Renoir's Dancer

by Catherine Hewitt

  The very vocal succour of her influential friend Édouard Herriot certainly helped; support for the Cartel des Gauches was gathering momentum, and many of his devotees were convinced Herriot would again serve as prime minister. His was a powerful voice.

  In the meantime, Suzanne tried to stay focused and to persist in her work. In the spring of 1932, she travelled with Utter, Maurice and Mme Jacquinot to attend the opening of an exhibition they had been offered with their friend the Lyonnais sculptor Georges Salendre at the Galerie Moos in Geneva.

  The family planned to spend a few days in Switzerland. It had been some time since they had all taken such a trip together, but packing was an uncomplicated affair, particularly for Maurice and Suzanne, who gave little thought to clothes. Maurice had been given a brand-new marine blue suit and some beige summer trousers, and those were duly packed so that he might appear respectable; his stepfather was always mindful of the importance of appearances.42

  Utter drove the car and every time they spotted a poor or destitute native en route, he was made to pull over so that the wretch could be given some money. To Suzanne’s delight, for much of the trip Maurice seemed relatively content, absorbed in his new surroundings and happy to be fussed over.

  It proved a pleasant interlude, and afterwards the trio returned to France and prepared to spend the summer at Saint-Bernard, where they would be visited by friends.

  One of their closest acquaintances had exciting news to celebrate, too. In June, Édouard Herriot was re-elected prime minister. His victory had obvious benefits for Suzanne: now, she could boast the support of France’s head of government whenever she exhibited her work.

  But nothing could remedy the fact that Suzanne’s marriage was now in tatters. There was much tension and bad feeling to set aside when she painted Utter in a nostalgic portrait in the grounds of Saint-Bernard that summer. The picture was unique in Suzanne’s oeuvre. Unusually, she showed her subject outside, seated on a fallen chestnut tree with his dogs by his side. Something of the composition recalled traditional 19th-century portraiture, where property owners were frequently depicted on their rolling estates. Suzanne’s subject was dressed in loose-fitting summer clothes, and he filled his personal space. But for all that his bright blue eyes and dimpled chin offered a reminder of the man Suzanne had fallen in love with, Utter’s hairline was now receding and his waistline insulated with a notable belly. He was still, by his own self-appointment, the Lord of the Manor, but Suzanne showed his youth fading and his expression pensive and solemn. It was as much a statement of their withering love as it was a snapshot of Utter in his 40s.43

  Despite the grim financial climate and the degeneration of her marriage, Suzanne would not resign herself to taking a half-hearted approach to her career. She had another show at the Galerie Le Portique that year. Then, in October, there came an exciting opportunity: the Galerie Georges Petit agreed to mount a large retrospective of her work. It was to be organised by Mauricia Coquiot and it would be the most important exhibition of Suzanne’s painting to date.

  As the opening approached, Suzanne and Utter were full of hope and expectation. The show would display some of her major works, including Adam and Eve (1909), Joy of Life (1911) and André Utter and his Dogs (1932). Herriot had added a foreword to the catalogue, while the critic and art historian Claude Roger-Marx had published a book of her engravings, printed by the craftsman Daragnès, to complement the exhibition, copies of which Suzanne herself had made available for sale from the Avenue Junot since the summer.44 People even whispered that Prime Minister Herriot might attend the grand opening. Everything was set for a showstopping retrospective.

  On the day of the vernissage, the press were there in force. And as people wandered around the gallery, one question played on everybody’s minds: would the prime minister come?

  Time ticked by, visitors came and went, and the likelihood of a ministerial visit seemed increasingly remote. After all, the prime minister was due to catch a train to London for a meeting later that afternoon. But then suddenly, at 4pm, the gallery door swung open and in walked Herriot, unannounced and unhurried, ready to savour the work of his favourite châtelaine-cum-artist.45

  Approaching Suzanne, he took her warmly by the arm, his eyes sparkling with pleasure. Not a gesture was missed by the press. Suzanne proceeded to introduce him to her painter friend, Emilie Charmy. It was, one reporter commented, like a family reunion. Suzanne and Herriot were clearly old friends.

  Before long, a Cabinet official approached. ‘M. le Président? The train leaves in twelve minutes.’

  ‘Coming,’ Herriot muttered distractedly as he contemplated the canvas in front of him.

  ‘What a great artist,’ he murmured to himself.

  People noticed Suzanne’s eyes becoming watery behind the horn-rimmed spectacles she was now obliged to wear.

  ‘M. le Président, eight minutes.’

  Ignoring the prompt, Herriot turned to Suzanne. ‘So,’ he began playfully, ‘when will you do my portrait?’

  ‘M. le Président, the train!’

  And with that, Herriot was gone.

  Despite his presence, sales from the exhibition were disappointing and the book fared little better. But the publicity was like nothing Suzanne had ever experienced. That afternoon, time stood still and just for a moment, art and politics had shared the stage in perfect harmony.

  ‘Her work reflects a mounting progression, a lightening of the palette, a simplification,’ enthused René Barotte in L’Homme Libre. ‘She knows that great art is about making something from nothing.’ In years to come, the author continued, Valadon’s drawings and painting would, ‘in their pure truth, declare what a female painter was in our age of uncertainty, just one woman, it is true, but one worthy of being placed next to Lautrec and joining the great masters of yesteryear’.46

  The exhibition offered a triumphant account of Suzanne’s entire creative oeuvre. But that celebration of her life was framed by two unexpected deaths.

  Just before the show opened in September 1932, Suzanne learned of the passing of her first husband, Paul Mousis. Then in February 1933, a shock hit the Unholy Trinity when it was reported that Robert Pauwels, one of their principal buyers, had died having been afflicted with uraemia following the stress provoked by the financial climate. Both deaths had a profound effect on the Utter family in general, and on Suzanne in particular. One loss concluded an important chapter in her past; the other was to bring her current existence to a shuddering halt and have a life changing-impact on her entire future.

  CHAPTER 17

  Empty Chairs and Empty Tables

  Pisses pas dins lo potz, benleu ne’n beuràs l’aiga.

  (Don’t piss in the well, you might drink the water.)

  OLD LIMOUSIN PROVERB1

  Lucie Pauwels had always known her marriage to be one of real distinction. Robert Pauwels came from a well-regarded family of Belgian bankers. He was handsome, educated (he spoke several languages fluently), and enjoyed a pleasing array of hobbies, including motor cars, horses, botany and stuffed birds. Meanwhile, his social standing and keen appreciation of painting (specifically his purchasing power) had earned him a superlative reputation in the art world. M. Pauwels was Lucie’s proudest accessory. When he died aged 52, she lost the validation for her persona. ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she admitted.2

  Maurice was prompt in writing to express his heartfelt condolences. Lucie’s late husband was both ‘good’ and ‘intelligent’, and would be much missed, Maurice assured her.3

  Sentimental considerations aside, the departure of such a prominent buyer would have a profound impact on the Unholy Trinity. Maurice’s fortune was now assured, his painting receiving substantial investment from sources in France and abroad. But with Suzanne’s less commercial pictures, the loss of any single buyer was bound to hit her hard. Robert Pauwels’s death merely tightened her dependence on Maurice.

  Suzanne was also increasingly aware of a change in Maurice an
d it made her uncomfortable. He was showing a mounting hunger for religion. Maurice now clung greedily to any expression of faith his daily life led him to encounter: the daughter of the concierge at 12, Rue Cortot embarking on her catechism, discussions with Mme Jacquinot, the glimpse of the little church from his window at Saint-Bernard, or even simply meditating on his own long-held reverence for Joan of Arc.4

  Such a craving for religion bewildered Suzanne. It was an area of life in which she possessed little wisdom to be able to guide her son, and too much suspicion to do so dispassionately. When Maurice was at Saint-Bernard, Suzanne let him attend Mass uninhibited. Mme Jacquinot was happy to escort him and she was struck by how Maurice would invariably approach the vicar after the service to offer a warm greeting. Once, she was amazed to see Maurice hand over a small gouache of the church as a gift. She supervised him round the clock, yet she had not even noticed him creating it.

  Through discussion with her charge, Mme Jacquinot learned that Maurice had not been baptised. He believed himself inhabited by a demon, he said. If he were baptised, Mme Jacquinot counselled him gently as she walked him back to the château, his inner turmoil would be over.

  ‘I don’t know what it is I have up here,’ he lamented, drumming his finger on his temple.5

  It was after another of Maurice’s escapades that things came to a head. Climbing through a skylight, he managed to access Suzanne’s dressing table where he discovered a bottle of Dubonnet and drained the contents. When Mme Jacquinot found him, he was so intoxicated that she genuinely feared for his well-being. She took him back to his room and immediately telephoned Suzanne in Paris, urging that a doctor be sent. Suzanne replied that alerting an authority was neither desirable nor necessary. By the time she reached him, Maurice had indeed recovered. But now he had just one thing on his mind: ‘Mme Jacquinot is right,’ he told his mother, ‘I must be baptised, I will not be tormented by this demon anymore.’

  ‘Very well, my son,’ Suzanne sighed. ‘We will get you baptised.’

  As Maurice prepared to take the holy sacrament and Utter found comfort in other women’s arms, Suzanne sought solace in her painting. Her oeuvre was now primarily taken up with flower studies. Blossoms and blooms provided the colours and forms she craved, and demanded nothing in return. They also made economic models when funds were scarce. The 1930s saw her gradually simplifying her flower pieces, choosing less elaborate arrangements, reducing them to their essential qualities, always defining her elements with bold outlines.6

  However, Suzanne’s energy was now flagging and money increasingly hard-won (or too easily spent). Early in 1933, she finally conceded to exhibit with Mme Camax-Zoegger’s Société des Femmes Artistes Modernes at the Maison de France. Though her absence at the group’s show the previous year had been keenly felt by critics, Suzanne never enjoyed having to swallow her pride.7 That women she respected such as Emilie Charmy and Mme Camax-Zoegger herself were participating sweetened a potentially bitter pill. Suzanne also exhibited at the Musée Galliera that spring and had work accepted to the Musée du Luxembourg.8 But as ever, sales of her paintings were underwhelming. More alarmingly, she was finding she had less energy to create at the rate she once could.

  Though the responsibility of Maurice and the torturous degradation of her marriage were weighty pressures, neither one was new. Still, for some reason, she now felt especially tired, so very tired, as though every last drop of energy had been drained, to the point where she could scarcely remember what it was to feel alive and invigorated. On many days, all she craved was a little rest.

  The 8th of June 1933 would be remembered in the art world as the date 49-year-old Maurice Utrillo finally got baptised in a decorous ceremony in Lyon.9 However, Montmartre gossip recounted another story, whereby Maurice had gone out on an alcohol-fuelled evening with the son of a Doctor Laforêt, into whose care Suzanne had entrusted him while she was away and there were no domestic staff at the château to supervise him. It was said that at first light of day, Maurice had stumbled into a little church in Bron, asking to be baptised. On both accounts of his alleged performance of the rite of passage, it was whispered that no formal proof existed and people speculated that Suzanne might be the cause of Maurice’s uncertain religious status. Some even held that she had led him to believe that he was already baptised, making such a ceremony in his late 40s unnecessary.10

  Suzanne certainly had little time for piety, but she had too many of her own concerns to sabotage her son’s spiritual pilgrimage. She and Utter were now on the point of separation. Utter wanted to cease living as husband and wife. For Suzanne’s part, however much she resented his affairs and the agonising demise of her marriage, she could not reconcile herself to thinking of Utter as anything other than her husband. And everywhere she went, there were memories of the man who no longer wished to be with her. Visits to Saint-Bernard were especially painful. The château was an edifice to a happiness that was no more, a home bought in the glorious springtime of love, now abandoned in a winter tainted by contempt. No longer able to bear the heartache, Suzanne decided she would not return to Saint-Bernard as usual that summer – in fact, she vowed she would never go there again. ‘He [Utter] has poisoned the well,’ she told friends.11

  Financial pressures only made the emotional torture harder to endure. It was not that money had stopped flowing; Suzanne’s own paintings still brought some profit and Maurice’s sales provided a more reliable income. But with his repeated stays in clinics and need for round-the-clock supervision, Maurice’s care was costly. Then after years of flamboyant living, Suzanne had lost her gauge on moderation. Her benevolence towards friends and acquaintances was another substantial outlay. On 10 July 1933, she was forced to borrow 20,000 francs from her contact M. Bellier, on the understanding that she would repay the loan in full after three months.12 Of course, her benefactor would need some form of guarantee. Suzanne offered three of Maurice’s paintings, all of churches. It was not the first time she had used the trio’s artwork to secure funds in a hurry. But one of the pictures she now chose was an especially poignant canvas to compromise: the study of the little church in Bessines.

  Suzanne was pushed to the limit; there was no place for sentimentality under such circumstances. She was grappling to stay afloat. Life’s twists and turns had carried her to a miserable destination.

  Fate should have known better than to try such a sleight of hand on a woman like Lucie Pauwels. Once the initial shock of her husband’s death had passed, Lucie scheduled a serious council of war with fortune. Amid the upset of M. Pauwels’s death, she had returned to the property she owned in her native Angoulême, ‘La Doulce France’, where she lived with a pair of friends, also widows. The situation was hardly ideal, but she could not yet bring herself to make her permanent home in Paris, where she had lived with her husband for so long. Most of all, Lucie was anxious about her future.13

  ‘I was not old but I wasn’t young,’ she conceded candidly, ‘and although I wasn’t thinking about another husband I wondered what the future would bring.’14

  Ever pragmatic, Lucie decided to take matters into her own hands. From a friend, she learned there to be a reputed clairvoyant working just across from where she had lived in Paris. Lucie had always regarded the occult with suspicion, but now she was desperate to claw back control. A reading was scheduled, during which the clairvoyant explained she would use palmistry and cards to provide Lucie with a forecast. The information was revelatory.15

  Lucie was assured that in two years’ time, she would be married again – and that her next marriage would be with ‘one of the greatest men in all of France’. ‘You will look after him as one would a child,’ the clairvoyant continued.16

  Lucie was incredulous but intrigued. She sought a second mystic’s guidance and the forecast reiterated and supplemented the first: ‘With this man, you will be in the public eye – one might even say famous.’ Then came the climax: ‘You already know him and he loves you in silence.’17

/>   Lucie scoured her memory. The Pauwelses were a social couple, and Lucie could think of several eligible men in their acquaintance whom she suspected might harbour amorous feelings. But to no avail: she could not place her mysterious admirer.18

  Meanwhile, Lucie remained in close and regular contact with the Unholy Trinity. She and Maurice continued to write to each other, sending either letters or a friendly postcard, like the one Maurice wrote from Saint-Bernard on 18 September 1933, to offer a warm greeting until he could see Lucie in person.19 Word also had it in Montmartre that Utter was good-naturedly helping Lucie to get her affairs in order, M. Pauwels having left business matters unresolved.20

  For all that the Butte gossiped about Utter’s motivations whenever he behaved kindly towards a woman, his interest lay elsewhere than with Lucie Pauwels. In fact, it was now Suzanne who was raising eyebrows, due to a new acquaintance she had formed. The man in question was an artist, of striking appearance and no more than half her age. But more scandalously, Suzanne’s new companion was not just another bohemian from Montmartre – he was a prince.

  Gazi Igna Ghirei originated from the Crimean peninsula, where it was said that his father was a prince descended from Genghis Khan. When the Bolshevik revolution took place in 1917, Gazi, like so many others, fled his home. He went to study art in Naples. Having gleaned a wealth of knowledge from the Neapolitan masters, he arrived in Paris in 1920 eager to immerse himself in French artistic life. He gravitated first towards the Latin Quarter, where he frequented the artistic haunts of Montparnasse. And through the network of painters, he encountered Suzanne.21

  Stocky with square shoulders, dark features, bright eyes and a bushy moustache, Gazi was just the type of man Suzanne had always been drawn to in her youth. Peter de Polnay, who lived on the Butte, vividly remembered Gazi.22 The ‘prince’ always wore a soft hat marked with grease stains, the rim of which he would touch lightly with his equally ubiquitous cane by way of salute whenever he greeted people. Gazi’s repertoire of accessories was not complete without his shopping bag, which seemed to go with him wherever he went. He was an otherworldly creature, de Polnay recalled, an old soul with a sage’s wisdom and an unsettling gift of prescience.