Although Jeanne had wanted to die she could, nevertheless, have been the victim of a momentary impulse that night in her parents’ home. She could have thought, as one survivor commented of his leap from the bridge, “It’s watching my hands come off that railing and thinking to myself, ‘My God, what have I just done?’…All of a sudden [I] didn’t want to die, but it was too late.” At three a.m. the following morning Jeanne found the means and opportunity. She opened the windows of her sixth-floor bedroom and jumped to her death.
Because of the Hébuternes’ staunch determination to keep their private tragedy private, what happened next has never been explained, and now André, the one person who might have cleared up the mystery, has died.
Some accounts state that André was in her bedroom watching over her, that she waited until he nodded off and then jumped. If so he would certainly have awakened when the window banged open. It was January. There would have been a sudden blast of cold air and a thump. Tradition has it that a workman in the street below found the body and loaded it onto a wheelbarrow, not her brother. Jeanne Modigliani’s cautious account makes no mention of André at all. If André had not been watching over his sister it would be reason for him to feel such pain and self-reproach that he would never want to talk about it. He was not the only person grievously wounded that night. As William Maxwell wrote, “The suicide doesn’t go alone; he takes everybody with him.”
There are obvious inconsistencies in the version of what happened next. The accepted account has the workman taking the dead girl to the sixth floor, where the Hébuternes slammed the door in his face. Leaving aside the question of slamming doors, that any workman made it up six flights with a wheelbarrow containing a dead body is very unlikely. Even if the rue Amyot apartment building had an elevator it was also unlikely to have held more than two people at its most capacious, given the times. That there was any such confrontation can be confidently discounted.
Second, a death notice first had to be filed in the appropriate town hall, in this case the sixth arrondissement. Then the family had to wait for the coroner’s arrival to obtain a burial permit. Funeral arrangements came last. Assuming that Jeanne Hébuterne died at three a.m., there was at least a six-hour interval before the town hall offices were open and her death could be recorded.
Perhaps the concierge was taken into the family’s confidence and sheltered the body somewhere on the ground floor. Secrecy would have been vital to the Catholic Hébuternes, whose shame at their unmarried daughter was now compounded because suicide was a sin in the eyes of their church. And to kill a full-term baby has always been a crime. In their horror and grief, one thought would have been uppermost. Somehow, they had to keep it quiet.
The death certificate was issued in the sixth arrondissement at nine that morning. It was based on information provided by two employees of 59 rue Bonaparte. As it turned out, this was the address of Charles Daude, the funeral home that was, at that very moment, planning Modigliani’s funeral. This led to the logical assumption that André Hébuterne had contacted, first Zborowski, then Charles Daude’s establishment, before the town hall opened. Two men and a handcart were then dispatched to the rue Amyot to transport the body. This, then, is the probable origin of the legend citing a laborer with a wheelbarrow. The two men declared the death and conveyed the pertinent details. The same information then had to be recorded in the town hall where Jeanne lived, in the fifth arrondissement. This took place at two that afternoon. By the time these formalities were concluded, Jeanne had been moved to the rue de la Grande Chaumière and could be visited at the right psychic and literal distance.
Repulsing the suggestion that Jeanne be buried with Modigliani, the Hébuternes took her body to the distant cemetery of Bagneux two or three days later. The ceremony was held at eight in the morning and they begged people not to come, but a few did anyway. Chantal Quenneville and a friend, Jeanne Léger, were the first to arrive at the apartment on the rue de la Grande Chaumière, where Jeanne’s body lay under a coarse coverlet. While Jeanne Léger went looking for a nurse to dress the body Chantal did what she could to tidy and sweep up the studio. There was a box of charcoal, there were empty bottles of preserves, presumably fruit and vegetables, wine bottles littered about, and a general air of desolation. Most of all there was Jeanne, her skin dead white, curiously patched with greenish stains, her stomach bulging under its loose coverlet, and one leg seemed to have been broken by the fall. The portrait of Varvogli, unfinished, still stood on an easel. Much has been made of the fact that the concierge refused to accept the body at first, on the grounds that Jeanne was not the actual tenant, but was overruled. It may be true. Many years later the daughter of Ortiz de Zárate recalled returning from school and finding the concierge in hysterics. It seems that, as Jeanne’s body was being carried up the endless flights of stairs, some of her brains spilled onto the floor.
The sad irony of Modigliani’s death just as he was becoming recognized, the ostentation of his burial, and its tragic sequel seemed to be taken by everyone as a personal reproach. Some who knew the truth about his health could have consoled themselves, knowing that death, in any case, could not have been far off. What no one could have foreseen was that this quiet, self-effacing girl had been driven to kill herself and take her baby with her. The event took on the dimensions of a Greek tragedy. If they could have done something to help Modigliani they certainly should have anticipated this, and now she had repaid them for their indifference; “every suicide is perhaps a repressed assassination,” as Gustave Flaubert commented. Feelings of guilt and remorse are inevitable, to be buried beneath a desire to deny and forget.
Lunia Czechowska returned to Paris in September 1920. While she was away Zbo wrote often enough and claimed that Modigliani had returned to Livorno. On arriving she was told that Modigliani had ceased to paint because of poor health. Zbo and Hanka were hoping perhaps that this would satisfy her and they could gradually prepare her for the worst. Somehow Lunia was not convinced and asked the same question from other friends. But they had all rehearsed the same answers. “I was struck by the fact that they seemed to avoid referring to him. I found that bizarre and accused them of having forgotten him”; to which, presumably, there was no reply.
Lunia’s first night back in the rue Joseph Bara was spent sleeping in the dining room, where Modigliani had painted so many masterpieces. That night she had a strange dream. She was in a little park surrounding the spa where she had been staying. It was autumn and the grass was carpeted with chestnut leaves. The park was deserted except for Modigliani, and they were making a leisurely tour of the grounds. He was carrying something that looked like a magazine. At some point he opened it and said, “Look at this, Lunia. They say in here that I’ve died. Don’t you think this is a bit much! I’m not dead. You can see it for yourself.” Just then she saw Jeanne Hébuterne on her way toward them and said, “There’s Jeanne. Let’s call her.” He held her back. “No, no, in a minute.” But she was so pleased to see Jeanne that she called out her name in a loud voice. At that moment she woke herself up.
The adorable baby girl, now an orphan at thirteen months, was somewhere on the outskirts of Paris with her nurse. A letter from that lady, stating that the baby had cut her first tooth and that she herself had not yet been paid, was found after the deaths. One would expect the Hébuternes, the Paris family, to have taken an active part in the baby’s future, but this does not seem to have happened. The one who went to fetch baby Jeanne and pay off her nurse was not her grandmother Eudoxie, but her father’s dealer. Meantime, there was Hanka to help. Where was baby Jeanne going to live? Not with the Hébuternes, apparently.
Fortunately the Modiglianis, now in Florence, wanted her, and the sooner the better. Emanuele would undertake the tedious formalities involved in getting the baby across the border. In the meantime she was sent to Uncle Albert Garsin in Marseilles, Eugénie’s youngest brother, who was declared her guardian ad interim. Emanuele would come for her as soon as th
e papers were in order. This seems to have happened in June 1920. She is ours, Emanuele would subsequently write triumphantly.
By now Eugénie was sixty-five, an age her generation would consider old. It would have been reasonable for her not to want the complication of a baby. But apart from losing Dedo she had other reasons for taking in Jeanne just then. Luci, her son Umberto’s baby, had just died of meningitis, and her mother, Ida, could not have any more children. Emanuele was also childless. That summer of 1920 he would be attacked and badly beaten while trying to defend the printing press of a Socialist newspaper. He would bear a large scar on his forehead for the rest of his life. Eugénie’s diary in March of that year describes the period of waiting for baby Jeanne to arrive and hoping to find in her a resemblance to her “dear lost one.”
The baby Jeanne in her Victorian perambulator, aged about fifteen months (image credit 14.1)
Thank heavens for Margherita, who immediately urged her mother to bring the baby to Florence to live with them. Life was worth believing in, after all, Eugénie wrote, when it presented such a moment of consolation and joy. A photograph taken just after the arrival of Nannoli, as she was called, shows a chubby baby with delicate features in a frilly hat, coat, and bib, in her delighted grandmother’s arms.
But the real heroes of Jeanne’s childhood odyssey would be her uncle Emanuele and aunt Vera in Rome. In letters home Emanuele emerges as an enormously helpful figure, always positive and hopeful even as he was fighting a losing battle against Mussolini and his Fascist thugs. His common sense never deserts him even at his worst moments. His warmth, loyalty, and good humor are unfailing. He is sympathetic, funny, even ribald, and wonderfully resourceful.
The first issue, to legitimize Jeanne’s birth, bothered his mother, who kept writing to him about the problem. Although Jeanne’s parents did not marry an acknowledgment of paternity on the father’s side and enough evidence from both directions would legitimize her and she could legally take her father’s name under French and Italian law. Had her father not accepted responsibility no such legal process could have been started. In this case the Hébuternes could point to Modigliani’s signed statement in the summer of 1919 and his frequent assurances that he would marry their daughter. The Modiglianis were more than willing to begin the effort. Eugénie was sure the Hébuternes would not cooperate. But, Emanuele wrote, she was “wrong, wrong, wrong.” That was on March 23 of 1923 and five days later they made a declaration in Paris supporting the project. At the age of three and a half, Jeanne finally became a Modigliani.
The Hébuternes must have devoutly wished that this was the end of the matter, but they had reckoned without Eugénie. She wanted Jeanne moved from her grave in Bagneux and reburied with Dedo at Père Lachaise. This project took rather longer to accomplish but, as before, Eugénie was not an easy person to discourage. Quite when the idea came about is not clear. But assuming that she thought of it soon after Jeanne’s legal status was assured, and if she made the proposal sometime later in 1923, it was at first rejected. One imagines that Achille was the one who resisted. After all, his daughter was a suicide and a baby killer. How could she deserve a place of honor? But in 1925, at the early age of fifty-eight, he died. That left the decision up to Eudoxie and the objections melted away. It was also a help that Emanuele and Vera were exiled to Paris a year later. After Mussolini came to power in 1926, Emanuele’s life was in danger. He, along with Filippo Turati, the head of the Italian Socialist Party, escaped across the border just in time. Plans moved ahead and by the time he wrote to Eugénie in February 1927, Jeanne had been moved to the Père Lachaise and was sharing Dedo’s grave. Her memorial, significantly, in Italian, not French, reads, “Jeanne Hebuterne, Nata a Parigi il 6 Aprile 1898, Morta a Parigi il 25 Gennaio 1920, Di Amedeo Modigliani Compagna Devota Fina All’ Estremo Sacrifizio.”
A French newspaper photograph of G. E. Modigliani fleeing with Turati, chief of the Italian Socialist Party, after Mussolini came to power, 1926 (image credit 14.2)
“There is still some masonry work to be done,” Emanuele wrote. “But there are some well-tended plants that bloom for weeks and also … a bunch of violets placed there by someone. One of the thousands of signs of the cult that has formed in his memory.” He had just read, with considerable admiration, a new book about Modigliani’s life. It was written “without the usual idiocy.” He would keep the book for Nannoli to read once she was old enough to understand and would “pardon her maternal grandparents for their lack of understanding in the face of tragedy.” The author had noted this fact in a brief sentence but, he added, “correctly.”
It is likely that Eugénie never saw the grave, and she died in Florence six months later.
Another orphan, this time a boy, was not so lucky. When he visited Paris in the summer of 1920 Emanuele met Simone Thiroux and her son Gérard, a bright and lively three-year-old. Jeanne Modigliani was always told he was “much prettier than she was.” She said that Emanuele almost took Gérard to Italy with him and always regretted that he had not. He did not, because Dedo had never mentioned Simone or the baby in letters home. No doubt Emanuele was even sadder when he learned the following year that Simone had died of tuberculosis. Gérard, now aged four, was at first cared for by two of Simone’s friends and then put up for adoption. He spent years in an orphanage before being adopted by the Carlinots, a childless couple, in June of 1931. His adoptive father, who at the time was running a small business in cardboard boxes in the rue Réaumur, had been a government employee in the colonial administration in Indochina. The couple apparently divorced within months of adopting Gérard, because his new father soon left for Indochina, taking the boy with him. Once there Gérard was unhappy and smuggled himself onto a boat back to Paris, where he went to live with his new mother. She told him then who his real father was, but he made no effort to contact the Modiglianis or lay claim to that name. Conflicting stories about his fate circulated for years. He was finally discovered by a reporter for a Paris newspaper in 1981. He had taken the name of Thiroux-Villette and was curé of a little church in Milly-la-Forêt. By then he was sixty-four, portly, wearing glasses, gray-haired, and, by his own admission, with no artistic talent whatsoever.
For the first seven years of her life Jeanne Modigliani’s principal caregiver was her grandmother Eugénie. “She was divine. A great beauty,” Jeanne told an interviewer for the French magazine Elle in 1958. “Gifted for everything. She was the lackey [nègre] of a bad writer for whom she wrote novels and she also published a very good study on Goldoni … A truly grande dame of the nineteenth century, with her gray eyes, her queenly carriage, and her white headbands under a black or white mantilla. I kept the little heart-shaped ornament in sandalwood that she always wore between her breasts.”
Eugénie Modigliani at Carlsbad, c. 1925 (image credit 14.3)
After Eugénie died, Aunt Margherita assumed Jeanne’s care. “Tante Marguerite was a large, dried-up lady who taught French. Violent, passionate, she took to wearing the enormous, flat-heeled shoes of the suffragettes and carried a cane. She was so difficult, when my father was living in Paris, that grandmother had to hide from her that she was sending him money. Tante Marguerite was furious at the idea that she was working to keep ‘that scoundrel of an artist’ alive.” It seems clear that Margherita genuinely loved her small niece but could not resist a close supervision in order to nip in the bud whatever she might discover in the way of her brother’s irresponsibility and selfishness, as she saw it. As she grew older Jeanne found such supervision intolerable. She even called her a sadist, and escaped as soon as she could. Uncle Mené and Aunt Vera had taken up residence in Paris at 8 boulevard Ornano in the eighteenth arrondissement, so as soon as she was twenty, in 1939, she joined them there. She was studying to become an art historian and had ambitions to write her father’s biography, but her timing was unfortunate, to say the least. Within months Emanuele and Vera had escaped to Switzerland. Jeanne might well have joined them there, but instead moved
to the Vichy area of France. She had married Mario Cesare Silvio Levi, an Italian economist and journalist on the run from Fascist Italy. Jeanne’s daughter Anne believed it was a marriage of convenience but other friends doubt that this was the case, at least at first. The consensus is that it was a genuine love affair.
Like her husband, Jeanne was fluent in French and Italian. She had her father’s green-flecked eyes and her mother’s lustrous, heavy brown hair with its gleaming red and gold highlights. She was also tiny, barely five feet tall, though perhaps an inch taller than her mother, with a narrow nose, tiny hands and feet, and a long neck. According to Jean-Pierre Haillus, for whom she was almost an aunt, she missed her calling. She should never have taken up art. She was born for the theatre, a “cabotine,” strolling player, full of panache. “She was very droll and amusing, with a wonderful sense of humor and she had this amazing voice, with a slight Italian accent. ‘Mon coco!’ she would say.”
She had these large theatrical gestures and an original way of dressing. Haillus recalled one occasion when he was asked to accompany her to the train station in Marseille. Arriving there they joined the queue to buy tickets. While they were waiting she saw a hippie, looking as if he had spent the night in a ditch. She regarded him with awe. “Isn’t he beautiful!” she exclaimed. Arriving at the ticket window she was asked where she wanted to go. “Listen, monsieur,” she replied in her compelling voice, “give me a ticket for some country that’s civilized!”
Jeanne Modigliani in Paris aged thirty-five, 1953 (image credit 14.4)
Dominique Desanti, the historian and novelist who met her just after World War II, said that Jeanne had to invent a memory of her parents whom she lost when she was too young. “Evidently she had a great deal of trouble forming a personality. Why? Because she had invented a myth of Amedeo and Jeanne, and in this history she could not see a place for herself.”
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