Renoir's Dancer

by Catherine Hewitt

However, when it was concluded that she was referring to her role in Dance in the Country, none of her audience seemed to recall that Dance at Bougival was also originally titled Dance in the Country, first when it was deposited with dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in April 1883 and then again in the dealer’s records in 1891.72 Moreover, when Dance at Bougival was used to illustrate model Paul Lhote’s short story, Mademoiselle Zélia, in 1883, it accompanied the description of a young female dancer ‘waltzing, deliciously abandoned in the arms of a fair-haired man with the air of an oarsman’ – an expression repeated by Maria.73 The ‘composition at Bougival’ which Maria also spoke of having posed for could refer to any number of works inspired by the time Renoir spent painting there in the summer of 1882.74 Either way, anyone acquainted with Renoir’s lover or his model could see that the figure in Dance in the Country was not Maria. And there was another difference between the three dance canvases, too. In Dance in the City and Dance at Bougival – the two works depicting Maria – the face and, notably, the eyes of the male character were almost entirely concealed. Like a Rembrandtian self-portrait, Renoir made his male dancer’s identity uncertain, malleable – illicit. The painter could almost imagine his own face into the pictures with Maria.

  One day, Maria was at home and had become so engrossed in the drawing she was working on that she had lost all sense of time. She was due for one of Renoir’s sittings. When she failed to appear, Renoir set out to find her, and called at her home. The scene he found came as a total shock: his model was drawing – and with assurance. ‘You too,’ he exclaimed, ‘and you hide it!’75 But he offered no further critique or encouragement.

  Maria was unfazed. She could feel when a drawing was good. As a model and budding artist, Maria could not fail to respect her employer, but in later years, she gained the confidence to critique him in her turn. She called him le peintre à la tomate, an insult many took to signify the ‘tomato sauce’ (i.e. superficial) painter.76 But the expression, which could also be understood as ‘the painter with the tomato’, might simultaneously have been a snide allusion to the rosy complexion and round-faced person of Aline. He was, Maria said, a ‘fine painter’, but ‘all brushes’ and ‘no heart’.77 Besides, Renoir’s conviction that a woman’s purpose was to please the eye and keep the home was not a view she could tolerate for long.78 In any case, by the spring of 1883, when Renoir finally submitted his finished dance canvases to Durand-Ruel, Maria had a more pressing concern. She had just made her own discovery: she was pregnant.

  CHAPTER 6

  Not Just a Pretty Face

  Ce que se vei ne po pà se cochà.

  (You can’t hide what everyone can see.)

  OLD LIMOUSIN PROVERB1

  The stigma attached to falling pregnant outside marriage had altered little since Madeleine had given birth to Maria eighteen years earlier. The devastating label fille-mère (girl-mother) was applied to a female who found herself in such a predicament.2 ‘No, we are not married,’ mother of two Gervaise admits in Émile Zola’s novel L’Assommoir (1877), published just five years before. ‘I don’t try to hide it,’ she declares.3 All the same, Zola has his antiheroine draw closer to her listener to say it.

  The spread of more varied forms of contraception brought some assurance.4 From the 1880s, latex condoms were beginning to replace more primitive versions made of sheep or pig gut. But they were not yet widely used. The standard contraceptives remained coitus interruptus, the vaginal sponge or the douche. But whichever method was used, all required foresight or swift reparatory action – neither of which harmonised with Montmartre’s prevalent mood of carefree living and spontaneity.

  In the circles Maria was mixing in, premarital pregnancy was considered, at best, a costly inconvenience. At its most extreme, it was a financial wound and an indelible social blight which could destroy a girl’s chance of making a good marriage – or indeed any marriage at all.

  But when news of Maria’s dilemma was leaked on the Butte, the question on everyone’s lips was not what the possible repercussions of the pregnancy might be but rather: who was its author? And that was a far more opaque matter.

  It could only be Miguel Utrillo, many Montmartrois reasoned. The pair were rarely apart. Why, just months before, Maria had been seen enthusiastically applauding the lecture Miguel had given at Le Chat Noir on the Bal del Ciri, a Catalan candle dance.5 He had spoken eloquently on the dance and associated folklore, sung, and even broken into an empassioned demonstration of the rapid footwork involved, with its contrapas and sardanas. Maria had been mesmerised and had often been heard to eulogise the evening since. More ominously, Miguel had recently left Paris to work abroad, embarking on an extensive tour of Belgium, Germany, Bulgaria, Russia and Spain.6 For cynics, no further evidence was required; those were indisputably the actions of a man fleeing responsibility, anxious to safeguard his family name.

  However, others were convinced that Renoir was the father. Everyone had heard the rumours, and the opportunities for business to blossom into pleasure would have been all the greater as Renoir raced to complete his Dance at Bougival in time for the exhibition at the Dowdeswell Gallery in London that April. Eventually, the painting had arrived for the show – five days late.7 (By way of evidence of an ongoing relationship, it would subsequently be said that when Renoir and Lhote travelled to Guernsey later that year, Maria accompanied them and was all set to stay until word reached the party that Aline was on her way to join them – whereupon Renoir hastily ordered his model to return to France.8 The fact that Maria was heavily pregnant at the time did nothing to dissuade purveyors of the myth, which soon became woven into the rich tapestry of Montmartre’s social history. As if to endorse the story, Renoir’s Seated Bather (1883–1884), which was said to have been inspired by studies the artist completed during his stay on the island, bore an uncanny resemblance to Maria.9)

  Yet a third school of thought subscribed to the theory that Puvis de Chavannes was the baby’s father. The painter’s ponderous working method was legendary. His eyes would roam Maria’s scantily clad body for longer than many younger artists. And how often time had been shown to increase the chances of sexual liaisons – and misdemeanours.

  But there was another, more sinister possibility, too. While the Sunday afternoon dances at the Moulin de la Galette were cheerful, good-humoured affairs, on Monday nights, women and girls were admitted free of charge, and as a result, on those evenings the venue transformed into the playground of a far less salubrious crowd.10 This included a good helping of local drunks, thieves and hooligans. Rumour had it that one night, Maria had ventured out to one of these events when there was a drunken brawl. The music stopped, the lights went out briefly, someone pulled out a knife and people screamed. Terrified, Maria fell into the arms of the lecherous, alcoholic insurance clerk and amateur painter, Adrien Boissy. In the confusion, she found herself accompanying him home. A drink was poured, and then another, and before long, the clear division between right and wrong started to blur. Boissy’s embraces became more urgent. He seemed deaf to Maria’s objections, oblivious to her struggles. Then it was over. The child Maria now carried was the rotten fruit of a sickening violation, several locals maintained. That the very sight of Boissy around Montmartre seemed to inspire virulent animosity in the usually placid Madeleine only reinforced the story’s likelihood.11

  Then to the distinctive verses of prime suspects was added a predictable chorus of various Montmartrois, artists and local riffraff who could all be potential fathers.

  Maria’s standard response when questioned directly was an enigmatic ‘It could be’ or ‘I hope so’.12 She remained elusive – studiously so. Ultimately, no one on the Butte could say for sure who the child’s father was. Some suspected that Maria herself may have been uncertain. She was once heard to rebuff the usual question with the candid reply: ‘I’ve never been able to decide.’13

  In any case, Maria had a more concerning problem to tackle. Paris’s arts scene may have been turning out a new
generation of forward-thinking painters, but few would seriously consider a girl swollen with pregnancy to model their Madonnas or their nubile sea nymphs. Without a source of income from outside, Maria’s pregnancy would cost her and Madeleine dear. But there was no choice. And once Maria was finally forced to accept that she had become unemployable, she had her drawing to distract her attention.

  Maria often destroyed her artwork, but that year, she did something unprecedented: she drew her own self-portrait, and she kept the finished piece.

  It was a poignant moment to carry out such a close inspection of the self. As Maria looked into the mirror, the face she saw staring back was not Renoir’s blushing dancer with her sweet smile and rosy lips; nor was it the lofty, statuesque muse who had posed so elegantly for Puvis. For once, she was not playing the role assigned to her by a man; she was being herself.

  In a near monochrome palette of cool blues and greens with mere highlights of pink and yellow, Maria recorded what she saw with unnerving honesty. With her hair centre-parted and swept back severely off her face, her plain, sombre dress and natural complexion rejected artifice, while her off-centre framing reflected the aesthetic innovations of the art world around her. Considerable industry was required to get the naturally smooth texture of pastel to form the sharp contours of her cheek and jaw. Combined with her unsmiling expression, the effect was dramatic, disconcerting – devastating.

  Critics subsequently described the dour-looking girl depicted as pugnacious and proud. Certainly, for an eighteen-year-old who had based a career on her appearance, Maria made surprisingly little effort to flatter herself. Her defiant expression and naturally upturned lip seemed instantly to challenge her viewer, as her big blue eyes fixed them with a sideways look, at once suspicious and sad; Maria wore the defensive mask of a girl who had already seen too much of the world. ‘I paint people in order to know them,’ Maria later explained.14 The drawing was not an exercise in self-glorification for the benefit of others; it was a curious, quasiscientific exploration of the woman she was becoming, designed to satisfy no one but Maria. The artist was not looking critically at the viewer; Maria was looking critically at herself.

  As Maria’s pastel swept across her paper, the very definition of art was being reassessed, the context in which it was consumed changing. That year had witnessed some dramatic shifts and exciting new beginnings. At the end of April 1883, the art world had lost Édouard Manet, the pioneer who had brought about a sea change in Western art and inspired a whole generation of enthusiastic young artists. The Impressionists, who had once seemed such a coherent and redoubtable group, had disbanded and as if to reiterate their autonomy, dealer Paul Durand-Ruel mounted a series of one-man shows at his gallery during the course of 1883. Even the long-standing dissatisfaction with the Salon was starting to effect tangible change. At the end of 1880, the everyday running of the Salon was finally placed in the hands of the artists, and no longer the state.15 In the event, the jury proved just as rigorous in its selection process, but the very fact that artists had been empowered heralded change and possibility. The 1863 Salon des Réfusés, where all the works rejected by the official Salon jury could be viewed separately, had already offered a taste of the kind of creative freedom many craved, and demonstrated that taste was diversifying. Now, the concept of an organisation which united independent artists and was entirely free of state control was no longer just a utopian dream; discussions were already under way. Then there was the Brussels group, Les XX, a newly formed organisation of twenty Belgian painters, which also showcased the work of twenty additional avant-garde artists from abroad in its yearly exhibitions. Suddenly, the ceiling on what was realistic and possible for a marginalised talent like Maria appeared less stable. For the first time ever, it was not a preordained fact that her drawings should have no life or impact outside her own four walls. Significantly, from that year she fell pregnant, Maria started keeping more and more of her works.

  However, if Maria stood to be affected by the changes taking place in the art world outside, they were of little consequence to Madeleine. Perpetually bewildered by her daughter’s creative yearnings, Madeleine’s requirements were far more elementary. Her aspirations seldom extended beyond basic necessities. As the pregnancy advanced, Maria used her time to capture the soon-to-be grandmother in a chalk-and-pencil study. The business of sitting still for protracted periods did not come naturally to Madeleine, who had been taught to measure self-worth by industry. In her experience, only purposeful activity yielded results. But she sat and obliged her daughter’s whims.

  Positioned close to her mother, Maria’s eyes darted between sitter and study as her red and white chalk rasped across the paper to fix Madeleine’s sceptical expression and timeworn face in a brutally honest profile portrait. Every wrinkle on her mother’s forehead was documented, each fold of skin around her eyes patiently recorded. Though neither had foreseen it, by the time the baby was due, circumstance had brought Maria and Madeleine to know each other more intimately than many mothers and daughters would in a whole lifetime.

  While Maria’s unplanned pregnancy was hardly desirable, Madeleine had retained a peasant’s pragmatism when it came to life’s unexpected twists. There seemed little value continually chastising her daughter for an act already committed, and one which was, in any case, impossible to repair. Besides, Madeleine had fallen into the same trap herself. She knew the struggle of raising a child alone would be penance enough. The most practical course of action now was to prepare for the baby’s arrival.

  By the time Maria’s due date approached that Christmas, the mother and daughter had moved to a flat in the Rue Poteau.16 It was a dingy street, higher up the hill of Montmartre, but it was at least removed from the hustle and bustle of the noisy Boulevard de Rochechouart.

  That December, the seasonal festivities were overshadowed by the anticipation of Maria’s imminent travail. It was just as well that the mother and daughter were well-prepared; no sooner had the Christmas celebrations commenced than Maria’s contractions began.

  The women never spoke in detail about the delivery, but word had it that it was an extremely difficult labour. Maria was said to have suffered terribly and fallen unconscious once the child was delivered.17 Fortunately, Madeleine had had the foresight to ensure that there was an experienced midwife on hand, 57-year-old Celinie Elisa Durrez, who was able to oversee the proceedings. The baby finally appeared at one o’clock in the afternoon on 26 December. It was a boy.

  Word later reached Maria that the same night, Adrien Boissy was found collapsed on the floor of the Lapin Agile, having bought rounds of drinks in honour of the birth and consumed more than his fair share into the bargain. He subsequently made himself scarce in Maria’s life.18

  On 29 December 1883, the child was registered. Maria was careful not to admit her real profession and offer information which might endorse further social opprobrium. She described herself as a more respectable ‘seamstress’. Like her own birth certificate, the document bore the damning qualification ‘father unknown’. Maria called her little boy Maurice.

  Maurice was not Madeleine’s first grandchild. Maria’s sister, Marie-Alix, had given birth to a daughter, Marie-Lucienne, shortly after her marriage nearly ten years ago. But with Marie-Alix married and living at a distance, there was no question of Madeleine playing the hands-on role that was now required of her. The family’s new composition called for a reassessment of each member’s duties and responsibilities.

  Madeleine was now in her 50s, and even if there had still been a substantial working life ahead of her, both women knew that of the two of them, Maria stood to earn considerably more once she could resume modelling. She was in demand. ‘I’m stuck in Paris,’ Renoir complained to Monet just weeks after Maria gave birth and was consequently indisposed, ‘where I’m bored to death and running after the unobtainable model, but I’m a painter of figures! Alas! – It’s very pleasant sometimes, but not when the figures you find are not to your taste.
’19 Maria’s pre-pregnancy physique and professionalism were not easily come by; she could command respectable prices now. With Madeleine looking after the baby, Maria would also save on childcare expenses. It was the kind of strategic use of family resources which had been adopted by Limousin peasants for centuries, an approach that prioritised the welfare of the group over that of the individual.

  The new arrangement seemed to suit all parties. But if it was primarily implemented for practical reasons, it also satisfied deeper, spiritual needs. Madeleine’s thinking was permeated by the rural mentality that favoured sons, and having lost her own, she found that Maurice filled an aching hole. He offered her a second chance to live the experience she thought she had lost. At last, she could be a mother to a son, and without the full weight of responsibility and pressure to earn experienced by young parents. She could savour that indulgence unique to grandparents of being able to truly enjoy her grandson. And Maria was still beautiful. Even with the child, she could yet ensnare a husband – and security for them all – if she were back in circulation in Montmartre society.

  Maria was content too. She had always oscillated between extremes, alternately throwing herself passionately into each new experience and then withdrawing to study the world around her objectively with a quizzical, unforgiving eye. The delicate tenderness of motherhood had no natural resonance for her. Her own relationship with her mother was neither demonstrative nor openly affectionate. The doting mother saw no imperfections; when Maria drew figures, she saw nothing else. The miniature body which suckled her breast was curious and strange, a mass of tiny, writhing limbs, a face made wrinkled and red through howling. But the adoring gazes and gestures she seemed unable to summon, the inane cooing, appeared to come naturally to Madeleine, in whom Maurice brought out a whole new side. So as soon as she was able, Maria left Madeleine and Maurice and returned to work, content that Madeleine would manage the family’s private life at home, while she would assume the masculine role as main breadwinner. And to Maria’s mind, circulating in the public sphere encompassed a return to the evening repertoire of parties and café visits which had formed such an intrinsic part of her routine before she became a mother.