Indeed, by midsummer, the intense emotions stirred by the Law of Separation were quieting, and the Dreyfus Affair was finally coming to a close. That July, the High Court of Appeal at long last completely exonerated Alfred Dreyfus. The minister of war now proposed to confer upon Dreyfus the rank of squadron chief (the equivalent of commandant, or major) and award him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Only a few were opposed, including the fervent nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard Maurice Barrès, and on July 21, the ceremony took place making Dreyfus a Knight (Chevalier) of the Legion of Honor. In response to cries of “Long live Dreyfus!” he movingly responded, “Long live the Republic! Long live truth!”33
Dreyfus and his supporters were indeed grateful for his exoneration,34 but despite the relief it brought, it did not bring him a rank commensurate with his full term of service, including those lost years on Devil’s Island, which would have made him a lieutenant-colonel or colonel. The following year, with his career virtually ended, Dreyfus opted for retirement and was placed in the reserves. At the same time as Dreyfus’s exoneration, a particular hero of the Dreyfus Affair, Georges Picquart, was reintegrated into the army with the rank of brigadier general. When Prime Minister Sarrien retired in October (on grounds of ill health) and Clemenceau became prime minister in his place, Clemenceau appointed Picquart as his minister of war.
Benefiting from the same winds of change that brought justice to Picquart and (at least in part) to Dreyfus, Emile Zola now received the attention of the Chamber of Deputies, which overwhelmingly voted to transfer his remains to the Panthéon. Maurice Barrès objected strenuously, but the socialist leader, Jean Jaurès, carried the day.
Perhaps oddly, Madame Zola was more shocked than gratified by the news of another resting place for her husband. She insisted on maintaining his tomb at Montmartre Cemetery, where it remains to this day—although she eventually resigned herself to the Panthéon honor. The actual ceremony would not take place until 1908; unfortunately it would be accompanied by the high drama that characterized the latter years of Zola’s life, as well as his death itself.
Rodin was nervous. His sculpture The Thinker was due to be placed in front of the Panthéon soon after Easter. There was as usual an ongoing current of establishment opposition, and Rodin would not feel secure about this all-important event until it had actually taken place.
It was during this difficult time that George Bernard Shaw and his wife arrived at Meudon for Rodin to do Shaw’s portrait bust. Shaw did not speak French well, and Rodin refused to venture into English, making an enormous mental as well as conversational gap between the two egocentric geniuses. While Shaw was intent on communicating to Rodin that he was an intellectual and should be portrayed as such, Rodin did not seem to have grasped this point—or at least refused to acknowledge it: “M. Shaw does not speak French well,” Rodin tartly commented, “but he expresses himself with such violence that he makes an impression.”35
Rilke, who had remained on at Meudon as Rodin’s devoted secretary, fully appreciated Shaw and was in awe of him—an attitude that Rodin did understand and evidently resented. Two days after the final sitting and Shaw’s departure for London, Rodin fired Rilke. Rodin had discovered that Rilke had written to some of Rodin’s friends, which implied a familiarity that Rodin found unacceptable. Whether or not this was the real reason for the dismissal, the damage was done. Rilke was hurt and appalled. After clearing out, he wrote Rodin that he had always thought that Rodin meant for him to consider these as mutual friends. “Here I am,” he wrote, “dismissed like a thieving servant.”36
In the meantime, The Thinker was indeed installed at the Panthéon’s entrance, fulfilling Rodin’s dearest wish of being prominently recognized in his own city.37 At the same time, his affair with the Welsh artist Gwen John was probably at its height. Still, following the inauguration of The Thinker, Rodin entered a long period of depression. As he wrote his dear friend Helene von Hindenburg-Nostitz, “the tiredness which I drag about me is terrible.”38
It would be more than three years before he pulled himself out of the abyss.
Gertrude and Leo Stein brought Matisse and Picasso together for the first time in March 1906. Gertrude had been posing regularly for Picasso for many months when she and Leo took Matisse and his daughter, Marguerite (then eleven years old), to visit Picasso’s squalid Bateau-Lavoir studio. (According to Marguerite’s reminiscences, Sarah Stein also accompanied them.)39
Matisse had already set the bar high with his Woman in a Hat, shown at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, where Leo and Gertrude acquired it and then displayed it prominently at their much-visited Rue de Fleurus studio. Matisse created similar shock waves (and derision) with his The Joy of Life (Le Bonheur de vivre), which Leo and Gertrude also acquired after he exhibited it at the 1906 Salon des Indépendants. Just prior to the Salon des Indépendants, Matisse gave his second one-man show, this time at the gallery of Eugène Druet, a former barkeeper with an instinctive liking for the works of those painters who once frequented his establishment. Druet was beginning to carve out a place for himself as a dealer in contemporary art, and he now bought a number of Matisse’s latest paintings, motivating Ambroise Vollard to do the same. Matisse’s work had begun to stir up interest outside of France, in Brussels and Munich; it had also attracted the attention of the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, as well as Gertrude, Leo, Sarah, and Michael Stein. Sarah Stein, after all, had been influential in encouraging Leo and Gertrude to buy Woman in a Hat; in time, it would be Shchukin and Sarah Stein who would provide the backbone of support for Matisse, as Matisse’s prices rose and Leo and Gertrude’s interest faded.
But for now, Leo and Gertrude had performed an important function with their pioneering purchases of Woman in a Hat and Joy of Life. And they had brought together Picasso and Matisse, two giants of their age, or any age. Picasso seems to have said little during this encounter; he still spoke little French, and as he later told Leo, “Matisse talks and talks. I can’t talk, so I just said oui oui oui. But it’s damned nonsense all the same.”40 Although Matisse would be generous in sharing good fortune with Picasso and other artists (he would in fact bring Shchukin to see Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at the Bateau-Lavoir), the two seem to have been aware early on of the competition that each represented to the other. As Gertrude Stein noted, “They had . . . to be enthusiastic about each other, but not to like each other very well.”41 Despite—or perhaps because of—their rivalry, Picasso’s famous observation from his later years is especially trenchant: “No one,” he said, “has ever looked at Matisse’s painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he.”42
Soon after this meeting, Picasso took Fernande with him to Barcelona, and then spent the summer high in the mountains at Gósol, where a twelfth-century church Madonna with widely staring eyes riveted his attention and subsequently found its way into his work.
Matisse summered once again in Collioure, but his recent interest in African tribal masks and primitive art impelled him first to journey to North Africa. Through Gustave Fayet, Gauguin’s first and most important collector, Matisse already was familiar with Gauguin’s “Maori” carvings, made during a visit to Auckland—even though these had not yet been publicly exhibited. Yet it was in Biskra that he first saw boldly patterned carpets for sale, each merchant with a bowl of goldfish beside him. Matisse returned to Collioure with the determination to learn how to paint North Africa’s blinding light, but it was memories of the textiles and the carpets that would especially stay with him.
When Matisse returned to Paris in the autumn, he found that for the first time in his career, collectors—and dealers—were competing for his work. Cézanne’s stock had risen as well, although unfortunately too late for Cézanne to enjoy it. “At the Salon d’Automne of 1905 people laughed themselves into hysterics before [Cézanne’s] pictures,” Leo Stein wrote, but “in 1906 they were respectful, and in 1907 they were
reverent.”43
During that autumn, Matisse bought a little Congolese figurine from a shop specializing in curios, and brought it to the Steins, where he showed his find to Picasso. Picasso became completely engrossed with the figurine and subsequently drew it compulsively. It was around this time that he also completed Gertrude Stein’s portrait, whose face he had blanked out after all those sittings, saying irritably, “I can’t see you any longer when I look.” Now he quickly painted her face, this time with masklike features perhaps inspired by that medieval Madonna and perhaps by Matisse’s African figurine. Under these influences, Picasso captured Stein’s essence, and even her appearance as she aged. “When she saw it he and she were content,” Gertrude Stein wrote afterward.44
By late 1906, both Matisse and Picasso had thus absorbed primitivism and African art, although they were about to express this influence in very different ways. As Gertrude Stein put it, “Matisse through it was affected more in his imagination than in his vision. Picasso more in his vision than in his imagination.”45
Gertrude Stein was not personally interested in African sculpture, noting that “as an American she liked primitive things to be more savage.”46 Influenced instead by Flaubert’s Trois contes (Three Tales, which she had just finished translating into English) and by Cézanne’s portrait of his wife that she and Leo had bought, she began the stories that became Three Lives—a bold and unconventional approach to reality in which she jettisoned the traditional elements of fiction-writing, including narrative and plot. “I think it a noble combination of Swift and Matisse,” she wrote Mabel Weeks, who thoroughly approved, calling it big, earthy, and rich.47 And to Gertrude’s evident pleasure, a French critic observed, “By exactitude, austerity, absence of variety in light and shade, by refusal of the use of the subconscious Gertrude Stein achieves a symmetry which has a close analogy to the symmetry of the musical fugue of Bach.”48
Gertrude Stein wrote Three Lives with pencil on scraps of paper, which she despaired of turning into typewritten copy—at least until she corralled Etta Cone (then in Paris) into doing the typing. Next came the work of finding a publisher, which was not proceeding very well by the time she and Leo left Paris that summer for Florence. There, she began to write The Making of Americans.
At the end of the 1906 academic year, Charles de Gaulle’s school on the Rue de Vaugirard closed for good, the victim of the Law of Separation. By this time Charles, almost sixteen years old, had quite suddenly emerged as a good student, having decided that he wanted to qualify for entrance to the French military academy of Saint-Cyr. His parents now sent him to a Jesuit-run school in Belgium, which met their strict standards. There, young de Gaulle buckled down, in preparation for a military career. His sister later recalled that “suddenly he became another boy.” At about the same time, de Gaulle—evidently envisioning the kind of future he had in mind—wrote that “a summit is not a crowded place.”49
Even as de Gaulle was dreaming of a military career, developments were taking place both in America and in France that would forever change the look of warfare. Travel by hot air balloon and by airship had begun in France, but it was the American Wright brothers who in December 1903 first achieved powered flight with a heavier-than-air airplane.50 From the outset, the Wright brothers understood their airplane’s military possibilities, but after the U.S. Army rejected their initial offer (on the grounds that their airplane was not yet practical), the Wrights began to look abroad.
Until Wilbur Wright’s demonstrations at Le Mans in 1908, many Europeans did not believe the Wrights’ claims, but the French military paid attention, especially during the first Moroccan Crisis, when tensions between the European powers reached the boiling point. Octave Chanute, the French-born American aviation pioneer, was quick to promote the Wrights, and the French military responded. The Wrights, however, requested a sizable sum of money (one million francs), in return for which the French demanded long-term exclusive rights in addition to requiring that the Wrights develop their airplanes to reach an altitude of three hundred meters by August 1, 1906. Not surprisingly, negotiations quickly broke down.
In the meantime, the Moroccan Crisis abated, while in Europe, the Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont was creating a stir with his own biplane. In November 1906, Santos-Dumont managed a brief (722 feet) but successful flight—the first officially verified heavier-than-air flight in Europe (although as Gabriel Voisin was quick to point out, Santos-Dumont crashed on landing). During the same year, Gabriel and Charles Voisin established one of the first aircraft manufacturing companies (Appareils d’Aviation Les Frères Voisin), near the Renault automobile works in Billancourt, just outside of Paris. The French were eager to get into the competition.
It was in 1906, at a ballet performed at the Paris mansion of the Comtesse de Béarn, that Mariano Fortuny’s lighting and textile creations first made their debut. Fortuny, a Spaniard from a wealthy and artistic family, had been raised in Paris and Venice. By 1906 he was ensconced in a Venetian palazzo, but his fashions would soon have an enormous impact on the most artistically inclined of the fashionable world, from Paris to London and New York. These included Proust’s narrator in The Captive, who expensively and exactingly dresses Albertine in Fortuny gowns. Their exotic beauty pleases her and evokes for him the Venice that he longs to see.51
Fortuny’s 1906 debut featured long scarves of stamped silk inspired by the art of long-vanished Aegean cultures. These scarves would soon become known as “Knossos scarves” and were wound gracefully around the body in ways that were meant to allow freedom of expression—quite the opposite of what the rigidly corseted women of Paris were accustomed to.
Soon Fortuny would develop the Delphos robe, a garment simply cut of shimmering pleated silk, which hung loosely from the shoulders. The well-dressed (and well-to-do) woman who wore Fortuny soon learned to wrap her Knossos scarf gracefully and creatively around her Delphos robe. Over the coming years, the basic model would remain pretty much the same; unlike the great fashion couturiers of Paris, Fortuny was not interested in yearly changes of “look” or of ornament and trim. Nevertheless, his constant work on painting and stamping his silks and velvets meant that his fabrics would always be extraordinary.
Not surprisingly, Isadora Duncan—who had adopted the flowing silks and chiffons reminiscent of ancient Greece—would become an avid fan of Fortuny. But in late 1906, when she began to dance again, she had little interest in anything but sheer survival. Having left her baby and its nurse with her mother in Italy, she traveled to Warsaw, where, as she wrote in her memoirs, she was “not in the least prepared for the ordeal of a tour.” She had not yet recovered from giving birth, and the baby had been abruptly—too abruptly, as it turned out—removed from breast-feeding. The theaters were sold out, but what she remembered was that “when I danced, the milk overflowed, running down my tunic.”52
She could not eat and was exhausted, but theater managers warned her that postponements would mean big losses, and so she soldiered on. “This is all too much suffering,” she wrote Craig on December 19. Craig was in Berlin, staging a production for Eleonora Duse, having just staged a successful production for Duse in Florence. Usually Isadora did her best to conceal any woes from him, but now she was completely drained and unable to conceal it. “It seems as if the Gods were piling everything on my head just now to prove how much I can stand!”53 At one point in this nightmare of a tour, she collapsed on stage and had to be carried back to her hotel.
Later, on looking back at this time, she could only exclaim, “How difficult it is for a woman to have a career!”54
Marie Curie could well have joined in Isadora Duncan’s lament. She was the recent mother of a second child and was continuing her teaching at Sèvres, in addition to her ongoing work in the laboratory. Yet despite her exhaustion, she could take satisfaction in her eldest daughter’s improving health: after a summer holiday at the beach, Irène was healthier than she had been in a l
ong while, and Pierre’s health also seemed to be improving. He had long complained of pain in his fingers and tired easily, but Marie ascribed this to rheumatism and prescribed special diets for him. What he and she did not see, or perhaps refused to see, was the impact that their newfound substance, radium, had on them.
Although already being hailed for its possibilities in treating cancer, radium had other, dangerous properties that the Curies had by now noted, most especially the burns it caused in contact with the skin. Any substance that could bring freezing water to a boil within a short time (as the Curies had found) must be hazardous, and in his Nobel address (which he delivered in his and Marie’s name in 1905), Pierre concluded “that in criminal hands radium could become very dangerous, and here one can ask if humanity is at an advantage in knowing nature’s secrets, if it is mature enough to make use of them or if this knowledge might not be harmful to it.”55
Pierre had anticipated the debates over atomic energy and atomic weapons, but more immediately, his own health was at issue. Whether or not his long exposure to radium was to blame for what happened that afternoon of April 19, it was clear that Pierre Curie was not sufficiently quick-witted or sure-footed as he approached the Pont Neuf and Rue Dauphine at the Quai des Grands-Augustins, a busy and dangerous intersection, especially in the rain. Pierre had his umbrella up and may not have seen the rapid convergence of a heavy wagon, a tram, and a horse and carriage. Crossing the street in the midst of this bedlam, Pierre collided with one of the wagon horses and fell under the wagon’s wheels. He died instantly.
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 17