Agahta Christie: An autobiography

by Agatha Christie

  ‘Show me.’ He had some gilt chairs there, and I sat down in a gilt chair, trying to hide my legs as much as possible underneath the chair.

  ‘No, no, that is impossible. That will never do,’ said Mr Washington Lob. ‘You turn slightly sideways, that is enough, not more; and as you sit down you are leaning slightly to the right, so you bend your left knee slightly, so that it is almost like a little bow as you sit.’ I had to practise this a good deal.

  The only things I really hated were my drawing and painting lessons. Mother was adamant on that subject; she would not let me off: ‘Girls should be able to do water-colours.’

  So very rebelliously, twice a week, I was called for by a suitable young woman (since girls did not go about alone in Paris) and taken by metro or bus to an atelier somewhere near the flower-market. There I joined a class of young ladies, painting violets in a glass of water, lilies in a jar, daffodils in a black vase. There would be terrific sighs as the lady in charge came round. ‘Mais vous ne voyez rien,’ she said to me. ‘First you must start with the shadows: do you not see? Here, and here, and here there are shadows.’

  But I never saw the shadows; all I saw were some violets in a glass of water. Violets were mauve–I could match the shade of mauve on my palette, and I would then paint the violets a flat mauve. I quite agree that the result did not look like a bunch of violets in a glass of water, but I did not see, and I don’t think have ever seen, what does make shadows look like a bunch of violets in water. On some days, to ease my depression, I would draw the table legs or an odd chair in perspective, which cheered me up, but which did not go down at all well with my instructress.

  Though I met many charming Frenchmen, strangely enough I did not fall in love with any of them. Instead I conceived a passion for the reception clerk in the hotel, Monsieur Strie. He was tall and thin, rather like a tapeworm, with pale blond hair and a tendency to spots. I really cannot understand what I saw in him. I never had the courage to speak to him, though he occasionally said ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle’ as I passed through the hall. It was difficult to have fantasies about Monsieur Strie. I imagined myself sometimes nursing him through the plague in French Indo-China, but it took much effort to keep that vision going. As he finally gasped out his last breath he would murmur: ‘Mademoiselle, I always adored you in the days at the hotel’–which was all right as far as it went, but when I noticed Monsieur Strie writing industriously behind the desk the following day it seemed to me extremely unlikely that he would ever say such a thing, even on his deathbed.

  We passed the Easter holidays going on expeditions to Versailles, Fontainebleau, and various other places, and then, with her usual suddenness, mother announced that I should not be returning to Mademoiselle T.’s.

  ‘I don’t think much of that place,’ she said. ‘No interesting teaching. It’s not what it was in Madge’s time. I am going back to England, and I have arranged that you shall go to Miss Hogg’s school at Auteuil, Les Marroniers.’

  I can’t remember feeling anything beyond mild surprise. I had enjoyed myself at Mademoiselle T.’s, but I didn’t particularly want to go back there. In fact it seemed more interesting to go to a new place. I don’t know whether it was stupidity on my part or amiability–I like to think, of course, that it was the latter–but I was always prepared to like the next thing that came along.

  So I went to Les Marroniers, which was a good school but extremely English. I enjoyed it, but found it dull. I had quite a good music teacher, but not as much fun as Madame Legrand had been. As everyone talked English all the time, in spite of the fact that it was strictly forbidden, nobody learned much French.

  Outside activities were not encouraged, or indeed perhaps even allowed, at Les Marroniers, so at last I was to shake myself free of my detested painting and drawing lessons. The only thing I missed was passing through the flower-market, which really had been heavenly. It was no surprise to me at the end of the summer holidays when my mother suddenly said to me at Ashfield that I was not going back to Les Marroniers. She had had a new idea for my education.

  V

  Grannie’s doctor, Dr Burwood, had a sister-in-law who kept a small establishment for ‘finishing’ girls in Paris. She only took twelve to fifteen girls, and they were all studying music or taking courses at the Conservatoire or the Sorbonne. How did I like that idea? my mother asked. As I have said, I welcomed new ideas; in fact my motto might have been established by then as ‘Try anything once’. So in the autumn I went to Miss Dryden’s establishment, just off the Arc de Triomphe in the Avenue du Bois.

  Being at Miss Dryden’s suited me down to the ground. For the first time I felt that what we were doing was really interesting. There were twelve of us. Miss Dryden herself was tall, rather fierce, with beautifully arranged white hair, an excellent figure, and a red nose, which she was in the habit of rubbing violently when she was angry. She had a dry, ironic form of conversation that was alarming but stimulating. Assisting her was a French coadjutor, Madame Petit. Madame Petit was very French, temperamental, highly emotional, remarkably unfair, and we were all devoted to her, and not nearly so much in awe of her as we were of Miss Dryden.

  It was, of course, much more like living in a family, but a serious attitude was taken towards our studies. There was an emphasis on music, but we had plenty of interesting classes of all kinds. We had people from the Comedie Francaise, who gave us talks on Moliere, Racine and Corneille, and singers from the Conservatoire, who sang the airs of Lully and Glück. We had a dramatic class where we all recited. Luckily we did not have so many ‘dictées’ here, so my spelling faults were not quite so noticeable, and since my spoken French was better than the others’ I enjoyed myself thoroughly reciting the lines of Andromaque, feeling myself indeed that tragic heroine as I stood and declaimed: ‘Seigneur, toutes ces grandeurs ne me touchent plus guère’.

  I think we all rather enjoyed ourselves at the drama class. We were taken to the Comedie Francaise and saw the classic dramas and several modern plays as well. I saw Sarah Bernhardt in what must have been one of the last roles of her career, as the golden pheasant in Rostand’s Chantecler. She was old, lame, feeble, and her golden voice was cracked, but she was certainly a great actress–she held you with her impassioned emotion. Even more exciting than Sarah Bernhardt did I find Rejane. I saw her in a modern play, La Course aux Flambeaux. She had a wonderful power of making you feel, behind a hard repressed manner, the existence of a tide of feeling and emotion which she would never allow to come out into the open. I can still hear now, if I sit quiet a minute or two with my eyes closed, her voice, and see her face in the last words of the play: ‘Pour sauver ma fille, j’ai tué ma mère,’ and the deep thrill this sent through one as the curtain came down.

  It seems to me that teaching can only be satisfactory if it awakens some response in you. Mere information is no good, it gives you nothing more than you had before. To be talked to about plays by actresses, repeating words and speeches from them; to have real singers singing you Bois Epais or an aria from Glück’s Orphée was to bring to life in you a passionate love of the art you were hearing. It opened a new world to me, a world in which I have been able to live ever since.

  My own serious study was music, of course, both singing and piano. I studied the piano with an Austrian, Charles Fürster. He occasionally came to London and gave recitals. He was a good but frightening teacher. His method was to wander round the room as you played. He had the air of not listening, looked out of the window, smelt a flower, but all of a sudden, as you played a false note or phrased something badly, he would swing round with the alaerity of a pouncing tiger and cry out: ‘Hein, qu’est-ce que vous jouez Ià, petite, hein? C’est atroce.’ It was shattering to the nerves at first, but one got used to it. He was a passionate addict of Chopin, so that I learnt mostly Chopin Etudes and Waltzes, the Fantaisie Impromptue, and one of the Ballades. I knew I was getting on well under his teaching, and it made me happy. I also learned the Sonatas of Beethoven, as
well as several light, what he called ‘drawing-room pieces’, a Romance of Fauré, the Barcarolle of Tchaikowski, and others. I practised with real assiduity, usually about seven hours a day. I think a wild hope was springing up within me–I don’t know that I ever let it quite come into my consciousness, but it was there in the background–that perhaps I could be a pianist, could play at concerts. It would be a long time and hard work, but I knew that I was improving rapidly.

  My singing lessons had begun before this period. My teacher was a Monsieur Boue. He and Jean de Reszke were supposed at that time to be the two leading singing teachers of Paris. Jean de Reszke had been a famous tenor and Boué an operatic baritone. He lived in an apartment five flights up with no lift. I used to arrive at the fifth storey completely out of breath, as indeed was only natural. The apartments all looked so alike that you lost count of the storeys you had climbed, but you always knew when you were getting to Monsieur Boue’s because of the wall-paper on the stairs. On the last turn, was an enormous grease mark which had a rough resemblance to the head of a cairn terrier.

  When I arrived I would be immediately greeted with reproaches. What did I mean by breathing fast like that? Why did I have to be out of breath? Someone my age should spring upstairs, without panting. Breathing was everything. ‘Breathing is the whole of singing, you should know that by now.’ He would then reach for his tape measure, which was always at hand. This he would put round my diaphragm and then urge me to breathe in, hold it, and then breathe out as completely as possible. He would calculate the difference between the two measurements, nodding his head occasionally and saying: ‘C’est bien, c’est bien, it advances. You have a good chest, an excellent chest. You have splendid expansion, and what is more, I will tell you something, you will never have the consumption. That is a sad thing for some singers; they get the consumption, but with you no. As long as you practise your breathing, all will be well with you. You like beefsteak?’ I said yes, I was extremely fond of beefsteak. ‘That is good too; that is the best food for a singer. You cannot eat large meals, or eat often, but I say to my opera singers you will have at three o’clock in the afternoon a large steak and a glass of stout; after that nothing till you sing at nine o’clock.’

  We then proceeded to the singing lesson proper. The voix de tête, he said, was very good, it was perfect, properly produced and natural, and my chest notes were not too bad; but the médium, the médium was extremely weak. So to begin with I was to sing mezzo-soprano songs to develop le médium. At intervals he would get exasperated with what he called my English face. ‘English faces,’ he said, ‘have no expression! They are not mobile. The skin round the mouth, it does not move; and the voice, the words, everything, they come from the back of the throat. That is very bad. The French language has got to come from the palate, from the roof of the mouth. The roof of the mouth, the bridge of the nose, that is where the voice of the medium comes from. You speak French very well, very fluently, though it is unfortunate you have not the English accent but the accent of the Midi. Why do you have the accent of the Midi?’

  I thought for a minute, and then I said perhaps because I had learnt French from a French maid who had come from Pau.

  ‘Ah, that explains it,’ he said. ‘Yes, that is it. It is the accent meridional that you have. As I say, you speak French fluently, but you speak it as though it were English because you speak it from the back of your throat. You must move your lips. Keep your teeth close together, but move your lips. Ah, I know what we shall do.’

  He would then tell me to stick a pencil in the corner of my mouth and articulate as well as possible while I was singing, without letting the pencil drop out. It was extraordinarily difficult at first, but in the end I managed it. My teeth clamped the pencil and my lips then had to move a great deal to make the words come out at all.

  Boué’s fury was great one day when I brought in the air from Samson et Delilah, ‘Mon coeur s’ouvre à to voix’, and asked him if I could possibly learn it, as I had enjoyed the opera so much.

  ‘But what is this you have here?’ he said, looking at the piece of music. What is this? What key is it in? It is in a transposed key.’

  I said I had bought the version for a soprano voice.

  He shouted with rage: ‘But Delilah is not a soprano part. It is a mezzo part. Do you not know that if you sing an air from an opera, it must always be sung in the key it was written in? You cannot transpose for a soprano voice what has been written for a mezzo voice–it puts the whole emphasis wrong. Take it away. If you bring it in the proper mezzo key, yes, you shall learn it.’

  I never dared sing a transposed song again.

  I learned large quantities of French songs, and a lovely Ave Maria of Cherubini’s. We debated for some time how I was to pronounce the Latin of that. ‘The English pronounce Latin in the Italian way, the French have their own way of pronouncing Latin. I think, since you are English, you had better sing it in the Italian pronunciation.’

  I also sang a good many of Schubert’s songs in German. In spite of not knowing German this was not too difficult; and I sang songs in Italian, of course. On the whole I was not allowed to be too ambitious, but after about six months or so of study I was allowed to sing the famous aria from La Bohème ‘Te Gelida Manina’ and also the aria from Tosca, ‘Vissi d’arte’.

  It was indeed a happy time. Sometimes, after a visit to the Louvre, we were taken to have tea at Rumpelmayer’s. There could be no delight in life for a greedy girl like tea at Rumpelmayer’s. My favourites were those glorious cakes with cream and marron piping of a sickliness which was incomparable.

  We were taken of course, for walks in the Bois–a very fascinating place. One day, I remember, when we were going in a neat crocodile, two by two, along a deeply wooded path, a man came out from behind some trees–a classic case of indecent exposure. We must all have seen him, I think, but we all behaved in a decorous manner as if we had noticed nothing unusual–possibly we may have been not quite sure of what it was we had seen. Miss Dryden, herself, who was in charge of us that day, sailed along with the iron-clad belligerence of a battleship. We followed her. I suppose the man, whose upper half was very correct, with black hair and pointed beard and a very smart cravat and tie, must have spent his day wandering about the darker places of the Bois so as to surprise decorous young ladies from pensionnats, walking in a crocodile, wishing perhaps to add to their knowledge of life in Paris. I may add that, as far as I know, not one of us mentioned this incident to any of the other girls; there was not so much as a giggle. We were all splendidly modest in those days.

  We had occasional parties at Miss Dryden’s, and on one occasion a former pupil of hers, an American woman now married to a French Vicomte, arrived with her son, Rudy. Rudy might have been a French baron, but in appearance he was a thoroughly American college boy. He must have blenched a little at the sight of twelve nubile girls looking at him with interest, approbation, and possible romance in their eyes.

  ‘I’ve got my work cut out shaking hands round here,’ he declared in a cheerful voice. We all met Rudy again the next day at the Palais de Glace, where some of us were skating and some learning to skate. Rudy was again determinedly gallant, anxious not to let his mother down. He skated several circuits of the rink with those of us who were able to stand up. I, as so often in these matters, was unlucky. I had only just begun to learn, and on my first afternoon had succeeded in throwing the skating instructor. This, I may say, had made him extremely angry. He had been held up to the ridicule of his colleagues. He prided himself on being able to hold up anyone, even the stoutest American lady, and to be floored by a tall thin girl must have infuriated him. He took me out for my turn as seldom as possible after this. Anyway I didn’t think I would risk being pioneered by Rudy round the rink–I should probably throw him too, and then he would have been annoyed.

  Something happened to me at the sight of Rudy. We only saw him on those few occasions, but they marked a point of transition. From that
moment forward I stepped out of the territory of hero-worship. All the romantic love I had felt for people real and unreal–people in books, people in the public eye, actual people who came to the house–finished at that moment. I no longer had the capacity for selfless love or the wish to sacrifice myself on their behalf. From that day I began to think of young men only as young men–exciting creatures whom I would enjoy meeting, and among whom, some day, I should find my husband (Mr Right in fact). I did not fall in love with Rudy–perhaps I might have, if I had met him often–but I did suddenly feel different. I had become one of the world of females on the prowl! From that moment, the image of the Bishop of London, who had been my last object of hero-worship, faded from my mind. I wanted to meet real young men, lots of real young men–in fact there couldn’t be too many of them.

  I am hazy now as to how long I remained at Miss Dryden’s–a year, perhaps eighteen months, I do not think as long as two years. My volatile mother did not propose any further changes of educational plan; perhaps she did not hear of anything that excited her. But I think really that she had an intuitive knowledge that I had found what satisfied me. I was learning things that mattered, that built themselves into me as part of an interest in life.