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

by Camille Laurens

  The Paris Opera’s record books allow us to follow Marie’s progress, or rather her path to perdition, which parallels her beginnings as an artist’s model. The more she posed for Degas — and no doubt for other lesser-known artists — the less assiduously she rehearsed for the ballet. The painter of dancers paid much more than the management of the Palais Garnier. A four- or five-hour session posing for Degas earned her two or three times what she received for a full day at the Paris Opera and left her less tired and with more free time for herself. The truth was, she had no great talent for dance, and the bohemian milieu, with its cafés and cabarets, was much more lively. The Montmartre cabaret Le Chat Noir had just opened, in November 1881, and she often went there. Yet after her expulsion from the Paris Opera, she turns up nowhere else, with the exception of the train station to which she accompanied her fleeing sister. It’s the last unquestionable trace of her that we have. She seems to have lived in Belgium for a time in the early 1890s, and a Marie van Goethem resided briefly at 43 rue Fontaine in Paris in 1893, but it could have been her mother. The trail stops there: nothing further about her in Degas’s Notebooks, nothing in the vital statistics records or the police files. Neither a marriage, nor the birth of a child, nor a death is recorded for any of the twenty arrondissements in Paris. Did she remain unmarried, as her sisters did? Did she find a protector who sheltered her from want, like Antoinette, or one who offered her an honorable if somewhat marginalized life, like Louise-Joséphine, who would die as the respected mistress of the painter Fernand Quignon? We don’t know. And none of the Van Goethems I talked to who are currently listed in the phonebook had heard tell of an ancestress who posed for Degas. Unlike her two sisters, Marie disappeared without a trace. The little dancer flew away. Her mortal remains most likely lie not in a sepulcher but a communal grave. In the cemeteries where I vainly searched for her final resting place, I was often asked, “Marie van Goethem? Is she famous?”

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  WE ARE SITTING THERE, Martine Kahane and I, with our cups of hot chocolate. It is the winter of 2016, and copies of the archives are scattered over the table. We are hard at it, trying to figure out what might have happened in 1882. Martine says something about the Van Goethems’ living standard, which must have dipped when Marie was dismissed from the Paris Opera. That would explain why Antoinette was stealing money: in May 1882, the family could no longer count on Marie’s wages. Only Louise-Joséphine was still on the payroll, but she was a beginner and received very little. In July, Antoinette stole seven hundred francs so that they could stay alive and pay their rent. Marie’s firing was decisive, no doubt about it, says Martine Kahane.

  I say nothing, I’m afraid my voice will quaver if I put my thought into words, our common thought. The merry-go-round of grief starts up again. If Edgar Degas hadn’t chosen Marie as his model for the Little Dancer, she would probably have stayed on at the Paris Opera. She might not have had her younger sister’s career, but who can say? By sticking to dance, she would have avoided the descent into hell whose signs are all too clear. Did she think she would have a better life as a model — less pain and more money? Did she quickly realize her error? And where was Degas in all this? Did he give Marie more work after her setbacks? Or did she really only figure in his life as an artist for four or five years? All the drawings and canvases in which she seems to appear are clustered within a short period around 1880. Is that her, behind the features of the high-cheeked milliner, drawn in charcoal in 1882? And her again in the background of The Green Dancer, adjusting her shoulder strap? We also seem to recognize her cheeks and her forehead in The Singer in Green, dated 1884. Subsequently, in his later work, other models vie for Degas’s favor. Did he help her, rescue her? There is no evidence that he interceded on her behalf with Vaucorbeil, the director of the Paris Opera, as he did for others — Mademoiselle Chabot, for instance, a ballerina at the Opera who wanted a raise, and about whom he wrote to Ludovic Halévy in 1883: “You must know what it’s like when a dancer wants you to plead her case. She pops in twice a day to see if you have put in a word, if you have written a line…I’ve never encountered such a maniac before. And she wants it to happen immediately. She would carry you in her arms to the Opera wrapped in a blanket if she could!”10 Several letters dated 1880–1884 show that for all his apparent annoyance, Degas helped his “little darlings” of the Palais Garnier. Did Marie have less confidence in herself, less charm, or did she simply not want to be reinstated? In any case, she asked for nothing, and he did nothing. As I read Daniel Halévy’s memoir of Degas, I felt a pang at this cheerful passage from a letter the painter had written: “Next Thursday, then, June 15, 1882, there will be a little housewarming soiree at 21 rue Pigalle, in the prettiest little fourth-floor apartment in the whole quartier.”11 Marie had just been fired from the Paris Opera, Antoinette would soon go to prison, and Degas was moving into a prettier apartment.

  The divergence in their lines of life would become even more marked on the great palm of time. Did Degas even see Marie in the years that followed? Neither his notebooks nor the newspapers mention her after 1882, although he continued to rework her sculpture. “I’ve made many changes to the small wax,” he wrote in June 1889.12 It’s as though Degas’s statue had absorbed her essential life and there was nothing left for her to do — like the heroine of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” — but vanish from the annals of time. Sculpted by Degas’s vision and desire, had she no recourse but to fade away? Is this too steep a price to pay for art, or could she have dreamt of no greater heights for her small life? I think back to the definition that the novelist Pierre Michon uses to avoid feeling either condescension or dejection over a person’s circumstances: “I call any man small whose fate does not measure up to the plan, which is to say everyone.”13 Rereading these words, I find they apply neither to Degas nor to Marie van Goethem. Degas’s fate measured up to his plan. As for Marie, her fate cannot be measured, because she had no plan — it certainly wasn’t her plan to be an icon of modern art and to maintain her unvarying pose in all the greatest museums in the world. Yet knowing nothing about her death, I have a tendency to confuse it with Degas’s old age, which was atrociously lonely. I even find myself believing sometimes that the hours-long walks that the painter took every day at the end of his life, and whose meaning or point no one around him could understand, were his unconscious way of staying with his little Opera rats, who were nicknamed marcheuses, or walkers. He could no longer see them or paint them or sculpt them, but he still walked with them. The funeral oration for Edgar Degas inventoried “nonexistent loves, family difficulties, ruined friendships” and the transformation of an “innate shyness” into a “furious pursuit of unhappiness”:14 I find myself unable to disentangle this documented end of Degas’s life from Marie’s, about which I know nothing. “I cry often enough over my poor life,” Degas wrote.15 The shade of Marie melts into the deep shadow that Degas himself disappeared into. Her ghost is carried off, buried with his remains. Nothing can separate them any longer. If we take their two lives as one, at that point in time when their trajectories intersected, like a momentary couple glimpsed through a pane of glass, the resulting life is neither resounding nor insignificant. It is a life of hard work. And also sadness, I believe. Yet it is a remarkable life, sovereign and vast in import. Both of them while still alive, she posing and he sculpting, had the experience of death. The little statue restores their absent presence. It is their monument, their requiem.

  I AM HAVING A HARD TIME ENDING THIS BOOK, because I’m having a hard time letting Marie go. I never thought I would say something along the lines of “I’m sorry to leave my subject, it’s become an obsession. I can’t stop thinking about this character…” Authors who make that kind of statement normally exasperate me, they seem conventional, hypocritical, ridiculous. Yet that is what I feel today toward the little dancer — my little dancer, I almost wrote. It may be because she had an actual body. Though I may have seen it on
ly in wax or in bronze, this body existed, it crossed Paris streets, where I can follow its trace even today. I can go to 36 rue de Douai and find the building where this body sheltered while posing for Degas — in fact, I have done so, but the hovel she lived in must have been torn down in the mid-1950s, as an economy hotel built of block concrete stands there today. I can go to the Opéra Garnier to see the stage where she danced, although the ceiling is no longer the same because of renovations. But here she extended her legs toward the red velvet of the curtains and the gilt of the paneling, rounded her arms under the complex machinery that raises and lowers the flats, looked with her eyes at this hall where the bourgeois continue to come in search of desire. She is a person and not a character, even if the sculpture, in a sense, provides a narrative and gives her the status of one. I know that she lived, I did not invent her life, I don’t like inventing life. My grandmother, born in 1907, could have crossed paths with her — had Marie already died by that point, the forty-two-year mark? No one knows. In any case, she could have met my great-grandmother, who was born in 1890, a penniless dressmaker’s apprentice and a single mother. I met her — she died in 1972. Thanks to my ancestor, a link exists between Marie and me, a link in time, or so I feel. It wasn’t all that long ago, in the end. I no longer belong to the working class that, in common with Marie, my great-grandmother hailed from. She came to Paris from the mining district in northern France, but I remember her. I remember seeing her in the hair salon that she’d bought with her own savings, talking about how she used to burn the tips of dancers’ hair with a candle to strengthen and beautify it before a performance. I also remember that my father formally forbade her to burn the tips of my hair.

  A few days ago, I went back to see “her” in the Musée d’Orsay. She was there, stately as ever, seeming to contemplate the masterworks of Degas on the walls around her from behind half-closed lids. By way of farewell, I took dozens of photographs of her — that “two-dimensional death.” A young woman who had been quietly watching me for some time approached, held out her cell phone, and asked in English if I might take her photograph next to the statue. I said yes. She bid me wait a moment while she posed, and she assumed the exact position of the little dancer. She must have made her plan beforehand, because she had tied back her long hair with a green ribbon, and she assumed her stance in seconds — feet in fourth position, hands clasped behind her back, chin raised. For my part, I had no time to quiet my heart, which was suddenly pounding, but why? I took four snapshots, just to be sure, given my trembling hands. The young woman was Australian. No, she wasn’t a dancer. It was just that she had heard a great deal about this sculpture as a child, and her grandmother had particularly recommended that she visit it during her stay in Paris. So that was it, she was going to bring back this photograph of the two of them, it would make a nice surprise, thank you.

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  WHEN I ARRIVED HOME, still keyed up—but why? — I thought back to my own grandmother, with whom I lived all through my childhood. Had she ever been to a museum? Highly unlikely. I realized that I knew nothing about her birth, her childhood — even less than I did about Marie. The one thing I knew — the fact had made an impression on me — was that she’d been born in Paris: she was proud of being the only Parisian in our provincial family. Her mother, Sophie, gotten with child by a boy who quickly vanished, had left her hometown of Hénin-Liétard to give birth anonymously in the capital away from wagging tongues, strongly encouraged to go into exile, if not actually driven to it, by an unloving mother. A start in life worthy of Zola. I wondered where she had landed in the strange and bewildering city. Had it been in the Ninth Arrondissement, like the Van Goethems, a neighborhood that was still very poor at the dawn of the new century? It would have made another link between us.

  Having learned to navigate the vital records archive, I started an Internet search. My grandmother did not appear in the decennial indexes for the Ninth Arrondissement. I then started working through all of Paris’s neighborhoods. It took me a while, but when I finally reached the Eighth Arrondissement, there she was: Marcelle Jeanne Liétard, stuck in as an afterthought between two lines of the ledger, as if the clerk had forgotten her. It fit with my grandmother somehow, this last-minute inclusion — a fatherless child, banned from home, written into the ledger but not given her own space, born between the lines. It was moving to find her there, my grandmother, buried in this long list handwritten in black ink, with capital letters of the kind once taught in schools, solemnly penned. All the names made me dizzy, as they wouldn’t have if printed. Here was the history of man written out by hand, the endless cycle of humanity and also of the drudging clerks laboriously scribbling, correcting their mistakes, disappearing only to be replaced in the ledger by another handwriting, less firm and legible, or else more finely turned, the changes in penmanship mirroring on a human scale the ceaseless progress of time, the passing of the baton.

  As my grandmother was born after 1903, her birth certificate wasn’t available online. I had to request it, and it would be sent to me in the mail. I did so. The document arrived ten days later, posted from the town hall of the Eighth Arrondissement. In the meantime, I wondered what I’d find recorded there. I was expecting the words “father unknown,” but the phrase I had to decipher was “father not discriminated.” I understood the meaning of this bureaucratic language well enough, but the word chilled me to the bone. I knew that the root of the word “discriminate” came from a Greek word originally meaning “to judge,” “to separate,” “to choose,” but it was the word “crime” that I heard, along with its implication of my great-grandparents’ immorality. Of all the possible men, the authorities had not been able to determine which had made my great-grandmother pregnant; worse yet, of all the criminals in existence, they had not established which was my grandmother’s father. For a moment, the word “incriminated” fanned out its ghostly palette, from prostitution to the apaches, and the “criminal” little dancer. I came back to my senses and reread the document, my heart beating strongly all the same, analyzing, weighing, studying every detail of the birth certificate of my grandmother, Marcelle Jeanne, born in the year 1907, on October 1 at nine o’clock in the evening, at 208 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. The address, today chic, belonged then to a charity hospital, a former Sisters of Charity hospice. To my query, Google Maps returned the hôtel Beaujon, a magnificent eighteenth-century town house, where a variety of cultural organizations are quartered today. Marcelle Jeanne, I read, “daughter of Sophie Liétard, domestic servant, residing in Paris, 135 avenue de Villiers.” A much less elegant address, of course, even if the Google photo makes the recently restored facade of this Haussmannian building look quite appealing.

  But what surprised me most was Sophie’s stated occupation. Before owning a perfume store and hair salon in Dijon, my great-grandmother claimed to have been a seamstress. When I read “domestic servant,” tears came to my eyes. I had just discovered, many years after the fact, what she had always kept hidden, no doubt a private shame. To serve in someone else’s household, to obey orders, this must have been a major humiliation for her, worse even than being an unwed mother. When I knew her, she was always so proud to set off early in the morning “to the store.” Even in her eighties, she was the first to rise and reached the store before any of her employees. It was only normal, as she was “the boss.” Her daughter, my grandmother, never worked. Of that too she was proud.

  The birth certificate mentioned another strange thing. In the margin, beside a variety of later notations about marriage and death, there was a note indicating that Sophie Joseph Liétard had “recognized as her daughter the child named herein” on October 17, 1907, which is to say more than two weeks after my grandmother’s birth. As with Marie van Goethem, the archive did little to fill in the gaps, instead opening chasms to speculation. Why, for instance, did the birth certificate distinguish between the birth itself and its acknowledgment? For the mother, it makes no sense:
mater certissima. And yet…what could the delay mean? That Sophie was ill and therefore could not officially claim her daughter, so that the child was registered but not legally recognized? Or does the interval point to a hesitation about keeping the child, an inclination to abandon it after bringing it into the world? I didn’t know, but even without knowing, I understood, my empathy was total. The fact of it was, I said to myself, brushing the doubts away, the fact of it was that she hadn’t abandoned her daughter, that Sophie Joseph (another oddity, this male given name appended to Sophie — it must have been her father’s), that Sophie Joseph valiantly raised Marcelle Jeanne. They both lived for several years in Paris, between 1907 and 1913, at which point, for unknown reasons, they moved to Dijon. Mother and daughter were never afterward separated. I always knew them together, living under the same roof with my grandfather, through whom they had been elevated to the bourgeoisie. My grandmother in particular was well known for her elegance and her deportment. My great-grandmother, though, always preserved a slightly rough edge, a burr from her populist background that she had no interest in polishing away. Despite her son-in-law’s offers, she never agreed to have a domestic servant. In a black-and-white photograph I have of her, at the age of about forty-five, she looks strangely like Louise-Joséphine van Goethem at that age, when she was a teacher at the Paris Opera — the same pleasant but not particularly pretty features, the same stocky, corseted body, the same frank gaze. Sophie and Marcelle might have crossed paths with the little dancer while out walking in Paris. They might also have seen Degas, who died in 1917, and who ambled around the city for several hours a day in the last years of his life, crossing it from end to end as his doctor had advised him. It’s perfectly possible. When it comes to Marie, I don’t know.