After those two years of society life, in which I played my role as debutante very successfully throughout the series of parties, balls, cotillions, luncheons for young ladies and Embassy dinners, I was eager to resume my exploration of other worlds and, particularly, to pursue the kind of adventures which excited me, in contrast to the rigid protocol of high society.
My longing coincided with my mother's desire to return to her artistic pursuits without fear of interruption. My father therefore accompanied us to Paris and left us in a mansion which he had rented for the winter on the corner of the Avenue Victor Hugo and the Rue de Longchamp.
Once established in this house, which was equipped with a sumptuous studio, my mother no longer depended on Whistler's advice. He did not like to venture outside his old neighborhood and replaced his visits with little notes assuring her of his faithful admiration. His delicate handwriting looked like a water course running in orderly lines between the wide margins of the page. As for his physical appearance, I have only a pastel Mother drew of him to still my remorse and soften my regrets. She probably did it in London while she was renting his house, ‘The White House' in Tite Street, for the season. In this portrait he is wearing his monocle, his eyes are sharp and blue, his hair and moustache black, a little blacker than nature intended.
While my mother was sketching models at the Académic Jullian in the Rue de Berry, I was studying the complex art of classical verse with Professor B.C.
So that no one could interrupt us, we did not even let our society friends know we were there.
How surprised and delighted I was to meet two friends from my childhood, Mary and especially Violette S., in the Bois. They were living with their parents at 23 Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. Maturity had done nothing but accentuate the grave softness of Violette's dark eyes under her wide protuberant forehead and Mary's blonde insipidity, which put me more than ever in mind of one of Shakespeare's nonentities.
They immediately told me about their friend, Renée Vivien "who also wrote poetry" and who, like me, shunned company—she had just been presented at St. James Court—so that she could devote herself to her poetry.
I was to meet her at a matinee of the Théâtre Francais. The butler announced the arrival of the S's landau with my two friends and Renée Vivien and, at the same time, handed me an envelope upon which I recognized the handwriting of Liane de Pougy, then traveling in Portugal.
Preoccupied as I was, I only pretended to pay attention when I was introduced to the young woman who, at first sight, seemed charming but too ordinary to capture my interest. I was impatient to read Liane's letter.
I was no more attentive at the play (I cannot even remember what it was called) nor did I listen to my friends' chitchat during the first interval. By the second interval I could bear it no longer but took the envelope out of my bag and withdrew to the back of the box muttering apologies. By the glow of a night light I read this strange letter:
For you who were my blonde sweetness, my Flossie, for you who were once, for you who should be and who are no longer, for you who were, inevitably, according to the law of nature by which all that is born must die. Even You and Me, and especially Us!... Your hair alone will never surrender, never be enslaved, a victorious rebel. It will ever be a pale moonbeam... growing still paler with time and yet more delicate, more capricious even unto the grave.
I write you these wandering thoughts in memory of your hair, to bid it adieu...
Yesterday the moon sulked and I went for a drive in the countryside by the gloomy banks of the Tage, drawn by five crazy little mules bedecked with ribbons. In front of me two young creatures were chatting and planning a happy future. Happy! Ah!... As though happiness were possible here on earth for those who know and understand... And I, I was sitting behind them alone, isolated, and I turned my head so that I should not hear them. And I gazed off into the distance at the road we had travelled. The moon sulked, still hidden by the Milky Way, the White Way lit up the sky and I thought of you, Moonbeam, of your fine fair hair...
Yes, I thought of You, my little blue flower I will never see again, whose perfume intoxicated me oh so sweetly. And the trees rushed past so quickly. I felt as though I was still and the countryside was running past... Just like You, just like Me. Is it You who has gone away?... Or Me?... or Us?
And a sweet sadness came over me, joyous and elating, making me part of You, my fair one, my Flossie... I was almost in tears.
Was it You? Was it Me? And my tears filled me with a pleasure more intense than the laughter and gaiety of the couple in front of me: the son of a king and his beloved. They would turn around from time to time, wanting me to share their joy.
"No, no, leave me to my dreams. I am happy as I am. Not alone, no, I am with one who knows and cherishes me!" And the road flew past! And I lowered my eyes to the ground. Then horror, disillusion!
I saw rocks and stones and mud, crushed, trampled grass, flowers covered with dust, manure, footprints, cart ruts...
...I wanted to hide myself in your hair but you passed by, pulling the petals off a flower, dropping them upon my eyelids and upon my forehead out of pity alone. My forehead will remain pure under the sweet-scented shower of pale leaves poured over me by your hand. And if they fade? Will you come back and scatter more? No flee! Walk on by! Fly away on your angel wings... And may no one snatch me from my torpor, from the sweetness of my dreams. My true beauty is safe and far away now from men's lust.
Written as my pen dictated and my thoughts flowed, for You, for Me, for what used to be Us. — Liane
I was so absorbed in this evocation of my love affair that I paid no more attention to the last act. But as we left the theatre that frosty evening in early spring, my friends, anxious to put off the moment of parting, suggested a drive in the Bois. Violette kept rather quiet, except when encouraging her friend, whom she loved with an innocent and devoted friendship. She asked Renée to recite one of her poems, which she did very simply and articulately. From the very first verse she had captured my attention entirely.
Lassitude
Tonight I will sleep soundly and long.
Draw the heavy curtains round, keep the doors
closed,
Do not let the sun penetrate these precincts.
Cast around my shoulders the evening drenched
with rose.
Lay down those funereal flowers whose scent so
haunts me
On the white cover of my deep pillow.
Lay them in my hands, on my heart, my forehead
Those pale flowers which seem like warm wax.
And I will murmur softly, "Nothing of me remains.
My soul is at last at rest. Have pity on it!
Let it rest in peace for all eternity."
Tonight I will sleep a death most beautiful.
I was taken by this sad poem haunted by the desire for death. Having failed in the mission I had set myself with such fervor, that of saving Liane de Pougy from a life I considered unworthy of her (and which she left in the end to marry a real Prince Charming, George Ghika), I took an interest in this young woman with such a gift for poetry.
How could I awaken her interest in life? In my life?
This is how she seemed to me as we continued to see each other: a young woman who was taller than me but bent forward politely so as not to seem so, a slim body with a charming face, straight mouse-colored hair1, brown eyes often sparkling with gaiety, but when she lowered her beautiful dark eyelids they revealed more of her than was in her eyes: the soul and melancholy of the poet I admired in her; her shoulders stooped as though already discouraged, her gestures a little clumsy, her hands trembled at times, about to seize hold of something invisible which had just escaped their reach. She usually wore sombre colors and her belt was forever slipping to the rear of her not very curvaceous body, which lent a rather touching quality to her back.
Her sense of humor was easy to set off and she had a childlike sense of fun wh
ich would suddenly halve her twenty years. Her weak chin was particularly evident in profile; full-face no one could resist the laughter of her full lips and her little teeth of which not even the canines were pointed. When she became animated her smooth complexion, set off by a beauty spot, would turn virginal pink.
If I describe her features in fine detail it is to provide a more truthful portrait than Rodin's bust of the poetess now on display in the Rue de Varenne Museum, which carries her name but not her likeness.
Furthermore, I feel I know her better than she knew herself, when she confesses:
You understand me, I am a mediocre person,
Neither good nor very bad, easy-going, a little sly
I hate strong perfume and loud voices
And grey is dearer to me than scarlet or ochre.
How, then, did she come by the poetic genius which inspired her?
Genius did nor appear to dwell in this young woman who looked like so many others who, she used to say, were her kind but not her kin.
I imagine that, as with Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson, the genius which visited or inhabited her, only took possession when it chose.
Colette was also struck by the contrasts in Renée Vivien, by her double nature, or split personality: the laughing young girl and the poet in love with death. Judge for yourselves from the description Colette gives of Renée in Ces Plaisirs [These Pleasures], toward the end of her short life:
Since she lived such a short, reclusive life, my task (and most pleasant it is too), is to report that the young woman whose writing is permeated with despair was blonde, with dimples in her cheeks, a sweet laughing mouth and large soft eyes...
I have about thirty letters from Renée Vivien. None explains the poet's secret melancholy... Each of these letters is like the others. Their childishness is easily explained; it is the same childlike quality which radiated from that charming face with its smooth, full cheeks, from that mouth whose lip curled delicately upward to reveal four little white teeth.
Under a bush of hair, blonde, straight, fine, abundant, two chestnut colored eyes sparkled with gaiety and mischief. I never saw Renée Vivien sad. She would often exclaim with heavy aspiration after each of her dental consonants, "Oh my dear Coletthe, how disgusthing life is. I do hope I'll have finished with ith soon."
No one took this impatience seriously, and none of her physical features reflected it, save Renée Vivien's long, long body, a body without substance, stooping forward a little, bearing her head and golden hair like a heavy poppy. She used to stretch out her long delicate hands, groping like a blind woman. I would tell her: "Renée, the only literary thing about you is your body." Her gowns covered her feet and she moved with an awkward grace, dropping her gloves, her parasol, losing her scarf or getting it caught on something...
Two or three times in five years I caught her at work, propped up in the corner of the sofa scribbling on her knees. She got to her feet guiltily and apologized: "It's nothing. I'd just finished."
Renée Vivien did not talk to me about her poems. If I persisted a companionable silence, a complete reserve about literary matters would change the subject. When she gave me a book she would hide it under a bunch of violets, a basket of fruit or a length of Chinese silk. I will imitate her reserve by passing over in silence the deep, tragic sadness which characterizes her poems—at times beautiful, at others less so, occasionally magnificent, uneven as human breath, as the path of the wind, as the throbbing of a great ache, the poetry and the short life of Renée Vivien.
Let us return to the period when we first met, when so many happy possibilities were opening up before us. Our friends, the S's, left for their villa in Nice, where we would be "very welcome." We had scarcely bid them goodbye when Renée asked me to go with her to the Palais de Glace (Ice Palace) where she wanted to show me what a superb skater she was. I sat on the wall and watched her figure skating, carefully keeping my eyes averted from various professional beauties I had glimpsed previously at Liane's. Not one succeeded in catching my eye which was fixed admiringly on Renée's youthful silhouette flying toward me as though borne on invisible wings.
One evening Renée invited me to her pension in the Rue Crevaux. "To make it worthy of my coming" she had filled it with lilies, the flower she had dedicated to me:
One day you will fade, oh my lily!
Meanwhile, it was the lilies which were fading. There were some crammed into the water jug and even on the bed. Their whiteness lit up the dark corners of the room: it was dazzling, suffocating, transforming that rather ordinary room into a passionate, virginal chapel, moving us to kneel—she before me, I before her.
I left at dawn; the snow, last innocence of winter, had disappeared but a light frost covered the ground. My white footprints lay embedded in the white carpet between her street and mine.
A disquieting beginning in which two young women try to find themselves through a mismatched love affair.
Renée's still dormant senses could hardly respond to my passion, her dawning love, fed and exalted by her imagination, took over my role as poet-lover. After each meeting, "for the night was to us as to others the day," I would receive flowers and poems from her. I have chosen the following fragment to bear witness to the beginnings of our strange love affair:
You see, I am of the age when the maiden gives her hand
To the man her weakness seeks out and fears
And I have not chosen a traveling companion
Because you appeared at a bend in the road.
I felt the sweetness and the fear
Of your first kiss on my silent lips
I hear lyres break under your feet.
With what kisses can I charm your languorous soul…
What loving rhythms, what passionate poems
are worthy to honour her whose beauty
wears its Desire upon its forehead like a diadem?
...Here is the night of love so long promised
In the shadows I see you grow divinely pale.
Embarrassed by this excessive devotion, to which I would have preferred shared pleasures, I still loved the poems she sent me. Then I realized that this adoration, for which I was the pretext, was necessary to her, that she had found new inspiration through me, almost without knowing me. Love replaced the old themes of solitude and death—but love in a guise which few poets have celebrated since Sappho. I was surprised that she attached more importance to her writing than to her life, for if I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem. I looked to life, I demanded of life the fullest expression of myself.
Writing detached prose or poetry, neither for nor about anyone, seemed to me an uninteresting literary exercise. So my first book, which had just come out, was aptly title Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de femmes [Some Sonnet-Portraits of Women]. It was illustrated by my mother, in complete innocence. News of this collection reached the ears of Town Topics, a magazine resembling Aux Ecoutes [The Listening Post] which published an article under the malicious title, Sappho Sings in Washington. What would they say, and what, moreover. would my family say if Liane's Idylle Sapphique [Sapphic Idyll] were published over there and the resemblance between me and "Flossie" came to light?
Renée Vivien had recently presented me with a whole notebook written in her neat schoolgirl script. Her writing had not yet achieved its later soaring heights. On the vellum cover, decorated with a lily and a lyre in rather doubtful taste, she had written: "For Natalie, and for her alone." Having read and re-read these poems, which I had inspired and which were far better than mine, I wanted to see them published. Renée however, aspiring to glory—she had a higher opinion of it than I—consented to let them come out on condition that only the name "R. Vivien" appear on the book. When this first collection was published by Alphonse Lemerre under that initial which could have stood for a boy's name, a young lecturer with a reputation for discovering and launching future geniuses, chose Etudes et Préludes as the subject of his talk and declared to the aud
ience, "how one could feel that those passionate love poems were the work of a very young man in love with his first mistress."
There were grounds for the mistake:
Like a chimera you touch softly but do not hold me...
Your body is like a lightning bolt, leaving my hands empty...
Since this fundamental error formed the basis of his lecture, Renée and I had to rush out of the room, overcome with uncontrollable laughter. No one in the audience guessed the cause of our abrupt departure.
A few years later, when some other volumes of her poetry were published, she bravely signed them Renée Vivien.
A professor at the Louvre wrote admiringly about her and Charles Maurras in L'Avenir de l’Intelligence [The Future of Intelligence] devoted a long chapter of the volume entitled Le Romantisme féminin [Feminine Romanticism] to this young poet, as well as to three others: Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, the Countess de Noailles and Madame Henri de Régnier. Here are a few extracts from the fifteen pages in which he studies Renée Vivien's art, comparing it with that of Baudelaire:
...But the amazing thing is that where Baudelaire gives the
impression of an eloquent hoax, this young woman touches us
by her sincerity. And she is a virtuoso.
...The mere plaything of literary craftsmen becomes, in her
hands, an instrument of joy and pain, springboard for deeply
felt elegies or heart-rending tragedies. Of the 'strange dreams'
which the poet shares with us, not one but seems to come
A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney Page 4
