You Must Change Your Life (34 page)

Calmette, meanwhile, continued his provocations until, in 1916, the wife of France's finance minister walked into
Le Figaro
's office with a gun. She was enraged that Calmette had published her husband's old love letters to her, written while she was still his mistress, and shot the editor dead.

     

BY 1912 THE
City of Light was descending into darkness. The endless glow of the twenty-four-hour street lanterns had not scared off criminals, it simply spotlighted the violence day and night. Anarchists were protesting in the streets while city-sanctioned brutality took place in the form of public guillotining.

Theft was rampant. One morning a burglar walked out of the Louvre with the
Mona Lisa
under his arm. The police investigated the crime for two years—questioning Apollinaire and Picasso as suspects along the way—before the culprit was finally caught trying to sell the painting to a Florentine art dealer. Meanwhile, street gangsters known as apaches terrorized pedestrians. As fashionable as they were savage, the apaches stalked, robbed and stabbed their bourgeois victims, all the while sporting snug sailor pants and neckerchiefs.

The crime wave petrified the Duchesse de Choiseul, who took it upon herself to personally protect her aging lover. She started stashing guns around the studio and told a friend that she once had to fight off a pair of night intruders. They had tried to blackmail Rodin, then seventy-two, “But I was luckily there!” she said. “And I had pistols too!”

She bought a German shepherd to guard him and arranged for a policeman to accompany him every evening on his commute home from Paris to Meudon. Some nights the officer even slept in a chair at Rodin's bedside. This lasted for about a month before the continuous company started to annoy the artist and he dismissed the man from his duties.

Some of Rodin's friends had started to warn him that it was Choiseul he should be afraid of, not gangsters. Rumors were spreading that the duchesse was scheming ways to wrest control of Rodin's estate. Some believed that she had conned him into signing over to her the rights to all posthumous reproductions of his work. Others heard that she was trying to break up his relationship with Rose Beuret so that he would name her the sole benefactor in his will.

She paraded their affair in front of Beuret and did not hide it from
her husband, either. At one point the duke wrote to Beuret, “It is unendurable that you tolerate the state of things which I can no longer abide. I refer to the constant presence of my wife . . . in the atelier of M. Rodin.”

He assumed Beuret would want a separation after hearing this news, but he underestimated the woman's long-standing tenacity. Beuret endured Rodin like a teacup set under a waterfall, Rilke once said. In the years following Rodin's affair with Camille Claudel, the artist sometimes made reference to his “beautiful” former assistant, causing Beuret to tremble with rage. If he noticed her reaction, he'd just chuckle and say,
Mon chat
,
I always loved you most. That's why you're still here
.

It was no secret that Choiseul and her gambling husband's financial troubles were worsening. Rodin sometimes bailed them out of debts, and never gave it a second thought. When the duchesse's sister died, Rodin paid for her husband to accompany her to America for the funeral. For years Rodin either ignored the gossip surrounding Choiseul or pretended not to hear it. Perhaps he could not bear the thought of her betrayal. Or he may have believed women were too simpleminded for such conspiring.

But then a trusted friend came to Rodin with a set of more serious claims. He had heard that Choiseul was stealing artwork directly from Rodin's studio—and he had already gone to the police with the matter. Now that Rodin thought about it, he remembered that a box of drawings
had
gone missing in June.

Rodin confronted Choiseul about the lost works. She denied having anything to do with it and turned the accusation against his secretary, Marcelle Tirel, instead.

Rodin might normally have fired the assistant on the spot, but Tirel had worked for him for six years, far longer than most had lasted in her position. When he questioned her about the missing art, she pointed the finger back at Choiseul. She told Rodin that she had seen with her own eyes the duchesse tucking the drawings into her stockings.

Rodin leaned back against his statue of Ugolino and started to sob. He knew what he had to do. After seven years, he ended the relationship
without a word. He sent an assistant to fetch Choiseul's key to the Hôtel Biron and then left town with Beuret before his lover could protest.

Rodin's friends rejoiced, and so did the press. The
New York Times
declared on its front page that all of Paris society could talk of “nothing” but the alleged split between Rodin and the duchesse. Rumor had it that she had “exercised too great influence over the master . . . and generally monopolized the sculptor's affairs.” The French were even more joyous to learn of Choiseul's departure. Rodin's studio, now “delivered of its Cerberus, has reopened its doors to friends of the modeler of the most beautiful torsos in our time,” announced
Le Cri de Paris
.

Rilke found the whole situation mortifying. Like many of Rodin's friends, he was glad to see the “frightful” duchesse go, but he wished that the artist had come to this conclusion on his own terms, rather than had it forced upon him with such an embarrassing deception. These trifles, which the artist might have kicked out of his path without a second thought in years past, now seemed to overwhelm him. He appeared so “grotesque and ridiculous” to Rilke now that it was almost as if all his years of struggle had been for nothing.

Rodin returned home from his trip with Beuret to a pile of letters begging for his forgiveness. “I have ceased to live. My heart is broken—the hour of deliverance does not frighten me,” Choiseul wrote in one. Even her husband implored him to take the miserable woman back: “If you could only see her. I cannot believe you wouldn't take pity on her.”

This went on for two years. Once, she showed up at the studio in a black veil and threw herself at Rodin's feet. He paused from his drawing, summoned an assistant, pointed to the woman on the floor and barked, “Show Madame out!” Rodin had resolved not to fall under her spell again, for he had truly loved Choiseul. “I am like a man who walks in a woods overcome by darkness,” he told a friend soon after their separation.

Although Rodin vowed not to let another woman interfere with his work again, he promptly hired one of his models to manage his
affairs at the Hôtel Biron. The young woman's qualifications apparently included a “moist red mouth” and “tranquil” eyes. But when he realized that she was admitting a stream of questionable characters into the building he fired her.

The stress seemed to take a toll on Rodin's health, too. Over lunch one afternoon in July, Beuret watched him drop his fork to the floor. When he went to pick it up his arm just hung limply at his side. It remained paralyzed there for a while, probably the effect of a mild stroke.

The mobility gradually returned to his arm, but those close to him said he was never quite the same after that. When Count Kessler noticed his friend's thinning frame one afternoon and asked if he would like to go for lunch, Rodin brushed off the concern. He gestured into the sky and asked, who could have an appetite while in the presence of nature? Nature, he claimed, was the only nourishment he needed.

CHAPTER
17

O
NE LATE SUMMER DAY IN 1913, SIGMUND FREUD TOOK
a walk in Munich with “a young but already famous poet” and his “taciturn” friend. It may have been in a park or on the outskirts of the city, where the fifty-seven-year-old Viennese professor had traveled to attend the fourth Psychoanalytic Congress. It was a tense juncture in Freud's life, with the conference marking the last time he would ever see his friend and former heir apparent, Carl Jung, then thirty-eight.

The two psychoanalysts had been close colleagues since 1906, when Jung was a budding Swiss doctor just starting to make a name for himself. When Jung discovered that Freud's word association studies supported his own theory of unconscious repression, Jung sent a letter to Vienna to tell him about it. They had been engaged in a lively exchange of ideas ever since. But tensions arose as Jung began to doubt Freud's belief that sexuality formed the basis of all human behavior. Meanwhile, Jung's interests were branching out into the fields of mysticism and the occult, which Freud feared would discredit his fledgling discipline of psychoanalysis and supply its critics fodder for attack. When Jung refused to yield to Freud's theories or to suppress his own, the elder doctor interpreted Jung's defiance as an
oedipal desire to overthrow his “father.” Jung claimed that he never wanted to be seen as a protégé, only as an equal. Shortly before the conference, Freud severed all personal communication with his former friend.

By early September, everyone in the psychoanalytic community knew about the dispute and it divided the congress: the researchers from Zurich sided with Jung at a table on one side of the room, while the Viennese joined Freud on the other. Hanging over the entire room was the question of whether the International Psychoanalytical Association would reelect Jung as its president. Since Jung had no challenger, Freud loyalists encouraged voters to cast blank ballots. Twenty-two of the fifty-two participants did, but it was not enough to unseat Jung and he narrowly kept his post. But his defection from traditional Freudian psychoanalysis was now definitive.

As this uncongenial event was underway, Freud was relieved to see his friend Lou Andreas-Salomé enter the hotel with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She had by then begun her own serious study of psychoanalysis, which she said was motivated in part by the years she spent sharing in “the extraordinary and rare spiritual destiny of another person”—Rilke. She was Freud's student and one of the first women to attend the inaugural congress in 1911. A photograph of the group shows Andreas-Salomé, wrapped in a long fur, seated before Jung and Freud. When she had asked Freud during the conference if he would allow her to study with him, he just laughed. No formal psychoanalytic training centers existed yet, and he could not fathom why she would want to learn, “since the only thing I do is teach people how to wash dirty linen.”

But Andreas-Salomé persisted, studying for another six months on her own, then going to Vienna to prove her dedication. She and Freud soon struck up a long, affectionate correspondence and she began training with him in Vienna in October 1912. It was she who urged him to look more closely at the role of the mother in early childhood. Soon, Freud entrusted her with treating his own daughter, Anna.

Now Andreas-Salomé was not only Freud's peer, but one of his staunchest allies. She took a seat firmly on his side of the room, writing in her journal from the conference, “there was nowhere I would have preferred to sit than right by his side.” It pained her to see Freud repress his sadness “over his break with his ‘son' Jung, whom he had loved.” He spent the entire conference worrying that any questions or contradictions he raised during the lectures would make him look like the patriarchal tyrant Jung had portrayed him as.

Freud found some respite from the stressful meetings by taking a walk with Andreas-Salomé and Rilke, with whom he was familiar mostly because of his children. His son Ernst and daughter Anna had memorized Rilke's poems in school and when Anna heard that her father had met him on this trip, she wrote, “Have you really met the poet Rilke in Munich? Why? What is he like?”

It seems Freud found him fascinating. Two years later, in his essay “On Transience,” Freud described his encounter with the “young but already famous poet,” who scholars widely believe was Rilke, and his “taciturn” friend, who also remains unnamed, but is thought to be Andreas-Salomé. Freud recounted how the poet marveled at the natural beauty of the summer afternoon, but confessed that he took no pleasure in it. Come winter, it would all wither and die, he said, just as everything one cared about would someday die. All that the poet would “otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom,” Freud wrote.