As the boat drew close to Dover, it was joined by other steamers and flocks of seagulls. Dorothy and the Underwoods got up early to watch the docking and to see off the departing passengers. “The chalk cliffs were so very white,” Dorothy wrote to her mother, “with the bright green fields coming to the very edge—and I loved the old fortresses. We weren’t there long, but I saw my first comic opera Englishman—with pale blue spats and a monocle.” After the boat pushed off again, she and Ros and Arthur spent the day running from one side of the deck to the other, trying not to miss anything. As they turned up the Scheldt River at Flushing, a picture-book village appeared, with bright-red gabled roofs. “All of Holland which we saw was just the same,” Dorothy wrote, “so painfully neat and regular—and even the cows were spotless.”
In Antwerp, she and Ros spent their first morning at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, and Dorothy delivered her opinion about the collection to her mother: “I don’t like Rubens’ pictures—they are too spectacular, and his women are nothing short of beefy, but I liked the portraits, and I simply fell in love with the cunning little Dutch scenes from the little Dutch masters. But the old, historical scenes of Antwerp in the Middle Ages were killing, they were so out of proportion and no perspective, but they give a fine idea of the times.”
The next day they woke up to a heavy rain but set out with Arthur for the zoological gardens and the Gothic Church of St. Jacques, tracing their way with their Baedeker. Tired and hungry after examining the cathedral, they decided to stop for a simple lunch. They went to the Hotel St. Antoine, where they ordered lobster, potatoes, and lettuce “and had a fine meal,” Dorothy reported, “dining—as Papa said—not feeding.” Then they were presented with the bill: seventeen francs (a reasonable seventy dollars a hundred years later). “We slunk away, feeling that we had been very gullible.” As they made their way back to their hotel, Arthur kept pointing out that it cost more than their ten-course dinner the night before.
After touring Holland, they settled in for a long stay in the Dolomites, where the girls played tennis and hiked with Arthur and Mr. Underwood. In Cortina, near the Austrian border, Dorothy wrote a long, chatty letter to her sister Anna, exclaiming over a succession of Auburn weddings: “It does seem as though all my friends were getting married.” She conveyed the beauty of the mountains and dwelled at length on the other guests at the hotel, mostly English and Italian, “with a few French & German scattered in.” She could be a merciless observer and was quick to confirm national stereotypes: “The English people amuse me a great deal—for they are so like the books you read about them, that it is too good to be true. Every woman we have seen has her skirt sagging behind, and short in front. . . . They chirp up a lot at night, however, and are so much better looking that you can hardly believe they are the same people.”
From Italy they went to Germany, then Switzerland, and one day Dorothy and Ros rode the funicular in Zermatt. They positioned themselves in the front, for the best view. Just before the car began to move, Dorothy said, “in stepped a perfectly enormous German.” He had a big rucksack on his back and was wearing high hiking boots. The girls had on their own space-consuming attire, including their wide blue “merry widow” hats with tall feathers. “He pushed me over against Ros, and if the door hadn’t been locked she would have fallen out.” Dorothy politely told him in German that the space was not really large enough for three of them, and asked if he would kindly move. He stared straight ahead, ignoring her. Rosamond, who spoke the language flawlessly, reiterated Dorothy’s request, adding that it really was very crowded. This, too, was met with impervious silence. “We were good and mad,” Dorothy said. She spitefully stepped on the man’s foot, but he stood his ground. Tempted to poke him with one of her long hatpins, she concluded that it would have no effect, so they removed their hats and had “a most uncomfortable trip up that mountain.”
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In early September 1910, they arrived in Paris, where Ros’s mother helped them get settled. Before her parents returned to Auburn, her father took them and Arthur to the Paris Opera to see twenty-year-old Nijinsky in Scheherazade, which was being performed that season by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes—perhaps the most influential ballet the company ever produced. Some of their friends had already been four times to see “the Russian dancers,” as Dorothy referred to them. They were “the sensation of Paris.” She liked the intricate toe dancing and Nijinsky’s fantastic leaps, but she took particular notice of the exotic sets and costumes, designed by Léon Bakst. Nijinsky, clad in jewel-encrusted gold harem pants and a gold bra, played the Golden Slave, the lover of the Shah’s favorite concubine, Zobeide. The sensuous Ida Rubinstein, who played Zobeide, wore her own harem pants, her torso and legs looped with pearls. In the middle of the ballet, the women bribe a eunuch to release the slaves, and stylized lovemaking ensues. It was a world away from Auburn’s Burtis Opera House. “The whole thing was like a scene from the Arabian Nights,” Dorothy wrote to Milly, only partly aware of what she was watching. Thinking back on it, she said that she and Ros were mystified when Mr. Underwood announced halfway through the ballet that he was taking them back to the hotel. They eventually overrode his concerns and stayed until the end. Even as an older woman, she was perplexed. “Something must have seemed indecent to him,” she said, “but I can’t imagine what it was.”
Dorothy and Ros lived for a brief time in a dark, narrow house at 5 Avenue de la Bourdonnais, the finishing school a block from the Seine where they studied French. The walls of the drawing room were crowded with prints and paintings in ornate gold frames. Mme Rey, who ran the school, was “an aristocrat to her fingertips,” Dorothy told her mother. She later described Madame as always wearing black dresses that had very high collars with little bones in them. The girls were more serious about their studies than they had been at Smith. Mme Rey had high expectations, and provided them with demanding teachers whom they described as the best in Paris. At the same time, they found “Madame” simple and kind, and she prepared delicious meals, especially on Sundays, when she served Parisian specialties like chestnut soufflé, which the girls considered “food for the gods.”
The three other students, who were younger, initially thought she and Ros were “eighteen and were amazed when they found out how ancient we are—I know they think we have one foot in the grave,” Dorothy wrote to her father. One of them, Nora, who was English, announced to them that all of the rich, vulgar American girls were marrying in to the English peerage for the titles, and that the men succumbed only because they needed the money to keep their estates going. Dorothy and Ros, irritated by her superciliousness—and by the truth of her charge—retorted in the best French they could muster. They had read E. M. Forster and Henry James, and they also must have thought of the true-life Miss Elkins, with her thwarted love for an Italian prince.
When they informed Mme Rey that they intended to explore the city by themselves, she threw up her hands, informing them that young ladies in France never stepped onto the sidewalk without a chaperone or maid. They explained that they had their parents’ permission, and she gave in. They took dictée, art, and history in the morning, studied for a few hours, and then got to know the city, accompanied by Walks in Old Paris. They often went around town in fiacres—horse-drawn carriages that jostled for space with automobiles, buses, bicyclists, and pedestrians. The pungent smells of old Paris didn’t bother them, but they never adjusted to the fleas in the straw at their feet; the bites lingered for weeks. “I know Cousin Josephine will take back her invitation when she sees me,” Dorothy wrote. Her mother’s cousin Josephine Beardsley had recently bought an estate in Cannes and had invited the girls to join Dorothy’s parents there for a visit that winter. Dorothy described three large welts on her face, “which makes me look as though I had some evil disease. . . . After a taxi ride the other day, I came in with twenty-eight bites!”
One day the two American women were in a narrow, crowded street, and
their fiacre stopped as a cocher in front of them backed up his horse, knocking theirs down. “We were perfectly terrified, but didn’t dare get out, as you would surely get run over,” Dorothy wrote to her brother Douglas, “and then our poor horse got up, but the drivers began fighting, and got purple with rage, and the other pulled out his whip, and started to beat our man, who whipped up the horse, and as we flew on, he hurled awful curses at the other man. He chased us for about three blocks, both of them screaming . . . and people rushed to doors and windows to see the excitement, while we, by that time, over our fright, were howling, it was so funny. Imagine such a thing in New York!”
Soon she and Ros were escorting Mme Rey around town. The erudite businesswoman was uneasy on the modern streets of Paris. “She is so afraid of the crossings,” Dorothy wrote to Milly. “She scuttles across the streets just like Mother, and when she gets in the middle, screams and almost has hysterics, and then runs back to the same side!” On a rainy day in November, Dorothy and Ros took her with them to Amiens Cathedral. They all admired the lofty lines, the stained-glass windows, and the light, even on a gloomy day. They took a tour, and as they were descending some narrow stairs, the guide stopped to point out the ceiling. Dorothy wrote, “As my head went back, my hat dropped off—in my hurry I had come away without any hat pins.” On the roof, where they ventured out to examine the exterior from a different perspective, Madame, standing in a deep puddle with the rain pouring down, stopped the entire procession, to exclaim, “Ah, quelle belle simplicité!”
Dorothy and Ros went to the Rue de la Paix to see an exhibition of contemporary paintings. Matisse and Picasso by then were well-known friends and rivals. Years earlier, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had introduced them at their salon; Stein’s brothers, Leo and Michael, collected Matisse’s work and helped to get him noticed. At the early exhibitions of Matisse, Derain, Braque, and Vlaminck—the key figures in the Fauve movement—one historian wrote, “viewers would give vent to the most powerful emotions, sometimes almost coming to blows. . . .” In 1910 Matisse was still working in hectic hues. Dorothy wrote home: “The contrast after the Louvre was too much . . . all the most startling colors, with queer and bizarre subjects—and the drawing was like that of a little child.” Matisse, she declared, “thinks the only real art is the very simplest, with just two or three lines to express a figure.” Decades later, she regretted her conventional aesthetic taste and her failure to buy a few inexpensive paintings.
They also toured the Conciergerie, the former royal palace, where prisoners were held before being led to the guillotine. “It was really an awful place, and some how seemed more terrible than the dungeons we saw in Germany,” Dorothy wrote. “Poor Marie Antoinette lived in a tiny little cell, damp, and with practically no lights, and the contrast between that and Versailles seemed too awful—Madame told us all kinds of gruesome stories, and her husband’s grandfather and great grandmother were guillotined from there.”
On October 8, Rosamond’s twenty-third birthday, she took Dorothy and several others to tea at the Pré Catelan, a new restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne. Dorothy ordered a birthday cake for the evening festivities at the school, and they played “Up Jenkins” and “Hide the Thimble” with the other students and Mme Rey’s daughters, two unmarried women in their thirties, with as much zest as they had as ten-year-olds at the Underwoods’ house.
Dorothy, a typical pampered student abroad, was grateful to her father for funding her trip and assured him that she was taking advantage of all that Paris had to offer. At the same time, she couldn’t disguise her overwhelming desire to have a good time. She wrote to him, “You can’t imagine how happy and contented I am here, and Ros and I just hop along the streets,” before going on to describe their visit to the Palace of Fontainebleau. They were “much interested in Napoleon’s apartments—his marvelous throne room and the place where he signed his abdication—and all his gorgeous suites. It made his whole story seem so real and recent to see all his furniture, just as it was—and even his hat was there.”
When Madame Rey discussed Racine, Molière, and modern drama with her daughters, Dorothy admitted, she and Ros felt very ignorant. She pledged, “I am going to begin on ‘Le Cid’ immediately,” and she asked, “Please write me about American politics. I am very much interested—what do you think of Roosevelt?”
A few months earlier, Theodore Roosevelt—out of office and disaffected from the Republican Party for its lack of concern about “the plain people” and about the unchecked power of big business and party bosses—had given his “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. It was becoming the blueprint for his platform in the 1912 presidential election, when he would run as the head of his new Progressive Party against President William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson (by then governor of New Jersey), and the Socialist Eugene V. Debs. Roosevelt spoke about a square deal for the poor man, about the need for a strong federal government to regulate corporations, and about the world setting its face hopefully toward American democracy: “O my fellow citizens, each one of you carries on your shoulders not only the burden of doing well for the sake of your own country, but the burden of doing well and of seeing that this nation does well for the sake of mankind.”
This inspirational rhetoric struck a chord with Dorothy, especially as an American living abroad. She was becoming vaguely aware of the civic responsibilities that came with adulthood. But, like any skillful correspondent, she wrote with her audience in mind. Her father heard about history, literature, and politics. Douglas, a popular, self-indulgent man-about-town, was the recipient of the most amusing gossip. When she was addressing her mother or her sisters, she focused on domestic matters, fashion, and excursions.
In the fall, she and Ros moved across the Parc du Champs de Mars to a sunny, one-room apartment with a private bathroom, at 6 Avenue du Général Détrie. They were pleased with their choice, but, she wrote to her mother, “imagine our rage on discovering that we aren’t to have hot water! They still heat the water in the kitchen and bring it to you in tin pitchers.” And she professed to be shocked by the movers, who “looked like pirates, with red sashes, and funny little tasseled caps—They just threw things into baskets and then dumped them over here—nothing done up, or labeled—You simply can’t imagine the confusion and chaos which resulted.”
Nevertheless, they were on their own at last, and they came to be amused at how little the modish Parisians cared about comfort. One night they went to a party along with “the two demoiselles Rey” and the other girls from the school. There was a log fire burning in the salon, but before long, Dorothy felt a chill creeping up her spine, and her teeth began to chatter. She knew it would be rude to put on her coat, but she finally went out to retrieve the fur. When she returned, her hostess laughed and said, “It is easy to see that you are American!”
In another letter to her mother, she described the penetrating cold as a prelude to a request for some acquisitions for her wardrobe. Ros was getting a dressy lavender suit made. Dorothy asked only for a good cloth dress and a formal gown that would be useful at home as well as in Paris, then added, “I want you to answer this immediately, as I don’t wish to do any thing without consulting you.” Despite her high regard for her mother, she found her frugality and her sporadic letters exasperating. Few of Dorothy’s correspondents could keep up with her.
She wrote to Milly about the marvelous creations: “Dresses very scant, very short coats—and either hats which cover the whole head, like a skull cap—or perfectly enormous ones.” Paris, she was not the first to point out, “is the most cosmopolitan city.” Ros, who was almost as close to Milly as Dorothy was, wrote to her, too, in a tone of joking defensiveness: “I hope you won’t think that it has been my influence which has corrupted Dot—she tells me you all think her letters are society ‘journals,’ but believe me, she has made lots of progress with her French, in spite of it.”
During a rare quiet evening at Mme Rey’s, they were reading their
mail when the maid brought in a visiting card: three friends from Auburn had arrived. “We let out one wild yell, and ran into the salon, and fell on their necks,” Dorothy wrote to her family, and “in a minute Madame appeared at the door, pale and trembling, for of course she thought some one was murdering us—not understanding the American expression of joy and surprise. Do you suppose when we are fifty—we will still scream like that?”
They had become friendly with the Howlands, two sisters and a brother they knew from home, whose aunt Emily was one of the country’s leading abolitionists and suffragists. The brother, infatuated with Ros, showered them with books and flowers and French chocolates. She didn’t reciprocate his affection, but they all went out companionably to expensive restaurants, the roller-skating rink, and the opera. On January 18, 1911, they went to see Isadora Duncan in her premiere performance of Orpheus at the Théâtre du Châtelet, with music from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. Duncan was already famous for her revolt against classical ballet and for her shocking private life. In 1909 she had run into Nijinsky in Venice. Reportedly, and perhaps in jest, she asked him to father her second child. Although she disliked the flamboyant sets of the Ballets Russes, she, too, had been dazzled by his 1910 performances in Paris. Several months later, the swashbuckling dilettante Paris Singer, an heir to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, fell instantly in love with her, and her second illegitimate baby was born in May 1910.
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