Paris: The Novel

the most exciting place in the world.”
    But it was her uncle Marc who really opened her eyes.
    “The whole of Europe is devastated after the Great War,” he liked to say, “but in Paris, we are recovering with style.” Certainly for a struggling artist, a poor writer or a young person like Claire, Paris was heaven on earth. And nobody knew more about what was going on than Marc.
    After Aunt Éloïse died, and left everything to him, Marc moved into her apartment. He kept all her pictures, adding his own, so that the walls were wonderfully crowded. More than once he had given Claire a guided tour, explaining where each picture came from, and something about the artist. One day, when she’d admired a painting of the Gare Saint-Lazare, he told her, “That picture really belongs to your mother. She can take it anytime she wants.”
    But when she asked her mother about it, Marie told her: “Aunt Éloïse bought the painting for me, but I never paid for it.”
    “What made you choose it?” Claire asked.
    “That’s a little secret from long ago,” her mother replied with a smile. “Anyway, it looks very well in the apartment where it is. Let it stay there.”
    Her uncle would tell her about the artists he’d met.
    “I’d love to take you to Giverny to see Monet, but he’s getting so old now that I don’t like to trouble him,” he remarked.
    “The last survivor of Impressionism,” she suggested.
    “I’d say he’s lived right through it and out the other side,” her uncle replied. You have the post-Impressionists like van Gogh, Gauguin, and the Expressionists—people who created a world that seems almost more vivid, urgent, even violent than real life—though they’re all tending toward abstraction—Cézanne especially, I’d say. But Monet’s gone on for so long that those pools of water lilies and screens of willows he does have turned into a sort of dream world of color that’s almost pure abstraction.”
    “Have you met Picasso?” she asked.
    “Yes. He’s a brilliant draftsman, you know,” he said. “He could have been a pure classical artist. He has incredible facility. Instead of which, he decided to break every rule of art.” He smiled. “Naturally, if he was going to invent Cubism, he did it in Paris.”
    They talked about Surrealism, which was all the rage just then. And Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. “They operate mostly in Paris, but they’re going to Monte Carlo for the winter now,” he explained. Her uncle had been at the stage scandal of
L’Après-midi d’un faune
, and the riot which took place when Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
was first performed.
    “But what you must understand,” he would impress upon her, “is that all this excitement in Paris isn’t just about painting, music and ballet, interesting as they all are. It’s deeper and broader than that. We’ve just had a war. The German Empire, the ancient Hapsburg Empire in Vienna and the creaking old Ottoman Empire of the Turks are all broken. The Russian Empire has undergone a Bolshevik revolution. The old world order has gone. We’ve seen warfare on an industrial scale that’s not only killed millions but may even call into question our society and the nature of man himself.
    “Naturally, most people assume that the comfortable old life with its solidity, its stratified classes, its masters and servants will gather itself together again. The world that is good to people like us.
    “But the avant-garde are looking to the future with fresh eyes. These artistic movements you read about—the Constructivists in Russia, the Vorticists in England, or Futurists in Italy—they’re artistic movements certainly, each with their manifestos—but they’re reacting to this new reality, where the old certainties of humanity are all called into question, and the destructive industrial machines we’ve created seem almost to have taken on a fearsome life of their own. And if you want the best expression of that uncertainty, then read this.”
    He gave her a slim book of verse:
The Waste Land
, by T. S. Eliot.
    “It’s just published. Eliot’s an American in London—I suspect he may turn into an Englishman, the way Henry James did. His friend Pound, an American who’s been living in Paris, gave it to me.”
    On other occasions, he spoke of some of the French authors—Apollinaire, the modernist and anarchist. He told her delightedly how Apollinaire and his friend Picasso were briefly arrested, for reasons