Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas's Masterpiece Read online

  Degas might have met the sisters — or their mother — around the Paris neighborhood where they lived. During the twenty years from 1862, when they arrived in Paris, to 1882, when we mostly lose track of them, the Van Goethem family was registered at seven different addresses, always in the Ninth Arrondissement, near the place Pigalle. These successive moves likely reflect that they were skipping out on their rent after missing several payments in a row and finding the landlord increasingly insistent or else that they were trying to escape charges of prostitution. Degas also relocated several times while staying in the same general area — rue Blanche, rue Pigalle, rue Fontaine, rue Ballu, and boulevard de Clichy, where he lies buried today, in the Montmartre Cemetery. That part of Paris was also where the greater part of bohemia lived, alongside workers, shopkeepers, and employees — a stratum of society known in French as la blouse, for the loose-fitting smock its members often wore at work. Degas felt comfortable there, and often wore the smock himself, as did many painters, and was photographed in it. But he wasn’t poor, he didn’t live in a garret, and he didn’t lead the bohemian life immortalized in the opera by Puccini and the biopics about Modigliani. He was a well-off and somewhat conservative bourgeois who, at the start of the 1880s, occupied the fifth floor of a new apartment building and rented a handsome studio in the courtyard. His family took pride in belonging to the petty nobility, but he had altered his name from “de Gas” to the more plebeian “Degas,” which even became, in the phonetic rendering of the visitors’ register to the backstage of the Opera, “Degasse.” The replacement of the noble particle de by a vulgar prefix did not strike him as a loss of status. When the concierge at the Paris Opera, not knowing who was who, made fun of the top-hatted toffs who came to visit the young girls, he would have rhymed “Degasse” with radasse and pouffiasse, two slang words for women of low morals that were then gaining currency in bohemian Paris.

  Yet at the point when Antoinette van Goethem and then Marie began posing for him in the mid-1870s, Degas — despite his early fascination with dancers and singers, whom he went to see regularly, and despite his reputation as, in Manet’s words, “the painter of dancers” — had not yet received permission to wander freely in the backstage area of the new Paris Opera. The old Opera building on the rue Le Peletier had been destroyed by fire, the Palais Garnier had just been inaugurated, and the pass that would allow Degas free entry via the service door to attend rehearsals would only be granted him in 1885, in return for his buying a subscription for three shows a week. In 1882, requesting access to the rehearsal space to attend a dance examination, Degas wrote, “I’ve painted so many of these examinations without ever having seen one that I’m a little embarrassed.”1 He may have insisted that the main part of painting was performed “by memory,” but he still needed time in front of the subject2 and often hired models to pose for him at his studio, sessions that produced a profusion of sketches and studies.

  Until about 1880, he had essentially been a painter. But in the past few years, his eyesight had started to fail. Already in 1870, when he joined the infantry during the siege of Paris, he had noticed that he couldn’t see the target with his right eye. A long spell in a cold, damp attic had apparently damaged his eyesight irreversibly. He was barely forty years old, but already he was half blind. Highly sensitive to light, he was easily recognized around the capital by his blue-tinted eyeglasses. For a painter, this was a cruel fate. “Sculpture,” he explained to the gallerist Ambroise Vollard, “is a blind man’s trade.”3 From being a desire, it became a necessity. His hand would henceforth function as “an additional eye,”4 the sureness of his touch would make up for the growing inaccuracy of his vision. But Degas’s turn toward sculpture was not simply a response to circumstances. It also corresponded to his search for greater truthfulness: “I realized that for an exactness so perfect that it gives the sense of life, one has to resort to three dimensions.”5 Since his primary objective was — as in his paintings — to capture pure movement, wax became his preferred medium. He could model it easily and indefinitely, while marble or granite, materials destined “for eternity,” did not allow “the hand to approach the idea.”6 And wax was the substance that most closely imitated flesh.

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  MARIE VAN GOETHEM, the mother of Marie Geneviève, was a laundress, just as in a Zola novel — or rather, the reverse, since the author of L’Assommoir and Nana would admit to Degas that in certain passages he had “quite simply described” Degas’s paintings.7 Van Goethem mère led a hard life, slaving for pennies. The father, Antoine, was long gone, either dead or returned to Belgium. Life expectancy in the lower-class neighborhoods barely reached forty. Absinthe often cut lives short.

  Having three daughters was both a plague and a boon to someone without money. You could always sell them. Childhood was not a defined sociological category in the nineteenth century, nor did it benefit from legal protection, and children could be exploited to differing degrees. The first recourse was to set them to work at something perfectly legal. This Marie van Goethem did in pushing her daughters to join the Paris Opera. She no doubt negotiated a group contract: sets of sisters were quite common. This was not the same as a mother enrolling her daughters in a ballet class, or even getting them an audition to see if they had talent. Rather, it was a terse bargaining session, leading to an employment contract that the mother would sign with an unsteady scrawl or a cross. The Jules Ferry Laws of 1881 and 1882, which would make primary education free and publicly available and later compulsory for all children ages six to thirteen, had not yet been enacted. The Paris Opera, in any case, would be exempted from those laws, and primary school would only become mandatory for the young girls at the Opera in 1919. The writer Théophile Gautier wrote an incisive but little-known text on this subject, “Le rat” (The Rat). In it, he bemoaned the total ignorance of these “poor little girls” who barely knew how to read and who “would do better to write with their feet, which are more highly trained and more adept than their hands.”8 These deprived girls never received any formal schooling and were obliged to earn, if not their living, at least their board. The majority had never known their father and provided the main support for their families. Boys could rent out their arms to work in the mines or on the farm; girls rented out their legs, their bodies. The Paris Opera recruited “little rats” as young as six years old. These would later come to be called marcheuses, “walkers,” because they spent all their time performing steps, first in the dance class, then onstage, where they would make their first appearance at thirteen or fourteen — Marie would make her walk-on debut in La Korrigane, a ballet in two acts. Théophile Gautier was quick to make fun of the nickname “walkers,” which suggested the profession the adolescents would soon adopt on the city’s sidewalks. The beginners earned two francs per day, a very small sum, but still twice what a miner or a textile worker was paid. Parisians had not forgotten that only a few years earlier, during the winter of 1870, when the capital was under siege by the Prussians, two francs was the price of a rat, a real rat — a cat would cost eight francs, while the elephant and the camel slaughtered at the Jardin des Plantes cost several months’ salary, a luxury only the rich could afford.

  Opportunities for advancement at the Paris Opera, both social and economic, were real but also rare, and subject to biannual examinations that were both costly and difficult. For her performance before a jury, a dancer had to buy her tarlatan skirt, her silk ribbons, and the artificial flowers in her hair. Over the years, the more talented students rose through the ranks and received better pay; each public performance earned them a small bonus, which was added to their meager salary. If they passed the exam, they moved up from the dance school to the corps de ballet, then to the rank of featured dancer. Only at that point would they sign a firm contract, usually for fifteen years. Of the rats, only a minuscule number earned fame. Every mother dreamed of glory for her daughter, but most had more pragmatic goals. They were often widows or sing
le mothers from working-class backgrounds, and they bombarded the director of the Paris Opera with pathetic letters (dictated, of course), pleading for “protection” for their daughters — no one was in any doubt what sort of protection a man might offer a woman. An auxiliary source of income was therefore available to the little Opera rat, and the practice was tolerated if not explicitly endorsed. What would be denounced today as pedophilia, pimping, and the corruption of minors was at the time normal practice, when “the prevailing moral code was a total lack of moral code.”9 Besides, children reached sexual majority at the age of thirteen, according to an 1863 law — the age had previously been eleven. Backstage, procurement was the quasi-official function of a mother, who was expected to “present” her daughter to male admirers. The police shut their eyes to it, as did the Opera administration. Those who reserved seats in the orchestra or private boxes in the balconies, the “subscribers,” had the free run of the foyer, the backstage area, and the private drawing rooms, which became trysting sites. Others, less fortunate and unable to obtain the privilege, waited in the hallways, the vestibules, and at the exit. “I adore the dancers’ mothers,” said the librettist Ludovic Halévy. “One always learns something from them…They have entry into every world. During the daytime they are fruit sellers, seamstresses, and washerwomen, but at night they chat familiarly at the Opera with our most eminent men.”10 It is entirely likely that Marie’s mother played the role of procuress and agent for her daughters. Shortly before Marie left the Opera, there was mention in L’Évènement, a newspaper that carried gossip about the world of dance, of “Mademoiselle Van Goeuthen [sic], fifteen years old. Has a sister who is a walk-on and another at the ballet school. Poses for painters.”11 The reporter adds that Marie frequented the cafés around Montmartre and ends: “Her mother…No, I can’t go on…I would say things that would make you blush — or cry.” Perhaps the mother also prostituted herself, but it seems certain at least that she, like many others, encouraged her daughters at a very young age to find a rich protector. Balzac, in the following scene about a man from the provinces freshly arrived in Paris, offers a prototypically Parisian tale:

  “Well, well,” he said, pointing his cane at a pair of figures emerging from the alley by the Paris Opera.

  “What is it?” Gazonal asked.

  “It” was an old woman in a hat that had aged six months on a store shelf, a pretentious dress, and a faded tartan shawl, whose face showed the ravages of twenty years in a damp lodging, and whose bulging market bag announced a social position no better than ex-doorkeeper; beside her was a slender, willowy young girl, whose black-lashed eyes had lost their innocence, whose complexion spoke of great fatigue, but whose face, prettily shaped, was fresh, surrounded by a mass of hair, her forehead charming and bold, her chest flat — in a word, an unripe fruit.

  “That,” said Bixiou, “is a rat, accompanied by its mother.”

  “A rat?”

  “This rat, just released from her rehearsal at the Opera, is returning home to a meager dinner and will be back in three hours to put on her costume, if she’s dancing tonight, because today is Monday. This rat is thirteen years old, already ancient. Two years from now, this creature will be worth 60,000 francs on the public square. She will be nothing or everything, a great dancer or a marcheuse, a famous celebrity or a vulgar courtesan. She has worked since the age of eight. As you can see, she is crushed with fatigue, having worn out her body this morning in dance class, and she is emerging from a rehearsal where the sequences are as hard as the moves in a Chinese puzzle. But she’ll be back again tonight. The rat is one of the constituent elements of the Opera. She is to the prima ballerina as a clerk is to a lawyer. The rat is hope.”

  “Who produces rats?” asked Gazonal.

  “Porters, actors, dancers, the poor,” said Bixiou. “Only the most desperate poverty could convince a child of eight to consign her feet and her joints to such severe torture, to stay obedient until the age of sixteen or eighteen, entirely on speculation, and to have always at her side a ghastly old crone, the way you might encircle a lovely flower with manure.”12

  In branding the foyer of the Opera as a prime locus for licentiousness, Théophile Gautier went even further, describing the sexual trafficking, the “lurid nights of evil and orgies,” for which mothers gave their daughters “lessons in suggestive glances” before selling them. “Not all the slave markets are in Turkey,” he noted.13

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  MARIE VAN GOETHEM, then, joined the Paris Opera. The terms of the contract for such a spindly girl would have been harsh. She worked ten or twelve hours a day, six days out of seven, going from ballet class to rehearsals to performances. The 1841 law setting a limit on the length of a child’s workday did not apply to the Opera. The ballet school stipulated in its regulations that a student must absolutely live within two kilometers of the Palais Garnier, because the daily stipend of two francs would not cover the cost of a tram or omnibus: Marie came on foot every day — and it is likely that she never ventured beyond her neighborhood during her childhood. The director was all-powerful, and the least absence was a pretext for fines, culminating in dismissal — which required the guilty party to repay one hundred francs for each unfulfilled year of her contract. This is what happened to Marie, who was fired for absenteeism before her contract expired — but how could she ever find so much money in one place? It was just to make a little extra money that she had missed her classes in the first place.

  Her daily life was one of hardship. She arrived at the Opera early in the morning and spent hours in class and at rehearsal, under the vigilant eye of despotic teachers: Mérante, the ballet master, who was known for his sadism, and the much-feared Monsieur Pluque. Marie was small and slight, the exercises exhausted her. The first order was to limber up at the barre, then to move out onto the parquet floor, regularly sprinkled with water, and string together the same movements: jetées, pirouettes, entrechats, ronds de jambe, fouettés, steps en pointe… She tired easily, not least because the food she ate was insufficient and of poor quality — and sometimes lacking altogether. She was threatened with having her legs and her back encased, as in the old days, in a sort of wooden box that was intended to correct faulty positions. She was forbidden to complain, to speak, to laugh, to cry. The musical accompaniment — played on the piano or the violin — and the breaks between sessions offered small crumbs of consolation over the course of a strenuous day. Chatting, laziness, and ill humor were infractions that received prompt punishment. When Marie’s mother attended class, sitting on a bench with the other biddies — she found occasional work at the Opera as a dresser — it was even worse, because scoldings then rained down on Marie from all sides. Her corset and tutu were worn, her hand-me-down cotton slippers were misshapen and had been repaired twenty times already. Her feet were often bloody and her poorly tended sores infected. When she arrived home at the tiny apartment she shared with her family, there was no running water. She couldn’t wash her sweaty body until the concierge saw fit to bring water, unless she went back downstairs herself, got in line at the water pump, and lugged the bucket back to the apartment without spilling. The public baths were expensive, and she could barely afford them once a month.

  Did she have friends and playmates, as other children do? Sisters in misery, more like. Apart from a few girls of the French or foreign bourgeoisie who were grudgingly allowed by their parents to live out their love of ballet in this celebrated but highly suspect world, most of the Opera rats were driven to the work by necessity. Girls who weren’t admitted to the corps de ballet worked as walk-ons for a few centimes — the eldest, Antoinette, did this on several occasions. If they had no “protector” among the male subscribers to the ballet, because of not being especially pretty or skilled at gallantries, they suffered the worst privations and lacked even the funds to pay the dentist or the doctor when they were ill. Some came to a bad end — the story of Emma Livry was told in hushed tones, the girl who
burned to death during a performance when her tutu caught fire from a gas burner in the wings. A number of girls, though barely fifteen years old, were already alcoholics — it was tempting to get tipsy milling with the crowd in the Opera’s foyer. Others died of tuberculosis. The class for the youngest girls was still fairly joyous and unrestrained, but as soon as the girls reached adolescence they acquired a blank gaze and a look of resignation, entering a life of prostitution without ever having been children. “The Opera rat is caught in the gigantic mousetrap of the theater at such an early age that she has no time to learn about human life,” wrote Théophile Gautier.14 A few, true enough, pursued their vocation assiduously and became great dancers, Marie Taglioni among them, whom Degas painted and even celebrated in verse. And if a subscriber took an interest, paying for a girl’s private lessons, a little rat might rise above her condition. It happened with Berthe Bernay, who joined the Paris Opera a short time before Marie van Goethem at six hundred francs a year and who, thanks to hard work, ended up a star with an annual salary of 6,800 francs. Others with less talent but endowed with grace made a career as courtesans of the demimonde and lived in luxury. And others yet, like Marie’s younger sister, retired from the stage after they reached thirty and became ballet masters. But all the rest, the great majority, were never more than little rats, swarming here and there in an unhealthy environment. Their nickname speaks to their true condition. Although some dubious etymologies claim otherwise, the name was applied most likely as a metaphor for their existence. In the words of a former director of the Paris Opera: “The rats make holes in the scenery so they can watch the performance, gallop around behind the backcloth and play blindman’s buff in the hallways. They are supposed to earn twenty sous per show, but because of the huge fines imposed on them for their transgressions, they receive only eight or ten francs per month and thirty kicks in the backside from their mothers.”15 To other observers, the rat was mainly the transmitter of the “sexual plague,” syphilis. We are a long way from the charming and austere image projected by the Paris Opera’s current crop of students. Only in the twentieth century, as the starlets of the music hall and moving pictures attracted the glare of scandal and the heat of lustful desire, did classical dancers begin to gain a measure of respectability.