Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  The sublime Jeanne is not only sexy but unpretentious and easy to talk to, as opposed to “Gastonibus Béguinus who does his little-king number. I cast him as the perfect concierge of Aristide Maillol and company—you can’t imagine the royal airs he puts on, clattering heels and high-pitched voice…. Certainly Gaston, in this household abandoned by the husband ‘who’s always in his warehouse’ (a malingerer, a southern no-good, etc., etc.)—certainly Gaston gropes the girls, greedily steals the jam off Jeanne’s lips, etc…. etc…. Oh well.” Jeanneret describes Jeanne grotesquely but according to his own taste: “She’s changed her dress and has greased her lips with the most generous helping of gooseberry jam.”9

  THE ACTION of the lubricious account really begins when Jeanneret goes to bed. There is the sound of a high wind in the surrounding orchard, of apples falling everywhere. Maillol’s bedroom is below. With palpable excitement, Jeanneret reports to Ritter,

  The big bed of the world’s greatest sculptor is in the room below mine. Banyuls is far from here, at the edge of the Golfe de Lion, and Maillol sleeps there tonight, having ended his day with “a flask of old wine,” apparently quite conjugally. Which doesn’t stop the whispering from keeping me awake, up here: Gaston has let me have his bed, and uses his master’s….

  This silence. Then, in the wind which gets in down below, a series of ha ha ha’s… modest at first, then faster, then panting. Go for it, Gaston! Then it stops short, and Gaston is heard no more. Now his voice sounds in a lower register, ha ha ha, Oh ho! And then, if you know our Gaston as the little bull of Locle, comes that decisive, definitive, closing Rrrrhan! an exploding shell. No resistance. It’s all there. Gaston has uttered his Rrrrhan! He’s content….

  The center of the house, the sanctuary of the life of the house: here, tonight, the sacrifice is consummated…. So be it, the heart has its reasons. Gaspard, poor devil, in his office!10

  Gaston Béguin—a rake from eastern Switzerland at the start of an adventure—is Jeanneret’s invented name for himself. It’s an obtuse tale, but what is clear is that the lovely Jeanne was in the house while her husband was still at work and that Charles-Edouard Jeanneret delighted in writing about his own orgasm.

  2

  In the fall and winter of 1915–1916, Jeanneret continued to work on private villas and apartments in Switzerland. Yet he felt as if he was stagnating at best. He was chronically exhausted and began to lose so much weight that his parents considered him ill. He saw himself as a victim, scorned and mocked by everyone: “There are a number of us these days who believe in the evils of the world, and worse still, in the insuperable obstacles that do you in, when everything gives you the lie and points the finger of scorn.”11 In March 1916, he wrote Ritter, “I’ve been feeling so depressed, so impotent, so lacking in all the resources of my craft, that everything seemed quite futile.”12 His mother often told him, “You are not kind,” to which he responded that she knew him well.13

  Then, one late April night, everything began to change with a dream. He entitled his account to Ritter, “Young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret takes the cherry of the virgin Marguerite de Nemours.”14 Even if it occurred only in his sleep, it was a momentous event.

  The setting in which twenty-eight-year-old Jeanneret pictured himself taking Marguerite de Nemours for his sexual pleasure fueled his later urbanism. It was a city where the arrangement of living and working spaces facilitated the sort of encounters that only an ideal urban environment made possible. The dream began there on a Saturday evening at the hour when everyone was leaving work in factories: “The proletarian hosts have already dispersed. One crosses the town. At the South Gate, one takes the boulevard to the right. On the left side, apartment buildings five to eight stories high form a square. Good God, I’ve got to stop!”15

  What makes him halt is a sight that recalls certain lewd paintings of Goya. A profusion of bare women are standing on the balconies of every floor: “Naked women busy with their toilette: bowls of water, combs, brushes; the one on the nearest balcony scrapes the scabs off her filthy thighs—Francion version—I glance out of the corner of my eye, as one does when two dogs are going at it.”16 The term “Francion” referred to the libertine hero of an early-seventeenth-century French comic novel; in search of love, Francion was a character beloved to Jeanneret.

  He then saw something “staggering…zany. At the top of the pediment of the tallest house, in the middle of the facades, Marguerite Frochaux representing the figure of Justice holding a mirror. Exactly like the Cabanel version—the one with a famous, prominent, and glistening hip, and on the side of her raised arm that wonderful straight line from her big toe up under the armpit all the way to the mirror. Next to her, Marie Frochaux represents ‘The Wave.’ Not a shred of body hair on either one. All the balconies are swarming with figures. It’s mythology come alive.”17

  Marguerite and her fiancé are seated at a piano, performing their own composition—“the mystery of St. Sebastien”—which Jeanneret hears in his dream. During the “poem symphonique,” Jeanneret becomes so captivated by Marguerite’s alabaster body that he is sexually aroused in his sleep. “Marguerite, ashamed, lowers her lovely arms over her sex, which she fails to see is not in the part she plays. Historical exactitude! Well, what can I do? Marguerite, your body’s pallor is suitable for martyrdom. I’m actually beginning to get a hard-on. Maurice Barrès, that Sodoma!”18

  Following this swipe at the monarchist Barrès, a hero to the rightist movement Action Française, the vision evolves into a sadomasochistic drama with Jeanneret in the role of harem master: “I unroll all seven yards of my Turkish girdle and command: ‘Raise your martyr’s arms; I, the executioner, shall conceal your sex. I shall bind your hips with Orient wool.’ I am of the opinion that at this moment a screen would descend, shielding the public’s eyes widened by expectation from the scene of the binding. The bridegroom acquiesces, the screen appears, separating the inspired musician from the body of his beautiful beloved.”19

  The naked Marguerite succumbs to his will: “I have begun binding one thigh, then the other. I return to the first, then to the latter. Her hips widen. The girdle describes a figure-eight, which it repeats. I have not passed my woolen strip over the belly nor over both thighs together: one after the other. Marguerite seems moved by my presence, as am I by the odor of her body. ‘Raise your arms, St. Sebastian, against the trunk of the tree!’ I attach her hands to the lowest branches.”20

  Different music now accompanies the fantasy: “‘Put your ankles together; your martyred body weighs heavily on these columns to which I have also tied two heavy astral lamps.’ I bind your martyred ankles. Shriek of oboes, glissando of flutes, the harp lacerated.”21

  Jeanneret becomes even more excited and irrational in describing the subsequent events with a panoply of literary flourishes: “The sky is entirely pink, reddening with the final reverberation of this splendid early-spring twilight above the factory gates at Landeron this Saturday evening. Marguerite bound, Marguerite at my mercy. My bow is drawn, intoxicated archer. Your torso struggles, St. Sebastian. I embrace it, adolescent; I force open the propylaeum. The girdle was a lure. The figure-eight had a defect in its armor.”22

  Jeanneret then hears the plaintive cries of Marguerite’s fiancé, who is seated, out of breath, at the piano. The atmosphere becomes a mixture of guilt and high drama. The poor fellow inquires desperately.

  “Oh, Marguerite, what ails you? My music, your nerves?”

  “No, my bridegroom, the gentile’s javelin has pierced me through!” she replies.

  The scenario is again accompanied by a shift in the music, which has the overstated melodrama of a silent-movie score: “The piano resumes, panting, suffering, dying away…. Go to it, Léon!”23

  At this point, Jeanneret awakes, having had a wet dream: “I awakened bathed in the blood of my blood.” This last sentence was accompanied by a drawing of a maze of curlicues from which a small bird emerges in flight. The image suggests pubic hair wit
h a sperm in flight from it: ejaculate as annunciation. Under the drawing, he has written, “Behold, dear Monsieur, this vile pornography.”24 Again, he was determined to put his pleasure on display.

  AFTER DESIGNING a movie theatre but losing money on it, and then feuding with a collaborator who worked on two houses with him, Jeanneret, again desperate to leave La Chaux-de-Fonds, resorted more and more to fantasy. “Ever since I learned that Europa was raped on the Bosporus,” he wrote, “the myth has struck me as full of life…. A dream which finds its victim, and away we go! O how I’d like to leave for an unknown shore: the flood, the naked bodies, that woman on the bull’s shiny rump; a swoon, a regret, but so many hopes, and then the notion that after all one might take the risk.”25

  The time had come to head for that unknown shore and become one of the naked bodies. He proposed a solution to his own anguish: “Get some water on your body and get out.”26 The sense of duty to his parents and his hometown was to imprison him no longer. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was ready to leap and become Le Corbusier.

  XII

  1

  The milestone of Jeanneret’s thirtieth birthday was looming (see color plate 1). When he was invited to Frankfurt to work on some municipal building projects, he accepted. But at the passport office in Neuchâtel, as he stood at the wooden counter awaiting the visa stamp, he changed his mind.

  Having walked into that office to gain the right to move to Germany, he requested a passport for an unlimited time period in France. The change of heart took him by surprise, but knowing that he could count on Max Du Bois to help set him up in Paris, he had no doubt. Du Bois had forgiven Jeanneret for his treatment of him on the Dom-ino project, and repeatedly insisted that he was destined to perish if he did not leave their stultifying natal city and move to Paris permanently. Du Bois had founded the Société d’Application du Béton Armé (SABA) to promote the use of reinforced concrete, and he wanted Jeanneret to join him in making this durable and efficient new material available through mass production.

  All that was left for Jeanneret to do was raise some funds and pack up. After returning to La Chaux-de-Fonds, he arranged a bank loan, which was granted because of fees he was still owed for the movie theatre. He also found three local businessmen who gave him a small amount of capital to invest on their behalf in new enterprises associated with the construction business. With twenty thousand francs—roughly the equivalent of thirty thousand dollars today—and a couple of suitcases, he again took the train to Paris. For the rest of his life, the French capital served as his home and the campaign headquarters for his battle to change all human habitation.

  2

  The Paris Jeanneret encountered when he arrived on February 9, 1917, had been torn asunder by aerial bombardment. Many people were at the brink of, starvation, and everyone felt constant danger. But to the young man from the Alps, the French metropolis was “the crucible, the diapason, and the torch.”1 He knew it had been the source for Géricault, Degas, Ingres, Manet, Courbet, Monet, Seurat, and Matisse. He was determined to join their ranks.

  Jeanneret stayed in Max Du Bois’s fifth-floor walk-up apartment. In his later reconstruction of his personal history, Le Corbusier presented himself as the intrepid country boy who went to the big city to make his way aided by nobody and who launched himself in solitude. He would have people think that, entirely on his own, he found a place to live, began an architecture practice, became a businessman, and located clients. He obfuscated the central role of Du Bois—who not only put a roof over his head and gave him a job with SABA but also introduced him to wealthy Swiss and members of the French business community.

  While in Du Bois’s flat, Jeanneret set up a small office in a former kitchen and maid’s room on the seventh floor of a charmless apartment building on the rue de Belzunce, near the Gare du Nord. It was a “dirty hole,” but the rent was cheap, and within five days he stripped the rough hovel into a fresh, clean space.2 “I have ‘boned’ my workplace with complete success,” he wrote his parents, jubilant at having cleansed it of its layers of excess and cut through to the structure. In these rudimentary headquarters, he began work as a consultant for SABA.

  Next, Jeanneret found his own place to live. This apartment, which he was to inhabit for seventeen years, was, like his office, high up in former servants’ quarters. But the building—at 20 rue Jacob—had far more charm. The narrow and quiet rue Jacob was one of the most lovely streets of St. Germain-des-Prés, near the Seine, in a neighborhood populated by artists and writers and full of small bistros and inviting cafés. Number twenty, a distinguished seventeenth-century residence built around a cobblestone courtyard with fragrant linden trees, was the former town house of Adrienne Lecouvreur (whose name may have subtly been one of the many factors contributing to the one Jeanneret soon chose for himself). To reach his small space there, he ascended an oval spiral staircase constructed in dark wood. Under the mansard roof, surrounded by plaster that dated back to the reign of Louis XIV, he in time dreamed up his streamlined modernism.

  He was enthralled to be in a space that had been inhabited by the colorful Lecouvreur, an immensely popular actress early in the eighteenth century. Her romance with Maurice de Saxe, a distinguished nobleman in the court of Louis XIV, was the subject of a poem by her friend Voltaire, as well as of an opera and a play. It ended tragically—Lecouvreur was apparently poisoned, at age thirty-seven, by her rival in de Saxe’s life, the duchess of Bouillon, and the Catholic Church denied her a Christian burial—but Jeanneret often referred to the golden time when de Saxe constructed a small temple that still stood in the garden. Jeanneret sketched it for Ritter and wrote him, “I’m thrilled to be able to paint the roof tiles of Maurice de Saxe. Shall I manage to live worthily in this residence?”3

  At 20 rue Jacob, late 1920s. Photo by Brassaï

  The reality of Jeanneret’s own life was less ideal. The rooms at 20 rue Jacob were sometimes bitterly cold, and no heating fuel was available. He had scarcely enough food. But, through the tricks of art, he transformed the garret. To warm up the flat, he painted on one wall a landscape of a tropical scene with palm trees bathed by sunlight.4 Visual illusion provided salvation and joy.

  3

  Jeanneret became absorbed by the prostitutes he studied and coveted in the Métro. He was a connoisseur of them, even though he considered the women mostly unobtainable. For Ritter and Czadra, Jeanneret sketched the profile of one who had bold features like a Greek warrior’s, her hat and coiffure an exotic blend of pouf and ornament that he rendered in elaborate detail. He wrote, “Yesterday in the tram at La Roquette I saw two whores from the brothels out there, one of whom was a marvel; I’m eliminating the first page of this letter, or rather I’m completing it by this notation: the Lord has created a lovely animal.”5

  But sex was often a struggle for him: “The act of love is rather complicated to perform; it requires special circumstances. I no longer manage to have my old magnificent erections, and I fall back—in a fatally Oriental impulse—on visions of Spanish fly.”6 Jeanneret said “fatally” because he knew that, while a small amount of the famous aphrodisiac could help stimulate the blood flow as well as the kidneys, too much of the insect’s venom could kill someone.

  A few weeks later, however, he saw, on the Métro, a prostitute with whom he had had sex. In one of his most obtuse soliloquies yet, he told Ritter that the encounter made him realize that he preferred the simpler women in cheap bordellos to the higher class of streetwalker whom he had drawn: “How I hate these cows! This is the second in months. I’m quite indifferent to all of them. What I lack is a sense of the ‘minaret.’ You know: the minaret rises solitary above the mosque, and pierces nothing but the sky. You tell me I need a Grand Passion. Thanks a lot. Except for the selfish pleasures of the heart, a woman is nothing but a bête d’apéritif. In which case I prefer the brothel, simply the animal and the water closet. I have close friends. O Adrienne [Lecouvreur], unless you manage to reincarnate yourself, your Maurice [
de Saxe] will not be wearing out too many bedsprings under your alcove roof, well tiled though it be. In the calm of this garden and the solitude of this empty house, there’s room for the eloquent explanation of two storms; I don’t dissociate love from the tempest and from danger. Beyond a sinuous mouth and a pair of eyes, I require a chin and a forehead.”7

  Jeanneret began writing a diary, which he sent in periodic installments to Ritter. In one entry, he confessed the problems of making love to these women: “But a man can’t give his body to these easy girls, for he feels something like fear. There’s no lust, only pity and affection, and instead of casting your seed into this public sewer, you’d like to caress these creatures, caress them gently. A lot they’d care for that!”8

  At the end of January, Jeanneret went with Max Du Bois and his friend Marcel Rey to the Casino de Paris to see “Les dancing Girls” in The Flags of the Entente. An all-Negro orchestra played. Jeanneret was enraptured by their beauty and raw force. The women cavorting onstage impressed him much as the Pisa altarpiece and Balkan pottery had: “There was Gaby Deslys, whom I remember three days later as a pink vision of magnificent flesh, an image of primeval life. Idiot movements, whorehouse plastique, or more often just bourgeois asshole tricks. But flesh…but sap…Panting marble…Who cares how stupid she is, Gaby Deslys represents seduction for a sad and solitary heart like mine.”9