The Valadon Drama The Life Of Suzanne Valadon

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The Valadon Drama

The Life of Suzanne Valadon
By JOHN STORM

I ILLUSTRATED

One of France's great woman artists,
mistress of Renoir, and mother of
Maurice Utrillo, Suzanne Valadon
THE (1865-1938) lived a life as tempestu-
ous and dramatic as the immortal era
in French art in which she played a
vital role.

From early infancy until her death
Suzanne Valadon belonged to the
Bohemian world of Montmartre, then
the center of the artistic life of Paris
and the world. There, throughout
her life, one of the most dynamic
movements in the history of art raged
about her. By turns a street waif, a
circus performer, and a vivacious and
lovely model, Suzanne Valadon be-
came a powerful and original artist
in her own right. She was also the
teacher and protector of her famous
but tragic son, whose world, like hers,
centered in Montmartre.

From the day when at the age of six-
teen she first stood with other hopeful
models by the fountain in the Place
PIgalle, eager to enter the world of
the painters, Suzanne Valadon saw
herself as a part of the artist's work
of creation. As quick to respond to
love as to art, she soon became the
mistress of the great muralist Puvis
"Hbook, the first full-length biography"
of Suzanne Valadon, is not only a
moving and fascinating life story, but
also a vivid panorama of the French
artistic world in the famous period
of the Impressionist and early mod-
ern painters.

The Valadon Dram

THE LIFE OF SUZANNE VALADON
ly John Storm

ILLUSTRATED

E. P. BUTTON & CO., INC.

New York 1959

Copyright, 1958, by John Storm
All rights reserved. Printed in the

SECOND PRINTING FEBRUARY 1959

No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without permission in writing
from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who wishes to quote brief passages in con-
nection with a, review written for inclusion
in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-9605

For Margaret
with love

Contents

Page

Preface 13

I MOTHER AND DAUGHTER 17

II IN FLIGHT 41

III FRIENDSHIP 72

IV LOVERS AND THE ARTIST 93
V THE CURSE 117

VI THRESHOLD OF REVOLUTION 138

VII "UNHOLY TRINITY" 171

VIII FRUITS OF SUCCESS 213

IX THE WASP 242

Bibliography 261

Index 265

Illustrations

Facing page

After the Bath. Pastel drawing by Suzanne Valadon.

1908 64

Seated Nude Woman with Standing Woman Seen from
Back in the Background. Crayon drawing by
Suzanne Valadon 65

Family Bath. Drawing by Suzanne Valadon. 1910 65

Portrait of Suzanne Valadon in the hat he bought for

her, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 96

Nude Reflection. Pastel drawing by Suzanne Valadon 96
Sacre-Coeur. Oil painting by Suzanne Valadon. 1929 97
Suzanne Valadon at the age of twenty 176

Maurice Utrillo, Suzanne Valadon, and Andre Utter in

the studio in the rue Junot 176

Suzanne Valadon with her husband, Andre Utter, in

1920 176

The Valadon Family. Sketch for oil painting by

Suzanne Valadon. 1913 177

Maurice Utrillo. Drawing by Suzanne Valadon. 1925 177

Woman with Cat. Oil painting by Suzanne Valadon 208
9

10

Vive la Jeunesse. One of the last paintings by Suzanne

Valadon 208

Self -Portrait. The artist at 62. Oil painting by Suzanne

Valadon 209

THE VALADON. DRAMA

Prefc

-ace

SUZANNE VALADON LIVED HER LIFE AMONG PEOPLE WITH
whom communication was largely on a personal and vocal
basis. She had no opportunity to express herself to them in
writing, and as she was extremely wary of the written word,
it is unlikely that she would have written had there been
opportunity. She kept no journal or diary.

Suzanne Valadon acted and she talked. Almost all her
life she lived in the heart of the Montmartre Butte, and for
the greater part of that time one of the most dynamic move-
ments in the history of art raged about her. Only during
the first months of her life was she physically detached from
that history. Alone, of all the artists who flocked to "the
Sacred Hill" with their causes of Impressionism, Symbolism,
Fauvism, Cubism, and other "schools," she belonged to the
Montmartre scene quite literally from the cradle to the grave.
It is interesting to note that on the Butte, which is strangely
loath to commemorate the passing of its great personages
with the blue and white plaques so often seen elsewhere in
Paris, the Montmartrois themselves have installed a marble
plaque on the Moulin Joyeux in rue du Mont-Cenis in her
honor. No such marking records the passage of Lautrec,
Degas, Cezanne, Monet, or Manet, nor Picasso, Braque, Modi-
gliani, or Dufy.

"Dans ce restaurant La Grande Artiste Suzanne Valadon

13

14

a dine de 1919 & 1955 accompagnee souvent de son fils

Maurice Utrillo"

But her life was in nowise spent solely among artists.
Tradesmen, waiters, police, postmen, concierges, models,
prostitutes, critics, writers, actors, musicians, sportsmen
the ragtag and bobtail of the quarter were among her friends
and confidants. In many respects they were also her audi-
ence, for there was always something of a theatrical air in
both her private and her public performances. It is largely
from their recollections of her that I have drawn her story.

Suzanne Valadon loved to talk; and in her later years par-
ticularly, she was eager to speak to almost anyone who would
listen to her. In her studio, in her kitchen, in any of the
dozens of cafes and restaurants about the Place du Tertre,
she would regale her listeners with theories about her work
and art in general, about her domestic difficulties and personal
problems, and, above all, with memories of her past.

How truthful was she? How accurate were her listeners'
and observers* accounts? Frankly it is hard to say. In the
main, I am sure, most of the people I have interviewed have
sought scrupulously to contribute only pertinent and honest
material. For her own part, there can be no doubt that
much of what she told people of herself was fanciful. But
if her imaginings and untruths fail to throw a dependable
light on biographical incidents, they do sharpen the sense
of her personality, which was, after all, a more direct source
of her art. I feel that whatever inaccuracies there may be
in the fabric of her story today, there are bound to be a great
many more as time goes on. Memories do not sharpen with
time. Many of the people who knew her well are now dead.
Is it not better, then, to capture what is left, imperfect though
it may be, than to wait until Time has erased all?

During the past forty years the importance of Suzanne
Valadon's work has met with gradually increasing recogni-

15

tion. Savage and extremely personal, unconnected with any
"school" of the past or present, her work was submerged for
a long time beneath the surging tides which began with the
birth of Impressionism. Today we realize that it stood alone
as a statement of the independence of a creative intelligence,
of uncompromising belief in draftsmanship in an era in which
drawing was no longer considered overly important. It is
primitive, strong, and frank, abounding in health and vigorous
color; and it owes its power solely to the nervous energy and
personality of a woman who came to grips with deeply tragic
experiences of life. An insight into that life is important to
an understanding of the work of one who is considered by
many to be "France's greatest woman artist."

Of more than a hundred people I have talked with I am
deeply indebted especially to Mme. Georges Kars, Paul
Petrides, Edmond Heuze, Mme. and Louis Chervin, Mme.
Agnes Humbert, Jean Vertex, Henri Level, Demetrios Gal-
anis, Andre Fillet, Georges Bernheim, Mme. Felice Colas,
Mme. Yvonne Vigneron, Raymond Bordage, Gazi-LG.,
Georges Belize, Mme. Gustave Coquiot, and Robert Attilo,
who, besides helping me gather anecdotal material, were at
pains to have me understand Suzanne Valadon's personality.
It is with their composite judgment that I have selected the
substance of the book. In making decisions in respect to all
interviews I have been guided less by the characters of the
other witnesses than by the character of the remarkable sub-
ject they have limned for me. At times, as is inevitable in
the circumstances, I have written imaginatively of what must
have occurred.

For permission to reproduce the illustrations in the book
and for access to the various collections of Suzanne Valadon's
work, I am grateful to the Musee de PArt Moderne in Paris,
the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek in Copenhagen, the Arts Coun-
cil and the Lefevre Gallery in London, the Archives Na-

16

tionales, the Art Institute of Chicago, Edmond Heuze, Paul
Petrides, Andre Bernier, Gazi-I.G., Mme. Georges Kars,
Mme. Yvonne Vigneron, and Mr. and Mrs. J. Garfunkel.
And finally, I should like to express my debt to my wife,
without whose support, criticism, and constant help the book
could not have been written.

J.S.

I Mother and Daughter

IT WAS NOT UNTIL SHE WAS AN OLD WOMAN THAT MADELEINE

Valadon talked much about herself. It pleased her then to
relate that as a young girl she had been married to a citizen of
Limoges named Courlaud, by whom, as she put it, she had
had "several children." When she was twenty-one, Courlaud
died very suddenly in the city jail before charges against him
had been entered on the books of the constabulary. Made-
leine claimed she could not remember exactly what the
charges had been. She thought he had been arrested for
political reasons or on suspicion of forgery.

Following Courlaud's death Madeleine resumed her maiden
name and returned to her native village of Bessines, a few
miles from the outskirts of Limoges, where she went to work
as a seamstress in the household of a prosperous family named
Guimbaud. Bessines was inhabited, for the most part, by
workers from the Limoges porcelain factories. At the end of
their day's work, if not ensconced behind the flaked facades
of their cubic houses, they busied themselves in raising pigs,
goats, and poultry in their back yards, or in tending the multi-
tudinous garden plots which ringed the litde community.
The atmosphere of Bessines was rural rather than suburban.

To the east of the village a screen of gray oaks across the
crest of a gentle slope hinted at the proximity of a forest
which, in reality, was not there. To the south, in the small
17

18

rectangular patches of wheat and oats for which the country-
side was famous, stood the bulbous white windmills, their
huge black sails squeaking in the breeze as they ground the
flour. Around the village square the slate mansard roofs of
half a dozen large rectangular houses, including that of the
Guimbauds, bespoke the prosperity to which the free citizens
of the village aspired.

Madeleine's people had been factory workers. She had
been taught to read and write by the village priest; and once
she was thought to have mastered these essentials, she was
dispatched to a convent in Limoges for more practical educa-
tion in needlework. She proved an apt pupil, and the course
toward which she was directed showed shrewdness. As
things turned out, once Madeleine was widowed she was
proficient enough as a needlewoman to be able to look out
for herself.

In the Guimbaud household she was soon established in
black bombazine suits with lace collars and cuffs of her own
tatting. In no wise a handsome woman, she was thin-lipped
and angular; her hair was drawn sharply across her ears and
tied in a bun at the back of her neck. Nevertheless, she
brought to the Guimbaud household a cool authority and
dignity not easily come by among provincial domestics.
Visitors to the house often mistook Madeleine for an im-
poverished relative of the family an impression the Guim-
bauds seem to have encouraged. Madeleine's position in their
home might be interpreted as a mark of their charity.

Indeed, Madeleine Valadon lived in the Guimbaud home in
rather more splendor than was customarily accorded a serv-
ant. She had two rooms to herself a bedroom and a sitting
room under the mansard roof and a free-and-easy run of
the house. For more than thirteen years she maintained a
kind of placid tyranny over the rest of the Guimbauds' staff,
issuing orders from her bedroom citadel and letting it be
known where dust lurked as she passed through the rooms

19

and hallways. To the little sitting room adjoining her bed-
room she bade the ladies of the household come for their
fittings, for here, with the dusty view of the Limoges spires
from her window, she spent most of her day at her needle-
work. It was generally conceded that the Guimbaud ladies
were fortunate to have her as a seamstress; their clothes were
the most Parisienne of all the families' about the countryside.

Madeleine ate her meals with the Guimbauds, was con-
sulted in all matters of household crises, and went for rides in
the family caleche. In the village, she remained stolidly silent
on all the Guimbaud family affairs, business problems, and
intrigues, thereby strengthening the belief that she was a
member of the family rather than an employee.

Although Madeleine's taciturnity was generally attributed
to loyalty, it might more accurately have been attributed to
apathy. Apart from her needlework, Madeleine had little
interest in anything. Her marriage to Courlaud had been
miserable, and she continued to bear its misery with her. She
had no friends, nor did she make any effort toward acquiring
any. Her children made their home with her family only a
few hundred yards away at the other end of the village, but
only rarely did she summon enough interest to visit them.
So it was certainly a great surprise to the Guimbaud family
as well as to the rest of the population of Bessines when
Madeleine Valadon suddenly became pregnant.

By her own account, she had been "seduced in a very cold
part of January" by a Bessines miller. Retelling this story in
her later years, Madeleine would often conclude it by declar-
ing that the man was subsequently crushed to death in an
accident in retribution for the sin he had committed against
her person. But her accounts varied widely, and sometimes
the miller was not a miller at all but a construction engineer
who met his just deserts by falling off a bridge and drowning
in a swift river.

Whatever Madeleine Valadon's reputation had been at the

20

time she startled Bessines with the news of her pregnancy,
she realized that once the child was delivered she would
no longer be able to remain in the village. As the widow of
a felon and mother of a bastard she would be hard pressed
to cope with the disapprobation which would be heaped upon
her. Nevertheless the Guimbauds, perhaps out of uncommon
affection for her, perhaps in an effort to display their philan-
thropy, prevailed upon her to remain in their house until after
her confinement. And so it happened that it was in the Guim-
baud home on September 23, 1865,* that Madeleine bore the
child who a few days later was to be baptized in the village
church as Marie-Clementine Valadon. When that child was
nineteen her friend Toulouse-Lautrec urged her to change
her name to "Suzanne/' And it is as Suzanne Valadon that
her story is here recounted.

A neighbor, Matthieu Masbeix, and one of the baby's half-
sisters, Marie-Celine Courlaud, were the godparents. It was
a christening without the usual Limousin festivities. A few
months later Madeleine and her baby left Bessines for Paris.
Madeleine never returned to the village. Nor did she ever
again communicate with anyone there not with her family,
nor with the Guimbauds nor with any of the "several chil-
dren" whom she left behind in the house where she was born,
including Marie-Celine.

When Madeleine Valadon arrived in Paris early in 1866 she
was terrified. The long merciless walls of buildings, the noise,
the bustle of the crowds, the whirring of traffic gave the im-
pression of stepping into the middle of a nightmare. For hours
she wandered aimless and panic-stricken amid the hubbub, the
baby in a basket on her arm or so she said in later years.
Then finally she saw the windmills on the crest of the hill

* The official record reads ", . , nee en 1865, le 23 Septembre a 6 heures
du matin. ..." In spite of the record, Suzanne insisted she was born in
1867, and her wishes in this matter have been respected by most of her
biographers, as well as by the Musee de 1'Art Moderne, where the
Valadon-Utrillo Room bears the date of 1867.

21

overlooking the city to the north, and the sight of the bat-
tered sails twisting lazily in the clear air had a sedative effect
upon her. The Limousin countryside! How welcome!
How comforting! Only a few hours before, she had fled it
in rage and shame. Now what relief it brought! Wearily she
climbed the hill. And so she came to Montmartre, to her
hardly more than a little country village perched high above
and seemingly indifferent to the terrorizing turmoil of the big
city.

Along the narrow grassy streets she passed the blotchy
white houses coated with gypsum quarried on the hill and
already known all over the world as "plaster of Paris." She
gazed up at the eaves of blue slate roofs and at the long
jalousied windows with their caged finches and canaries, their
potted geraniums and philodendrons, their fluttering lace
curtains and tricolors. And seeing this ordered and comfort-
able domesticity, she could feel the stirrings of was it am-
bition? Did she really want for herself these pleasant ac-
coutrements of living? She did not quite know. But here,
in this faraway place, she, Madeleine Valadon, might some
day come by goose-down featherbeds and silk cushions like
those now being aired on the little iron balconies overhanging
the streets. She might have crisp lace curtains, good napery,
and handsome dress fabrics, and perhaps even little porcelain
figures like the ones in Mme. Guimbaud's drawing room . . .
perhaps. . . .

In the village square (now the Place du Tertre) little iron
chairs and tables stood about under the plane trees in whose
shade old men played dominoes and piquet and old women
tatted and dozed in the sun. Madeleine saw herself at peace
in such old age as theirs.

One of the old women pointed out to her, across the road
'from the red-brick mairie, the ancient church of St. Pierre,
older than the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. It had been
desecrated by the atheist revolutionists in 1793, the old

22

woman told her in shocked tones, and a signal station had
been erected above its apse in 1795. In another year or so
it would be rededicated by the archbishop to the glory of
God. Madeleine made a mental note that she would worship
there. But as it turned out, she did very little worshipping.
In the course of her life she was to go to St. Pierre's only
when she felt in need of material assistance. The Church held
small comfort for her.

Unnoticed by Madeleine, the ramshackle stables, the tin-
topped laundry sheds, the shops, bars and cabarets hugging
the crazy hump of the hill bespoke the coming of less rustic
days. But for the present there were still flower gardens and
vineyards, small orchards of espaliered fruit trees, even small
meadows with cows; and here and there springs of clear well
water bubbling from the clayey soil. Occasionally, among
the plane trees, a catalpa or tree of heaven, rooted in the pave-
ment, leaned crazily out over the road like a permanent
drunk. There was plenty of washing on the lines. Goats,
chickens, and geese chased along the streets, fat cats dozed on
walls and the tops of fences, and a host of pigeons nested
under the eaves or waddled along the roof tops. And if the
permanency of this pleasant atmosphere was in any way
threatened, Madeleine Valadon believed strongly enough in
the eternity of a French village to be sublimely oblivious of
the fact.

Had Madeleine had an inkling of the history of this place,
she might have been more realistically prepared for what was
in store for her. The hill was supposed to have derived its
name, "Mount of Martyrs," from the fact that it was the
scene of the execution of St. Denis, the first bishop of Paris,
and of his lieutenants, St. Rustique and St. Eleuthere. They
had come to Gaul as refugees from the persecutions of the
Emperor Decius (A.D. 201-251) and were put to death in the
cause of the Redeemer. St. Denis is said to have carried his
severed head from the place of his martyrdom at the top of

23

the hill to the spot in the rue de PAbreuvoir where a pitying
woman took it from him and allowed him to lie down in
eternal tranquillity. Immediately a spring arose at the spot
where this deed of compassion took place. There it was to
refresh wayfarers for centuries until in 1855 the hill was
incorporated into the city and the Ministry of Works saw
fit to divert the miraculous water underground to clear the
road for vehicular traffic.

In the ninth century the industrious monks of St. Martin-
des-Champs commemorated the martyrdom of the three
saints by erecting a monastery on the site of their execution.
A group of Benedictine nuns took over the monastery build-
ing in die following century, and it was here, in the "Holy
Martyr's Chapel" of the Benedictine sisters, that Ignatius
Loyola and his six followers assumed the vows by which they
founded the Jesuit Order.

For five hundred years the life of the hill was dominated
by the piety of these good women. It was the misfortune of
the Benedictines that ultimately, in their long tenure, the con-
vent amassed great wealth and the sisters became corrupted
by their prosperity. By the middle of the fifteenth century
stories about the corruption and lechery of the convent be-
came bywords throughout France. The convent was the butt
of hundreds of obscene jokes, and concurrently with the
deterioration of morals in die holy place there began to appear
on the hill an agglomeration of gaming houses, cabarets, pot-
houses, brothels, dens, and dives all of which paid tribute for
their existence to the reverend sisters of the Benedictine con-
vent. The situation was such that many a devout priest who
mounted the hill on a pilgrimage to "the Martyr's Chapel"
claimed he had done so only after having crossed the River
Styx.

In the shadow of the once noted convent, drinking, gam-
bling, and prostitution had become the business of "the Holy
Hill." Not without a show of grim humor the pestholes

24

devoted to these amusements sported such sanctimonious
names as "the Image of St. Anne," "the Image of St. Louis,"
"the Cross of Lorraine," or "The Arms of Madame the
Abbess"; or frankly advertised their fleshly wares as "the
Island of Love," "the Suckling Calf," or "Women's Ways."
In the beginning these places offered the pleasure-bent Pari-
sians, especially members of the court, a measure of salty
entertainment. However, before long, crime throve so much
among them that eventually the customers dared not come to
the hill for fear of assault and possible loss of life. The flow
of gold stopped, and vice as a business collapsed.

After the Revolution the impoverished village, its mon-
astery now destroyed, its ancient church a grocery ware-
house and signal station, assumed the aura of a remote chapter
in romantic history. The Arms of Madame the Abbess
became a tumble-down stable, the Island of Love the village
laundry. Visitors from the city on Sunday afternoon excur-
sions wandered along the crooked byways wrapped in some-
what the same pleasurable sentiments as those in which, on
another Sunday afternoon, they would stroll the gray, ghostly
streets of Versailles or Chantilly.

It was inevitable that artists would be struck by the pic-
turesqueness of the village and its historical atmosphere. It
was a place removed from the present, brushed by the shift-
ing moods of sailing white clouds, its colors made vibrant by
clear air washed in the basin of the Seine valley.

Georges Michel was the first to paint the village, in 1796
from the valley, in the gold and black of a setting sun a
Gothic pile fretted by minute windmills. Michel was the
first artist to take refuge on the Butte, where he lived with
his wife and the five children, all born before he was twenty,
in a den formerly occupied by a band of thieves. CamiUe
Corot and Theodore Gericault were among the early artists
to become fascinated with the atmosphere and lore of the hill.
Corot came thither to stay weeks at a time in one of the tiny

25

inns; Gericault came on horseback with his paintbox and
easel dangling from his pommel to spend his days painting.
Others took up permanent residence. Georges Bruandet, who
tossed his unfaithful mistress out the window, was one of the
first of many free spirits to live in the rue Norvins. Louis
Daguerre, the pioneer photographer, was an early inhabitant.
In a small cottage in what was later to become the rue St.
Denis, Hector Berlioz lived with the English girl whom he
later married. Another musician, the Pole Frederic Chopin,
lived in the rue Tronchet and soon became a familiar figure
about the little village square, with his tight-fitting clothes,
his proud Bourbon nose and bloodless lips looking, as the
painter Moscheles remarked, "like nothing so much as the
music of Chopin." Franz Liszt, lean and tremulous, lived
"among the laundresses." To a room over the greengrocer's
the novelist Eugene Sue, already the author of the enor-
mously popular Mysteries of Paris, retired after six years as
a naval surgeon to begin his Wandering Jew. And for a
time, in a sewer close to the Place Blanche, Gerard de Nerval,
the poet, lived with his friends the tramps who were supposed
to be the scourge of the nearby chicken yards. When de
Nerval committed suicide on January 25, 1855, he hanged
himself from what is believed to be the first street lamp
erected on the Montmartre hill, in the rue de la Vielle-
Lanterne.

As early as 1855, on the lower fringe of the hill facing the
city, the new boulevards cutting from Chantilly and the
eastern suburbs to Neuilly and the west had already begun
once again to attract the night life of Paris, as well as much
of its political and intellectual disputation. Always Paris had
drawn its life breath and spirit from its cafes, its taprooms,
its restaurants. The nineteenth century did not break this
tradition. Around little wire tables on the sidewalks and in
the cacophonous, mirrored back rooms of cafes, philosophers,
politicians, labor leaders, artists, musicians, and writers found

26

noisy forums for ideas which would bring about tomorrow's
revolutions. Nowhere in the city was change incubating at
a faster rate than at the base of the Montmartre hill, for the
restoration of the Empire in 1852, with its suppression of the
freedom of the press, its establishment of bourgeois bureauc-
racy and the police state, had kindled the fires of revolt
among the Parisians proletarians and intelligentsia alike.

Madeleine Valadon found a room for her child and herself
not far from the smoldering fires of revolution. The Boule-
vard de Rochechouart, recently widened and lined with
young plane trees, sliced across the base of the hill into the
very heart of the revolutionary furnace. In a few hundred
'yards it penetrated the thick of the seething masses of human-
ity which were the Place Blanche, the Place Clichy and the
Place Pigalle. Sometimes in the night the wind brought the
sound of uproar into the tenement room. A volley of shots
fired by student rioters would be heard. A chanting company
of workingmen would pass below the window under the
plane trees bearing banners: "Arise, Prisoners of Starvation,"
'We Have Been Naught, We Shall Be All," or "The Earth
Shall Rise on New Foundations."

To Madeleine, bemused by thoughts of future lace cur-
tains and porcelain figurines, the noise in the streets meant
nothing. She had her own problems and was already con-
siderably disenchanted by the turn things had taken for her.
She had been compelled to accept certain facts of life for
which she had made no preparation. One did not simply
arrive in Paris and find a job as a seamstress in a pleasant
household not when one had an infant to take care of. Not
even Mme. Guimbaud's glowing references were enough to
prevail upon a Parisian family to take in a young woman with
a child. Slowly the realization came over Madeleine that the
dingy room she had rented might well be a permanent home.
It was a painful admission to have to make.

27

It would have been fairly easy for Madeleine to find em-
ployment in a dressmaker's establishment or in one of the
sweatshops in the quarter. She did try one or two such jobs,
but to one who had never known anything but the easy free-
dom of small village life and a comfortable house to live in,
the suffocating atmosphere and the close physical and mental
relationship with other women was terrifying. Ultimately
a measure of contentment came to her in being a scrub-
woman, doing odd jobs in shops and offices, and entrusting
the care of her small daughter to the wife of the concierge in
the tenement.

So, she was scrubbing floors when the Emperor Napoleon
III was pushed into his war with Germany. On the park
benches in the Place du Tertre the old men playing piqiiet
said it was the Empress' fault. It was the Empress who had
forced the war. Granted the Emperor had made his own
disastrous involvements in the past in the Crimean War
(1854-1856), in the Italian War (1859-1861), and in the
fiasco of Maximilian's adventure in Mexico (1863-1867). The
Empress was at the root of all evil. Madeleine went about her
daily job tidying up the office of a young doctor named
Georges Clemenceau; she could not have cared less about a
war between nations. And when after two months, some-
where near the German frontier, the Emperor was defeated
and taken prisoner at Sedan, and the Empress fled to England,
the old men in the square said, "Didn't we tell you so? Now
her skin is safe." Madeleine took her little daughter to the
Convent of St. Vincent de Paul and registered her there as a
day pupil with instructions that more emphasis be put on her
reading and writing than on her needlework.

She could hardly be expected to cope with life as it erupted
in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. She had a deaf ear
for the febrile confabs of her neighbors. She was not one to
sit in the cafes and listen to political chatter. She scrubbed
floors. It meant nothing to her that a "Government of Na-

28

tional Defense" had voted to carry on the war after the
Emperor's surrender. This was a decision strongly opposed
by a group of reforming Communards who saw in the con-
tinuation of the war an attempt to extend "the bourgeois ex-
pression of public liberty" initiated by the monarchy. What
was "liberty" anyway? Was it any more than being able to
travel from Bessines to Montmartre, to make of one's life
what one could? There were Communards in the tenement
where she lived. The concierge loathed them and prayed
early each morning for the safe return of the Emperor.
Madeleine shied from associating with them, but only as she
shied from associating with anyone.

The Communards were calling for dissolution of the Pre-
fecture of Police and the City Guard at a time when it was
obvious to Madeleine that if one worked steadily at an honest
job one did not have to traffic with the police at all. The
Communards were agitating for the constitution by election
of the Parisian municipality or Commune. For the life of her,
Madeleine could not see what possible bearing such a cause
might have on the lives of simple working people.

But somehow, for reasons she could in no wise fathom, the
prices of everything rose daily, and the supplies of food in the
shops were very low. In September, 1871, the German army
laid siege to a Paris whose supplies were already reduced to
a quarter of normal. Madeleine could now understand
enough of what was going on to be able to muster hatred for
the invaders. The bestial Germans were responsible for all
the troubles which now began to shower down upon her. It
"was a hatred she harbored for the rest of her life.

By January the German guns commenced the bombard-
ment of the starving capital. Everywhere families burned
their furniture in order to protect themselves from the bitter
cold. The city's gas supply failed. Many people took refuge
in the cavernous sewers by day and night. An artilleryman in
the National Guard, an artist named douard Manet, whom

29

Madeleine might well have seen many times when she passed
the Cafe Guerbois in the Grande Rue des Batignolles, wrote
to his wife in the Pyrenees: "We are eating horse meat when
we can get it. Cats, dogs and even rats are now sold in the
shops." A few days later Manet reported that the popula-
tion's appetite for horse flesh was so ravenous there were no
longer any cabs or drays in the streets. The day after Christ-
mas, Victor Hugo noted in his journal, "Yesterday I dined
on rat."

Throughout these desperate times Madeleine could console
herself in the knowledge that she had been able to provide
something better than the common lot for her daughter. The
child was in the hands of the sisters of St. Vincent de Paul.
There, for the greater part of the day, the little one was safe.
Miraculously, the sisters fed their charges on fresh eggs from
their own poultry farm and on butter from their own churns.
For her own part Madeleine could forage for the strange in-
gredients of her own eternal ragout and feel that her lot was
perhaps a good bit better than that of many of her neighbors.

When the news swept the hill that the war was over,
Madeleine expected the grocery shops to be full by the
following morning and things to be normal once more. The
past six months could be forgotten in a single night's sleep, so
she reasoned. What had been horror suddenly seemed to be
only foolishness. But things did not suddenly become
"normal." The same people who had chattered about bour-
geois suppression of public liberty, constitution by election,
and dissolution of the Prefecture of Police, now ranted on
about "the large indemnity we have to pay," the "ignominy
of ceding Alsace and Lorraine to the Germans," "the dis-
honor of allowing the enemy to occupy Paris for forty-eight
hours as a gesture of surrender." There was talk about the
government's sending out feelers for a restoration of the
monarchy.

Incredible as it appeared to Madeleine, people seemed to be

30

more aroused by talk of political matters than by thoughts of
food. Suddenly the gaunt, sunken eyes of the hungry were
afire with a passion for battle. In a desperate onslaught the
Communards seized the Hotel de Ville, and the Government
of Paris gave warning that it meant to defend the city against
the forces of the Government of National Defense, which
had fled from the city to Versailles. Not far from Madeleine's
tenement room in the Place Pigalle a Communard mob seized,
tried, and summarily shot the two generals, Lecomte and
Thomas, who had ventured into the city calling for surrender
to the Versailles government's terms.

The Commune lasted only seven weeks. On the 21st of
May the troops of the Versailles government, under General
MacMahon, broke through the Communard cordon at Point-
du-Jour and swept into the city. While part of their forces
defended the crumbling barricades, the Communards set fire
to the Hotel de Ville, the Cours des Comtes, the Tuileries,
the Louvre, and the Palais Royale. The homes of everyone
suspected of loyalty to the Versailles government were
bombed or burned. Libraries and museums were senselessly
fired. Frantic revolutionaries wrought havoc upon churches
and public buildings. Despairing of victory, the defenders
now began to slaughter hostages. At La Sante prisoners were
shot in their cells or mowed down by riflemen against the
prison walls, their bodies left for the children of the neighbor-
hood to mutilate. Elsewhere in the city as many as fifty
hostages at a time were marched into the streets to be butch-
ered with bayonets, rifles, or bludgeons by the blood-soaked
"police." Bombs shattered shops and factories. The Arch-
bishop of Paris and five of his diocesan clerics held in the
prison of La Grande Roquette were shot by a communist
firing squad.

Slowly, across the barricades the Army of Versailles fought
its way to the heart of the city. It took a week to reach there;
and 17,000 men, women, and children perished in the drive.

31

Ditches were filled with the stripped bodies of the dead.
Human scavengers preyed over the streets like voracious kites.

In the name of law and order the Army of Versailles
proved itself no less bloodthirsty than the Communards.
"There is everywhere now," wrote Puvis de Chavannes to his
friend Bally, "an immense poisoning of all morality, and I
can't but be confounded when I think of the illusions of both
sides and how they have hoped to cure our ills." To the
politically ignorant Madeleine and thousands like her, what
took place in the summer and autumn of 1871 was heinous
beyond all philosophizing. Vengeance and hate swept aside
everything men had striven for all their lives. Love, religion,
friendship, social consciousness, decency, idealism tumbled
as easily as heads had fallen into the baskets in 1793. Mankind
was cut off from all the ethical and moral concepts which had
been the mainstream of its progress since the time of Christ.
Blistering hostility, suspicion, fear, and revenge flashed like
hard coals of fire in the gaunt, sunken eyes of hungry people.
Everyone was adrift and wracked by terror in a world with-
out trust, affection, or kindness. Spies denounced Commu-
nards and Communard sympathizers real or imagined. A
few minutes of trial without legal defense and their fate was
settled. In the Place Maubert street cleaners tumbled three
hundred executed corpses into a common grave in a single
day following the findings of one court. Lunatics, freed from
asylums in order to make room for the ever-increasing swarms
of prisoners, ran howling through the streets. Children dis-
appeared from their homes, never to reappear. The sisters of
St. Vincent de Paul barricaded themselves inside the convent
and refused to open their gates to anyone, their day pupils
included. "From that day the streets of Montmartre were
home to me," Suzanne said many years later. "It was only in
the streets that there was excitement and love and ideas
what other children found around their dining-room tables."

The last pitched battle of the struggle took place, fittingly

32

enough, in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, against the wall to be
known thereafter as the "Wall of the Federals." It was the
evening before Pentecost. And when the sun rose the follow-
ing morning, the grim work of the White Terror began.
Within the next three months 13,450 Parisian citizens were
sentenced to prison, to exile, and to death. In nearly all cases
their chief accusers were their neighbors.

"Paris had buried her dead," wrote Hector Berlioz. "The
paving stones from the barricades are laid down in their
places again. . . . What a sight! What hideous devastation!
The Spirit of Liberty on the top of the column of the Bastille
has a bullet through her body. The fallen trees, the mutilated
houses, the squares, the streets, the quays seem still to be
quivering from the hideous struggle . . . rats in the corners
gnaw bleeding vertebrae . . . swarms of sparrows now fight
for scraps of sustenance. . . ."

This, then, was the first playground of Suzanne Valadon.

The years 1870-1872 had completely demoralized Made-
leine. Whatever illusions of a future good life she had been
able to hold onto since arriving from the Limousin she had
lost under the impact of the war and the long months of civil
strife. The behavior of her fellow men had sickened her
spirit. She made a few perfunctory attempts to restore her
perspective by involving herself in amatory affairs with
neighborhood widowers, but each affair was brief and un-
rewarded. She finally resigned herself to the drudgery of
cleaning floors, to callous knees and work-hardened hands,
and the torment of rheumatism. And with her resignation to
this drab lot she developed a sullen disposition and a feeling of
apathy toward the tenement room as much as toward human-
ity. The room was seldom cleaned. The linen was dirty.
The dress materials (she was never able to resist buying them)
lay in dust-covered packets and boxes under the bed. The
porcelain figures accumulated grime.

33

She drank. Alcohol was something to anesthetize her sense
of frustration and failure as well as the growing bitterness she
felt toward mankind. In her canvas bag she carried a bottle
of brandy and a bottle of Montmartre red wine and on the
job she consumed both steadily. No one could tell if she were
drunk or not. Her movements had already become sluggish
and faltering, and she was surly and taciturn. Her body was
flabby, her shoulders painfully stooped. Aging with merciless
speed, her teeth badly decayed, her gray eyes dull and watery,
and an intricate mesh of grimy lines masking her leathery
face, she shuffled listlessly between her tenement room and
the appointed job. Shaken from her reverie by a friendly
greeting, she appeared bewildered or hostile. People said that
she "wasn't all there," that she was dim-witted, crazy. And
when she was not at work she would sit by her second floor
window sipping brandy from a coffee-stained cup, staring
vacantly at the parade of imperfect humanity passing below
in the Boulevard de Rochechouart, and giving the gossips
something more to say about her.

Once die terror of die Commune was past, the sisters of the
Convent of St. Vincent de Paul attempted once again to in-
still in Suzanne Valadon the fundamentals of reading and
writing, to be rewarded only by the most prodigious record
of truancy the school had had in its history. It was a hope-
less task. The litde girl had already found a wonderful
world: she had become a creature of the twisted Montmartre
streets.

Smaller than most children her age, agile and quick, with a
wide-eyed willful litde face and tousled cognac-colored hair,
Suzanne darted about the hill with the zigzagging energy of
a wasp. What struck people first about her was her eyes.
They were very large, dark gray, stiffly lashed, and set wide
apart under a pure broad forehead, and looked out with an
expression of simple candor and singularly innocent sweet-
ness. Only the mouth, too massive for her litde face, a rigid

34

line more likely to be sardonic than merry, gave a hint of
anything but sportive childishness. Alone of all her features
it bore a resemblance to her mother.

Now she went where she liked, did what she wanted, wore
what clothes she pleased (what clothes she possessed), with
but the haziest remembrance in her mind that once she had
been the object of maternal affection, cared for as other chil-
dren were cared for. If now by some mysterious change in
circumstances she was rejected or neglected by the morose
woman with whom her life was strangely coupled, she could
not brood over it. She went her breathless way, roaming the
streets by herself, playing games or performing acrobatic
stunts with the boys of the hill (she preferred their company
to that of girls), bantering with workingmen and trades-
people, consorting with the flotsam the outlaws, apaches, or
prostitutes, all of whom, she insisted in a high-pitched voice
perpetually charged with excitement and wonder, made bet-
ter soups and preached more edifying homilies than people
who ran greengroceries and butcher shops.

In the world to which she had been turned loose and to
which she clung with the passion she might have had for a
favorite doll, reading and writing had no place. They re-
quired time, and time belonged to the teeming life about her.
Furthermore, she had begun to draw pictures; and pictures
were to her a far more effective means of communication
than pages of cramped type face or wriggling penmanship.
Indifference to reading and writing were to remain with her
all her life, and as a grown woman, it bothered her not the
slightest that her handwriting was that of an inept schoolgirl,
or that she licked her lips when she read a newspaper to her-
self.

She disappeared from school at every opportunity. The
Mother Superior attempted to bribe her into regular attend-
ance with little gifts. Schoolmates were given special privi-
leges for preventing her escapes from school. Madeleine

35

administered beatings. But the little girl had fallen in love
with a way of life, and there was no preventing her from en-
joying it. What she had found for herself had already begun
to charm hundreds of young people from all over the world.
They came, the beauty seekers, the truth seekers, the world
shapers, all to this curiously enchanting mecca high above the
violet light of Paris, bringing their dreams with them. If at
the age of nine Suzanne had not yet crystallized her dreams,
rebellion was in her blood and she sensed that in some myste-
rious way her lot was with the newcomers. So when the
sisters of St. Vincent de Paul finally acknowledged their
defeat and suggested to Madeleine that it was pointless for
them to attempt to continue the child's education, Suzanne
felt that in the battle for her soul, the streets of Montmartre
had won and would hold her always. Before she was ten she
went to work.

Now, as her coevals remembered her, there was a certain
ridiculous, breathless savagery in almost every mood she ex-
perienced. People on the streets often stopped to stare at her
as she thought aloud or enacted fragments of her daydreams.
Those who believed her mother was crazy muttered about the
sins of the fathers. Barefoot a good part of the year, she
paraded the streets, her hands clasped behind her back, a
miniature human being, almost a midget, with long, deliberate
masculine strides, her toes pointed in. It was her idea of how
Frangois Villon, the only figure in history who ever had any
interest for her, walked. She called herself "Mademoiselle
Villon," and assumed an air of boastful pride in the frag-
mentary state of her wardrobe and her personal uncleanliness.
"Water is for washing pigs," she bawled at the schoolmate
who took exception to her grime. Often she perched on walls
or fences "I am a monkey. I am a cat" and caterwauled
obscene argot ballads, loud and far off key. Physically fear-
less, she once swung for a quarter of an hour six stories above
the street, clinging to the bottom of a French window and

36

advising the paralyzed onlookers to stop shouting at her until
the fire department came to her rescue. Singlehanded, she
caught a runaway Percheron in the Place Blanche while men,
women, and children ran for shelter.

Nervous, loquacious, given to gusts of hysterical gaiety and
paroxysms of strident laughter, she could level her ready
vulgar wit at playmates or elders with equally telling effect.
"The little Valadon terror," she was dubbed, not unadmir-
ingly, by those who knew her. Years later her very good
friend Degas was to call her "terrible Maria." As a child she
was extremely quick to explode in ungovernable rage, attack-
ing her adversary with fingernails or with stones, crockery, or
any other loose object within reach, accompanied by a stac-
cato onslaught of gutter profanity. Once the storm passed,
she made as dramatic a display of her remorse which, pas-
sionate and tear-sodden, blossomed almost instantaneously
into transports of affection and even tremulous adoration, for
there was in all her frenzy a poignant desire, above all else,
to be loved.

Even in those early childhood days she knew, it seemed,
that she was destined to be someone important in the world
of grownup people. What it was to be she did not know:
she had no clear objective ahead of her. In her daydreams
she did not see herself as a future diamond-decked princess,
a fur-draped gentlewoman, an elegant hostess, or a glamor-
ous actress, as most little girls might see themselves. If she
had dreams, they were of eating unlimited supplies of sausages
and pastries, of enduring passionate friendships with dis-
reputable tramps and criminals, of winning races, of perform-
ing miraculous feats of strength and daring, or of putting an
end to one of her enemies with the flashing steel of a long
blade. Her dreams gave her no clue as to where she might go
in the world ahead. And yet she was always certain that
when she was grown up she would be one of the rare ones
one of those whose lives were apart from the masses.

37

Her desire to ingratiate herself with others stemmed from
this solid belief. Popularity was the only rung she recognized
in the climb she knew some day she must make to the top of
the ladder. Often this determination to win applause took a
strangely pedantic or whimsical turn. She saw fit to advise
her elders as to how they should take care of their health,
their children, their in-laws, their finances all with disarm-
ing seriousness.

When she was seven or eight years old, she said much later,
she once stopped to watch Renoir working at his easel in
the rue Lepic and advised him solemnly to keep on with
his painting and not be discouraged; that he had a future in
it. At times her longing for sympathetic attention was so
great that she would follow funerals tag along at the end of
a cortege wending its way to one of the Montmartre ceme-
teries, shedding a steady stream of tears all the way to the
edge of the grave. On one occasion this performance
achieved unexpected results when at Pere Lachaise a bereaved
young widow comforted her at the conclusion of the ob-
sequies, took her home, fed her, and gave her some money,
all in the belief that the child was one of her dear departed's
"little mistakes."

Only with her mother were her efforts to ingratiate herself
wholely unfruitful. A barrier she could not break through
stood between them. Dutifully she did the housework and
the shopping. In a fever to win approbation she labored long
hours perfecting her needlework and executing embroidery.
She gathered flowers from neighborhood gardens and win-
dowboxes (not always with respect for property rights) to
brighten the drabness of their living quarters. None of these
efforts seemed to arouse the reaction she hungered for, and
ultimately she was to give them up as hopeless. Her early
drawings cats, flowers, dogs, and horses, drawn with pencil
stubs on scraps of paper in a curiously unimaginative way and
presented to Madeleine as gifts, were received with bovine

38

disinterestedness. But when Madeleine found the child draw-
ing nude figures, either as she knew her own body or as she
imagined the body of the opposite sex, Madeleine roused her-
self from her torpor long enough to give the little one a
sound bearing. Suzanne's reaction was matter-of-fact. Hence-
forth she spent considerable time drawing her nude figures
on the pavements of the Place Vintimille, where they were
certain to attract attention. In the alleys of the Butte she
cajoled her masculine playmates into taking off their clothes
and posing for her.

The strange, elfin figure of Suzanne was eternally beyond
Madeleine's comprehension. Beyond sympathy with the run
of common human behavior, she was unable to cope with the
dynamic energy and fantasies of the little one who was her
charge. While she herself stood sodden and earth-bound, the
child flitted in zigzag butterfly flights about the Butte. It was
all Madeleine could do not to hate the creature. Happily, the
apathy which enveloped her was a barrier to any passionate
feelings. Nothing about her own life or sentiments could she
express in fiery terms any longer. Weariness and lethargy
permeated her entire being. She was totally unable to muster
the intense emotions which might have created active batde
or concord between mother and daughter. The child's sud-
den bursts of rage or her passionate show of remorse were
equally unreal to Madeleine. Observed in a dull glass at long
range, they were but one of the manifestations of dismal
human behavior little more. With something almost akin to
terror she shied from physical contact with her small
daughter. In their life together there were no embraces or
kisses. The little gifts the child brought from time to time
were received with surly indifference. When Madeleine ad-
dressed her daughter directly it was only to nag, to complain,
to bicker. They ate their meals separately for the most part,
or, if together, in silence. They never appeared together in
public.

39

But Suzanne did not brood on the rejection. She went her
breathless way dancing in the streets, acting out her day-
dreams, following funerals. And as she grew older she roamed
farther and stayed away longer from the series of tenement
rooms they called their homes. People said that Suzanne was
heartless, neglectful of her poor, hardworking mother, that
she was "an unnatural daughter." It was a judgment they
were obliged to reverse later.

There came a rime when a daughter could be expected de-
cently to desert her mother and make an independent life for
herself. Amazingly, for "the little Valadon terror" this rime
never came. In spite of the fact that mother and daughter
rarely spoke to each other, that they went nowhere together,
that they shared no interest in each other's doings, that they
snarled and bickered at one another continually, they re-
mained in the same household for almost sixty years.

Not until Suzanne, harnessing her vitality and restlessness,
begins to assert herself as a creative artist, does their real re-
lationship come into focus. The unfaltering pencil, the savage
charcoal line, the bold and certain brushstroke speak poeti-
cally for their meaning to each other. In hundreds of
Suzanne's drawings, etchings, paintings, the square-hipped
figure of Madeleine is present.

The woman (old always) is eternally at work, although it
is no longer the painful drudgery of those first years on
Montmartre. It is pottering, fribbling work. She combs a
model's hair. She helps a figure disrobe. She cuts a child's
toenails. She sews. She bears water or prepares a bath.
Rarely is she the subject itself: usually she is background
the lifeless straight hair parted in the middle and pulled
severely into a bun on the back of her head, the long terrier-
like nose, the toothless munching mouth, the lacework of
grime-filled wrinkles masking her face. She is never a lov-
able figure an old family antique, unneeded, unlovely but
cherished. For she speaks of a time of golden sentiment, of

40

unfettered youth, of brave fantasies and unbounded energy;
so that many years later, when caught up by the tragic cir-
cumstances of her own motherhood, Suzanne Valadon the
artist could never look through her portfolios and, on seeing
the hovering figure of her mother, not experience a lift of
tender happiness in her heart.

II In Flight

PERHAPS SUZANNE OCCUPIED HERSELF, RATHER MORE THAN
other children, drawing pictures. The few toys she had, she
told friends in later years, were shabby, broken ones rescued
from rubbish bins or found in the streets. She owned one doll
in her life, and it lacked a leg and an arm. Pencil stubs and
pieces of chalk or coal were more easily come by; nor was
it especially painful to her to conclude that these could pro-
vide as much entertainment as dolls or toys. Her interest in
drawing, however, was sporadic. For months she would do
no drawing at all, only to start again with a frenzy which
might last anywhere from half-an-hour to a couple of weeks.
That was the way she went at everything in furious spurts.
Suddenly, in bold charcoal lines she would draw outsize cats
and dogs and jungle beasts all over the tenement-room wall-
paper, or make pencil drawings of flowers, nosegays, or
bouquets on scraps of loose paper. In the Place de Vintiinille
the unemployed and even an occasional artist would watch
with amusement as the excited, chattering youngster limned
her nude figures of little boys and girls on the pavement.

Her art could hardly be said to be superior to other childish
scribblings one might have found in thousands of nurseries or
kitchens in the city or on miles of cement pavements. By her
own account, her figures were crude and static. The dogs
were always in the same stiff attitudes, the cats always had
41

42

arched backs; the naked children all had the same face. There
was no suggestion of the childish fantasy, the imagination, the
naive and primitive wit, which in our day have come to be
the yardstick of a child's artistic propensities. No mental or
emotional impact revealed itself in her drawings, no glimmer
of invention or even of fancy marked them with a tinge of
her temperament or personality. Faced with these stolid, un-
gracious figures, one could not have imagined that they were
the work of this elfin, mercurial child. They revealed nothing
more than a desire to contain within the perimeter of crude,
heavy lines the shapes of objects which interested her at the
moment. They were hardly the auspicious beginning of the
career of a great artist.

Had she lived elsewhere than in Montmartre, this disposi-
tion to draw pictures might well have been dissipated in other
directions at an early stage. But it was her good fortune to
be growing up in a place and at a time when almost any
artistic skill had extraordinary importance. Montmartre had
become the center of the world's artistic life.

In some inexplicable way, migration to "the Sacred Hill,"
which had begun after the Revolution of 1793 with the com-
ing of Michel, Gericault, Berlioz, Daguerre, de Nerval and
others who found there a pleasant semirural tranquillity and
charm, with the setting-in of the Third Republic now swelled
to tremendous proportions. First from the Latin Quarter on
the Left Bank, then from all over Europe, and finally even
from America, artists, sculptors, writers, actors, musicians,
and students swarmed to the hill to the cafes, to the tene-
ments as full of teeming life now as rabbit warrens, to the
renovated stables, the defunct potteries, the garden tool sheds
and unplastered lofts under the mansard roofs the "studios"
and "garrets" of future autobiographies. In their former
habitat, George du Maurier had summed them up "All
laugh, and chaff and mischief, blague et blaguet Parisien
wits, butts, bullies; the idle ... the good and the bad, the

43

clean and the dirty (especially the latter) all more or less
animated by a certain esprit de corps'' With them came night
life cafes concerts, cabarets artistiques, dance halls, music
halls, their air of feverish, profligate jollity to dominate the
life of the hill. These places would be immortalized by the
lithographs of the little misshapen aristocrat Henri de Tou-
louse-Lautrec, or those of the lean, peppery Pierre Bonnard
the Moulin Rouge, the Mirliton, the Chat Noir, the Elysee-
Montmartre, the Divan Japonais. And that last of the thirty
windmills, spotted by Madeleine Valadon the day she arrived
in the city, the "motif" for the artists Michel, Theodore
Rousseau, Corot, Daguerre, Vollon, Renoir, Van Gogh,
Rusinol the Moulin de la Galette.

First converted to a goguette, or wine shop, which also
specialized in serving its customers thin little pastry wafers or
gaieties, the Moulin eventually became a dance hall. Here in
the rose- and vine-trellised pavilion under the shady trees, on
Sunday afternoons and evenings, mothers and chaperones,
drinking beer and watered wine and chattering like sparrows,
kept their eyes on the young girls waltzing with scrubbed,
pomaded young plumbers and draymen. Behind them in the
garden the more irresponsible elements of the community
squealed in garden swings and on the small carousel. Young
republicans played skittles, gambled at the wheel of fortune,
or took pot shots at clay statuettes of the politician Adolphe
Thiers, Louis Philippe, or the Tsar of Russia, In the Avenue
de Clichy laundresses, milliners, flower vendors and working-
men crowded noisily about Dutrou's bar. Students held wild
drinking parties in the garden of Pere Lathuile's restaurant or
at the Franc-Buveur in the rue des Saules. Parisians and
foreigners jostled shopmen and the indigent along the bar at
Wepler's or Boivin's. Musicians, actors and circus performers
lounged about Chez Olivier's fusty little room or the oilcloth-
covered tables at Mme. Bataille's.

The Cafe de la Nouvelle-Athenes in the Place Pigalle, the

44

rendezvous of the artists who now called themselves "Impres-
sionists," had succeeded the ormolu atmosphere of the Cafe
Guerbois in the rue des Batignolles. Until the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War, the Guerbois had been in the nature
of an unofficial headquarters for the "new painting" and the
"new painters." There, under the leadership of fidouard
Manet, the writers Zacharie Astruc, Edmond Duranty, Theo-
dore Duret, and Emile Zola joined forces almost daily with
the artists Antoine Guillemet, Felix Bracquemond, and
Frederic Bazille. And often to their company on Friday
evenings came Fantin-Latour, Edgar Degas, Pierre Auguste
Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Constantin Guys, Alfred Sisley,
Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and the photographer and
balloon enthusiast Felix Nadar, whose studio in the Boulevard
des Capucines was to become the setting for the historic
First Group Exhibition in 1874 the culmination of the Im-
pressionist movement.

At the Nouvelle-Athenes, after the war, the composition
of the group changed considerably. Bazille had been killed
at Beaune-la-Rolande. Monet and Sisley lived outside the
city and rarely appeared. Writers like Villiers de Flsle Adam
and the Irishman George Moore were to be found there now
along with other newcomers like Puvis de Chavannes, Alfred
Stevens, and Degas' earnest young friend, the painter Zan-
domeneghi. Always, too, at a table by himself sat the rock-
ribbed monarchist Marcellin Desboutins, in tatters and grime,
gazing pensively at the floral ceiling decorations by Petit,
who had given his adored Empress Eugenie water-color les-
sons.

Pausing before the Nouvelle-Athenes on one of her butter-
fly flights one evening, Suzanne, at the age of ten, stopped to
stare into the bright gold-and-white interior. She long re-
membered one figure she saw there or so, at any rate, she
claimed many years later a small round-shouldered man,
fragile and sad-eyed, in pepper-and-salt tweeds, his throat

swathed in woolen scarves. But for the pepper-and-salt
tweeds this recollection of the Nouvelle-Athenes might be
dismissed as one of her late-in-Iife fabrications. It is interest-
ing to note, however, that the pepper-and-salt tweeds caught
George Moore's eye as well, and he noted them in his Con-
fessions, a volume Suzanne Valadon was most unlikely to
have seen, much less heard of in the course of her life. The
figure in the pepper-and-salt tweeds was Edgar Degas.

While the little village* spent its nights in boisterous
revelry or in high-spirited discussions of the present and
future of art, its days were preoccupied with work. Red-
armed laundresses, midinettes, dressmakers, pushcart vendors,
laborers, shop assistants, delivery boys, and farmers scurried
about the tangled cobblestone streets, while the artists the
successful ones in tight-fitting frock coats and broad-brimmed
black hats, the impoverished ones and students in working-
men's corduroy trousers, smocks, and berets toiled at their
easels on the sidewalks and in the little squares.

It was one of the most important tenets of the "new art"
that painting should no longer be confined to the artificial
arrangements of a studio room, but should seek out its sub-
jects and evolve its techniques in the life of the city. The
rapid development of post-Revolutionary technology was
quickening the city's pulse; and with its new dynamic mo-
tion, its new machinery and smoke, its fragments of life and
fleeting moods, the city had become a kaleidoscope of new
and exciting landscapes. There was in the air a nervous ten-
sion to capture the ephemeral impressions of this fast-moving
and turbulent world. Even the countryside itself was to be
seen now in new terms of changing light and shadows, of
quivering variable colors. The moment, never to be repeated,
was the goal of the Impressionist's art. To achieve it, the
artist's observations had to be made on the instant, while he
stood face to face with the volatile temper of nature. He

*It was actually incorporated into metropolitan Paris in 1855.

46

had to bring to his work the vibrations of light, and this he
sought to do by dissolving the scintillating colors before him
into "mists" or by breaking them into minute dabs and
patches while simultaneously he abandoned much of his em-
phasis on contour, modeling or chiaroscuro. In order to do
this and yet preserve the precarious balance between subject
and surrounding atmosphere which he felt to be essential, he
now had to forgo the meticulous "licking" of the academi-
cians and attack his canvas with rapid, loose brushstrokes.
Concentrating on this fluid play of light, he was often com-
pelled to lose his outlines at the expense of speed. But what-
ever his particular problem might be, to secure and develop
the "new vision" he had to work out of doors. And so he
became an integral part of the working Montmartre scene.

The Impressionist movement culminated with a series of
eight exhibitions stretching over a period of twelve years and
beginning with the First Group Exhibition of April 15 to
May 15, 1874, at Nadar's studio at No. 35 Boulevard des
Capucines. Here, at one franc a head, Parisians flocked to
look at the work of thirty painters among them Pissarro,
Renoir, Cezanne, Monet, Sisley, Degas, and Berthe Morisot
and to hear every boulevard wit fire some caustic jibe at the
display of "dabs" or "blotches" on the walls.* Thus began
the series which continued until the "Eighth Exhibition of
Painting" (May 15 to June 15, 1886), from which most of
the old Impressionists, in fact, abstained, leaving the exhibi-
tion to be dominated by the "Divisionist" work of Georges
Seurat** and his followers and the dawn of yet another

*At the sight of one of Monet's canvases entitled "Impression: Rising
Sun," the critic Louis Leroy is supposed to have exclaimed, "The whole
show is an impression." This outburst naturally got a laugh, and the ex-
hibitors were thus dubbed "Impressionists." In the April 25, 1879, issue of
Charivarij Leroy first set the word "Impressionism" in print. The painters
liked the term and soon adopted it as a group name.

** Notably by the exhibition of his "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island
of La Grande Jatte."

47

movement. This last exhibition of the Impressionists was less
a breakup than a regrouping of their inquiring spirit and
analytical drive. The field now passed into the hands of
younger men Signac, Odilon Redon and Gauguin (only
Pissarro remaining of the Impressionists). Manifestoes, trea-
tises, clashes, and coalitions were to signal further grouping
and regrouping for a period of thirty years, and from their
vitality was to emerge the painting which today we so loosely
call "modern." It was during these years that Suzanne Vala-
don became an artist.

If she was unaware of the artistic and philosophical argu-
ments being forged about her, Suzanne could not be uncon-
scious of the extraordinary personalities who invaded the hill
following the Franco-Prussian War. The atmosphere in
which she grew up fairly cracked with their will to assert
themselves. The cafes, bistros, and brasseries reverberated
with their arguments. In their unpredictable, often eccentric
behavior, she sensed an affinity with her own restlessness, with
her intense feelings. Somehow she belonged to them, hun-
gered to share the comradeship of these strange, blustering,
dedicated men, to join in their altercations, their spontaneous
parties, their quivering excitement.

But to want to be a part of the artists' social and tempera-
mental existence was one thing; to want to be an artist was
quite another. Suzanne fostered no such ambition. It did
not even occur to her that she might possibly become an
artist. There existed in her childish mind no connection at
all between the little drawings which she executed sporadi-
cally for her own amusement and the accomplishments of the
young men whose easels bristled about the Montmartre hill.
Once she left the Convent of St. Vincent de Paul she had to
earn a living an earnest business, and a far cry from the
indolent occupation of standing around on street corners put-
ting daubs of paint on canvas.

She was first apprenticed at nine to an atelier de couture

48

in the Place de Clichy, where, in a murky, cluttered work-
room a hundred rimes more oppressive than the classroom at
St. Vincent's, she was supposed to lay the groundwork for
the future life of a seamstress. As she remembered in later
life, she loathed the place, with its great masses of flimsy dress
materials, tinsel, and artificial flowers, and the cheap perfume
of her co-workers. Madeleine had to take her to work every
morning, and the forelady, not without a show of brutality,
saw to it that she stayed on the job through the day. For
although Suzanne accepted the necessity of having to work
and was rather boastful of the fact that hers was grim em-
ployment, she was not above removing herself from the hated
atmosphere when the fancy struck her. On the occasions
when she was able to effect an escape (by climbing out a
second storey window) she was beaten both at home and in
the factory. But the freedom was worth the pain.

She worked in the sweatshop for over three years, until she
was almost thirteen. Then, according to her own account, she
escaped one day and stayed away from home until she was
able to tell her mother that she had found a more remunera-
tive job "taking care of rich children in the Tuileries." It
is difficult to imagine that this story tallies with the truth, or
by what persuasion Madeleine was induced to accept it. One
look at the scrubby urchin should have convinced her that
rich people would be most unlikely to entrust the care of
their children to her daughter.

In rapid succession Suzanne found employment as a waitress
and dishwasher in a cheap working-class restaurant, as a
pushcart vendor of vegetables at Les Halles des Batignolles,
and as a groom in a livery stable. In this last job she is re-
membered by some of her living contemporaries, who many
times stood before their parents' tobacco shop to watch her
go up the rue Lamarck, a wild, tiny figure trotting between
a pair of giant Percherons held by their halters, or bobbing
along on a horse's bare back executing handstands, head-

49

stands, somersaults, and cartwheels* This extraordinary per-
formance on the rue Lamarck was apparently what eventually
won her a job as an equestrienne in a circus troupe, a Job
she was to look back upon with considerable sentimentality
for the rest of her life.

There seems to be a curious unanimity among those who
knew her that Suzanne was a member of the troupe of the
Cirque Molier. However, a very careful review of the circus
programmes between 1879 and 1881 fails to reveal among the
performers either her name or one which might be taken for
a stage name. Considering the nature and the objectives of
the Cirque Molier, this is not surprising. M. Ernest Molier
was a wealthy gentleman and an equine enthusiast who, con-
vinced that it was very important somehow to prove that
"aristocrats could be as clever and amusing as plebeians,"
created a circus which gave two gala performances each year
one for "the ladies of high society," as the New York
Herald put it, and the other for "their sisters of the 'half-
world.' " It was therefore a real matter of principle with
M. Molier and his audience that the entertainment be supplied
solely by members of the Parisian elite. It would have been
quite impossible for anyone from Suzanne's stratum of society
to be among these performers.

That she might have been employed by one of the four
permanent circuses established in Paris at the time the Hip-
podrome, the Cirque Medrano, the Cirque Fernando (now
the Cirque d'Hiver) or the Nouveau Cirque also seems most
unlikely. There was, as may well be imagined, extremely
keen competition among the four. Their scouts scoured
eastern Europe and the Orient to bring to their rings the most
exotic and sensational acts, and the standards of performance
demanded were extremely high. It is doubtful whether a
young girl with no training, who could perform only simple
acrobatics on the back of a horse, would have been taken on
as a member of one of these troupes. More probably

50

Suzanne's "circus career" was spent not in a circus but in one
of the tent shows or carnivals at Neuilly or Le Trone, which
were the showcases for performers aspiring to be taken up
as acts by the managers of music halls, cafes concerts, cabarets,
or the small traveling shows in the provinces.

The legend that Suzanne was associated with the Cirque
Molier seems to have originated with Suzanne herself. It was
her own little joke. In her last years she often spoke ironically
of "the grandeur of my past" The hideous days of the
Commune and the White terror were for her "our hunting
days"; the tenement room was "Chateau Rochechouart."
Her son Maurice was born in "La Grande Salle du Poteau"
(the Great Hall du Poteau) . In the same vein she remembered
her father as "an aristocratic baron," and hinted that Made-
leine was not really her mother but an old governess retained
on a family pension; that the Empress Eugenie was her god-
mother; that as a debutante she was secretly betrothed to the
Prince Imperial (who was dead at the time); that she had
inspired M. Guerlain to create his famous scent Jicky in her
honor a host of similar fantasies. It was absurd, of course,
that she, Suzanne Valadon, the untidy old wasp of the Butte,
should have originated in or had anything to do with the
effete world of Parisian high society. Such a paradox amused
her hugely, and if someone believed it, it was all the funnier.
Still, we must face the fact that the dream world she created
for herself as a lonely child was something she never quite
discarded as she grew older and that, indeed, toward the end
of her life it re-established itself compellingly. If the Cirque
Molier story was not her little joke, then she believed it her-
self just as she came half to believe anything about the past,
not knowing (and not caring) where the facts and the fan-
tasies had become confused. Truth or reality lay in the pic-
tures she had produced. She was an artist. Truth was in
her pictures. Where else it lay was unimportant.

51

Whatever her "circus career" was, it ended disastrously
after about seven months. With characteristic daring she
took it upon herself, during a performance, to substitute for
the trapeze artist, who was indisposed. She had done a few
turns on the trapeze, it is true, but she was hardly skillful
enough to turn in a professional performance. During one of
the turns she missed her timing and fell, and although the
injuries she sustained were not severe enough to maim her
seriously, she was forced to leave the circus.

It was a cruel blow. For here, for the first time, it seems,
she had an expression of her temperament in her work. The
excitement, the color, the atmosphere of the carnival were
things she understood, things she seemed to have prepared
herself for unconsciously all her life. But for the fall she
might have visualized a dazzling career. And fif ty years later
it was still a poignant tragedy to her that her career in a
circus had been shattered. "They gathered up the poor little
broken body," she would murmur softly. With bittersweet
longing she gazed back at the irretrievable past. It had not
seemed then that there could have been a future.

When the fall from the trapeze ended Suzanne's prospects
as a circus performer, she was sixteen. On the offhand sug-
gestion of a friend, she then became an artist's model.

Modeling was a stopgap until she should be in physical
condition once more to undertake some other work. But
her first appearances at the fountain in the Place Pigalle,
where each morning hopeful models of various ages, sizes,
shapes, and sexes paraded before the artists, created more than
the usual stir. In a very short time she was aware that she had
attached herself to something which really mattered to her
in a very intimate and precious way.

"I remember the first sitting I did," she recalled. "I re-
member saying to myself over and over again, This is it!

52

This is it!' Over and over I said it all day. I did not know
why. But I knew that I was somewhere at last and that I
should never leave."

With glowing excitement and radiant happiness she en-
tered the world that had fascinated her for so long, a world
to which she was drawn by an incomprehensible affinity.
Tiny, elfin, vivacious, with an ivory skin, soft, luminous
eyes, and a superbly ripened figure, she was at the same time
the loveliest of children and the most voluptuous of women
considerably more than an artist looking for a model on Mont-
martre might have hoped for. And beyond her not unimpres-
sive physical attributes she possessed a zestful and original
temperament and an enthusiasm for work far beyond the
call of duty. Neither the length of time she had to hold a
difficult pose nor the question of overtime was of great interest
to her; rather, she saw herself as a part of the artist's creation
in a vague, metaphysical way. This was her contribution to
his fulfillment. Dramatizing her own role, she was even
capable of considering herself his inspiration. And so, from
the very beginning of her new career she was a resounding
success.

Success could not be measured in terms of monetary re-
ward. Pay was poor and notoriously irregular. Models had
to haggle over the rates they would receive for each sitting.
The hours were long, the "breaks" few and far between.
Often after the bargaining and a long sitting the artist would
confess that he did not have the money to pay anyway. But
painful as these conditions might be, to Suzanne they were
compensated for to an enormous degree by the fact that she
had become a part of the active life of Bohemia, that the
extraordinary personalities she had so fervently longed to
approach as a child were now a part of her daily existence,
that she was no longer an outsider or freak among the people
with whom she lived. Now she "belonged." She would sit
in the cafes, listen to or take part in the discussions. She

53

could express her opinions as dogmatically as the next fellow.
She could, if she ingratiated herself in the proper quarters,
spend time at the circuses, the cabarets artistiques, and the
dance halls which were the hubs of the life of the Butte.
She was always welcome at a studio party.

For all the poverty and struggle, for all Madeleine's sullen
resentment and whining, it was a far better life than any she
had ever before known. She would rise late in the morning,
breakfast frugally on chunks of baguettes and coffee, loiter
about the fountain in the Place Pigalle gossiping with other
models if she did not already have a working assignment for
the day; or, if she had an opportunity, she made her appear-
ance at the artist's studio shortly before noon. The afternoon
was spent in posing, usually until the light failed. Later might
come a visit to one of the cafes for "the green hour," that
period of lively relaxation devoted to chatter or serious con-
versation and the sipping of absinthe. Properly drunk, ab-
sinthe was diluted with water, and its bright green color,
which gave "the hour" its name, became opalescent. Com-
pounded of medieval-sounding herbs wormwood, hyssop,
fennel, balm mint and brandy at 136 proof it was the strong-
est of all alcoholic drinks, and it had the additional virtue of
being generally considered a potent aphrodisiac.

The evening was for dinner, again in the joyous company
of friends, at one of the brasseries on the boulevards or at
one of the small restaurants of the side streets, paid for by
whoever had money in his pocket. Then on to a dance hall
or a cabaret, after which she went home at three or four
o'clock either alone or with a companion.

Nor was Suzanne's life without its creative side. Once
more she began to draw, but now the static figures she had
once limned suddenly became alive in graceful, fluid curves
of movement. As though by magic, the crudity of her child-
ish drawings became certainty, sureness, and power, solidly
contained within the limits of bold, savage lines. Her temper-

54

ament, so curiously absent in early drawings, now found
itself in automatic and masterful control of her compositions,
which were permeated with joy. For all their savagery they
were infused with compassion and even with a touch of senti-
mentality. Whether they were people, animals, or things,
her models were infused alike with her strength and her weak-
nesses. The sketching which had been hardly more than a
momentary release from childhood boredom had now be-
come, miraculously, a manifestation of her burgeoning artis-
tic expression. She was quick to be aware of it. It had come
full-blown from where? She did not know. She had re-
ceived no tutelage. No one had pointed the way or attempted
to enlighten her. She simply accepted it as hard fact and
good fortune, and allowed herself secretly to dream of be-
coming an artist.

Henceforth in the little time she found free between the
role she played in the frenzied pace of Bohemian life and
her responsibilities as a breadwinner for her mother was no
longer able to produce an income she worked at her draw-
ing. Considering the little time she was able to spend on
her work, her sketches seemed to mature with astonishing
speed. Listening to the interminable discussions of artistic
problems and observing the methods and techniques of the
artists with whom she sat daily undoubtedly had some in-
fluence on her development. Anything she garnered from
the conversation of other artists or through her study of
their working methods she digested. But what emerged bore
the stamp of her own invention alone. Groupings of familiar
objects, a child combing her hair, flowers, assumed a sensuous-
ness which stemmed not so much from a study of technique
as from her own hearty appetite for life. She wanted, she
told herself, "to work like mad, not to produce beautiful
drawings to be framed and hung, but good drawings which
capture a moment of life in movement in all its intensity";

55

and somehow she managed, in spite of the pressure of living,
to apply herself to this end.

But art, in one form or another, by no means filled her
life in those years. Far from it. For love is also an important
part of the artist's vocation, the fountainhead of his creative
life; and Suzanne, living in a world in which all her com-
panions were ceaselessly engaged in aff airs of the heart, rang-
ing from frivolous flirtations to the most violent dramas of
passion, did not lag behind. Her temperament and her sym-
pathy with masculine society combined to make her amorous.
Perhaps the circumstances of her birth led her to think lightly
of the virtues of chastity. The sisters of St. Vincent de Paul
who had not succeeded in teaching her to read and write
were hardly more successful in instructing her in the ideal of
immaculacy. When Madeleine protested that being an artist's
model was to embark on the road to prostitution, Suzanne
replied tartly that even the respectable existence of a village
seamstress had failed to provide a father for her. As though
fathers mattered anyway! What was important was that she,
Suzanne Valadon, had come into a way of life which was joy-
ous, and that she was now in a position to enjoy it with the
full power of her warm-blooded nature.

Her account of her loss of chastity, given eighteen years
after the fact, was calculated fiction, created from whole
cloth in order to justify a tragic turn of events in her life.
It is altogether possible that her first lesson in love occurred
in early childhood and that it was accepted as casually as the
nuns' instruction in other fields. Wherever or however it
happened, by the time she was sixteen it had given rise to a
prodigious show of promiscuity which had many Montmartre
tongues wagging. The Breton waiter at Pere Lathuile's res-
taurant, the postman Leconte, Degas' young friend Zando-
meneghi, the sailor Guichet they are but a few of the
remembered names of her lovers. A night or two, a week, a

56

month, a sudden disappearance to the forest at Fontainebleau,
a rented room above a stationer's shop in the rue Custine, a
bacchanale necessitating a call by the police in the studio of
Louis Anquetin such was the substance of her amours,
which for all their intensity and animal vitality preserved an
aura of playfulness and naivete. Sensuality and joyousness
dominated her love life, uncorrupted by either heartache or
the sentimentality natural in a young girl of sixteen. Men?
She loved them en masse. That she should be faithful to one
man was preposterous. Nature had bestowed sex appeal on
her in generous proportions; it ill suited her to waste it.

Yet for Suzanne Valadon even the course of promiscuity
could not long run smoothly. It was destined to be inter-
rupted by a romantic idyl which lasted almost six months.

Just after Christmas of 1882 she sat for the already eminent
painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Today the legend persists
in Montmartre that Puvis was the first artist she ever sat to,
that it was he, in fact, who started her on her career as an
artist's model The story goes that at the time she met Puvis
de Chavannes she was a laundress, and that one day when she
was delivering the wash to his studio Puvis saw her and was
so struck by her beauty that he prevailed upon her to pose
for him. But the fact that only a month or so previous she had
so seriously injured her back as to be unable to continue in
a circus makes it unlikely that she would have been doing
the strenuous work of a laundress at that time. Her own
account, as recited to her friends through the years, is some-
what more plausible: that Puvis de Chavannes heard of her
success as a model for other artists and sent for her to come
to his studio at Neuilly.

Suzanne was seventeen, and Puvis de Chavannes was fifty-
seven a tall, impeccably clad dandy with square shoulders
and a proud, imperial beard. One would take him to be a
successful lawyer or a politician of the Palais Royale rather
than an artist. "At any rate he looks very famous," his friend,

57

the sculptor Rodin, said of him, "and one suspects he had the
same imperious beard when he was a schoolboy." Famous he
was, at that time certainly better known throughout the
world than any of the other Montmartre artists. He was said
to be immensely wealthy, partly by virtue of the considerable
sums his murals commanded, partly because he was the scion of
an old and eminently prosperous Burgundian family. He had
been educated at Lyons College and later at the Lycee Henri
IV in Paris in preparation for a career as a mining engineer.
But when he was eighteen a serious bout with pneumonia sent
him to Italy to convalesce. There he became enamored of
the placid moods of the quattrocento masters and decided
to become an artist. Returning to Paris, he studied art under
the academicians Scheffer and Couture; and in the Salon of
1852 he exhibited a Pieta imitative of the Giotto fresco in the
Arena chapel in Padua. In 1852 and 1853 he was rejected by
the Salon and did not bother to submit again until 1859, this
time with "Return from Hunting," in the uninspired academic
style. "It was a very dull picture, and it looked as though
I had completely lost interest in easel painting which I had,"
he confessed in a letter to his friend Bloy.

Through some family connections he was finally called
upon to execute a mural in the library in his native Lyons.
The spell of Giotto in Padua was heavily upon him, and he
went back to Italy for a month before he undertook his first
sketches. Once he began work he realized that the walls gave
him room to free himself from the constrictions of academic
easel painting. But they did more than that: they allowed him
to break from that tendency he feared most to become
caught up in the oncoming flood of Realist-Impressionism
undammed by Courbet and Manet. The style which now
emerged was purely his own, a heritage but certainly not an
imitation of his beloved painters of the quattrocento. Simpli-
fying his drawing and muting his colors, he brought to his
murals not what his eye perceived but the feelings his observa-

tions released. These were reflected in the mood of serenity
in which he composed them the subdued color tones and
lyrical lines speaking for the leisurely pace of his brushwork,
for the relaxed pipe-smoking and humming he did on the
scaffold. Tranquillity was the over-all mood of his work, and
it struck a responsive chord in the critics and the public of his
day as no other painting had done. And the fact that his art
found its being on the walls of public buildings, possessions
of the people, and not in the homes of the bourgeoisie or
aristocracy, endeared it considerably to the democratic public
heart. His success was immediate, and shortly his fees became
astronomical

For six months during the autumn and winter of 1882-
1883 Suzanne left Madeleine to grumble to herself in their
one-room flat in the rue du Poteau and moved into Puvis de
Chavannes' apartment at Neuilly as mistress of the famous
artist. Although for more than twenty years Puvis de Cha-
vannes had cherished a love for the Princess Cantacuzene,
the wife of a Romanian nobleman living in Paris, he was still
a bachelor. This romance had been kept alive by a fervent
exchange of verse, gifts, and pale pink roses, but, because
of the chivalrous convictions of the lover, had reached a
no more intimate basis of realization. Dante and Beatrice
were reborn in nineteenth-century Paris. Then quite sud-
denly after twenty years, Puvis de Chavannes had renounced
celibacy and had taken to sleeping with his models. This
strange turn in behavior had not in the least altered his atti-
tude to the princess: he continued to shower her with gifts,
spent long hours composing poetry worthy of her virtue, and
continued the flow of pale pink roses. But to one of his
aesthetic pupils who had not as yet discovered the new twist
in his morality he confessed, "You'll soon discover I'm no
saint. There is nothing better in the world than passionately
loving women and voluptuousness." By the time he sent
for Suzanne Valadon, the student and the rest of his col-

59

leagues on the Butte had been more than moderately startled
by his amatory exploits.

Puvis, the man of the world, knew the heart of a young
girl even though he may have found it increasingly difficult
to keep up with the demands of her body. He did not fail to
note the light in Suzanne's eyes when she first stepped into
the gold-and-white foyer of his apartment, as she took in
expanses of the Aubusson carpets, the furniture by Topino,
the crystal chandelier, and the bed with the fleur-de-lis pat-
terned silk by Philippe de Lasalle. She might not have rec-
ognized it for what it was, but clearly she had never before
been surrounded by such elegance. She was standing on the
threshold of a girlish dream, and it was within his power to
make it come true for her.

"The landscape," he once wrote, "must awaken dreams and
strike chords of feeling to summon a mood of solemnity, to
delight the eye, and uplift the spirit." For Suzanne he was
eager to create such a landscape. In a way he might some-
what bitterly have resented being called "fatherly"; it amused
him to observe her reaction to a way of life hitherto alien to
her. More practically, he did not want to lose an excellent
model, one who was so completely satisfying that he was
using her for both the feminine and the masculine figures of
his "The Woods Sacred to the Arts and to the Muses," the
painting which was currently occupying his attention. It
never dawned upon him that in transplanting her to the
atmosphere in which he lived he threatened to destroy crea-
tive powers which sprang from her savage and unsophisti-
cated way of life.

At first Suzanne was dazzled indeed. The cool, controlled
pace of her lover's existence subtly seemed to sap from the
young girl all the turbulence which had been the essence of
her former life. It was a pleasant new sensation. The tran-
quillity so much admired in the painting of Puvis de Cha-
vannes was indeed at the very root of his character. Every-

60

thing he did was suffused with it. He never hurried. He
could search for a shirt stud for an hour unruffled, without a
flicker of ill temper. He walked "like a monk reading his
breviary"; and at his work the long, unhurried measures of
his brushstrokes transferred his serenity to his canvas. Gentle,
unpedantic, quietly entertaining, he ordered the gentle tenure
of their days together, and she was mysteriously without the
power to disturb them. Once or twice, with a supreme effort,
she was able to rouse a flicker of temper which she thought
would disconcert him. It was to no avail. He would not
take her to a cabaret? Very well. She would go alone. She
would flounce into the street, waiting at the doorway below
for him to follow. But he did not come; and after an hour
of waiting she would return, contrite and pouting, to find
him reading a book. Or she would refuse to pose for him,
telling him that his pictures were soulless and bored her, that
she wanted nothing more to do with them. Unruffled, he
would go on with his work after assuring her kindly that she
was probably tired and that, if he really needed a model, he
would call another. In a little while she would be back on
the model's stand.

For the first time in her life Suzanne found herself domi-
nated by the mood of another human being. It was easy to
be passive when one was fairly smothered in amiability, when
everything done was in pursuit of tranquil joyousness, when
one was always surrounded by beautiful and elegant things,
comfort and ease. One lost the urge to control one's own
destiny when one was in the charge of a powerful man whose
only wish seemed to be contentment. Suzanne did not know
by what means this master artist had created the dream in
which she now lived, the lovely illusion of peace which had
suddenly captured her. In a vague way she had expected her
voluptuousness to demean him, not because she was not fond
of him but because Youth delighted in the foibles of Age.
But he had been neither hurt nor ashamed by their physical

61

relationship. He had merely taken control of the situation
and without any great show had steered the course of their
lives on another tack.

What he created then was a glowing, tender idyl suffused
with soft poetry, as serenely devised and as gently applied
as the pale blues and greens and misty grays with which he
swathed the poised figures of his murals. She would always
remember their many long walks in the twilight along the
glimmering boulevards, and chaste suppers in the gracious
atmosphere of the Tour d'Argent or Laperouse, the glitter of
nights at the Opera, the rides in an open carriage under the
shadows of the lime trees in the Bois de Boulogne, and their
occasional visits to cafes of Montmartre frequented by
the artists. He gave her her first lessons in gastronomy and
taught her the rudiments of wine tasting. He presented her
with a little pearl ring.

Long afterward Suzanne suspected that, having created the
dream, he also determined its duration. He spoke once of
marrying her, but it was in an offhand way which did not
allow her an opportunity to give an answer. He continued
to send pale pink roses to the Princess Cantacuzene, and
Suzanne could recall a couple of instances when she herself
posted his letters to his beloved. Strangely, she was not
jealous. The letters, like everything else, seemed to her unreal.

And in her memory Suzanne could find no signal for the
dissolution of the idyl. Slowly, imperceptibly, it evaporated
into nothingness like one of the pallid mists of a Puvis de
Chavannes landscape. There were no struggles, no pains, no
miserable voids, no sentimental souvenirs to conjure tears.
Suddenly she was back in the rue du Poteau with Madeleine
in the familiar one-room tenement, Cinderella after the ball;
and there were friendly platonic greetings when she encoun-
tered Puvis de Chavannes on the Montmartre streets.

She posed for him again in 1884, and in 1886 she sat for the
preliminary sketches of the "Life of St. Genevieve," which

62

was later to grace the walls of the Pantheon. In both cases
the sittings were on a purely professional basis, and, accord-
ing to Suzanne, the fees were somewhat higher than normal.
She had awakened from the dream, and around her once more
was the intoxicating whirl of ecstasy, passion, and self-pos-
session which was her natural element.

Perhaps it was while the idyl with Puvis de Chavannes was
dissolving (for it was early in the spring of 1883) that Su-
zanne was in the Chat Noir on the Boulevard de Rochechouart
one evening with a group of old Montmartre friends. During
the course of the evening a young Catalan engineering
student, one Miguel Utrillo, rose from the table he was oc-
cupying with some of his fellow students and, commanding
the attention of the rest of the customers, launched into a
two-hour lecture on a Catalan dance called the Bal del Cm y
performed in the church by outgoing church wardens. It
was an extraordinary lecture, peppered with Catalan folklore
and wit, and the young man concluded it with an exhibition
of leaping contrepas and sardanas which, to his own tuneful
baritone accompaniment, he executed with consummate grace.

Similar spontaneous acts had frequently been performed
in the place ever since the Chat Noir had opened its doors the
year before. The cabaret was the creation of a theatrical-
minded Swiss, Rodolphe de Salis, and was inspired by the
thriving business then being enjoyed by another cabaret called
the Grande Pinte, which had attracted an especially chic
clientele merely by decorating its walls with some historical
chromos. Salis' inspiration carried him considerably farther.
He re-created the interior of a tavern of the period of Louis
XIII, complete with a gigantic open fireplace and great
charred ceiling beams. On the walls and from the ceiling he
hung copper cooking utensils, armor, and hunting para-
phernalia, and he furnished the hall with massive oaken chairs
and tables which it required the services of liveried waiters to

63

budge. "God created the world, Napoleon created the Legion
of Honor, but I created Montmartre," was Salis' modest boast.
There was, however, a grain of truth in his claim: he set
the standard for the air of informality which brought the
world to the Montmartre cabarets.

At first Salis depended on little more than his own per-
sonality to attract the public his soaring egotism and a mix-
ture of pseudo-seventeenth-century wit and Montmartre
argot. The rest of the entertainment he provided was drawn
from the good spirits of his customers. With remarkable suc-
cess he called upon the patrons to display their talents to
render songs, play musical instruments, read poems, perform
magic tricks, and act out dramatic sketches. One of these
customers, Aristide Bruant, subsequently became one of the
greatest theatrical idols of France. The flamboyant Bruant,
first a singer of sentimental Montmartre songs, then master of
ceremonies, was finally to become the proprietor of the
premises. At the peak of his career he broke with Salis; and
when Salis moved the Chat Noir to larger quarters in the rue
de Laval, Bruant opened his own Mirliton on the old site.

But while Bruant was at the Chat Noir and his lively wit
and argot songs depicting the joys and miseries of the dis-
possessed were enchanting the night-club crowd, the intelli-
gentsia, which considered itself responsible for the success of
both Salis and Bruant, withdrew to a room in the rear which
became known as "the Institute." Salis, who could not resist
any ironic twist, decked the waiters in green livery identical
with the uniforms worn by the venerable members of the
French Academy. From that point on he left amusement to
the patrons themselves. So, while in the main hall of the
cabaret the Philistines gathered to drink their beer at sixty-
five centimes a glass, in the Institute the customers drank
absinthe or cognac at twenty centimes, and amused them-
selves. Entertainment was of a high order indeed. It was in
the Institute that Henri Riviere inaugurated the famous

shadow theater after the fashion of the Chinese. There Guy
de Maupassant read his stories aloud, Sarah Bernhardt and
Coquelin cadet performed Shakespearean dialogues, and Ste-
phane Mallarme and sometimes Paul Verlaine spoke their
verses. Anatole France, Andre Gill, Jean-Louis Forain,
Georges Auriol, Andr Antoine, and young Claude Debussy,
too, exhibited their various skills when the mood was upon
them, and were roundly cheered by that group of artists,
models, musicians, students, and writers who were pleased
to consider themselves, according to one of their number,
"the only intellectual force of the Third Republic."

Young Miguel Utrillo, with his two-hour lecture on the
Bal del Ciri y was not out of place in such company. An
engineering student at the Institute Agronomique on the
Right Bank, he affected the velvet jacket and broad-brimmed
hat of the true Montmartroti, and together with many of his
fellow students spent his hours of relaxation on the Butte.
There, as Jean-Louis Forain had put it, "Youth could behave
as fantastically as it pleased without being conspicuous."
Utrillo's urge to be conspicuous came but rarely, but come
it did. He was to be remembered for some rime for having
ridden into the Moulin de la Galette on the back of a donkey,
for having staged a mock bullfight in the lobby of the Boule
Noir, and for having arrived among the dancers at the lysee-
Montmartre with a pushcart of fish.

He was the only son of a well-to-do family of Barcelona.
Both his mother and his father were "Sunday painters," and
a cousin on his father's side of the family was making a
name for himself as a portrait artist in Catalonia. Miguel
himself had studied art at La Llonja, the Provisional School
of Fine Arts, where he was a classmate and boon companion
of the painters Santiago Rusifiol and Ramon Casas. In the
course of his studies he had switched from painting to archi-
tecture; and it was only after five years, during which he
received two first prizes, that he decided upon yet another

After the Bath. Pastel drawing by Suzanne Valadon. 1908.
Courtesy of the Lefeme Gallery, London.

Ltff. Seated Nude Woman
with Standing Woman Seen
from Back in the Background.
Crayon drawing by Suzanne
Valadon. Courtesy of the Art
Institute of Chicago. Below.
Family Bath. Drawing by Su-
zanne Valadon. 1910. Courtesy
of the Lefevre Gallery, Lon-
don.

65

switch, this rime to engineering. And it was this that had
brought him to Paris.

His lecture at the Chat Noir delighted Suzanne Valadon
as much as it did the other habitues of the Institute. Whether
or not this was the occasion of their first meeting we do not
know. Suzanne often spoke of Miguel's lecture, especially of
the contrepas and sardanas which he subsequently taught her
and which she often later performed at parties. However,
shortly after the performance at the Chat Noir she was to be
found frequently in his company. And it was indeed she
(along with Casas and Rusinol) who trailed him as the push-
cart of fish made its way across the dance floor of the filysee-
Montmartre.

It is known that they often ate their meals together that
spring beneath the arbors of the Guinguette or in the garden
of the Franc-Buveur; and it was presumed by most of the
people who knew them that they were lovers. Suzanne's
reputation left little reason for any other conclusion. She
made no secret of her relationship with the Breton waiter, the
postman Leconte, Zandomeneghi, Guichet, Puvis de Cha-
vannes, and a number of others. When in the fall of 1883,
therefore, Utrillo and she were still often seen together and
she was obviously pregnant, it was generally assumed that
he was responsible for her condition.

But among the gossips of the quarter the question of im-
pending paternity was moot indeed. Edmond Heuze, one of
Montmartre's most reliable chroniclers, remembers an old
Montmartre hackman shrugging his shoulders and ruminat-
ing: "The little one is bitten at last, yes? But which mosquito
bit her? Ah, that is the question." And the gossips wondered
too. Was it Puvis de Chavannes? Or the young Catalan?
Or who in between might it have been?

Suzanne herself was unconcerned or, at any rate, made a
studied effort to appear so. She had modeling to do and

66

parties to go to. The serenity of Neuilly behind her, she went
her fitful, darting way once more with renewed zest, albeit
somewhat misshapen. Never one to be shy of the attention
paid her, she was delighted to be the subject of gossip. x\nd
when pressed by her friends as to who was responsible for her
condition she was evasive and coy. If asked point-blank,
"Was it so-and-so?" she merely tossed off an "It could be,"
or an "I hope so," and went on to another subject. As far as
she was concerned, the subject was not worth discussing.

As the birth of the child drew near, Suzanne of course be-
came unemployable as a model The loss of work apparently
did not bother her unduly. She seemed to have money
enough to live on. Whoever the father of her unborn child
was, he had evidently assumed a decent financial obligation
toward her.

She went into labor early on Christmas morning. Made-
leine sent for the midwife whose services had been arranged
for beforehand. Together in the dingy, cluttered room in the
rue du Poteau the two older women prepared for the com-
ing event with that routine of deft puttering which had been
a tradition of midwifery for centuries. The patient's agony
was unheeded. She flew about the room like a scalded cat or
writhed on the bed howling in pain, only to be told with gall-
ing casualness that she was not the first woman in the world
to have a baby. Toward evening the midwife noted aloud
that the birth was taking quite a long time, and Madeleine,
muttering that a child born in sin always took longer to face
the world, began to drink generously of her brandy. The
hours dragged painfully past dawn when the midwife decided
that there might be something wrong, and leaving the patient
in charge of the by then quite drunken mother, went in
search of help. When she returned with a doctor Suzanne

61

was hemorrhaging violently. Meanwhile Madeleine, swaying
before her, was screaming at her that her misery was all her
own doing.

Shortly after noon on December 26 the baby was born a
frail, jaundiced little boy with a head "that looked like an
aubergine" and bore the black bruises of the doctor's forceps
below each ear. Suzanne was barely aware of the birth. She
remembered the little mass of moist flesh somewhere during a
succession of violent chills in a blackening room. Within
minutes of the child's birth she was in a coma.

It was two days before she regained consciousness and
felt the baby drawing greedily from her breast. Madeleine
grinned down at her the first time, Suzanne thought, she
had ever seen her mother smile. "The little one, he saved
your life. The rest of them are fools," Madeleine said. From
then on she was always to insist, "If Maurice had not been
so hungry, you would have died."

Suzanne decided to name the baby Maurice because "there
is no Maurice who could have been his father and because I
like the name." The next day Madeleine registered the child's
birth at the Montmartre mairie. She gave his name as Maurice
Valadon.

Shortly after the birth of Maurice, Suzanne, Madeleine,
and the baby moved from the single room in the rue du
Poteau to a three-room flat at No. 7 rue Tourlaque, an
establishment which the gossips of Montmartre were quick
to note was considerably more cosdy than their former
abode. Since at the time Suzanne was nursing the baby and
could take modeling jobs only at odd hours, it was evident
that she was receiving financial assistance from some source.
There was now a nurse for the baby too. It was also to be
observed (without surprise) that, except for feeding the child,
Suzanne was prone to take motherhood uncommonly lighdy.
As of old, she was off again on a perpetual round of parties,

68

dance halls, and cabarets; and once more she was the object
of masculine attention and was enjoying it as promiscuously
as ever. But it was to be noted also that among her admirers
Miguel Utrillo still commanded a considerable share of her
time.

Then, in the summer of 1884, Miguel completed his studies
at the Institut Agronomique and went to Bulgaria. Six
months later Suzanne reported that he had been transferred
to Germany. From then on she could always be counted
upon for news of his whereabouts; and their mutual friends,
like the gossips of Montmartre, came to believe that between
her and the young Catalan there lay a good deal more
intimacy than met the eye.

Nonetheless, she spent little time in pining for him. He
had not yet left Paris when Suzanne first posed for Pierre-
Auguste Renoir.

Renoir had recently returned from Italy, where he had
gone to study the work of Raphael, Tiepolo, and Veronese.
"I had gone to the end of Impressionism, and I was reaching
the conclusion that I didn't know either how to paint or how
to draw. In a word, I was at a dead end," he was later to
say in explaining his Italian journey. He returned to Paris
now with litde taste for the swelling accolade in the rue
Faubourg St. Honore, where the Parisian art dealers had
begun to receive impressive sums for his pictures. At the age
of forty-one he clung to ramshackle Montmartre and a reso-
lution to acquire the craftsmanship which had given the
Italian masters the simplicity and grandeur he so fervently
admired. He destroyed as many of his old canvases as he
could lay his hands on. So obsessed was he with the impor-
tance of elegant lines that he now drew the individual leaves
of his background trees in pen and ink upon the canvas before
starting to work in color. He no longer painted out of doors,
for he was convinced that his preoccupation with light had

69

caused him to neglect the more basic factors of draftsmanship
and form. "I am suffering from experimentation," George
Moore quotes him as writing. "Fm not content, and I scrape
off, always scrape off. I hope this mania will have an end.
I'm like little children in school the white page is to be
written upon and bang! a blot."

Suzanne knew little and cared less about the perturbation
which was marking a turning point in Renoir's career. To
her, he was no more important as an artist than a score of
others she knew, all heavy with personal artistic problems.
When were artists otherwise? Her story of having once en-
couraged Renoir, when she was a child, advising him to keep
up his painting, may be apocryphal. But she did undoubtedly
see him many times while she was growing up, and being the
gregarious creature she was, she more than likely had a casual
acquaintanceship with him. The fact that he, like her mother,
came from the Limousin gave them a subject for passing
pleasantries. Surely, in her childhood days, Renoir was a
fine sight to see uncommonly handsome, with his peaches-
and-cream complexion, his merry brown eyes, his fragile
upturned nose, and his tousled black hair squashed beneath
the battered felt hat worn on the back of his head. He was
honey to the swarms of midinettes, grisettes, models, and
laundresses of the Butte, all of whom he treated with a kindly,
casual air* Happily he had changed little since those days.
Whatever his mental and artistic problems, he was still a
rapturous little man, exuding amiability, fun, and boundless
love.

"He fell in love with me," Suzanne insisted in after years,
"and at Bougival he painted me in his famous picture." This
account does not jibe with Renoir's own claim that "Le Bal
a Bougival" was painted in his Montmartre studio from
sketches made in the Restaurant Fournaise at Bougival.
Whether or not Suzanne accompanied Renoir on his excur-
sions to the little river town, or whether she simply posed for

70

the actual painting in his Montmartre studio, we do not know.
But in her eagerness to be identified with the famous painting
at the source she was well aware of the fact that in the pre-
ceding year Renoir had been at Bougival and painted his "Le
Dejeuner des Canotiers," and that the model for its central
figure was a young woman named Alice Charigat, who was
soon to become Mme. Renoir. Suzanne was to harbor a dis-
like of Mme. Renoir for the rest of her life.

In spite of the existence of Alice Charigat, Suzanne did
have an affair with Renoir. And brief though it was, she
cherished the memory of it into her old age. At no other
time in her life had Montmartre borne so romantic an air:
never had life been so steeped in charming grace. "The
Montmartre Renoir knew," Pierre Courthion writes, "was a
rose that still had its natural hues in spite of its proximity
to the artifices of the throbbing capital: a rose diamonded in
morning dew. It was a home for lovers, an oasis of light re-
served for youth which could remain unsophisticated in an
atmosphere of carefree gaiety." In its setting a month or two
of love could glisten jewel-like throughout a lifetime of
less innocent pleasures, and in Suzanne's case it did. Renoir
brought her nosegays and presented them with old-fashioned
courtliness. When she strolled about the Butte on his arm
she knew she was the object of envy of every young woman
in the quarter. Such delight was not soon to be forgotten.
And on Sundays! Dancing with Renoir at the Moulin de la
Galette, or accompanying him on picnics to Argenteuil,
Chatou, or perhaps Meudon. Sometimes they made love in
the shadows of the garden in the rue Cortot. Love seemed to
breathe about them in a rosy cloud in which they soared high
above the common clay. In public they behaved as lovers
were supposed to behave with appropriate cooings and sim-
perings, hand squeezings, and occasional displays of bad
temper and jealousy, chiefly on Suzanne's part.

Early in the fall Renoir went to Guernsey, and Suzanne went

71

with him to pose for a nude which he was later to destroy but
which he used in developing the ideas for the classical gran-
deur of "The Bathers," which took him three years to com-
plete. The face of the central figure of the painting bears
some resemblance to Suzanne, but the Goujonesque torso
none. Yet Suzanne often claimed that the figure was hers,
although by 1887, when the painting was completed, her
romance with the artist was long since past and she was not
averse to dismissing him with a spitting gesture and the con-
temptuous expostulation: "Ah Renoir! A fine painter. All
brushes but no heart." But with the passing of many years,
time was to ease much of the pain she felt at first and to leave
it suffused with charm and delight. She could forget entirely
that it was while she was with Renoir at Guernsey that he
received word that Alice Charigat was coming to see him,
and that he had met that situation by ordering Suzanne
Valadon to pack up and leave.

Ill Friendship

ONE DAY IN THE SUMMER OF 1884, WHEN HE HAD CALLED

unexpectedly for her in the rue Tourlaque, Renoir had dis-
covered Suzanne at work on a drawing. "Ah, you too," he
had exclaimed, "and you hide this talent!" But he had gone
no further. He had not asked to see more of her work, had
shown no further interest. And in the time they were to-
gether he had never again alluded to her drawing. Suzanne
was certain that what he had seen of her work had made him
jealous of her ability; that she could create vivid, dynamic
line naturally and easily, whereas he had to labor over his
technique. But in thus slighting her talent, she claimed, it
was Renoir who first brought her the realization that she was
really an artist.

Back in Montmartre once more and licking the wounds to
her pride suffered at Renoir's hands, she was soon once again
subjected to the opinions, disputations, theories, and dogmas
of her artist friends. Art was the eternal subject of all con-
versation; and exposed to its jargon and its dialectics all her
waking hours, she could not help reach a time when "breath-
ing Art was better than breathing air." But it was her good
fortune that she possessed the ability to do something more
than pose, listen, and talk. Conversation and chatter led her
to test the mettle of her own creative powers, to draw more
pictures. This she chose to do secretly, apart from her daily
72

13

world. And in the very fact that she who was gregarious
by nature could remove herself from her friends in order to
apply herself to her work was proof to her of her serious
purpose. The hours she was able to divorce herself from
Bohemia were a secret joy a fresh facet of independence
which she was able to create for herself out of the simple
instruments of paper, pencil, and charcoal. Nevertheless,
these hours were more than mere retreat. They were pro-
ductive. Without the aid of a teacher, purely from her own
inner resources, and sometimes in spurts so powerful that
she could not keep food on her stomach, she was learning to
draw. What she might have garnered from conversation in
a cafe or from observation in an artist's studio was being di-
gested and developed into forceful technique and solid com-
position brimful of her own vivid emotions. But she did not
need instruction in the formal sense, she needed badly the
encouragement of a fellow artist: within it she would find the
boundaries of control. It was this, perhaps, that she had hoped
to find in Renoir, and it was his failure to come to her as-
sistance at this time, as much as his physical rejection of her,
that accounted for her bitterness toward him in kter life.

But Suzanne had, in fact, little time to brood over Renoir's
indifference. From two unexpected sources she was to come
by help and interest which were to launch her securely as a
serious artist Two artists were to launch her one a young
man as yet unknown, the other the recognized dean, the most
successful, the most respected of the Impressionists.

In the spring of 1887 a new tenant arrived in the large
studio on the top floor of the building at No. 7 rue Tourlaque
a young would-be artist of twenty-two who had only
recently completed his studies in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec
had studied first with the deaf master Princiteau, with whom
he had learned to draw and had begun to work in paint; then
with Leon Bonnat, "the painter of millionaires," who was to
win dubious distinction in future histories of art by telling

74

the greatest draftsman of his day, "Your painting is not bad
. . . but your drawing is atrocious." Lastly he had worked
with Fernand Cormoa, the artist who specialized in painting
prehistoric reconstructions. In Cormon's studio Lautrec first
made friends with Louis Anquetin, Vincent Van Gogh,
Henri Rachou, Francois Gauzi, and a coterie of other young
exuberants who, for one reason or another, were to become
his good companions for the remainder of his short and
brilliant life.

Scion of the counts of Toulouse, the ancient defenders of
the Albigensian Cathari, and of the viscounts of Lautrec, with
whom they had been united since the twelfth century, Henri
de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa was born on November 24,
1864, in the large house, part of which seems to have been
a portion of the old medieval wall, at Albi in Languedoc.
As a small child he showed little disposition toward following
the life of riding and hunting which seems to have been his
father's chief occupation. Apart from a short period during
which he attended the aristocratic Lycee Condorcet in Paris,
Lautrec's early childhood was spent under his mother's direc-
tion, either at Albi or at the Chateau de Malrome at Celeyran,
his mother's country home, where the time not devoted to his
studies was given to drawing pictures a recreation in which
he seemed to find inordinate pleasure.

When he was fourteen years old he slipped on a polished
floor and broke his left leg. The following year, while walk-
ing with his mother near Bareges, he fell again and broke
the right one. Neither leg grew again and, after months of
immobility, the boy's entire physique took on an inexplicably
grotesque appearance. When he came to live permanently in
Paris at eighteen, he was a hideous little man with a body and
head too large for his fragile, shuffling pins of legs. He
walked with the aid of a cane. His nose was large "big
enough for two faces,'* the singer Yvette Guilbert observed
upon first seeing him. His skin was dark and oily. A wiry

75

black beard wreathed his face. "I was horrified," Yvette
Guilbert wrote, "until I looked into his eyes. How beautiful,
how large, how wide, rich in color, astonishingly brilliant
and shining! I looked at them for some time, and suddenly
Lautrec, noting my expression, took off his glasses. He was
aware that his eyes were his only attractive feature, and he
generously unveiled them for my inspection."

Lautrec did not live in the rue Tourlaque. He shared a
flat with a doctor friend at No. 19 bis rue Fontaine, but his
rue Tourlaque studio immediately became the focal point of
his life. There, attracted by the magic of his buoyant person-
ality (and in a measure by the generosity of his purse) fore-
gathered the first of those extraordinary companies of "charac-
ters" who for almost thirty years were to symbolize the
spirit of Montmartre throughout the world Adolphe Albert,
the etcher; Tristan Bernard, the journalist and playwright;
the critics Francis Jourdain, Arsene Alexandre, and the jovial,
witty Gustave Coquiot; Maurice Joyant, Lautrec's erstwhile
schoolmate and future biographer, not yet a famous art dealer
but already a great amateur chef; Louis Bougie, manager of
a bicycle-chain manufacturing company and in off-hours a
bicycle rider billed under the name "Spoke"; Aristide Braant,
whose argot songs and ribald wit at the cabaret the Chat
Noir were one of the highlights of Montmartre night life, and
a host of others. The order of business was talk. There were
curses and tirades against the Bonnats and Cormons, boister-
ous approval or rejection of the work of Ingres or Delacroix,
Manet or Degas, Monet or Pissarro. There were endless argu-
ments over the abilities of bicycle riders, prize fighters, the
power of the French navy, religion, Rosicrucianism, the vir-
tues and faults of Seurat's Pointillism, or Symbolism, of
Degas' "keyhole nudes," of Zola's UOeuvre, which repudi-
ated Impressionism and which Cezanne took to be a personal
attack on himself. The entire new Societe des Artistes Inde-
pendants came in for criticism as well as the Academicians

16

and Impressionists, "Interplay of colors," "brushstrokes,"
"visionary qualities," "luminosity, color, and harmony" shared
attention with less abstruse matters, such as the quality of the
beer at the Belle Gabrielle, the amatory techniques of "the
girls" in the rue d'Amboise, the wrestling matches at the
Folies Bergere, the odds on the horses at Longchamps and
Maison Lafitte, the disputes between the managers at the
Velodrome-Buffalo, or the performance of the new invention
the telephone. The studio vibrated with chatter while Lau-
trec, a stubby figure dressed in a large white apron and with
a towel over his arm like a waiter, hobbled between his easel,
where he continued to paint in spite of the confusion about
him, and the bar, where he mixed "cocktails" for himself and
his friends.

Often he made these mixtures blindfolded. Or he would
create the potion numerically by asking one of the company
to choose a number between one and ten and another guest
to choose a direction, right or left. He would then pour from
die number of bottles selected by the first guest from the
direction of the bar selected by the second one and pass the
resulting drinks around. To prevent overindulgence in water
on the part of the company he had goldfish swimming in the
carafes. If Maurice Joyant did not oblige by preparing one
of his delectable dinners, the evening's repast would be
limited to salted herrings to keep everyone's thirst at an active
pitch. Sometimes the party would gather up its bottles and
proceed to other studios on the Hill ( Anquetin was the son of
a prosperous butcher and could also afford to supply drinks).
Or they would install themselves Chez Bouscarat in the Place
du Tertre, or among the Louis XIII trappings of Rodolphe
Salis 7 Chat Noir, at Bruant's Mirliton (where he had recently
started in business for himself), or along the railings at the
Moulin de la Galette or in the fauteutts of the Cirque Fer-
nando. Lautrec drank constantly to anesthetize the pain in
his legs and in prodigious quantities. Yet he always man-

77

aged to remain erect and was very proud that he could always
outdrink any of his friends.

Sometimes he gave elegant dinners in fine restaurants "en
smoking" at other rimes homey "family" affairs in Pere
Lathuile's latticed garden in the Avenue de Clichy. He loved
picnics and boating parties along the Seine. And frequently
he was given to sudden inspirations which reflected the
strength of his artistic passions and the originality of his mind.

"Lautrec was giving one of those elaborate luncheons he
loved so to arrange," Vuillard, the self-styled "intimist" of the
Nabis, tells us. "He knew the specialties of all the Paris res-
taurants, and so he decided that for this luncheon we would
eat each dish at a different restaurant. It would be a veritable
feast for kings. Lautrec brought the wine from his mother's
cellar. Then, at the end of the meal, when our palates were
stimulated to the highest pitch, we wondered what superb
touch would conclude such a magnificent repast. Lautrec,
inspired, rose and began to lead us Heaven only knew
where. He did not say a word. A bit suspicious as to what
whimsical notion might be taking wing in his unpredictable
mind, we followed him up three flights of stairs leading to the
Dihau flat in the rue Frochot. With the most cursory
acknowledgment of the tenants of the flat, he led us before
Degas' portrait of Dihau playing the bassoon in the Opera
orchestra, and announced with very deep feeling: 'There is
dessert.' "

At these gatherings of Lautrec's Suzanne soon became a
kind of unofficial hostess. Often she was the only woman
present. To Lautrec she was, before all else, a fellow spirit,
one who in this wonderful springtime could be a vibrant ad-
junct to the gaiety his soul craved. On fire for the dramatic
and picturesque and openly at war with the commonplace,
this little Montmartre model could flout convention as bravely
as Lautrec himself. She spoke her mind with the ferocity of
the enfant terrible. Her wit was pungent, her tongue acid.

IS

She was very beautiful, the object of unreserved admiration
among his men friends; and the fact that she was so and at the
same time was his friend was something for which he was
humbly grateful.

Perhaps it was in gratitude to her that he first evinced
interest in her development as an artist. In much the same
way as Renoir had happened upon her at work in her flat,
Lautrec discovered her. He had come to ask her to join him
at a party. (It was a source of deep satisfaction to him that
she was so tiny that he could appear with her in public and
seem less grotesque.) Suzanne was busy on a charcoal sketch.
What Lautrec saw on her pad so delighted him that he forgot
about the party and stayed, perched on the edge of a chair,
watching her and marveling aloud at what she was doing.
From that time onward he would often tap on her door with
his stick and peek in to demand cheerily, "What is the good
work today?" If she had any new drawing to show him, he
would come in and, forgetting anything else which might
have been in his mind at the moment, would give himself
fully to a study of her accomplishment.

He was her first customer. He bought a couple of her
drawings and hung them in his flat, where he amused himself
by asking his friends to identify their author. Were they
Degas' or Steinlen's, Willette's or perhaps Rodin's? It was
agreed that they were certainly the work of an artist of
stature, an artist who, if yet unrecognized, was certain to be
heard of soon.

Often, too, Lautrec would call Suzanne up to his studio to
criticize something he had done, for he seemed as respectful
of her critical opinions as he was of her artistic ability. Fre-
quently they would sketch together, comparing and analyzing
each other's work before they consigned the completed pair
of drawings to the fireplace in spite of each other's protests.

Between 1887 and 1890 Suzanne posed for him many times,
although he was unwilling to pose for her. Such ugliness as

19

his was a subject fit only for his own satirical brush. She sat
for "Gueule de Bois," the hangover sprawled at a cafe table.
But it was not a pose she executed for money. It was un-
thinkable that their relationship should be reduced to profes-
sional terms: "Gueule de Bois" was a lark, an experience they
shared in high spirits, a little private joke that came as an
aftermath of one of Lautrec's less inhibited parties. On
another occasion he painted her sitting in a straw yachting
hat, elegant and youthful, and yet another time in the "Por-
trait of Suzanne Valadon," which now hangs in the Ny Carls-
berg Glyptothek in Copenhagen, in the great butterfly hat he
himself had helped her select. Both these sittings were held in
the flickering sunlight of the garden of a neighbor of his, M.
Forest. In this portrait, alone with the little man who has
become her very true friend, the first one to know who she
really is and where she is going, she sits pensive, lyrically
lovely. He painted her with a gentle tenderness never again
to be captured in any of the hundreds of pictures of women
he was destined to produce.

As their friendship ripened Lautrec tended to assume ar
proprietary air toward Suzanne which she would hardly have
countenanced from anyone else. He constituted himself her
counselor, advised her what clothes to wear, and even went
with her when she bought a hat. He told her how to handle
her mother, what she should do about the education of her
little boy, what she should eat, how she should look after her
health. Even when he suggested that she change her name to
Suzanne because Marie-Clementine was too prosaic, she ac-
cepted the suggestion blithely and gave him the first drawing
she executed over her new signature.

She had, in fact, a more profound reason to accept Lau-
trec's intimate friendship than he might have guessed. From
earliest infancy her son Maurice had been subject to inexpli-
cable fits of rage. Lying peacefully in his grandmother's arms,
his body would suddenly stiffen and shudder violently. He

80

would squeeze his eyes shut, bite his lips, and hold his breath
until he went purple as a grape. In a panic Madeleine would
rush to put him in a basin of warm water, wrap his head in
a warm, moist towel, or feed him a cbabrot, a hot mixture of
soup and red wine which was believed by the peasants of the
Limousin to be a remedy for many nervous disorders. Soon
he would relax and go to sleep. As he grew older the boy
would throw himself to the floor, beating it wildly with his
fists and feet. He would kick over pieces of furniture, rip
curtains or bed linen, smash his grandmother's china figurines.
Or he would threaten to jump from the window of the flat or
hurl himself before the traffic in the rue Caulaincourt. Equally
sudden were his outbursts of grief. He might be quietly
playing with a toy or watching the drays and carriages pass
in the street below when tears would stream down his cheeks
and his small frame would tremble in paroxysms of misery.
At the sound of a doorbell, a pot boiling on the stove, or an
angry voice directed at an animal he would be overcome with
rage or dissolve in tears of sorrow.

Otherwise he was tractable enough a small, frail, and
solemn little boy with deep-set blue eyes and a gentle timid
voice given to long rolling sentences which trailed off to a
whisper or were left uncompleted. Suzanne, for all the affec-
tion she held for the child, was a poor mother. Always short
of time and constantly spinning in the whirl of complications
and ecstasies which were her professional life, she contributed
very little emotional stability to the home. She, too, had her
passions, her fits of rage, her bursts of strident laughter, her
occasional vulgar humor. They did not make her an easy
person to live with; and no amount of impulsive embraces,
kisses, pats on the head, toys, and boxes of chocolates could
disguise their lurking danger. Not that the little boy feared
her or failed to extend toward her the sweetness of his trem-
ulous affection. She had only to open the door and stand in
the doorway and he would burst into tears with the joy of

seeing her. He adored her. "Oh, my mtmm, how beautiful
you are! I love you more than anything in the world!" he
would sob. But Suzanne knew in her heart that Maurice
could not help but be haunted by the knowledge that the
vision of loveliness he treasured could be shattered utterly
by her mood of the moment.

It was with his grandmother that he really lived, as
Suzanne knew. Madeleine, having rejected the affections of
her daughter, was determined not to make the same mistake
with her grandson. With her Maurice dispelled the apathy
she had felt toward the human race since her flight from
Bessines, and on him she poured out the love which all her
life had been suppressed. The child was her whole existence.
She made his clothes. He slept in her bed. Together they
played games. As he grew up they developed a special
language which was theirs alone. It was she who first called
him "Maumau," the nickname which remained with him the
rest of his life. And in his turn he loved her with equal
fervor. He loved to hold her hand and sit on her lap. He
loved the purr of her voice. "Talk. Talk, grancFmere. It
does not matter what you say only talk."

Though Suzanne might have been jealous of this com-
panionship, she was not. In fact she looked upon it with con-
siderable tenderness and not without pride. It was as though,
at long last, she had a gift to offer her mother which was
being accepted with joy. Maurice was her gift. She had
finally been able to present her mother with something of her
doing which had met with approval. From the time she had
been a tiny child she had hoped for this, and now it had
come.

And yet she felt somehow that it was ironic that the little
boy was not the perfect little cherub she would have wished
to offer. One gift accepted in a lifetime should have been
flawless. She could not close her eyes to the fact that Maurice
was not. Often, bewildered and saddened by some outrageous

82

thing the child did, she would turn to the only friend she
knew who might console her Lautrec, the genial, misshapen
one. And somehow, from his optimism, won in the face of
such appalling adversity, she would always take heart that in
the end everything would turn out all right. There was no
cause to worry about the strange behavior of her little boy.

It was Lautrec who insisted that she take samples of her
work to Degas, who lived across the courtyard from him in
the rue Fontaine. Degas was Lautrec's idol, the man whose
work he most admired. Lautrec's enthusiasm for her work
was not enough. For all his passionate determination to be
an artist Lautrec had yet to create a ripple of interest in his
own work. What he had to say of Suzanne's talent was mean-
ingless. But if Suzanne was going to devote her energies
entirely to drawing, as he thought she should, she ought to
submit her work to the judgment of a real artist. And of
the professionally genuine men of art there was no one whose
opinion could be of more value than Edgar Degas'.

Of the thirty young artists who had exhibited in the First
Group Exhibition in 1874 (later to be known as the First Im-
pressionist Exhibition) Degas was certainly the one who had
come the furthest in critical acclaim and public acceptance.
Durand-Ruel, the dealer who had successfully popularized
the work of Boudin, Corot, and Millet before the coming of
the Impressionists, and who had given over his own gallery
at 1 1 rue le Pelletier for the Second Impressionist Exhibition,
had no trouble selling such works of Degas as he could
convince that neurasthenic artist to part with. Edmond Du-
ranty, the most knowledgeable of Parisian critics, put Degas'
worth a good notch above that of the other Impressionists;
and J. K. Huysmans, already a man of literary importance,
was his impassioned champion. By the cognoscenti as well
as by the public, Degas was considered the foremost painter
of his day.

83

Degas had abandoned his study of law to enroll at the co!e
des Beaux-Arts under Ingres' pupil Lamothe. More or less
regularly over a period of ten years he had submitted pictures
to the Salon, and for the most part they had been accepted
and had won applause. But Degas had an intense respect for
the creative ability entrusted to man by God, and it was only
with chafing difficulty that he could bear to see talent shackled
to the impoverished imagination of the Academy teachers.
Man's productive powers were limitless: it was criminally
wasteful to hold them to formulae.

Otherwise Degas had no fight with the Salon. For himself
he was quite happy with the instruction he had received at
the Beaux-Arts. To a person of his intellectual powers and
originality, however, recognition by the Salon or from any
official quarter was quite meaningless. For example, his con-
tempt for Manet, who was frankly eager to receive the red
ribbon of the Legion of Honor, was unbounded.

But in spite of his predisposition to chart and sail his own
independent course, Degas felt himself drawn to the Impres-
sionists. For all his doubting of their theories, they nonethe-
less offered a concerted revolt against the rigidity and preju-
dices of the established order; and his cold, logical mind told
him that the group was more likely to succeed than the in-
dividual. Cynically confident that the revolutionaries would
eventually attempt to hew all developments to their own set
of intransigent theories, he was, for the present, willing to
join their ranks. He was derisive of their shimmering sunlight
and leaves, of the air which they sought to breathe into their
pictures. "The air one breathes in a picture is not the air one
breathes out of doors," he told Ambroise Vollard. Before a
group of Monet and Sisley landscapes in the Durand-Ruel
galleries he turned up the collar of his coat and growled, "I
hate drafts."

The Impressionist passion for dissolving form into atmos-
phere infuriated him, for to his ordered mind drawing was

84

the very core of artistic expression, and he believed with
Ingres that "an object well drawn is an object well painted."
"The study of Nature is insignificant," he wrote; "it is in-
finitely more important to learn to draw from Holbein." To
Degas, the presence of a human being in a picture was worth
the most meticulous draftsmanship: he had no patience with
the Impressionist inclination to treat the human silhouette
accidentally. And although he himself became more and
more dependent upon color for his effects, he maintained that
color was far less important than line. Still, he recognized in
the Impressionist revolt an acceptance of the reality of the
times in which he was living a modern world distinguished
by its scientific restlessness and eagerness for truth. And it
was from that world, he insisted, that the art of his own day
must come.

The fleeting moment as modern reality thus became the
substance of his art. No poses. No contrived prettiness. He
selected the angles of realistic vision the view from above,
the view from below, the subject off center, foreshortened;
the unnatural gaslight, the ungainly, even vulgar movements
from which magically beauty springs in the intimacy of a
woman's toilet, at the barre of a ballet class, at the ironing
board or wash tub, on a street corner, at a cafe, in a theater.
His was the camera's click, the instant solidified in incisive,
unfaltering line which precisely rendered the life of the
nineteenth century.

Degas the man was as restless as his day. He was a Royalist
at a time when the monarchy had been forever lost to France.
He was successful at a time when the failures of his associates
bore an aura of nobility and immortality. Even his economic
security was inappropriate: the great work was supposed to
be done by the poor. But while the other artists wore work-
ingmen's corduroys and berets, Degas dressed in tweeds like
an English dandy. Physically he seemed to have come out of
the Second Empire, yet his point of view was so far in advance

85

of his day that he was already developing techniques for
photography, a science which was as yet virtually unborn.

Degas might align himself with the Impressionists and
might, indeed, assume leadership in organizing seven of their
eight exhibitions, yet he would always be an outsider. It was
not in his nature to "belong." He was deeply suspicious of
"schools" and "movements." Even in his relations with mem-
bers of his own family and with his friends he maintained a
respectable distance. When he was still a very young man
he began to have fits of depression and hypochondria which
were to remain with him, growing ever worse, to the end of
his life. In 1870, when he was enlisting in the artillery, the
doctors discovered that he was losing the sight in his right
eye. Nevertheless he was accepted for military service. He
never saw combat, but he was billeted uncomfortably and
claimed later that the dampness had further accelerated the
loss of his vision. The doctor's diagnosis unnerved him: he
began to wait for blindness.

In 1886 Degas relinquished the bulk of his fortune in order
to help a brother who had lost heavily in American cotton
speculations. From then on he was occasionally obliged to
sell some of his pictures. He now became painfully fright-
ened. He had always disliked parting with his paintings.
Durand-Ruel continually pleaded with him to increase his
output; but with Degas it was a question not of meager pro-
duction but of his unwillingness to separate himself from his
work. He wanted to rework everything he accomplished.
It had to be perfect; in his eyes he knew it never would be,
but he wanted his work around him. He could love a picture
trustingly as he had never been able to love a living creature.
Many times he would borrow a picture from someone who
had bought it on the pretext that he wanted to retouch it.
He would then forget to return it. The singer Faure had to
go to law in order to recover two pictures Degas had "bor-
rowed" from him eleven years before and had consistently

86

promised to return "in a few days" or "tomorrow." Henri
Rouart, another friend, of somewhat cannier substance than
Faure, chained and padlocked his Degas pictures to his walls
and insisted he had lost the keys.

When he was in Paris he walked long hours in the back
streets where he could escape from the familiar surroundings
of his living quarters, his studio, or the cafes he had once
known. In his flat he artificially created a sense of movement
and instability by constantly shifting the furniture and the
pictures on the walls. "It's the movement of things and people
which both distracts and consoles me," he wrote to his friend
Rouart; "that is, if it's possible to be consoled when one is so
miserable. If the leaves of the trees don't stir, the trees are as
miserable as we are."

Degas was given to moving fretfully from place to place;
he could not stay long anywhere. In 1872 he had stood on
the platform of the Gare St. Lazare to bid farewell to his
brother, who was leaving for New Orleans. On the spur of
the moment, as the train began to pull out of the station, he
hopped on: he ended by sailing to the New World. After
six months in Louisiana he returned to France Paris for a
while, then to Menil-Hubert near Gace (Orne) to stay with
his friends the Valpingons; then to Dieppe, where he first met
Gauguin, one of the few contemporaries whose work he
bought for his own collection; to Couteret to take the cure
for his asthma; to Mont St. Michel; to Le Havre; to Bur-
gundy, Italy, Sicily, Spain, and Tangiers.

As he grew older his depressing moods increased and he
began to speak cynically of his work as "articles" pieces of
merchandise destined for the vulgar marts of trade, the art
galleries. And he showed little disposition to finish any work
he began. Unendingly his eyesight was a subject of his com-
plaining. "Ah, la vtie, la vue, la vue?* he whined. Yet his
vision was not nearly so bad as he would have people think
it was. True, his housekeeper Zoe read him the newspapers

87

each day, but he could spot on the opposite side of the street
an acquaintance who happened to miss seeing him, and would
complain to Ambroise Vollard, the dealer, that people
snubbed him on the streets. He still did the close work of
engraving and lithographing. Nevertheless, he was increas-
ingly querulous and contentious. Few who knew him came
to see him, and many went out of their way to avoid him.
"A great wrangler and formidable debater," Paul Valery
found him, "especially sensitive on the subjects of politics and
draftsmanship."

Long before he was an old man, indeed, Degas had become
perfectly adamant on the subject of draftsmanship. It was the
cornerstone of art, he claimed, just as Ingres had; and, as we
have seen, his main quarrel with the Impressionists arose from
the fact that they neglected draftsmanship in their obsession
for light and fresh air. Degas was unwilling to accept the
notion that draftsmanship might be achieved solely by an
artist's own efforts, by the development of a natural talent;
he felt that it should be studied laboriously. It could be
achieved only by endless repetitions and rigid discipline.
Furthermore, draftsmanship could result only from a deep
appreciation of the great masters of the past Ingres, Leo-
nardo, and others.

All this Lautrec had heard and listened to. But he did not
believe. In proof, he told the Master, he would send him a
"natural artist" one who had never received instruction
from anyone and who had probably never even seen a draw-
ing by Ingres or, for that matter, even a painting by Leonardo.

Thus Lautrec laid the groundwork for the meeting in 1887
which to Suzanne Valadon was always to be "the wonderful
moment of my life."

"Lautrec's great brown eyes laughed behind his thick
glasses, and his mouth was as solemn and grave as a priest's
when he told me I must go to M. Degas with my drawings,"
Suzanne was to recall many, many times. The event had the

88

aura of a Victorian theatrical about it the young girl for
some unknown reason dressed in all her best things, and those
things "all wrong." Her hat would not stay straight; there
was a gap in the toe of one of her patent-leather shoes, her
huge portfolio weighed her down. Then Degas' somber*
cluttered house, his formidable starched housekeeper, the in-
terminable wait in his study while she smarted with bitter
chagrin over the fact that she had given her name as "Marie-
Clementine" and not as "Suzanne," her artist name. The pic-
tures on the walls were swallowed in darkness: she could not
make them out. From the corridor came a sudden blast of
tyrannical rage directed at a servant. Finally the Master ap-
peared through the portieres, a lean little man with quick,
shrewd, sunken eyes, high-domed forehead, suspicious mouth.
Was he hero or villain? Not until later did she remember
having seen him in salt-and-pepper tweeds, swathed in scarves
at the Nouvelle-Athenes, when she was a child. But once she
remembered, she never forgot the vision. At the age of ten
she had mysteriously noticed one who years later would play
a large part in the molding of her destiny.

Degas took the portfolio from Suzanne as though it were a
package from his tailor, half muttering a "Thank you" in his
querulous nasal voice. He moved toward the light by the
window, hobbling like an octogenarian and complaining that
he was losing his eyesight and was plagued with a cold. With
unbearable slowness he went through the drawings without
much interest, she thought. From time to time he looked up
from her work to Suzanne herself, and each time she was
certain he found something disagreeable in both. His heavy
lip seemed to droop, but soon the almost perpetual sneer
which flickered about his mouth dissolved. He wiped his eyes
with his handkerchief, shifted his weight, and went through
the drawings again. At last, turning to face her as she sat in
the straight-backed chair at the opposite side of the room, he

89

snapped the portfolio closed. "Yes. It is true. You are indeed
one of us."

It was a performance destined to mark the beginning of a
friendship that lasted the rest of Degas* life, and the only un-
broken one he was ever to maintain with a woman. From
that day Suzanne was Degas' "terrible Maria," his "ferocious
Maria."

To an artist who, like Degas, spoke of himself as "a colorist
with line," Suzanne's drawings could not help but be impres-
sive. They were drawings in pure, savage state. The firm
outlines were bold, achieved with economy and certainty.
They were totally without refinement, yet they were pliant
and graceful. They were free of invention, candidly realistic,
but in them was the fever of the artist who created them, also
the earthiness.

That earthiness was the quality in her personality which
made Suzanne Degas' good and lasting friend. She was the
type of woman with whom his social position would not
ordinarily have brought him into contact. Degas was pitifully
afraid of women of his own class. He could not abide their
artifices, their deceits, their intrigues. Alone, of all the women
he knew, Suzanne was forthright and honest. While his
housekeeper Zoe, with a poor show of diplomacy, warded off
the ladies of the faubourgs who eternally called to see "dear
M. Degas," he pleaded with Suzanne to pay him a visit. "Do
not miss coming next Sunday, please." "How are you, my
poor Maria? Do let me have news of you." Or, "It is now
nearly a month and I have not answered your good wishes for
the New Year. I have been confined to my room with I
know not what. When fancy takes you, or you have time to
come, please do not fail to come and see me."

.He wanted to hear what was going on on the Butte and to
share the latest gossip. No longer was he capable of being a

90

part of the life which surrounded him. He was ill and aging
fast in his own mind, at any rate. His eyes were worse
every day. No one could bring him in such a lively and gay
way as his "ferocious Maria" the glimpses he hungered for of
that world from which he had resigned. She alone could
capture it all for him and deliver it with the spriteliness it
demanded. As it came from her lips it would be colorful,
mad, passionate, punctuated with the argot of Montmartre,
rich in raillery.

But even more than for the lively accounts Suzanne would
bring, Degas wanted to see her for her drawings. In his later
years he lived a hermitlike existence on the three top floors of
an old house in the rue Victor-Masse. The top floor was
crammed with his own pictures and pictures he had bought
before he remembered that he had no place to hang them.
The floor below was his studio. Below it were his living
quarters, their walls hung solidly with drawings and can-
vases. Of these, the drawings seemed to provide his only
flashes of delight.

"I look at your red chalk drawing in my dining room. It
is still hanging there/' he writes to her. "And I always say,
'That she-devil Maria, what talent she has!' Why do you
show me nothing more? I am approaching sixty-seven. . . ."

When in 1894, at his insistence, she sent five of her draw-
ings to the Salon de la Nationale, he bought one of them
beforehand, and upon arriving at the exhibition the closing
day, found the drawings withdrawn. He wrote to her:

"You must have taken your drawings away from the
Champs de Mars, Illustrious Valadon. Come and bring mine
tomorrow morning. Bartholome* will have written to you
about one of them he was terribly anxious to have. . . ."

* Paul Albert Bartholome, the sculptor and a mutual friend. Degas was
unduly pessimistic in this instance. The four remaining drawings were
sold at the exhibition. Bartholome* later became an avid collector of
Valadon drawings.

91

But it was not only at the expositions that he watched for
her work. He called at the print shops and the smaller gal-
leries.

"Terrible Maria, yesterday at LeBarc I wanted to buy your
excellent drawing, but he did not know the price. . . . Come
if you can tomorrow about 9:30 with your portfolio to see
if you have something better."

Another time he beseeched her:

"I have been in bed and am late in answering you, terrible
Maria. Come and see me with drawings. I love seeing those
bold and supple lines. Happy New Year!"

Or once again:

"At last, terrible Maria, I am replying to your good wishes.
It is influenza. It is bronchitis everything. You, for your
part, are getting along all right? Happy New Year and Good
Drawings! You will come soon and show me."

In his last letter to her he said:

"They tell me I am still delicate and must beware of cold
on my left side. You must, in spite of the illness of your son,
bring me some of your wicked and supple drawings."

It has long been said that Suzanne Valadon owed no debt to
any other artist, that hers was entirely a spontaneous and
uninhibited talent. Degas himself believed so. Yet today it
is impossible to look at her drawings, with their unexpected
perspectives, their foreshortenings, their off-center figures,
without feeling that her composition was not without its debt
to Degas.

Degas supervised her first engravings. They were made in
his studio on his press (which, by a curious coincidence, is
now used by the artist Demetrios Galanis in the house at No.
20 rue Cortot, which Suzanne so long inhabited). Following
Degas' advice, these engravings were made on zinc, a medium
much more sympathetic to her broad lines than the more con-
ventional copper. And it was Degas who prevailed upon

92

Vollard to present an exhibition of these engravings in his
gallery in 1895.

To Suzanne Valadon, Degas was always "the Master," the
only artist in the world worthy of that respectful tide. What-
ever he said, it was at once the wittiest and wisest thing she
had ever heard; whatever he did was supremely intelligent.
To her, his irascibility was charm; his bitterness had the pious
air of martyrdom. She alone, of all who knew him, had
sympathy with his illnesses, imagined as well as real. In her
company she would tolerate no snickering reference to
"Degas and his hypochondria/' Of all the men she knew,
only Degas did she class as a genius. And to her, his genius
excused his hypochondria as it did all his other faults. "He
has powerful feelings which we are too insignificant to under-
stand," was her blanket defense of him.

When it was suggested that she might have been the model
for one of his sculptured dancers, Suzanne was furious. It
must be clearly understood that she had never posed for
Degas, that she was his friend and not one of his models.
Their relationship had been on an altogether different plane:
artist to artist, mind to mind. There were very few people in
the world who could claim to have been a friend to Edgar
Degas, but Suzanne Valadon had been. Of this she was
prouder than of any other friendship she was ever to have.
She had brushed against the angel's wing.

IV Lovers and the Artist

IN 1888 MIGUEL UTRILLO WAS BACK IN PARIS. FROM GERMANY
he had gone to Belgium and had finally returned to Spain to
take a position as director of a mining construction company
in Cordoba Province. The job lasted only a year. He then
went to work with his friend Rusinol on the construction of
a miniature reproduction of the Battle of Waterloo for the
Universal Exhibition at Barcelona. The fateful battle of the
century was ingeniously reconstructed with the aid of several
hundred gallons of oil paint, mirrors, motors, and lighting
effects which gave the illusion of acres of battlefield and life-
sized fighting men and horses. It was the sensation of the Ex-
hibition.

At the close of the Exhibition, Miguel made his way to
Paris, this time to act as art critic for Barcelona's largest news-
paper, La Vanguardia-, and with Rusiiiol he took up quarters
first in the Boulevard de Clichy, and in the fall of 1891 in a
room next to the bar at the Moulin de la Galette.

One evening, shortly after New Year's Day of 1891, he is
supposed to have been dining with Suzanne Valadon, Tou-
louse-Lautrec, and a group of their friends at the Auberge du
Clou in the Avenue Trudaine when one of the company
asked Suzanne point-blank if she actually knew who was the
father of her child. "I've never been able to decide," she is
supposed to have replied. "I don't know whether the little
93

94

feUow is the work of Puvis de Chavannes or Renoir." Where-
upon Miguel is said to have exclaimed, "Why, I would be
honored to sign my name to the work of either of those fine
artists." The story is no doubt partly apocryphal if for no
other reason than that so far as is known, her affair with
Renoir postdated the birth of the boy. But a few weeks later,
on February 27, Suzanne and Miguel appeared at the mairie
of the 9th arrondissement where Miguel signed the "Act of
Recognition," the text of which ran as follows:

"27 February 1891. Act of Recognition of Maurice,
Masculine Sex. Born 26 December 1883 and inscribed
on the 29th following at the mairie 18th arrondissement
as son of Marie Valadon and unnamed father. Set up by
us, Charles-Paul- Auguste Bernard, assistant to the mayor,
officer of the civil state 9th arrondissement, on the
declaration made by Michael (Miguel) Utrillo, 28 years
of age, journalist of 57 Boulevard de Clichy, who has
recognized as his son the aforementioned Maurice. In
the presence of Charles Mahaut, 44 years of age, em-
ployed, residing in Paris, 5b Impasse Rodier, and of
Felix Dunion, 44 years of age, waiter, residing in Paris,
3 rue Saint-Rustique, who have signed with the peti-
tioner and ourselves after reading. Paris. 8 April 1891."

It seems improbable that at the age of twenty-eight Miguel
Utrillo would have made this extravagant spontaneous ges-
ture, which would certainly involve him in the manifold
responsibilities of paternity, if he had not had sufficient cause
to do so. He was no longer an impetuous boy. After seven
years' experience in the world of business, he must have
known the full meaning of his signature on a legal document.
The fact that the machinery of the Act of Recognition was
set in motion at the end of February and did not come up for
signature until six weeks kter allowed him ample time to re-

95

fleet on the wisdom or folly of his action. Yet he filed the
application, waited the prescribed length of rime, and signed
the Act. It seems hardly reasonable that he would have done
so had the statement of the Act not been true.

At the time Miguel signed the Act of Recognition, Suzanne
no longer had need of financial assistance. She had formed a
liaison with one of Miguel's friends, Paul Mousis, a wealthy
banker. It was rumored that, good man though he was,
Mousis wanted to marry Suzanne but refused to accept
Maurice as his son. In bestowing his name upon the boy,
some people were saying, Miguel acted as much to please his
friend as to honor his former mistress. However, since Paul
Mousis was quite willing to accept Maurice as a member of
his household and (as subsequent events proved) to be a very
good friend to him, it is extremely unlikely that it would have
mattered to him whether the lad's name were Valadon or
Utrillo. If he did not want it to be Mousis, he could hardly
have cared what it was. Here too, then, Utrillo's recognition
of the child would have been pointless were the boy, in fact,
not his own.

As Maurice grew to manhood there was strong physical
evidence that he was Miguel's son. The two men were of
identical height. They had the same massive skull structure,
the thin-lipped line of mouth, the black hair, the deep-set
brilliant blue eyes, the long rectangular fingers. Among their
studies at school each showed a greater disposition for mathe-
matics than for any other subject in the curriculum. The
rolling rhythms of Maurice's speech strongly resembled
Miguel's. And men like Edmond Heuze, Gustave Coquiot,
and Raoul Dufy, who knew them both, often commented
upon the similarity of many of their gestures the way they
both ended a question with a dead pause followed by a quick
shrug of their shoulders; the way they sat pigeon-toed in the
cafes; the way they nervously clenched and unclenched their
fists when they conversed.

96

As these resemblances became evident over the years the
question was often put to Suzanne was Miguel Maurice's
father? The same question was often asked in respect to
Puvis de Chavannes, Rodin, Bartholome, Zandomeneghi,
Renoir, Lautrec almost every male who had lived in Mont-
martre during that period. For all such questions Suzanne had
enigmatic answers much like the one she had given at the
Auberge du Clou. It was therefore extremely curious that
when Miguel's name was put forth as a possible father, then
and then only did she have a quick and definite response:
ir Nb. Absolutely no. Miguel Utrillo is not the father."

If anything, her denial strengthened suspicion. Weren't
the boy's eyes exactly like Miguel's? One did not see eyes
like them in thousands. Didn't Suzanne remember how
Miguel used to open and tighten his fists when he talked the
way the little one does? And when he speaks, the way his
words roll along on top of each other and fade away at the
end! Did she not remember the young Catalan's voice?

Miguel had been gone from Paris only a short time when
Suzanne first told the story she was to repeat again and again
throughout her life until she herself believed it and was con-
fident the rest of the world did too. Maurice was, at the time,
eighteen years of age, and the circumstances of her life made
it expedient for her to account for the boy's strange and
tragic behavior. She blamed heredity. Maurice's illness was
inherited from his father & dissolute young man named
Adrian Boissy who, indeed, had briefly been her lover before
she sat to Puvis de Chavannes and who, in 1901, had con-
veniently been dead for more than a year.

In her telling of the story Maurice's father and her first
lover became miraculously one and the same man. The pic-
turesque Moulin de la Galette was the setting of the melo-
drama. It was a Monday night, so different in atmosphere
from the Sunday afternoon and evening proceedings when
mothers and chaperones monitored the deportment of their

Left. Portrait of Suzanne Vahi-
don in the hat he bought for her,
by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Courtesy of \y Ciirlsberg Glyp-
t o t b c k , C o p c n b a c n . B elo v: .
Nude Reflection. Pastel draw-
ing bv Suzanne Valadon. Un-
datcd.'C^w/tdvv of Paul Pet rides,
Paris.

Sacre-Coeur. Oil painting by Suzanne Valadon. 1929.
Courtesy of Paul Petrides, Paris.

91

young charges. On Monday nights the Moulin was the play-
ground of the Montmartre underworld. Women and girls
were admitted without charge. And what a crew they were!
pickpockets, thieves, nymphomaniacs, lesbians, and prosti-
tutes, disporting themselves with the brutes, drunks, dope ad-
dicts, hoodlums, and gangsters who were the terrors of all
Paris. Occasionally a group of students, perhaps a little the
braver for the wine they had drunk, would go slumming
among this flotsam. They would take with them their female
companions of the moment a muscular laundress, a dancer
from one of the cabarets, or one or two of the adventurous
models. According to Suzanne's account, it was while she
was on such a slumming adventure that events led to her
seduction.

There was a brawl, as she remembered it. The music
stopped. The lights went out. There were feminine screams
and flying fists. A knife flashed. And she found herself,
terror-stricken and weak, in the arms of Adrian Boissy, a
drunken accountant from an insurance company. He
bundled her off to his studio flat off the Place Pigalle. There
he plied her with drink which she dared not refuse. And in
the course of one frightful, hideous night he cruelly raped
her.

A couple of years later Boissy suffered two savage attacks
at the hands of apaches whose women he had wronged. Until
he lost his job and his money ran out, he continued to abuse
a string of miserable prostitutes who visited his studio daily
to satisfy his insatiable lusts. After that he became a tramp, a
clochard rambling aimlessly about the Butte, soaked in alcohol
and caked with grime. For a while he slept in a dustbin be-
hind an ironmonger's shop on the Boulevard de Roche-
chouart. He finally died of acute alcoholism in a tenement
doorway during a heavy snowstorm in the winter of 1899.

For the rest of her life Suzanne insisted that Boissy was the
loathsome villain who had vilely seduced her when she was

98

hardly more than an innocent child and that Maurice was the
child of that unfortunate union. It was from Boissy, clearly,
that Maurice had inherited the passion for alcohol that was
to develop. Had she admitted that Miguel Utriilo was the
father of her son (or that anyone else not addicted to drink
was the father) she might have hinted that the source of the
boy's malady stemmed from her side of his family. She had
strong reason to suspect that indeed it did. She had only to
cast a glance at Madeleine and her ever-present brandy bottle
to know where Maurice's obsession for alcohol may well have
come from. Furthermore, gossip had long had it (unjust
though it was) that Suzanne herself had an uncommon ap-
petite for drink. Therefore, to admit that anyone who did
not have a history of excessive drinking might be the father
of her son would have strengthened the belief that she was
the one who was responsible for the terrible curse on the boy.
In selecting Adrian Boissy as the boy's father Suzanne was
confident she had put the responsibility for the curse on
Boissy's shoulders.

Only once was she known to have a good word for the
wretched insurance-company accountant, and the reporter in
this case is Maurice, hardly an unimpeachable source, espe-
cially in matters which concerned his mother. "It was in the
me Girardon," he told Francis Carco. "He [Boissy] went by
on the pavement with several other 'characters/ and she said
to me, That's him, down there with the beard ... a fine
drunkard too/ Then she added, 'But I don't ever want you
to think ill of him, for in spite of all his vices, to me he'll
always be the troubadour who sang of the windmills of Mont-
martre.' " "The Song of the Windmills" is the title of a poem
l by a minor Montmartre poet named Gabriel Boissy, a con-
temporary of Maurice's and, incidentally, a friend of Guil-
laume Apollinaire and Picasso. Suzanne wanted Maurice to
believe her story, and he alone, of all who heard it, did believe
it.

99

But ultimately she was to admit at least on one occasion that
Miguel Utrillo was Maurice's father. Two or three days after
Miguel's death at Sitges in January, 1934, Berthe Weill, the
art dealer and one of Suzanne's close friends, happened upon
an obituary photograph in the Barcelona newspaper La
Vanguardia. Never having seen Miguel, Berthe Weill was
immediately struck by the resemblance between the photo-
graph and Maurice Utrillo. Armed with the clipping, she
hastened to Suzanne in the rue Junot, where she found the
artist depressed and listless. Yes, Suzanne knew Miguel
Utrillo was dead. She had received the word directly from
Spain. All her old friends were dead. Yes, she had known
Miguel "rather well" in the old days.

"Ma f0*7" Berthe Weill exclaimed, bringing out the photo-
graph. "It's Maurice! The spitting image. The same eyes.
The shape of the head. The expression!"

Yes, it was so, Suzanne confessed wearily. Miguel was
Maurice's father. And because Miguel was dead now, she
spoke long and fondly of the days of their youth when they
had been together, of the meals they had eaten beneath the
arbors of the Guinguette, of parties at Lautrec's studio, of
the night they had pushed the cart of fish onto the dance
floor at the lysee-Montmanre. Yes, Miguel would always
be a delight to her.

But within a few days of the interview with Berthe Weill,
Suzanne was to deny to Edmond Heuze that she had ever had
anything more than a passing acquaintance with Miguel
Utrillo. She had never laid eyes upon the "so-called Act of
Recognition" he was supposed to have signed. Everything
that was being said about her relationship with the dead
Spaniard was senseless gossip. If Edmond Heuze believed
such nonsense, let him go to the 9th arrondissement and find
any such document as an Act of Recognition! Heuze went
instead to the 18th arrondissement and found it.

In Barcelona, however, neither gossip nor the Act of Rec-

100

ognition were being blithely dismissed by the executors of
Miguel Utrillo's estate. In April, three months after Miguel's
death, his two Spanish sons journeyed to Paris to see Suzanne.
Under Spanish law an illegitimate child was entitled to a share
in his father's estate unless his claim against it was disavowed
by his mother.

Mme. Nora Kars, a close friend of Suzanne for many years,
was present when the two young Spaniards arrived in the rue
Junot, and has given the writer an account of the interview
which followed. Suzanne had called her to witness the pro-
ceedings. "It is very important. It may even be historic,
cherie" Suzanne had warned. Nora Kars's account leaves
little doubt that on this occasion Suzanne was acting the part
of a heroine in a melodrama, and that the point she wished to
make by her histrionics was the point she chose so dramat-
ically to deny.

"The young men stated their business," Mme. Kars relates,
"and Suzanne, who had been apprised beforehand of their
mission, promptly denied that her son had any claim on their
father's estate. She asked for the necessary documents and
signed them. The conversation then went on to incon-
sequential chitchat, which ordinarily would have bored
Suzanne. But she sat on the edge of her big chair, squinting
with keen interest at each young man as he spoke. It was
plain that she was amused not by what the young men were
saying but by what she was thinking. The chitchat had con-
tinued for some time when suddenly she bounded to her feet.
Wait a moment!' she cried, and rushed upstairs. She was
gone for some time. When she returned she carried a packet
of letters oh, there must have been fifty of them, tied with
a colored ribbon. She sat down and untied the ribbon, and
from the packet she drew out one letter. C I will read you
something/ she said with great intensity. She read the letter
over to herself first, licking her lips and mouthing the words
as she always did when she read to herself. Then, just as she

101

seemed on the verge of reading the letter aloud or perhaps
passing it to us, she leaped to her feet and tossed it into the
fire. She stood before the fireplace with her back to us watch-
ing the flames consume the paper. At last, after riffling
through the rest of the packet, she tossed it too into the fire.
'No/ she said, facing us again, 'it was not your father. I did
not know him very well.' She glanced back at the packet
burning in the fireplace and shrugged her shoulders. . . .
This is what she wanted us to remember, not the words she
had spoken. 'It is all over, now.'

"And when the young men got up to leave she presented
them with a set of her drawings which she had promised to
give me. They were all nude studies all except one, which
was a portrait sketch of Miguel Utrillo. 'Maybe you would
like to have it as a souvenir of this afternoon,' she said. Tve
held onto it a long, long time. I don't have any more use for

it.' "

When Maurice was five years old Suzanne enrolled him at
the Pension La Flaiselle in the rue Labat. It was a long walk
up the hill from the rue Tourlaque which the spindly little
fellow negotiated tightly gripping his grandmother's hand.
Or if he did not go with Madeleine, it was Catherine, the
Breton maid, whose hand he clung to. He was terrified of
school and did very badly. His entire day was spent in a long
hideous wait for his grandmother or Catherine to take him
back to the security of his home. Suzanne was aware of his
terror, yet could not bring herself to accompany him to
school or to be at the school gate when his purgatory for the
day was over. To her, his fears and terror were cowardly
and absurd. She could see no connection between the torture
he obviously endured away from home and the rages and
depressions he suffered, for as he grew older his spells of
violence of curtain-rippings and china-breakings and tearful
paroxysms did not become less frequent or less intense as

102

the doctors had assured her they would. She saw them now
as examples of weakness of character of cowardice, of self-
indulgence. And remembering her own fearlessness at the
same age, she was more inclined to be ashamed of the child
than sympathetic with him.

Yet she could share his triumphs with great pride. When
he picked out chords on Lautrec's piano, all Montmartre
knew. And when, at the age of eight, he was reading the
works of Zola, she bore his opinions of them to the tables of
the cafes in the rue Fontaine. She did not confess that it was
Madeleine who was responsible for this phenomenon, that it
was her mother who had hired a tutor for the boy. But when
something went wrong, when there were fits of anger and
tears, when Madeleine's china figurines went hurtling through
the air, Suzanne vanished from the scene to forget about home
with a lover or by joining a group of her lighthearted friends
at a party.

Early in 1888 the lover was Paul Mousis. A young well-to-
do banker and avowed bourgeois, Mousis had become a
nightly habitue of the Auberge du Clou and the Chat Noir,
where he had been accepted as "a worthy Philistine" by the
convivial coterie of artists for whom he bought drinks with
an open hand. It was a short spiritual journey from the
Auberge du Clou to Lautrec's studio, and it was there that
Suzanne met him a bemused fish out of water who, by his
affability if by nothing else, was able to defend the political
policies of Jules Ferry in company which ignored politics,
and to ignore the establishment of Antoine's Theatre Libre
in a company which considered the event a major one in
world history. Mousis immediately fell in love with Suzanne,
and before many weeks had gone by he proposed marriage.
She coyly turned down his offer and countered with a will-
ingness to become his mistress. It was an arrangement that
Mousis was obliged to accept on her terms, for he was soon
aware that in being her lover or "her protector" he was in no

103

wise her master. The liaison had scarcely been established
when Suzanne's constancy stood threatened by the appear-
ance of the bizarre figure of the composer Erik Satie.

Once again the meeting place was the Institute of the Chat
Noir, where Satie for a short time had been employed by
Rodolphe Salis as "second pianist." The son of a minor
Parisian composer and music publisher and of a mother who
composed for the piano, Erik was a year younger than Suzanne,
having been born at Honfleur, Calvados, May 17, 1866.
When he was thirteen he entered the Paris Conservatory,
where, in contrast to the grim manner in which he pursued
his courses, he often entertained fellow students and teachers
alike by improvising humorous parodies of the verses of
Villon and Ronsard to his own accompaniment. At twenty
he interrupted his musical studies to don the uniform of the
33d Infantry Regiment in service at Arras. It was a short
military career, for within a few months he evolved for him-
self and two of his companions a "health-building" regimen
of cross-country running from which he contracted severe
bronchitis, and was invalided out of the army.

Shortly after his release he published his first two composi-
tions for piano "Valse Ballet" and "Fantasie Valse," and the
following year came "Gymnopedie" and "Trois Sarabandes."
Here were harmonic processes which forty years later were
to be recognized as die outstanding characteristics of "the
Modern French School," but having initiated them, Satie did
not develop them further. Once he stated an idea, musical or
otherwise, he was virtually finished with it.

He was not a "serious artist," In a sense, he was rather sick
of the world and chose to mark his disgust by assuming the
rote of a bewitched eccentric. He was possessed of devils of
a somewhat waggish bent. The peculiar dead-pan humor of
Normandy, the pmce-sans-rire and repertoire of extravagant
caprices and idiosyncrasies he acted out with a comic flair;
and to the Montmartre of his day he presented, in all, a new

104

type of buffoon the enchanted intellectual. Cynic and mis-
anthrope that he was, his very disbelief in life left a void
which only religion could fill. And since the world was inef-
fably repugnant, he looked to the occult to dwell in a happier
one. His search led him to the work of "Sar," Josephin
Peledan, and the Catholic Rosicrucian movement known as
the "Rose et Croix du Temple et du Graal." "How vain is
painting which would have us admire the representation of
things which in reality we would disdain!" So ran the motto
of the cult.

From 1885 to 1895 most of Satie's compositions were oc-
cult-religious in character. In the end, however, nobody else's
religion was likely to satisfy him. Eventually he withdrew
from the Rosicrucians and organized his own church the
Metropolitan Church of the Art of Jesus the Conductor. At
the peak of its membership he had a dozen followers.

At the conclusion of his "turn" at the Chat Noir on the
evening of their meeting, Satie left the piano to greet Paul
Mousis and Suzanne at the corner table where they were
sipping beer. Within a matter of minutes Suzanne com-
manded his complete attention. He lost no time in informing
her that he thought they ought to get married. "I breathe
with care, a little at a time, and I dance very rarely," he in-
formed her.

"It was my last chance," he later reflected. "It was then
three o'clock in the morning an impossible time to get to
the mairie. After that it was always too late. She had too
many things on her mind to get married, so we never brought
up the subject again."

Within a week they were lovers, and Suzanne found her-
self caught up in a whirlwind of fantasies, wit, and madness
transcending anything she had ever known. So dazed by
what now went on before his eyes, even Paul Mousis could
not retreat. Cuckoldry held for him amazing facets of

105

fascination. Or was it cuckoldry? True, his "wife" had a
lover. Everyone knew it, but so did he. That fact had no
bearing at all upon their own physical relationship. She had,
he was proud to admit, abundant passion to serve two men.

Meanwhile Satie, bearded and wan, with his long hair and
gleaming intelligent eyes behind his thick pince-nez, dressed
always in soft gray velvet with shoes and top hat to match
and with a flowing gray lavaliere at his throat, leaped into his
newest role conductor of a bizarre triangle. He bought
Suzanne necklaces of sausages. He took her to the Luxem-
bourg Gardens to sail toy boats. He sent an enormous funeral
wreath to her son Maurice "so that you may learn the names
of the flowers and make up better ones." He wrote passionate
letters to Madeleine "because I know you cannot read them/'
He hired two small Negro boys to march before them bearing
small drums the night he took Suzanne and Mousis to Fort's
Theatre d'Art to see Pierre Quillard's The Girl with the
Chopped-off Hands. For her birthday his gift to Suzanne was
a paper sack "with all the wonderful smells of the world
in it."

While he occupied himself with devising these capers he
turned out strange little atonal compositions such as "Real
Boneless Preludes for a Dog," "Things Seen to the Right and
to the Left (With a Groping Fugue)," "Three Waltzes of
Affected Disgust." These he performed in friends' studios,
often with Suzanne at his feet. On such occasions he ex-
plained that it was she who radiated the love that nurtured his
inventiveness despite the fact that she knew nothing about
music. "She will never get a rapt expression on her face like
a spaniel of a critic, and she has a tender little belch which is
often inspiring."

But for all his antics, the pivotal position of the triangle
was firmly Suzanne's, and she did not fail to capitalize upon
it. To Mousis she presented herself as the will-o'-the-wisp
bacchante the spirit of love as well as the body. To share

106

her, she quite convinced him, was a greater accomplishment
than to possess her wholely. She was a gem so rare that a
man of his bourgeois background was indeed blessed to have
glimpsed her. While she mended Sarie's socks and cooked his
white meals ("I eat only white food eggs, sugar, scraped
bones, dead animal fat, veal, salt, and coconuts"), ran his
errands, kept a chart of his temperature, and slept with him
wrapped in blankets on the bare floor of his studio, Mousis
was well convinced that she was the only woman in the world
who could satisfy him sexually.

Having created this illusion, Suzanne herself was quick to
believe fervently in it. It was no rime at all before she was
convinced not only that both Sarie and Mousis needed her,
but that in her turn she loved each of them passionately.

It was nonetheless an arrangement not destined to ride long
on an even keel. Highly amusing at first though it might be,
Mousis' bourgeois breeding would not allow him to accept it
indefinitely. He called for its breakup, was refused, and
finally went away in a huff . When he returned, six months
later, it was Sarie's turn to demand Suzanne's undivided at-
tention. Her refusal sent him to seek consolation in the
Christian Rosicrucian Movement. He commemorated his re-
turn by composing a song, to be dated Easter Sunday, 1893,
entitled "Bcmjour, Bigui, Bonjour" on the title page of which
he executed a prim "authentic portrait" of Suzanne in pen and
ink. In 1894, on the eve of her first exhibition at the Salon de
la Nationale, Mousis fled once again this time to Italy and
later to the North African coast. Upon his return he and
Suzanne moved into the small gray house at No. 2 rue Cortot,
two doors from Satie, and it was from here that many people
living on Montmartre today remember "Madame Mousis"
driving forth about the Butte in her trap drawn by a mule
with little brass bells in his mane and with his tail plaited
with bright silk ribbons & pair of wolfhounds at her feet and
a parrot in a cage beside her.

101

In Satie's bare room at No. 6 Suzanne painted Sarie's por-
trait, her first in oils. And it was there that they had their
final breakup on what specific grounds no one was ever to
discover, but that it was a violent and dramatic one the
neighbors in the rue Cortot often attested to. Speaking of it
to one of his disciples in later years, Satie recalled: "The
Master was the most melancholy of humans. He bawled and
he threw himself to the floor to weep bitter tears. Suzanne
was the only one in the world from whom he could draw the
spirit his soul required. She was the anchor to his sanity. If
she left him, all would be lost. He sobbed and fainted."

But when the scene was over, she left. Immediately he sat
down and wrote her the first of the letters he was to write for
almost thirty years in which he protested over and over again
that his love for her was indestructible and eternal, that there
was no life without his Bigui.

Five years after this parting, Satie left Montmartre pushing
a wheelbarrow containing his effects (two wooden benches,
a small rectangular table, and a wooden chest) down the hill
and across the southern reaches of the city to the grimy little
suburb of Arceuil-Cachan and a room over a bistro. No one
else ever set foot in that room except to remove his corpse in
1925. "There are mosquitoes here which have certainly been
sent by the Freemasons," he wrote, "and the disgusting smells
of the tanneries which are too precious to ignore."

Without the distraction of Erik Satie, Suzanne was able to
give time to her work. If her appearance at the Salon de la
Nationale failed to impress the art world, it at least produced
an amusing anecdote which put her name on the tongues of
the Parisians. It seems that a mediocre academician, Jules
Valadon, was also among the exhibitors at the Nationale. By
mistake he received from the critic of the Argus a laudatory
letter intended for Suzanne. In due course he forwarded it
to her, at the same time writing to her to demand what she

108

intended to do about any future confusion arising from the
fact that they bore the same surname. He had decided, he
informed her loftily, that henceforth he would sign his work
"Jules Valadon, Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur." To
which Suzanne replied immediately, "You might also use the
signature 'Merde'!"

The Salon of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts organ-
ized under the leadership of Meissonier and Puvis de Cha-
vannes had come into existence in 1890 after a battle over the
question of awards to exhibitors within the Societe des Ar-
tistes Frangais, the annual "official" Salon. As early as 1884
a group of artists under the leadership of the young and fiery
Georges Seurat had signaled their dissatisfaction with the
official Salon by forming their own "Societe des Artistes
Independants," to which any artist who paid the modest fee
might belong and might exhibit in what was hoped would be
a yearly salon. There was no jury and there were no awards.
But, even more than evincing its distaste for the politics of the
Salon, the new organization spoke for the tremendous surge
of new ideas and new concepts which were now sweeping
aside the old. Impressionism, like a lovely crystal goblet, had
been shattered by the clamorous voices of Divisionism, Sym-
bolism, Neoclassicism, Synthesism, the Nabi movement, and a
host of individual expressions unallied with other movements.
In the short period of twelve years between the First Impres-
sionist Exhibition and the Eighth (and last one) the course of
Impressionism had been brilliant and incandescent. On the
Realist side it had spoken for the nervous technological
changes which had altered the life of the city since nine-
teenth-century man had put his faith in the machine; on the
purely Impressionist side it had brought a new concept of
light and a renewal of vision. The singularity of the instant
was the basic emotional experience of the men and women
of the day. Man was the sum total of the individual moments

109

of his life. And this obsession with the significance of the
moment the Impressionist painters had couched in terms of
elegance and fastidiousness despite all the bleating by their
critics about their "disorganization" and "sloppy brushwork."
There were no tears at the breakup of the movement. The
artists themselves were eager to be free of it, to ref ortify their
creative powers independently, and to dedicate themselves to
new ideas. To have stayed together longer as a group would
have meant to become an academy themselves. Already the
critics, hostile at first to the movement, talked of it in doc-
trinaire terms as a set system by which they measured the
worth of the rising generation of artists. It is certainly to the
credit of the Impressionists that, although they had begun to
enjoy monetary reward for their work, they chose to turn
their backs on financial success rather than submit to sealing
up in a vacuum the living ideal which had been the substance
of Impressionism. With the exception of Monet and Sisley,
who continued to paint in the Impressionist style, though in
doing so they were ruled by their sensibilities rather than by
a desire for gain, they became a part of a modern renaissance.
Color architecture, die expression of emotion through color,
abstraction, symbolism, and the unconscious mind became the
fields to which they now directed their interests. Cezanne
retired to Aix and Gardanne in the South to undertake end-
less research in "the strong experience of nature." Renoir,
who in 1883 had already wearied of painting out of doors,
occupied himself with classical traditions which the critics
attacked as cold and dry just as vehemently as once they had
taken exception to his "rainbow palette." Degas, who had
always refused to paint from nature and who in organizing,
with Berthe Morisot, the last Impressionist Exhibition, had
insisted that the word "Impressionist" be dropped from the
publicity, continued to explore the unexpected angles of vi-
sion which were to become such an important part of the
graphic arts of the next century. Berthe Morisot began to

110

search for form at the expense of the exquisite light of her
early painting, using long, flexible brushstrokes that followed
her forms, in place of the strokes which ran in all directions
that characterized her Impressionist period. Camille Pissarro
joined the Pointillists, And on the threshold stood the new
independent spirits Seurat, Van Gogh, and Gauguin and
with them Lautrec, Bonnard, Signac, Valloton, Redon, Denis,
Bernard, Serusier, and the other young men whose names
were later to be identified with the Postimpressionist Period.

Postimpressionism was a historical epoch rather than an
artistic movement. It represented no clearly defined "ism"
and claimed no homogeneity. It was merely the chronologi-
cal boundary for the formation, dissolution, and re-formation
of a host of schools, movements, and groups which appeared
on the scene in the wake of Impressionism. Such groups as
existed within the limits of its dates bore no clearly definable
relationship to one another or to a greater whole. Yet there
was among both the groups themselves and the artists who re-
mained apart from them a constantly shifting interplay of
ideas which was a continual source of influence upon the
work of all.

In the shif tings Suzanne remained apart. For all the enjoy-
ment she found in their society as a model, she was uneasy
about her association with artists on an intellectual level. She
was conscious of the fact that she was untrained, that as yet
she had done very little painting and had actually produced
few drawings. Then, too, she was intellectually incapable of
understanding the multifarious new concepts about which
the artists seemed to live in constant turmoil. The history of
the development of art was a subject about which she knew
nothing. To her, art was purely a personal expression, the
product of her emotion. Before any theory she believed in
her own natural gifts and her own physical power to express
her feelings in her drawings. Capricious in almost everything
else, in one thing alone she remained constant to make her

work expressive of her turbulent passions. She realized in-
nately how, to one of her temperament, that constancy might
be disrupted by intimacy with her fellow artists. She could
envision its possible devastation of her sensibilities. Perhaps
she remembered that day not so long past when Vincent Van
Gogh had brought one of his paintings to Lautrec's studio
in the rue Tourlaque. It was one of those occasions when the
"cocktails" were flowing and Lautrec's friends were lounging
about wrangling over the past, future, and present of Art.
Van Gogh, then thirty-three (an old man! ) had recently ar-
rived from Antwerp to be near his brother Theo, who man-
aged GoupiTs Gallery around the corner in the rue Caulain-
court. The Dutchman was full of art now, as once he had
been full of Christ, whose words he had tried to bring to the
horrible coal-mining district of the Borinage in Belgium a
few years before. His green eyes burned with the sacrificial
fires of dedication, and he wanted nothing so much as to be
accepted as an artist among artists. The fury of his own
words made his hands shake. He was too old, too furious,
and too humorless to be a part of the exuberant company of
Lautrec's studio. He came now because he felt that the only
language he knew was the language these people he was
among understood, and because the little dwarf had kindly
invited him. Years later Suzanne described the scene. "He
arrived," she said, "with a large canvas under his arm which
he set up in a corner in a good light. And then he waited for
it to be noticed. No one looked. No one said anything. He
sat in front of it, watching for some expression from his
fellow artists, trying timidly to coax a word of encourage-
ment from their conversations. Then at last, wearied, he left,
taking his picture with him. You painters are cows!" Suzanne
exploded.

However, at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 Suzanne
stood face to face with the work of an artist whose power

112

she was unable to resist. The language he spoke she under-
stood: it was before her in several canvases only re-
cently brought back from Martinique. The artist was Paul
Gauguin.

She attended the exposition with Degas, who spoke glow-
ingly of Gauguin's passionate dedication to his art and quizzi-
cally of the sacrifices he had made in order to pursue it
how he had given up his job in a stockbroker's office and left
his wife and family. In 1886 he had gone to Pont-Aven in
Brittany, where with a group of friends he had evolved a
theory of art which he called Synthesism. Here simplified
forms, color as intense as it possibly could be, shadowless
drawing, and "a free treatment of nature" combined to
speak as a symbol for the artist's thoughts as well as his emo-
tions. The following year, with a young painter friend,
Charles Laval, he had fled France with an undigested notion
that he might be able to participate in the building of the
Panama Canal and at the same time paint the intense colors
of the tropics. In Panama he went to work as a laborer, but
the strenuousness of the work left no opportunity for paint-
ing. After a few months, and with a bit of money for his
labor, he moved on to Martinique, where he and Laval set
up their establishment in a hut in a cocoa plantation among
the Indians, Chinese, and Negroes. There Gauguin painted
the seventeen canvases he was to show at the Exposition Uni-
verselle. But by the beginning of 1888 Laval came down with
malaria and in one of his deliriums tried to commit suicide,
and Gauguin became wretched with dysentery. They de-
cided to return to France together.

Gauguin was nursed back to health at Montrouge, where
his friend and former associate in the stockbrokerage office,
fimile Schuffenecker, now had a house and a studio. In the
summer he returned to Pont-Aven, where he painted with
Emile Bernard, Laval, and Serusier at the Pension Gloanec.
In October he answered Vincent Van Gogh's plea to join

113

him at Aries: for three tortured months he attempted to
reason the desperate Dutchman from insanity. Fleeing finally
after the violent outburst when Van Gogh cut off his ear,
he arrived in Paris in time to organize the opening of the art
exhibition at Volpini's during the Exposition Universelle.
There, an extraordinary figure in his long blue coat with
mother-of-pearl clasps, astrakhan cap, green and yellow col-
lars, and white kid gloves, he prowled the galleries. The
pictures including paintings by mile Schuifenecker; fimile
Bernard, who under the name of "Meno" also exhibited some
"pictures done with gasoline"; Louis Anquetin; Leon Fauche;
and Louis Roy. Volpini's cafe, where the exhibition was
held, was on the Champs de Mars in front of the Press Pa-
vilion and in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower (which was built
specially for the occasion). It was held in a hall painted in
pomegranate-red, and the pictures were all framed in white.
In competition with this attraction Signor Volpini directed
the public's attention also to the presence in his cafe of a
"Russian" orchestra comprised entirely of women violinists
and a male trumpeter under the direction of a "Princess Dol-
gouska." Among the visitors to the cafe the princess proved
the bigger attraction.

But what Suzanne saw on the pomegranate walls was
deeply moving. The sinuous, heavy black lines of the ara-
besques which gave the painting of Gauguin and his associates
at once the quality both of primitive art and of the sophisti-
cated Oriental cloisonne enamels was to her the "glorification
of the decorative plane." Here was the direction in which
the firm line of her drawing might lead. The Symbolist ideal,
however, she dismissed as she was wont to dismiss anything
she did not understand. There was in her no urge to adopt
the Pont-Aven techniques in order to create some mental
cerebration or an imaginative suggestion of her dreams.
Whereas Gauguin and his friends strove to create in their
canvases an intellectual or a spiritual adventure, Suzanne was

114

determined to reduce her own experience purely to visual
and emotional terms. Years later she was to sum up her
reaction to the show when she admitted to Gustave Coquiot
that she had been "impressed much by the techniques of
Pont-Aven," but that she had then decided "to pursue them,
but without the vestiges of aestheticism or artiness."

Shortly after the exhibition at Volpini's a group of her
drawings of Maurice as a naked child were shown in the
exhibition called "Impressionists and Symbolists" held at
the gallery of Le Bare de Boutteville in the rue Pelletier. Her
work stood in company with Gauguin, Bernard, Daniel de
Monfreid, Anquetin, and that of a new group the Nabis
philosopher-painters led by Bonnard, Vuillard, and Maurice
Denis. Denis had already issued the manifesto of the Nabis,
the oft-repeated phrase of the next fifty years in the history
of painting: "A picture before being a war horse, a nude
woman, or any subject at all is essentially a flat surface cov-
ered with colors assembled in a certain order." This was
strange company indeed for a young woman who believed,
above all else, that her painting was the instrument of her
emotions. Yet to some degree Suzanne's decorative style was
akin to the Nabis' two-dimensional conception of space even
though her passion for life was revealed in her bold lines. Her
elemental human drawings must have been difficult for the
Nabis to reconcile with their misty beliefs. Yet the drawings
were so beautifully composed that they seemed to be in com-
plete harmony with the other painters' work. All of them
were sold. Francis Jourdain, the art critic, then but a young-
ster helping Le Bare hang the show, was struck by their
power "Suzanne Valadon's line was crude but firm, exe-
cuted with undaunted courage which gave her studies un-
expected character and revealed a mania for truth."

Degas, who had been responsible for her appearance with
the Impressionists and Symbolists, had also been responsible
for her first one-woman show at Vollard's the year before.

Recently arrived from Reunion Island, Volhrd opened a
gallery-cellar in the rue Lafitte, where in addition to exhibit-
ing the works of new artists he prepared succulent casseroles
for friends and customers. The place was quick to become a
hub and forum for the artists of the Butte. At Vollard's
Suzanne exhibited twelve remarkably supple and dynamic
zinc etchings, nudes in various attitudes of their toilets, pre-
pared in Degas' studio with the Master himself supervising the
work. Degas was wretched. By now his eyesight was very
bad. "It is too difficult,' 5 he kept moaning as he went over
the plates time and again with a magnifying glass. As far as
his own work was concerned he had practically given up
painting altogether. He worked in pastels almost exclusively
or modeled small figures of nudes and dancers in clay with-
out bothering to have them cast. But mostly he puttered over
his enormous collection of paintings and drawings by his
contemporaries, many of whom, he was convinced, had taken
the paths he had discovered and had long ago overtaken him.
The series of anarchist bombings which shook Paris in the
spring of 1894, culminating in the assassination of President
Carnot at Lyons in June, terrified him. He saw nothing but
disaster ahead for himself and for the world. When he
could muster enough courage to venture out of the house in
the rue Victor-Masse he fled to the country, visiting the few
friends he could still tolerate.

In October, Colonel Henry's revelation in La Libre Parole
that Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, had confessed to charges
of communicating military secrets to a foreign power un-
leashed a wave of anti-Semitism. Degas roused himself
enough from his misanthropy to add his voice to that of the
anti-Semites. Immediately his health and his eyesight took
a turn for the better; he had, at last, something tangible on
which to pin his misery. Within less than three years he had
cut himself off from a twenty-five-year-old friendship with
Pissarro, who was a Jew, and Claude Monet, who was a

116

Dreyfusard, and a host of his old acquaintances, to say noth-
ing of the young artists, who were in the main passionately
pro-Dreyfus in their sentiments. It was perhaps as well that
his Suzanne "knew nothing about such things."

As a result of the exhibition at Vollard's a number of small
galleries began to take an interest in Suzanne's work and to
send her orders for etchings. Vollard ordered a hundred
additional prints of her "Two Girls Drying Themselves,"
observing to Degas that most of the etchings he had sold had
been bought by artists. Artists had little money and could
buy only what they believed in. They did not pay much for
the etchings of Suzanne Valadon, but they bought them
because they believed in her art. On the Butte people were
heard to speak of her as "Mme. Valadon the artist."

V TKe Curse

BUT THE PATH AHEAD HAD BARELY BEEN SEEN WHEN THE

course of Suzanne's life veered from it. In after years Suzanne
put the responsibility for this shift upon Paul Mousis. Even
before Erik Satie had been removed from the scene, Mousis
had begun to lose his taste for Bohemia and to maneuver him-
self back into the bourgeois atmosphere whence he hailed.
His wild oats sown, he was ready to create for himself that
domestic tranquillity prescribed by the society of his day
for the life of a banker. And having won himself a talented
"wife" and having accepted generously the responsibility of
providing for her family, he felt it his due to enjoy the aura
of approbation which could never be his in the hedonist world
of the Butte.

In the spring of 1892 he took the first step in the direction
of reclaiming respectability by leasing a house in the village
of Pierrefitte, some twenty-five kilometers north of Paris in
the Seine valley. Ostensibly the place was to serve merely as
a country retreat for himself and his family for weekends
and holidays, but almost immediately, using Maurice's un-
stable state of health as an excuse, he established Madeleine
and the boy there on a year-round basis.

The geographical shift was a bitter blow to Maurice. From
the Pension La Flaiselle, he had gone to the College Rollin,
where his scholastic record had begun to show marked im-
117

118

provement, owing particularly to prodigious performance in
mathematics. Coupled with the fact that his stepfather pro-
vided him with a generous spending allowance, his pro-
ficiency in mathematics earned him the respect and friendship
of his schoolmates. In a short time Maurice had become one
of the most popular boys in the school. Although he could
still be made wretched by a harsh word or a snub, he had
already learned that a quick smile and not-too-hearty laughter
were armament against pain, and that he had in himself the
power to muster them. For the first time in his life Maurice
recognized the possibilities of human companionship. No
longer did he bolt from the school gates to the shelter of his
home. He lingered among his companions, smoked cigarettes
with them, and drank beer in the cafes after school, and on
one or two occasions loitered long enough to send Madeleine
scurrying frantically through the darkening streets to search
for him.

This pleasant way of life was disrupted, of course, by the
move to Pierrefitte. Not until he was a grown man did he
speak of it, and then hardly with resentment: it was for him
only one more bewilderment in a pattern of life he never
understood.

Madeleine, for her part, was sublimely content to have her
grandson to herself and to find about her, once again, the lazy
tranquillity of a small town. By this time she was well into
her sixties, shriveled, gnarled by rheumatism, and fretfuL
She had never liked the city, had always been a stranger to
the Butte; and the restless Bohemian existence her daughter
led had been a long, thorny trial to her. Whether it was her
age or whether it was because she still drank steadily, she
moved about in a vague, babbling daze in which the sole point
of reality seemed to be the little fellow, her grandson, now
entrusted to her care. Only when she was with him did the
querulous tremolo leave her voice, her dull watery eyes catch

119

the light of life, and her bodily movements assume their
peasant stolidity. The old woman and the boy shared a secret
world which she had created. It was built of private little
jokes and interminable silly games and a language which was
theirs alone. Except for the few hours he spent in the village
school, it was uninterrupted. A deep coziness permeated
their lives together. To anyone who observed them strolling
through the village or sitting in cane chairs in the garden on
a summer afternoon as the boy read aloud to her and she
clucked happily between naps, the affectionate calm of their
lives would have been impressive. But the old woman knew
how fragile such moments were. For all the outward peace
of their existence, she was more than ever unable to control
the terrible moods which had dogged Maurice since infancy
and which, now that he was alone with her in the country,
seemed to be becoming more frequent and more violent.
When such fits of rage or grief possessed him she was power-
less. The chabrot no longer worked its charm. She would
give him a glass of wine instead, even though she soon noticed
that wine was as likely to aggravate his seizure as to dispel
it. At such rimes he would scream "More! More! Or I'll run
away and never come back." Panic-stricken, she would give
in, filling one glass after another until he was insensible and
she could put him to bed, hoping above all else that the neigh-
bors had not heard.

In the summer of 1894 Mousis began to build a new house
on the crest of the Butte Pinson, which divided Pierrefitte
from the adjoining village of Montmagny. Ostensibly it was
a business project, an investment in real estate, but by the
time it was finished, Mousis had pretty well convinced
Suzanne that if she was going to be a serious artist she would
have to dissociate herself from the frenetic atmosphere of
Montmartre. How seriously Mousis actually took her work
we do not know; how much of his plea was flattery it is im-

720

possible to say. We have it from Maurice that "this man
whose memory I respect, lived in an atmosphere that had
nothing to do with artistic matters." But the fact that Mousis
was among the very first to interest others in Maurice's art
and that, eager though he was to divorce himself from the
Butte, he was still willing to allow Suzanne to maintain the
studio in the rue Cortot, indicates a certain sympathy not eas-
ily found among the Philistines. At any rate, there was enough
truth in Mousis' plea to convince Suzanne that the "artiness"
which surrounded her was destructive to her talents, and
that in order to bring her powers to maturity she would have
to tear herself away from the distractions of the Butte.

It was not easy for her to leave. Though she repeatedly
told herself that she would be able to arrange her daily life
so as not to interfere with her work, that Madeleine and the
Breton maid Catherine, and whatever other help she wanted
would be quite able to run the household, that Maurice would
be out of the way in school nearly all day, when the time
finally came for the move she was frightened. She was, at
core, a creature of the twisted streets. The brasseries, the
bistros, the butter-and-cheese shops, the bare-armed laun-
dresses, scurrying grisettes, the pushcarts, the pigeons in the
gutters, the cats on the crumbling walls were all a part of her
bloodstream, more so perhaps than the urge to draw and
paint, more certainly than the swarms of artists with their
high-flown theories and arguments, egocentric drives, and
protean verbiage. She was a Montmartroise, not by adoption
or affectation but because Montmartre was the only world
she had ever known. To her it was not picturesque. She did
not want to paint it, catch its lights, romanticize its moods.
It was home, ugly and cluttered as a kitchen. And even
though she could convince herself of the necessity of desert-
ing it momentarily as an expedient, she sensed that deep
within her lay the conviction that her future was inexorably

121

bound to it, that somehow she would return to draw from
it the ultimate glory of her work.

The house at Montmagny, rectangular and massive, with
its green tile frieze of entwined garlands below the eaves and
its cement urns in the Grecian style atop its pediments, look-
ing out through a hillside grove of young chestnut trees to
the sweep of valley and blue zinc roofs of the village, was a
monument to acumen in banking. Suzanne now stood at the
palace door, and the palace was hers. There was a rose-
marble foyer, a parlor and dining room with their bulging
satin-upholstered furniture reproductions in the style of Louis
XIV, their vitrines stuffed with Grandfather Mousis' gold
and purple Sevres porcelain with Imperial N's on them, ala-
baster statuettes, ormolu chandeliers and mirrors, walls hung
with stuffed trophies of the chase, and oil paintings depicting
scenes from the victories of Napoleon I, Did Suzanne dare
to refuse to enter?

Perhaps unconsciously for some time she had been prepar-
ing herself for such an environment. Apart from the emo-
tional factors involved, the liaison with Mousis had given her
economic security, and she was now sufficiently convinced of
the importance of her creative work to appreciate the ad-
vantages of security. Being a breadwinner, for all her appar-
ent casualness, had been a heavy drag on her productivity.
The long hours spent in studio gatherings, parties, and cafe
disputations and discussions, all inseparable from her work as
a model, had likewise interfered with her progress as an
artist. In both cases Paul Mousis offered release. But from
the first Suzanne also realized that in accepting Mousis' help
she would eventually be subject to his will. A successful
banker was not likely to tarry overlong in a studio in Mont-
martre. Ultimately she would be faced with the decision of
either letting him go his way in which case she would be left

722

to face the same struggles she had had before he came into
her life or else going with him. And even though he ap-
peared to have a genuine interest in her life as an artist, she
knew that secretly he harbored the hope that in moving her
to Montmagny he was establishing a permanent and respect-
able menage of which she was hardly more than another
graceful adornment.

He had counted on her zest for life to fill the void created
by her desertion of Montmartre. He understood her tempera-
ment well enough to know that, faced with a new situation,
she would not waste time mourning the past. He calculated
well. Before very long Suzanne had assumed a domestic role
and was acting it out wholeheartedly to the delight of his
friends and business associates, to say nothing of their middle-
class neighbors. The pair were mammoth fish in the little
pond. Their home, the most pretentious in the area, was also
the most animated, the most lavish, the most gracious. Staffed
now with a cook, a butler-coachman, a corps of gardeners,
and two housemaids besides Catherine, the Mousis kept some-
thing of a perpetual open house, with weekend house parties,
elegant luncheons, elaborate dinners, and musical soirees.
Over them all Suzanne presided with the air of a miniature
young duchess lovely, exuberant, her personality now
flushed with authority and well-being. A cool, slightly the-
atrical grandeur dominated her social manner. As a hostess
she seemed to combine the most desirable attributes of both
sexes, to exhibit simultaneously masculine directness and
feminine tact, a woman's voluptuousness and a man's sense
of humor. Her temperament, full-blooded as it had always
been, in its present aspect appeared attractively astringent
rather than brash or diabolic. She cultivated a taste for fine
food and wine, and kept a close eye on the kitchen and wine
cellar. If she failed to read the latest novels of M. Daudet
or M. Ohnet, she remembered enough of what was said of
them at one gathering to be able to talk about them knowl-

123

edgeably at the next. Her reading was pretty well limited
to La Vie Parisienne^ Modes Pmslermes^ and the Jottrnal des
Modes. With such literary ammunition she was able to chat
airily with the ladies about the latest designs of Worth, Creed,
or Coucet, Mme. Colas' lingerie or the chapeaux of Miles.
Romain. Her own wardrobe was chic and simple.

Toward men she maintained an attitude of genteel polite-
ness in keeping with her position as wife of a banker. It
was an air perhaps a shade too neatly drawn, for by its
rigidity it suggested that she had formerly been of quite an-
other disposition. A similar hint was to lurk in her attitude
toward the collection of furniture and bric-a-brac which
surrounded her in her home. It arrived haphazardly in bulk
shipments from dealers in Paris or Chantilly, to be disposed
of as free floor space or free shelf space alone decreed. She
collected in order to fulfill one of the functions of her class,
because it was expected of her with little interest and no
affection. A subtle eye would have noted that she had but
recently been quite comfortable in sparser quarters.

There was, in fact, a murmuring restlessness underlying
her air of authority. Today it would be called an inferiority
complex. But she was resolute enough in purpose to keep it
fairly well under control. It found no expression in irasci-
bility or contentiousness. She never preached. Her con-
versation was always good-humored, albeit sporadically salted
with cynical observations or waspish criticism. But in the
perfection of her role there was a constant current of nerv-
ousness. That she would remain permanently and securely
as she was ladylike, even-tempered, lighthearted few who
knew her believed.

However, her life at Montmagny was not wholly an
accomplishment in stagecraft. Suzanne still found time for
her creative work, less, it is true, than in her most productive
Montmartre days, but she succeeded in completing several
sets of drawings, etchings, and lithographs. At first she

124

worked only in the studio in the rue Cortot which Mousis
retained for her, journeying back and forth to Montmagny in
the little dogcart drawn by the mule Mousis had given her
upon his return from North Africa. But as time went on,
and particularly when the weather was severe, she worked
at "the Chateau of the Four Winds," as Mousis had dubbed
the big house on the Butte Pinson. She became quite fond of
the little village with its gray, hall-like main street, its blue-
smocked workingmen and bulbous ambling housewives, its
perpetual bakery smells, and the voices of its ever-crowing
cocks. She began to paint in the woods and fields about the
village; in Montmartre she had never drawn or painted out
of doors. Later she prevailed upon several of the village peo-
ple to allow her to paint their portraits in their own homes
or in their gardens. It was at Montmagny that she developed
the simple palette which was to serve her for so long and
which was to be developed so brilliantly by her son two
chrome yellows, vermilion, Turkey red, and white zinc. She
also turned her hand to furniture designing large undec-
orated pieces of yellow oak and walnut, the last sort of furni-
ture one would expect from one who lived surrounded by
reproductions of Louis XIV. In connection with this furni-
ture it is interesting to note that Mousis was enthusiastic about
it, if not artistically, commercially. He installed it in his
office, whence he proceeded, to sell it to his colleagues. These
poor men were obliged to keep it at their places of business:
it was unwelcome in the houses of wives who aspired to
lovely furniture like Mme. Mousis' in the Chateau of the Four
Winds.

At Montmagny Suzanne developed the passion for flowers,
fierce and constant, which was to remain with her the rest of
her life. From earliest childhood she had inherited the Pa-
risian's love for a little bowl of color, a pot of greenery. At
Montmagny she was to know flowers in the forests and in the
fields, alone in poignant splendor, in grassy blankets, or in

125

surging sweeps of vertiginous colon She could not be out in
the countryside or in the village streets for a quarter of an
hour without discovering some kind of root which was cer-
tain to turn her garden into a miracle of splendor. With the
jealousy of a governess she brought it home to consign it to
its place in the informal variegated masses she grew in the
English style. She spent long hours in the garden, pruning
and planting and squabbling with the gardeners. And the
children of the Butte Pinson, peeking in at the gate and seeing
her clad in brown corduroy pantaloons and a blue working-
man's smock, reported at home that Mme. Mousis had "a
little Chinese working in her garden."

Her performance as wife of a banker might have jogged
along uninterrupted a long time. The aura of pleasure, once
constructed, was agreeable enough and quite durable. There
was something of the indolence of convalescence about it, and
to one who had never before known the luxury of relaxation
it was fraught with benign possibilities. But hardly had half
a year gone by when Suzanne's peace of mind received a
severe jolt. Maurice ran away from home, and after a twelve-
hour search the police found him dead drunk, with three
drained wine bottles, in the forest.

At first Suzanne refused to believe the incident had oc-
curred. She accused her mother of having neglected the boy,
intimated that Madeleine had been drunk herself and had
urged the child to drink and flee the house. Mousis, taking
stock of the boy's surroundings the doting grandmother, the
unstable mother, the foreign atmosphere of the house itself
and appreciating (perhaps from his own experience) the
disturbing effects of dislocation upon an adolescent, prescribed
the boy's return to the College Rollin.

His decision seemed immediately to bear heartening results.
Maurice was visibly delighted with this latest shift in his for-
tunes. The last day he went to the village school he wept all

126

day for happiness; and the first reports from the College
Rollin were more than encouraging. He enjoyed commuting
between Alontmartre and Montmagny. Still small for his age,
and frail, he was deeply thrilled at the size and power of the
locomotives, hissing their white clouds of steam, their enor-
mous boilers throbbing with the burning of crimson coals as
he stood beside them in the station shed. The black sheen,
the bright brass pipes, the clang of couplings fascinated him
as living things. Then to be on the train! To be riding
through the tunnels, through the long corridors of grimy,
crumbling buildings out onto the sweep of the valley with its
low-lying fields and tiny plowmen, propelled by the fantastic
power of that tremendous giant, the engine certain, relent-
less, and furious! It was a vision which was to stay with him
always. For the rest of his life he never saw a train without
being once again caught up in the ecstasy he had known as
a small boy standing on the platform of the Gare du Nord,
or with his face squeezed tightly against the cool of the
compartment window as the train tore, powerful and relent-
less, across the valley of the Seine. Many years later, when
he had grown up, his mother bought him a toy electric train;
and playing with it for hours, he recaptured those delightful
memories of commuting with such intensity that beyond the
little track before him the world ceased to exist.

However, neither the fascination of the trains nor the facts
that he was doing passable work at school, that he was well
provided with pocket money by his stepfather, and that he
was living once again with his adored mother, was enough
to draw Maurice away from the bewitchment of drink. At
the cafes the waiters would serve him rouge as though he
were a man. At the little round marble tables he would stand
drinks for those of his schoolmates who would join him.
When he ran out of money, he would travel third class in-
stead of second as his stepfather's allowance provided. The
wooden benches were small inconvenience for the number

727

of pinards the money would buy. Wine was cheap, but he
also liked cognac and absinthe. But, curiously, neither of
these more potent drinks seemed to satisfy him as wine did,
especially red wine. And although later in life he would
drink eau de Cologne, fuel alcohol or even ether in his
desperation to escape from the world about him, it was for the
rouge only that he actually thirsted, and he drank only rouge
if it was available.

Once the first report came from the College Rollin that
Maurice was making satisfactory progress and, indeed, notable
strides in mathematics, Suzanne paid little attention to his
activities or his moods. She scoffed at Madeleine's oft-re-
peated stories of his drinking during the time they had been
alone in the house at Pierrefitte. The old woman talked less
and less sense as she grew older. That Maurice behaved a
bit strangely sometimes Suzanne had to admit. He was given
to protracted periods of brooding silence. He never laughed
or smiled. There was often a vague, faraway look in his eyes.
He was forgetful, shy, and nervous. But these lapses, she was
certain, were characteristics of adolescence; they would pass.
And when the school reports showed a deterioration in the
quality of his schoolwork, she dismissed them with a guffaw.
At his worst, she was sure, he was a better scholar than she
had been at her best in the hands of the sisters of St. Vincent
de Paul!

Finally came word from the school that the masters had
reason to suspect that Maurice was attending classes in a state
of intoxication. The first of these reports aroused Suzanne
to scornful laughter. How preposterous could schoolmasters
be! A second and a third report served only to heighten her
derision. But it was derision born of fear, and ultimately she
could not resist the impulse to bespeak her suspicions to the
boy. The results hideously confirmed what she had refused
to believe. Maurice flew into a violent rage. He tore his shirt
and began to howl like a dog. Panic-stricken, she tried to

128

embrace him, only to be thrown brutally against the wall. In
an effort to avoid his flailing fists she stumbled, and he tried
to kick her. Cowering in a corner before his maniacal rage,
pleading desperately for him to calm himself, weeping, shiver-
ing with terror, she heard herself offer him a glass of wine.
It was a moment she could never again entirely wipe from her
consciousness. He was calm immediately, waiting for her next
move, the blue flames of his eyes boring into her command-
ing. She fetched him the wine and poured a glass for him. He
took it and smiled* Then with measured calm he drank it off
and quietly demanded another. She poured it for him, and
in doing so she arrived at the turning point of her life.

Until now Maurice had certainly been a minor force in her
existence. Equally obsessed with the need to give expression
to her artistic power and to draw from her environment the
fullest degree of pleasure, she had been unfettered by maternal
feelings. From time to time she would take her son for a
walk or for a visit to the studio of one of her artist friends.
Toulouse-Lautrec gave him a comic drawing of a cow and
at another time a sailboat. Degas was uneasily kind. Other-
wise there was little beyond a kiss for him now and then, a
hurried impulsive embrace; and she was gone the lovely
butterfly vision vanished. He was out of her mind entirely.

Now with dramatic swiftness, as any emotional shift was
bound to come with Suzanne, her entire relationship with the
boy was changed. For all her laxity and apparent irresponsi-
bility, nature had given her a deep love of human companion-
ship. Far more sincerely than most people she longed to en-
gender well-being and pleasure in others. If until now her
life had been untouched by actual tragedy, she had the
generosity which made her eager to offer the best of herself
to a fellow human being in distress. How much stronger must
this impulse be when the person involved was her own son!
The vigor of her spirit welled up in a tidal wave of compas-

129

sion and tenderness toward the child whom she now rec-
ognized as a desperately sick boy in need of her ministrations.
And as in everything else into which she threw her energies,
there was a suspicion of theatricality about her passionate
reaction. Suzanne Valadon became, all of a sudden, the she-
wolf defending her young.

Obviously it was only a question of time before she would
be torn between her loyalty to the man she lived with and her
new devotion to her son. From the start she was completely
frank as to what her decision would be if pressed to the
choice: unhesitatingly it would be Maurice. And there can
be little doubt that her candor went a long way toward
breeding in Mousis a tolerant and indeed sympathetic attitude
toward his stepson. On the whole he was extraordinarily
patient and made the most of the few hours of tranquillity
allotted to him in his own house. To neighbors, business
associates, and guests he remained cool, affable, and poised.
Nothing in his bearing betrayed the domestic horrors sur-
rounding him Maurice coming home drunk from school
every evening, Suzanne's acute nervousness and tension, the
violent scenes of rage and tears, recrimination, and hysteria
that shook the household upon the drop of a word or the
slightest gesture of reproof. They were bitter pills indeed
to a young man with a large suburban house, a beautiful and
talented wife, and all the other marks of "success."

When Maurice was fourteen Mousis convinced Suzanne
that there was nothing more to be gained by keeping the boy
in school; not only was Maurice bored with it, but going to
school was, in fact, contributing to his illness. How much
better off he would be with a job and an opportunity to prove
himself manly in a man's world. With a job he might have
an opportunity to gain full self-confidence and no longer
feel the need for alcohol to bolster him. In final proof he
laid the proposal before Maurice. At once the boy brightened.

So in rapid succession over a period of about three years

130

Maurice was a shipping clerk in a furniture-polish factory,
a delivery boy, a messenger for a process server, and a fitter
in a lampshade factory. In each case some pretext was seized
upon for his dismissal; at the bottom lay the real reason
drunkenness. Finally, through Mousis' influence, he landed a
job in the bookkeeping department of the Credit Foncier,
where for several months his skill at figures gave promise of
rapid promotion. Thanks to Mousis' generosity, he now
sported custom-made clothes and a bowler hat. "I liked that
bowler hat," Maurice was to sigh in later years. For longer
than ever before, things went well. He stopped drinking
entirely, strode the boulevards, and went to the bicycle races
with his associates at the bank, or at Montmagny wandered
about the village ripping his bowler to the ladies and dispens-
ing sous to the small children. But then one day at work,
for no apparent reason he suddenly seized his umbrella and
beat the manager of his department into unconsciousness.
Thus ended his banking career.

Events now rushed to their terrible climax. Maurice lost all
desire to work and spent his time floundering about the house
and the village drinking anything he could lay his hands on.
If he was not given the rouge, he stole it from his step-
father's cellar, the kitchen, a cafe, or a wine shop. For weeks
he was unshaven. His clothes reeked of vomit. His fits of
rage were now wilder than ever. There were rows with the
shopkeepers during which he hurled their stocks into the
street and reviled them with obscene taunts. He abused the
servants at home until they quit. The sight of a pregnant
woman particularly enraged him; he would loudly hurl abuse
at her. Such outbursts would be followed by dark fits of
depression during which he would sit despondently for hours
with his chin in his hands and tears streaming down his cheeks
while Suzanne would try to coax some rational response from
him. All such scenes would end in the same way, with pro-

131

testations of remorse, ineffable lassitude, and again the plea
for another rouge.

Suzanne was certain that some day these outbursts would
pass and the boy would be miraculously cured. But she did
not resign herself to the arrival of the miracle. If there was to
be a cure, she was determined that she, his mother, would be
able to claim the major share of it. She left no stone un-
turned. She consulted all sorts of doctors and psychologists.
She tried to pursue each course prescribed. She even took
to reading books on psychology. All, of course, in vain. If
there were any signs of a change in Maurice's condition, they
were for the worse.

Then one evening in the midst of an explosion Maurice
ran into the kitchen threatening to kill himself with a meat
knife. It was the beginning of an orgy of destruction. He
ran through the house like a wild animal, overturning furni-
ture, slashing curtains and upholstery, flinging crockery,
glassware, and kitchen utensils in all directions. On Mousis*
order Catherine ran for the police and a neighbor, Dr. Ettlin-
ger. By the time they arrived Maurice had torn off all his
clothes and was defecating on the staircase.

The doctor was finally able to administer a hypodermic
sedative and put him to bed; and for several days Maurice was
confined to his room under the influence of the drugs. In the
meantime there were consultations with medical men and
psychologists, at the conclusion of which an exhausted and
terrified Suzanne reluctantly signed the necessary papers com-
mitting her son to the care of Dr. Vallon at the Asylum of
Sainte-Anne. Maurice was then not yet nineteen years old.

While Maurice lay under sedation in his room overlooking
the garden at Montmagny, Suzanne received word that
Toulouse-Lautrec had died at Malrome at the age of thirty-
seven. Suzanne had last seen him a little over a year before

132

in May, 1900. From February until April of the preceding
year Lautrec had been incarcerated in a sanatorium in the
Madrid suburb at Neuilly as the result of a mental breakdown
owing primarily to the effects of excessive drinking. It was
his release from Neuilly he was celebrating when Suzanne
saw him for the last rime. He was giving another of his
famous parries an informal exhibition of his latest work in
his studio. The invitation had borne an uproarious cartoon
of the host-to-be in his high-crowned bowler hat milking a
cow and bidding the invited guest "to come drink a glass of
milk with me."

On arriving at the studio Suzanne was appalled to see her
old friend his face die deadly gray of putty, the beautiful
eyes he was so proud of sagged in dull mists behind his heavy
glasses. Teetering pathetically on his two stubby canes, the
wraith of rite ugly little man struggled manfully to re-create
that air of incandescent gaiety which had once enveloped him.
But his speech faltered, and he did not seem to hear much
that was said to him. "It was terrible seeing him like that,"
Suzanne recalled. After a very litde while she slipped quietly
from the studio.

Lautrec was much on her mind during the three months
Maurice remained in the sanatorium of Sainte-Anne. If
Lautrec's untimely death was the result of drink, what was in
store for her Maurice? What would happen to the boy once
he was released from the asylum? Was his mind already
destroyed by his morbid appetite for alcohol? Yet while
Maurice was in the hands of the doctors she could do noth-
ing more for him than promise herself that once he was re-
leased she would devote her life to his care. To have to wait
at Montmagny for the boy's release with nothing to do but
conform to the hollow inanities of the life of a banker's wife
was an insufferable prospect. She had to throw herself into-

133

hard work. She had to do something to fill the vacuum of
her days.

So it was that she spent most of her time in the rue Cortot
at work on the magnificent series of nude drawings for which
she served as her own model. During those three months she
executed hundreds of drawings, only a dozen or so of which
met with her critical approval and are preserved. Nothing of
her mental exhaustion or perturbation is to be found in them.
They are deft, forceful, and supple, as nothing she had ever
done up to that time had been. In them her tiny wiry phy-
sique somehow assumes an almost statuesque quality, and she
begins, for the first time, to portray rather than to reproduce
her subject. Touchingly the drawings bespeak the role she has
devoutly assumed for herself the tower of strength. There
are grandeur and vibrant mysterious hope in the rhythmic
linear arabesques which finally and unalterably lift her draw-
ings into first rank. When Degas saw them he is said to have
remarked, "If there were any tears left in me, I'd be happy to
shed them for one of those drawings."

After three months Maurice was released from Sainte-
Anne's "looking better than he has for years and so beau-
tiful," Suzanne reported ecstatically to a friend. His thirst
for alcohol was gone. But he was spiritless, dull as though
life had been drained out of him. He moped about Mont-
magny doing nothing. He shrank from contact with every-
one and rarely spoke. Sometimes he roused himself to read
a book, and then for days he would be lost in it a technical
scientific work which he could not possibly understand.
Francis Carco tells us that he put down these scientific books
only at mealtimes, and that when he was not reading he spent
long hours staring at a spot on the floor or just stroking the
cat. If he wandered down the hill to the village, he was likely
to be lost for hours, and Suzanne would have to summon the
police to find him.

134

It was their neighbor Dr. Ettlinger who suggested to
Suzanne that some sort of manual therapy might improve
Maurice's state of mind. He suggested that she try to interest
him in painting. An early Freudian psychologist, the doctor
was much concerned with "a number of eccentric gestures
of an erotic character" which he had observed in Maurice's
behavior. Later he suggested that Maurice's first alcoholic
excesses were connected with a morbid sexual development.
But as to what such a development was, and as to what extent
it may have continued during the rest of his life, he offered
no clue. Subsequently other doctors, notably Dr. Revertegat
at Sannois and Dr. Vicq at Aulnay-sous-Bois, attempted to
probe these sexual aberrations, but their findings were incon-
clusive, and in later life Maurice was unwilling to submit to
psychological testings which might have produced concrete
results* Whatever aberrations possessed him, Maurice kept
them subjugated to alcohol throughout his life and took the
secret to his grave. Beyond an occasional visit to a prostitute
but never to a maison close, always to a dark room his
active sexual life was virtually nonexistent. In his own auto-
biographical sketch he tells us that he was twenty-eight before
he had his first sexual experience with a woman and that it
was painfully shameful.

He did not respond miraculously to the idea of painting.
He seemed at first to have no interest in art. It was something
for women or for sick old men like M. Degas or cripples like
U M. Toulouse." He much preferred being left alone to
wander about as he pleased or to "read" his scientific books
or histories of his new-found idol Napoleon. Only the ulti-
mate threat that he would have to paint or else be reincar-
cerated at Sainte- Anne's for further treatment moved him to
take up brush and palette.

Then the miracle occurred. Suzanne taught him to paint
a few months of daily lessons, to which he seemed to
remain glumly apathetic. When he was not with his mother

135

he now began to sit alone at the window of his room, his
chin in his hands, staring for long hours at the village
at the foot of the hill and at the play of light hovering
over it. What did he see? When Suzanne asked, he said
he did not know. He had no further interest in his scien-
tific books, and even a short walk about the garden seemed
to command all his strength. Then, with ineffable weari-
ness and no conviction, he began to paint by himself to put
colors on his canvas, to set down almost as though they were
columns of mathematical figures the relationships as he saw
them between blues and greens and reds. He used the palette
his mother set up for him.

The first awkward efforts, the heaviness of his palette, the
crudity of his brushwork soon gave way to a spontaneous
buoyancy, clarity, and impeccable mastery of technique.
In a surprisingly short time he was completely his own master.
Over these first works there lay a magic glow of tenderness
and freshness, of astonishing originality which had its source
apparently in instinct alone. The problems of the painter's
craft color relationship, chiaroscuro, tone, and perspective
resolved themselves in his subconscious mind and die pic-
ture appeared on his canvas as from the unfaltering hand of
an expert. His movements as he painted seemed automatic,
involuntary, never deliberate. As Maurice Raynal was later
to observe, "the art of painting was as unthinking as that of
the pianist who improvises while he carries on a conversation
or reads aloud." From the beginning the substance of great
painting was in him, the craftsmanship intact and solid, given
wing by ingenuous sincerity and a secret fountain of gentle
poetry.

That he should reject mankind was a logical expression of
his temperament. His shyness was an insurmountable barrier
to the human understanding which must be the essence of the
portraitist's art; his timidity made any adventure into the
moods of Nature hopeless. Still, if Man was forbidding and

Nature awesome, he saw in the 'work of Man a display of holy
things. Man's achievements surrounded him his locomo-
tives, his houses, his churches, the thousands of works he had
wrought by his hands out of his imagination and necessity.
Of all of these, nothing his eyes fell upon had for Maurice
the compelling fascination of a wall. To him, a wall became
man's most meaningful creation, and the most beautiful.
Wherever he went he saw man-made walls battered, flaked,
crumbling; solid, forbidding, soaring; cruel, sheltering, com-
forting with their tortured surfaces, their mosses, and their
scraps of advertising posters, their stains of animal urine. The
sky, the sun, the fog, and the snow existed only as their back-
ground, and they were most lovely when they took on the
grayish tones of walls. Human figures, pathetic daubs that
they were, existed only to accent the terrible solidity of walls.
Walls became the protagonists of his vision.

The part which walk were to play in Maurice's art can,
of course, be explained in modern psychological terms as an
obsession with shelter and security. It can also be seen as an
outgrowth of man's emotional history, as a poignant victory
over the assailing forces of nature which surround him. But
in Maurice Utrillo, who in a few years was to be roused to the
very depths of his being by the sight of a little gilt figure of
Joan of Arc, the stirrings of mysticism were uncommonly
deep. And in view of the future developments of his life,
they alone can be cited logically to account both for his in-
ability to rouse himself to normal human relationships and for
the seemingly automatic expression of his art. To him, walls
were the direct knowledge of God's desire to protect his
children. They were the manifestation of the divine gift the
ability to build, to construct. And even as with the little
statue of Ste. Jeanne, with the innumerable man-made cruci-
fixes, rosaries, medals, books, and religious pictures which
became the anchors of his later faith, he approached them
with artless humility, awe, and profound love.

137

In this first spate of painting he found sound health and
security at last. He was able to make frequent excursions to
Montmartre, where he remembered there stood the most beau-
tiful walls in the world. He no longer needed alcohol to
shield him from the tortures of the world. In two years he
produced over 1 50 paintings, many of them masterpieces.

Now it was time to go and live among the painters, for
surely he was one of them. He took up permanent residence
in his mother's studio at No. 2 rue Cortot. He was twenty-
three years old and he was brave at last

VI Threshold of Revolution

SNOW PLAGUED PARIS THROUGHOUT MARCH, 1896. ALONG THE
boulevards gray, soot-sprinkled drifts lined the curbs to be
dusted white by the next snowfall. The roads were a morass
of slush and horse manure which kept most of the feminine
population of the city indoors. Traffic was, at best, desultory.
Business was in a sorry state. But on the afternoon of the
23d Suzanne and Paul Mousis journeyed into the capital by
train to go to the theater.

The word had already spread wide of Montmartre that at
Lugne-Poe's new Th6atre de FOeuvre a bombshell was about
to be dropped which would revolutionize the whole world
of art. After tonight Montmartre would be changed com-
pletely. The Prince of Poets, it was said, was already pre-
paring to welcome "the victims of the Revolution" back to
the Latin Quarter. Despite the weather the evening promised
to be one which would not soon be forgotten. Many Parisian
intellectuals journeyed a distance longer than from Mont-
magny in order to be at hand for the historical occasion.
Clearly Lugn6-Poe*s publicity men had done their job thor-
oughly.

"Merde!" The monosyllabic obscenity thundered out over
the footlights, the first word of the new play Ubu-Roi by the
young Breton, Alfred Jarry. The speaker was Ubu, a mon-
strous parody of a bourgeois humbug monumentally gross,
138

139

brutal, lewd, hypocritical, and respectable. He moved like
a giant marionette across a stage peopled with grotesque
masks (scenery, costumes, and masks were designed by the
author), among scenic changes announced by the posting of
placards. A single soldier played the part of a regiment; and
when the hero was to mount a charger he merely hung round
his neck a sign announcing that he had accomplished that
feat. The play was greeted with hisses, boos, catcalls, and
applause. The audience rose to its feet. Men and women
shouted and screamed, spat and shook their fists at the fallen
curtain. "Ubu will become a popular legend of man's in-
stincts vile, greedy, and unclean," wrote Catulle Mends.

Alfred Jarry was twenty-three, sodden with absinthe and
ether. He lived in a world of fantastic hallucinations and
spent much of his time on a bicycle, yet somehow he man-
aged to remain in the regular employ of Remy de Gourmont
by writing witty, satirical, and lucid essays for Flmigier. A
tiny bowlegged man with "irregular, wolfish teeth," he made
his home with two tomcats and an owl in rooms in which he
had had the ceiling lowered so that tall people would have
to come in on their hands and knees. He always carried a
revolver, and without warning he would stop on a crowded
street to shoot pigeons and sparrows. 'Tilthy beasts of night-
ingales!" he would scream. He fancied that he had been
created to lead an intellectual revolt against the world. Ill-
mannered, hostile to common sense, overbearing, and mi-
sogynous, he now settled on the Montmaxtre hill to plot his
own weird brand of satirical revolution.

Despite the fanfare of the opening might Ubu was taken
lighdy by the subsequent audiences at the Theatre de
TOeuvre a pea shot at the walls of Jericho, too bizarre to be
taken seriously. But on the turbulent Butte, Jarry immedi-
ately assumed the stature of a sage, an animated symbol of
the intellectual and artistic forces which threatened to annihi-
late all vestiges of bourgeois complacency. Under his sar-

140

donic patronage fresh and original evaluations of the mean-
ing of art were to burgeon and a new intellectualism to flour-
ish. Whether in the end he was symbol, patron, or prophet,
by dint of his fanciful eye and curious imagination Jarry
contributed considerably to the change in the mentality
which now crept over the Butte. But he was by no means
alone in bringing this to pass.

Of itself the "golden age" had gone a long way to plot
its own extinction. While Lautrec and his friends strove to
keep bright the last flickering of their high spirits in the
gaudy gaslight of the cabarets and dance halls, the Nabis as
a group disintegrated. Serusier, Verklade, and Denis veered
toward the mysticism which was to make of the first a
theoretician rather than a painter, of the second a monk, and
a religious painter of the man who once had warned his
fellow artists, "Remember that a picture, before it is a horse,
a nude woman, or any subject at all, is essentially a flat sur-
face covered with colors assembled in a certain order." Pierre
Bonnard and Vuillard pursued their separate courses by seek-
ing in the everyday lives of the common people to create "In-
timism," while Felix Valloton evolved his own highly per-
sonal aesthetic. The men who, with Seurat, had forged Neo-
impressionism out of scientific theory Signac, Redon, Gross,
Angrand, Dubois-Pillet, and later Pissarro struck out, after
Seurat's death, to develop Pointillism according to their in-
dividual forms of expression. In Tahiti that restless spirit
Gauguin, plagued by syphilis, wrote home to Daniel de Mon-
freid that his imagination "had begun to cool"; he was think-
ing of moving on to the Marquesas. Monet and Renoir (who
still lived in the rue la Rochefoucauld) were becoming rich
men. And Degas, his eyesight failing, continued to shuffle
about in his house in the rue Victor-Masse cataloguing and
arranging his pictures.

Something of the revolt which Jarry deliberately strove to
foment through the strength of his personality and acid Ian-

141

guage Cezanne had already stirred up through the power of
his brush. A shy, clumsy man, thickset, short and very dark,
churlish and proud, a bourgeois conservative who went to
Mass every Sunday, hungered for the ribbon of the Legion
of Honor and observed all the conventions of his class,
Cezanne might have been a pale shadow of Ubu-Roi. Instead
he was something Ubu did not know existed a painter, not
a person. Whatever he truly was his pictures reflected. "I
thought that one could do good painting without drawing
attention to one's private life," he wrote. "Surely an artist
tries to lift himself as high as possible intellectually, but as a
human being he should remain in the dark." He was to be
seen purely through his own eyes on the canvas. In his paint-
ings stood his visual experience, his sensations set in the mirror
of his mind, constructed in the most refined terms of honesty,
the fruit of long hours of "research," each painstaking stroke
of his brush a solid brick shaped and hewn by his intellect and
heart.

Beginning as an Impressionist of sorts, Cezanne first aimed
"to make of Impressionism something as solid and durable
as the paintings in the museums." He arrived at the age of
twenty-two in Paris, where he studied at the Academic Suisse
and first met Pissarro. By this time he had finished his formal
education, tried studying law to please his father, abandoned
it, and subsequently rejected a paternal offer to admit him to
the family banking firm, Cezanne et Chabessol, in his native
Aix-en-Provence. Dissatisfied with his progress in Paris,
Cezanne returned home in less than a year. But after a few
months he was back again, to associate gingerly with the Im-
pressionists. In 1871 he returned to Paris, having hidden out
at TEstaque to avoid military service. This time he deflected
from the Impressionists completely and occupied himself with
a series of weird theatrical orgies, heavy with sexual over-
tones, set to canvas in wild torments of gloomy color.

It was only a phase, after which Cezanne settled down to

142

the long work of evolving an aesthetic system based, as he put
it, on "the strong experience of nature" rather than on the
mere eff ects of light or his own emotional instability. Finally
the repeated antagonism of the critics, discontent with the
Impressionist personalities, his own doubts, and his distrust
of people in general forced him to leave the Paris scene en-
tirely. "Honors can be created only for the cretins, the jack-
asses, and the crooks," he said.

He retired to Provence, where he was equally irritated by
the advent of electric light, road repairs, "modern" architec-
ture, provincial society, and the "stupidity of the peasants."
His wife and son, unable to tolerate his irascibility, spent the
greater part of their time in Paris. "What remains for me in
my condition," he wrote, "but to rusticate quietly?" Never-
theless, in the familiar landscape which was so dear to him he
could at least paint. He could wander off into the green and
copper countryside among the pines and olive trees which
always kept their foliage, with his boxes of paints, his can-
vases, and his easel, and set himself up in the clear white sun-
light "to express simultaneously objects and the air that en-
velops them, form and atmosphere." "The sun is so power-
ful," he wrote to Pissarro, "that I have the impression that
everything stands out in silhouette, not only in black and
white but in blue, in red, in brown, in violet. I may be mis-
taken, but it seems to me to be the opposite of modeling."

Systematically Cezanne worked to arrange and order what
lay before him until it loomed big, balanced, and serene, until
light and shadow were no more and color expressed every-
thing. His "method" and "logic" meticulously created "the
picture," the structure of forms and tones which, as he saw
it, were no longer the mood of the instant, the passing thing,
but Truth, solid and eternal.

"I must always continue to work, not, however, to
arrive at that perfection which wins the admiration of the

143

stupid. . . . That perfection, which the public esteems
so highly, is nothing but the result of technical knowl-
edge, and makes every work that is thus created inartistic
and commonplace. I must try to arrive at perfection
solely from a desire to be truer and more artistic. . . .
I work stubbornly. I see the Promised Land before me.
Shall I feel like that great Hebrew leader, or be able to
set foot in it? ... Is art really a priesthood which re-
quires pure men who are given to her body and soul?"

Cezanne's work threw up before the world an intellectual
and spiritual adventure so magnificent in its prospects it
revolutionized the course of painting. While the critics
carped and the public snickered, a few of the minds which
had themselves come through the fire stood in awe before
his paintings at Vollard's. "My enthusiasm was nothing com-
pared with Renoir's," Pissarro wrote to his son. "Degas him-
self is captivated by the spell of this refined savage Monet,
all of us. The only ones who are not subject to Cezanne's
magic are precisely those artists and amateurs who have al-
ready shown by their own errors that their sensibilities are
at fault."

And so the nineteenth century passed into limbo and the
twentieth began. Pablo Picasso (or, as he was then, at nine-
teen, Pablo Ruiz y Picasso) arrived in Paris in 1900, appro-
priately inaugurating the new century of art in which he was
assuredly to play the chief role. He stayed only two months,
selling three of his drawings to Berthe Weill, who had re-
cently opened a gallery and whom the artists already called
"La Merveille" (la Mere Weill) . In December he returned to
Barcelona where he had studied at La Lion j a, the Barcelona
Province school of Fine Arts for "a warm bed and a good
feed." He was back in Paris again for a few months the

144

next spring. During his stay Vollard held a small exhibition
of his work which created little excitement, and after his
return to Spain fifteen of his paintings were exhibited at
Berthe WeilTs gallery. The following year Picasso returned
to Paris for six months, and in April, 1904, he moved perma-
nently, taking up residence at No. 13 rue Ravignan in a
great jumble of rickety rooms and dark corridors dubbed "the
Bateau Lavoir," because externally it suggested one of the
laundry boats to be found along the Seine. In the five years
he lived there, until 1909, the "Bateau Lavoir" became the
nest from which the art of the twentieth century took wing.
The other tenants of this warren of dark and dirty cubicles
included an "ether salesman," a costermonger, a laundress, a
couple of prize fighters, an artist's model, a picture framer, an
unfrocked priest, and a young woman who insisted that she
was a milkmaid. They came and went with mysterious irreg-
ularity and in varying degrees of insobriety. The Dutchman
Van Dongen was its first artistic inhabitant; and shortly after
Picasso moved in came the two Spanish sculptors Paco Durio,
who had been a friend of Gauguin, and Manolo; the writers
Pierre MacOrlan and Andre Salmon, who were to be among
the most brilliant historians of this period of Montmartre
history; the poets Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob (Picasso's
great friend and former roommate, that extraordinary cynic
and mystic) ; the mathematician Maurice Princet, whose im-
aginative calculations were later to form a cornerstone of the
Cubist movement, and later Juan Gris.

When it did not overflow into the little bistro Zut whose
walls, during his second sojourn in Paris in 1901, Picasso
decorated with blue nudes or into the Closerie des Lilas,
another haunt, the place seethed with discussions, inspirations,
and manifestoes. Artists like Braque, Matisse, Derain, Dufy,
Marie Laurencin, Jean Metzinger, Modigliani, Louis Mar-
coussis, and Vlaminck were there always, singly or in groups.
Alfred Jarry was the center of the company; and it was to

the "Bateau Lavoir" that the mourners were to come "to
sing, drink, and eat sausages" after seeing Jarry's "wine-and-
ether-soaked remains" interred in the Montmartre Cemetery
on a sunny November Sunday in 1907. "A barbarous sight
like a scene imagined by the fellow we were putting into the
ground," so spoke Guillaume Apollinaire of the occasion.
Jean Cocteau, Maurice Raynal, Gustave Coquiot, and Apol-
linaire himself, whose "aesthetic meditations" were often the
basis for much of the talk, were always there, certainly on
Monday nights, when Max Jacob held forth on classical liter-
ature, acting pages of Racine from memory and passing out
ether and tinned sardines to his guests. And, of course, there
were the ones who failed to make names for themselves the
youths who ultimately retreated to the careers their families
hoped they would pursue, the discouraged, the ungifted, the
dilettanti, the wastrels. There, too, were the American
brother and sister Leo and Gertrude Stein Leo, who Max
Jacob said looked like "St. Francis of Pennsylvania," and
Gertrude, who sat to Picasso eighty times in the "Bateau
Lavoir" for the portrait of which the artist said, "Everybody
thinks that it is not like her, but never mind, in the end she
will look like the portrait." Paul Fort, the theatrical im-
presario, was a frequenter, as were the actors Harry Baur and
Gaston Modot, the art dealers Vollard, Clovis Sagot, Louis
Libaude, Daniel Henry Kahnweiler and Berthe Weill, the
German collector Wilhelm Uhde (he was to be one of the
first to write a book on Picasso), and the Russian Shchukin.
Picasso worked at night after the confusion died down,
"small, black, squat, restless and inspiring restlessness, with
somber eyes, deep, piercing, and strange always staring.
He seemed almost awkward in his manner, and dressed care-
lessly. A thick lock of hair, black and shining, slashed across
his intelligent forehead. Part Bohemian, part workingman."
He was concerned with life's outcasts, the poor, the miserable
and homeless who thus became the dramatis personae of what

146

has since been called his "Blue Period." Soon his style was
to mellow to the melancholy sweetness of the harlequins,
acrobats, and jugglers of his "Rose Period." Then suddenly
his agile intelligence was off to strange new vistas.

It was Cezanne who had said, "Everything in nature is
based on the cone, the sphere, and the cylinder." The cube,
reasoned the mathematician Princet, was the cone, the sphere
or the cylinder reduced to even more absolute terms. Was
not the straight line the beginning of all things? Might not,
therefore, humanity and everything else which came within
the artist's visual frame gain its fullest power and greatest
artistic significance when it was reduced to purely geo-
metrical solids that is, to cubes? Picasso wondered, too.

Then, at the opposite pole, Henri Matisse studied the archi-
tecture of color of Cezanne. (In 1899 he had bought Ce-
zanne's Bathers, which later, in 1936, he was to present to the
Petit Palais. At that time he wrote, "I have appreciated it for
thirty-seven years. To it I have pinned my faith.") To-
gether with a group of young friends Maurice Vlaminck,
Andre Derain, Othon Friesz and Albert Marquet, and later
Georges Braque, Cornelius Van Dongen, Jean Puy, and Louis
Valtat he sought to achieve space-construction through
color by creating "strange visions of green skies, vermilion
rivers, lemon-colored trees and emerald green faces." The
group had first exhibited its paintings at the Salon des Inde-
pendants. It is said that when the critic Louis Vauxcelles
spotted a small statue of a child's head in the Florentine man-
ner, by the sculptor Marque, in the room with these paintings,
he exclaimed, "Ah, Donatello among the wild animals." The
name "Fauves" (Wild Ones) stuck.

The two directions, Cubism and Fauvism, were in the
making when Cezanne caught his fatal chill on a muddy
country road near his home in Provence. The following year
Jarry died. It was Jarry who, in rage against the world he
loathed, had called for the "unfolding [of] a new universe

141

that supplements our own." With his compassionate love of
mankind, Picasso could hardly have sought the same objec-
tive from the same motive. If now he painted his extraor-
dinary picture "Les Demoiselles d* Avignon" in which "the
lines, the angles, the strange juxtaposition of the planes an-
nounced a new direction in modern painting," he painted
because he believed in man's ability to understand and love.

Matisse had already exhibited his "Luxury, Calm and
Voluptuousness," which was to chart the course of the Fauve
movement.

Revolution was in the air.

As far as Maurice was concerned, Montmartre had not
changed when he settled down there in 1906 at the age of
twenty-three. It was still a place of twisted, weather-worn
streets, bricks and mortar, plaster, tiles, cement, and wonder-
ful stone and roughcast walls. When had he first fallen in
love with these visions? He did not remember. In a nebulous
way they spoke to him of nostalgia and of a happiness he had
never really experienced as a child. They suggested that in
those faraway days his life had been bathed in gentle golden
light and soft shadows. The fear and the rage which had
bewitched his boyhood were forgotten entirely, the melan-
choly suffused tenderly with his joyous illusion of the past.
It was the Montmartre of these memories which he now
began to paint.

If only there had not been people! If only there had not
been those terrifying faces of the monster children of the
Pension La Flaiselle, the big, merciless bodies of grownups in
bustling crowds, the strident voices, the questions, the an-
swers, the laughter, he would have been profoundly happy
and would have been able to work calmly at his painting.
But they were there now as they had been in other days
setting his nerves on edge, vile, tormenting, driving him to
distraction. He wanted to slaughter them, all of them, with

148

one great sweep of his mighty arm. It was not enough to
try to ignore them to leave them entirely out of the pic-
tures he painted. He had to shut them out of his mind en-
tirely or else meet them head on with titanic rage. And in
order to be able to take either course he had to drink.

His driving urge to paint saw him through the daytime in
peace. Sometimes he suffered excruciating hangovers, but he
could bear them as long as he could paint. He painted, as we
have seen, automatically, with miraculous precision and speed,
hardly aware of his own movements. Suzanne had warned
him that he must visit art galleries, and he went dutifully,
especially to Durand-Ruers, where the Impressionists were
now a regular feature. He avoided the Louvre because there
were too many people there, but he would go to the Luxem-
bourg. "When the attendants were not looking," Carco
says, "he would caress the works of the Impressionists with
his fingertips." What he carried away from the galleries in
his mind it is hard to say. His biographer Tabarant says that
he was influenced particularly by the work of Sisley. Yet the
incisiveness of his design and the solidity of his structure
belies any such influence. His own commentary to Gustave
Coquiot on his work at this period is perhaps nearer the
truth: "When I believe that what I've done is good I say, It's
good, eh? Sisley, maybe! ' Why Sisley? I don't know. I've
never seen any of the work of this master, but I've heard my
mother speak of him. So I repeat the name. ... A beginner
is very stupid, isn't he?"

If Maurice owed a debt to any other painter, it was prob-
ably to Adolphe Monticelli, that brilliant painter of circuses,
masquerades, and fetes galantes who had died when Maurice
was three years old. Monticelli's thick layers of paint ("the
pudding") and invented pictorial light ("I am the luminous
center: it is I who light") are clearly evident in Utrillo's
early painting. But, here again, how much of it was conscious
awareness of the master's technique and how much his own

149

painting instinct it is hard to divine. One could never tell
with Utrillo when he was studying and when he was stupe-
fied. For the most part he was singularly uninterested in the
work of other artists; and beyond their application to his own
work he had no critical faculties. For his own work his
standard was very high, but otherwise his taste was bad. If
he had an ambition, it was that he should be thought as
"great" a painter as the hack Raffaelli. He believed that
Raffaelli's "Clemenceau Giving an Account of His Mandate
to the Voters of Montmartre at the Cirque Fernando" was
a great picture, and when pressed to explain this singular judg-
ment he replied, "It is very big, and Clemenceau is very
heroic." Once he told Francis Carco, "It was Raffaelli who
impressed me most. My greatest hope was that one day I'd be
able to paint as well as he did." Then he added, as though
he were talking only to himself, "But Suzanne kept me away
from him, and I had to hide my opinions."

Anyway, outside influence on his art was negligible. He
pursued his own unique course, transferring what stood be-
fore him, decrepit or banal, into terms of his personal rapture.
By the laws he alone established for himself he controlled his
impulses and exaltations. Yet they allowed him a wide field
for experiments. With the primitive ingenuity of a child, for
example, he tried to intensify the tactile quality of the build-
ings he painted by mixing plaster, sand, or glue into his paints,
by pasting sticks and bits of burlap to his canvas. Was he
here stepping unconsciously toward the colleges of a decade
later? In any event, he drew back: it was as far as his laws
allowed him to go.

Each day now saw Maurice in a different place on the
hill at his easel before the Moulin de la Galette at any one of
a dozen angles, in the rue du Mont-Cenis facing the roof tops
of the northern suburbs, facing the rue Cortot, where he now
lived in his mother's studio at No. 2, on the pavement of the
rue Norvins looking toward the Place du Tertre, Mont-

150

martre's heart, before the church of St. Pierre, before Notre-
Dame de Lorette, along the Place Blanche or the Place
Pigalle; and how many rimes and from how many vantage
points before the cool Byzantine white turrets and dome of
the still-unfinished basilica of Sacre-Coeur! The canvases, one
a day, are his diary of those first years of his return to the
Butte.

But his nights were horrors. Beginning innocently enough
with a glass of rouge as he sat alone at a cafe table straining
his ears to pick up the threads of the lively conversations
around him, he would finally be sufficiently fortified by his
wine to introduce himself at one of the tables. "My name is
Maurice . . . Maurice Valadon," for he obstinately refused
to accept the name given him by the Act of Recognition
signed by Miguel Utrillo. "Never call me that other name
Utrillo. Never. My friends call me 'Maumau/ " he would
add. His manner was charming, slighdy formal: the flicker
of a timid smile, the gentle roll of his soft speech, the fun in
his blue eyes, the patrician lift of his shoulders all gave
promise of geniality. His conversation was rather whimsical
and delicate; it startled him to find that people were amused
by it. But, as the talk about him grew more animated, he
began to lose himself. His eyes shifted restlessly from one
face to another. He quickened his drinking, often ordering
the waiter to bring him half a dozen glasses at a time. Around
him the talk spun like the uncontrollable pieces of colored
light in a kaleidoscope: he could not follow it. After a while
he understood nothing, only the furious hostility which these
jabbering faces and cacophonous voices now assumed
toward him. If he was among painters, he heard words like
"Cezanne" or "Matisse," "research," "expression," or phrases
like "our geometrical problems," "organized brain." He
knew nothing of this language. He was "a simple painter
fellow." One didn't talk, one painted. Why did people have
to talk about something that came out of their souls?

151

In his desperate confusion he imagined that he was being
mocked. People were laughing at him, shoving him around,
spitting on him. And then, all at once he would explode. He
would scream and curse, smash the glassware, swing his fists,
and reel out into the night on to more wine, more bistros,
more hideous, hostile people, more pain, more violence, more
wine, more . . . more. . . .

"Don't you even prepare your canvas?" Maurice looked
up. A young man stood at his shoulder looking at the paint-
ing on the easel an immensely handsome fellow with light
hair, the ghost of a golden beard flickering about his broad
full-lipped mouth, pipe stuck between two rows of small,
even teeth. "I'm Andre Andre Utter. I paint, too."

Maurice grunted and went back to applying paint to his
canvas. The young man stayed where he was, watched
silently for a quarter of an hour. Then all at once Maurice
turned to him. "I'm called Maurice."

It was to be his first genuine friendship. Andre Utter,
nicknamed "Dede," was three years younger than Maurice.
The son of a plumber who had his shop in the rue Caulain-
court, he had gone through the Ecole Communale in a blaze
of brilliant scholarship which gave his mother the idea that
he was headed for one of the learned professions, possibly
law or the priesthood; his father expected him to take over
the plumbing business. But the boy had made up his mind
that he wanted to be an artist. For several years while at
school he had spent all his spare time on the Butte watching
the painters at their easels, running errands for them, helping
them to clean up their studios, listening to their discussions.
At thirteen he began smoking a pipe and sampling absinthe.
By the time he left school he felt as if he were one of them.

He could paint very competently, as he could do whatever
else he put his mind to. And there was in everything he did
a dash of breathlessness and brilliant imagination. In a full-

152

blooded happy-go-lucky way he was the leader of a group
of young painters and intellectuals, lads like himself who had
grown up in Montmartre and who saw in the artists' carefree
atmosphere a possible escape from the drab succession to their
father's business. Self-taught as painters, writers, and in one
or two cases as musicians, they undertook to give themselves
full courses in the sensual pleasures of life. They learned to
drink absinthe and ether so that they might live in feverish
dreams. They learned to eat hashish or to smoke opium
(hashish was the more easily available and the more popular),
and, quite naturally, they delighted above all in exploring the
mysteries of love. Here Utter was "Pope," the leader of the
priesthood in whose charge stood the sacred altar of Venus.

Utter credited an aunt, his father's spinster sister Louise,
with having crystallized his interest in art and given him
direction. "Living in the Faubourg St. Germain, in the rue
Madame, and dividing her time between her religious devo-
tions and museums, she determined my vocation. On the first
Friday of every month she came to Mass at Sacre-Coeur and
then to lunch at our house. One Friday she came as usual and
happened to ask me what I had jjeen doing with myself. I
told her that the day before I had been to a museum. 'Ex-
cellent. Which one?' 'The Luxembourg,' I said. 'Good!
But that isn't the place to begin. You should begin at the
Louvre. Next Thursday I'll take you there.' " Thereafter he
went with her regularly every Thursday.

In the Louvre he studied the old masters. Among the
Leonardos and Titians, the Raphaels, Van Eycks, Velas-
quezes, and Rembrandts he began to form his own ideas and
tried to incorporate them in his painting. Driven by insatiable
curiosity, he delved into history and the problems of tech-
nique, from which he developed his "philosophy of art"
"simplicity, courage, and elemental emotion." Max Jacob
thought him "highly original" and for a short time shared a

153

room with him. Through Jacob he was introduced at the
"Bateau Lavoir," where, as "a real Montmartrois" and a
bright intelligence, he was warmly accepted by the group.
Gustave Coquiot spoke of him as "one of the coming
'greats.' " Although he ignored most of the audacities of his
contemporaries, Utter was temperamentally a Fauve, and had
he not eventually constricted his creative power with the
weight of intellectual restraints, he might have been an im-
portant painter.

Thanks to his mother's willingness to let him go his chosen
way, and in spite of his father's opposition, he moved into the
studio room which had been Sarie's at No. 6 rue Cortot, a
few steps from Maurice.

Soon after they met, Maurice and Utter became inseparable.
Andre Utter's boyish enthusiasm, his unaffected warmth and
friendliness, the sense of fun that emanated from him put
Maurice at his ease as he had never been before. In the day-
time they painted together. Utter loved to talk while he
worked, sounding off on his "philosophy," registering his ob-
servations about color, light, technique. Maurice was the
perfect listener. "Yes, yes," he would mutter from time to
time as he went on his automatic way, almost rhythmically
transferring his pigments from the dirty palette to the canvas.
Now and again he would smile at his friend, timidly, grate-
fully. If they had money, they would go off for dinner at
noon to a restaurant somewhere on the hill the Mere
Catherine, or the Belle Gabrielle, or perhaps to the Bonne
Fraquette in the rue Saint-Rustique, to sit quietly at one of
the garden tables where the Impressionists once ate and where
Van Gogh painted his "La Guinguette." In the evening they
would pick up Jules Depaquit ("the quick drinker") and
Tiret-Bognet ("the greatest painter alive have you seen his
latest picture of Napoleon in Flllustration'?") or Robert
Naley, the Swiss, and sell what canvases there were among

them to buy drinks. Then, arm in arm or falling over each
other, they would make their high spirits felt wherever it
suited their fancy, invading a friend's studio or one of the
maisons closes near Notre-Dame de Lorette, settling in a cafe
or bistro in the rue des Saules, the Place du Tertre, or on the
precipitous steps of the rue Muller. Only Maumau would go
beyond the fun. As the others' spirits rose, his plummeted.
As the gaiety increased, he became more miserable. And ul-
timately he would wander off by himself to abuse passers-by,
to send stones crashing through windowpanes, to fall into a
gutter, to end up bloody and filthy in the police station.

After a particularly violent bout the police would send for
Suzanne, and she would take him back to Montmagny, where
she and Madeleine would nurse him back to health for a few
days. And then he would return to Montmartre.

It was apparently while Maurice was at Montmagny that
Andre Utter first saw Suzanne. He was painting in the street
with another friend, Edmond Heuze. "She passed by, ignor-
ing us," Utter wrote, "but I began to dream of her."

And well he might! She had never been lovelier a tiny,
voluptuous figure, cool and detached, a touch of poignant
melancholy about her eyes. The ripened vigor of her spirit
was in her walk, in the long unfaltering stride so strangely
incongruous to her size, in the lift of her breasts. She at once
exuded fine sensuality and robust grandeur. She was far too
subtle, too complicated, too dangerous to fire the desires of
the callow. To Utter she was immediately and passionately
a challenge to his vigorous masculinity, his intelligence, and
his profound sensibilities. If he were to live a hundred years,
he knew, he would find no one else like this.

They were to meet finally at Montmagny. By 1908 the
pace at which he had been living had begun to tell on Utter.
His weight had dropped to barely one hundred pounds.
Alarmed, his parents packed him off to a convalescent home

155

in the country, which, by a curious coincidence, was at
Pierrefitte-Montmagny. There he found Maurice. "I set up
my easel beside him," he wrote many years later, "and when
our painting session was over I walked with him to the gate
of the big house overlooking a magnificent stretch of country-
side. It was the home of his stepfather, M. Paul Mousis, where
he was staying with his mother and grandmother. . . . That
evening Maurice told his mother about our meeting. His
mother was pleased. Apparently she thought I should be a
good influence on him. . . . The next day Maurice in-
troduced me to her. . . . She was the young woman I had
been dreaming about! . . . She showed me two of her paint-
ings, some pastels, some drawings, and some etchings. . . .
I left on a cloud."

It was a fateful meeting.

The bourgeois life of Montmagny had begun to pall on
Suzanne. Mousis had evidently seen the danger signals, for
shortly afterward he expressed his willingness to leave his big
house and establish his family on the Butte, staying at Mont-
magny only weekends. He rented an apartment and studio
recently vacated by the Catholic writer Leon Bloy on the
first floor of the old seventeenth-century building at No. 12
rue Cortot. Poor Mousis! His cause was by now hopeless.
The last years at Montmagny had been too strenuous for
Suzanne. It was only a question of time when the "marriage"
would come to grief. During the first years it was held intact
by the ardor of their youthful passion and the novelty of
their social life. Even then they sometimes quarreled. But
as the trouble with Maurice increased, the differences be-
tween them rose more and more to penetrate that veneer of
well-being to which the big house on the Butte Pinson was a
monument. Living as she did in a feverish state of apprehen-
sion over Maurice never knowing whether to give him free
rein or to coddle him, torn between her duties as a mother
and her surging creative urge Suzanne had been compelled

156

to assume interest in the endless trivialities of a housewife's
life, to create an illusion of well-being which, in her own
sense of the fitness of things, was completely false. She
wilted. The more frivolous her life appeared to be, the deeper
became her real anxieties. True, she dramatized her predica-
ment somewhat; otherwise she would have been able to re-
solve it and make a clean break. But, in an obscure way, what
she saw ahead was as depressing as what she was living
through. If she gave up her present position, she would only
be catapulted into a struggle for economic survival, and then
the problems of Maurice and of her artistic expression would
still be with her. To live on what she was able to make as an
artist was impossible; even modeling jobs were not likely to
come her way as they had fifteen years before.

Not that Suzanne coolly determined these matters in her
mind she was far too agitated. They were but desultory
thoughts in her confusion. But the Montmagny years (and
sometimes she had an oppressive feeling that it might be age
too) had filled her with a lassitude which was not easily cast
off.

Had she known what to do about Maurice, she might have
made the plunge. Despite all her savage determination to save
the boy, she could see herself losing the battle. She was al-
ways torn between a desire to shield him and a fear of being
overprotective. Sometimes she was convinced, in a mystical
way which was certainly alien to her character, that the boy's
salvation could come only through her absolute rejection of
him; then immediately she knew that she was the only prop he
had.

In her actual contact with Maurice she was patient and
sympathetic. She did not chide or nag him. Nor did she fail
to show her disapproval or her pain. She made the most of
his rare periods of sobriety talking to him about his work
and his friends, going for walks with him, taking him out to

151

dinner. It was such a pitiful bit to offer, and yet it was all
that was possible to be there when he wanted her. Where
would she be, she asked herself, if she broke with Mousis?
With a living to make and the fight to hold a household
together, how much would Maurice be able to come to her
then?

And still she longed to escape from the life she was living.
No amount of reasoning could deaden the feeling of pain that
she felt in keeping herself chained to this practical power of
money. If only she had the strength to tear herself away!
For the first time in her life she lacked courage, and no one
knew it better than she. It was knowledge which only added
to her confusion, her distress.

If anything, her discontent was increased by the environ-
ment in which she now lived. She might have suffered less
in Montmagny, with parquet floors, lace curtains, and shop-
ping lists. But instead she was in the rue Cortot, This was the
Montmartre of her carefree days, and she was entertaining
bankers! The contrast was bitter.

So matters stood, one day after they had moved into No.
12 rue Cortot, when young Andre Utter passed by in the
street and Suzanne called to him. The consequence of this
encounter was the painting of that curiously barbaric and
solid "Adam and Eve," * for which Utter posed for the figure
of Adam. The picture was shown at the Salon d'Automne,
which had been inaugurated some years earlier in the base-
ment of the Petit Palais on the Champs Elysees by Matisse,
Francis Jourdain, the architect Marquet, and Pierre Bonnard
a show then dominated by the Fauves. But more important
to her at the time than her appearance among this dynamic
group of revolutionaries was the fact that next to her "Adam

*Now in the Valadon-Utrillo Room in the Museum of Modern Art,
Paris.

158

and Eve" hung "Pont Notre Dame," by Maurice Utrillo
V.,* and that Maurice spent hours each day strolling through
the rooms at the Petit Palais with a sly smile on his lips, his
shoulders straight, and a cane under his arm. Once again
her hopes soared.

Despite her anxieties it was, all in all, an optimistic period
for her* While she painted "Adam and Eve" Utter became
her lover. Brilliant, beautiful, inflamed with glowing youth-
ful passion, it seemed to her he was everything she had all her
life been hungering for. That he was twenty-one years
younger than she three years younger than her own son
she airily ignored. The force of his youth made her young,
imbued her once again with the buoyancy she had had when
she first went to the fountain in the Place Pigalle. Now,
closing her eyes to everything but her own sensations, she
knew to the very depths of her being that she had found the
love of her life. Nor was Utter less moved. His boyish
dreams had come true. He stood in possession of a mature
and magnificent woman with a superb body, an original
mind, a temperament at once extravagant and impassioned. In
every one of her changing moods her intensity, the shimmer
of raillery, her bursts of lusty humor she seemed alive as no
woman he had ever known was alive.

The years 1909-1910 saw them caught up in a cloud of
happiness. Utter now shared a studio at No. 5 Impasse de

* Maurice had begun to use this signature in 1905, having previously
stubbornly signed all his work "Maurice Valadon" or "Maurice U.
Valadon." The reasons for this change of heart have never been probed by
his biographers. It was about this time that one of Miguel Utrillo's closest
friends, the artist Rusinol, painted a charming Impressionist picture,
''Suzanne Valadon and Her Son Maurice Utrillo at the Moulin de la
Galette." It seems that Rusinol would not have so entitled his painting had
he not had Maurice's permission to do so. There is also room for conjec-
ture that during the painting of the picture Rusinol might have gone a
long way toward prejudicing the young man in favor of the elder Utrillo's
name.

159

Guelma with Maurice, and here the lovers enjoyed rendez-
vous which they were at pains to see could hardly be called
"secret." In the rue Cortot they posed for each other. At the
cafe tables they held hands and were lost in tender attitudes.
Even their rows became public spectacles, for from the be-
ginning they enjoyed a fight. They were a continual delight
to each other and were pleased that the world should know
it.

Suzanne's art found renewed strength and sureness. Spring-
ing partly from the release of emotional forces which had
been stifled during the final Montmagny years, partly from
the optimistic prospects of the future, the new power yet
owed much to Utter's highly sensitive feeling for painting,
his intelligence, instinctive good taste, and tremendous en-
thusiasm. From the first he regarded her art as even more
important than their personal relationship. It was something
in which he believed with all the terrible brutality of his
youth. "The Valadon Drama," he called it, "a kind of divine
magic which moves of itself." But even in his awe he was
aware of the direction in which her energies must bend in
order to give that "divine magic" its might. That her draw-
ing was beautiful he knew; but he was also perceptive enough
to realize that she had already carried it as far as it could go.
Nowhere in it now was the promise of further development,
of a rise to new horizons. Instead, she must paint. To direct
her power to painting, he pointed out, was to refresh her
aesthetic spirit, to give it free rein, to create for herself a vast
new field in which she would reflect the full potency of her
temperament. She accepted his judgment as a loving pupil.
How could she do otherwise, knowing that in him she had
someone who fervently believed in her genius?

In turn, it was her confidence in him even more than her
love which in 1909 made of her break with Mousis a light

160

thing.* She packed Madeleine and her collection of china
pieces off to the Impasse de Guelma, and within an hour
followed with her own effects. Maurice had just received
the news that his application to enroll for study at the Ecole
des Beaux Arts had been rejected. He was drinking like a
fiend. There was no money. And yet Suzanne was sure
that she had never been so happy.

Shortly after Maurice's return to Montmartre a merry,
round little man named Clovis Sagot ("Sagot the Madman"),
who had established himself in a former chemist's shop in the
rue Laffitte and handed out to the artists, in exchange for
their pictures, the drugs and medicines left on his shelves by
his predecessor, had begun to buy Maurice's pictures, or
rather to exchange them for medicines of high alcoholic con-
tent. Ultimately he paid money from five to twenty francs,
depending on the size of the canvas. These paintings Sagot
shipped to Switzerland, where they passed into the hands of
the type of international tourist who buys oil paintings in
gift shops. But Sagot doubled his money.

It was at Sagot's shop that Louis Libaude, art critic of
UArt Litteraire, first saw Maurice's work. Libaude, of whom
Andre Utter was to say "he wouldn't hurt a lion," had
recently shifted his talents from the auctioneer's stand at
TattersalTs, the Neuilly horse market; and mile Bernard,
the editor of UArt Litteraire, was delighted to have come by
such cogent critical talent in so unlikely a place. Libaude's
job seemed, on the surface, to have little connection with big
money-making, which was his confessed purpose in life.
However, it did allow him a good deal of time to frequent the
government auction rooms at H6tel Drouot. There he in-

*Mousis has often been referred to as "Suzanne's first husband." A
thorough search of the rnavries, both in Montmartre and at Pierrefitte-
Montmagny, has failed to produce any record of marriage or of divorce.
It has always been assumed by all of Suzanne's friends that her "marriage
to Mousis" was figurative rather than literal.

161

vested shrewdly by purchasing antique furniture, paintings,
porcelain, and sculpture. His flat at No. 6 rue Baudin was
filled with these purchases, and everything, including the bed
he slept in, displayed a sales tag. Francis Jourdain gives us a
fine description of the man: "Thin, bilious, with a greenish-
yellow face ... he lurked in the auction rooms at the Hotel
Drouot like a shadow. I often met him there, and each time
he tried to throw me off his track by talking about nothing
but horses. 'I want to talk to you/ he would say. 'Where can
I see you? I'd invite you to lunch, but I don't eat or drink.
My stomach is bad, my liver is awful/ "

Libaude's method of buying Utrillo paintings was char-
acteristically devious. In the back of his mind was the idea
that once it became known that Libaude was buying them,
others would offer more than he did. By promising to stage
a one-man show of the canvases, he did business with
Suzanne under a pledge of secrecy. Not even Maurice (least
of all Maurice, who was likely to spill anything when drunk! )
must know that the art critic of VArt Litteraire was buying
his pictures.

To Francis Jourdain, however, must go the credit for being
the first critic to recognize in print the importance of
Maurice's art. Shortly after the Libaude show Jourdain pub-
lished his first brochure on the artist: Maurice Utrillo. But
by that time a few wise collectors could already boast of
having Utrillo paintings in their collections. One day in 1909
Manzana Pissarro, the Impressionist's son, came upon Maurice
with one of his pictures under his arm standing under a
Montmartre awning in a rainstorm. The picture interested
him, and he persuaded Maurice to let him see more of his
work. A few days later young Pissarro appeared at Maurice's
studio, where he found the painter at his easel eating pickled
herrings to increase his thirst as he worked. Pissarro bought
ten canvases at fifty francs apiece.

A year later Francis Jourdain was in the Galerie Druet

162

when Maurice, drunken and filthy, brought in several of his
canvases and tried to show them to M. Druet. Druet would
have none of them, but Jourdain was impressed. Finally the
firm's accountant, overhearing the critic trying to persuade
the dealer to reverse his judgment, asked him whether he
thought it might not be a "bit of business" to buy one of the
canvases for fifty francs. "I told him to go ahead," Jourdain
recounts; then adds, "And my commission was a grateful
smile from the poor wretch." He himself then bought two
paintings of the Montmagny period, and soon his enthusiasm
brought several of his friends to Libaude's flat and the new
gallery which he had just opened in the Avenue Trudaine.
These visitors included the Kapfeerer brothers, who were
collectors; Paul Gallimard, the publisher, and his brother-in-
law Duche, the novelist; Octave Mirbeau; and the critic lie
Faure; all of whom bought paintings. Libaude lost no time
in having word spread about that these eminent personages
were buying Utrillos from him "at from 250 francs upward."
At the Hotel Drouot he passed out leaflets "M. Louis
Libaude sells privately and at retail his collection of modern
pictures. . . ." He was at the time paying Suzanne a flat rate
of fifty francs. "This price must remain confidential," he
wrote to her in a letter dated "at ten minutes to noon." "I
buy few works by young artists, but I am prepared to make
an exception for your son because his talent particularly

interests me."

Had the money been handed over to Maurice, it would
have gone for wine only. No longer driven by a desire to
paint, he now did so only to drink, staggering from bistro to
bistro offering his still-wet canvases in exchange for a few
glasses of rouge. Two or three glasses were enough to make
him reeling drunk; if he still had money then, he would throw
it into the sewers. Now he floundered about, sometimes
miserable and weeping, sometimes absurdly belligerent, some-
times trying to be comical by making erotic and obscene

163

gestures, often sick. Hounded by ruffians, tormented by
yelping urchins, abused by night revelers, he could find es-
cape only in stupor or coma. When he fell into some merci-
ful dark corner, young brutes stripped him of his clothes or
emptied garbage buckets over him. So many were the de-
bauches that ended for him in the police station that the
gendarmes always had brushes and colors on hand and made
him produce a painting before letting him go home. It no
longer seemed to matter whether he was drunk or sober when
he painted. The automatic production went on. Canvas after
canvas seemed "to happen" before the listless strokes of his
brush. Nor did he have to look at what he was painting.
Often he set up his easel to command a certain street scene
and then, facing it, he would paint an altogether different one
one in his mind.

For the most part he worked from picture post cards
picked up in souvenir shops! From these he measured angles
and perspectives with a ruler, but what happened in the
finished painting bore no relation to the post card in front of
him. The scene was now suffused with affection and radi-
ance, with the harmony of his uncanny technique, radiating
security, magic, and glory. His famous "White Period," that
of his greatest painting, belongs to these years, roughly be-
tween 1908 and 1914. Here, by using massive blocks of blues
and browns he brought to his white walls, in contrast, a solid
grandeur and poetry never before seen in painting, or equaled
since. On the meaning of those walls, on their emotional im-
pact upon the hearts of men, he staked his worth as an artist.

Only at the Lapin Agile did he find a measure of peace.
This tiny single-storied pink building on the northeast corner
of the rue des Saules and the rue Saint- Vincent, looking
squarely at the high wall of the cemetery across the street,
had since 1902 become the meeting place of the "Bateau
Lavoir gang" and a great many of the other Montmartre

164

artists. The building had a romantic history. Originally sup-
posed to have been the hunting lodge of Henri IV, it was in
the eighties the home of Andre Gill, the great political carica-
turist. In remembrance of its original purpose Gill painted
a rabbit above the door in the manner of sixteenth-century
taverns. As a result the house became known as "Le Lapin
a Gill." In 1885 Gill blew out his brains in the kitchen, and
soon afterward the place was converted into a cabaret fre-
quented in the main by local thugs. The proprietress was "la
grosse Adele," a former model and friend of Suzanne
Valadon. During her regime the cabaret was known as "Les
Assassins." But in 1901 Adele established herself in a restau-
rant at the top of the hill facing the church of St. Pierre
The Moulin Joyeux while Frede Gerard, who had owned
Zut in the Place Ravignan when Picasso painted the mural,
now took over the cabaret, changing its name to "Le Lapin
Agile," a pun on the name it had borne in Gill's time. Just as
at the Zut, Fred6, with his heavy beard, his flaming velvet
vests and tasseled nightcap, looking for all the world like an
operatic bandit, once again sat astride a barrel strumming his
guitar and singing "Cherry Time" and "The Coster's Wife."
Cramped at the benches and tables around him in the small
main room decorated with paintings by Picasso, Modigliani,
Utrillo, Rouault, and others, and with a large wax crucifixion
by Wasselet, the customers would drink their Corsican wine,
join in the choruses of Frede's risque ballads, and continue
the arguments which had been broken off the previous
evening.

It was the only place where Maurice could feel that there
were understanding and affection around him. No one tried
to change him. No one ridiculed him; in fact, he had a feeling
that everyone admired his strange independence of spirit.
"He is one of the greatest French painters," Picasso was later
to say of him. For the present, being a painter was enough.
As such, he was entitled to behave as he wanted to. If he fell

165

asleep, they let him snore through the evening and then took
him home. If he stormed off in a drunken rage, they shrugged
their shoulders rather than murmured in pity. They knew
that he wanted to be one of them, that he tried to make sense
of their high-flown language and their complicated aesthetic
theories, but that in the end it was easier for him to insult
them all and get roaring drunk. They did not mind. There
was not one among them who did not have the urge to do
the same thing every once in a while.

Modigliani alone would go with him.

Born in Leghorn in 1884, the son of a Jewish banker whose
bank had failed and a mother who was happy for her son to
be an artist, Amedeo Modigliani was sent to study at the
Florentine and Venetian academies before he arrived in Paris
in 1907, when he was twenty-three. He came to the Butte
with an exaggerated conception of the artist's life, in his
mind's eye and the intermittent fever of tuberculosis in his
body. A tall, indolent figure, aristocratic and poised, he
dressed in corduroy suits and brilliant purple and orange
scarves, and affected the wide-brimmed black hat which had
been the mark of the artist before the turn of the century.
Uncommonly handsome, with the lithe and powerful body
of a Ghirlandajo stripling and the emotional drive of a satyr,
he plunged at once into all the dissipations of Montmartre.
He seems to have made a beeline for Pigeard, the notorious
dope peddler, whose small house in the Impasse du Delta,
fitted to resemble the current idea of a Chinese opium den,
was the gathering place of the hashish addicts. Fifteen francs
bought enough of the drug to last a fortnight.

It was at one of Pigeard's "hashish and alcohol parties"
that Modigliani met Andre Utter, who later introduced him
to Maurice. And it was during the evening of this meeting
chez Pigeard that Modigliani is supposed suddenly to have
shouted, "I've found the way!" and shown the company a
sketch he had just drawn of a woman's head with the almond-

166

shaped eyes and swanlike neck which were henceforth to
stamp his painting. Whether or not this vision of sickness,
refined, decorative, and gentle, which now began to permeate
his work stemmed from the delirium of the addict it is hard
to say. Surely the cool air of death was upon Modigliani
always; it was in the natural course of things that it should
be in his art. But, far from depressing him, it heightened and
quickened his desire to experience all sensual pleasure at its
most ecstatic pitch. Desperately he loved women. Willfully
he became addicted to wine, to absinthe, to drugs. No dis-
sipation was too wild for him to hurl himself into it with
rapture. "I have been through Dante's hell tonight. Ah,
wonderful hell!" he once exclaimed to Suzanne Valadon.

But there was also at the core of Modigliani's character a
deep compassion for the dispossessed, the humble, the simple
people. The melancholy which he found in their weariness,
in their drawn faces, in their loneliness was the restraining
anchor to the dark forces which possessed him. It is the
melancholy which haunts his pictures. He could burst into
tears at the sight of a sick child, or insist that a ragged little
girl take the last sou in his pocket.

In Maurice, Modigliani found an outlet for all these emo-
tions as well as a fellow who could share his appetite for
alcohol. They were two gentle men. Furthermore, Maurice
was a painter, while as yet Modigliani had not been able to
give direction to his work. For although the "Bateau Lavoir"
gang listened to his theories, mostly only half formulated, and
a few of the minor art galleries paid him a franc or two for
some of his drawings, the only public attention his work had
had was when Berthe Weill received a summons from the
police for exhibiting one of his nudes in her window. "I work
at three pictures a day in my head. But what's the good of
spoiling canvases when no one buys my work?" he com-
plained. To him there was something glorious in Maurice's

167

astonishing ability to produce endlessly wonderful pictures in
spite of his debauchery. Even selling them for twenty francs
was marvelous. In his eyes Maurice was a kind of hero of
Bohemianism.

There was, as far as Modigliani was concerned, a glow of
lighthearted humor in his carousals with Maurice despite all
the disgust with which the Philistines viewed them. There
was, for example, the night on Montparnasse when the two
of them astounded the clientele of a restaurant by suddenly
whipping out their paints and brushes and executing an
enormous mural of Montmartre, Utrillo doing the landscape
and "Modi" the figures, while the waiters rushed about with
their trays and the patron made feeble threats to call the
police, only to be checked each time by the cheers of his
customers as the scene on the wall developed.

Or there was the occasion when the two friends collected
the dregs from all the glasses and bottles on the tables and
toasted one another.

"You are a great painter, Dedo."

"I'm very honored, Maumau, but you are a greater painter
than I."

"No. You are the greatest."

"I protest. Don't contradict me! "

"I protest!"

At this point they began to fight.

On the way to the police station the argument continued.

"Well, who's the greater painter now you or me?"

"You."

"You He! It's you."

"You call me a liar?" And again the fists began to fly.

However, for each good-humored episode there were a
hundred sordid ones of nights when they would be beaten
up and robbed by ruffians, of nights when they slept in the
gutters, of nights when they were lost in the rain or the snow

16S

and Modigliani would be racked by his hideous tubercular
cough, of nights of abysmal depression obsessed by thoughts
of death and suicide.

Sometimes their bouts were solitary, and Modigliani would
finish by rolling himself into a corner at the Impasse de
Guelma with Suzanne's great German sheep dog and sleep off
the effects of his orgy. Or he would clatter up the winding
stairs, shed all his clothes on the landing, and burst into the
flat naked, dancing wildly. Suzanne and Utter would stand
him in a tub of water in die kitchen and clean him up before
putting him to bed. Suzanne understood drunks. To her and
Utter he was, like Maurice, not an object of scorn, not just a
noisome alcoholic. He was a gifted spirit, a fine artist bat-
tered by demons, and they loved him. If he were mad, so to
a point were they also touched with madness. Every artist
was touched with it.

In the Impasse de Guelma Suzanne and Utter lived in a
sort of miniature "Bateau Lavoir" of their own. Here every-
one was an artist Raoul Dufy, Georges Braque and his wife
(and his flute), the bombastic Tuscan Gino Severini, with his
sandals and wild unmatched socks. There were no keys to
any of the studios, but there were hundreds of empty wine
bottles on the landings. Interminable arguments about art
filled days and nights, and there were gay uninhibited parties.
Vagabond poets and artists streamed in and out at all times,
tramps slept on the stairs. Suzanne kept a goat in her studio,
where she said she fed it bad drawings. They lived on
money borrowed from Dufy, who had a regular employment
designing fabrics for Paul Poiret, the couturier, or on the sale
of their pictures, which was rarely enough to keep them in
food for two or three days once Dufy was paid back. But if
Modigliani needed affection and encouragement, Suzanne and
Utter gave it unstintingly. Their studio was always open to
him as one of their family. "My elected mother" he called
Suzanne as he poured out the troubles of his soul, sitting at

169

her feet while she painted. After he left the Butte for Mont-
parnasse he carried his canvases and drawings across the city
for Suzanne and Utter to see; their admiration was impas-
sioned and sincere. He loved to bring them armloads of hot-
house flowers, on which he spent all he had received from the
sale of a picture. "Ah! But they are our beautiful Italy!" he
would cry. He would sing them boat songs of his native
Leghorn and recite for them passages from his beloved Dante.
At other times, in less lyrical mood, he would steal one of
their paintings and sell it, using the proceeds to launch a
spree. Once he brought in a prostitute and camped with her
on the studio floor for a week, consuming quantities of hashish
pills and engaging in a protracted sexual orgy. Even when he
fought with them, smashing one of his canvases on Utter's
head because he would not give him money for dope, Suzanne
and Utter felt no resentment. Whatever Modigliani did, they
understood and loved him.

But, discouraged by failure to win recognition, he became
increasingly bitter, and his dissipations became more violent.
"Ah! To have the world at my feet as Maumau has!" he
would exclaim. And then in a jealous fury he would revile
his friend. When he was sober he was surly, quarrelsome, and
sadistic. Once accepted by the artists of the Butte as a charm-
ing hedonist, he ultimately became a pariah. Too much
meanness, too much bitterness. His friends shunned him. He
became so objectionable that even the genial Frede refused
to allow him into the Lapin Agile.

Then in 1913 he deserted the Butte for Montparnasse,
where he found a kindly oasis in the studios of the Jewish
immigrant artists at Kisling's, at Pascin's, or at the boy
Soutane's. And somehow, when he was among these aliens
bitterness left him for a while at any rate. Women were
generous to him. And it was on Montparnasse that the Polish
poet Leopold Zborowski befriended him Zborowski, who
was to go into debt to buy paints and dope for him, who

no

sheltered him like a child and bore the full brunt of his worst
tantrums, and who believed so passionately in his art that he
gave up his own literary career in order to sell his pictures.
When he came back to Montmartre it was either to bully
some money from Beatrice Hastings, the English poet who
lived in the rue Norvins and had been his mistress, or to be
with Suzanne and Utter for a little while to talk, to laugh,
to sing them his songs of Leghorn, to take them with him to
where his heart was "Cara, cara Italia" dear, dear Italy,
where he was not a stranger, an alien. "Cara, cara Italia"

VII "Unholy Trinity'

"HOMAGE TO YADWIGA!" "HONOR TO ROUSSEAU!"

The hall was festooned in red, white, and blue bunting
with French and Mexican flags. On an easel at one end of
the room stood an oil painting of a nude woman lying on a
couch surrounded by trees and greenery. This was Yadwiga,
a memory of first love. A few feet from her, sitting in solemn
dignity on an improvised dais, was her creator small, plump,
sixty-five-year-old Henri Rousseau, whom his friends called
"the Douanier" because he had once held a job as a minor
customs official at a tollgate on the outskirts of Paris. He had
had two brief careers in military service: the first in 1866,
when he had served as a drummer boy with the 52d Infantry
Regimental Band in Napoleon Ill's disastrous gesture to save
Maximilian in Mexico; the second in 1870, when as a sergeant
he had, so he said, "saved the town of Dreux from the horrors
of civil war" by his "presence of mind in a crisis," and had
been cheered by the grateful townspeople with cries of "Vive
le sergeant Rousseau.^

After he retired from the Customs and Excise Service,
Henri Rousseau opened a tiny stationery store, and it was
here that he began to paint strange, primitive visions of
commonplace scenes, peopled with stiff, comic personages
and toy animals. No one bought his paintings, and few
bought the stationery. Once again he retired, this time to a
111

772

room over a foundry in the rue Pernelle, where he posted a
notice on the door: "Instruction: Elocution, Music, Painting,
and Solfeggio." A lady and her four children seem to have
been his only steady pupils. Here he held "literary and
philosophical soirees," during which his pupils performed on
the mandolin and clarinet and he himself played his own com-
positions on the violin. Afterward the company soaked bread
in wine, talked, and sang, and then went home "all happy."
"Holding that complete freedom of production should be
given to any beginner whose turn of mind aspires to achieve
the Beautiful and the Good," he exhibited each year in the
Salon des Independants. It was there that, in 1885, he met
Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Redon, and Gustave
Coquiot, who were amazed and delighted at the naive
splendor of the two pictures which he exhibited. Ten years
later Alfred Jarry "discovered" him and ultimately brought
Apollinaire, Picasso, Max Jacob, and others to his soirees.

On this particular night of the year 1908 he sat under a
red candle which was dripping wax, and a little inverted cone
gradually appeared on the top of his bald head. Apparently
he felt that it would be unsoldierly to move. Before him an
uproarious "banquet" was in full swing. Given by Pablo
Picasso for thirty of his friends, its stated purpose was
to celebrate Picasso's acquisition of "Yadwiga," rescued
from a secondhand furniture shop. Actually it was in
honor of "the brave douanier" Somehow Picasso and the
caterer had gotten their dates mixed, for, except for the fruit
tarts, no food arrived until the following day. But the wine
was there, and before the evening was over so was most of
the population of Montmartre. Frede from the Lapin Agile
arrived with his guitar and his donkey Aliberon. Andre
Salmon pretended to have a fit, chewing a cake of soap to
produce a terrifying froth. There were calls to Gertrude
Stein to sing some Pennsylvania Red Indian songs, Marie
Laurencin, then twenty-three and with the grace of a fairy,

113

managed to alight in the middle of the dish of tarts, after
which, dripping fruit and juice, she sang old Provenal
rondels. The highlight of the evening, however, was die
extempore recitation of a poem composed by Guillame Apol-
linaire which recalled Rousseau's military career among the
mangoes, pineapples, and monkeys of Mexico. The poem
concluded:

"Nous sommes reunis four celebrer ta gloire;
Ces vim, qu!en ton honneur nous verse Picasso,
Buvons-les done, puisque c'est Fheure de les boire,
En criant tous en choeur: 'Vive! Vive Rousseau? " *

The cheers, "Vive Rousseau!" lasted the night.

The "bravest of customs officials" then rose to sing a num-
ber of his own songs "Clochettes" and "An Angel's Dream"
among them and to play a few solos on his violin, conclud-
ing by delivering an address on his Mexican war experiences
of forty years before. And at some time during the evening
Rousseau is supposed to have told Picasso, "You and I are
the two greatest living painters, I in the modern style, you
in the Egyptian."

The "banquet" was the climax of thirty years of rollicking
fellowship which had made Montmartre the Mecca of the
young in heart all over the Western world. From this time
onward, the painter-philosophers, the painter-sociologists, the
painter-theoreticians, the painter-poets, the painter-psycholo-
gists the heirs of Cezanne began to drift away from the
Sacred Hill as mysteriously as, in the seventies, the artists of
Light had followed Manet toward it. Rousseau died of
gangrene, the result of a badly dressed cut on his leg, in

* "Thy glory we are together to celebrate;

These wines in thine honor are bought by Picasso.
Let's drink 'em it's time now to down 'em
And cry in a chorus, Long life to Rousseau!'"

114

September, 1910. The following month Picasso left the
"Bateau Lavoir" for his large studio on the Boulevard de
Clichy, and shortly afterward moved to Montparnasse. Some
said it was the commercial fever generated by the theaters and
dance halls of the Place de Clichy and the Place Pigalle that
drove Cezanne's men to the broad boulevards of Raspail and
Montparnasse. Others said it was the motor buses of tourists
who arrived every quarter of an hour before the basilica of
Sacre-Coeur or in the Place du Tertre; others that it was
the sight of the new apartment houses, with the names of un-
imaginative, stuffy architects etched on their uninspired
fagades, that drove anyone with aesthetic sensitivity to desert
the Butte. The very picturesqueness of what remained on
the scene seemed to impel others to leave. Whatever the rea-
son, the artists departed, and with them went the brilliant
light which had ushered in "their" century. Soon most of the
eager, the brave, the hopeful young artists followed them.
And in the lengthening gray shadow in their wake the
weather-torn sails of the last of the windmills turned slowly,
and people said that Montmartre was finished.

Above the door of his studio at No. 12 rue Cortot, on the
floor above the one Suzanne had maintained when she was
living at Montmagny, mile Bernard had posted a notice:
"He who does not believe in God, Raphael, and Titian does
not enter here." The words were still there when Suzanne,
Utter, Maurice, and Madeleine, two tomcats, the German
sheep dog, and a goat moved in.

"If we cannot be as exclusive, at least we shall be better
painters than Bernard," Suzanne laughed. It was no idle reso-
lution. With the full powers of her creative being unleashed,
and filled with the exquisite turbulence of love, she hurled
herself at her work with every fiber of her vitality. If there
was talk in the cafes and studios of an artistic exodus from
the Butte, she did not hear it; nor, if she had heard it, would

115

it have altered her course. She did not believe in "schools'*
and "movements." To her, art was an expression of private
passion, uncomplicated and irrational. Its theories were im-
posed by nature, not by group thinking. "Above all," she
was to say later, "I believe that the true theory is the one
imposed by nature first on the painter and then on what he

sees."

Suzanne loved the confraternity of artists in an anarchic,
emotional way because she shared their eccentric tempers, not
because she hoped to draw upon their thought processes or
align herself with their aesthetic credos. In any case, most
of what she heard was over her head. She had no intellectual
training. She never read. The charge of her own emotions
had always been too mercurial for her to be able to control
her thinking responses. Intelligent enough to appreciate su-
perior mentality, she nonetheless to a certain extent despised
it. This was true particularly in the case of her lover. Utter's
fund of knowledge, his curiosity, the daring thrusts and
somersaults of his lively reasoning, his ability to pierce to the
heart of almost any subject dazzled her, but at the same time
she convinced herself that his cerebral prowess did little to
enhance his artistic worth. Yet in the beginning she found
it somewhat flattering that, in much the same way as in their
physical relationship he ignored the difference in their ages,
he accepted her rational powers as the equal of his own.

Her physical enjoyment of Utter's presence was slavish.
In his youth, in the sound of his voice, in the smoke from his
pipe she found a source of profound exhilaration. To have
him near as they worked at their easels in the studio was a
tonic to her painting, and she was irritable and frustrated
when he was not around. "They flirted like schoolchildren,"
Utter's boyhood friend Edmond Heuze says, "and she was
always devising pretexts to stay close to him." So together
they spent hours at the Louvre and the Luxembourg "on
Thursdays, in honor of my aunt Louise." They went to all

116

the exhibitions, visited the galleries. When they could raise
the money, there were the theater and the ballet. They saw
Nijinsky dance "The Specter of the Rose," and Suzanne told
a friend that "the dancers all seemed to dance very well."
In Max Jacob's dark and mysterious room in the "Bateau
Lavoir" they listened to Guillaume Apollinaire ("the bastard
son of a cardinal," so he said) read the poem called "Alcools"
and discuss aesthetic objectives and Cubism. At Severini's
they heard the manifesto of yet another movement Futur-
ism ("we extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the
double-quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisti-
cuff"). And at Picasso's new studio on the Boulevard de
Qichy the painter Pascin would juggle with Freud, or Matisse
in his cool, incisive way would speak of "chromatism" and
"zones of color." That these occasions had a genuine im-
portance to Utter, that on them he was able to draw for either
his character or his art she could not believe. She could
attribute his interest only to youthful exuberance, and accept
it docilely with whatever verve she thought necessary to
muster.

There were financial difficulties. They were desperately
poor. Libaude continued to buy Maurice's paintings, but he
complained that there were too many of them. "Since early
April you have brought me a picture every other day. It is
too much." To make matters worse, he kept payment a bit
in arrears. Their own canvases Suzanne and Utter sold for
twenty-five or thirty francs when they could sell them at
all. It was better when they could trade them at the butcher's.

A few months after they moved into the rue Cortot, Utter,
with a weather eye to the machinations of the wily Libaude,
persuaded Clovis Sagot that there were sensational possi-
bilities in a joint exhibition of the paintings of mother and
son Valadon and Utrillo. Suzanne exhibited "Maurice, la
Gran'mere et le chien Pierret" the vigorous "Portrait of

Below. Suzanne Valadon with her hus-
band, Andre Utter, in 1920. Photograph
courtesy of Mnte. Georges Kjrs.

Above. Suzanne Valadon at the age
of twenty in the hat Toulouse-
Lautrec bought for her. Photo-
graph courtesy of Gazi-LG. Below.
From the Left: Maurice Utrillo,
Suzanne Valadon, and Andre Utter,
in the studio in the rue Junot. Pho-
tograph courtesy of the Musee de
PArt Moderne, Pans.

The Valadon Family: From
the left: Andre Utter, Suzanne
Valadon, .Madeleine Valaclon,
and Maurice Urrillo. Sketch
for oil painting by Suzanne
Valadon, ign. Court esv of
Pjitl Petride^ Paris.

Maurice Utrillo. Draw-
ing by Suzanne Vala-
don. 1925. From the col-
lection of Mme. Yvonne
Vigneron, Paris.

Ill

Maurice" which now hangs in the Valadon-Utrillo Room
of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, two of four large
white nudes which she had done at the Impasse de Guelma,
five still lifes which she painted for the exhibition, a pastel
portrait of Andre Utter, and some drawings. Maurice's share
of the show was greater thirty-seven paintings, all of them
Montmartre scenes, and a few pencil drawings. The two por-
traits of Maurice and five of the paintings, including his
"Rue Ravignan" and "Renoir's Garden," were shown that
year at the Salon des Independants and were subsequently
sold. But the exhibition at Sagot's was disappointing. Sagot
blamed the apache disturbances: the newspapers were full of
stories of robberies and brutal murders. People were afraid
to go into the streets in their own neighborhoods, much less
venture into the dark and narrow Montmartre purlieus. At
Meudon, Rodin had a loaded revolver in every room in his
house and an armed bodyguard beside his bed at night.

But if Sagot failed to profit much financially, he had the
satisfaction of watching Libaude lurking in the doorways
across the street, and to Sagot, the merry little "madman,"
it was a sight that compensated for the failure of his show.

However, neither poverty, intellectual pursuits, nor private
calamities had the power to shake the inner citadel of their
happiness. Maurice still drank heavily, and there were fre-
quent calls to the police station. For a while he stayed with
Suzanne and Utter in the rue Cortot, apparently quite happy
with the domestic setup his beloved mother, his "wonderful
best friend," and his darling gran'mere all together. "How
practical and original we are!" he kept repeating. "How
charming!" But eventually he grew restless. "It is too stuffy.
I prefer to sleep alone." And so he began to move from
lodging to lodging, or, as he put it with the gentle irony he
delighted in, "I go from this hotel de luxe to that one." But
each morning, in varying stages of sobriety, he returned to

178

the rue Cortot, and in the little room adjoining his mother's
studio he painted his scenes of Montmartre from post cards
pinned to his easel.

Even when, one spring day in 1912, Maurice was found
in a violent state of delirium tremens in the pissoir near the
Place des Abbesses, Suzanne and Utter took this setback in
their stride. Utter sold all his own canvases to Libaude, and
they were able to put Maurice in a private sanatorium at San-
nois under the care of Dr. Revertegat, a specialist in alcohol-
ism.

Though at first resentful of his confinement, Maurice sat
on the stone bench in Dr. Revertegat's small garden staring
at the iron gate, his moods varying between apathy, depres-
sion, and frustration. Finally he sent for his paints and post
cards. Immediately he began to improve. Furthermore, his
painting ripened. He began to work less rapidly. His brush-
work no longer seemed automatic, and his canvases lost much
of the gloom which had so far characterized his "White
Period." His sensitivity sharpened. He cleaned his palette of
everything but the essential materials. His pictures seemed to
take on a fresh suppleness and sobriety.

By the beginning of the summer Maurice was released, and
Suzanne and Utter took him to the little village of Ouessant
in Brittany. To Suzanne, Brittany was Gauguin, to whom
she had for some time formed a sentimental attachment,
crediting him with her artistic heritage in much the same way
as she had heard the other Montmartre artists credit Cezanne
with theirs. She painted with great fervor "in homage to
that fine artist," while, less enthralled, Utter worked beside
her. But for Maurice there was no spiritual or emotional
anchor in Brittany. He longed for Montmartre as one longs
for a lover f or the walls, the plaster, the familiar buildings,
the poetry of the rain-soaked and weather-beaten streets. He
had been away from them too long. He had nothing to paint

119

The fields of flowers, the starched white coifs, the pony carts
with their English tourists, the fog-enveloped cottages meant
nothing to him. He gazed at them listlessly, grew sullen
and morose, finally irritable. Soon work became impossible.
Suzanne put away her paints, and Utter wandered restlessly
over the red iron soil of the countryside. Maurice's unhappy
moods dominated the days. The last weeks of the holiday
were spent waiting for an explosion.

The summer was charged with forebodings anyway. Even
the Montmartre hedonists, resolute refugees from the affairs
of the world, were buying newspapers, peeping over the wall,
as it were, at the curious behavior of Europe's statesmen. At
the tables of La Rotonde on Montparnasse, two saturnine
Russians, Lenin and Trotsky, spoke of the coming of war and
"the crisis of imperialistic capitalism." In a maneuver to bring
Morocco into a French "protectorate," in case Germany
should challenge the solvency of the Franco-Russian Alliance,
the government sent troops to Fez. The Kaiser countered by
sending gunboats to Agadir. War was in the air. But Cail-
laux, die French premier, had gone farther than his nerve
would carry him. The wind rushed out of his sails, and he
scrambled together a policy of appeasement that for the time
being saved the day.

Back on the Butte at the end of the summer, the pattern
of life in the rue Cortot resumed its old course. Meanwhile
Sagot had died, and Libaude was quick to put Maurice on a
small monthly retainer in exchange for the exclusive right
to handle his paintings. The arrangement eased the financial
situation somewhat. Later in the year Libaude gave Maurice
the long-promised one-man show, where, thanks to the sup-
port of Jourdain, Mirbeau, and Faure, the majority of the
paintings were sold at prices between 100 and 120 francs.

But Maurice was not interested. Sitting at the edge of the
gutter before Libaude's gallery with a couple of wine bottles,

180

he enjoined the pedestrians to drink with him and to extol
"the divine art of M. Raffaelli."

In the course of his wanderings this year Maurice had found
a silver-painted statuette of Joan of Arc in a market. The little
figure was with him always now. If the passers-by before
Libaude's showed no disposition to talk with him about
M. Raffaelli, Maurice invited them to converse with "his"
saint. At cafes almost anywhere on the hill customers were
likely to see his wavering, unkempt figure speaking aloud his
part of an imaginary conversation with the little statuette,
confessing his sins to it, or kneeling before it in supplication.
When he fell asleep, huddled in some dark alley or at the
foot of a tree, he would be clutching the little figure. Some-
times he cradled it in his arm as he walked, and, the tears
streaming down his cheeks, croaked lullabies to it.

Summer saw Maurice on holiday again with Suzanne and
Utter, this rime in Corsica, where, as he told Frede afterward,
"On the hills there were wonderful bouquets of houses, white
as if for weddings." It was a happy, relaxed time. The three
painted together in the unpaved streets of the little villages.
They took long walks along the surf. Everywhere the crisp
bright colors blazing under the clean blue skies delighted
them. Inspired by the sight of the Corsican fishermen at
work at their nets, Suzanne made the first sketches for her
"Le$ Lanceurs de Filets" that large, strangely self-conscious
canvas which now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in
Paris, for which Utter posed for the three figures. The food
was strange and good, the wine (drunk in moderation) was
excellent, the Corsicans were friendly and warmhearted.
Within two months Maurice had gained ten pounds and was
spending a couple of hours each day on a bicycle "to build
muscles."

But not long after they returned to Paris with the two little
donkeys to which Maurice had become attached, Maurice had
to be confined again, this time in the insane asylum at Ville-

181

juif. Here his sadistic keeper smudged his paintings, and his
cellmate ate his paints. He responded with astonishing pa-
tience. "Here I am, stumbling among all sorts of vexations,"
he wrote to a friend, the ex-police sergeant M. Gay. "Fm
dying with impatience to be free, to work, to paint, and to
be reasonable."

Had he cared anything about what happened to his pictures
once he had painted them, he might have taken heart from the
results of the sale which took place at the Hotel Drouot
shortly after his release from Villejuif in February. A society
of Parisian businessmen called "The Bearskin (La Peau de
FOurs)" which for some years had been collecting paintings
by contemporary artists, put their collection up for auction.
Among the pictures, which included works by Matisse,
Picasso, Dufy, Derain, and Rouault, three of Utrillo's canvases
brought 120, 150, and 270 francs, while a view of Notre
Dame commanded 400 francs.

Maurice was standing on the threshold of acclaim and for-
tune. He could not have cared less. Once again he was
floundering in the nightmare of his alcoholism, reeling through
the same shabby streets which his brush would transfigure in
the new day's light, full of alcohol, rage, and misery. Around
him, in the little squares which he loved so tenderly when
they were empty, masses of hostile humanity chattered and
laughed and sang. Their merrymaking stalked his lonely zig-
zag course. All he wanted was escape escape from people,
escape from himself.

That year the spring was especially sunny, and along the
Champs lysees the chestnuts were in leaf a month earlier
than usual. King George V and Queen Mary and later the
King and Queen of Denmark arrived for gala state visits. The
city buzzed with American businessmen and their wives look-
ing for the works of Impressionist and Postimpressionist
painters to take home. At fetes and costume balls people were
turkey-trotting and bunny-hugging to orchestras featuring

182

the new moaning horn of Adolphe Sax. Count Camondo's
collection of Impressionist paintings, including Manet's "Lola
de Valence" Degas' "U Absinthe" and Lautrec's "La Cloivn-
esse Cha-U~Kao" was installed in a dark corner of the
Louvre.

On June 28 the heir to the Austrian throne and his morga-
natic wife were shot dead in the streets of Sarajevo while
making a St. Vitus' Day inspection of the town. People said
the incident meant war.

Mme. Caillaux, the wife of the ex-premier and present
Minister of Finance, went to her hairdresser's for a hairdo
and manicure, after which she proceeded to shoot and kill
Gaston Calmette, the editor of Figaro, who had charged her
husband with corruption in office. Her deed was done with
style, and even Caillaux's first wife came to court to support
her. Everyone was delighted when, on July 28, she was
acquitted.

Three days later Jean Jaures, the Socialist leader, was assas-
sinated by a monarchist fanatic while he sat in a cafe.

On the 4th of August the German army invaded Belgium,

On Montmaitre the bugle call held a ring of gaiety. U I
have loved art so much that I'm an art-illery man," sang
Apollinaire. Let others prate about "the lamps going out all
over Europe," the exuberant young men of the Butte, charged
with cynicism, patriotism, or romance, hastened to don the
blue uniform of the Army of the Republic. To the cynics,
war spelled the end of bourgeois impedimenta. Food and
shelter would be free. It mattered no longer whether one was
"successful" or not. Landlords, bill collectors, critics, and
dealers were left to prey upon one another. To the patriotic,
France stood as the glorious defender of mankind against the
loathsome bestiality of German imperial ambition. To the
romantic young men like Apollinaire, war was a new frontier
opened to their abilities, their stamina, and their sensitivity.

183

It was a world of fresh ideas, of experiment, of action. But
whatever their motives, the young men flocked to the recruit-
ing stations by the hundreds.

Andre Utter was among the first. He went off in a de-
tachment which included his neighbors at No. 12 rue Cortot
Galanis and the poet Reverdy, Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis
Marcoussis, Charles Laborde, and Edmond Heuze. At first
they were billeted in improvised barracks on the Esplanade
des Invalides, but after a few days Utter was assigned to the
158th Infantry Regiment at Fontainebleau. What impulse
carried him it was hard to say. Afterward he insisted he had
volunteered because he knew he would be drafted. But, like
millions who fought with him, his disillusionment when he
returned was so intense that it masked forever any idealism
which might have propelled him into the struggle.

Utter's going was a cruel blow to Suzanne. Nor did the
fact that before leaving he insisted on marrying her lessen
its impact. She went to the mairie depressed and disconsolate.
The brief ceremony, for others a beginning, to her spelled
the end. Behind it was the happiness of five years an idyllic
ecstasy, as she saw it now, in which together they had started
on the road to fine achievement. Always she had hated sep-
aration from him. This, she told herself, was because she
enjoyed having him close to her. But now, seeing him go
off with the others, sharing their lives, being a part of some-
thing in which she did not exist, she knew she was afraid of
losing him. It was a disastrous admission, for with it came a
host of doubts and questions, of which the most cogent was
probably: What powers did she have to hold him? Her art?
Her mind? She was not deluded.

Her body? Here Suzanne ran into a problem she had never
faced before. Utter was twenty-eight years old, and she was
forty-nine. Until now it was he who had made a point of
refusing to acknowledge the difference in their ages; of course
she had been willing to humor him. He had made her keenly

184

aware of her fascination, encouraging her to exploit her
voluptuousness, her fine sensuality, her passionate tempera-
ment, her lusty humor all that he loved best in her. And,
with the wisdom born of her experience with other men, she
shifted the light from one facet of her personality to another
with such subtlety that he was always enthralled. It was a
game she loved a triumphant substitute for any deficiency
she felt intellectually. As long as Utter was beside her she
would feel certain of the power she held over him. Had he
had the broad experience of love of which she had been the
climax, she might have been confident that he would remain
constant. But he was young, in the full bloom of virility, tor-
menringly handsome in his blue uniform; and in spite of the
legal ties which now bound them together, Suzanne was
haunted by fear of what would happen to their relationship.
"She was always too young for her age," Nora Kars, who
met her at the close of the war, observed. Outwardly Suzanne
had changed very little since Andre Utter first saw her. Tiny
still, with a beautifully ripened figure and an enormous
amount of animal energy, she had lost none of the appeal she
had always had for men. Yet she was not reassured inwardly.
Her age had become her adversary, and she was fighting a
desperate battle against it, using all the artifices associated in
her mind with youthful feminine allure. Her movements
became birdlike flutterings. She giggled and tittered in a
high-pitched, excited voice. "Suzanne," said a friend, "chirps
like a robin." Maurice had to call her by her first name. The
year of her birth changed repeatedly, and soon all the events
of her past life followed suit. Only when Maurice came to
her in the mornings did she paint, for play was the badge of
youth. Her studio was rarely empty of friends. The evenings
found her the vivacious center of some cafe or cabaret gather-
ing, or, in a friend's studio, the life of the party. Even her
fidelity to Utter had to be sacrificed occasionally so that she
might prove her body had lost none of its vigor.

185

Still Suzanne missed Utter every hour of the day, missed
him even more than she had feared she would from the mo-
ment he had announced his intention to enlist. Part of her-
self had gone with him, Heaven only knew where. What
was left on the platform of the Gare Montparnasse as the
train carrying her young husband pulled away was seared
with the pain of years. Age struck savagely from the cold
draft of the departing train. She was ineffably old. A violent
chill overcame her, and by the time she reached the Metro her
teeth were chattering uncontrollably. But by the time she
reached Lamarck-Caulincourt the chill had passed. Ruefully
and wearily she climbed the long hill to the rue Cortot.
Somewhere ahead, she told herself, there must be hope for an
aging woman. Utter must come back. And youth would
be with him, always.

One day in February, 1915, Maurice too presented himself
at the army recruiting station in the rue Ordener and volun-
teered for military service. The officer accepted his applica-
tion and instructed him to proceed to the training center at
Argentan. Maurice was delighted. For six months a depres-
sion had hung over him as he saw young men of his genera-
tion leaving for the front. Hatred of the Germans coursed
through his blood. Only fear that people might ridicule him
if he were not accepted for service had prevented him from
appearing at the recruiting station earlier. Now it was done:
he was in the army. This called for a celebration, which in
turn became a binge, and he arrived at Argentan in such a
wild, drunken fury that he was flatly rejected.

The next two months began one of the darkest periods of
his life days of hallucinations, nights of maniacal screaming
and window-breaking, rabid tirades against the Germans. His
hatred of pregnant women became obsessive again; frothing
at the mouth and howling madly, he lurched about the streets
in pursuit of them. In one of his few periods of comparative

1S6

calm he painted his indictment of the German savagery "La
Cathedrale de Reims en Flamme" the cathedral where his
revered Joan of Arc had accomplished her earthly mission by
crowning the dauphin. He had never seen the cathedral: he
copied it from a post card and enveloped it in flames of his
own imagination. At last one day the police picked him up
in the Place de la Bourse, where he had outraged a crowd
of citizens by his particularly unlicensed conduct. He was
taken to La Sante prison and the judge ordered him to be
confined as a lunatic at Villejuif .

In June, Madeleine died. The long unloving relationship
of mother and daughter had run its course. Dwelling on
thoughts of what their lives might have been, Suzanne was
able to weep; and since she happened to be in possession of a
little money at the moment, she purchased a family burial
plot in the cemetery at Saint-Ouen. She felt Madeleine's
passing keenly. However detached the relationship between
her mother and herself had become, contemptuous and hostile
as her feelings had grown to be, Madeleine's death could not
but intensify the sense of loneliness that gripped Suzanne
after Utter's departure to the war, a departure now all the
more poignant because even Maurice was not with her.

It was six months before Maurice was released from Ville-
juif and returned to live with his friend Cesar Gay. Gay, the
retired police sergeant, ran a small bistro called the Casse-
Croute in the rue Paul-Feval, a few steps from the Place du
Tertre in one direction and the rue Cortot in another. Since
early 1915 a small room above the Casse-Croute had been
one of Maurice's "hotels de luxe? One night he had lingered
there very drunk, and had astonished Gay by insisting on
tallying the daily receipts in his account book, which he did
with amazing speed and accuracy. From then on he returned
nightly "to do his bookkeeping." Gay finally let him rent the
little room which Maurice began to call home, and hung some

187

of his pictures (with price tags of 100 francs on each) about
the walls of his bistro. And when he found a likely customer
for one of them, he applied all he knew about salesmanship,
which was usually considerably more than the customer could
resist.

With patient devotion Gay assumed a fatherly role, to
which Maurice responded with affection. The old sergeant
was no prude: "I gave him his liter of red wine whenever he
finished a painting. Only I tried to keep him from downing
it in one gulp." There was admiration in his voice when he
called him "Monsieur Maurice." He liked to sit beside the
artist while he painted, and talk about his experiences in the
police force. He was delighted when his lodger offered to
teach him to paint. It was small pay for what Gay was
obliged to put up with, but he did not complain. Something
of a lighthearted, play-acting formality permeated their rela-
tionship up to a point; what came afterward Gay accepted
with resignation. As long as it was practical to be firm, he
was so unflinchingly, but once matters were beyond his con-
trol his retreat was good-humored and kind. With cere-
monial dignity they made "agreements" which they always
sealed solemnly with a toast.

When he was thirsty Maurice would stamp on the floor
and Gay would leave his bar and come up to see what he
wanted. The "agreement" was that Maurice was to be given
his wine when the painting he was working on was finished.
Now, in the middle of the job, Maurice demanded three
liters. The ex-sergeant was firm. Then Maurice threatened
to drink his turpentine. Clearly there had to be a new agree-
ment. So they toasted it. Another time they had an "agree-
ment" that Maurice was to give up drinking entirely. Within
a matter of hours he appeared at the bar of the Casse-Croute
roaring drunk on Mme. Gay's eau de Cologne. There was
the written agreement which Tabarant, Maurice's biographer,
speaks of: "I agree to stay at M. Gay's without going out until

188

the end of September." This would have been for three
weeks, but before the day was over Maurice had jumped out
of a window into the street and made a getaway. "What can
I do?" the old sergeant wanted to know. "He gave me his
word in writing and swore by the head of his mother to be
serious about it, and by the time the day was over he had
gone. Perhaps I should have tied him up, but that wouldn't
have done any good. He'd have ended by cutting the rope
with his teeth. What a pity! And such a fine painter!" And
when Maurice finally returned, his face swollen and bleeding,
his clothes covered with filth, he stuck his head in the door-
way and asked plaintively, "Do you want me back?"

There were countless agreements that he would stay locked
in his room for various periods of time. These, too, had to be
revised when he kicked in a panel of the door, or threatened
to set the building on fire, or screamed to passers-by in the
street to come and rescue him, or again jumped from the
window and disappeared for several days. There was the
agreement that he would write his autobiography, to expiate
his past misdeeds and to take his mind off his obsession.
Maurice began with what he first considered a prologue but
which later became an epilogue a testament to the virtues of
the noble man who was his friend. The rest of the material
was a miscellany of drinking bouts and confinements in dis-
jointed, wandering prose.* A few pages and he was off on
another binge.

While at M. Gay's he had to be locked in a room in order
to paint; in the rue Cortot he was free to come and go as he

* There is, however, one interesting statement in the sketch. Here for
the first time he states that he was born on Christmas Day, a fact which in
the later years of his piety had some obscure but nonetheless profound
meaning to his religious belief, just as the statuette of St. Joan had.
Actually he was born on December 26, as the record in the Montmartre
mairie shows. He dismissed the validity of the official record with the
contention, "God keeps more accurate ones. He told me I was born on
Christmas Day."

189

chose, and there he worked most of the rime. It made little
difference what the preceding night had been for him. He
came in the morning as he had been doing for years, with a
mischievous ghost of a smile about his lips. Suzanne painted
with him now in the big studio where she had painted with
Utter. It was only because he came that she painted at all,
she used to say. Not that she was really apathetic to her
work. When she was at her easel everything fell into its old
way again. Strangely, she did not even miss Utter then. The
old powers asserted themselves as strongly as ever; it was
simply the desire to get to work that had slackened.

Only in these hours with her son did she find any happi-
ness. The studio teeming with people who brought their own
food and a great deal of wine and picnicked on the beds, the
hilarious impromptu parties, the gossip of the cafes were only
an antidote to the malignant disease that threatened her old
age. Maurice's visits were a tonic, not because he and Suzanne
had much to say to each other, but because Maurice's presence
gave meaning to Suzanne's rudderless life. Circumstances had
long since tamed her fierce protective impulses toward him.
She had been forced to accept his wish to be alone, to rove
as he wanted. Independence is the very soil from which any
artist draws his strength; without it, Suzanne was now con-
vinced, Maurice would be trapped and his future hopeless.
The wild fire of genius that burned so unsteadily in him
needed freedom, or else it would be quenched. He needed
his art; it was the only medicine that could keep him alive.
In time, therefore, the full flourishing of his artistic powers
became more important to her than the tortured course of his
personal life. "Ah, if my son had not known how to render
light in his painting, how I should have suffered!" she ex-
claimed to Jacques Guenne. It was here, then, in the work he
was doing, that she could be of practical help in directing
him to the only objective which could, in the end, save him
from disaster.

190

She could not believe in the strange automatic development
of his art. He had learned to paint from her. It was impos-
sible for her to accept the fact that he had long since out-
reached her. "If it is not right," she told Jean Vertex, "I in-
sist on his doing it over again. And he does." She was cer-
tain that she was the dominating influence in his art. At the
1924 Valadon-Utrillo Exhibition at the Bernheim Jeune Gal-
lery, Andre Utter made the observation (later supported by
Coquiot) that in the pictures of both mother and son, during
the period 1910-1912, one found "the same organization, the
same materials, the same method, the same harmonies: that
only the subjects, the motifs differ." Suzanne was quick to
reply, "But of course! And it is the Valadon palette."

Against the ravages of Maurice's obsession, on the other
hand, everything Suzanne could do seemed useless. She
might plead with Marie Vizier at the Belle Gabrielle not to
give him wine, or with M. Gay to keep him locked in his
room. She might go to the hospital or the police station in the
middle of the night, as she often did, to bring him home, or
sign the necessary papers to confine him in a sanatorium
all with a heavy heart. But all this seemed to do no good.
To be able to tell him that his drawing was not as certain
as it should be, that his palette was muddy, or that he had
caught beautifully the melancholy of a church spire was to
give him the only help that meant anything.

Without ambition for himself or his art, with nothing else
prodding him except an unaccountable urge to paint, Maurice
was virtually unaware of his mother's desire to influence his
development. "She was too great an artist herself," he would
say, in later years, "to interfere with another, even her own

son."

To Maurice it was not what she was to his art that mat-
tered; it was what she was to him. He adored her. He came
to the rue Cortot to work beside her because it was painful to
him to be away from her. She was everything that was right,

191

everything a woman was meant to be. He had never been
able to outgrow the thrill of seeing her. He wrote of her:

"Suzanne Valadon, ma mere ainsi se nomme.
Cest une noble -femrne, et belle ainsi que bonne,
En vertus, en beaute. Dieu du genie enfin
Par surcroit la dota de son souffle divin" *

Suzanne could scarcely be expected to see herself in the
role in which Maurice cast her a childish dream of mother-
hood come true, a sort of "Madonna of the Easels." It was
the last character she would ever have attempted to pky.
But, badly as she interpreted her importance to him, her
reasoning was intelligent and brave, her devotion to her own
creed selfless and vehement. If she found happiness in be-
lieving that her son came to her studio in order to draw from
her the full power of his talent, that he sensed that her under-
standing of his art was greater than his own, there was no
evidence to the contrary; in fact, there was ample reason for
her to have been right. For it was clear that to Maurice,
whatever she said was wisdom, all that she did was perfec-
tion.

The "dreary human muddle of fabricated doom" which
was the war dragged on. The united excitement the fever-
ish dislocation of the call to arms, the German lunge at Paris,
the taxicab army had boiled down to dismal months of in-
conclusive trench warfare. From the sandbags and mud of
the front a mood of bitterness and misery slowly crept over

* "Suzanne Valadon my mother is so called.
A noble woman, as beautiful as she is good
In virtue, in beauty. The God of Genius
In addition, endowed her with his divine breath."

Maurice Utrillo, "A ma mere"; Preface to Jean Bouret, Suzanne Valadon
(Paris, Petrides, 1947).

192

the country. The dreaded telegrams from the Ministry of
War arrived in ever-increasing numbers. People muttered
about "useless slaughter," "false patriotism," and "criminal
stupidity." "What good can come of it?" they asked.

But in 1915, when Berthe Weill staged the first one-woman
show of Suzanne's paintings, civilian spirits were still high.
Paris had been saved for the time being, at any rate. Disaster
had come very close, and one of the first things everybody
had thought about was money. What could you do with
your money? Surely you didn't buy pictures with it? Not-
withstanding their unwillingness to buy, the public came to
the show. "At the point of her brush," wrote the critic
Clarensol, "everytlung comes to life, lives and breathes. This
extraordinary woman is passion itself, and one seeks in vain
for anyone to compare her with. . . . Madame Valadon is
justly celebrated. She paints solidly." "Cezanne himself
could not use a different word," wrote Gustave Coquiot.

Suzanne had reason to feel that her future was about to
brighten. If anything, it became more precarious.

Before the end of the year Maurice was in another hospi-
tal at Villejuif , where he stayed from August to the beginning
of November. In 1916 Suzanne put him in the hands of a
Dr. Vicq at Autnay-sous-Bois, where he lived in the doc-
tor's house as a member of the family and apparently kept in
buoyant spirits for about six weeks. He had a good number
of long talks with the doctor, and the fact that he roused him-
self from his customary taciturnity was in itself a hopeful
sign. It was during these talks that Dr. Vicq attempted to
probe into the sexual disturbances which he had reason to
suspect lay at the root of the patient's alcoholism. Evidently
Maurice responded for a while with candor and interest, but
in the midst of the consultations he suddenly bolted for
Montmartre and refused to return.

Meanwhile in the rue Cortot Suzanne's restless attempts to
forestall old age continued. The irrepressible chatter, the

193

parties, the myriad amusing happenings of daily life went on
in the face of an ever-deepening atmosphere of resdessness.
In the ground-floor flat of the building, Othon Friesz's malo-
dorous cheese became the bone of contention among his
neighbors in what soon came to be called "the Battle of the
rue Cortot." In the flat directly below Suzanne's studio, the
poet Pierre Reverdy, home on leave, fired his revolver into
the ceiling in a vain attempt to command silence for his muse
from his neighbors overhead. An old corporal, a veteran of
the Crimean War, drilled three of his ancient comrades on the
cobblestone street. In the garden behind No. 20 a schoolmis-
tress from Picardy was constructing an airplane which, she
said, would also "fly under water." And Frede's donkey Ali-
beron, nicknamed "Lolo," made love to a pony from the
Cirque Medrano in the middle of Place du Tertre.

Sometimes Suzanne would get away. While Maurice was
in Dr. Vicq's hands she had a short holiday at Pontoise with
Mme. Coquiot during which she painted a few landscapes.
And there were rapturous weekends at Evreux and Levallois
when Utter was home on short furlough.

Degas came to see her occasionally, fumbling on the nar-
row spiral stairs. The old man, complaining of deafness as
well as blindness, now wandered aimlessly about the city he
no longer understood. With him came the bittersweet aura
of the past, when gaiety and high spirits were realities and
there was no need to change your personality to suit the
times. Occasionally a friend would bring Suzanne word of
Renoir at Cagnes in the south. The lover who had brought
nosegays to the door of her tenement room in the rue Poteau
now painted in a wheel chair with a brush strapped to his
arthritic hand and worried through sleepless nights over his
two boys who were at the front.

In 1917 the Bernheim Jeune Gallery put on a joint exhibi-
tion of Valadon, Utrillo, and Utter the wicked trinity ("la
trinite maudite r"), as some anonymous Montmartre wag had

194

dubbed the three when first they were established in the rue
Cortot. The interest in the show was lively, less so perhaps
because of the paintings than because of the painters: to a
war-weary, patriotism-stuffed citizenry, a woman who lived
with her drunken son and a husband three years his junior was
likely to prove a lurid and amusing character. A strong scent
of unholiness wafted about her name among those who were
"in the know." There were extravagant legends of her past:
she had been the mistress of the whole Impressionist move-
ment, with Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec thrown in. She
was an alcoholic and an opium smoker. She had danced naked
through the streets of the Butte in a wild bacchanalia. A
dozen men had killed themselves for love of her. The curious,
then, were hardly to be satisfied on the opening day of the
exhibition by the appearance of the elfin figure with soft,
luminous eyes and tremulous, childlike movements, dressed
in a long sack tunic and large flat-heeled shoes, and carrying
a string bag of vegetables, who stood about peering at the
pictures as though she were seeing them for the first time, and
who, in departing, explained to M. Bernheim, not without a
note of irony in her voice, that she had to leave because she
"had some soup on the stove."

Certainly there was about this first exhibition of the three
an air of scandal which attracted the sensation-seekers, and to
deny that her unique menage had no bearing on their ac-
ceptance as artists would be nonsense. The very staging of
the show was a bid for sensationalism. The man who was
responsible for it, Felix Feneon, the directeur artistique of the
gallery, had a flair for showmanship. His personal appearance
alone was theatrical. With his lean gargoyle figure, his
stringy goatlike beard, and his casual manner he was also to be
easily recognized as "M. Feneon, the well-known critic and
directeur artistique" by the midget-sized round black hat on
the back of his head, the patent-leather shoes, the pepper-and-
salt tweed cape and tippet, and the crimson gloves he wore.

195

Yet in his long career there were few who could claim a
better record of artistic integrity, more meticulous devotion
to work, or greater clarity of perception in approaching the
problems of painting. At twenty-three he had been the first
to understand the meaning of the art of Georges Seurat and
the Divisionists. It was he who had coined the word "Neo-
impressionism," both as a gesture of respect for their illustri-
ous predecessors, the Impressionists, and to emphasize the
differences in their methods of achieving their common goal
of light and color. At Volpini's show he had espoused the
cause of Gauguin and his friends, noting that "It is not easy
to see these canvases through the buffets, beer-faucet handles,
and tables, not to mention the breasts of M. Volpini's
cashier. . . ." And with the founding of la Revue Blanche,
of which he was the first art critic and later secretary-general,
he became the leading champion of the Nabi movement.

Feneon's interest in Suzanne Valadon dated from the Im-
pressionist and Symbolist Exhibition at Le Bare de Boutte-
ville's in 1 892, and it was only natural that it should lead him
to her son and husband. Although he was concerned with the
work of the three artists, not with their private lives, he was
at the same time shrewd enough to know the foibles of the
picture-buying public and its appetite for scandal.

However, little came of the exhibition. The war was not
over. The era of sensational purchasing was still in the fu-
ture. At Bernheim Jeune's in 1917 the spotlight merely
picked up the first glimmer of commercial possibilities in the
art of "the wicked trinity."

A glimmer was all Paul Poiret needed. By 1917 this re-
markable little man with the pale myopic eyes and grizzly
beard had transformed a few scraps of umbrella silk into one
of the most extraordinary commercial enterprises in the
world. It could not properly be called a business. True, it
centered about the designing, manufacturing, and selling of
women's gowns. Indisputably the name Poiret stood loftily

196

above all others in haute couture. On six continents ladies of
fashion awaited Poiret's dictum as to the bulge of their hips
and the sweep of their chiffon drapery. At his bidding they
had plucked their eyebrows into graceful Moorish arches,
donned purple and pink wigs, lacquered their fingernails in
gilt, and painted their sandaled toes. His influence had long
since gone beyond decreeing what should go on their backs.
He had made them, by his own account, "works of art." In
his palatial house in the Faubourg St. Honore he gave parties
which in their sumptuousness recalled the last days of the
court of the Second Empire. Indeed the Empress, now living
in retirement in a small suite in the Hotel Continental, ap-
peared at some of them. Nijinsky and Fokine danced in his
magnificent gardens before an audience which included the
Grand Duke Alexander, Re jane, Mary Garden, Mistmguett,
Sarah Bernhardt, and Isadora Duncan were among his most
doting admirers. Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel per-
formed in his drawing room; and Anatole France, Alfred
Savoir, D'Annunzio, and Andre Gide were among his guests
at table. To his "Fete des Rois" he issued invitations in the
name of Louis XIV. For his "Thousand and Second Night"
he provided costumes of his own design and making. On
his own bateau mouche, the Paniche, the cream of interna-
tional society dined and danced.

In Poiret's volcanic mind all the glitter of the world was a
part of his "business." The theater, the dance, sculpture,
painting, and literature followed his erratic course through
the heavens the tail of his comet. Nor was Poiret insensi-
tive to the possibilities of brilliant light in the future. At
one time half the theaters in Paris bore the names of Poiret
proteges (and protegees) on their programs. Aspiring actors,
scenic designers, and musicians had him to thank for their
jobs. Both Robert Piquet and Alfred Lenief, who eventually
became famous dressmakers, sold him designs and worked for
him, and it was Piquet, of all those Poiret had helped, who

191

did the most for him when his nebulous "business" disinte-
grated.

Dufy received a retainer from Poiret for designing many
of his fabrics. Dozens of young sculptors and ceramists were
part of the "business," exhibiting their pieces in his salon
and in his home. A young jeweler in one of the shops off the
rue de la Paix had the legend "Jeweler to M. P. Poiret" in
gold leaf on his window. Paul Poiret was also the founder of
the Martine School of Decorative Arts.

"Each time I 'make' someone it is good for my business,"
Poiret used to say. But in no other field did he aspire to
"make" new talent as he did in the field of painting. The
walls of his house were covered with canvases by painters
whom he expected to be great artists. The majority of them
disappointed him in the end, but pictures by Matisse, Picasso,
Derain, Vlaminck, Dufy, Friesz, and Modigliani were on his
walls long before they decorated any other walls in the
Faubourg St. Honore.

If Paris was "the fashion capital of the world," Paul Poiret
knew that it was also "the bourse of art," and that the custom-
ers were the same people "the kings and princes of cattle
yards and railroads," as Ambroise Vollard called them. "Yes,
and they will say, 'Ah, that Poiret, he is a genius in all the
arts.' And look! How happy are the artists!"

At the Valadon-Utrillo-Utter Exhibition at Bernheim, Paul
Poiret bought a Valadon nude and a "Moulin de la Galette"
by Utrillo.

In May, 1917, Utter was wounded in the shoulder at
Champagne, and in January he was sent to convalesce at
Belleville-sur-Saone, near Lyons. Suzanne joined him there
almost immediately. She left Paris in a state of great excite-
ment, having first disposed of more than a dozen canvases
and about fifty drawings and etchings in order to meet the
expenses of the trip. Most of these she sold to Leopold Zbo-

198

rowski, the ex-poet and devoted friend of Modigliani, who
was struggling now to make a living as a picture dealer in a
tiny gallery in the rue de Seine on the Left Bank. She left
Maurice in M. Gay's charge.

The reunion was ecstatic. Except for a few weekends,
Suzanne and Utter had not been together since Utter's enlist-
ment. Shortly after Suzanne arrived at Belleville they were
able to take a room in a small inn away from the town. Their
days were filled with pastoral rapture. In a horse and trap
hired from a farmer they went for long drives along the
poplar-lined roads among the rolling hills of the countryside.
It was a beautiful sun-drenched spring. As Utter's health im-
proved they took to walking. The Lyonnais inns abounded
in good food, so difficult to come by in wartime Paris. Al-
ways together now, Suzanne and Utter picnicked and painted
along the low banks of the Saone old bridges, rowboats, the
wayside shrines in the vineyards. It was their first protracted
period alone, a holiday without Maurice's dark moods haunt-
ing them, undisturbed by the turmoil which had always
whirled about them on the Butte; and they enjoyed it with
unflagging good humor. It never grew dull. Utter filled the
days with ebullient monologues about his artistic theories, his
political convictions, his thoughts on science and religion, his
hopes for their future. The magic of his mind fascinated
Suzanne as it always had. She would listen to him endlessly.
The specter of old age which had haunted her since he had
enlisted vanished. His indefatigable vigor permeated her en-
tire being. She fluttered about him like a butterfly, waiting on
him, lighting his pipe, even reading to him in her halting way.
She was replete with youth and happiness.

For almost three months they lived in a state of idyllic
delight, and in the manner of sentimentalists, which at heart
they both were, the Lyonnais countryside became for them
a symbol of their happiest hours.

But when Utter returned to his regiment and she was back

199

again in the rue Cortot, the old fears began to assail Suzanne.
On the 17th of September Degas died. In a bittersweet mood
of recollection she saw him in his dreary study in the rue
Victor-Masse, beside the window with the portfolio of her
drawings in his hands. She heard him slam it shut and his
nasal voice say, "You are indeed one of us." Somehow she
could not help feeling that she was part of that generation
which had all but passed away before her Toulouse-Lau-
trec, Van Gogh, Puvis de Chavannes, Gauguin, Seurat, the
Nouvelles-Athenes, the Assassins when Adele had been there,
Sunday afternoons at the Moulin de la Galette (and even the
boisterous Monday nights) all gone.

Suzanne was fifty-three, admitting to fifty when cornered
by people who had known her since she was a child; other-
wise the hint was strong that she was in her late twenties. It
was impossible for her to accept any notion that her day was
done. She could still outlast any party. Her stay at Belleville
had convinced her of her durability. But in the last year of
the war it was not easy to keep up a front of youthful in-
destructibility. Suddenly Montmartre's indifference to the
course of the fighting irritated her. She was annoyed by the
troops of friends who always seemed to be bounding into
her studio. Parties were almost unbearable. She wrote to
Utter rarely, and then only to complain that his biweekly let-
ters were too infrequent. Her financial plight was increas-
ingly precarious. The niggardly prices which she had always
managed to get for her pictures slumped.

Most of all Suzanne was upset by Maurice. Outwardly he
seemed no better or worse than usual. But she had seen signs
which now terrified her. After his release from Villejuif she
first noticed a change in his painting. Until then, barring the
first canvases at Montmagny, his work had been of astonish-
ingly consistent quality. Now the colors had suddenly begun
to brighten and sharpen. The rigid lines of realism began to
dominate his perception. The poetic quality began to falter.

200

The post cards were no longer transformed; they were being
enlarged in paint.

Suzanne studied him closely at work. He painted more
slowly, seemed to select his colors only after periods of per-
plexity. No longer did his brush move automatically from
palette to canvas. Painting seemed to require an intense men-
tal strain from him something it had never done before.

At first she was rather hopeful. The rapidity with which
he worked had always bothered her. With the slackening
of this speed, she told herself, there would soon come a new
phase in his painting. For a while she went so far as to expect
a fresh and brilliant manifestation of his creative powers.
But by the rime he came back from Dr. Vicq there was a
suspicion that he was actually losing them. It was something
which in her wildest imagination she could not have foreseen,
something she had never thought possible. Nowhere in her
experience had she ever heard of this happening. The possi-
bility of what might become of him if suddenly he should
no longer be able to paint became a nightmare to her.

Bewildered and terrified, she finally persuaded Maurice to
have himself committed to the mental hospital at Picpus. He
went voluntarily but not for long. He escaped. And instead
of going back to the Butte, where he knew the authorities
would be sure to find him, he made for Montparnasse.

He found Modigliani, who took him to a restaurant for
dinner on credit and then to his studio. There Maurice
painted a couple of Montmartre street scenes from memory
in order to raise money for drinks. Modigliani took the wet
canvases to Zborowski, and on the proceeds of the sale he and
Maurice launched a three-day tour of the bars of the quarter.
It was, as always, a wild binge. What money they did not
drink up was folded into paper airplanes and sent gliding into
the trees along the Boulevard Raspail.

Ultimately the two rolled back to Modigliani's studio to
sleep. When Modigliani awakened, Maurice was gone, and

201

so were ModiglianFs clothes. However, Maurice soon re-
appeared quite drunk and laden with bottles of wine. These,
he explained, he had bought after pawning his friend's clothes.
Now their drinking could go on! Chaim Soutine came in at
what might have been the tail end of the ensuing drinking
bout, and at Modigliani's suggestion he took Maurice's clothes
to the pawnbroker in order to buy more wine. When
Sourine informed Zborowski of what was going on, the ex-
poet managed to reclaim the pawned clothing and then suc-
ceeded in bustling Maurice off to a hotel room of his own.

The friends never saw one another again. A few weeks later,
in January, 1920, Modigliani died in the Hospital of Charity of
a combination of pulmonary meningitis and tuberculosis. His
final words were familiar to many who had known him:
"Cara, cara Italia" From Rome his brother Emmanuel, a
Socialist deputy, telegraphed, "Give him the funeral of a
prince." The evening Modigliani died, his young wife
Jeanne, the mother of his child and pregnant again, returned
to her parents' home near Pere-Lachaise and threw herself to
her death from a fifth-storey window.

Through the streets of the city he had come to conquer, a
great crowd of artists, writers, musicians, and humble people
who had never been able to love him followed the remains of
the strange dark prince, carrying flowers. His sins against
them all were forgiven. Only Suzanne Valadon and Andre
Utter, walking behind the hearse, wept.

When Utter was released from the army only a few days
before Modigliani's death, Suzanne was already in an acute
state of nervousness. There was little domestic amenity to be
enjoyed in the studio. Maurice had moved in with her, and
the place continued to swarm with friends and sycophants.
Amid all the hullabaloo she had developed a gluttonous
stomach for admiration; it had suddenly come to be as neces-
sary as the air she breathed. Nothing seemed to be more im-

202

portant to her than her ability to make an impression on other
people, and she cast frantically about for any means by which
she could compel attention or adulation. Like a circus per-
former who had outlived her star billing, she strove, with un-
quenchable hope, again and again to command the limelight.
Through the force of her personality the studio in the rue
Cortot was to become the hub of bohemianism in Mont-
martre. She was at once the foremost artist on the Butte, the
most sprightly intelligence, the soundest critic, the gayest
bon vivant, the best cook, the most irrepressible spirit.

To the public Suzanne presented herself as an eccentric.
At one time she took to wearing a corsage of carrots on her
ragged coat, at another she would carry a nosegay of lettuce
and live snails. The Butte often saw her in outsized Indian
moccasins with a pair of cats in her arms and a goat at her
heels. On the night of the Armistice she appeared in the
Place du Tertre clothed in nothing but fluttering flags of the
Republic and a moth-eaten fur tippet. One night sightseers
were flabbergasted to see her before Chez Ma Cousine milk-
ing a mare into a wine glass and drinking the milk with ap-
parent pleasure.

Utter's homecoming served only to heighten her mood.
With his boundless high spirits and full-blooded tempera-
ment, he was indeed actually the chief cause of it. If now
she strove to focus attention upon herself, it was because she
wanted above everything to be more desirable to him, to daz-
zle him. Unfortunately she allowed the role to run away
with her, and expected Utter to sit enraptured at her feet. He
might have done so had she given him time. At the moment
he was in love with everything, for he was home after four
years in the army. But in her state of excitement all responses
had to be immediate, and when they failed to be she was
piqued and cantankerous. She accused Utter of lack of feel-
ing, of egotism, of having grown tired of her. Sensitive al-
ways to his appeal to other women, she began to harbor the

203

notion that he was unfaithful. Then, devastated by her own
accusations, she sought his forgiveness by bringing into play
all her coquetry acknowledging his mental superiority, ex-
tolling his artistic taste, his generosity, his sincerity, and his
masculine beauty. He responded with grace but also with
bewilderment. After four years away from her he was ma-
ture enough not to expect the ardor of their first passion to
have remained intact. Belleville had made him very happy,
but it had not deluded him.

Their relationship had always been stormy, but they had
so much delighted in each other that they were always able
to make up. A considerable part of the excitement they
generated for each other lay in these scraps and fervent recon-
ciliations. Somehow, Utter noted now, there was little dis-
position any longer on Suzanne's part to patch up their
quarrels. At first he tried to make them up in the old way,
but his efforts seemed only to heighten her vindictiveness.
Then, rather than carry the fight to the point of bitterness, he
retreated, allowing her anger to peter out as it would. Occa-
sionally he was unable to control himself; once he struck back,
it was with animal ferocity and no holds barred. The wild
fires that made Utter the man she loved were still there. At
such times, in the intensity of his rage he did not even notice
that she cowed before him and sued for peace. He hated such
exhibitions; in his eyes they indicated a lack of mental matu-
rity. He did his best to regard the present turn of events with
impish good humor and bide his time. Optimistically, he was
certain that they would run their course shortly, and that
once again Suzanne and he would be able to forge together
the life he was sure they both wanted.

Even so, Utter could not play to order the ludicrous part
Suzanne expected him to play in public and among their
friends. He felt a fool a dangerous feeling indeed for a
young man charged as he was with a sense of his own high
purpose. At the same time Suzanne was to him, as she had

204

always been, the most beguiling of all feminine creatures; and
it was for this reason that he was willing to put up with what
he really believed at first was nothing more than another facet
of her enchanting temperament.

Besides, being back on the Butte was glorious fun. "Dede
is back! Dede is back!" the laundresses in the rue Lepic
squealed on the first day, and immediately he was besieged in
the street by dozens of people he had known all his life. It
was what all the men in the trenches who came from little
towns had been dreaming it would be. In the cafes he was
hugged and kissed by men and girls alike* A score of genial
patrons proffered toasts until he was quite drunk. Pastries
were stuffed in his mouth and chocolates in his pockets. The
girls of the maisons closes offered him their services gratis.
Flowers and cases of champagne followed him up the stairs
to the studio. Necklaces of onions hung about his neck.
There were charming formal calls from the priest who had
baptized him, a couple of old professors from the Lycee, the
police sergeant, an old lady who had been in love with his
father. A barman and a butcher came to tell him that they
had wiped off their ledgers "little outstanding matters" dating
from five years ago.

Then there were the old friends the engraver Galanis and
his wife, who lived across the courtyard; Othon Friesz on
the ground floor below; his former schoolmate Edmond
Heuze; the writers Andre Salmon, Andre Warnod, Jean
Vertex, and Francis Carco; Jean d'Esparbes and Robert
Nalcy, two old drinking companions, and Georges Braque,
their neighbor at the Impasse de Guelma. And Suzanne's new
friends Derain, "the intellectual Fauve," and his beautiful
wife; Maurice Vlaminck; Pascin ("the Little League of Na-
tions" Utter was to dub him*) and his painter wife Hermine

*He was born in Bulgaria, the son of a Spanish-Jewish father and an
Italian-Serbian mother. He became a naturalized Frenchman.

205

David; and the Czech painter Georges Kars and his expansive
wife Nora.

Around these hovered a miscellaneous collection of cliques
and isolated personalities. All the groups argued interminably
with one another and among themselves. Loyalties were
always crumbling and reshaping themselves; erratic disciples
continually flitted from one group to another as each new
theory or idea bubbled. This artistic turmoil was set against
a background of parties, pranks, antics, love-making, and
alcohol in an atmosphere of picturesqueness, poverty and
decay. Busloads of tourists and curiosity seekers had finally
conquered the Butte. A rash of night clubs crept up the hill,
accompanied by the syncopated palsy of "le jazz hot" Soon
its rising tide would reach the crest. But meanwhile the little
band of true Bohemians, the tradition-destroyers who had
found at last a tradition they would have liked to be able to
save, awaited the flood with light hearts. And after four years
of intellectual and artistic suff ocation in the trenches there
was none lighter in heart than Andre Utter.

Shortly after the Armistice, Berthe Weill staged a Valadon-
Utter Exhibition, and the dealer Lepoutre staged one of the
work of Utrillo. Money was free again, and all over the
world the war-weary cashed their war savings and converged
on beautiful, wonderful Paris. In wave after wave they came
from America, Britain, the Orient, South America, Africa.
Trainloads and busloads from Germany and the Balkans,
too, whisked by the devastated villages of the eastern departe-
ments with their newly erected memorials to "the glorious
dead," athirst for the wine, the delicious food, the daring
fashions, the cosmetics, and the art treasure of fabulous Paris.

The international millionaires arrived once again, to dis-
cover that most of the Impressionist paintings had been sold
to their competitors and that those which were left were

206

tagged at astronomical prices in the Faubourg St. Honore.
Not that the prices daunted them. They loved everything
with a high price on it; it gave them an opportunity to spend
big money. They had come to spend. Europe could be saved
by their spendings. A bullish mood dominated "the bourse
of art," as it did all other markets.

But bargain hunters who could not afford Faubourg St.
Honore prices heard of "modern art," and taxicab drivers
knew addresses in little side streets, like the rue Lafitte, the
rue de Seine, and the rue Chevalier-de-la-Barre, where
"comers" could be bought for a song. If one bought in a
hurry, one could perhaps sell at a profit Yet even at Berthe
WeilTs and Lepoutre's there was a sharp difference between
present-day prices and those of the prewar level. The Utrillo
which Francis Jourdain had persuaded Octave Mirbeau to
buy for 100 francs now went for 1,000. Less than a year
later, at Libaude's sale, another was bought for 2,700 francs.
"Now," said Maurice, "Libaude should be able to bring me a
box of cigars." The dealer had paid Suzanne his usual fifty
francs for the canvas.

One day shortly after the Libaude sale Suzanne was to
answer a knock on the studio door to discover on the
threshold, as she said later, "a long, tall man with a gold-
headed stick and his wife decorated in ostrich plumes." The
man introduced himself as M. Pauwels, a Belgian banker. He
was interested in buying some paintings of hers and her son's.
M. Pauwels, his wife explained, was interested in everything
blooded horses, flowers, and birds, and was an art collector
to boot. A tip from a taxi driver had brought them to the rue
Cortot.

Suzanne claimed afterward that her first impulse was to shut
the door in their faces, and as an old woman she often be-
moaned the fact that she had not done so. But she let them
into the studio, and they bought a couple of pictures. From

207

that time forward the name Pauwels was destined to weigh
heavily upon the heart and mind of Suzanne Valadon.

Almost immediately Suzanne recognized in Lucie Pauwels
her match in will power. A former actress in a small provin-
cial touring company, Lucie had deserted the stage for a
marriage of "real distinction." "I have always been extremely
gifted," she reported to Maurice's biographer Robert Cough-
Ian. "I came from a wonderful family, die de Veaus of An-
gouleme, and as a child I recited poetry so beautifully that it
was decided I should be an actress. I was always called in
when great artists came to play in the city. The great
Coquelin heard me one day and said immediately, 'There is
a girl who should be on the stage.' Of course he was very,
very old then and I was very young. If I had stayed on the
stage, there is absolutely no question that I would have been
the greatest actress in France." *

Lucie immediately offered Suzanne her intimate friendship,
which Suzanne was uneager to accept. But from the time
when she first appeared in the studio Lucie seemed determined
that her fate was to be bound to the menage in the rue
Cortot. She became a frequent visitor. She bought pictures.
She offered her heart in undying devotion to her "dearest
friend, the great artist Suzanne Valadon." Suzanne and Utter
were often amused and somewhat charmed by Lucie's airy
assurance during her visits. Maurice seems to have taken at
first no very active part in Lucie's friendship with the family.
It was twelve years before Lucie would embark on a new
role that would dramatically alter all their lives.

The sales at Berthe WeilTs and Lepoutre's gallery were
gratifying indeed, so far as Suzanne's and Maurice's canvases
were concerned. At the exhibition at Lepoutre's they were

*From Wine of Genius, by Robert Coughlan (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1951).

208

considerably stimulated by the appearance in UOeuvre of the
first serious critique of the artists by Adolphe Tabarant, one
of the leading critics and Maurice's future biographer. Albert
Flamant contributed a sensitive commentary to the catalogue
of the Valadon-Utter show at Weill's. Writing in U Informa-
tion, Robert Pels spoke of the work of Valadon: "The
material is rich and clear, the color sober and vibrant, the
touch forceful and ardent. There is in the painting a faith
and certainty which can be acquired only by those who have
learned to use their fists. This is what one recognizes in
Valadon, the artist who one day will be among the glories of
feminine French painting."

Of Utter's work in the same show Gustave Coquiot wrote:
"When I look at his work I think of Vincent Van Gogh
obviously a stabilized and wise Van Gogh, but Andre Utter
has the constitution, the same aggressive air of that rare
Dutchman. . . ." But Utter's paintings did not sell. To
Utter, had it not been for the success of his wife and stepson,
Coquiot's words might have been consoling. Yet try as he
would, he could not help but be bitter. The war had put
him in a back seat.

Suzanne hardly improved matters. The Weill exhibition,
her first concrete success, became in her eyes proof of her
superior powers as an artist. Superior to whom? In the first
flush of excitement she may have cried triumphantly "supe-
rior to all"; later she may have been more pointed: "To Dede,
of course." In her own eyes she was now clearly the center
of the universe. She did not admit, she seemed not even to be
aware of any authority but her own. What she approved of
was right, what she disliked wrong. One moment she was
the munificent and kindly queen of the art world; the next
she was a barbarous shrew. In either mood she thought her-
self beyond criticism, and other people had to think so as
well. She was capable of the most extravagant remarks: "I
do not seek to be known but to be renowned. For I shall go

Woman with Cat. Oil
painting by Suzanne Val-
adon. /// the collection
of Mr. and Mrs. J. Gar-
fynkd, AVer York.

Vive la Jeunesse. One of
the last paintings by Su-
zanne Valadon. Courtesy
of Paul Pe'trides, Paris.

Self-Portrait. The artist at 62. Oil painting by Suzanne Valadon.
Courtesy of the Lefevre Gallery, London.

209

to the Louvre. That will be my glory." And when in 1920,
through the influence of her friends, she was elected an as-
sociate of the Societe des Artistes Independants, an impressive
honor, she proceeded to issue her dicta to the Salon on the
spot, apparently oblivious of the fact that practically all her
proposed rules had been in effect for thirty-six years: "No
jury. No awards. No board of admission. No hanging com-
mittee. To no one the place of honor. And the hanging
committee [which she had scarcely finished saying must not
exist] to be drawn by lot." She could not face the fact that
her inflated vanity made her extremely vulnerable; and her
egotism was so unbounded that she was incapable of reform-
ing herself. Instead, bewildered, terrified, and resentful, she
rushed blindly about seeking, she hardly knew how, to hold
her quaking dream together.

The brunt of her tyranny fell on Utter. Suzanne insisted
now that he must love her not only because she was a superior
being but also because she was the cynosure of all eyes. She
demanded sycophancy as well as adoration. In the company
of their friends she ordered him to fetch the groceries. His
pipe annoyed her. When he spoke in a discussion she found
a pretense to leave the room, or started a raucous conversation
of her own. The family money she kept in a cloth bag under
her skirt and doled it out to him as though he were a child.
And when she could needle him no further, she flew into
wild, screaming rages, in which she accused him of stealing
"her" money, of plotting to kill her, of smearing her paint-
ings, of turning the whole world against her.

One thing only seemed to bring her to her senses
Maurice's crises. For the most part Maurice lived in the rue
Cortot now, shambling about the four rooms muttering in-
coherently to himself while Suzanne raged on. Sometimes he
would sit in the corner of his room biting his nails and weep-
ing. During a breathing space in a tirade he might venture,
"It is much nicer here when everyone is friendly," or "Dede

210

is my friend," or yet again, "Suzanne is very beautiful." Or
suddenly fury would possess him, and he would kick out the
windowpanes or send a flatiron hurtling into Galanis' studio
across the courtyard.

With the outburst all the air would rush from Suzanne's
sails, and she would suddenly become a courageous woman
whose entire purpose in life was to protect the pitiful sick one
in her charge. But even here her response was hysterical.
When in April, 1920, Maurice was ordered by the chief
alienist of the Department of the Seine, Dr. Briand, to be con-
fined at Picpus as a mental patient, she was panic-stricken by
the notion that he was being taken away from her for good.
She went from one to another of her friends with a stack of
his canvases. "Crazy?" she cried to Francis Carco. "Is a boy
capable of producing masterpieces like these crazy? We must
protest. Go to the newspapers and tell them. They'll believe
you because you know him. You must do it." As a matter of
fact, she was very much in doubt herself as to whether
Maurice was sane or not. What she had recognized as the
beginning of deterioration in his painting might well have
been the portent of a final mental crack-up. It was that fear,
as much as her relationship with Utter, which was responsible
for her perturbation. Yet she dared not acknowledge its ex-
istence. But when for the second time Maurice escaped from
Picpus, she went wild with terror at the thought that he
might harm someone. For five nights she did not sleep.
Ghostly pale, bone-thin, and with eyes starting from her head,
she looked insane herself as she hurried along the alleys and
streets of the Butte inquiring after the whereabouts of her son
and warning the people she knew to keep their doors locked
against him.

Fortunately he had gone to Montparnasse again, and
Zborowski had found him. He had installed him in a little
hotel and pawned a suit in order to keep him supplied with
painting materials and food. By the time Suzanne arrived

211

Maurice was in excellent spirits, sitting at the window looking
down into the trees on die Boulevard Raspail and painting
"A Country Church." Suzanne collapsed in a heap on the
threshold.

There were bright spots, however. It was not always, as
Utter referred to it later, "the House of Usher," "The
Heights of Hurlevent," and the "Voyage to the End of
Night." The arrival of a tipsy friend, a birthday or an an-
niversary, the sale of a picture, or perhaps the appearance of
a laudatory criticism in a journal would be the signal, as it
always was in Bohemia, for revelry. For a few hours the air
would clear. Amicability and affection would be the order.
There would be wine and food, and the company might be
treated to the sight of Suzanne squealing with delight in her
husband's arms and smothering him with kisses. On the occa-
sion of her election as an associate of the Societe des Artistes
Independants the party which began in the Maison Rose
lasted for three days. Called upon at one stage of the revels
to make a speech, Suzanne laid the reason for her success in
Utter's lap: "Without my darling Dede there would be no
love; and it is from love that I paint."

Happily for "the trinity," Andre Utter was not a man to
let personal disappointments or his wife's delusions depress
him. Frustrated by the hysterical atmosphere in which he
found himself, he nevertheless began to concentrate his abun-
dant energies on the development of his own resources. He
continued to paint, but less with an eye to achieving recogni-
tion than for the sheer love of having a brush in his hand.
Strangely enough, it was at the beginning of these chaotic
years that he threw aside the emotional control which had
always characterized his work, and painted like Suzanne. "His
robust temperament banished cerebral speculations," wrote
Andre Warnod. "He was too much a sensualist not to prefer
to confront nature face to face, brutally." Painting was

212

where his heart would always be; his mind he turned to less
aesthetic matters. And so he became a businessman.

"Maurice Utrillo is the prettiest piece of business to appear
in half a century/' Utter later told his friends Heuze and
Carco. He was no admirer of Maurice's talents as a painter,
but he had no doubts as to their commercial possibilities.
Hardly less quick than Suzanne, he was aware of the deteriora-
tion which had begun to set in. It did not bother him much.
"Once an artist begins to sell, the public will buy anything,"
he told Heuze. The signs were in the wind the prices paid
at the Octave Mirbeau and Libaude sales, the results at the
Lepoutre Gallery. It was a time for bold action. Utter's plan
was simple. He proceeded to sell one Utrillo in the Faubourg
St. Honore in order to buy up several Utrillos in the bistros
and byways of the Butte, where once they had been ex-
changed for drinks, food, or a few nights' lodging. Taking
his cue from the canny Libaude, he set himself to build up a
large collection. Nor did he exclude the possibilities of
Valadon. His own experience at Berthe WeilTs had indicated
the public taste for his wife's work. He began to scour Paris
for everything by these two artists which he could lay his
hands on. When he ran out of money he exchanged his own
paintings in order to reclaim theirs: he gave as many as ten
of his own for one Utrillo.

In 1921 Utter arranged with Berthe Weill for another ex-
hibition this time Valadon and Utrillo. The success of this
show made it clear that he was on the right track. Francis
Carco contributed considerably by writing his short book,
Maurice Utrillo. And in the following year, carefully eying
the collection he had on hand, Utter allowed the Paul Guil-
laume Gallery to buy ten Utrillo paintings from his stock for
a reputed 30,000 francs. "Unbelievable!" Derain exclaimed
when Utter told him of the deal. "Ah, my friend," the
painter-turned-businessman replied, "it is only the beginning
of the story."

VHI Fruits of Success

UTTER WAS RIGHT. IN MAY, 1923, PAUL POIRET INTIMATED
to the "world of fashion that it was chic to own the paintings
of Maurice Utrillo and Suzanne Valadon. In his salon on the
Champs lysees he presented an exhibition of their work, the
success of which was reflected immediately in demands for
their paintings from the dealers in the Faubourg St. Honore.
Following it, Bernheim Jeune suggested another exhibition.
They would have liked to make it a one-man show of Utrillo.
However, Utter explained tactfully that if they wanted
Utrillo, they would have to take Valadon too. This was no
heroic gesture to ensure peace at home. Suzanne's pride in
Maurice's work was untainted by jealousy, and this Utter
knew. But whereas he was completely cynical in his attitude
to Maurice's painting, he believed profoundly, as he had from
the first, in die "divine magic" of Suzanne Valadon* "The
Valadon drama" was in his hands and, irrespective of his per-
sonal relationship with its author, he was its consecrated
custodian. There remained always in Andre Utter an in-
genious enthusiasm, a boyish passion for the ideal, for the
good things in life around him. The battles might be vicious;
somehow they were never real. As time was to prove, he was
not a saint. Once his temper was aroused (and it took a very
long time to rouse it), he was capable of the crudest brutality
and unspeakable meanness. But these manifestations were
213

214

only flashes of lightning in the storm he could never quite
believe existed. His amiability and cheerfulness were his
armor against the merciless needling of the woman he loved
and the indifference of the world which did not want the
beautiful pictures he painted. They were also his stock in
trade in business. A playful naivete pervaded his commercial
operations and was, indeed, the reason for his singular suc-
cess.

"All the time we were talking business we laughed," the
dealer Petrides said of him. Often Utter's demands struck a
disarming note of innocence and candor. "Let us look at this
picture post card," he would say as he showed a prospective
customer an Utrillo canvas* "It will take a lot of postage
stamps to move it from here, eh?" What might have sounded
absurd, under cover of his infectious humor often became
daring and reasonable. "Why should big, important fellows
like us talk about fives and tens when we can quite easily talk
of hundreds of thousands?" "A small exhibition is a fine
thing for small profits." And in arranging for one of the first
German exhibitions of Valadon, he advised his customer, "In
your country a few words to the press and Valadon will go
right to the sentimental hearts of the Germans Trilby,
Mimi, and Marguerite Gautier all in one."

Utter would also be tantalizingly casual, arriving two hours
late for an appointment, or breaking up a conference because
he had "to take the dog for a walk." "On the Butte we never
know when we are going to do anything, and mostly it is all
right when we do it. Earlier would be too soon," he remarked
to an American collector who had come to the studio to buy
an Utrillo. The first Swiss exhibition of Utrillo was arranged
while Utter was running to catch a train. He made his con-
tract with Paul Petrides while having his trousers fitted. And
when, at the conclusion of the enormously successful Vala-
don-Utrillo show at Bernheim Jeune in 1923, Feneon and
Bernheim tried to speak to him about the possibilities of draw-

215

ing up a contract with Suzanne and Maurice for their future
work, he sent back word that he thought they would all come
to the point more quickly after he had had a holiday.

With Suzanne and Maurice, their friends Georges and
Nora Kars, and an amazon who was known simply as
Paulette, he left in a hired car headed for Orthez in the Basses-
Pyrenees. None of the party had bothered to consider that
Kars, who made the arrangements for the car and proposed to
drive it, had never before sat in a driver's seat. The trip south
was a succession of hilarious mishaps which included being
unable to put up the top in a hailstorm, the loss of a wheel on
a mountain grade, and a collision with a cow.

Paulette had been attached to the household for some
months as a cook, cleaning woman, and bodyguard for
Maurice, and only lastly as a model. A large, lusty fisher-
woman with a fondness for tight-fitting cerise satin clothes,
she had come to Paris to seek wider opportunities and had
ended up selling fish in the market of Les Batignolles and
taking on odd modeling jobs in her spare time. The turbulent
atmosphere in the rue Cortot somehow appealed to her, and
on her first visit she announced her intention of remaining as
a member of the menage. A few days later her effects arrived,
and she moved into the kitchen.

At Orthez, Suzanne was suddenly seized with the notion
that Paulette should marry Maurice. The idea that Maurice
ought to be married was not a new one with her. That he
was still unmarried bothered her considerably. It set him
apart from other young men, made him appear abnormal.
And remembering always the doctors' hints that some sexual
disturbance might well be at the seat of his alcoholism, she
was sure that a normal sex outlet would go a long way toward
curing him. She had always encouraged his association with
women. For a while she had thought that something might
develop between him and Marie Vizier, the proprietress of
the Belle Gabrielle.

216

Marie was a lively, generous woman about Suzanne's age
who had assumed a proprietary interest in Maurice. He had
decorated the premises with murals, including the water
closet, which in a fit of anger she scrubbed clean upon dis-
covering, when she went into it in the dark, that the wet paint
had come off on her new frock. Something of a nympho-
maniac, she made no secret of the fact that she was initiating
Maurice into the mysteries of love. People twitted him about
his "whore Marie," but he only gave them a sly smile. In one
of his pictures of the rue Norvins which included the Belle
Gabrielle he painted a small boy writing on the wall of a
building across the street, "On the other side of this street are
the best memories of my life." Marie tried to reform his
drinking habits by refusing to give him wine and by insisting
that he eat the gargantuan portions of food which she put
before him. He stuffed the food into his pockets when she
was not looking, and went for his drink elsewhere. If she had
matrimonial ambitions as far as he was concerned, his perpet-
ual drunkenness eventually dampened them, and after a while
she even lost interest in continuing his sex education.

As the affaire Marie Vizier petered out, Suzanne prodded
Maurice to go to prostitutes. At first she gave him the money;
then, aware that he was spending it on drink instead, she took
him to the maison close herself, made the necessary financial
arrangements with the management, and waited in the street
until he came out. On occasion she also brought girls home
and locked Maurice in with them, in which situation he was
just as likely to sit in a corner and read a book as to do any-
thing else. If the girl grew too aggressive, or if he felt other-
wise harassed, he would fly into one of his diabolic rages until
she screamed for help and was set free.

During the war Suzanne had tried to arrange a marriage
with a laundress named Gaby. It was of this affair that
Maurice spoke wistfully to Francis Carco many years later.

217

"You know," he mused, "it wouldn't have been bad with her,
but how the bitch drank!"

When Suzanne decided that Maurice ought to marry
Paulette, she was hardly less direct in her maneuvers. She
gave a large party to announce the engagement, which was
something of a shock to both the persons involved. Maurice
seemed pleased; he painted a colorful view of Orthez which
he presented to his betrothed. For a few days Paulette ap-
peared to be rather gay about the sudden turn of events: she
combed the Orthez shops looking for cerise satin. It was not
until Suzanne had gone to the mairie to make arrangements
for the wedding that Paulette showed signs of nervousness*
And then, in the middle of the night, she packed her things
and disappeared, leaving the view of Orthez behind her.
Maurice was not disappointed, so Suzanne gave another party
to celebrate her son's freedom. Back in Paris, she reported,
"It was the best party in the Basses-Pyrenees in a hundred
years."

The holiday over, Utter returned to Bernheim Jeune, and
the results were spectacular indeed. To the consternation of
the Faubourg St. Honore, Bernheim Jeune agreed to guaran-
tee a million francs a year minimum (then approximately
$60,000) to Utrillo and Valadon in exchange for their future
production.

For the moment all the bitterness of the past five years was
washed away by the tidal wave of jubilation. Long-out-
standing bills were paid. At Utter's insistence, Suzanne ap-
peared at Patou's for a new tailored suit, which in another six
months she would be painting in. All the customers at the
Lapin Agile drank champagne for a week in honor of the new
contract and at the expense of the two artists who were
parties to it. Montmartre urchins ran about the streets of the
Butte delightedly waving hundred-franc notes tossed to them

218

from the studio window at No. 12 rue Cortot. And with an
uncharacteristic eye to the future Suzanne had Madeleine's
coffin surmounted by a splendid granite tomb bearing the
legend "Valadon-Utter-Utrillo" in gold letters.

Before the year was out Suzanne and Utter, caught up in a
billow of sentimentality, journeyed back to the Lyonnais
countryside bent upon recapturing the ecstatic days of their
wartime stay at Belleville. By the time the train reached
Lyons the resolution was in tatters. Suzanne was the most
trying travel companion imaginable. The excitement of the
past few weeks had heightened her nervous instability as
never before; her moods changed not every day but every
quarter of an hour. A taxicab was too slow; the hotel room
was "filthy," the food garbage. She flirted outrageously with
every young man she saw, abused waiters and porters, and
dispensed munificent tips to chambermaids. She was not
above introducing herself anywhere as "the famous artist."
At Belleville she wept for a day and refused to eat because
the horse they had driven about the countryside five years
before had died. All her memories of the idyl were garbled.
What she remembered as being on the right side of the road
was now on the left. Where there had been a sweep of the
Saone there was now a cornfield. And apparently Utter was
responsible. When he went off to find tobacco for his pipe,
she accused him of infidelity. A few glasses of wine made
him a drunkard. When he showed interest in the architecture
of a church, he was tiring of her. If she could not sleep, she
woke him up. When he suggested going off by himself in
order to paint, she swore that if he did, he would never see
her again. Word went about that he was a desperate dope
addict whom she had undertaken to cure.

Unexpectedly, however, the trip ended on a high note of
hilarity: they bought a chateau. In a village cafe at lunch
one day they overheard the proprietor mention that the
nearby Chateau St. Bernard was for sale. For the first time

219

in a long while they had the same inspiration: buy it. And
within the hour they owned a large, square patchwork of
three hundred years' assorted architecture, crumbling stair-
cases, flaking plaster walls, and feathery acacia trees. It was
the sort of madness which they might have dreamed of in the
first flush of their love. Coming as it did now in their days of
perturbation, it was, if anything, more delicious. No celebra-
tion could be too preposterous. They sent money to their
friends on the Butte to come and witness their delirium. The
Karses arrived with Maurice and Utter's young sister Gabri-
elle. Gustave Coquiot and his wife came. So did the sculptor
Leonardi and Max Jacob. A score of "old friends" from
Belleville and half the surrounding countryside managed to
find their way through one of the many doors of the Chateau
St. Bernard. A winegrower from Macon delivered an entire
cm. In the middle of the week's festivities Suzanne dis-
patched a telegram to Edouard Herriot, the mayor of Lyons,
who happened to be at the moment premier of France, in-
viting him to come and see her paintings. He Claimed later
(when, indeed, he was often a guest at St. Bernard) that he
had never received the telegram. In any event the party did
not stop to wait for him. It finally tapered off with some
groaning hangovers, a few skinned knuckles, and a black eye
or two. But the host and hostess were radiantly happy. In a
single stroke they had swept aside the frustrating years and
gained the enchantment of their early rapture.

Nevertheless it did not last long. Once they were back in
Paris, a rift began to show itself again in their relationship
which was to bring down their married life in irreparable
ruin. Strangely, the more destructive tools of demolition
were in Utter's hands. In spite of his careful good humor and
his efforts to treat Suzanne's caviling with a light touch, there
remained in him the eager appetites of the sensualist which he
was less able to control than his temper. In their prewar life
together Suzanne had altogether satisfied these demands of his

220

character. A beautiful woman, considerably older than him-
self, she had been at once challenge and fulfillment of his
passionate cravings. In the intoxication of their daily existence
all desires were satisfied. Other women meant nothing to him.
Thirst for alcohol, which had been very much a part of his
early youth, had abated. Experimental ventures into the drug
addict's feverish world were no longer necessary. To him
Suzanne had been an amalgam of worldly pleasures, of all
good things.

But now her beauty was fading rapidly. She was an old
woman, a hysterical shrew, except for the infrequent bursts
of animal sexuality which would still seize her. At such times
they would both be transported, and all the magic of their
former days of love would envelop them. The years would
drop away. The tensions of the past would be forgotten. But
such occasions were naturally rare.

In the meantime the world about Utter offered many com-
pensating temptations. Still, Utter might not have allowed
himself to drift into them had he been able to turn to his work
for consolation. As it was, work offered him little but frus-
tration. He garnered small pleasure from the fact that he was
a success as a businessman and a failure as an artist. Although
his original accomplishments in the commercial field amused
him, he was miserable in the face of spending his future
"haggling with the cardinals." He felt trapped. Each "deal"
somehow led him into the next. Nowhere was there a break-
away point from which he could escape to pursue his life as
he wanted it. Money added to his frustration. He wore
elegant clothes and rosebuds in his lapel. He drove a car.
His free spending in the bars and restaurants of the Butte,
where he had passed his life with only a few francs in his
pocket (and sometimes none), gave him a feeling of im-
portance he had never known before. But he always had the
Bohemian's scorn of money, and to discover himself now in

221

thrall to it like the despised bourgeois was to acknowledge
that his lofty principles had deserted him.

Nor was the situation more tolerable because the money he
made was, in large part, the fruit of Maurice's success as a
painter. Utter was neither charmed nor interested by the end-
less succession of street scenes, walls, and architectural masses
which had become the objects of adulation and commercial
competition in the Faubourg St. Honore. To him, Maurice
as an artist was a cheap trick, a phoney, a drunken "character"
who had nothing to say and had somehow stumbled upon
popular acclaim, while a thousand serious, dedicated artists
(including himself) with imagination and intelligence, strug-
gled to find recognition in a morass of apathy. His bitterness
toward Maurice did not, of course, stop with the artist. He
took umbrage at the monopoly which Maurice seemed to
hold on Suzanne's attention. At the beginning of their life
together he had accepted Suzanne's concern for her son's
welfare with pride as a superb exhibition of maternal devo-
tion. It was another one of her fascinating virtues. Besides,
he felt sympathy for the poor wretch who was unable to free
himself from his passion for drink. However, a reformed
drunkard of sorts himself, he was not sympathetic for long.
As time went on and his own life became complicated by
another's moods and crises he grew increasingly resentful.
Eventually his rancor found expression in a thousand childish
taunts and mockeries which he heaped upon the unfortunate
Maurice, who either failed to comprehend them or, if he did,
transcended them, sublimely certain that in Andre Utter he
had a friend.

It was behavior which Suzanne could not be expected to
take as passively as did her son. Appalled by its meanness, she
soon fiercely counterattacked. The little street echoed with
scene after scene. Abuse and curses, hurtling crockery,
scissors jabbed into the breast of a nude on his easel, doors

222

bolted against him, his clothes ripped and thrown into the
courtyard, threats of murder and suicide, public denuncia-
tions in restaurants and pavement cafes these were the
measure of the intermittent fury that came upon her as she
protected her son. Nor did she revile Utter solely in defense
of Maurice. What she most feared had come to pass: Utter
had gone to other women. Like the majority of wives,
Suzanne learned it last, even though recent years had been a
maze of suspicions, accusations, doubts, and fears. This, she
had told herself repeatedly, would be the end of her life, a
shame she could never bear. But even as she strove frantically
to prevent its happening, she had begun to prepare for its
eventuality. Utter now had free rein to come and go as he
pleased. No longer did Suzanne pass from cafe to caf i look-
ing for him. When he came home she was often not there.
As early as 1923 she had faced the deterioration of her
beauty by painting an extraordinary self-portrait, a picture no
other woman would have painted of herself flat-faced, the
sensuous lips drawn to an absurd rosebud mouth obviously
holding in badly fitting false teeth, the pendulous breasts of a
dissolute savage. There she was naked, completely im-
modest and old, and considerably more durable than the fitful
humors of love.

Her reaction to Utter's infidelities surprised even herself.
Despite the rage which his faithlessness generated, and which
she lost no opportunity of unleashing in his direction, she saw
something ironically amusing in it. The spectacle of his in-
volvement with other women had, indeed, a touch of the
comic about it. For all his indolent, worldly manners, the
smart cut of his clothes, the eager light in his bright blue eyes,
Utter was forty years old rather more than double the age
he imagined himself to be. And although apparently his
sexual prowess was untouched by the years, he was unable to
muster the gay imperturbability which had characterized the
amatory exploits of his youth. Each adventure became an in-

225

f atuation, each flirtation a transport of love. In either case he
suffered. The emotional demands which women made on
him were inexhaustible and they were also very costly. He
was continually beset by the claims, protests, and abuse not
only of his present inamorata but of former loves, as well as
by the wiles of those who aspired to his favors in the future.
Often there were noisy, embarrassing scenes in public places
when past and present and sometimes future converged on
him simultaneously. Bills arrived from everywhere. When
he failed to indulge one of his mistresses, a model called
Eveline, in the presents which she thought her due, she
bought what she fancied on the Champs-lysees and had the
bills sent to him. Another mistress always needed money
for doctor bills, for her landlord (who later turned out to be
her husband), for sick relatives in the country. Many other
demands were made on him. Models wanted him to arrange
sittings for them with his artist friends. Artists wanted him
to show their work to the dealers he did business with. Aspir-
ing actresses, musicians, and dancers wanted him to press
their talents upon his theatrical impresario friends. All of
them consulted him about their endless family problems.

Utter played his part with all the spirit he could mobilize,
but it was never enough to prevent him from being slightly
absurd. Everyone knew his troubles; often people knew
more about the object of his devotion than he did himself.
When he appeared at a familiar haunt with a new love, he
was cheered like a victorious football player. The entire
Butte was entertained by the love life of "the Pope" of Mont-
martre.

He was too sensitive not to know that he was making a
fool of himself, too entangled to be able to cut himself free.
When momentary release came he was at Suzanne's feet, full
of remorse, begging her to forgive him, telling her again of
his love for her. And she, no longer haunted by fear, and
rather pleased to see him the harassed victim of his own folly f

224

could be magnanimous. It would be mistaking her character
not to recognize that part of her magnanimity was prompted
by her knowledge that the eyes of the Butte were upon her,
that she was being called upon to enact the role of the injured
but forgiving wife. She played it to the hilt. Her clemency
was on view at the greengrocer's and the baker's, in the bars
and restaurants, and in their studio in the rue Cortot, where
they again painted together, if anything more harmoniously
than of old. Such public displays of generosity, however,
were only pale reflections of the unbounded joy she felt at
having him with her once again, of knowing that, for the
moment at least, she had triumphed over some youthful rival,
that it was she who was the pivotal point of his life. But most
of all she was charitable because she loved him, because for
all their differences and battles, the bitterness, the recrimina-
tions, even the hatred which sometimes flashed across the
drama of the life they shared, loving him had been the greatest
joy she had ever known.

When Utter could not bring himself to plead for his wife's
grace, he drank. Drunkenness was much the easier escape
from his misbehavior, for even when he and Suzanne had
been reconciled, the old recriminations were bound to follow.
In alcoholic befuddlement he could escape all women; men,
too, if he chose. He could vent his resentment against the
world for its failure to appreciate his painting. He could
curse the commercial stratum of society in which he was com-
pelled to sully himself. He could fulminate against critics,
dealers, and collectors. And he could heap scorn upon
Maurice Utrillo. At such times he became repulsive and
malevolent, debasing every endearing facet of his character,
a spectacle far more painful to a woman who loved him than
his philandering.

That so despicable a creature should be the object of the
great passion of her life was a searing blow to Suzanne's self-
esteem. But years of experience with Maurice had instilled in

225

her compassion toward a drunkard that no blow to her pride
or wounding of her sentiments could overcome. When she
was put to an actual test her vanity crumbled completely be-
fore what she recognized as her duty toward another human
being. To desert Utter in his misery would be against the
very core of her character. Still, she began to feel that the
less she saw or knew about the sordid side of his life the better
off both of them would be, the better she would be able to
work, the more securely she would keep her love for him*
For the most part they still slept under the same roof; occa-
sionally they dined together in public in comparative calm;
and nearly every day they painted together. But they went
their separate ways. In spite of their love or in order to keep
it a living thing they no longer sought their destiny in one
another.

As a matter of fact, Suzanne was already in a hurly-burly
of fresh excitement. It was only natural that fame and money
so suddenly come by should alter the tenor of her life. The
long struggle to attract attention to herself and her work had
ended in a burst of glory. It mattered little that the lion's
share of the fruits belonged to Maurice, that his pictures now
sold for four and five times as much as hers. To be his mother
was alone something to be proud of; and everyone knew that
she had been his only teacher.

Not that she was content to bask in his kudos. She worked
very hard indeed, once again with all the heart and vigor
which had characterized the first paintings of the Impasse
de Guelma and the rue Cortot. But now her canvases were,
in the main, smaller, her compositions more compact. There
were fewer nudes, more of the vibrant details of daily life
in casual, indeed oifhand arrangement still lifes of fish and
wine bottles, plates, baskets, napkins, onions, apples, dead
pheasants and hares, and especially flowers, in all the crude
colors for which she had such a passion. Her pictures were

226

vigorous and incisive, their inner structure sound and certain.
They reminded one of Cezanne and his solids. "Does an apple
move?" he asked disgustedly as his sitter Vollard shifted his
weight in his chair. Everything else in Suzanne's life was
moving; only in her painting could she feel that her feet were
on the ground. But she was far from disgusted with the state
of things about her.

Her Russian-style clothes were designed by Yteb in the
rue Royale and modeled by lovely mannequins of the Rus-
sian nobility. Her suits were by Paquin and Alex Maguy, and
she wore tea gowns by Lucille, Lady Duff-Gordon. At a
private showing at Vionnet's she sat alone with Queen Marie
of Romania. Not that she cared a fig for fashion. In a few
weeks she would be wearing her "creation" besmeared with
paint at her easel. "One has one's caprices, and when one has
money one buys them," she said airily. The Persian-lamb
coat she had often dreamed of owning served as a bed for her
dogs more often than it appeared on her back. The dogs lived
very well indeed, dining on faux-filets specially prepared for
them to their mistress's order at the restaurant Moulin Joyeux.
Her cats had beluga caviar on Fridays.

Suzanne now cruised about Paris in a gleaming Panhard
driven by a chauffeur in white livery which he was obliged
to change twice a day. When the Panhard was in the repair
shop she rode in a taxi. Once she took a taxi to St. Bernard,
a distance of 350 miles, in order to pick strawberries out of
the garden. At the chateau she caught from the window a
view which she thought she would like to paint, and sent the
taxi driver back to Paris to fetch her paints. When he re-
turned a couple of days later, naturally the light had changed.
In the meantime she had decided that she would not paint the
view anyway, and had taken the train back to Paris. Another
time she drove to St. Bernard, again in a taxi, and asked the
driver to wait for her at the gate. It was two days before she

227

remembered she had left him waiting, and she was indignant
that meanwhile he had taken a room in the village inn and
supplied himself with food and wine.

Always one who loved to entertain, she could do so now
with a princely flourish. At St Bernard there were elaborate
wine-tastings and luncheons alfresco, and the guests now
often included Premier Edouard Herriot. At sumptuous
buffets in the rue Cortot prepared by Escoffier, the great
names of the theater Lugne-Poe, Copeau, Mistinguett, and
Diaghilev mingled with the foremost names in the world
of art. There were dinners in the great restaurants Le Tour
d' Argent, Prunier's, Laperousse; thes dansants at the famous
Cafe de la Cascade in the Bois de Boulogne. The originality
of Suzanne's parties was often not without a touch of mad-
ness a picnic in the Metro catered for by Maxim's, a mid-
night supper among the tombstones of the cemetery St.
Vincent, and a soiree at the celebrated maison close La Belle
Poule.

Entering a flower shop to pick up a bouquet or table
decoration, Suzanne would be unable to make up her mind
what she wanted, and to save time would buy everything
in the store. Or, picking out a single bloom, she might order
the rest of the stock to be sent to a sick friend.

Nature, having endowed her with pride, rage, and fear-
lessness, had not failed to add compassion and generosity to
her character. Believing, as she always had, in the infallibility
of her own powers, she aspired far more passionately than
most people to live a noble life; if her heart was touched,
she responded with a sincere urge to show kindness to her
fellow men. Thousand-franc notes squeezed into a lavatory
attendant's fist, left under a plate in a bistro, could bring to
the lives of less fortunate people radiant moments which,
as she knew from her own experience with poverty, were the
substance of poor men's dreams. The pleasure of giving was

22S

enough: she wanted no thanks. When a waiter rushed to the
street to thank her for a fantastic tip, she assured him that
she had been sitting at another table.

Suzanne knew that many of the people whom she helped
thought her an irresponsible fool Jokes went around the
Butte and even appeared in the press about her wild extrava-
gance. She was hurt but undaunted. Most of what was said
of her was exaggerated anyway. The unpredictable, the
whimsical gesture had been a part of her make-up all her
life. Now that money had suddenly thrown open fresh fields
she was not likely to change her nature. To be able to collect
fifty children from the streets on the spur of the moment and
take them to the Cirque Medrano; to overhear the butcher's
wife complain of lumbago and be able to send her to the
Riviera for a month; to see a young artist at his easel in the
street painting on cheap cotton canvas and be able to present
him with a dozen good frames and a bolt of the best-grade
linen; to notice a cigarette burn on a friend's sofa and be
able to send him a new sofa; to buy a violin for a street
musician or a piano for a new cabaret; to remember a laun-
dress's birthday or the postman's wedding anniversary and be
able to send a beautiful gift this was what money was for.
If people thought she was ostentatious, ridiculous, or mad, she
cared little. She was convinced that her motives were sincere,
and followed her course with princely insouciance. It was
not always easy, for she was also engaged in the grimmest
battle of her life.

In the spring of 1924 Maurice had agreed to undergo treat-
ment for several months in a sanatorium at Ivry. The suc-
cession of accolades of the past two years, the vast sums of
money now at his disposal, the fact that he was a respected
celebrity of the Paris scene, with people bowing to him in
the street and writing articles about him in the newspapers,
filled him with nothing but an overpowering desire to lose
himself. The notion that people were hostile to him was

229

superseded by the fear that he was crazy and that people
wanted to see him put permanently in an asylum. Ten years
before, he had written in the fanciful autobiographical sketch
composed at M. Gay's: "People said I was mad, the fools.
But when they put me in Villejuif they called me not a luna-
tic' but a highly strung person who has been overstimulated."
Nevertheless, the thought that the "fools" might have been
right and the doctors wrong haunted him. "Fin not crazy!
Fm not crazy!" he would shout when he caught a stranger
looking at him. Passing a group of people with a friend or his
mother, he would begin to shiver in fright. "Look at them!
They think Fm crazy. They're going to put me in Picpus
again." His new-found fame, of course, only heightened pub-
lic curiosity. He was pointed out wherever he went, drunk
or sober; and the more attention he attracted, the more
desperate he grew, the harder he drank to escape notice, and
the wilder became his fears that he was losing his mind.
Finally in a police station he attempted to commit suicide by
smashing his head against the wall.

Suzanne saw his attempt to destroy himself as the fulfill-
ment of her direst fears. In the very hour of his success
Maurice was struck down by the lunacy which had dogged
him all his life. Now, when it was too late, she could see the
long chain of symptoms which she had obstinately refused to
recognize his odd behavior as a little boy, his desperate, un-
fathomable moods, his alcoholism, and his strange sexual be-
havior. Even the curious development of his art should have
forewarned her of the tragedy which now confronted her.
In the end his art, on which she had pinned her hope, had
failed to save him: it was gone, and nothing but the wreckage
was left.

For several weeks Maurice lay semiconscious in the studio,
his head swathed in bandages while the doctors tried to
assure her that he would recover. She was inconsolable, cer-
tain that she knew more than the medical profession, afraid

250

to hope. Her own health began to deteriorate. She had vio-
lent headaches and ate nothing. Friends who came to see her
reported that her skin was jaundiced and shriveled, and that
she seemed to have grown old overnight.

Gradually hope rekindled. Maurice began to talk. Most
of what he said was garbled, but there were flashes of intelli-
gence. He asked for an orange, and that the statuette of
Joan of Arc be put beside his bed. He noted each day's
change of weather. Sometimes he talked about painting
problems which he had faced in the past.

As soon as the doctors would allow it Suzanne whisked
Maurice off to the sunshine at St. Bernard. Recovery was
slow and by no means steady. For months he meandered
aimlessly round the house and grounds in an apparent daze
broken by odd bits of conversation, a sudden fit of inex-
plicable rage, or a wild, maniacal seizure of laughter. In his
small whitewashed room he sat on the edge of his bed staring
at the rolling cornfields. Often he seemed incapable of under-
standing what was said to him. For the most part his speech
was incoherent.

Suzanne hired a male nurse, an ex-keeper from Picpus, to
take care of him, but she insisted upon dressing and feeding
him herself. If the nurse took him for a walk, she followed.
At night she sat beside his bed until he fell asleep. When
she managed to exchange a few intelligent sentences with
him her spirit soared: everything was going to be all right.
But most of the time she was sunk in black depression; or else
she was in a state of nervous irascibility which set her darting
about the house, pacing the garden, nettling the servants, un-
leashing a gust of temper on Utter, or even storming off to
Paris for two or three days. Her nerves were raw despite all
the effort she made to maintain an atmosphere of tranquillity
for the patient. A sudden noise a door slamming or a bell
ringing sent her rushing to Maurice's side in a panic. The

231

sight of the unused easel in his room caused her to burst into
tears.

Strangely, as Maurice improved she became more irritable,
and when he finally took up his materials and started painting
again she fled to the room in the tower which was her studio.

In a few weeks Maurice had recovered sufficiently to work
on a commission from the great Russian impresario Diaghilev,
who had asked him to do the sets and costumes for a new
ballet, Barabau, with choreography by Balanchine and music
by Rieti. Within two weeks he had read the libretto and
submitted finished designs. They were fresh, colorful, and
superficial: the backgrounds were white. But once Maurice
was back at his easel it was clear that he no longer had any-
thing to say. He was resorting to cheap devices and easy
effects: flat, meaningless white was everywhere. When Utter
pointed this out Suzanne flew at him in a defensive rage,
accusing him of jealousy. Maurice was the greatest painter
in the world a great genius. But the same evening at dinner
she was heard murmuring to herself, "I should not want to
be able to draw even a sugar bowl from memory."

Her inquietude was hardly lessened by Utter's comings
and goings. "This Eden was transformed into a real hell,"
Utter wrote later. "I thought we had bought the place for
peace. But Maurice was able to scream and shout about to
his heart's content. Suzanne replied in kind. And only the
walls and the fish in the Saone listened to them."

Utter and Suzanne were living apart now. In 1925, alarmed
by Suzanne's lavish spending, Bernheim Jeune had bought a
modern house in the Avenue Junot in Maurice's name. It
was only a short walk down the hill from the rue Cortot,
sitting rather prettily in a small private courtyard called "the
Hamlet." There was a large studio: Maurice's room on the
first floor had heavy iron grilles at the windows and contained
an old harmonium, which he loved to play by ear. Behind the

252

house was a small garden which Suzanne tended herself. It
was probably the only material thing in the world that she
ever really treasured. She gardened with burning passion and
with the haphazard lavishness which she brought to every-
thing she did. She was always buying flower seeds, and she
accumulated barrels of unlabeled bulbs in the basement. The
names of flowers meant nothing to her. When she painted an
arrangement of flowers she usually called in her neighbor,
Mme. Poulbot, to give the picture a tide. She bought flowers
by color alone, and this often led her to put fall plants at the
edges of the borders and the pansies or violets behind them
against the wall. The appearance of each new shoot was an
occasion for jubilation. Many were the times she rushed up
to Paris from St. Bernard in order to catch the blossoming of
a favorite shrub, to fertilize one of the flower beds, to spray
a rosebush, or even to pick some blooms for an arrangement
which she wanted to paint.

Utter did not move into the house on the Avenue Junot.
The old studio in the rue Cortot was the scene of his happiest
memories of those years before the war. There he had
loved in joy the beautiful little woman who to him meant
more than any other creature in the world. There he had
painted with the exhilaration born of love and with un-
dimmed hope of being one of the important artists of his day.
There he would stay. Even so, he was at the Avenue Junot
daily whenever Suzanne was there to boast, to quarrel, to
curse his lot, to mock Maurice, or to make love. Years later,
when Suzanne was dead, Utter wrote to a friend: "Always I
dream of the rue Cortot and the beloved Suzanne. When we
first moved there, how beautiful everything was except for
the gossips! And I knew then that it was the place I should
always keep in my heart. Every man has a home. He is lost
if he does not treasure it."

Now, while Suzanne and Maurice were living at St. Ber-
nard, Utter would arrive without warning and leave equally

233

abruptly, often in a fury. He was full of irritating chatter
about his "deals," and usually before his visit was over he was
too full of wine. He painted a great deal exciting, beauti-
fully thoughtful pictures which he carried back to Paris to
sell for a few francs. He came because he loved the country-
side the white sky, the slashing sunlight, the swaying
columns of the poplars and because he knew there was
genuine sympathy with his lot. For when it came to his fail-
ure to win recognition as an artist, Suzanne was deeply
touched. He was a fine painter, far better, indeed, than many
who were enjoying current popularity. It was painful to see
him frustrated and embittered by the public taste. And yet
there was nothing she could do to change matters. If he
would only be patient and sanguine, she told him, his success
would come in due course as it had to others to Renoir, to
Monet, to Lautrec. "Or poor Modi, or perhaps Van Gogh,"
he fired back; he saw small comfort in posthumous recogni-
tion.

When Utter was at St. Bernard the tension was almost un-
bearable. Suzanne tried to avoid it by having large house
parties and troops of friends from Paris: Max Jacob, the
Coquiots, Roland Dorgeles, Derain and his wife but more
often than not the guests eventually witnessed a battle. And
yet Suzanne dreaded his departure. Whatever his excuse, she
knew that he was 4 leaving her to go to another woman. By
turns she was indifferent, mocking, or furiously jealous all
to no avail. She went so far as to hint that she herself had a
lover, possibly "a high official in Lyons." When that failed
to bring the hoped-for response, it was her turn to flee to
Paris. Sometimes she took Maurice with her; more often she
went alone. For a few days she would dispense quixotic
bounty on the Butte, attend a round of parties, perhaps
give one herself. But if she did not have her eye on Maurice,
she could not stay away for long.

Fate did not see fit to release Suzanne from this thwarted
and stagnant situation for twelve years. Maurice made no
further suicide attempts, and that was about the measure of
her victory. For the rest, it was one tedious battle against
the deterioration of a man's mind, and another to hang onto
some part of what had been the love of her life. In neither
engagement was she ever to feel that she had won.

She continued to paint, and there were important exhibi-
tions. She was invited to show in the Exhibition of Contem-
porary Art Women and Flowers, in 1929, and again in the
same year in the Painters, Self-Portraits exhibition. She
showed the extraordinary nude of 1923 and a poignant reflec-
tion of an aging woman in a mirror done in 1927. In 1932
Utter arranged with the Galerie Moos in Geneva for the first
trinite maudite exhibition outside France, and to Suzanne's
and Utter's delight his sales were very good. Suzanne had a
one-woman show of paintings, drawings, and etchings at the
Galeries Georges Petit that same year. It was of this exhibi-
tion that douard Herriot was to write:

"Alive as springtime itself and, like spring, clear and
ordered without interpretation, Suzanne Valadon pursues
her magnificent and silent work of painting. ... I
think of the words of Theophile Gautier, 'Summer is
a colorist, winter a draftsman.' To us who admire and
love her art, Suzanne Valadon is springtime a creature
in whose sharp, incisive forms we find the fountains of
life, the spontaneity of renewed day-to-day living. And
before this very great and dedicated artist, the heir of
those masters of the nineteenth century whose names we
now revere, I marvel that so scrupulous a respect for
the truth of form is able to achieve such a fete of color
and movement.'*

235

Indirectly, Maurice himself provided some deliverance.
The possibility of his marrying arose once again. This rime
the would-be bride was Utter's younger sister Gabrielle, a
solid, devout young woman who was often a welcome guest
at St. Bernard.

Suzanne always had in her heart a deep sympathy toward
humble, simple people. Surrounded, as she had been since
girlhood, by egoists and eccentrics possessed of fiery tempera-
ments and flaming ambitions, who were nevertheless the
breath of life to her, she was truly at ease only among the
common people. The compassion she had for die thwarted,
the outcasts of fortune, the drunkards, the derelicts, and the
prostitutes was actually a dramatization of the genuine
warmth and friendliness which she felt toward the people
who worked as waiters, sold groceries and vegetables, tilled
the fields, delivered laundry, or swept the streets. From
earliest childhood this feeling of kinship had been strongly
with her, sharpened greatly by her mother's neglect. People
who went about performing their dull tasks without com-
plaint had in her eyes a special glamour, and commanded both
her loyalty and her affection. Her most intimate friends were
women of this cut seamstresses, the cafe patronnes, laun-
dresses, village women, the Paulettes of this world, with
whom it was possible to talk on an easy, amicable basis.
Gabrielle Utter, the plumber's daughter, was one of these, so
different from her mercurial, intellectual brother with his
brooding resentments and unpredicable moods. Gabrielle
was forthright and dependable. With her simplicity, her
quiet affectionate manner, and her piety Suzanne was sure
she would make an admirable wife for Maurice.

Gabrielle was willing. By no means was she an unattractive
woman, and it was probably because of the qualities Suzanne
saw in her that she had withstood, into her thirties, the mar-
riage proposals of other Montmartre blades. Her pity for

236

Maurice tended to inspire love of a maternal or sisterly
sort. She was sympathetic and kind; and only when he was
with Gabrielle did Maurice seem to shed the pitiable child-
like dependence on his mother. For four years Gabrielle came
to St. Bernard. Together they sat talking for hours, or rather
she listened as he talked about his miserable past ("I was
never hungry. Never. But I was often thirsty"), and about
his religion which ever since he had come by the statuette at
St. Sulpice had occupied a great part of his sober thinking
hours. They played cards. He read to her again something
religious: the psalms or lives of the saints. Often they walked
the country roads hand in hand. Whenever he was in Paris
he went to see her. They dined out frequently; a single glass
of wine was all he would drink, but he asked her to pay the
bill for him because he did not like to touch money. It was
with Gabrielle that he saw the first performance of the ballet
Barak MI in 1925.

Some sixth sense must have stayed Suzanne's unsubde hand:
she failed to charge in with a suggestion of marriage for
four years, at any rate. Instead she waited and watched with
airy hope. From time to time she was disconcerted by the
rudderless course which the lovers, as she came quickly to
think of them, steered. Sometimes a shadow of apprehension
flickered across her mind when Maurice did something espe-
cially juvenile, like hiding Utter's painting materials or in-
sisting upon holding his mother's hand when they walked in
a crowd; or when he managed to get hold of the household
wine and got drunk again; or when he suddenly broke into a
fit of laughter or into one of his terrible rages. Such mo-
ments of doubt were soon dispelled by the confidence Su-
zanne had in Gabrielle as a potential wife. But she would not
have been Suzanne if she had kept her self-control indefi-
nitely. After four years of waiting and hoping, she could
remain silent no longer. She spoke to Maurice; he balked.
Then on the first available train he fled to Montmartre and a

257

terrific bout of drinking. A few days later a deflated Suzanne
received a note from him. She handed it to Utter. It read:
"I've had enough tragedy in my family with one of that
family. That is quite enough."

Apart from the fact that she herself was sympathetically
drawn to Gabrielle and that Maurice seemed to get on hap-
pily enough with her, Suzanne had counted on Gabrielle's
piety to seal the alliance, for Maurice had entered a new
phase. In the first months of his convalescence at St. Bernard
he had come upon a Catechism belonging to his nurse's small
daughter. At a time when he seemed only dimly able to com-
municate with the world around him, the book had a strange
fascination. He carried it with him always, as he continued
to carry the statuette of Joan of Arc, and for long hours he
sat reading it and memorizing questions and answers that
struck his fancy. From his reading he began to fabricate the
framework of a religious belief mystical, confused, and dis-
jointed, an eccentric tangent to the teachings of the Church.
Not that he dissented. In truth, his trouble was that he tried
to accept Christianity as avidly as he had consumed his bot-
tles of wine, and with the same motive to lose himself
where he would be able to avoid humanity. The result was
that once again he was floundering in something he did not
understand. With the slyness of the alcoholic, when he did
not understand he improvised. Around him swirled the great
issues of faith and ethics, which to his already confused brain
were incomprehensible. If he failed to find in them the assur-
ance his spirit craved, he supplied his own. In the same way
he created from his personal yearning the acts of supplica-
tion, confession, and adoration which he could not discover in
the Catechism. On the other hand, if he found the answers
he was seeking, he accepted them without question, with
humility and ineffable relief. The miscellaneous collection of
dogma, mysticism, liturgy, and invention in his mind never

238

quite coalesced into firm belief. Like his drinking, it was
accompanied by insecurity and fear. Even if it had been less
shadowy, he would still have found no solace, for he lived in
a dim world of half tones. All his life the real, the meaning-
ful, the definite were the things he feared, and the struggle
to be free of them was never won; if it had been, it would
have meant that he was mad. As it was, in the end he was
to live out his days in the peace of a gray world.

Ultimately he was led by another to die sacraments of the
Church, and he accepted them happily and without under-
standing. He would not have ventured toward them on his
own, for in more than ten years of meditation he could never
bring himself to consult a priest.

Nor could Maurice have turned to his mother, for, apart
from the short time she had been in the care of the Sisters
of St. Vincent de Paul, Suzanne's life had been lived without
religious instruction and with no thought of it. Madeleine
had gone to church when she wanted to make a bargain with
God, and when she was dying she had sent for a priest.
Bohemian Montmartre was hardly an atmosphere in which
religious yearnings were likely to flourish. Religion was per-
haps the most despised of bourgeois conventions. When
artists like Renoir or Cezanne or a poet like Max Jacob pro-
fessed religious faith, they were looked upon by their com-
rades and associates as eccentric characters. Still, it was her
temperament more than her environment which induced
Suzanne to give religion a wide berth. She was too much a
creature of her own instincts to be swept up by any mysteri-
ous sense of an august and unearthly power behind the show
of things or governing her destiny. Her solid belief in her
own powers left no room to probe their possible origin: that
they were in her was quite enough. The world as she saw it
was a pretty literal place. As for the idealistic intentions by
which people who were religious professed to be driven, she
accepted diem with ingenuous faith. In fact, she rejected

239

very little that her senses encountered. If something existed
and there was firsthand evidence of it, she believed it. That
it was not passive acceptance is the clue to her glory as an
artist. Once believed, whatever she experienced became a
passion which she had to set down in her own medium of
expression the drawing, the etching, the lithograph, or the
painting. The lyrical result was a statement at once of her
savage responses and of her childlike literalism.

Suzanne might be scornful of religious ideas because they
were not within her experience, and she might be contemptu-
ous of religion in so far as it was a trait of the Philistine; but
when such belief was a part of an individual, she stood to one
side respectfully. In the lives of many of the humble people
who were her friends religion played an important part, and
she was not beyond attributing their essential goodness to it.
So, although religion was not for her, she welcomed its arrival
in Maurice's life. At first she was worried by the extraor-
dinary figments of fancy which it seemed to create. His brood-
ing silences troubled her, and she was suspicious of the hours
he spent in meditation. Yet after a few months she could
relax and take stock of the changes which religion had
wrought. Compared with the past, how few were the ter-
rible eruptions of temper! How much less nervous he was!
How much less subject to fits of depression! There could be
no doubt that religion was bringing Maurice the long-hoped-
for release.

Always these changes had to be considered in relation
to the past, for progress was by no means steady. Nor was
improvement ever to be complete. Nevertheless, long hours
given to Bible or Catechism were not being spent trying to
steal alcohol from a locked cabinet or wine cellar. When
Maurice knelt in supplication before his statuette of Joan of
Arc he was not unleashing torrents of fury. When he held
lengthy conversations with God he was not in a black abyss
of despair. Between his ever-increasing religious devotions

240

and his persistent production of oil paintings for the insatiable
art dealers, he was less prone to drink. At St. Bernard he
was not plagued by hostile forces staring at him; the people
who were there were almost all people he knew well. There
was less fear. All the same, when the outbursts did occur they
were as violent, as devastating as ever. Bric-a-brac flew,
furniture was smashed; servants left, and the whole household
was thrown into a turmoil from which it might take days to
recover.

As he grew older Maurice began to be impressed with
fame. He decided quite coolly to develop a stock of eccen-
tricities which he thought commensurate with it. People
who called on him were instructed to ascertain beforehand
what color he wished to see them in. For weeks he refused
to shave, and when he did shave, it was only with water
which he had not seen come from the tap. Playing simple
tunes on his harmonium, he would let it be known that he
was in the throes of composing a "great symphony" and was
not to be disturbed for a week. For a time he made a collec-
tion of fish eyes which he kept in his coat pocket.

But such self-conscious efforts to lend some sort of charm-
ing color to his personality were pitiable rather than amusing.
Too close, indeed, stood the pathetic figure in his gray world
never quite sane, never wholly man or boy. At the Avenue
Junot he spent countless hours playing with the toy electric
railway which Suzanne had bought for him, or dropping little
pieces of colored chalk from the barred window of his room
onto the ground below. He might stroll about the house,
his bodyguard behind him, clapping his hands and repeating
aloud to himself, "Fm very happy today," or "Suzanne is
going to let me have wine with my dinner tonight." The
sight of a car in the driveway might send him to bed. He
might be in a daze, mumbling gibberish and bumping into
furniture. Or he might sit quietly for several days, the long

241

wrinkles of his face caught up in an ironic sneer, his blue
eyes weary and baffled, saying nothing.

It was thus that the official delegation of government rep-
resentatives and young Lyonnais artists found Maurice at St.
Bernard on the morning in 1927 when they came to decorate
him with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. He sat on a
low bench under an acacia tree in the little courtyard, Su-
zanne beside him, her hand gently on his knee. Throughout
the short presentation ceremony he gave no indication that he
understood what was going on. "Suzanne's eyes were shut,
and two sad little pearls of tears slithered down her drawn
cheeks," reported one of the young artists. "Everyone knew
it was the time of her bitter victory."

Once the little ceremony was over, Maurice seemed to
brighten, and by the time luncheon was served he was quite
gay. During the meal he kept stroking the ribbon. And when
the toast "To the artist of the Legion of Honor" was pro-
posed, he lifted his glass solemnly. "A word of warning,
gentlemen," he said; "mine is watered." With that the glass
was drained in a single draught. "What a glorious day!" he
sighed after the festivities were over. Then he added archly,
"And not even a real glass of rouge for the artist of the Legion
of Honor."

IX The Wasp

ONE EVENING IN THE WARM SPRING AIR OF 1937 A COUPLE OF

young Americans strolling along the rue Norvins were
stopped by the sound of a woman's voice. Turning, they saw
at one of the little tables before Chez Ma Cousine the grin-
ning face of a tiny gnome of a woman, with square-cut
straight hair and large horn-rimmed spectacles. A big square
hand fluttered at the end of a diminutive, childlike wrist,
beckoning to them: "Come. Come and sit with me." She
might have been drunk or a little "touched," but one came
to Montmartre these days as much to see "characters" as any-
thing else,

"It has all changed so much," Suzanne said wistfully,
squinting at the crowds milling along the pavements of the
little square. Under the lines of young chestnut trees people
were dining in the flickering glow of Chinese lanterns be-
neath bright-colored umbrellas. Waiters from the cafes lining
the square were juggling trays of food high over their heads
as they wormed their way from the kitchens on one side of
the street, through the ambling tide of sightseers, to tables on
the other. At the corners of the square, artists painted pic-
turesque cafe fronts and the marble domes and minarets of the
basilica of Sacre-Coeur, their pictures strongly reminiscent of
the poorest canvases of Maurice Utrillo; or they sketched
likenesses of tourists, while around them watched the curious
242

243

and the amateur art critics. Everyone was pleased with how
"charming" and how "quaint" the Place du Tertre was. "I
Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby" blared in French
from the bar of Au Pichet du Tertre two doors away.

"Dear Monsieur Toulouse! He did not like the Butte,
It was not gay enough for him. But he loved the boulevards
the Place Blanche, Place Pigalle, Place de Clichy. Oh, they
were for him. All the gay places. He was always gay. . . .

"The old chestnut trees with the sun coming through them
they were what Renoir liked. It was different then. The
young people used to stroll under the trees. And when there
was a fete, how gay it was, with the students and the grisettes
and the dancing. . . .

"That long building over there with the shutters it was
the mairie of Montmartre before 70. The great Clemenceau
was the mayor of Montmartre once, but that was later. My
mother used to clean his office. Everybody was poor then, or
so it seemed. Now everything is prosperous. Everybody
makes lots of money except the artists. . . .

"And there where they sell glaces that was Sergeant Gay's
place the Casse-Croute. He is dead now, poor fellow."
She started to cross herself, stopped in midair, and slowly
brought her hand down to the half -filled glass of wine before
her. "I have just been with my son," she explained. "He is
married now. He lives in a great house at Le Vesinet. Very
chic. He does that" she made the sign of the cross "when-
ever he speaks of somebody that is dead. He is very religious,
my son. . . .

"You know that in 1920 Montmartre seceded from the
French nation? Ah! That was the day, I tell you. Jules
Depaquit he was my son's good friend and my husband's
too. They used to say he was 'the quick drinker,' but they
made him 'mayor of Free Montmartre.' There was a big
parade and much to drink and dancing. . . .

"Then there was the time when Frede's donkey Lolo

244

painted a picture with his tail and it went to the Salon des
Independants. And everyone said Matisse could have done
as well." Her large hand slapped the table, and her high-
pitched voice trailed off in a cascade of laughter.

"And Puvis" she pronounced it 'Bou-vee' "what a fine
aristocrat he was! Wonderful great beard, and a very loving
man, I can tell you. . . .

"Then there was Degas the Master. He was the greatest
of them all. . . "

Finally she was weary. She wrapped her grimy tweed coat
tightly to her bosom and leaned back in her chair. "We must
have another glass," she sighed. Her eyes behind the large
horn rims brightened sharply. When the waiter set the
drinks on the table, she lifted hers high. "Now we must not
think of the old days any more. We must drink to the
present. Come, let us drink to love. Vive ? amour!"

But it was impossible for Suzanne npt to dwell on the past.
Around her the present was fast crumbling into ruin, and at
the age of seventy a toast to love was a brave though hollow
gesture. The fact was that the mainspring of her amazing
vitality had been broken finally by the events of the past two
years.

In January, 1935, she, who had never known illness before,
was rushed to the American Hospital at Neuilly dangerously
ill with uremic poisoning. "I was never afraid of death. Only
the doctors terrified me," she said afterward. She was a trying
patient, making scenes, overturning her trays of food on the
floor, refusing to take the medicines prescribed for her. But
when she was \pell enough to leave the hospital, there could
be no doubt that she had come through a devastating experi-
ence and that a gray sense of the fleetingness of things pos-
sessed her spirit. Was this the acceptance of defeat? At times
it seemed so. She puttered about the house, moving pieces
of bric-a-brac without any definite idea why she wanted

245

them moved or where she put them. For weeks, weeds
flourished in her little garden; a canvas stood unfinished on
her easel. Uncertainty dogged her movements and her speech.
Seeing her shuffle unsteadily about the streets or hearing her
disjointed staccato speech, people thought she was drunk. The
legend grew that she was an alcoholic, a legend which those
who knew her best furiously denied.

It was now when she was weakest and most uncertain of
herself that she had been called upon to pass through one of
the most trying periods of her life. In 1933 M. Pauwels, the
Belgian banker, had died. "You have no idea," said his widow,
delivering a biographical sketch of herself to Robert Cough-
Ian, "what it is like to have been held up and supported by
such a wonderful man and then, suddenly, to have him no
more. ... I didn't know what to do with myself. I was
not old, but I wasn't young, and although I wasn't thinking
about another husband, I wondered what the future would
bring. M. Pauwels left me quite well off, even though he
had suffered reverses a few years before, but I certainly didn't
have enough to live in great comfort for the rest of my life." *
Following her husband's death Lucie Pauwels resumed her
stage name, Lucie Valore, and became an even more frequent
visitor to Suzanne's studio, where she continued to offer
Suzanne her intimate friendship. Few people now sought
Suzanne's friendship, and in her loneliness, she craved friend-
ship.

According to Suzanne's account, Lucie had come to visit
her at the hospital and had told her, "I have decided to take
care of your son since you are obviously not going to be able
to." Lucie's account is considerably different. According to
Lucie, Suzanne asked her from her hospital bed, "What will
happen to my poor Maurice? Who will take care of him?"
It was then that Lucie volunteered to assume the burden Su-

*From Robert Coughlan, Wine of Genius (New York: Harper &
Brothers; 1951).

246

zanne had carried so long. Whichever version is true, it was
clear to both women and to everyone who knew them that
the contest for the protection of Maurice was on. Few
doubted what the outcome would be.

In none of her efforts to get Maurice married had Suzanne
seriously contemplated the possibility of losing him. Had he
married Marie Vizier, Gabrielle Utter, or the statuesque
Paulette, she, Suzanne, would have remained in charge of his
destiny. He would still primarily have been hers. But if he
were to marry the capable Lucie Valore, Suzanne felt certain
her boy would be lost to her forever.

Would it help save Maurice if she piled insults on Lucie?
If she ridiculed her? If she evinced contempt of the erstwhile
affluence of Mme. Pauwels? Would Maurice decide to cut
himself off from his beloved Montmartre, from their free,
undisciplined, creative world, to try to replace the late re-
spectable and prosperous banker at Mme. Pauwels' side?

Although Suzanne employed every trick she was capable of
using, Maurice gradually made his decision. He was baptized,
confirmed, and received his first communion under Lucie's
watchful eye. And when all was thus in order, she married
him in a civil ceremony at the Montmartre mairie and after
that at Angouleme, in a church ceremony. Suzanne witnessed
all but the religious marriage ceremony. When it came time to
proceed to Angouleme, Suzanne was well aware that she had
lost the contest. She refused to go on with the show.

Maurice and Lucie stayed in Angouleme for a year while
Lucie launched herself in the dual role of bodyguard and
business manager to "the greatest man living in France." In
both roles she was successful from the start. On watered-
down wine given him in doses carefully apportioned by
Lucie, Maurice continued to paint pictures with lots of white
in them for the greedy appetites of the "bourse of art" and
for the free-flowing purses of millionaire collectors. She dis-

247

missed Utter summarily. For a while she stopped all sale of
Maurice's canvases, and during this period the word spread
abroad that he was no longer able to paint. Because of this,
prices for his work rose substantially. Presently Lucie began
to release the pictures she had on hand. She received such
good prices that about a year after their marriage, the couple
were able to buy a house and extensive grounds in fashionable
Le Vesinet, outside Paris. They called the villa "La Bonne
Lucie." In the garden a show of nineteenth-century pieces of
sculpture and artificial frogs, ducks, and turtles brightened the
lawns. They had a big car and a chauffeur, a secretary, a
Polish bodyguard and his wife, a cook, Pekingese dogs, a
houseful of rococo furniture and objets (Tart, and an Aubus-
son carpet of which Maurice was inordinately proud. Lucie
wore clothes by the leading Parisian couturiers, and she grad-
ually acquired an impressive collection of diamond jewelry.
Amid this splendor lived the little man whose only concern
with money was how much red wine it would buy, his gray,
misty world illuminated by an occasional mystic transport
during one of his long daily bouts of religious devotion, by
a gentle joke which he might rouse himself to make, by one
of his old flashes of rage. Toward Lucie he maintained a
curiously distant and baffled attitude, as though he never quite
believed that she was a figure in his life. When he said, as he
often did, "I love Joan of Arc, my mother, and my wife,"
he suggested a small boy reciting a piece. Despite his pitiable
dependence on his wife, when she was out of his hearing he
would sometimes toss a caustic barb or two in her direction,
He referred to her as one of "them" the police, the medical
authorities, the jailors at Picpus and Villejuif all rolled into
one. His manner seemed by turns listless, surly, derisive, or
amused. His thoughts dwelled much in the past, upon the
people he had known, upon Suzanne, upon the souls of the
departed: the Sergeant Gays and Zborowskis, the Modiglianis
and Marie Viziers of his life. He never really knew Lucie.

248

All the same, Suzanne's life was hardly the happier for
knowing that Maurice was in Lucie's doughty hands. From
time to time she saw him. For a while she made frequent
visits to Le Vesinet, and Lucie brought him to the Avenue
Junot. Willing to be magnanimous, Lucie made an earnest
effort to be friendly. It was lost on Suzanne.

Nor were Suzanne's feelings by any means pent up. That
Lucie had taken Maurice off was bad enough, as she saw it,
but that she had set him up in loathsome bourgeois splendor
and kept him at work turning out bad pictures was insupport-
able. Forgotten entirely was her own willingness to let him
do much the same thing; what with her had been therapy, in
Lucie's case was crass commercialism and greed. On Lucie
rained the full flood of her mother-in-law savagery mock-
ery, malice, contempt, fits of rage, torrents of tears. Each
meeting saw a fresh eruption of acrimony. At first deeply
hurt, Lucie soon began to think of herself as the harried
heroine of these occasions. She recited with composed no-
bility and measured statements eloquent of filial affection,
extravagant admiration for the sublime art of "France's great-
est woman artist" "As a painter I kneel before Suzanne
Valadon" and concern for the older woman's health.

Release of her resentment, however, did not compensate Su-
zanne for the loss of her son. If we discount the protestations
of mother love and sacrifice which, under the circumstances,
she magnified to gargantuan proportions, it nevertheless re-
mains that worrying about Maurice's physical well-being had
become a driving force in her life. Lucie's masterful control
of every moment of his day left her without apprehension on
that score; even Suzanne's rabidly prejudiced eye was obliged
to recognize that the "asylum at Le Vesinet" kept its patient
in better health than he had ever known before. But the
years of anxiety had continually renewed Suzanne's strength.
Now this spur was gone and her strength was waning. The

249

very nervousness which Maurice's moods and outbursts had
generated for so long was dissolving. The ferocious guardian
no longer had anything to protect. These things were the
fibers of her being, and to be without them was to walk closer
to death.

But for one memory that remained painfully in her heart,
she might not have cared: Utter. Friends noticed that men-
tion of his name alone jarred her free of a prevailing mood.
If she was particularly weary or apathetic, it could even pro-
duce tears. Now at last separation from him had poignant
meaning. He came to the Avenue Junot almost every day,
and, forgetting all her resentments against him, she made
pathetic efforts to keep him from leaving. Practically without
money again, she traded paintings and drawings with butchers
and wine merchants in order to provide Utter with the beef-
steaks and fine Burgundies he loved. She bought him books
and gave him money, often the last she had. Lucie had
offered to put her on an allowance, but had added, "And you
may stay in my house* until you die." In the explosion which
followed, the allowance was lost sight of*

Utter tried to respond by occasionally bringing Suzanne
flowers, by listening kindly as she recalled the pleasant mem-
ories of the eighties and nineties, and of their first galvanic
years together in the Impasse de Guelma and the rue Cortot
It was as though his mother were talking to him now. Even
his own part was being played by some historical wraith who
had no connection with the misery of the present. In the
gathering dusk it was impossible for him to feel that between
the tiny aged figure, fluttering and timorous, and himself
there had once raged the wild, passionate fires of love. And
yet, as he told his friends Marie and Louis Chervin, he never
turned the key in the latch, or stepped into a room in which
she was present, or saw her pass uneasily across a street with-

* The house in rue Junot. It was in Maurice's name.

250

out feeling a flutter of happiness. Whatever had happened to
the flesh, for him she was the only real joy he had ever
known.

Bitterness against Maurice and Lucie was almost a mania
with Utter now. As long as he had managed Maurice's busi-
ness affairs he could claim a large measure of respect at least
in the business world. It was some compensation for his fail-
ure to achieve success as an artist, distasteful as the com-
promise was to him. Lucie had put an end to that:
she had removed the ground under his feet. In by-
gone days it would not have bothered Utter at all. The
exuberant spirit would have leaped on to something more
daring, more dazzling, and conceivably more remunerative.
But he was too intelligent not to know that he was slipping
and had neither the will nor the energy to stop himself. If
he was an amatory buffoon and a drunk, it was because
women and drink were the only salves he could find to soothe
the sore wounds of his pride. He painted furiously. At times
he went without food in order to buy paints. At St. Bernard
a caretaker found him unconscious on the floor before his
easel.

Suzanne came finally to understand his terrible frustration.
Pitying him and hungering to care for him, she wanted des-
perately to have him back. But the time they spent together
was spoiled by his sense of failure, his defensive egotism, and
his resentment against Maurice and Lucie. Sooner or later the
atmosphere of peace and solace which she sought to create for
him would be shattered by boasting, self-pity, or acrimony.
Only rarely would she respond in kind, and then only with
a quick show of temper which was rather a memorial to the
rages of their younger days than a passion of itself. Her
physical weakness, for one thing, prevented her from loosing
the explosions she had so easily fired in the past. In an
old-womanish way she hoarded them for Lucie. The
fact was that Utter had grown to be the only one in the

251

world who made life worth living for her, and she was not
going to lose him again if the only sacrifice was that she had
to hold her tongue.

In his paunchy middle-aged figure and even in the cynical
turn of his lip she still saw the glow of the happiest days
of her life. More and more her mind tended to dwell on the
past, anyway; and in the long stretch of it only the bright mo-
ments were still clear. Of these, the moments with young
Andre Utter were luminous as no others were. Still, for all
her yearning to have him to herself, she could not muster
strength to fight for him. Living alone in a house which had
been bought to be shared with one she loved, who was now
gone from her finally, she waited for one from whom not
even the wreckage of their marriage could ever separate her
completely. She would sit gazing into her little garden or the
tiny square before the house with its lonely young locust tree,
sunk in melancholy, waiting to see him, the familiar pipe in
the corner of his mouth, come puffing up the hill. When he
did not come, there was nothing she could do but tell her
troubles to her cats, "dear Djoubouti" and "darling Ratmi-
nou," and plead with them not to desert her too. In the
quiet which she had always hated, she gradually came to
accept the fact that she was old and infirm and alone.

Actually the onset of such melancholy moods was slow.
Now and again the cloud lifted to disclose a glimpse of the
old Suzanne: with a group of friends about her, serving them
champagne and a buffet supper which she had taken days and
her last francs to prepare; or at a friend's studio party, giving
a waspish imitation of Renoir dancing at the Moulin de la
Galette or of Louis Libaude appraising a picture. On other
occasions she might shuffle up the hill to the Place du Tertre
in her bundle of soiled and frayed tweeds and outsize moc-
casins to sit away an afternoon or evening in a familiar cafe.
Members of the old guard of the Butte would spot her and
perhaps buy her drinks, and the hours would fly by while

252

they laughed and talked about the days that were past. When
she was unnoticed she often sat down at someone else's table,
or called to a stranger to sit with her while she launched into
an autobiographical monologue quite different in content
from the last one she had delivered.

But it was when she approached her easel that the old spirit
found itself and took wing. There is no mistaking the bitter-
sweet sadness which pervades these last paintings her cats
and her flowers which alone shared the intimacy of her de-
clining years. Her golds are those of the setting sun, her
browns and ochers those of the plow-worn earth. Brooding
magentas and purples linger among the fresh full colors of
spring. On a workaday crockery vase stand the words "Vive
la jeunesse"; on another "Joie de vivre" The poignant love
of life is still there, sharpened, if anything, by the maturity
of her talent. No surface is flat or inert, no color smooth.
The calm of age cannot smother the passionate vibrations.
Each canvas is invested with a secret of life of sweetness and
compassion the embers of a blaze which still smolders with
a fierce heat.

In May, 1937, Suzanne attended the Women Painters Ex-
hibition at the Petit Palais, in which several of these last
paintings hung, together with a small representative collec-
tion of her earlier work. Around hers hung canvases by
Vigee-Lebrun, Berthe Morisot, Seraphine Louis, Marie Lau-
rencin, Marie Blanchard, Eva Gonzales, Sonia Turk, and
others whose creative artistic powers had brought a not-
inconsiderable measure of glory to the history of French art.
For more than three hours Suzanne passed from picture to
picture and back again, squinting from behind her large horn-
rimmed glasses at brushwork, draftsmanship, the arrangement
of light, the treatment of form and shadow now in excited
delight over a composition, the line of an arm, the pearly
tone of an expanse of skin, or the color of a bowl; now click-
ing her tongue loudly in anger as she spotted a "trick," a

253

"lie," or an uncertain perspective. Leaving the show, she was
strangely subdued and pensive; and that evening she said to
the friend who had gone with her: "You know, cherie, I
often boasted about my art because I thought that was what
people expected for an artist to boast. Pm very humble
after what we have seen this afternoon. The women of
France can paint too, hem?" Suddenly tears welled in her
eyes. "But do you know, chrie? she spoke quietly, "I think
maybe God has made me France's greatest woman painter."
She spoke of God frequently now; the eternal aspects of
her earthly mission had begun to trouble her. Still she was
unprepared to wrestle with them. By temperament umnysti-
cal and from lack of training agnostic, she was loath to fly
to the bosom of the Church. Instead, it seemed both reason-
able and simple to establish herself on a friendly and respect-
ful basis with the Supreme Being whom she dutifully
acknowledged to be the source of her life and powers. Since
all her life she had maintained that such powers were hers
alone, this transformation had a sacrificial aura about it: it was
proof of her humility. God became for her an old and very
dear friend whom she had deserted but who would never
desert her. Thus her faith was that of a savage child, un-
adorned, uncomplicated, and forthright. It required neither
churchgoing nor acceptance of the sacraments, no meditation,
and only short improvised prayer. But it was quite enough
from which to draw intermittent peace in this dimming world,
and perhaps ensure everlasting excitement in the next. For as
time dragged on, it was the turmoil and the bustle of the
old days that she really missed most of all. On the increas-
ingly rare occasions when she made her way to the top of the
Butte, she relived it all in her mind's eye against the settings
which Maurice had captured long ago in his beautiful pictures
the battered and flaked walls, the grimy facades of tumble-
down houses, the warped roofs and twisted rusty gates, the
stillness of the violet air over the great oyster shell of Paris,

the Place du Tertre with its hollow-tranked old chestnuts
and the friendly golden glow of cafe interiors, and the glisten-
ing magnet of the Sacre-Coeur, drawing to its white turret
the faithful and those who enjoyed heights. But for her these
were scenes that had to have people in them beautiful, odd,
and rapturous souls who sold wine and bread and souvenir
post cards, who delivered packages and painted pictures, who
sang in the streets at night until someone threw a bucket of
water on them from a window above, and made the cafes
resound with gossip, artistic theories and inspirations, chatter
and laughter. The entire fabric of her life belonged to these
few acres of tattered and worm-eaten hillside. Here the
great ghosts of the past were flesh and blood: Lautrec sitting
under a black umbrella painting "Berthe, the Deaf One," in
M. Forest's garden; Renoir at the Nouvelle-Athenes doodling
with burnt match sticks on the tablecloth; the rough red
hands of Vincent Van Gogh greedily shoveling food into his
mouth in Mme. Bataille's restaurant; Puvis de Chavannes,
looking like Michaelangelo's Moses, stamping up the rue de
1'Abreuvoir in a snowstorm; Modigliani, frenzied by dope and
alcohol, kicking frantically on Beatrice Hastings' door in the
rue Norvins; and the bitter figure of the one who was the
greatest artist of all, in his pepper-and-salt tweeds, his throat
swathed in woolen scarves, fumbling up the twisted staircase
of the rue Cortot to see her. Here, along the rue des Saules,
she had climbed the acacia trees and picked off the yellow
blossoms to sell to the pastry shops in the rue Custine to be
embalmed in sugar for cake decorations; here, Chez Bous-
carat, with Modigliani, Soutine, and Kisling, she had dined on
a Valadon still life "in order to save a Soutine choirboy from
the stewpot"; here, on the long flight of steps of die rue
Muller, Erik Satie had told Puvis de Chavannes, "I learn more
about music from observing your Toor Fishermen' than I
shall ever learn from musicians. But, monsieur," he added,
"you would improve your work if you boiled your wine and

255

drank it cold mixed with fuchsia juice." In this jumble of
moldering timbers, plaster of Paris, and gaping windows she,
Suzanne Valadon, had passed, in the arms of ardent lovers,
nearly all the rapturous hours which her loving nature craved.
In this one little cobbled street, the rue Cortot, had been en-
acted most of the tempest of her marriage, from its joyous
springtide to the agony of its collapse. Maurice was there, his
elbow on his knee, his chin in the palm of his hand, gazing
into the courtyard; so was the pottering figure of Madeleine.

She spoke of her mother sometimes of the lonely life she
had led. Both Maurice and Madeleine had long been in her
care; but though she had loved the one and could have loved
the other if she had been permitted to do so, she had failed to
communicate with either of them. Her sense of responsibility
had not always conformed to conventional patterns. Inde-
pendence of spirit had been the mainspring of her character
both as artist and as human being, so that frequently her erra-
tic temperament belied her deep loyalties. Now Madeleine
was dead, and Maurice had deserted her. In a painful flash she
saw him in the entrance hall of the Avenue Junot, scrawny
and shivering, caught up against Lucie's ample bosom, heard
her own voice in a careless way ask the fatal question, "What
have you decided?" and then his reply, given in the quick,
nervous way he spoke, "I'm going with her." As though it
were not enough, a few moments later he cried, "And now,
long live liberty!" and was gone.

Still, Madeleine's death and Maurice's leaving might not
have mattered so much had there been someone else on hand
to accept her ministrations. It was only a matter of time be-
fore the one she loved most would be gone too.

Shortly after Maurice left the Avenue Junot she had in-
deed thought that she had found someone to take his place,
someone to care for. There had been another row with Utter,
and somehow the notion had struck her that in his drunken-
ness he intended to harm her physically. Carried away by

256

this fantasy, she soon had it firmly in her mind and much on
the tip of her tongue that Utter beat her. It made a pathetic
and dramatic story, which for a while restored some of her
zest. There was not a word of truth in it, of course, but while
she was dramatizing its possibilities she asked a young artist
she knew to come and live with her.

The situation was one to delight the gossips of the Butte.
Shades of the Montmartre of old! The amorous wasp, Su-
zanne Valadon, had found another young lover at the age of
seventy!

Who was this dashing, intense young man with blazing
dark eyes and taut, swarthy skin who called himself Gazi-
I.G.? A painter of gloomy Montmartre streets lit by reck-
less explosions of green light a good painter. It was said
that he was a Mongol prince: people called him "Gazi the
Tartar." They spoke knowingly of countless amours.

His own story was considerably tamer. He came from
Provence. He had first known Suzanne Valadon when he was
eight years old. She had been a friend of his aunt's and had
wanted to adopt him as her son. He called her "Memere,"
and referred to her as his "mother by adoption." "She said I
was the son she had been waiting for all her life. She adored
me like a god." But the real love of his life was the Blessed
Virgin, toward whom he had been drawn by a long series of
moving mystical revelations since early childhood. The Holy
Mother had instructed him to cherish and care for Suzanne.

Tender though his ministrations were, they were hardly
an answer to Suzanne's yearnings. She wanted someone to
care for, someone to receive the abundant love and compas-
sion in her heart. Instead, it was Gazi who took charge of
her and fairly smothered her in his devotion. He cooked her
meals and took charge of the house. He waited on her as
though she were a queen. Her health and her state of mind
were his hourly concerns. In the evenings they sat long hours
together in the kitchen of the house in the Avenue Junot.

251

Throughout her life she had always resigned herself to listen-
ing to the monologues of men Renoir in the Louvre, Puvis
de Chavannes at a table for two at the Tour d* Argent, Satie
in his monastic room in the rue Cortot, Utter everywhere. It
was almost a form of coquetry with her, for all her belief in
herself, to appear to defer to the intellectual force of a man.
Now she sat quiedy and listened to young Gazi expounding
his adoration of the Blessed Virgin. He was pleading with
her to embrace the Church, and, as always when it came to
matters of the mind, she was evasive. "When I die," she told
him, "you will have my soul in your pocket, and you will
take care of it, hem?" But for the present she would not go
to church, and the prayers she said were her own silent ones.

From time to time she would find energy to interrupt
Gazi's monologue with one of her own; its subject was always
the past, and, strangely, with Gazi it was the unhappier
aspects she remembered. She spoke to him of the black days
of the Commune, of her mother's rejection of her, of Adrien
Boissy, who had raped her when she was "an innocent child
of sixteen." Step by step, over and over again, she traced the
tragic pilgrimage of Maurice from asylum to asylum. Always
she returned to Utter and the heartbreak which had followed
the years of the war.

For three years the flickering twilight lingered. More and
more she stayed at home, doing little, painting when she
could. Occasionally the massive figure of Derain appeared
sprawled in the big chair in her studio, talking about the tra-
ditions of classical painting which, he said, she and he alone
were preserving. Nora Kars came almost every day to see
that there were flowers in the house, and to relive with
Suzanne briefly the days of their early friendship. Georges
Braque and his wife called occasionally. So did Mme.
Coquiot, an old friend from the days when they were models
together in the Place Pigalle. Nor did the humble people
she loved fail her. An old laundress showed up, a waiter, a

258

taxi driver, a prostitute, the butcher's wife whom she had sent
to the Riviera. But between these visits long hours passed
without the ringing of a doorbell or the buzzing of the tele-
phone.

To one who had been at the hub of the brilliant artistic
flame illuminating the entire world, it was heartbreaking to
feel cut off from the creative life of the day. Across the city,
with its thrashing birth pains of new ideas and concepts,
Montparnasse might as well have been at the other end of the
earth. Echoes of its discussions reached her. The new move-
ment was Surrealism, completely beyond her powers of un-
derstanding, as had been the long line of other movements
even perhaps Impressionism. She did not believe in "move-
ments and schools," she reiterated. But a new movement
brought new names, and these in turn were attached to peo-
ple; and people she always wanted to know. What were they
like these Man Rays and Max Ernsts and Salvatore Dalis?
Who were Chagall, Tchelitchev, Chirico, Ives Tanguy, and
Miro? Where were they taking the light that had been fired
by her old friends of the Nouvelle-Athenes, of the Chat Noir,
of Lautrec's studio in the rue Tourlaque? What did they
think of the art of a little Montmartre gamine who had taught
herself to draw and paint, and who just painted what she saw
with all the savage intensity of her being?

Fittingly, she was at her easel, painting a bowl of flowers,
when the end approached. She had a stroke. Her neighbor,
Mme. Poulbot, passing the studio window opened to the air of
an April morning, heard her cry out. She summoned her
friend Mme. Kvapil, and the two women broke into the house
to find Suzanne crumpled on the studio floor. They carried
her to bed and called a doctor. Suzanne lay unconscious,
breathing faintly, the fine mesh of wrinkles slowly dissolving
until her face was a calm and lovely waxen mask. The ghost
of a smile trembled about her dry lips. So did the pain of old
age and suffering leave at last.

259

At three o'clock it was decided to remove her to a hospital.
Somehow the decision managed to penetrate her unconscious-
ness. Her last opportunity to do the unexpected arrived, and
she did not let it slip by.

"Send for Lucie," she said weakly.

In the ambulance Mme. Kvapil and Gazi were with her.
As the car swung into the broad circle of the Etoile, the early
April sunset swept its tawny light dramatically over the mas-
sive Arc de Triomphe into the Champs-lysees. Gazi, the
artist, turned to catch a glimpse of it. Beside him the tiny
frame of another artist sighed wearily and lay still.

Three days later, on April 9th, 1938, her body lay before
the altar of Montmartre's ancient parish church, St. Pierre,
"where every true Montmartrois goes in the end." Maurice
was in a state of collapse at Le Vesinet, and Lucie had taken
capable charge of the arrangements. In the church, crowded
with the renowned, the humble, and the ragtag and bobtail
company of Bohemia, Edouard Herriot, senior statesman and
twice Premier of France, delivered the eulogy. Haggard and
trembling, Andre Utter was sunk in grief. For the rest it was
hard to know who mourned a tired, little woman, who a pas-
sionate artist, or who wept for an era which had seen the glory
of French art.

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262

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Paris, 1947.

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. Quand Petals Montmartrois. Paris, 1936.

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. Les Maitres Impressionistes. Paris, 1900.

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GALLATEST, A. E. Georges Braque. New York, 1953.

GAUNT, William. March of the Moderns. London, 1949.

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Index

Academy, French, 46, 63, 75-76, 8?

Adele, "la grosse," 164, 199

Albert, Adolphe, 75

Alexandre, Arsene, 75

Angrand (painter), 140

Anquetin, Louis, 56, 74, 76, 113, 114

Antoine, Andre, 64, 102

Apollinaire, Guilkume, 98, 145, 172,
173, 176, 182, 183

art: characteristics of artists, 141,
143; criticisms of, 75-76; dealers,
145; definition of, 140, 175; drafts-
manship, 87; mechanical principles,
146; "new," 45; Utter's philosophy
of, 152, 153

Assassins, the, 109

Astruc, Zacharie, 44

Auriol, Georges, 64

Balanchine (choreographer), 231
Bartholome, Paul Albert, 90, 96
"Bateau Lavoir," 144, 145, 153, 163,

166, 168, 174, 176
Bazille, Frederic, 44
"Bearskin, The," 181
Beaux Arts. See jficole des "Beaux

Arts; Societe des Beaux Arts
Bernard, mile, 110, 112-14, 160, 174
Bernard, Tristan, 75
Bernhardt, Sarah, 64, 196
Bernheirn Jeune Galerie, 190, 193,

195,213-15,217,231
Blanchard, Marie, 252
Bloy, Leon, 57, 155
Boissy, Adrian, 96, 257
265

Boissy, Gabriel, 98

Bonnard, Pierre, 43, 110, 114, 140,

157

Bonnat, Leon, 73, 75
Boudin, Eugene Louis, 82
Bouret, Jean; Suzanne Valadon, 191,

note
Braque, Georges, 13, 144, 146, 168,

204, 257

Bracquemond, Felix, 44
Bruandet, Georges, 25
Bruant, Aristide, 63, 75
Butte, The. See Montmartre

Cantacuzene, Princess, 58, 61

Carco, Francis, 98, 133-34, 148, 149,

210, 212, 216-17; Maurice Utrillo,

212

Casas, Ramon, 64, 65
Cezanne, Paul, 13, 44, 46, 73, 109,

141-43, 146, 173, 174, 178, 192, 226,

238

Chagall, Marc, 258
Charigat, Alice, 70, 71
Chervin, Marie and Louis, 248
Chirico, Giorgio di, 258
"chromatism," 176
Clarensol (critic), 192
Clemenceau, Georges, 27, 149
Cocteau, Jean, 145
collages, 149
color and line, 84
Commune, Paris, 27-28, 30-31
Contemporary Art Women and

Flowers; exhibition, 234

266

Coquelin cadet, Ernest, 64, 207
Coquiot, Gustave, 75, 95, 114, 144,

148, 153, 172, 190, 192, 193, 208
Coquiot, Jacques, 219, 233
Cormon, Fernand, 74, 75
Corot, Camille, 24, 43, 82
Coughkn, Robert, 207; Wine oj

Genius, 245; 245, note
Courbet, Gustave, 57
Courlaud, Marie-Celine, 17, 19, 21
Courthion, Pierre, 70
Couture, Thomas, 57
criticism of art, 75-76
Cubism, 13, 44, 146, 176

Daguerre, Louis, 25, 42, 43

Dali, Salvatore, 258

David, Hermine, 204-05

dealers, art, 145

Debussy, Claude, 64, 196

Degas, Hilaire Germain Edgar
("The Master"), 13, 36, 44-46, 55,
75, 77, 78, 82-87, 92, 109, 112, 114-
16, 128, 133, 134, 140, 143, 182,
193; meeting with Suzanne Vala-
don, 87-89, her debt to Degas, 91-
92; death, 199

Delacroix (painter), 7 5

Denis, Maurice, 110, 114, 140

Depaquit, Jules, 153

Derain, Andre, 144, 146, 181, 197,
204, 212, 233, 257

Diaghilev, Sergei Pavlovich, 227, 231

Divisionists, 46, 108, 195

draftsmanship, 87

Drouot, Hotel, 160-62, 187

drugs. See opiates

Dubois-Pillet (artist), 140

Dufy, Raoul, 13, 95, 144, 168, 181,
197

du Maurier, George, 44

Duncan, Isadora, 196

Durand-Ruel (dealer in art), 82

Duranty, Edmond, 44, 82

Duret, Theodore, 44

Durio, Paco, 144

ficole des "Beaux Arts, 83, 160
Eighth Exhibition of Painting, 46
Eighth Impressionist Exhibition, 108,
109

Ernst, Max, 258
EscofEer, Auguste, 277
Eugenie, Empress, 27, 44, 196
exhibitions, 44, 46, 82, 85, 106-09, 114,

176-77, 179, 190, 192-94, 197, 205,

208, 212, 214, 234, 252-55
Exposition Universelle (1889), 111-

13

Fantin-Latour, Ignace Henri Joseph

Theodore, 44
Fauche, Leon, 113
Faure, lie, 162

Faure, Jean Baptiste, 85-86, 179
Fauves, 14, 146, 147, 153, 157, 2^
Fels, Robert, 208
Feneon, Felix, 194-95, 214-15
First Group Exhibition, 44, 46, 82
First Impressionist Exhibition, 82, 108
Flamant, Albert, 208
Forain, Jean-Louis, 64
Fort, Paul, 145
France, Anatole, 64, 196
Frede. See Gerard, Frede
Freud, Sigmund, 176
Friesz, Othon, 146, 193, 197, 204
Futurism, 176

Galanis, Demetrios, 91, 183, 204, 210
Gauguin, Eugene Henri Paul, 47, 86,
111-14, 140, 144, 172, 178, 195, 199
Gay, Cesar, 181, 186-88, 190, 198, 229
Gazi-I.G., 256-57

Gerard, Frede, 164, 169, 172, 180, 193
Gericault, Theodore, 24, 42
Gide, Andre, 64, 164, 196
"Golden Age," 140
Gonzales, Eva, 252
Goujon (artist), 71
Gris, Juan, 144
Gross (artist), 140
Guillemet, Antoine, 44
Guimbauds, the, 17, 18
Guys, Constantin, 44

Herriot, Edouard, 219, 227, 259;

praise of Suzanne, 234
Heuze, Edmond, 65, 95, 99, 154, 175,

183, 204, 212

267

Imagier, ?, 139

Impressionism, 13, 15, 44-47, 68, 73,
75, 76, 82-85, 87, 108-10, 114, 141-
42, 148, 153, 181, 182, 194, 195, 205,
257; exhibitions, 85, 108, 114

Impressionism-Realism, 57

Impressionist and Symbolism; exhi-
bitions, 85, 108, 114, 195

Independants, Salon des, and Societe,
108, 146, 172, 177

Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 83,
84,87

"Institute, the," 63, 65, 102

Intimism, 77, 140

Jacob, Max, 144, 145, 152-53, 172, 176,

219, 233, 235

Jarry, Alfred, 138-40, 144-47, 172
Joan of Arc, 136, 180, 186, 230, 237,

239, 247
Jourdain, Francis, 75, 114, 157, 161,

179, 206; Maurice Utrillo, 161
Joyant, Maurice, 75, 76

Kahnweiler, Daniel Henry, 145
Kars, Georges and Nora, 100, 184,
205, 215, 219, 257

Lamothe (artist), 83

Lapin Agile, 163-64

Latin Quarter, 42

Laurencin, Marie, 144, 172-73, 252

Lautrec. See Toulouse-Lautrec

Laval, Charles, 112

Le Bare de Boutteville, 114

Legion of Honor, 241

Leroy, Louis, 46, note

Libaude, Louis, 160-62, 176-80, 206,

251

line and color, 84
Llonja, La, 64, 143
Louis, Seraphine, 252
Louvre, 152
Luxembourg, the, 152

MacOrlan, Pierre, 144
Mallarme, Stephane, 64
Marcoussis, Louis, 144, 183
Marquet, Albert, 146, 157
Martine School of Decorative Arts,
197

"Master, The." See Degas, H.
Matisse, Henri, 144, 146, 147, 157,

176, 197

Maurice Utrillo, by Jourdain, 161
Meissonier, Jean Louis Ernest, 108
Metropolitan Church of the Art of

Jesus the Conductor, 104
Metzinger, Joan, 144
Michel, Georges, 24, 42, 43
Millet, Jean Francois, 82
Mirbeau, Octave, 162, 179, 206, 212
Miro, Juan, 258
models; meeting place, 51, 53
"moderns," 47, 206
Modigliani, Amedeo, 13, 144, 164-69,

197-201, 233; death, 201
Modot, Gaston, 145
Molier, Ernest, 49, 50
Monet, Claude, 14, 44, 46, 75, 83, 109,

115-16, 140, 143, 233
Monfreid, Daniel de, 114, 140
Monticelli, Adolphe, 148
Montmagny, 122-23, 155, 156, 159,

162, 174
Montmartre, 13, 21-26, 42-45, 47, 53,

57, 61, 63-65, 70, 75, 76, 89-90, 96-

98, 102, 104, 115, 117-20, 137-40,

144, 147, 149-52, 163-64, 169, 173,

177, 178, 182, 199, 202, 205, 214,
238, 242; books on, 144; desertion
by artists, 173-74; memories of,
253-55; "secession," 243

Montparnasse, 167, 169, 174

Morisot, Berthe, 46, 109-10, 252

Moulin de la Galette, 43

Moulin Rouge, 43

Mousis, Paul, 95, 102, 104-06, 117,

119-21, 124, 125, 129-31, 138, 155,

157, 159-60, 160, note
"movements" and "schools," 85, 257
Museum of Modern Art, 177, 180

Nabi movement, 108, 114, 140, 195
Nadar, Felix, 44, 46
Naley, Robert, 153, 204
Neoclassicism, 108
Neoimpressionism, 140, 195
Nerval, Gerard de, 25, 43
"new art," 45
"new vision," 46

268

"Nouvelles-Athenes, 44-45, 199
Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek, 79

opiates, 152, 165, 166, 169

Painters' Self -Portraits; exhibition,

234

painting, see art
Paris; revival after World War I,

205-06

Pascin (artist), 167, 176, 204
Paulette, 215, 217
Pauwels, M. and Mme., 206-07, 245-

46

Peledan, Josephin (Sir), 104
Petit (artist), 44
Petrides, Paul, 214
philosophy of art, Utter's, 152, 153
philosopher-painters, 114
Picasso, Pablo, 13, 98, 143-47, 164,

172-74, 176, 181, 197; bibliography,

145

picture, a; definition of, 114
Pissaro, Camille, 44, 46, 47, 75, 110,

115, 140-43

Pointillism, 75, 110, 140
Poiret, Paul, 168, 195-97, 213
Postimpressionism, 110, 181
Princet, Maurice, 144, 146
Princiteau (artist), 73
Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 31, 44,

56-62, 65, 94, 96, 108, 199, 257;

Suzanne becomes his mistress and

model, 58-62
Puy, Jean, 146

Quilliard, Pierre, 145

Rachou, Henri, 74
RarTaelH, 149, 180
Raphael, 68, 174
Ray, Man, 258
. Raynal, Maurice, 145
Realism, 108

Realism-Impressionism, 57
Redon, Odilon, 47, 110, 140, 172
renaissance, modern, 109
Renoir, Pierre- Auguste, 37, 43, 44,

68-73, 78, 94, 96, 109, 140, 141, 193,

233, 238, 257
Renoir, Mme., 70

restaurants, Paris, 227

Reverdy, Pierre, 144, 183, 193

Revertegat, Dr., 134, 178

Revue Blanche, 195

Riviere, Henri, 63-64

Rodin, Francois Auguste Rene, 57,

78, 96, 177
"Rose et Croix du Temple et du

Graal," 104, 106
Rouart, Henri, 86
Rouault, Georges, 164, 181
Rousseau, Henri, 171-74
Rousseau, Theodore, 43
Roy, Louis, 113
Rusinol y Prats, Santiago, 43, 64,

65, 93, 158, note

Salon, the, 57, 83, 108, 209

Salon d'Automne, 157

Salon des Independents, 146, 172, 177

Salon of the Societe Rationale des
Beaux Arts, 90, 106-08

"Sar," 104, see Peledan

Satie,Erik, 103, 117, 153

Savoir, Alfred, 196

ScherTer (artist), 57

"schools and movements," 13, 85, 257

Schuffenecker, J&mile, 112, 113

Second Impressionist Exhibition, 82

Serusier (artist), 110, 112, 140

Seurat, Georges, 46, 75, 108, 110, 140,
172, 195, 199

Severini, Gino, 168, 176

Signac, Paul, 47, 110, 140

Sisley, Alfred, 44, 46, 83, 109, 148

Societe des Artistes Independants, 75,
108, 209, 211

Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts,
108

Soutine, Chaim, 169, 201

Stein, Leo and Gertrude, 145, 172

Steinlen (artist), 78

Stevens, Alfred, 44

Surrealism, 257

Symbolism, 13, 108

Symbolists and Impressionists; ex-
hibitions, 114, 195

Synthesism, 112

Tabarant, Adolphe, 148, 187-88, 208;
biographer of Utrillo, 148

269

Tanguy, Yves, 258

Tchelitchev (artist) ,258

Tiret-Bognet (artist), 153

Toulouse-Lautrec, 13, 20, 43, 73-80,
82, 87, 93, 96, 102, 110, 111, 128,
134, 140, 172, 182, 194, 199, 233;
death, 131-32

Turk, Sonia, 252

Ubu-Roi (play), 138-41

Uhde, Wilhelm, 145

Utrillo, Maurice, 14, 79-82, 91, 105,
114, 117-19, 124, 129, 130, 133, 174;
paternity and birth, 50, 65-<57, 92-
102; "Act of Recognition," 94-95,
99; art, 120, 134-35, 137, 147-52,
163, 164; drinking, 125-28, 130, 148,
150-51, 154, 160, 162-63, 165, 177-
81, 185-88, 190, 192, 200-01, 216;
drinking and sex disturbance, 134,
215; fascination by walls; mys-
ticism, 135-37; rages, 130, 131, 240;
biographers, 148, 161, 187-88, 207,
208, 212; name, 158, and note;
sales of paintings, 161, 176, 181, 206,
247; exhibitions of art, 176-77, 179,
205, 214; "White Period," 163,
178; and Modigliani, 166-68; con-
finement, 180-81, 186, 192, 200,
210, 228-31; rejection by the Army,
185; birthday, 188, note; genius,
189-90; similarity of painting to
Suzanne's, 190; son and mother,
190-91; changes in paintings, 199-
200; prices of paintings, 206; deteri-
oration, 209-210, 212, 234; success
as a painter, 213, 221, 228-29;
Swiss exhibition, 214; marriage
planned by Suzanne, 215, 217, sex
experiences, 216; bitterness of
Utter toward Utrillo, 221; auto-
biographical sketch, 229; lunacy,
229-30; discussion of possible mar-
riage, 235-37; religion, 237-40;
eccentricities, 240-41; elected to
Legion of Honor, 241; care by
Mme. Pauwels, and marriage, 245

Utrillo, Miguel, 62, 64, 65, 68, 96, 150;
"Recognition" of Maurice as son,
93, 94; death, 99-100

Utrillo-Utter-Valadon exhibitions,
197, 234

Utrillo- Valadon exhibitions, 190, 212,
214

Utrillo- Valadon Room, 157, note

Utter, Andre, 151-55, 157, 160, 165,
168, 169, 174-80, 183, 189, 190, 193,
197-99, 201-05, 207, 211, 217, 218,
230-34, 247, 249-51, 257, 259;
philosophy of art, 152, 153; meet-
ing with Suzanne, and liaison, 154;
marriage to Suzanne, 183-84; work
praised; failure in selling, 208;
tyrannized by Suzanne, 209; suc-
cess, 214; ruin of marriage, 219-22;
success in business; failure in art,
220-21; infidelities, 222; drinking,
224-25; frustration as an artist, 233

Utter, Gabrielle, 235-37

Utter- Valadon exhibition, 205, 208

Utter, Valadon-Utrillo exhibition,
234

Valadon, Jules, 107-08

Valadon, Madeleine, 17-23, 26, 32-33,
37-40, 48, 50, 53-55, 57, 61, 66, 67,
69, 79, 81, 98, 101, 102, 117, 118,
120, 125, 127, 154, 155, 160, 174, 177,
218, 238, 255; death, 186

Valadon, Marie-Clementine; early
name of Suzanne, 20

Valadon, Maurice. See Utrillo,
Maurice

Valadon, Suzanne:
honored on Montmartre; life on
the Butte, 13-14; recollections of
her, 14; fame, 14-15; "France's
greatest woman artist," 15, 253;
collections of her work, 15-16;
mother, Madeleine, 17-23 (See also
Valadon, Madeleine); early name,
Marie-Clementine; birth, 20; early
home in Paris, 26; features, beauty,
33-34, 52; early drawings, 34, 37-
39, 41-42, 47, 53-55; in Convent of
St. Vincent de Paul, 27, 29, 34,
35; departure, 47; at home in
Montmartre streets, 31-36; rudi-
mentary education, 34; desire for
popularity, 37; relations with
mother, 37-40; drawings of nudes,

270

38, 41; apprenticeship to couturier;
other employment, 47-49; with a
circus, 49-51; dream life, 50;
artists' model, 51-53, 56, 68-70;
early love life, 55-56, 65, 68, 102-
08; mistress of Puvis de Chavannes,
and model for him, 58-62; meeting
with Miguel Utrillo, 54, 62; models
for Renoir's "Le Bal a BougivaT
and < Bathers"; affair with Renoir,
69-71; talent and technique, 72-73;
and Toulouse-Lautrec, 73-80, 82;
unconventionality, 77-78; develop-
ment as an artist, 78; as a mother,
80-81, 128, 156-57, 190-91; meeting
with Degas, 87-89; impressive
drawings, 89; independence of
other artists, 91; engravings, 91,
92; debt to Degas, 92; paternity of
Maurice Utrillo, 93-94; seduction
of, 97-98; drinking, 98; meeting
with Satie, 104; first exhibition at
the Salon de la Nationale, 106, 107;
first portrait in oils, 107; views on
art, 110-11; attracted by work of
Gauguin, 113-14; first one-woman
show, 114-16; etchings, 116; fi-
nances, 120, 121, 156, 157, 160, 179,
188, 189, 199, 217-18, 225, 249; de-
parture from Montmartre, 120-21;
economic security, 121; at Mont-
magny with Mousis, 121-25; read-
ing, 122-23; drawings of the nude,
133; development of her art, 159;
meeting with Utter, 154; liaison,
158-60, 183-84; "marriage" to
Mousis, 160, note; painting, 174-
75; mentality, 175; exhibitions,
176-77, 214, 234; artistic heritage;
tribute to Gauguin, 178; fight
against age; infidelities, 183-85, 189,
192, 198, 199; studio, 189; painting
similar to Utrillo's, 190; mother
and son, 190-91; biography by
Bouret, 191, note; legends and
scandals, 194; desire for admira-
tion, 201-02; eccentricities, 202;
praise by critic, Fels, 208; egotism;
elated by success, 208-09; tyranny
over Utter, 209; Associate of
Soctite de$ Artistes Independants,

209, 211; demand for her work,
212, 213; German exhibitions, 214;
whims, sentimentality, 218; pur-
chase of chateau, 218-19; ruin of
marriage, 219, 221-22; infidelities
of Utter, 222; theatricality, 224;
fame and money, 225; subjects for
painting, 225-26; dress and luxury,
226-27; generosity, 227-28; fail-
ing health, 230; new home, 231-32;
gardening, 232; one-woman ex-
hibitions, 192, 234; sympathy for
the humble, 235; religion, 238-40,
253, 257; clue to her glory as an
artist, 239; reminiscences, 244; ill-
ness, 244-45; jealous of Mme.
Utrillo, 248; loneliness, 251; last
paintings, 255; "France's greatest
woman painter," 253; memories of
Montmartre, 253-55, 257; inde-
pendence of spirit, 255; at seventy,
a new lover, 255-57; death, funeral,
238-59

Valadon, Suzanne; son of. See
Utrillo, Maurice

"Valadon Drama, The," 159, 213

Valadon-Utrillo Room, 157, note;
177

Valadon-Utrillo-Utter exhibitions,
193-94, 197, 234

Valadon-Utter exhibition, 205, 208

Valery, Paul, 87

Valloton, Felix, 110, 140

Valore, Lucie, 245-46

Valtat, Louis, 146

Van Dongen, Cornelius, 144, 146

Van Gogh, Theo, 111

Van Gogh, Vincent, 43, 74, 110-13,
153, 194, 199, 208, 233

Vauxcelles, Louis, 146

Verklade (artist), 140

Vica, Dr., 134, 192, 193, 200

Vigee-Lebrun, Marie Anne Elisa-
beth, 252

"vision, new," 46

vision, realistic, 84

Vizier, Marie, 215-16

Vlaminck, Maurice, 144, 146, 197,
204

Vollard, Ambroise, 83, 87, 92, 114-
16, 153-45, 199, 226

271

Vollon, Antoine, 43
Volpini, Signer, 113, 114, 195
Vuillard, Jean douard, 77, 140

War, World, First, 182, 191-92
Warned, Andre, 204, 211
Wasselet (artist), 164
Weill, Berthe, 99, 143-45, 166, 192,

205-08, 212
Willette, Adolphe Leon, 78

Wine of Genius, by Coughlan, 245,

and note
Women Painters' Exhibition, 252-55

"Yadwiga," 171, 172

Zandomeneghi (artist), 44, 55, 65, 96
Zborowski, Leopold, 169-70, 197-98,

200, 201, 210-11
"zones of color," 176

128217