That fourteenth of July, Bastille Day—France’s own Fête Nationale—“echoed with the tread of marching squadrons, . . . the crash of military music, the voices of children chanting so high that it seemed . . . that ‘le jour de gloire est arrivé.’”23 Then at midnight, “a deep, baying clamour broke the darkness.” Parisians, wakened, waited for the sirens, but there were none. Adam suddenly understood that this was no air raid. “The immense symphony of drums that sounded . . . was no barrage,” nor were the lights from Paris’s anti-aircraft defense.24 Edith Wharton realized that she had heard this “level throb of distant artillery”25 during her expeditions to the front, but never before in Paris. It was the sound of the long-awaited German offensive, just a few short miles away.
On July 12, just before this dreaded offensive began, Pablo Picasso got married. His bride was the lovely Ballets Russes dancer Olga Khokhlova, with whom he fell in love the previous year in Rome, while working on the sets and costumes for Parade. “Russians marry,” Diaghilev had warned him,26 but Picasso did not shy from the prospect. He was thirty-seven years old and thought himself quite ready to become a husband and father.
He wed his bride in Paris’s Russian Orthodox Church (later, Cathedral) of Saint-Alexandre-Nevski, a traditional onion-domed edifice that had been the social as well as religious center for homesick Russians in Paris ever since the mid-nineteenth century—a function that it would embrace with special fervor during the years of the great exodus of Russians to Paris following the Bolshevik Revolution. Stravinsky, for whom the church would play an important role during the 1930s, thought of it as “an island of Russian colour in its drab Parisian neighbourhood.”27
Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, and Apollinaire served as witnesses for the marriage, and the newlyweds honeymooned glamorously in Biarritz, in the villa of Picasso’s new patron, the Chilean heiress Eugenia Errázuriz (who by this time was supplying him with a thousand francs a month). When Picasso and Olga returned, they moved from Montparnasse to a large Right Bank apartment on Rue La Boétie, between Boulevard Haussmann and the Champs-Elysées. Just as Picasso had permanently left Montmartre for Montparnasse, he now left Montparnasse forever.
Only two months earlier, Picasso and Ambroise Vollard had served as witnesses at Apollinaire’s marriage to Jacqueline Kolb at the Church of Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin, near Apollinaire’s quarters on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Ostensibly it was a joyous occasion, but the war was at its peak, and Apollinaire himself was suffering more and more from headaches, depression, and vertigo. Something was wrong, but no one quite knew what. He certainly wasn’t his old self. Perhaps his head wound had not properly healed? Or had his brain been permanently damaged?
Modigliani, too, was ill—although his illness was a recurrence of the tuberculosis that had plagued him since childhood. A year or so before, Beatrice Hastings had exited his life and another woman, Jeanne Hébuterne, had quietly entered. Jeanne was a gifted artist almost sixteen years Modigliani’s junior, from a proper, if artistically inclined, bourgeois home. By May 1917, they had become lovers, and by the spring of 1918, she was pregnant. Soon after, they left Paris for Nice, where Jeanne’s mother joined them—presumably to care for her daughter and imminent grandchild, but prompting Modigliani to move into his own space.
Modigliani had never taken much concern for the welfare of his lovers, or of the children they bore (at least one of which clearly was his). Years before, he had argued that “people like us [artists] . . . have different rights, different values than do normal, ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.” According to his view of things, everything—including Jeanne and the child—was secondary to his art. According to a close friend, “he had no other attachment.”28
Several years earlier, in contemplating the shambles of his second marriage, Debussy had argued that “an artist is by definition a man accustomed to dreams and living among apparitions. . . . It’s pointless expecting this same man to follow strictly all the observances of daily life, the laws and all the other barriers erected by a cowardly, hypocritical world.”29 Yet Ravel, who never married or—to anyone’s knowledge—had an intimate relationship with anyone, had long before reached a different conclusion. Soon after the war’s end, he responded to the news of friends’ marital troubles by observing: “Artists are not made for marriage. We are rarely normal, and our lives are even less so.” Given that, he chose to hold himself aloof from intimate relationships. “Morality,” he noted, “this is what I practice, and what I am determined to continue.” He added, “Life does hurt us, doesn’t it?”30
As the war ground on, Stravinsky remained in Switzerland, where he was supporting an ever-growing horde of destitute Russian in-laws on his much-diminished income.31 “You had to see him at the piano,” recalled one of the soloists in The Soldier’s Tale, which occupied Stravinsky during the first part of the year. There he was, “hammering the keys with nervous hands and sustaining his dynamism with an improbable number of kirsches, gulping them down one after the other, then correcting their sometimes too drastic effects with a no less enormous intake of aspirin.”32
Matisse, too, found the stress of the war almost unbearable, especially with one son, Jean, soon to be posted to the front and his youngest, Pierre, about to be mobilized. Matisse was still in Nice when the long-range March shelling began on Paris, and he wrote a friend that “there’s a wave of panic in Nice just now,” with everyone assuming—and hoping—that there was a mistake in the radio transmission about the new weapon’s astonishing range. Communications were disrupted, and he had little word from Amélie (who had returned to Paris for Marguerite’s regular medical treatment), except to tell him to stay where he was. Rising early each morning to read the latest dispatches in the newspapers, Matisse wrote in late March that “the atmosphere isn’t at all reassuring here—and as I haven’t worked today, I’ve lost my usual ballast.”33
The panic diminished during April and May but surged once more during the crisis of late May and early June, as the Germans pushed to the Marne. Even painting did not calm Matisse now, and he daily took the tram downtown to wait for the communiqué posted every afternoon—drinking coffee and, to calm his nerves, beer while he waited. While Matisse remained anxiously on the sidelines, Amélie prepared their Paris home for evacuation, burying sculpture in the garden and rolling up batches of paintings to travel south. In the meantime, Paris hospitals had been evacuated, surgeons throughout France had been drafted for duty on the front, and facilities nearer Nice were inadequate for Marguerite’s medical care.
It was in the midst of this furor that Pierre Matisse celebrated his eighteenth birthday and, jubilant about being saved from endless hours of violin practice (upon which his father insisted), raced to enlist. Unfortunately he soon took ill in a cholera outbreak that killed a number of his colleagues. Matisse, who had already managed to return to Paris to move Marguerite closer to her surgeons (and consequently spent several nights with his family in their cellar during a resumption of the shelling), now raced to Pierre in Cherbourg. Pierre, as it turned out, only suffered from the flu, but taking no chances, Matisse managed to win leave for him and take him home.
That April, Manfred von Richthofen—the “Red Baron”—who was credited with an awe-inspiring eighty air victories or kills, was in turn killed in action. France’s René Fonck then became the man of the moment, earning the title “Ace of Aces” for his seventy-five confirmed air victories.
In the meantime, the daring pilot Roland Garros at last escaped his prisoner-of-war camp and now encountered Isadora Duncan, who in April returned to Paris after a lengthy stint abroad (including a homecoming in San Francisco, an acrimonious and expensive stay in New York, and an unsuccessful attempt to seduce George Bernard Shaw in London). She and Garros watched a nighttime burst of shells in the Place de la Concorde, where Isadora danced to the sound of the shells and Garros applauded, “his melancholy
dark eyes lit up by the fire of the rockets that fell and exploded quite near us.” That night, he told Isadora that he “only saw and wished for death”—a death wish that Isadora said she identified with, calling it “Incurable Sorrow & Heartbreak. I rush about the world trying to find a remedy—There is none.”34
Garros returned to the front,35 and Isadora consoled herself with a new lover, the famed concert pianist Walter Rummel, who shared her American roots (being a grandson of Samuel Morse). For the next three years Rummel would become Isadora’s accompanist and musical adviser, receiving equal billing in what were described as joint recitals. Her association with Rummel would bring Isadora a period of unaccustomed calm, as well as a surge of fine reviews.
And then, in the midst of despair, good news at long last came. On July 18, Helen Pearl Adam reported that all news of the relentless German offensive seemed to have disappeared, replaced, amazingly enough, by news of an Allied offensive. Strong French and American resistance had held the Germans at the Marne, and on July 18, Foch ordered a counterattack. Suddenly the Allies were pushing the Germans back, and back farther yet, until by the end of August, they had withdrawn to the Hindenburg Line. In September, American forces, attacking on both sides of the Saint-Mihiel salient, captured some fifteen thousand of the enemy, and the news kept getting better as the counterattack spread. At last, at long last, the initiative had passed to the Allies.
Ludendorff’s nerve now cracked, and he began to probe possibilities for an armistice. Clemenceau’s nerve, though, never cracked. He had maintained the morale of France’s troops and of the entire nation during the long difficult months when victory seemed beyond reach. Following Germany’s devastating victory over the Allies on March 21, Clemenceau had remarked that after news like that, “you need an iron-bound spirit to retain your confidence.”36
Pétain’s pessimism had swung Clemenceau in favor of Foch for the command of Allied armies, and Foch, too, inspired as well as coordinated. Yet it was Clemenceau’s own confidence as well as his presence, as near to the front lines as he could get, that bolstered sagging morale when it was most needed. Not only his mental but his physical endurance was remarkable for a man of his age. But it was his disregard for danger that brought him into instant rapport with the fighting men in the trenches.
One encounter in particular stood out in Clemenceau’s mind: “They came to meet [me],” he later recalled, “vague shapes all white with the dust, who made the gesture of lining up to give the military salute while their leader stepped forward and in staccato tones shouted out, ‘1st Company, 2nd battalion, 3rd regiment, present’!” And then, touchingly, the soldier offered Clemenceau a little bouquet of dusty flowers. “Ah, those frail dried-up stalks,” Clemenceau recollected. “The Vendée will see them; for I have promised that they will go to the grave with me.”37
And they did. For these dry and dusty flowers remained in Clemenceau’s study until his death, when they were placed in his coffin.
Another touching ceremony took place in early autumn, when Squadron Chief Alfred Dreyfus, after having served fourteen months on the front, was posted to duty behind the lines, having reached the age of fifty-nine. In his new post, he received an excellent report from his commanding general, leading to his promotion, at long last, to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Marking the occasion, Dreyfus found on his desk a “superb bouquet of flowers,” accompanied by a touching note of congratulations from the women he employed in the work of destroying grenades. Two days later, a delegation of civil workers from the armaments workshops under his command presented him with a “ravishing bronze” of a Gallic cock crushing a Prussian helmet under its feet. The oldest member of the delegation then read Dreyfus a “heartfelt speech.” This demonstration of respect and even affection was perhaps not surprising, given the encouragement that Dreyfus showed his subordinates (on at least one occasion noting that his men at the front were “admirable” and “‘exceptional,’ not a complaint, not a murmur”).38 Yet Dreyfus was deeply moved and wrote his son, Pierre, of these developments, including the text of his promotion.39
By September, the news from the front continued to be good, but Paris took the change quietly. “It is like a city created in a dream between sleeping and waking,” Helen Pearl Adam wrote. “Like lovers united after many years of unhappiness, France and Victory talk together in low tones.” In October, she wrote, “We are half afraid to be as happy as we are!”40
As soon as the Germans departed, Matisse rushed north to his hometown of Bohain, to rescue his mother and brother and his brother’s family, who had suffered terribly during their years under the German army’s yoke. In contrast, Charles de Gaulle anticipated his own release with despair. “If I cannot get into the fighting again between now and the end of the war,” he wrote his mother on September 1, “shall I stay in the army? And what commonplace kind of a future would I have there?”41 Having missed so much of the fighting, his future career as an army officer looked bleak.
The global flu pandemic, which first surfaced at the beginning of the year, now reappeared in a far deadlier form, sweeping through Paris that autumn. One of its first victims was Apollinaire, who, weakened as he was by his war wound, died on November 9 at the age of thirty-eight. Among the many other deaths in Paris, Sarah Bernhardt’s beloved playwright, Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac and L’Aiglon, succumbed to the flu in December. And there were many, many more.
Yet despite the pandemic’s dismal impact, the end of the war was drawing near. Germany was pressing for an armistice, and at this, Clemenceau “nearly went mad, mad with joy. . . . I had seen too much of the front, too many of those water-filled holes where men had lived for four years.”42 In early November, when victory was sure, he recalled that he was the last survivor of those in the National Assembly who had signed the protest against the treaty of 1871 that relinquished Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. It had taken almost fifty years and a war of unimaginable proportions, but France had emerged victorious. She had repelled Germany’s invasion, and in the end, Alsace-Lorraine once again was hers.
On the morning of November 11, Edith Wharton was startled to hear the sound of church bells at an unusual hour. “Through the deep expectant hush,” she later wrote, “we heard, one after another, the bells of Paris calling to each other.” For a moment, “our hearts wavered and doubted. Then, like the bells, they swelled to bursting, and we knew the war was over.”43
Celebration in Paris, France, for the signing of the armistice, November 11, 1918. © Excelsior–L’Equipe / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.
That same morning, Sarah Bernhardt and her granddaughter, Lysiane, sailed into port in Bordeaux, returning from their long tour in America. A large crowd on the wharf was shouting and gesturing, and it was a while before anyone on board could make out what they were saying. “It’s the armistice!” Sarah’s doctor finally cried. “They’re shouting ‘Armistice!’ Can’t you hear them?”
Lysiane ran to tell her grandmother, but she was jostled and held up by the other passengers, “who were mad with excitement.” Her father, racing on board from shore, beat her to it, and when Lysiane reached their cabin, he was holding Sarah in his arms. “Mama! It’s the armistice!” he exclaimed. “The war is over!”44
At that, Sarah Bernhardt and her family wept.
On November 11, at 11 a.m. (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month), guns sounded the Armistice, and Parisians celebrated for three days. “No one who saw the boulevards on the Sunday when we were waiting for the news, the Monday when the Armistice was signed, or the Tuesday when we heard its terms, and the lights went up at dusk along the splendid thoroughfare for the first time in four years, will ever forget the sight,” wrote Adam.45 People poured into the Place de la Concorde, where they climbed on the enemy cannons and gathered around the Strasbourg memorial—“an immense, unorganized, intoxicated crowd, driven by a desire to shout, to cry aloud,
to run or to climb up something.”46 This jubilant throng downed champagne and anything else that was bottled, but they remained in good order. About the worst crime committed by the Paris populace in those three days was the theft of Allied flags, once the shops sold out.
Isadora Duncan and Walter Rummel watched the victory march through the Arc de Triomphe and shouted, “The world is saved.”47 Paul Poiret gave an enormous victory party, while Claude Monet wrote to his good friend Georges Clemenceau to tell him that he was on the verge of finishing two water lilies panels, which he wanted to sign on Victory Day. Could they, he wanted to know, be offered to the state? “It’s little enough,” he added, “but it’s the only way I have of taking part in the victory.”48
Despite the relief and the euphoria that came with victory, Clemenceau clearly recognized the problems that lay ahead. That evening, after reading the text of the armistice in both the Chamber and the Senate, he remarked quietly to a friend, “We have won the war: now we have to win the peace, and it may be more difficult.”49
Some months later, when a young American soldier visited Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris, they took him to see the sights. Afterward, he told them solemnly, “I think all that was worth fighting for.”50
Virtually every Parisian would have fervently agreed. And yet the cost had been horrendous. To achieve victory, France had lost almost one and a half million men, with at least another three million wounded—many so severely that they would be unable to work or function normally again. The loss of property—homes, fields, shops, and factories—was incalculable. Moreover, the trauma of more than four years of warfare would affect the nation for years to come.
It was as France began to realize the depth of its war-inflicted wounds that its prewar world increasingly acquired the aura of a golden age. This was of course an illusion, as Proust so clearly realized while depicting and dissecting a society and a way of life that (in Céleste Albaret’s words) “was disappearing then and is now gone forever.”51
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 44