Belle Epoque Quotes

I’ve started to question if the flaws on the finished photograph aren’t an integral part of the portrait: soft focus, underexposure, poorly applied emulsion, mysterious lines and distortions … all of these elements can change the character of the photograph and its subject.

Groping in the blackness seems an appropriate metaphor for the creative life. You are compelled to do this work but cannot know the end result; the truth of the moment you captured on the plate remains a mystery.

I think that a good portrait reveals a suggestion of the subject’s mind, and not just a representation of how they look. It’s by no means easy; to snatch the right moment can feel impossible, like capturing fairies.

In taking that photograph, I understood something I will never forget: how I wished to arrest all the beauty that came before me. Not the classical beauty of symmetry and exact proportions or the fancy of fashion, which is ever-changing with the seasons, but the beauty of a soul, that inner life that reveals itself so seldom, just for an instant, and only if you look closely and learn to see with an open heart.

Cairo is one of the greatest storehouses of human achievement on earth, ranging from the pharaonic through the Christian and Islamic periods to the Belle Epoque.

We had the Belle Epoque. Now we have the Botox Epoque, permeated by plastic emotions from antidepressants and plastic veneers from collagen, silicone, cosmetic surgery and Botox.

To be an anarchist is to leave the beaten paths on which for hundreds of years generations of sheep have walked without reflection, break with routines, reject commonly held believes, be contemptuous of public opinion, have disdain for rejecting smiles and treacherous laughs, insults, and calomnies.

You have a temperament,” he told her, “that finds pleasure in a labyrinth of intrigue. Be careful—because you will be a victim again and again.

Sono stata ammaliata dal fascino sfacciato e intrigante della Belle Epoque. Sfacciato perché, per la prima volta, in quell’epoca le distinzioni di classe perdevano d’importanza davanti all’irrompere dei tempi moderni. In effetti lo stile di vita borghese si evolve raggiungendo e talvolta superando in splendore, classe e mondanità l’aristocrazia medesima. Intrigante in quanto l’umanità accoglie unanime un rinnovamento sociale, culturale, tecnico, artistico senza precedenti.

Rodin was on the brink of a grand passion. But unlike Bernhardt’s, his lover would become the greatest inspiration of his career. Her name was Camille Claudel, and if she was not pretty in a conventional way, she was as beautiful and alive as quicksilver. She was also an extraordinarily gifted sculptor in her own right.

The Montreux Palace Hotel was built in an age when it was thought that things would last. It is on the very shores of Switzerland's Lake Geneva, its balconies and iron railings look across the water, its yellow-ocher awnings are a touch of color in the winter light. It is like a great sanitarium or museum. There are Bechstein pianos in the public rooms, a private silver collection, a Salon de Bridge. This is the hotel where the novelist Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov and his wife, Véra, live. They have been here for 14 years. One imagines his large and brooding reflection in the polished glass of bookcases near the reception desk where there are bound volumes of the Illustrated London News from the year 1849 to 1887, copies of Great Expectations, The Chess Games of Greco and a book called Things Past, by the Duchess of Sermoneta. Though old, the hotel is marvelously kept up and, in certain portions, even modernized. Its business now is mainly conventions and, in the summer, tours, but there is still a thin migration of old clients, ancient couples and remnants of families who ask for certain rooms when they come and sometimes certain maids. For Nabokov, a man who rode as a child on the great European express trains, who had private tutors, estates, and inherited millions which disappeared in the Russian revolution, this is a return to his sources. It is a place to retire to, with Visconti's Mahler and the long-dead figures of La Belle Epoque, Edward VII, d'Annunzio, the munitions kings, where all stroll by the lake and play miniature golf, home at last.

As for denying the existence of fairies, good and bad, you have to be blind not to see them. They are everywhere, and naturally I have links of affection or dislike with all of them. The wealthy, spendthrift ones squander fortunes in Venice or Monte Carlo: fabulous, ageless women whose birthdays and incomes and origins nobody knows, putting charms on roulette wheels for the dubious pleasure of seeing the same number come up more often than it ought. There they sit, puffing smoke from long cigarette-holders, raking in the chips, and looking bored. Others spend the hours of darkness hanging their apartments in Paris or New York with Gothic tapestries, hitherto unrecorded, that drive the art-dealers demented-gorgeous tapestries kept hidden away in massive chests beneath deserted abbeys and castles since their own belle epoque in the Middle Ages. Some stick to their original line of country, agitating tables at seances or organizing the excitement in haunted houses; some perform kind deeds, but in a capricious and uncertain manner that frequently goes wrong, And then there are the amorous fairies, who never give up. They were to be seen fluttering through the Val Sans Retour in the forest of Broceliande, where Morgan la Fee concealed the handsome knight Guyomar and many lost lovers besides, or over the Isle of Avallon where the young knight Lanval lived happily with a fairy who had stolen him away. Now wrinkled with age, the amorous ones contrive to lure young men on the make who, immaculately tailored and bedecked with baubles from Cartier, escort them through the vestibules of international hotels. Yet other fairies, more studious and respectable, devote themselves to science, whirring and breathing above tired inventors and inspiring original ideas-though lately the unimaginable numbers,the formulae and the electronics, tend to overwhelm them. The scarcely comprehensible discoveries multiply around them and shake a world that is not theirs any more, that slips through their immaterial fingers. And so it goes on-all sorts and conditions of fairies, whispering together, purring to themselves, unnoticed on the impercipient earth. And I am one of them.

Manet, however, was enthralled; he proceeded to give the title Nana to his painting of the courtesan Henriette Hauser, naming it after the daughter of the alcoholic laundress Gervaise Lantier in L’assommoir. Zola had not yet even begun to write his novel Nana, but the references in Manet’s painting were clear. When the Salon (presumably scandalized) rejected it, he brashly showed it in the window of a shop on the Boulevard des Capucines, virtually on the doorstep of the Opéra Garnier, where it created a succès de scandale. Zola, of course, appreciated the value of scandal in promoting his novels and was adept at creating it.

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, France enjoyed an upsurge of artistic flourishing that became known as La Belle Epoque. It was a time of change that heralded both art nouveau and post impressionism, when painters as diverse as Monet, Cezanne and Toulouse Lautrec worked. It was an age of extremes, when Proust and Anatole France were fashionable along with the notorious Monsieur Willy, Colette's husband. On the decorative arts, Mucha, Gallé and Lalique were enjoying success; and the theatre Lugné-Poe was introducing the grave works of Ibsen at the same time as Parisians were enjoying the spectacle of the can-can of Hortense Schneider. Paris was the crossroads of a new and many-faceted culture, a culture that was predominately feminine in form, for, above all, la belle Epoque was the age of women. Women dominated the cultural scene. On the one hand, there was Comtesse Greffulhe, the patron of Proust and Maeterlinck, who introduced greyhound racing into France; Winaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac, for whom Stravinsky wrote Renard; Misia Sert, the discoverer of Chanel and Diaghilev's closest friend. On the other were the great dancers of the Moulin Rouge, immortalised by Toulouse lautrec — Jane Avril, Yvette Guilbert, la Goulue; as well as such celebrated dramatic actresses as the great Sarah Bernhardt. It would not be possible to speak of La belle Epoque without the great courtesans who, in many ways, perfectly symbolized the era, chief of which were Liane de Pougy, Émilienne d'Alençon, Cléo de Mérode and La Belle Otero.

In the meantime, he anxiously awaited visitors, and on occasion even attempted some visits of his own—including one to his nearby Bellevue neighbor, the charming and notorious courtesan Valtesse de la Bigne. Red-haired and beautiful, Valtesse de la Bigne had brought several rich and titled men to financial ruin. She had also captivated some of the most sophisticated men in town, including Manet, who referred to her as “la belle Valtesse” and had painted her the year before. Born Louise Emilie Delabigne, Valtesse de la Bigne was sufficiently intelligent and charming to draw an entourage of admiring writers and artists such as Manet. Zola also paid court to Valtesse—although in his case from a desire to get the characters and setting right for his upcoming novel Nana. Flattered by his journalistic interest, Valtesse even agreed to show him her bedroom—until then off-limits to all but her most highly paying patrons. Zola (who seems to have limited his visit to note taking) used her over-the-top boudoir as the model for Nana’s bedroom. Even if the fictional Nana was nowhere near the sophisticated creature that Valtesse had become, the bed said it all. It was “a bed such as had never existed before,” Zola wrote, “a throne, an altar, to which Paris would come in order to worship her sovereign nudity.

Among these adventurers, the most stylish chose the latest in luxurious transportation, the Orient Express. Paris by now boasted six large train stations. These stood, and still stand, as the termini for tracks that radiate outward from the city like ever-extending spokes of a wheel. The first, the Gare Saint-Lazare (8th), was inaugurated in 1837 and originally served Paris’s western suburbs before reaching north into Normandy. The Gare d’Austerlitz (13th) connects Paris with southwest France and Spain. Its neighbor on the Left Bank, the Gare Montparnasse (15th), is the terminus for trains to Brittany and western France. The Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est, near neighbors in north-central Paris (10th), were built to serve northern and eastern France as well as international destinations beyond. And the Gare de Lyon (12th), whose first station on this site opened in 1849, stands across the Seine from the Gare d’Austerlitz, where it connects Paris to southern France, Switzerland, and Italy. Eventually, the Orient Express would depart from the Gare de Lyon under the name of the Simplon Orient Express. But when the first Orient Express left Paris for Vienna in June 1883, it was from the Gare de l’Est. Soon after, the route was extended all the way to Istanbul.

For he was their Victor Hugo. And his Paris, the Paris of Esmeralda and Jean Valjean, would live forever.

What about justice,” he asked, “and charity, and resignation, and courage, and everything which makes the human soul to live!” Religion, he continued, “is a spirit, a movement of the heart. You make of it a power, a society, an exterior force, something which struggles with other powers and other societies. To love God and one’s fellow man, is it necessary to have so much materiality?”42

indeed a trunk numbered 1231 that departed Paris on the

Pummeled in turn by the Prussians, by French government forces, and by the Commune, Paris in late spring of 1871 was a shambles.

the Bièvre had once been a bucolic stream where, according to legend, beaver thrived (possibly giving the watercourse its name). For centuries it meandered through a countryside dotted with ancient watermills and rustic villages.

leaving a searing impression of a brilliant, emotional, and deeply caring woman—one who, with a startling degree of selflessness, poured her considerable passion into helping the downtrodden.

Escoffier reduced the number of courses, developed the à la carte menu, introduced lighter sauces, and eliminated the most ostentatious of the food displays. He also simplified the menu and completely reorganized the professional kitchen, integrating it into a single unit. Women approved, and he approved of them, creating dishes for some of his most famous diners, including Sarah Bernhardt (Fraises Sarah Bernhardt) and the Australian singer Nellie Melba, who garnered two creations in her honor—Peach Melba and Melba Toast.

Pioneers do not as a rule settle for the comfortable corners of life, and Maria Sklodowska was no exception.

All suffered, but not equally, for the greatest damage was borne by the poor, whose despair and anger had fueled the Commune

That one doesn’t paint a landscape, a seascape, a figure; one paints the effect of a time of day on a landscape, a seascape, or a figure.

incensed Clemenceau angrily denounced Ferry for dragging France into this mess, which he charged that Parliament had not properly authorized. China, Clemenceau warned, had an “inexhaustible reservoir” of men, and fighting such a power would sap France of its manpower for years to come.

When the struggling young painter Rodolphe Salis opened Le Chat Noir in 1881, he had no idea that he was about to make history.

Le Chat Noir’s clientele were looking for good times, to be sure, but their idea of a good time was a convivial (and well-lubricated) evening based on shared intellectual and cultural interests.

ever since Eugène Poubelle had become prefect of the Seine and issued strict laws governing street cleaning and garbage collection (thus giving his name to the French trash can).

Death would soon carry off Zola as well, although in his case the suspicion existed, and still exists, that he was murdered. No concrete evidence was ever produced to prove this, and yet the circumstances of his death were sufficiently odd to encourage speculation.

Degas, the most conservative of the group, was adamantly anti-Dreyfus and adamantly anti-Semitic as well.

Renoir, as it turned out, was also deeply anti-Semitic.

Esterhazy’s nephew Christian, unexpectedly showed up. Esterhazy had bilked Christian of large sums, and Christian was eager to spill the beans on his reprehensible uncle.

Degas, who did not seem to have taken much personal interest in any of these girls except as models for his paintings, was endlessly interested in their lives, including the older men who hovered so possessively over them. These men, termed “lions,” appear again and again in his paintings, sometimes adjusting a costume or sometimes simply watching. Degas

Théodore Vacquer,

1883, Printemps achieved the distinction of being the first department store in Paris to be lit electrically. Zola,

Many prominent families were affected by this disaster and would in time build the beautiful chapel of Notre-Dame-de-la-Consolation on the spot, as a memorial to their lost loved ones.

addition to Debussy, Ravel had begun to attract the interest of patrons such as the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, to whom he dedicated the Pavane pour une Infante défunte, and Misia Natanson, who became a lifelong devotee.

the time of World War I, the Eiffel Tower provided the basis for communication with Berlin, Casablanca, and North America, and allowed the army to intercept enemy messages, including the famous intercept that led to the arrest and conviction of the German spy Mata Hari.

In his Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust would model his Baron de Charlus on Montesquiou, just as he would base the Princess Yourbeletieff and Madame Verdurin on Misia, the actress Berma on Sarah Bernhardt, and elements of the character of Bergotte on Prince Edmond de Polignac (although more on Anatole France).

Significantly, it was while the final act of Italian unification was drawing closer that the First Vatican Council (on July 18, 1870) declared the doctrine of papal infallibility—increasing the pope’s power in the spiritual realm at the very moment when his temporal powers were appreciably waning.

Le Figaro’s Albert Wolff,

Raising a child, managing a household, and being a good wife, all the while focusing on expressing herself in ways that had never been done before, took an enormous toll on Morisot

La Samaritaine and the Cognacqs were also thriving.

Paris had for years been a center for those alienated from and opposed to the Church, as well as being opposed to organized religion in general.

La dame aux camélias.

For two months he had tried to keep up his writing as cannon boomed night and day and as shells hissed over his head, but at last—warned that he was about to be seized and possibly shot by the Communards—he fled Paris. At the time, it seemed the end of the world. But he quickly forgot this once the Commune was over. Writing in July to his boyhood friend, Paul Cézanne, he told him that now that he was back in his home in Paris, it all seemed as if it had been a bad dream. When he saw that “my house is the same, my garden has not budged, not a piece of furniture, not a plant has suffered,” he concluded that it almost seemed as if it all had been a “nasty farce invented to frighten children.”3

Returning to Paris the day after the empire’s fall, Hugo was greeted by a huge crowd at the Gare du Nord. Never one to shy from an audience, he pushed his way through the mob and into a café, where he spoke from a balcony: “Citizens,” he told them, “I have come to do my duty.” He had come, he added, “to defend Paris, to protect Paris”—a sacred trust, given Paris’s position as the “center of humanity.”6 After that, he climbed aboard an open carriage, from where he spoke again to the fervent crowd before making his way to the house of a friend, near Place Pigalle. There the young Montmartre mayor, Georges Clemenceau, warmly welcomed him.

He was witness to a Paris in ruins, with ashes and destruction everywhere. But despite the terrible damage and the enormous amount of suffering, the shattered city was already showing surprising signs of life. The day after the Commune had been annihilated, Goncourt sanguinely wrote: “This evening one can hear the movement of Parisian life starting up again, and its murmur like a distant tide.” Two days later, he added: “Across the paving-stones which are being replaced, the people of Paris, dressed in their travelling-clothes, are swarming in to take possession of their city once more.” Zola, writing to Cézanne soon after his return, put it more succinctly: “Paris is coming to life again.” Sarah Bernhardt agreed. One morning soon after her own return, she received a notice of rehearsal from the Odéon theater. “I shook out my hair,” she wrote, “stamped my feet, and sniffed the air like a young horse snorting.” She had realized, with typical exuberance, that “life was commencing again.” But perhaps Edouard Manet put it best of all. Writing to Berthe Morisot on June 10, he told her, “I hope, Mademoiselle, that you will not stay a long time in Cherbourg. Everybody is returning to Paris; besides, it’s impossible to live anywhere else.

Do not copy me,” [Antoine] Bourdelle repeatedly told his students. “Sing your own song.

The war, that was meant to be over in a few weeks, or, at worst, a few months, dragged on for four grinding years. All generations felt the lash, but the cut ran deepest among the young men. During the hostilities Emile Durkheim lost many of his most talented students: Maxime David, Antoine Bianconi, Charles Peguy, Jean Rainier and Robert Hertz, all perished at the Front... When he learned the sad news that his son, Andre´ had succumbed from his battle wounds, he wrote, in a letter to his nephew, Marcel Mauss, ‘I feel detached from all worldly interests. I don’t know if I ever laughed much, but I’m through with laughing . . . due to no longer having any temporal interest’ (Besnard and Fournier, 1998: 508)... Durkheim died on 15 November 1917, nearly a full year before the Armistice brought hostilities to an end. One cannot rid oneself of the feeling that he died of a broken heart… It was not just his son, his most promising students and the children of others, who had died. The rational hopes of the Enlightenment, and the positive sociology of La Belle Epoque, lay in shreds. (Chris Rojek, The longue durée of Spengler’s thesis of the Decline of the West, 2017)

It was not until 1869 that Claude Monet became a friend of Edouard Manet, joining Manet’s circle, which by now included Zola, Cézanne, and Degas.

Monet in turn introduced Sisley, Bazille, and Renoir to the group, which met evenings at the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles district, at the edge of Montmartre.

The dazzling white Sacré-Coeur, which went up in the Commune’s aftermath, was erected in expiation for the sins of France, but its conservative Catholic promoters had little sympathy with the Communards. Not coincidentally, the basilica completely hides the ground where the cannons were parked and the uprising first broke out.

Certainly one of Haussmann’s finest achievements, this is the water system that, with modifications and updates, still supplies Paris today.

The youngest son of an officer in Bonaparte’s army, Hugo was born in 1802 near the Swiss border, in Besançon. Two years later, his mother, a confirmed royalist, gave up on her marriage, leaving Major Hugo to his mistress and his wars.

Rome—the final event in the long

march toward Italian unification. The two stories were intertwined, for Napoleon III had for several years used French troops to defend the pope, who was determined to retain temporal power in Rome, the last remaining vestige of the once-mighty Papal States.

Goncourt observed in a rare compliment, although he felt compelled to add that the dinner included “some grouse whose scented flesh Daudet compared to an old courtesan’s flesh marinaded in a bidet.”14

Instead of a coup d’état, MacMahon’s associates risked a general election—a daunting prospect given the amount of opposition that they now faced. With little appreciation for the nature of that opposition, they put off the elections for many months, during which they embarked on a series of actions that amounted to mass arm-twisting—prosecuting newspapers, threatening owners of republican meeting places, dismissing “unreliable” local officials, and forbidding circulation of opposition circulars and propaganda while conducting their own massive propaganda campaign. Their actions, which betrayed more than a whiff of desperation, merely united the previously fragmented opposition, of which Gambetta now took command.

they did not yet have control of the Senate. But elections for one-third of the Senate’s members were coming up in early 1879. And despite the Senate’s reputation as a bastion of conservative power, the republicans intended to win.

As for alcoholism among the poor, there had been no one who had dramatized the problem more graphically than he, but he saw alcoholism as a result, not simply a cause, of the social evils that the poor suffered.

For years Matisse had battled his conflicting impulses, between commercially viable conservatism and something else, although he had not yet grasped what that something else was. Earlier that year he had helped organize the first official exhibition of Vincent van Gogh’s works, as part of the Salon des Indépendants—certainly an influence, for he later gave credit to van Gogh as well as Gauguin for his summer breakthrough. But it was the little fishing village of Collioure that dazzled him with color and light, and drove him to take more risks than ever before. Two summers in the south of France had exposed this northerner to vibrant color, and he responded ardently, even gratefully. Collioure radiated color and light, but it also exuded an element of savagery, for there was a fierce primitivism in this Catalan town that expressed itself in the explosive colors and contrasts of Fauvism, so unlike the gentler colors of the Impressionists. Embracing Gauguin’s insistence that art should primarily communicate emotion, Matisse forged ahead, daring all by rejecting art as representation, and producing works of shattering impact.

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