24
There were two fronts; there was the war front, and then in Paris there was what might be called the Montparnasse front.
JEAN COCTEAU
Imprisoned by asthma in his apartment at 102 boulevard Haussmann, Marcel Proust wrote at night, sleeping by day in his cork-lined bedroom, and only rising, if he got up at all, at four in the afternoon. He saw the war in fragments: glimpses through the windows of his closed car as his chauffeur, Odilon Albaret, a former cabbie and husband of his faithful housekeeper, Céleste, drove him to some nocturnal rendezvous, sometimes in the glitter of the Ritz Hotel dining room on Place Vendôme, on other occasions to the small and squalid Hôtel Marigny on rue de l’Arcade, a gay brothel managed by Albert Le Cuziat. As Proust was a partner in the business, M. Le Cuziat willingly accommodated his sadistic tastes, which “needed,” in the words of arch-gossip Cocteau, “the spectacle of a young Hercules slaying a rat with a red hot needle.”
Seeing the city in time lapse alerted Proust to minute changes in style. Patriotism, he saw, was transforming fashion.
As the Louvre and all the museums were closed, when one read at the head of an article “Sensational Show,” one could be certain it was not an exhibition of pictures but of dresses. Just as artists exhibiting at the revolutionary salon in 1793 proclaimed that it would be a mistake if it were regarded as “inappropriate by austere Republicans that we should be engaged in art when the whole of Europe is besieging the territory of liberty,” the dressmakers of 1916 asserted, with the self-conscious conceit of the artist, that “to seek what was new, to avoid banality, to prepare for victory by developing a new formula of beauty for the generations after the war,” was their absorbing ambition.
With designers such as Patou and Poiret working for the army, smaller dressmakers and milliners flourished, particularly if they could improvise. Deprived of feathers from Africa and the Caribbean, Coco Chanel adapted the simple straws and berets of her country childhood. Like almost everything she did, they started a trend and increased her reputation. With silk unobtainable, dressmakers scavenged what they could. Once it became known that each flare sent up to light no-man’s-land included a small silk parachute to slow its descent, soldiers on both sides risked their lives to retrieve them for their girlfriends back home. Two could be sewn into a pair of knickers, and four made a good-sized blouse.
Uniform chic
Meanwhile, in Paris, shrewd designers suggested to their all-too-suggestible clients that it was their duty to dress well, so long as their clothes included some acknowledgment of the war. In a Baïonnette cartoon, a dowager asks a couturier if selling expensive clothes in wartime is unpatriotic. “Are you saying I’m not a patriot, Baroness?” he replies indignantly. “But who created the gown in Pekin taffeta called ‘Croix de Guerre,’ and the ‘Where Will It End?’ evening coat?” Proust noticed that
young women were wearing cylindrical turbans on their heads and straight Egyptian tunics, dark and very “warlike.” They were shod in sandals, or puttees like those of our beloved combatants. Their rings and bracelets were made from fragments of shell casings from the 75s, and they carried cigarette lighters consisting of two English half-pennies to which a soldier in his dug-out had succeeded in giving a patina so beautiful that the profile of Queen Victoria might have been traced by Pisanello.
1915 fashions—the military look
Soldiers on leave in Paris, expecting to see many women in mourning, were told the custom of wearing black for a year after the death of a loved one had been allowed to slide—“the pretext being,” wrote Proust, “that [the deceased] was proud to die—which enabled them to wear a close bonnet of white English crêpe (graceful of effect and encouraging to admirers), while the invincible certainty of final triumph permitted them to substitute satins and silk muslins for the earlier dark cashmere, and even to wear their pearls.”
Better than trench-art accessories or having your dressmaker run up a military-looking costume was winning the right to wear a uniform. The first stop for anyone with the slightest connection to an ambulance service or to the armed forces was, as had been the case with Misia Sert, their tailor or dressmaker. The Regent Tailor on boulevard de Sebastopol offered to create “military uniforms in satin, suede, leather, whipcord, gabardine, khaki etc. Cut and styling beyond reproach.” For those who couldn’t afford made-to-measure, plenty of stores offered ready-to-wear. In Henri Barbusse’s novel Under Fire, a poilu on leave in Paris is dazzled by “the shop windows displaying fantastic tunics and kepis, cravats of the softest blue twill, and brilliant red lace-up boots.” The New America, a manufacturer of military wear in bulk, advertised, “Wholesalers, department stores and tailors etc. who would care to contact us will receive an immediate proposition that will allow them to double their business in a week.”
Edith Wharton, paying a visit to the front, noted the diversity of uniforms.
The question of color has greatly preoccupied the French military authorities, who have been seeking an invisible blue, and the range of their experiments is proved by the extraordinary variety of shades of blue, ranging from a sort of greyish robin’s-egg to the darkest navy. . . . But to this scale of experimental blues, other colours must be added; the poppy-red of the Spahis’ tunics, and various other less familiar colours—grey, and a certain greenish khaki, the use of which is due to the fact that the cloth supply has given out and that all available materials are employed.
The inconsistency of fabrics and the proliferation of uniforms from other countries and armies helped draft dodgers to lose themselves. In Le Feu, five soldiers from the front notice that some of the men who appear, from a distance, to be soldiers, are actually wearing a kind of fancy dress. Arriving home on leave, writer Paul Tuffrau was as astonished by the gaiety of the women on the boulevards as by the dubious military credentials of their men.
The lighted department stores, the beautiful cars, the pretty girls in their little hats, high-heeled boots, rice powder, muffs and little dogs, and draft dodgers in beautifully tailored blazers and breeches that look like uniforms, but drip with gold braid brighter than anything on the jackets of real officers. Over and over, you see such sights, next to soldiers on leave who roam the boulevards in tin hats, muddy greatcoats and heavy boots.
In John Dos Passos’s novel Three Soldiers, an American on leave is overwhelmed by the variety and quality of the uniforms in the cafés around the Opéra, none of them damaged or stained by combat. “Serbs, French, English, Americans, Australians, Rumanians, Tcheco-Slovaks. God, is there any uniform that isn’t here? The war’s been a great thing for the people who knew how to take advantage of it.” Songwriter Cole Porter owned an entire wardrobe of uniforms. His friend Monty Woolley recalled, “Porter had more changes than Maréchal Foch, and wore them with complete disregard to regulation. One night he might be a captain of the Zouaves, the next an aide-de-camp.”
Young common soldiers, embittered by their experience of the front, found the city’s cynicism disgraceful. In June 1916, Gaston Biron wrote to his mother at the end of a leave, “You will probably be astonished to hear that it was almost without regret that I left Paris, but it’s the truth. I’ve noticed, like all my comrades who are left, that these two years of war have, little by little, made the civilian population selfish and indifferent, and that we and the other combatants are almost forgotten. So what could be more natural than that we become as distant as they are, and return to the front calmly, as if we had never been away?”
In September, at Chartres, Biron died of wounds. He was thirty.
After leaving the ambulances, Cocteau joined a fortnightly magazine called Le Mot—The Word. Like most publications in Paris, it was geared to the war. Part of his job, not so different from that of Norman Lindsay in Australia, was to demonize Germany: in his case, to produce sketches of imaginary atrocities committed by the Germans in Belgium, including children whose right hands had been hacked off. Fortunately, enough was happening in Paris to take his mind off these squalid tasks.
Literally and figuratively, he had a new love, aviation, and in particular a young military pilot, Roland Garros. Already famous at twenty-seven for having been the first aviator to cross the Mediterranean, Garros downed four German planes with a new system of aerial gunnery he helped develop. Born on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion—Cocteau called him “my dear creole”—Garros boasted the slight frame, dashing mustache and dark complexion of action star Douglas Fairbanks, one of Cocteau’s childhood heroes. At school, Cocteau took gymnastic classes in hopes of emulating his feats. Garros was married, but he and Cocteau discovered a mutual attraction. The pilot took Cocteau up for joy rides, an experience the poet found all the more dizzying for their infatuation.
Paris could not help but find war chic. Just as dressmakers were not content simply to get by with inferior materials but adapted them into a new style, hostesses embraced austerity and offered only a token apology for dinners of soup, bread, and wine. Who cared, so long as there was good talk?
As Malcolm Cowley had noticed, privation and danger stimulated the creative juices. Cocteau flitted around the city, attending benefit concerts for the troops, posing for portraits, and socializing with his old patron, Misia Sert, while cultivating such glamorous newcomers as the Princess Hélène Soutzo, fiancée of diplomat-writer Paul Morand. As he did so, he was incubating an idea for something new: a ballet for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, now based in Rome. In 1912, while the Ballets Russes was appearing in Paris, he’d pressed the impresario to let him write something ambitious for the company.
Diaghilev is walking home after a performance, his thick underlip sagging, his eyes bleary as Portuguese oysters, his tiny hat perched on his enormous head. Ahead, Nijinsky is sulking, his evening clothes bulging over his muscles. I was at the absurd age when one thinks oneself a poet, and I sensed in Diaghilev a polite resistance. I questioned him about this and he answered, “Astonish me! I’ll wait for you to astonish me.”
Cocteau believed he had found such an astonishing idea. It would take only passing account of the war. One might almost think of it as thumbing its nose at the news by dwelling on the silliest aspects of reality. As he wrote just before the premiere, “Our wish is that the public may consider this as a work which conceals poetry beneath the coarse outer skin of slapstick. Laughter is natural to Frenchmen: it is important to keep this in mind and not be afraid to laugh, even at this most difficult time.”
He had already suggested to a producer of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream that members of the Fratellini clown family play the “rude mechanicals.” Now he thought of an entire ballet based on the traveling circuses that toured country carnivals. Before such shows, performers appeared on a small stage outside the tent in excerpts from the program, while barkers shouted the attractions of each and urged the audience to pay and see the full show: “Step right up: it’s all happening on the inside.” Both the stage and the performance were called a parade.
Erik Satie, whom Cocteau knew from Misia’s salons, agreed to write the music. As for the costumes, he must have the gruff, opinionated Pablo Picasso, who could have returned to neutral Spain like many of his compatriots but preferred to remain in Paris. Composer Edgard Varèse offered to introduce them. For the occasion, Cocteau arrived at Picasso’s Montparnasse studio dressed, in tribute to the clowns in his paintings, as Pierrot.
Picasso was easily persuaded to collaborate on the ballet. Shrugging off the war and ignoring the fact that he hated to travel, he took the train to Rome with Cocteau to pitch their idea to Diaghilev. By the time they arrived, they’d decided broadly on the action and style. Against a vivid backcloth of carnival themes, characters in cubist costumes would dance the story of three circus acts en parade. One would be based on movie serial daredevil Pearl White; another on Charlie Chaplin. There would be a pantomime horse, and (don’t tell Satie) gunshots, sirens, and other noises, the shouts of the barkers spoken through a megaphone, and a passage played on water-filled milk bottles. They called it Parade.