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Atelier Christian Dior, avenue Montaigne, Paris. February 12, 1947. Expecting a tentative collection reflecting postwar austerity, fashionistas are astonished by dresses containing, according to one report, “between fifteen and twenty-five yards of material, with tiny sashed waists in black broadcloth, tussore, and silk taffeta, each with a built-in corset that was itself a deeply disturbing work of art.” In a reminder of couture’s roots in nature and seasonality, Dior calls it “La Ligne corolle” (the Flower Line), but Carmel Snow, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, prefers “the New Look.”
WHILE BUSINESSMEN, BUREAUCRATS, PRIESTS, AND FARMERS breathed a collective sigh of relief at the demise of the Republican calendar, some poets, musicians, and artists regretted the return of the Gregorian model.
Many sympathized with Fabre’s attempt, however clumsy, to reimagine nature as a kind of poem. British novelist Thomas Hardy, who celebrated rural life in such novels as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, spoke for many when he wrote, “I feel that Nature is played out as a Beauty, but not as a Mystery. I don’t want to see landscapes. . . . I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings.”
Lafitte’s paintings for the calendar revived his career, relaunching him as a decorator and designer. Widely circulated and massively reproduced, the paintings became the calendar’s standard illustrations and most enduring monument.
His image for Messidor, the month of the grain harvest, may have inspired one of the greatest of all poets. Lafitte represents the harvest as a woman asleep against a sheaf of wheat, sickle by her side. Red flowers droop at the edges of the picture and lie on her lap, and the verse refers to “the day’s labor succeeded by a sweet sleep.”
Twenty years later John Keats, in “To Autumn,” would also compare the season to an exhausted harvester and employ almost identical imagery:
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers . . .
Messidor by Louis Lafitte.
Lafitte, Louis. Messidor. Author’s collection.
Poets, particularly those of the decadent movement that flourished in France during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, embraced the idea that nature could embody human emotions. Paul Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne” (“Autumn Song”) became one of the most popular of all French poems:
The long sobs of autumn’s violins
Wound my heart with a monotonous languor.
Suffocating and pallid, when the clock strikes,
I remember the days long past and I weep.
And I set off in the rough wind that carries me
Hither and thither like a dead leaf.
He was equally moved by moonlight. In Clair de Lune, he wrote:
The calm, pale moonlight, whose sad beauty, beaming,
Sets the birds softly dreaming in the trees,
And makes the marbled fountains, gushing, streaming—
Slender jet-fountains—sob their ecstasies.
Fiction too found this new technique useful. Traditionally, novels relied on conversations, letters, or authorial musings to carry a story. Descriptions of landscape or weather were rare. During the last half of the nineteenth century, however, novelists began using nature to amplify a character or establish a mood, sometimes specifically evoking the Republican calendar. For his 1885 novel about a strike among coal miners in northern France, Émile Zola chose the title Germinal. It concluded, “Men were springing forth, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century, and their germination would soon overturn the earth.”
Filmmakers would seize on the symbolism of nature to augment often feeble stories and third-rate performers. Storms conveyed passion, flowers romance. Higher aspirations were suggested by sunrises and sunsets, or by the camera staring meaningfully at the sky. Images of flowers, insects, and nesting birds to illustrate procreation passed so quickly into the language that “the birds and the bees” became shorthand for sex education.
To songwriters, the language of Fabre and Lafitte was likewise a gift. Jacques Prévert’s lyrics for one of the most popular of French chansons, Joseph Kosma’s “Les Feuilles mortes” (dead leaves), compares sad memories to leaves carried away by “the wind of forgetting.” Charles Trenet, writing of the sea in “La Mer,” suggests that the “love song” of the sea has “cradled my heart.”
Both songs became even more successful in English versions, though in each case the new lyrics coarsened the message. Eva Cassidy’s reworking of Prévert’s song as “Autumn Leaves” compared dead leaves, obscurely, to “your lips, the summer kisses / The sunburned hands I used to hold.” In his version of “La Mer,” Bobby Darin turned Trenet’s paean to the waves and his clouds like sheep guarded by angelic shepherdesses into the finger-snapping “Beyond the Sea,” in which “somewhere, waiting for me, a lover stands on golden sands.”
Having a new means of speaking of the seasons continues to tempt poets and lyricists. In the sixties, songwriter Hugues Aufray made the months of the Republican calendar into a love story:
White is the snow in Nivôse,
Gray is the rain in Pluviôse.
Black is the wind in Ventôse.
We met one another in Germinal,
We fell in love in Floréal
And got married in Prairial.
The child was born in Messidor,
He grew up in Thermidor
And then left in Fructidor.
Life is white in Vendémiaire,
Life is gray in Brumaire,
And then life is black in Frimaire.
Using nature to mirror human feelings doesn’t appeal to everyone, least of all plain-speaking Anglo-Saxons. In 1856, art theorist John Ruskin coined the term “pathetic fallacy” to describe the belief that autumn might “sob” or birds “softly dream.” In his view, “Objects . . . derive their influence not from properties inherent in them . . . but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by these objects.” As for weather, it was, he insisted, just weather: “Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.”
The element of “Bah! Humbug!” in such comments found no sympathy across the Channel. Both Freud and Jung conceded that elements of the natural world can affect us deeply. How ironic if one of the most enduring legacies of the revolution should be not that of either Danton or Robespierre but of the fraudulent and swindling Fabre d’Églantine.