The War Bans the Bizarre

Even during the war, the upper echelons of French society, with whom Arthur had always passed his time, still dedicated much of theirs to leisure. The nobility was no different from other classes in being made up of various elements — including from intermarriage with the grande bourgeoisie —and was neither an assimilated nor a homogenous group. Yet while no longer retaining much power, they nonetheless retained much of their old sense of exclusiveness and still enjoyed great status. Conferring prestige and receiving deference from those around them, they confirmed the existence of a social hierarchy at whose apex they had remained.

Arthur was a haut bourgeois imbued with the idea that work was commendable. However, with no need of money, and having transformed his work ethic into an almost existential need for experience, he was also one of the few from the upper classes unconventional enough to live with his mistress. In addition, he was sufficiently forward thinking that he found subservience in a lover ultimately unrewarding. Gabrielle was compellingly unsubservient. And despite her lack of education (perhaps “cultivation” is a better word, as there were so few women in this period who had much of a formal education to speak of), her outstanding natural intelligence was clearly a match for Arthur’s. Gabrielle was the only woman he had ever met who appeared to be his equal. And yet, however strong his love and admiration for her, these feelings had done little to curb his prodigious appetite for women.

In the first flush of their affair, Arthur’s need for conquest was temporarily held in check, but it wasn’t long before his compulsion had asserted itself once again. As for Gabrielle, she apparently felt reassured in the belief that she was Arthur’s only real love. Saying she felt no jealousy, she even asked him who his other lovers might be. But Arthur’s tastes ranged wide, and he laughed and told Gabrielle that her knowing would only make his life more complicated than he had already made it.¹

In addition to these private “complications,” Gabrielle’s lover managed his fleet of ships and his now enormous coal interests and ceaselessly shuttled between the front, Paris and London. Yet whatever his work-related absences or the brief spells in other women’s arms, Arthur always returned to Gabrielle, his most significant companion.

By the beginning of 1916, when the war showed no sign of ending, Arthur’s experiences had stimulated his interest in a more political role. Accordingly, in March, he requested permission to resign his intelligence service commission in the hope of being taken on as a liaison officer instead. He had made it his business to become acquainted with both politicians and senior commanders in the French and British armies. Perhaps with a nudge from someone high up, the British War Office wrote to the commander in chief of the British army in France saying that Arthur wished “to go to Paris in order to carry out his ordinary business. It is probable that this… may involve his participation in French political affairs. In these circumstances it would be very inadvisable for him to retain his… commission and the status of a ‘British Officer on leave.’”² It appears that there were also more personal reasons for Arthur’s resignation of his commission. Working in such a stressful occupation near the battlefields of the front — and the death of his friend Hamilton-Grace, for which he held himself responsible — had reduced him to a state of emotional exhaustion. “His health broke down and he had to resign his inter-pretership in the field” was how a commentator would put it.³ Either Arthur himself, or a doctor, had recognized that in order to recover, he must take a job away from the front.

Arthur’s chaotic times and privileged background had made him a worldly skeptic who, until the war, had pretty much done what he wanted. He had, after all, described himself to Gabrielle as a cheerful pessimist whose dictum “One does not have to hope in order to undertake” had enabled him to sign up for active service without much conviction. Yet the appalling suffering and loss of life he had witnessed had not reduced Arthur to a state of bitterness and demoralization. Instead, his religious faith had provoked in him a renewed sense of hope. Ironically, this change was to set in motion a series of grievous results.

For the moment, however, Arthur did believe in a future, and in a utopian spirit away from the front, he set out to write a book. He often showed Gabrielle what he was writing.

By the end of that year, 1916, Gabrielle was becoming more self-reliant. Her business was so prosperous she chose to return all of the three hundred thousand francs Arthur had invested in her salon at Biarritz. And if his frequent absences were not only on war business, Gabrielle by no means languished at home. If her comment “I was my own master, and I depended on myself alone,” made later in conversation with Morand, was made with some defensiveness in relation to Arthur’s absences, it was also increasingly the case. There was no question of Gabrielle’s sincerity when she declared that Arthur “was well aware that he didn’t control me.” This, of course, was part of her attraction for him. And yet with regard to supporting her ventures, this was the point at which Arthur made that melancholy statement to Gabrielle referred to in the prologue to this book. Characterizing the problems men and women faced when trying to devise new ways of relating to one another, he said: “I thought I’d given you a plaything, I gave you your freedom.”⁴

The year 1916 saw the twin disasters of Verdun and the Somme. Verdun, the longest battle of the war, gained no advantage for either side and was responsible for more than half a million casualties. The Battle of the Somme was notorious for its first-day British casualties of 58,000, one third of whom lost their lives. One liaison officer, for whom the romance of war had long since disappeared, felt it was nothing more than “a dreary massacre, a stupefying alternation of boredom, fatigue and fear.”⁵ In February 1917, Jacques-Emile Blanche said to his friend the writer André Gide:

Huge portentous things are happening above our heads, through the branches of the trees in my garden which fall under Olivier’s axe, and will replace coal in the winter 1917–18. Boy [Arthur] Capel, our friend, the great coal importer, mobilized by England and France at St Dominique Street [the Ministry of Defense], the man our tomorrow depends on… said to Rose, “Have your cook come up, I will make her understand her duty. From next month onwards things will be very difficult. Stock up. Do without what is not absolutely necessary. Around June, it will be almost famine. As for next winter, even if peace is signed, you will have to stay in bed and suck your thumb.⁶

The effects of the Russian Revolution were now playing out their relentless course; on March 15, 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. In early April, to the great relief of the Allies, America at last entered the war, and on April 26, Lenin arrived in Russia to agitate more unrest. Then, with the second October revolution, Russia withdrew from the conflict. Meanwhile, the French commander in chief, Robert Nivelle, had argued for a massive onslaught on the German lines, which was to bring about a French victory in forty-eight hours. Many high — ranking officials disagreed, but the prime minister insisted.

The massive attack on the German positions was eventually supposed to link up with the Allied forces. From the beginning, the plan was dogged by delay and information leaks, and by the time the battle was launched, the Germans had had plenty of time to prepare their defenses. The offensive was an unmitigated disaster for the French, who suffered 187,000 casualties. On the western front, the slaughter was appalling. Thousands died every day, and the people of France were in a poor state of morale.

Arthur had been appointed to the new Allied War Coal Commission, but he was also unofficially liaising between the British and French politicians and the military. In addition, by the spring of 1917, when the Allied position had never been more in doubt, he published Reflections on Victory, in which he was confident of just that. To many, this looked misguided. While respecting the move toward democracy, Arthur abhorred the centralizing state. In its place he proposed a “Europe-wide Federation, giving full autonomy to every corporate body, region, people and race.” This federation could be seen as a forerunner to the present-day European Union and indeed was recognized as such by one of those later to become one of its architects.⁷

Reflections on Victory was reviewed in serious journals, and despite Arthur’s antifederal critics, the book broadened his reputation within the circles of power. Those who had known him only as a rich playboy-businessman — made even richer by the war — now looked at him with more discernment.

Few, however, shared Arthur’s optimism. The war had become a crushing burden, leaving many incapable of enthusiasm for anything. Even with the long-awaited arrival of the American troops in Paris, “the crowd, especially the women, were weary, every spark gone; wanting only the quickest possible end to this dreadful war.”⁸ The catastrophic failure of the Nivelle offensive proved the last straw for some, and French soldiers now mutinied, refusing any longer to go over the top to certain death. The mutinies weren’t quelled till the end of May, by the new commander in chief, Marshal Philippe Pétain.

While the slaughter continued at the front, in Paris in that May of 1917, the Ballets Russes gave the premiere of a new work, Parade, in aid of war victims. It was the only Ballets Russes work put on in Paris during the conflict and was by invitation only. Diaghilev’s carefully chosen audience consisted of a selection of society figures, prominent experimental musicians and artists, and a good number of the bourgeoisie, who he knew liked the frisson of dabbling in the avant-garde. Diaghilev also invited Gabrielle.

However much bolstering and covering up had been necessary during the growth of industrialism in France, prewar Belle Epoque society had muddled along, shoring up the old social structures and attitudes. The Belle Epoque had clung to its belief in the value of permanence and tradition, which in turn depended upon an overriding belief in the idea of authorities. For years before the war, a number of artists had reacted to this hypocrisy by searching for a language to express their sense of alienation from the modern world. Now, as the war dragged on, the initial belief of the population that a secure world would survive the hostilities was physically and metaphorically being smashed to smithereens. Diaghilev’s new ballet mirrored aspects of this instability, and was to strike yet one more blow at the certainties of the past.

The ballet was young Jean Cocteau’s brainchild, and he provided the scenario and libretto. Léonide Massine was choreographer; the ungovernable and cheerfully eccentric Eric Satie, initially distrustful of Diaghilev—“Will he try to screw me? Probably”⁹—was persuaded to write the music; and Picasso, already the most famous modernist painter, agreed to create the sets. These became a cubist cityscape with high-rise blocks of flats. But the most radical elements were two figures (a French and an American manager) costumed as larger than life-sized cubist sculptures.

While the audience’s response was nothing like that of the first night of The Rite of Spring, it was still one of shock, and the crowd became raucous in its disapproval. In part this was because, aware of what was going on at the front, the audience expected something soothing and patriotic. Instead what they got was an unconventional experiment. To many, it was an exercise in “banality and superficiality,”¹⁰ and some of the audience made their way toward the stage, yelling for the curtain to be lowered. A horse appeared wearing a cubist mask, cavorted about, then danced, knelt down and bowed. “The audience clearly thought the dancers were mocking their protests and completely lost their heads; they yelled, ‘Death to the Russians!’ ‘Picasso’s a Boche!’ ‘The Russians are Boches!’”¹¹

This was the first ballet ever to be set in the present. In addition, its witty and apparently lighthearted romp through popular culture — the circus; the music hall; the ephemera of everyday life, including fashion, advertising and the cinema — had never before been used as the subject matter for ballet. However, under the guise of frivolity, Parade ’s aim was in fact a serious one: an attack on the old authorities.¹² Those in the audience who were already embracing avant-garde fashion, popular music and a wider social range of people, believing they were just as worthwhile as the traditional elites and high culture of their parents, understood the ballet’s subversion and applauded.

Parade wasn’t a great ballet, but it was a seminal artistic work. As the first to push modernism to center stage, it made it part of mainstream artistic culture. Parade ’s creators were not only intent on dragging art down from its high-culture pedestal; they believed they had revealed the essential, simple artistic beauty of the mundane and the everyday.¹³

Once again, Gabrielle’s presence at an avant-garde event was appropriate: Cocteau’s ballet was at one with her own path. (Their friendship was almost inevitable.) Borrowing from workaday wardrobes and using modest materials, Gabrielle was the designer then showing that a democratization of fashion was possible. And while her daring hints at classlessness were at first taken up only by a wealthy clientele, as time went on, her simple designs and “modest” materials would be transferred from the salons to the streets. All over France, and abroad, women would be able to copy Gabrielle’s styles, allowing more of them than ever before to take part in the game of fashion.

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