Twilight of the Belle Epoque
Page 46
25. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 74.
26. Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 200.
27. By that autumn Germaine had taken up with Ramon Pichot, whom she would eventually marry. Picasso now lived briefly with a young woman only known to history as Blanche.
28. Richardson notes that “Vollard, to name only one potential buyer, disdained the Blue period until it found favour with the Steins” (Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 226).
4 Dreams and Reality (1902)
Selected sources for this chapter: Debussy, Debussy Letters; Nichols and Smith, Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande; Nichols, Life of Debussy; Lockspeiser, Debussy, vol. 2; Orenstein, Ravel; Ravel, Ravel Reader; Orledge, Satie Remembered; Spurling, Unknown Matisse; Barr, Matisse; Danchev, Georges Braque; Flanner, Men and Monuments; Eve Curie, Madame Curie: A Biography, trans. Vincent Sheean (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1940); Susan Quinn, Marie Curie: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); Alan E. Walter, Radiation and Modern Life: Fulfilling Marie Curie’s Dream (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2004); Josephson, Zola and His Time; Brown, Zola; Mayeur and Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War; Jack D. Ellis, The Early Life of Georges Clemenceau, 1841–1893 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1980); Watson, Georges Clemenceau; Williams, The Last Great Frenchman; John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870–1914 (London: SPCK, 1972); Reynolds, André Citroën; Rhodes, Louis Renault; Mouret, Louis Renault; Descouturelle, Mignard, and Rodriguez, Le Métropolitain d’Hector Guimard; Berton and Ossadzow, Fulgence Bienvenüe et la construction du métropolitain de Paris; Maurice Bessy and Lo Duca, Georges Méliès, mage (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1961); Butler, Rodin; Bernard Champigneulle, Rodin, trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967); Isadora Duncan, My Life; Kurth, Isadora; Mary Desti, The Untold Story: The Life of Isadora Duncan, 1921–1927 (New York: Da Capo, 1981); Preston Sturges, Preston Sturges, ed. Sandy Sturges (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990); Richard Nelson Current and Marcia Ewing Current, Loie Fuller: Goddess of Light (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997); Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Prodigy.
1. Maeterlinck’s diatribe, published on 14 April 1902 in a letter to Le Figaro, is quoted in Nichols and Smith, Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande, 143.
2. Debussy to Robert Godet, 13 June 1902, in Debussy Letters, 128.
3. Satie (according to Jean Cocteau) quoted in Orledge, Satie Remembered, 46. Orledge notes that “although Cocteau did not meet Satie until 1915, his retrospective account of Satie’s career was undoubtedly prepared with the composer’s assistance” (Orledge, Satie Remembered, 45).
4. Saint-Saëns quoted in Nichols and Smith, Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande, 148.
5. Georges Sagnac to Pierre Curie, in Eve Curie, Madame Curie, 186–87.
6. Marie Curie quoted in Eve Curie, Madame Curie, 204–5.
7. Josephson, Zola and His Time, 489.
8. Brown, Zola, 786.
9. Josephson, Zola and His Time, 510.
10. The left-wing bloc had a clear parliamentary majority but a relatively small popular majority (see Mayeur and Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 221).
11. Nichols, Life of Debussy, 107.
12. Butler, Rodin, 375.
13. Butler, Rodin, 402.
14. Butler, Rodin, 403.
15. This Beaux-Arts sculpture, by Louis-Ernest Barrias, was destroyed in 1942 during the German Occupation.
16. Desti, The Untold Story, 25.
17. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 75.
5 Arrivals and Departures (1903)
Selected sources for this chapter: Spurling, Unknown Matisse; Matisse, Matisse on Art; Barr, Matisse; Camille Pissarro, Letters to His Son Lucien, ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro, trans. Lionel Abel (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine Smith, 1981); John Rewald, Camille Pissarro (New York: Abrams, 1963); Richard R. Brettell and Joachim Pissarro, The Impressionist and the City: Pissarro’s Series Paintings, ed. Mary Anne Stevens (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); David Sweetman, Paul Gauguin: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); Butler, Rodin; Kurth, Isadora; Isadora Duncan, My Life; John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1987); Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (New York: Putnam, 1996); Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage, 1990); Leo Stein, Appreciation: Painting, Poetry, and Prose, ed. Brenda Wineapple (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); Rhodes, Louis Renault; Mouret, Louis Renault; Berton, Fulgence Bienvenüe et la construction du métropolitain de Paris; Descouturelle, Mignard, and Rodriguez, Le Métropolitain d’Hector Guimard; Brown, Zola; Debussy, Debussy Letters; Orenstein, Ravel; Ravel, Ravel Reader; Nichols, Life of Debussy; Eve Curie, Madame Curie; Quinn, Marie Curie.
1. The older son, Jean, had stayed with his paternal grandparents in Bohain, while Pierre had gone to his mother’s relations in Rouen.
2. Pissarro to Lucien, 8 and 22 September 1903, in Letters to His Son Lucien, 475.
3. Spurling, Unknown Matisse, 134.
4. Pissarro to Lucien, 22 September 1903, in Letters to His Son Lucien, 475.
5. Pissarro to Lucien, 30 March 1903; Pissarro to Esther [Lucien’s wife], 30 June 1903, in Letters to His Son Lucien, both on 470.
6. Rewald, Camille Pissarro, 45.
7. Butler, Rodin, 384.
8. Kurth, Isadora, 108.
9. Kurth, Isadora, 105.
10. They would meet for the first time in Paris.
11. Gertrude Stein tells this story in Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 79, but Wineapple finds little evidence to corroborate it; James gave Stein an A for her laboratory work, but in his seminar, he gave her an A at midyear and a C at the end (including that final exam), averaging the two into a B overall (Wineapple, Sister Brother, 82).
12. Brinnin, Third Rose, 22.
13. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 81.
14. Her devil-may-care version of the experience thirty years later (Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 82–83) may have distorted the facts: Wineapple, in Sister Brother, 142–43, finds evidence of Stein’s fear of failure and her disappointment at not receiving her degree. Yet even at the time, Stein’s friends certainly felt that she “did not seem to care a rap” (Wineapple, Sister Brother, 149).
15. Debussy to Messager, 29 June 1903, in Debussy Letters, 135.
16. Ravel quoted in Orenstein, Ravel, 39.
17. Ravel to Jane Courteault, 11 September 1903, in Ravel Reader, 65.
18. Orenstein, Ravel, 40.
19. Ravel to Jane Courteault, 11 September 1903, in Ravel Reader, 65. Fauré’s exclusion would not in fact be permanent, but it would take several years and a lot of persuasion on the part of his supporters before he became a member.
20. Nichols, Life of Debussy, 109. It is perhaps curious that Claude Debussy would feel this way, given his father’s failure at just about everything he undertook. Still, the father once had dreams of Claude becoming a concert pianist, which Claude had not managed to achieve. This seemed to make up for everything.
21. Eve Curie, Madame Curie, 202.
22. Marie Curie to Joseph Sklodovski, 11 December 1903, in Eve Curie, Madame Curie, 211.
23. Until her daughter Irène won the prize in 1935, Marie Curie would be the only female Nobel Prize winner in the sciences.
24. Marie to Bronya, 25 August 1903, in Eve Curie, Madame Curie, 190–91. Bronya was a medical doctor.
25. According to a biographer, Susan Quinn, Marie Curie was five months pregnant at the time (Marie Curie, 183–84).
26. Marie to Bronya, 25 August 1903, in Eve Curie, Madame Curie, 190–91.
6 Alliances and Misalliances (1904)
Selected sources for this chapter: D
ebussy, Debussy Letters; Nichols, Life of Debussy; Gold and Fizdale, Misia; Butler, Rodin; Helene von Nostitz, Dialogues with Rodin, trans. H. L. Ripperger (New York: Duffield & Green, 1931); Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Prodigy; Pierre Villoteau, La vie Parisienne à la Belle Epoque ([Genève, Switzerland]: Cercle du bibliophile, 1968); Spurling, Unknown Matisse; Flanner, Men and Monuments; Barr, Matisse; Brinnin, Third Rose; Wineapple, Sister Brother; Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Leo Stein, Appreciation; Isadora Duncan, My Life; Kurth, Isadora; Francis Steegmuller, ed., “Your Isadora”: The Love Story of Isadora Duncan and Gordon Craig (New York: Random House and New York Public Library, 1974); Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970); Jean Cocteau, Souvenir Portraits: Paris in the Belle Epoque, trans. Jesse Browner (New York: Paragon House, 1990); Sicard-Picchiottino, François Coty; Barillé, Coty; Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr, eds., A “Belle Epoque”? Women in French Society and Culture, 1890–1914 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006); Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals; Reynolds, André Citroën; Wildenstein, Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism, vol. 1; Pierre-Antoine Donnet, La saga Michelin (Paris: Seuil, 2008); Stephen L. Harp, Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Auguste Escoffier, Memories of My Life, trans. Laurence Escoffier (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1997); Timothy Shaw, The World of Escoffier (New York: Vendome Press, 1995); Eve Curie, Madame Curie; Quinn, Marie Curie; Current and Current, Loie Fuller; Butler, Rodin; Kessler, Journey to the Abyss; Monet, Monet by Himself; Sabartès, Picasso; McManners, Church and State in France; Mugnier, Journal; Mayeur and Rebérioux, Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War.
1. Debussy to Lilly, 16 July 1904, in Debussy Letters, 147–48.
2. Debussy to Jacques Durand, [July 1904], in Debussy Letters, 148–49.
3. Debussy to André Messager, 19 September 1904, in Debussy Letters, 149.
4. Spurling, Unknown Matisse, 273. Level would buy another Matisse, two Picassos, and a Gauguin for the Peau de l’Ours that year. In March 1914, when the syndicate auctioned off its holdings, its investors quadrupled their investment.
5. Flanner, Men and Monuments, 80.
6. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 31–32.
7. Leo Stein, Appreciation, 157.
8. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 21. The spelling and punctuation are her own.
9. Picasso sold La Vie to a Parisian collector, Jean Saint-Gaudens, soon after completing it, but little further is known about the collector or the transaction. La Vie is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.
10. Kurth, Isadora, 117.
11. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 159.
12. Kurth, Isadora, 130.
13. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 8.
14. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 9. There have been persistent rumors that Cocteau père was secretly homosexual, leading to doubts about Jean’s paternity. See Steegmuller, Cocteau, 10 (note).
15. Madame Singer quoted in Steegmuller, Cocteau, 9.
16. Barillé, Coty, 112. Coty named his perfume after Docteur Jacqueminot, the owner of the pharmacie Jacqueminot where Coty first discovered his perfume-making abilities.
17. There would be no fine dining stars until 1926.
18. Escoffier, Memories of My Life, 9.
19. Escoffier, Memories of My Life, 84.
20. Escoffier, Memories of My Life, 113.
21. Contrary to legend, the Curies do not appear to have visited the Folies Bergère to see their friend perform. Instead, she brought her act to them, at their Boulevard Kellermann home, including the lighting essential to her act. According to what Marie later told Eve, it took hours to set up, during which she and Pierre escaped to their laboratory (Eve Curie, Madame Curie, 232).
22. Kessler, 11 May 1902, in Journey to the Abyss, 279–80.
23. Vernon is the nearest train station to Giverny, which is located a short distance across the Seine from Vernon.
24. Kessler, 20 November 1903, in Journey to the Abyss, 309.
25. Bazille, one of the early Impressionist painters, was killed during the Franco-Prussian War.
26. Monet quoted in Kessler, 20 November 1903, in Journey to the Abyss, 311, 312.
27. Monet to Georges Durand-Ruel, 3 [July] 1905, in Monet by Himself, 196.
28. Sabartès, Picasso, 78.
29. Sabartès recalled that Place Ravignan, now Place Emile-Goudeau, was at that time “a veritable desert,” with “no lights, no sidewalks, no cobblestones” (Picasso, 72).
30. Mugnier, 17 July 1904, in Journal, 148.
7 Wild Beasts (1905)
Selected sources for this chapter: Flanner, Men and Monuments; Spurling, Unknown Matisse; Barr, Matisse; Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Leo Stein, Appreciation; Wineapple, Sister Brother; Brinnin, Third Rose; Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Prodigy; Palau i Fabre, Picasso: The Early Years; Fernande Olivier, Picasso and His Friends, trans. Jane Miller (London: Heinemann, 1964); Fernande Olivier, Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier, trans. Christine Baker and Michael Raeburn (New York: Abrams, 2001); Jean-Paul Crespelle, La vie quotidienne à Montmartre au temps de Picasso, 1900–1910 (Paris: Hachette, 1978); Villoteau, La vie Parisienne à la Belle Epoque; Carter, Marcel Proust; Marcel Proust, Selected Letters, vol. 2 (1904–1909), ed. Philip Kolb, trans. Terence Kilmartin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Edith Thomas, Louise Michel, trans. Penelope Williams (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980); Mayeur and Rebérioux, Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War; Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Rebel; Lysiane Sarah Bernhardt and Marion Dix, Sarah Bernhardt, My Grandmother (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1949); Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, The Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah Bernhardt (New York: Vintage Books, 1992); Gottlieb, Sarah; Steegmuller, Cocteau; Cocteau, Souvenir Portraits; Nichols, Life of Debussy; Debussy, Debussy Letters; Orledge, Satie Remembered; Rollo H. Myers, Erik Satie, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 1968); Alan M. Gillmor, Erik Satie (Boston: Twayne, 1988); Orenstein, Ravel; Ravel, Ravel Reader; Gold and Fizdale, Misia; Butler, Rodin; Champigneulle, Rodin; Steegmuller, “Your Isadora”; Kurth, Isadora; Sjeng Scheijen, Diaghilev: A Life, trans. Jane Jedley-Prôle and S. J. Leinbach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Isadora Duncan, My Life; Poiret, King of Fashion; Reynolds, André Citroën; Barillé, Coty; Sicard-Picchiottino, François Coty; Ruth Brandon, Ugly Beauty: Helena Rubinstein, L’Oréal, and the Blemished History of Looking Good (New York: HarperCollins, 2011); McManners, Church and State in France; Mugnier, Journal.
1. The Cone sisters’ collection ultimately went to the Baltimore Museum of Art.
2. Leo Stein, Appreciation, 158.
3. Leo Stein, Appreciation, 170.
4. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 46.
5. Leo Stein, Appreciation, 170.
6. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 47.
7. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 47.
8. Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 362.
9. Proust to Anna de Noailles, 27 September 1905, in Proust, Selected Letters, 2:207.
10. Proust to Montesquiou, soon after 28 September 1905, in Proust, Selected Letters, 2:208.
11. Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Rebel, 3. Péguy was about to become an ardent nationalist as well as a devout Catholic.
12. As told by Sarah Bernhardt’s granddaughter, Lysiane, who as a nine-year-old witnessed the event (Lysiane Sarah Bernhardt and Marion Dix, Sarah Bernhardt, My Grandmother, 180–81).
13. Gold and Fizdale, Divine Sarah, 302.
14. Cocteau, Souvenir Portraits, 109. De Max “realized his blunder [and] took us away, removed our curls and our make-up, and dropped us at our respective homes” (109).
15. Lysiane Sarah Bernhardt and Marion Dix
, Sarah Bernhardt, My Grandmother, 193.
16. Nichols, Life of Debussy, 115–16.
17. Debussy to Durand, [January 1905], in Debussy Letters, 150.
18. Debussy to Laloy, 14 April 1905, in Debussy Letters, 152.
19. Satie and Louÿs had been witnesses at Debussy and Lilly’s wedding in 1899.
20. Debussy to Durand, 7 August 1905, in Debussy Letters, 154.
21. Nichols, Life of Debussy, 118.
22. According to Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, in Orledge, Satie Remembered, 97.
23. Myers, Erik Satie, 40.
24. Rolland to Paul Léon, 26 May 1905, in Ravel, Ravel Reader, 66–67. Rolland’s letter was addressed to the art historian Paul Léon, who at the time was an undersecretary of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
25. Orenstein, Ravel, 44n55.
26. Debussy to Fauré, 28 June 1905, in Debussy Letters, 153.
27. Ravel to Maurice Delage, 24 June 1905, in Ravel Reader, 70.
28. Ravel to Maurice Delage, 5 July 1905, in Ravel Reader, 70. According to Ravel, the foundry he visited, in Ahaus, Germany, employed twenty-four thousand men working round the clock.
29. Ravel to Madame René de Saint-Marceaux, 23 August 1905, in Ravel Reader, 75.
30. Champigneulle, Rodin, 239.
31. Butler, Rodin, 376.
32. Champigneulle, Rodin, 240.
33. Although how much of an impact Duncan made on Fokine’s choreography is subject to debate (see Kurth, Isadora, 147–48, 154–55, and Scheijen, Diaghilev, 173).
34. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 140. She may well have invented this recollection. Joan Acocella writes, in the introduction to the 2013 edition of Duncan’s My Life, that “her story of arriving in St. Petersburg in 1905 in time to see, out of her cab window, the funeral procession of the victims of the Bloody Sunday massacre . . . is demonstrably false.” But “she needed such stories, to make sense of her life” (xviii).
35. Steegmuller, “Your Isadora,” 69.
36. Duncan to Craig, [probably Berlin, 10–15 March 1905], in Steegmuller, “Your Isadora,” 83.
37. “I wonder what this was?” Craig scrawled on the first of Isadora’s two letters to him. “Jealousy?” (Steegmuller, “Your Isadora,” 81). Eventually Craig’s mother, Ellen Terry, would pay May Gibson’s alimony after May’s divorce from Craig.