by Susan Ronald
The head of the river Yonne, which feeds the Seine from the Massif Central mountain range in south-central France, had burst its banks, too. City after city fell victim to the unprecedented floodwaters. Still, the real crisis for Paris came when the Marne River, fed by its raging tributaries the Grand Morin and Petit Morin, spilled over into the Seine.9
By the evening of January 22, the only mode of transport on the streets of Paris was the rowboat. As dusk fell, the City of Light remained dark. The gas lamplighters had scrambled to find rowboats, but understandably, there was an insufficiency. The stench from the sewers and their detritus mingled with the roaring floodwaters, making the darkened, noisy city eerily threatening. Soldiers barricaded flooded areas at gunpoint, adding to Parisians’ fears of insurrection. No one knew if the splash of oars would bring rescue or looters. It was a long, black night in the pouring rain.
* * *
From their apartment on rue de Fleurus, Florence and her family could see the floodwaters approach. The Boulevard Saint-Germain, only a half dozen city blocks away, was inundated, and those who could no longer enter their homes had taken refuge in the Baroque church of Saint-Sulpice nearby. The much-admired author Guillaume Apollinaire would write, “Tonight, nearly 600 misérables are sleeping at Saint-Sulpice.”10 The church was only a few minutes’ walk from the Lacaze home, and the river was still rising. On the Right Bank, the Seine was lapping at the streets in front of the Louvre. Again, barricades were hastily erected, in the hope of keeping the nation’s treasures within safe.
As the Seine spread its tentacles throughout the length and breadth of the city, careless of its path through working-class neighborhoods and fashionable boulevards alike, fear spread. Debris, raw sewage, and formerly warehoused goods from the Bercy district were carried on the yellow floodwaters. Opportunistic treasure seekers braved the bridges of the city in search of liberated casks of wine or household furniture, rescuing their booty with huge hooked poles. Then there were the “sightseers” like American writer Helen Davenport Gibbons, who wrote that “the calamity was forgotten in the sport of watching huge barrels sucked one by one under an arch and jumping high in the air as they came out on the other side.” She, like other Parisians, cheered on the flowing rubbish in a mock “Pooh Sticks” race, rooting for “their rubbish” to win as it emerged from the other side of the bridge.11
Volunteers and the Red Cross soon jumped into the breach to minister to the displaced and wounded. Churches and schools were coopted as improvised shelters, tended by the Union of French Women and the Catholic Sisters of Charity. Soldiers and police worked tirelessly to maintain public order, and everyone prayed at special Masses for the floodwaters to recede. Paris had pulled together. On January 28, one week after the state of emergency had begun, the Seine reached its peak.
The British journalist Laurence Jerrold, London’s Daily Telegraph correspondent for Paris, was immediately reminded of a recent earthquake, while most journalists were comparing the City of Light to Venice. Jerrold reported that in December 1908, a devastating earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale hit in the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the mainland of Italy. A tsunami with forty-foot-high waves crashed onto cities and towns all along the Mediterranean. The sheer force and surprising speed of destruction was disastrous. The death toll was 60,000, with thousands more injured and homeless. Admittedly, Paris was flooded, but the waters’ rise had taken a week, and no one had died.
The comparison to an earthquake and the devastation wrought would have also run through the minds of Florence and her family. Her father had been assured time and again that they were safe in Paris, that life was better. Florence may have seen the lighter side of this tragedy—as in playing “Pooh Sticks” on the bridges of Paris with the other children—since she had a keen sense of humor, yet it is difficult to believe that she would not have been shaken by this second natural disaster in her short life.
* * *
Within a year of the malodorous floodwaters receding, another tragedy struck. Florinte died on February 18, 1911. No cause of death was recorded, but that was not unusual for an elderly patient. If Berthe had promised her husband that she would return to San Francisco after Florinte’s passing, her words rang hollow as the months slid by, while she and the girls remained in Paris.
Sadly, just over nine months to the day, Maximin followed his mother-in-law to the grave on November 21, aged only fifty. His obituary, published in the San Francisco Call, stated simply that he was the husband of Berthe, father of Florence and Isabelle, and offered no cause of death. Arrangements for his funeral and burial in the Bay Area on November 24 were made by his Lacaze cousins in California. It was the family of prominent San Franciscan Louis Lacaze who informed Berthe and attended to all Maximin’s funeral arrangements and interment at Holy Cross Cemetery just outside the city.12
In an age when appearances of normalcy in family relations mattered far more than the truth, Berthe must have sensed the unspoken danger, for she invented what seems like a ridiculous fiction today. Florence maintained that fiction, saying shortly before her own death as an elderly woman that they were a “happy family.” She told everyone that her father’s body arrived in Paris on January 6, 1912, and was buried in the Bazille crypt in the Montparnasse cemetery.13 No one ever doubted the word of a woman noted for her phenomenal memory of people, places, and events.
There is no denying that Berthe was in an extremely awkward situation, both socially and financially. The fiction of Maximin being buried in a family crypt in Paris was designed to mitigate the facts from friends and prospective bridegrooms for her daughters, as well as to “big up” the family’s status. If there was one glaring, but understandable, fault to lay at Berthe’s door, it was that she considered any untruth that would strengthen Florence’s chances of a good match worthwhile. The practice of the “untruth” was a trait that Florence would elevate to an art form.
Still, Berthe’s primary concern was to reclaim the family “fortune” left by her mother and estranged husband in San Francisco. Fortunately, a very able American lawyer in Paris, Charles G. Loeb, the young partner in Valois & Loeb, was at hand.
Berthe’s choice of Charles Gerson Loeb was both brave and inspired. Loeb was young, bright, hungry for business, and Jewish. That made him a controversial choice. Given that France was still reeling from the deep-seated anti-Semitic divisions released like the hellhounds of war by the Dreyfus Affair, Berthe had placed herself firmly in the active Dreyfusard camp, against the anti-Semites. It was a camp she gladly shared with other notable French thinkers like the future French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, Anatole France, and Marcel Proust.
“The Affaire,” as the fate of Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus became known, divided France over twelve long years, deeply scarring French society and the French Third Republic. Dreyfus, the son of a wealthy Jewish textile merchant, was denounced by the real guilty party, and was convicted in 1894 for alleged acts of treason during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. The trial became a test of French republicanism, pitting the army, clerics, royalists, and anti-Semites—or “anti-Dreyfusards”—against the republicans and free thinkers.* Originally found guilty and transported to Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guyana, Dreyfus was retried five years later in 1899, and found guilty again, despite revelations of the anti-Semitic plot between the French Ministry of War and Major Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, the man who committed the treason. Author Émile Zola stood up for Dreyfus. His open letter to the president of the republic, printed in Georges Clemenceau’s newspaper Aurore in 1898, entitled “J’accuse,” made Dreyfus’s second trial possible.
Zola’s attack accused the army colonels and generals of treachery, concealing documents that gave irrefutable proof of Dreyfus’s innocence. The French press and citizenry, the anti-Dreyfusards, hardly came off any better: Zola wrote that they were all guilty of “social malfeasance” and poisoning the atmosphere of all France with their religious intolerance.
Although found guilty again in 1899, Dreyfus was pardoned by the president of the Third Republic in the hope of stopping the unrelenting bitterness on both sides. In 1904, Dreyfus still sought to clear his name in a retrial, but it was only in 1906 that a civil court of appeal found him innocent of all charges, and reinstated him in the army.†
* * *
Berthe was well aware of the divisions and anti-Semitic feeling in Paris. The Affaire tore at the weft and warp of society, and eventually gave rise to anticlericalism. It was not unusual to see dinner guests leave prematurely if anyone at the table held an opposing view regarding the Affaire. Former friends passed one another in silence in the street, or refused invitations from those who did not share their viewpoint. The tensions were mirrored among the intelligentsia, too, so that it became widely accepted that any words “would never have carried across the worlds that lay between them.”14
Bravery aside, due to her five years residing in France, Berthe’s right to claim her mother’s U.S. assets, as well as her dead husband’s estate, required highly specialist knowledge, and Charles Gerson Loeb was her man, Jew or no. There is no evidence to point to an official separation between the Lacazes, or a prior relationship with another lawyer admitted to the California Bar. More than likely, Loeb was painstakingly selected from a list of practicing attorneys-at-law provided by the American Chamber of Commerce at the United States embassy in Paris. Berthe hadn’t become part of the “American Colony,” which resided in its moneyed splendor on the Right Bank. She hadn’t socialized with the Left Bank bohemian Americans either, like her neighbors Gertrude Stein or Stein’s soon-to-be life partner and fellow San Franciscan who also fled the earthquake, Alice B. Toklas. Nor had she hobnobbed with the author who analyzed the upper echelons of society and its reaction to social change, Edith Wharton. Without any personal touchstones to advise here, Berthe’s knowledge of the right man for the job would have been limited.
Still, she chose well. The outcome of the legal battles ahead directly affected her daughters’ future, and given Florence’s as-yet-unproven flair for business, it is reasonable to assume that she, too, had a hand in selecting Loeb. He was ten years her senior, aged a mere twenty-five, sporting dark wavy hair and a thick mustache. His high forehead and rounded face with its aquiline nose were signs typically believed, at the turn of the twentieth century, to denote intelligence and good breeding. Born in New Orleans, Loeb was licensed to practice law in California, New York, and the U.S. federal ninth circuit courts.15 From Berthe’s potentially precarious financial perspective, Loeb’s youth suggests an ambitious lawyer she thought could deliver a victory at bargain-basement prices. Undoubtedly, too, Florence’s innocent youthful beauty, over and above an interesting test case of international law, proved an irresistible combination. Their friendship would continue until Loeb’s death in 1944.
Armed with the facts, Loeb advised Berthe with due authority that she and her family had potentially lost their rights to automatically claim American citizenship, and therewith an American inheritance, due to the Expatriation Act of 1907. An extended residence abroad, as in the case of the Lacazes, presumed the loss of any American citizenship, unless it could be proven through satisfactory evidence to the U.S. government that it was never the person’s intention to lose his or her American nationality. Satisfactory evidence was usually provided in the form of overseas permits for work in the consular, military, or other international business sectors. The intent of the law was to define which Americans had become permanent expatriates, and was directly aimed at women who had contracted an “international marriage.” Berthe, Florence, and Isabelle fit the alien American profile perfectly.
Still, Loeb pondered, was Berthe’s marriage to Maximin considered an international marriage by the terms confirmed in the new law? Both were born in France and had immigrated separately to California. Were Florence and Isabelle, both born Americans, now considered French through their residency in France for over five years? These were the tricky questions that Charles Loeb needed to consider quickly. Without steady income from Maximin’s estate and Florinte’s property, Berthe, Florence, and Isabelle would be penniless.
To complicate the situation further, Maximin’s cousins and their families lived in San Francisco. Were these Lacaze cousins now American, and if so, would they contest any inheritance Berthe might claim from Maximin? A crucial unknown factor was whether they felt Berthe had deserted Maximin’s home and their stricken city just when she was needed most at her husband’s side. If they did resent her, and chose to contest the will, could Loeb counter their arguments successfully? Any kind feelings the family might have held were probably dashed by Berthe’s 1908 refusal to return.
Then there were other unpalatable possibilities. Had the supposed last will survived the earthquake? Or had Maximin made a new will taking into consideration Berthe’s 1908 rejection of his demands for her to return? Had he filed for a legal separation? Or had Maximin made a will at all? A legal battle looked likely, especially since the 1907 Expatriation Act had already been tested in numerous cases. Defending the interests of “foreign wives” against other “American” relations was, quite simply, futile. American courts, then as now, did not recognize the rights of aliens over Americans, and the American relative always won.16
The law was, of course, a travesty—but it was still the law. Florinte’s estate alone was worth over $75,000. Her California testament declared Berthe her sole beneficiary. The estate comprised $56,000 in cash and $20,000 in real estate and stocks, worth approximately $1.8 million in 2017.17 Yet Maximin’s will and estate remained a mystery. No will was published in the press. No probate announced. Could this mean that the Lacaze cousins intended to hold on to Maximin’s assets?18
While Loeb fought for Berthe’s and her daughters’ inheritance, other arrangements needed to be made to make ends meet. In the time-honored tradition of the matronly mother and the beautiful daughter coming of age, Berthe turned to Florence as the sole solution to all their woes.
3
LA PARISIENNE
… all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.
—ALEXANDER THEROUX, American novelist
Florence, aged sixteen, thought of herself as La Parisienne, that gigantic statue representing modernity, fashion, and glamour at the Exposition Universelle of 1900. The statue, sculpted by Paul Moreau-Vauthier, was the exhibition’s focal point. All visitors walked into the Paris fairgrounds through the Porte Monumentale, where they were greeted by this female colossus, La Parisienne, in all her glory. She was modern, like Paris, stunningly beautiful, outfitted in Jeanne Paquin’s haute-couture gown. She was quintessentially French. She was no Marianne, the allegorical, martial, patriotic symbol of France. La Parisienne invited all visitors, French and foreign, to enter and see a new, contemporary Paris, released from the shackles of tradition and the scandals of the Third Republic, to revel in the excitement that Paris represented to the world in culture, invention, and science.1
Florence saw herself as a living, breathing La Parisienne, modern, glamorous, sexy, a future Gaby Deslys, star of the Folies Bergère. Unlike Gaby, Florence wanted to find her feet in the rarefied world of opera. While she learned only about La Parisienne in school, Florence could easily relate to both La Parisienne and the designer of her haute couture, Jeanne Paquin. The House of Paquin was the rising star in the fashion world, noted for wooing away clients from the aristocratic, traditional designs of Gaston Worth. Despite Paquin’s short ascendency, she eclipsed the established, male House of Worth with her daring and innate feminine understanding of what women wanted to wear. Beautiful in her own right, Paquin had risen from humble origins to become first a model, then a designer, and finally the owner of her own fashion house. It was that kind of upward mobility that Florence admired and yearned to emulate, up to a point.2 Where Paquin was happy for her fashions to shine in the limelight, Florence needed the oxygen of the limelight shining directly on her.
By 1900, money, or
the lack of it, had become a gradually determining factor in social status. While land ownership still mattered, and marked an enviable noble heritage, the landed gentry throughout Europe were finding the new, raw capitalism of the early twentieth century hard to fathom, and harder still to adopt. The titled aristocracy were on the hunt for American heiresses born to wealthy robber barons of the ilk of the Vanderbilts, Morgans, and Goulds; or even, if the need absolutely dictated, daughters born to manufacturing giants like Isaac Merritt Singer, inventor of the first evenly stitching sewing machine.*
In Florence’s Paris, it was a commonly known fact that all Americans were equally unacceptable in society, but their money was a necessary evil to be envied and plundered, so European aristocracy could plow on regardless. It was the American search and need for belonging in European society, coupled with the European requirement for new money, that changed many heiresses’ and aristocrats’ futures. Consuelo Vanderbilt was coerced into her marriage with the Duke of Marlborough by her mother, saving Blenheim Palace and the duke’s other assets from oblivion. Marie Alice Heine, born in the French Quarter of New Orleans to a Jewish banking family, converted to Roman Catholicism to become the Duchess of Richelieu. When Alice was widowed as a young woman still of childbearing age, she remarried well, becoming Her Serene Highness of Monaco, Princess Alice.* Jennie Jerome, the first American-dollar “princess,” and mother of Sir Winston Churchill, also gave her inherited fortune to underpin her husband’s political career for the dubious pleasure of becoming Lady Randolph Churchill.
Florence ached to belong to the treasured circle of these elite society women, but despite her private school education, she lacked the money and connections to meet, much less marry into, such illustrious circles. While Charles Loeb toiled to obtain satisfaction through the California courts, Florence was, momentarily, relatively penniless. Dreams were one thing, reality quite another. Still, the sixteen-year-old was already a remarkable beauty, and knew it. Florence had also become a frightful snob—something everyone who met her remarked upon—and could not see herself living forever in obscurity, much less in poverty.