Despite the bucolic memories of former residents, a revolver could be a useful accessory in Montmartre, especially by night. Artists generally did not encounter trouble, largely because they were too poor to attract attention. Yet even Picasso’s favored cabaret, the Lapin Agile, encountered occasional violence—especially one memorable night, when a thug shot the owner’s son-in-law.
Before meeting the Steins, Picasso had already established a routine for nighttime revels, which included weekly jaunts to the Closerie des Lilas (clear across town, at the northern edge of Montparnasse). These revelries also included more frequent outings at the Circus Médrano or Circus Bostock (both located just a few blocks south of the Bateau-Lavoir) as well as the Lapin Agile cabaret (nestled just over the top of the Butte). Circuses had long fascinated Picasso, and the circus inspired his Saltimbanques, which he completed during the summer of 1905. Earlier in the year he painted Au Lapin Agile, to pay his bar tab by decorating one of that tavern’s dingy walls.
The Lapin Agile had been around for a couple of decades before Picasso and his gang gravitated to it, acquiring its name when the illustrator André Gill designed its sign of a nimble-looking rabbit jumping out of a pot. The place subsequently took the punning name of the Lapin à Gill, or Lapin Agile. During earlier stays in Paris, Picasso and his friends had been too broke even to drink at the Lapin Agile and had instead frequented a sordid little tavern on Place Ravignan called Le Zut, which attracted a lowlife clientele and specialized in cheap beer. Finding it unbearably filthy, Picasso and company cleaned up a back room for themselves, whitewashing and decorating it with murals. Picasso’s was The Temptations of St. Anthony.
Le Zut’s owner was Frédé Gérard, an itinerant fish seller, who in 1903 left Le Zut to its fate and moved to the Lapin Agile. Picasso and his friends followed, contributing to the place’s glory years, from about 1905 to 1912, when Picasso left Montmartre. It was an attractive enough place in the summer, shaded by acacias, and Picasso seems to have brought his dogs along to enjoy it. Yet the picture he painted, Au Lapin Agile, was a somber one, featuring himself as Harlequin with Germaine Gargallo as Columbine by his side. Both look straight ahead rather than at one another, in eerie solitude.
Picasso painted The Death of Harlequin after this, in late 1905, but the Harlequin image would continue to haunt his work.
In September, Marcel Proust’s mother died, leaving him a considerable fortune. She also left him in complete anguish. His father’s death in 1903 had grieved him, but his mother’s death left him desolate. “She takes away my life with her,” he wrote, “as Papa had taken away hers.”9
He now kept his promise to his mother and checked into a clinic for nervous disorders, located just outside Paris in Boulogne-sur-Seine, where he languished. “My life has now forever lost its only purpose,” he wrote Count Robert de Montesquiou, “its only sweetness, its only love, its only consolation.”10 After less than two months he left the clinic, no better than when he arrived.
Much like Proust, Louise Michel never fully recovered from her mother’s death, which had occurred fully twenty years earlier. Michel was a dedicated activist and had been at the forefront of virtually every Parisian effort on behalf of the poor since the bloody Commune uprising of 1871. By the time of her death in early 1905, she was widely revered and beloved by those she sought to help, as well as by those who sympathized with them—including Georges Clemenceau, who as mayor of Montmartre had assisted Michel during the horrors of the 1870–1871 German siege of Paris and who remained her friend.
Although an unapologetic anarchist, Michel never embraced violence. When gunned down by an assassin, she characteristically forgave the man and defended him in court (she survived, although the bullet remained in her head until her death, many years later). Never a Marxist or a theoretician, her anarchism was based on a deep identification with the poor and the suffering. She could not bear to see anyone or anything suffer, human or animal, and her pain was the keenest if this suffering was the result of cruelty or injustice. Although more of an irritant than a threat to France’s establishment, her politics and her protests had for years made her unwelcome in her native land. After exile in New Caledonia (which she spiritedly survived) and a five-year self-imposed exile in London, she returned to France to brave the authorities while, despite deteriorating health, she kept up an ambitious schedule of talks and lectures.
She died in Marseilles in January 1905, prompting an enormous turnout of mourners along the funeral route to the cemetery. Memorial services subsequently took place throughout France and other countries, and when her body was disinterred and taken to be buried with her mother in Levallois-Perret, just outside of Paris, another crowd formed, which the newspapers reported as being the largest since the massive turnout for Victor Hugo’s funeral twenty years earlier.
The funeral route wound its way through the heart of Communard territory: from the Gare de Lyon in the twelfth arrondissement, where the casket arrived from Marseilles, through the Place de la Nation and past Père-Lachaise cemetery, where government troops had gunned down the last of the Communards in 1871—a date still raw in the memories of many of the people paying tribute that day. The hearse, preceded by a wagon laden high with wreaths, continued through militant Belleville, where much of the male population of a certain age was missing, martyred to the Communard cause. It slowly continued past Sacré-Coeur, where someone cried out, “Down with the priests!” And finally, it reached its destination in Levallois-Perret. Anticipating trouble, the government had stationed dozens of infantrymen and cavalry around the Gare de Lyon and along the entire route across Paris to the cemetery.
There was no trouble in Paris, but in a remarkable coincidence, the day of Louise Michel’s funeral coincided with the Bloody Sunday massacre in St. Petersburg, when an unarmed and peaceful crowd of Russian workers and their families attempted to deliver a petition to their czar and were gunned down as they approached the Winter Palace. As many as one thousand were killed or wounded, leading to widespread strikes, mutinies, and general unrest throughout the Russian Empire. By 1907 this first Russian Revolution would be brutally suppressed, but the stark misery that created it remained. For those who listened, it was either a call to arms or an alarm bell in the night.
There were other events in 1905 that set off alarms in France, in particular Kaiser Wilhelm II’s landing in Tangier. The poet and essayist Charles Péguy presciently noted that Germany’s action opened “a new epoch in the history of my life, in the history of this country, and undoubtedly in the history of the world.”11
The Tangier Crisis, or Moroccan Crisis, erupted when the German Kaiser used his presence in Tangier to assert Germany’s support of Moroccan independence—testing France and Britain’s recently signed Entente Cordiale, which had placed Morocco under France’s imperial colors. Pushing the issue further, Germany now sought a multinational conference to call France to account. When the French refused to back down, Germany threatened war.
After considerable altercation, the French agreed to attend a conference in the Spanish city of Algeciras in 1906. Despite German pressure, France would retain its effective protectorate over Morocco, and the British-French alliance would remain firm. Yet this would not be the last of German provocations, nor of the steady ratcheting-up of diplomatic confrontations between the imperial powers in the years to come.
An altercation that year on the domestic front marred an otherwise pleasant family gathering at one of Sarah Bernhardt’s Sunday lunches. Marcel Proust may have been able to navigate the difficult shoals that still surrounded the Dreyfus Affair, but Sarah Bernhardt had neither the patience nor the inclination to do so. When one of her luncheon guests, an ardent opponent of Dreyfus, made a disparaging crack about the Jewish captain, another guest took offense, leading to general disruption. Salad was spilled, guests began to yell at one another, and Sarah—a fervent supporter of Dreyfus—took umbrage at her anti-Dreyfusard
son, Maurice, and furiously broke her plate in two. When Maurice (deeply offended) tried to pull his wife away from the table, Sarah broke another plate on the arm of the guest who had first denigrated Dreyfus. The Sunday afternoon bonhomie now irrevocably shattered, the party withdrew in general disarray.12
According to Jean Cocteau, Sarah Bernhardt “presented the phenomenon of living at the extremity of her person in life and on the boards.”13 Yet she was not about to put up with any nonsense from young upstarts like sixteen-year-old Cocteau, who in 1905 made his entrance at a ball given at the Théâtre des Arts dressed as the decadent young Roman emperor Heliogabalus, complete with “russet curls, a crippling tiara, a train embroidered in pearls, rings on my toes, and painted nails.” Even though accompanied by the legendary actor Edouard de Max, who was dressed just as outrageously, Cocteau quickly learned that he had overstepped the line when Sarah Bernhardt sent him a note (via her maid) saying, “If I were your mother, I’d send you to bed.”14
Sarah Bernhardt was passionate, but she was a hard-headed businesswoman and a thorough professional who never confused self-promotion with mere self-indulgence. She also never let illness or pain get in the way of ticket sales or a performance. That same year she began a long tour of the Americas, even though her right knee was giving her trouble. In Buenos Aires, she had to have the knee operated on, and all seemed well for a time. Then in Rio de Janeiro, she leaped from a stage parapet down onto bare boards where thick mattresses were supposed to be. It was the death scene from La Tosca, and it about did her in.
Still she went on. And on. From New York she went to Chicago, Montreal, and Quebec, where the archbishop denounced her play, La Sorcière, as blasphemy, and indignant members of his flock pelted her and other members of the cast with rotten eggs. In Kansas, her private (and luxurious) train jumped the tracks, while in Dallas she had to perform in a tent, thanks to the war between her management (the young Shubert brothers) and the powerful Klaw and Erlanger theatrical syndicate. In San Antonio, she performed in a music-hall saloon, while in Houston, she did her best in a skating rink. In San Francisco, she arrived shortly after the great earthquake and performed (according to her account) in the only theater left standing.
Few people knew that in addition to severe knee pain, Sarah Bernhardt suffered from terrible stage fright. Her granddaughter, who accompanied her on a later American tour, recalled Sarah going all clammy-handed an hour before each first night, exclaiming, “My God, my God! If only the theatre would burn down!”15 Yet Sarah never regarded this as a liability, and in fact thought it made her a better actress. And she unquestionably made money from her American tours—lots of it—as well as stockpiling enough stories about her American adventures to last the rest of her long life. She would tour three more times in America, each time a “farewell tour.”
By March, Debussy’s lover, Emma Bardac, was two months pregnant, and Debussy’s divorce proceedings were under way, even though an anguished Lilly insisted that she still wanted to live with him. Debussy wrote in his notebook that Lilly exercised “a daily tyranny over my thoughts and dealings” and accused her of lying to their friends.16 “I’m being hounded by the press campaign Madame Debussy has been kind enough to launch against me,” he complained to his publisher, Jacques Durand. “It seems I’m not allowed to get divorced like anybody else.”17 Certainly it was true that most of his friends now left him. “I’ve had to look on as desertions take place all round me,” he wrote the music critic Louis Laloy.18 Maurice Ravel and Debussy’s longtime friend Pierre Louÿs even contributed to a fund for Lilly. Only Jacques Durand, Louis Laloy, and the composer Erik Satie remained loyal to him.19
“So, after a year, the nightmare is finally over,” Debussy wrote Durand in August, shortly after the divorce was finalized.20 Debussy and Emma now moved into a rented house in a small cul-de-sac that opened onto the elegant Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (now Avenue Foch). There, at the end of October, their daughter, Claude-Emma, was born. Chouchou, as they affectionately called her, delighted her parents, although Debussy at forty-three was not about to sacrifice any of his musical priorities for parenthood.
Certainly by October, Debussy was in the midst of a professional as well as personal whirlwind, for in the midst of publishing his first set of Images, he had also completed the score of La Mer and now was anxiously hovering over rehearsals for an October 15 first performance. As always with Debussy’s music, the critics were divided about La Mer, but among those who understood that Debussy had succeeded in creating something entirely new, one wrote: “One has the impression that M. Debussy . . . has here considerably condensed and clarified the mass of his discoveries,” and that his music was on its way to achieving the “hallmark of masterpieces.”21
One of La Mer’s movements is titled, “From dawn to midday on the sea.” Erik Satie, who enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for sly humor, told Debussy, “Ah, my dear friend, there’s one particular moment between half past ten and a quarter to eleven that I found stunning!”22
Satie, whom Ravel as well as Debussy had befriended during Satie’s years as a piano player in Montmartre cabarets, was about to return to school. Oddly enough, given Satie’s predilection for remarkably original and avant-garde compositions—including his three Gymnopédies for piano (of which Debussy set the first and third to orchestra) and a piano duet that he mysteriously titled Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear—Satie chose to attend the rigorously conservative Schola Cantorum, headed by the prominent traditionalist composer Vincent d’Indy.
Debussy warned Satie, “At your age one does not change one’s skin,”23 but Satie (now almost forty) had decided that the rigors of counterpoint and theory were exactly what he needed at this stage in his development. D’Indy was open to backing contemporary composers, even if he was not enthusiastic about what they wrote, and he accepted the modest but unpredictable Satie as a pupil.
Ravel’s position in the spring of 1905 was unusually frustrating. On the one hand, he was a rising young composer, the well-known and highly regarded author of works such as Jeux d’eau, the String Quartet, and Shéhérazade. On the other hand, he had unbelievably failed once again in his attempt at the Prix de Rome. At the age of thirty, he had reached the age limit for the prize; there would be no further attempts, even had he been willing to undergo the humiliation. This time the judges eliminated him in the first round, having decided that Maurice Ravel lacked the technical proficiency to be considered as a finalist.
This infuriating decision did not go unnoticed, and soon the affaire Ravel not only roused music critics to battle but became front-page news. As the eminent author Romain Rolland lamented: “I can not comprehend why one should persist in keeping a school in Rome if it is to close its doors to those rare artists who have some originality—to a man like Ravel, who has established himself . . . through works far more important than those required for an examination.”24
The scandal escalated when news leaked that all six of the finalists were pupils of the same professor of composition at the Conservatoire, who most damningly was also a member of the jury. Charges and countercharges filled the air, with the Prix de Rome judges and the Conservatoire itself under attack. As one critic charged, the Conservatoire had become “little more than a stronghold of time-worn conventions and blind prejudices.” Even Ravel’s persistent critic Pierre Lalo joined in complaining that the Conservatoire taught little more than stultifying rules and formulas.25
Among the casualties of this uproar was Ravel’s longtime adversary Théodore Dubois, who resigned as Conservatoire director. Several others of the most hidebound faculty members left with him. It was now that Ravel’s esteemed former composition teacher, Gabriel Fauré, unexpectedly vaulted into power as the Conservatoire’s new director, bringing the promise of reform with him. As Debussy noted, in a congratulatory letter to Fauré: “If they’re going to put ‘the right man for the job’ in charge of the Conservatoire, who knows what
will happen? And how much dust of old traditions there is to shake off!”26 As hoped for, Fauré immediately launched a series of much-needed curriculum reforms, giving new life to the place. At Fauré’s request, Ravel would now participate in various juries, including the piano jury and, in a final triumph, the jury for the Prix de Rome itself.
In the midst of this furor, Ravel received a lifeline to peace and quiet when he accepted an invitation from Misia Natanson Edwards to join her and her second husband, Alfred, on their yacht for a summer cruise through Belgium, Holland, and Germany. Ravel had met Misia through her brother and sister-in-law, Cipa and Ida Godebski, who would become two of his closest friends. Indeed, the Godebskis would become a second family to Ravel, including their two children, whom Ravel adored.
Misia had been irate about the Prix de Rome jury’s treatment of Ravel, and she prodded her new husband to publicize the scandal in his newspaper, Le Matin—contributing to the widespread press interest in the story. She also decided that Ravel needed a respite from the mess, and during his much-needed vacation on Misia’s yacht, the Aimée, Ravel indeed relaxed and enjoyed himself. “I’m not doing a thing,” he wrote his friend Maurice Delage, “but I am storing things up, and I believe that a lot will come out of this trip.”27
They visited museums and saw the birthplaces of Goethe and Luther, but one of the sights that truly mesmerized Ravel was a nighttime view of a huge foundry on the Rhine. “How can I tell you about these smelting castles, these incandescent cathedrals, and the wonderful symphony of traveling belts, whistles, and terrific hammerblows which envelop you?” he wrote Delage. “How much music there is in all of this!—and I certainly intend to use it.”28
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 14
