Le Corbusier

He did not wish to lose any time in putting his plan into effect, for he could not but blame himself for what the world was losing by his delay, so many were the wrongs that were to be righted, the grievances to be redressed, the abuses to be done away with, and the duties to be performed.

—CERVANTES, Don Quixote

In Paris, Jeanneret stayed with Max Du Bois. In the course of the visit, he met Aristide Maillol, considered the greatest sculptor alive. In that first encounter, Maillol was making a stone wall. If Jeanneret’s account can be trusted, the sculptor praised Jeanneret’s architecture, although he could have known it only from hearsay or drawings or a few photos, since nothing had as yet been published. Jeanneret began to dream of making a building for Maillol’s work.

Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol was Jeanneret’s senior by twenty-six years. He was the colorful sort of character who would, life long, appeal to Le Corbusier. Born on a farm near the small port of Banyuls-sur-Mer, Maillol had grown up admiring a smuggler grandfather, had been expelled from boarding school, and—after showing his work to Jean-Léon Gérôme, a Beaux-Arts academician, and being told he knew nothing whatsoever—had jumped at the chance to make art in his own way.

After war broke out in 1914, Maillol had buried his statues to protect them against enemy bombs. That act led to Maillol’s being accused of spying for the enemy. A public prosecutor issued a search warrant to try to find grounds for arresting Maillol for treason, and, although the investigating judges dismissed the charges, a mob burned Maillol’s workshop.

When Jeanneret met Maillol, he felt immediate sympathy for someone he considered, like himself, society’s victim. And he admired Maillol’s robust, overtly sensual sculptures, which were like spirited fertility symbols.

On the second and third of August, Jeanneret stayed at Maillol’s house in Marly-le-Roy, not far from Versailles. It was the setting of a great sexual awakening. The sculptor himself was not, however, present. Jeanneret wrote up what occurred in an account full of literary flourishes that he sent to William Ritter. Titled “Grandeur et Servitude…,” it began, “There stands the house that Maillol built the year before the war. He did everything himself: plans, financing, supervision, employees: 15,000 Swiss francs is a lot for such mean walls, and the house is little more than a shed but so agreeably arranged. Untrained architects always have a verve of their own, and it’s good Maillol didn’t seek professional help.”¹

The visitor from La Chaux-de-Fonds admired the carefully chosen mixture of the ancient and modern objects: “In the large room downstairs was an old, Flemish (?) tapestry on the wall: a wonderful effect, something like Bonnard, something like Gauguin.” Jeanneret responded viscerally to the sculpture—“one of those powerful figures by Phidias at the Parthenon”—and Maillol’s plaster for “‘Pomona’…with her apples in her hands, the tits even more beautiful as fruits go, her huge thighs.” This voluptuous piece and the woman who had modeled for it were his ideal type: “A Spanish woman from Banyuls, actually more powerful than that, with a chest out to here! Well, really something. The Pomona, still in plaster, was lying on the ground, maybe two-thirds life size: amazing.” There was also an “admirable Gauguin, perfectly hung near the big glassed-in area (the former studio) where the fig tree outside presses its leaves against the panes, creating a green undersea atmosphere where the green Gauguin seascape of waves filling the whole frame sings as it rises up the long pink snake of beach.”²

Unbridled colors, the moving evocation of the sea, the glories of nature: again Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s eyes were opened.

HAVING SET the scene, Jeanneret introduces one of its key players. He is Gaston Béguin, from Locle, one town away from La Chaux-de-Fonds, to whom Jeanneret gives a Latin-style Rabelaisian name: “Gastonibus Béguinus, a Calvinist Swiss, from Locle, models a bust of Jeanne, Maillol’s niece. Soon she looks like a frog, so strongly are the planes, spheres, prisms, etc. brought out; a tin frog made by a roofer. Was this the influence of cubism? Indeed, Maillol might have reason to complain when he comes back from Banyuls.”³

Jeanneret then interrupts his account of Béguin at work to extol the charms of Maillol’s own oversized, well-endowed nudes. These sculptures, with their capacious bosoms and ample hips, exemplified a Mediterranean sense of pleasure he found irresistible. “This is certainly the Olympus of monumental, earth-mother buttocks, the breasts that fill your hand.” The Pomona was particularly inspiring: “I’ll take this torso and put it in my bedroom. That would give me a splendid Maillol of esthetic value equal to the financial.”⁴

The Swiss Calvinist Béguin is ill at ease in the luxuriant scenario of Maillol’s studio: “No, everything cracks and crumbles under the shed roof; this autumn, apples from the apple trees between the breasts of the huge, broken torso, fill the valley of her thighs, a new Pomona that rots, bringing to an end this splendid health concretized so magnanimously. It inspires serious thoughts of theft and a new concept of others’ possessions. Gaston Béguin’s role is not an easy one, having to observe these slow deaths.”⁵

Again Jeanneret jumps from describing the awkward Béguin, now to amplify the merits of an artist who lived simply while cultivating monumental work: “The trees here are quite small and cover the ground. In fact, everything is small, the fruit, the cottages; the suburbs of Paris know nothing of the Kolossal and Aristide Maillol; ‘the world’s greatest sculptor,’ according to him, lives in a little house whose modesty reassures, comforts, and inspires thoughts of the futile and disappointing pomps of this world. The huge thighs of the torso of Phidias afford an adequate sensation of grandeur. And such grandeur is superior in terms of reverie. This odd combination of a Parthenonic Hellas corresponding to Hymettus and the Pentelic heights, of the Gulf of Salamis and the Peloponnesian rumps, ever so gently caressing the reveries of a man lost in the outskirts of the huge capital, in a minor jungle of sweet fruits in endless profusion.”⁶

Jeanneret turns his sights to Jeanne, the wife of Gaspard Maillol, the sculptor’s nephew, who worked for him. Maillol was sculpting her. She is a “lovely young woman of magisterial bearing, shoulders as broad as her smile, and God knows voluptuous, to cut short the definition; in any case her lips are distinctly sinuous and the high cheekbones make her eyes squint in a countenance quite used to receiving à la française its constant coating of powder.”⁷

Then, in his most competitive voice, Jeanneret deprecates a portrait Gaspard had painted of this beautiful woman to whom he had the good fortune to be married: “The gentleman who painted this must be as coarse as that famous brown and yellow oilcloth that covers the walls of the poor of Paris, as I discovered as a student in the hallways and W.C.s of cheap furnished rooms and on the partition walls of the blocks of slums still being torn down today. Poor powerful Jeanne whose behind or whose pink cretonne gowns serve as a pretext for this fake Douanier Rousseau.”⁸

The sublime Jeanne is not only sexy but unpretentious and easy to talk to, as opposed to “Gastonibus Béguinus who does his little-king number. I cast him as the perfect concierge of Aristide Maillol and company—you can’t imagine the royal airs he puts on, clattering heels and high-pitched voice…. Certainly Gaston, in this household abandoned by the husband ‘who’s always in his warehouse’ (a malingerer, a southern no-good, etc., etc.)—certainly Gaston gropes the girls, greedily steals the jam off Jeanne’s lips, etc…. etc…. Oh well.” Jeanneret describes Jeanne grotesquely but according to his own taste: “She’s changed her dress and has greased her lips with the most generous helping of gooseberry jam.”⁹

THE ACTION of the lubricious account really begins when Jeanneret goes to bed. There is the sound of a high wind in the surrounding orchard, of apples falling everywhere. Maillol’s bedroom is below. With palpable excitement, Jeanneret reports to Ritter,

The big bed of the world’s greatest sculptor is in the room below mine. Banyuls is far from here, at the edge of the Golfe de Lion, and Maillol sleeps there tonight, having ended his day with “a flask of old wine,” apparently quite conjugally. Which doesn’t stop the whispering from keeping me awake, up here: Gaston has let me have his bed, and uses his master’s….

This silence. Then, in the wind which gets in down below, a series of ha ha ha’s… modest at first, then faster, then panting. Go for it, Gaston! Then it stops short, and Gaston is heard no more. Now his voice sounds in a lower register, ha ha ha, Oh ho! And then, if you know our Gaston as the little bull of Locle, comes that decisive, definitive, closing Rrrrhan! an exploding shell. No resistance. It’s all there. Gaston has uttered his Rrrrhan! He’s content….

The center of the house, the sanctuary of the life of the house: here, tonight, the sacrifice is consummated…. So be it, the heart has its reasons. Gaspard, poor devil, in his office!¹⁰

Gaston Béguin—a rake from eastern Switzerland at the start of an adventure—is Jeanneret’s invented name for himself. It’s an obtuse tale, but what is clear is that the lovely Jeanne was in the house while her husband was still at work and that Charles-Edouard Jeanneret delighted in writing about his own orgasm.

In the fall and winter of 1915–1916, Jeanneret continued to work on private villas and apartments in Switzerland. Yet he felt as if he was stagnating at best. He was chronically exhausted and began to lose so much weight that his parents considered him ill. He saw himself as a victim, scorned and mocked by everyone: “There are a number of us these days who believe in the evils of the world, and worse still, in the insuperable obstacles that do you in, when everything gives you the lie and points the finger of scorn.”¹¹ In March 1916, he wrote Ritter, “I’ve been feeling so depressed, so impotent, so lacking in all the resources of my craft, that everything seemed quite futile.”¹² His mother often told him, “You are not kind,” to which he responded that she knew him well.¹³

Then, one late April night, everything began to change with a dream. He entitled his account to Ritter, “Young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret takes the cherry of the virgin Marguerite de Nemours.”¹⁴ Even if it occurred only in his sleep, it was a momentous event.

The setting in which twenty-eight-year-old Jeanneret pictured himself taking Marguerite de Nemours for his sexual pleasure fueled his later urbanism. It was a city where the arrangement of living and working spaces facilitated the sort of encounters that only an ideal urban environment made possible. The dream began there on a Saturday evening at the hour when everyone was leaving work in factories: “The proletarian hosts have already dispersed. One crosses the town. At the South Gate, one takes the boulevard to the right. On the left side, apartment buildings five to eight stories high form a square. Good God, I’ve got to stop!”¹⁵

What makes him halt is a sight that recalls certain lewd paintings of Goya. A profusion of bare women are standing on the balconies of every floor: “Naked women busy with their toilette: bowls of water, combs, brushes; the one on the nearest balcony scrapes the scabs off her filthy thighs—Francion version—I glance out of the corner of my eye, as one does when two dogs are going at it.”¹⁶ The term “Francion” referred to the libertine hero of an early-seventeenth-century French comic novel; in search of love, Francion was a character beloved to Jeanneret.

He then saw something “staggering…zany. At the top of the pediment of the tallest house, in the middle of the facades, Marguerite Frochaux representing the figure of Justice holding a mirror. Exactly like the Cabanel version—the one with a famous, prominent, and glistening hip, and on the side of her raised arm that wonderful straight line from her big toe up under the armpit all the way to the mirror. Next to her, Marie Frochaux represents ‘The Wave.’ Not a shred of body hair on either one. All the balconies are swarming with figures. It’s mythology come alive.”¹⁷

Marguerite and her fiancé are seated at a piano, performing their own composition—“the mystery of St. Sebastien”—which Jeanneret hears in his dream. During the “poem symphonique,” Jeanneret becomes so captivated by Marguerite’s alabaster body that he is sexually aroused in his sleep. “Marguerite, ashamed, lowers her lovely arms over her sex, which she fails to see is not in the part she plays. Historical exactitude! Well, what can I do? Marguerite, your body’s pallor is suitable for martyrdom. I’m actually beginning to get a hard-on. Maurice Barrès, that Sodoma!”¹⁸

Following this swipe at the monarchist Barrès, a hero to the rightist movement Action Française, the vision evolves into a sadomasochistic drama with Jeanneret in the role of harem master: “I unroll all seven yards of my Turkish girdle and command: ‘Raise your martyr’s arms; I, the executioner, shall conceal your sex. I shall bind your hips with Orient wool.’ I am of the opinion that at this moment a screen would descend, shielding the public’s eyes widened by expectation from the scene of the binding. The bridegroom acquiesces, the screen appears, separating the inspired musician from the body of his beautiful beloved.”¹⁹

The naked Marguerite succumbs to his will: “I have begun binding one thigh, then the other. I return to the first, then to the latter. Her hips widen. The girdle describes a figure-eight, which it repeats. I have not passed my woolen strip over the belly nor over both thighs together: one after the other. Marguerite seems moved by my presence, as am I by the odor of her body. ‘Raise your arms, St. Sebastian, against the trunk of the tree!’ I attach her hands to the lowest branches.”²⁰

Different music now accompanies the fantasy: “‘Put your ankles together; your martyred body weighs heavily on these columns to which I have also tied two heavy astral lamps.’ I bind your martyred ankles. Shriek of oboes, glissando of flutes, the harp lacerated.”²¹

Jeanneret becomes even more excited and irrational in describing the subsequent events with a panoply of literary flourishes: “The sky is entirely pink, reddening with the final reverberation of this splendid early-spring twilight above the factory gates at Landeron this Saturday evening. Marguerite bound, Marguerite at my mercy. My bow is drawn, intoxicated archer. Your torso struggles, St. Sebastian. I embrace it, adolescent; I force open the propylaeum. The girdle was a lure. The figure-eight had a defect in its armor.”²²

Jeanneret then hears the plaintive cries of Marguerite’s fiancé, who is seated, out of breath, at the piano. The atmosphere becomes a mixture of guilt and high drama. The poor fellow inquires desperately.

“Oh, Marguerite, what ails you? My music, your nerves?”

“No, my bridegroom, the gentile’s javelin has pierced me through!” she replies.

The scenario is again accompanied by a shift in the music, which has the overstated melodrama of a silent-movie score: “The piano resumes, panting, suffering, dying away…. Go to it, Léon!”²³

At this point, Jeanneret awakes, having had a wet dream: “I awakened bathed in the blood of my blood.” This last sentence was accompanied by a drawing of a maze of curlicues from which a small bird emerges in flight. The image suggests pubic hair with a sperm in flight from it: ejaculate as annunciation. Under the drawing, he has written, “Behold, dear Monsieur, this vile pornography.”²⁴ Again, he was determined to put his pleasure on display.

AFTER DESIGNING a movie theatre but losing money on it, and then feuding with a collaborator who worked on two houses with him, Jeanneret, again desperate to leave La Chaux-de-Fonds, resorted more and more to fantasy. “Ever since I learned that Europa was raped on the Bosporus,” he wrote, “the myth has struck me as full of life…. A dream which finds its victim, and away we go! O how I’d like to leave for an unknown shore: the flood, the naked bodies, that woman on the bull’s shiny rump; a swoon, a regret, but so many hopes, and then the notion that after all one might take the risk.”²⁵

The time had come to head for that unknown shore and become one of the naked bodies. He proposed a solution to his own anguish: “Get some water on your body and get out.”²⁶ The sense of duty to his parents and his hometown was to imprison him no longer. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was ready to leap and become Le Corbusier.