Chapter Nineteen

Family Affairs

(1892)

Following a glorious autumn in their rented house in Mézy-sur-Seine, just to the northwest of Paris, Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet returned to Paris. After some initial hesitation they had bought a beautiful seventeenth-century château near Mézy, the Château du Mesnil. The entire family, including Julie, adored it, and although for a time they had backed off for practical considerations, they still found the lovely old château irresistible. By autumn, the château was theirs.

Unfortunately, that winter Eugène Manet’s health grew steadily worse. Back in Paris, Morisot continued her Thursday dinners. But soon her husband grew too frail even for dinner parties, and Morisot cancelled them indefinitely. On April 13, 1892, Eugène Manet died. Despite his long illness and all the signs of impending death, Berthe Morisot was devastated. “I have descended to the depths of suffering,” she scrawled in her notebook. “I have spent the last three nights weeping. Pity! Pity!” And then, after musing on the unimportance of “material objects to be contemplated as relics,” she decisively wrote, “It is better to burn the love letters.”1

La Pâtisserie Gloppe, avenue des Champs-Elysées (1889) (Jean Béraud). Paris, Musée Carnavalet. © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.

She buried herself in her work, preparing for her first solo show, which was to be held at the gallery of Boussod, Valadon. Despite her usual fears (she left Paris immediately after the opening, which she did not attend), the show was a success, propelling her into even more intense work at the easel. But first she had to deal with the château that she and Eugène had bought together for their old age. After spending three weeks supervising workers to fix up the place—a distressing task, as she found the château becoming “prettier and prettier”—she rented it out, to cover expenses. Someday, she hoped, Julie would enjoy it and “fill it with her children.” But as for herself, “I feel mortally sad in it, and am in a hurry to leave.”2 The memory of Eugène was too strong for her there.

In September, Morisot wrote Mallarmé that the passage of time was only increasing her sadness, and in October she answered another friend with a brief admission of loneliness. “I have Julie,” she added. “But it is a kind of solitude none the less, for instead of opening my heart I must control myself and spare her tender years the sight of my grief.”3

That autumn, she and Julie took a short trip to the Touraine, but by that time Morisot’s older sister, Yves, had become seriously ill. “My heart is filled with sorrow,” Morisot wrote a close woman friend, adding, “We now constitute a circle of old ladies of bygone days.”4 Although certainly not an “old lady,” Morisot had indeed aged. Now, at fifty-one—although still beautiful—she was completely white-haired.

* * *

Being a genius can be difficult enough, but being female and a genius in nineteenth-century France must have been infinitely harder. Camille Claudel certainly passed the genius test, as Rodin recognized, and as her brilliant sculpturing clearly showed. From 1888, when she left her family’s home to live in an atelier paid for by Rodin, she had strongly impressed the critics, beginning with her sculpture Sakuntala, a physically and emotionally charged depiction of two embracing lovers that she showed in that year’s Salon, soon after Rodin showed The Kiss at the Georges Petit gallery.

Yes, she could imitate Rodin, but from the outset she was true to her own vision. She also was quite clear about what she expected from Rodin, who in an 1886 document agreed to make her his only pupil and to do everything in his power to advance her career. According to this extraordinary document (which he signed), Rodin also agreed to exclude other women from his life, and (after passing a series of tests) to marry Claudel. Rodin certainly did his part in advancing Claudel’s career, introducing her to influential people and doing his utmost to help her obtain commissions. After all, he believed in her. But, much to Claudel’s consternation, he did not and would not leave Rose.

By late 1892 and early 1893, Claudel’s anger over Rose had grown into an obsession, leading to her breakup with Rodin.5 It was then that Rodin moved with Rose from Paris to Bellevue and, eventually, to Meudon. Yet he continued to do everything he could to continue to help Claudel’s career, and even retained the lease on her atelier on the Boulevard d’Italie. He still loved and admired her, but in 1895, he told Octave Mirbeau that it had been two years since they had even seen or written to one another.

Claudel’s adoring younger brother, Paul, later portrayed her as victimized by Rodin, whom Paul castigated as an egocentric and heartless monster, one who took advantage of a dazzled young girl.6 But others have seen Claudel in a different light—as a brilliant but flawed genius who was destroyed by obsessive jealousy and paranoia.7

In any case, by late 1892 it was clear that whichever version of Rodin and Claudel was correct, their affair was not ending happily.

* * *

Debussy met Gaby Dupont in 1890 and began to live with her in 1892. It was a crucial step for the young composer, who until this time had lived with his parents. (In another major change at this time, he now began to sign his name as Claude rather than Claude-Achille or Achille.) One of Debussy’s friends, René Peter, described Gaby as “blonde with catlike eyes, a powerful chin and firm opinions.” She took care of the housekeeping, which was not without its challenges—partly because they were poor, and partly because Debussy (according to Peter) was “a large, spoilt child who . . . indulged all his whims and was impervious to reason.”8 If, for example, a particular Japanese print caught his eye (he was an avid collector of Japanese prints and objets d’art), he bought it without stopping to think where the money would come from for their next meal. And while Debussy was busy impulse buying, daydreaming, or composing, Gaby was in charge of the practical side of their lives.

Gaby managed their frugal household and Debussy’s life, but Debussy found it difficult to manage his moods, especially when a particular composition was not going well or when he felt that the world had turned its back on him. By 1892 he was one of only three musicians attending Mallarmé’s Tuesday evening salon—certainly a major accomplishment. But in the autumn of 1892, Debussy was in a bleak mood when he wrote to Prince André Poniatowski, whom he had met at Mallarmé’s salon. Poniatowski had hoped to arrange a concert for Debussy in the United States, possibly with Walter Damrosch, but this did not work out. “Whatever happens,” Debussy wrote him, “I shall always be grateful to you for keeping me in mind . . . and for helping me escape from the black hole which my life has tended to become.”9

Debussy went on about “the failures that crush even the strongest” and “the enemies ranged against me”—an interesting complaint given how little known he still was, except among Mallarmé’s admittedly exclusive salon. (“It’s strange,” Debussy added, “but even though my name is almost unknown there are innumerable people who detest me.”10)

But despite the difficulties that faced him, whether real or imagined, Debussy still had Gaby to take care of him—at least, for the time being.

•

From February through April 1892, Claude Monet was hard at work painting the cathedral of Rouen. It was grueling work, he reported to Alice, with twelve-hour workdays—standing all the time. But by late spring he was back in Giverny, where he celebrated his return (and the death of Ernest Hoschedé the year before) by marrying Alice. Their wedding, in July, was followed a week later by the marriage of Alice’s daughter Suzanne to the American painter Theodore Butler.

Added to another successful exhibition (this one of his Poplars series at Durand-Ruel’s gallery) and an income of more than a hundred thousand francs a year, 1892 was a very good year for Claude Monet.

But 1892 was not a good year for Georges Clemenceau, for whom the year hurtled from one disaster to another. Although his marriage had soured long before (some would argue that it had not gone well from the outset), it was not until 1892 that it completely collapsed, highlighted by an especially nasty divorce. Interestingly, Clemenceau assumed the role of the aggrieved partner, for despite his own flagrant infidelities, he was not about to allow his wife to take similar liberties. The story making the rounds (which Edmond de Goncourt—no fan of Clemenceau’s—helpfully preserved for posterity) was that, weary of her husband’s philandering, Mary Clemenceau herself took a lover. Clemenceau had the lover followed, caught the two in flagrante, and sued for divorce. The Napoleonic Code being what it was, the furious husband had the upper hand. The next thing Mary Clemenceau knew, she had a choice between prison or divorce. Having (not surprisingly) agreed to divorce, she was immediately escorted by two policemen to the nearest port, where she was sent back to the States.

But this unhappy story was not yet over, for following Mary’s abrupt departure, Clemenceau shipped off her personal belongings to her sister and then proceeded to destroy everything in the house that reminded him of her. Taking out his rage on inanimate objects, Clemenceau smashed a marble statue of his wife and decimated memory-inducing photos and paintings. As for Mary, who had no money and no means of supporting herself, she took to lecturing on the Panama scandal, using her maiden name followed by the words “ex-wife of M. Clemenceau.”

But worse was yet to come, for that autumn, the Panama Canal scandal at long last burst into the open, enveloping Clemenceau and ironically giving Mary Clemenceau a sure-fire lecture topic on which to speak.

* * *

The key figure in Clemenceau’s messy involvement with the Panama affair was the financier Cornélius Herz. Clemenceau first met Herz during the early 1880s and quickly developed a close relationship with him, entertaining him in his home and receiving money from him for Clemenceau’s beloved and financially challenged newspaper, La Justice. How much money Clemenceau received is not known, although many years later he told an interviewer that there was no reason that he should have refused Herz’s funds. “They were for a useful struggle,” he said. “Moreover, I completely paid him back.”11 Yet it was not quite that simple, as Clemenceau himself must have realized, because by 1885 he was borrowing from friends in order to buy back Herz’s considerable investment in La Justice and disentangle himself from the financier, whose reputation was shady and whose latest dealings included a major effort to acquire a monopoly over Paris’s fledgling telephone system.

Unquestionably, Herz was a schemer, and from the outset he had cultivated political figures who could help him. Although Clemenceau paid back Herz and voted against giving him the Paris telephone concession, by the mid- and late 1880s newspapers were already raising questions about this relationship as well as about the entire Panama venture. By the autumn of 1892, the simmering Panama mess exploded into a full-scale scandal.

The scandal was a far-reaching one, involving bribery and corruption on an enormous scale. De Lesseps had badly underestimated the monetary as well as human cost of building the canal and by the mid-1880s desperately needed a fresh infusion of capital, which he tried to get through lottery bonds. Special legislation was necessary for him to do this, and that is where the bribery came into play—about thirteen million francs to journalists and newspaper owners for favorable publicity, and another ten million francs to financial intermediaries and politicians.

Herz was to be paid ten million francs to get Parliament to allow the company to raise capital through lottery bonds, and in 1888 Parliament did indeed pass the necessary legislation—with the assistance of a large number of bribed deputies (more than a hundred may have had their palms greased, although Clemenceau was not among them). But even with this maneuver, the amount of capital raised was not enough, and the company soon went bankrupt.

Criminal proceedings began in 1891, but despite efforts to keep the whole thing quiet, the anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole in September 1892 began to publish a detailed account of the scandal, denouncing not only de Lesseps but also Herz and the company’s banker, Baron Jacques de Reinach, both of whom were Jewish. But this was only the beginning. In November, Ferdinand de Lesseps and his son, Charles, as well as Gustave Eiffel and two of the company’s directors, were indicted on charges of swindling and breach of trust.

Reinach committed suicide before he could be indicted, and Herz escaped to England, but the scandal continued to escalate, fueled not only by anti-Semitism but also by anyone who sought political advantage from the affair. Among these was Paul Déroulède, an ardent supporter of Boulanger and an equally ardent enemy of Georges Clemenceau. On December 20, Déroulède attacked Clemenceau in the Chamber of Deputies, claiming that without Clemenceau’s patronage, Herz could not and would not have risen so quickly to wealth and influence. “He [Herz] had to have had someone to represent him,” Déroulède told the hushed assembly, “an ambassador to open for him every door and every circle, especially political circles.” When Déroulède named “this obliging, devoted, indefatigable intermediary” as Clemenceau, an uproar erupted in the Chamber. But Déroulède was not finished, for he now proceeded to label Herz (“this little German Jew”) as a foreign agent working—with Clemenceau’s full knowledge and assistance—to undermine the French Republic.12

Clemenceau defended himself verbally against this “odious slander,” but in the end he took the most direct means he knew to counter this attack on his honor and reputation—by challenging Déroulède to a duel. Technically dueling was illegal, but in practice it was only prosecuted if either of the parties did not conduct himself according to the prescribed rules or if the duel resulted in death.13 Clemenceau was a renowned and feared duelist, and given his temper and the animosity on both sides, it was generally expected that this duel, unlike most others, would be fought to the death.

But it was not. Despite his reputation for expert marksmanship, Clemenceau shot wide of the mark all three times, as did Déroulède. This unsatisfying outcome left some to claim that Clemenceau had deliberately missed (no one made a similar claim for Déroulède). Yet Clemenceau’s unexpected vulnerability (or magnanimity) did not take the heat off him. If anything, it seemed to encourage his enemies, who continued their attacks unabated into the following year.

While Clemenceau would never face charges for any of the crimes that Déroulède or others accused him of committing, Gustave Eiffel—caught in the same web—would soon find himself defending his considerable reputation in a court of law.

* * *

Several years after his mother’s death, James McNeill Whistler terminated the last of his relationships with a series of mistresses and, at the age of fifty-four, finally wed. His bride was Beatrice (Trixie) Birnie Godwin, the widow of architect Edward Godwin and an artist in her own right. Whistler adored his Trixie, and it was in 1892, in the full flush of happiness, that he decided to return for good to Paris.

Born in 1834 in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler had from childhood lived an unusually cosmopolitan life. His family moved frequently, including a lengthy stay in Imperial Russia, where Whistler’s father, a West Point–educated engineer, oversaw construction of the new Saint Petersburg–Moscow railroad line. Saint Petersburg was followed by six years in London, until the death of Whistler’s father upended young James’s dreams of becoming an artist. With visions of something more practical for her beloved son, Whistler’s mother wangled an appointment for him to West Point.

Whistler stuck it out there for three difficult years (difficult not only for him but for the West Point staff, including its new superintendent, Colonel Robert E. Lee). He chafed at the discipline and earned so many demerits that, taken with his poor academic record, it was no surprise when West Point finally kicked him out. An appointment with the predecessor of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey also ended badly. At last Whistler gave up even the pretense of trying to be what he was not and left for Paris, where he was determined to conquer the art world. He never set foot in America again.

Bilingual and cosmopolitan, young Whistler adapted easily to bohemian Paris life of the late 1850s, attending art classes, living in a series of cheap lodgings, and taking a mistress. Always a dandy, he now dressed more flamboyantly than ever, clearly enjoying standing out in a crowd. But his lively social life came at a price: extravagant by nature, he already was dodging creditors—much as he would for years to come.

Paris may have been socially congenial, but its art establishment was as unreceptive to the kind of style that Whistler was developing as it was to that of Manet, Monet, and Degas, with whom he would eventually become friends. Like them, he departed from the classical subjects and historical tableaux favored by the establishment-controlled Salon, and instead focused on everyday life, which he depicted with increasingly abstract and evocative brushstrokes. In this, he shared much of the vision of the emerging Impressionists, although he never considered himself one of them. Despite the final effect of his etchings and paintings, he created most of them painstakingly in his studio rather than rapidly en plein air. And although focusing increasingly on color, his palette was a subtle one, sometimes exploring the various shades of white (The White Girl), but more often, as with the portrait of his mother, the infinite shadings of gray and black. Even among those with whom he had the most in common, Whistler remained alone.

Much as he loved Paris, Whistler’s rejection by the all-important Salon made him decide to try his fortunes in London instead. Unfortunately, London’s art establishment turned out to be even stodgier than the one he had left behind. Fighting the British critics, he embroiled himself in endless other disputes (as delectably recorded in his book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies). In the midst of this turmoil, Anna Whistler arrived, determined to settle in London with her dear son. Despite his antipathy to her Puritanism, he tempered his lifestyle on her behalf and, in a heartfelt tribute, painted her portrait.

It may come as a surprise to many Americans, but Whistler’s quintessentially American portrait, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother (informally known as Whistler’s Mother), has resided in Paris since 1891—first at the Musée du Luxembourg, then at the Louvre, and more recently at the Musée d’Orsay. Before that, it had spent its entire existence (since its inception in 1871) with Whistler in London, where it did not attract much in the way of favorable attention. It had received tepid reviews after the Royal Academy hung it in 1872, over protest. A decade later, Whistler submitted it to the Paris Salon, where it received only a third-class medal.

Its long-term French residence began soon after Whistler was publicly acclaimed by the art critic Gustave Geffroy, who identified him with the new Symbolist movement. Whistler had not changed, but his art had suddenly found its place at the forefront of the most avant-garde movement of its time—one that rejected Realism as well as the light- and color-infused work of the Impressionists, and instead embraced evocative (and frequently dark) descriptions of atmosphere and mood. Paying tribute to Baudelaire, Poe, and the pre-Raphaelites, the movement’s major French spokesman was Mallarmé, who by now was a friend of Whistler, thanks to their mutual friend Monet. Suddenly finding himself as touted as Monet or Rodin (both of whom Geffroy had also praised), Whistler decided that the time was ripe to push for the purchase of one of his paintings by the French government. The painting that he had in mind was the Portrait of the Painter’s Mother.

Whistler and Mallarmé together worked on the plan. Mallarmé approached the current inspector of fine arts, who was a good friend, while Whistler contacted Geffroy, who was pleased to write an article urging the purchase. Happily, the gallery of Boussod, Valadon agreed to exhibit the painting while these talks were going on, and Georges Clemenceau (by this time a good friend of Monet and therefore of Monet’s friend Whistler) persuaded the minister of public instruction and fine arts to consider the painting for government purchase.

The minister agreed, and soon the painting was on its way to the Luxembourg, with the promise of the Louvre in its future. The sum for its purchase was a paltry four thousand francs, but although Whistler had hoped for considerably more, he was delighted by the prestige that the sale conferred. The honor “will show the recognition of my work in France in contrast to elsewhere,” he wrote Mallarmé, “and make up for past sufferings.”14

He added that “since France has permanently taken the ‘Mother’ it seems to me that she also has to adopt the son a little!”15 Soon after the French government’s purchase of the Portrait of the Painter’s Mother, Whistler made good on this idea by permanently moving to Paris. Searching the Left Bank, he found an expansive sixth-floor studio on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs (6th), with an extraordinary view of the Luxembourg Gardens and much of Paris. And then he and Trixie settled in a comfortable apartment with adjoining garden behind the Rue du Bac (7th). Many long years after Whistler had left Paris for London, he had returned—this time, he hoped, for good.