Mary Blume, “The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World”

I’m going to start with a quotation here, and if you don’t like it you can just move on, because while I adored The Master of Us All, not every reader wants to devote a few hours to a long-dead Spanish fashion designer. See how this tickles your fancy:

The sleeve was, as is well known, Balenciaga’s obsession: everyone connected with the house remembers anguished cries of la manga and the awful sound of the master ripping one out at the last moment.

“The sleeve was a mania with him and always a problem,” Florette said. “In those days the buyers came by ship and their orders had to be ready to leave with them, not on the next ship. Once I had a huge delivery and I saw he was taking apart the sleeves of a dress I had to ship that night. I said, Monsieur Balenciaga, you can’t do this, they have to be there at six p.m. He said, they can’t leave like this, and kept on working. I finally started to cry and he said I was bad-tempered — et en plus elle a un mauvais caractère – and kept right on pinning.”

Maybe The Master of Us All is the literary equivalent of one of those wonderful fashion documentaries like The September Issue or Valentino: The Last Emperor. It offers the insider’s view, the unscripted moments. Missing, of course, are color and motion, but what you do get with a book is the ability to control the pace of your experience. And I found that valuable with The Master of Us All: there are so many delicious moments that I wanted to linger over or return to. Like the fact that when Christian Dior died, “his otherwise hard-headed business manager told Japanese television that it was because God needed Dior to dress His angels.” (It was Dior who dubbed Balenciaga “the master of us all.”) Not wholly relevant, but too good to leave out, I guess.

Irving Penn photo of his wife Lisa Fonssagrives in a Balenciaga dress, taken for Vogue in 1950. Courtesy National Gallery of Art

This little book is full of splendid nuggets like that. I got the sense that Mary Blume had been collecting material for years. Her primary source seems to have been Florette Chelot, Balenciaga’s head vendeuse, a position of enormous power (and earning power) in the heyday of couture. Blume was lucky enough to get to know Florette in the 1960s and to benefit from Florette’s generosity with discounted Balenciaga outfits. She stays out of the story until the end, though, preferring to showcase Florette, an appealing, good-natured but hard-headed woman who thought the world of Balenciaga.

If you’ve read this far, it’s because you you admire the clothes. There aren’t many glamorous photographs in the book — there are other books for that — mostly grainy black and white candids, with a slender insert of color. You’ll know also about Balenciaga’s famous reticence, dignity, and perfectionism. As Blume says, “Those who admire him want to know him better, aware that we cannot really know him at all. A paradox, and mighty unsatisfactory, but also a homage of sorts — to the art, the discretion, and even the contradictions of the man.”

Pierre Assouline, “Le Portrait”

It’s not easy to buy me books, but Beloved Husband outdid himself this Christmas. And say what we will about the state of the book market, it’s pretty cool that he could find a French paperback published in 2007 and put it under our tree.

The portrait of the title is Ingres’ fabulous painting of Betty de Rothschild, completed in 1848. It is still in the Rothschild family, so Pierre Assouline  must have had extensive cooperation from the family. No surprise: he’s a very well-known French journalist and author who focuses on the broad area of intersection between culture, politics, and social history in France. (For instance, see his Le dernier des Camondo.) Le Portrait builds on some of that context, because it is narrated by the portrait itself.

La baronne de Rothschild, Ingres, 1848

Clever, no? Betty-the-portrait is a wonderful character; cosmopolitan, warm, grand. And what a world she has seen! Born a Rothschild in Vienna in 1805, she married her uncle James in 1824 and moved to Paris. In those early days of the Rothschild banking empire, there were brothers in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Naples and Vienna. (They were known as the “five arrows” of international banking.) Betty describes the luxury of their way of life, the beautiful houses, the relationships with artists and musicians like Rossini and Chopin. This section of the book is catnip for social historians: for instance, did you know that there was a French category of friendship known as “relations de bal?” I suppose those would be casual, dancing-partner friendships? Certainly a level of acquantanceship that exists no more. Betty is fond of observations like this: “In a certain society, knowing how to express yourself in five languages is also knowing how to be silent in five languages.”

But grand as they are, the Rothschilds are also Jews, and this essential part of Betty’s identity is always in the foreground. The family and the businesses are knit tightly together; the children marry in the faith; the quality of “other” is never forgotten. Betty’s portrait is often seen primarily as a painting of “la grande Juive.” So we know where this story is going. First there is the Dreyfus dust-up, and ugliness starts to appear. Then Assouline skips to a day in 1938 when Betty  witnesses the family’s reaction to news from Germany: papers burned, accounts closed, preparations for the worst. Then the portrait is captured. Betty’s not a fan of Goering, and does not enjoy her spell in the salt mines.

Hotel Lambert, Paris

The last portion of the book covers the portrait’s career at various post-war exhibitions, which gives Assouline a way to work art-historical interpretations into the narrative. By and large, Betty isn’t  impressed. She is, however, saddened when the furnishings of the  Hôtel Lambert, the Rothschild house on the Ile de la Cité in Paris and her home since 1975, are split up after the house is sold to Qatari prince: “A dispersion is always a heartbreak, even if everything remains within the narrow limits of the family circle.” But Betty is not sentimental. Her last words, true for portraits and families as well as for women, are, “We will never again be the way we were. That’s the way it is.”

Andrew Miller, “Pure”

If I describe Andrew Miller’s Pure as a novel about excavating a cemetery in 18th century Paris, you’re not going to want to read it. And maybe if you’re really, really squeamish the subject matter is going to be problematic.

On the other hand, if I present Pure as a coming-of-age novel set just before the French Revolution, in which an engaging  young engineer faces a great challenge, that may sound more attractive, and it’s equally true. The novel opens with Jean-Baptiste Baratte kicking his heels in an anteroom at Versailles, waiting to see a minister who has a job for him. Baratte is a farmer’s son from Normandy who has been educated at the elite Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and thus that useful fictional figure, the socially mobile protagonist. We see him, in Pure, as a supplicant, a boss, a lover, a son, a rube, and above all a man growing into his natural authority.

19th century print of the Cemetery of Les Innocents in Paris.

The task assigned to Jean-Baptiste at Versailles is the demolition of an overcrowded cemetery in the center of Paris. Les Innocents had been in use since the Middle Ages and by the 1780s presented serious health hazards to the neighborhood. Miller is pretty eloquent about the aesthetic issues as well — olfactory for the most part. The cemetery did indeed get demolished, the bones removed to a new location in what is now Montparnasse. The neighboring church was also destroyed, and Miller lingers over the irruption of light into the filthy dark medieval interior:

Once inside the church, they go in single file. The sun has risen above the roof line and where the roof is gone, the light breaks in a shallow angle on the facing wall, picks out, with a kind of unnecessary perfection, the fluting of a pillar, the bevelled edge of an arch, a stone face staring goggle-eyed at some wonder in the middle air…. Something falls, flickers through light into shadow and hits the piled pews with a noise of thunder.”

Light, purification, education, social mobility — you see where Miller is going. A secondary character in Pure is an affable forward-looking doctor named Guillotin whose future invention would remove so many heads. The opening scene at Versailles is matched by a closing scene that foreshadows the coming irrelevance of the Ancien Régime. We even see a cameo of the firebrand Camille Desmoulins delivering a rabble-rousing speech at the Palais-Royal (homage to Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety?). But these themes are woven artfully into the trajectories of the characters. This is not one of those historical novels that feels studded with facts, like an overloaded fruitcake. Instead it feels like a seamless, illuminating experience. And here’s the clincher: I finished it two days ago and it lingers in my mind — enormously satisfying.

Carole DeSanti, “The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R.”

It’s 1861. Goose-girl from the south of France runs away with her handsome lover. He sends her to Paris to wait for him but he never shows up and she has to become a prostitute. She sits for a painter and his portrait of her launches him at the Paris Salon. She enters a posh brothel. Turns out it’s basically indentured servitude. Second Empire Paris, she finds out, is run for the benefit of the rich and crafty.

The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. could have been right up my alley, with that subject matter, but I knew from the prologue that Carole DeSanti and I were not going to get along. “Because I was a girl, and am now a woman, I have dreamed, some nights. Dreams do their best to reset the soul, but it is heavy work.” Maybe it’s not the author but her narrator I took against: Eugenie Rigault has a portentous way with a story, to the extent that I sometimes did not know quite what was going on. More, clearly, than the mere action of the book, which in itself is pretty comprehensive. Eugenie travels the underside of Paris and DeSanti has obviously done a great deal of research so if you wonder about Prefectural record-keeping or mid-19th-century birth control, this is a terrific resource. The novel spans ten years, including the Siege of Paris and Commune, meticulously plotted out.

Problem is, Eugenie is sort of a downer. She has moments of exhilaration, mistrusting them as she does so. Enjoys various men, eligible or not. Relies on pals from the brothel whom I couldn’t quite keep straight. At the end, it turns out she had a bad relationship with her mother: “She was the very node of turmoil; a trouble inseparable from me, that webbed my life. She was every part of me; the knife edge of my own contamination. I didn’t need Paris to find corruption.” Well, Paris was the part of this book I liked best.

Honore de Balzac, “Pere Goriot”

Wouldn’t it be fun to know how many library books circulate without ever getting read? I haven’t had a library card in 25 years so I’m just getting used to the new freedom of choice that lets me bring books home and dip into them for free. Last week’s haul was eclectic: a Tracy Chevalier novel, a volume of Chekhov novellas, and Pere Goriot. I only finished one of the Chekhov tales but the Balzac was lots of fun, in a literature-geek way. Which is to say that I enjoyed reading it, but a great deal of my pleasure involved books connected to Pere Goriot rather than the book actually in my hand. What I did cherish was the detail of the settings and atmosphere. Balzac is generous with descriptions of the world his characters live in, from the squalor of certain neighborhoods in 1819 Paris to the enameled monogram on a gold Bréguet watch.

Ingres portrait of Francois-Marius Granet, at Nat'l Gallery London. Corresponds to my mental image of Eugene.

It turns out that Pere Goriot was published in the mid-1830s and was one of the first full-length novels that falls into Balzac’s immense series called la Comédie humaine. It has a number of important features that narrative culture still takes advantage of. One is the prototypical French character of the young-man-from-the-provinces who arrives in Paris eager to make the city its own. In this case, he’s Eugene de Rastignac, from minor nobility, poor, handsome and charming but above all, ambitious. Balzac retooled him as Lucien de Rubempré in Lost Illusions and Dumas gave him a rapier and called him d’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers. Zola uses the trope over and over again, as does Maupassant.

Of course you know what they say: that there are only two stories, “A man goes on a voyage” or “A stranger comes to town,” and this is the former.  Eugene is all potential — he has no present when the book begins. Just his restrained provincial past and the future which he must choose. Balzac sets out two paths for him, embodied in the two older men living at the shabby Maison Vauquer, a Left Bank boarding house. In one corner is our titular Pere Goriot, a retired manufacturer of vermicelli, who has sacrificed everything for his two beautiful daughters. (The specificity of “vermicelli” is typical of Balzac.) In the other is Monsieur Vautrin, a mysterious figure of titanic energy who tries to lure Eugene into a profitable arranged marriage. Yes, actually, he probably is the devil: Balzac gives him great lines like, “… there are no principles, just things that happen; there are no laws, either,  just circumstances.”  When another character calls him a prophet, he answers, ”I am anything and everything.”  Oh, that Balzac, what a cynic!

The narrative tension hovers around Eugene’s choice, and Balzac leaves the outcome open. Only in later books do we meet Eugene de Rastignac as a powerful and worldly Parisian figure. Vautrin comes back, too, to reprise his role of tempter and fixer. This trick of working with recurring characters over an extended narrative was another Balzacian innovation. Actually, I think that means “Downton Abbey” is directly descended from  Pere Goriot.

Julian Barnes, “Something to Declare”

I tend to think of Julian Barnes as an all-English writer but I realize, that’s probably just because he used to rather famously play tennis with Martin Amis. (So very English!) But it turns out that Barnes is Francophone and something of a Flaubert scholar — ack, Flaubert’s Parrot, of course he’s a Flaubertiste. So Something to Declare is a nice little collection of various Francophilia subjects: tourism in France, the Tour de France, Henry James and Edith Wharton touring France, French food…. and in the kind of cleverness this book is full of, “French letters.” (A pun: you might not recognize that as an old-fashioned term for condoms.) Most of these pieces, in fact, are reviews for the usual suspects: The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Flaubert "dissecting Madame Bovary." He looms large in this book.

Well, cleverness about the French: how delightful! In a book like this there are going to be hits and misses and only because I am conscientious did I read all of the essay on Boris Vian, Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens,which was a waste of time because I don’t know what any of them sounds like. Ditto the essays on films I hadn’t seen. But when Barnes is writing about literary figures, that’s when the fun starts, because he treats Baudelaire and Mallarmé and George Sand and, yes, Flaubert as if they were friends who had just left the room.

For instance, I was especially entertained by the essay on Louise Colet, Flaubert’s mistress, a figure Barnes handles with both amusement and sympathy. Her writing — of course she wrote — was evidently overheated and bombastic, she herself always the heroine of the tale. Here’s how Barnes describes  Colet’s thinly veiled account of her affair with a celebrated poet (the character “Albert” in Colet’s novel, Alfred de Musset in history):

Musset was clearly unsafe in a cab at any speed, and as Flaubert sardonically reminded Louise, ‘Convention has it that one doesn’t go for a moonlight drive with a man for the purpose of admiring the moon.’ But Louise went for many moonlight drives with the poet. Musset would turn up drunk and imploring on her doorstep and — such being her reverence for glory — he eventually got into her bed.

One of the most engaging essays covers the correspondence between George Sand and Flaubert, who were literary friends in middle age. Barnes calls this a correspondence in which Flaubert manages “to attain both equality and difference.” They argued, they gossiped, they tried to hammer out the basic question of What Fiction Was For, and ended up on opposite sides of the question. Sand became “increasingly prone to giving Flaubert increasingly basic advice… She has told him to get married… she has told him not to be grumpy;… told him to eat properly, take walks, and do some gym…” Barnes straddles respect and irreverence in these essays. If this is the kind of thing you like, you’ll like it a lot.

Bel-Ami Alert: Rob Pattinson Seduces in a Top Hat

Hungary stands in for Paris -- effectively, no?

As I’ve already made clear, I’m pretty eager to see the film version of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami. It’s a book I love (serial seduction in 1885 Paris!) and the casting is delicious, with Robert Pattinson as Georges Du Roy and Cristina Ricci, Uma Thurman, and Kristin Scott Thomas as three of his, um, targets. The trailer even includes a shot of the scene where Du Roy hits on Scott Thomas’ character in church! Dastardly!  Release set for March 2.

Caroline Moorehead, “Dancing to the Precipice”

Lucie Dillon de la Tour du Pin has been vaguely on my radar for a long time; her memoirs show up in  bibliographies when you’re reading about pre-Revolutionary Versailles, or for that matter, about the revolution itself — or even Napoleonic France. To write Dancing to the Precipice, Caroline Moorehead used Lucie’s memoir as a primary source, but the memoir takes us only up to 1814, and Lucie lived until 1850 — yes, her life spanned the reigns of Louis XV to Napoleon III (as president). For the later years, Moorehead refers to Lucie’s many letters. Throughout the book she provides not only historical context, but also the kinds of details I need to help me imagine history: weather, clothes, food, pastimes. For instance, in one of the happiest times of Lucie’s life, when she was farming outside Albany, New York during the Terror, she milked and made butter wearing a black and blue-striped woolen skirt, like the other Hudson County housewives.

Versailles: one of Lucie de la Tour du Pin's worlds

Sometimes, I’ll admit, I wished that I was reading just Lucie’s own words; Moorehead quotes liberally but her subject’s voice is necessarily diluted. And sometimes I had the feeling that the tale just goes on a little bit too long, but I think that’s an inveterate novel-reader’s complaint. Authors of biography don’t get to tidy up the long, uneventful years. Since I just finished the book, and it ends with many years of Lucie’s life becoming sadder and narrower, I have to make a little effort to reconstruct the exhilaration I felt in reading the first half.

Henriette-Lucie Dillon makes an ideal chronicler of her era. On the one hand, as a grand aristocrat, she had perfect access to the grandeur of her era. Daughter of a count, wife of a marquis, she served as one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies in waiting and frequented the salons of Napoleonic France. But she’s also appealing to our democratic age: despite her belief in the aristocratic system, she judges individuals and herself according to ideals familiar to us, like courage, humor, intelligence and lack of vanity. She can be grand, but she can also be funny. (Talleyrand, the arch-schemer who keeps recurring throughout her era, comes in for barbed admiration.) She adores her family and handles loss with enormous fortitude.

The most vivid part of the book, of course, is the first section when Moorehead and la Tour du Pin in tandem depict the years leading up to the revolution. Lucie looks back with hindsight on the splendor and waste and heedlessness and beauty and cultivation, while Moorehead adroitly follows the saga of the forces and characters who produced the revolution. (It was probably helpful that I’d read Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety.) Just one detail to whet your appetite: The Duc de Chartres, nephew of Louis XVI, was a wastrel prince who spent his days before the revolution in the Palais-Royal, and developed a system for rating all the women he knew. The available grades were “beautiful, pretty, passable, ugly, frightful, hideous, and abominable.” A bas les aristos!

Irene Nemirovsky, “All Our Worldly Goods”

I’m having a little French-bourgeoisie moment; last night I began watching Olivier Assayas‘ fabulous Les Destinées Sentimentales, which focuses on a big prosperous turn-of-the-century family that produces porcelain (one branch) and brandy (another branch). Hours earlier I had finished reading Irène Némirovsky’s All Our Worldly Goods which follows several generations of the Hardelot family, famous for their high-quality paper. The film provides me with wonderful images: stiff collars, formal meals, burning glances between men and women. Némirovsky provides the commentary, illuminating the habits and practices of this sector of French society that valued the preservation of capital and business opportunity as highly as personal happiness.

But while Assayas seems to lean harder on the question of personal satisfaction weighed against responsibility to a family enterprise and its dependents, Némirovsky is more concerned with the effect of war on her characters. The Hardelot family dominates the Norman village of St. Elme, and many readers will pick up the cue right away: Normandy was a battle-ground in both World Wars. In fact, the novel opens with the Hardelot family watching a display of fireworks; there will be quite a few explosions to follow.

The Hardelots summer at Wimereux Plage in 1910

This is the first English edition of All Our Worldly Goods, which was published in France in 1947, five years after Némirovsky’s death at Auschwitz. It must have preceded Suite Française by the narrowest of margins, since it takes the action into the summer of 1940, after the German invasion of France. It’s both a thinner and a gentler novel than Suite Française, more concerned with love than with war. When the novel opens in 1910, Pierre Hardelot and Agnès Florent are miserably in love — miserably because Pierre is engaged to the wealthy Simone Renaudin. Némirovsky is matter-of-fact about the arrangements: “All introductions of this kind were arranged at someone else’s marriage or engagement; it was only natural. In this peaceful province, where no one ever held dances, such solemn occasions were like county fairs, where everyone brought along the thing they wanted to sell.”  Pierre manages to escape his arranged match, though, and All Our Worldly Goods traces his thirty years of marriage with Agnès.

In a novel as short as this, that covers this time span, it’s not surprising that the liveliest character is actually the narrator. Pierre idealizes his wife: Agnès likewise adores him, but we get little sense of them as individuals. Maybe they are just cogs in the Hardelot machine, which includes a nasty overbearing patriarch. It’s the narrator who gets to say things like:

And still people carried on living as they always had. They hosted grand dinners where black-suited Jeremiahs carved the pheasant… imagined future wars as if they were right in the middle of them. ‘A sudden invasion, one day, at dawn, the airfields bombed… civilians machine-gunned down along the roads…’ The women shook their heads and murmured, ‘Awful, just awful…’ while thinking, ‘I should have worn my pink dress… How annoying… I’m underdressed.’”

Which is vintage Némirovsky. 

Emile Zola, “La Debacle/The Downfall”

Another long silence, but I’ve been helping Emile Zola fight the Franco-Prussian war, and it’s taken a long time. Didn’t turn out too well, either: after all, Zola called his book La Débâcle for a reason. Just to get you up to speed: in July of 1870, Prussia more or less manoeuvered France into declaring war. The French, banking on a tradition of military triumph, marched eastward in confidence, carrying only maps of Germany because it was assumed they would invade the neighboring country. But the Prussian army was better organized, better provisioned, and better commanded. Defeat followed defeat, and on September 4,  a large segment of the French army surrendered after a crushing battle in a village called Sedan. Nearly 90,000 men — including the Emperor of France — were taken prisoner. The Prussians swept west to surround Paris, besieging it for more than four months. In the political instability that followed its surrender (you still with me?) the city itself seceded from France and was governed briefly by the Commune. Civil war ensued, with street-to-street fighting and the torching of many familiar monuments. You’ve heard the phrase, “Paris is burning?” In May of 1871, it really was.

Meissonier's "Allegory of the Siege of Paris"

You think that’s a lot of explanation? I’ve just saved you 582 pages. But when Zola wrote La Débâcle in 1892, this was recent history, fresh in everyone’s mind. His goal in reiterating the horrors was to demonstrate how France had been humbled, and why.

There’s way too much here to sort through so I’m taking the lazy way out with bullet points. Truth to tell, I’m still somewhat stunned. As I’ve said elsewhere, Zola’s not a subtle writer and when you get him on, say inadequate wound care, he’s relentless. This is hardly an enjoyable book but it packs a punch.

–Unlike La Curée, this is a polemic rather than a novel. Sure, there are characters and it’s through them that that we perceive what Zola’s so het up about (corruption, laziness, disorganization, mistrust, neurosis, selfishness, cowardice, etc.) But the characters are pretty schematic. Types rather than individuals.

–The research is prodigious. Zola began as a newspaperman, and he reported the heck out of this book. My copy had some scholarly apparatus that tracked our intrepid author’s sources and they were very impressive.

–Back in 1870, when you wanted to make a case — or beat an audience over the head, perhaps? — the way to do it was with a big, heavy piece of fiction. No longer true. I don’t know much about Zola’s role in the Dreyfus affair but I wonder if his famous “J’accuse” letter  of 1898 isn’t a precursor of modern journalistic rhetoric. Which would have Zola using both old and new tools within his career.

–Seems to me there are two fictional things to do with a battle. One is Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme technique in which your protagonist gets mighty confused about all the noise and people running around, and loses track of Waterloo. The other is Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels method, where you provide maps and let the reader follow the action hour by hour. Zola switches back and forth between them.

–One forgets how much the basics matter in wartime, both before and after the battle. The French fought hungry and tired — we’re talking days of fasting because of disorganized supply lines, and sleepless nights because of wet tents and dawn marches. What’s more, once the gunfire stops, the problems really begin, not only for the soldiers but also for the civilian population.

–This book is too long. There’s a lot of repetition and the pacing is slow. But the length forces the reader to feel a tiny bit of the tedium and, imaginatively, a measure of the discomfort, dislocation, terror, pain, humiliation and grief endured by the soldiers and victims of the Franco-Prussian war. And by that measure, it’s a success.