Twilight of the Belle Epoque

by Mary McAuliffe

  Everyone, that is, except for a distasteful group who viewed the tragic events with a certain satisfaction, having construed the children’s deaths as retribution for the regrettably immoral life of their mother.

  That June, Bulgaria launched an attack on Greece and Serbia, in an attempt to even the territorial grab that its former allies had made in Macedonia. Soon Turkey and Rumania joined the fray, and—suddenly and unexpectedly surrounded—Bulgaria agreed to peace negotiations. The new treaty ending this second Balkan War rearranged the map of the Balkans, but managed to dissatisfy just about all the participants as well as some noncombatants, chiefly Italy. It did not bode well for the future.

  It did, however, leave a wretched group of refugees, especially in Greece and Albania, and soon after the deaths of Isadora’s children, she left Paris for Corfu, where her brother Raymond had established relief efforts during the first Balkan War. “It is terrible to see the results of war,” she wrote Craig in late May. “If we can save some hundreds of little children I will say Deirdre & Patrick are doing it for me.”50 She later wrote, “We returned to our camp weary, yet a strange happiness crept into my spirit. My children were gone, but there were others—hungry and suffering. Might I not live for those others?”51

  Yet by late July, she could not bear to “look at all this misery” any longer and returned to the empty house in Paris, where she fell into fits of weeping.52 Distraught, she left Paris and drove alone across the Alps to Italy, where she joined Eleonora Duse, who helped her through her grief. “For the first time since [the children’s] death,” Isadora later wrote, “I felt I was not alone.”53

  With Duse’s encouragement, Isadora found the courage to return to dancing. She also encountered a handsome young Italian sculptor with whom she had an affair. When she returned to Paris, it was to the promise of a new school: Singer had bought a large and beautiful mansion for her in Bellevue, on the outskirts of Paris, which she began to transform into a Temple of the Dance of the Future. She also returned to the promise of another child: thanks to her Italian lover, she was pregnant.

  Early the previous year, after two and a half years of virtual silence, Georges Clemenceau once again became politically active, helping to overthrow yet another government and bring in that of Rodin’s friend, Raymond Poincaré.

  Poincaré’s election in early 1913 as president of the Republic put in place a man of firm convictions and wide experience—a man of center-right and increasingly conservative politics who was a lawyer, an economist, a former finance minister, prime minister, and foreign minister. He also was a man who was determined to make the office of the president as powerful as it once had been under Marshal MacMahon during the Third Republic’s early days. In particular, Poincaré intended to dominate foreign policy, which meant a policy guided by suspicion of and antagonism toward Germany—a position he shared with Clemenceau, who otherwise intensely disliked him.

  Under Poincaré’s stewardship, French nationalism continued its rise, with public opinion siding decisively with the new Three-Year Law that extended the period of obligatory military service (aimed at raising an army comparable in size to Germany’s). Patriotism had by now replaced pacifism, and increasingly bellicose nationalist demonstrations formed in Paris around the black-swathed statue of Strasbourg (the city lost to Germany in 1871) in the Place de la Concorde.

  It was against this background that the French army engaged in its annual military maneuvers, which seemed to serve little purpose except to keep its soldiers occupied. Certainly these maneuvers (like their German counterparts, in which Count Kessler took part in late July) were no secret, especially as those that autumn involved the deployment of virtually the entire French army in an area near Toulouse. It was all very dignified and disciplined, with umpires declaring entire platoons eradicated and gun batteries wiped out. The German emperor even wrote the president of France that he was pleased the exercise had gone so well.

  Yet in the background, the threat of real rather than mock warfare was growing, and to those who were watching carefully, it was clear that this would be a different kind of war from any that had gone before. Germany’s General Staff still viewed aircraft as useful only for reconnaissance, but by 1913, the German War Ministry began to increase its contracts for aircraft, narrowing France’s lead. The French army, too, was at first reluctant to consider using aircraft either for pursuit or bombardment. Nonetheless, Gabriel Voisin’s factory already was shifting its manufacturing and sales toward supplying France’s military, and the 1912 Voisin airplane, which its maker praised as “unequalled for observation,” was about to become “the first of all the fighting aircraft.”54

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Dear France, dear country”

  (1914)

  “It is pure delight for a soldier to see the national idea come into being, grow and increase on the field of battle,” extolled a certain Captain H. de Malleray in 1905, on pilgrimage to the great medieval battle-site of Bouvines. “Dear France, dear country,” he added, “you will doubtless live through some grave times.”1

  Grave times indeed were coming, but few Parisians in early 1914 seemed to sense this. In late spring, Georges Clemenceau told an American journalist that despite his drumbeat of editorials warning of the German threat, the readers of his newest newspaper, L’Homme Libre, “scoff at talk of war.” He added, “Paris is gay, elegant, luxurious. . . . Paris is now the important place for unimportant things.”2

  As always, scandal ranked high in interest, and Henriette Caillaux’s March assassination of Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro, created a tidal wave of compelling reading. Calmette, during the course of his stormy career, had taken on Sergei Diaghilev and avant-garde morality, as well as the current minister of finance and former prime minister Joseph Caillaux, a powerful politician whom Calmette had accused of financial as well as marital irregularities. As leader of the Radicals (leftist republicans), Joseph Caillaux had long favored a policy of conciliation with Germany and, correspondingly, opposed the Three-Year Law, the highly popular extension of military conscription. He also staunchly advocated the conservatives’ nightmare, an income tax, which now loomed (essentially in exchange for the Three-Year Law). For all these reasons, the conservative press, led by Le Figaro, heatedly and even libelously attacked him from 1913 through early 1914 as France’s willing betrayer to socialism and to Germany. Yet it was the publication of letters from Henriette to Caillaux, while both still were married to their previous spouses, that tipped the balance. Rather than allow her second husband to challenge Calmette to a duel, Henriette took it upon herself to deal with the editor. Entering Calmette’s Le Figaro office swathed in a fur coat and a muff, she pulled out a pistol and shot him.

  Crowd acclaiming the departure of the troops, Paris, 1914. Jacques Moreau / Archives Larousse, Paris, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library. © The Bridgeman Art Library.

  The scandal was delicious, especially when Madame Caillaux was brought to trial for murder. Powerful members of the French political elite headlined the proceedings, which resulted in Madame Caillaux’s acquittal—on the grounds that, as a woman, she had been unable to control her emotions in a crime of passion. It was not an outcome that feminists could cheer about, but Henriette Caillaux seems to have made no complaints.

  As it happened, on June 28, the day that she was acquitted, a Serbian nationalist assassinated the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo. The archduke was heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, but he was not especially well known in France—thus allowing news of Madame Caillaux’s acquittal to eclipse this particular item, at least in Paris. There had been Balkan crises galore in recent years, all of them resolved or at least papered over. What could one more amount to?

  Proust, who had dedicated Swann’s Way to Calmette, was devastated by the news of his death—and equally devastated by the news of Madame Caillaux’s acquitta
l.3 For years Proust had assiduously courted Calmette, who was ready enough to socialize with the aspiring writer but (presumably engaged in more important matters) never bothered to acknowledge the dedication.

  On the other hand, André Gide had experienced a dramatic change of heart about Swann’s Way, writing apologetically to Proust: “For several days I have not put down your book; I am supersaturating myself in it, rapturously, wallowing in it.” He even confessed that “the rejection of this book will remain the gravest mistake ever made by the NRF—and (for I bear the shame of being largely responsible for it) one of the most bitterly remorseful regrets of my life.”4 Gide proceeded to offer publication in the Nouvelle Revue Française for the next two volumes of what Proust then envisioned as a trilogy.5 By this time, Proust’s publisher, Grasset, had realized his client’s worth and made a calculated bid to keep him, even while telling him that he was “free to choose.” Morally as well as contractually bound to Grasset, Proust opted to stay with him, but on somewhat more favorable terms than originally.

  Proust now was dealing with extremes in happiness and grief, for the object of his desire, Agostinelli, had recently crashed and died while taking flight lessons. By early June the Nouvelle Revue Française was publishing excerpts from Proust’s upcoming volume, but Proust was too devastated by Agostinelli’s death to care. As he told Gide, “I don’t know how I can endure such grief.”6

  While Henriette Caillaux was capturing headlines, Isadora was hard at work starting up her new school at Bellevue, where by late spring she had admitted about twenty students. She also permanently moved her six best dancers (the so-called Isadorables, now in their teens) to the new location, where they served as dance instructors. There, her students’ Friday afternoon performances attracted, among others, her near-neighbor Rodin as well as Jean Cocteau and Gordon Craig’s famed mother, the actress Ellen Terry. On June 26, her students performed at the Trocadéro, while Isadora—now eight months pregnant—remained hidden from view. “I believed,” Isadora later wrote, “that this school at Bellevue would be permanent and that I should spend there all the years of my life, and leave there all the results of my work.”7

  In late spring, Gertrude Stein also was making satisfying progress with her career, having published Tender Buttons with a small New York press that, most fortunately, had little interest in profits and, in its own words, specialized in “New Books for Exotic Tastes.” The publisher’s enthusiastic promotion touted Gertrude Stein as “a ship that flies no flag and . . . is outside the law of art, but she descends on every port and leaves a memory of her visits.”8 Reviewers split between those who regarded Tender Buttons as a revolutionary breath of fresh air and those who regarded it as nonsense (one reviewer said “he felt as if an eggbeater had been applied to his brain”).9 A slim book of prose poems divided into three sections (Objects, Food, Rooms), Tender Buttons has been described as the literary version of Cubism, especially in Cubism’s later stage of synthesis or, more familiarly, collages. “I was very much struck at this period,” Gertrude Stein later wrote, “with the way Picasso could put objects together and make a photograph of them. . . . To have brought the objects together already changed them to other things, not to another picture but to something else, to things as Picasso saw them.”10

  By this time, Leo and Gertrude Stein had definitively parted company, with Gertrude feeling spurned and badly used and Leo feeling morose but immeasurably superior in all ways, especially in intellect. Both claimed a need for independence. Yet although there was no explosion accompanying Leo’s departure, they would not speak to one another again.

  Leo left for Florence, and the two divided their paintings between them. Gertrude took the Picassos (except for the drawings, which went to Leo), while Leo claimed the Renoirs. They divided the Cézannes—although Leo expressed a particular wish for the Cézanne apples (“I’m afraid you’ll have to look upon the loss of the apples as an act of God,” he told her). Leo kept Matisse’s Joy of Life, while Gertrude got Matisse’s Woman in a Hat. Leo concluded his proposal with the patronizing comment, “I hope that we will all live happily ever after and maintain our respective and due proportions while sucking gleefully our respective oranges.”11

  Shortly before his own death, Leo took pains to refute the story that there had been a feud or quarrel between them. “We never quarreled except for a momentary spat,” he wrote. “We simply differed and went our own ways.”12

  Amid his journal entries for numerous luncheons and dinners, Abbé Mugnier, back in the social whirl, noted on June 29, “Yesterday, the Archduke of Austria and his wife were assassinated.”13 The American writer Edith Wharton, who now was living in Paris, observed that “a momentary shiver” ran through the members of a garden party she was attending when the news broke. “But to most of us,” she added, “the Archduke Ferdinand was no more than a name.” Although one or two elderly diplomats shook their heads solemnly, “the talk wandered away to the interests of the hour, . . . the last play, the newest exhibition, the Louvre’s most recent acquisitions.”14

  During the month that followed, the enormity of the crisis that this assassination unleashed was not yet clear, especially to the average Frenchman. Helen Pearl Adam, a British journalist then working in Paris, wrote in her diary for July, “In 1914, the people of France had decided that it could not be bothered with politics.”15 Still, by late July, Edith Wharton noted, “Everything seemed strange, ominous and unreal, like the yellow glare which precedes a storm,”16 and Abbé Mugnier was writing of “grave rumors of war unleashed by the rupture between Austria and Serbia. If Russia defends its Slavic brothers against Austria, will not France be pulled in?”17

  Austria had decided that the assassination of its heir apparent provided sufficient provocation and opportunity to swallow Serbia, much as it had swallowed Bosnia and Herzegovina only a few years before. Earlier that month, Germany had assured Austria of its support, if indeed Russia decided to defend its Slavic brothers. On July 28, Austria declared war against Serbia, and it began its attack on the following day. Russia immediately mobilized along its Austrian frontier, eliciting a German ultimatum. The French had already promised Russia to fulfill its treaty obligations by intervening militarily if Germany supported Austria-Hungary. Suddenly, all hell was about to break loose.

  Jean Jaurès, the great socialist leader who had long worked for peace, had warned that in case of war, Germany was prepared to use its demographic advantage to the utmost, overwhelming France with sheer manpower. He was due to attend a conference of the International in early August, where he dearly hoped to persuade the belligerents to back down. But on July 31, as he sat in a café on Rue Montmartre, a twenty-nine-year-old French nationalist, Raoul Villain, shot and killed him.18 Jaurès’s assassination did not trigger a revolt by the workers, as France’s leaders initially feared, but it did remove a powerful voice on behalf of peace—which was what his assassin intended.

  At noon on Saturday, August 1, Germany’s ultimatum to Russia expired in the face of Russian silence. At five o’clock, the Kaiser decreed general mobilization. Would France stay neutral in a Russo-German war? France had treaty obligations as well as self-interest to consider. That afternoon, France also declared mobilization, to begin at midnight. Bands played the Marseillaise, and a crowd tore the black mourning off the statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde. “Vive la France!” reverberated throughout the land, along with “Vive l’Alsace!”—in memory of the bitter defeat of 1871.

  Misia Edwards rejoiced with other Parisians at the news. Caught up in the frenzy of excitement, “everybody kissed, sang, cried, laughed, trampled each other, hugged each other,” she later recalled. “We were filled with compassion, generosity, noble feelings, ready for any sacrifice, and as a result of it all, wonderfully, unbelievably happy.”19 Yet Helen Pearl Adam reported that an hour after the first notice of mobilization was posted, “there were already groups of men with bundles on their
shoulders marching to the railway stations,” and “groups of weeping women everywhere.”20 Jules Bertaut, who lived through it, recalled that “as the evening drew on, Paris became calmer and graver. Shops put up the shutters which in many cases were not to be taken down for four years; uniforms that had not seen light for years appeared on the street; men linked arms and embraced each other, while others marched in slow file side by side. Passing by doors in quiet streets you could hear the sound of sobbing inside.”21

  In Brittany, at Sarah Bernhardt’s vacation home of Belle-Isle-en-Mer, Sarah’s granddaughter, Lysiane, made the rounds (in Sarah’s car) to post the mobilization orders at nearby villages. “At each hamlet our appearance spread consternation,” she later wrote. “The men shook their heads solemnly. The women crossed themselves and wept.” Sarah herself, when she heard the news, could only exclaim, “Two wars in one lifetime! And to be able to do nothing: to be old and ill!”22 Paul Poiret recalled that the taciturn men in the Brittany village where he was holidaying resolutely called to one another, as they returned from their fields: “Very well, then, we shall go and see him, [Kaiser] Wilhelm.”23

  “I still hope, non-believer though I am,” Proust told a friend, “that some last-minute miracle will prevent the launching of the omni-death-dealing machine.”24 But as Count Kessler noted in his journal, “The storm is coming.”25

  While Europe was poised on the brink of war, Isadora Duncan was holed up in the elegant Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde, where she awaited the birth of her child. It was hot, and she had her windows open. “Beneath my windows,” she later wrote, “they were calling the news of the mobilization. . . . My cries, my sufferings, my agony were accompanied by the rolling of the drums and voice of the crier.”26