The Bugatti Queen

by Miranda Seymour

  In the summer of 1914 a solitary drum called the harvesters of Aunay to drop their scythes and return to the town hall, to be told their military duties. Lucien, not, perhaps, sorry to be given a reason to escape from a dutiful life as the oldest male in the family, kissed his mother goodbye and told her not to worry. Everybody said that it would be a short war. He expected to be home by Christmas. A year later he had not returned.

  In 1915 Alexandrine Delangle decided to leave Aunay and its sad memories behind her. Perhaps she wanted to be nearer to Jean Bernard, the man she lived with ‘en concubinage’, as the French saying goes, in later life. (They never married, although she called herself by his name. Neighbours discovered the truth only from her gravestone.) She may have grown weary herself of those endless cornfields, the screech of rooks, the heavy odour of the smothering autumn carpet of manure. Independently, she rented and then bought a small house in a secluded part of Jean Bernard’s village, Sainte-Mesme, just to the southwest of Paris; later, she acquired a larger second home on the village’s main street. Behind this second house, formerly a café, Alexandrine thriftily converted a fertile half-acre of ground into a vegetable plot, producing beans and marrows for the city markets.

  The landscape of Sainte-Mesme has not changed much. Its principal features are the luxuriant woods which separate it, to the east, from the plain of the Beauce, and the pale blockade of a disused cotton factory which had once brought prosperity to the village but which, by the time the Delangle family settled there, had become a summer school for young missionaries. Standing guard in miniature effigy over a well at the edge of a small path in the centre of the village, Sainte-Mesme’s medieval persecutor still wields his wooden axe above a pious sister’s head (her sacrifice allegedly brought water to the village, and thus, in due course, the mills for its cotton industry). It has, like many French villages, an air of languor bordering on torpidity in the afternoons when shutters mask the housefronts and shadows shrink back from the vacant street.

  This, in the year 1916, was still the home of Hélène Delangle, a slight, strongly built girl with a mop of brown curls, big blue eyes and an enormous, heart-stopping grin.

  In January 1916 Ettore Bugatti’s younger brother Rembrandt returned from church to his modest white studio room on rue Joseph-Bara, not far from the Jardin du Luxembourg. At thirty-one, he had already made his reputation. He was only twenty-five when he received the Légion d’Honneur for his arrestingly graceful studies of animals in bronze. Friends who had seen Rembrandt sitting in the cages of panthers at the Jardin des Plantes or modelling the elephants at Antwerp zoo joked that he preferred such wild company to their own. Few of them, however, understood the anguish Rembrandt felt when, in the year that war broke out, the elephants of Antwerp and the panthers and tigers of the Jardin des Plantes were all destroyed to save the cost of feeding them. To a young man of fragile psyche, this was a more painful loss than the abrupt closure of the Hebrard gallery which had always represented him. Loss of commissions meant nothing to Rembrandt; he had lived for years on the verge of destitution.

  Returning to Paris from Antwerp in 1915, Rembrandt had found his brother Ettore established in style at the Grand Hotel on the rue Scribe, having decided that he could not bear to spend the war in a German province, with his workshops in Alsace on France’s eastern border being used to assist a German victory.* An old friend, Count Zeppelin, had enabled Ettore to make his escape; now, hankering for the country he thought of as home, Ettore had returned to France. Offered a commission by the military to design aero engines, he was full of optimism; all he needed was the space in which to work. Rembrandt, when asked to use his influence with one of his closest friends and chief patron, the Duc de Guiche, was able to help. A generous scientifically minded aristocrat who inspired Proust’s portrait of Robert de Saint-Loup, Armand de Guiche kept a fully equipped laboratory and workshop in the industrial Levallois district to the northwest of Paris and this was immediately placed at Ettore’s disposal.

  Rembrandt Bugatti – seen here with one of the statuettes he modelled from life at the Antwerp menagerie.

  Ettore, absorbed in designing a powerful new engine, had little time to spare for his quiet, elusive brother. Guilt may have played some part; Barbara Bolzoni, a beautiful young Milanese operasinger to whom Rembrandt was once engaged, had chosen to marry Ettore instead. By 1915, the couple had two daughters and a six-year-old son, Gianoberto (Jean). Rembrandt had never ceased to love her, although he was too gentle to bear ill-will towards his brother.

  His unhappiness had been apparent for some time to the artists Modigliani, Delaunay, Utrillo and Picasso, who thought of themselves as being Rembrandt’s closest friends. They were aware that he had ceased to make any effort to see them by the end of 1915. There was talk of a broken love affair. Working on a crucifixion for de Guiche in these final months, the sculptor had attempted to nail the young Neapolitan model to the cross, an action entirely out of character in such a kind-hearted man.

  On 8 January Rembrandt Bugatti closed the door of his studio, filled the cracks, shut the windows and placed two letters neatly on the table. One of the two was addressed to ‘Ettorino’ and signed ‘Pempa’, the nickname by which Ettore had known his younger brother since their youth. Its contents are not known. After turning on the gas he lay down on the bed, the medal of the Légion d’Honneur in his buttonhole, a bunch of Sunday violets clasped in his hands. The neighbours who called for an ambulance were too late: he died of asphyxiation before reaching the hospital.

  Rembrandt Bugatti was known to have been deeply religious and, despite his suicide, arrangements were made for a church service to be held at the Madeleine and for his body to be given provisional burial at Père Lachaise until it could be taken to the Bugatti family tomb in Milan. Ettore, who had just signed a contract with the Italian firm of Diatto and who was on the verge of accepting a larger, more important commission to develop his aero-engine for American use, must surely have felt some responsibility for the tragedy. Their father Carlo had become immersed in his work as the wartime mayor of Pierrefonds, but Ettore, having gratefully used Rembrandt’s introduction to Armand de Guiche, had found no time to worry over his brother’s evident despair. To a close friend, Gabriel Espanet, Ettore wrote now of his sense of devastating loss. On the base of Rembrandt’s final work in bronze, The Lion and the Snake, he inscribed the words: ‘The last work of my brother’, and added, with his own signature, the date of death. The newspapers, muted in their tributes, quickly forgot the brilliant young Italian’s death in their rush to honour a fallen automobile hero, Georges Boillot, shot down in an air-battle that April. Ettore decided to make compensation for their deficiency. He may have been making peace with himself when, in the years after the war, he set about creating a museum for Rembrandt’s work on the Alsace estate at Molsheim to which he had returned. The Bugatti Royale, Ettore’s favourite of his own designs, would carry on its gleaming seven-foot long bonnet the mascot of a silver elephant. It had been modelled by Rembrandt as his homage to the slaughtered inmates of the Antwerp zoo where he spent his calmest hours.2

  Ettore Bugatti

  In Paris, in 1916, the government decided to end the presentation of death announcements by post; the effects had proved too traumatic, the agony of suspense too great, when every visit by the postman became an occasion for dread, with families clinging to each other for support in the doorways as they saw a black-bordered envelope being withdrawn and slowly carried towards a still unknown destination. Instead, in 1916, the authorities decided to communicate bad news in a more discreet fashion; pairs of soberly dressed ladies were recruited to deliver the message in person and, if required, stay to offer advice and comfort.

  Such thoughtfulness could not, for practical reasons, be extended to families living in the smaller towns of France, less still, to its thousands of villages and hamlets.

  In 1916, 169,000 French conscripts died in the struggle to prevent German troops from taking the ci
ty of Verdun and marching south towards Paris. Lucien Delangle was in one of the last batches, sent out on the orders of Pétain, ‘the hero of Verdun’, to hold the grimly named Dead Man’s Hill. The defence was successful. Twenty-one-year-old Lucien Delangle, however, was killed, shot or blown to pieces – the body was not identified – on 28 May.

  This was the news which the postman brought to the Delangle household at Sainte-Mesme, sometime that summer.

  THE DANCER

  4

  PARIS

  ‘I’ve cut my dress, my slip, my hair: what next?’

  CAPTION TO A CARTOON IN LE JOURNAL, 1919

  Hélène was sixteen when her brother Lucien died. She spoke of him rarely after this, and only to the closest of her friends.

  At some point now, well before the age of twenty, Hélène Delangle left home to make a new life for herself in Paris. Asked by interviewers in later life to tell them how it was that she survived, she always laughed and promised an answer. ‘It’s a secret,’ she repeated, ‘but I might have time to tell you, soon!’

  She never did.

  From 1918 until 1928, Hélène occupied a series of rented rooms just off the Avenue des Ternes, of the sort in which the young Jean Rhys was living at much the same time, and in equally straitened circumstances.

  The bed was large and comfortable, covered with an imitation satin quilt of faded pink. There was a wardrobe without a looking-glass, a red plush sofa and – opposite the bed and reflecting it – a very spotted mirror in a gilt frame.

  The ledge under the mirror was strewn with [Julia’s] toilet things – an untidy assortment of boxes of rouge, powder, and make-up for the eyes. At the farther end of it stood an unframed oil-painting of a half-empty bottle of red wine, a knife, and a piece of Gruyère cheese, signed ‘J. Grykho, 1923’. It had probably been left in payment of a debt.1

  A lodging of this sort was easily found. War widows were not, on the whole, fussy about the private lives of their tenants, so long as the modest rent came in. An attic room, unheated and without a water supply, cost little, and a midday meal was often included. Hélène’s landladies were even prepared to overlook the two snappy little shih-tzus she acquired shortly after leaving Sainte-Mesme, and which always slept on her bed. During the first years of independence in a city where she knew nobody, they made welcome companions.

  An early photograph from the trunk of memorabilia shows Hélène leaning back in a large armchair, smiling at the photographer and making the most of her beautiful, lively eyes. Her hands are neatly folded. She couldn’t look more demure; all that is missing are a pair of the cat-fur mittens sold by pharmacists to an army of pretty, underfed young girls who shivered away the bitter months of winter in damp garrets, while the Seine performed its annual metamorphosis, reaching icy fingers into the city as it spilled over its banks.

  She might be only nineteen or twenty in this photograph. She isn’t at all well-off. Look closer, at the antimacassar draped on the back of the chair, the tattered wallpaper, the row of unframed prints, the shabby curtain. You can almost smell the cabbage soup being boiled up in the kitchen below street-level, five storeys down.

  Hélène in her first flat.

  These were the years when Hélène kept herself by working as a model, striking attitudes for the naughty French photographs which were sold in batches of six or ten to eager tourists, slipped under the counter in an unmarked envelope. One has survived, showing her draped in a length of gauze, an arm locked behind her head to accentuate the lifted roundness of an exposed breast. Look at the hand on her stomach and you can see that her fingers are saucily twitching the gauze aside to reveal a hint of what is supposed to be hidden from view. This isn’t, we can be certain, the first time she has performed such work.

  The man who may have been Hélène’s first lover and whom she photographed, for a joke, while he was taking a bath, was René Carrère, an artist whose serious work was subsidized by sexy drawings which were published as postcards and used to advertise music-hall revues. One card which has survived shows a mildly sinister Don Juan sheltering a pretty naked girl under his cape. Don Juan bears a striking resemblance to René Carrère. The girl has a body very like that of Hélène Delangle.

  Carrère, with his connections in the theatre world, was a man who might well have advised his young model-mistress to get herself some training as a dancer. This, for an athletic girl with plenty of stamina, a pretty face and a good sense of balance, was one of the easiest semi-respectable ways to make a living in the post-war years. Paris had always been in love with dancing, long before the days when La Goulue first kicked up her legs in split knickers at the Moulin Rouge and Loie Fuller swirled her radiant chiffon veils. La Goulue was out of fashion and working for a circus by 1920, but Loie was giving a new performance at the Gaumont Palace, Lys de la Vie, while Isadora Duncan took time off from interpreting the music of Chopin, Brahms and Beethoven in barefoot performances of unforgettable intensity, to strut the tango with her latest lover in a Montmartre nightclub. Dancing had kept up the spirits of Parisians throughout the war; in 1920, new music halls competed against hastily renovated old friends in the struggle to meet an ever-growing demand for huge, spectacular shows. Each promised more gorgeous girls, more nudity and more lavish expense, than the last.

  René Carrère’s signed theatre postcard of Don Juan and a victim.

  Hélène may have earned her rent and the money which bought her first car, a Citroën she nicknamed Maisie, by working, dark curls hidden under a helmet of bleached horsehair, in one of the chorus lines at Concert Mayol or the Ba-Ta-Clan. Somehow, she had also acquired some formal ballet training. The poses which she struck for publicity shots a few years later are easily analysed; ballet critics who have examined them are able to see, as I cannot, the way she presents a dance position, the way she angles her hips, the way she manages her pointework and tilts her head. They can study the pointe shoes – no box in the toe for protection and a shank as unrelenting as an iron caliper. Here, they are ready to confirm, is clear evidence of formal training. Poses of this kind cannot simply be struck for the camera by an inexperienced dancer.2

  The likelihood is that she listened to René Carrère’s suggestion and went to take lessons in one of the shabby first-floor drawingrooms which, stripped of their rugs and rococo mirrors, were rented out as dance studios after the war, their social atmosphere, faint as the scent of dried rose-petals, banished by a cloying combination of sweat, rice-powder and Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleu. It has proved impossible to discover who taught her. A member of the newly formed Ballets Suèdois is one possibility: we know that she made friends in these early years with the chubby jazz-loving young Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, who took several commissions from the company. It’s conceivable that she joined the strenuous classes held by the illustrious Madame Egorova in a room above the Olympia. Madame’s terrible candour to another pupil, Zelda Fitzgerald, suggests that the rest of her flock turned into swans; it wasn’t so. The room above the Olympia was where some of the best vaudeville dancers took a few lessons before they were spotted by the talent scouts who came visiting every week; classical and popular entertainment were enmeshed, during the post-war years in Paris, in a way that is now almost impossible to imagine. This arabesque might take you into the corps de ballet at the Opéra; that one, into performing a nude adagio number at the Casino de Paris. And the latter was no disgrace.

  Let’s imagine. It’s a summer morning in 1923.3 Lesson time over, Hélène joins some of the dance pupils for cigarettes and a slug of coffee, then wanders off to kill an hour before her next modelling appointment. She strolls with a long sideways glance past one of the big new brasseries, thronged with beefy American men and smart, skinny girls. She carries her money – no bank accounts for a girl on her own in those days – in a cotton purse stitched into her underclothes. When, brushing through a crowd, she feels a hand nudge her waist, she lifts her leg and brings a spiked heel smartly down, nailing the thief until
he swears and falls away, a black shadow glimpsed through a sea of bright dresses. Passing the matt black doors of Harry Pilcer’s new club, the Florida, she remembers the shrill whistles and shrieks of a South American band, the husky voice of a red-lipped girl singing Mistinguett’s latest hit, ‘The Java’: ‘Tout contre moi/serre toi/ bien fort dans mes bras/ Je te suivrais/Je ferais ce que tu voudras./ Quand je te prends / dans mon coeur je sens / Comme un vertigo . . .’ Humming, she turns to flash a smile and widen her eyes at a window-show of the latest line in striped silk jockey caps and pilot-style hats with side-flaps trailing like spaniel’s ears. Staring at her own dim reflection in the glass, she’s startled to see another face beyond it, gazing out at her. For a brief, shocked moment, she sees her mother before realizing that this second darker image is also of herself. Unnerved, she crosses herself, even though she hasn’t stepped inside a church for five years.

  Passing the entrance to a vast new hotel, still unfinished, she glances down rue Marboeuf, where an illuminated arrow above the palatial garage of Alfa Romeo flashes on and off over a row of rakishly elegant sports cars which include a stylish Bugatti touring car. (Ettore was represented in Paris by the Marboeuf garage at this time.) Clicking one red heel on the cobbles, Hélène stands and yearns. Modern in her tastes, she admires the cool curves of Mallet-Stevens’s architecture – ‘The garage is one of the purest expressions of design’, another fan will gush to readers of L’Art Vivant in February 1927. But what she wants is one of the cars. Who wouldn’t hanker for an Alfa or a Bugatti, when all they possessed was a Citroën, one of the 20,000 being turned out every year on Quai Javel and sold for a little over 7,000 francs to people who had never dreamed, before the war, that they might one day be able to afford a fuel-driven vehicle?