Chapter III

MOULIN DU SOLEIL

“What thunder and fire for breakfast!”

—Harry

In the early spring, Caresse was growing restless for the smell of country air, real countryside where one could bask in the sun and evoke the muse. It was in this frame of mind that the Crosbys discovered the Moulin du Soleil, a dilapidated mill on the property of the Chateau at Ermenonville, which Armand de la Rochefoucauld had inherited on his twenty-first birthday. Armand, whose mother was a Radziwill, was the most sought-after young man about Paris in the late 1920s; his scrapes and peccadillos were legendary among the beau monde.

The Crosbys attended Armand’s housewarming, and Caresse immediately fell under the Mill’s spell. Jean Jacques Rousseau had lived there when he was enamored of the Duchess of Montmorency. It was rumored that Cagliostro, in retreat at the nearby abbey, devised his magic formulae beside the mill stream. Varda, the mystery-loving Greek painter in the Crosby entourage, offered the theory that if one establishes one’s dwelling on ground beneath which water flows, one will have a touchstone with magic. Indeed, from the “enchanted” mill stream, Caresse observed that little fish leapt mysteriously several feet in the air and landed safely in the pool above. Some 500 years before, sand had filled the hollows in the surrounding forest of Senlis, creating a mer de sable, a phenomenon that still exists. (Atlantis receding beneath the waves was Caresse’s explanation.)

Harry, who as usual had no idea how many francs were in the Morgan Bank account, promised to draw a check for the total balance if Armand would sell the Mill to them on the spot.

“Right now?” Armand asked, incredulously.

“Yes!” replied the impulsive Harry. Since he never carried a checkbook, he wrote an IOU on the nearest blank object at hand—a white cuff ripped from Caresse’s shirtwaist. (He once used a plate for the same purpose at Zelli’s, one of their favorite bars. The bemused waiter took it, without comment, to be cashed at the Place Vendôme the next morning.)

Henceforth the Moulin du Soleil became the Crosbys’ country retreat. To Caresse, the three buildings built around a courtyard were reminiscent of the Adirondack camps she had loved as a child, save for the 19th-century stagecoach, with Gare du Nord painted on its side in large red letters, in the courtyard. A white palisade fence ran along the front of the quadrangle, where five donkeys cropped the grass and sunflowers stood guard. At the front gate, signposts like the spokes of a wheel pointed to the different paths through the forest. The locals claim that the forest of Senlis is so vast that a man can ride through it to Germany without ever leaving its shade. The most often-used path led to the old well, the Poteau du Perth, to which Harry ritualistically walked the half-mile, every morning and night. In spring, the sweet scent of lily-of-the-valley was almost overpowering.

To the left of the main building, the old mill survives today, though the great water wheel has rotted away. Even in the 1920s, the stream that once activated the mill wheel was overgrown and silted up, but the water still flowed in a pleasant trickle. Polleen recalled that “our swimming pool was no larger than two postage stamps, and most unappetizing to swim in, because all sorts of marine life and slimy bugs infested the brown, murky water.”

The millstones, like mantic rings, rested on the granary floor. The old washroom and cellars were turned into a vast kitchen, adjoining which was the bedroom of the local gravedigger and his wife, Monsieur and Madame Henri, whom Harry, with his lugubrious wit, hired as loyal retainers. The Henris’ duties were endless: to look after a dozen disintegrating rooms, a garden, five donkeys, two dogs, a parrot, a cheetah, 15 pigeons—and the usual weekend complement of ten or more guests. No wonder that M. Henri walked three miles to the village every day for his measure of cognac.

The center building—the former stable—became the dining room. Its rafters, manger, and hay boxes were left intact under a Roman villa-type roof. The trestle-table rested on uneven cobblestones, and Polleen remembered forever shoving pieces of crusty French bread under its legs to keep the table from wobbling. Inside the entrance, under the staircase, visitors were asked to sign their names with colored paints on the whitewashed wall, which served as an impromptu guest book. (D.H. Lawrence scribbled a Phoenix next to Salvador Dali’s interlocked “I’s.)

On the first floor were the master bedroom, a guest room, and the only bathroom, installed by the Crosbys; such amenities were unknown at that time in rural France. Under the arched roof of the attic was another small room where the bats made their home, “hanging upside-down over whoever slept there. On crowded weekends, that was usually me,” Polleen recalled. “I had to leave the window open wide at night, otherwise the bats couldn’t get back out. They would swirl ’round the room with high-pitched screeches, swooping over my head and banging into the window panes!”

This tiny room opened onto a small terrace where Harry communicated with the Sun God Ra. A slab of dove-grey marble grave marker—inscribed with the Harry/Caresse cross, their dates of birth, and their (projected) date of death—was placed atop the tower where the sun struck first.

Harry had selected the date—October 31, 1942—when the earth would be closest to the sun at the perihelion. By age 44, Harry predicted he would have had enough; he didn’t like the idea of lingering on, after the party was over. He was obsessed “to die at the right time,” quoting Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

•

Le beau monde and les boulevardiers soon discovered the Mill, and poets and artists were invited for longer stays to complete their creative work. At one time, the then-unknown poet Hart Crane was installed in the tower with a bottle of Cutty Sark and a ream of paper, condemned to work on his monumental opus, The Bridge. According to Harry’s diary: “Hart Crane here, and much drinking red wine; he reads aloud from Tamberlaine, and is at work on his long poem. . . .” At that time Crane was young and cocky, “stocky and bristly, rather like a young porcupine,” Caresse described him. “He had gusto and a Rabelaisian laugh” and was a welcome guest at the weekend parties. He stayed on at the Mill for three weeks, faithfully attended by Monsieur and Madame Henri.

In Polleen’s childhood memoirs, she recalled: “M. Henri liked to eat snails, collected in profusion from the garden plot. . . . One evening, when the escargots were being prepared for dinner, M. Henri bellowed from the floor below, ‘Mais il est fou . . . il est fou!!’ [He is crazy!] Crane had invaded the kitchen and stamped out the snails, presuming they were the larvae of butterflies!

Hart was inspired by the “solitude of the place,” and for the first time in many months, worked consistently until he delivered a draft of the “Hatteras” section to the Black Sun Press. Harry prophetically predicted its success:

Hart, what thunder and fire for breakfast! By Christ, when you read something like that, all the dust and artificiality and bric-à-brac are swept magnificently aside. . . . Someday, when we are all dead, they will be screaming and cutting each other’s throats for the privilege of having it. . . . I am no critic, but I know gold when I see it!

Later, in the season of daffodils, Frieda and D.H. Lawrence were guests. The previous winter, on the Crosby’s trip to Egypt with Harry’s mother, Harry had discovered a first edition of The Plumed Serpent in a Cairo bookstore. He avidly read it, sitting cross-legged on the deck, as the boat plied slowly up the Nile. He proclaimed it the most inspiring novel since E.E. Cummings’s great work about the war, The Enormous Room. Quoting: “I without the Sun that is back of the Sun am nothing,” he rushed off an enthusiastic letter to Lawrence in care of his London publisher, describing the impact of the strong Egyptian rays on his psyche and proclaiming his faith in the Sun God, Ra. He hoped that Lawrence might have a story on the same theme for a Black Sun Press Limited Edition, and promised in payment $20 gold pieces, “the eagle and the sun.” Lawrence and his wife Frieda (daughter of the German flying ace Baron von Richthofen) were invited to bask in the sun at Le Moulin du Soleil.

Also in Cairo that winter—on Leap Year day, February 29—Caresse discovered the Sun Ring that was to become Harry’s wedding band, “the eternal circle, the letter ‘O’” to endure forever. (She was told it had been stolen from King Tutankhamen’s tomb.)

Soon after the Crosbys arrived back in Paris, they received a large brown envelope postmarked Florence, enclosing a manuscript of the short novel, Sun. Lawrence noted in the attached letter that he hoped it would be printed as written, unexpurgated. Lescaret immediately began setting the type, to be printed on fine Holland van Gelder paper, with the title emblazoned on a cover of “sunburnt red.”

The Crosbys were quite accustomed to unannounced guests on their doorstep, so it was no surprise when a curly-haired painter, Bill Sykes—a friend of Ted Weeks, Harry’s old comrade from the Ambulance Corps—arrived at the rue de Lille. Sykes limped up the long flight of stairs, and took off his low tan shoes in front of the roaring fire. Out fell the promised “golden eagles,” smuggled from the States following Harry’s urgent request.

Harry carefully wrapped and placed the coins in an empty Cartier box, as an afterthought adding another treasure from his ample stock. Then he rushed off to the Gare de l’Est to put them aboard the Rome Express. The first “honest man” he saw, leaning from the First Class window; was a starchy, Chesterfield-coated Englishman, who promised to deliver the package to Lawrence. (Harry’s instincts were sound. He had unknowingly entrusted his treasure to the Duke of Argyll.)

Lawrence replied warmly:

My wife went to Florence yesterday and brought back the Queen of Naples’ snuff box and the pieces of gold, to my utter amazement. I’m sure you’re not Croesus to that extent, and . . . what right have I to receive these things? . . . How beautiful the gold is! Such a pity it ever became currency. One should love it for its yellow life, answering the sun . . . I feel almost wicked with it! For the first time I know what embarras de richesse means . . .

Soon thereafter the Lawrences turned up at the Mill. Harry and Lawrence disagreed on almost everything at their first meeting, except their mutual love of the sun. Harry wrote: “He is direct, I am indirect; I am a visionary, I like to soar; he is all engrossed in the body and the complexities of psychology.” For his part, Lawrence perceptively saw in Harry “a glimpse of chaos not reduced to order . . . but chaos alive.”

Caresse took Lawrence for a turn in a donkey cart, with a shawl tucked over his knees, his collar turned up and soft hat pulled over his ears. He liked to sit for hours on the sun terrace using the gravestone as a backrest, hoping to cure an ominous, hacking cough. He reflected later that “Harry was really so well, physically . . . and my nerves are healthy, but my chest lets me down . . . So there we are, Life and Death in all of us. . . .”

Caresse described Frieda as “upholstered, petulant, and full of pride.” She played the gramophone all evening, which put Lawrence’s nerves on edge until—in a fit of exasperation—he smashed record after record over her head. (Some years after D.H. and Harry both were gone, Frieda wrote to Caresse: “It’s all so vivid to me, that weekend. They were both such vivid creatures, Lorenzo and Harry. I see you in the sailor suit and the [sun] bracelet Harry gave you.”)

Almost every weekend at the Mill was festive, “an unreal atmosphere,” as Polleen described it. “We had no electricity and no telephone, so attempts were made to communicate with Paris by carrier pigeon.” Soon, the news flew around when there was to be a party at the Moulin du Soleil. Harry recorded a typical weekend—and what Hart Crane called “the new atrocities”—in his diary:

Mobs for luncheon—poets and painters and pederasts and lesbians and divorcées and Christ knows who and there was a great signing of names on the wall at the foot of the stairs and a firing off of the cannon and bottle after bottle of red wine and Kay Boyle made fun of Hart Crane and he was angry and flung The American Caravan into the fire because it contained a story of Kay Boyle’s (he forgot it had a poem of his in it) and there was a tempest of drinking and polo harra burra on the donkeys, and an uproar and confusion so that it was difficult to do my work. . . .

A small cannon, mounted near the front gate, was fired in lieu of a starter gun, as a party of very reluctant guests were forced to mount the frisky beasts and race down the homemade track.

Champagne flowed more abundantly than water at the Mill, and the weekend nights usually ended in orgies (perhaps not enchantée in the eyes of young Polleen):

The top floor of the Mill was one large room (once the hayloft) with a huge fireplace at the far end, and two sofa beds on either side; zebra and bear skins covered the floor. There were candelabra and oil lamps, but the wood fire gave out most of the light. When night fell, the guests would retire to this hayloft, and out came the roulette wheel, the horse-racing games. The dice rattled, the wheel spun, and great bottles of champagne were uncorked. Couples intertwined on sofas beside the fireplace . . . helped along by opium, a large jar of which was kept in my toy box. This brown sticky stuff with a funny smell, I was told on no account to touch!

Of the rich tradition of drug lore in literature, Harry had sampled a large portion, from De Quincey’s Confessions to Cocteau and Rimbaud. Opium was his drug of choice, a quick trip to Nirvana, and smoking it in his pipe became “almost a religious act, almost a prayer.” Caresse tells us that only once did she accompany Harry in the ritual of the pipe, which they observed “in a most sybaritic manner.”

Stories circulated among the bourgeois neighbors about the scandalous orgies at the Mill, “but I presumed it to be a fairly ‘normal’ way of life, if one belonged to the artistic and smart sets of those times,” Polleen observed. Salvador Dali, also a frequent visitor, described the Mill’s allure: “A mixture of Surrealists and society people came there, because they sensed that in the Moulin, things were happening”—that’s where the action was.

Caresse collected titles, and even royalty appeared on the cobblestoned doorstep. GEORGE (of England) added his name to the whitewashed entrance wall; the Prince joined a stagecoach race from Mill to Chateau (not without crashing into a tree), accompanied by a great ringing of bells and firing of cannon. America’s royalty, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, entertained the houseguests on a glorious October afternoon: Mary read palms and told fortunes, while Fairbanks, in full costume (with white spats), swung on a rope from hayloft to courtyard.

Somewhere, sometime, the music had to stop. The Golden Years, the passionate years, ended in ’29. For many, they ended with the Great Depression. For the Crosbys (as Harry predicted), they ended with a .25 caliber, pearl-handled Belgian revolver.