Renoir's Dancer Read online

  But for many, the possibilities opened up by the railway were simply marvellous. Everyone in the Limousin had heard retold the tale of Martin Nadaud, the humble stonemason from the neighbouring department of the Creuse. As a young boy, Nadaud would travel every year on foot to Paris; by 1849, he dressed as a gentleman and was elected member of Parliament.14 The story served as a glittering reminder that in Paris, peasants really could become kings. It was said that even women could hope for a better lot – more freedom – in the capital. So when the Limoges–Poitiers line via Saint-Sulpice-Laurière finally opened just before Christmas in 1867, it was greeted with widespread enthusiasm in the Limousin.15 The railway was a symbol of possibility and progress, and anyone involved in its construction or maintenance was venerated and seen to radiate an aura of glory.

  For many country folk, the railway was Paris. Its gleaming tracks brought tales of success, prosperity and realised dreams to the provinces, qualities with which the capital was increasingly seen as synonymous. For a countrywoman like Madeleine, short on money and luck, overworked, and whose future appeared only to offer more of the same, those dazzling steel tracks represented a chance. All at once, resignation turned to hope. Suddenly, Madeleine could see clearly. If she stayed in Bessines, her future was mapped out – and it was bleak. But if she boarded the train to Paris, anything was possible – perhaps even happiness.

  Jeanne and Widow Guimbaud were horrified when, not five years after Marie-Clémentine’s birth, Madeleine announced that her mind was made up: she was going to start a new life in Paris.

  ‘What on earth will you do in Paris?’ Jeanne exclaimed, ‘It’s like a moth to a flame. The grass is no greener up there, you know.’16

  But her colleagues’ objections merely strengthened Madeleine’s resolve. She had an aunt on her father’s side living in the capital on the Ile Saint-Louis, she told them.17 It was not a permanent solution, but Madeleine felt sure that Marie-Anne Valadon would put her and her girls up until she could make alternative arrangements.

  When word got out about Madeleine’s plan, people suspected her new beau to be at the root of her decision. But Madeleine had loftier aspirations. She envied those she had seen escape the monotonous, suffocating existence to which she felt condemned. Now, at last, Madeleine felt that she too could have a fresh start. Wages in the city were higher – a powerful incentive now that Marie-Alix too was old enough to work – and she and her daughters could be a proper family.

  For all that the railway symbolised progress, making use of it came at a cost. A linen maid in the provinces could seldom expect to earn more than 2 francs 50, perhaps 3 francs a day.18 Being under seven, Marie-Clémentine could travel half price; but even then, at nearly 25 francs a full price ticket, relocating the family to Paris would cost Madeleine at least a month’s wages.19 And then a journey undertaken in one of the cheapest seats was tedious and deeply uncomfortable. Third-class passengers were squeezed into cramped carriages, where they would be obliged to perch on hard wooden seats as the steam train trundled through the countryside. A train leaving Saint-Sulpice-Laurière at 9.15 in the morning would not arrive in Paris until shortly before midnight, an exhausting journey for Madeleine and the teenage Marie-Alix, still more so for the four- or five-year-old Marie-Clémentine.20 But Madeleine knew countless traditional country songs and tales if little Marie-Clémentine needed to be entertained en route. The mother considered the fatigue, discomfort and expense a price worth paying, for of one thing she was certain: she was never coming back to Bessines.

  ‘I never saw anything more beautiful and gay than Paris,’ Queen Victoria had declared when she visited the capital in 1855.21 For a small, impoverished child of the country like Marie-Clémentine, accustomed to the green hills and cattle-studded pastures of the Limousin and for whom the bright colours and noise of Bessines’ modest weekly market was the only highlight, that first glimpse of Paris’s spectacular skyline through the carriage window could only be more marvellous. Paris was vast.

  The capital’s population had doubled in the first half of the 19th century, so that by 1850 it had reached 1 million.22 Under the Second Empire, it merely continued to expand. At Baron Haussmann’s command, the Parisian landscape had been radically transformed, while the Empire continued to project an enviable image of glamour and carefree pleasure. For hopeful provincials, the draw was irresistible.

  In reality, by the 1860s, cracks were forming beneath the Empire’s lavish veneer. The working classes were growing more fretful, the Emperor’s foreign policy struck many as ill-advised and since the spectacular climax of the 1867 Exposition Universelle, everyday life had felt flat and uneventful. But Madeleine, like so many other migrants from the countryside, was blissfully unaware of the widening fault lines. Paris remained a utopian emblem of good living and possibility.

  For a newcomer to the city in search of a better life, ignorant (or at least dismissive) of wider problems, the Ile Saint-Louis was an ideal destination to seek shelter. Comprising a network of narrow streets lined with tall, 17th-century buildings, it felt like a miniature, self-contained city, and was seemingly immune to the rumblings of discontent now sounding in the world outside. It exuded a near puritanical aura, having remained largely unaffected by the revolts which had plagued the rest of Paris over the last 150 years.23 It was little wonder that it had become a favoured haunt of such bohemian literary and artistic figures as Baudelaire and Delacroix. From this peaceful vantage point, a person could lose themselves in the hypnotic rhythm of barges and laundry boats drifting, unhurried, up and down the Seine.24

  But if at first the Valadon family’s temporary home offered protection from the troubles that were brewing, they could not be shielded indefinitely. In bringing her girls to Paris at the dawn of the new decade, Madeleine had sorely mistimed their move. In the summer of 1870, daily life in the capital was turned on its head.25

  In July 1870, a Prussian prince came forward as a candidate for the vacant Spanish throne, placing France’s southern frontier under immediate threat.26 A fierce French reaction led to the Prussian candidacy being withdrawn. But fearing a second attempt to seize power, France declared war on Prussia on 19 July 1870. It was an ill-judged decision. On 1 September 1870, Napoleon III was defeated at the battle of Sedan and captured. The Empire was officially over.

  With the Emperor gone, people assumed that life would return to normal. But they were wrong. The Prussians stormed Paris, and a full-scale siege set in. The provisional government, now based in Tours, continued to fight, but in vain. For four months, daily life in Paris was in uproar. Communications were cut off, food shortages spiralled into starvation. The rich defiantly turned sewer rats into patés; the poor were reduced to eating cats and dogs. Once a glamorous capital famed for luxurious living, Paris was now a war zone scarred by poverty and hunger.

  ‘You talk only about what is eaten, can be eaten, or can be found to eat,’ wrote Edmond de Goncourt on 8 December 1870.27 ‘Conversation does not go beyond that.’ Madeleine and her daughters’ first Christmas in Paris should have been a happy, hopeful occasion. Instead, it was grim. As one Parisian remarked, that 25 December:

  No one had the heart to amuse himself. With what melancholy bitterness one remembers the sparkling quality of Paris, of our Paris, in those days that led up to the 1st of January? What animation on our boulevards and streets! How the carriages rolled joyously by the thousand along the macadam! What gaiety in the lights in the windows of the department stores decorated for this holiday! … And the long, the interminable line of small booths which imprinted on all our boulevards such a charming character of popular joy! Alas! All that was far in the past! A grey sky, full of snow weighed down on a mournful city!28

  By mid-December, even horsemeat had been rationed.29 In the New Year, the already poor quality bread was rationed as well, while the price of un-rationed foods rocketed. Butter was eight times its normal price. The cost of eggs increased fourteenfold. ‘We are moving fast towards starvati
on,’ Edmond de Goncourt exclaimed.30

  The capital was in chaos – and Madeleine’s situation was becoming desperate. Though Marie-Alix was now of working age, Marie-Clémentine was entirely reliant on her mother. All around Madeleine raged the pervading belief that women offered inadequate protection for the capital’s children in their men’s absence.31 For many, the Prussian offensive could only be thwarted with physical strength, something the weaker sex was ill-equipped to provide. Deceived in her vision of Paris, urgently needing work and affordable accommodation in a strange, war-ravaged city, Madeleine, like so many migrants before her, frantically sought out something familiar.32

  Then, at last, Madeleine’s luck turned. She came across Montmartre.

  With its windmills, its clear air and the old-fashioned, village feel of its higgledy-piggledy houses perched on a slope, few places recalled the Limousin countryside so vividly as Montmartre.33 It was up to 129 metres above sea level at the highest point. Why, with its narrow, winding streets and alleys, and its cottages clinging to the hillside, a person could have believed themselves in Le Mas Barbu. The bustling Rue Lepic and the Place des Abbesses readily called to mind Bessines’ town square on a busy market day. And all around, steep, grassy banks rose up protectively, hillside homes bloomed with flowers, old men installed in wrought iron chairs sat outside doorways and set the world to rights, children played in the street and women chatted and gossiped as they made their way to fill baskets with provisions. At last, Madeleine had found somewhere familiar, reassuring, comforting. Montmartre felt like home.

  Madeleine could not have fully comprehended the intricacies of the area’s history at the time, but like herself, Montmartre had had a chequered past.

  The area took its name, the most popular legend held, from one of Paris’s first martyrs. Around AD 250, an old man named Denis, the first bishop of Paris, was arrested for refusing to accept the Roman Emperor’s divinity. He and two of his colleagues were decapitated on the hill of Montmartre, and the story went that afterwards, he picked up his own head, washed it and continued walking for 6,000 paces (or six miles, depending on which version of the legend was recounted). A pious woman took pity on him and, taking the severed head out of his arms, enabled Denis to die. A chapel was built where he finally fell and the area became known as ‘Mont des Martyrs’, then ‘Montmartre’.

  In 1133, Louis VI acquired the site and the now derelict chapel, and built the church of Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, as well as founding an abbey, whose buildings and gardens came to occupy most of Montmartre. A chapel was also built on the site where Denis’s murder was believed to have taken place. For many years, an order of Benedictine nuns reigned over Montmartre, owning most of its buildings and land (which included vineyards), while pilgrims flocked to its summit to pay homage to the cult of martyrs. Over time, however, the nuns’ wealth increased and through their questionable use of these funds, the sisters earned themselves a reputation for frivolity and corruption. Still, despite popular jokes about their doubtful morals, the nuns ruled until the Revolution, when the abbey and its chapel were destroyed. At the same time, Montmartre (which was still administratively considered outside the limits of Paris) became more clearly defined in Parisian eyes when it was officially re-categorised the ‘commune’ of Montmartre.

  But aside from its religious associations, Montmartre’s elevation and strategic position had also seen it play a pivotal role in numerous military exploits. It was used variously by the Normans, Otto II, and Henry IV, and had acted as a lookout point for Joseph Bonaparte, the former King of Spain, in 1814 when Prussian, Austrian and Russian armies invaded Paris. The Russians too recognised Montmartre’s tactical advantages, and occupied the area using the hill for their artillery as they bombarded the city. It was then fortified in 1815, but escaped further attack.

  Over the course of the nuns’ rule, the number of pilgrims had gradually dwindled as rumours spread that the summit of the Butte was haunted by evil spirits. But by the 18th century, Montmartre was attracting interest for other reasons, namely its vineyards and its mills. The windmills first started appearing in the 16th century, and were used for grinding wheat and pressing grapes. The conical landmarks with their elegant sails soon came to symbolise Montmartre and enterprising owners set up sideline businesses in the hospitality trade. Henceforward, a new kind of pilgrim could be found in Montmartre: every Sunday, people would climb the steep slopes to the windmills where they could relax beneath the shade of the mills’ sails, and enjoy a glass of cheap wine, since as a ‘commune libre’, Montmartre was exempt from city taxes.34 (During the 1814 siege of Paris, Montmartre’s mills found further, unsought fame when the miller M. Debray was killed defending his property against the Russians, who nailed his quartered corpse to the wings of his mill.35) At one time, more than 30 of these triumphant edifices imprinted their proud silhouettes against the Montmartre skyline. If by the time Madeleine arrived their number had significantly reduced, their memory continued to shape perceptions of the area.

  The operation of gypsum mines to provide the material necessary for the world-famous plaster of Paris added yet another layer to Montmartre’s character. The earliest mining activity dated back to Gallo-Roman times, and by the 19th century a substantial industry had built up. An unsavoury consequence of this was the proliferation of thieves and drunks, who came to seek shelter in the great cavernous pits, tainting Montmartre’s reputation. But by midcentury, the quarries’ closure restored Montmartre’s respectability, and in 1860 Paris embraced the northern ‘commune’ as part of its own identity, by annexing Montmartre to the city and turning it into the 18th arrondissement. The wall of the Ferme générale tax operation erected in the 1780s (which imposed a tax on merchandise being brought into the city) was torn down and the sparkling new Boulevard de Clichy and the Boulevard de Rochechouart rose up in its wake. The boulevards made the area more accessible, but they also reiterated its independence by physically segregating it from the rest of the city.36 From then on, Montmartre was both part of Paris, and clearly separate; at one with the quickly modernising city, yet retaining its own, distinct identity and otherworldly feel. It was a quartier lost in time.

  Like Montmartre itself, Madeleine had come to have an ambivalent relationship with the capital; she was at once attracted by its novelty, yet anxious; hungry to taste its opportunities and its buzz, but wary of relinquishing the traditional way of life she knew so well.

  The Montmartre Madeleine first discovered extended a rural welcome in an otherwise hostile metropolis. She soon learned that the lower part of Montmartre was dominated by cabarets, dance halls and entertainment venues, a legacy of the fiscal wall, which had caused a vibrant leisure and entertainment industry to blossom on the Montmartre side where wine was inexpensive.37 But besides the cheap rents (which could be found throughout the former commune), the upper part of Montmartre also boasted a peaceful atmosphere and so had begun to attract workers and artists. The former had found themselves driven out of the city centre, unable to afford the elevated living costs of Haussmann’s grand, multi-storey apartment buildings. The artists, who frequently shared the workers’ precarious financial situation, found cheap studios and spectacular views to paint. But more than that: by the mid-19th century, paint and politics had become indissociable. Montmartre provided a perfect forum for aesthetic polemics.

  Increasingly, a new generation of artists were finding the creative projects which so excited them systematically rebuffed by the official art bodies.38 It was exasperating. Did the jury of the Salon, that ‘great event’ of the artistic world, never tire of the tedious repertoire of historical events and myths that had formed the mainstay of Salon paintings for so long? Did they not feel ridiculed being sold the blatant lie of highly finished paint surfaces, of bodies without a blemish, of landscapes stripped of all signs of modernity? Was contemporary life, the sweat and odour of real men and women, not deserving of a place on the Salon walls?

  Young artists huddled
around tables in Montmartre’s cafés, sharing their deepest frustrations, breathing life into their most keenly held ideas. Just a few streets away from the Cimetière de Montmartre, Édouard Manet, the enfant terrible of the contemporary art world, could be found at his regular table in the Café Guerbois surrounded by reverent confrères, who would in time become famous in their own right.39 When Manet spoke, his blue eyes sparkled, his body leant forwards persuasively, and an artistic revolution felt achievable. The atmosphere was electric, the conversation passionate – often heated, but always exciting. The discussions ‘kept our wits sharpened,’ Claude Monet later recalled, ‘they encouraged us with stores of enthusiasm that for weeks and weeks kept us up.’40 And though the war caused many of the artists to leave the capital, it proved merely a temporary migration. At the time Madeleine and her daughters arrived in Montmartre, the artists had firmly marked their patch.

  Hence by the mid-19th century, Montmartre had become known as a pleasure-seeker’s paradise, a common man’s refuge and a crucible of creativity. It was a district infused with quaint rustic charm, at once affordable, lively in parts, tranquil in others and seemingly free from the constraints that stifled the rest of Paris. The spirit of revolution felt ingrained in its very soil. In Montmartre, anything seemed possible.