Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas's Masterpiece Page 11

  When I was a child, in Dijon, I took classical dance, like most little girls. I went twice a week with my sister Dominique to a highly regarded dance school near the theater. The teacher was a big, imposing man who ran his world with a stick, literally — he corrected our position with the help of a switch that never left his hand. He frightened us, threatened us with the most horrible future if we didn’t listen to him. I was seven or eight years old, my sister was ten. He was convinced that we had great talent. Dominique had flexibility, I had grace, he would tell my mother or my grandmother when they accompanied us to our lessons. “Together, the two of you could be a prima ballerina,” my grandfather joked. But the big man was not joking. He was convinced that if the two of us worked like dervishes, we could get a place as little rats in the Paris Opera. In the footsteps of Pauline and Virginie, who were storybook heroines under the French Third Republic, would come Dominique and Laurence (me), future stars in the firmament of ballet idols. We had the potential, and it was only left to us to make the required effort, by taking additional courses, by rehearsing at home, by walking with a dictionary on our heads. He would tell us when he thought we were ready, and he would take us personally to the entrance exam. The Paris Opera!!! I think this prospect did not really fulfill my sister’s dreams, but it did mine. I had seen the outside of the Palais Garnier on my first trip to Paris with my mother the summer before, we had walked past its imposing facade. I had tripped up and down the grand staircase en pointe, my arms rounded, before going to the Musée Grévin to look at the wax figures. The building impressed me. I pestered my mother every morning to make my hair into the tight, round bun that is the mark of a ballerina. To show my friends and the world at large (the passersby in Dijon) how well I danced, I wore my ballet slippers into the street and made arabesques on the sidewalk in front of my house. I listened to Swan Lake on repeat. All my dolls had tutus and a rhinestone hairband.

  One day when my sister was taking a shower, my mother noticed the red welts on her thighs. “What’s that?” she asked. It was where the teacher had smacked my sister across the legs with his switch during dance class: “Fourth position! I said fourth!” My mother didn’t know what to do. On the one hand she felt respect for the work of the artist and a sense that discipline was necessary, but the physical violence made her uneasy. In the end, she decided to consult my father. My sister hiked up her skirt to show him her welts. “What sort of pervert is he?” said my father. “Under no circumstance will my girls return to him, it’s finished. He should be glad I’m not filing a lawsuit.” And that was it. My mother didn’t try to find us another dance class, or the only available ones were too far away and would have required us to go by car. I don’t remember if I pleaded with my parents. I must have decided to go along with the family decision: my sister and I had a real protector, not at all like yours, Marie, and we had parents who loved us, even if they didn’t understand anything. At my grandmother’s house, where the windows gave onto the theater, I made up for it by watching rehearsals through the curtains whenever a ballet was to be performed.

  After my dance studies came to an abrupt end, I continued for a time to do my exercises. I would put on my demi-pointe shoes and practice my positions holding on to the bedstead. When no one else was in the apartment, I would cross the living room back and forth on tiptoe with a dictionary balanced on my head — a volume of the illustrated Larousse, not always the same one, which I borrowed from my parents’ glassed-in bookcase. Then one day, I felt I’d had enough of prancing toward a dead future. I took the dictionary off my head, sat down, laid it across my knees, and cracked it open. Another life opened to me then, which I am still living.

  Time has passed, and I still love dance. But I didn’t pass that love on. At the age when you, Marie, were a little rat and I was dreaming of becoming one, my daughter was entirely obsessed with soccer. The one time in grammar school when she had to dance for a year-end assembly, she refused to put her hair in a bun, sent the tutu packing, and danced the entire ballet in overalls, chin held high, with that little air of independence you would have liked, Marie. The audience reacted with consternation: such insolence in so small a girl. It’s just that things are not the same for little girls, the age of happiness has moved to other playing fields. I still like dance, especially modern dance; the magic of tutus and pointe shoes has faded, but not the magic of bodies in motion. I subscribe, as Degas did, to dance performances, not returning thirty nights in a row as he was known to do, but still sometimes revisiting a program four or five times. I like to be in front, as close as possible to the stage, so that I can see the dancers’ faces, male and female, their glistening bodies, their tremulousness. Dance often makes me cry, I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the art that tells me most clearly that I’m going to die. Maybe it’s the art that tells me most clearly that I’m alive. Or it may just be that it allows me to “dance on my grief.”1

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I STARTED THINKING ABOUT WRITING THIS STORY, playing with the material as writers do, I originally thought I would address the little dancer directly, make this text a long letter to her. I tried writing her using the familiar tu, as though she were my own daughter or someone in my family. But it didn’t work. There was something artificial and pretentious about it, the familiarity seeming almost sacrilegious. Now that I’m at the end of my tale, it no longer seems so wrong, as though the text and the archival research have woven a link between us and for a moment made this pas de deux possible.

  I felt little sympathy toward Degas when I started this work. It wasn’t my ambition, as Zola said about Manet, to re-create “in living actuality, a man with all his limbs, all his nerves and all his heart, all his dreams and all his flesh,”2 but rather to form a sort of intuition about Degas that would allow me to draw close to him, and thus to you, Marie. He was solitary, intransigent, sarcastic, and rarely tender. I learned to know and love him as he was, or as I sense him to have been, even if I blame him for having apparently dropped you from his acquaintance. “I would like to be celebrated and unknown,” he said.3 No doubt it applied to you too, Marie. But on the surface, this is not the case: he is famous, and you are unknown. In reality, the two of you are joined for all eternity (I know, he didn’t like the word, nor the idea); let’s say, then, that the two of you are at the same time dead and eternal. You will always be fourteen years old, always three feet tall, like a three-year-old. As I finish telling your story, I find myself remembering that other statuette where your face is recognizable. You wear a little hat, a jacket with a shawl collar, and a long skirt. You’re holding a pile of books, and you’re very chic. The Schoolgirl is the title. I imagine you posing for Degas for hours in these borrowed clothes, carrying books you will never read. What books were they? Dickens, Rousseau, Cervantes — the painter’s favorite authors, grabbed at random for you to hold? You look as though you’re walking calmly through the streets, on your way to school. This is the image of you that I want to keep. But there’s another, possibly more in tune with the strange grief I feel in leaving you. It’s from a work you may have modeled for, but which has never been found, a work described in a letter by Jacques-Émile Blanche, in June 1882, after a visit to Degas’s studio. He saw, he writes, a new sculpture by Degas, a funerary monument perhaps prompted by the death of a niece: “A little girl half-lying in her coffin is eating some fruit; beside it is a bench on which the child’s family can sit and mourn (for it’s a tomb).”4 I am sitting on that bench, Marie. I’m writing you from there.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I OWE A LARGE DEBT OF GRATITUDE to Martine Kahane and Henri Loyrette, noted experts on Degas’s work, for the kindness they showed me during our interviews and the invaluable information they gave me on the Little Dancer.

  I would also like to thank Claude Perez and Jean-Raymond Fanlo, professors at the University of Aix–Marseille, and Philippe Forest, a writer and a professor at the University of Nantes, for their generous advice during the w
riting of my doctoral thesis, “Practice and Theory in Artistic and Literary Creation,” of which the present work is an offshoot.

  Finally, a thousand thanks to my editor, Alice Andigné, for her attentiveness, enthusiasm, and erudition.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION (PP. 1–10)

  1. Thomas Schlesser and Bertrand Tillier, Le Roman vrai de l’impressionisme (Paris: Beaux-Arts Éditions, 2010), 69.

  2. Richard Kendall, Degas and the Little Dancer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 45.

  3. Jules Claretie, Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains, vol. 2 (Paris, 1883), quoted in Henri Loyrette, Degas (Paris: Fayard, 1990), 393.

  4. Nina de Villard, “Exposition des artistes indépendants,” Le courier du soir, April 23, 1881. Reprinted in Ruth Berson, The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1996), 370–371.

  5. Joris-Karl Huysmans, “L’exposition des indépendants en 1881,” in Écrits sur l’art: L’Art moderne; Certains; Trois primitifs (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 200.

  6. Ibid., 200, 203.

  7. Ibid., 200.

  8. Paul Mantz, “Exposition des œuvres des artistes indépendants,” Le Temps, April 23, 1881. Reprinted in Berson, The New Painting, vol. 1, 356–359.

  9. Edgar Degas, letter to Louis Braquaval, quoted in Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., Degas (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988).

  10. Daniel Halévy, Degas parle (Paris: Éditions Bernard de Fallois, 1995), 142.

  11. Edgar Degas, Je veux regarder par le trou de la serrure (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2012), 64.

  ONE (PP. 11–71)

  1. Edgar Degas, letter to Albert Hecht, Lettres (Paris: Grasset, 2011), 64.

  2. According to Paul Valéry, Degas was instructed by his master, Ingres, to work “always from memory.” See Paul Valéry, Degas Dance Drawing, in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Bollingen Series 15, vol. 12, Degas Manet Morisot, tr. David Paul (New York: Pantheon, 1960), 35.

  3. Ambroise Vollard, Degas (Paris: Éditions Crès, 1924).

  4. Jacques-Émile Blanche, Propos de peintre: De David à Degas (Paris: Éditions Émile-Paul Frères, 1927), 306.

  5. François Thiébault-Sisson, “Degas sculpteur raconté par lui-même, 1897,” Le Temps, No. 2553, August 11, 1931. Largely reprinted in Barbour et al., Degas Sculpteur (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 85–87.

  6. Ambroise Vollard, Souvenirs d’un marchand de tableaux, in Barbour et al., Degas Sculpteur, 42.

  7. Jules Claretie, “Le mouvement parisien. L’exposition des impressionistes,” L’Indépendance belge, April 15, 1877.

  8. Théophile Gautier, “Le rat,” in Peau de tigre (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1866).

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ludovic Halévy, Les Petites Cardinal (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1880), quoted in Martine Kahane, “Enquête sur la Petite Danseuse de quatorze ans de Degas,” Revue du musée d’Orsay 7 (Fall 1998), 55.

  11. Kahane, “Enquête,” 57.

  12. Honoré de Balzac, Les Comédiens sans le savoir, in La Comédie humaine, vol. 7 (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1983), 1157–1158.

  13. Gautier, “Le rat.”

  14. Ibid.

  15. Nestor Roqueplan, Nouvelles à la main (Paris: Lacombe, 1840).

  16. Edgar Degas, quoted in Marie-Josée Parent, “La Petite Danseuse de quatorze ans: une analyse de la version subversive de l’œuvre” (master’s thesis, University of Montreal, 2009), 89.

  17. Daniel Halévy, Degas parle (Paris: Éditions Bernard de Fallois, 1995), 45.

  18. Balzac, Les Comédiens, 1160.

  19. Valéry, Degas Dance Drawing, 18.

  20. Balzac, Les Comédiens, 1161.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Julien Gracq, En lisant, en écrivant (Paris: Corti, 2015), 78.

  23. Alain Corbin, Le Temps, le Désir et l’Horreur (Paris: Aubier, 1991), 164.

  24. Émile Zola, Nana, in Les Rougon-Macquart, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1989), 1470.

  25. Joris-Karl Huysmans, “L’exposition des indépendants en 1881,” in Écrits sur l’art: L’Art moderne; Certains; Trois primitifs (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 252.

  26. Edgar Degas, “Danseuse,” Sonnets, quoted in Edgar Degas, Je veux regarder par le trou de la serrure (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2012), 77.

  27. Henri de Régnier, Vestigia flammae, “Médaillons de peintres,” in Degas, Je veux regarder.

  28. Valéry, Degas Dance Drawing, 54.

  29. Ibid., 39.

  30. Jacques-Émile Blanche, Propos de peintre: De David à Degas (Paris: Éditions Émile-Paul Frères, 1927), 298.

  31. Charles Ephrussi, quoted in Henri Loyrette, Degas (Paris: Fayard, 1990), 393.

  32. Paul Mantz, “Exposition des œuvres des artistes indépendants,” Le Temps, April 23, 1881. Reprinted in Berson, The New Painting, vol. 1, 356–359.

  33. Huysmans, Écrits sur l’art, 199.

  34. Daniel Halévy, Degas parle, 38.

  35. Ibid., 220.

  36. C. Lombroso and G. Ferrero, La Femme criminelle et la Prostituée (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1991), quoted in Parent, “La Petite Danseuse,“ 88.

  37. Mantz, “Exposition des œuvres.”

  38. Douglas Druick, “La petite danseuse et les criminels: Degas moraliste?” in Musée d’Orsay, Degas inédit (Paris: La Documentation française, 1989).

  39. Richard O’Monroy, Madame Manchaballe (Paris: Lévy, 1892), quoted in Kahane, “Enquête sur la Petite Danseuse.“

  40. Blanche, Propos de peintre, 290.

  41. Edgar Degas, Carnets, in Degas, Je veux regarder, 43.

  42. Paul Cézanne, letter to Émile Bernard, October 23, 1905.

  43. Huysmans, Écrits sur l’art, 200.

  44. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, tr. Lee Fahnestock (New York: Signet Classics, 2013), 382.

  45. George Moore, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Magazine of Art 12 (1890), 416–425.

  46. Kendall, Degas and the Little Dancer, 48.

  47. Ibid., 63.

  48. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Écrits sur l’art: L’Art moderne; Certains; Trois primitifs (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 200.

  49. Ibid., 126.

  50. Werner Hoffmann, Degas (Paris: Hazan, 2007), 187.

  51. Nina de Villard, “Exposition des artistes indépendants.”

  52. Paul Mantz, quoted in Loyrette, Degas, 403.

  53. Blanche, Propos de peintre, 299.

  54. Huysmans, Écrits sur l’art, 252.

  55. Ibid., 255.

  56. Valéry, Degas Dance Drawing, 33.

  57. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, L’Amour avec mon pinceau (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2009).

  58. Henri Loyrette, Degas (Paris: Fayard, 1990), 405.

  59. Daniel Halévy, Degas parle, 226.

  60. Émile Zola, Lettres de Paris, Le salon de 1876. Reprinted in Berson, The New Painting, vol. 1. Available online at cahiers-naturalistes.com.

  61. René Huyghes, quoted in Anne Pingeot and Franck Horvat, Degas: Sculptures (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1991), 21.

  62. Mantz, “Exposition des œuvres.”

  63. Daniel Halévy, Degas parle, 258.

  64. Ibid., 262–263.

  65. Ibid., 263.

  66. Ibid., 244.

  67. Émile Zola, L’Évènement, May 11, 1866, and online at cahiers-naturalistes.com.

  TWO (PP. 73–105)

  1. Edgar Degas, letter to Henri Rouart, December 5, 1872, Lettres (Paris: Grasset, 2011), 27.

  2. Quoted in Anne Pingeot and Franck Horvat, Degas: Sculptures (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1991), 13.

  3. Edgar Degas, Je veux regarder par le trou de la serrure (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2012), 90.

  4. Paul Valéry, Degas Dance Drawing, in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Bollingen Series 15, vol. 12, Degas Manet Morisot, tr. David Paul (New York: Pantheon, 1960), 7.

  5. Degas, Je veux regarder, 90.

  6. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Écrits sur l’art: L’Art moderne; Certains; Trois primitifs
(Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 245.

  7. Degas, letter to Évariste de Valernes, October 26, 1890, quoted in Degas, Je veux regarder, 108.

  8. Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., Degas (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988), 369.

  9. February 13, 1874.

  10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’Invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).

  11. François Thiébault-Sisson, “Degas sculpteur raconté par lui-même, 1897,” Le Temps, No. 2553, August 11, 1931. Largely reprinted in Barbour et al., Degas Sculpteur (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 85–87.