From The Banquet Years: The Arts in France, 1885-1918 Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, Guillaume Apollinaire. by Roger Shattuck 

Harcourt Brace. New York. 1958.

ONE • The Good Old Days

The French call it la belle époque--the good old days. The thirty years of peace, prosperity, and internal dissension which lie across 1900 wear a bright, almost blatant color. We feel a greater nostalgia looking back that short distance than we do looking back twenty centuries to antiquity. And there is reason. Those years are the lively childhood of our era; already we see their gaiety and sadness transfigured.

For Paris they were the Banquet Years. The banquet had become the supreme rite. The cultural capital of the world, which set fashions in dress, the arts, and the pleasures of life, celebrated its vitality over a long table laden with food and wine. Part of the secret of the period lies no deeper than this surface aspect. Upper-class leisure--the result not of shorter working hours but of no working hours at all for property holders--produced a life of pompous display, frivolity, hypocrisy, cultivated taste, and relaxed morals. The only barrier to rampant adultery was the whalebone corset; many an errant wife, when she returned to face her waiting coachman, had to hide under her coat the bundle of undergarments which her lover had not been dexterous enough to lace back around her torso. Bourgeois meals reached such proportions that an intermission had to be introduced in the form of a sherbet course between the two fowl dishes. The untaxed rich lived in shameless luxury and systematically brutalized le peuple with venal journalism, inspiring promises of progress and expanding empire, and cheap absinthe.

Politics in la belle époque found a surprisingly stable balance between corruption, passionate conviction, and low comedy. The handsome and popular Prince of Wales neglected the attractions of London to spend his evenings entertaining in Maxim's restaurant, and he did not entirely change his ways upon becoming Edward VII. It was the era of gaslights and horse-drawn omnibuses, of the Moulin Rouge and the Folies-Bergère, of cordon-bleu cooking and demonstrating feminists. The waiters in Paris cafés had the courage to strike for the right to grow beards; you were not a man or a republican without one at the turn of the century. Artists sensed that their generation promised both an end and a beginning. No other equally brief period of history has seen the rise and fall of so many schools and cliques and isms. Amid this turmoil, the fashionable salon declined after a last abortive flourishing. The café came into its own, political unrest encouraged innovation in the arts, and society squandered its last vestiges of aristocracy. The twentieth century could not wait fifteen years for a round number; it was born, yelling, in 1885.

It all started with a wake and funeral such as Paris had never staged even for royalty. In May, 1885, four months after an immense state banquet to celebrate his eighty-third birthday, Victor Hugo died. He left the following will: "I give fifty thousand francs to the poor. I desire to be carried to the cemetery in one of their hearses. I refuse the prayers of all churches. I ask for a prayer from all living souls. I believe in God." Four years earlier, during public celebrations of his eightieth year of vigor, the Avenue d'Eylau, where he lived, had been officially renamed in his honor. Now his remains lay in state for twenty-four hours on top of a mammoth urn which filled the Arc de Triomphe and was guarded in half-hour shifts by young children in Grecian vestments. As darkness approached, the festive crowd could no longer contain itself. "The night of May 31, 1885, night of vertiginous dreams, dissolute and pathetic, in which Paris was filled with the aromas of its love for a relic. Perhaps the great city was trying to recover its loss. . . . How many women gave themselves to lovers, to strangers, with a burning fury to become mothers of immortals!" What the novelist Barrès here describes (in a chapter of Les déracinés entitled "The Public Virtue of a Corpse") happened publicly within a few yards of Hugo's apotheosis. The endless procession across Paris the next day included several brass bands, every political and literary figure of the day, speeches, numerous deaths in the press of the crowd, and final entombment in the Panthéon. The church had to be specially unconsecrated for the occasion. By this orgiastic ceremony France unburdened itself of a man, a literary movement, and a century.

Paris at the time was like no other place in the world. Even in retrospect her physical presence demands the feminine gender. The Seine, no mere frontier, as today, separating left and right banks, was a central artery carrying bateaux mouches for suburban commuters, bateaux lavoirs for the city's washerwomen, heavy traffic of brightly painted and planted barges, and a fleet of light fishing skiffs. The Champs Elysées was still a bridle path flanked by elegant hôtels particuliers. In the Bois de Boulogne, the rich and well-born had their domain in which to parade in their carriages during the morning and in whose restaurants they dined and danced and made love at night. More cows and goats and chickens thrived on the open slopes of Montmartre among the windmills than artists lived in its steep village streets. Montparnasse lay quiet and far away across the river beyond the fashionable residences of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Through the middle of Paris like an equator ran les boulevards, a busy and still fashionable quarter devoted to theaters, newspaper offices, and crowded cafés.

Most important of all, Paris had just had her face lifted. Baron Haussmann's ambitious plans for opening up the constricted city had been executed by 1880--except for his own unfinished Boulevard Haussmann, which came to a stop halfway through the eighth arrondissement. (It became the standard music-hall joke of the eighties.) The magnificent new Opéra, commanding its own avenue to the Louvre and the Théâtre-Français, the refurbished city hall, and wide tree-lined boulevards slicing through the most clogged quarters--these were more than architectural renovations. Paris now had the space to look at herself and see that she was no longer a village clustered about a few grandiose palaces, nor merely a city of bustling commerce and exchange. She had become a stage, a vast theater for herself and all the world. For thirty years the frock coats and monocles, the toppers and bowlers (chapeaux hauts de forme and chapeaux melon) seemed to be designed to fit this vast stage-set along with the ladies' long dresses and corsets and eclipsing hats. Street cleaners in blue denim, gendarmes in trim capes, butchers in leather aprons, coachmen in black cutaways, the army's crack chasseurs in plumes, gold braid, and polished boots --everyone wore a costume and displayed himself to best advantage.

It is this theatrical aspect of life, the light-opera atmosphere, which gave la belle époque its particular flavor. Since Offenbach's era, living had become increasingly a special kind of performance presided over by fashion, innovation, and taste. History provides its own reasons for the gaiety of the era: economic prosperity following rapid recovery from the defeat of 1871, the unexpected stability of this third try at republican government, and innocence of any world conflict of the kind that would put a stop to it all. But such reasons do not explain why almost every book of reminiscences about the period indulges an unashamed nostalgia about a charmed way of life now lost. One suspects the attitude of being pure sentimental illusion until one perceives how truly different life was in Paris in the nineties and in the early years of this century. More than its debated public issues, the rarely challenged truisms of the age gave it its character. Without them the city's boulevards and walled gardens, its salons and boudoirs might long since have been forgotten. These truisms were simple and, in their own way, wise. Everyone loves a crowd; everyone has a right to privacy. Equality is a word reserved for public declarations and must not be allowed to pervert justice and social distinctions. Politics is a game played for fun or profit; business is a game best mixed with pleasure. Love cannot last, but marriage must; any vice can be forgiven except lack of feeling. The histrionic gifts of the French, concentrated in one city, enacted these themes with passion and conviction. Paris was a stage where the excitement of performance gave every deed the double significance of private gesture and public action. Doctor and ragpicker alike performed their professional flourishes, and the crime passionnel was practiced as a fine art.

In such an environment the theater, legitimate and illegitimate, operatic and naughty, was bound to thrive. The number of theaters in the city had been increasing since Molière, yet the actor came into his own as a public figure only toward the end of the nineteenth century, after the era of great literary-political heroes: Rousseau, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Hugo. In the eighties, the roaring voice and sheer physical power of Mounet-Sully made him king in a world of mighty tragedians whose grandiloquence we no longer know. His furious integrity as an actor combined a cultist's intensity with the posturing of a buccaneer. For a few months, until she left him for further glory, Mounet-Sully found his queen in a young actress of illegitimate birth (with an illegitimate child of her own), violent disposition, slender figure, and haunting feline face. This woman, Sarah Bernhardt, lived for thirty-five years at the center of scandal and publicity; she was denounced by some for her love affairs and extravagances and lauded by others as the greatest genius of her time.

After eight years with the Comédie-Française she resigned in a quarrel with the director and made the first of eight triumphant tours in America. She dragged with her across the country, in addition to her score of pets, the famous gold-fixtured coffin which an admirer had given her at her request. After having been photographed in it to spite her director, she kept it at the foot of her bed wherever she went. In the United States dozens of pamphlets circulated in her path, with titles like The Amours of Sarah. The Bishop of Chicago thundered so eloquently from his pulpit against the corrupting influence of the French actress that her agent sent him a polite note: "Monseigneur: I make it a practice to spend $400 on publicity when I come to your city. But since you have done the job for me, I am sending you $200 for your needy." Every fortune Sarah amassed on her world-wide tours she proceeded to lose during the next season or two in Paris, even though she was idolized by all classes. One after the other, three major Paris theaters passed through her hands; each had to be sold to cover her mounting debts. When an injury to her leg first caused talk of amputation (which finally became necessary in 1915), P. T. Barnum approached her with an offer of $10,000 for the severed limb and the right to exhibit it. In 1896 a municipal Journée Sarah Bernhardt brought the whole of Paris to her feet. It began with a banquet for six hundred at the Grand Hotel. The guests marveled at the undiminished youth of the fifty two-year-old beauty whose son was already over thirty and managing her affairs. A procession of two hundred carriages followed hers to her own Théâtre la Renaissance. After her performance of the third act of Phèdre, half a dozen poets, including François Coppée and her new lover, Edmond Rostand (shortly to write two hits, Cyrano de Bergerac and L'alglon), recited verses to her on a stage banked with flowers. Four years later she attempted her most ambitious performance: Hamlet, en travesti, in Marcel Schwob's fastidious prose translation. For twelve days running she rehearsed from noon until six in the morning and finally staged a passionate, sometimes sentimental version in which she whispered "To be or not to be" almost in secreto. Colette described her in the performance as having "a face sculpted in white powder." Paris loved it; London, despite her previous successes there, refused it in outrage; the festival at Stratford-on-Avon was entranced. She went on acting for fifteen years, short one leg at the end but never out of voice. Sarah Bernhardt's was the most highly charged temperament of the era and one of its greatest talents. Neither Caruso nor Nijinsky had such a career of enduring public adulation, somersaulting business ventures, and tumultuous private life. Only an actress could replace the colossus of Victor Hugo, take Paris for her private stage, and become what the French have called ever since a monstre sacré.

But in reality it was the era of music hall and café chantant--both of them popular adaptations of the light-opera craze which Offenbach had brought to the Paris of the Second Empire. Everyone was willing to pay to see even brighter costumes and more sparkling antics than those that filled the streets. La Goulu and, later, Mistinguett (originally Miss Tinguette) were vivacious brassy entertainers who worked themselves to the point of exhaustion. Then out of this bubbling atmosphere emerged the apparition of a thin nervous woman in a white dress and long black gloves. No one could have predicted her success. In a sensual grating voice she sang of heartbreak and cruelty and unabashed crime. After hearing her, people never forgot the harsh diction and awkward eloquent gestures of Yvette Guilbert. These were also the years when Colette left her cultivated musiccritic husband, Willy, for whom she had first set pen to paper. She danced in gold tights through the provinces and into the best salons of Paris before she reached fame as a novelist and one of the most penetrating chroniclers of the period. Three permanent circuses and a new Hippodrome fringed Montmartre along the boulevards. The clown, the horse, and the acrobat here earned their place in modern art: the Degas ballet dancer became the Toulouse-Lautrec cabaret entertainer, and then became the Picasso Harlequin. The team of clowns, Footit and Chocolat, developed the first comic stooge act (known as clown et auguste). Groc and Antonet, the American Emmet Kelly, and the Fratellini brothers all achieved fame in Paris before the turn of the century.

Antoine, actor-producer and truant employee of the Paris gas company, brought a restrained naturalism and new dramatic talent (Strindberg and Ibsen) into his pioneering Théâtre Libre near the Place Pigalle. Actors learned to speak for, not at, the audience. He hung a bleeding side of beef in the set of a butcher's shop, and--it is hard to realize--for the first time in Paris regularly turned the house lights out so that the attention of the audience would have to be directed to the stage. The theater reigned supreme. Yet it was all a show within a show. The frenzy on hundreds of stages all over Paris reflected the gala life around them. At the Opéra, unlike the concentration required at Antoine's Théâtre Libre, the performance never stopped the fashionable goings on in the boxes. The city beheld itself endlessly and was never bored or displeased.

Of all the stages that made up the city, the most formalized and demanding was the salon. The aristocracy still cultivated the conversation of what were assumed to be great minds. The revolution had not destroyed the old aristocracy, but had set up beside it another: the Napoleonic. The most elevated member of the new nobility, Princesse Mathilde Bonaparte, Napoleon's niece, did not mince her words: "The French revolution? Why, without it I'd be selling oranges in the streets of Ajaccio." Her sympathy and loyalty had begun by attracting Théophile Gautier, Flaubert, and Renan to a dangerously liberal salon during the Second Empire. During the Third Republic she again began receiving in her house in the Rue de Berri (today the Belgian Embassy) and continued until after 1900, when she was over eighty. Dumas fils, Henri de Régnier, Maupassant, and Anatole France came to her simple early dinners, which Proust described affectionately in one of his best "Figaro" society articles.

In barely a generation, Princesse Mathilde had learned an aristocratic ease which gave her the proper "presence" for a salon. Her guests never felt like performing animals. Madame Aubernon, however, a somewhat vulgar aristocrat of the old school, passionately interested in literature and the theater, conducted her rival salon like a lion tamer. About a dozen guests attended her poorly cooked dinners in the Rue d'Astorg, and Madame Aubernon alone decided the subject for discussion. One guest at a time was permitted to orate, and his chances of a second invitation depended on the brilliance of his performance. The hostess silenced any disorderly interruption by ringing a little porcelain bell which stood at her right hand. One evening when Renan was discoursing at some length, she had several times to call to order the dramatist Labiche (author of The Italian Straw Hat). When she finally asked him to speak, he admitted with some reluctance that he had only wanted to ask for more peas. On another occasion Madame Aubernon asked D'Annunzio point-blank what he thought of love; his reply was not designed to bring him a second invitation: "Read my books, Madame, and let me eat my dinner." A lady, asked with similar abruptness to speak her piece on the subject of adultery, replied, "You must pardon me, Madame. For this evening I prepared incest."

As the salon declined for lack of ladies trained to conduct one and through disappearance of the basic attitude of hommage on which the institution rested, the need for a verbal arena increased. One of the principal changes of la belle époque was that the great performers moved from the salon into the café. Here anyone could enter, and each man paid for his drink. As far back as the mid-eighteenth century artists and writers in Paris had begun to rely increasingly on the stimulus and exchange of the café. (They were served by young boys, whence comes the word garçon for waiter.) The term boulevardier was now invented to describe men whose principal accomplishment consisted in appearing at the proper moment in the proper café. More than the salon, the café came to provide a free market place of ideas and helped France produce its steady succession of artistic schools. The Napolitain, the Weber, the Vachette--the famous cafés of the period following 1885 were sprinkled from the fashionable boulevards to the Latin Quarter to the slopes of Montmartre. The Café Guerbois and the Nouvelle Athènes in the sixties and seventies had nurtured the first artistic movement entirely organized in cafés: impressionism. By the end of the nineteenth century the café represented a ritual which could absorb the better part of the day. "In the old days," wrote Jean Moréas, one of the great habitués and lion of the Vachette, "I arrived around one in the afternoon . . . stayed till seven, and then went to dine. About eight we came back, and didn't finally leave until one in the morning." It was a life unto itself.

Salon and café demanded performances on a small and intense scale from a group of highly trained actors. There was an equally specialized class of Parisians who played, however, to a larger audience. In the title of his famous play, first produced in 1885, Dumasfils brilliantly named this special world: Le demi-monde. The beautiful, cultured, kept women had undisputed sway over styles in women's dress. Fashion is the most unpredictable and competitive theater of all, and they brought it to a peak of perfection. Mesdemoiselles les cocottes (also more crudely known as les horizontales) were on display mornings in the Bois in their carriages, filled the tables at the Café de Paris and the Pré Catelan in the evening, and entertained lavishly at night in their own tastefully decorated hôtels particuliers. One of the best known, Mademoiselle Jane Cambrai, practiced no deceit in exploiting her lover, a successful rag dealer. He was in no wise suitable company--or host--at her brilliant parties, to which Tout Paris swarmed at the turn of the century. She saw to it that he remained happily upstairs playing bridge with a few of his own friends, and he showed no disgruntlement over the crowd below dancing and banqueting at his expense. These creatures of pleasure and fashion and canniness lived truly in a "half-world" from which they might fade into penury and loneliness, or out of which they might emerge dramatically by marriage into nobility and respectability. A cocotte had not arrived in her profession until she had inspired at least one suicide, unsuccessful of course, and three or four duels, and had déniaisé (initiated) her lover's eldest son.

Fashion influenced every domain of life. Just after 1890 the velocipede had been introduced with little success. A few years later, the Prince de Sagan, the most prominent and dashing nobleman in Paris, pedaled through the Bois on a "little steel fairy," wearing a loud striped suit and specially designed straw boater. The city was delighted, and women's fashions changed immediately to allow them to ride astride. The bicycle, symbolizing everything democratic and modern (and supporting two weekly papers and a daily), led the way to an upsurge of sport which culminated in the revival of the Olympic games in 1894. After the bicycle, but without public participation, came the airplane. Blériot designed and stubbornly flew eight successive models before he finally drifted across the English Channel in 1909 in a ship that looked like a bicycle with fins. He was deliriously mobbed during the welcome-home parade in Paris.

One of the most fashionable annual social events in the nineties was the Bazar de la Charité. It was held in a rambling wood-and-canvas structure off the Champs Elysées, and the ladies who organized it went to great lengths to include every kind of attraction. In 1897 they set aside a room for a showing of Louis and Auguste Lumière's recently perfected cinématographe, which had rendered obsolete Edison's unwieldly kinetoscope only a few months after the latter came into use. The film program at the Bazar attracted many children, and a turnstile was installed at the door to keep them orderly. An ether lamp provided light for projection, and one afternoon when the operator had difficulty keeping it lit, he inadvertently shot across the room a jet of flame which reached the canvas wall. The entire premises went up in flames in a few minutes, and adults and children found themselves blocked behind the turnstile. In the panic, scores of people died, including some of the most prominent aristocrats in France. The blame fell, naturally, upon the new invention rather than on the outmoded lamp, and promotion of films in France suffered a grave setback for several years.

The Bazar de la Charité disaster led to one of the strangest quarrels of the period. The dandified Count Robert de Montesquiou, a scion of ancient French nobility, lost his wife in the fire. In addition to a reputation for elegance, wit, and the ability to mime at will, he was to achieve literary notoriety as the model for Huysmans' unregenerate aesthete, Des Esseintes, in A rebours and for Proust's cultured and corrupt Baron de Charlus. At Verlaine's grotesque funeral the count's silk-clad figure with curled mustaches served as a pallbearer next to the poet Catulle Mendès. It was rumored after the Bazar fire that to identify his wife's body Montesquiou insisted on using the tip of his cane to lift the coverings off the disfigured remains. At a reception in Baron de Rothschild's house the symbolist poet Henri de Régnier made insinuations about Montesquiou's sinister uses of his cane, and hinted (mistakenly) that the count had fought his way out of the fire with it and left his wife behind. First the count challenged Régnier, choosing pistols, with Maurice Barrès as one of his seconds. After an exchange of letters and procès-verbaux in the newspapers, the direction of challenge reversed, with Réguier choosing swords. "Quite a few people came to watch the affair," Montesquiou wrote in his memoirs, "but nothing about it was uncomfortable, displeasing, or ridiculous." He was wounded by Réguier, and the two participants refused to be reconciled.

Honor was still something out of a Corneille tragedy, and dueling perfectly suited the mood of the times. "On the field of honor" one could go beyond words to settle personal differences by serious dramatics. The papers carried announcements of each day's affaires d'honneur, with lengthy procès-verbaux drawn up by the seconds to establish how settlement had or had not been made. Engagements were fought until the first blood flowed, and afterward the combatants sometimes walked off the field arm in arm. Fatal encounters were rare. When an important duel was to be fought, numbers of spectators tried to follow the participants to the chosen spot on the outskirts of Paris. Journalists, who outdid one another in writing slanderous articles, constantly had their friends up at dawn to serve as seconds, and many doctors began their day by dressing a sword wound. Catulle Mendès almost lost his life defending Sarah Bernhardt's right to play the role of Hamlet. Duels were fought on the slightest provocation, and no effective attempt was made to outlaw the custom, so typically exhibitionistic, until after World War I.

The numbers of duels multiplied wildly during the two contrasting political crises of the period. One was excellent farce; the other serious melodrama. In 1886 a handsome and apparently trustworthy officer, General Boulanger, enjoyed a reputation for bravery, republicanism, and such terse slogans as "The army doesn't take sides." In order to introduce necessary reforms into the army, then regaining full strength, Clemenceau maneuvered Boulanger's appointment as minister of war. The common people and politicians alike believed that the full-bearded "man on horseback" was destined to overcome the lethargy and divisionism of the government. Parading everywhere on his coal-black charger, his military figure appealed irresistibly to men and women alike. Because it supplied the desired rhyme, his name was chanted across the country at the end of the second stanza of a popular song, En revenant de la revue, describing a Fourteenth of July parade:

Moi. j'faisais qu' admirer
Not'brav' général Boulanger.

When the hero was relieved of his ministry and sent back to duty at Clermont-Ferrand, a cheering uncontrollable mob surrounded the entire Gare de Lyon, and people lay down on the tracks in front of the train to prevent his departure. He escaped by jumping into a lone locomotive on another track and riding off with the engineer. Two secret affairs prevented him from exploiting the mob, as he might easily have done. One was a consuming love affair with Madame de Bonnemain, the divorced wife of one of his subordinates at Clermont. The other involved his political negotiations with the Royalists. After flirting with all parties in succession, Radical, Republican, and Bonapartist, he had begun to come to terms with the still powerful Royalists. They hoped to use him to bring back the Orleanist pretender, the Comte de Paris, and to that end they furnished him money and electioneering facilities. Returning to Paris as a deputy, the general prepared to seize power with the simple and simple-minded program: "Dissolution and reform." The sixty-year-old Radical Floquet mocked the fifty-year-old general in the Chamber of Deputies by saying, "At your age, Napoleon was dead." They chose sabers, and Paris held its breath. The old politician wounded the vigorous cavalry officer after some dazzling sword play on both sides, but even this shaming could not hinder Boulanger's ascent. The plot, which had already involved spies, disguises, secret conferences with powerful emissaries, and midnight rendezvous with Madame de Bonnemain, thickened but never resolved. Enjoying the adulation of the populace and feted by the cream of the aristocracy (who took to wearing his insigne of a red carnation), the general never conceived a plan of action and opposed any use of force. The government cannily scared Madame de Bonnemain out of the country and then let word reach her ears that a warrant was out for the general's arrest. At the peak of his popular acclaim, listening to the crowd outside shouting that he should march on the president's palace, and knowing that both the police and the army would join him rather than arrest him if he did, General Boulanger lingered over his dinner at the Restaurant Durand and pondered his mistress's plea that he follow her to Belgium. As the minister of the interior said the next morning, "The comedy is over." He was allowed to cross the border unmolested. But it was not quite over. Madame de Bonnemain died the following year, and the lover who had abandoned the leadership of an entire nation to rejoin her stabbed himself on her grave.

After this two-year national farce came the international melodrama of the Dreyfus case. Almost by force it divided public opinion into partisans of individual justice and defenders of vested authority; the poisons of anti-Semitism and anticlericalism flooded through the cleft. Zola's open letter, J'accuse, in 1898 first brought the affair into the open, helped by the publicity surrounding a duel between the "two colonels": Picquart, the first officer to insist that justice had miscarried, and Henry, who was arraigned many months later for responsibility in forging key documents. (Henry finally slit his own throat in the Mont Valérien military prison.) They met in an indoor cavalry training ring, the worst possible spot because of tetanus infection. Henry, fighting "with his tongue hanging entirely out of his month," impressed the spectators (who had climbed to the windows on ladders) as half insane. Two minor wounds started him raving, and he had to be carried away.

The case followed its course of embattled trials, petitions and public letters with scores, then hundreds, of signatures, shooting of the defense attorneys, endless duels, and fist-fights in the street and in cafés. When Loubet, a new pro-Dreyfus president, was elected, Baron Christiani smashed in his top hat with a cane on the pelouse of the Auteuil race track. In reply the incensed working classes demonstrated against the aristocracy at Longchamp race track the day of the ultrafashionable Grand Prix. An anti-Semite, Jules Guérin, who published the blatant paper L'Anti-Juif, barricaded himself for thirty-seven days against Lepine, the Prefect of Potice, until starvation brought him out. During the Rennes retrial, the officers of the General Staff tried to rattle their sabers loud enough to drown out the voice of Dreyfus's lawyer. As soon as the important events took place, they were restaged and filmed by the first great movie producer, Méliès. It made a twelve-reel grand film in scrupulous documentary style ( L'affaire Dreyfus, 1899).

With only one exception, every aspect of the case evolved into demonstration; there was no middle ground between crusading and corruption. The exception was Dreyfus himself, brought back from five years on Devil's Island. Near collapse after a few minutes in public, his uniform visibly padded so as not to hang too pathetically on his wasted frame, and talking in a rasping colorless voice, he disappointed his most fervent partisans and settled for a pardon. But even without a popular hero like Boulanger, the melodrama had accomplished its work of dramatizing the social and political issues of the times. Church, army, government, nobility, newspapers, courts--very revered institution revealed its profound taint. Waldeck-Rousseau, the premier who formed a government in 1899 to meet the crisis, conceived the most theatrical gesture of all. He welcomed the country's 22,000 mayors at a mammoth banquet and assured the feasting company that he would be moderate but firm in his legislation.

If not the profound effects, at least the bitter memories of the Dreyfus case were dispelled by an immediate distraction: the International Exposition of 1900. The previous exposition, in 1889, had feted the centenary of the revolution. ^* At this earlier event, scientific exhibits filled

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^*	After the first, in 1867, the second Universal Exposition, in 1878, had proclaimed the recovery of France from the defeat of 1871 and the overwhelming subscription of forty-two billion francs to a requested three billion government loan. Among the French there is no surer expression of confidence.

several buildings, including the colossal Hall of Industry, a monument of structural steel. Gauguin showed his paintings at the Café Volponi. A Cairo street scene was constructed with authentic imported Egyptians to live in it and perform the danse du ventre. The Javanese dancers became the rage of Paris, influenced music-hall routines for twenty years, and confirmed Debussy in his tendency toward Oriental harmonies. Thomas Edison, exalted by French scientists as "the sorcerer of Menlo Park," visited the grounds where his own pavilion was one of the largest. His latest invention, the incandescent bulb, augmented the miracle of the fair by lighting the silhouette of its principal buildings. Edison was so impressed by an allegorical statue called "The Fairy of Electricity" (a winged woman crouching on a dilapidated gas jet, surrounded by a Volta battery, telegraph key, and telephone, and brandishing an incandescent bulb--all in the best Carrara marble) that he bought it for his new West Orange laboratory.

After such a stunning success in 1889, Paris staged for the new century a still more fabulous and universal fair; it had been under construction for ten years. The nineteenth centenary of the birth of a certain well-known religious figure was not prominently featured. For more than a year after the April opening, the banks of the Seine for a mile on both sides of the Trocadero were transformed by exotic buildings--or at least exotic façades. Paris looked and acted like an overblown Venice.

Both expositions lay at the feet of the same gigantic monument. The Banquet Years received their symbol built to order in the heart of the city. The Eiffel Tower, raised at the cost of fifteen million uninflated francs in 1889, aroused protest from a committee of prominent citizens from Gounod to Dumasfils. Their outraged letter condemned the "Tower of Babel" which would "disfigure and dishonor" the city--but to no avail. When work was completed, tables were set up on the lower level, and three hundred workmen still in overalls feasted and drank champagne. Later an official banquet with full official pomp opened the tower to the public. This great anomaly of modern engineering expressed all the aspirations of a period which set out to surpass its heritage. And it remained: styleless, functionless, unhistoried, and soon as familiar as an urinoir. Tourists visited it, artists painted it, newlyweds with innocent faces were photographed beside it, suicides and inventors of devices for human flight jumped off it. In the end it became a symbol of Paris as famous as the Seine itself. The Eiffel Tower in its truculent stance is the first monument of modernism. For half a century it remained the tallest man-made structure in the world. ^*

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^*	Another prominent structure associated closely with Paris was also rising at this time on the heights of Montmartre. The white wonder of the Sacré-Cœur basilica, a symbol of penance for the Commune massacres, took forty years to build; the Eiffel Tower, two.

The expositions turned every resident and visitor in the city into an actor in the extravaganza of human progress and vanity. There was no resisting such pageantry. The closet performances of salon and caré, the social drama of Dreyfus, were only part of the show. For the Banquet Years, all Paris was a stage.

In its prolonged romp through the eighties and nineties and into the avant-guerre, Paris scarcely know what it was excited about. Was it a liberation? A revolution? A victory? A last fling? A first debauch? Amid the externals of funerals and fashions the city knew only that it was having a good time and making a superb spectacle of itself. Sensing this prevailing mood, artists, more than any other group, saw their opportunity. Exactly in the years following Hugo's funeral in 1885, all the arts changed direction as if they had been awaiting a signal. Along a discernible line of demarcation they freed themselves from the propulsion of the nineteenth century and responded to the first insistent tugs of the twentieth.

In painting, impressionism fell into public domain after its last group show in 1886. While Gauguin and Van Gogh, working together in Arles, were finding two different paths leading away from the literal vision of impressionism, Signac, Redon, and Seurat founded the "Société des Artistes Indépendants." Membership was open to all; its annual salon had no jury. The Société marks one of the crucial dates in the formation of modern Western art, for, more than those of the impressionist group, its growing exhibitions gave space to every new tendency in painting. The first show came in 1884, a reasonable public success, but rocked by internal upheavals. ^* Reorganized the same year, the group tried to hold another show in December "for the benefit of cholera victims." This event was totally snowed out. Thus the second exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in August and September, 1886, was the real beginning. Two hundred paintings were hung in the Rue des Tuileries in a huge barracks of a building originally erected to house postal and telegraph offices. Two of the canvases have become landmarks in modern painting: Seurat Un dimanche d'été à la Grande Jatte and Rousseau Un soir de carnaval.

Only two years before Hugo's death, music had lost its own last genius-artist of romanticism. Although Wagner's popularity swelled until 1900 at least, his death in 1883 finally made possible the liberation of French music from German domination. The best works of Chabrier and Fauré followed almost immediately, as if these composers needed no other inducement to find themselves. Debussy and Ravel were only a few years

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Apparently the treasury was mercilessly raided by idle members wanting fishing rods; the Seine flowed temptingly nearby. Nonangler members demanded to see the accounts, and the cashier had to defend himself by producing a revolver. "Members of the Organizing Committee had fist fights in the exhibition rooms during the day and waylaid one another at night on street corners, and then went to denounce each other at local police stations." ( R. Rey in Histoire de l'art contemporain, ed. Huyghe)

behind. In literature, the very different writings of Verlaine and Huysmans, Laforgue and Rimbaud, and, above all, Mallarmé converged in an area of endeavor that earned its name in 1886. Symbolism meant everything from intense verbal lyricism to spiritual defiance. In all the arts, 1885 is the point from which we must reckon the meaning of the word "modern."

The forces that thus began to give a new impetus to the arts hover just below the exuberant surface of la belle époque. These less-known aspects of its life still partake of the theatrical posturing without which no action seemed possible or meaningful. They distinguish themselves from superficial events by both their destructiveness and their sense of purpose. One must probe behind the quirks of Madame Aubernon's salon and General Boulanger's romantic failure in politics in order to find what supported that gaudy façade. Only a few people had an inkling of what was happening. Beneath the careening of the Banquet Years, something pulled hard and long to establish the direction the new century would travel.

The most turbulent force of all is almost forgotten. Anarchism had been seething for many years in the south, principally in the industrial city of Lyon. Its way was prepared by the surge of antimilitarism after the war of 1871 and by the fresh memory of the Commune. Traveling inexorably northward, the libertarian movement finally shook Paris in a series of bomb explosions and controversial trials.

Anarchists come from the most varied backgrounds. But a specific mentality links them--the spirit of revolt and its derivatives, the spirit of examination and criticism, of opposition and innovation, which leads to scorn and hate of every commitment and hierarchy in society, and ends up in the exaggeration of individualism. Decadent literature furnished the party with a strong contingent; in recent years there has been, especially among young writers, an upsurge of anarchism. ( Maurice Boisson, Les attentats anarchistes)

First Ravachol, with five murders behind him, blew up the homes of several magistrates in 1892. He was caught in a restaurant, brought to trial, and let off with penal servitude for life. Then another jury, intimidated by public outcry, reversed the decision and sent him to the guillotine. The end of the same year Vaillant, of illegitimate birth and hysterical disposition, tossed a weak bomb full of nails into the Chamber of Deputies from the visitors' gallery. None of the deputies was killed, and Vaillant, pleading in his defense that the bomb was intended only as a "warning," quoted Darwin, Spencer, Ibsen, and Octave Mirbeau in support of his doctrine. After his execution, he was widely acclaimed as a martyr. At a literary banquet the evening of Vaillant's bombing, the polemical critic Laurent Tailhade was interviewed about the violence in the Chamber. "What do a few human lives matter," he replied, "if the deed is outstanding." Two years later he lost an eye when a bomb exploded in the restaurant where he was eating, and the next morning's papers chastised him with his own Nietzschean sentiments. Yet his sympathies were shared by many.

A few weeks after Vaillant's death, a young intellectual of good family named Emile Henry exploded a bomb in the Café Terminus in the Gare Saint-Lazare. He had to be saved by the police from being lynched on the spot. The trial brought out the full challenge of anarchist convictions. Judge (in red robe): "Your hands are stained with blood." Henry: "Like the robes you wear, Your Honor." His coolness on the stand allowed him to discuss the precise chemical composition of his bomb and regret that it had not taken the lives of more victims. He died bravely under the knife crying, "Vive l'anarchie," and it was discovered that he had spent his last days in prison reading Don Quixote.

In the summer of 1894 began the mass trial of thirty ill-assorted men accused of anarchist leanings and treasonable acts. Among them was the prominent literary figure Félix Fénéon, an early champion of the impressionists. The prosecution could not produce significant evidence, and Fénéon in his response to cross-examination was concise to the point of parody. ^* The climax of the trial came when the government attorney unwisely opened in the courtroom a package which had been sent to him containing, not explosives, but de la matière fécal. He asked for a recess to wash his hands. Fénéon's voice rose over the assembly: "Never since Pontius Pilate has a magistrate washed his hands with such ostentation." The trial led to no convictions.

During the years preceding 1894 the anarchists had gained wide amateur support. Several literary reviews and daily papers defended the "brave gestures." There were strange chapters in the history of the movement, like the story of the prefect of police in Paris who anonymously founded and subsidized an anarchist magazine in order to have a reliable source of information. During a raid on the Bal des Quat'z'Arts for immodest attire, the police killed an innocent bystander. The students, fired with anarchist ideas, resisted this invasion of their rights. For several days the full Paris police force kept the Latin Quarter in a state of siege while the issue almost came to a vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies.

Acting on their ideas, the anarchist "martyrs" inspired artists to demonstrate as boldly.

And so they had been doing since the eighties in the new setting of the literary cabaret. The organized yet authentic Bohemia of the Chat Noir, the most famous of the cabarets, was a salon stood on its head. Its origins go back to a group of young Latin Quarter poets, chansonniers, and painters, calling themselves the Hydropathes, who had begun meeting regularly in the seventies to recite, sing, and issue a magazine. Among them were the sardonic poet Charles Cros, close friend of Rimbaud and Verlaine and legitimate inventor of a pre-Edison phonograph, and Alphonse Allais, chief tumiste (perpetrator of tall tales and hoaxes) and short-story writer, with the mixed talents of Poe and Mark Twain. In 1881 an unsuccessful painter named Rodolphe Salis had the idea of opening a cabaret with its own weekly paper and literary evenings. Serving both as chief performers and dependable clientele, the entire Hydropathe group let itself be lured across the Seine to Salis' Chat Noir on the slopes of Montmartre. Within a few months the establishment was turning away customers attracted by wild stories and farcical publicity. The Chat Noir claimed to have been founded under Julius Caesar and displayed on its cobwebbed walls "cups used by Charlemagne, Villon and Rabelais." The surly waiters wore the formal garb of the Académie française, and Salis insulted each customer as he entered. No one had tried such a "democratic" enterprise before, and the snobs loved it. A few years later Aristide Bruant opened his famous Le Mirliton, where he served as rudest of hosts and perambulating singer, probably the best of the era. A dozen more such establishments flourished until the turn of the century.

By 1885, in an operation twice delayed by the elaborate maneuvers of Hugo's funeral, the rowdy crowd of the Chat Noir burst out of its old quarters and paraded in costume through the streets with a mounted escort to occupy an entire building in the Rue Victor-Massé. The inaugural banquet and festivities included among the guests (for once the account in the Chat Noir paper told the truth) Léo Delibes, Maupassant, Jules Lemaître, Huysmans, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Waldeck-Rousseau and eleven other deputies, two Paris mayors, and three respected septuagenarians: Renan, Bouguereau, the academic painter, and Théodore de Banville, the Parnassian poet. The weekly paper thrived, publishing poems by Verlaine and Mallarmé, humorous chroniques by everyone, and cartoons by Forain, Steinlen, Caran d'Ache, and Willette. The chansionner-dramatist Maurice Donnay had the dizziest success of all: ten plays and twenty years after his debut at the Chat Noir, he was elected to the Académie française--the real one--and was not out of place. The most original undertaking on the three-story premises was the Théâtre d'Ombres, which developed the crude technique of shadow plays into a convincing art form ten years before the advent of films. This menagerie of writers turned performers of their own work kept Paris entranced for a decade; their brand of sentimental humor both mocked and exploited the era.

The atmosphere of permanent explosion in artistic activity is evidence not only of anarchistic tendencies but also of the fierceness of its experiments. New reviews appeared, principally La Vogue (founded in 1886; in a brief life of nine months it reached the staggering circulation of 15,000 and published major texts by Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and Laforgue), the long-lived Mercure de France ( 1890), with its monthly banquets and weekly editorial receptions, and the Natanson brothers' Revue Blanche ( 1891). The Salon des Indépendants outgrew one building after another with more and more work from young painters, while ethnological museums were being filled with astounding art from Africa, the Pacific, and Egypt. The new Schola Cantorum brought back old church modes, and composers began to collect the ancient songs of France. Modernism coincided in significant fashion with primitivism. Gauguin's "flight" to Tahiti in 1891 may not have produced his best work but it reveals the integrity of his desire for another vision. Anarchism itself can be seen as a form of political primitivism trying to return to an earlier stage of social evolution. What one can overlook most easily in all this demonstration is its stubborn purpose to change the aspect of both life and art. There was a connection and a difference between the irrepressible frivolity of the upper classes and the resolute gaiety of young artists.

Deep down at its center of gravity, however, the century turned slowly despite all this ferment. It changed its pace for no man. Artists who strained forward into the future found that their fresh trail was rarely being followed in a prosperous and complacent France. In response they did what was only natural: they banded together for support. They constituted what we have come to call the avant-garde, ^* a "tradition" of heterodoxy and opposition which defied civilized values in the name of individual consciousness. They developed a systematic technique of scandal in order to keep their ideas before the public. It amounted to an artistic underground, which began to break through to the surface in the latter part of the Banquet Years.

The avant-garde was not radically new, for it grew out of the nonconformist tendencies of the romantic movement. The lucid frenzy of Gérard de Nerval and the sentimental Bohemia of Murger crystallized into a determined group of artists who maintained a belligerent attitude toward the world and a genuine sympathy for each other. The Chat Noir was no ivory tower; it was, in fact, closer to the gutter, with Villon as its patron saint.

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First used in journalistic writing in the expression "les artistes de l'avantgarde," the term gradually outgrew the millitary metaphor and achieved independent existence during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Unquestionably the polemics of the Dreyfus case, with its military associations and political crusading, promoted the new usage.

Arbitrarily one can establish the origin of the avant-garde in 1863, when Napoleon III consented to a Salon des Refusés. Artists rejected by the official exhibit were able to protest loud enough to gain recognition as a group and a separate showing. Unfortunately, both Emperor and Empress were offended by Manet Le déjeuner sur l'herbe; the exhibit was not repeated. By 1885 there was a crying need for fresh outlets of expression, a need met in part by the new literary reviews, the Salon des Indipendants, and influential private gatherings of artists such as Mallarmélundis ( 1884) and Edmond de Goncourtgrenier (1885). Even more important, café and cabaret provided the artist with social independence and produced their own variety of conversational wit and brilliance. The cultured public, no longer dominated by the salon, gradually came to realize that there existed a small group of people thinking and living and creating beyond the pale of ordinary behavior. Today the persevering remnants of the avant-garde are generally scoffed at, often exploited, and occasionally glorified beyond all measure. Modernism wrote into its scripture a major text, which demands, at least in retrospect, our gratitude: the avant-garde we have with us always.

Like everyone else, they had their own banquets. These untrammeled gatherings tended to gain momentum toward wild farce or orgy. The Lapin Agile (also known as the Lapin à Gill or Là peint A. Gill), the Montmartre cabaret that succeeded the Chat Noir around the turn of the century, housed many celebrations, which always included Frédé, the bushy-bearded proprietor, and his unhousebroken donkey, Lolo. A group of young artists, inspired by the author Dorgelès, there concocted the celebrated hoax of a canvas brushed entirely by Lolo's twitching tail. The resulting work, distinctly "impressionist" in style, was hung at the Salon des Indépendants with the title "And the Sun Went Down over the Adriatic." Dorgelès signed it "Joachim Raphael Boronali," and the painting was praised by a respectable number of critics on their marathon tour of the show.

The rival reviews the Mercure de France and the Revue Blanche joined forces in 1893 to organize a dinner for the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren. It soon became apparent that Verhaeren would not be able to attend, but no one was dismayed; once under way, such a banquet had a life of its own. An upper room in the Vachette Café on the Left Bank held the guests, who, before entering, had to make their way through a street demonstration against Oscar Wilde's prison sentence and sign a petition of protest. It was carnival time, and women were speedily found for all males who had come alone. Drinking ran heavy, and after speeches of tribute to the absent guest of honor, a letter from the ailing Verlaine was read by a handsome painter. His embroidered silk vest and rich voice so attracted the ladies' admiration that he soon found himself engaged in a scuffle with several jealous males. Thereupon the whole company moved off to Bullier's, a disreputable Latin Quarter dance hall for students and streetwalkers, and spent the rest of the night with the cancan girls. It was, obviously, always carnival time for many of the guests.

The larger the banquet, the better occasion it provided to demonstrate one's exuberance. At a three-hundred-plate affair in the Palais d'Orléans to celebrate the erection of a monument to Verlaine after his death, the dignified critic Charles Morice was chosen to give the major speech. The younger generation rapidly decided he was too conservative to do justice to the former Prince of Poets, and, after some preliminary whistling and heckling from the back, china and glassware began to fly. The bombardment succeeded in breaking up the banquet, and the ladies present had difficulty escaping the brawl that followed.

By 1900, then, Old World gaiety had taken on an aspect of methodical demonstration. Montmartre and the Latin Quarter do not merely provide a colorful background for these years. Their cabarets and cafés represented a new aesthetic. The banquet called for gaiety and scorn of convention, and also for an assimilation of popular art forms and a full aliveness to the present moment. This was the setting for a great rejuvenation of the arts. The Chat Noir and the Lapin Agile fostered a group of artists who ventured far into the realm of pure buffoonery without abandoning their loyalty to artistic creation. A similar pursuit of newness for its own sake was taking place in England with the Yellow Book and the Savoy. But Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm found no surroundings in London to equal a Paris café.

The frenetic gaiety of the bistro had its reverse side. Some of the most high-spirited artists lived in poverty and at times frightful physical hardship. The way they bore their lots demonstrates the dedication of their lives. The long antic of the Banquet Years was not a matter of mere frivolity, for in many cases the demonstrations arose out of basic earnestness. Referring to what underlay the extravagance of his Chat Noir days, the Catholic revolutionary Léon Bloy wrote: "I brought with me, along with my religious preconceptions, a raging hunger for the Absolute, and an overpowering need for the trigonometric spirit in criticism, and even in the simple version of external reality." Bohemian surroundings could produce both a "Pilgrim of the Absolute" like Bloy, and a familiar macabre humorist like Alphonse Allais.

It has been said of men like Degas and Lautrec that they lived in the decade before it became necessary for the artist to be a part of the absurdity he described. The statement applies to most impressionists and symbolists. Mallarmé may have envisioned a "shipwrecked" universe, but his outward life moved on an even keel. The Banquet Years brought on stage a set of artists whose waggishness was not intended to serve as an interlude of comic relief. Their lives matched their art in a fashion that does not even now seem natural. Their "act," an intensification of the exuberant play acting of la belle époque, generated the energy necessary to change the direction of things. There had been something of this deliberate creation of a way of life in the "frenetic" romanticism of Pétrus Borel, in Théophile Gautier's and Baudelaire's pose of the dandy, and in Rimbaud's short-lived dérèglement. Now figures as heterogeneous as Max Jacob and Picasso and Modigliani worked in concert as if the world around them were the gala start of a voyage of discovery. They made fools of themselves and broached the limits of art. It is doubtful that they could have done so by clinging to their sanity. Their enthusiasm survived the catastrophe of World War I, but only in that severely modified form that we know as the twenties.

The climax of it all--for a climax was still to come after so long a period of stimulation--shook the world far beyond the limits of Paris. The year was 1913. Vorticism, the English version of cubism and simultanism, broke out in London; D. H. Lawrence published Sons and Lovers, and, after eight years of fruitless attempts to place it, Joyce sent the manuscript of Dubliners to the man who would publish it the following year. The Armory Show scandal aroused New York. Italian futurism tried to annex painting by issuing a new manifesto. In Paris, everything was happening at once. Picasso and Braque had carried cubism, then five years old, into its second stage of growth, which influenced even the reluctant Matisse; Apollinaire, looking on, contributed the forthright declarations of Les peintres cubistes. He was also sitting for a portrait by Chirico and working with Delaunay toward simultanism-orphism. Jacques Copeau founded the Vieux Colombier theater and launched Dullin and Jouvet on their careers in productions of Molière and Claudel. Diaghilev invaded the world of music. Having staged Debussy L'après-midi d'un faune and Ravel Daphnis et Chloé in 1912, he went on to give Paris the uproarious première of Stravinsky Sacre du printemps with Nijinsky's inept choreography. Only lately brought out of retirement, Satie was composing again. Annus mirabilis of French literature, 1913 brought down a cloudburst of books: Proust Du côté de chez Swann, Alain-Fournier Le grand Meaulnes, Apollinaire Alcools, Roger Martin du Gard lean Barois, Valery Larbaud A. O. Barnabooth, Péguy's L'argent, Barrès' La colline inspirée, Colette L'entrave and L'envers du music-hall. The Prix Goncourt went to an obscure novel by Marc Elder. Valéry began writing poetry again after a fifteen-year silence, and Gide finished his first and only "novel," Les faux-monnayeurs. It is almost as if the war had to come in order to put an end to an extravaganza that could not have sustained itself at this level.

In its early demonstrations the avant-garde remained a true community, loyal to itself and to its time. To a greater extent than at any time since the Renaissance, painters, writers, and musicians lived and worked together and tried their hands at each other's arts in an atmosphere of perpetual collaboration. It was their task to contain and transform the teeming excitement, the corruption, and idealism of this stage-struck era. In their enthusiasm, the Banquet Years often sinned through excess-through lack of discrimination and mere bluster. Because of their desire to outrage the public by making innovations in life as well as art, the creative figures often went astray and lost touch with human values. But their vices lie so close to their virtues that they cannot be separated without careful scrutiny. Their feast was not the last celebration of a dying aristocracy but a lusty banquet of the arts.