A Year in Paris

by John Baxter

  Comte’s proposal failed to find a following, but the calendar—unlike the weather—remained a problem about which people continued to do something, though not with much success. In 1929 Soviet Russia abolished Sunday in favor of a rest day taken at some more convenient time during the week, but returned to the traditional week in 1940. Among other attempts to streamline the ordering of the year, only the introduction of daylight saving time has achieved anything like international acceptance. Sunday remains the international day of rest, and at least in France, children continue to be named for the same “beatified skeletons pulled from the catacombs of Rome.” Efficiency and rationality have proved nowhere a match for the weight of custom.

  34

  Night of the Scythe

  Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris. June 6, 1911. 10 p.m. 28°C. Vaslav Nijinsky dances the Paris premiere of Le Spectre de la rose, concluding with his heart-stopping leap through an open window. On the other side, four young members of the city’s gay elite, among them Jean Cocteau, wait to catch him in midair. Wrapped in warm towels, he’s carried, exhausted, to a bath filled with warm water, where they peel off his skintight costume and sponge the sweat from his shivering naked body.

  IT MAY BE ONLY IN FRANCE THAT THE ARRIVAL OF SPRING FAILS TO excite the most exuberant emotions.

  Italian music soars in praise of warmth’s return and the reaffirmation of life, and Russian novels ring with ecstatic evocations of that moment when the rivers thaw and begin again to flow. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Andrei Bolkonsky sees his ruined life symbolized in an apparently dead oak. Passing again in spring, he finds the tree in vigorous full leaf and is seized by “a causeless springtime feeling of joy and renewal.”

  Anyone who studies English literature beyond fifth grade will eventually encounter William Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and its celebration of April, which “with its sweet-smelling shower has pierced the drought of March to the root.”

  Even American students unfamiliar with fourteenth-century English verse welcome April as the month of spring break, and the start of the season of wet T-shirts and beer pong.

  Not so France. To the French, March and April are too early to celebrate a year that’s hardly begun. These are the months to get one’s head down, to work long hours and concentrate on the golden days of July and August, the vacances, when one can mellow back and truly appreciate the sensual possibilities of the greatest country in the world.

  Fabre d’Églantine seems to have sensed this in his bones. Why else would he have chosen poisonous hemlock, a knife, and the Judas tree to signify Germinal, the month that began on the former March 21 and ran to April 19? They imply apprehension, distaste, and a recognition that so fundamental a disturbance in nature must have a price.

  One could almost believe that Fabre was present in spirit at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on the night of May 29, 1913, for the premiere of a new ballet by the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev, Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), to music by Igor Stravinsky. It would have been day 10 of Prairial in the new calendar, and the emblematic object, appropriately, was the faux, or “scythe.”

  The Paris appearances of the Ballets Russes reflected the respect for seasons that dominated French theater, art, and fashion. Diaghilev developed ballets to a peak of refinement, then unveiled them in seasons of three or four productions. After playing them in repertory in Paris for a few weeks, they moved on to Rome or London, riding, it was hoped, a wave of exuberant reviews and leaving behind an audience more eager than ever for the company’s return.

  Jean Cocteau’s impression of Igor Stravinsky composing The Rite of Spring.

  Aware of the shock effect of his ballets, Diaghilev strove to maximize it. When Jean Cocteau asked what it would take to have him commission a ballet, the impresario simply said, “Astonish me.”

  As he readied the 1913 season, Paris was still digesting the stylistic advances of 1909, when the gorgeous costumes and decor of Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois, the music of Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, and, above all, the dancing and choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky had ripped through the artistic community in a shrapnel of new ideas that transformed fashion, music, and design.

  The year 1910 brought a startling version of Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune, for which Nijinsky both conceived the choreography and danced the role of a satyr, half man, half goat. Mirroring the two-dimensional decorations on Greek vases, he acted out an erotic encounter with some nymphs, at the climax of which he lay facedown on a scarf one had left behind and masturbated.

  Nijinsky again dominated the 1911 season with Le Spectre de la rose. A dreaming girl conjures up her vision of erotic desire, the embodiment of a rose. When she has been excited to the peak of ecstasy, the spirit launches itself weightlessly through a window, apparently to disperse on the evening air.

  For 1913, Diaghilev needed something even more innovative. Listening to Stravinsky hammer out a piano version of The Rite of Spring, subtitled Pictures from Pagan Russia in Two Parts, he wasn’t sure he’d found it.

  Stravinsky imagined a tribe fearful that the spring, on which their survival depended, would fail to thaw the ice and germinate the grain. To ingratiate themselves with the spirits, they sacrifice a young woman who, at the climax of the ritual, dances herself to death.

  “Does it go on like this much longer?” Diaghilev asked, wincing at the pounding, repetitive chords, for all the world like the chugging of a giant engine—or, as Stravinsky intended, the stamping of feet in a primitive dance.

  Without stopping, Stravinsky snarled, “Only to the end,” and thundered on.

  Diaghilev faced a complex decision in which his liking, or otherwise, for the music was only one factor. More showman than aesthete, he thought less about the worth of Stravinsky’s score than about how to fill the enormous new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

  He was impatient with his regular choreographer, Michel Fokine, and mindful that Nijinsky, who had replaced Fokine as his lover, was eager to develop his choreographic ideas. But Nijinsky’s inventiveness was not matched with diplomacy. Inarticulate and unable to reason with dancers, he bullied them to the point of breakdown.

  Diaghilev’s dilemma was classically Parisian. Should he lead with another crowd-pleaser like Scheherazade or Le Spectre de la rose that would wring coos of delight from the rich patrons who took a box for the season? Or with an unknown work almost certain to enrage them? Shrewdly, he decided on the latter and gave Nijinsky his head. Long-term success lay, he reasoned, with a succès de scandale that would sustain his reputation for innovation.

  As Le Sacre du printemps had no male lead role for him to dance, Nijinsky poured his imagination and incipient schizophrenia into the choreography. Zelda Fitzgerald, another schizophrenic seized with an urge to dance, described the distorted perceptions that sometimes accompany an attack. “I see odd things,” she wrote. “People’s arms too long, or their faces as if they were stuffed and they look tiny and far away, or suddenly out of proportion.” One sees a similar effect in the shapeless flannel costumes of Le Sacre du printemps, the fright wigs and comic bonnets worn by the peasants, the stamping and spasming of the steps, and the frenzy with which the sacrificial maiden dances to her death.

  That the ballet would be greeted with hostility was a foregone conclusion. No opera house, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées had plenty of cheap seats to accommodate spectators eager for sensation. Some were so ready to disrupt the show that they brought whistles, which they began blowing even before the curtain rose.

  Diaghilev gambled that the scandal of that first night would take on a life of its own more durable than the ballet itself, and guarantee full houses for the rest of the season. In 1925 the producers of Revue Nègre, also using the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, would follow his lead, restructuring what had been a relatively staid show to feature a near-naked Josephine Baker doing her goofy version of the Charleston.

  To maximize the furor, Diaghilev staged the ball
et only twice in Paris and three times in London during that first season, and then shelved it, knowing that speculation and exaggeration would garner far more réclame for the company than any amount of advertising. He wasn’t disappointed. “In Paris in 1923,” he wrote, “I was accosted, as ever, by Gertrude Stein.”

  “Ten years, Mr. Diaghilev,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

  “Since what, Miss Stein?”

  “Since that extraordinary night.”

  “I wasn’t aware that you were there,” I said.

  “Of course I was there!”

  Then she sighed and said, “Ah, Nijinsky.”

  He played the same card in 1917 with Parade. To stage, in the darkest moments of the war, a ballet about the circus, designed by Picasso and choreographed by Fokine, with music played on bottles partly filled with water, was seen by many as callous trivialization, but Diaghilev threw more fuel on the fire by handing out free tickets to soldiers on leave and to the rowdiest bohemians in Montparnasse. He also encouraged Fokine to use elements of African-American dance in his choreography, specifically the one-step, described by Harlem Hellfighters bandleader James Reese Europe as “the national dance of the Negro.”

  Attending the first performance, young composer Francis Poulenc was as shocked as the rest of the audience: “A one-step is danced in Parade! When that began, the audience let loose with boos and applause. For the first time, music hall was invading Art-with-a-capital-A.” Women tried to blind librettist Jean Cocteau with hatpins, and for subsequent performances sensualists hired boxes in order to fornicate during the uproar. Having correctly judged the French appetite for the roller-coaster sensations of seasonality, the great impresario must have been more than content.

  35

  One Perfect Rose

  Versailles, Île-de-France. 1715. Louis XIV, believing that bathing removes a protective layer that keeps out disease, has washed only three times in his life. Instead, the scent of roses permeates the newly built palace. Visitors are sprayed with rose water, with which the king also douses his shirts. In each room rose petals float in bowls of water, and courtesans anoint themselves with rose oil, each gram of which uses thirty kilos of flowers.

  MORE SO IN FRANCE THAN ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD, POLITICAL survival turns on a gesture.

  Its rulers have traditionally displayed a flair for shows and symbols. Versailles under Louis XIV was as gaudy as Las Vegas. Lavish banquets concluded with musical shows that tested the inventiveness of the most skilled designers and performers. That the king himself danced in such performances added to his stature.

  The revolutionaries of 1789 showed they had learned this lesson. When they burst into the Bastille on July 14, the ancient prison held only seven inmates, and the rebels were less interested in releasing them than in seizing the weapons stored there. But the symbolism of destroying the ancient fortress made such details superfluous.

  In August 1944, Charles de Gaulle led a triumphant walk down the Champs-Élysées to signify the liberation of the city from German occupation. Since June 1940 he had directed a Free French government from exile in suburban London, but the Allies approaching Paris agreed to hang back until he made his lap of victory. It guaranteed his place at the center of national power for the next twenty-five years.

  The posters, barricades, and manifestos of student uprising of May 1968 also proved more theater than politics, but as historians downgraded it from revolution to mere événements—“events”—politicians took note of its most important lesson: power would increasingly belong to those who could entertain as well as persuade.

  By the time de Gaulle surrendered the presidency in 1969 after ten years in office, younger voters were weary of his stiff, lofty style of government. They wanted a head of state both powerful and human, someone whose hand they might even shake—who could, as Rudyard Kipling urged in his poem “If—,” “talk with crowds and keep your virtue / Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch.”

  No modern French politician was a more skillful showman than François Mitterrand, who would serve as president from 1981 to 1995, the longest term of any to hold the office. To counter de Gaulle’s history as wartime leader, Mitterrand traded on his experience in the Resistance. Each year, he led a pilgrimage to the summit of a rocky outcrop in Burgundy known as la Roche du Solutré. Associated with pilgrims since the Middle Ages, the rock had special significance for Mitterrand: he’d hidden from the Germans nearby.

  Once he became president and began inviting colleagues and allies to join him and his family and friends in the climb, the press took a keen interest in the guest list. Each year’s walk—evoking Mitterrand’s links to the war, nature, and the national heritage—and those who made it with him became news.

  The most significant publicity gesture of Mitterrand’s period in office, however, took place on the day of his inauguration in May 1981 and hinged on a superficially insignificant prop: a single red rose.

  Although its national flower is the iris, France has always accorded a special position of honor for the rose. During the Middle Ages, Guillaume de Lorris’s allegorical poem “Roman de la rose” (“The Romance of the Rose”) was popular all over Europe. A young man dreams of entering the walled garden surrounding the Fountain of Narcissus in hopes of stealing a rose. Pierced instead with arrows by Love, he flees, doomed to yearn for the bloom he cannot possess.

  The rose became the symbol of love, the bud signifying virginity, the full-blown blossom standing for the woman open to every erotic experience, and the thorns the pain of unrequited or unfulfilled love. In time, the single rose as a token of love declined into a cliché, mocked by Dorothy Parker:

  Why is it no one ever sent me yet

  One perfect limousine, do you suppose?

  Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get

  One perfect rose.

  The scent of roses suffused the court of Louis XIV, earning it the name “the Perfumed Court.” Marie Antoinette was often painted holding a rose. When Fabre d’Églantine added the name of a rose to his own, he reaffirmed the flower’s importance in the intellectual life of France.

  In modern times, the new president of the Republic traditionally begins his first day in office by laying a wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier. In the afternoon, the mayor of Paris hosts a formal reception in his honor at the town hall.

  In 1981, Mitterrand broke with protocol. Following the mayoral reception, he didn’t, as was customary, go directly to the presidential palace, the Élysée. Instead, his motorcade crossed the river and climbed the hill of Montagne Sainte-Geneviève to the Panthéon, where the great of France are interred. Leaving the car a block away, he walked alone to the building through jubilant crowds, carrying the symbol of his Socialist Party, a long-stemmed red rose.

  As he approached the building’s columned façade, the crowd fell back, leaving him to climb the steps alone (though shadowed by a surreptitious TV team). As he did so, conductor Daniel Barenboim, on the far side of the square, lifted his baton to lead the Orchestre de Paris in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

  Millions of viewers watched live as Mitterrand crossed the empty floor of the Panthéon (Foucault’s pendulum was taken down for the occasion), paused before its monuments, and descended to the crypt. Striding confidently along its anonymous corridors, he laid roses on the tombs of Jean Moulin, leader of the resistance; socialist pioneer Jean Jaurès; and Victor Schoelcher, who campaigned for the abolition of slavery.

  As he stepped out again into the open air, the symphony reached its climax in the famous “Ode to Joy,” which is also, significantly, the anthem of the European Union. Light rain began to fall, but Mitterrand spurned offers of an umbrella, remaining in the open until the music reached its triumphant conclusion: the man of power, respectful of nature and art.

  Behind this apparently unrehearsed event lay weeks of planning by an informal committee of media advisers, including Roger Hanin, Mitterrand’s movie-star broth
er-in-law; TV producer Serge Moati, a specialist in news broadcasts; Jack Lang, his young minister of culture; and historian Claude Manceron.

  Manceron, an unlikely recruit to this chic and trendy crew, was then in his late fifties, with a wild white beard spilling halfway down his chest. A childhood victim of polio, he was confined to a wheelchair. His sense of history was acute: it was he who urged Mitterrand to embrace the nation’s oldest traditions and the symbolism of the rose.

  François Mitterrand at the Panthéon, 1981.

  Anonymous. François Mitterrand. Archives AFP.

  Inside the Panthéon, assistants had been strategically placed behind pillars, ready to point him down the correct passages and hand him fresh roses as required. But the millions who watched on television saw only a president who needed no retinue, who knew exactly where he was going but maintained at the same time a decent humility and reverence for tradition.

  36

  The Darling Buds of May

  Grasse, Alpes-Maritimes. August 2017. 4 p.m. 18°C. Perfume seems to suffuse the air of this hillside town, the heart of the fragrance industry. The headquarters of parfumiers Fragonard fills a four-story building that drops down a steep hillside from the street. Entering at the top floor, one descends past a museum of perfume into a retail area whose vendeuses swim in a miasma of rose, jasmine, vanilla, cedar, and orange blossom. Perfume must permeate their flesh like a marinade. Lucky the lover who welcomes such a living bouquet to his bed.