Twilight of the Belle Epoque

by Mary McAuliffe

  She went into labor on August 3, as Germany declared war on France. Her doctor had been called up, and she spent the day in increasing agony, going from clinic to clinic in search of a responsible medic who could attend her childbirth. Finally, in despair, she headed back to Bellevue (passing through a military blockade en route). At the last minute a satisfactory doctor was found, who arrived in time to deliver the child—a boy, who did not live long enough to be named. As Isadora lay in her room she could hear “hammer-taps closing the little box which was my poor baby’s only cradle.” These sounds “seemed to strike on my heart the last notes of utter despair.”27

  Had she any sense, she later wrote, she would have remained at Bellevue and dedicated herself to Art. Yet, swept along with the fervor of those around her, she gave Bellevue to the Dames de France to use as a military hospital. “My Temple of Art was turned into a Calvary of Martyrdom and, in the end, into a charnel-house of bloody wounds and death.”28

  Then, like many other well-to-do Parisians, she escaped beyond the war zone to Deauville and the sea. Soon after, she left for safety in New York.

  Anticipating war, in late July Count Kessler sent his mother and sister to safety in England. He, though, promptly returned to Berlin, where he took up his commission, ordered and purchased field equipment—boots, coat, and a revolver—and went to requisition horses.29 Huge crowds of boys and girls were forming in the city, he noted, singing patriotic songs.

  On the morning of August 1, Kessler wrote that “the uncertainty weighs, heavy and sultry, on the mood.” Yet late that afternoon, when the German mobilization was announced, “the sultry pressure gave way, and a cool determination took its place.” That night, the square in front of the palace was filled “by a mighty crowd of people” singing “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” and “The Watch on the Rhine,” waving their hats.30 He was well aware that the coming war “will be frightful, that we will suffer perhaps occasional setbacks,” but he trusted that “the qualities of the German character—dutifulness, seriousness, and stubbornness—will in the end bring us victory.” Everyone, he added, understood “that this war must result in Germany’s world domination or its ruin. Since Napoleon there has been no gamble its like.”31

  Abbé Mugnier was not sleeping well, remembering the horrors of the Franco-Prussian War. Were times like that returning? And what, if anything, had the Church done to prevent them? “Nothing,” he concluded morosely, noting the zeal expended on rites rather than on Christian charity. “Thou shalt not kill,” he wrote in his journal, adding sadly that it becomes natural to kill thousands of people for a just cause. Yet was there a cause sufficiently just to be worth so much bloodshed?32

  By the time he wrote, the blood had already begun to spill. On August 4, Germany crossed the frontier of neutral Belgium in the first stage of its Schlieffen Plan. This called for brazenly wheeling five German armies on a northern arc through Belgium, with the goal of quickly outflanking and destroying France’s armies, grouped (as was expected) on France’s eastern and northeastern frontiers, and laying siege to Paris. The Belgians unexpectedly put up a fight, but the French refused to come to their aid. Instead, the French followed their plan (initiated by General Ferdinand Foch and approved by France’s commander-in-chief, General Joseph Joffre) to free Alsace and continue eastward across the Rhine to Berlin—a plan that led it directly into the German trap.

  The French assumed that their offensive would be supported by a huge Russian advance from the east, as well as by aid from Great Britain, which had entered the war following Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality. Defense did not figure in France’s plan; taking the offensive (the more spirited the better) was everything. As for defending the exposed portion of the Belgian frontier, it did not appear in French military options, even though an officer in the German General Staff had, years before, slipped an early version of the Schlieffen Plan to the French. As late as August 18, the French General Staff still firmly believed that “if the Germans commit the imprudence of an enveloping maneuver through northern Belgium, so much the better! The more men they have on their right wing, the easier it will be for us to break through their center.”33

  Picasso and Juan Gris were Spanish nationals and noncombatants, but they were among the few of their age group to continue their lives as artists during the war. Picasso, who remained neutral during the conflict, saw Braque and Derain off at the station, but their eagerness to join the fight repelled him. Afterward, he said that he never saw either of them again—factually inaccurate, but metaphorically sound. Afterward, their relationship never was the same.34

  Georges Braque became a sergeant in the infantry and was commissioned a lieutenant that December. André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Fernand Léger all were mobilized, while Apollinaire, although still a Polish subject, volunteered to join the French army. Swiss-born Blaise Cendrars and Polish-born Moïse Kisling joined the French Foreign Legion, while Russian-born Ossip Zadkine became a stretcher-bearer. The Norwegian artist Per Krohg joined a volunteer ambulance corps of Norwegian skiers for mountain fighting in the Vosges.

  Cubism itself joined the military, in the form of camouflage. The French soon established a Section de Camouflage, headed by the painter Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, who later commented that “in order to deform totally the aspect of an object, I had to employ the means that Cubists used to represent it.”35 One of this section’s members was the Cubist painter Jacques Villon, who along with his brother, Marcel Duchamp, had exhibited at the famed New York Armory Show.

  All the participants in the war quickly learned the importance of camouflaging airplanes, trucks, and gun positions (the latter, by using painted canvas tarpaulins), which became necessary to protect against the new threat of aerial reconnaissance. The British painted their ships in the disruptive Dazzle pattern, while the Germans were inspired by a range of modern artists (one German noted that the tarpaulins he painted to hide artillery emplacements “chart a development ‘from Manet to Kandinsky.’”)36 In addition to the growing sophistication of French camouflage efforts, the French also reluctantly replaced their beloved but easily targeted army uniforms of baggy red trousers, red caps, and blue jackets with somber gray-blue uniforms.37

  Matisse, despite his age (forty-four), was eligible to be called up, like other Frenchmen between the ages of eighteen and forty-eight. Prepared to leave for the front, he even bought himself a pair of army boots. But age and a weak heart put an end to this determined expression of patriotism. A second attempt to enlist brought the same results.

  Among composers, Satie, at the age of forty-eight, served as a corporal in the local militia of Arcueil, while Debussy (fifty-two and ill) expressed his envy. “I’m nothing more than a wretched atom hurled around by this terrible cataclysm,” he wrote Jacques Durand, “and what I’m doing seems to me so miserably petty! It makes me envious of Satie and his real job of defending Paris as a corporal.” Still, despite his age and complete lack of military aptitude, if one more body was needed to ensure victory, “I’ll offer mine without hesitation.”38

  Meanwhile, Maurice Ravel (thirty-nine) was going through agonies over his determination to serve his country. As a young man he had been exempted from military service due to frail health; but now that his brother Edouard and “virtually all of his friends” had enlisted, Maurice wanted to serve. Still, he was torn, largely because he felt responsible for his aged and ill mother. To one friend, he wrote: “If I leave my poor old mama, it would surely kill her. Moreover, France isn’t waiting for me in order to be saved. . . . But that’s all rationalization, and I feel it falling apart from hour to hour . . . and to hear no more of it, I’m working.”39 Finally, he wrote his brother, “As I felt I was going to go crazy, I took the wisest course: I’m going to enlist.”40 In the meantime, he frantically tried to finish his Trio before signing up, and managed to do so by August 7—completing in five weeks “the work of five months
.”41

  Ravel was a small man and, much to his disappointment, the army medics found him underweight by about four pounds. Nevertheless he planned to apply again, this time among those previously rejected. If he didn’t succeed at that, he planned to “try to finagle something when I return to Paris.”42 Yes, he told a friend, he was well aware that he was “working for the fatherland by writing music! At least, I’ve been told that enough times in the past two months to convince me of it; first to stop me from signing up, then, to console me for being rejected.” This had little effect: “They didn’t stop anything, and I’m not consoled.” In the meantime, he served as best he could by caring for wounded soldiers where he then was located, in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. “The number, if not the variety of needs which forty gentlemen can have in the course of one night is incredible!”43

  Dr. Robert Proust, Marcel Proust’s brother, was among the first to be called up. To his family’s dismay, Dr. Proust—who had become a distinguished surgeon—requested that he be sent to the front. When Marcel accompanied Robert to the Gare de l’Est at midnight on August 2, he realized that he was sending his brother into the gravest of danger, even though the destination itself had not yet entered public consciousness. Dr. Robert Proust had been assigned to a place named Verdun.

  Proust, by now a chronic invalid and exempted from military service, watched his friends disappear into the army or into a variety of service efforts and organizations. His dear friend Lucien Daudet, who had been declared unfit for army duty, was assigned to the Red Cross. Jean Cocteau, also classified as unfit for duty, decided to become a male nurse at the front—snappily dressed in a uniform designed by Paul Poiret. Poiret, in turn, left his fashion house for the war’s duration, sent his family to Normandy for safety, and went to help streamline the army’s uniform production.

  Virtually everyone except for Rodin initially thought that the war would be over before Christmas. Yet by late August, the French army had been sufficiently pounded that, despite heavy censorship, the public’s initial euphoria was shaken. Hundreds of Belgian refugees began to arrive in Paris, and soon the first German plane flew over the city, dropping bombs and killing or wounding several civilians. More bombers followed, prompting an enforced nighttime blackout.

  Restaurants and theaters closed, and the Grand Palais (along with numerous schools and hotels) was turned into a hospital. The government moved to Bordeaux, and the streets of Paris acquired a sad and empty look, especially at night, when “the hush became acute.”44 Helen Pearl Adam, who stayed in Paris with her husband (a correspondent for The Times), wrote that the city had become strangely quiet, especially at night, when “almost the only sound heard was the curious note of the claxons of the Red Cross cars bearing wounded from the distributing stations in the suburbs.” By the third week in August, she wrote that Paris was sweltering, “the streets were empty, and half the shops were shut. . . . One could have dined in the middle of the Place de l’Opéra. Every theatre and cinema was shut.”45 “Things aren’t going very well,” Marie Curie wrote her daughter Irène from Paris in late August.46 Already, there was talk of a siege of Paris.

  With the closing of so many hotels, restaurants, shops, and workrooms following the massive exodus of men into the army, equally vast numbers of women and children were left without means of support. In response, the government took the important step of paying a separation allowance to every needy family throughout France whose head had been mobilized. The amount was not large, but it was meaningful, and it may well have made the difference in bolstering the will of the French in holding out for what turned out to be more than four harrowing years.47

  Private charities also played a large role in bolstering the home front. Edith Wharton immediately opened a workroom for unemployed Parisian seamstresses, and then she began the enormous job of helping to care for the French and Belgian refugees that were pouring into the city. Soon her workroom had about sixty women, and her American Hostels for Refugees would become even more extensive, including numerous houses and apartments throughout Paris, a lunchroom, a place for grocery and clothing distribution, a free clinic, coal delivery, day care for small children, classrooms, and even an employment agency. Within its first year, the American Hostels for Refugees provided lodging for thousands of refugees—supported by donations solicited by committees in America and Paris. In addition, Wharton’s Children of Flanders Rescue Committee would soon be caring for more than seven hundred children, plus many elderly, in empty houses in Normandy and on the outskirts of Paris. Wharton also launched appeals for the victims of tuberculosis, which was on the rise, and opened fresh-air TB sanatoriums for refugees and soldiers. “I have plunged into work,” she wrote her good friend, the art historian Bernard Berenson, on August 22.48 On September 2, she wrote another friend that the stories of German atrocities were all true, and that “it is to America’s interest to help stem this hideous flood of savagery. . . . No civilized race can remain neutral in feeling now.”49

  Soon Misia Edwards—who thrived on being at the center of things—took charge of one particularly useful effort, that of bringing first aid to the wounded at the front. Knowing that most of the fashion couturiers had virtually shut up shop for the war’s duration, she persuaded them to donate their delivery vans, which she turned into ambulances. She then obtained authorization from the military governor of Paris to form a convoy of these ambulances to bring aid as close to the front as possible. Her tour of duty began in a burned-out railway station, where she attended to men so horribly burned that there was virtually nothing left of their faces. Her second outing, to Reims, brought her along a road “littered with the bodies of dead horses, fragments of men and animals thrown into the air by the explosions and remaining hanging on the branches of trees.”50

  Appalled by what she had seen, Misia was relieved to bow out gracefully after a short spell, gifting her fourteen vehicles to the Empress of Russia. In the meantime, the Red Cross amply filled the breach, and Marie Curie had begun to apply the results of her work on radium to treating the wounded at the front.

  From the outset, Marie Curie had no illusions: “What a massacre we are going to see,” she wrote Irène, who remained (unwillingly) with her sister in their holiday cottage in Brittany. “What folly to have allowed it to be unchained!”51 Yet despite her dread of what was coming, Marie Curie was committed to contributing to her adopted country.

  She wanted to keep her children in relative safety in Brittany, but as for herself, she opted to remain in Paris—in large part to keep watch over her new research laboratory, jointly established by the Pasteur Institute and the University of Paris. In particular, she wanted to watch over the laboratory’s valuable supply of radium, which Marie soon transported (in heavy lead casing) to safer quarters in Bordeaux.

  Irène (who turned seventeen in September) was especially determined to return to Paris, since she felt useless and deprived of news in Brittany. “I understand now the difficulty that historians must have in establishing the facts,” she wrote her mother, “when one can’t even know what is happening at this very moment.”52 She was not alone in this complaint; wartime censorship in France was severe, not only for military information of possible value to the enemy, but for any information that might weaken morale at home. As a result, Swiss newspapers enjoyed a loyal readership among French cognoscenti, including Marcel Proust, who asked Céleste to take Le Journal de Genève regularly. Because of the censorship, he told her, it was the “only . . . paper now that is well informed.”53

  Still, only a small proportion of Parisians had access to this source of information, and according to French historian Jean-Jacques Becker, “there is no doubt that by leaving it in ignorance of the gravity of certain military defeats, of diplomatic failures and of the horrors of the war, censorship went a long way towards helping the French civilian front to stand firm.”54

  The Curies certainly were standing firm. By early autumn Irène and
her sister, Eve, joined their mother in Paris, and Irène now took a nursing course so she could help her mother in her daring new venture of bringing X-rays to wounded soldiers at the front. It was a brilliant idea: equip regular automobiles with everything necessary to produce X-rays (the automobile engine, hooked to a generator, provided the power), thus creating highly mobile units. Soon, funded by generous individuals as well as by organizations such as the Patronage des Blessés [wounded] and the Union des Femmes de France, Marie Curie eventually had twenty such “little Curies.” In addition, she would soon establish about two hundred permanent radiology posts as well as set up a school to train nurses as technicians.

  The Battle of the Marne, in early September, became a turning point for her: as she saw the casualties inundating Paris hospitals, she became acutely aware of the necessity of bringing X-rays to the wounded at the front. The Battle of the Marne would in fact constitute a turning point in the entire course of the war—but not in the way that people first expected.

  When war broke out, Monet made it clear that he intended to remain at Giverny. “I’m staying here,” he wrote Gustave Geffroy, “and if those savages insist on killing me, they’ll have to do it in the midst of my paintings.”55

  Unlike Monet, few who had a choice opted to stay in or even near Paris: during the war’s early days, the city was almost emptied of those who could afford to leave and had a safe place to go. Helena Rubinstein sailed for New York, leaving her husband and two sons to pack up the valuables and follow. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas continued on in the English countryside, where they had been since July. Rodin and Rose left for England, where they stayed until November, when the prospect of an English winter drove them south to Italy (which had side-stepped its treaty obligations with Germany and Austria and, much to France’s relief, declared itself a neutral). There, Rodin wanted to do a bust of the pope, although mainly he wanted to avoid the war. Finally, Rose’s deteriorating health brought them back to Paris—although Rodin would make another Italian visit in the disappointing attempt to create a portrait bust of the Holy Father.