However, Gauzi maintained a clear recollection of a pivotal moment in Maria’s – Suzanne’s – life which took place when she was in her twenties.60
One day, he was painting in his studio when his doorbell began ringing frantically.
The caller’s impatience allowed him no time to set his brushes and palette down. He hurried to the door. As it was opened, a panting Lautrec near-on fell into the room. Gauzi had no chance to speak.
‘You’ve got to come at once!’ Lautrec gasped. ‘Maria is trying to kill herself.’
CHAPTER 8
Flavours of Happiness
Lo que se conha la testa dins un bornat Se deu pas planher d’èsser fissat.
(He who sticks his head in a bee hive Can’t complain about being stung.)
OLD LIMOUSIN PROVERB1
Shouting could be heard coming from the kitchen in the Valadon apartment as Lautrec and Gauzi came to a halt at the bottom of the stairs.2 Lautrec had left the front door ajar when he raced off to fetch Gauzi and the friends slipped inside unheard.
‘You’ve really done it now!’ Gauzi remembered Madeleine bellowing at Suzanne. ‘He’s taken fright and will never come back – then where will you be?’
‘He wouldn’t play ball,’ Suzanne protested, ‘and I used every trick I knew.’
‘You could wait a bit longer …’ the mother offered.
Lautrec stepped through the kitchen doorway so that the friends could be seen. Suzanne and Madeleine stopped arguing and spun round. Both parties beheld each other in awkward silence. Finally, Gauzi found his voice, and demanded to know what was going on. But before either woman could answer, he had drawn his own conclusion: Suzanne had resolved to shore up her family’s material security through marriage – a marriage which, for her part at least, would be entirely one of convenience. But however much he cared for Suzanne and loved company, Lautrec prized his freedom. Gauzi calculated that when his friend’s proposal had not been forthcoming, Suzanne had begun using emotional blackmail to corner her prey.
‘My poor friend,’ he said to Lautrec, ‘they have been duping you!’
Lautrec turned his back, and stopping only in the front room to collect his cane and hat, left the apartment with Gauzi, closing the door behind them.
Outside on the landing, Lautrec turned to his friend. ‘Goodbye, see you tomorrow,’ he said, shaking Gauzi’s hand before returning to his room.
Lautrec hated solitude. Gauzi felt sure that had he followed his friend that day, he would have found Lautrec collapsed, ‘choking with sobs’, nursing his broken heart. And as far as Gauzi was aware, Suzanne and Lautrec never saw each other again.
However sour the note on which Suzanne and Lautrec parted, she could not brood over the loss for long. There were too many other people and problems clamouring for her attention. Maurice’s performance at school was causing alarm, Madeleine was fretting, Miguel and countless others were seeking her company. Meanwhile, there were modelling assignments to fulfil, and at every turn, there seemed to be a figure or form just begging to be brought to life in pencil or chalk, committed to paper, captured forever. And then each afternoon, there was Degas expecting her arrival at 37, Rue Victor-Massé. If for any reason she failed to appear, Suzanne could be sure that Zoé would appear on her doorstep to inform her that the master demanded to know the reason for her absence.3
Degas had only moved to the spacious three-floor apartment in 1890, largely through necessity as his passion (or obsession) for collecting paintings was then reaching its peak.4 Until 1892, he could often be found at the opera in the evenings, and was in the habit of going to stay with his friends the Halévys in Normandy or the Valpinçons at Ménil-Hubert in the summer months.5 But the rest of the time, he was at home. It was therefore important that the apartment – and the landlord – met his every requirement.
‘Let’s not quibble anymore over details,’ he wrote impatiently to the proprietor in the year he took up residence. ‘I am a quiet and solvent tenant; ask no more of me.’6
Degas had his studio on the fourth floor of the house, and on the second was his ‘museum’, where Suzanne could marvel at works by great masters including Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Camille Corot, as well as examples of younger talent such as Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne.7 It was on the third floor that the artist lived. Polymath Paul Valéry recalled the scene a visitor like Suzanne could expect to find when they paid a call on the great man.
‘Degas would be milling about, dressed like a pauper in old slippers and loose-fitting trousers that were invariably unbuttoned.’ For Valéry, Degas could be described as:
a man who once was elegant, whose manners, when he chose, could be of the most unforced distinction, who used to spend his evenings in the wings of the Opéra, a frequent visitor in the paddock at Longchamp, a supremely sensitive observer of the human form, a supremely cruel authority on female contours and poses, a discerning connoisseur of the finest horses, the most intelligent, most reflective, most demanding, most ruthless draughtsman on earth … not to mention being a wit, the guest whose comments, in their sovereign breach of fairness, in their selective truth, could prove lethal …8
It was not unusual for Suzanne to cross paths with other of the artist’s close acquaintances on her visits, often Bartholomé or Degas’s great friend Henri Rouart.9 Rouart was an amateur painter who had regularly exhibited in the Impressionists’ shows from 1874.10 But he had made his fortune as an engineer, and since spent it liberally building up an enviable art collection. And whatever the day or the season, all the comings and goings of the household were overseen and catered for by the formidable and rotund person of Zoé.
‘She speaks very well,’ Valéry observed, ‘it seems she was once a schoolteacher. The huge round spectacles she wears lend her broad, frank, invariably serious face something of a scholarly air.’11 Notwithstanding, Suzanne came to like her enormously.
By the 1890s, Degas was growing more selective about where he exhibited and what he sold. But his output remained steady and consistent, and he experimented voraciously. He claimed to have invented the technique of monotype, and he worked in a range of drawing media as well as oils, but increasingly his medium of choice was pastel.12 Pastels did not require mixing and so lent themselves to a more spontaneous working method; they also effectively conveyed the elusive, fleeting quality of the scenes Degas wished to capture.13 Above all, while pastels could be retouched and changed, a mark once made could never be fully erased. As such, they corroborated Degas’s conviction in the need for excellent draughtsmanship, his belief in the importance of line and respect for its authority.
That kind of commitment struck a chord with Suzanne. She never used erasers.14 Mastering a line was like riding on a wave; either you caught it and the drawing came to life, or you had failed and must start again.
Degas was astounded by the pieces Suzanne brought to show him. How a linen maid’s daughter with not a day’s training could take a pencil and handle it with such assurance, maintain such confident control of a line as to bring a form to life on a flat page, left him speechless. Though there was no formal agreement to their relationship, Degas took his self-appointed role of tutor with the utmost seriousness. And as Camille Pissarro observed, as critics went, ‘Degas was one of the harshest’.15
Still, merciless self-scrutiny was a familiar bedfellow to Suzanne. ‘You have to be hard on yourself,’ she warned. ‘You should not put suffering into drawings, but all the same, nothing is achieved without pain.’16
Degas’s style defied categorisation. He refused to let the course of his creative oeuvre be steered by a single aesthetic doctrine and he was never an Impressionist as such (though he was often bracketed together with that group).17 Similarly, Suzanne abhorred the oppressive bounds of theory. ‘I sincerely admire people who have theories on art,’ she declared ironically, as though to unsettle those of obverse persuasion. ‘I’ve noticed that the most contradictory theories can be used to justify the same wor
ks of art. When all is said and done, I think that the real theory is nature which imposes itself; the painter’s nature first of all, then, that of the subject they are representing. Is there really an artist who has ever painted as he would have wished? Everyone paints as they see, which is to say that everyone paints as they are able.’18 Suzanne could not have chosen a more suitable master.
Degas was a notoriously awkward man to befriend. But in the previous decade he had lost a number of close acquaintances: there was Mary Cassatt’s sister, Lydia; the Italian painter Giuseppe de Nittis (for whom Suzanne had posed); his old school friend Alfred Niaudet.19 And of course, nobody could forget the horrific demise of Édouard Manet who had suffered a slow and agonising death as a result of locomotor ataxia, the gradual deterioration of the spinal column and nervous system, in his case brought on by syphilis. It was a chastening reminder of the unrelenting march of time and it did nothing to ease Degas’s morose disposition. ‘Oh, where are the days when I thought I was strong,’ he had already moaned to Bartholomé in the early 1880s, ‘when I was full of logic, full of plans! I am quickly sliding downhill, rolling I know not where, wrapped up in lots of bad pastels, as if in so much packing paper.’20 There was room in his life for new acquaintances.
A fresh young talent like Suzanne breathed vitality into his dusty existence. She also proved a wonderful source of Montmartre gossip. More importantly, if Suzanne admired Degas, it was clear that she was not prepared to compromise her unique personal blueprint to satisfy him. People must take her as she was. For Degas, such quiet self-assurance and refusal to imitate was refreshing. Degas’s attention had often been drawn to Lautrec’s idolising tendencies. Years after his initial meeting with Degas, Lautrec was still smitten. On one occasion, having treated some friends to a sumptuous dinner, Lautrec stood to his feet and instructed his bewildered guests to follow him.21 Going out into the street, he led them to the Dihau residence, where he guided them up and gestured towards one of Degas’s pictures. ‘There is your dessert,’ he announced. In his artwork too, Lautrec had borrowed liberally from his hero, another point that had not escaped Degas’s attention. ‘The gentleman’s wearing trousers that are too big for him,’ Degas was once heard to sneer maliciously when the similarity was pointed out.22
However, so long as his caustic swipes were not directed at her, Suzanne knew she stood to learn much from this man. When asked, she firmly denied ever having posed for him. But, people probed, was she ever more than just his pupil? The insinuation invariably met with a laugh: no, but she would have slept with him out of gratitude.23 Their friendship, like their work, defied simple classification. Degas was the spiky mentor Suzanne could not help but admire. And whatever pseudonym she took, she would always be his ‘Terrible Maria’, the wild gamine of Montmartre who arrived on his doorstep one day and changed his life.
But if her afternoons at 37, Rue Victor-Massé were abuzz with creativity and learning, her home life was growing increasingly fraught. Maurice’s behaviour was worsening, his tantrums becoming more frequent. The daily routine at the Valadon residence was a minefield of broken crockery and broken tempers.
Motherhood had been unplanned, and it was a role for which Suzanne was ill-prepared. She was as human as the next inexperienced new mother. Each fresh, explosive outburst required her to learn a new lesson, and quickly. Desperately, she sought to understand the little boy in the only way she knew how: she drew. She studied every limb, watched closely how each sinew and muscle moved, stretched and tightened. With pencil in hand, it seemed she regained control of the situation, because Suzanne truly believed that close observation of the form led to an intimate knowledge of the spirit. ‘You must have the courage to look the model in the eye if you want to see into their soul,’ she explained.24
But there was no escaping the fact that without a father, the boy’s personal history was incomplete. Schoolmates could be merciless; neighbours whispered. Suzanne understood well how that kind of uncertainty and stigma could give rise to debilitating self-doubt. It seemed impossible to exclude Maurice’s absent father as a factor contributing to his fits and tantrums.
So, really, who was the boy’s father? The question was yet again posed as Suzanne, Miguel and a group of their friends sat around a café table meditating over glasses of beer, wine and absinthe one evening. Miguel had lately taken an apartment on the Boulevard de Clichy; Montmartre’s watering holes were more than ever his home. ‘I don’t know if the little fellow is the work of Puvis de Chavannes or Renoir,’ Suzanne confessed.25
‘Why,’ Miguel returned, ‘I would be honoured to sign my name to either of those fine artists.’ The response was bound to arouse titters around the table. But the Spaniard was deadly serious: ‘Call him a Utrillo,’ he offered.26
Within a few weeks, the remark many had dismissed as a playful quip made in a moment of high-spirited revelry was being drawn up into a formal act of recognition.
Early in 1891, Miguel Utrillo arrived at the mairie of the 18th arrondissement and duly penned his signature on the Act of Recognition of Maurice Valadon-Utrillo. The document finally gave Maurice a father while enabling him to retain his French citizenship (Miguel had been careful to verify this point before signing).27
The act seemed to provide the ultimate resolution to the question of Maurice’s paternity. People had already noticed how alike the Valadon boy and the Spaniard were. The resemblance was growing more striking the older Maurice got. Suzanne’s drawings of both men – with their dark, slightly sunken eyes, fine-boned features and heavy lids – seemed to offer silent confirmation of the theory. Even similar gestures and mannerisms were starting to become apparent. But other people remained suspicious; Miguel was too obvious an answer. And why would he acknowledge the child now, after all this time? Might it not be the ultimate in selfless and chivalrous gestures, made for a best friend and soulmate who found herself in an impossible predicament of which there seemed no way out? A kindly sacrifice to save a child who was the blameless victim of the whole sorry situation? An apology for whatever disagreement no doubt caused him to flee France when Suzanne fell pregnant?
Suzanne had confounded Montmartre’s gossips once again, and in so doing, had given Maurice a clearer sense of his own identity, which she believed might alleviate his suffering. Now she could only hope that life at home would become calmer as she returned to her own chaotic routine.
In Montmartre’s dizzying social cocktail of people, parties and places, one acquaintance led to another, and it was seldom possible to recall who had introduced whom, or when. Some seemed to think Suzanne met Miguel’s friend Paul Mousis at the Auberge du Clou, others at one of Lautrec’s parties, and a few swore it happened at the Lapin Agile.28 Either way, by the early 1890s the well-built businessman with a magnificent moustache was often seen in her company, and was quite clearly pursuing her.
The pairing struck many as odd; two years older than Suzanne, Mousis came from a strict Catholic family and seemed the very essence of bourgeois propriety.29 He was wealthy, had a good, stable career with the firm Bel et Sainbénat and a respectable family who owned a house on the Rue de Clignancourt. He was the very antithesis of Suzanne’s wild bohemianism, the embodiment of the stability she lacked.
However, her existing career as a model and her burgeoning one as an artist both demanded attention. She had no desire to dedicate herself entirely to one man if she could enjoy the benefits of Mousis’s acquaintance without commitment. Through Degas particularly, she was making more contacts in the art world, and she was equally determined not to let existing friendships slip or kind gestures go un-thanked. ‘Dear Mademoiselle, Why do you always thank me?’ Bartholomé enquired in response to one of her letters. ‘One day, you brought me the joy of meeting a real artist; it is I who am indebted to you.’30
But Suzanne was under no illusion: for a woman to even hope for an artistic career was, at best, wildly ambitious. Many would declare it impossible. It certainly would not happen overnight. As
a single mother, she had to continue modelling to put food on the table.
A young student named Suzay Leudet, herself an aspiring female artist, was particularly struck by the model she and her classmates were asked to draw during a session in the studio of Hector Leroux one summer in 1891.31 It was Suzanne. The students were impressed by her grace, professionalism and most of all, her stamina; for the fortnight for which she was hired, Suzanne demonstrated that she could hold a pose for four hours at a time with only a ten-minute break and without appearing to tire. But it was the conversation, after Suzanne’s departure, between Leroux and their mentor Henner, who had come to inspect the students’ work, that stayed with Leudet.
‘You know, she’s painting now,’ Henner informed Leroux, referring to Suzanne.
‘What’s the painting like?’ Leroux asked.
‘Bad!’ Henner proclaimed. ‘But all the same, it’s quite something to think that it’s our influence that has given her the notion to paint.’
With a temperament like Suzanne’s, it was fortunate for Henner and Leroux that their model did not overhear them.
Suzanne was ploughing her own furrow, pursuing her own creative vision, absorbing those influences she deemed useful, discarding the criticism and gender-based prejudice she did not. When it came to her artwork, she needed to stay focused if, as Degas maintained, she truly stood to make a serious profession of art. There was much to distract her if she allowed it.
Despite Miguel’s presence in Paris and his formal recognition of Maurice as his son, the little boy’s disquiet showed no signs of abating. The study of mental health and learning disabilities was in its infancy, but anyone could tell that something was amiss.
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