Renoir's Dancer

by Catherine Hewitt

  If Marie-Clémentine were to fit in in Paris – and ultimately be independent – she must have a sound grasp of French.

  In 1857, the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul had established themselves in Montmartre and with support from the legacy of a Russian noblewoman, the late Mme Sophie Swetchine, had begun running classes for poor and orphaned little girls in the area. As the pupil intake swelled, the sisters were obliged to move premises several times. Finally, in 1876, the year Marie-Clémentine turned eleven, construction commenced on the sisters’ ultimate location, and soon, their new school, orphanage and sewing room opened in the Rue Caulaincourt, just a few minutes’ walk from the Valadons’ apartment.

  Enrolling Marie-Clémentine in the new establishment would lift any concern that played on Madeleine’s mind about the youngster’s antics when she was not there to supervise her. And while Madeleine was not an especially devout woman, the rigour and discipline of the nuns’ approach would surely have a desirable impact on her daughter. Even if Marie-Clémentine did not emerge from the experience a confirmed Catholic, she would undoubtedly learn good manners, along with a host of practical skills such as needlework. If she applied herself, she might even master some scholarly expertise. Madeleine began to arrange the formalities.

  Charitable religious primary schools or petites écoles had begun to appear in the 17th century in Paris when priests started founding free schools for the children of the poor.18 To begin with, these catered mainly for boys, but before long religious orders such as the Ursulines were also founding schools to meet female education needs. These welcomed day girls as well as boarders and were free or cost very little to attend.19 A wave of social discourse and novels like Adolphe Belot’s Mlle Giraud, Ma Femme (1870) criticised convent education, holding the claustrophobic environment in which the girls were taught responsible for all manner of female ills, not least lesbianism. Nonetheless, with the Virgin Mary held up as the exemplary model of femininity, and religious teaching widely seen as an essential part of every respectable girl’s education, in 1870, 60 per cent of girls attending school were still being taught by sisters.20 And to the founders’ surprise, these charitable organisations attracted not just the poor and destitute, but the middle classes as well, whose confidence in clerical education – and enthusiasm that it should be free – unwittingly turned these schools into great social levellers.21

  So it was that one morning, Marie-Clémentine found her bare feet forced into suffocating stockings and imprisoned in tight-fitting boots. Once made as presentable as possible, she was ushered outside, not to bound through the streets unchecked as usual, but to begin the solemn walk towards a new life, one governed by timetables and rigorous discipline. From that moment, her freedom of expression was curtailed, her private world invaded.

  Religious schools lived by strict rules and regulations, and were staunch advocates of traditional methods of discipline and punishment when their policies were not complied with.22 From the middle of the 19th century, they had become even stricter. The nuns taught modest comportment and self-restraint. Discretion and industry were rewarded, spontaneity and natural impulses suppressed; from the outset, Marie-Clémentine’s relationship with the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul was ill-fated.23

  Once a girl stepped through the school gates, every minute of her day was structured, each activity monitored with the utmost scrutiny. It was considered unwise to leave a child unsupervised for long periods, and liberty – the kind Marie-Clémentine had been used to – was systematically eradicated. Nothing passed unnoticed. The slightest movement was watched, judged, assessed, the theory being that constant surveillance would negate entirely the need for punishment.24 ‘In the seminary,’ complained the 19th-century writer Stendhal, ‘there is a way of eating a boiled egg that reveals the progress made in the devout life.’25 Henceforward, Marie-Clémentine’s day was framed by morning Mass and evening prayer, and the time in between was heavily regimented and closely observed.

  Though convents claimed not to groom girls in readiness to join their order, in practice, religious education formed a large part of the convent syllabus.26 French, history, geography, music and botany were all subjects highly regarded by convent administrations. However, at primary level, the main objective was simply to ensure that the girls could read, write and count.27 Even so, the time allotted to these academic pursuits was usually minimal. A good portion of the school day was given to fashioning socially respectable young ladies. This meant cultivating the important arts of sewing and embroidery. Girls were taught to stitch, knit, make stockings and gloves, and launder, for manual tasks were revered.28 ‘You would do well to employ your leisure time undertaking manual work,’ stipulated a student handbook in 1865. ‘It is the occupation most fitting to your sex: your health, your character, your heart and your spirituality will be all the better for it.’29 For if the sisters could not transform their charges into nuns, they were determined to turn out good wives and mothers.

  Teaching included instruction in good conduct, self-presentation, politeness, and how to make intelligent conversation. Girls were told to adopt moderation in all things. Dress should be simple, food plain and sufficient. Classic works of literature were accepted, but ‘frivolous’ novels, much poetry, songs with doubtful lyrics and anything that excited the emotions, was banned.30 Excessive movement without purpose was condemned and in many convents dancing was prohibited; a girl’s very walk should be slow and considered.31 Passion and sensitivity were repressed, curiosity calmed. In the convent, perfect obedience and docility were the order of the day.

  Marie-Clémentine’s ebullient nature was in direct conflict with the sisters’ ethos. From the moment she set foot in the school, the young girl proved herself a social deviant.

  Not that all the nuns inspired animosity. Few could dislike the cheerful Sister Geneviève, whose happy disposition and sheer delight in language was contagious. But a sister was still a figure of authority, and though Marie-Clémentine enjoyed words and language, she was always too distracted to apply herself to the repetitive exercises used to instil linguistic competence.32 Her writing was wild and impassioned. Text and writing lacked the immediacy she craved. Ideas caught her imagination more than text. Jean de La Fontaine only secured her attention because his vivid fables appealed to her love of the fantastic. Similarly, when Marie-Clémentine was introduced to the renegade 15th-century poet François Villon, it was as much his dramatic life story as his verse that earned her admiration.33 She understood confrontation with authority figures and appreciated rebellious measures taken to outsmart them. She fancied what it might be like to know such a man, and with utter disregard for temporal continuity, solemnly told people that she was his daughter, insisting that they address her as Mlle Villon, and adopting the walk and gestures she imagined such a character might have used.

  Marie-Clémentine lived entirely in her mind. ‘I was haunted,’ she explained years later. ‘As a child, I thought far too much.’34 Moreover, she had the physique and agility to support her mental acrobatics and live out her daydreams. Marie-Clémentine was petite, shorter than most of her classmates, and physically fearless. As a result, the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul soon found they had no wall high enough, nor gate secure enough to contain her. ‘I am a monkey. I am a cat,’ she would call down from the top of a wall or fence, before springing nimbly to the ground and speeding off.35 Institutional repression propagated brazen rebellion. She became one of the most artful truants the school had ever known.

  When she was in class, there was one matter on which the sisters were particularly firm: hygiene.36 Marie-Clémentine’s contemporary, Anne-Marie Chassaigne, who would grow up to become the famous courtesan Liane de Pougy, recalled arriving for her first day at a convent, ‘at the age of nine, with filthy fingernails and head lice.’37 The youngster was instantly rejected by her classmates and she returned ‘clean, washed, gleaming and worthy of association, not dangerous […] Naturally, I was teased for the rest of
the term.’ For Liane, ‘the lesson was hard, but it served me well for the rest of my life’.38 Marie-Clémentine was less responsive to such uninvited teaching. ‘Water is for washing pigs!’ she hurled back when one of the more biddable students criticised her cleanliness.39 Her appearance bothered her not at all; she was unmoved by social exclusion. ‘Solitude suited me,’ she explained, years later.40

  Despite Madeleine’s and the Mother Superior’s best efforts, Marie-Clémentine was definitively a child of the streets. Her Montmartre was a marvellous playground. Where there were bars, she saw apparatus to climb; handrails were not aids, but irresistible poles to slide down. She went jumping, leaping, tumbling just where her mind took her, talking to people she encountered on the way, and picking up coarse expressions and vulgar songs, of which she was fond of giving raucous performances. ‘I was a devil,’ she conceded. ‘I behaved like a boy.’41

  Once, she was seen swinging from an upstairs window and passers-by stared up aghast and hollered as she called down assurances that they need not worry, the fire brigade were on their way.42 On another occasion, a horse broke loose in the Place Blanche, causing terrified pedestrians to dive this way and that for cover; people were amazed when Marie-Clémentine succeeded in catching and then gently calming the wild creature. The pomp, ceremony and emotion which could be observed at funerals fascinated the youngster, and she took to attending the burials of complete unknowns at Père Lachaise. One day, she gave such a convincing impression of a tearful mourner that the deceased’s widow came to comfort her and slipped her some money, concluding that the child must be a consequence of one of her late husband’s extramarital dalliances. She bantered and chatted with anyone she came across who happened to interest her, though never seemed to demand closeness from any of these contacts. ‘I had just one friend, an old girl of 78 who could speak seven languages,’ she recounted.43 Some years later, she recalled one particular encounter she made in the Rue Lepic when she stopped to watch an artist working at his easel. After observing his industry for a little while, she approached him, convinced that her advice would be pertinent. He should not feel discouraged, she assured him. Why, she could see real potential in his work; he certainly had a future in it. As it turned out, her prophecy proved accurate: the artist was Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

  In her conversations, Marie-Clémentine showed utter disregard for the truth. Sometimes her father was an aristocratic baron, the Empress Eugénie her godmother and Madeleine merely an adoptive mother who was doing the best she could. She took each experience, every exchange as she found it, with no thought of the consequences. Dates, times, names, were all immaterial and perfectly changeable. The past was irrelevant, and so was the future. All that mattered was the present.

  And by the time her care was entrusted to the sisters, she had discovered a uniquely gratifying way to engage with the present: drawing.

  At first, her attempts to capture the world around her were crude. Using pencil stubs, she traced the outline of flowers and trees on any scrap of paper that she could find.44 One of her chance encounters was with a coalman, who gave her some lumps of charcoal. Madeleine was outraged to discover cats, dogs and all sorts of exotic creatures drawn here and there on the walls of the apartment. Then, charcoal sketches of nude figures started appearing on nearby pavements, to the titillation of passing workmen and the outrage of well-bred ladies. Marie-Clémentine’s toys were few and shabby; drawing became both her passion and her principal entertainment.

  Not that she drew with any kind of regularity; she abhorred routine, and would sometimes go for long spells without committing anything at all to paper or pavement. Then, all at once, the desire to draw would take her over, and she would work frantically as though possessed. ‘It seized me so young,’ she remembered. Already ‘at eight years old I was hooked; I recorded what I saw, I would have liked to possess, to demonstrate the very essence of the trees and limbs so that I could keep hold of them’.45 By the time she was presented to the sisters, Marie-Clémentine was positively addicted to drawing. She had always been at odds with the sanctioning frameworks of the world around her. Now, for the first time in her life, there was something she could control. She had power. With a pencil or piece of charcoal in her hand, she suddenly moved from passive servant to active master.

  Capturing the world on paper demanded good observational skills, heightened sensitivity and being highly attuned to surroundings and stimulus. Marie-Clémentine boasted all those traits. On Sundays, she would climb to the roof of the tenement building where she lived and lie on her stomach for hours at a time, watching the people and carriages in the street far below moving about like tiny ants.46 She noticed the flashes of colours which seemed to merge from such a distance, and listened to the continual hum of faraway activity. It was the world in miniature, and from such a height she felt like a divine creator, empowered by omniscience. When night fell, obliging her to return to the cramped apartment, she would climb into the confined space of her bunk with her observations of the day still racing through her mind, and would draw arms, legs, anything which sprang to mind, on the wall. ‘How did I do it?’ she wondered years later. ‘I really don’t know when I think about it, because I couldn’t draw a sugar bowl from memory now.’47

  But the world around her was changing. In February 1874, when Marie-Clémentine was nine, Marie-Alix had accepted Georges Merlet’s proposal of marriage, and the following year, the couple had moved to the coastal town of Nantes.48 Since then, Madeleine and Marie-Clémentine had been alone together, and now that she had started school, Marie-Clémentine’s unruly behaviour was thrown into even sharper relief. The tolerance of the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul began to wane, and Madeleine decided a short stay with her half-sister in Nantes and the firm hand of an authoritative male presence might succeed where the sisters had failed. The project proved no more effective. Marie-Clémentine seemed to thrive on naughtiness; she could not be tamed, and though Marie-Alix at least felt tenderly towards her younger sibling, her husband was under no obligation to show the same degree of patience. The arrangement was agreed unworkable, and Marie-Clémentine sent back to Paris.

  Before long, the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul were also obliged to admit defeat, and the convent doors were closed firmly behind the youngster forever. Now, there was only one course possible: Marie-Clémentine would have to get a job.

  It was not unusual for the children to start work as young as seven or eight in the country, so from Madeleine’s perspective, the timing of Marie-Clémentine’s entry on to the job market before she was fourteen was perfectly reasonable, and if anything a little late.49 Her first job was that of apprentice seamstress at an atelier de couture not far from where she lived.50 Her training at the convent had equipped her with all the skills necessary to excel in such a position. And she proved herself an adept employee, quick and competent in all the fine motor skills required to apply ribbons and trimmings. But Marie-Clémentine loathed the work. The artificiality of all those frills and all that frippery exasperated her.51 And she was no more inclined to adhere to routine and kowtow to authority than she had been at the convent. She took to disappearing when she felt the whim, and her relationship with her employer soon soured. Before long, she was looking for another job.

  One day, she returned home and told Madeleine that she was to begin ‘looking after rich children in the Tuileries’. But that did not last long either. There followed a series of menial positions: waitress and dishwasher at a cheap café; fruit and vegetable seller at Les Halles des Batignolles; factory worker making funeral wreaths. Then, she took a position as stable hand at a nearby livery. It seemed the best-fitting post to date, and people later recalled seeing her ride, despite having no formal training, with natural dexterity and skill. Some even said they had seen her perform handstands on horses’ backs. But she was still answerable to somebody and ruled by time. Marie-Clémentine took against authority and routine. Her very nature was in discordance with the role of emplo
yee, or at least that was how it seemed. Until, that is, a very unique employment opportunity presented itself.

  By the time Marie-Clémentine was approaching her fifteenth birthday in 1880, Paris was on the cusp of a golden era.52 The Exposition Universelle of 1878 had seen the capital reclaim its position as a great European city. For the first time in decades, politics appeared stable, while scientific and technological progress were fashioning a world which would have been unrecognisable to Madeleine’s forefathers back in Bessines. Industry was booming, communications improving and proliferating transport links expanding mental and geographical horizons as never before. Public telephones started appearing from the 1880s, electricity made it possible to illuminate a room with the mere flick of a switch, and improving literacy levels meant that newspaper circulation continued to rise.

  In practical terms, the upper and middle classes found that they now had money to spare once the cost of basic necessities had been met, and decadent department stores guaranteed that they never ran short of commodities on which to spend it. Mass consumerism was on the rise. But more than anything, whether they sought to distract themselves in their spare time or to colour the dull monotony of the working week, both classes craved entertainment. Paris’s flourishing leisure industry was quick to oblige. An eruption of café concerts, balls, music halls, theatres and sporting events ensured boredom had no place in the city.53

  Montmartre was already peppered with such entertainments, and they thrived in the 1880s. There were two dance halls on Marie-Clémentine’s street. In the evenings, they would come to life, bringing a tide of catchy melodies, jovial bachelors and happy-go-lucky girls in frothy skirts spilling out on to the streets in an effluence of pleasure. For indeed, Montmartre had two faces; during the day, much of it remained the quaint rustic haven which had first tempted Madeleine to settle there. But when the sun began to set, the windows of hundreds of entertainment venues lit up, twinkling seductively and drawing a nocturnal population of artists, prostitutes and anarchists out of hibernation. At night, Montmartre became the illuminated playground of Paris’s marginalised, its smoky pleasure palaces a forum for sharing grievances and ideas.