I AM HAVING A HARD TIME ENDING THIS BOOK, because I’m having a hard time letting Marie go. I never thought I would say something along the lines of “I’m sorry to leave my subject, it’s become an obsession. I can’t stop thinking about this character…” Authors who make that kind of statement normally exasperate me, they seem conventional, hypocritical, ridiculous. Yet that is what I feel today toward the little dancer — my little dancer, I almost wrote. It may be because she had an actual body. Though I may have seen it only in wax or in bronze, this body existed, it crossed Paris streets, where I can follow its trace even today. I can go to 36 rue de Douai and find the building where this body sheltered while posing for Degas — in fact, I have done so, but the hovel she lived in must have been torn down in the mid-1950s, as an economy hotel built of block concrete stands there today. I can go to the Opéra Garnier to see the stage where she danced, although the ceiling is no longer the same because of renovations. But here she extended her legs toward the red velvet of the curtains and the gilt of the paneling, rounded her arms under the complex machinery that raises and lowers the flats, looked with her eyes at this hall where the bourgeois continue to come in search of desire. She is a person and not a character, even if the sculpture, in a sense, provides a narrative and gives her the status of one. I know that she lived, I did not invent her life, I don’t like inventing life. My grandmother, born in 1907, could have crossed paths with her — had Marie already died by that point, the forty-two-year mark? No one knows. In any case, she could have met my great-grandmother, who was born in 1890, a penniless dressmaker’s apprentice and a single mother. I met her — she died in 1972. Thanks to my ancestor, a link exists between Marie and me, a link in time, or so I feel. It wasn’t all that long ago, in the end. I no longer belong to the working class that, in common with Marie, my great-grandmother hailed from. She came to Paris from the mining district in northern France, but I remember her. I remember seeing her in the hair salon that she’d bought with her own savings, talking about how she used to burn the tips of dancers’ hair with a candle to strengthen and beautify it before a performance. I also remember that my father formally forbade her to burn the tips of my hair.
A few days ago, I went back to see “her” in the Musée d’Orsay. She was there, stately as ever, seeming to contemplate the masterworks of Degas on the walls around her from behind half-closed lids. By way of farewell, I took dozens of photographs of her — that “two-dimensional death.” A young woman who had been quietly watching me for some time approached, held out her cell phone, and asked in English if I might take her photograph next to the statue. I said yes. She bid me wait a moment while she posed, and she assumed the exact position of the little dancer. She must have made her plan beforehand, because she had tied back her long hair with a green ribbon, and she assumed her stance in seconds — feet in fourth position, hands clasped behind her back, chin raised. For my part, I had no time to quiet my heart, which was suddenly pounding, but why? I took four snapshots, just to be sure, given my trembling hands. The young woman was Australian. No, she wasn’t a dancer. It was just that she had heard a great deal about this sculpture as a child, and her grandmother had particularly recommended that she visit it during her stay in Paris. So that was it, she was going to bring back this photograph of the two of them, it would make a nice surprise, thank you.
WHEN I ARRIVED HOME, still keyed up—but why? — I thought back to my own grandmother, with whom I lived all through my childhood. Had she ever been to a museum? Highly unlikely. I realized that I knew nothing about her birth, her childhood — even less than I did about Marie. The one thing I knew — the fact had made an impression on me — was that she’d been born in Paris: she was proud of being the only Parisian in our provincial family. Her mother, Sophie, gotten with child by a boy who quickly vanished, had left her hometown of Hénin-Liétard to give birth anonymously in the capital away from wagging tongues, strongly encouraged to go into exile, if not actually driven to it, by an unloving mother. A start in life worthy of Zola. I wondered where she had landed in the strange and bewildering city. Had it been in the Ninth Arrondissement, like the Van Goethems, a neighborhood that was still very poor at the dawn of the new century? It would have made another link between us.
Having learned to navigate the vital records archive, I started an Internet search. My grandmother did not appear in the decennial indexes for the Ninth Arrondissement. I then started working through all of Paris’s neighborhoods. It took me a while, but when I finally reached the Eighth Arrondissement, there she was: Marcelle Jeanne Liétard, stuck in as an afterthought between two lines of the ledger, as if the clerk had forgotten her. It fit with my grandmother somehow, this last-minute inclusion — a fatherless child, banned from home, written into the ledger but not given her own space, born between the lines. It was moving to find her there, my grandmother, buried in this long list handwritten in black ink, with capital letters of the kind once taught in schools, solemnly penned. All the names made me dizzy, as they wouldn’t have if printed. Here was the history of man written out by hand, the endless cycle of humanity and also of the drudging clerks laboriously scribbling, correcting their mistakes, disappearing only to be replaced in the ledger by another handwriting, less firm and legible, or else more finely turned, the changes in penmanship mirroring on a human scale the ceaseless progress of time, the passing of the baton.
As my grandmother was born after 1903, her birth certificate wasn’t available online. I had to request it, and it would be sent to me in the mail. I did so. The document arrived ten days later, posted from the town hall of the Eighth Arrondissement. In the meantime, I wondered what I’d find recorded there. I was expecting the words “father unknown,” but the phrase I had to decipher was “father not discriminated.” I understood the meaning of this bureaucratic language well enough, but the word chilled me to the bone. I knew that the root of the word “discriminate” came from a Greek word originally meaning “to judge,” “to separate,” “to choose,” but it was the word “crime” that I heard, along with its implication of my great-grandparents’ immorality. Of all the possible men, the authorities had not been able to determine which had made my great-grandmother pregnant; worse yet, of all the criminals in existence, they had not established which was my grandmother’s father. For a moment, the word “incriminated” fanned out its ghostly palette, from prostitution to the apaches, and the “criminal” little dancer. I came back to my senses and reread the document, my heart beating strongly all the same, analyzing, weighing, studying every detail of the birth certificate of my grandmother, Marcelle Jeanne, born in the year 1907, on October 1 at nine o’clock in the evening, at 208 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. The address, today chic, belonged then to a charity hospital, a former Sisters of Charity hospice. To my query, Google Maps returned the hôtel Beaujon, a magnificent eighteenth-century town house, where a variety of cultural organizations are quartered today. Marcelle Jeanne, I read, “daughter of Sophie Liétard, domestic servant, residing in Paris, 135 avenue de Villiers.” A much less elegant address, of course, even if the Google photo makes the recently restored facade of this Haussmannian building look quite appealing.
But what surprised me most was Sophie’s stated occupation. Before owning a perfume store and hair salon in Dijon, my great-grandmother claimed to have been a seamstress. When I read “domestic servant,” tears came to my eyes. I had just discovered, many years after the fact, what she had always kept hidden, no doubt a private shame. To serve in someone else’s household, to obey orders, this must have been a major humiliation for her, worse even than being an unwed mother. When I knew her, she was always so proud to set off early in the morning “to the store.” Even in her eighties, she was the first to rise and reached the store before any of her employees. It was only normal, as she was “the boss.” Her daughter, my grandmother, never worked. Of that too she was proud.
The birth certificate mentioned another strange thing. In the margin, beside a variety of later notations about marriage and death, there was a note indicating that Sophie Joseph Liétard had “recognized as her daughter the child named herein” on October 17, 1907, which is to say more than two weeks after my grandmother’s birth. As with Marie van Goethem, the archive did little to fill in the gaps, instead opening chasms to speculation. Why, for instance, did the birth certificate distinguish between the birth itself and its acknowledgment? For the mother, it makes no sense: mater certissima. And yet…what could the delay mean? That Sophie was ill and therefore could not officially claim her daughter, so that the child was registered but not legally recognized? Or does the interval point to a hesitation about keeping the child, an inclination to abandon it after bringing it into the world? I didn’t know, but even without knowing, I understood, my empathy was total. The fact of it was, I said to myself, brushing the doubts away, the fact of it was that she hadn’t abandoned her daughter, that Sophie Joseph (another oddity, this male given name appended to Sophie — it must have been her father’s), that Sophie Joseph valiantly raised Marcelle Jeanne. They both lived for several years in Paris, between 1907 and 1913, at which point, for unknown reasons, they moved to Dijon. Mother and daughter were never afterward separated. I always knew them together, living under the same roof with my grandfather, through whom they had been elevated to the bourgeoisie. My grandmother in particular was well known for her elegance and her deportment. My great-grandmother, though, always preserved a slightly rough edge, a burr from her populist background that she had no interest in polishing away. Despite her son-in-law’s offers, she never agreed to have a domestic servant. In a black-and-white photograph I have of her, at the age of about forty-five, she looks strangely like Louise-Joséphine van Goethem at that age, when she was a teacher at the Paris Opera — the same pleasant but not particularly pretty features, the same stocky, corseted body, the same frank gaze. Sophie and Marcelle might have crossed paths with the little dancer while out walking in Paris. They might also have seen Degas, who died in 1917, and who ambled around the city for several hours a day in the last years of his life, crossing it from end to end as his doctor had advised him. It’s perfectly possible. When it comes to Marie, I don’t know.
When I was a child, in Dijon, I took classical dance, like most little girls. I went twice a week with my sister Dominique to a highly regarded dance school near the theater. The teacher was a big, imposing man who ran his world with a stick, literally — he corrected our position with the help of a switch that never left his hand. He frightened us, threatened us with the most horrible future if we didn’t listen to him. I was seven or eight years old, my sister was ten. He was convinced that we had great talent. Dominique had flexibility, I had grace, he would tell my mother or my grandmother when they accompanied us to our lessons. “Together, the two of you could be a prima ballerina,” my grandfather joked. But the big man was not joking. He was convinced that if the two of us worked like dervishes, we could get a place as little rats in the Paris Opera. In the footsteps of Pauline and Virginie, who were storybook heroines under the French Third Republic, would come Dominique and Laurence (me), future stars in the firmament of ballet idols. We had the potential, and it was only left to us to make the required effort, by taking additional courses, by rehearsing at home, by walking with a dictionary on our heads. He would tell us when he thought we were ready, and he would take us personally to the entrance exam. The Paris Opera!!! I think this prospect did not really fulfill my sister’s dreams, but it did mine. I had seen the outside of the Palais Garnier on my first trip to Paris with my mother the summer before, we had walked past its imposing facade. I had tripped up and down the grand staircase en pointe, my arms rounded, before going to the Musée Grévin to look at the wax figures. The building impressed me. I pestered my mother every morning to make my hair into the tight, round bun that is the mark of a ballerina. To show my friends and the world at large (the passersby in Dijon) how well I danced, I wore my ballet slippers into the street and made arabesques on the sidewalk in front of my house. I listened to Swan Lake on repeat. All my dolls had tutus and a rhinestone hairband.
One day when my sister was taking a shower, my mother noticed the red welts on her thighs. “What’s that?” she asked. It was where the teacher had smacked my sister across the legs with his switch during dance class: “Fourth position! I said fourth!” My mother didn’t know what to do. On the one hand she felt respect for the work of the artist and a sense that discipline was necessary, but the physical violence made her uneasy. In the end, she decided to consult my father. My sister hiked up her skirt to show him her welts. “What sort of pervert is he?” said my father. “Under no circumstance will my girls return to him, it’s finished. He should be glad I’m not filing a lawsuit.” And that was it. My mother didn’t try to find us another dance class, or the only available ones were too far away and would have required us to go by car. I don’t remember if I pleaded with my parents. I must have decided to go along with the family decision: my sister and I had a real protector, not at all like yours, Marie, and we had parents who loved us, even if they didn’t understand anything. At my grandmother’s house, where the windows gave onto the theater, I made up for it by watching rehearsals through the curtains whenever a ballet was to be performed.
After my dance studies came to an abrupt end, I continued for a time to do my exercises. I would put on my demi-pointe shoes and practice my positions holding on to the bedstead. When no one else was in the apartment, I would cross the living room back and forth on tiptoe with a dictionary balanced on my head — a volume of the illustrated Larousse, not always the same one, which I borrowed from my parents’ glassed-in bookcase. Then one day, I felt I’d had enough of prancing toward a dead future. I took the dictionary off my head, sat down, laid it across my knees, and cracked it open. Another life opened to me then, which I am still living.
Time has passed, and I still love dance. But I didn’t pass that love on. At the age when you, Marie, were a little rat and I was dreaming of becoming one, my daughter was entirely obsessed with soccer. The one time in grammar school when she had to dance for a year-end assembly, she refused to put her hair in a bun, sent the tutu packing, and danced the entire ballet in overalls, chin held high, with that little air of independence you would have liked, Marie. The audience reacted with consternation: such insolence in so small a girl. It’s just that things are not the same for little girls, the age of happiness has moved to other playing fields. I still like dance, especially modern dance; the magic of tutus and pointe shoes has faded, but not the magic of bodies in motion. I subscribe, as Degas did, to dance performances, not returning thirty nights in a row as he was known to do, but still sometimes revisiting a program four or five times. I like to be in front, as close as possible to the stage, so that I can see the dancers’ faces, male and female, their glistening bodies, their tremulousness. Dance often makes me cry, I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the art that tells me most clearly that I’m going to die. Maybe it’s the art that tells me most clearly that I’m alive. Or it may just be that it allows me to “dance on my grief.”1
WHEN I STARTED THINKING ABOUT WRITING THIS STORY, playing with the material as writers do, I originally thought I would address the little dancer directly, make this text a long letter to her. I tried writing her using the familiar tu, as though she were my own daughter or someone in my family. But it didn’t work. There was something artificial and pretentious about it, the familiarity seeming almost sacrilegious. Now that I’m at the end of my tale, it no longer seems so wrong, as though the text and the archival research have woven a link between us and for a moment made this pas de deux possible.
I felt little sympathy toward Degas when I started this work. It wasn’t my ambition, as Zola said about Manet, to re-create “in living actuality, a man with all his limbs, all his nerves and all his heart, all his dreams and all his flesh,”2 but rather to form a sort of intuition about Degas that would allow me to draw close to him, and thus to you, Marie. He was solitary, intransigent, sarcastic, and rarely tender. I learned to know and love him as he was, or as I sense him to have been, even if I blame him for having apparently dropped you from his acquaintance. “I would like to be celebrated and unknown,” he said.3 No doubt it applied to you too, Marie. But on the surface, this is not the case: he is famous, and you are unknown. In reality, the two of you are joined for all eternity (I know, he didn’t like the word, nor the idea); let’s say, then, that the two of you are at the same time dead and eternal. You will always be fourteen years old, always three feet tall, like a three-year-old. As I finish telling your story, I find myself remembering that other statuette where your face is recognizable. You wear a little hat, a jacket with a shawl collar, and a long skirt. You’re holding a pile of books, and you’re very chic. The Schoolgirl is the title. I imagine you posing for Degas for hours in these borrowed clothes, carrying books you will never read. What books were they? Dickens, Rousseau, Cervantes — the painter’s favorite authors, grabbed at random for you to hold? You look as though you’re walking calmly through the streets, on your way to school. This is the image of you that I want to keep. But there’s another, possibly more in tune with the strange grief I feel in leaving you. It’s from a work you may have modeled for, but which has never been found, a work described in a letter by Jacques-Émile Blanche, in June 1882, after a visit to Degas’s studio. He saw, he writes, a new sculpture by Degas, a funerary monument perhaps prompted by the death of a niece: “A little girl half-lying in her coffin is eating some fruit; beside it is a bench on which the child’s family can sit and mourn (for it’s a tomb).”4 I am sitting on that bench, Marie. I’m writing you from there.