Chapter Eighteen

Sacred and Profane

(1890–1891)

As the last decade of the nineteenth century began, Charles de Gaulle was born.

This future leader was a reserved child who became a notoriously taciturn man, a fact that most biographers ascribe to the fact that he was “un homme du nord,” or man of the north—evoking the straight-laced, close-mouthed citizens of Lille, where he was born. True, de Gaulle was not a product of the Mediterranean lands of the South, whose vibrant inhabitants left him ill at ease, and whom he never entirely trusted. But apart from his birth—in his mother’s home in Lille, as local tradition dictated—he was raised in Paris.

It may seem difficult to picture de Gaulle as a Parisian, but if one discards the Paris of Montmartre, which de Gaulle seems never to have visited, and focuses instead on the more commonplace but comfortable bourgeois quarters of the seventh and fifteenth arrondissements, one finds the area where de Gaulle grew up—and where he returned as an adult.

Sign from Le Chat Noir (Adolphe Willette), used at both addresses of the Chat Noir cabaret. Paris, Musée Carnavalet. © Fr. Cochennec et E. Emo / Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.

He was born in 1890, the third child of what would become a family of four sons and one daughter. His father, a teacher, was a fourth-generation Parisian, and both parents were devout Catholics and monarchists. Imbued with a large dose of patriotism and a respect for the military (de Gaulle père, although no Bonapartist, frequently took the family to the nearby Invalides for outings), young de Gaulle’s life revolved around his parish church, St-François-Xavier (7th), and his schools. Given his parents’ ardent Catholicism, his first school was run by the Brothers of the Christian Schools of St. Thomas Aquinas, followed by the Collège de l’Immaculée-Conception, on Rue de Vaugirard (15th). The latter, a rigorous and influential Jesuit institution where de Gaulle père taught, played a significant role in shaping young de Gaulle—not only his rhetoric but his values and his view of the world.

A Jesuit institution? Indeed, for by 1890, despite the efforts of the Third Republic to oust the Jesuits and secularize education, nearly all of France’s former Jesuit collèges, or secondary schools, were back at full strength—thanks to considerable support from those who applauded them for standing firm against the forces of modernity, including secularism and socialism as well as the more liberal and socially conscious Catholicism that was beginning to emerge. Indeed, as the last decade of the century opened, right-wing Catholics and die-hard monarchists regarded the social order as increasingly precarious. Traditionalists in France, such as Charles de Gaulle’s parents, insisted on the rigorous and conservative education that the Jesuits provided, with its rigid discipline and tough moral code.

Yet during these same years, Pope Leo XIII was conveying quite a different message to his French flock. Since his accession in 1878, this pope had shown a surprising degree of moderation in his relations with the French Republic, advising French Catholics to accept the current state of affairs, which included not only the secularization of French education but also continuation of the Concordat and the state subsidy of the French Catholic Church—neither of which the Church wanted to lose. Given the Vatican’s unhappy recent relations with Italy and Germany, as well as with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was inclined to yield on the issue of educational laicization in France. After all, acceptance of the admittedly moderate Third Republic was beginning to look both necessary and inevitable—and in any case far preferable to the political and social models envisioned by the rising radical left.

And so in late 1890 and early 1891, the pope set to work to bring about a rapprochement between France’s current government and the religious and monarchist right—a rallying to the Republic, or ralliement. As the pope’s spokesman on this issue put it: When the people’s will has been made clear on the form of government it wishes, and when that people’s government is consistent with “those principles which alone can preserve Christian nations,” then certain sacrifices to conscience must be made “in order to put an end to our divisions” and “save that nation from the abyss which yawns before it.”1

Nevertheless, many conservative and royalist Catholics in France were not convinced.2 In their eyes, the government of the Third Republic was anti-Christian, and that was that. Against this backdrop, the basilica of Sacré-Coeur continued to rise. Although it still lacked its great dome, the basilica’s inauguration and benediction took place in June 1891. For those such as Clemenceau, who had opposed Sacré-Coeur’s construction from the outset, this constituted yet another outrage against the people of Paris. But for the faithful, the event offered reassurance that Christian piety still had a firm base in the godless city of Paris—even in that former Communard stronghold (and now bohemian center) of Montmartre.

* * *

As if to underscore the seamy side of political life, the Panama Canal affair now resurfaced, creating some nasty excitement on the otherwise featureless political scene. Memory of the Boulanger crisis as well as awareness of the rising socialist threat had assured a certain amount of self-interested stability in France’s government after Boulanger, but cracks in this façade now began to appear.

The allegations were of bribery, and in 1890 the minister of justice was directed to investigate. It took a year before the wheels of justice began to turn, but in 1891, the homes of several of those involved in the Canal adventure, including Gustave Eiffel, were raided. These raids yielded no incriminating evidence against Eiffel, but by this time there was no turning back.

Suddenly, not only were Ferdinand de Lesseps and his directors in grave trouble, but Gustave Eiffel was endangered as well.

* * *

Meanwhile, the poor—whether working or unemployed—remained destitute, and Louise Michel continued to agitate on their behalf. This led to yet another arrest following her 1890 May Day speech in the town of Vienne, where protesting workers had set up barricades, fought with police, and looted a factory.

When offered provisional release, she refused unless all of those arrested with her were treated similarly. The town then tried to get rid of her by revoking her arrest warrant, but she refused to leave the prison until her conditions were met. Local doctors then declared her insane, and she was returned to Paris. But fearing that the government would try to get her out of the way by committing her to an asylum, she fled Paris for London, where she remained for five years.

Vienne was not the only place where oppressed workers were rising in protest, and the spring of 1891 saw a surge in demonstrations and uprisings throughout the country. When soldiers fired into a workers’ procession in Fourmies, along France’s northeastern border, ten people were killed and many others wounded. Angered and alarmed by the violence, in which several children died, Clemenceau spoke out. Asking for an end to the prosecution of labor leaders, he begged the badly divided republicans to do something about the crisis facing France’s workers by uniting around a much-needed program of social reform. “Look out the window,” he told his fellow deputies. “See all the peaceable people who work and ask nothing of you except conditions of order and peace that will allow them to work and to prepare the regime of justice.” The very future of France depended upon a just resolution of these workers’ grievances. One day, he warned, France might need to call upon these very workers to defend it.3

One day in the not-too-distant future, Clemenceau’s prophecy would prove correct.

* * *

The 1890s thus opened inauspiciously, with labor demonstrations and anarchist bomb threats amid an environment of continued economic stagnation. Property owners predictably feared the rising tide of socialism, while desperate workers just as predictably gravitated to radical political action.

Despite this austere backdrop, the beauty, creativity, and opulence that would later be called the Belle Epoque was already emerging. To some extent this reflected continuing activity or even new alignments among an older cast of characters, such as the Impressionists, where the American artist Mary Cassatt and Pissarro shared techniques as they created breakthroughs in the difficult art of color engraving, and Cassatt and Berthe Morisot drew closer over a shared interest in Japanese prints, even venturing into a brief collaboration.4

And then there were the emerging figures, such as Debussy, who was still a virtual unknown but would in time become an emblem of the good years to come. Debussy’s Fantaisie had been scheduled for a spring 1890 concert by the Société Nationale de Musique—a singular honor for the young composer. But after the final rehearsal, Vincent d’Indy, who was conducting, realized that the program was too long and decided to cut all but the Fantaisie’s first movement. Deeply distressed by this decision, Debussy quietly took action by removing the music for Fantaisie from the musicians’ stands. Afterward, he wrote d’Indy that he could hardly have done otherwise: “Playing just the first movement of the Fantaisie,” he told him, “is not only dangerous but must inevitably give a false impression of the whole.”5

It represented an amazing amount of cheek on the part of the young and unrecognized composer, but Debussy was completely sure of what he wanted—and didn’t want. As he wrote Raymond Bonheur (a friend from Conservatoire days who shared literary interests with Debussy), “All I want is the approval of people like you, who find literary programmes not sufficiently solid or engaging as a basis for music and prefer the sort which can be taken on its own terms.”6

It was not long afterward that Debussy met Erik Satie, who also preferred music that could be taken on its own and undeniably new terms. “The moment I saw him,” Satie later wrote, “I felt drawn to him”—and indeed, their friendship would last for many years, even through stormy periods in Debussy’s life when other friends fell away. Despite Satie’s age (four years Debussy’s junior), he seems to have had a marked influence on Debussy—although the debate continues as to how much. Many years later, Satie would recall that when they first met, Debussy “was full of Mussorgsky, and very conscientiously was seeking a path which he had difficulty in finding.” Certainly Debussy at that time was seeking a new path in musical expression, and Satie— who wryly noted that his own progress had not been impeded by the Prix de Rome or any other prizes—took the opportunity to emphasize “the necessity for a Frenchman to free himself from the Wagnerian adventure.” And then he famously added: “We ought to have our own music—if possible without choucroute [sauerkraut].”7

According to Satie, it made little difference whether this music made use of some of the methods discovered by Monet, Cézanne, or Toulouse-Lautrec. Symbolism, Impressionism—it did not matter what one called it, so long as one went one’s own way. And from the outset, Satie had been as determinedly individualistic as anyone on the planet.

Born in 1866 in Honfleur to a French father and Scottish mother (who gave a Scandinavian rather than French spelling to his Christian name), young Erik was placed in his grandparents’ care following his mother’s death and his father’s move to Paris. Eccentricity seems to have run in the family, although it skipped over Satie’s eminently respectable father and grandparents and landed squarely on his uncle, whom the young boy adored. Drawn to music (although he didn’t begin piano lessons until the age of ten), Satie was also drawn to the unconventional, and he proved a rebel from the start.

At the age of twelve, Satie rejoined his father and new stepmother in Paris, and a year later was sent to the Paris Conservatoire. His father and stepmother undoubtedly wanted to encourage his musical inclinations, but Satie was bored by the music he heard there and put off by the Conservatoire’s conventionalism. Not unexpectedly, the Conservatoire was equally unimpressed with him, and he passed his years there without distinction.

It was in 1887, at the age of twenty-one, that he began to publish his first works for the piano, including his three deceptively simple but seminal Gymnopédies, two of which Debussy later scored for orchestra. These plus Sarabandes, which Satie published the same year, in time earned him a reputation as a “harmonic innovator” and a “forerunner of the music to come,” including the Groupe des Six and, especially, Debussy and Ravel.8

But in 1891, when he first met Debussy, Satie was still an unknown, making his living by playing the piano at Le Chat Noir and then (after quarreling with its owner, Rodolphe Salis) at its nearby competitor, the Auberge du Clou. These were Satie’s Montmartre years, when he lived behind Sacré-Coeur on Rue Cortot, near the beautiful old mansion that now is the Musée de Montmartre.

Like Debussy, Satie preferred the company of artists and writers, and he claimed that he learned more from painters than he ever had from musicians. He probably had one particular painter in mind, the gifted and fiery Suzanne Valadon, with whom he had a brief affair. She already had a son, Maurice, by a father whose name she refused to divulge (Maurice later took the name of Utrillo from the owner of the Auberge du Clou). Satie befriended the boy, whose artistic abilities would eventually emerge, along with severe alcoholism and mental instability. But a conventional family unit never formed from this highly unconventional grouping. Valadon went on to professional success and more personal fireworks, but without Satie, who was heartbroken.

For the time being he occupied himself with the mystical Society of Rosicrucians (Debussy at this time was also drawn to the mystical and the occult) and then founded his own church—a strange and elaborate structure of which he was the only member, and whose journal he used primarily to attack a couple of individuals he despised. He also pushed for admission into the sacrosanct Académie Française and reacted with scathing denunciations when, quite understandably, the Académie members flatly rejected him. Yet despite Satie’s eccentricities, there were those who took him seriously, eventually including the eminent philosopher Jacques Maritain.

An odd bird, no doubt about it, Satie nevertheless had the ability to cut through pretense and neatly skewer sham. It was this ability that would repel those who found him strange or merely laughable. But along the way it did earn him the friendship of a few stalwarts, who appreciated him and, at least to some degree, understood.

* * *

As the decade opened, Debussy was still striving for recognition, but Claude Monet had at last achieved artistic acclaim and financial success. The emerging American market played a large role in this, even though Monet had consistently disparaged Durand-Ruel’s efforts to cultivate it. And Monet had successfully played off dealer against dealer, to his own benefit.

It was now that Monet bought Giverny, which he had been renting since 1883, for the sum of twenty-two thousand francs (paid in four yearly installments). And it was now that he began his series of Poplars and Haystacks, using a single motif in each to explore the infinite gradations of change in light, shadow, and color from one day to the next, one season to another.

Choosing sites near Giverny (the line of poplars rose along the banks of the Epte, and the haystacks dotted nearby fields), Monet was able to visit and revisit these locations with relative ease. Next would come his studies of the great cathedral of Rouen, which despite its proximity to Giverny, required him to stake out an empty apartment overlooking the cathedral from which to paint.9 After that, his eye fell on a much closer subject, the possibilities at Giverny itself.

Monet’s Haystacks and Poplars at first roused a certain amount of incomprehension and derision, such as from one of the partners in the Boussod, Valadon gallery, who informed Théo van Gogh’s replacement that “you will also find [among our inventory] a certain number of paintings by a landscape artist, Claude Monet, who is beginning to sell a bit in America, but he . . . is beginning to overstock us with his landscapes, always the same subjects.” And an unimpressed critic wrote: “Here we have the grey stack, the pink stack (six o’clock), the yellow stack (eleven o’clock), the blue stack (two o’clock), the violet stack (four o’clock), the red stack (eight o’clock in the evening), etc., etc.”10

Still, praise for Monet’s Haystacks and Poplars outweighed the criticism. An 1891 exhibition of Monet’s paintings at the Durand-Ruel Gallery (Durand-Ruel was now back in place as Monet’s primary buyer) brought critical acclaim and increased sales. Pissarro, who had yet to find an audience for his work, complained to his son that “for the moment people want nothing but Monets. . . . Worst of all they all want Sheaves in the Setting Sun!”11

Pissarro was right. That year, Monet’s sales from Boussod and Durand-Ruel amounted to a hefty ninety-seven thousand francs.12

* * *

While Monet at last prospered, life still was exceedingly difficult for two other artists of genius, Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh. Camille Pissarro had spent the spring painting in London, but on his return to France received a request from Théo van Gogh to take in his brother, who had been confined during the previous year in the asylum of Saint-Rémy.

Pissarro had known Vincent van Gogh during his stay in Paris, and had been generous with his time and advice, helping van Gogh move away from his dark, Dutch-inspired style and colors and toward the brighter and freer Impressionist palette and technique. Pissarro was also well acquainted with Théo van Gogh, who had come through for him when other dealers, especially Durand-Ruel, had not. With characteristic generosity, Pissarro agreed to have Vincent stay with him in Eragny, just outside of Paris, where Pissarro had settled with his wife and many children.13

But Pissarro’s wife was afraid that Vincent might prove dangerous and was especially worried about the children. Giving way to his wife’s wishes, Pissarro recommended that Théo turn to Pissarro’s friend, Dr. Gachet, in Auvers-sur-Oise. Dr. Gachet was indeed willing to care for Vincent, who came to him in May 1890. But despite Dr. Gachet’s efforts, two months later Vincent van Gogh committed suicide.

Even then, the tragedy was not over, because soon after Vincent’s death, his devoted brother, Théo, became seriously ill. Traumatized by Vincent’s death, Théo ultimately went mad. He died in January 1891, only a few months after his beloved brother, and is buried beside him in Auvers.

The Seurat story is less dramatic but ultimately just as moving, ending as it did in the sudden loss of a young and gifted artist. In Seurat’s case, death came quickly and unexpectedly, in March 1891, nine days after he had taken an active role in an exhibition of Neo-Impressionist painters. Scarcely two weeks later, his infant son died of the same illness, possibly influenza.

At the time of their deaths, van Gogh was thirty-seven and Seurat was thirty-one. Given a normal lifespan, they both could have lived well into the twentieth century. “It is a great loss for art,” Pissarro commented about Seurat,14 who had forged the radically new style that Pissarro, however temporarily, had adopted. And although Pissarro did not seem to recognize it at the time, it was a fitting tribute to van Gogh as well.

* * *

There was yet another death in 1891 with reverberations in the Parisian artistic community, although it was the Monet household that was most immediately affected. Ernest Hoschedé, the abandoned husband of Alice Hoschedé and current art editor of the Magazine Français Illustré, had for years overindulged in food and drink, with the unhappy outcome of a severe case of gout. By 1890 the gout had grown worse, and by early 1891 it was clear that Hoschedé was dying.

During his last days on earth, Alice suddenly appeared at her husband’s bedside and attended him day and night. He died wretchedly, in poverty, and Monet paid for his funeral and burial, which at the request of Hoschedé’s children, was at Giverny. Apart from Hoschedé’s children, there appear to have been few real mourners.

As for Alice, one simply does not know what she felt. One thing was clear, though: she now was in a position to salvage her reputation by marrying Monet.

* * *

Not long after the death of Ernest Hoschedé, sixteen-year-old Maurice Ravel received first prize in the piano competition at the Paris Conservatoire. Across town, after a lengthy stay in Brittany, Paul Gauguin (who had not attended Vincent van Gogh’s funeral) showed up at Madame Charlotte’s crémerie, where he made friends with Alphonse Mucha before embarking for Tahiti. And Auguste Rodin, who had made a real splash at his joint 1889 exhibition with Claude Monet, now received a vied-for commission from the Société des Gens de Lettres to create a monument to Honoré de Balzac—the Société’s choice being heavily influenced by that year’s president, Emile Zola, who thought Rodin supremely capable of conveying Balzac in the way that Zola envisioned him, as the forerunner of Naturalism.

Around this same time, Ernest Cognacq, by now a very rich man, moved into a large mansion at 65 Avenue du Bois (now Avenue Foch, 16th), which was big enough to accommodate his growing art collection—a collection that would eventually be open to the public in Paris’s Musée Cognacq-Jay.15 And a new face, that of a young woman by the name of Maria Sklodowska—soon to be known as Marie Curie—appeared in Paris.

From the outset, Maria’s determination and focus were extraordinary—certainly on a par with her exceptional intellect. Born in Warsaw in 1867, she had been raised in the stifling political atmosphere of Poland under Russian domination. Although blessed with a supportive family, her father’s salary as a physics teacher was insufficient to underwrite the kind of education she longed for. The University of Warsaw did not admit females, and if she was to pursue her dreams, she would have to study abroad.

Paris beckoned, but Maria’s older sister had dreams as well—of becoming a doctor. These two young women, remarkable for their time, at last decided upon a plan. Bronia, the elder, would study medicine in Paris while Maria worked as a governess to support her. Then, when Bronia won her medical degree, Maria would come to Paris. For five long years Maria carried out her part of the agreement, teaching by day and studying by night, until at last Bronia sent for her.

When Maria arrived in Paris in 1891, she was twenty-four. It was not the usual age to begin an academic career, but she was undaunted. After qualifying for admission, she enrolled in the Faculty of Sciences at the Sorbonne for an advanced degree in physics. Utterly committed to her studies, she found lodging in a series of Left Bank garrets in which she both starved and froze. But she treasured these years of solitude. “We must believe,” she wrote her brother during this difficult time, “that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”16

Pioneers do not as a rule settle for the comfortable corners of life, and Maria Sklodowska was no exception.