Paris through the keyhole

MAURICE SACHS

An inside glimpse behind some famous Gallic doors, including the story of the famous de Noailles affair

He said (he was a little naive about it; as a matter of fact lie was a painter), "People who live in Paris must be the happiest on earth. I'd rather be in Paris than anywhere."

He explained why. Cafés one could dream in, drinking endless aperitifs, the dusty sun over the Tuileries, the street of art dealers crammed with master magic. Picasso—to think of seeing him promenading his dogs like anyone else! Matisse, a kindly-faced man with a professor's beard. Cocteau. The people one reads about in fashion supplements and international magazines: the Comte de Beaumont, Marquise de M., Comtesse de Noailles, Princesse This or That and a hundred others ("You know the ones I mean, pictures in the rotogravure sections and all that"). Exquisite manners and refined customs, refined down and down. The people who make the intellectual history of this age, all concentrated in one city. Paris, Paradise.

Naive or not, the artist who said he would rather live in Paris than anywhere else represents the opinion of thousands of visitors to the French capital who know it better than most, who can take you with pride to restaurants in quiet streets "where only Frenchmen go", who make a point of knowing head waiters and being able to point out celebrities at Ciro's. They shrug their shoulders at the charabanc tourists and put themselves in good humor at the couturier's or the Kitz Bar; they tea dance at the Château de Madrid, dine at Foyot's, go to Variétés on the boulevards, take supper aux Ambassadeurs. They have an entrée to several houses—New York countesses and Illinois marquises. Paris is wonderful, one feels at home.

But it is not really Paris they see, the "tout Paris' which sets fashions in dress for the world, which lives and revolves upon itself with the self-sufficiency of an amoeba. For Paris never troubles to open shut doors, to uncover the swarming melange of drama, complications, rancor, jealousies, hates—the extremes of all sentiments that rule to a greater degree than in any other capital of the world, in this paradise for Americans. Perhaps Paris plays its dramas behind a closed curtain because controversies between the great must ever seem small, and the great in every art and their patrons are living Twentieth Century lives along the Seine.

But sometimes it is amusing for a soul full of illusions, like my painter, to stand before imposing and glamorous doors and fix his eye to the keyhole of each in turn.

Picasso and Matisse have never been very friendly fellow artists. Their rivalry dates from before the War—to the beginning of cubism; in fact, one of the things Picasso could never forgive was that Matisse had invented the word cubism.

Picasso lives rue la Boëtie in the house next to the art dealer who sells his pictures— at the source of the river of fortune, as it were, for Paris boasts no position so secure that it can do without overseeing. The apartment is a duplex, the first floor for living quarters, the second for his studio; in one room are finished canvases, in another paintings begun but not finished, in another sculptures. But the walls are bare and white, virgin walls giving the impression, so frequent with equally virgin land and maiden aunts, that the place is for rent.

It is possible for one to see Picasso, but with what difficulties! Even if one is very humble, one can kneel before the Pope and receive his sacred blessing more easily, because if the private audience is out of the question there is always the public one. Not so with Picasso; the Spanish genius is as cloistered as one of the Holy Father's nuns. If one rings his bell on a gambler's chance, the little maid will not even ask you in— simply opening the door, looking suspiciously out and closing it again. It is a hard and penitential thing to see the god of gods, the son of painting, the father of cubism.

But an occasional privileged sinner is admitted, is allowed to climb to the heaven where the painter works. Did I say there was absolutely nothing on the walls, nothing? A grave error. There, down at the end is one lone canvas, important as an altar piece. The visitor begins to tremble, what must he say?

Looking more closely, a sudden shock. It seems a poor specimen; the sort of canvas no painter would wish to sign, one of those unsuccessful ones which every artist, no matter how touched with genius, produces at some time in his career, when he is young, unhappy, defiant perhaps. (Picasso, himself, would blush if be visited the Bartlett Memorial room of the Chicago Arts Institute and saw the aged and horrible musician of his blue period.) And this poor painting Picasso had discovered after careful search and still more carefully hung, alone and pitiful, on his white wall. And when the visitor, ill at ease, a cold sweat on his back and a dryness in his throat, stops and looks at it, Picasso says nonchalantly, but with an eye full of malice, "You like that, don't you? It's a Matisse!"

And then he shows his masterpieces.

There is one hour in the morning, however, when one who knows him can bait Picasso and talk with him: this is at nine, when he takes his two dogs walking in the rue la Boëtie. Short, stocky, a shock of hair over one eye, well dressed, with a pleasant air and a roving glance, he promenades on the street famous for its art dealers. In truth, walking his dogs is an alibi, Picasso's object being to keep an eye on the dealers. Each morning he favors one or the other with a visit, entering unobtrusively. But immediately the employees fly about the gallery, thumping against the walls like flies. Jupiter has shown himself. "Picasso is here, Picasso is here!" He looks at the paintings, smiles, says nothing; the unhappy attendants wait for a word which they can relay to their employer. Picasso looks at the work of some young painter.

"Ah! Amusing, that boy's talent. It's good."

They bow. He stops before another canvas. "Hm. Nothing at all." The salesmen's heads turn. Picasso has spoken. And his pronouncements have weight; with a word he has destroyed the painter he did not wish to see and given the accolade to the one who did not bother him. In everything Picasso, the politician, gives a fatherly boost to the work of Picasso, the painter.

My painter friend, always the illusionist, thinks that the surrealists are the flaming group of apostles, as brilliant and as far above Paris and petty things as Citroen's name on the Eiffel Tower. But the keyhole has another version.

When the surrealist school had taken form enough to grow a head and several tails, the entire body declared war on Cocteau. They wanted to hang him, they said, but in view of several slight obstacles to this plan, they spent the time devising more legal ways of torturing the writer.

■ Having learned that on one particular night Cocteau would be out very late—he was living then with his mother rue d'Anjou— they spread the alarm anonymously by telephone that he had committed suicide. Reporters rushed to the scene and woke Madame Cocteau with this news; in the meantime the Comtesse de Noailles and several other close friends of the author of Opium, having been thoughtfully informed by the conspirators, rushed to the rue d'Anjou. In a few hours, "all Paris" had heard something of the drama and many believed it probable—a sign they did not know Cocteau very well. A host of mourners and reporters were waiting at the house for the corpse to be carried in, when at five o'clock in the morning, Cocteau arrived, smiling, and very much alive. So closed another small incident of the poetic war.

Speaking of surrealists, they have contributed to more than one of Paris's inner scandals, if—as some people think—to nothing else. The Vicomte de Noailles, by the strange game of names in the aristocracy, is the younger brother of the Due de Mouchy, son of the Princesse fie Poix. Several years ago. he married Mademoiselle Bischoffsheim, daughter of a very rich banker and of Madame Bischoffsheim, née de Chevigné. The de Chevigné family is famous for three things: its high rank, its relationship with the notorious Marquis de Sade, whose Eighteenth Century writings are among the classics of obscenity, and, finally, because Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné was Proust's model for Madame de Guermantes. The de Chevigné family flatly refused to consider the de Sade connection commendable and proceeded to cross him off the family roster, being luckier in this than most families, because for two centuries they at least had the satisfaction of searching out all de Sade volumes and burning them. (For that matter, Madame de Chevigné hardly realized her Proustian fame, never having read A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Cocteau received a copy of Le Côté des Guermantes, with a note from Proust on the fly leaf, begging him to persuade Madame de Chevigné to read it.)

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At the death of Monsieur Bischoffsheim, his widow married Francis de Croisset, writer of comedies and collaborator with Robert de Flers, thus making him the father-in-law of the Vicomte de Noailles. For the latter, life opened up with the marriage; he and the new Vicomtesse decided to be the social leaders of fickle Paris. The magnificent palace of the Noailles, place des Etats-Unis, was already filled with older works of art, but he wanted a modern collection: he filled it with canvases of Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Miro, Salvador Dali, Bérard and a hundred others. He built a pinokothek. He plunged so deeply into literature and the arts that he drew' the writers and artists into his life and to his table with the grand gesture of a Renaissance prince.

Bunuel, who was just finishing a modernistic film called Le Chien Andalon and looking for capital to begin another, loomed on the de Noailles horizon. The Vicomte, charmed with his new manifestation of surrealism. furnished not only the necessary backing, but his time and country palace, to the affair. Dresses for the cow were ordered from Lanvin, a piano was torn apart for a donkey to sleep in, bishops' robes and mitres were brought in from the highways and byways; in fact it was the best fun of the year. Finally it was filmed to the^satisfaction of everyone and called L'Âge d'Or; it was not absolutely indecent, but certain scenes and the sequence were, at the least, audacious, disrespectful to tradition, and difficult to show without a scandal.

The film was shown in the de Noailles' private theatre to a small group, and it proved a triumph. And as successes have a way of coming in groups, just at that moment an editor asked and obtained authorization from the Vicomte to reprint a rare edition of a book by the Marquis de Sade, of which he possessed the only known copy. With pictures.

New triumphs. Cocteau at that moment wished to make a poetic film which he had long planned, Le Sang du Poète (which will probably be shown in New York this winter) ; the Vicomte, encouraged by the cinema's possibilities, furnished the funds for this and even appeared in one scene. On a snowy night in a deserted square, a battle between children takes place, and one of them is killed by an icy snowball. As he dies, a window opens, light streams out and a group of society people gather there as in a theatre loge, applauding the children: among them are the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles, Arturo Lopez, Marcel Raval, Jean Rouvier, Tony de Gandarillas.

This film, too, was shown privately. But it seemed the height of selfishness to keep two such chefs-d'oeuvre hidden under the de Noailles bushel, and arrangements were made to show them in a small Paris theatre.

Here the drama began. . . . The Comte de Beaumont, famed for his fêtes, was de Noailles' bitter rival on the slippery pinnacle of social leadership. (The costume balls of de Noailles and de Beaumont are the highlights of the Paris season, and how many platitudes are passed to get an invitation!) The Comte de Beaumont is silent, calm, a little reserved, dresses in London and has an Oxford accent (the Due de Saint Simon, speaking three centuries ago of the Vicomte de Noailles, of a slightly different branch of the family, said he affected an English accent; perhaps there's something in a name after all) ; de Noailles is tall, thin, with a dissolute look, falsetto voice and the accent of Parisian society. And with the public showing of the two films, his opportunity arrived.

First he dropped several words at the Jockey Club—the most exclusive did) in France, wdiose members have always been titled, with the exception of Charles Haas, Proust's model for Swann; the rumor flew about the sacred halls that one of their members was sponsoring a film unworthy of his name. Two or three elderly ambassadors of the club risked their honor in the theatre where one of the films was showing; history is silent as to the extent of the shock. But the effect on the club was disastrous—people of their own world applauding a death! Making fun of the church, and the de Noailles permitted it? Their horror reached the ears of His Eminence, the Archbishop of Paris, who in turn sent a pious hut lay friend to investigate. The pious ambassador saw a file of bishops with mitres and crosses dissolve slowly on the screen and become skeletons, and the skeletons parading on deserted rocks by the sea in the trappings of Holy Church. His report to the Archbishop was even more heated than those of the Jockey Club members. The Archbishop referred the whole matter to the Vatican, with still photographs; the Vatican examined them and decided that the de Noailles should he excommunicated. And at the same instant, the Jockey Club's resentment grew so hydraheaded that the Vicomte resigned.

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That was minor, but the scandal in Rome affected the whole family. Horror-stricken, the Princesse de Poix took the first train for Italy and threw herself at the feet of the Holy Father in intercession for her wandering son. And as disasters have a way of attracting others by the mating call of despair, unhappy Francis de Croisset, who for years had been campaigning for election to the Academic Franceaise and was just on the point of success suddenly was drawn into the storm as the father-in-law of de Noailles, and saw his chances melt.

After the tempest came a hush— and dripping wreckage. The Princesse tie Poix finally calmed the Vatican to the extent of lenience, should her son repent and behave, and all Paris, tired of its amusement, showed promise of turning to someone else. But unforInnately, at that exact moment, the young editor, completely ignorant of the storm in social Paris, was happily putting ten thousand folders into ten thousand envelopes addressed to the social, literary, artistic and mondaine world of the city. The folders contained the usual urge to buy this rare edition of the Marquis de Sade, and the information that this book was reprinted by permission from a rare edition in the Vicomte de Noailles' library. And at the very moment that news of the Pope's pardon reached Paris, the envelopes like homing doves fluttered to their addresses.

The de Noailles left Paris very suddenly for a quiet vacation at their country place near Grasse. The Comte de Beaumont continued to smile. And ⅝ my painter friend read in an international magazine that the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles were spending several months overlooking the Mediterranean, and sighed.

No—no one ever sees Paris except through a keyhole.