The Musee Rodin, formerly Hotel Biron (Shutterstock)
My only trip to Paris was a three-day whirlwind many years ago. With no time for the Louvre, I went instead to the Rodin Museum—and fell in love. The white roses climbing a stone wall outside the entrance; the stillness inside, despite the crowd; sunlight streaming through floor-to-ceiling arched windows, lighting the sculptures’ stark beauty.… This was before I knew how Rodin treated his lover, Camille Claudel—and how much credit she deserved for his work—and how she wound up institutionalized, one more woman rendered officially insane by annoyed or nervous relatives. I have kept that knowledge carefully apart, so the museum can still shine in my memory.
It was once a hotel, you know. Rodin lived there, sprawled across four ground-floor rooms, his gramophone filling the air with Gregorian chants. The other tenants included a free-spirited dancer named Isadora Duncan, nineteen-year-old Jean Cocteau, the painter Henri Matisse, and Rainer Maria Rilke, who worked for a time as Rodin’s secretary.
Eager for more information—surely there were collaborations, squabbles, and affairs—I stumble upon The Tenants of the Hôtel Biron, a playful novel by Laura Marello. She invites others to rent apartments in the hotel: photographer Eduard Steichen, the Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, a young Spanish painter called Pablo Picasso, an older painter he admired called Henri Rousseau, and composer Erik Satie. I feel like I am at a reunion, surrounded by people I have loved and enjoyed for years, eager to hear the gossip.
Marello begins with “Camille Claudel’s Letters Not Sent,” letting Steichen introduce their existence. He tells us that in 1943, he received an unsigned note: I am dying now. I love you. I will see you again. He thought it was for him and could not imagine who had sent it. But two weeks later, Claudel’s twin sons (many scholars believe she did bear Rodin two boys) came to see Steichen: “They had Rodin’s soft eyes under his stern brows, but Camille’s beautiful nose and mouth.” They handed over a box of letters their mother had written to Rodin but never sent. Her dying wish was that Steichen have them, her contribution to a book he was editing about the Hôtel Biron.
That “book” is the novel’s fictional premise, and the artists in residence offer pieces of plot. The setting has its own backstory: built in the eighteenth century for a duke, the Hôtel Biron was one of the most elegant mansions in the Faubourg St-Germain before it was converted to the Couvent du Sacre Coeur, a convent and Catholic girls’ school. It fell into disrepair (Catholic girls can be hard on a place, all that energetic stomping and secret smoking), then was turned into a hotel.
Matisse taught art classes in the former chapel, this we know to be true. Marello places the rebellious nineteen-year-old Cocteau in the sacristy, which he decorates with hanging goatskins. But the novel’s centerpiece is Camille Claudel. We watch her fall in love with Rodin, and to my delight, she is spirited from the start: “I know you have these ideas because you are jealous,” she tells Rodin, “because my work was exhibited and reviewed in the newspapers by the time I was fifteen, and you are only now getting exhibited and reviewed at the age of forty.” I hope she was that crisp, and this is not score-evening revision on the part of Marello. She researched these lives for fifteen years before spinning her tale.
Rather than blame Rodin for taking advantage of her, Claudel writes, “No, I am not sorry we made love. If I were going to be sorry I would not have done it. You needn’t fear for my chastity. No artist has a chaste heart, that is what my family fears.” Especially Paul, the ultra-Catholic brother who would eventually sign her away to a mental institution as Rodin stood by and did nothing.
Rodin could have driven anyone mad, but Claudel’s love was clear-eyed, aware of his manipulations. “It is truly cunning the way you manage to have your place at the dinner table changed to suit whatever angle you need to gaze upon the great writer that day,” she writes, “and the way you can draw so skillfully on those tiny cigarette papers without [Victor] Hugo noticing.”
Later, when he is returning to Rose—“who would be happier without you,” Claudel cannot resist the jab—she finally realizes that “it is not so much that you want me, or you want Rose, or you want any particular relationship or woman. You simply want to have your own way at all costs, and so whatever anyone else wants, you oppose.”
When she is locked up, she blames Rodin as well as her family, but above all, she writes, “I blame myself for my lack of cunning and deceit. I should have pretended to you that I had no grand aspirations, and to my family that I was chaste. It is my great failure in life that I could not fool you or them. I was not capable of deceit.”
Her voice, and the others in this novel, ring so true that I find myself believing every word. Indeed, many of the details are true. Picasso did devour Sherlock Holmes and Buffalo Bill novels. Rodin did feel guilty enough to (temporarily) give up art when his sister fell ill and died. “A broken heart,” their mother diagnosed, and how could he not have known that his little sister had fallen in love with his friend? Steichen also tells us, quite plausibly, that “Cocteau, in his impatience to be famous and loved by great men, insists he wants to meet Rilke but is afraid of coming inside the main house. Rilke, for his part, wanders around the house in a trance and doesn’t speak to anyone.”
Rousseau was convinced that there were ghosts in the house: “At night I can hear him chasing them and swatting at them with magazines and paint rags,” reports Steichen. That, I cannot confirm. But he could well have begged all the tenants of the house to write letters to his new girlfriend about what a wonderful man and painter he was. He would die a year later, suffering from an infected leg wound and from her rejection.
Picasso’s contribution to Steichen’s “book” is an essay about the ancient tribe of Post-Impressionists, nomads “who only lived in direct sunlight.” After their tribe traipsed Cezanne, who was less interested in the way light hit and instead painted the forms he saw in the objects. “He couldn’t use models because he was embarrassed to hire them,” Picasso divulges. “As a result his nudes are oddly shaped.”
“Of the emotions, Gauguin liked unsatisfied desire the best,” Picasso continues. “Van Gogh was cranky and fought with everyone in Paris.” “Toulouse-Lautrec painted with oil on cardboard. He didn’t steam his pencils into syrup the way Degas did.” “Matisse said you have to seek the desire of the line.” “Gertrude Stein said that Cubism was Spanish. She said only the Americans and the Spanish understood Abstraction, the Americans through disembodiment and the Spanish through ritual.”
Erik Satie’s contribution is refreshingly practical and includes priceless advice for recovering from illness. Travel “cures disordered imaginations, unbridled passions, jealous characters, worried dispositions and headaches, but only in thin women,” he notes. As for “taking the waters,” “this does not cure anything, but is satisfying if you wish to gamble or find your daughter a husband.” Fresh air, exercise, drinking plenty of water, and eating a vegetarian diet? “Hogwash. It makes you oversensitive, and you’re bound to contract every ailment that’s tangoing through Paris.” Living on a boat in the Seine and playing music during meals? “It makes the fish terribly ill.”
Near the novel’s end, we return to Steichen’s calm, attentive diary: “Matisse scratches out certain forms on a canvas but leaves their traces visible. Someday this technique will be the rage in New York. I must tell Alfred Stieglitz about it. There is something fussy and irritable about it that would appeal to a New York painter.”
“Picasso continues to be afraid that Nijinsky is losing his mind. … [He] says he has never seen so many examples of human destruction as the result of lost or thwarted love as have passed through the Hôtel Biron. … Of course he blames it on women.”
One of those women has the last word. “I am going to die now,” Camille Claudel writes to Rodin. “I will not be joining you in hell, because, as you know, my sins of hubris, martyrdom, bitterness, exaggeration, and the excessive way I cherished my own victimization, hurt no one but myself.
“I have arranged for my sons to steal my body from the asylum after I die, and bury it under the window of my room at the Hôtel Biron,” she continues. “I am not abdicating to you. I do not see the Hôtel Biron as a museum for your works, even though since 1919 that is what it has become. I see the Hôtel as a house in Paris where, for just a few years, several great artists lived under the same roof and pursued their art. … I want to be a part of that now, even though it is too late.”
Young and dreamy on that visit to Paris, I would have said I wanted to be a part of it too. Now, smiling over ridiculous eccentricity, wincing at the various feuds and tragedies, admiring the genius but not the cruelty it permitted … I am not so sure.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
