Chapter Thirteen
Between Heaven and Hell
(1911)
Early in the year, Proust wrote Lucien Daudet that he was living “suspended between caffeine, aspirin, asthma, angina pectoris, and in . . . six days out of seven,” between “life and death.” He continued to work on his book, but “God knows if I shall ever finish it.”1
In July, Alfred Edwards’s latest wife, twenty-four-year-old Geneviève Lantelme, drowned in the Rhine—after having fallen from Misia’s beloved yacht, the Aimée. Lantelme’s death was ruled accidental, but the yellow press screamed that Edwards had murdered her to buy his freedom. Edwards sued, and the trial went on for months before he was awarded damages of one franc.
Debussy, in the meantime, had spent months composing music for Gabriele d’Annunzio’s verse-play, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. After working almost unceasingly on it from January until its premiere at the Théâtre du Châtelet in May, Debussy was exhausted. According to stories, Léon Bakst, who designed the sets, argued long and hard with him over the appearance of Paradise in Act 5. “You’ve been to Paradise then, have you?” Bakst demanded. To which Debussy replied, “Yes, but I never discuss it with strangers.”2
La Ruche, Paris. © J. McAuliffe
Early in 1910, when the cross of chevalier in the Legion of Honor was offered to Marie Curie, she followed Pierre’s example and refused it. Then late in the year, she unexpectedly decided to place her name in nomination for membership in the French Academy of Sciences, where a member had recently died, leaving his position open. It was a momentous decision, since the Academy of Sciences exercised enormous power, and French scientists avidly sought membership.
Having already won a Nobel Prize and recently published a massive nine-hundred-page Treatise on Radioactivity, Marie Curie was not only a logical choice but, in the minds of some, a necessary one. As the Academy’s permanent secretary, Gaston Darboux, put it: “Where would the Academy find a scientist with greater authority than Madame Curie to give it an opinion on these works about radioactivity, whose number is growing so rapidly?”3
Her only serious challenger was Edouard Branly, the physicist who invented the radio receiver that made Marconi’s transmission of wireless signals possible. As a teacher at the Catholic Institute of Paris, Branly had widespread support from clerics and nationalists, who were upset that Marconi had won the Nobel Prize in 1909 without any mention whatever of Branly. One of Marie Curie’s supporters told her that “the struggle between you and M. Branly will arise most strongly on the clerical issue” and added that “his work has little in it to compare to your qualifications.”4
Marie Curie’s supporters either overlooked or chose to play down the factor that turned her candidacy into a front-page circus: if elected, she would be the first woman to become a member in the long history of the Institut de France.5 Instead of a tussle between Catholics and secularists, the struggle became primarily one over the admission of a woman to the Academy. “Women cannot be part of the Institute of France,” one member pronounced indignantly,6 and the press trumpeted the dangers of admitting a woman, underscoring Madame Curie’s threat to the Belle Epoque feminine ideal. Intensifying her opponents’ ire, Marie Curie had not renounced husband and children for her career but had, in the face of daunting obstacles, managed to do it all.
In the end, she lost to Branly—by one vote. Of course the Academy had rejected Pierre in his first attempt at membership, and once a member, he never particularly enjoyed the experience. But still, rejection was rejection—especially under such circumstances and for such reasons. The only thing that could have been worse was what did in fact follow, when Paul Langevin’s wife, Jeanne, took steps to exact her own personal revenge.
It was not long after the Academy affair that someone (evidently hired by Jeanne Langevin) broke into the small apartment that Marie and Paul had shared and stole letters that they unfortunately had saved. Soon after, Madame Langevin’s brother-in-law, a newspaper editor, informed Marie Curie that Madame Langevin had the letters and was prepared to expose Marie as Paul Langevin’s mistress.
Having a mistress certainly was no crime in Belle Epoque Paris; if anything, it was expected. Yet the typical mistress was anonymous and remained in the background, allowing the wife to take her place publicly by her husband’s side. Marie Curie was hardly anonymous, and after the vilification she had received at the time of her Academy nomination, any further scandal promised to be especially nasty.
Months of hell followed for both Paul and Marie, with threats and possibly blackmail from the scheming wife and her brother-in-law until, in November, the scandal hit the front pages. Interviewed, Madame Langevin assumed the role of the injured and grieving wife, swamped in tears, with small children at her knee. Her tale of woe was ugly, malicious, and shot through with lies. Still, there was enough substance to the liaison itself to give credit to the whole web of falsehood and to Jeanne Langevin’s pose as everything a Frenchwoman and wife should be. With release of the letters, the press swung into attack mode, vilifying the foreigner Marie Curie, who was destroying a French home. It was, as one tabloid editor put it, the Dreyfus Affair all over again, showing “France in the grip of the bunch of dirty foreigners, who pillage it, soil it and dishonor it.”7
In the midst of this, the Swedish Academy awarded Marie Curie an unprecedented second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry. The French press, caught up in denigrating the recipient, barely acknowledged the news. Then, as a final insult, the Swedish Academy informed her that had it been forewarned of the scandal, it probably would not have awarded her the prize. Further, the Academy suggested that she put off accepting her prize until she demonstrated that the accusations against her were baseless.
Marie Curie was down but not out. “I believe that there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life,” she wrote the Swedish Academy, adding that she planned on being in Stockholm for the ceremonies. Despite fatigue and illness, she indeed did attend, accompanied by her sister Bronya and her daughter Irène. There were no awkward moments, and Madame Curie carried off her part of the occasion with great dignity, for the first time underscoring the role that she had played in discovering and isolating radium, and proving her hypothesis that “radioactivity is an atomic property of matter and can provide a method for finding new elements.” In effect she was saying that, contrary to the beliefs and assertions of others, she had not ridden to glory on the coattails of her husband or male colleagues.8
Upon her return, she was rushed to the hospital. For two years, she would be incapacitated, and throughout the rest of her life she would suffer from ill health. In the meantime, Paul and Jeanne Langevin came to an out-of-court settlement that awarded Jeanne a substantial cash settlement and custody over the children until the sons reached the age of fifteen.9
Three years later, Paul and Jeanne Langevin were back together. With his wife’s acquiescence, Langevin had found another mistress—this one, a secretary.
In July, war once again seemed imminent.
The 1911 Moroccan crisis began when France entered Fez, in violation of the 1906 Algeciras agreement, leading the German gunboat Panther to enter Agadir to protect German interests. Britain’s late entry into the confrontation threatened to blow the incident into war, but calmer heads finally prevailed, and by October, France and Germany had come to an agreement by which Germany ceded control to France in Morocco in return for part of the French Congo.
Prompted by France’s gains in Morocco, Italy hastily annexed Tripoli, leading to war with Turkey, which refused to recognize Italy’s acquisition. Despite ongoing efforts to mediate, the war continued for a year, during which Russia invaded northern Persia, Germany bulked up its navy, and Bulgaria and Serbia took advantage of Turkey’s preoccupation with Italy to join the attack on the Turks over the question of autonomy for Macedonia. Montenegro soon joined what became kn
own as the first Balkan War.
It was during this highly volatile situation that Italy became the first nation to use airplanes for military purposes. France’s military was carefully watching. The previous year it had purchased thirty planes and ordered sixty more, and in November, the French held their first military air show, in which a monoplane achieved an average speed of seventy miles per hour. Along with the impressive performance that year by French aviators in French air games, this served as a wake-up call to the German General Staff, which previously had focused almost entirely on airships. Although (in contrast to the French) the German War Ministry issued few contracts for aircraft until 1913, Germany definitely was in the race.
It was about this time that Count Kessler noted a remark made at lunch by the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, a deeply committed pacifist, who talked with concern about the mounting chauvinism in France. “It’s the airplane that has made it explode,” he told Kessler and the others.10
During the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, French nationalism had clearly belonged to the political Right, which combined a drum-beating patriotism with diatribes against Jews, foreigners, socialists (deemed “dangerous ideologues,” “pacifists,” and “internationalists”), and those opposed to French imperial expansion. But ever since the first Moroccan crisis (1905), nationalism in France had expanded its base to include a strong anti-German strain.
In 1911, as yet another Moroccan crisis raised the international temperature, anti-German sentiment in France swelled—aided by memories of France’s ignominious defeat to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War, only four decades before. By now, French republicans and anticlericals had joined with monarchists and right-wing Catholics in the rising nationalist fervor. They did not like one another, but their tolerance for each other was growing. Nationalism and patriotism, disseminated by sources such as Léon Daudet’s well-funded daily, Action Française, now were gathering sufficient steam to make an impression on national thought and, most important, on foreign policy.
Beneath the Belle Epoque’s brilliance, wealth, and tranquility, there were troubling signs, wrote French historian Jules Bertaut, signs that appeared “most clearly in the disposition of the younger generation. Perhaps the most notable of these [was] the steady resurrection . . . of the patriotic idea.”11 In September, Count Kessler noted in his journal that war within the next decade was a certainty, partly because “the younger generation in France wants a war,” and partly because “the French are persuading themselves ever more of their superiority (aviation, ‘culture latine’).” He also noted the push from England’s financial circles, and added, from the German perspective, that “we have had it with being constantly threatened on our western front.” All of these factors pointed to war, he concluded, “which will break out as soon as the mass of Frenchmen are convinced of the French advantage, and the Russian government believes it has finally crushed the revolution.”12
It was in this atmosphere that Charles de Gaulle, at the end of his first year at Saint-Cyr, decided to choose a career in the infantry rather than in the more elite cavalry, for which he was eligible. Despite a future of “foot-slogging,” he chose the less glamorous option because, as he later put it, “it is more military!”13
One day in 1911, Juan Gris was arrested and dragged to the Montmartre police station, having been mistaken for the “redoubtable Garnier” of the dread Bonnet gang. Gris, a large man who was sufficiently formidable-looking for the role, owed his deliverance to André Derain, who lived near the police station and swore to his identity.
Violence continued to permeate life on Montmartre. The Bateau-Lavoir crowd was generally too impoverished to attract cutthroats, but Frédé Gérard was engaged in an ongoing war with the hooligans he repeatedly kicked out of the Lapin Agile—one of whom returned one night to shoot Frédé’s son-in-law. Even more shocking, though, was the arrest of Picasso’s good friend Apollinaire for the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.
Apollinaire, born Guillaume Albert Wladimir Alexandre Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky, was the illegitimate son of a young Polish beauty and a dashing Italian soldier of sufficient prominence that his identity as Apollinaire’s father remained hidden for years. After splitting with her soldier lover, Apollinaire’s mother raised her two sons on the Côte d’Azur, where she found protectors among its glittering demimonde. Fleeing bill collectors, the family eventually made its way to Paris, where Apollinaire set to work on his much-desired literary career. It was slow going, but in 1902 he signed his first published story with the name Guillaume Apollinaire.
Soon after, he founded a small (and short-lived) literary review with André Salmon and became friends with Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain, and Picasso. Surrounded by painters such as these, Apollinaire now emerged as an art critic, poet, editor, and figure to reckon with among the younger members of the avant-garde. He was handsome, witty, widely traveled, and—given his shadowy roots—infused with a certain exotic mystery. Accompanied by his lover, the painter Marie Laurencin, he could be found in the thick of whatever was going on, which generally meant staying close to Picasso.
By 1911 Apollinaire had published a volume of collected stories and was writing a column for a leading literary review, the Mercure de France, as well as serving as art critic for another important review, L’Intransigeant, where he strongly championed Cubism. Then, in September, disaster struck. The Mona Lisa went missing from her sanctuary in the Louvre’s Salon Carré, and the police arrested Apollinaire as their prime suspect.
It was an audacious theft—so much so that for a full day no one even realized the Mona Lisa was missing. “Oh, the photographers have it,” a guard replied when a visiting artist inquired. The artist’s persistent inquiries at last led the authorities to put the Louvre into lockdown and send dozens of policemen to scour the premises’ forty-nine acres from top to bottom. It was fruitless; all they discovered were the sad remains of the Mona Lisa’s frame, stashed in an inner staircase.
The work of a maniac, some thought, or a discontented Louvre employee, angling for a ransom. Yet no leads or ransom notes appeared, and in the days that followed, disconsolate Parisians lined the Salon Carré to stare at the empty space on the wall where the Mona Lisa had once hung.
With a dying trail and no leads, an increasingly frantic Sûreté and Prefecture of Police at last lit on a couple of suspects: Guillaume Apollinaire and his good friend, Pablo Picasso. The basis for this extraordinary accusation lay in events dating from 1907, when Picasso was working on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. At that time Apollinaire had a Belgian friend, Géry Pieret, whom he passed off as his secretary, but who seems to have been little more than a self-aggrandizing con man devoted to risk-taking and theft. Picasso and Fernande found Pieret amusing, and it was at a dinner with him and Apollinaire early in 1907 that Picasso seems to have expressed an interest in certain of the Louvre’s primitive Iberian sculptures.
Soon after, Pieret headed for the Louvre, after asking Apollinaire’s mistress, Marie Laurencin, if there was anything she needed (she assumed that he was going shopping at the department store, the Magasin du Louvre). Although Pieret later claimed that he had never planned in advance to steal the sculptures, he managed to lift exactly the ones that Picasso coveted, and he quickly made a sale. Their influence can readily be seen in the Demoiselles’ two central figures, who have extraordinary ears, much like those of the sculptures Pieret sold to Picasso.
Picasso and Pieret seemed to regard the matter as a joke, but Apollinaire was alarmed and tried to persuade Picasso to give the statues back, with no luck. Then, after having left Paris for several years, Pieret once again turned up—just as the Mona Lisa disappeared. Pieret could not resist confessing his Louvre thefts in a letter to the Paris Journal, leading the police to conclude that there was a connection between the two events, and they soon decided that Apollinaire was the leader of an organized gang. Pieret skipped town, and a panicked Apollinaire
and Picasso tried to return the sculptures but couldn’t figure out how to do it. At length, Apollinaire turned them over to the Paris Journal. And then the police arrested Apollinaire.
Picasso, according to Fernande, was “practically out of his mind with terror”14 when a plainclothes detective appeared on his doorstep to take him before the examining magistrate. It was there that he first saw Apollinaire, who had already spent two days in the notorious La Santé prison, where he had been stripped, searched, put in solitary, and subjected to long interrogations. In the end, Apollinaire implicated Picasso, while Picasso denied having any part in the affair or even knowing Apollinaire. They remained friends afterward, but the affair—and the humiliation as well as the nastiness of the experience—had a lasting impact on Apollinaire, who spent several miserable days and nights in prison before being released for lack of conclusive evidence. Picasso, on the other hand, managed to escape all charges.
Picasso’s departure from the Bateau-Lavoir signaled the beginning of the end for that establishment’s position as center of the avant-garde universe, and Montmartre with it. It was around this time that a new center began to emerge in Montparnasse, focused around an odd building on Passage Dantzig called La Ruche.
La Ruche dated from 1900, when a successful society sculptor and committed philanthropist by the name of Alfred Boucher bought land at the southern edge of Paris, just inside the Thiers fortifications, where he created an artists’ colony. Cleverly recycling the octagonal wine rotunda from the recently closed Paris exposition, he divided it into numerous small trapezoidal studios, each with its own source of natural light, and opened these to a passel of struggling artists. Boucher charged next to nothing for these accommodations (thirty-seven francs per quarter, when he even bothered to request it), which was about what the traffic could bear. Grandly inaugurated as the Villa Médicis, the place quickly became known as La Ruche, or the Beehive.
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 27