Paul Morand - The Allure of Chanel

“You don’t have to learn in order to know, Madame; Misia, for instance, is considered to be a great musician yet I’ve never heard her play more than four chords by Chopin.

“Let’s talk about her! She adores the Jews. Furthermore, my dear, Misia lives in the ghetto; look at all those members of the chosen race she has dragged around behind her, Thadée Natanson, Bernstein, Edwards, Alfred Savoir … Me, I’ve got nothing against Jews … And I’ve got plenty to prove it. To put it plainly, at the time of Félix Faure, the Rothschilds, they didn’t count for much … at the Jockey, my dear, there was only Haas,6 and even then, he had been elected in ’71, during the Commune, one afternoon when there was no one there to blackball him …”

Madame de Chévigné died shortly before the war. For some years she had not been receiving visitors. Her door was only open to her family, to close friends, to me. If Misia came to see her, she would only have her brought in so that she could speak to her harshly, to her face.

“You wouldn’t understand that, you who know everything!”

And she would wink surreptitiously at me, click her tongue, and give me a mischievous kick under the table, without Misia realising.

“In 18—, we knew how to behave. F— loved me; or so I thought. One day, after a journey, I arrive on the arm of Monsieur de Chévigné for a grand dinner party. In the anteroom, I cast my eyes over the list of guests. I read: Comte and Comtesse de F. The fickle fellow had got married without telling me. I feel flustered … but all of a sudden I pull myself together, and I say to myself: ‘You are Laure de Chévigné, née Sade.’ (Sade! What a lovely name … Misia would sigh. What would I not give to be born Sade!)

“We’re French, we are! These foreigners, they think they know it all! Can’t stand the Russians … I was in Petersburg … I stayed with the Grand-Duchess Vladimir. People are polite over there, too polite. You’re treated well in Russia, but they don’t respect you; they give you presents with diamonds, but they use you as they would an object. And then, their wealth, I went to Tsarskoe Selo, and it wasn’t as smart as all that!”

Occasionally Auguste, the elderly servant, would come in.

“What is it now, Auguste?”

“Madame la Comtesse, it’s Madame X.”

“Could you not have said that I was unwell? I am with Mademoiselle.”

“Madame la Comtesse, I can’t lie.”

“Then why are you a servant? Servants are supposed to say no.”

Worried that I might weary the Comtesse, Auguste returned a little while later.

“Madame la Comtesse should think about dinner.”

“Leave me alone! I’m having fun! That fellow wants to force-feed me! He gives me my soup; he thinks he can do as he pleases! I’m not doddery, but he’s convinced I am! What were we saying? That Misia didn’t know three notes of Chopin? Reynaldo, by Jove, now there’s a musician! In Venice, my dear, Madame de Vantalis would arrange for a piano to be put on the gondola for him; the moon, the Grand Canal, and off we go, with everyone following. And Madrazo! Coco, have you heard Madrazo singing ‘ la Tour Saint-Jacques ’? It was quite different from Jacques Février! … What was I telling you … Remind me please, I no longer know where I am, because of that idiot, Auguste … Ah yes, we were talking about the young women of today … They’re all tarts! And worse! (In my day, even the tarts had manners.) Have you noticed that nowadays women don’t even know how to walk into a drawing room? Shall I show you how they introduce themselves?”

There followed an imitation by the Comtesse, who had leapt out of bed, of a woman of today, slightly awkward and slightly pretentious, who is always clumsy and ‘coarse’.

“In our day, we cut a better figure! Do you call that making an entrance? Well, look!”

After this violent exercise, Madame de Chévigné went back to bed, out of breath.

“I’m short of breath, my dear. My heart’s packing in …”

I reassured her that it was simply lack of fitness. She turned her gaunt, tragic old clown’s mask towards me, with its Punchinello nose, its downturned mouth, and her muted, gruff voice that seemed to come from beneath the ground:

“My children have forced me to leave rue d’Anjou; I lived there for forty years; I have obeyed; but I know very well it will bring me bad luck: one only leaves one’s home to die. I’ll die because of it. If I feel better, if I can go out, ask me round. But not with old people, whatever you do. Invite me with the young. Otherwise, come back and see me. I’ll talk to you about Madame Standish (née des Cars) and about Madame Greffulhe. Those were women, they were! They knew how to curtsey. At Fordsdorf I watched them curtseying, it was quite different …”

“Auguste, drive Mademoiselle home … You’re very likely to find me in bed again next time. You see, at my age, when a woman has removed her corset and her hairpiece, my dear, she never puts them on again!”

The day came, in fact, when Madame de Chévigné did grow weak. Marie-Thérèse de Croisset came to tell me:

“Maman is very ill. She thinks she’s at your house …”

A few days later, I went to her burial.

5 Princesse J Murat

6 Swann

WHEN PICASSO LIVED IN MONTROUGE, during the last war, some burglars broke into his home; they only took clothes and didn’t bother about his paintings. Today clothes cost much more than they did in 1915, but Picasso’s canvases have increased far more than clothing material. No burglar would make the same mistake again. ‘ Il y a les toiles de maîtres et les mètres de toile ’, as Labiche puts it.7

I don’t know whether he is a genius; it’s hard to say whether someone you see a lot is a genius; but I am certain that he is somewhere on that invisible chain which links geniuses to one another over the centuries.

Years, decades have passed and Picasso is still alive, very much alive. The wave on which he rode has not receded. He is neither forgotten, nor has he become an idol, which is equally serious. He has retained his intelligence, his acrobat’s reflexes, his Basque suppleness, for he is Basque through his father, the drawing teacher.

I have maintained a strong friendship with him. I think it is reciprocated. We have not changed, in spite of upheavals. Twenty years ago, everything was delightful, for many reasons, but mainly because not everything was in the public domain, because the burglars of Montrouge did not know who Picasso was, because politics did not poison art.

I get on very well with strong personalities. With great artists, I am very respectful and very free at the same time; I am their conscience. If they disappear into the pages of Harper’s Bazaar , I tell them. I retain my critical faculties. If I find myself choking with admiration, then it means they are not truly great artists.

“I protected you from Picasso,” Misia said.

I had no need of being protected from anyone except from Misia. For where Misia has once loved, the grass doesn’t grow any more. Picasso set himself the huge task of making a clean sweep of everything, but I wasn’t on the path of his vacuum cleaner. I liked the man. In reality it was his painting that I liked, even though I didn’t understand anything about it. I was convinced and I enjoy being so. Picasso, for me, is like a logarithms table.

He destroyed, but then he constructed. He arrived in Paris in 1900, when I was a child, already able to draw like Ingres, whatever Sert said. I am almost old and Picasso is still working; he has become the radioactive principle of painting. Our meeting could only have happened in Paris (people don’t live in the Auvergne, and you don’t spend your life in Malaga, or in Barcelona).