By the end of the summer, there was every reason to feel cheered. Suzanne’s mood mirrored that of many Parisians still drunk on the heady narcotic of the Belle Époque. Rumblings of unease concerning international relations could still be heard; every now and then, someone mentioned the German threat, or the fight for control in Morocco, or the tension in the Balkans. But by and large, the reassuring rhythm of everyday life carried Parisian men and women along more or less contentedly.48
‘Germany, who beat us and who abused her victory, has allied herself against us with Austria and Italy,’ a 1912 school history textbook briefed the younger generation. ‘But supported by solid friendships like that of Russia, our country has nothing to fear from its enemies, it has only justice and can look to the future with an un-furrowed brow.’49
It was an empty reassurance. On 3 August 1914, Germany declared war on France. The consequences were devastating. For Suzanne personally, the declaration of war was life-changing. In a few short weeks, her thinking altered, her priorities shifted and her very status as a woman changed forever.
CHAPTER 13
Till Death Do Us Part
Lou màù ve a chovàù, s’en torno d’ape.
(Evil arrives on a horse and returns on foot.)
OLD LIMOUSIN PROVERB1
‘Cailing all women of Paris,’ Le Figaro entreated the day after war was declared. ‘During the period on which we are now embarking, the solidarity of Parisian women can be put to good service.’ By helping a neighbour in need, the paper specified, ‘women of Paris will be accomplishing a sort of patriotic duty. We can count on them.’2
Suzanne was one of those to whom the rallying call was addressed. The city was not yet a battlefield, but overnight everything had changed.
When Suzanne stepped out into the street to walk the dogs in the morning, shops were closed, their shutters drawn, with merely a hastily erected sign by way of explication: Boss Away. Crudely pinned to buildings, tricolore flags flapped eerily in the breeze, while in the once-bustling streets, there reigned an unnatural quiet. Not an idle flâneur perused the boulevards; instead, men with solemn faces marched purposefully towards their chosen destination.3
By contrast, beneath the surface of the earth, the Metro stations – on the few lines still running – were packed with people; people of all classes, from grand bourgeois to humble worker. Now, a common cause united them. Silken dresses brushed soiled rags, and nobody seemed to mind. Class had become irrelevant. Shared anxiety, that great social leveller, dissolved previously divisive social boundaries. And everywhere, on the trains, on the platforms and filling the Gare de l’Est, were uniformed men in their blue coats, blazing red kepis and trousers and creaking boots, preparing to leave their families and fight for France. National consciousness was stirring.4
All at once, artists with whom Suzanne had shared absinthe and ideas, men whose primary concern had always been their next great masterpiece, were setting art aside and enlisting to defend their country: Georges Braque, who had lived above Suzanne at the Impasse de Guelma, was posted to Sorgues; the dignified painter André Derain, a familiar face from the Lapin Agile, became a gunboat operator.5 Only those prohibited by age (like Matisse), nationality (most notably the Spaniard Picasso) or those of weak constitution (such as Marcel Duchamp) remained. A willingness to fight became a measure of masculine virility. Suzanne could confidently predict that with his health devastated by alcoholism, Maurice would be rejected. But with sinking heart, she realised that her lover was among the most virile of France’s young men. Soon after war was declared, André Utter enlisted as a soldier, along with his friend, Edmond Heuzé.
Faced with his departure, Suzanne agreed to a life-changing proposition: for the second time, she would become a wife. Her decision had a practical as well as a sentimental motivation; as Utter’s wife, it would greatly facilitate his being granted leave to see her. She would also be entitled to the allowance the government paid to soldiers’ spouses.
On 1 September 1914, just a few weeks before her 49th birthday, Suzanne made her way to the mairie of the 18th arrondissement to attend the utilitarian ceremony which would make her André Utter’s wife. Wartime marriages were seldom extravagant shows of romantic decadence; Suzanne and Utter’s wedding was designed primarily to gain public recognition of the union they already considered sacred. Neither Madeleine nor Maurice’s names were recorded as witnesses, but Utter’s parents attended and gave their consent. Some sense of the need to maintain a veneer of decorum remained; Utter gave his address as 76, Rue de Clignancourt, his family’s home.6
When the couple stepped outside into the autumn sunlight after the ceremony, the sense of the shift they had undergone was overwhelming. They had accomplished a common rite of passage, but the mood in the capital was closer to that expected of a funeral than of a wedding. The Paris which met them was as a perishing flower whose petals were falling one by one. The day after the wedding the French government left the capital. And shortly after, so did André Utter.
Utter joined the 158th Infantry Division and at the end of September was posted to Belleville-sur-Saône in the Rhône department.7
Alone in Montmartre, Suzanne attempted to digest her new situation. On paper, she and Utter were more united than ever, yet the separation was an emotional torture on which neither party had reckoned. Every day, Suzanne woke to find an empty space in bed next to her, while each mealtime, the table had to be set with one less place. It was impossible to think of anything but Utter, his well-being and the agonising ache she felt for herself. And she could not escape the omnipresence of war. Her surroundings were a constant reminder that the notes of normal life were in discord.
Montmartre’s café culture had wilted, with outdoor tables being hastily packed away. Many establishments had shut up shop entirely, while others now closed around 9pm. Even the lights in some bureaux de tabac had been extinguished. Where shops and markets remained open, all conversation between patrons and customers turned on the latest developments in the hostilities. Some shopkeepers were reluctant to let their products go at all, unless for exorbitant prices. Every now and then, a private car passed displaying a notice: ‘Available to military personnel needing to transport luggage’.8 Not even the Lapin Agile was immune to the influence of war; it now had a makeshift soup kitchen running alongside the cabaret, to provide affordable meals for abandoned wives and children.9
Tales of extraordinary courage filtered back to Paris from the front, rekindling optimism and buoying national spirit. The account of taxis ferrying soldiers to the front to reinforce the troops during the first battle of the Marne in early September was proudly repeated in the capital. In reality, the taxis played a comparatively minor role in France’s victory at the Marne, only carrying 4,000 men to a base of secondary importance.10 But the story was sufficiently stirring to be quickly woven into the romantic tapestry of the war. Such episodes were reaffirming, but they could scarcely alleviate Suzanne’s longing for her husband and the gnawing anxiety that at any moment, she might receive word that he had been hurt.
Suzanne tried to work. That year, she produced several studies of nudes, and the psychologically challenging The Dressmaker (1914). The piece showed a well-to-do but unsmiling little girl in a sombre dress with lace collar standing in an interior while being fitted for a dress by the eponymous dressmaker. As the dressmaker busied herself with her task, the little girl was shown by a window, open, tantalisingly, just a crack and giving on to a colourful world beyond the interior’s restricted confines. Only the blue bow and her vibrant red hair hinted at a natural ebullience being repressed. Suzanne’s young girl stared straight out of the canvas at the viewer, implicating them in the scenario. The painting flirted with questions of freedom and confinement, desire and duty, claustrophobia and care, leaving them frustratingly unresolved.
Eventually, Suzanne decided that the separation from Utter had become so unbearable, and sales of her paintings in Paris so poor, that she risked not
hing by going to be near him.11 That way, she could at least be close by whenever he was granted a break from fighting. Imploring César Gay to watch over Maurice (whose unpredictable behaviour and drinking binges were now too much for the elderly Madeleine to deal with alone), Suzanne travelled to Belleville. The sense of relief was overwhelming and she even found some casual agricultural work to supplement her income while she was there.12
Meanwhile, back in Paris, deprived of the mother he loved and unfit to fight, Maurice sank into a deep depression. He felt helpless, a social outcast. Lodging at César Gay’s, he channelled his melancholy musings into a muddled and digressive autobiography. Otherwise, he spent his time drinking and painting. In view of her own spiritual misgivings, Suzanne had never attempted to steer Maurice on to a religious path. However, in recent times, he had developed something of an obsession for the figure of Joan of Arc. He was consequently outraged when he learned of the destruction of Reims Cathedral, which he considered to be an ‘admirable edifice, one of the most magnificent monuments of Gothic architecture in France and in the world’.13 Reims had been the site of 25 coronations of French kings, including that of Charles VII, where Joan of Arc, with her ‘pure, virtuous, candid and magnanimous heroic soul’, was present, having first liberated the Cathedral.14 At the outbreak of war, the edifice had served as a hospital and had then caught fire after shelling. Maurice, who was intensely patriotic, felt utterly powerless. Unlike other men, he could not fight back in response. And so he painted. He pictured the burning structure in a breathtaking outpouring of passion. He also painted scenes of the devastated villages around the Marne.
But ultimately, Maurice’s art could not subdue his torment, nor rid him of the constant sense of being hunted. César Gay was unable to restrain him. Maurice was forever breaking out of his room when the alcohol he needed was denied, tearing down to the nearest bar, gasping for drink. On at least one occasion, Mme Gay was horrified to find that, in the absence of a more palatable beverage, her eau de Cologne had been greedily guzzled.15
The war had not been under way many months when, on one of his drunken breakouts in early December, Maurice attacked a woman in the street and vandalised a fire alarm. He was swiftly escorted into police custody, from where he penned a remorseful letter to Suzanne:
I beg your forgiveness for the latest pain I am going to cause you, it is always that damned alcohol, that pernicious demon and maker of madness […] I bitterly regret the miserable consequences of my execrable mistake, and I beg you once again to forgive me; please do, because, you are good and you have always taught me good.16
Suzanne had to return so as to plead with the authorities to release her son on the understanding that he would again receive professional help for his alcoholism.
All personal and circumstantial factors seemed to have conspired against Suzanne progressing in her career as an artist. The art scene in Paris had fallen silent. There was some talk of a new arrival in the capital: an Italian named Giorgio de Chirico, who had turned heads at the Salon des Indépendants in 1913 with his haunting vistas of buildings and architecture, with their crisp perspective and dreamlike ethereality.17 But otherwise, the art schools felt abandoned and none of the big exhibitions were running.
Urgently needing to sell some paintings, in 1915, Suzanne implored Berthe Weill to mount an exhibition of her and Utter’s work. Weill, now a friend and always empathetic towards struggling talent, was only too delighted. But sales from the show were disappointing. Perhaps, Weill reasoned, the Parisian public found avant-garde daring like Suzanne’s just too much to stomach when it came from a woman.18
But Suzanne received some more promising boosts to her career that year. One came in the form of an important commission.
Writer, art critic and collector Gustave Coquiot was portly, with a double chin, flabby jowls, and eyes which were narrow and suspicious. Crucially for Suzanne, he wielded considerable influence in the art world.19
Just one day younger than Suzanne, but appearing several years her senior, Coquiot was a sharp and merciless critic. He had written at length about Maurice in his book Cubistes, Futuristes, Passéistes in 1914 (a volume Suzanne was to proudly include in a still life painted in 1915). Coquiot greatly admired both Maurice’s and Suzanne’s work. He had lately started purchasing artwork and had a nose for a potentially lucrative style of painting. Added to which, he was fascinated by female artists – the mother and son immediately caught Coquiot’s attention. Before long, Suzanne and Maurice found themselves invited to Coquiot’s and his wife Mauricia’s home, which positively dripped with artwork. There they were wined and dined like royalty, and offered the finest port, liqueur and cigars.20 It was a relief when, in the year of that disheartening exhibition at Berthe Weill’s, Coquiot commissioned Suzanne to paint a portrait of himself and of his wife.
Suzanne treated the husband and wife as she did all her subjects: with brutal honesty.
Full-figured and formidable, Mauricia was shown in a revealing dress, her head tilted upwards dramatically, accentuating her impressive cleavage. With exotic flowers on one side and a richly patterned curtain on the other, the whole piece exuded theatricality and hinted at the preponderant role of artifice. For the husband’s portrait, Suzanne focused in on the critic’s head and neck as he looked out of the canvas to his right. She used dramatic tonal variation to bring out the relief of his facial features and to distil the essence of the larger-than-life character which had become Coquiot’s trademark.
Protective of her friend and wise to the devious ways of collectors, Berthe Weill treated Coquiot with suspicion.21 To her mind, the success of a man like Coquiot in the art world was an anomaly which could only be attributed to the distorting effect of war.22 When Coquiot’s demands did eventually strike Suzanne as unreasonable and a dispute erupted, Berthe Weill was one of the first to know. Few could deny Coquiot’s cunning; but the association saved Suzanne that year and gave cause for optimism regarding the future.
However, as Suzanne’s professional star was being realigned on its path to greatness, Maurice’s mood continued to darken. In the first half of the year, the army called him up with the intention of reviewing his physical suitability to fight.23 But Maurice was soon agreed quite incapable of defending himself, let alone his country. The rejection came as a cruel blow. It did nothing to lift him from his depression.
Then just a few weeks later, something unexpected turned Suzanne’s and Maurice’s worlds upside down, making all other preoccupations seem trivial: on 10 June 1915, Madeleine, whose health had been faltering for some time, passed away at home in the Rue Cortot.24
All at once, the stabilising constant in both Suzanne’s and Maurice’s lives, the final link to their Limousin roots, had gone. As age had gradually worn down Madeleine’s resistance to the family’s unconventional life, both the mother and son had come to take her presence for granted. The sounds of the old woman shuffling about the apartment muttering, of the clattering of pots and pans as she prepared her regional dishes, the soothing croon of traditional Limousin songs in her local dialect, and the long, repetitive country tales recounted by the hearthside – all those features which had felt such an intrinsic part of their everyday existence that at times they became positively irritating, suddenly seemed so precious that Suzanne and Maurice would have traded anything to have them back in an instant.
Both Suzanne and Maurice had spent all their lives with Madeleine. Her death left a gaping hole, the full magnitude of which Suzanne only realised at the funeral she arranged for her mother.
‘I loved her so!’ Suzanne sobbed afterwards. ‘I knew how much I loved her on the day that, having made her a grave, I wanted to be there for the inhumation of what was left of her poor remains. I felt an unspeakable pain, something terrible that I could not even describe to you, because I could not see her hands, the remains of those dear little hands. Her little hands, where were they?’25
Suzanne was still mourning the loss of her mother when
the following month, she learned that she had been awarded a subsidy from the Conseil Municipal de Paris, intended as ‘encouragement’ to artists in the extenuating times of war. It was at once a professional accolade and a practical lifeline. But it scarcely alleviated the melancholy permeating her personal life.26
It was consequently with delight that Suzanne received word that Utter would be granted leave for Christmas. But her elation at their first embrace as he stepped through the doorway of the apartment was short-lived; just after Christmas, Maurice went out on one of his wildest, most terrifying drunken episodes yet. The day after his 32nd birthday, Maurice was admitted to an asylum. On the visit he should have spent with his wife, André Utter instead found himself escorting his older stepson to a psychiatric unit.
The year 1916 started on a bleak note. In February, the biggest battle the French had yet fought commenced at Verdun. Soon, word was trickling back to Paris of horrific injuries, excruciating deaths, of an atrocious battle which could only ever be purely defensive. But it was hard to know how many of the rumours to believe; rigorous press censorship ensured that the truth remained an elusive concept.27
What was more certain was the degree of hardship Parisians were enduring on a daily basis. Though the citizens of Paris did not suffer as keenly as the inhabitants of some invaded regions, the cost of living had still risen by 20 per cent since the start of the war.28 Meat and coal had become unaffordable to most. Sugar was virtually unattainable.29 And as more and more sons, brothers and husbands were reported missing, or maimed, or worse, it was gradually dawning on Parisians that the hostilities might not be the swift precursor to the triumphant French glory so many had predicted.
In July, the Battle of the Somme tested the Allies’ stamina still further. With heavy hearts, Parisians learned of the mass slaughter on an unprecedented scale of their English comrades. The reports provided a sobering backdrop to the gruelling reality of civilian life during the war.
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