The Way to Paradise Page 9

  On the ninth day of her stay, four police officers and the police commissioner of Lyon, Monsieur Bardoz, appeared at the Hôtel de Milan with a search warrant. After spending a few hours rummaging through her things, they took away her papers, notebooks, and private letters—among them a passionate one from Olympia—and the copies of The Workers’ Union that she hadn’t yet distributed to bookstores. As they left, they handed her a summons to appear before the King’s Counsel, Monsieur A. Gilardin.

  Gilardin was a man as thin as a knife, dressed in a suit like a religious habit. He didn’t rise to greet her when she entered his office.

  “The work you are doing in Lyon is subversive,” he said icily. “An investigation has been opened, and you may be charged as an agitator. Consequently, while we await the results of the investigation, I prohibit you to continue your meetings with the canuts of Croix-Rousse.”

  Flora studied him slowly from head to toe, with disdain. She made a great effort not to explode. “Do you consider it subversive to exchange ideas with the people who weave the cloth for the elegant suits you wear? I’d like to know why.”

  “Those filthy holes are no place for ladies. And it is a dangerous business to speak to the workers when one has inflammatory ideas about the social order.” The lipless mouth of the King’s Counsel barely moved as he spoke. “I must warn you: so long as this investigation continues, you will be under observation. But if you like, you may leave Lyon immediately.”

  “The only way you’ll make me leave is by force. I like this city very much. And I must warn you of something too: I will move heaven and earth so that the press here and in Paris let the people know the outrage that is being perpetrated upon me.”

  She left the office of the King’s Counsel without bidding him farewell. The three opposition newspapers—Le Censeur, La Démocratie, and Le Bien Public—reported the search and the seizure of her papers, but none of them dared to criticize the measure. And from that day on, two police officers were stationed at the door of the Hôtel de Milan, taking note of the visitors Flora received and following her in the street. But they were so lazy and clumsy that it was easy to give them the slip, thanks to the complicity of the chambermaids at the hotel, who helped her leave through a kitchen window that opened onto a back alley. Therefore, despite the prohibition, she continued to hold meetings with the workers, taking every possible precaution, always fearing that the police would appear, alerted by some traitor. They never did.

  At the same time, she undertook an intense labor of social research, visiting workshops, hospitals, poorhouses, madhouses, orphanages, churches, schools, and finally brothels in the neighborhood of La Guillotière. On this last expedition, accompanied by two Fourierists —they had behaved very well, finding her a lawyer to defend her case before the King’s Counsel—she was not disguised as a man, as in London, but covered in a cape and a rather ridiculous hat that hid half her face. Although it wasn’t as Dantean as the enormous Stepney Green in London, La Guillotière presented a spectacle that unnerved her: prostitutes clustered on corners and in the doorways of taverns and bawdy houses with cheery names—The Bride’s House, The Warm Arms. She asked the ages of many of the youngest: twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Children, barely developed, playing at being women. How was it possible that men could be aroused by these creatures of skin and bone, who were not yet out of childhood and were threatened by consumption and syphilis, if they hadn’t already contracted them? Her heart shrank; rage and sorrow struck her dumb. Just as in London, here too there was something part monstrous and part comic: in the midst of depravity, children two, three, and four years old crawled among the prostitutes and their clients (many laborers among them), playing on the dirt floors of the houses of ill repute, left there by their mothers while they worked.

  Though profoundly disgusted, she made these visits out of a sense of moral obligation—she couldn’t reform what she didn’t know. From the early days of her marriage to André Chazal, sex had repelled her. Even before she acquired political awareness or an understanding of social problems, she had intuited that sex was one of the primordial weapons for the exploitation and control of women. This was why, although she didn’t preach chastity or monkish reclusion, she had always distrusted theories that extolled the sexual life and the pleasures of the flesh as the objectives of a future society. It was one of the reasons she had distanced herself from Charles Fourier, for whom she nonetheless felt admiration and fondness. Curious, the case of the master; he had always led, at least in appearance, a life of complete austerity. He was thought to be a misogynist. But in his design of the society of the future—the coming Eden, the period of harmony to follow civilization—sex took pride of place. It was hard for her to accept this. Such a project could end in true chaos, despite the master’s good intentions. It was unnecessary, absurd, impossible to organize society around sex, as certain Fourierists pretended to do. In the phalansteries, according to Fourier’s design, there would be young virgins who would entirely forgo sex; and vestals, who would practice it moderately with the vestels or troubadours; and women with even more freedom, the damsels, who would pair off with the minstrels; and so on, up a rising scale of freedom and excess—odalisques, fakiresses, bacchantes—up to the bayaderes, who would make love as a charitable act, sleeping with the old, the sick, travelers, and in general beings who were otherwise condemned by an unjust society to masturbation or abstinence. Although every aspect of this system might be free and voluntary—each person could choose which sexual body of the phalanstery they wanted to belong to, and abandon it at will—to Flora it seemed improper. It made her fear that under its shelter new injustices would spring up. The plans for her Workers’ Union included no sexual formulas. Except for establishing the absolute equality of men and women and the right to divorce, it avoided the subject of sex.

  What alarmed her most about Fourier’s doctrine were his claims that “all fantasies are good in matters of love” and “all passionate obsessions are just, because love is essentially unjust.” His defense of the “noble orgy” made her dizzy, as did his espousal of coupling in groups and his assertion that in the society of the future, minority tastes—unisexual, as he called them—like sadism and fetishism shouldn’t be suppressed but rather encouraged so that each person might find his perfect match and be satisfied in his weakness or whim. All this, of course, would harm no one, since everything would be freely chosen and approved. These ideas of Fourier scandalized her so much that she secretly rather agreed with Proudhon, the puritanical reformer who not long before, in his 1840 pamphlet What Is Property?, had accused the Fourierists of “immorality and pederasty.” The scandal had recently led Victor Considérant to temper the sexual theories of the movement’s founder.

  Although she recognized and admired his revolutionary daring, Flora was intimidated by Fourier’s libertine tolerance in sexual matters. She was also amused at times. She and Olympia had laughed until they cried one afternoon in the midst of lovemaking, remembering the master’s confession that he had an “irresistible passion for lesbians,” and his claim that, according to his calculations and research, he could prove that there were twenty-six thousand “like-minded individuals” in the world, with whom he could form an “association” or “body” in the future world of Harmony, in which he and those like him would freely and unabashedly enjoy sapphic displays. The lesbians exhibiting themselves before these happy voyeurs would do so of their own accord, because the performance would allow them to exercise their exhibitionistic talents. “Shall we invite him to join us, my dear?” Olympia laughed.

  You could poke fun at Fourier’s classificatory mania now, Florita, but ten years ago, upon returning from Peru, how overjoyed you were to discover his teachings, which recognized the unjust situation of women and the poor, and proposed to alleviate it by encouraging the formation of a new society, which would emerge with the establishment of more and more phalansteries. Humanity had progressed beyond its early stages—Savagery, Barbarism,
Civilization—and now, thanks to new ideas, it would soon enter the last: Harmony. The phalanstery, with its four hundred families of four members each, would constitute a perfect society, a small paradise organized in such a way that all sources of unhappiness would disappear. Justice was useless, at least in bringing happiness to human beings. Fourier had foreseen this and prescribed everything. In each phalanstery the most tedious, stupid, and unrewarding jobs would pay best, while the most enjoyable and creative would pay least, since working at the latter would constitute a pleasure in and of itself. As a result, a coalman or a tinsmith would be better recompensed than a doctor or an engineer. Each limitation or vice would be turned to its best advantage for the good of society. Since children liked to play in the mud, they would be assigned the task of picking up garbage in the phalansteries. At first, this seemed the height of wisdom to Flora. So did Fourier’s formula for ensuring that men and women did not tire of always doing the same thing: they would rotate from job to job, sometimes in a single day, to keep routines from growing stale. From gardener to professor, from bricklayer to lawyer, from laundress to actress, no one would ever be bored.

  And yet she ultimately found alarming many of the categorical statements made by the kind and compassionate Fourier. To maintain that “on my own I have managed to gainsay twenty centuries of political imbecility” was an exaggeration. The master presented unverifiable assertions as scientific truths: that the world would last exactly eighty thousand years, and that in that time each human soul would transmigrate between the earth and other planets 810 times and live 1,626 different lives. Was this science or sorcery? Wasn’t it ludicrous? By the same token, though she knew that she was not nearly as wise as the founder of Fourierism, she said to herself that the Workers’ Union program was more realistic than its Fourierist counterpart, precisely because it was more modest.

  After her visit to the brothels, her tour of La Antigualla, a madhouse and hospital for prostitutes suffering from shameful diseases, was even worse. The ill and the insane, intermingled, were supervised by cruel, moronic warders who beat the madmen when they screamed too much as they walked half naked and in chains around a courtyard full of filth, amid clouds of flies. In the corners, ruined women spat blood or displayed the pustules of syphilis as they tried to sing hymns under the direction of the Sisters of Charity, who ran the infirmary. The hospital’s director, a pleasant man with modern ideas, admitted to Flora that in the majority of cases it was poverty that caused the alienation of these wretches.

  “It makes perfect sense, doctor. Do you know how much a working woman earns in Lyon for fourteen or fifteen hours in the workshop? Fifty centimes—a third or a quarter of what a man makes for the same job. How are they to live on that much a day, if they have children to feed? That is why many turn to prostitution, and are driven mad.”

  “Don’t let the sisters hear you.” The doctor lowered his voice. “In their view, madness is a punishment for sin. Your theory would seem hardly Christian to them.”

  It wasn’t only at La Antigualla that Flora encountered priests and nuns. They were everywhere. Lyon, city of rebellious workers, was also a clerical city, stinking of incense and the sacristy. She went in and out of many churches, which were full of poor fanatics praying on their knees or listening passively to the obscurantist tripe spilled out by priests who preached resignation and obedience to the powerful. Saddest of all was to see that the poor made up the immense majority of the faithful. To study fetishism, she climbed up to Lyon’s highest point, nearly expiring in the process, where Notre Dame de Fourvière was worshiped in a small chapel. The ugly figure of the Virgin impressed her much less than did the abject idolatry of the mass of parishioners who had climbed so high and were now on their knees pushing and elbowing to approach the glass case holding the statue of the Virgin and touch it with a fingertip. It was the Middle Ages in the heart of one of the most industrialized and modern cities in the world!

  Returning to the center of Lyon, halfway down the mountain she tried to visit a poorhouse where old people with no home or job could take refuge and be given a roof over their heads, a bowl of soup, and a Christian burial. She couldn’t get in. The place was guarded by policemen with muskets. Through the bars, she saw the Sisters of Charity, who also ran schools for the poor in the city. Of course! Nuns and officers arm in arm, keeping the poor trapped from childhood to old age, teaching them submission through prayers and sermons, or imposing it by force.

  Compared to these research forays, how different were her meetings with the small groups of canuts from the silk factories, and other Lyonnais workers. Sometimes the discussions were violent. Flora always left them strengthened in her convictions, feeling rewarded for her efforts. One night, at a meeting with some Icarian workers, followers of Étienne Cabet—whose novel, Travels in Icaria, had converted many in the region to his doctrine, called communist—Flora fainted in the middle of an ardent dispute. When she opened her eyes, it was dawn. She had spent the night in a weavers’ workshop, lying on the ground. The workers who slept there had taken turns watching over her, massaging her hands and wetting her forehead. She had seen one of the workers, Eléonore Blanc, at other meetings. Flora had noticed that the young woman listened devotedly and had an agile mind. Something told her that she might become one of the leaders of the Workers’ Union in Lyon. She invited her to the Hôtel de Milan for tea, and they talked for hours under the placid gaze of the policemen charged with watching her. Yes, Eléonore Blanc was an exceptional woman, and she would form part of the organizing committee of the Lyon Workers’ Union.

  By the time the examining magistrate called her in, Flora had become even more famous in Lyon. People flocked to her in the streets, and although some men averted their eyes and some women dared to say, “Go away and leave us alone,” most greeted her with friendly words. Perhaps it was this popularity that made the magistrate, Monsieur François Demi, decree—after interrogating her for two hours in a most agreeable conversation—that there were no grounds on which to charge her, and that the police should return the papers they had seized.

  “These last few weeks I’ve been simply superb,” Flora said to herself upon recovering her notebooks, letters, and diaries, which Commissioner Bardoz himself sullenly delivered. Yes indeed, Florita. In five weeks in Lyon you had preached to hundreds of workers, enriched your knowledge of social injustice, set up a committee of fifteen people, and on the suggestion of the workers themselves ordered a third edition of The Workers’ Union, to be sold at a very low price in order to put it within the reach of the humblest of pocketbooks.

  Her words had even reached the heart of the enemy, the Church. Her last meeting in the region came as a surprise. In great secrecy, some priests who lived in a community in Oullins, under the leadership of Abbot Guillemain de Bordeaux, invited her to visit, since “many of our ideas are the same as yours.” She went out of curiosity, expecting little of the meeting. But to her astonishment, she was received in the castle of Perron at Oullins by a group of religious revolutionaries. They called themselves the rebel priests. They had read and discussed Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Cabet, and Fourier. But their guiding spirit and mentor was Father Lamennais, who had lived a generation before. Rejected by the Vatican, he had been a supporter of the Republic, an opponent and scourge of the monarchy and the bourgeoisie, a defender of freedom of worship and social reform. Like Saint-Simon and like Flora, these rebel priests believed that the revolution should preserve Christ and a Christianity untainted by the authoritarianism of the Church and the privileges of power. The evening was pleasant, and as Flora took her leave, she told the rebel priests that there would be a place for them in the Workers’ Union too. She counseled them, half in jest and half seriously, that since they had taken so many important steps they should take one more and rebel against ecclesiastical celibacy.

  Her parting with Eléonore Blanc, on the day she left Lyon, was very hard. The girl burst into tears. Flora embraced her and whispered in her ear
something that frightened her even as she said it. “Eléonore, I love you more than my own daughter.”

  6

  ANNAH FROM JAVA

  PARIS, OCTOBER 1893

  When one fall morning in 1893 a knock came at the door of his studio in Paris at number 6, rue Vercingétorix, Paul stood open-mouthed in astonishment: the tiny dark-skinned woman-child in front of him was dressed in a tunic like the habit of a Sister of Charity, with a little monkey on her arm, a flower in her hair, and around her neck a sign that read: “I am Annah from Java. A gift for Paul, from his friend Ambroise Vollard.”

  As soon as he saw her, before he had even recovered from his bewilderment at receiving such a present from the young dealer, Paul wanted to paint. It was the first time he had felt the urge since his return to France, on August 30, after his ill-fated three-month voyage from Tahiti. Everything had gone wrong. He had disembarked in Marseille with only four francs in his pocket and arrived dazed and half dead of hunger in a blazingly hot Paris deserted by his friends. In the two years he had been away in Polynesia, the city had become strange and hostile. The exhibition of his forty-two “Tahitian paintings” at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery had been a failure. Only eleven were sold, and the proceeds didn’t make up for what he had been required to spend on frames, posters, and publicity, going into debt again. Although some of the reviews were favorable, he had felt ever since that the Paris art world was shutting him out, or treating him with disdainful condescension.