Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  “Françoise mustn’t ride into the arena to open the bullfight,” she said. “What will the newspapers say?”

  Pablo laughed. “In all the years newspapers have been printing nonsense about me, if that were the worst thing they’d said! If Françoise and I want to do it that way, we’ll do it. Let the newspapers make the most of it.”

  “But it’s like a circus,” she protested.

  “That’s right,” Pablo said. “It is like a circus. And what’s wrong with the circus? Anyway, I like the idea. If others don’t, tant pis.”

  When she saw he was intractable, she brushed the tears and hair out of her eyes and said, “Perhaps you’re right. I didn’t understand. You’re always right.” And she left.

  That afternoon the program went off hilariously. Pablo’s son Paulo shaved one side of his head and drove through the streets of Vallauris in an old car. Pablo, with a small jazz band, followed him in another. After the bullfight Pablo was in an expansive mood.

  “You were wonderful,” he told me. “Absolutely sublime. You’ve got to stay this time. You’re the only one I have any fun with. You carry with you the right atmosphere. I’ll die from boredom if you go.” I told him I knew I would not be able to bear up under our old way of life and I left that evening. After I had gone, he got into one of his black moods again and couldn’t stand being in Vallauris. He took the children and their nurse, Jacqueline Roque and her daughter, and all the others and went to Collioure, in the Pyrenees. There he spent the rest of the summer buzzing around Madame de Lazerme.

  IN PARIS THAT FALL, I was taken ill and had to have an emergency operation. After I came out of the hospital, Kahnweiler called to tell me Pablo wanted to have the children the next Sunday. He said Jacqueline Roque wouldn’t be there, that there would be only Picasso, himself, and the children. Since the children were still rather young—five and seven—I told him it might be simpler for everybody if I accompanied them. Kahnweiler and Pablo called for us. They sat in the front seat and the children and I in back, and Kahnweiler drove us out to his country place at St.-Hilaire on the road to Orléans. In the middle of the dinner, Pablo said suddenly that he was very ill, that he knew his heart was giving out. I offered to look after him, but he said he didn’t want anything to do with me. Kahnweiler, of course, became extremely agitated. Pablo left the table and went up into a bedroom to lie down. Kahnweiler and I sat downstairs while he rested.

  After an hour or so, I went upstairs to look at him. He seemed on the point of expiring quite dramatically, but he revived sufficiently to say, “You’re a monster, the lowest form of human life. You see how your mere presence is enough to make me ill? If I see any more of you, I’ll die. When I think of all you owe me!” Then, of course, I understood his frame of mind, so I nodded compassionately, and said he was quite right; he had found me lying in the gutter and had rescued me from all that and brought me to the castle to live like a princess. That made him all the angrier. He stormed on about middle-class morality and bourgeois values, cursed my parents for having brought me up in a life of ease, and said he wished he could have my father thrown in jail for being a successful businessman who had accustomed his daughter to a pampered life and educated her in sophistries.

  “If I had found you in a gutter, we’d both be better off,” he said. “Then you would owe me everything and you’d be smart enough to know it. If this were the ancien régime and I were king, I would put your father in jail. It’s all his fault.”

  I had to laugh. I told him it sounded so funny to hear a Communist yearning for the ancien régime. And I reminded him that if it were the ancien régime, it would be more likely that my father would have him thrown into jail for having caused his only daughter to stray onto the primrose path at such an early age.

  Pablo sat up in bed. “You can’t look me in the face and tell me you consider you were pure.” I looked and I told him.

  “And you don’t consider yourself enormously indebted to me?” he asked. I told him I did indeed. He had taught me a great deal. But I had given him a great deal throughout those years—at least as much as he had given me—and I felt, as a result, that my indebtedness had been amply paid off.

  “Ah, so you think you’ve paid for your life with me by undergoing a bit of annoyance on occasion?” he asked. I told him it wasn’t a question of annoyance. I had paid with my blood for everything I had got: from every point of view and far more than he realized. Finding me so hopelessly unrepentant, he gave up. He was too sick to argue further, he said. He had to return to Paris at once.

  He stamped downstairs and faced a trembling Kahnweiler with the announcement, “This woman makes me ill. I never want to set eyes on her again. It was a terrible mistake on your part to bring her here.” Kahnweiler grew even paler. I apologized but said I had felt it was my duty to be with the children, especially since there was no one else to look after them.

  All the way back to Paris no one spoke. Every few minutes Pablo went through a little mime designed to convince us all he was passing out. I felt sure he was as strong and as well as ever: except when he was remembering to act out his little comedy, he certainly looked it.

  In December, his son Paulo had to undergo a hernia operation. Doctor Blondin was the surgeon. After the operation, Paulo suffered a lung embolism. For several days he was between life and death. Blondin sent a telegram to Pablo, in the Midi, telling him that Paulo was very ill and urging him to come to Paris. He didn’t come.

  In January, while Paulo was still in the hospital, his mother, Olga, partially paralyzed and suffering from cancer in a hospital in Cannes, took a turn for the worse. Paulo couldn’t move. I think he was greatly troubled, knowing that he was unable to be with her and that she would die alone. In a few days she did die. The coup de grâce—posthumously—was that she was buried in Vallauris, a place she had despised once Pablo and I settled there. She had lived much in Cannes and it would have been more appropriate for her to be buried there. She was a communicant of the Russian Orthodox church and there is an Orthodox cemetery in Cannes, but it was decided Vallauris would be better.

  About two weeks after that, now that Paulo was on the mend, Pablo came up to Paris, but for purely personal reasons. I wanted to stabilize my life, and had come to feel I could do that with Luc Simon, a young painter I had known since my teens. I hadn’t seen Luc since then until one day about a year after I left Pablo, when I met him, quite by accident, in a bookshop on the Left Bank. After a year of seeing each other again, we had decided to marry and I wanted to tell Pablo my plans. I telephoned him at the Rue des Grands-Augustins and made an appointment with him. He received me after lunch in the long room on the third floor.

  When I told him I was thinking of marrying, he grew angry and said, “It’s monstrous. You think only of yourself.” I told him I wasn’t thinking only of myself. I was thinking of the children, too. He calmed down and said, “Well, let’s not get into a quarrel right off. I’ll get you something to eat.” He went into the kitchen and returned with a tangerine. He gave me a piece of it.

  “It’s better not to get into a row about everything,” he said, no doubt recalling our previous meeting at Kahnweiler’s country place. I felt he wanted to put this conversation on a different plane, just as though this were our customary meeting-ground, as it had been. We sat there, talking and eating our tangerine. The charm of the place put us both, I think, a bit under the spell of the old days and it seemed very pleasant to be sitting there together again where everything had begun. Pablo seemed quite relaxed and happy. Just then the door that led from that room into the sculpture atelier opened a crack. Behind it I could see someone listening to everything we said. Whenever we came to what must have seemed too personal a phase in our conversation the door would open wider as a warning to Pablo that he was treading on dangerous ground. He was soon back on formal terms.

  “You owe me so much,” he said, “this is your way of thanking me, I suppose. Well, I’ve got just one thing to say. Anybody el
se will have all of my faults but none of my virtues. I hope it’s a fiasco, you ungrateful creature.” He was wearing a wristwatch I had given him. He pulled it off and threw it at me. “Your time is no longer mine,” he said. Since the watch I was wearing was one he had given me, I took it off and handed it over to him. He began to laugh. At that point the door in the rear creaked open again, and he sobered down. I could see there was no point in continuing the discussion and I left.

  That summer I sent Claude and Paloma, accompanied by the Martinique maid who took care of them at home in Paris, to visit Pablo, and I arranged with Maya to be there at the same time so that she could look after them, as well. Luc and I were married quietly early in July and left for Venice. I planned to be in Vallauris at the beginning of September.

  While I was in Venice, Maya sent me information bulletins about the children and life at La Californie, Pablo’s new home in Cannes. One day, just before I was to leave, she wrote that La Galloise had been emptied completely. I wrote immediately to a lifelong friend of mine, Christiane Bataille, and asked her to get in touch with a huissier—a kind of sheriff’s officer, or bailiff. When I reached Vallauris, the huissier was there to go into the house before me and establish the fact that all my things had been removed. He took the testimony of Monsieur and Madame Michel, my caretakers, who said that everything of mine had been taken out of my house.

  Not only the things Pablo had given me, like paintings and drawings, were gone, but my books—I had many and they meant more to me than anything else—my own drawings, and almost all other personal objects had disappeared, even the letters Matisse had written to me over the years. There were the beds and a few chairs, three boxes of papers stored in the attic—where no one, apparently, had thought of looking—and that’s all.

  After I returned to Paris, I never saw Pablo again. I did hear from him indirectly from time to time: for example, in the spring I was not invited to exhibit at the Salon de Mai. And the next fall, a week after I returned from the clinic with a new daughter, Aurélia, I had a letter from Kahnweiler terminating my contract with him. Occasionally—even today—a picture dealer will tell me that he would like to buy or exhibit my work, but that he doesn’t dare to, for fear of losing Pablo’s good will. And then there are all those people who showered me with attentions when I was with Pablo but who look the other way when our paths cross now.

  Pablo had told me, that first afternoon I visited him alone, in February 1944, that he felt our relationship would bring light into both our lives. My coming to him, he said, seemed like a window that was opening up and he wanted it to remain open. I did, too, as long as it let in the light. When it no longer did, I closed it, much against my own desire. From that moment on, he burned all the bridges that connected me to the past I had shared with him. But in doing so he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful to him for that.

  INDEX

  The links below refer to the page references of the printed edition of this book. While the numbers do not correspond to the page numbers or locations on an electronic reading device, they are retained as they can convey useful information regarding the position and amount of space devoted to an indexed entry. Because the size of a page varies in reflowable documents such as this e-book, it may be necessary to scroll down to find the referenced entry after following a link.

  Adam, Henri-Georges, 144

  Adéma, Marcel, 292

  Aix, 64

  America, 129, 256

  Anderson, Sherwood, 61

  Andromaque, 34

  Antibes, 89, 124–125, 214, 279

  Museé d’, 124–125, 136, 167–168, 183, 184–185, 202, 228, 281

  Apollinaire, Guillaume, 32, 71–72, 128, 139–140, 143, 291–292, 321

  Apollinaire, Jacqueline, 393-394

  Aragon, Louis, 55, 81, 249–255

  Arias, 212, 220

  Aristotle, 66

  Arles, 64, 219, 221–222, 298, 312

  Auberge des Maures, 276

  Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The, 60

  Bakst, Léon, 139–140

  Ballets Russes, 139

  Balthus, 133

  Balzac, Honoré de, 18

  Barcelona, 139, 158, 321

  School of Fine Arts, 157

  Barrault, Jean-Louis, 17

  Barrès, Maurice, 252

  Bataille, Christiane, 334

  Bataille, Georges, 221

  Bataille, Henri, 252

  Bâteau Lavoir, 70–91–259

  Baudelaire, Charles, 27

  Baylot, André, 299

  Baziotes, William, 164

  Beaudin, André, 78, 267

  Beaumont, Count Etienne de, 141

  Beaumont, Countess Etienne de, 141

  Beauvoir, Simone de, 33

  Belvédere, Le (clinic), 151, 207

  Benois, Alexander, 139–140

  Bernard, Guy, 227

  Billy, André, 292

  Blanche, Jacques-Emile, 228

  Blue Enamelled Casserole, 228

  B.N.C.I. (Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie), 36, 138, 180

  Boisgeloup, 17, 139, 141, 144, 215

  Boissière, Mme., 212–214

  Bonnard, Pierre, 41, 247

  Boudin, Marcel, 70, 88, 93–96, 122–123, 148, 152, 159, 195, 200, 206–208, 213, 230, 294–299, 303

  Braque, Georges, 67–68, 131–136, 139, 163–164, 185, 250, 259–260, 284

  Braque, Mme. Georges, 149

  Brassaï, 35, 77, 160

  Brasserie Lipp, 187

  Brauner, Victor, 78

  Breton, André, 37, 77, 82, 129–130

  Bretonne, Restif de la, 25

  Brière, 100

  Brittany, 100

  Bruant, Aristide, 70

  Bucher, Jeanne, 78–79, 117

  Bullfights, Picasso and, 219–220

  Burial at Ornans (Courbet), 187

  Cachin, Marcel, 255

  Café de la Renaissance, 282

  Café de l’Union, 120

  Cahiers d’Art 14, 32, 178

  Caldwell, Erskine, 61

  Californie, La (Cannes), 212, 334

  Cannes, 124, 214, 333–334

  Film Festival, 128

  Cap d’Antibes, 83, 124, 141, 224

  Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 259–260

  Carpaccio, Vittore, 278

  Carré, Louis, 58–59, 164, 263

  Casanova, Danielle, 70

  Casanova, Laurent, 70–71, 255–256, 281

  Cassou, Jean, 53, 182–183

  Castel, André, 219–222

  Castelucho, 204

  Catalan, Le, 13, 20, 60

  Catalan Peasant Woman (Miró), 180

  Cézanne, Paul, 41, 51, 61, 116, 203, 260, 262

  Chagall, Bella, 256

  Chagall, Ida, 256, 258

  Chagall, Marc, 256–258, 260, 319

  Chanel, Coco, 178

  Chant des Morts, Le (Reverdy), 135, 177–178, 203, 256

  Chaplin, Charlie, 232, 317–319

  Char, René, 128, 135–136

  Charrat, Janine, 324

  Chatagnier, Doctor, 277–278

  Château de Vallauris, 281

  Château Grimaldi, 124

  Chef-d’Oeuvre Inconnu, Le (Balzac), 18

  Chevalier, Maurice, 252

  Chez Francis, 96

  Chez Marcel, 89, 126, 130, 183, 275, 297

  Chez Sénequie, 278

  China, 31, 171

  Chirico, Giorgio di, 77

  Christ, Jesus, 66

  Cintrón, Conchita, 221–222

  Clair, René, 163

  Cocteau, Jean, 34, 139, 278–279, 281

  Collettes, Les (Cagnes), 245

  Collioure, 331

  Columbus, Christopher, 278

  Communist Party, 54–55, 57, 163, 183, 249, 252–256, 265–266, 280

  Conquerors, The (Malraux), 33

  Coquiot, Gustave, 185

  Corot, J.-B.-C., 142

>   Courbet, Gustave, 117, 187

  Couturier, Father, 237–239

  Cox, Mr., 168–169

  Crane, The, 287–288

  Cubism, 61, 67–70, 133, 138, 201

  Cuisine, La, 203–205, 289

  Cuny, Alain, 13–16

  Cuttoli, M., 183–184

  Cuttoli, Marie, 83, 118, 124, 183, 186, 194, 224, 299

  Dante Alighieri, 33

  Daumier, Honoré, 85

  David, Sylvette, 320–321

  Davis, Stuart, 180

  Death of Sardanapalus (Delacroix), 187

  Delacroix, Eugène, 186–187

  Denis, Maurice, 213

  Derain, André, 138, 259

  Desastres de la Guerra (Goya), 174

  Détective (magazine), 272

  Deux Magots (café), 77

  Diaghilev, Sergei Pavlovich, 139–140

  Domínguez, Oscar, 222–223

  Dominguín, Luís, 274, 277

  Don Juan, 295

  Dor de la Souchère, Jules-César Romuald, 125, 183–184

  Dos Passos, John, 61

  Dubois, André, 32, 33, 299

  Duchamp, Marcel, 290

  Ehrenberg, Ilya, 199

  Eiffel, Gustave, 185

  Eiffel Tower, 71

  Eluard, Dominique, 275–280, 311, 322

  Eluard, Nusch, 128–129, 155, 312

  Eluard, Paul, 54–55, 77, 80–82, 128–131, 155–156, 179, 200, 275–280, 281, 303, 311–312, 314, 317

  Emmer, Luciano, 278

  Ernst, Max, 37, 84

  Farm, The (Miró), 180

  Faulkner, William, 61

  Femme Couchée, 55

  Femme-Fleur, La, 108–109, 165

  Fenosa, Apelles, 135

  Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 61, 141

  Fitzgerald, Zelda, 141

  Flore, Café de, 97

  Fontès, 26

  Forain, Jean-Louis, 41

  Fort, Louis, 82, 87–90, 124, 167, 193, 237

  Fort, Mme. Louis, 193

  Fougeron, André, 279–280, 281

  France, Free Zone of, 26, 54

  German Occupation of, 13, 54–55, 91, 130, 172, 201

  Franco, Francisco, 36, 141