Twilight of the Belle Epoque

by Mary McAuliffe

  By midsummer of 1909, Clemenceau’s government seemed out of danger. It was an unexpected turn of events, then, when Clemenceau brought about his own downfall through some imprudent (although probably accurate) language involving a report on the inadequate state of France’s navy. Clemenceau was a master tactician, but he could erupt in anger, especially when prompted by personal grudges. This was a prime example, and although he was effective in his attack, suddenly all the pent-up opposition of three years rose up in a groundswell of opposition to him and his government. Quite suddenly the “dictator,” the “red beast,” and “the emperor of the informers” was gone.48

  By comparison with the tumultuous world of politics and national affairs, the world of Abbé Mugnier was satisfyingly tranquil. Or at least it would have been, had the gentle and forgiving Abbé not entangled himself in a terrible mess.

  The problem was the Abbé’s willingness to forgive. This, according to Church doctrine, was quite appropriate for a priest. However, there were certain things that, according to the Church, were not forgivable; one of these was the denial of papal infallibility, and another was the marriage of priests. Abbé Mugnier, despite his conservative position on many issues, was surprising tolerant on others, including the decidedly toxic Père Hyacinthe Loyson. Loyson was an eloquent preacher, but along the way had evolved a sort of deistic religion of his own, including the denial of papal infallibility. “The Pope is not the master of the Church and of souls,” he had written, “but their servant.”49 This promptly led to his excommunication. Worsening the situation, Loyson married an American heiress and moved back to Paris, where he established his own church, L’Eglise Gallicane.

  Mugnier longed to return Loyson to the fold—much as he had so successfully done with the notorious novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. In addition, Mugnier may have harbored a secret admiration for Loyson’s independence and for the courage with which he had defied the laws of the Church and the disapproval of the world. In 1907, Mugnier even invited Loyson and his wife to luncheon; Loyson’s wife wisely stayed away, but Mugnier continued the friendship, exchanging visits and letters. In one, of June 1909, Mugnier went so far as to state: “I have admired and revered you for a long time.”50 He was frank that he could not follow Loyson in the ecclesiastical paths that he advocated, but he expressed the desire to maintain his friendship with him.

  Before long, the Abbé agreed to come to the defense of another married and defrocked priest, Charles Perraud, who had died several years earlier. News of this was published in the Catholic journal L’Univers Religieux, edited by Louis Veuillot—a bad-tempered monarchist and defender of the pope’s temporal authority, who delighted in violent polemics. Mugnier was no match for him. Mugnier wrote explanatory letters; he wrote apologetic letters; he visited L’Univers Religieux; he was called on the carpet by the archbishop. “Mon Dieu,” he confided to his journal, “how bored I would be were I the Archbishop of Paris!”51

  In October, Mugnier received the archbishop’s decision. He was to take a leave of absence, following which he would depart from his beloved church, Sainte-Clotilde, and receive another appointment. “Perhaps,” Mugnier mused sadly, “it is time for me to retire.”52

  Having been told to resign as vicar of Sainte-Clotilde, he left his nearby apartment, stored his furniture, and departed for Greece. He had longed to see it since his youth, but as he prepared to leave—just before the November 2 fête des morts (a day of remembrance for the dead)—he wrote bitterly: “Tomorrow is the Day of the Dead. I am one of them.”53

  Since the summer of 1909, Rodin’s idyllic Hôtel Biron had been up for sale, with the sale date set for late December. The Hôtel’s overgrown but glorious grounds were to be divided into forty-five lots, with a price tag of more than five million francs.

  It was more than Rodin could bear. After contemplating his alternatives, he contacted a deputy in the National Assembly to propose that he give all of his sculptures and drawings, as well as his by now extensive and valuable collection of antiquities, to the state. In return for this bequest, the state would keep the Hôtel as a Rodin museum and allow him to reside there for the rest of his life.

  One senator did intervene to postpone the sale, but no one jumped to accept Rodin’s offer. Unfortunately, Rodin’s stay in this paradise looked like it was coming to a close.

  Chapter Twelve

  Deep Waters

  (1910)

  The Seine always rose in January. Parisians were used to it, and so the city’s residents were not alarmed when, by the third week of the new year, the river had climbed to well above its usual level.

  Devastating floods had once regularly inundated Paris; the worst, in 1658, swelled the river to twenty feet above normal. Yet in 1910, Parisians were not worried. After all, quay walls along the river’s edge had long since been enlarged and raised, while the Seine’s tributaries—the Oise, the Yonne, and the Marne—had been channeled and dammed. New bridges across these arteries boasted larger arch openings, and Baron Haussmann’s modernization of the city’s water and sewage system provided assurance of further protection. If the Seine rose too high, the sewers would simply carry the excess away. Flooding would of course continue to occur, but not to catastrophic levels. Or so Parisians believed.1

  Thus when the water began to rise from its usual level (more than thirty feet below the street-level quays), few paid much attention. Temperatures were unusually warm for winter, and prospects for the New Year appeared bright. Yet northern France had already been drenched by an unusually wet summer and weeks of heavy winter rain, leaving the soil saturated. The warm weather melted snow, and by the second week of January, the Seine and its tributaries upriver were beginning to overflow, creating havoc along their paths.

  People in boats during the flood of Paris, 1910. Repro Photo: Hervé Lewandowski. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

  Still, Parisians were not concerned. Their informal water level gauges, the statues on the Pont de l’Alma, still stood well above the river. These were twenty-foot sculptures of four soldiers erected on stone foundations attached to the bridge, one of which—the most beloved—was a Zouave, a colonial soldier in full dress and cape.2 By January 21, the water had reached his ankles—meaning that it was about six feet above its normal level. Nevertheless, the quay walls reached well above the Zouave’s head, and so few were worried.

  But by now the water was moving swiftly, carrying a large amount of debris—everything from tree trunks to barrels and furniture—which crashed into bridge supports all along the Seine’s course through Paris. City engineers were beginning to sandbag the most vulnerable neighborhoods. And more ominous yet, water had entered the unfinished construction of the Nord-Sud Métro Line (Line 12), whose tunnel crossed beneath the Seine at the point between the National Assembly and the Place de la Concorde.

  By January 21, even the most complacent Parisians were starting to realize that things were beginning to go badly wrong. First, the clocks stopped, as water submerged the plant that pumped the compressed air that ran elevators, factory motors, the postal service’s message delivery system, and many of the city’s clocks. The Seine had risen four feet in a single day, to ten feet above its normal level, reaching the Zouave’s knees. “Who would have ever imagined that Paris could be inundated,” Ravel’s aunt wrote in alarm from Geneva, “and that the Seine could overflow its elevated banks?”3

  Yet overflow was only the beginning. Despite increasingly desperate sandbagging and construction of emergency retaining walls, the water began to invade from beneath, through the unfinished Métro line and the sewers, which began to back up. Runoff from the streets pushed beneath the city, erupting into basements and collapsing streets and sidewalks. Soon electrical power plants short circuited, putting most of the Métro out of service. Instead of affording relief, the city’s infrastructure was working against it, providing conduits for t
he mounting flood, which now infiltrated areas even a good distance from the Seine. Astonishingly, water swamped Gare Saint-Lazare and its surroundings—including Boulevard Haussmann, which turned into a rapid river streaming past and into Marcel Proust’s apartment building.4 And the heavy rains continued.

  During the days that followed, as the water dramatically rose, rescuers evacuated stranded Parisians by boat from their houses, while others, including the army, helped construct wooden walkways, or passerelles, across deeply flooded streets. Life became increasingly strange and daunting. Gas street lamps—normally lit and extinguished daily by hand—went dark, and much of the city with them. Suddenly Paris was a threatening place, full of darkness and danger.

  The fast-moving icy water continued to climb. Food became scarce, and prices rose. Factories stopped, electricity and gas went out, telegraph communication failed, and subscribers to the new telephone service found themselves cut off. Shops closed; people evacuated if they could or stayed huddled up at home if they could not. Train stations became emergency shelters, while charitable organizations frantically did their best to distribute food and clothing to a growing horde of refugees (according to one newspaper account, the Red Cross distributed a hundred thousand loaves of bread a day during the height of the devastation). Garbage-processing plants shut down, making it impossible to burn the tons of waste that Paris produced daily, and rats emerged in droves as garbage was now dumped into the Seine. Older residents recalled the worst days of the siege of Paris, back in 1870–1871, but others thought grimly of Dante’s Inferno.

  By January 28, when the now putrid and dirty yellow Seine crested, it had reached the Zouave’s neck—almost twenty feet above its normal level. Could Paris possibly survive a disaster of this magnitude?

  Ill and discouraged, Octave Mirbeau wrote his good friend Claude Monet that he found the mud-filled ruin of Paris a spectacle “of desolation and of terror.” The water would recede and rise again several times before its final departure in mid-March, but in mid-February, as water once again began to rise, Mirbeau wrote: “It will never be over. I am beginning to believe it is the end of the world.”5

  In the midst of this ongoing disaster, Ravel—located on relatively high ground near Etoile—managed to complete the piano version of Daphnis et Chloé, despite the floods “bringing life to a virtual standstill,” as he graphically put it.6 But Matisse, newly located just outside the city at Issy-les-Moulineaux, was mentally and emotionally immobilized by the onslaught. The six-foot-deep flooding in Issy was bad enough; in addition, the fast-moving flood waters swirled chemicals in a local factory into a flammable mixture, whose explosion rocked neighborhoods as far away as central Paris. This, plus the driving rain and rising water, almost paralyzed Matisse, who would remember this experience with horror.

  Nearby, in Billancourt, six-and-a-half feet of water flooded the Renault plant, destroying six hundred chassis and a large amount of machinery, while at the Voisin aircraft plant, flood waters covered the machinery in mud and lifted the flooring, crushing aircraft under construction. In Giverny, to the northwest of Paris, the Seine’s floods covered most of Monet’s garden and all but the top of the Japanese bridge, leading him to fear that all his plantings would be destroyed. He and Alice endured isolation for days, with much of the lower road into Giverny and the nearby railway impassable. When the water at last receded, Monet acknowledged that despite the loss of many plants, “it will probably be less calamitous than I’d feared. But what a disaster all the same!”7

  Despite anxiety for his garden, Monet’s greatest concern was for Alice, who was seriously ill. By April, her decline occupied all of his thoughts. “A glimmer of hope remains,” he told Durand-Ruel, “but it is a hope.”8

  Abbé Mugnier, who was abroad at the time, escaped the Seine’s flood waters, but in personal terms, he was facing deep waters of his own. He had long wished to see Greece, but his trip was permeated with melancholy; he felt more an exile than a tourist, and upon his return to France after ten months of travel, he had no position to fill or even a place to stay. During his absence his friends, including the Countess Greffulhe, had faithfully attempted to plead on his behalf, but to no avail. The archbishop informed him that there was no question of his staying at Sainte-Clotilde. Instead, after being rebuffed by a series of parish priests who refused to accept such a controversial figure into their midst, the archbishop decided to place him as chaplain for the Sisters of Saint-Joseph de Cluny, located in a working-class neighborhood in the fourteenth arrondissement. The position was admittedly “little engrossing,”9 as the archbishop put it, but with no other choice, Abbé Mugnier left for his new home, where he would spend the rest of his life.

  It was “a solitary and sad quarter,” Mugnier noted despairingly in his journal. “I am truly buried there. I will live soberly, solitarily. I am finished!”10

  Was it possible? Could Marie Curie, the grieving widow and self-effacing scientist, be having an affair? Not only was it possible, but it was in fact the case. By midsummer of 1910, Marie Curie and Paul Langevin had become lovers. On July 15 they even rented an apartment together near the Sorbonne, a small place where they could be alone with one another. In their letters to each other they called it chez nous, or “our home.”

  Paul Langevin was a prominent French physicist five years Marie Curie’s junior who had been a student and close friend of Marie’s beloved husband, Pierre. He also was a badgered husband and devoted father, who had endured physical as well as mental abuse from his wife, her mother, and his wife’s sister. His wife, Jeanne, appears to have been mentally unstable, but the root cause of her anger seems to have been Paul’s devotion to scientific research and his refusal to sacrifice it in order to take a more lucrative position with private industry.

  Marie Curie had suffered yet another loss that February, when Pierre’s father died. A beloved and essential member of their small family unit, Dr. Curie had played a large role as grandfather to the two girls following Pierre Curie’s death. Now Dr. Curie was gone, and Marie seemed more than ever in danger of following him. But then, quite suddenly, she revived. What, her friends wondered, had happened?

  She had known Paul Langevin for years; after all, he had studied under Pierre at the City of Paris’s Ecole de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle (Polytechnic School for Physics and Chemistry) and then assumed Pierre’s job there when Pierre left for the Sorbonne. Paul also taught with Marie at Sèvres and took her job there after her appointment to Pierre’s Sorbonne post. A gentle man, a brilliant researcher, and an outstanding teacher, Paul was a devoted friend of Pierre Curie and shared many qualities and basic beliefs with him. Like Curie, a republican and a critic of tradition, Paul Langevin would devote his life to causes, especially those involving human rights.

  The Curies and the Langevins had been close and even vacationed together, but Marie did not realize what was going on in the Langevin household until sometime during the spring of 1910. Then, learning of the violence (Jeanne had broken a bottle over Paul’s head), she was all sympathy. Soon sympathy turned to love. “Isn’t it natural enough that, many years after Pierre Curie’s death, this friendship, reinforced by mutual admiration, be transformed, little by little, into a passion and a liaison?” wrote Langevin’s son, years afterward.11

  Not surprisingly, Jeanne began to be suspicious, and things quickly turned nasty. Jeanne told Paul that she was “going to get rid of this obstacle”—meaning Marie. According to a friend who visited regularly at this time, Jeanne was highly agitated and “shouted threats for everyone to hear, that if Madame Curie didn’t leave in eight days she would kill her.” Jeanne and her sister also accosted Marie in the street and threatened her, telling her to leave France. Terrified, Marie did not even dare to go home but sought refuge with friends.12

  Finally, friends arranged a truce: in return for Marie and Paul breaking off their liaison, Jeanne Langevin would stop her threats of physical vio
lence and public scandal. Yet Jeanne’s threats continued, while Marie allowed herself to dream of a life together with Paul Langevin—something that seemed less and less likely as the weeks and months passed. Paul responded to Marie’s lengthy letter weighing all aspects of a divorce with a harried-sounding protest about the extreme difficulties of his existence, and how shattering a divorce would be for his four young children.

  Despite his suffering, Paul Langevin did not have the will to make the break.

  Langevin’s marriage was not the only one in trouble. By now, Debussy’s marriage to Emma was showing severe strains, with Emma even writing a lawyer about a possible separation. In his own defense, Debussy explained to his friend and publisher, Jacques Durand, that “those around me resolutely refuse to understand that I’ve never been able to live in a world of real things and real people. . . . After all, an artist is by definition a man accustomed to dreams and living among apparitions.”13

  Debussy then reverted to a familiar theme: “It’s pointless expecting this same man to follow strictly all the observances of daily life, the laws and all the other barriers erected by a cowardly, hypocritical world.”14 When life and his own needs conflicted, Debussy preferred to place the blame on the constrictions and hypocrisies of others.

  Yet despite illness and dissatisfaction with his personal life, Debussy’s professional life was blooming, demanding his ever-reluctant presence in far-off places. These engagements paid well, and, as always, he needed the money. From Vienna, he wrote Chouchou humorous postcards (“which would make a goldfish weep”),15 and from Budapest he informed Jacques Durand that he was not cut out for that sort of life. “It needs the heroism of a commercial traveller and a willingness to compromise which I find decidedly repugnant.”16