Twilight of the Belle Epoque

by Mary McAuliffe

  Naturally, Demoiselles scandalized the Salon’s visitors and became the star of the show.29 Coming at the height of war, the Salon d’Antin’s exhibition of modern art was already preparing the way for the postwar world.

  During the months while so many of their friends had been serving their country, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were enjoying themselves in Majorca. It was pleasant, yet the news of Verdun made it impossible to stay on holiday any longer. Feeling miserable, they decided to return to Paris. There they signed on with the American Fund for French Wounded, which required them to travel about from hospital to hospital, delivering supplies in their own automobile.

  Gertrude did not have enough money to purchase the required auto, and so she wired relatives in New York, who raised the funds and had a Ford shipped over. She promptly christened it “Auntie,” in honor of her Aunt Pauline, who “always behaved admirably in emergencies and behaved fairly well most times if she was properly flattered.”30 A friend had taught Gertrude how to drive his Paris taxi, and she now took on the driving duties with enthusiasm (except for driving in reverse, which she never mastered). Auntie repeatedly broke down, but Gertrude Stein (unlike Marie Curie) did not take pride in her self-reliance; she always managed to wangle help, sometimes from the unlikeliest sources.

  Much like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, the Princesse Edmond de Polignac (née Winnaretta Singer) had been staying with friends in England when war broke out in 1914. It was an agreeable place to be and, having completely underestimated the gravity of the situation, she remained there until she realized that the advancing German armies might well block her route home. She made it, but upon arriving in Paris she was shocked to see the flood of Parisians fleeing town. Unshaken by the German threat, she lent her car to Anna de Noailles and Anna’s mother, who were leaving for the south; for her part, she decided to stay.

  The princess promptly threw herself into war relief efforts, helping to finance Marie Curie’s X-ray units and organizing major fund-raising efforts on behalf of soldiers on the front. She soon realized that many composers and musicians were now in great financial distress and needed help. Stravinsky, in particular, seemed in trouble, having lost his Russian lands (and the income from them) to Austro-German armies; in addition, he was having a difficult time collecting fees and royalties, especially from Diaghilev, who typically was hard up.

  Early in 1916, the princess met with Stravinsky and offered him a substantial fee to write something for her. Her only specification was that the work be orchestral and for a chamber-sized group. Stravinsky’s chamber opera-ballet, Renard, was the result. That spring, the princess also commissioned Erik Satie to write a work on a subject and with a form and size of his own choice. The mezzo-soprano Jane Bathori, who was responsible for introducing Satie to the princess, later recalled that Satie “was particularly fond of the dialogues of Plato and he chose three passages . . . making up a portrait of Socrates.”31 The Princesse de Polignac, who had read Plato’s Dialogues in the original Greek, may have been the one to suggest the subject, but in any case, patron and composer were of one mind. This commission, in addition to encouraging Satie to write a work that would prove of major significance, would also prove a financial lifesaver for him.

  Isadora Duncan’s return to Paris consisted of one long party, during which she entertained the usual A-list as well as hundreds of soldiers. Soon her coffers were running dry, making it necessary to dance again just to pay the bills. She performed in Paris to wild acclaim, and then in May she left on tour of Latin America, where she continued her nonstop love affairs and champagne binges. She also played the diva, throwing tantrums in Buenos Aires and responding to newspaper insults about her weight by in turn insulting her audience, stopping the program to tell them that they were “primitive and uneducated,” and capping her harangue with painfully racist epithets.32 Angered, the management canceled the rest of her engagement.

  Although her personal life remained out of control, Isadora’s subsequent performances in Rio and Montevideo went well, leaving her audiences cheering. Unfortunately her school, temporarily located in Switzerland, now ran out of money. To pay their debts, Isadora’s young dancers, the Isadorables, gave a dance performance—a daring action, since they took it without her permission. Given the success of this venture, they then organized a tour through Switzerland, under the management of Isadora’s brother Augustin. It was their first break for freedom. “Much as we loved Isadora and venerated her as an artist and teacher,” one of her students later wrote, “we nevertheless ardently wished to be independent.”33

  By year’s end, Isadora once again was in New York, where she gave a benefit performance at the Metropolitan Opera for the families of needy French artists. Paris Singer once again came to her rescue, booking the Met for her, but once again Isadora baited him mercilessly, dancing an astonishing tango with an unidentified stranger during the after-performance party. Singer, who was furious, seized the considerably smaller man and carried him out the door. Equally furious, Isadora ripped off the fabulous diamond necklace that Singer had given her, scattering diamonds across the floor.

  The lovers made up, much as in the past, and Singer agreed to bring the Isadorables from Switzerland to New York. He also took an option on Madison Square Garden, which he offered to Isadora for her school. Earlier, she had expressed interest in the venue, but now she was sarcastic and insulting. Singer said nothing, but abruptly left the room. “He’ll come back,” Isadora said complacently to the party of family and friends around her. “He always does.”34

  Yet this time, he did not. It was the end of the long and troubled relationship between Isadora Duncan and Paris Singer. And with it, all funding from Singer finally ended.

  As Charles de Gaulle wrote his mother from prison camp: “For a French officer, the state of being a prisoner is the worst of all.”35 In this spirit, after recovery from his wound, de Gaulle made his first attempt at escape, in a boat on the Danube. His captors quickly caught up with him, and he promptly was sent to a punishment camp in Lithuania. There he made friends with a former engineer in the French Department of Mines—a tunnel specialist who, in an additional stroke of luck, spoke Russian.

  Unfortunately, prison guards soon detected the hole that de Gaulle and his colleague were digging, leading to punishments for all their fellow prisoners as well as a transfer for de Gaulle and his friend to Fort IX, a high-security camp in Bavaria. Here, the Germans had gathered together one hundred or so of their most difficult prisoners (including the famed pilot, Roland Garros). So far as the camp’s commander was concerned, they all were criminals and were treated accordingly. The prisoners responded by doing their best to disrupt the place: setting fire to straw mattresses, throwing water bombs, and performing “concerts” on food tins at all hours of the night.

  De Gaulle soon decided that, given the fort’s layout and surveillance, the best way to escape was by getting himself sent to the garrison’s hospital. Deliberately swallowing the entire bottle of picric acid that his mother had sent him for his chilblains, he became sufficiently ill that he was sent to the hospital, where he discovered that the prisoner’s wing was almost as well guarded as the fortress. Still, the adjoining hospital for German casualties was not guarded, and after he and a colleague with similar intent managed to pile up food and civilian clothes (thanks to well-placed bribery of a German guard and effective pleas to a French electrician), they managed to escape, with de Gaulle escorted out by his colleague, who was disguised in a male nurse’s coat. Their goal was Switzerland, two hundred miles away.

  The two escapees traveled by night, through a steady downpour of rain. Unfortunately, by the eighth day their rag-bag appearance gave them away, and they were arrested—having traveled almost two-thirds of their long journey. Brought back to Fort IX, de Gaulle now decided on a course of good behavior, in the hope that this would get him transferred to a place where it would be easier to break out.


  For the rest of the year, he became a model prisoner, reading, writing, and giving lectures. In what would become characteristic de Gaulle fashion, these analyzed and leveled serious criticism of France’s leadership of the war. All the while, he carefully watched for further opportunities to escape.

  Throughout the year, Monet worked on huge canvases (three feet high and between nine and fifteen feet wide) of his garden’s water lilies. He now was working in a new studio large enough to accommodate them and enable him to work indoors throughout the winter. He called these canvases his Grandes Décorations, and from now on he would be almost totally preoccupied with what he referred to as “The Work.”

  Monet swung back and forth between hope and despair as he painted his Grandes Décorations, aware that his age and declining eyesight were operating against him. Still, he remained hopeful that he would somehow be able to complete this enormous project, which obsessed him. Perhaps what he was attempting was “sheer madness,” he wrote Gustave Geffroy in November, but it served to distract him from the war’s constant anxieties. “I was extremely worried about my son Michel,” he told Geffroy in September, adding that Michel “had three terrible weeks at Verdun.” Presently Michel was on leave at Giverny, Monet added, but only for six days. “How long-drawn-out and painful it all is!” he exclaimed.36

  The pain was not lessening. The Battle of Verdun dragged on, while the equally devastating Battle of the Somme ground through hundreds of thousands of British as well as French troops during the second half of the year. In response to the steady barrage of bad news and the sound of distant guns, Parisians pulled together, in an attempt to console one another and help each other through the anguish. Edith Wharton found that many of the women with whom she was in contact “found their vocation in nursing the wounded, or in other philanthropic activities.”37 For his part, the poet Blaise Cendrars met Erik Satie regularly at the home of the widow of a mutual friend who had recently been killed at Verdun. Cendrars, who had lost an arm the previous year at the front, later recalled that the widow was from Marseilles, and on Friday mornings she often received a basket of fish from her hometown. On those evenings, she ate bouillabaisse with Satie, Cendrars, and Georges Auric, a young musician who would soon become part of the Group des Six. They talked “of this and that,” Cendrars later recalled, but the main thing was the companionship, a small effort to relieve the gloom.38

  By now the high seas were becoming almost as dangerous as the field of battle, thanks to Germany’s strategy of unrestricted submarine warfare. In March, a German sub torpedoed the passenger ferry Sussex in the English Channel, with the loss of many lives, including the Spanish pianist and composer Enrique Granados. Although no American citizens were among those lost, President Wilson warned that if Germany continued this practice, the United States would break off relations. Fearing U.S. entry into the war, Germany agreed that henceforth it would not target passenger ships. It was against the backdrop of this precarious agreement that, in October, Sarah Bernhardt dared once again to cross the Atlantic.

  Rapturously welcomed by Americans, Bernhardt toured indefatigably, playing ninety-nine cities in fourteen months. Accommodating her disability, she performed short scenes designed to win sympathy for her beleaguered nation, and she spoke at Red Cross rallies, benefits, and just about any other public venue where she could urge America to join the Allies in the fight. “How many cities there are,” she wrote her son, Maurice, well into the tour. “Some fine, some ghastly.”39 She also showed a spirited sensitivity for human rights, praising a suffragette convention for its support of a black woman who wished to attend, and stating flatly, “I think that the ostracism in which blacks are held by the whites is odious.”40

  After months of touring, Bernhardt became seriously ill and had to undergo a kidney operation. Yet even after this setback, she soon was up and touring again. “Never stop,” was her motto; “never stop; otherwise you die.”41 Colette, the writer and erstwhile music hall entertainer who had fought her way out of crushing difficulties of her own, would put it another way: what she later noticed, even as Bernhardt approached her eightieth year, was Bernhardt’s “indomitable, endless desire to please, to please again, to please even unto the gates of death.”42 In other words, Bernhardt was a performer, and she would perform to the end.

  The war was taking its toll among Paris’s artists, musicians, and writers. Not only had Apollinaire and Braque received serious head wounds, and Blaise Cendrars lost an arm, but the artist Fernand Léger suffered a near-fatal exposure to mustard gas during the autumn of 1916. That year, the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, one of the famous Duchamp brothers, contracted typhoid on the front and died. The sculptor Ossip Zadkine, who served as a stretcher-bearer from 1916 through 1917, was gassed while transferring the wounded. After a lengthy hospitalization, he was invalided out.

  Maurice Ravel did not escape harm, even though he was not injured; by early autumn he had become seriously ill with dysentery, leading to an operation. He was apprehensive about the surgery, telling Madame Dreyfus, the mother of his friend Roland-Manuel, that he knew “from the example of many comrades here—that I will suffer horribly for some time, but I prefer that to discomfort and pain for the rest of my life.”43 The operation went well, and afterward, a more characteristically upbeat Ravel told Jean Marnold that he experienced no aftereffects from the chloroform, but “on the contrary, as soon as I woke up, I needed a cigarette, because I was dying of hunger.”44

  Madame Dreyfus had been serving as Ravel’s marraine de guerre, or wartime godmother—a correspondent who “adopted” a soldier and sent packages and letters. It was a fortunate development for Ravel, because his own mother had become too ill and weak to write either of her sons. In late July, when Ravel was still at or near the front, he received a letter from her that was so “frail, . . . incoherent, almost illegible,” that it caused him great sadness.45 Although he still hoped for improvement, it was becoming increasingly unlikely.

  Some, like Debussy’s friend, the composer and conductor André Caplet, managed to keep up their spirits, even in the trenches. Caplet, who had survived an alarmingly tempestuous seduction by Isadora Duncan (on the floor, beneath the piano, within Paris Singer’s hearing),46 now faced far graver dangers. As Debussy described it, Caplet was a liaison officer in Verdun who “toys with death from morning till night and manages to keep in high spirits.” Much to Debussy’s delight, Caplet had “a collapsible piano in the trenches with him!”47 Unfortunately, life in the trenches was not so jolly as Caplet made it sound; not long after, he was severely gassed and later died from the effects.

  Debussy himself was not doing well, and he became ever more exasperated with his illness as the months wore on. In February, he wrote Robert Godet, “I’ve just started a new treatment. . . . I’m asked to be patient. . . . Good God! Where am I to find patience?”48 In June, he wondered, “Will I ever again know what it is to be well?”49 In September, he told Godet, “I watch the days go past, minute by minute, as cows watch trains go past.” In December, he wrote, “Naturally, I don’t take this poor tattered body for walks any more, in case I frighten little children and tram conductors.”50

  Auguste Rodin was not doing well, either, having suffered a series of strokes during the year. Once again, he was the target of manipulative females, this time Jeanne Bardey and her daughter, Henriette, Frenchwomen from Lyon. Bardey, who was a talented painter and sculptor, had encountered Rodin several years earlier but had made little progress in the face of firm opposition from Claire de Choiseul. Now Bardey’s husband was dead, and Choiseul was safely out of the picture. “I want to be your slave,” Jeanne Bardey assured Rodin. “My dear little papa Rodin,” twenty-one-year-old Henriette addressed him.51 Rodin, by now an ailing old man with a weakness for pretty women, was “easy prey.”52 Although he planned to give his entire oeuvre to France, there still were plenty of other goodies to be nabbed, such as reproduction rights
to those works.

  With Rodin so clearly in his dotage, the state now found the time amid the chaos of war to ensure the transfer of his massive donation to France, including the provision that the Hôtel Biron would henceforth be called the Musée Rodin. By autumn, the bequest was formally executed, although Parliament reserved its right to debate acceptance of the gift. Unfortunately there were some right-wing extremists who opposed the idea, on grounds that France had no need for yet another museum, and certainly not one that desecrated the memory of the Convent of the Sacré-Coeur, which had occupied the Hôtel Biron prior to the Convent’s expulsion. Most opposition, though, focused on the nature of Rodin’s art, which his critics described as decadent, vulgar, and “tending toward the pornographic.”53 Fortunately, when the final vote was taken, the bequest was overwhelmingly approved.

  In the meantime, other interested parties ensured the departure of Madame Bardey and her daughter, and guards were posted around the Hôtel Biron to prevent her entry and the disappearance of any works of art. As with the Duchesse de Choiseul, drawings and small bronzes were rumored to have disappeared.

  Gustave Eiffel had abruptly retired in the 1890s, following his humiliating involvement in the Panama Canal scandal, but he did not put his feet up during the remaining three decades of his life. During these years, some of his many projects may have come to nothing (such as constructing an astronomical observatory on Mont Blanc, or a tunnel beneath the English Channel), but others, especially those involving his iconic tower, had remarkable results.

  Eiffel had always believed that his tower offered great possibilities for scientific research, and by the early years of the century, the Eiffel Tower had become the center for military experiments in communications. By 1908, the French army was able to use it to establish contact with its bases throughout France, as well as with foreign destinations of interest—notably Berlin. One of the Eiffel Tower’s most famous exploits was the early 1917 interception of a message between Berlin and Spain that led to the identification and conviction of Mata Hari as a spy. (She was executed by firing squad later in the year.)