OLD SONGS SUNG FROM A MARBLE TABLETOP
THE MAN KIKI WAS TOLD WAS HER FATHER SOLD charcoal from his buggy. When making his deliveries, he announced himself by playing on a silver trumpet. The charcoal he made by tending bonfires deep in the forest beyond the village. She remembered him inviting her into the woods and her many refusals. She never knew if he meant to harm her or if he’d only wanted to embrace her, finally recognizing her as his daughter, someplace safe, away from the gaze of others.
She was born Alice Ernestine Prin on October 2, 1901 in Châtillon-sur-Seine, a village in Burgundy 150 miles southeast of Paris and 30 north of the source of the Seine. It was a place where life’s rhythms flowed in concert with the duties of the land, as it did in most of France beyond the capital. Alice liked to tell of how, clamoring to be born, she’d forced her mother into a labor so fierce her mother had to lie down in the street, threatening to give birth on the sidewalk until someone carried her home. She said she arrived with the cord wound around her neck and was going purple until “fortune dictated” that she “be given the chance to live.” She said she was named for an aunt whose own uncomfortable life had ended in reform school, dead at eighteen for reasons never known to her namesake.
Her mother, Marie Prin, was eighteen and poor. Her supposed father, Maxime Legros, was ten years older and a bit better off. They’d seen one daughter stillborn and another reach only four months. They’d kept this third pregnancy secret for as long as they could. Maxime’s parents opposed the relationship and later pressured him to marry a woman from another village deemed a better match than Marie. She brought a dowry of a thousand francs and a pig.
Alice joined five cousins born out of wedlock to her two aunts. All of them—three boys, Alice, and two girls—had been left to be raised by their grandmother, Geneviève Prin in her stone house on rue de la Charme. Marie went to Paris to work as a nurse at a maternity hospital, following the path of many unwed mothers sent to such institutions to escape their local scandals and, their guardians hoped, be reminded of the noise and blood waiting for them should they repeat their misdeeds.
From Paris, Marie sent home five francs a month. Grandmother Prin meanwhile took in the neighbors’ cleaning and sewing. Grandfather Prin worked as a road hand, the first in generations of Prin men not to make his living herding sheep.
Twice weekly Alice and her cousins lined up before the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul for helpings of vegetable broth and rice. Theirs wasn’t an observant family, and the nuns dealt scorn with the soup. If Alice’s mother was living it up in the big city with the rich folks, they would ask loudly, why was her girl standing in front of them hungry and in tatters? In a drawing she made of this memory, many years later, Alice placed herself as a skinny child at the end of a line of people waiting to be served by a nun rendered as a terrifying presence, three times the size of the villagers she feeds, her white cornette headdress spanning far beyond her broad shoulders. “You wouldn’t believe what came out of the mouths of these representatives of God on earth!,” she wrote later in her memoir; “those thin-lipped mouths, ravaged by all the bitterness and wickedness that poured from them.”
Alice found happiness where she could. Pots of red beans made her happy. The bread soup they served when she went to kindergarten made her happy as well. But this was one of the few joys she found at the village’s public school. She could tell the headmistress hated the charity cases, with their tattered clothes and rickety legs, who were made to sit at the back of the classroom. The headmistress scratched at Alice hunting for lice with her sharp nails, even though Grandmother Prin had taken the precaution of cropping her hair like a boy’s. If Alice fought against the scratching, it ended with her standing in a corner, nose pointed to the wall.
The other children adored her. Across from the schoolyard, she played at scaring them by walking on tiptoe along a low limestone wall running the edge of the Seine, a ten-foot drop below.
By the time she was ten, Alice spent most days away from school. She’d figured out no one could force her to go. Elementary school was by then compulsory across France, a bedrock of the modernizing mission to forge a national identity, which meant inculcating the peasantry with Republican values while trying to stem the influence of traditional folkways and “backward” local languages. For Alice, however, the rules went unenforced. “Grandmother often screamed at us,” she wrote of growing up alongside her cousins, “but we always screamed louder.” Neighbors chided Grandmother Prin for being too soft on her wards. She tried to fool them by smacking a broomstick against a table outside while her coconspirators wailed as if she were beating them blue.
Alice preferred life outdoors, where she could always find something to eat. After heavy rains, she would root out snails from freshly made crevasses and head off with mud-darkened fingers to find more in the cracks of old houses. She picked wild strawberries and mushrooms tasting of earth. And there were always dandelion roots that, when washed and separated from the leaves and stems, could be sold by the bowlful for making tea.
Among the cousins, Alice was the only one with a father still living. One day she heard one man telling another that a girl in the village was her half-sister, laughing as he remarked that the resemblance was obvious, since “one was just as ugly as the other.” Alice and this other girl fought whenever they saw each other, as if by instinct. When the other girl threatened to tell her father about their fights, Alice answered that she didn’t care since he was her father, too. Grandmother Prin meanwhile told Alice that if she ever went to see her father, he would “kill” her “just like the others.” Writing as an adult, she inferred this to be a reference to the two children that Marie and Maxime lost before her birth, whose deaths her grandmother somehow blamed on Maxime.
Another man, who Alice referred to in her writing only as her “godfather,” helped to raise her. He collected the village trash in a horse-led dump truck. When he took his haul out for disposal in a faraway field, she rode along, digging among the rags and bottles, “playing Alice in Wonderland.” After the job, they would stop at a bistro where she sneaked drops of Pernod from glasses not yet collected for washing while her godfather, who made moonshine, conducted some business. She would climb sometimes onto one of the marble tabletops to sing old drinking songs, belching out the well-worn rhymes with her licorice breath, after which she went around to be rewarded with coins and sips of wine.
Alice was twelve when her mother called her to Paris. With Grandmother Prin (her grandfather had died a few years earlier), she traveled the two hours to Troyes, where her aunt lived, and there was transferred to the care of a train conductor who put the crying girl in a first-class cabin hoping to calm her. When she unpacked her meal of pungent garlic sausage with red wine, whimpering for her grandmother between bites, she saw the woman across make a face as if someone had kicked her dog. Years later she could still summon the shame she felt there in the rumbling compartment, skinny and jaundiced, her crow-black hair spilling out in all directions from her blue beret with its pompom of red. She recalled crying all the way to Paris.
She loved the city the moment she stepped out from the Gare de l’Est and into its symphony of whistles, horns, and clacking hooves. As she and her mother mounted into one of the waiting horse-drawn coaches, she asked her mother how long it took to wax the streets to make them so shiny.
But theirs was an unhappy reunion. Her mother was like a stranger, unseen aside from holidays when she’d whisked into the village laden with toys, pretty dresses, patent leather shoes, and other items from Paris meant to signal the middle-class respectability Marie so craved. She’d left her job at the hospital and was working as a linotypist at the Calmann-Lévy publishing house, preparing text to be set in molten lead. She lived at the edge of Montparnasse at 12, rue Dulac, the ugliest street in the neighborhood, sharing a ground-floor apartment with a man named Gaston, the foreman in charge of her linotype machine. The publishing house owned their apartment building, which made the rent manageable so long as they remained employees.
Marie sent Alice to a school, close by on rue de Vaugirard, to learn reading and numbers so she too could become a linotypist. She dreaded going back to a classroom and was embarrassed at being put in a class with kids five and six years younger than her. But there she discovered that alongside enjoying history—especially stories about Napoleon—she loved reading. Best were the pulpy Fantômas books, published monthly (thirty-two in all), each detailing the misadventures of the brilliant, occasionally murderous arch-villain Fantômas, the “genius of crime,” forever escaping the Sûreté’s Inspector Juve thanks to a revolving set of aliases. Each night Alice opened her window before getting into bed still dressed, ready for Fantômas to come get her. Her mother teased her for it, though Marie was also a secret Fantômas fan. But Alice knew he was coming to steal her away to wreak havoc on the sleeping city, their identities hidden behind domino masks and under capes as they dashed along the mansard roofs. It was Fantômas who initiated Alice into the power and pleasure of an effective disguise.
Marie pulled Alice out of school after a few months. She was thirteen and legal to work a factory job. “I know how to read, count—that’s it!” she wrote in her memoir. She worked as a knitter’s apprentice, a bottle cleaner, and a bookbinder’s apprentice, this last job offering the added excitement of exposing her to books she never would have seen at home, such as the Kama Sutra, whose pictures produced “a feeling between my thighs like the movements of a fluttering bird struggling to fly.” And then with what was not yet called the Great War under way, she worked at disinfecting and oiling dead soldiers’ boots before they went back into rotation, and at repairing fabric for observation balloons, and at soldering military equipment. Alice’s earnings were vital to the household. They helped her mother feel less dependent on Gaston. Marie earned just enough to hover at the poverty level. The average Frenchwoman’s salary, 2.25 francs a day for ten hours’ work, was then a third of the average man’s. Alice ate many of her lunches at the local soup kitchen, where they served a watery lentil soup that people joked had more pebbles than lentils.
Saturdays Alice and her mother helped some friends, the Guinoiseau family, run their flower stall in the open-air market on rue Mouffetard in the Latin Quarter. The eldest Guinoiseau daughter, a tall girl with brilliant blond hair, worked alongside Alice as they tried to make the withered low-quality irises and lilies look sellable, propping up broken stems with a bit of matchstick, and adding a touch of rosewater to old roses. (She recalled no great outrages over their deceptions but also that the stall didn’t get a lot of repeat customers.) Admiring the Guinoiseau girl’s fine hands, Alice wondered if she wasn’t a secret princess in exile. They would play at making themselves up like gitanes, oiling their hair and plastering down their kiss-curls, whirling combs adorned with brass charms and many-colored stones to mimic the untamed Carmen who’d seduced an older generation a world away across the Seine amid the gold and velvet of the Opéra-Comique.
After their shifts, their mothers let them go unsupervised to the flea market at the city’s southern outskirts to rummage for clothes. They shared meals of fried potatoes with white wine before heading back into Montparnasse to the movie house. There Alice would rub a stolen flower petal on her lips and cheeks before meeting Dédé, who must have been nineteen or twenty. She figured his wife supported him since he never mentioned any kind of job, until the night he got caught trying to rob a shoestore, which only heightened his appeal to a teenaged devotee of Fantômas. Her time with Dédé came to an end when her mother discovered purplish blotches on her neck.
A few years into the Great War, Alice was sent to live with her aunt Laure in Troyes. The mill there paid three times what she could earn in Paris. She liked her aunt, who looked to her like a policeman shrunken down a couple sizes and given the body of a woman. A big eater and a bigger drinker, reeking of snuff and always barking orders. She was generous with what little she had. She rented a two-bedroom house at the edge of town. Alice shared a bed with her thirteen-year-old cousin Madeleine, who she called sister. Aunt Laure slept with her oldest daughter, Eugénie, while Eugénie’s baby, whose father had been killed in the war, lay between them. Alice would remember her time in Troyes as a happy one. She and Madeleine had come up together under Grandmother Prin until both turned twelve and were returned to their respective mothers. Now the two of them walked together to the mill as if they were grown-ups, rushing home on their lunch break for black coffee and herring. At dinners, Kiki would hide some of her meal to give later to Madeleine, who never got enough to eat since Aunt Laure thought that Eugénie, older and prettier than Madeleine, would make better use of the calories. But three months in, Alice hurt her foot. No more spinning. She was sent back to Paris in early 1916.
Her mother had split from her foreman by then and was living with a soldier named Noël Delecoeuillerie, who had returned from the front with an injury and was pretending to be her boarder for the sake of appearances. Alice heard them at night and wondered at the sounds. Noël was eleven years Marie’s junior, closer in age to Alice. The apartment was tight. Marie decided it was time for Alice to leave.
She arranged a job for Alice in a bakery on Place Saint-Charles, just south of the Eiffel Tower. Alice got thirty francs a month and a room with the elderly couple who owned the bakery. She was up at first light to serve the laborers who came for the morning bake, then went out for deliveries, came back to sift flour, went out again to buy supplies before running back to bring the last batch from the oven, the assistant baker leaning into her the whole time, stripping down in the heat to show her his prick, telling her she would “never see one so beautiful.” Evenings she cooked and cleaned for the owners.
Nights were hers. She liked to look out on the lamp-lit square outside her window where couples met up on the benches. Watching their indiscretions would set her off. She was scared by how much she enjoyed her pleasure, how eager she was to know about bodies and what they could do. “Two or three times a day, I’d have to go off somewhere to be alone,” she wrote. One night she invited a boy, “small, stocky, and mean-looking,” to the bakery’s backroom. He went to embrace her, but that frightened her, and she told him to stop.
She dreamed of falling in love with a poet, painter, or actor. She felt something big was going to happen to her. Badly educated country girls weren’t meant for big lives, she knew, but she was hungry to see people and places. “I wanted to run away. But where was I going to go without money?” Still, she loved Paris deeply, even as she longed for Châtillon-sur-Seine and her grandmother’s affection. Alice saw that her future lay in the capital, much as it hurt to turn her back on her first home.
Mostly she felt tired. She could never get enough sleep. And then one day she punched the baker’s wife. She’d blackened her eyebrows with burnt matches, and the older woman, seeing her in makeup, called her a “little tart,” so she hit her. The assistant baker had to pull them apart. Afterward, under his breath, he told Alice that she threw a great punch.
The baker and his wife refused to give Alice her final month’s pay. She drifted from place to place, staying with friends, looking for another job. She ran into one of the bakery’s regulars who’d always had an eye for her. A sculptor, he wore a huge beret. She never saw him without the silver-tipped cane she mistakenly took as a sign of enormous wealth. She told him her story. He said if she needed money she could pose for him. He kept a studio a few steps from where her mother lived.
She’d never stood naked in front of a man before. She wasn’t too concerned about this one, with his paunch and his silvery beard. She figured he was too old to do her any harm. She arrived at the Impasse Ronsin, a hive of artists’ studios and workshops tucked away in a tiny oasis of a dead-end street overgrown with vines, where one heard songbirds, pigeons, cats, dogs, and the chickens that one of the other artists living there, the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, sometimes tempted into his kitchen so he could cook them for dinner. The place had earned the nickname Crime Alley for a double murder committed there in 1908: the victims were the popular French miniaturist Adolphe Steinheil and his mother-in-law, the alleged murderer the painter’s wife, Marguerite. Acquitted after a sensational trial, she was already notorious across France as the mistress of the late president Félix Faure, who’d reportedly died while in office—in his office—from a seizure suffered as they were having sex.
At first Alice felt anxious, “shivering as much from fear as from cold,” as she wrote, and was shocked when the sculptor put a measuring compass to her thighs. But she found she liked the work, being captured in clay. It was simple enough, sitting, standing, lying there, becoming another version of yourself while someone watched. Outside people were sweating, screaming at each other, chopping up meat, packing crates and unpacking them, running over the river to catch some early tram or motor bus. In the studio, all you had to do was be still and breathe. Who said work had to be hard? It was more exciting than running around with baguettes or pouring cream for the gâteaux basques. And for their three-hour session, he paid her as much as she made in a week at the bakery.
She posed for him three times. “My first contact with art!” as she described it in her memoir. But then a neighbor spotted her walking into Crime Alley, headed for the fourth session, and an hour later Marie came banging on the sculptor’s door, accusing him of corrupting her daughter and threatening to call the police. She pulled Alice out into the street and hit her, called her a “miserable whore,” and screamed that she no longer had a daughter.
Hearing the words, Alice felt no surprise, only calm, understanding that whatever last threads had tied them together were torn. They would find other people to love.
She’d just turned sixteen. She found occasional work posing for other artists, knocking on studio doors, but not enough to keep her going. Finally, like so many other Frenchwomen supporting the war effort in industrial settings and enjoying the measured liberation that came with their new circumstances, she landed a factory job in Saint-Ouen, one of the northern suburbs. She found a cheap apartment, preferring to stay in Montparnasse despite the long commute.
At the outset of the Great War in the summer of 1914, the French president Raymond Poincaré had called on the nation’s citizens to show their resilience against the enemy as a “sacred union” (union sacrée). The first heady weeks were followed by terror at the sight of Germans encroaching on the capital, then jubilation when they were repelled in the “Miracle of the Marne,” when the city’s taxi drivers shuttled troops to key positions (while charging full fare). Parisians then tried to settle into something resembling normalcy. An impossible task in the face of intermittent bombing raids from Taubes and Zeppelins, which tore craters through the Tuileries Garden and just missed Notre-Dame cathedral, whose stained-glass windows had been removed and stored, replaced by panes of washed-out yellow. People struggled to sort through the swirling rumors of imminent defeat, and false stories in the press about German guns firing blanks and German troops surrendering in exchange for a single slice of French bread and butter. There were scattered reports of mutinies from both sides of the front. There were mass strikes and shortages of food and fuel. Wide boulevards once neatly lined with chestnuts looked ragged, as swaths of trees were felled for firewood. And yet while more than twelve thousand square miles of France would be destroyed in some way during those years, Paris managed to escape massive physical damage. The war’s most immediate wreckage in the city was psychological. People across the social spectrum were made to understand how tightly they were all held together by the same vise of history, how quickly and completely their lives could be broken by events far away and people they would never meet.
The war pushed and pulled at Alice just as it did everyone else. She woke often to air raid sirens, marching down with the building’s other tenants to the black basement. One day she went to work to find that her factory’s owner had to fire the unmarried female employees to free up spaces for women with children, or with husbands who were serving.
Alice had no savings and could no longer afford her rent. One night she stood hungry and alone, admiring the exquisite window display of a store, the falling snow having ruined her hair. She heard a man approaching from behind, offering to treat her to hot chocolate in his studio. She would remember being attracted both by the chocolate and by the hint of adventure in the word studio, which “made me think: artist.” Robert was tall, thin, and angry and was indeed an artist, or rather he sometimes painted watercolors, but never sold any. He showed little interest in Alice once she’d moved in. He mostly used her for the money she earned from her occasional posing.
One evening, after modeling for someone who’d stiffed her for the day’s work, she was crying on a bench, worried about coming home empty-handed, when an old man approached and said he would pay her three francs to show him her breasts, motioning to a spot behind the train station. She was hungry and worried about Robert’s hunger, too. She cried on the way home. But as soon as she entered their studio, showing Robert the bread and cheese she’d bought with the old man’s money, and seeing his expression, she “no longer had any regrets. . . . You’d have thought I was the sun, the way that empty-bellied man’s fevered eyes lit up at the sight of me.” They ate and drank, and he took down his guitar and played. “Life was beautiful,” she wrote. “Robert was beautiful playing the only two chords he knew. He was beautiful being ugly. I felt perfectly happy. . . . I sang and sang.”
They didn’t sleep together. Robert blamed her. One night he brought two women back from a café and had sex with them while Alice was in the bed beside them, telling her to watch, to show her how easy it was. She wrote that as deeply as it wounded her and as jealous as it made her, she refused to show any reaction. She wondered if her pain was just how it felt to be in love. (She would title her memoir’s chapter about Robert “Is This Love?”) Following that episode came an even harder period when she struggled to find any posing work, and they had so little money they went days without eating. Robert tried to put her out, taking her across town to rue Saint-Denis, well known for prostitution, and ordering her to go with the first American soldier she saw. She refused and survived his violence. “He beat me and yelled that I was ‘good for nothing!’ ” she wrote.
And then one day Robert kicked her out without explanation and headed for Brittany with a friend. Alice wandered the city in a daze for weeks, sleeping in Robert’s friend’s studio. Eventually she moved in with a dancer she knew. She gave Alice a “Ninon” cut, styling her hair in long ringlets after the look of a famed French courtesan. Next she moved in with a painter who worked in an airplane factory and got her a job as a riveter. After getting her first pay, she found an apartment on the corner of rue de Vaugirard and boulevard du Montparnasse. It stank of mushrooms and mold, and the dramas of the pimps and prostitutes who were her neighbors kept her up. She got a brief taste of luxury during a short-lived affair with a Brazilian diplomat she met, who was notorious for the orgies he hosted in his villa west of the city. He or another admirer introduced her to cocaine. “It made me happy right away.”
One night, wearing only an overcoat, she staggered to a nearby public assistance hospital complaining of a heart attack. She swore that a rival had slipped something into her drink. The on-duty nurse told her to stop taking cocaine. They kept her for four nights. The nurses treated her roughly. She heard the wailing of unseen patients who shared the large hall where they placed her. She was horrified when the nurses mocked an elderly patient who’d wet herself before she could ask for a bedpan.
After they let Alice out, diagnosed with an untreatable “problem of the nerves,” she suffered waking nightmares and fantasized about hurting strangers she passed on the street. At first it felt like she had a raging devil shut up inside her. And then the anger subsided as she felt herself disappearing into depression. She compared the feeling to wanting badly to dance but being unable to move. She got hold of some arsenic but, as she told an interviewer years later, “didn’t have the courage to swallow it.” She said that staring at the vial of poison in her hand was what saved her. “I knew then I would make it through.” Gradually she started to feel lighter.
Seeking more modeling work, Alice set her sights on the Café de la Rotonde. Though its ornate facade belied a shabby sawdust-floored interior, the local artists prized it for its warmth in the cold months, for its wraparound terrace (nicknamed “Raspail Beach”) in the warm ones, and because the owner, Victor “Papa” Libion, genuinely enjoyed their presence among the laborers, drivers, hawkers, and washerwomen who made up his regulars. Artists went there looking for models and models for artists, each side wagering something on the other’s future. But you couldn’t just walk in and announce yourself as one or the other and be taken seriously. Unspoken codes of conduct dictated who could be granted a place in the order and when.
The Rotonde occupied the northeastern corner of the carrefour Vavin, a wide crossroads dominated by two tree-lined arteries bisecting the heart of Montparnasse: boulevard Raspail, spanning much of the Left Bank, running south to the Parc Montsouris and the suburbs, and boulevard du Montparnasse, running northwest by southeast past the Luxembourg Garden and toward Les Invalides, Napoleon’s resting place. So much modern art and literature could be traced in one way or another to the cafés clustered around this crossroads that the novelist Henry Miller deemed it “the navel of the world.”
The varied clientele of these cafés reflected the recent history of this mostly residential, largely working-class neighborhood. Montparnasse had started attracting artists as early as the turn of the nineteenth century. They came initially for the low-rent workspaces, many of them located on the ground floor and big enough to accommodate the creation of large-scale works, and because Montparnasse lay fairly close to the Parisian campus of the national École des Beaux-Arts, a half-hour’s walk north. For centuries, the Beaux-Arts academy had trained and minted “master” artists, promoting its progeny across France and beyond in a lucrative operation reliant on long-standing traditions and networks of influence, which bred a conservatism among its teachers and students. A few smaller schools opened in Montparnasse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to offer an alternative. Schools like the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière fostered an independent spirit that spread from the classroom to the neighborhood, but slowly. Many among the first influx of students at these academies were lured from abroad by France’s reputation as a leader in the arts, and they took their vocations seriously. They spent more time training than they did lounging on café terraces. It was across the city in Montmartre, birthplace of Impressionism, where café life flourished most intensely.
In the years before the Great War, Montparnasse started pulling in a new generation of artists. They were still seeking cheap studios, but fewer of them had connections to any of the academies. Cafés started popping up around the neighborhood. Entrepreneurial art dealers opened galleries in modest spaces, mostly around rue de Seine. Developers built blocks of studios, quickly and on the cheap, to meet demand. The best known was La Ruche (The Hive), where Alice sometimes found work. A round three-story building at 2, passage Dantzig, originally built as the British India pavilion for the 1900 world’s fair, it looked like a beehive. Alfred Boucher, a sculptor who’d come into some money, wanted to help his fellow artists and had converted the pavilion into studios radiating out from a central staircase so that each was shaped like a wedge of pie, their fat ends dominated by tall windows. Small huts went up haphazardly around the central structure. The chaotic atmosphere extended to the management of the rentals, so that La Ruche functioned almost like social housing. The Hungarian sculptor Joseph Csáky recalled paying the first installment of a year’s rent when he moved in and then never being asked for anything more, as if he’d been forgotten about.
By the 1910s, some of the Montmartre-based artists were relocating to Montparnasse, as their neighborhood filled with tourists and gaudy cafés. Leading the charge, as he did in so many other realms, was Pablo Picasso. In 1912 he moved to a newly constructed apartment building on the edge of the Montparnasse cemetery. (In 1918, after getting married, he returned to the Right Bank.) While Picasso’s move set a very public precedent, the poet and artist Jean Cocteau suggested that Montparnasse’s usurping Montmartre as the city’s new hub for artistic experimentation happened organically. To Cocteau, certain districts simply emerged at different times for no clear reason, as if a group of people had collectively decided to reach toward the light of art and escape the drudgery of their lives.
Foreign artists, too, started looking at Montparnasse as the place to go to learn their craft and be taken seriously by dealers, buyers, and critics. Among the artists pining for Paris was the expressionist painter Chaïm Soutine, who grew up in the mostly Jewish village of Smilovitchi near Minsk. He’d read so many letters from artist-friends who’d left their own villages for Montparnasse, gushing over its Café de la Rotonde, that when Soutine emigrated in 1913 he walked three miles, luggage in hand, straight from the station to the Rotonde. Paris—sophisticated, cosmopolitan, modern, holding the potential for untold riches—functioned as a mythical site in the imaginations of many central and eastern European Jews, artists or not. Many would have heard the old Yiddish saying Azoy gliklich wi a yid in Paris (Happy as a Jew in Paris). Soutine had nothing on another eastern European when it came to walking: Brancusi first arrived in Paris after walking there from Romania on an eighteen-month trek. He settled in Montparnasse in 1908.
Parisians in Alice’s time called Montparnasse “the Quarter,” as though it stood alone and absent of rivals, a district so distinct it required no other designation. And the Quarter did operate as a kind of special zone, where policemen tended to overlook infractions, satisfied to watch the mess of bohemia unfold unmolested so long as no one did anything too violent. Generations of French functionaries had been trained in an environment of official admiration and even respect for artists, which served the national interest by bolstering French notions of cultural superiority. And these functionaries came of age in a society largely swayed by the notion that artists had by their nature to live nontraditional and unfettered lives.
By the 1920s the idea of “bohemia”—named for the spiritual homeland of the Roma people, synonymous in the popular imagination with freedom from responsibility—as a separate world operating by its own rules was commonplace. So was the equation of bohemianism with the life of the artist, and vice versa. Officials recognized that enclaves such as Montparnasse served practical functions, both as pleasure zones, to which the rest of the city could come to release the pressures of their daily lives, and as informal testing grounds, in which people could make sense of their unstable identities amid sweeping social changes that promised greater personal freedoms. Places like Montparnasse clarified class and cultural boundaries by letting people, especially middle-class Parisians, experiment with breaking the rules so that they could ultimately be reminded that most of them were not rule breakers and were unwilling to pay the costs of living a truly free life. The Quarter, as an idea, never threatened to infect the rest of the city. And so while life in Montparnasse was far from orderly, a certain kind of order prevailed. Troubles were kept inside the magic circle.
As in much of Paris, navigating Montparnasse meant weaving among a dizzying mix of wide boulevards and smaller streets, some running with just enough sense to let you picture a grid as you walked, but not quite, others crisscrossing at forty-five-degree angles, and still others dead-ending abruptly. The neighborhood’s two visual anchors, the cemetery and the train station, were plain and utilitarian. On gray days especially, the neighborhood broadcast a heavy gothic gloom. Its gaudy thoroughfare of pleasure, rue de la Gaîté, surely inspired as much depression as it did gaiety among those who walked it. But Montparnasse’s squalor had its value, offering relief from the oppressive beauty put out by so much of Paris, and scaring off all but the most risk-loving speculators, along with most among the initial trickle of postwar tourists.
The Quarter’s denizens, the Montparnos, were an endlessly and happily self-regarding tribe. And yet this provincialism was paired with what Cocteau called “international patriotism,” the dream of living “unencumbered by political, social, or national problems of any kind”—even as everyone knew there would have been no Quarter without the flow of ambitious, artistic, and overly intelligent youth from Livorno, Stockholm, Tokyo, Toronto, Málaga, Minsk, and so many other places to feed it, nor the very real and often violent “national problems” that unyoked those lives and put them into motion.
Those newcomers to Montparnasse were only drops in a wave of close to three million immigrants who would move to Paris in the 1920s. Contrary to the French myth of “color-blindness” stemming from the nation’s universalist values, the French people could be as xenophobic as anyone. France’s colonial policies were as cruel as those of any other colonial power. Still most Parisians, whatever their own private hatreds might have been, recognized how badly they needed foreign labor, ideas, and capital to revitalize the city, which had suffered neglect as so many of its resources were channeled toward making war. The city would see isolated attacks targeting immigrants, especially in the second half of the decade as the value of the franc dropped precipitously and the right-wing press stoked fears of an invasion by foreigners, with much teeth-gnashing directed at Jews coming from eastern Europe. But foreigners were mostly tolerated, and the artistic and intellectual communities of Montparnasse more often welcomed them. The neighborhood also had a vital and relatively open gay and lesbian presence, with the prevailing attitude best expressed by Gertrude Stein: “I like all the people who produce and Alice [B. Toklas, whom Stein called her wife] does too and what they do in bed is their own business and what we do is not theirs.”
While the Quarter was hardly devoid of tension or violence, people who would have been shunned as outsiders in most other places felt free there to conduct themselves as they wanted, although they experienced such feelings unequally across lines of class, race, gender, and sexual identity. That one of the great cultural flowerings of the twentieth century took place in an environment that was global in its makeup and progressive in its outlook, and where people felt unencumbered by the weight of a shared history, was hardly a coincidence. The expansion of worldviews in Montparnasse fostered new ways of thinking about human relations and how to explore them in one’s work. Marcel Duchamp suggested that the Montparnasse community constituted “the first really international group of artists we ever had,” and that it was precisely this “internationalism,” and its resulting sense of openness and possibility, that made it superior to any of the century’s other artistic hubs.
For Alice, the most direct route into Montparnasse’s social world was through the backroom of the Rotonde, where the neighborhood luminaries gathered. But to get there, you first had to charm “Papa” Libion, who let his favored artists treat the space as if it were their office. There they collected mail, arranged loans, and handled other transactions. They lined up, especially in the colder months, to scrub themselves in the Rotonde’s washroom. To Libion, this was all just “good business,” as he put it. “Artists and intellectuals don’t have much money, but when they do, they spend it.” Libion was known to extend credit until debts grew embarrassingly large, and then he might still take a painting in lieu of cash. He had no problem with drug use, refused to call the police for a fight he could break up himself, and threw out drunks only when he had to. And if he yelled at someone caught ripping a chunk from the long loaves he kept by the bar, everyone knew his threats were for show. Aware of how many of his drinkers came from elsewhere, he subscribed to the major foreign newspapers, an attraction worth advertising in bold letters on the Rotonde’s canopy.
But he didn’t like Alice. She wore filthy clothes and a cheap hat, which might have contributed to his aversion. Most likely it was simply that Libion didn’t yet know her and was protective of his backroom regulars. He was fine with Alice sitting in the front like anybody else, but let her go no further. “I would have put my ass on my head to get into that room,” wrote Alice later, using a bit of country slang. Instead she spent days at the long wooden bar watching them pass by, the painters and models everyone knew by sight. Aïcha Goblet, so stately in her green turban, said to hail from Martinique (in truth from the North of France), a former bareback circus rider, presided as their unofficial queen. They sat around marble-topped tables drinking, smoking, laughing, gossiping. Arguing, above all—about the war, books, Communism, the genius of Charlie Chaplin, the small and large failings of a rival’s latest performance. To Alice, they seemed always to be plotting some kind of revolution.
The backroom offered the Rotonde’s only washroom, another major attraction for Alice. At that time she was cycling through various friends who would put her up for a night or two, and she wasn’t always sure when her next chance to clean up would come. Some nights, if the weather was fine, she would let herself into a storage hut behind the train station, belonging to a friend’s rich uncle. She would pile sandbags to make a bed. The lights from the station shined in her eyes all night but made her feel safe.
To pass time at the Rotonde and pay for her coffees, Alice would pick someone out, watch them closely, and draw. She sometimes sold her pictures, most often to soldiers and tourists, by approaching a subject with a finished portrait in hand and asking if they wanted to buy it. She wrote, “I’m not a great artist but I know how to keep track of how much wine someone’s had and how much they’ve been spending on cigarettes. The portraits might not have been spitting images, but they were easy to do, and I pocketed ten cents for each one.” She was a better illustrator than she claimed. She drew as she spoke, in lines that were barbed and ironic and warm and tenderhearted all at once. Along with her portraits, she also sketched and sold images inspired by the French writer Henri Murger’s 1848 book Scènes de la vie de bohème (Scenes of Bohemian Life), a series of episodes tracing romanticized versions of the lives of his friends. Alice specialized in drawing nineteenth-century grisettes, independent women, usually from working-class backgrounds and often working as artists’ models, who entered into liaisons as they wished, seeking love, money, social capital, or all three.
Libion got used to seeing Alice around. She was always ready to tell an off-color story or show a funny picture. It got to the point where Libion could hardly look at her without laughing. One day he said to her, “For god’s sake, why don’t you just get yourself a decent hat already?” letting the two of them pretend that Alice’s clothing, rather than Libion’s initial snap judgment of her character, had been the only thing keeping her from the backroom. She found some lace fabric samples in a dumpster and cut them up to work into shirts. She fashioned a hat, trimming it in tinsel like a Christmas tree. Eventually Libion let her go to the backroom. She made friends with some of the staff. The cook would warm a pot of water that Alice lugged to the bathroom so she could wash herself in one sink while the bathroom attendant washed her clothes for her in the other. They caught up on the neighborhood gossip as the clothes dried on the radiator. “When you went to the Rotonde it was like coming home,” wrote Alice. “You were with your family.”
In the last year of the Great War, Alice fell in love with a painter named Maurice (Moishe) Mendjizky, who lived at La Ruche and was popular at the Rotonde. Libion had once let him have an informal exhibit on the café’s walls, the first time such an honor was ever extended, and one of the few times Mendjizky showed his work in public. Alice had recently battled the Spanish flu, as it was then called, and was feeling “sad, desperate, and lonely,” when she met him. He was Jewish, Polish, thin, and alluring with wise, laughing eyes and twenty-eight to her seventeen. He’d come to Paris in 1906 to train at the École des Beaux-Arts, but his studies were interrupted by the call of the Imperial Russian Army and then by war, injury, and a long recuperation during which he stayed in the same hospital bed for two years. Now back in Paris, he put little effort into selling his work and wavered between painting and composing music, studying for a time under a disciple of the French composer Hector Berlioz. Alice admired his paintings and thought they had some of the best qualities of Cézanne’s work with their tight brushstrokes, warm colors, and dense shading.
Mendjizky first painted Alice in 1919, when she still had long hair, and before they’d grown to know each other intimately. For whatever reason, the painting fell well short of his other work from the time. It was a listless profile that looked as though done by a stiff academic painter from the previous century, the subject posed at an unimaginative ninety-degree angle and unremarkable save for her large and pointed nose. This is the first known painting of Alice Prin.
Mendjizky started calling Alice “Kiki,” which stuck only because they liked how it sounded, two quick breaths pushed with clenched tongue through bared teeth. It was a fairly common nickname for women as well as men. People used kiki as a bit of slang to describe all sorts of things: chicken giblets; someone’s neck (usually strangled or hanged); a cock’s crow; having a chat; having sex. Prostitutes used kiki as a catchall word for client, like the use of john in English.
Kiki and Mendjizky took an apartment together in Montparnasse halfway between the train station and the cemetery, early in 1919. Aside from a few quiet streets where grass still grew through the cobblestones, the neighborhood was changing quickly. Montparnasse was gaining hulking concrete apartment blocks and parking garages boasting space for two hundred cars. And yet while modernizing, it remained a patchwork of small-time operations.
Kiki would live with Mendjizky for three or four years. She described him as her first “true love” and her first mutually satisfying sexual experience. Over those years, Mendjizky painted her with great care and little ambition. Besides the first portrait, five oils survive, as well as a pen-and-ink sketch, all done between 1919 and 1921. The finest among them is Kiki (1921), one of the oils, a frontal portrait in which she looks dangerously chic in a green cloche hat and matching dress, with a hint of white lace peeking out from the low neckline, emphasizing Kiki’s long neck, which earned her the second nickname “Gazelle” among her friends. The portrait also reveals Mendjizky’s struggle to escape his influences. Kiki holds in one hand, resting on her lap, a tempting apple that could have been lifted straight from a Cézanne still life. And Amedeo Modigliani has left his trace in Mendjizky’s semiabstract rendering of Kiki’s eyes, all dark pupils and mystery.
Kiki credited another painter, Moïse Kisling, as the one to “discover” her. Kisling, who’d grown up in the Jewish ghetto in Kraków, had arrived in Paris in 1910, a teenager speaking no French, hoping to study at the École des Beaux-Arts but lacking the funds. He sometimes slept rough, went days without eating, and fell in with the crowd at the Rotonde. At the war’s outbreak, he numbered among the many foreigners living in France who enlisted in the Foreign Legion, which earned him a night of the best champagne from Papa Libion. In battle, Kisling suffered a chest wound from an exploding shell. He was just back from a convalescence in Saint-Tropez when Kiki first saw him at the Rotonde. He wore loose overalls on his broad, bullish frame, and metal bangles around his wrists, looking as if he’d just come from the beach, a style just starting to come into vogue.
By Kiki’s account, the first words she heard from Kisling were, “Tell me, Papa Libion, who’s the new whore?” motioning at Kiki as if there had been a changing of the guard while he was gone. Then he spoke to her: “Come on, kid, join us for a drink.” Always a reckless spender, he was treating a table of friends to champagne. Kiki, feeling somewhat intimidated, decided to go over, and they traded a few mocking insults, with Kiki at one point calling him a “syphilitic old bitch,” which seemed to bring him immense pleasure. By night’s end, she’d booked a three-month engagement to pose for him exclusively. Kisling was highly possessive of the models he worked with, demanding exclusivity for extended stretches of time and that they make themselves available at all hours, as he liked to paint them again and again until he found the composition that pleased him most.
Many in Montparnasse suspected that Kisling would one day rank among the greatest painters of the era. Cocteau thought him an absolutely “pure painter,” while Picasso, not generally effusive with praise for his contemporaries, also numbered among his early admirers and sometimes exchanged paintings with him, knowing that Kisling could sell them if he hit hard times. Kisling didn’t seek to create any great rupture in the theory or practice of art. His gifts lay in how finely he handled color and light, and the clarity of his vision, one “charged with a profound awareness and meaning,” as his friend the avant-garde writer Antonin Artaud said of him.
Kiki wrote of being a poor model in those days, always laughing and breaking pose. She helped herself to soap, toothpaste, cheese, and other useful things. She traipsed around the studio barefoot, forcing Kisling to paint around the fact of her dirty feet. (She preferred to be shoeless whenever possible.) He had her lounge on a low-slung table fitted with casters, which he slowly spun, turning Kiki as he wanted her in the changing light. Whenever she looked like she was getting bored, Kisling would tell her that her nose was losing its pointiness. She made him laugh by imitating opera singers. He enjoyed her voice. Then they might compete to see who could make the loudest fart. She liked his cowboy shirts, which he wore to look like his fashion idol Tom Mix, America’s first western film star. Kiki and Kisling could have passed for brother and sister. For a while, they sported identical short haircuts, with bangs flopping down to their eyebrows. Further complicating matters was that Kisling sometimes went by Kiki, too, which led them to argue over which of them held the nickname’s rightful claim.
Getting along was a bonus to their main transaction. Kisling no doubt saw some special quality in Kiki, felt her unusual energy, and hoped that through her he could, when staking his claim in the grand gallery of images, offer something wholly new. While on the surface Kiki never took any modeling session too seriously, she clearly understood her appeal, and was proud of her body. “I can say without bragging that I have splendid breasts,” she wrote. “Small as I am, I have breasts shaped like funnels, white with small, pink tips and pretty blue veins running through them.”
For all the merrymaking they enjoyed in the studio, Kisling imbued Kiki with the melancholy he gave to all his female portrait sitters, none of whom smile and all having big, sad eyes. He presented Kiki as a gothic vamp, hair sleek, makeup heavy, contrasting the pallor of her chest with a low-cut black dress, and enlarging her eyes to such proportions that they became at once haunting and cartoonish, emphasizing their black rims, which Kiki achieved with kohl. In Kiki (1920), he painted her gazing somberly at the viewer, slumped in her seat, chin resting on her hand, her long fingers drumming on her cheek, seductive and menacing at once. When a Parisian magazine ran a piece consisting of answers to the question “What do you think of Kisling?”—“my best client,” said Libion; “a sheep disguised as a wolf, but what a good painter,” said the Swedish writer Thora Dardel—Kiki gave the slyest answer of all: “I have to whisper it in your ear.”
Lucky for Kiki, Kisling had a lot of friends, many of them numbering among a motley group of artists, as well as some dealers and collectors, whom the French critic André Warnod would dub “The School of Paris.” They were united not through their formal similarity but by a shared sensibility and a desire to revolutionize painting, and by the fact of living so close together. Many of them were émigrés, and many, like the Belorussian-born painter Marc Chagall, the Bulgarian painter Jules Pascin, the pioneering Russian abstract painter Sonia Delaunay, and the Lithuanian Cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, were also Jewish. Warnod, then, meant to be provocative in judging these foreigners as the representatives of Paris.
Fellow artists and other friends piled into Kisling’s studio, which he plastered with photographs and sketches of seemingly everyone he’d ever met, its big windows looking onto the trees of the Luxembourg Garden. A gramophone blasted the latest dance tunes. People would laugh, argue, and pass around a bottle, while Kisling remained at his easel, listening but never talking as he worked, finding the chatter stimulating. Someone might bring a balalaika or an accordion. Kiki recalled a constant stream of beautiful women coming by, and the phone forever ringing. No matter how late he had been up the night before, Kisling maintained his schedule of starting work at daybreak.
The Polish art dealer Léopold Zborowski, one of the School of Paris’s most prominent dealers, would come from his apartment below Kisling’s studio to watch him and Kiki at work and be “treated to an eyeful,” as Kiki put it. So did the art critic Florent Fels, appraising her “as if he were looking at a nice piece of meat on display at the butcher’s.” Posing for Kisling and meeting Zborowski and Fels led Kiki to introductions to another Paris Schooler, the remarkably talented Soutine, also Jewish, and who, as Kiki wrote, “unsettled me with his savage looks.” As the tenth of eleven children of an impoverished tailor, Soutine was used to sharing small spaces, and he let Kiki stay with him at La Ruche whenever she needed a break from living with Mendjizky, making a fire and giving her his bed while he slept on an old wicker chair. Soutine was anxious and shy. Kiki helped get him out of the studio. They would wander the neighborhood, Kiki wearing her usual outfit from that time, which consisted of “a man’s hat, an old cape, and shoes three sizes too big.” Soutine painted a few portraits of her, though they haven’t been found. He would likely have used one of the repurposed canvases he made by scraping off the original images from flea-market-bought paintings, due to his fear of starting a work on a blank, unused canvas. Their sessions would likely have lasted for weeks as Soutine was a notoriously slow, detailed-obsessed painter.
Through Kisling and his crowd, Kiki met Modigliani. She knew of him before she met him. She would see him at the Rotonde in the front room, which he preferred to the clubby back one, posing as a misfit even among his fellow misfits. She recalled how he ate with one hand while drawing with the other. He would go from table to table around the neighborhood terraces peddling his paintings, which he kept rolled up in a newspaper, for a few francs each, enough for a drink or a tin of sardines. Kiki enjoyed watching him hurling insults at the stoic Rosalie Tobia, a former model, from Italy, who at age forty-six, with no restaurant experience, had opened her four-table café on rue Campagne-Première, Chez Rosalie, where down-and-out artists appreciated her willingness to make half-portions of her minestrone when they couldn’t afford the full bowl, already cheaper there than anywhere else.
Modigliani, originally from Livorno, had settled in Montparnasse the same year Rosalie opened her restaurant and, despite or because of his carrying on, became her most beloved regular. “His shouts made me tremble from head to toe,” Kiki wrote of watching Modigliani haranguing Rosalie. “But was he ever handsome!” In Modigliani, charming and mercurial, Kiki found someone who could stay out just as late as she could, though his wild living masked a burning professional ambition. He would borrow studio space from friends—most often Kisling, later Zborowski, his dealer, who also paid him an allowance—and as Kiki discovered, he furnished his temporary quarters with the Rotonde’s cutlery, plates, glassware, stools, and a side table, courtesy of the willfully blind Papa Libion.
Because of his use of stylized, elongated heads and figures, it’s not clear which of Modigliani’s pictures drew on Kiki as a model. But between him, Kisling, and Soutine, she was on her way to semiregular work. “The painters adopted me,” she wrote. “End of sad times.”
Along with her modeling, Kiki hawked copies of a slim arts and letters review, Montparnasse, through the summer and fall of 1921. The journalist Paul Husson, a nodding acquaintance, put out the review, basing his operation out of the Café Parnasse next door to the Rotonde. Kiki went there to pick up the latest issue and some complementary croissants—as valuable to her as the pay, she said—and then worked the neighborhood, weaving her way through the rows of wicker chairs like the palmists and mystics who haunted the cafés in search of trade. Kiki reported, “I get five sous for every copy I sell. That puts a little butter on my spinach!” As she passed, someone might call out for her to flash her breasts for a few coins more, and if she felt like it, she obliged.
One night toward the end of fall, Kiki and a friend with the same job met up at one of the cafés to celebrate another shift’s end. They’d done themselves up like French gangsters’ molls with thin skirts and heavy makeup. Kiki and her friend went hatless to show off their curled bobs, cut short, a provocative, borderline revolutionary act at a time when the French papers told of men punishing, locking up, and in a few cases killing daughters or wives for bobbing their hair.
On entering the café, Kiki waved to another friend, the artist Marie Vassilieff, whose tiny frame, browless blue eyes, and wide moon face made her easy to spot in a crowd. Born in Smolensk, Vassilieff had moved to Paris in 1907. Though a skilled painter, she earned most of her money hawking leather dolls fashioned after celebrities of the day. Kiki would have heard the rumor that Vassilieff enjoyed years of secret financial support from her admirer the Tsarina Alexandra, until the execution of the Romanovs in 1918, a rumor all the more wonderful if true, given Vassilieff’s vocal support for Communism. Vassilieff had also worked as the head of Paris’s Russian Academy until a difference of opinion over some misappropriated funds prompted her to leave and open the Marie Vassilieff Academy based out of her studio. She was beloved in Montparnasse for the artists’ canteen she’d run in the narrow courtyard adjoining the studio, its walls adorned by the works of her friends Modigliani and Chagall, the meals often accompanied by a lecture from one of the locals, often the painter Fernand Léger, who lived a few doors down. When wartime blockades kept foreign-born artists from accessing money from back home, they’d sought out Vassilieff’s cheap, hearty servings of ham and pea soup, making her canteen a kind of international outpost, with the dinners giving way to parties, city-wide curfew be damned, the festivities capped by their host’s nimble Cossack dancing. American soldiers came, too, bearing gifts of whiskey and gin. A brief house arrest by the French police in 1917, reportedly for sheltering her compatriot Vladimir Lenin or for being a Bolshevik spy, or both, lent Vassilieff an added air of mystery.
By the war’s end, Vassilieff knew every artist, writer, dancer, decorator, actor, and café loafer in Paris worth knowing. On this night, she was sitting with a man Kiki had never seen before. Short, dark, and thin, with sad, slightly bulging eyes. No film star, but magnetic in his own way.