Nothing Daunted (11 page)

The three other students, who were younger, initially thought she and Ros were “
eighteen
and were amazed when they found out how ancient we are—I know they think we have one foot in the grave,” Dorothy wrote to her father. One of them, Nora, who was English, announced to them that all of the rich, vulgar American girls were marrying in to the English peerage for the titles, and that the men succumbed only because they needed the money to keep their estates
going. Dorothy and Ros, irritated by her superciliousness—and by the truth of her charge—retorted in the best French they could muster. They had read E. M. Forster and Henry James, and they also must have thought of the true-life Miss Elkins, with her thwarted love for an Italian prince.

When they informed Mme Rey that they intended to explore the city by themselves, she threw up her hands, informing them that young ladies in France never stepped onto the sidewalk without a chaperone or maid. They explained that they had their parents’ permission, and she gave in. They took
dictée,
art, and history in the morning, studied for a few hours, and then got to know the city, accompanied by
Walks in Old Paris.
They often went around town in
fiacres
—horse-drawn carriages that jostled for space with automobiles, buses, bicyclists, and pedestrians. The pungent smells of old Paris didn’t bother them, but they never adjusted to the fleas in the straw at their feet; the bites lingered for weeks. “I know Cousin Josephine will take back her invitation when she sees me,” Dorothy wrote. Her mother’s cousin Josephine Beardsley had recently bought an estate in Cannes and had invited the girls to join Dorothy’s parents there for a visit that winter. Dorothy described three large welts on her face, “which makes me look as though I had some evil disease. . . . After a taxi ride the other day, I came in with twenty-eight bites!”

One day the two American women were in a narrow, crowded street, and their
fiacre
stopped as a
cocher
in front of them backed up his horse, knocking theirs down. “We were perfectly terrified, but didn’t dare get out, as you would surely get run over,” Dorothy wrote to her brother Douglas, “and then our poor horse got up, but the drivers began fighting, and got purple with rage, and the other pulled out his whip, and started to beat our man, who whipped up the horse, and as we flew on, he hurled awful curses at the other man. He chased us for about three blocks, both of them screaming . . . and people rushed to doors and windows to see the excitement, while we, by that time, over our fright, were howling, it was so funny. Imagine such a thing in New York!”

Soon she and Ros were escorting Mme Rey around town. The erudite businesswoman was uneasy on the modern streets of Paris. “She is so afraid of the crossings,” Dorothy wrote to Milly. “She scuttles across the streets just like Mother, and when she gets in the middle, screams and almost has hysterics, and then runs back to the same side!” On a rainy day in November, Dorothy and Ros took her with them to Amiens Cathedral. They all admired the lofty lines, the stained-glass windows, and the light, even on a gloomy day. They took a tour, and as they were descending some narrow stairs, the guide stopped to point out the ceiling. Dorothy wrote, “As my head went back, my hat dropped off—in my hurry I had come away without any hat pins.” On the roof, where they ventured out to examine the exterior from a different perspective, Madame, standing in a deep puddle with the rain pouring down, stopped the entire procession, to exclaim,
“Ah, quelle belle simplicité!”

Dorothy and Ros went to the Rue de la Paix to see an exhibition of contemporary paintings. Matisse and Picasso by then were well-known friends and rivals. Years earlier, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had introduced them at their salon; Stein’s brothers, Leo and Michael, collected Matisse’s work and helped to get him noticed. At the early exhibitions of Matisse, Derain, Braque, and Vlaminck—the key figures in the Fauve movement—one historian wrote, “viewers would give vent to the most powerful emotions, sometimes almost coming to blows. . . .” In 1910 Matisse was still working in hectic hues. Dorothy wrote home: “The contrast after the Louvre was too much . . . all the most startling colors, with queer and bizarre subjects—and the drawing was like that of a little child.” Matisse, she declared, “thinks the only real art is the very simplest, with just two or three lines to express a figure.” Decades later, she regretted her conventional aesthetic taste and her failure to buy a few inexpensive paintings.

They also toured the Conciergerie, the former royal palace, where prisoners were held before being led to the guillotine. “It was really an awful place, and some how seemed more terrible than the dungeons we saw in Germany,” Dorothy wrote. “Poor Marie Antoinette lived in
a tiny little cell, damp, and with practically no lights, and the contrast between that and Versailles seemed too awful—Madame told us all kinds of gruesome stories, and her husband’s grandfather and great grandmother were guillotined from there.”

On October 8, Rosamond’s twenty-third birthday, she took Dorothy and several others to tea at the Pré Catelan, a new restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne. Dorothy ordered a birthday cake for the evening festivities at the school, and they played “Up Jenkins” and “Hide the Thimble” with the other students and Mme Rey’s daughters, two unmarried women in their thirties, with as much zest as they had as ten-year-olds at the Underwoods’ house.

Dorothy, a typical pampered student abroad, was grateful to her father for funding her trip and assured him that she was taking advantage of all that Paris had to offer. At the same time, she couldn’t disguise her overwhelming desire to have a good time. She wrote to him, “You can’t imagine how happy and contented I am here, and Ros and I just hop along the streets,” before going on to describe their visit to the Palace of Fontainebleau. They were “much interested in Napoleon’s apartments—his marvelous throne room and the place where he signed his abdication—and all his gorgeous suites. It made his whole story seem so real and recent to see all his furniture, just as it was—and even his hat was there.”

When Madame Rey discussed Racine, Molière, and modern drama with her daughters, Dorothy admitted, she and Ros felt very ignorant. She pledged, “I am going to begin on ‘Le Cid’ immediately,” and she asked, “Please write me about American politics. I am very much interested—
what
do you think of Roosevelt?”

A few months earlier, Theodore Roosevelt—out of office and disaffected from the Republican Party for its lack of concern about “the plain people” and about the unchecked power of big business and party bosses—had given his “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. It was becoming the blueprint for his platform in the 1912 presidential election, when he would run as the head of his new Progressive Party against President William Howard Taft, Woodrow
Wilson (by then governor of New Jersey), and the Socialist Eugene V. Debs. Roosevelt spoke about a square deal for the poor man, about the need for a strong federal government to regulate corporations, and about the world setting its face hopefully toward American democracy: “O my fellow citizens, each one of you carries on your shoulders not only the burden of doing well for the sake of your own country, but the burden of doing well and of seeing that this nation does well for the sake of mankind.”

This inspirational rhetoric struck a chord with Dorothy, especially as an American living abroad. She was becoming vaguely aware of the civic responsibilities that came with adulthood. But, like any skillful correspondent, she wrote with her audience in mind. Her father heard about history, literature, and politics. Douglas, a popular, self-indulgent man-about-town, was the recipient of the most amusing gossip. When she was addressing her mother or her sisters, she focused on domestic matters, fashion, and excursions.

In the fall, she and Ros moved across the Parc du Champs de Mars to a sunny, one-room apartment with a private bathroom, at 6 Avenue du Général Détrie. They were pleased with their choice, but, she wrote to her mother, “imagine our rage on discovering that we aren’t to have hot water! They still heat the water in the kitchen and bring it to you in tin pitchers.” And she professed to be shocked by the movers, who “looked like pirates, with red sashes, and funny little tasseled caps—They just threw things into baskets and then dumped them over here—nothing done up, or labeled—You simply can’t imagine the confusion and chaos which resulted.”

Nevertheless, they were on their own at last, and they came to be amused at how little the modish Parisians cared about comfort. One night they went to a party along with “the two
demoiselles
Rey” and the other girls from the school. There was a log fire burning in the salon, but before long, Dorothy felt a chill creeping up her spine, and her teeth began to chatter. She knew it would be rude to put on her coat, but she finally went out to retrieve the fur. When she returned, her hostess laughed and said, “It is easy to see that you are American!”

In another letter to her mother, she described the penetrating cold as a prelude to a request for some acquisitions for her wardrobe. Ros was getting a dressy lavender suit made. Dorothy asked only for a good cloth dress and a formal gown that would be useful at home as well as in Paris, then added, “I want you to
answer this immediately,
as I don’t wish to do any thing without consulting you.” Despite her high regard for her mother, she found her frugality and her sporadic letters exasperating. Few of Dorothy’s correspondents could keep up with her.

She wrote to Milly about the marvelous creations: “Dresses very scant, very short coats—and either hats which cover the whole head, like a skull cap—or perfectly enormous ones.” Paris, she was not the first to point out, “is the most cosmopolitan city.” Ros, who was almost as close to Milly as Dorothy was, wrote to her, too, in a tone of joking defensiveness: “I hope you won’t think that it has been my influence which has corrupted Dot—she tells me you all think her letters are society ‘journals,’ but believe me, she has made lots of progress with her French, in spite of it.”

During a rare quiet evening at Mme Rey’s, they were reading their mail when the maid brought in a visiting card: three friends from Auburn had arrived. “We let out one wild yell, and ran into the salon, and fell on their necks,” Dorothy wrote to her family, and “in a minute Madame appeared at the door, pale and trembling, for of course she thought some one was murdering us—not understanding the American expression of joy and surprise. Do you suppose when we are fifty—we will still scream like that?”

They had become friendly with the Howlands, two sisters and a brother they knew from home, whose aunt Emily was one of the country’s leading abolitionists and suffragists. The brother, infatuated with Ros, showered them with books and flowers and French chocolates. She didn’t reciprocate his affection, but they all went out companionably to expensive restaurants, the roller-skating rink, and the opera. On January 18, 1911,
they went to see Isadora Duncan
in her premiere performance of
Orpheus
at the Théâtre du Châtelet, with
music from Gluck’s
Orfeo ed Euridice.
Duncan was already famous for her revolt against classical ballet and for her shocking private life. In 1909 she had run into Nijinsky in Venice. Reportedly, and perhaps in jest, she asked him to father her second child. Although she disliked the flamboyant sets of the Ballets Russes, she, too, had been dazzled by his 1910 performances in Paris. Several months later, the swashbuckling dilettante Paris Singer, an heir to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, fell instantly in love with her, and her second illegitimate baby was born in May 1910.

Dorothy thought Duncan’s performance was one of the loveliest things she had ever seen. She wrote to Milly, “The stage was absolutely bare—hung in soft brown draperies—and she was accompanied by a very fine orchestra. . . . She just simply floated around the stage, which was so simple that it looked like ordinary walking.” She thought, as others did, that Duncan “looked like the Winged Victory come to life—or a figure off a Greek coin—she danced entirely in bare feet, and it seemed perfectly natural, and quite different from the way the Russians did it. I never saw such an ovation . . . and such flowers!”

Before they left Paris in January 1911, Dorothy and Ros splurged, setting themselves up with suits, everyday dresses, and several evening gowns each—which, they told each other, would be perfect for Auburn’s formal events. This time Dorothy did not consult with her mother. One of her gowns was a closely fitted sleeveless blue satin with a very low neck and a long train; she had satin slippers dyed to match. Rosamond ordered a black velvet suit with a white fox collar and muff. “Oh, she was so beautiful in it,” Dorothy told her grandchildren. “I felt I couldn’t afford that, but I certainly enjoyed seeing her in it.”

—————————

In their final month in Europe, they made the long-anticipated trip to Cannes to stay with Dorothy’s rich relation, Josephine Beardsley Brown. Her parents already had arrived, and her father met them at
the station. “I can tell you,” Dorothy wrote to Carrie-Belle, “the sight of Papa was the best thing I have seen abroad.”

Cousin Josephine, a lively, fun-loving cousin of Mrs. Woodruff, had grown up at Roselawn, an Italianate mansion on South Street in Auburn that backed onto Fort Hill Cemetery. When she was a baby, she was dropped by her nurse, which left her lame, and she walked with a cane. Josephine’s father, William Beardsley, Dorothy said, had been “a perfect dragon,” and he ruled his three daughters “with a rod of iron.” Although he put out the word in Auburn that, upon marriage, each of them would be given a Victorian house, he disinherited Josephine’s older sister Cora when she married someone he considered unworthy. Josephine didn’t marry until her father died. She was forty-nine.

William Beardsley would have been even more enraged by Josephine’s choice: Clement Brown was a tall, impressive-looking man with a Vandyke—but a mere clergyman, over a decade younger than she was, and “so poor,” according to Dorothy, “that he lived in a boarding house where he had to stuff one of his windows with an old cloth.”