ÉCOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS

The years that a woman deducts from her age are never lost. They are added to other women’s.

Diane de Poitiers

If you walk toward Boulevard St.-Germain on our side of Rue Bonaparte, in a few steps you come to the École des Beaux-Arts, the national graduate school of art and architecture. Behind a handsome grille you see a large courtyard with buildings on three sides. On the left, various architectural elements are preserved against the wall; on the right you’ll see Queen Margot’s church, Église des Petits-Augustins, with its facade taken from Anet, the château that belonged to Diane de Poitiers.

By the time of Queen Margot’s birth in 1553, there had been a long tradition of powerful mistresses and female rulers in France—Queen Margot is only one of the remarkable women associated with this quarter. The constellation of names also leads back to an earlier century, the fifteenth century, to Diane de Poitiers. Standing in the courtyard of the École des Beaux-Arts, you feel that Diane de Poitiers is a personage at least as present as Queen Margot. This interesting lady, influential mistress of Queen Margot’s father, Henri II, had as a young woman been at the court of Queen Margot’s grandfather, François I. She was in fact twenty years older than her royal lover his son. Even before coming to France, I had always been fascinated with this namesake Diane, and, especially, would have liked to know the secrets of her unusually long career as femme fatale. (She was said to have bathed in milk, for one thing.)

Facade of the church of the École des Beaux-Arts

Someone, possibly Queen Margot herself, commented about her father, that he “had all the faults of his father [François I], with a weaker mind,” implying that France during her father’s reign was really ruled by this “ancient mistress,” who had wrested control of him from another, “the pious and learned Anne d’Étampes.” Both these mistresses had to contend, of course, with Catherine de Médicis, the legal wife, but wife and mistress seemed not to have interfered with each other too much, at least during Henri II’s lifetime. The minute he was dead, Catherine sent Diane back to her country place, where she died, at sixty-seven, of a fall from her horse. If you count Diane as a de facto queen, she is the fifth queen to be associated with this neighborhood, only by association with the facade of her château, as she really didn’t live here. But she was in a way the fifth female ruler of France in this period, with Catherine and Marie de Médicis, Queen Margot, and Anne of Austria. (There have been not a few female military figures as well, including Joan of Arc, Duchesse de Montpensier, and Henri IV’s mother, Jeanne d’Albret.)

There was also a long tradition for the courtesan—the word originally referred to members of the court rather than to kept women. Queen Margot tells of at least two episodes when her husband Henri fell in love with a lady of the court. One was a Madame de Sauves, one a woman referred to as “Fosseuse.” Both times Henri fell in love at the same moment that the eye of the reigning king fell upon the same lady, so that the rivalry between Protestant Henri and Catholic Queen Margot’s brothers played itself out in the bedroom as well as on the field of battle.

Henri IV was capable of good-natured behavior but more often got into a snit, as once when he thinks Queen Margot is not nice enough to his mistress Fosseuse when Fosseuse gets pregnant. Queen Margot, not having much choice, tries to be nice to this young woman, and offers to take her away to a remote spot during the last stages of her pregnancy, to quiet any scandal under the pretext of withdrawing to avoid an epidemic.

But Fosseuse refuses. “So far from showing any contrition, or returning thanks for my kindness,” complains Margot, “she replied with the utmost arrogance.” According to Margot, Fosseuse rants that:

she would prove all those to be liars who had reported [that she was pregnant by the King], that, for my part, I had ceased for a long time to show her any marks of regard, and she saw that I was determined upon her ruin. These words she delivered in as loud a tone as mine had been mildly expressed; and, leaving me abruptly, she flew in a rage to the King my husband. He was very angry upon the occasion, and declared he would make them all liars who had laid such things to her charge. From that moment until the hour of her delivery, which was a few months after, he never spoke to me.

One feels a little sorry for Fosseuse in this story, although she seems to have been somewhat undiplomatic. Because apparently one did not lightly say no to a king, and could only hope to gain some advantage from compliance.

Henri was a determined womanizer; Queen Margot recounts how one night he had some sort of fit, and lay for an hour in a coma:

…occasioned, I supposed, by his excesses with women, for I never knew anything of the kind to happen to him before. However, as it was my duty so to do, I attended him with so much care and diligence that, when he recovered, he spoke of it to everyone, declaring that, if I had not perceived his indisposition and called for the help of my women, he should not have survived the fit.

In fact, it behooved Margot to have had a little charity, given her own numerous lovers. But the point is that the long-established conventions of sexual freedom that have attracted not only the French, and not only back then, were also attractive to our American forebears and all the American travelers to Paris since then.

 

As I said, I feel a kind of affinity with Diane de Poitiers on account of having her name. My friend Michelle, an American married to a Frenchman, thinks that American women who find themselves living in France are apt to have been given Frenchified first names at birth, as she was, and as was I. Maybe destiny steers the Tammys and Wendys elsewhere. It was evidently some Francophilia on the part of my parents that made them think of this name, and spell it Diane in the French way, not with the more English form, Diana. I came upon a list among my mother’s papers of other names she and my father were considering, and these were also French: Charlotte, Margot, and Anne.

After Queen Margot’s death in 1615, the new queen, Anne of Austria, continued the building of a church and convent for the Petits-Augustins—themselves an order of Augustinians called “petits” to distinguish them from the Grands Augustins, who had a convent of their own on the street of that name a few minutes away. Anne gave the credit to Margot for the finished church. The inscription on the chapel reads: “Le 21 Mars 1608, la Reine Marguerite, Duchesse de Valois, petite-fille du grand roi François, soeur de trois rois, et seule restée de la race des Valois, ayant été visitée et secourue de Dieu, comme Job et Jacob…elle a bati et fondé ce Monastère.”

Anne of Austria was the wife of Louis XIII, the monarch d’Artagnan faithfully served; her portrait hung in his rooms. By d’Artagnan’s day, the little Chapel of Praises that had stood alone before then had been incorporated into the church of the Petits-Augustins we see today. Queen Anne’s new church was a handsome, large structure that served the monks until the Revolution nearly two hundred years later and now sits within the precincts of the École des Beaux-Arts.

You enter the courtyard of the École des Beaux-Arts from Rue Bonaparte through gates topped with out-sized, almost postmodern-looking stone busts of Nicolas Poussin and Pierre Puget, two seventeenth-century painters, the former much admired today, the other more or less forgotten. The courtyard is itself a classé space, listed on the register of buildings that mustn’t be altered or torn down. It is wide and cobbled, with a mythological figure—is she Art herself, or maybe France?—standing in the middle on her twenty-foot plinth, with archaeological morsels of pilasters and cornices stuck on the buildings to the right and left, and a handsome Palladian nineteenth-century building across the back, containing classrooms, the library, and an amphitheater where a giant mural pays homage to the great artists of history.

(Who was it who pointed out that in every frieze of great men across the face of an old building, some of the figures will be completely unfamiliar to modern eyes? And so it is with the pantheon of painters in the École des Beaux-Arts amphitheater mural, painted 1836–1841. Holbein le Jeune, certainly, but Arnolfo di Lapo? Vignole? Peruzzi? I have a lot of architectural history to learn. The immortalized figures are overwhelmingly French and Italian, of course. There is only one Englishman—Inigo Jones—and no American.)

At the time of the French Revolution, the revolutionaries had planned to destroy all vestiges of previous regimes, including the art, the calendar, and certainly the churches, and start over with a blank slate. It was an analogous situation, I suppose, to the looting that went on in Iraq in 2003, the difference being that the French revolutionaires had more things to loot. Many a French family still preserves the finger bone of a king, the scrap of a bonnet, motley souvenirs of that time, handed down with increasing vagueness as to the provenance, and increased carelessness in dusting. Religious buildings were deconsecrated, and many were despoiled or destroyed completely, but somehow an enterprising archaeologist, Alexandre Lenoir, was allowed to commandeer the Église des Petits-Augustins for a museum. He was given the power to gather together various parts of discarded and destroyed tombs, statuary, and pieces of torn-down buildings into a museum of monuments, thus luckily preserving much of French heritage that would otherwise have been smashed to bits.

 

I had been looking at the church in the École des Beaux-Arts complex for six months before I was ever able to go inside, for it is usually closed now, except for the exhibitions, or expositions, as the French call them, but it is worth trying to see inside if it is open. (It is always possible on the guided visit on Monday afternoons, by appointment; to reserve call 01 47 03 50 74.) Even if it isn’t, you’ll see the facade, taken from Diane de Poitiers’s château, her initials entwined with those of Queen Margot’s father Henri II. (At Blois, the appearance of this monogram, entwined H’s and D, is explained as denoting “Henri Deux.”) To see the chapel, you have to go inside the church, or else look out of my kitchen window. But the church itself, the courtyard, the facade of Diane de Poitiers’s château—all these are visible from Rue Bonaparte.

The facade of Anet is worldy in its origins and also its details—statues of the pagan goddess Diana the huntress, classical columns, the initials celebrating earthly pomp, and so on. Anet was begun in 1548 by Henri II’s architect Philibert de l’Orme, and worked on by sculptors Jean Goujon and Jean Cousin, and, less certainly, Benevenuto Cellini. It, too, was slated for destruction when Alexandre Lenoir saved it and brought it to Paris. The rest of the château still exists and can be visited. It was Lenoir who added statues of Apollo and Diana in the niches about half way up.

The wooden doors from Anet are particularly beautiful, decorated with Diane de Poitiers’s monogram—two D’s facing each other, their backs forming the sides of an H for Henri. Later in her life Diane would add stags, antlers, and the moon to her personal iconography. As she still seems a vivid presence, it’s interesting to keep in perspective that she was born more than five hundred years ago, in 1499, only seven years after Columbus sailed for America. And it is odd that although Columbus seems a figure of distant antiquity, Diane de Poitiers is intimately present.

Apropos of Diane, recently I went with a friend to the town of Étampes, a place an hour outside Paris where no one goes. Étampes was a French royal retreat in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, on the banks of the Juine and Chalouette Rivers—now home of a watercress festival and nothing much else to be said for it except for an amazing, ruined, round tower, of the sort the French call a donjon, all that is left of an ancient palace. This is the “Prison of Ingeburge,” standing on a rampart above the village, where, apparently, various minorities—Africans and North Africans—have now come to live, but where kings did live. The dungeon tower was built in the thirteenth century by Philippe-Auguste, whose great wall surrounding Paris is now to be seen in a few places, including the parking garage on the Rue Mazarine which I have mentioned.

My friend was writing a piece for the travel section of the New York Times on the nearby famous garden of Méréville, and I had gone along for the lunch; we had planned to check out a local inn where Times readers might perhaps be guided to eat. On the main street we stopped before the local library, a locked and shut but ancient-looking place that said in tiny letters on its sign that it was a classified building “dit de Diane de Poitiers,” Duchess of Étampes. As we were wondering how to get in, a man came along, like a figure in a fairy tale, and offered to open the large wooden doors of the gate with a key from his big bunch of keys.

We went into the graveled courtyard. Across it was a lovely and old, rather touchingly small sixteenth-century building—noble houses would become larger and more grandiose in the seventeenth century. This one was of two stories, with stone carvings by the ubiquitous Jean Goujon around the door and on the gables and a mossy slate roof. Inside, something of a letdown, a cheerful modern library, with the banal lowered ceiling of perforated soundproofing tiles and rack of bulletins and announcements, and the New Book shelf standard in all libraries. The librarian stepped out to talk to us—she was closed for lunch. On the door and amid the carvings, the same two D’s forming an H that we see on the Anet facade, also worked on by Jean Goujon. Just tracking the works of a prolific sixteenth-century sculptor like Goujon gives a good idea of what the life of a prosperous artisan/artist was like then, itinerant and varied. Goujon worked on the Louvre, at Anet, and on many other famous châteaux, and did numberless statues, but would die in Italy, in exile for his Huguenot beliefs.

To return to the contents of the Église des Petits-Augustins in the École des Beaux-Arts: Lenoir’s museum, established after the Revolution, would stay a museum until the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, when some of the bits were given back to those who had possessed them originally but had lost them in the upheavals, happy to have kept their heads. Like kings, religion had come into fashion again, the churches were reconstituted, and the monuments were moved to other sites or restored to the families and churches they had belonged to. This period of restitution decimated Lenoir’s collection, though luckily many things made their way to the Louvre—for instance, Diane de Poitiers’s fountain, a lush work begun by some unknown sculptor for her Anet château and finished by Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet in 1799–1800, showing the naked goddess Diana and a stag reclining on an urn.

The next phase for the church/museum was as a fine arts college, the École des Beaux-Arts. This institution took over the whole complex of the Petits-Augustins, cloister and courtyard, in 1832 to harbor copies or moulages of great artworks, taken mostly from the Italian and meant for the training of art students who might not be able to go to Italy to see these mighty works for themselves. Copies of great statues were gathered to inspire them, and to form part of their course of study.

If you have a chance to go in, do. (I have mentioned that this can be arranged in advance.) Inside you will see a hangar-size, barrel-vaulted space, ceiling painted blue, whose oxblood walls are decorated by copies of famous paintings from Carpaccio to Ghirlandaio, and dominated by a vast rear wall showing the Last Judgment, copied from the Sistine Chapel.

To the right you can enter Queen Margot’s chapel, which has numerous copies of famous sculpture: Michelangelo’s works—the “Pietà,” “Prisoners,” the Médicis’s tombs, slightly reduced in scale—and others, like the Ghiberti doors and some of the famous French royal tombs. These copies seem neglected, blackened and chipped, quite unlike the gleaming marble one sees in Italy; disappointing until it occurred to me that the copies date from a time when the Italian statues and paintings were probably dark with age and pollution, and the copyist had faithfully reproduced the patina he saw. Similarly, the “Last Judgment” is as it would have been seen a hundred years ago, before the recent cleaning of the work in Rome, lending to these copies a kind of historical interest of their own. The artist Xavier Sigalon, dispatched to Rome to make copies of some of the paintings when more influential painters thought it would be a waste of their talent, was fated to die there of cholera soon after finishing his work.

Beside housing the rather dusty and pocked plaster copies, the museum now also serves as a temporary gallery space, most recently showing drawings by the American artist David Smith, whose chaste abstractions were in striking contrast to the baroque ornaments ranged around the dim interior, and, this week, some drawings by the original architect of the École, Felix Duban (1798–1870), who designed the rest of the grand early nineteenth-century buildings in the courtyard.