immediately wrote a response, published in Le Temps shortly after Lalo’s article appeared, in which he noted that although Lalo had not specifically named him, “as my name is cited rather often in the article, a regrettable confusion might occur, and some uninformed readers might believe that I am one of the musicians in question.” Given this, Ravel stated that he would “like to issue a formal denial to M. Lalo, and challenge him to produce one single witness who has heard me utter such absurdities.”25 To this, Lalo merely replied that Ravel had defended himself “without having been accused.”26
Louis Laloy, who was friendly with both composers, later wrote that he did “everything possible to prevent a misunderstanding between Debussy and Ravel, but too many thoughtless meddlers seemed to take pleasure in making it inevitable.” Laloy firmly believed that “their esteem was mutual,” and he just as firmly believed that “they both regretted this rupture.”27
Ravel continued to maintain his independence from Debussy, but he remained a stout supporter of Debussy’s work. In 1913, he would write a ringing defense of Debussy and a vigorous attack on Pierre Lalo and Lalo’s brother-in-arms, Gaston Carraud, who “tried to turn [young musicians] against their revered master [Debussy], and he against them.” These critics, Ravel predicted, will continue to close “their eyes before the rising sun, while loudly proclaiming that night is falling.”28
In the meantime, Debussy was having a quiet year, working on two operas based on tales by Edgar Allan Poe (Le Diable dans le beffroi and La Chute de la maison Usher), whose writings he had long admired, as well as several other projects. Ricardo Viñes’s premiere performance of the first set of Images for piano seems to have pleased him, but baby Claude’s health worried him (“One has so little idea of what’s going on inside such a tiny frame”).29 Debussy seemed in a thoughtful mode when he wrote his stepson, Raoul Bardac: “Collect impressions. Don’t be in a hurry to write them down. Because that’s something music can do better than painting: it can centralize variations of colour and light within a single picture.”30
Elsewhere, when a bust of Paul Cézanne’s childhood friend, Emile Zola, was installed in Aix-en-Provence in May, Cézanne attended the ceremony—a magnanimous gesture, given the split that had occurred between them, for which Zola bore much of the blame.31 Already ill and frail, Cézanne died that October, after being caught in a storm while painting.
By this time Madame Zola had already sold the Cézanne paintings in her husband’s collection. Whether or not the split between the former friends figured into her consideration, financial reasons certainly played a large part: Zola had not provided for her sufficiently, and she needed to raise money. Yet despite the challenges facing her after her husband’s dramatic death, Madame Zola continued to retain her hard-won tranquility, reaching out to her husband’s mistress and, in late 1906, taking the initial steps to officially adopt Zola’s illegitimate children. Denise and Jacques Rozerot would henceforth be known as Denise and Jacques Emile-Zola.
France as a whole was anything but tranquil during this unsettling year, when steps began for actually implementing the separation of Church and state. It was one thing to close the schools run by religious orders and to expel religious orders such as the Carthusians; it was quite another to take property from the Church that it had legally acquired since the Concordat went into effect, or to withdraw state subsidies of the clergy. French bishops discouraged violence, as did the February papal encyclical Vehementer nos—although the vehemence of the encyclical’s condemnation of the Law of Separation significantly deepened disgruntlement among French Catholics. Yet even before Vehementer nos, riots had broken out in Paris and Lille as well as in rural districts throughout the country. It was the arrival of government officials charged with inventorying Church property that set off the worst violence. Church bells rang and people barricaded themselves in their churches, piling up chairs behind doors and singing hymns while the men armed themselves with sticks, stones, pitchforks, and iron-tipped lances. In the Pyrenees, Basques even brought their bears.
In Paris, at least, the rioting was in large part provoked by the far Right, especially by a new and small coalition, the Ligue d’Action Française, which combined royalist and nationalist extremists in a particularly lethal mix. The group had originally formed because it regarded the right-wing nationalist and anti-Dreyfus Ligue de la Patrie Française as “too soft.” Action Française’s extremists, led by Charles Maurras and largely funded by the Daudet family, thrived on memories of the Dreyfus Affair and on Edouard Drumont’s brand of vitriolic anti-Semitism. Yet instead of pushing the Republic toward the kind of nationalism that the Ligue de la Patrie Française envisioned, this group of young militants fervently believed that a restored monarchy—and an unfettered Church—was the answer.
Abbé Mugnier witnessed firsthand the results of this militant protest. On February 1, a government revenue agent attempted to enter Mugnier’s church, Sainte-Clotilde, but was manhandled and blocked by a mob of young men—“our so-called friends,” Mugnier said scathingly, calling them “Catholic loud-mouths” and “pious thugs.” The scene was chaotic, with the tocsin insistently ringing while guardsmen, on foot and on horseback, surrounded the church. Finally, firemen were able to open the door by force, and a second vicar received the revenue agent. The majority of Mugnier’s flock strongly supported the resistance, and he blamed this on the fiery incitements of both press and clergy; but at root, he believed, were the machinations of those who wanted to sweep away the Republic and restore the monarchy.32
Faced with riots at church doors and cries (from the Right) of government persecution, the anticlerical but relatively moderate government of Maurice Rouvier began to back off. For his part, Clemenceau continued to press Rouvier hard on continuing the separation. A number of centrist deputies now made a political miscalculation by deciding to cast their lot against Rouvier, resulting in the caretaker government of Ferdinand Sarrien, who appointed the grand old radical Clemenceau as minister of the interior. After thirty years in politics, Georges Clemenceau now took his place in office.
The new government, formed only a few weeks before the general elections, faced critical situations in two areas other than Church-state tensions: foreign affairs, where negotiations over the Tangier Crisis had reached a crucial point, and widespread strikes and social unrest prompted by a catastrophe in a northern coal mine, where an explosion killed more than one thousand men. In the absence of a strong prime minister, Clemenceau virtually took over, stiffening French resolve at the Algeciras conference (a role that he would again play during the Great War) but showing a surprising willingness to back off on the religious question, allowing the inventory-taking to cease until emotions h
ad quieted.
It was on the social front that Clemenceau took the most surprising turn. The strikes, which had erupted spontaneously, quickly surged out of control and became violent. Clemenceau sent in troops to quell the unrest, and suddenly this defender of the workingman gained a new reputation as a defender of law and order—“France’s Premier Cop”—a reputation reinforced by his actions in confronting and defusing the radical trade union movement, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), in its attempt to launch a general strike on May 1. There were rumors of revolution, and panic spread among Paris’s middle classes. Clemenceau, who was determined to put a stop to the kind of disorder that might swing votes to the Right in the upcoming elections, arrested the CGT’s secretary and several other militants on grounds that there was evidence of a plot linking the extreme Left with the monarchist Right. No revolution occurred (Abbé Mugnier reported that his street was even quieter than usual) and no evidence of a plot ever surfaced, but the electorate in the May 1906 general elections gratefully proceeded to vote Clemenceau and the republican Left into power.
The republican Left had benefited from Clemenceau’s handling of the strike scare and the resulting influx of votes from the Right. But this influx would have a definite impact on the republican Left’s political future—especially given the breakup of the left-wing Parliamentary bloc, which now began to disintegrate as the anticlerical fight as well as the Dreyfus Affair disappeared as political issues.
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 16