Shy by nature, Schueller found it devastatingly difficult to go out and sell his revolutionary new hair dye, but he did it. He had an excellent product, and soon he was selling to the top fifty hairdressers in Paris. By night he made his hair dyes; by day he took orders and made deliveries. He first gave his product the brand name of L’Auréole, after a hairstyle popular when he began his research. Soon the name would evolve into L’Oréal.
Women’s fashions as well as beauty aids were changing rapidly as the new century progressed. As Jean Cocteau later noted, a high-speed film of the fashion changes during these years would be truly gripping, with hems rising and “sleeves inflating, deflating, and reflating; hats plunging and rearing, peaking and flattening, sprouting feathers and moulting; chests swelling and shrinking, enticing and shaming.”43
By 1907, a new fashion “look” had emerged, with Poiret and Fortuny in the lead. Fortuny may have viewed himself as an artist rather than as a couturier, but Poiret gladly embraced his role as a leader (“the” leader, in his own view) in the emergence of modern fashion. This fashion rejected the corseted shape of the nineteenth century for a more natural and uncorseted silhouette—a movement toward freedom in clothing and activity that was part of a larger movement to free women from their traditionally restrictive roles. “I waged war upon it,” Poiret later boasted about his hostility toward the corset.44 A flowing Delphos robe by Fortuny or a softly draped tunic dress by Poiret marked a revolution in comfort as well as style for the well-dressed Parisian woman.
Women’s perfume, as an important fashion accessory, was evolving just as quickly as was clothing. In 1905, François Coty introduced L’Origan; within a week, L’Origan was on virtually every dressing table of well-to-do Parisian women, and at subsequent opening nights of the Opéra, one could smell its characteristic mix of carnation and jasmine everywhere. It was daring, vivid, and an immediate success—reminiscent, some said, of the intensity and audacity of the Fauves. By 1907, Coty had hired seven sales representatives to support his rapidly expanding business throughout France. He also set up a new laboratory in Neuilly, just over the Paris city limits. By 1908, he would have to expand again.
That November, Count Kessler immersed himself briefly in the world of women’s fashion and observed the Paris fashion shows. He was fascinated by what he saw, noting in particular the “Byzantine orchid-like quality of the current evening fashions” and the contrasting “abrupt, short, smart street clothes” for daytime. This “contrast,” he added, “between an esotericism verging on the perverse and a plain, but elegant, utility appears to be the character of today’s fashion and perhaps of the age itself.” What he found especially significant was neither the refinement nor the practicality in and of themselves, but the “simultaneous saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to modern reality.”45
It was still early days for the European aircraft industry, but the Voisin brothers were in the vanguard. “We worked day and night,” Gabriel Voisin recalled. “Working hours were fantastic. My team [of two workers] slept when I slept and ate little.”46
It was a matter of constant problem-solving at every level. Even finding a place to test their machines was a challenge. The Voisins tested their flying machines in the Parc de Bagatelle, near Billancourt, until the police banned them. The next best alternative was the Bois de Vincennes, but this was clear across town, which raised a transport problem. Using creative know-how, Gabriel solved this particular difficulty by attaching old parts from Serpollet steam cars to a Stanley steam car, minus boiler, that he had earlier bought “for a song” at a sale of bankrupt stock. Then he fitted a towing attachment, becoming the first to use car trailers with towing bars.
In the spring of 1907, Charles and Gabriel Voisin built a pusher biplane for the early aviation pioneer, Léon Delagrange. Soon after, the Voisins built an almost identical biplane for the former racing car driver, Henri Farman. Within a few months, Farman would use this Voisin biplane to become the first European to complete a one-kilometer closed-circuit flight, an event that took place just outside of Le Mans.
By this time, Henri Juliot had designed and built for Lebaudy Frères the dirigible Patrie, which they tested throughout the summer and early autumn of 1907 before handing it over to the French army for military service. In July, Count Kessler noted in his diary that the dirigible Patrie had that morning “rushed over our heads like a giant, yellow whale.” It is possible that the dirigible he saw was Patrie’s predecessor, Le Jaune, which was painted yellow. Yet whichever one of the huge airships he saw, it had an unsettling impact on him.
“A strange feeling of a new era,” Kessler recalled feeling as he looked up at the sky.47
Chapter Ten
Unfinished Business
(1908)
Early on the evening of June 3, 1908, a hearse slowly entered Montmartre Cemetery and approached the tomb of Emile Zola. There it began the momentous job of transferring the great novelist’s remains to the Panthéon. Eternal rest in the Panthéon was the highest honor that the nation could bestow, and now that those who had supported Zola during the Dreyfus years had attained political power, amends would be made for the abysmal treatment the novelist had suffered during those difficult years.
Clemenceau and Jaurès led the movement that brought about this honor, but they and the rest of Zola’s supporters faced a residue of royalists, nationalists, and anti-Semites, whose hatred of Zola—and Dreyfus—remained white-hot. Shortly before the ceremony, the royalist journal Action Française published a manifesto by Léon Daudet that ended with the lines: “Get Zola’s corpse out of the tomb! Bring Dreyfus to the execution block! Re-establish the Monarchy!”1 Daudet may not have had the intention of literally carrying out all of these words, but there were those among his readers who took him seriously. And so, on the evening of June 3, some thirty of Zola’s defenders took the precaution of escorting the hearse on a secret course across the city, to avoid the possibility of violence.
Louis Blériot flying his airplane, circa 1909. French Photographer / Private Collection / Archives Charmet / The Bridgeman Art Library. © The Bridgeman Art Library.
All was well until the hearse and its escort crossed to the Left Bank and approached the Panthéon. There they encountered hundreds of rowdy nationalists who menacingly blocked Rue Soufflot and the other main approaches. Taking a detour up narrow streets to the rear, the cortège almost reached the Panthéon when a mob descended. Only the timely intervention of a squadron of horse guard and a company of foot soldiers, plus some well-armed police, held off the bully boys and managed to escort the bier into the Panthéon, where it was placed on an enormous catafalque beneath the dome. While police continued to patrol outside, Madame Zola sat vigil throughout the night.
The ceremony took place the next morning, with the Zola family as well as Alfred Dreyfus in attendance. It was at the close of the eulogy, after the minister of fine arts praised Zola for the courage he had shown during the Dreyfus Affair, that a shot suddenly rang out, then another. Maurice Le Blond, who would soon marry Zola’s daughter, was standing directly behind Alfred Dreyfus when he heard the first ominous click and wheeled about. Fortunately, Dreyfus heard this sound at the same time and threw up his arms, protecting himself from the bullets that followed. Le Blond tackled the would-be assassin, a military journalist who later claimed that he had not wished to kill Dreyfus, but only to wound him, to protest against his rehabilitation and the glorification of that arch-fiend, Zola.2
Dreyfus suffered a flesh wound to his forearm, but otherwise was unhurt. The ceremony proceeded, and Zola was at last peacefully interred in the Panthéon’s crypt, next to his boyhood idol, Victor Hugo. Yet the vestiges of hatred that had bubbled up during this solemn ceremony remained.
Early in 1908, Debussy at long last married Emma Bardac, whom Debussy had referred to as “Madame Debussy” since at least 1906.3 Emma and her first husband had divorced in 1905, shortly bef
ore she gave birth to Debussy’s daughter Chouchou; yet for almost three years she and Debussy did not wed.
We know virtually nothing about the actual event. What is known about Debussy’s life at that time is that on two successive Sundays in January he conducted La Mer with the Colonne Orchestra in Paris, the first time he had ever conducted. “It was not without a furiously beating heart I climbed the rostrum yesterday morning for the first rehearsal,” he wrote his friend, the doctor and all-around Renaissance man Victor Segalen. “It’s the first time in my life I’ve tried my hand at orchestral conducting and certainly I bring to the task a candid inexperience which ought to disarm those curious beasts called ‘orchestral musicians.’”4 Debussy conducted La Mer on January 19 and 26; on January 20, he married Emma—whether with or without a furiously beating heart, we do not know.
Why marry Emma on that particular date, and why so suddenly after all this time? Debussy leaves us no clue, but one biographer speculates that Debussy’s upcoming conducting engagement (on February 1) at the Queen’s Hall in London was sufficiently high profile that it may have provided the impetus to regularize his and Emma’s relationship. We do not know. His thoughts seem to have been primarily on his conducting adventures, as when, two days after his marriage, he wrote his friend, the poet and novelist Paul-Jean Toulet: “It’s interesting while you’re using the little stick to obtain the colour you want, but . . . the reception of your success isn’t very different, I feel, from that of a conjuror or an acrobat bringing off a successful leap.”5
While Debussy was making forays into the world of conducting, Ravel was trying to complete the orchestration of his Rapsodie espagnole for the same Colonne Orchestra, where it was due for performance on March 15. On March 3, Ravel wrote the young English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams: “My Rapsodie espagnole is supposed to be performed at a Colonne concert on March 15, and only the 4th movement is orchestrated!”6
Ravel and Vaughan Williams had met the previous winter, after Vaughan Williams requested lessons in composition and orchestration. These lessons took place over the course of three months and consisted largely of orchestrating piano works by Ravel or by some of the Russian composers whom Ravel especially admired. Vaughan Williams later recalled that Ravel showed him “how to orchestrate in points of color rather than in lines,” adding that “it was an invigorating experience to find all artistic problems looked at from what was to me an entirely new angle.”7 It was the beginning of a close friendship, during which Vaughan Williams and his wife would welcome Ravel almost as a member of their family during his future visits to England.
Ravel did indeed complete the orchestration of Rapsodie espagnole in time for the March 15 performance, although (as he wrote Ida Godebska on March 9), he was “exhausted. No time to sleep.” The program was long, so much so that its conductor, Edouard Colonne, decided to leave out one number, a Scherzo by Edouard Lalo—father of the critic Pierre Lalo, who so deeply disliked Ravel’s and Debussy’s music. Ravel feigned some concern on this account, telling Ida in a sly aside not to “say anything to the son of the lamented master.”8
Ravel’s group of avant-garde friends swarmed into the cheap balcony seats for the concert, where they loudly supported their man. Following some hissing after the Rapsodie’s second movement, one of Ravel’s cadre called out in a booming voice, “Once more, for the public downstairs, which didn’t understand!” When the conductor complied, the same voice rang out, “Tell them it’s Wagner and they will find it very good.”9
Even without this kind of assistance, the Rapsodie espagnole received generally favorable reviews, although Pierre Lalo predictably panned it. “He’s consistent,” Ravel drily remarked to Cipa Godebski, and then quickly moved on to other things.10 There were soirées and dinners to attend, plus proofs and scores to correct, and work on multiple new projects. In the months to come, Ravel would complete Gaspard de la nuit and begin to compose Ma Mère l’Oye, his Mother Goose suite, written for and dedicated to the Godebski children, Mimi and Jean. (Coincidentally, during these same months, Debussy was completing the Children’s Corner suite for his daughter Chouchou.)
Yet occupying a large part of Ravel’s thoughts at this time was his father’s long illness. Two years before, Ravel had brought his father to Switzerland, in the hope that a stay with the family’s Swiss relatives might strengthen him. Sadly, neither this nor a subsequent stay did much lasting good, and Joseph Ravel died in October 1908. The Ravels were a close-knit family, and following Joseph’s death the two sons and their mother moved from Levallois-Perret to a more centrally located and certainly more fashionable address, on the seventeenth-arrondissement side of the Place de l’Etoile (now Place Charles de Gaulle). There, the three would continue to live together.
Both Ravel and Debussy deeply admired the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, which added to the growing competitiveness between them. The year before, Debussy criticized his friend Louis Laloy for favorably comparing Ravel’s Histoires naturelles with a particular Mussorgsky song cycle, while in late spring 1908, Ravel expressed amazement that Debussy had actually told a person who was going to a performance of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov: “Go see it, all of Pelléas is found in it!”11
The occasion for Debussy’s remark—and Ravel’s irritation—was yet another spectacular event brought to Paris by Sergei Diaghilev. Diaghilev’s 1907 season in Paris had featured concerts that had included opera excerpts, but no fully staged operas. Diaghilev corrected this omission in a grand way for his 1908 season, presenting what many considered to be Russia’s greatest opera, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, featuring the renowned Feodor Chaliapin in the title role. The costumes and sets were magnificent, the music was sublime, and the audience was enraptured. Despite preproduction chaos, during which French and Russians worked and clashed in a plethora of multicultural dramas, the end result was a triumph.
Misia Natanson Edwards was so enthralled that she attended every one of the seven performances and bought all the unsold tickets, urging them on her friends. Soon she would wangle an introduction to Diaghilev, which in turn would lead to a magnificent role for her as a patron of the arts.
Yet Misia did not need to look to the stage for drama, as those who knew her fully appreciated. Born in St. Petersburg following her mother’s wild dash from Brussels during the height of winter, Misia entered the world as dramatically as any Bernhardt could wish. Her mother, then in her last weeks of pregnancy, had embarked on her bone-shattering midwinter journey in the attempt to break up a torrid love affair by Misia’s father in that far-off city. The two-thousand-mile journey proved fatal; soon after her arrival she collapsed and died—but not before giving birth to her child.
Misia, whose father was Polish, was first raised by her maternal grandmother, the Russian widow of a renowned Belgian cellist, and as a child Misia showed great talent as a pianist. She continued piano lessons (from none other than Gabriel Fauré) after she moved to Paris to live with her uncaring father, the sculptor Cyprien Godebski, and the second of Godebski’s three wives. Misia’s adolescence was unhappy and rebellious, and she repeatedly ran away from home. As punishment, she was sent for several miserable years to the strict convent school of Sacré-Coeur, or the Sacred Heart.
Her feistiness and beauty attracted attention, especially that of her first stepmother’s nephew, Thadée Natanson, who proposed marriage. Misia accepted and soon found herself at the center of a life filled with artists, writers, and musicians—friends from Thadée’s world, in which she thrived. When Thadée’s finances collapsed, and their marriage with it, marriage to Alfred Edwards brought unimaginable riches but, in the end, rejection and misery. In 1908, after Edwards had left Misia for Geneviève Lantelme, the Spanish painter José-Maria Sert reappeared in Misia’s life. Physically unattractive, but rich, romantic, and for the moment satisfyingly attentive, Sert was exactly the sort of man she was looking for. Although still married to Edwards, Misia did not hes
itate to leave Paris with Sert for a passionate and fantasy-infused escapade in Rome.
Upon their return to Paris, she and Sert attended Diaghilev’s production of Boris Godunov—the event of that spring’s season. Sert had already met Diaghilev, so it was not difficult to arrange an introduction. Misia was overcome, and she poured out her feelings about the music and the performance with a clear comprehension of what she was talking about. Diaghilev, who was no fool, undoubtedly understood the importance of such a wealthy connection. Still, it was their commonalities, including their Slavic backgrounds, rather than simply Misia’s money that made for their long-lasting if tempestuous friendship.
Early in 1908, Henri Matisse moved his studio to the Hôtel Biron, the dilapidated mansion that had been the convent and school of Sacré-Coeur—the very school that Misia had unwillingly endured for so many years. Following the separation of Church and state, neither the school nor the convent survived, and the mansion and its extensive grounds came under the charge of the government, which offered portions of it for rent at attractively low prices.
Matisse by now was familiar with the way this sort of thing worked. Two years earlier, he had moved his studio from its cramped quarters on the Quai St-Michel to another former convent, on the Rue de Sèvres. It was here, encouraged by Sarah Stein, that he began to teach. Sarah had started to paint, and she was serious about it. She was just as serious about getting Matisse to help her, and by the year’s end she had persuaded him to take a small class on a regular basis. It was at this time that he became famous for advising his pupils that “you must be able to walk firmly on the ground before you start walking a tightrope!”12 He consequently began with drawing techniques and did not let his students paint for several months.
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