Igor Stravinsky, on the cusp of fame, was hardly of the same mind. He was only twenty-seven when he first saw Paris—in spring, from the arrival platform of the Gare du Nord. His colorful fellow Russian, Sergei Diaghilev, had personally commissioned the ballet The Firebird from him for the 1910 Ballets Russes season, and Stravinsky made the long trip westward with every confidence of success.
Life had not always been so filled with promise. The third of four sons born to a respectable St. Petersburg family with connections to minor nobility, Stravinsky later described his childhood as unbearable. His father seems to have been bad tempered, and his parents clearly preferred their taller and more handsome eldest son. Yet young Igor’s life was not one of deprivation or hardship; he was not even denied music. His father, a well-known opera singer, acquainted him with the world of music, and his parents gave him piano lessons. Still, Stravinsky felt unappreciated and misunderstood—by his parents and by virtually everyone else in St. Petersburg, with the exception of the great composer Rimsky-Korsakov, who privately tutored him, and a quiet and perceptive first cousin, Katya, whom Stravinsky eventually married. Recognition would first come in Paris, where Diaghilev had decided to take a chance on the young unknown.
Filled with dreams of glory, Stravinsky immediately joined in rehearsals, which already were under way at the Paris Opera. There, he discovered that the casting was not what he had expected (Tamara Karsavina rather than Anna Pavlova would dance the part of the Firebird), and the entire production, including the musicians and the choreography, was to his mind dismayingly crude. “The choreography of this ballet always seemed to me to be complicated and overburdened with plastic detail,” he later wrote, “so that the artists felt . . . great difficulty in coordinating their steps and gestures with the music.”17
Especially disconcerting was the conductor’s curt dismissal of Stravinsky as an inexperienced youth. In his autobiography, Stravinsky would warmly compliment Gabriel Pierné for “the mastery with which [he] conducted my work,”18 but at the time Stravinsky was displeased that his directives for the score were not regarded as sacred. In fact, to his surprise and dismay, Pierné on one occasion flatly disagreed with him in front of the entire orchestra. Stravinsky had written non crescendo in several places, regarding this as a “sensible precaution,” but Pierné irritably told him, “Young man, if you do not want a crescendo, do not write anything.”19
Happily, opening night made up for any indignities that Stravinsky had suffered along the way. It was a glittering affair, with everyone who was anyone in attendance: Misia Sert, the Princesse de Polignac, and the Countess Greffulhe—Diaghilev’s primary financial backers—as well as Count Kessler, who seemed to show up whenever anything of note was going on. Kessler reported that the painter Pierre Bonnard commented afterward, “After having been to see the Russians (Russian Ballet), you see harmonies everywhere.”20 Sets and costumes were sufficiently sumptuous to set off a new craze for Orientalism in fashion (where Paul Poiret astutely led the way). More important, Diaghilev had the satisfaction of having brought his Ballets Russes into the world of the avant-garde, both in music and in dance.
Without question, this was a triumph for Stravinsky, who suddenly was a celebrity. Diaghilev had already announced to the company, “Take a good look at him—he’s about to be famous,”21 and his prediction (admittedly helped by the buzz that he carefully crafted around his young discovery) proved correct. “I sat in Diaghilev’s loge,” Stravinsky later recalled of this dazzling opening night, “where, at intermissions, a path of celebrities, artists, dowagers, . . . writers, balletomanes, appeared. I met for the first time Proust, [Jean] Giraudoux, Paul Morand, St John Perse, [Paul] Claudel. . . . I was also introduced to Sarah Bernhardt, who sat in a wheelchair in her private box, thickly veiled.”22
The audience received The Firebird’s score enthusiastically, and composers such as Ravel and Debussy quickly made their way backstage to meet the young celebrity. Ravel (according to Stravinsky) “liked Firebird” and noted that “the Parisian audience wanted a taste [but only a taste!] of the avant-garde, and . . . Firebird satisfied this perfectly.” Stravinsky agreed (he later wrote that The Firebird “belongs to the style of its time” and that it “is also not very original”), and he and Ravel soon became good friends.23
Debussy, too, “spoke kindly about the music” when he joined Stravinsky backstage, and soon after, he wrote Jacques Durand that The Firebird was “not perfect, but, in certain respects, it’s an excellent piece of work none the less because the music is not the docile slave of the dance. . . . And every now and then there are some extremely unusual combinations of rhythms!” Late in 1911 Debussy would write Robert Godet about “a young Russian composer: Igor Stravinsky, who has an instinctive genius for colour and rhythm.”24
Although Stravinsky’s friendship with Ravel would remain relatively free of rivalry, his relationship with Debussy proved pricklier. Later, when asked by Stravinsky for his real feelings about The Firebird, Debussy replied, “Oh well, you had to start somewhere.”25 Stravinsky returned the favor: “I thought Pelléas a great bore on the whole,” he wrote, “in spite of many wonderful pages.”26
In October, Sarah Bernhardt—now sixty-six and a great-grandmother—left for yet another “farewell tour” of the United States, bringing her handsome twenty-seven-year-old lover with her. Everyone was shocked, but for three years, both on tour and in Paris, Lou Tellegen would perform the principal men’s parts in all of Bernhardt’s productions.
When Sarah returned, her youngest granddaughter, fifteen-year-old Lysiane, moved in with her after her own mother’s death. Lysiane adored Sarah, who for years had entertained both of her granddaughters at weekly luncheons, after which they were allowed to roam in the “precious glory-hole” of her studio and romp with Sarah’s menagerie of dogs and parrots (by this time Sarah had given up her pumas, which she decided were too dangerous, and the monkeys, which she thought were too exhibitionist).27 As the grandchildren grew older, they and their friends were invited to matinees at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, followed by over-the-top teas in Sarah’s backstage apartment, where the youngsters gleefully ate themselves sick on sandwiches, mocha cakes, babas, and brioches.
While the youngsters gorged on cakes, businessmen throughout Paris were finding new and better ways for making money. François Coty, who regarded Paris as a mere stepping-stone to the rest of the world, opened his first foreign store that year in Moscow, following Louis Cartier and other prestigious retailers in the hunt for the profits to be had from the Russian upper classes and the imperial court. That same year, “Boy” Capel financed Coco Chanel’s first independent millinery shop, Chanel Modes, on fashionable Rue Cambon, while filmmaker Georges Méliès—who between 1895 and 1910 had produced around 685 reels of film, at far longer lengths and complexity than those of his competitors28—agreed to give Charles Pathé and Pathé Frères control over the editing and distribution of his films, in return for what looked like a lucrative financial deal.
Meanwhile, Ravel took a tough negotiating stance with Diaghilev over anticipated royalties from his upcoming Daphnis et Chloé (Ravel argued that under no circumstance would he accept less than 50 percent). While negotiating, Ravel continued to work on orchestrating the ballet: “Which other instrument, played in the orchestra by an E clarinet, might a shepherd be holding?” he asked a friend. While thus preoccupied, he consoled himself by playing Debussy’s Preludes. “They are wonderful masterpieces,” he enthused. “Do you know them?”29
That year, Marcel Proust lined his bedroom with cork as he continued to write his masterpiece,30 and Thomas Fortune Ryan, a self-made American millionaire, purchased two works from Rodin, which he gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as a first step toward establishing a Rodin gallery there. Characteristically, Rodin’s by-now entrenched companion, Claire de Choiseul, was quick to take all the credit for this development, but with Ryan’s money, Cho
iseul’s push, and the less vaunted but essential efforts of others, the Metropolitan Museum’s Rodin Gallery would open in 1912 with forty sculptures plus numerous drawings and watercolors.
By 1910 it was clear that Gertrude Stein’s first book, Three Lives, was not going to be a financial success: of the one thousand copies (five hundred of them bound) that the Grafton Press had printed at her expense, few sold. Still, Three Lives garnered a satisfying array of compliments from friends, including her former professor, William James, who called it “a fine new kind of realism.” She now sent it to a list of celebrities she thought might help promote it (most of whom, including George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, and Booker T. Washington, never replied). Yet her audience had always been the avant-garde, and Three Lives brought her a welcome degree of notoriety among this milieu. Although she had vividly built the portraits of her characters through a rich and innovative layering of dialogue, her style was not for the faint of heart, as her publisher was painfully aware. When learning that Gertrude Stein was embarked on yet another novel, The Making of Americans, he is said to have groaned, “Tell her I’m dead!”31
While Gertrude Stein continued to write her way into a new style and voice, Isadora Duncan retired temporarily from dancing to give birth to a son, after spending the winter sailing up the Nile with Singer. “For those who can afford it,” she later wrote, “a trip up the Nile in a well-appointed dahabeah is the best rest cure in the world.”32 Fortunately, this birth was far easier than her first, and once again she found herself “lying by the sea with a baby in my arms.”33 Without hesitation, she refused Singer’s offer of marriage, and only her name, not Singer’s, appeared on the birth certificate. “I was against marriage,” she later wrote, “with every intelligent force of my being. I believed it then, and still believe it to be an absurd and enslaving institution.”34
By summer of 1910, Cubism was emerging full-blown from Braque’s and Picasso’s canvases, and other artists—including Fernand Léger, André Derain, André Lhote, Francis Picabia, Marie Laurencin, Alexander Archipenko, and the three Duchamp brothers (Marcel, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Gaston, known as Jacques Villon)—had begun to embrace it. Picasso was tutoring his shy Bateau-Lavoir neighbor, Juan Gris, in the form, and Gris would soon become (after Braque and Picasso) a major figure, if not a pioneer, in the Cubist movement. As Janet Flanner noted, Cubism was becoming so pervasive among the avant-garde that “subject matter was fully recognizable almost for the last time.”35
Yet Matisse continued on his own road,36 completing his huge panels, Dance (La Danse) and Music (La Musique), in time for the 1910 Salon d’Automne, after months of intensive work and rework. He may not have expected unmitigated praise, but the reception these extraordinary panels received was unexpectedly brutal, spanning the breadth of tastes and generations from the young avant-garde to deeply entrenched conservatives. This major slap in the face came only months after Matisse’s one-man exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune aroused similar vituperation. And so it came as a particular shock when Sergei Shchukin, who had commissioned Dance and Music for the stairwell of his palatial Moscow residence, unexpectedly refused both on grounds of propriety—Shchukin was squeamish about hanging these large panels of nudes on the staircase of his home. In time, Shchukin would retreat from his prudishness, but for the moment Matisse was so shattered by this as well as by the hostility he was encountering in Paris that he left for Spain, only returning to France in early 1911.
For his part, Picasso was making a bumpy transition from bohemianism and poverty to comfort and its attendant problems. He would never again need to worry about money, but he would find that a starring role in Paris’s avant-garde brought more than its share of tedium and irritation. Social conventions annoyed him, yet he was stuck in an endless round of dinners, at-homes, and other occasions that combined marketing and schmoozing, which he hated. Even the old gang was splintering, as its members became increasingly well known and prosperous. Fernande noted the underlying tensions of envy and resentment that were creating fissures “between these artists who had once been so united, which they now tried in vain to disguise.”37 She, too, was increasingly unhappy, as Picasso’s boredom and indifference to her grew.
In April, nineteen-year-old Private Charles de Gaulle was promoted to corporal in the 33rd Infantry Regiment. A new law—the expression of post-Dreyfus efforts to assert political control over the army—required him to serve for a year in the ranks before entering the officer corps via the military academy of Saint-Cyr. De Gaulle had passed his entrance exam to Saint-Cyr the previous autumn, and so in compliance with the law, he promptly headed for the regiment’s barracks in Arras.
He did not like the experience but made the most of it, including any opportunities for impressing his superior officers. He and his comrades were marched with “very like the full load” through the rain and mud of the January floods, but rather than complain, de Gaulle wrote his father that it was “good training for the trial-marches.”38 By April 1910, he had been promoted to corporal, and he seems to have pressed for immediate further promotion. To this, his superior officer replied, “Why do you think I should make a sergeant of a young fellow who would not feel he had had his due unless he were made Constable?”39
De Gaulle continued on this path after entering Saint-Cyr in October. Easily noticed for his height (six foot five inches), which earned him the mocking nickname of the “Great Asparagus,” he quickly established himself as an earnest student and a “grind.” He just as quickly earned a reputation for arguing with and even besting his instructors—an irritating trait that landed him in the school’s magazine with a cartoon captioned, “The Saint-Syrien de Gaulle undergoing an oral in history: the examiner is in a tight corner.”40
Raised with a rigorous devotion to Church and country, de Gaulle later wrote that he had never doubted that “France would have to go through enormous trials, [and] that the whole point of life consisted of one day rendering her some conspicuous service.”41 Despite footsore marches through the mud and the heckling of his schoolmates, he seems never to have forgotten this goal—nor his conviction that someday he would have the opportunity to render this service.
By 1910, the disrepute into which nationalism and patriotism—and indeed the military itself—had fallen following the Dreyfus Affair was beginning to fade, and a groundswell of patriotism (known as the réveil national, or national wake-up) was gathering strength. A series of crises, especially in Morocco, stoked hostility to Germany, especially among the ardent supporters of Léon Daudet’s Ligue d’Action Française, who remained a small but vociferous and potentially influential minority.
It was against this background of heightened Franco-German tensions that Debussy decided not to attend a festival of French music in Munich that September. He made this decision based on the conviction “that nothing will be achieved by performances of our works in Germany. It will be suggested, of course,” he continued, “that a closer understanding will result from these performances. The answer to this is that music is not written for such purposes. And the time is badly chosen.”42
Fauré also declined to attend the Munich festival. But two composers, Camille Saint-Saëns and Richard Strauss, attempted to bridge the growing Franco-German divide by giving an informal concert of light-hearted waltzes there, including waltzes that Strauss had only recently completed for his upcoming opera The Rosenkavalier.43
Late in the year, Abbé Mugnier noted that the flooding was beginning again and that the Seine was rising rapidly—a spectacle he had not witnessed the previous winter, having been away from Paris. This time, as the rain beat down and the wind blew, he agreed to meet with Countess Anna de Noailles, who wished to make his acquaintance.
Not many months before, Charles Demange—a young nephew of Maurice Barrès who had fallen desperately in love with the countess—killed himself when she did not return his love. The countess had already conducted a long and ferven
t but unconsummated relationship with Barrès, which ended several years earlier (“they did in their heads what others do with their bodies,” the Abbé wryly observed).44 Following Demange’s suicide, his friends launched a campaign against the countess, insinuating that she had broken the nephew’s heart in vengeance for the uncle’s betrayal. It was a sticky situation, and one that the Abbé might be forgiven for wishing to avoid. Now, as the rain poured and the wind blew, Mugnier considered what he would say to the countess about Demange.
Undogmatic when it came to theology, and with the soul of a poet, the Abbé was a little leery of Anna de Noailles, who to his way of thinking had gone Saint Francis of Assisi one better by saying to the melon, “You are my brother,” and to the raspberry, “You are my sister!”45 In time, the Abbé would successfully mediate between the warring parties in the Demange affair, but on this first meeting with Anna de Noailles, little seems to have been said about Demange. Instead, she regaled the Abbé with her views on everything, especially herself and her genius, and fairly drowned him in words.
In person, Mugnier (like so many others) found Anna de Noailles overwhelming. Yet he greatly admired her poetry, which he described as lyrical, melancholy, pagan, and thoroughly Parisian. “No one,” he acknowledged in his journal, “has given me, as she has, the perception of the infinite.”46
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 26