Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas's Masterpiece

by Camille Laurens

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  I LOOK AT DAMIEN HIRST‘S GIANTESS, pregnant and flayed, who in her own way sends us back to questions of life and death, and I ask myself without finding any answer: “Did Marie van Goethem have children?” And also: “Where is she now? Where is her body?”

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  AFTER A WEEK, unable to bear the agonies of my own imposture, I decided to return to Marie, to her most basic aspects. What I needed was to gather everything that was known about her, everything that came from a trustworthy source, leaving aside everything that had been imagined or conjectured from generalities. I didn’t want to know about the life of a little Opera rat of the nineteenth century or a young model, I wanted to know about her life, whose length was a mystery. As Barthes would have said, she “protested her former existence,” and I heard her calls. I had learned a lot, but it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t abandon her without doing more for her memory.

  My investigation met a first obstacle in that the best experts gave contradictory information — different dates, different versions of such and such a supposedly well-known episode — according to whether they consulted, as I had, one or another of the previously published articles. Each trusted his predecessors, and no one, in consequence, had gone to the trouble of fact checking, myself included. I thought of what the memoirist Annie Ernaux had said to me one day in an interview: “When I write, I need to be engaged through and through with truth-finding, even to the point of obsession —going back to original sites, inventing no detail.”6 This is not my natural mode. I am not normally fixated on accuracy, I let my memory use its imagination. But in this case, it wasn’t about my own memories. I wanted to be honest in my dealings with this tiny life, not settle for what everyone was saying about it. I wanted to pick up her trace in Paris, where she was born, where she had disappeared one day into an unknown but inescapable misfortune. A work by Patrick Modiano was my companion, its sentences engraved in my mind: “I think of her in spite of myself, sensing an echo of her presence in this neighborhood or that,” he wrote about the unknown Jewish girl whose traces he followed as far as Auschwitz.7 His book, which I read and reread, is full of unanswered questions, of unfinished answers, of “maybes” and “nevers.” The last paragraph starts with this observation: “I shall never know how she spent her days,” and ends suspended on “her secret. A poor and precious secret.”8 For me the secret was in the statue, a secret now made of bronze. But the soul of this secret still hovered in the air. Marie van Goethem had become my Dora Bruder.

  I had no idea how to go about my task. I’m not a historian. I felt that at this stage of my project, only the archive could provide orientation and at the same time give me peace, possibly. But I didn’t know where to look or whom to ask.

  I then remembered that of all the authors I had consulted in the course of my work, only one, who was often cited, had seemed to light the way ahead and, in some sense, carry out my project. It was Martine Kahane, the head librarian at the Paris National Opera, who, in 1998, had published in the Revue du Musée d’Orsay an article entitled “Investigation into Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.“ What prompted her research was unusual. She had been asked by her colleague Anne Pingeot, a curator at the Musée d’Orsay, to consider how a new tutu might be made for the sculpture, as the costume workshop at the Paris Opera had an excellent reputation. This was in 1997. A controversy surrounded the tutu, however, because the original was long gone and the specialists disagreed about the garment’s color, length, and even its material. In its concreteness, the tutu led back to the living body of its wearer. “Interested as I was in the young lady’s skirts,” wrote Martine Kahane, “I quickly came to ask myself questions about her identity…It struck me that to know more about Marie van Goethem, I would have to research her family history.”9 The Opera librarian, therefore, began searching energetically through the available archives, believing that “young Marie was still a part of the organization.”

  Impatient to learn more, I obtained Martine Kahane’s contact information and wrote her straight off, bombarding her with questions. She didn’t take long to answer, clearly pleased and amused that someone was picking up the torch she had lit twenty years earlier. Retired, she no longer lived in Paris, but she was coming to the capital in a few weeks. We could meet, and she would bring me everything she had on the subject.

  Waiting for the appointed day, I typed on my keyboard, “vital records Paris nineteenth century.” This would allow me to personally check Marie’s birthdate, which varied inexplicably according to the source, with some setting the date in 1864 and others, the majority, in 1865, but always in Paris’s Ninth Arrondissement. The site for the Paris Archives popped up immediately — it was so easy, how had I not thought of it earlier? The vital statistics records have recently been digitized and can be searched back to 1860. You consult an alphabetical index of names, divided into decades and subdivided by arrondissement, listing every person born or married in Paris and every person who died there. The full records, which include descendants, are open only to family members, who are required to give proof of identity and kinship, but the short-form records are available online to all. So you can surf incognito on the Internet for the lives, loves, and deaths that transpired in Paris from 1860 to 1974, with interruptions corresponding to the great upheavals of history — the Paris Commune, the two world wars — and these gaps in the chronology of the vital records are like holes in the body of humanity.

  I went to the data indexed by decades and typed in: “kind of record: birth,” “decade: 1860–1872,” “arrondissement: Ninth,” “name of person: Van Goethem.” My hands trembled, I hit the wrong key several times, I felt my heart rate go up. What was I afraid of? The violent incursion of reality into my little story, as would happen a few moments later when I zoomed into the left-hand page of folio nine? Could I foresee that reality was going to leap out and grab me in the form of strangers born more than a hundred years ago? Because, of course, she wasn’t alone on the page, Marie Geneviève van Goethem, born June 7, 1865. She was there among dozens and dozens of Van Thises and Van Thats: Van Germies, Vanberck, Van Houtte, Van Isacker, hundreds of Belgian immigrants packed together in the vital records of the Ninth Arrondissement. She was there with her youngest sister, Louise-Joséphine, born July 19, 1870. There was no mention of the eldest, Antoinette, who had been born in Belgium. I thought of the impoverished family that had left Brussels in hopes of a better life, or at least of a less harsh one. In 1881, close to half a million Belgians had already emigrated to France, crossing the border on foot to settle in the northern provinces or continue on to Paris. Italians, Spaniards, insurgent Poles, and Jews fleeing the pogroms had done the same. The vital records offered the names of their children at this end of the alphabet in bulk quantities: Urrabieta, Uruski, Verlek, Volpini, mixed in with names grounded in the French provinces: Vavasseur, Vidal, Vigneron, and Vilain. I thought of the refugees who now arrive in France every day with their children, of their destitution, greater even than in the nineteenth century, the insurmountable obstacles that prevent them from becoming registered anywhere, or belonging anywhere. I thought of a news program I had seen about ten- and eleven-year-old children who had gone to school in Syria and were now working in Turkish textile factories to make money for their families. I remembered the fourteen-year-old boy who liked school so much and who now stared into the camera dully, saying that it was hard to give everything up, that he was gradually forgetting all he had learned, but that at least by working he was able to feed his parents and his sisters. What will become of him? Will he return to school one day? Will this child die, slaving to make T-shirts for the likes of us? Time doesn’t move ahead for everyone at the same pace. This Syrian boy and Marie van Goethem were born a century and a half apart, they are both fourteen, both foreigners, and their condition is the same, they share the same physical and mental suffering. It’s also what Degas was telling us with his Little Danc
er, that his own present time is universal, that he projects it into all times, that he informs the future with his hands.

  My thoughts lingered on these unhappy children, both dead and alive. I thought of the siege of Paris in 1870, during which Marie, then five years old, must have been terrified at the sound of the cannons, just as the children in Aleppo would have been terrified when the bombs rained down. How do you survive the terror, the cold, the hunger, the pain? And was she still alive during World War I? When I emerged from my startled reflection, the page of vital records was still posted on my screen. Examining the entries a second time, I noticed something that had escaped me at first. Just above Marie Geneviève van Goethem, born on June 7, 1865, there was a Marie van Goethem, born on February 17, 1864. Strange discovery. So there were two Maries, two birthdates. Which was the little dancer? I then consulted the corresponding records. They were sisters, born sixteen months apart — I didn’t need to make the calculation, because I myself had given birth to two children, one of them in February 1994 and the other in June 1995. The correspondence struck me immediately, 130 years later, and I realized at once, following the parallel, that one of the two must have died, as had happened to me. I called up the death records for the same decade and arrondissement and found her. A Marie van Goethem had died on March 7, 1864, aged eighteen days. This was what explained the confusion about birthdates in the articles on the Little Dancer. The parents, as was often the case, had given their next daughter the name of her dead sister, wanting to pass on their own names to their descendants. The birth certificates named the father, Antoine van Goethem, tailor (who had already bestowed his Christian name on his eldest, Antoinette, born in Belgium), and the mother, Marie van Volson. They were married in Brussels in 1857. On the same page of the alphabetical index, on the line above, there was another Van Goethem, Jean-Baptiste, who died on February 14, 1862. The record confirmed that it was their first and only son, born in Brussels, who died in Paris at the age of three years, five months.

  Archives are an abyss, a fascinating spiral that draws you in irresistibly. Every detail takes on magnified importance, every fact registers as a sign, as in a love story, everything is there to be interpreted, obsessed over. Archives foster a pathology all their own, which is possibly aggravated in a novelist. There’s a suffering associated with archives, their power over the emotions is extraordinary, violent, dangerous. Reality is everywhere, in the numbers on the folios and the certificates, in the black ink of the clerk’s handwriting, penned in greater or lesser haste, with more or less artistry. The calligraphy, ink blots, downstrokes and upstrokes, bring back schoolroom memories. The real inheres in the details: record No. 289, Marie, born February 17, at 1:00 a.m., in her parents’ home, 34 rue Lamartine, the father’s signature appended. Record No. 1033, Wednesday, June 7, 1865 — it was a Wednesday, why does this bring tears to my eyes? Marie Geneviève, “born this morning at eight o’clock, at her father and mother’s residence, place Bréda, No. 8.” Since the previous year, the family had moved to the place Bréda, known as one of the most squalid precincts of Paris. “Statement given, in the father’s absence, by Virginie Laury, midwife” and signed by two witnesses, two “office boys” residing on the rue Pigalle. Why was the father not present at the birth of Marie Geneviève? Was he traveling, or on the lam, or dead? The death certificate of Marie, in 1864, was signed by the still-present father and a young witness, “Pierre, aged 25, polisher.” The vital records bristle with these working-class trades, some of which are mysterious, while others still existed during my childhood: water carrier, lemonade vendor, coalman, knife grinder, noodle maker (shades of Père Goriot)…In the record books, the wives never have a profession: even when they worked, it wasn’t mentioned. Only the man counted, and his work was his strength. The work of women signaled their weakness, the fact that they were spinsters or widows.

  On March 7, 1864, five other persons died aside from Marie in Paris’s Ninth Arrondissement: a little girl of two, declaration made by her father, day laborer; a stillborn baby, “stated to have come from its mother’s womb last night at four o’clock”; a forty-year-old perfumer, spinster; a woman of thirty-five, daughter of a porcelain painter; a landlord, aged twenty-eight, born in New York, declaration made by an agent of the American consulate. Death makes all these creatures equal, makes them affecting and poetic; each becomes a potential person, a romantic specter, a ghost story.

  I wandered for a bit among this handwritten crowd, then came back to the little dancer. Marie (Geneviève) van Goethem. It’s not all that easy, I knew, from my own experience and from watching my daughter’s, it’s not all that easy to develop cheerfully in the wake of a dead sibling, especially when you carry the weight of that person’s first name. I also remembered Vincent van Gogh, who bore the first name of a stillborn brother.

  Having trawled the decennial indexes for 1860–1872 and 1873–1882, examining the records for all of the arrondissements in Paris, I found that I had collected a large number of Van Goethems. The surname, it appears, was a common one in Belgium, equivalent to “Martin” or “Durand” in France. It was difficult under the conditions to identify who might be close family to Marie, although it was likely that a cousin, an uncle, or an aunt had emigrated from Belgium with them and formed part of their circle. But how to be sure? The only certainty was in the group of immediate siblings. Marie van Goethem, the mother, had five children, two of whom died at a young age, which was not unusual at the time, especially in those surroundings. Pushing my research forward into subsequent decades (I couldn’t stop, the hours flew by without a thought of food or drink, the need to know outweighed everything), my heart suddenly skipped a beat, I thought I had found her, the little dancer: Marie van Goethem, died October 30, 1908 — forty-three, that would make her. Age forty-three, it doesn’t surprise me that she died young. But the full death certificate showed that I was wrong. It was the mother, née Van Volson, widow of Antoine van Goethem, “aged seventy, no profession, residing 3 rue Gaillard, died at the Opéra this 28 October, at 5:30 in the evening.” The certificate was drawn up two days later, on October 30, and was signed by two witnesses, “no relation.”

  Died at the Paris Opera! I couldn’t get over it. In some sense, the mother of the little dancer had died in a Degas painting. Was she in the wings or, although declared to have “no profession,” in a dressing room helping with costume changes? Was she seated during a rehearsal on the mothers’ bench, which Degas painted in the background of several of his canvases? But only one of her daughters was still at the Paris Opera, and she was no longer a little rat: Louise-Joséphine would have been thirty-six, she had recently become a teacher after a brilliant career. I had no great opinion of this mother who had probably led two of her daughters into prostitution, so why was I so moved? My imagination, stimulated by the archive, was gaining the upper hand. I could see the scene. This seventy-year-old mother who continued to accompany her youngest daughter to the Opera moved me, even though I knew that the real story was probably grimmer. The widow Van Goethem was most likely clinging to a part-time position that brought in a few francs and also to this daughter who owed her success to her. “You won’t forget your mother when you’re happily settled” was, according to Théophile Gautier, the sentence most often heard in the wings of the Paris Opera. But I imagined her dying suddenly while watching her successful youngest child — did the daughter run to her mother on seeing her collapse, the victim of a stroke, or was she indifferent to the passing of a grasping and unloving parent? I preferred the first hypothesis, or rather, the first imagined scene. In my mind, the mother and daughter were the last survivors of the family. The father had died, and neither of the other two sisters was mentioned in the death certificate, which was signed by witnesses identified as “no relation.” I imagined Louise-Joséphine as all the more shattered because no trace of Marie or Antoinette made an appearance in my little improvised story. It was stupid, but reading the circumstances of this death, imagining th
e scene, I was suddenly convinced that the other sisters were dead.

  Martine Kahane, whom I met two weeks later, gave my suspicion credence. She provided me with the chronology she had drawn up for the Van Goethem family. Antoinette, the eldest daughter, died at the age of thirty-seven, on March 20, 1898. Her death at 68 rue des Chantiers, in Versailles, was attested by two witnesses, “in the absence of kin.” Her mother and at least one of her sisters were still living, but she had apparently dropped all contact with them, and the neighbors had no knowledge of their whereabouts. The vital records describe her as a “spinster, living from rents.” Her first youth and her clashes with the courts behind her, Antoinette had managed to find a rich protector and settle quietly outside of Paris, her escapades a thing of the past. Many years before, at the age of twenty-one, she had figured in the records of the lower court of the Seine district. Penal court No. 11 sentenced “the young woman Vangoethen [sic] to three months’ imprisonment and a fine of sixteen francs seventy-six centimes, plus three francs’ postage. If the fine is not forthcoming, imprisonment for debt will be limited to five days.” Antoinette stole seven hundred francs from the wallet of one of her “clients” while dining with him in a private room. The news gazettes of the time, quoting from the police report, indicate that Antoinette van Goethem was arrested at the train station after the theft, on July 20, 1882, while trying to escape to Belgium “with her mother and sister.” Her sister was Marie, who had been fired from the Paris Opera two months earlier. Révoquée (dismissed): this is the word that appears in the account books of the Paris Opera, dated May 1882. Leafing through the pages photocopied by Martine Kahane, I found the works and days of the little dancer evoked in affecting detail. Each little rat had her line in the ledger, which showed her job title (Marie never progressed beyond the lowest rank, second class), her wages by month and by year, and the various withholdings against the “net balance owed.” The last two columns are headed “Attendance” and “Remarks.” It’s in the last of these that Marie Vangoenthem (the spelling is still wrong) is entered as “dismissed” and “resigns.” Prior to this fateful day, she received 71.25 francs net per month, though often less when fines were levied against the total. In January 1882, for instance, she received only 63.75 francs, having been charged 7.50 francs in fines. In April 1882, she received only 35.65 francs. In the margin is the following remark: “15 days without wages.” She was fired the next month.