Artists in Montmartre and Montparnasse may have been impoverished, but theirs was not the poverty of despair that had set off the Commune uprising in 1871 and in fact continued throughout the Belle Epoque, which hardly was a golden age for Paris’s poor. In 1908, as a reminder of 1871’s tragic events, the present simple plaque was placed on the Mur des Fédérés in Père-Lachaise cemetery, in memory of the 147 Communards shot against this wall at the culmination of the last ferocious battle of the Commune uprising. In the days following this massacre, many more bodies were collected and added to what became a communal grave and a natural memorial for those who wished to pay tribute.
Over the years, political gatherings gravitated here, which the Third Republic began to tolerate. By the 1880s the municipal council granted the land around this communal grave to the families of the dead. This led to discussion—and argument—over what kind of monument would be most suitable. Some wanted a dramatic rendition of the martyrs, but others thought this would be “too bourgeois.” At last, in 1908, they settled on the dramatically simple plaque, letting those few words evoke the story.
Mur des Fédérés, mass gravesite at Père-Lachaise cemetery. © J. McAuliffe
Life remained difficult for the poor of Paris. By the first decade of the twentieth century, most of Paris’s working poor were located on the city’s outskirts—in the outer arrondissements and in the industrial suburbs that lay just outside the city’s borders. They had fled there following Baron Haussmann’s mid-nineteenth-century renovation of central Paris, which created a more attractive and salubrious city, but in the process destroyed the tenements and the dark and narrow streets that held their homes. Within a few decades, the population of these outer arrondissements and industrial suburbs doubled, to more than one and a quarter million residents. Most of these individuals no longer worked in handicraft production but in the factories that increasingly dominated the city’s rim. This in turn left the center of Paris as a residence largely of the bourgeoisie and the workers who directly served it.
Although for the most part invisible, at least to those bourgeois Parisians and visitors with a disinclination to notice, the service portion of Paris’s population was sizable, including some thirty thousand coachmen, cabbies, and delivery men; ten thousand railroad and tramway workers; nine thousand butchers’ assistants; twelve thousand café waiters, and many others. An important segment were the sixty thousand cooks and workers who labored in restaurant kitchens, in addition to the thousands who worked in private homes—an unenviable way to eke out a living, given the typically abysmal working conditions.
Turn-of-the-century Paris kitchens usually were located in cramped and poorly ventilated basement quarters, and those who labored in these hell-holes had to endure suffocating heat, poisonous gas fumes, and odors from the filth that typically collected there. Fourteen-hour days in such surroundings took their toll; at the turn of the century, cooks and kitchen workers suffered from more occupational diseases than did miners, resulting from long hours of standing, heavy loads, and putrid air, as well as from undernourishment—a particularly ironic fate for kitchen workers. And of course there was the constant danger from fire and accidents. Not surprisingly, many cooks and kitchen workers turned to drink to get them through their days and nights. Life expectancy was low, and few cooks lived beyond their early forties.
One who did live well beyond his forties was Escoffier, who had worked his way out of an appalling apprenticeship and up through the ranks with admirable dispatch. By the 1890s, when he became chef de cuisine at the Savoy Hotel in London, he did his best to correct the worst abominations of kitchen life by insisting on clean and light kitchens, large and dirt-free staff quarters (including the luxury of bathrooms), and ample staff meals. He would continue these requirements throughout the rest of his career, and in 1910 he published a pamphlet proposing a society to provide financial assistance to the poor, including cooks. In addition, he supported several charities aimed at helping those in the profession who were in need.
Unfortunately, there were many in need. Despite the increase in wealth in Paris by the early years of the century, along with a corresponding rise in living standards,30 poverty remained widespread, with the majority of working-class Parisians living at or close to the edge. Unemployment and underemployment were the chief culprits, and even highly skilled laborers faced steep variations in the demand for their work. Boilermakers faced seasonal layoffs; workers in the clothing trades earned half their yearly income during four months of the year (of sixteen-hour days); and skilled cabinetmakers had to resort to ordinary piece work, at less pay, during slack times.
For unskilled workers, conditions were worse. Employment at factories fluctuated widely, and layoffs frequently left workers unemployed for months at a time, especially during times of recession—such as the one that hit the Paris area in 1908. Hardest hit were households headed by women, whose wages were lower than those of their male counterparts, although the elderly of both sexes also suffered disproportionally: well before old age, workers’ wages generally declined. With the working poor relying extensively on bread and other cheap carbohydrates for sustenance, the creation of school lunch programs during the late nineteenth century provided some welcome additional calories. Even though the nutritional value of these lunches was questionable, at least they staved off immediate hunger.
Still, despite these ongoing conditions, certain elements of life had improved, even for the poor. Cleaner water now was more widely available, and Paris’s new sewer system helped remove much of the filth that had previously threatened public health. The very fact that many bakers no longer used contaminated water to bake their bread had a significant impact on their customers’ health. Yet, as with every other aspect of life, the purest water and the best sewage facilities went to those who could afford them. The poor, as always, had to settle for what they could get.
Despite Baron Haussmann’s pioneering efforts in providing cleaner water and better sanitation, as well as his massive construction of roads and parks throughout Paris, the City of Light faced a new wave of urban problems by the opening years of the twentieth century—something that the urban planner, Eugène Hénard, proposed to rectify.31
Between 1872 and 1911, metropolitan Paris had burgeoned from just under two million to almost three million inhabitants. Not only were there far more people crowding in, but automobiles had proliferated—from around two thousand in 1903 to fifty-four thousand in 1910 (although these figures are for all of France, most of France’s autos at that time were in Paris). Congestion had become a problem, and it required a new way of looking at things.
Hénard, the son of a professor of architecture at Paris’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts, studied in his father’s atelier before snagging an appointment at the office in charge of the city’s architecture, where he would remain throughout his career. At first he merely designed school buildings, but soon he became involved in planning the expositions of 1889 and 1900 (earning him a gold medal and the accolades of the Legion of Honor, which made him a Chevalier). With the opening of the new century, Hénard began to study city problems in Paris, making an analysis of pedestrian and vehicular movement as well as a post-exposition proposal for the preservation of the Champ de Mars. More than anything, Hénard wanted to put in place a long-term master plan to improve open space, housing, traffic circulation, and development in the entire Paris region.
This included preservation of the best of the past, and under Hénard the most important of Paris’s historical areas were catalogued, described, and ranked in order of urgency for preservation. As a result of his work, entire perspectives have been preserved, including the banks of the Seine as well as the tip of the Ile de la Cité at the Pont Neuf. But Hénard looked with particular urgency to the future, where (despite the construction of the Métro) he correctly anticipated an enormous growth in automobile traffic. And so he began to analyze Paris’s road network.
Drawing on plans from other major cities, he concluded that a major north-south transversal was needed, as well as more bridges across the Seine. He also proposed counterclockwise circular traffic flow at major intersections such as the multi-branched intersection at the Arc de Triomphe, and he correspondingly designed what may have been the first underpass to protect pedestrians at this same intimidating spot.
Hénard also concerned himself with parks, which despite Haussmann’s additions had declined significantly during the previous century, even as population burgeoned. The city government viewed any open space as a source of revenue and, in the opening years of the new century, had already sold off one-third of the Esplanade des Invalides for development. It also was considering the sale of part or all of the Champ de Mars as well as the extensive zone along the city’s outer borders surrounding Paris’s last remaining wall, the Thiers fortifications—the single largest land reserve left in Paris.
In 1909, Hénard proposed replacing the outmoded Thiers fortifications with nine new landscaped parks in areas where they were badly needed, linked by a new kind of road that Hénard called a stepped boulevard. This in turn incorporated gardens and courtyards in the uneven spaces between buildings and the street. The alternative, he feared, would be haphazard and unattractive development and the loss of open space. Yet, faced with strong opposition from the city government and real estate interests, his plan was defeated, and after the war the City of Paris tore down the fortifications and sold nearly all the land to private developers. Hodge-podge development and the much-maligned ring road, the Périphérique, soon followed.
As for the Champ de Mars, Hénard envisioned converting a portion into the first in-city airfield in the world, with the Eiffel Tower as its signal tower and a sprinkling of cafés, sports facilities, and gardens throughout. The idea of an airfield never was popular, but Hénard’s proposal to keep the Champ de Mars as an open space gained many adherents. Yet here, too, real estate interests prevailed, and by 1910, ninety-meter strips along each side of the Champ de Mars had been sold and filled with houses.
Hénard did not live to see his dream of a master plan for Paris and its surrounding regions put into effect. But in 1934, such a plan, authored by one of his assistants, was at last accepted. With subsequent modifications, it remains in effect today.
Late in 1908, Abbé Mugnier showed his age by despairing over the younger generation. He had already noticed that young women of high birth were increasingly seen smoking in public;32 now, in the privacy of his journal, he unleashed a few choice words about the self-centeredness of the young, whose favorite word was “amusing.” They live to amuse themselves, he wrote, and they prefer to sit rather than play tennis or outdoor games. Rather than dance, they prefer to flirt. “When a young couple sets up house, they are more concerned with a ‘garage’ than with quarters for children. ‘No children, two autos,’” he added acidly.33
Seventeen-year-old Charles de Gaulle was not of this sort. That summer of 1908, prior to entering Paris’s Collège Stanislas, he traveled in Germany. There, going from Baden to the Black Forest, he read the newspapers and observed that they “are quite hostile to us.” And then he added: “Something has changed in Europe these last three years, and as I observe it I think of the unrest that comes before a great war.”34
Young de Gaulle was rigorously preparing for a military career, and already he sniffed the coming conflagration.
Chapter Eleven
Idyll
(1909)
It was autumn when Jean Cocteau wandered into the huge courtyard of a decaying mansion at the corner of Rue de Varenne and the Boulevard des Invalides.1 The mansion was the Hôtel Biron, and until the separation of Church and state it had been the convent and school of Sacré-Coeur, or Sacred Heart.
Neither the school nor the convent any longer existed, and the property now was under the custody of a liquidator of government property. But the concierge told Cocteau that the sculptor Auguste Rodin lived in the central part, and that if Cocteau wanted one of the remaining rooms, he should make an offer to the liquidator. Cocteau immediately found his way to the man in charge, and by that afternoon had become the proud tenant, at a nominal fee, of the nuns’ former dance and music classroom.
The Hôtel Biron had a noble past, having been designed—at least in part—by Jacques-Ange Gabriel, the architect of the Petit Trianon and the palatial residences flanking the northern entrance to the Place de la Concorde. The mansion acquired its name from an early owner, the Duc de Biron, who was responsible for its extensive gardens. Unfortunately the sisters of Sacré-Coeur had banished all signs of luxury, including hot water and heat, and sold off the mansion’s paneling, its huge wall mirrors, and its painted decorations.2 The sisters also built a chapel and a boarding school, and let the grounds go wild.
The Hôtel Biron, now the Musée Rodin. © M. McAuliffe
Rainer Maria Rilke discovered the property through his wife, the sculptor Clara Rilke, and took up residence there after his wife returned to Germany. Rilke told Rodin about the property—a generous gesture, considering Rodin’s treatment of him—and this act prompted a reconciliation. After one look at the romantically run-down mansion, Rodin immediately rented the large ground-floor rooms facing the garden. He never lived there, but it was his favorite studio, where he loved to work and to receive visitors. It was a “realm from a Perrault fairy tale,” Cocteau wrote, bordered by romantically tangled gardens that were perfect for fêtes and poetry readings. Brambles and bushes overran “a little virgin forest, an impenetrable vegetable chaos.” Even the tall windows to Cocteau’s room were impeded by a thick carpet of forget-me-nots; once opened, they revealed “a veritable tunnel of greenery, leading to the unknown”3—much like the magic wood that would appear in Cocteau’s 1946 classic film, La Belle et la Bête.
Of course young Cocteau had no way of knowing that fame as a poet, novelist, and filmmaker lay ahead. Indeed, only several months earlier, Cocteau had begun his public career with a poetry recital at the Théâtre Femina, a fashionable little playhouse on the Champs-Elysées. This event was entirely underwritten and promoted by the actor Edouard de Max, whose over-the-top antics had gotten Cocteau in trouble with Sarah Bernhardt not so long before.4 In contrast with Cocteau’s previous outing, his verses on this occasion (which would be printed as La lampe d’Aladin) were fashionably delicate—a youthful product that Cocteau would later denigrate as “stupid.”
Yet Cocteau’s idyll at the Hôtel Biron was anything but stupid, a dream world that abruptly ended when his usually permissive mother accidently discovered her son’s secret bachelor pad. At the time, and apparently until her death several decades later, she supported him with a regular allowance, which seems to have been his most reliable source of income. In addition, Cocteau was accustomed to living rent-free at home. It may have been about the time of his residence at the Hôtel Biron that his mother “made a very serious and painful scene on the subject of my ‘excessive freedom, that I put to such bad use,’ the ‘appalling people I see,’ my idleness, not earning my living, etc. etc.”5 As always with family relations, there may well have been more to the story than that, but the outcome was clear enough: Cocteau left behind his idyllic garden at the Hôtel Biron.
Rodin may never have lived at the Hôtel Biron, but it became his treasured hideaway, where he worked and welcomed visitors in the company of his determined companion Claire de Choiseul, who referred to it as “our enchanted abode.”6 Rodin bought a phonograph, on which he played everything from Gregorian chants to folk dances and music-hall ditties. During these retreats, Choiseul was ever by his side—a presence that annoyed Rodin’s friends, including Count Kessler, who described her as a “no longer young, chubby lady with very red-painted lips.” When Choiseul had the temerity to thank Kessler for “all that I have done for the master,” he merely noted to himself how astonishing it was that “that old man has the s
tamina for all these Americans.”7
Yet it was Rilke who was the most disturbed by Choiseul’s influence over Rodin. Rilke shared his concerns with Kessler, telling him that originally Rodin had “seemed to me to be a living example for how an artist growing old could be beautiful.” But then, “it suddenly turned out that growing old is something terrible for him, exactly as terrible as for your average person.” Not only was Rodin afraid, Rilke told Kessler, but he was bored and susceptible to women, “as one would expect from any other old Frenchman.” It was disconcerting for Rilke that Rodin seemed to need Choiseul to entertain and distract him, to keep his “naked fear of death” at bay.8
In addition to Rilke, another of Kessler’s and Rodin’s mutual friends was the Basque sculptor Aristide Maillol. Maillol, who was born in a village on the French Mediterranean coast near the Spanish border, had struggled to become a sculptor after a bout with rheumatic inflammation and blindness forced him to abandon painting and tapestry design. By 1905, his sculpture La Méditerranée—exhibited in that year’s Salon d’Automne—seemed to many to embody the same revolutionary spirit as Matisse’s Woman in a Hat.
Kessler may have first encountered Maillol’s work at a 1902 Vollard exhibition, but it was not until 1904 that he first visited Maillol’s studio, located in his small, primitive house in Marly, to the west of Paris. Maillol, who by then was in his forties, “with a long untrimmed black beard [and] very expressive, luminescent blue eyes,” did not bother to introduce himself or learn his visitors’ names, but simply led them into his studio.9 Kessler immediately purchased a small model.
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 22