Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  Then it was my turn. “But no,” I said, “you’re not so sick as all that. Of course, you’ve got a little stomach trouble but it isn’t really very serious. Besides, your doctor is very fond of you.”

  “Yes,” Pablo shouted, “and he says I can drink whiskey. That’s how fond he is of me. He ought to be ashamed. He doesn’t give a damn about me.”

  “Not at all,” I explained. “He says that because he thinks perhaps that might make you happy.”

  “Oh, I see,” Pablo said. “Well, I won’t take it, anyway. It would probably make things worse.” And so I had to go on reassuring him, telling him no, he didn’t really have such terrible troubles. Given a little time, things would straighten themselves out. Life would become more agreeable. All his friends loved him dearly. His painting was something absolutely marvelous and everybody was completely in accord with that opinion. Finally, after an hour or so, as I was beginning to run out of all the reasons he might have for living—or I either—he began to stir in his bed vaguely, as though he were making his peace with the world, and said, “Well, maybe you’re right. Perhaps it’s not so bad as I thought. But are you sure of what you say? You’re absolutely certain?” So at that point I could only reach for a second wind and say, “Yes, yes, of course it’s going to be better. It’s not possible for it to be any other way. At least you can take action. Through your painting you can be sure that something is going to change. You’re going to do something extraordinary today, I feel sure. You’ll see this evening after your work is done. You’ll be in a completely different frame of mind.”

  He sat up, more hopeful now. “Yes? You’re very sure?” Then he got up and began his usual movements, complaining first to one friend, then to another, among those who had come before lunch, waiting for him outside in the studio. After lunch he forgot completely about his pessimism. By two o’clock he thought of only one thing: to get down to painting. And then, with a brief stop for dinner, nothing but painting until two in the morning. At two in the morning he was as fresh as a rose. But the next morning it would begin all over again.

  Of course, Pablo did suffer from some kind of disease of the will, which made it impossible for him to make the slightest domestic decision. A little later on, because the weather in Paris had been rather bad, we had decided to go down south for a while. We had made our plans a week before and were going to take Michel and Zette Leiris with us. It had been decided that we would get up very early in order to leave by six, which was not at all the way we were accustomed to doing things. Marcel the chauffeur would come to pick us up and the Leirises would be there, ready to go with us at six.

  The night before we were supposed to leave, beginning about ten o’clock while we were having dinner at Lipp’s, Pablo began to twist and turn in his seat and then said, “Well, after all, why are we going to the Midi?” I said we were going because we were tired and had decided it would be a good idea to go to the Midi for a rest.

  “Yes,” he said, “but we said that a week ago and now I’m not sure I want to go any more.” I said that was all right with me. It was really to make him happy that we were supposed to go in the first place but, I said, it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

  He began to squirm a little, not sure which horn of the dilemma to reach for.

  “Yes,” he said tentatively, “but all the same, I don’t see why we have to go down there. I never can do what I want to.” I said that if he didn’t want to go, it was very simple: we’d call up Marcel and call up the Leirises and we wouldn’t go.

  “Well, yes,” Pablo said, “but what will it make me look like if I change my mind?” I said he needn’t worry about that. We could telephone them that we weren’t going and that would end it.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, “but I’m not sure that I won’t go. Just because I don’t want to go doesn’t necessarily mean that I won’t go. After all, tomorrow I may feel differently about it.”

  I said, “Let’s think it over. There’s plenty of time. It’s only ten o’clock. Up until midnight we can reasonably telephone Marcel and the Leirises and tell them not to show up at six o’clock because we don’t want to leave.”

  Then Pablo started off on a long philosophical monologue in which he quoted Kierkegaard, Heraclitus, St. John of the Cross, and Santa Teresa, building up to a disquisition based on two of his favorite themes: Todo es nada and Je meurs de ne pas mourir—what in a more amiable frame of mind he often referred to as his philosophie merdeuse. He went into all the reasons there were for taking action or for remaining passive in general, in particular, in this or that hypothetical case, and wound up by saying that since every action carried within it the seeds of its own degeneration, one was better off, in principle, not to act rather than to act, whenever there was a choice.

  I agreed with everything he said. I said it was absolutely true that whenever anyone made a gesture or a move in any direction, very often one found he had occasion to regret it; that it wasn’t at all a necessity to go to the Midi; that if we went, we might well wish we hadn’t. I told him I didn’t want to bring any pressure to bear on his wishes, whatever they might be; therefore, he should make the decision he felt happiest about.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, “but that’s exactly what’s so difficult about it—making the decision.”

  I said, “All right. Since we’ve already made one, perhaps we should just follow it through.”

  He looked uncertain. “Yes,” he said, “but getting up at six o’clock in the morning is not very gay. I understand why they execute condemned men at dawn. I just have to see the dawn in order to have my head roll all by itself.”

  This went on for four hours. Although normally I could carry on this type of discussion without getting wrought up, or without making him wrought up, which was even more difficult, I was now so tired that I burst into tears. He brightened up immediately.

  “Ah,” he said, “I knew very well you had an exact idea of what you wanted to do.” I had no idea at all. I was simply so tired that I was crying because it was a thoroughly useless discussion and, after four hours, no further advanced than it had been at the start. It was completely enervating to be there from ten o’clock until two in the morning discussing a matter of no importance. So I told him, “I’m crying from exhaustion.”

  “No,” he said, “you’re crying because you want something.” I saw it was useless. I was so worn out I preferred to make the decision, because it was just too painful to stay there any longer and still not be able to get one out of him. I said, “All right, if you insist. I want something.”

  “Fine, fine,” he said. Then he put on a bland air and added, very sweetly, “Now then, what is it you want, exactly?”

  “I’d like to go to the Midi,” I said.

  “You see?” he said. “I knew very well it was that. You should have told me in the beginning if you had a little idea like that in the back of your head. Since you’ve finally told me, we’ll go. But I’m going, understand, only to please you. If I don’t like it down there, it’s your fault.” After that he was completely happy, because I had taken upon myself the full responsibility for our departure and if the trip was a fiasco, he would be able to chalk it up to my account.

  THE BABY WAS DUE IN MAY. In February I received a letter from my grandmother, asking me to come see her. I hadn’t seen her since I went to live with Pablo but she had learned where I was through a newspaper article someone had shown her. She was calm and loving, as always, and before I left she said to me, “You mustn’t think that just because you’ve changed your way of life, you’re not going to take me to the Midi for my winter vacation any longer. I’m not going to reproach you for what you’ve done but I don’t expect it’s going to alter our way of doing things.”

  When I was a child, she had taken me south with her every year from the time I was five years old. Later on the situation was reversed and it was I who took her. I explained all that to Pablo and he agreed that I should go with her. He came along to see us off a
t the Gare de Lyon. He settled us into our compartment and then went back outside onto the platform. As the train started to pull away, Pablo’s eyes seemed to soften with emotion and they were no longer just black and piercing but very beautiful. I had rarely seen him moved or affected emotionally in that manner and it gave me a real tug at the heart to see him receding into the distance.

  When my grandmother and I returned to Paris after three or four weeks, I discovered that while we were away Pablo was convinced I wasn’t coming back. He had been certain that the trip was a ruse to cover up my desire to get away from him, and that my family was going to pull me back into the fold. When he saw me return and learned that I had never intended anything else, he seemed so relieved and sweet, I could hardly believe it was Pablo, and the look he lavished on me then, too, was one I shan’t forget in a long time.

  Although the baby was due in a little over two months, I hadn’t yet seen a doctor about my pregnancy. Pablo was against the idea because he felt that if one looked after such things too carefully, it might bring bad luck. The only medical person I had seen during that winter was the psychoanalyst Doctor Lacan. Pablo always felt you should use people for things that lay outside their area of specialization. Since Lacan was a psychoanalyst, Pablo had adopted him as his general medical practitioner. He took his troubles to him and Lacan prescribed very little, saying, as a rule, that everything was fine. One time, a little earlier, I had had what seemed to be a bad grippe and was coughing a great deal. Doctor Lacan said it was a combination of fatigue and nervousness and simply gave me some pills to make me sleep and I did, in fact, sleep for most of two days and two nights as a result. When I got up, the grippe was gone and the cough with it.

  About a week before the baby was to be born I was beginning to be quite excited and I decided it was time to do something. I kept talking about it until Pablo finally agreed we should think about an obstetrician and a clinic. He called Doctor Lacan, who was astounded to learn that I hadn’t been seeing an obstetrican. He got Doctor Lamaze for me and he, even more flabbergasted, arranged for a bed in a clinic in Boulogne called Le Belvédere.

  A year or two before I met Pablo I had begun to note down the details of any dreams I had that seemed out of the ordinary. Just before we met I dreamed one night that I was taking a bus trip, the sort of thing organized to show tourists famous monuments. In my dream we stopped at a museum. When we got out they herded us into a goatshed. It was very dark inside but I could see there were no goats. I was beginning to wonder why they had brought us there when I saw, right in the middle of the shed, a baby carriage. In it and hanging from it were two paintings: the portrait of Mademoiselle Rivière by Ingres, and a small painting by the Douanier Rousseau called Les Representants des puissances étrangères venant saluer la République en signe de paix. Both of them were smaller than their actual size; the Ingres was dangling from the handle of the baby carriage and the Douanier Rousseau was nestling inside it.

  A few months after I met Pablo I had shown him the notebook in which I wrote about my dreams. He had thought that one particularly interesting; all the more so since the Douanier Rousseau painting I had dreamed about belonged to him, although I hadn’t known it at the time. The day I went to the clinic for the delivery, Doctor Lamaze was delayed in arriving and when I got there, instead of finding him, I had a nurse and a midwife waiting for me. One of them was named Mademoiselle Ingres and the other, Madame Rousseau. Mademoiselle Ingres had black hair parted in the middle and pulled down severely on each side, like so many of Monsieur Ingres’s female sitters. Pablo remembered reading what I had written about the dream and when Lacan arrived he asked him the meaning, in analysis, of a goatshed. Lacan told him it was a symbol for the birth of a child.

  The baby—a boy—was born without difficulty on May 15, 1947. Pablo wanted him to be named Pablo but since his first son had been named Paul—the French equivalent—I thought we should try something different. I remembered that Watteau’s teacher had been called Claude Gillot, and that he had done many paintings of harlequins, just as Pablo himself had, even before the Blue Period and long after, so we named the baby Claude.

  PART IV

  ASIDE FROM THE FACT that Pablo’s studios in the Rue des Grands-Augustins were not designed to accommodate children, even one child, very adequately, there were two other reasons why it soon began to seem uncomfortable there after Claude was born. Their names were Inès and Sabartés.

  Pablo had met Inès and her older sister one summer at Mougins while he was vacationing there with Paul Eluard and Nusch. The girls were fifteen and seventeen at the time. Inès was a jasmin picker for one of the perfume factories. He brought them back to the apartment in the Rue La Boétie, Inès as chambermaid and her sister as cook. When war broke out, he didn’t want the responsibility of having the two young girls with him so he sent them home to Mougins. Not long after, Inès met Gustave Sassier, a young fellow from Paris who was taking part in a bicycle race in that region. Gustave fell in love with Inès, married her, and brought her back to Paris with him. Pablo rented a small apartment of three rooms for them on the second floor of his building in the Rue des Grands-Augustins, leading off the same little circular staircase that he used for reaching his studios. That took care of the newlyweds and at the same time provided him with a kind of caretaker for the studios.

  Almost no one knew of Inès. If Sabartés was absent and Pablo too, a visitor might ring at Inès’s door but that was rare. If one had thought about it, walking into the entrance hall of Pablo’s studios, full of plants and disorder, one might have imagined her existence; no one would assume that either Sabartés or Marcel the chauffeur took care of watering the plants or dusting the clutter. That’s what I thought, anyway, the first time I went there. But she remained hidden for a long time. When I began visiting Pablo afternoons, I got to know Inès because that was when she came to do the housework.

  She was very pretty at that time. She had an oval face with a small nose, black hair and eyes, and olive-brown skin. I could well understand why Paul Eluard had been led to write his poem about Inès and her sister—“like two dark doors to summer.” Every year, for her birthday, around Christmastime, Pablo had her come to pose one afternoon for a portrait sketch and gave it to her, so that by now she must have twenty or more portraits by Picasso. She knew nothing about painting but she was very proud of the fact that every afternoon when she came to the atelier to clean, Pablo would show her what he had done the day before and ask her what she thought of it. Naturally, she got in the habit of expressing her opinions and Pablo seemed to take a good deal of interest in them. And so Inès was understandably proud of her prerogatives. She dressed very carefully and saw to it that her feather duster and her apron harmonized very noticeably, and she changed the combination each day. She was chambermaid to a great painter, not to just anybody.

  In the spring of 1946 Inès had a baby. She wasn’t very well for a time after that. When I first saw her she had seemed very much like the chambermaid in classic Italian comedy, a bit of a flirt yet at the same time rather shy, at least on the surface, speaking generally in monosyllables, running in and out with tiny steps. But with the birth of her child and her illness, plus the fact that in May 1946 I came to live there, her manner and her disposition changed. Pablo had always had women but not women who lived with him. Inès first arrived on the scene after he had broken with Olga and although he saw Marie-Thérèse Walter regularly, it was at her house. When Dora Maar entered his life, she lived in her own apartment, in the Rue de Savoie, around the corner from Pablo, and seldom came to the studios in the Rue des Grands-Augustins. As the woman entrusted with the care of Pablo’s studio, Inès had come to feel, innocently and perhaps unconsciously, that Pablo belonged to her, in a certain sense. She felt that she filled a role in his life that no one else could duplicate exactly, and she considered herself a kind of priestess. But with the birth of her child and the constant presence of another woman, her life changed. The result was, she
didn’t like me very much. I sympathized with her, and did everything I could to put her at ease, but got nowhere. Whatever I did seemed to antagonize her further. When Claude was born and occasionally she had to take care of him as well as of her own child, she complained of being tired and ill and soon found herself unable to make the slightest exertion in Claude’s behalf. We had no room for anyone else and Pablo didn’t like the idea, anyway, of having someone new around. And so family life in the Rue des Grands-Augustins became difficult.

  After her child was born, whenever Inès came to pose for her annual portrait she posed with the baby in her lap, and so seriously, you would have thought it was the Virgin Mary with the Infant Jesus. Pablo made two lithographs of her with the baby. Once, after she had posed, Pablo’s nephew Javier came and we decided to go out and have dinner in a restaurant. Inès had apparently planned, in honor of the occasion, to serve dinner there and when Pablo told her we were eating out, she burst into tears. “It’s not the way it used to be around here,” she said. “Now anything goes. In the old days I took good care of Monsieur but he’s forgotten all about that.” She loved to cry and did it with great art. Pablo calmed her down and agreed with everything she said, as in all such situations, but since he wanted to eat out, we ate out. But Inès became more and more of a problem.