You Must Change Your Life (29 page)

Rodin left it to the younger artist among them, Toulouse-Lautrec, to capture the seedy scene in his art. Over the years, Toulouse-Lautrec drew on cabaret walls and sketched hundreds of caricatures of the debauched clientele. Once he drew Rodin as a hunched-over lump of beard and coat.

The sculptor was far happier to spend his Saturdays sipping tea with Monet in Giverny, or sitting by the pond in Meudon. He had come to mourn the loss of his and Rilke's old conversations there.

Ultimately, it was Rilke's wife who laid the groundwork for the pair's reunion, albeit inadvertently. At the end of the summer, she decided to pay an extended visit to a friend in Hanover, allowing Rilke to take over her studio in the Hôtel Biron. Rilke moved into the oval-shaped apartment with soaring ceilings at the end of August and rented a second room, too, with a terrace that opened onto the gardens. Though it cost five hundred francs more than he could really afford each month, he was about to turn in the
New Poems
and claimed he needed a change of air in order to transition into a new body of work.

With just a few swift touches, he made the space feel like a little Bohemia in Paris. He set out fruits and flowers on the table, the breeze from the open window dispersing their sweet aroma around the room. He placed a bust by Westhoff in the corner and left the rest of the room bare, allowing the brilliant sheets of sunlight to be the décor. When Rodin learned that Rilke could not afford a desk, he gave him a big oak table,
which the poet placed in front of an open window and promised to make it the “great fertile plain” where he would complete the
New Poems
. In return, Rilke bought Rodin a wooden statue of Saint Christopher, the muscular martyr who carried the Christ-child across the river. “This is Rodin, bearing his work, ever heavier, but containing the world,” Rilke said.

In these quaint quarters Rilke reminded his friend Count Harry Kessler of a little old maid. The smell of apples overwhelmed the room like in “an old country house,” he said. But Rilke knew there was one person who would appreciate its rustic charm as much as he did.

“You ought to see the beautiful building and the room I have inhabited since this morning,” Rilke wrote to Rodin the day he moved in. “Its three bays look out prodigiously across an abandoned garden, where from time to time one sees unsuspecting rabbits leap across trellises as if in an ancient tapestry.”

Not two days passed before Rodin paid a visit to see the space for himself. Reunited at last, the old friends talked for hours. They agreed that Beethoven was the most fearless composer in history and Rilke recited for Rodin one of his favorite quotes by the composer, from when the man was losing his hearing and having suicidal thoughts: “No friend have I, I must live with myself alone; but I know well that God is closer to me than to others in my art, I go about with him without fear, I have always recognized and understood him; I am also not at all afraid for my music, that can have no ill fate; he to whom it makes itself intelligible must become free of all the misery with which others are encumbered.”

Rodin not only loved hearing this quote from Rilke, he already knew it. Someone else had mailed Rodin the passage to comfort him during
l'affaire Balzac
.

They also discussed once again the role of women in an artist's life, and debated whether there could be such a thing as love without deceit. Here their views diverged acutely, with Rilke, for the first time, willing to disagree with Rodin. The sculptor believed that women were impediments to man's creativity, but a nourishment, like wine,
to man himself. Rilke thought this was severely stunted logic. To him, the ability to sustain meaningful relationships with women, outside of sex, had always symbolized a mark of manhood. To think of women purely in terms of pleasure and consumption was to think like a child.

Rodin thought women were inherently conniving and sought only to “hold men fast.” Rilke tried to convince Rodin that he had known plenty of women who were interested in much more than marriage. But even as he spoke he knew he'd never change the old man's mind. Rodin was obstinately tied to the past, “bound to the rites traditional in him, even to those which are not meant for us and yet were necessary in the cult of his soul in order to mold him,” Rilke wrote to Westhoff after his friend's departure that day.

Of course, Rilke's feminism was tinged with hypocrisy, given that his own wife was fundamentally “held fast” by the parenting burdens he had imposed on her. It's possible that Rilke recognized this contradiction, for he made a point of telling Westhoff that he had emphasized to Rodin the many independent women he knew in northern Europe—a roundabout compliment to his northern German wife, who he always hoped would come to see her struggle as a strength on her part, rather than a weakness on his.

Despite Rilke's rather inconsistent views on women, Becker's death had awakened his sympathies for them, and for women artists in particular. Rodin's complaints seemed superficial to Rilke now, compared to the sacrifice that women made every time they had children. Rodin may have chosen art over “life” in the sense of certain material comforts, but at least it was a choice he had the freedom to make.

Rilke doubted that Rodin would ever recognize the unfairness of his logic, but for now the poet reveled in the satisfaction that at least he had spoken his mind. No longer was he exclusively the listener; his voice had resounded in Rodin's reality loud and clear. He vowed in his letter to Westhoff that it would “not drop out of it again.”

But although he claimed to have forgiven Rodin for the past, in the next sentence he fantasized about dethroning his old master. He imagined how gratifying it would feel if his own artistic powers one day
eclipsed Rodin's, leaving him “to need us now a thousandth as much as we once needed him.”

RODIN HAD FOUND RILKE'S
new quarters in the Hôtel Biron so enchanting that, in September 1908, he rented out all the available rooms on the ground floor and several on the first floor, including one that Rilke had privately hoped to take for himself. Rodin had long ago transferred his fabrication operations to Meudon, so he turned the new space into a magnificent showroom to receive collectors and members of the press. He kept the main salon simply furnished, with little more than a wooden table, a bowl of fruit and a single Renoir painting. He turned four other rooms into drawing studios and lined the walls from floor to ceiling with his watercolors.

It was to become his sanctuary away from Meudon, a place where “no one will find him,” as Rilke wrote. Rodin set up a bedroom so he could spend nights there with the Duchesse de Choiseul, while the gardens provided an oasis for quiet contemplation. The knotted forest of acacia trees pressed up against the windows of his studio, while scorpion grass grew so thickly across the panes he could hardly open them. The garden insulated the property from the sounds of the city, enclosing it into what Jean Cocteau called “a pool of silence.”

Rodin scattered his
Walking Man
and other sculptures throughout the tall grass in the garden, where they looked like crumbling old tombstones in a graveyard. Sometimes he would watch his American housemates Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller spinning around in the grass, teaching dance lessons to young girls. Rodin often observed them out there while he sat with his notebook and wrote. “How long I wait, how many vexations I accept in order to enjoy a few hours of solitude in this garden, alone with the trees which greet me amiably, alternating in beauty with the sky! My torpid thoughts, when withdrawn from their lodging, come now and run their course.”

Inside, the Hôtel Biron hummed with activity at all hours of the day and night. The duchesse had convinced Rodin to buy a gramophone
and liked to invite friends over to watch her dance jaunty bourrées. She tarted up the old folk dances with high-kicks and shawl teases. The ostrich feathers in her hat swayed to and fro as she charged around the room with such force that she collapsed breathlessly on the sofa when the song was through.

Rodin used the machine to play huge, ponderous Gregorian chants. These were albums “which nobody wants,” except for maybe the Pope, Rilke thought, yet he saw how they mesmerized Rodin completely. Written to fill the volume of a cathedral, the music had the power to “modulate silence as Gothic art models shadow,” Rodin said. The shrieking castrati singers reminded the artist of damned souls crying out to tell the living what hell felt like. The poet watched Rodin grow silent and closed off while he listened to the music, “as before a great storm.”

A moment later Choiseul might walk into the gloomy scene and wind the gramophone up again with one of her American folk jigs. It occurred to Rilke that maybe she was good for Rodin in this way. “Perhaps Rodin really needs that now, someone like that to go down with him cautiously” from the perilous peaks of his mind and return him to reality. Before, “he used to stay up on top, and God knows how and where and through what sort of night he finally got back.” Her presence turned Rodin into a bit of a helpless child, but at least she lightened him up.

Choiseul was responsible for much of the carousing that went on at the Hôtel Biron. When the flamboyant actor Édouard de Max came to visit a friend living in the building, the woman asked if he'd like to meet her famous neighbor downstairs. Rodin was not there, but they were greeted instead by the duchesse, to whom de Max raved about the building's architecture. The place was an absolute jewel, he told her.

“Come live here, then,” she said.

“But isn't the building fully occupied?” he asked.

“Yes, but the chapel is empty.”

With that, the Hôtel Biron's most notorious tenant arrived. De Max renovated the chapel into his own private boudoir. He outfitted it with new doors, a marble floor and installed a bathtub. It also became
a flophouse for guests who couldn't make it home at the end of one of his all-night garden parties.

Contributing to the chaotic scene was de Max's friend Cocteau, the young writer who had just gotten his first big break, thanks to a poetry reading de Max had organized for him at a Champs-Élysées playhouse. Cocteau had a nervous energy, long limbs, bedraggled hair and was known for staging elaborate practical jokes. Once, when he was waiting for a friend to arrive to the Hôtel Biron, Cocteau strapped on a Santa Claus beard and waited for him in the gardens. When the man came out back looking for Cocteau, he saw an ominous bearded figure prowling around the weeds instead. Was that Rodin? the man wondered. But why would he be out wandering so late—had the old man gone mad? Not wanting to find out, he spun around and ran the other direction.

At night, Cocteau hosted regular salons for artists. An aging Catulle Mendès recited his poetry while the Venezuela-born musician Reynaldo Hahn played songs for his guests. Sometimes Cocteau staged reenactments of Baudelaire's séances and would stay awake for days on end, sitting on his goatskin rug, drawing writings and writing drawings.

Occasionally his experiments with drugs actually proved productive (or at least weren't entirely counterproductive). Cocteau published the literary magazine
Schéhérazade
out of his room at the Hôtel Biron. It was designed in the fashionable Art Nouveau style, and the brightest creative luminaries of the day made appearances in its pages: drawings of Isadora Duncan, poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, writing from Maurice Rostand and Edmond Rostand, among many others.

Rilke rarely joined in all the social activity around him. He found Choiseul's music fatuous and Duncan too loud. He did not drink or take drugs, and he most certainly didn't dance. It was only in later years that Cocteau discovered that Rilke even lived in the same building. He had often seen the gas lamp glowing from the window of that corner room, but he hadn't given any thought to who its reclusive inhabitant might be.

Little did Cocteau know that Rilke's words would one day soothe him during some of the most painful periods of his life. When he underwent treatment for opium addiction in the late 1920s he wrote about his longing to have a copy of Rilke's
Malte
with him there to ease the agony of spitting up bile.

But back in the days of his youthful frenzy at the Hôtel Biron, Cocteau was too self-absorbed to realize his proximity to greatness. “I believed I knew many things and I lived in the crass ignorance of pretentious youth,” he wrote in his memoir
Paris Album
. “Success had put me on the wrong track and I did not know that there is a kind of success worse than failure, and a kind of failure worth all the success in the world. Neither did I know that the distant friendship of Rainer Maria Rilke would one day console me for having seen his lamp burn without knowing that it was signalling to me to go and singe my wings against its flame.”

NOVEMBER MARKED THE ONE-YEAR
anniversary of Paula Becker's death, and still Rilke had scarcely uttered a word about it to anyone. But now her memory came rushing back to him in a current of guilt so forceful he had no choice but to follow it wherever it may lead. Rilke was beginning to see that perhaps the hardest part of Becker's death was not necessarily the loss of his beloved friend so much as the birth of a new presence, which was Becker in death.

Over three sleepless days he extracted a long poem, “Requiem to a Friend.” It was partly an extended apology for failing his friend, who had “but one wish, for a lifetime of work—which is not done.” He needed at last to expel this ghost, announcing in the first line: “I have my dead and I have let them go.”

Rarely does Rilke let anger cut through his work as sharply as he does here. He writes that the real tragedy of Becker's life was not her death, but the fact that her death was not her own. To him, death was the most personal of human experiences. It was, as he wrote in
Malte
, a seed which everyone is born with, and which grows inside
us a little more each day. Thus a raging, painful death would have been preferable to the one taken from Becker in such an arbitrary and old-fashioned way. Rilke blames himself, her husband, and the entire male gender for the injustice of Becker's passing: “I accuse all men.”