It was only later, when she returned to the kitchen, that Céleste remembered the most striking thing about the room: “It was as if I’d been inside an enormous cork; there were panels of cork nailed everywhere to keep out the noise.”29
And thus began Céleste’s service at 102 Boulevard Haussmann.
Much to the surprise of Proust’s publisher, Swann’s Way was widely reviewed, for the most part favorably, and the publisher now contemplated a second printing—albeit with trepidation. It had taken five sets of proofs, in addition to galleys and mountains of complicated revisions, to bring Swann’s Way to press—an editor’s nightmare. Once in print, there still were a large number of errors and misprints that, in an odd turn of events, the impresario Gabriel Astruc helped correct for the second printing. Reverting to his early career as a proofreader, Astruc began to make corrections in his personal printed copy. Proust soon learned of Astruc’s notated copy and asked to borrow it for the second printing. Astruc somewhat sheepishly agreed.
Yet despite such cheering developments on the literary front, Proust was in a morose mood. He spent December pining for his secretary and former chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli, who had willingly accepted Proust’s many favors but now fled from him, refusing to return. And so, feeling bereaved and misused, Proust sadly occupied himself in typing the second volume of his tome,30 naming the girl who would become the unattainable object of the Narrator’s desire Albertine.
Countess Greffulhe, 1907 (oil on canvas), by Philip Alexius de Laszlo. Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library. © The Bridgeman Art Library.
Early on, Proust had decided on the name “Guermantes,” and was relieved to discover that the last Comte de Guermantes had died in 1800, making the name available for fictional use. As for Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes, his primary model appears to have been the Countess Greffulhe, who stood at the pinnacle of Belle Epoque Parisian society, where she dispensed favor and largesse as a leading patron of the arts.31 Proust had first glimpsed Elisabeth, Countess Greffulhe, during the early 1890s, when he led an active social life and ardently aspired to associate with members of the highest Parisian society (“his ‘camellia button-hole’ period,” he later called it, adding that even his own mother “couldn’t have introduced me into that sort of society”).32 The Countess Greffulhe was still in her young thirties and of impeccable social lineage. She also was rich—married to the Belgian banking tycoon Henri Greffulhe. More than this, she was beautiful, believed by many to be the most beautiful woman in Paris. After finally catching a glimpse of her at a ball, Proust wrote the Countess’s cousin, the extravagantly refined Count Robert de Montesquiou: “The whole mystery of her beauty lies in the brilliance and especially the enigma of her eyes. I have never seen a woman so beautiful.”33
Proust was dazzled by the Countess Greffulhe in much the same way that Proust’s Narrator idolizes the duchesse de Guermantes, following her on walks in the hope of encountering her. Yet in both the story and in real life, Proust and his Narrator learn that the woman they worship is far from a goddess. Apart from her great wealth, cultivation, and social position, she turns out to be unexpectedly ordinary and even vulnerable.
Paul Poiret, whose ego was second to none, saw only the arrogance that he in turn may well have provoked. “I did not know that you were capable of making a dress for a great lady,” the Countess Greffulhe disdainfully told him after he dressed her to her satisfaction (in gold and ermine) for her daughter’s wedding. “I thought that you only knew how to dress midinettes [seamstresses] and hussies.”34
Yet Count Kessler saw something else. After witnessing a strained encounter between the countess and her husband, he asked why Rodin had never done a portrait bust of her. “Because my husband has never had the notion of having anything done of me,” she replied. “I am the wife of a very rich man,” she added, “but I have never considered his fortune as mine. I have a house and as long I will be there, I will be there. If ever I would lose it, I would have nothing.” When Kessler asked if there were no paintings or pictures of her, she replied that there was “a pretty good photograph, taken last year in Brussels,” but added, “No, nothing will remain of me.” Kessler noted that “her voice was quite cold, but you sensed the fate beneath the words.”35
It was a year of physical and financial challenge for a number of Paris’s most prominent citizens. Sarah Bernhardt returned early in the year from her sad American tour and subsequently appeared on her own stage in a suitably moving role as the suffering mother in Jeanne Doré. It was a success, but a bittersweet one; the aging star was in pain, and it would be her last appearance in a full-length play.
Gabriel Astruc did not have much time to enjoy the successes of his Théâtre des Champs-Elysées: financial problems forced him to vacate in November the theater he had opened with such high expectations that spring. Filmmaker Georges Méliès also was broke and deeply in debt to Pathé. As if life had not dealt him enough blows, his wife now died, leaving him with a young son to raise. And Debussy, desperate for funds to pay for his sick mother’s care as well as to maintain the lifestyle to which he and his family had become accustomed, wrote his publisher that he was “paralysed with worry. You can’t possibly envisage the hours of torment I’m going through at present! I promise you, if my little Chouchou weren’t here I’d blow my brain out, as stupid and ridiculous as that might be.”36
On a happier note, late in the year the Mona Lisa unexpectedly came to light, in Italy. The thief, an Italian house painter who had been living and working in Paris, contacted a leading Florentine art dealer to request a substantial sum of money for living expenses, although he claimed that his real motive had been to return the painting to Italy. (The fellow was confused about the painting’s provenance, having mistakenly thought that Napoleon had plundered it, when in actuality, France’s King François I had acquired it legitimately some three centuries earlier.)
And how had the thief done the impossible? It had been easy, he told the judge. Having worked for the company that had the job of placing the Mona Lisa under glass, he had ample opportunity to see how the painting was hung and to become known to staff members. These recognized him when he appeared several months later in his work smock, even though he was not in fact employed at the Louvre at the time.
Slipping into the Salon Carré early one Monday morning, when the Louvre was closed to the public, the fellow waited until the guard disappeared, unhooked the Mona Lisa from the wall, and took off down an interior staircase. There he removed the lady from her frame, stowed her beneath his smock, and left. Despite all the theories that the French police had entertained for more than two years, the Mona Lisa had spent almost her entire absence in the thief’s humble Paris apartment in the tenth arrondissement, wrapped in red silk and carefully stowed in the false bottom of a battered trunk.
All of France celebrated, especially when Italy agreed to return the lady to the Louvre. As for the thief, he went to jail, but only briefly. After serving in the Italian army during the war, he unaccountably returned to Paris. There, he opened a paint store.
In addition to battling a lingering illness early in the year, Rodin faced the challenge of mending some badly broken relationships with friends and family once Claire de Choiseul finally disappeared from his life. In particular, he returned to Rose, “the poor little flower of the field,” as he called her, “which I almost crushed.”37 He also took it upon himself to improve relations with his son, Auguste Beuret, whom he had supported financially but always kept at a distance, never agreeing to recognize him—a situation that was deeply painful to Auguste, who worshiped his father. Auguste’s financial need and illnesses had become pressing, and Rodin finally invited him and Auguste’s longtime mistress to live at Meudon. There, the two lived under an assumed name in a house that Rodin provided, while Auguste (who showed significant skill as an artist in his own right) was classified and paid as an engraver, in addition to
working as a guard.
Yet other shadows from the past continued to haunt Rodin. In March, following the death of Camille Claudel’s father, who had provided her with financial and emotional support, Claudel’s brother had her committed to an insane asylum. There (despite her doctors’ reluctance, but in accord with her mother and brother’s insistence), she would remain for the rest of her long life. Rodin tried to visit this former student and lover—a significant artist in her own right who had played such a vital part in his life—but Claudel’s mother and brother managed to sequester her from receiving visits or mail from any but themselves. (For the record, her brother rarely visited, and her mother never came.) Eventually, Rodin would find a way to send her money (to provide “some comfort until she gets out of this hell”),38 but in a more meaningful gesture, he promised to try to set aside a room for her work in the future Musée Rodin. Claudel’s mother and brother were adamantly opposed to having her work shown, and so she never learned of this tribute. It was not until long after her death, when Paul Claudel donated four major works by his sister to the Musée Rodin, that Rodin’s request could be honored.
While Rodin was working to mend the broken or frayed relationships in his life, Diaghilev’s relationship with Nijinsky was rapidly deteriorating. After their final split, Nijinsky wrote that he had “begun to hate [Diaghilev] quite openly,” and that Diaghilev had even hit him with his cane “because I wanted to leave him.”39 Diaghilev’s appearance and age now repelled the much younger man, and Nijinsky claimed that he even took to locking the door of his hotel room to keep Diaghilev out. By summer, despite Diaghilev’s attempts to hide the fact, his affair with Nijinsky had ended.
What came next, though, was a complete shock. The company departed on a scheduled tour of Latin America without Diaghilev, as planned (he was terrified of sea voyages, having once been told by a fortune-teller that he would die on the water; as it happened, he died in Venice). On shipboard, Nijinsky attracted the attention of Romola de Pulszky, a fledgling ballerina from Hungary who had taken classes with the Ballets Russes dancers and joined the company on its Latin American tour. They soon were seen everywhere together, but no one thought anything of it; despite some bumpy times, everyone assumed that Nijinsky still was Diaghilev’s lover. But Nijinsky—or at least Romola—had other ideas, and a few days after landing in Buenos Aires, the two were married.
Nijinsky’s mother was furious that her son had not sought her permission nor even informed her of his impending marriage. Diaghilev was almost hysterical with grief and rage. According to Misia (who was with him at the time he learned the news), he was “overcome with a sort of hysteria, ready to go to any extreme, sobbing and shouting.”40 And then he did what he could to avenge himself: he fired Nijinsky.
Nijinsky seems to have been floored by this response. He wrote Stravinsky, begging him to intercede with the irate impresario. Diaghilev “owes me a lot of money,” Nijinsky pleaded. “For two years I wasn’t paid anything at all for my dancing or for the new productions of Faune and Jeux and Sacre. I was working without a contract.” Of course, as Diaghilev’s lover, he had wanted for nothing. Yet now he had “lost everything.”41 It never had occurred to him that Diaghilev could do without him, whether as dancer, choreographer, or lover.
Change was everywhere. The last of the horse-drawn omnibuses now disappeared from the Grands Boulevards, taking an era with them. The skirts of women’s day dresses, unlike the ballooning skirts of the recent past, had become so tight that they revealed the outlines of the thighs. And the automobile, only recently a new-fangled invention, had become a necessity—as was that intruder on private life, the telephone. Abbé Mugnier, who had managed to recover the social life he feared he had lost, marveled at the usefulness of automobiles and other inventions in connecting him with his many friends and acquaintances. “Ah, what a life is mine!” he exclaimed. “A life of automobiles and of pneumatics. A life of luncheons and of dinners.”42
By early 1913, Lili Boulanger—dressed as fashionably as ever—once again was hard at work in preparing compositions for her end-of-semester exams at the Conservatoire, as well as preparing two works for performance. In March, she took time out to rest, but by April she was once again at work, preparing for the Prix de Rome competition. Her teacher, Paul Vidal, again reported on her extraordinary talent, but noted that most unfortunately she still suffered from poor health.
That May, Lili left Paris to go into seclusion in the Château de Compiègne for the first, or elimination, round of the Prix de Rome competition. Each of the thirteen contestants was required to compose an orchestrated chorus and fugue within strict constraints. The judges dictated the fugue’s subject and the chorus’s words, which were kept secret until announced to the contestants. Once given their musical challenge, the contestants were kept under strict surveillance, to ensure that they did not communicate with each other or with anyone outside, even their families.
Six days later, Lili submitted her composition, which won her entrance (with four others) to the next and final round, which required the composition of a cantata in the space of one month. As Lili and her fellow competitors once again went into seclusion, the press took due note of the fact that a woman (and the sister of a previous prize-winner) had made the cut. She was six years younger than the next-youngest contestant, and the only one who had never before competed in the final round. On June 5, she learned the results. She had done it. She was the overwhelming winner of the Prix de Rome for music, having received thirty-one out of thirty-six votes. It took the judges only forty-five minutes to reach their decision.
It was a stunning victory. At the age of nineteen, Lili Boulanger had become the first woman to win the Prix de Rome. And she had demolished the competition.
Back in Paris following her latest tour of Russia, Isadora Duncan continued to have premonitions of tragedy. She felt as if she was living “under a strange oppression,” and one night, awakening with a start, she saw “a moving figure, draped in black, which approached the foot of the bed and gazed at me with pitiful eyes.”43 The figure vanished when Isadora turned on the light but reappeared at intervals.
On the doctor’s recommendation, Isadora temporarily moved with the children and their governess to Versailles. It was while she was staying there that Singer unexpectedly returned and asked that she lunch with him and bring the children. She was delighted, and the four had a festive lunch at an Italian restaurant. After that they returned to her studio in Neuilly, where she planned to rehearse while the children and their governess went back to Versailles, so the children could rest.
Isadora’s studio was located only a few hundred yards from an intersection with the boulevard that ran beside the Seine. By this time it was raining, and the chauffeur who was driving the children to Versailles had to brake hard to avoid a collision at the river’s edge. At this, the car stalled, and the chauffeur got out to crank the engine. Afterward he insisted that he had left the car with the parking brake on and the gear in neutral, but when the engine started, the car shot forward across the boulevard, over the embankment, and into the river.
Several workmen at a nearby café responded to the cries for help, notifying the nearby fire brigades and diving into the water, but it was of no use. It took an hour and a half to locate the submerged automobile and haul it to shore. By that time Isadora’s two children and their governess were long dead.
It was a tragedy beyond belief, and Isadora’s life would never again be the same. For the moment, she was in complete shock. “Our little girl Deirdre was taken from us today without suffering,” she telegrammed Craig in Florence. “My boy Patrick is taken with her,” she added. “This sorrow is beyond any words.”44 She later wrote that “ever since then I have had only one desire—to fly—to fly—to fly from the horror of it, and my life has been but a series of weird flights from it all, . . . and all life has been to me but as a phantom ship upon a phantom ocean.”45
Rebelling against what she called “the mummery of what one calls Christian burial,” she had but one wish, “that this horrible accident should be transformed into beauty. The unhappiness was too great for tears.”46 In response to her ardent request, her brothers and sister surrounded the children with mountains of flowers, and students from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts brought armfuls of white blossoms. Refusing to put the children into the ground “to be devoured by worms,” Isadora insisted on cremation—a controversial decision at the time, but the closest she could come to Byron’s act of “burning Shelley’s body on the pyre by the sea.”47
Count Kessler represented Gordon Craig at the funeral service, which took place in Isadora’s Neuilly studio. He brought, at Craig’s request, two tiny bunches of flowers—two sprays of white lilacs to place on the white coffins. Afterward he wrote that he had “never seen a more moving ceremony. The absolute absence of words, of all the dreary, hypocritical jabbering of ordinary funeral services, did a great deal, and then the exquisite taste in the choice of music.”48 He added, “Everyone in Paris is moved to the depths of their hearts.”49
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