Twilight of the Belle Epoque

by Mary McAuliffe

  By late 1907, Matisse received notice that he had to move from the Rue de Sèvres, and soon after, he and his family made the move to the Hôtel Biron. For fifteen years the Matisse family, minus one or more of the children, had lived in one apartment or another at 19 Quai St-Michel, overlooking the Seine and Notre-Dame. Now, Matisse found ample work and living space in the Hôtel Biron, where he turned the former convent’s huge refectory into a studio, and installed his family on the ground floor of another building on the mansion’s extensive grounds. For the first time his oldest son, Jean, could move in with them, and Amélie enjoyed the luxury of entertaining guests in an extensive parlor once used by the nuns of Sacré-Coeur.

  Within a short time, Rodin would also find his way to the Hôtel Biron, with important consequences, but during 1908 the great sculptor was in the throes of a difficult love affair. Two affairs, actually, as he was winding down one affair with the British artist Gwen John while embarking on yet another. The new woman in his life, Claire de Choiseul, was an American of French descent who had married the Marquis de Choiseul-Beaupré. As often happened in such marriages, the Frenchman had gladly bestowed his title in return for an influx of funds from his American wife, in his case to pay off gambling debts. Her money helped, yet because of their lavish lifestyle, Claire de Choiseul and her husband soon found themselves in considerable financial difficulty. It was the marquis’ query to Rodin about the possibility of selling him a family heirloom that led to introductions all around and, soon after, to a torrid relationship between Rodin and the marquis’ strong-willed wife.

  Claire de Choiseul was determined to latch onto Rodin, and by 1907, she was writing Rodin as “Mon Amour adoré” and signing herself as “your little wife.” She wrote him daily whenever she did not see him on a daily basis, and did not hesitate to order him about, mixing commands with not-so-subtle flattery. Her evident goal was to cut him off from his friends and relations, especially Rose Beuret, but also from former and ongoing lovers such as Gwen John. Claire de Choiseul evidently enjoyed being the lover of a famous man such as Rodin, but there was money at stake as well. The Choiseuls’ financial needs were great, and Rodin had never married Rose nor acknowledged his illegitimate son by her. Rodin’s friends were frankly appalled at the situation and resented Choiseul’s domination of the aging sculptor, who—as one friend put it—was “as clay in her hands.”13 So far as they were concerned, Choiseul’s behavior easily canceled out whatever title she had managed to snag.

  However indebted the marquis may have been to his wife financially, he was embarrassed by her flaunted liaison and sent Rodin a telegram asking him to stop encouraging Claire’s daily visits. In July 1908, the marquis finally wrote Rose Beuret. “It is unendurable,” he told her, “that you tolerate the state of things which I can no longer abide.” Caught between Rose, Gwen John, and Claire de Choiseul, Rodin went into seclusion, hiding out in La Goulette, a small property that he owned in Meudon. While he was there, both Gwen and Claire tried desperately to see him, the latter imperiously: “I beg you to send me a word tomorrow morning,” she wrote. Shattered, Rodin told Gwen John, “I am like a broken vase: if someone touches me, I’ll fall to pieces.”14

  Rodin finally relented to see Claire that Christmas, but only after her maid wrote him that Madame was not eating and was in a terrible state. He and a presumably triumphant Claire then spent Christmas together at the marquis’ country house in Dijon. The marquis spent Christmas elsewhere.

  Sometime between 1908 and 1909, Marcel Proust began to work on Swann’s Way—the first volume of what would become his chef-d’oeuvre In Search of Lost Time.15 For years he had alternately hoped for and despaired of a breakthrough as a novelist, and in late 1902 had written a close friend: “A thousand characters for novels, a thousand ideas urge me to give them body, like the shades in the Odyssey who plead with Ulysses to give them a little blood to drink to bring them back to life.”16

  Anna de Noailles had early sensed Proust’s capabilities for greatness, praising his “precious and marvelous soul” and encouraging him to work to “satisfy those who are here and those who are no longer here.” Yet Proust floundered, continuing with his painstaking translation of Ruskin until, by 1904, he wrote Marie Nordlinger (his colleague in the grueling translation process): “This old man is beginning to bore me.”17

  Proust’s translation of Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens appeared in early 1904, to considerable acclaim, and Maurice Barrès even suggested that Proust continue his career as a translator. Proust dismissed this idea, partly because he still had more Ruskin translations to do, “and after that I shall try to translate my own poor soul, if it doesn’t die in the meantime.”18

  Yet even while translating Ruskin, Proust was finding his own literary voice, one that his former history professor, Albert Sorel, described (in a review of La Bible d’Amiens) as “flexible, floating, enveloping, opening on to infinite vistas or colors and tones, but always translucent.”19 This voice first appeared in Proust’s preface to La Bible d’Amiens, but Proust initially distrusted this style as an effective vehicle for a work of fiction. What would his story be? And could he possibly write it before his life slipped irretrievably past?

  The answer would lie within the realm of memory, in the web of subtly linked past impressions that remained in his imagination. Yet several more anxious years passed before Proust was able to begin Swann’s Way—years in which he continued to suffer invalidism and the effects of a mounting ingestion of drugs, as well as what he was beginning to perceive as the dangers of society: “All these compliments, all those greetings,” he wrote, “[that] we call deference, gratitude, devotion, and in which we mingle so many lies, are sterile and tiresome,” the “sterilizer of inspiration.”20

  His mother’s death in 1905 left him in a state of near collapse, but it also weaned him from her anxious hovering and over-indulgence, which he had grown accustomed to manipulating. It is this intricate interplay of longing and manipulation that Proust’s narrator portrays in Swann’s Way, where he recalls his childhood yearning for his mother’s good-night kiss. The strands of this story, and the setting of the narrator’s childhood home in Combray—the lightly fictionalized town of Proust’s father’s birth—interweave with the story of Charles Swann, the narrator’s elegant Jewish neighbor, and Swann’s desire for and marriage to the unsuitable and manipulative Odette. This in turn is woven into the story of the narrator’s own adolescent attraction to Swann’s daughter, the equally manipulative Gilberte.

  All of these are memories, involuntary memories, linked by a narrator who summons them up irrespective of time, at least in a linear sense. For Proust creates a world where personal time is not made up of fixed moments in chronological order, but consists rather of intertwined memories and experiences, in which a character can be pulled out of the present simply by sensory associations, such as the taste of the famous madeleine that the narrator dips into his lime-leaf tea (infusion tilleul). Adding to the complexity, Proust’s narrator exists on at least three different levels: the book-loving child who longs to become a writer; the grown man telling of his quest for artistic identity; and the author, who is keenly observant and comments extensively throughout.

  Proust was fracturing traditional literary perception, but he was not alone in smashing long-established ways of understanding. As he began to write Swann’s Way, Picasso (whom Proust did not yet know) had begun to shatter conventional visual perception,21 while new conceptions of time and space had begun to radically—and often uncomfortably—shift people’s views of the world around them. Ever more rapid movement across greater distances had already required the establishment of a profoundly new concept, that of standardized time.22 But it was Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, first published in 1905, that upended the world as people had hitherto known it, posing space and time as relative and changing rather than as constants in a clockwork Newtonian universe.

  The impact of Ei
nstein’s discovery was at first greatest on physicists and astronomers, but its challenge reached deep into conventional beliefs. Whether or not Proust knew about Einstein at this early date (and it is doubtful that he did), by the end of his life he was pleased with the comparison. A 1922 article, “Proust et Einstein,” delighted the author by noting that, among other similarities, Proust and Einstein “have the sense, the intuition, the comprehension of the great natural laws.” Proust, well pleased, saw this comparison as “the most immense honor and the keenest pleasure one could grant me.”23

  Automobiles, trains, and especially airplanes were at the heart of the revolution in speed and its related conception of time that was beginning to define the new century, and first encounters with any of these wonders, especially airplanes, could be boggling. Witnessing his first airplane in flight, Proust’s narrator was moved “as might a Greek have been setting eyes for the first time on a demigod.” For a moment, the narrator “felt there to lie open . . . every course through space, or through life.” The pilot glided on for a moment and then, “with a slight movement of his golden wings, he headed straight up into the sky.”24

  Proust’s narrator (and Proust himself)25 was not the only one transfixed by his first sight of manned flight. Wilbur Wright’s demonstration flights near Le Mans in August 1908 riveted the French, many of whom had never quite believed what they heard of the Wrights’ accomplishments.26 “For me,” Count Kessler wrote in his diary following his observation of the great event, “the strongest impression . . . were the majestic and graceful turns. It looks as if flying were completely safe.”27

  Even as Wilbur Wright was astonishing French crowds by maneuvering his biplane into sharp angles and figure eights, the French aeronautical pioneers were rapidly catching up with the Americans. Henri Farman had already won the Grand Prix de l’Aviation for the first closed-circuit flight of more than a kilometer, which until Wright’s demonstration flights was seen as a major breakthrough. In subsequent months, Farman and Léon Delagrange would leapfrog one another in breaking records, and by the time of Wilbur Wright’s demonstration flights, a Voisin plane had already made a flight of more than twelve miles—and bested the Wrights by leaving the ground solely under its own power. In the following years—prompted by military necessity as well as by engineering derring-do—the Europeans would emerge as the dominant force in aviation.

  Meanwhile, on the ground, automobiles were becoming increasingly common, prompting the ever-alert Michelin brothers to create their first travel office in 1908. Called the Bureau of Itineraries, it was located in the old Michelin offices on Boulevard Pereire, in northwest Paris. As the Michelin brothers shrewdly recognized, their dominance of the French pneumatic tire market meant that any increase in sales would have to come from an increase in auto travel. This innovative service, which provided motorists with travel itineraries free of charge, proved a success with travelers and the Michelin brothers alike. By 1910, Michelin road maps would further enhance the driving experience, as would the road signals and directional signs that were beginning to appear, thanks to the Michelins’ encouragement.

  At about the same time as the Michelins’ new marketing venture, André Citroën dipped his toe into the turbulent waters of the fledgling automobile industry by becoming a consultant to the Mors auto makers, whose luxury sedans and expensive racing cars no longer dominated the market. Mors in fact was in deep trouble, and it was only after Citroën spotted a quiet and smooth (but expensive) engine, designed by the American Charles Knight, and installed it in a new range of Mors cars that he was able to revive sales and revitalize the foundering company. In time, Citroën would produce his own automobiles and would absorb Mors, but that still lay in the future.

  In the meantime, Line 4 of the Paris Métro was encountering difficulties. To begin with, it was the first to run beneath the Seine. Further complicating an already-challenging situation, the most direct route for the line passed directly beneath the Institut de France—a plan that greatly upset certain individuals, especially the Immortels of the Académie Française, who argued that the construction would damage the Institut’s structure. As a result, the line’s route had to be substantially modified to its present irregular course, taking a considerable jog around the Institut (it now crosses the Seine between Boulevard Saint-Michel and the Place du Châtelet). In their bid for support, the detour’s advocates argued that this would substantially improve service to the fifth arrondissement.

  We do not know what Hector Guimard’s reaction was to these challenges besetting the Métro’s builders, but then again, he had little reason to care. Having wed an American heiress, he now was free from financial worries. He and his wife would live for many years in Guimard’s very own Hôtel Guimard on Avenue Mozart (16th), until moving to New York shortly before the outbreak of World War II.

  It was now that Helena Rubinstein, who had already established herself in London, learned of an herbal skin-products business that was for sale on Paris’s chic Rue St-Honoré. Rubinstein had never been slow to act, and—recognizing the importance of a prime Paris location—she promptly acquired it and its stock, soon transforming it into her up-and-coming Paris salon. Concurrently, Eugène Schueller was on his way to fame and fortune with his L’Oréal hair dye, while François Coty now opened a shop in the exclusive Place Vendôme and expanded his laboratory to nearby Suresnes. By catering to women’s anxieties about their appearance and their fear of aging, each of these entrepreneurs in the early years of the twentieth century had tapped into a huge and relatively unexploited market. Yet it was Coty who most clearly understood the importance of his product’s appearance, and it was Coty who memorably reached out to an artist to handle this end of the business—the remarkable jeweler René Lalique.

  Coty’s new shop at 23 Place Vendôme was situated right next door to Lalique’s jewelry store. Lalique, who already was a recipient of the Legion of Honor, was by then famous for his Art Nouveau designs, which were snapped up by his devoted (and wealthy) customers, including Sarah Bernhardt. He had even been granted an entire pavilion to himself at the 1900 exposition. Coty immediately spotted Lalique as the man he wanted to design his perfume bottles, and he was surprised when Lalique at first turned him down. Still, Lalique was fascinated by glass and had even built a furnace in his garden in which to experiment with it. Coty was persistent, and eventually he convinced Lalique that “a perfume needs to attract the eye as much as the nose.”28

  Lalique’s first design for Coty, in 1908, was a small rectangular plaque depicting a woman languidly emerging from the petals of a flower—a design that he then incorporated into a bottle. Mass-production still was not within his reach, but by autumn he had rented a glassworks at Combs-la-Ville on the Seine, and within a few months he would patent a new casting method “applied to the production of all bottles, carafes, and vases with openings narrower than their interior space.” Three years later he would apply for a second patent: “a production process for glass objects and vessels using casting, and simultaneously applying pressure and blowing.”29 These techniques amounted to a significant technological advance, but perhaps Lalique’s greatest discovery was of a semi-crystal that was lighter, cheaper, more pliable, and more transparent than the material traditionally used by crystal-makers such as Baccarat.

  Lalique’s casting was not a cheapening method, but one that he combined with other processes, especially his acid frosting and felt-wheel polishing, to create true works of art. He did not even overlook the bottle stoppers, which appeared in an amazing array of shapes and sizes, including balls topped with flowers in bloom or with large bees. By 1909, Lalique had created his famous Dragonfly bottle designed for Coty’s perfume Cyclamen, and a long and remarkable partnership had begun.

  It was sometime during the autumn of 1908 that Picasso purchased a naive but arresting portrait by the gentle and somewhat strange little painter, Henri Rousseau, also known (from his former job as a customs a
gent) as Le Douanier. Picasso bought it dirt-cheap for its canvas, which he meant to paint over—at least until he took a good look at it. Or so the story goes. It never has been clear whether Picasso was making cruel fun of Rousseau or truly praising him when, following a series of rather scrambled events, he decided to give a party in Rousseau’s honor.

  As usual for this gang, things went wildly wrong. The caterer never showed up, but no one minded. Everyone had come for the booze and a good time, and by early evening, as they set out from their café rendezvous for the Bateau-Lavoir, a spirit of drunken good cheer had developed. Gertrude Stein had to push the painter Marie Laurencin all the way up Rue Ravignan, steadying her as she swayed. When Fernande Olivier (who had never liked Marie) demanded that she leave, Gertrude—feeling aggrieved—was adamant that she stay. No one opposed Gertrude, especially when adamant, and so Marie stayed, but the disasters and the good times continued. There were fights, toasts, dancing, and songs (including a rousing rendition of the University of California fight song, graciously contributed by Alice B. Toklas’s friend, Harriet Levy). Rousseau sat on an improvised throne of packing cases, where he seemed to be enjoying himself, even though hot wax regularly dripped from a Chinese lantern onto his head. Perhaps the climax came when a very drunk guest ate the huge yellow flower off of Alice B. Toklas’s new hat.

  It was the stuff of legends, and thanks to Gertrude Stein’s celebration of it in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the story of the Rousseau banquet has made the rounds for years. Yet despite its over-familiarity, this rowdy affair did have its importance, by capturing the feeling of an era in Montmartre—one that already was beginning to vanish.