The Belle Epoque had never been a golden age, especially for those who did not share the wealth and privilege of society’s upper echelons. Yet even for those who belonged to these rarified strata, the Belle Epoque had never been as radiantly perfect as enshrined in memory. Tensions and fault lines had shadowed the era’s extraordinary achievements, and dramatic breakthroughs had inevitably heralded change. Those who enjoyed the comforts and pleasures that their rank and wealth commanded saw their world rapidly disappearing, in the kind of last throes that Ravel’s La Valse would evoke. This world was dying, and it would at last be swept away by war.
“Ah, Céleste,” Proust told his sympathetic housekeeper, as he pondered the pre-war world he had known so well and portrayed so uncompromisingly. “All that is crumbling to dust. It is like a collection of beautiful antique fans on a wall. You admire them, but there is no hand now to bring them alive. The very fact that they are under glass proves that the ball is over.”52
Notes
1 Enter the King (1900)
Selected sources for this and subsequent chapters are listed, by chapter, in the approximate order in which they informed the text: Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso: The Early Years, 1881–1907, trans. Kenneth Lyons (New York: Rizzoli, 1981); John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881–1906 (New York: Knopf, 2012); Janet Flanner, Men and Monuments (New York: Harper, 1957); Robert Boardingham, The Young Picasso (New York: Universe, 1997); Jiri Mucha, Alphonse Mucha: His Life and Work (New York: St. Martin’s, 1974); Jiri Mucha, Alphonse Mucha: His Life and Art (London: Academy Editions, 1989); Claude Berton and Alexandre Ossadzow, Fulgence Bienvenüe et la construction du métropolitain de Paris (Paris: Presses de l’Ecole nationale des ponts et chausses, 1998); Frédéric Descouturelle, André Mignard, and Michel Rodriguez, Le Métropolitain d’Hector Guimard (Paris: Somogy editions d’art, 2004); Maurice Rheims, Hector Guimard, trans. Robert Erich Wolf, phot. Felipe Ferré (New York: Abrams, 1988); Alain Clément and Gilles Thomas, Atlas du Paris souterrain: La doublure sombre de la ville lumière (Paris: Editions Parigramme, 2001); Clive Lamming, Métro insolite: Promenades curieuses, lignes oubliées, stations fantômes, metros imaginaires, rames (Paris: Parigramme, 2001); Ghislaine Sicard-Picchiottino, François Coty: Un industriel corse sous la IIIe République (Ajaccio, France: Albiana, 2006); Elisabeth Barillé, Coty: Parfumeur and Visionary, trans. Mark Howarth (Paris: Editions Assouline, 1996); Bill Mallon, The 1900 Olympic Games: Results for All Competitors in All Events, with Commentary (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998); Mike O’Mahony, Olympic Visions: Images of the Games through History (London: Reaktion Books, 2012); Stephanie Daniels and Anita Tedder, “A Proper Spectacle”: Women Olympians, 1900–1936 (Houghton Conquest, UK: ZeNaNA Press, 2000); Mike Dyreson, Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Anthony Rhodes, Louis Renault: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970); Jean-Noël Mouret, Louis Renault (Paris: Gallimard, 2009); Arbie Orenstein, Ravel: Man and Musician (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975); Maurice Ravel, A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews, comp. and ed. Arbie Orenstein (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003); Mary McAuliffe, Dawn of the Belle Epoque: The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and Their Friends (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011); Paul Poiret, King of Fashion: The Autobiography of Paul Poiret, trans. Stephen Haden Guest (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1931); Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals: Paris—La Belle Epoque (London: Michael Joseph, 1962); Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
1. The Gare d’Orsay, now transformed into the Musée d’Orsay, was built especially to accommodate the crowds attending the Paris exposition.
2. It is now preserved in the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris (23 Rue de Sévigné, Paris).
3. This is now Métro Line 1, which then extended from Porte de Vincennes in the east to Porte Maillot in the west, minus several stations that would be built later. It took approximately thirty minutes for a passenger to travel its 10.6 kilometers.
4. The majority of these establishments were quite small, employing fewer than ten people. Among the largest, Guerlain was the most prestigious, with Houbigant and Lubin close behind.
5. Rhodes, Louis Renault, 26.
6. Ravel quoted from a 1933 article in Ravel Reader, 399. Here he would add that his own Bolero (written in 1928) “owed its inception to a factory,” and he mused that someday he would “like to play it with a vast industrial works in the background.”
7. Debussy won the Prix de Rome in 1884 and hated every minute of his Rome years (see McAuliffe, Dawn of the Belle Epoque).
8. Ravel to Dumitru Kiriac, 21 March 1900, in Ravel Reader, 57. The Institut de France, which included the Académie des Beaux-Arts, was the official body overseeing the Prix de Rome competition.
9. Ravel to Dumitru Kiriac, 21 March 1900, in Ravel Reader, 57. See also Ravel Reader, 35n15 and 57n2.
10. Saint-Saëns praised Ravel’s 1901 Prix de Rome cantata, which presented Ravel in his most traditional mode (Ravel, Ravel Reader, 107n2).
11. Madame de Saint-Marceaux’s comment from her diary, in Orenstein, Ravel, 21.
12. Poiret, King of Fashion, 19.
13. Poiret, King of Fashion, 23.
14. Poiret, King of Fashion, 40.
15. Poiret, King of Fashion, 24.
16. Poiret, King of Fashion, 65.
17. Poiret, King of Fashion, 67.
2 Bohemia on the Seine (1900)
Selected sources for this chapter: Palau i Fabre, Picasso: The Early Years; Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Prodigy; Boardingham, Young Picasso; Jaime Sabartès, Picasso: An Intimate Portrait, trans. Angel Flores (New York: Prentice Hall, 1948); Flanner, Men and Monuments; McAuliffe, Dawn of the Belle Epoque; Robert Orledge, ed., Satie Remembered, trans. Roger Nichols (Portland, Ore.: Amadeus Press, 1995); Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, trans. Randolph Weaver and Dorothy Weaver (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962); Charles Rearick, Paris Dreams, Paris Memories: The City and Its Mystique (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011); Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse, A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869–1908 (New York: Knopf, 2005); Alfred H. Barr Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951); Henri Matisse, Matisse on Art, rev. ed., ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Ruth Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993); Poiret, King of Fashion; Claude Monet, Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters, ed. Richard R. Kendall, trans. Bridget Strevens Romer (London: Macdonald, 1989); Daniel Wildenstein, Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism, vol. 1, trans. Chris Miller and Peter Snowdon (Cologne, Germany: Taschen/Wildenstein Institute, 1999); Robert Gottlieb, Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010); Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Rebel, 1890–1944, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Norton, 1993); Charles Williams, The Last Great Frenchman: A Life of General de Gaulle (New York: Wiley, 1993); Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 1871–1914, trans. J. R. Foster (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Frederick Brown, Zola: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995); William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000); Marcel Proust, Selected Letters, vol. 1 (1880–1903), ed. Philip Kolb, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983); Marcel Proust, Selected Letters, vol. 3 (1910–1917), ed. Philip Kolb, trans. Terence Kilmartin (London: HarperCollins, 1992); Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (Vol. 3, In Search of Lost Time), trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev., D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 1993); Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust: A Memoir, rec. Georges Belmont, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976); Arthur Gold and Robert
Fizdale, Misia: The Life of Misia Sert (New York: Morrow, 1981); Misia Sert, Misia and the Muses: The Memoirs of Misia Sert, trans. Moura Budberg (New York: John Day, 1953); Peter Kurth, Isadora: A Sensational Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001); Isadora Duncan, My Life (New York: Liveright, 2013); Gale Murray, ed., Toulouse-Lautrec: A Retrospective (New York: Hugh Lauter Levin, 1992); Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Random House, 1931); Gabriel Voisin, Men, Women, and 10,000 Kites, trans. Oliver Stewart (London: Putnam, 1963); Harry Kessler, Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880–1918, ed. and trans. Laird M. Easton (New York: Knopf, 2011).
1. The father’s family name was Ruiz and the mother’s was Picasso (her family originally came from Genoa). It was usual in Spain for the child’s legal name to combine both parents’ names, but with the child called by the father’s family name. Until about the age of seventeen Picasso signed his pictures “P. Ruiz Picasso.” After that, he opted to be known as Picasso.
2. Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 160–61.
3. Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 161.
4. The exposition’s enormous fine arts display, housed in the newly built Grand Palais and Petit Palais, was divided into three sections: an exhibition of French art to 1800; an exhibition of French art from 1800 to 1889 (the year of the previous Paris exposition); and a contemporary exhibition, where works by artists from the exclusive and tradition-minded Salon (the official exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts) for the first time mingled with artists from the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, which had been formed several years earlier as an alternative to the Salon.
5. Contamine de Latour’s reminiscences appeared in the August 3, 5, and 6, 1925, issues of the French journal Comoedia. From Orledge, Satie Remembered, 26.
6. At this time Paris’s original twelve arrondissements, or administrative units, expanded to the twenty that exist today. Note that the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes, at the eastern and western edges of Paris, lie outside these arrondissements, even though they belong to the city.
7. Orledge, Satie Remembered, 26.
8. As told to his son, Jean Renoir (Renoir, My Father, 197).
9. Swags of similar gilded leaves can still be seen in the courtyard of the Petit Palais.
10. Spurling, Unknown Matisse, 46.
11. Matisse to the Museum of the City of Paris at the Petit Palais, 10 November 1936, in Matisse on Art, 124. This painting still hangs in the Museum of Beaux-Arts of the City of Paris, in the Petit Palais.
12. Butler, Rodin, 439.
13. Poiret, King of Fashion, 27.
14. Falguière received the nod from the Société des Gens de Lettres for a Balzac sculpture when the society famously rejected Rodin’s monument of Honoré de Balzac.
15. See note 4.
16. Monet to his gardener, [February 1900?], in Monet by Himself, 187.
17. Monet to Alice Monet, 28 March 1900, in Monet by Himself, 190.
18. Gottlieb, Sarah, 179–80.
19. King Louis Philippe I was forced to abdicate in 1848, and Emperor Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was deposed in 1870.
20. The amnesty did not go into effect until 1901. For background on the Dreyfus Affair, see McAuliffe, Dawn of the Belle Epoque.
21. Brown, Zola, 778. L’Aurore was the newspaper in which Zola published his famous defense of Dreyfus, “J’accuse.”
22. Carter, Marcel Proust, 294.
23. Proust never seems to have been a practicing Catholic, and he referred to himself as a nonbeliever. But at the end of his life he expressed the wish that Abbé Mugnier pray at his deathbed and that Proust’s housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, place in his hands a rosary brought by a friend from Jerusalem (Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 207).
24. As when the Duchesse de Guermantes complains: “I went to see Marie-Aynard a couple of days ago. It used to be so nice there. Nowadays one finds all the people one has spent one’s life trying to avoid, on the pretext that they’re against Dreyfus, and others of whom you have no idea who they can be” (Proust, Guermantes Way, 321).
25. Proust to Madame de Noailles, 1? May 1901, in Proust, Selected Letters, 1:219. Proust recommended flattering Anna de Noailles, as “she is at once divinely simple and sublimely proud” (Proust to Jean Cocteau, 30 or 31 January 1911, in Proust, Selected Letters, 3:28).
26. Kurth, Isadora, 70.
27. Kurth, Isadora, 72.
28. Brown, Zola, 786.
29. Adams, Education of Henry Adams, 380, 388.
30. Voisin later insisted that Ader, in his first aircraft, the Eole, had in 1890 been the first to leave the ground “under his aircraft’s own power, from a level surface, without the aid of up-currents” and had flown “about 260 feet (80 meters) in a straight line at a height of from three to six feet” (Voisin, Men, Women and 10,000 Kites, 104–5).
31. Voisin, Men, Women and 10,000 Kites, 100.
32. Kessler, 8 July 1900, in Journey to the Abyss, 230.
33. Kessler, 22 July 1900, in Journey to the Abyss, 231.
3 Death of a Queen (1901)
Selected sources for this chapter: Monet, Monet by Himself; Wildenstein, Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism, vol. 1; Palau i Fabre, Picasso; Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Prodigy; Boardingham, Young Picasso; Murray, Toulouse-Lautrec; Julia Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994); Orenstein, Ravel; Ravel, Ravel Reader; Claude Debussy, Debussy Letters, ed. François Lesure and Roger Nichols, trans. Roger Nichols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind, vol. 2, 1902–1918 (New York: Macmillan, 1965); Roger Nichols and Richard Langham Smith, Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Roger Nichols, The Life of Debussy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Rhodes, Louis Renault; Mouret, Louis Renault; John Reynolds, André Citroën: The Man and the Motor Cars (Thrupp, Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1996); Jacques Wolgensinger, André Citroën (Paris: Flammarion, 1991); Alex Danchev, Georges Braque: A Life (New York: Hamish Hamilton, 2005); Flanner, Men and Monuments; Brown, Zola; Matthew Josephson, Zola and His Time (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1928); Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: George Braziller, 1986); Mayeur and Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War; Abbé (Arthur) Mugnier, Journal de l’Abbé Mugnier: 1879–1939 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1985); David Robin Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (New York: David McKay, 1974); Carter, Marcel Proust; Proust, Selected Letters, vol. 3 (1910–1917); Léon Daudet, Memoirs of Léon Daudet, ed. and trans. Arthur Kingsland Griggs (New York: L. MacVeagh, Dial Press, 1925); Kurth, Isadora; Isadora Duncan, My Life; Michael de Cossart, The Food of Love: Princesse Edmond de Polignac (1865–1943) and Her Salon (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978); Butler, Rodin; André Tuilier, Histoire de l’Université de Paris et de la Sorbonne, 2 vols. (Paris: Nouvelle Librarie de France, 1994).
1. Monet to Alice Monet, 2 February 1901, in Monet by Himself, 190.
2. Monet, 2 February 1901, in Monet by Himself, 190.
3. Natanson in Murray, Toulouse-Lautrec, 179.
4. Natanson in Murray, Toulouse-Lautrec, 316.
5. Despite the collaboration, this two-piano score indicates that Ravel alone did these transcriptions (Ravel, Ravel Reader, 59n1). Debussy’s complete Nocturnes, including Sirènes, would first be performed on October 27, 1901. Reception was mixed, especially for Sirènes, whose female chorus unfortunately was a bit out of tune.
6. Ravel to Lucien Garban, 26 July 1901, in Ravel Reader, 60. Jules Massenet was a prominent French composer.
7. Saint-Saëns to Charles Lecocq, 4 July 1901, in Ravel, Ravel Reader, 61n3.
8. By the turn of the century the Opéra-Comique was a substantial rival to the Paris Ope
ra and offered a similar repertoire, although the Opéra-Comique found a competitive niche by offering contemporary works such as Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.
9. Debussy to Georges Hartmann, 23 July 1898, in Debussy Letters, 98. Adding to Debussy’s woes, Gabriel Fauré wrote incidental music for an 1898 performance of the Maurice Maeterlinck play on which Debussy’s opera was based. By that time Debussy had been at work on his opera for several years and had also turned down the commission that Fauré accepted.
10. Debussy to Pierre Louÿs, 5 May 1901, in Debussy Letters, 120.
11. Arthur Symons, Annotations by the Way, quoted in Nichols and Smith, Claude Debussy: Pelléas and Mélisande, 1.
12. Debussy quoted in Nichols and Smith, Claude Debussy: Pelléas and Mélisande, 28–29.
13. Rhodes, Louis Renault, 29.
14. Rhodes, Louis Renault, 29.
15. Josephson, Zola and His Time, 491.
16. Abbé Mugnier, 30 August 1901, in Journal, 128.
17. Abbé Mugnier, 28 August 1901, in Journal, 128.
18. Abbé Mugnier, 30 August 1901, in Journal, 128–29.
19. Technically Clemenceau was mayor of the eighteenth arrondissement, which comprised Montmartre.
20. In 1899, Waldeck-Rousseau granted Dreyfus a pardon but not an acquittal (see McAuliffe, Dawn of the Belle Epoque, 323). In 1900, the Senate granted amnesty to all the Affair’s participants, which went into effect in 1901 (see chapter 2 of this book).
21. This was Alexandre Millerand, as minister of commerce.
22. Daudet, Memoirs of Léon Daudet, 267.
23. Carter, Marcel Proust, 302.
24. Kurth, Isadora, 79.
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