The Clues
The gods of hazard lead us down
The backstairs of the universe
Dancing to fiddlestrings accurst
We go as other men have gone.
—GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
“La Chanson du mal-aimé”
A. J. A. SYMONS, who wrote a biography of a forgotten figure, an English writer who called himself “Baron Corvo,” published his work in 1934. This experimental study, The Quest for Corvo, is still considered a model for authors seeking to penetrate an accepted image to uncover the actual human being behind a façade. In Corvo’s case the disguise was self-invented. In Modigliani’s case it came about almost immediately, with the clear goal of capitalizing on the tragic circumstances of his life and almost simultaneous deaths of himself and his mistress in 1920. Symons wrote of Corvo, “[H]ere was indeed a tragic comedy, more sombre and fantastic than I had expected or hoped…Frustration and poverty had been the condition of his early years as of his last; tutorships, odd jobs, and charity were the actual lot of the dreamer who (in his dreams) had ruled the world.” The comparison seemed exact, even the summing-up of Corvo’s life by another observer: “A self-tortured and defeated soul, who might have done much, had he been born in the proper era or surroundings.”
The historians Julie Martin and Billy Klüver in Venice, 1988 (image credit 2.1)
And yet. Was this really an accurate picture of the life I was studying? For all the graphic descriptions of Modigliani’s life and death, could this withstand the evidence of the works he had accomplished in his short career, particularly the masterful paintings—portraits and nudes—created in the final period of his life, more than one a week? The physical stamina alone needed to keep up with this pace, combined with the rigor, economy, elegance, and confidence of those final works, showed a man at the height of his powers. And in fact such evidence, along with his paintings, sculptures, a few scrawled notes, and photographs, was more to be trusted than the firsthand accounts that emerged in the years after his death. Ernest Hemingway, who did not always follow his own advice, once instructed other writers that what was needed was “a built-in, shock-proof shit-detector.” This was hard enough to do when the witness was alive, almost impossible once everyone involved was long dead. In Modigliani’s case, almost ninety years had passed.
Besides evaluating some wild stories of debauchery and deflowering one needed to discover the direct heirs, who sometimes had archives that had been kept private or overlooked. Then there were the research libraries, the heirs of friends, collectors, artists, and dealers, as well as experts in the circle of artists to which Modigliani belonged in the early years of the twentieth century. Here was a man who once rubbed shoulders with Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Robert Desnos, Moïse Kisling, Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, Maurice Utrillo, and so many others, all living near the crossroads of the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail on the Left Bank of Paris.
Among a group of scholars I was to meet, Julie Martin and Billy Klüver stood out as the éminences grises, considered with a respect bordering on awe for their encyclopedic knowledge and ability to pinpoint galaxies of complicated interrelationships among the artists, sculptors, poets, writers, and musicians in Paris in the early years. Their book, Kiki’s Paris (1989), is an invaluable reference and a compendium of letters, photographs, poems, and anecdotes, amassed over a decade. I immediately contacted Julie Martin. (Billy Klüver has since died.) We agreed that the accepted view of Modigliani was no longer defensible but that nothing had replaced it so far. We both believed he was a remarkable man who had been dismissed as a clownish figure who just happened to have painted some unforgettable canvases. He was a remnant of another age, “the last Bohemian,” even a lost soul who had committed slow suicide with alcohol. There had to be a reevaluation, and one was long overdue. She immediately pointed me toward some important contacts: first, the expert Marc Restellini; then Kenneth Wayne, who had curated another important exhibition about Modigliani; Moïse Kisling’s son Jean; the art historian Colette Giraudon; Noël Alexandre, son of Modigliani’s earliest collector; even a former chief of police in Paris.
Then Julie Martin suggested that I investigate a series of interviews conducted in 1963–64, when so many of the people around Modigliani were still alive. The interviews were commissioned by the American author Pierre Sichel for his biography of Modigliani. By the time he decided to write about Modigliani, Sichel had already written a novel based on the life of Lillie Langtry, The Jersey Lily, which was a best seller, and another about a Vermont poet, The Sapbucket Genius, that was loosely modeled on a life of Dylan Thomas.
Sichel originally planned to approach Modigliani’s life in a similar vein. But then, thanks to an extraordinary series of interviews conducted by John Olliver, his bilingual investigator in Paris, Sichel changed his mind and wrote a biography instead. It took him five years. After publication, Sichel placed his huge manuscript on deposit at the Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, where he also deposited the interviews. This immediately interested me. I had often had the experience of consulting the identical sources as other authors and discovering overlooked possibilities, not to mention arriving at quite different conclusions. I at once set about getting copies.
Julie Martin also started me on the path of uncovering another treasure trove: “L’Histoire de notre famille,” by Modigliani’s mother, Eugénie Garsin-Modigliani. This account of her own and her husband’s families, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century and continuing until Modigliani’s birth in 1884, had long been known but presumably discounted. Jeanne Modigliani, whose own biography of her father, Modigliani: Man and Myth, was an attempt to uncover the truth, had access to the document. However, her excessively careful, almost bloodless, narrative makes very little use of it. There could be an explanation. Far from being the prosaic account one might expect, Eugénie’s descriptions of people, places, and events have a lively and irreverent immediacy, perhaps the reason why her writings were so heavily edited. She is opinionated, unexpected, shrewd, and frank. In a confident, rhythmical hand, she sets down her observations about family members, describing their idiosyncrasies and shortcomings with the verve of a born novelist. No better observer could have been found to describe the particular influences at work on the complex personality of her son.
Eugénie’s history begins with a description of the Garsins, Sephardic Jews who had lived on the Mediterranean coastline for centuries. One ancestor, based in Tunis, became an authority on sacred texts, which, according to Leo Rosten, he probably wrote in Arabic. He also founded a school of Talmudic studies. Eugénie and her son claimed to be descended from the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who had fled from Spain during the Inquisition. It was true that there was a Regina Spinoza in the family and she was certainly Spanish because, according to Jeanne Modigliani, her daughters spoke the dialect of the Spanish Jews. Jeanne added that, since Spinoza was childless, they could not be direct descendants. But to judge from the way the Garsins insisted on their connection and their scholarly studies of the philosopher’s writings, that they were somehow linked by family ties seems likely.
This was a family much more apt to take pride in intellectual prowess than financial dealings, although at the beginning of the nineteenth century the Garsins had opened a business in Livorno (Leghorn). As Sephardim they were heirs to a train of thought which had dominated Jewish culture from about 600 AD until Jews were expelled from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. Sephardic Judaism, Leo Rosten wrote in The Joys of Yiddish, was “an exceptionally sophisticated blend of Talmudic thought, Greek philosophy, Aristotelianism, science and the ideas of Averroes, the great Islamic scholar.” Unlike Ashkenazic Jews, who settled in central and eastern Europe and spoke Yiddish, the Sephardim spoke Ladino, were educated and cultured, and rose to positions of eminence in Spain, Portugal, and North Africa as doctors, philosophers, poets, royal advisors, and financiers. The Garsins were no exception. Jeanne Modigliani wrote that besides Spinoza, the family’s heroes were Uriel da Costa and Moses Mendelssohn. That philosopher, grandfather of the composer Felix, was one of the leading lights in the Haskalah, or Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century movement which aimed to bring Judaism out of its self-imposed isolation into Western thought, and which emphasized assimilation. The Garsins, worldly, scholarly, fluent in languages, exemplified Mendelssohn’s ideal as they moved with ease between cultures and social groups. These businessmen bought houses and kept servants, although the source of their income is not described in either Eugénie’s or Jeanne’s accounts. June Rose, who wrote a biography of Modigliani and interviewed his brother Umberto, believed that they ran a credit agency, with offices in Livorno, Marseille, Tunis, and London.
In a fascinating essay on the Garsins’ British connections, the art historian Kenneth Wayne has established that Eugénie’s oldest brother, Joseph Évariste Garsin, moved to London in 1877 and married Jessie, a girl from Plymouth; they had three children. Amedeo’s father and uncles also had British connections in the development of zinc mines since their partner was another Englishman, William Gerard Gibson of the Crown Smelter Company in London. Eugénie, born in Marseille, has little to say about the turbulent times through which she lived. But since the Garsins were doing business in Livorno in the nineteenth century they were bound to be affected by this most chaotic of periods in Italian history. That country, used for years as a battleground and subjected to periodic invasions by Austria and France, did not become unified until 1870. Livorno was a major port on the Mediterranean, and wars, bringing about plunging markets, currency exchange disruptions, and a tendency to wipe out speculative investments, are the kinds of events no businessman wants to deal with. When times were good the Garsins played the stock markets, took leisurely vacations, and bought houses. When they were bad they cut costs and moved in together, sometimes sheltering four generations at a time. Eugénie called it “our smala,” or circus.
The Garsin home base in Marseille was at 21 rue Bonaparte, a four-story house fronting on a large square, the Place du Palais de Justice. The house was bought in 1852, three years before Eugénie was born, and she grew up there. Her parents, Isacco and Regina (actually his first cousin, daughter of his uncle Isacco), eventually had seven children. After Évariste, the firstborn, came Eugénie, then Amédée, Clémentine, Laure, Gabrielle, and Albert. These brothers and sisters would figure, one way or another, in the life of Amedeo Modigliani. Eugénie has an early memory, when she was four, of going to meet her parents across the square as they returned from a holiday in Italy. Waiting at the door was her uncle Giacomo, wearing “his invariable red handkerchief half out of his back pocket, his gold-framed glasses on the end of his nose, and with his perpetual thin-lipped smile, always kindly but a little foolish,” she wrote. Giacomo had a modest career as a dealer in men’s furnishings before joining the family firm. He became the accountant, spending his days in a kind of cage with barred windows, which for some reason filled Eugénie with fear. Her uncle had saved a little money and wanted desperately to marry Nonnina, Eugénie’s grandmother, who lived in the house with them. She, however, remained true to the memory of her husband Isacco, who took skirt chasing as his personal sport and died—of shock, or pneumonia—after having been discovered wearing only a shirt in the bed of somebody else’s wife.
Her grandfather Giuseppe, “Nonno,” head of the family, was blind and seldom left the house. He would wake every morning before dawn and, despite his blindness, open the shutters of the windows to their office, lifting the heavy iron bars himself. Then he would dictate three simultaneous letters in three different languages, keeping an effortless train of thought in each. Outside of office hours, Nonno was ready to talk on all kinds of subjects, and was particularly interested in philosophical and religious issues. In memory of his wife, who died of cholera a few years before, Nonno kept the old traditions; he fasted, prayed, and observed the holidays. But his was the most benign form of Judaism, revolving around celebrations, special cakes—the Livornese kind were his favorites—and vast holiday feasts at which the welcome mat was out to any passing stranger, provided he or she was Jewish. He would tell the younger family members that tradition was “all a bunch of nonsense,” no doubt with a wink, and if Nonnina recited the Sh’ma, or daily morning prayer, it was only the first few verses.
Papa, who worked in the bureau with Nonno, was his equal as a linguist, speaking Greek fluently and Spanish without flaw, in contrast to the kind of patois affected by most Sephardim. He was his mother’s favorite, very handsome, not particularly tall but well proportioned and with clear, expressive eyes. Most of all, he had the air of a natural aristocrat that, combined with beautiful manners and elegant gestures, gave him an effortless distinction and social success into old age. His only failing was his darting intelligence. He was too ready to be distracted by worldly interests, for which his father, matter of fact and scholarly, acted as a natural brake. Both were regarded with awe in the household and Papa, Eugénie wrote, was practically considered an oracle.
One of Eugénie’s aunts, named for her great-grandmother, was “Regina Grande” to distinguish her from Eugénie’s mother, called “Reginetta.” Eugénie does not describe the fate of Regina Grande, but her daughter Margherita appends a note in which she sets down Nonnina’s memories of the woman she knew. Regina Grande was, according to Nonnina, not particularly beautiful, because she had red hair (an interesting comment) and her skin was blotchy. But, like Eugénie’s Papa, she had a natural air of command. She carried herself regally, and a certain intimidation in her manner concealed, according to Nonnina, a loveless childhood and an understandable hope for a happier future. This seemed to offer itself in the shape of a wealthy Livornese, who courted her assiduously. But then the Garsins went bankrupt in one of their periodic financial reversals and the suitor vanished. Regina Grande, much too proud to refer to the matter publicly, was, she confessed to Nonnina, terribly humiliated.
After the family moved to Marseille she received another offer: marriage to a dealer in wholesale jewelry with a promising future. The engagement went smoothly even if Nonnina wondered just how enthusiastic Regina Grande was about this marriage. Certainly no one in the family suspected that a close cousin was, it seemed, in love with the young jewelry dealer. The evening before her marriage Regina Grande, who suffered from an irregular heartbeat, had palpitations and said she felt ill. The next day she was vomiting. The family doctor being unavailable, a substitute was called, and he recommended some herbal teas. That night, Regina Grande died.
As she told the story Nonnina shook and tears rolled down her face. From the beginning the family suspected that Regina Grande had either taken poison herself or been poisoned, but nothing could be proved. Years later, when she was on her own deathbed, the cousin in question confessed to the crime.
Murder may be considered distinctly eccentric for most families, but for the Garsins, living in nineteenth-century Marseille, sudden death was all too frequent. One of the most important figures in Eugénie’s childhood was her uncle Félix, then a medical student. He was the one who spoiled her, made her sing songs, showered her with presents, and called her “my good, dear, and tender friend.” He had finely drawn features and a smile that transformed his face, very black hair, reddish side whiskers, and a gentle, almost embarrassingly hesitant manner, Eugénie wrote. After Uncle Félix married and opened a practice on the rue Sylvabelle, he continued to visit them at the rue Bonaparte so often that “he is at the centre of my childhood memories,” she wrote. In one of their prosperous moments the family bought a house in a small French village. Eugénie was staying there with her grandmother in the summer of 1867 when there was an epidemic of cholera in Marseille and Uncle Félix fell ill. Eugénie later remembered that her mother took over the major share of nursing him back to health and how worried the rest of the family was about that. Many people died. Félix survived but never quite recovered, suffering from continuing intestinal problems and anemia. He had lost his old verve, Eugénie wrote. A kind of pervasive sadness would be interspersed by a typically bitter Jewish humor.
All of them knew what chances they took whenever they set out to minister to diseases that struck without warning and for which there were no cures. Successive waves of cholera had swept through Europe since ancient times; in the nineteenth century, with increasing travel, the epidemic that almost took Félix’s life in 1867 reached Europe by overland routes via Mecca and Egypt and spread as far as North America. Three decades later, in 1897, another outbreak took an even worse toll in the Mediterranean ports of France, Spain, and Italy.
The cholera bacillus had been identified as early as 1849, but its exact cause was not isolated or studied until the 1880s. It took years for the relationship between its spread and the contamination, by human waste, of water, food, and especially seafood such as oysters and shellfish, to be understood. Just how sanitary the house was at 21 rue Bonaparte, and where its waste went, is unknown. But even on the Right Bank in Paris, water on the upper floors was a rarity until 1865, and it was a decade later than that arriving on the Left Bank. Bathrooms hardly existed. As for flush toilets, these certainly existed, but people continued to think of human waste as a useful fertilizer, and night-soil men went on, as they had done for centuries, hauling their fetid loads out of the city. In A History of Private Life, Roger-Henri Guerrand notes, “In Marseille, 14,000 of 32,653 buildings in the 1886 census had no system for human waste disposal. Waste was simply accumulated in a potty on each floor and then disposed of in the gutter.” City sewers were rare, wells became contaminated, and reforms took decades. This was still 1867. The arrival of a cholera epidemic must have looked like the vicissitudes of fate as families succumbed to the cumulative effects of diarrhea, vomiting, and prostration.
Inside its dark, picturesque old houses and along its labyrinthine, steep back streets, the ancient port of Marseille was also a fertile breeding ground for other illnesses. Diphtheria was common, babies died in infancy, and in 1850 the average life expectancy was thirty-eight for men and forty-two for women. Typhoid fever was such an ordinary, everyday kind of calamity that Eugénie’s memoir refers to it without comment. Here again the culprit is raw sewage that contaminates water, milk, vegetables, and shellfish. Typhoid fever’s symptoms are particularly nasty, its convalescence usually prolonged, and before the availability of vaccines and modern medicines the only recourse was devoted nursing care. That, of course, was the role of the Garsin women.
Eugénie wrote, “Each of the Garsins was simultaneously a doctor and a pharmacist. Each of them had a personal remedy which he or she applied to certain criteria as absolute as those of the Faculté [de Médicine].” For instance, there was a horrible concoction containing camphor used on cuts and scratches, but it hurt so much the children never complained about injuries for fear of being subjected to this particular remedy. Digestive upsets were Eugénie’s particular “specialty” since orchards surrounded their country house and she loved fruit. She would blame her stomachaches on the air coming in from the Mediterranean. Uncle Félix, with his best smile, would reply, “Yes my darling, it’s the sea air, but next time, don’t eat so many figs.”
Then there was Nanette, a hairdresser who came to stay in the Garsin household, bringing her own homemade skin and hair preparations along with a great many folk remedies. She had the added skill of being able to set bones and deal with sprains. She had successfully healed a bad cut sustained by Évariste, Eugénie’s older brother, who had scratched himself on a prickly branch and neglected to keep the wound clean. She knew how to make medicines from certain bitter herbs to cure indigestion and colic. Her most spectacular cure involved Eugénie’s father, who developed an eye malady that was causing a rapid and disturbing loss of eyesight. The nightmare possibilities of having Papa become blind as well as Nonno roused the family to desperate measures. A specialist was consulted; he said nothing could be done. Nanette made up her magic potion of herbs and instructed Papa to sniff the liquid up his nose every day. Papa dutifully took his morning dose, and in the days that followed had violent fits of sneezing and all the other symptoms of an acute cold. Then his eyesight returned; it was as good as new. From that day on, Nanette was their miracle worker.
Despite, or because of, their faith in miraculous cures, a strain of superstitious belief ran through this proud, emotionally distant family of intellectuals. All of them had, Eugénie wrote, “[t]he credulity of ignorance and the blind obedience of the simplest folk. I shall never be able to enumerate all that was tradition and an article of faith.” One never cut one’s hair during a waning moon, or nails on a Friday, and never in sequence. One should never sew a button on a garment one was wearing (a sensible precaution), and as for black-letter days, the list of obligatory rituals designed to mitigate its gods was endless.
Bernard Berenson, who came from the Pale of Settlement, was subject to the same curious propitiations. He felt compelled to look at the new moon, but never through glass, to make three bows and turn over the loose cash in his pockets, and did not seem to connect the observance with the broche, or blessing, that was a ritual of his early training. (For observant Jews, the broche must be recited on a host of occasions, including the first sighting of a new moon.) To Berenson the act remained an inexplicable quirk of his nature, “a drag towards superstition in any and every one who was brought up … in a magical world.”
In 1870, the year of the Franco-Prussian War, Paris was under siege, and Napoleon III, having sustained heavy losses against Bismarck’s fighting machine, had been deposed. Eugénie was just fifteen. Although Marseille was out of the direct fighting it was another of those moments for businessmen to make a prudent retreat. The Garsins, who had constantly shuttled between Marseille and Livorno, turned back toward Italy. After decades of struggle, Italy was finally unified, and Livorno presented fresh opportunities. It seems that Papa and Nonno put their heads together and came up with a future for Eugénie: marriage. The groom-to-be was a member of a prominent Livornese family.
As with art dealers into the twentieth century, who negotiated marriages between each other like minor principalities, the Garsins were always looking for ways to place their daughters in advantageous business unions; the younger and more pliant they were, the better. There was, of course, a dowry to be paid in yearly installments, but at the end there would be those lucrative and rock-solid business ties. The joke is that both families thought they were marrying for money at a moment when the fortune of each might take a disastrous downward plunge. Neither, for the moment, was aware of it.
Physically the Garsins were small and dark with “alert, expressive, changeable faces,” Eugénie wrote. They were subject to illnesses: liver disease (which suggests alcoholism), tuberculosis, and psychological disorders, as well. The Modiglianis were taller and well built, held themselves well, were of “phlegmatic temperaments,” were robustly healthy, and lived into old age. Whereas the Modiglianis were “more inclined to enjoy life than strain their intellects,” Eugénie wrote with her usual acerbity, the Garsins were almost fanatically well-read, eager scholars.
Eugénie might have noted, but did not, that despite her family’s superior cultural sophistication, they never seemed able to hold on to money. In that respect they were at a disadvantage when compared with the culturally illiterate Modiglianis, who had a genius for business. The legend was that an earlier generation had made a fortune in banking and lent money to cardinals; they boasted of being “bankers to the Pope.” Jeanne Modigliani’s view was that the Modiglianis were never bankers (banca means bank) but ran an agency (banco). Pierre Sichel, Modigliani’s tireless investigator, believed the family made money selling wood, coal, and hides.
Given the scale on which the Modigliani family lived, neither explanation is satisfactory, and, indeed, neither is correct. Recent research has established that the family’s fortunes were based on shrewd business dealings in lead and zinc in Sardinia and Lombardy. As early as 1866 the Modigliani brothers, Isacco, Alberto, and Flaminio, were managing a lead mine in Sardinia. Then new prospecting in the province of Bergamo, where silver, copper, and iron had been mined since Roman times, established that there were still fresh veins to be exploited. The Modiglianis investigated and found some extremely pure deposits of calamine (hydrous zinc silicate), which they began to extract and export in the early 1870s. They built modern shaft furnaces, constructed cableways, and were soon employing large numbers of workers.
This, then, was the basis for the lifestyle that Eugénie Garsin described. The Modiglianis inhabited two palazzette, or large villas, presumably containing a maximum of space with a minimum of comfort. The house on the via Roma was “crawling” with servants, the meals were gargantuan, and there were receptions “en grand tralala” in and out of the suites of rooms (enfilades) and the ground-floor salon, its heavy doors opening onto flowering terraces. Guests and family members came and went according to strict social ritual under the control of the family’s head. Eugénie described Emanuele, her future father-in-law, as “very tall, very fat and short of breath.” His authority was absolute; even married sons had to address him in the third person and ceremoniously kiss his hand. Eugénie’s first visit came the year she was engaged, and her sharp little eyes missed little. The contrast between the elegant, cultured, and freethinking Garsins and this family of rich businessmen with their orthodox observances and empty minds was marked.
Flaminio Modigliani as a young man, no date (image credit 2.2)
She had met her future fiancé when he dined with them in Marseille but he had made little impression on her, even though he was slim, dark, and already wealthy as a young mining engineer. In 1870 Flaminio, thirteen years her senior, was comanager of his family’s mine in Sardinia as well as twelve thousand hectares (almost thirty thousand acres) of land with vast tracts of timber. In those days he spent most of the year in Sardinia, overseeing mining operations and also becoming something of an expert in forestry and farming. He is thought to have helped found a school for peasants, showing an interest in education that he would share with his future wife. Their official engagement took place with so little fanfare that nobody bothered to tell Eugénie. It was a business arrangement. Eugénie wrote, “I didn’t have enough character to rebel and not enough knowledge of the world to know what I was getting into. Where would I have gained the idea that I could revolt?”
She and Flaminio were married in January 1872. She writes, “Our married life began as drab and lifeless and stayed that way … I can honestly say that my husband did not exist for me.” She saw him for ten days every Easter and fifteen days every summer; for the remainder of the year she lived alone. “He did not understand me any more than I understood him. I wrote to him, as I did everything else, because it was expected of me, and my letters had to be sent unsealed to my mother-in-law for approval before they could be mailed.” She resorted to the kinds of generalities one would write to a stranger. “I continued to be treated as a girl even after I had my first child.” It is hardly surprising that she did not welcome motherhood. She continued, “[I]t took years for me to become the passionately involved mother I did finally become. My spirit and character developed bit by bit with no help from my environment. Those early days seemed to pass in a period of moral and intellectual stupor.”
Her firstborn, Emanuele, arrived in the winter of 1872 and Reginetta visited her grandchild three or four days later. Eugénie had not seen her mother since the wedding, when she was in good health. She was horrified to discover that Reginetta, who had nursed a young maid ill with tuberculosis, had herself become infected. Her decline was rapid. “She was firm, without illusions,” Eugénie wrote. They both knew she was dying. “[My mother] saw Emanuele for an instant and put her delicate white hand briefly on his head, knowing that she could not embrace him.” Then she left. “I was in absolute despair, one made all the more agonizing because I could not go to see her.”
Part of the problem, Eugénie wrote, was that her mother had always enjoyed good health and, when she began to feel ill, ignored the symptoms. Eventually they had to be taken seriously, and at this point their wonderful Nanette took over, the one who could cure anything. She administered one of her mysterious and magical potions. It had an immediate and drastic effect on Reginetta’s digestive system. The daily “cure” went on for months with no result except to make the patient much sicker. Finally Uncle Félix stepped in and insisted Reginetta enter a hospital for all that medical science could offer. This consisted of such treatments as blistering, cauterizations, and other assaults on the body which further weakened the invalid. Eugénie never saw her mother again. She died a few months later, in May 1873. Eugénie was eighteen and her mother, in her early forties.
Another kind of epidemic, one Eugénie did not describe in such detail, afflicted this gifted, cultured family. Reginetta’s illness and death was taking place as the Garsin family was experiencing one of its periodic financial crises. Mismanagement (probably embezzlement) sent the London branch into bankruptcy; the family member involved promptly disappeared. The branch in Tunis was also compromised, and so was the Marseille business. The only branch not in a state of collapse just then appeared to be in Livorno.
One often sees in this family a curious and perhaps predictable link between crises, financial or otherwise, affecting the security of the group, and emotional as well as physical illness. In Papa’s case the news arrived in the middle of Reginetta’s illness and descended on him with hurricane force. He became wildly agitated and so irrational other family members thought he had gone mad. An unmarried sister, Laure, suffered from what was called “a persecution complex” and was hospitalized. Margherita, who also never married (later becoming a second mother to Jeanne Modigliani), was opinionated and biased and, according to one account, equally unbalanced. Umberto, Amedeo’s brother, appeared to have suffered from depression as an adult. Emanuele, the future Socialist leader, was one of the few members of this brilliant, troubled family to escape mental distress.
The Garsin family was, of course, fiercely united. As Luigi Barzini wrote in his seminal study The Italians, the family was the first source of power, the only refuge in a life full of political upheaval, and the Garsins, with their tenuous alliances and fluctuating fortunes, felt the same imperative to close ranks. Eugénie’s “smala” was, she wrote, a beehive in which each person’s role was clearly ordained. “Every member is duty bound to do all he can for [the family’s] welfare,” Barzini wrote, “give his property if needed and sometimes, when it is absolutely inevitable, sacrifice his life.” In the Garsin household one of Eugénie’s sisters had done just that.
It happened shortly after Eugénie’s marriage and Reginetta’s death. Several years passed before the Garsins were back on their feet financially. Évariste, sent to London in 1877, had made a promising start. After a period of idleness and uncertainty, Papa had regained his sanity and accepted an important job as manager of the Banque Transatlantique in Tripoli. But until that happened the Garsins had to struggle to make ends meet. Someone had to care for Amédée, Laure, Gabrielle, and Albert. The parenting role fell on Clémentine, then just twelve years old. She was not pretty, Eugénie wrote, but had a lovely smile and admirable dark eyes. They could not afford servants. Some hard physical work fell on Clémentine, who was frail, along with the severe emotional strain of dealing with her erratic and unstable father. She would be up until midnight overseeing Albert’s homework. Then, after a few hours of sleep, she had to be at work because Papa rose early and expected his morning coffee, not to mention a stream of cheerful chatter. “Oh the heroism of those early morning conversations!” Eugénie wrote. Taking care of Papa would become the focus of Clémentine’s short life. When he moved to Tripoli she went with him. She was there until she died at the age of twenty-four, overwhelmed by the emotional and physical demands. Eugénie gave her future son Amedeo the name of Clemente in her honor.
In 1881 the Modiglianis’ zinc mining operations in Lombardy were considered the most important in the mining district outside Milan. This was the year that metals began a decline on the world markets. In 1882, the Modigliani brothers stopped mining. The price of metals continued to fall, and in 1883 they declared bankruptcy in Sardinia and were forced to begin looking for another buyer in Bergamo. The disaster came at a particularly difficult time. As was customary the Modiglianis had been marrying off their daughters with dowries calculated to the last decimal point to return the investment with interest. Olimpia, one of the daughters, had married Giacomo Lumbroso, wealthy son of a wealthy family. It was an advantageous match, and so the Modiglianis, including Flaminio, agreed to a hypothetical clause in the marriage contract pledging all their houses and possessions as guarantee for her dowry. In 1884 the house of Modigliani was put into liquidation. The Lumbrosos moved to enforce the marriage contract. By then Flaminio and Eugénie had three children: Giuseppe Emanuele, Margherita, and Umberto. She was pregnant again with her fourth child and about to give birth. Everything—house, furniture, china, glass, silverware—was now owned by the Lumbroso family. Eugénie was beside herself.
Then the Modiglianis discovered an obscure Italian law that prevented the authorities from removing the bed on which a pregnant woman was about to give birth. One imagines the jewels, silver, clothes, laces, silks, curtains, bedspreads, blankets, linens, pillows, draperies, cushions, objets d’art, rugs, and much else piled upon the very large bed on which the mother-to-be presumably lay. The scene’s aspects are worthy of opera buffa: the wailing family, the bailiffs methodically removing chairs, tables, beds, armoires, sofa, lamps, and pictures; the grunting men, banging doors, clinging children, and a groaning woman on a bed in a rapidly emptying room. Less farcical is the precedent that this calamity set in motion: the plunge from wealth to want that would haunt the lives of Amedeo and his descendants from the day he was born.
The house in via Roma where Modigliani was born in 1884. This later, undated photograph depicts the house in a state of decay. A plaque recording the fact of his birth is faintly visible between the second-floor windows. (image credit 2.3)
Somehow they managed to keep an enormous kitchen table with a black marble top. Amedeo (“Beloved of God”) was born on it at 9:30 a.m. on July 12, 1884, before the doctor could arrive. As was customary he was circumcised by the mohel eight hours later and entered the world, in the Jewish calendar, in the year 5644. Eugénie wrote, “I celebrated his birth with tears and anguish.”