Seven Ages of Paris (53 page)

In the political arena, the years 1900–14 offered much for the Paris press to get its teeth into. First of all, the triumph of the Dreyfusards signalled a reaction back to militant anti-clericalism, hovering in the background ever since 1789. L’affaire brought the Radicals to the fore, with the right (which was seen closely to embrace both the Church and the army) as the enemy. In 1902, Emile Combes, a sixty-nine-year-old anticlerical politican, came to power in Paris determined to complete the separation of Church and state in France. Possessed of all the prejudices of the small-town provincial, Combes legislated against “unauthorized” religious orders (some of which had admittedly intervened in a most rashly improper fashion during the Dreyfus affair). Schools were closed, religious processions stopped. In the expropriations of nunneries and monasteries, wanton pillaging occurred. The army was finally called in to effect the expropriations, thereby confronting its officers with a grave issue of conscience. Typical was the case of a lieutenant-colonel who, on asking what his superior was going to do, was told “I have ’flu,” whereupon, in a rage transcending rank, he seized his regimental commander fiercely, shouting, “I suppose when the war comes you will have ’flu too!”

Combes’s law exacerbated divisions within the army, to a large extent widening the same chasm dug by l’affaire. Worse still, as a consequence of Dreyfus, the responsibility for promotions had been transferred from the army commission to the Minister of War. The newly appointed, anticlerical General André abused his power deplorably. Officers were set to spying on each other; the Grand Orient Lodge of the freemasons was used as an intelligence service to establish dossiers on their religious persuasions; promotion became more a matter of an officer’s political views, and particularly to which church he went on Sundays, and how often, than of merit. Able officers like Foch, whose brother was a Jesuit, and de Castelnau—accompanied to the front in 1914 by his own private chaplain—would always be at a disadvantage. It was no coincidence that in 1911 the office of the new Chief of the General Staff fell to a general who ostentatiously ate meat on Good Friday.

L’affaire, Combes and André were followed by the most intense bout of Socialist-led anti-militarism that France had experienced since 1870. All politicians distrusted the General Staff. The repute of the army sank to its lowest ebb. In 1905, a new Act reduced military service to two years, and army effectives declined from 615,000 to 540,000. In Germany the new Kaiser with his bellicose moustaches noted all this, and waited.

THE ARTS

To muster and market the great burst of painting that followed on from the Impressionists, three years after the Exposition of 1900 closed its doors there opened in the basement of the Petit Palais the first of the Salons d’Automne. There was also the Salon des Indépendants, founded in 1884 by breakaways like Seurat, Signac and Redon. This had no selection committee, which explained how an unclassifiable primitive like the sweetly ingenuous “Douanier” Rousseau found space on its walls. Rousseau was so loved by his eminent colleagues they gave him a special banquet in 1908, in the midst of which he engagingly fell asleep while a candle dripped wax unnoticed on his recumbent head. In contrast to Monet, Renoir and Cézanne, Vuillard and Bonnard took Impressionism indoors, as often as not to paint the comforts of an increasingly affluent bourgeois world.

This was not, however, the habitat which most of their colleagues knew. Matisse’s miserable studio was so cold he had to work in overcoat and hat; Picasso’s early lodgings in Montmartre, as described by his then mistress Fernande Olivier, consisted mainly of “a mattress on four legs in one corner. A little rusty cast-iron stove with a yellow earthenware bowl on it which was used for washing …” As late as 1907 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, one of a new breed of keen-eyed private dealers, could record, “Nobody can imagine the poverty, the deplorable misery of those studios in the Rue Ravignan … The wallpaper hung in tatters from the unplastered walls.” Yet it was then that he set eyes on the huge Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of the first examples of Cubism, and later to be worth several kings’ ransoms.

In 1903, James Joyce wrote to thank his mother for a postal order of three shillings and fourpence, “as I had been without food for 42 hours.” The previous year Trotsky had found an exiled Lenin living in straitened circumstances near the Parc Montsouris; Trotsky thought that Paris was “like Odessa—but Odessa is better!” Among the painters up at Montmartre, Vlaminck played gypsy music on the violin to live; Derain worked as a professional boxer; while Van Dongen unloaded vegetables and sold newspapers. Picasso was saved from the gutter when a Catalan dealer, his first, paid him 150 francs a month—just enough to live on. Then, in 1906, Ambroise Vollard paid him 2,000 francs for thirty canvases. Two years later Matisse was saved by a wealthy Russian entrepreneur, Sergei Schukine, who commissioned two large panels of dancers for his Moscow mansion, and subsequently bought no fewer than thirty-seven other canvases. It was fortunate for Matisse and others that such wealthy and discerning patrons existed—one of the more lastingly beneficial spin-offs of the highly questionable Franco-Russian alliance.

In the wake of the miraculous richesse of the Impressionists, Paris continued to be the epicentre of modern art. The immortal Cézanne died senselessly of hypothermia after being caught in a storm in 1906, aged sixty-seven, but close on the heels of his great legacy came the Nabis (derived from the Jewish word for prophet) movement of Sérusier, Bonnard and Vuillard. Then there was the scandalizing new group led by Matisse, which proudly assumed the pejorative nickname of Fauves: entering this world of flamboyant colour at the Salon d’Automne of 1905, a critic had exclaimed that it was “Donatello au milieu des fauves” (Donatello in the wild beasts’ den). Matisse, son of a grain-dealer from Flanders, Dufy, Vlaminck and Van Dongen were all northerners seeking refuge from greyness in the exuberant colours of the south, influenced by a Picasso just emerging from his exquisitely colourful Pink Period. To a romantic like Apollinaire, Matisse represented “Instinct regained!” At all these exhibitions of the early 1900s, in sharpest contrast to the sedate vernissages of London and New York, viewers would give vent to the most powerful emotions, sometimes almost coming to blows in a manner more comparable to the Paris theatre through the ages.

There was no let-up. Once more led by Picasso, who by now was constantly administering shocks to the Paris art world, after Fauvism there arrived Cubism, pioneered by Cézanne in his last years. By 1911, the Cubists, having achieved recognition, had perhaps reached their pinnacle. That year a terrible, unthinkable blow struck: somebody stole the Mona Lisa off its wall in the Louvre. At first, Apollinaire was under suspicion; imprisoned briefly, he was plunged into deep depression, but the painting was found two years later, safe and sound in Florence, the theft having been carried out by a glazier working in the museum. It was a happy ending that lightened an increasingly gloomy scene. The greatest period of artistic creativity possibly since the Renaissance had passed its peak in Paris. It was somehow symptomatic of what was about to happen to Europe, to the world at large. Cubism, arm in arm with the dissonant themes of Stravinsky, would be succeeded by the violent nihilism of Italian Futurism, and by English Vorticism, its very name symbolic of the disaster just a year or two away.

In marked contrast to the Paris of a century previously, when Napoleon had contrived to whittle down the number of Paris theatres to a handful, there were now once again some forty-odd. Theatre life was as lively, and disputatious, as it ever had been. For those who, like Marcel Proust, didn’t want to venture out, there was even an electrical device called the Théâtrophone, a subscriber service that enabled you to hear live music or a play. Listening to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Proust found that “the scent of roses in the score is so strong that I have asthma whenever I hear it.”

In 1905 there was another efflorescence of drama in Paris. At the summit, Sarah Bernhardt reigned sublime, still after several decades at centre stage undistracted by her plethora of unsatisfactory love affairs—which critics would denounce from time to time. To confound them, in later years she would appear on stage recumbent in her famous coffin. Opening in time for Expo 1900, Bernhardt had managed to squeeze her fifty-five-year-old frame into a corseted uniform to appear as Rostand’s tragic twenty-two-year-old hero in L’Aiglon, and, despite the absurdity of the casting, Paris loved every minute of its four hours. Her courage was boundless. While in Rio, playing Tosca, she bounced out of the net which was supposed to catch her in her death-plunge off the battlements, causing such damage to her right knee that she limped for the rest of her life. (Eventually, in 1915, the leg had to be amputated, and, ghoulishly, Barnum’s circus offered $10,000 for the limb and the right to exhibit it.) But Bernhardt never gave up. Aged sixty-five, she was playing a nineteen-year-old Jeanne d’Arc. Eventually she was awarded the Légion d’Honneur (like Dreyfus)—though not for acting, because an independent actress was still not considered “respectable” in Paris.

During the Belle Epoque, opera and ballet audiences were as excitable as ever: the first night of Pelléas et Mélisande provoked something like a riot. One wag dubbed it Pédéraste et Médisance; another critic complained of waiting for “a tune that never came. A succession of notes like the noise of the wind … I prefer the wind.” Nevertheless, by Christmas 1906 Pelléas would reach its fiftieth performance—every one of which had been attended by Maurice Ravel, while Romain Rolland rated it the most original opera ever written.

Two years later Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet arrived, one of the most exciting and provocative events on the cultural scene of pre-war Paris, and a second major spin-off from the fateful Alliance sealed in 1894. Since then everything Russian was the rage in Paris, and from 1908 the ballet would return every year until 1914 put an end to it all. But, in a wonderfully Russian way, the Moscow bankers financing this important asset of the Alliance swiftly ran out of funds (or they disappeared into Grand Ducal pockets), a process accelerated by the incredible extravagance of the thirty-five-year-old Diaghilev’s productions. As a result Parisian “angels” found themselves picking up the tab.

At first Parisians were lukewarm in response to the Russian onslaught. Then suddenly they became seized by Fokine and Bakst, by the brilliantly exotic stage settings and by Nijinsky’s acrobatics. Of Schéhérazade in the 1910–11 season, Proust—quite overcome—admitted, “I never saw anything so beautiful.” Outrage and unbeatable publicity followed in the 1912 season when in L’Après-midi d’un faune Nijinsky chose to dance without a jockstrap. Shocked, Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro—taking over the role of critic himself—condemned “Gestures smacking of erotic bestiality and heavy shamelessness … an ill-made beast, hideous from the front, even more hideous in profile.” Still more offensive to Parisian sensibilities was when Nijinsky in a Terpsichorean frenzy affected to masturbate into a nymph’s abandoned scarf: “a lecherous faun,” thundered the soon-to-be assassinated Calmette, “whose movements are filthy and bestial in their eroticism and his gestures as crude as they are indecent. That is all … greeted by the boos it deserved.” The offending gesture was expunged, but audiences still flocked to the theatre.

Nineteen-thirteen brought to Paris Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring and more sensation. At the première, Gertrude Stein observed Apollinaire “industriously kissing various important looking ladies’ hands.” But “No sooner did the music begin and the dancing than they began to hiss. The defendants began to applaud. We could hear nothing.” One young man became so excited that he beat rhythmically with his fists on the head of an American in the row in front of him, whose own emotion was so great that he claimed, “I did not feel the blows for some time.” The conductor, Pierre Monteux, recalled that “Everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on.” Amid the hubbub even the Théâtrophone broke down. Insults were exchanged. Ravel was called a “sale Juif.” Eventually the row escalated into a full-scale riot, with the gendarmes forced to intervene—as in the days of Louis XIV. As much as anything what had, apparently, provoked the uproar was the “barbarian” exaggeration of Stravinsky’s music. Did the harsh clangour of Stravinsky seem to presage the violence that was about to engulf civilization?

More in tune with the happier mood of the Belle Epoque was the comic theatre of Georges Feydeau, that dashing figure of the boulevards. Speed—the speed of the era of electricity, telephone and motor car—was the essence of Feydeau’s hilarious farces. Drawing on rich material from his own life, Feydeau’s favourite prop was the bed, with people in it, hidden under it or behind it, his central figure the cocu husband. The backdrop to the contemporary Parisian scene was perhaps that, in the words of the young playwright Sacha Guitry, “The burdens of marriage were too heavy to be borne by two people alone.” Meanwhile, there was Lumière’s new-fangled Kino, still silent though accompanied by stirring music, but expanding its entertainment possibilities at ever increasing speed. With it would arrive the young Charlie Chaplin, starting aged twenty at the Folies Bergère in 1909, who, always deeply influenced by his early experience in Paris as Charlot, would delight Parisian audiences for many decades to come. By 1913 Paris already boasted thirty-seven cinemas; one of them, the Pathé, near the Invalides, ran to an orchestra of sixty and claimed to have the world’s largest screen.

THE APPROACH OF WAR

Whether on stage or screen or in the cabarets, the message of that first decade and a half of the new century before the deluge was one of relentless optimism. Perhaps that was why Parisians had booed Stravinsky. Like Queen Victoria Paris was not interested in gloomy talk, and looked back at the men of the 1890s with something akin to pity, thinking how naive and lacking in subtlety they had been. Yet, for all the evidence of the march of technical progress, of perfectibility, there were occasional reminders that mankind had not yet tamed Nature—let alone himself. In January 1910 Paris was stricken with the worst floods in 150 years. Waters of the Seine came up to the famous Zouave’s beard on the Pont de l’Alma, the standard flood measurement, and floating debris threatened to carry away the older bridges. Photographs of the time show a sailor sculling along Boulevard Haussmann towards Gare Saint-Lazare. By 28 January, not a single pavement could be seen in the Ile de la Cité, while the Ile Saint-Louis was totally submerged. Bursting its banks, the Seine filled the courtyard of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and was five metres deep in the Quai d’Orsay station. Inhabitants near the Zoo were fearful that crocodiles would swim out of their pools and devour them. Sewers burst, looters appeared on the scene and 50,000 inhabitants fled their homes.