AND ANOTHER THING
When the Boneless Wonder and Greedyguts danced a hundred years ago
PAUL JOHNSON
I
t is, I suppose, almost exactly 100 years ago since Toulouse-Lautrec completed his life's work at the age of 35. He lingered on for more than another year, dying in September 1901, and made efforts to paint and draw, but a combination of advanced alcoholism, tertiary syphilis and a worsening of his inherited debilities told against him. Despite the brevity of his professional life, however, he left — like Raphael — an immense body of work. The 1971 catalogue raisonne, which is far from complete, records 4,784 drawings, 275 watercolours, 369 posters and prints, and 737 canvases, many of them large and elaborate. Equally important, he had a more beneficent and profound influence on 20th-century art than any other painter. It was a wretched centu- ry, to be sure, in the arts, but without the lit- tle man's marvellous sense of colour, beauty and exactitude of line, fidelity to the truth and to the comedy and tragedy of human existence — all of which passed into the life- blood of his best 20th-century successors it would have been infinitely worse. More- over, he brought to moving life a glittering cast of characters: Jane Avril and La Goulue, Charles Conder, L'Anglais (William Warrener), Oscar Wilde, Felix Feneon, Aristide Bruant, Louie Fuller, Yvette Guibert, May Belfort, May Milton, La Clownesse Cha-U-Kao and dozens of others, who stick in our memories as tena- ciously as the puppets of Dickens or Balzac, with the added zest that they were real peo- ple who led vivid, often tragic lives. No other painter, not even Rembrandt or Hog- arth or Goya, created such a troupe of inti- mately observed eccentrics. We feel we know them well, though in some cases even the basic biographical information is scanty.
One of them who particularly interests me is Valentin le Desosse, and for two rea- sons. First, he illustrated the peculiar physique which features in Winston Churchill's devastating attack on Ramsay MacDonald in the early 1930s: `Mr Spea- ker, Sir, when I was a boy there was one exhibit at the fairground I was never per- mitted to see. It was considered too dread- ful for my tender years. How disappointed I was! How often have I wondered, in the years that followed, what this forbidden sight was really like. But now I need won- der no more. It is sitting there on the Trea- sury Bench! My parents were quite right to forbid it — it is a frightful spectacle. Behold — the Boneless Wonder!' Desosser means to fillet the bone from meat or fish, and Valentin, if not exactly boneless, was double-jointed in knees and ankles, as Lautrec clearly shows him, or his bones were so rubbery that they could be bent at will in either direction. He could do more or less anything he liked with his limbs.
This made him a marvellous dancer, whose grace and style were particularly evi- dent when he waltzed. His right hand held his partner with great but firm delicacy round the waist, and he invented the device of holding his left hand open, palm upwards, so that the partner simply placed her hand elegantly in it and no ugly grip- ping was necessary. The speed at which he whirled the girls around was astonishing, but he also danced apart, hands on hips, toes pointed, while the chahuteuses (row- dies) lifted their skirts, revealing black stockings and up to 60 yards of lacy petti- coats, ending with the splits on the floor. At the Moulin Rouge or Moulin de la Galette or other dance-halls, there was no absolute distinction between house-dancers and cus- tomers. Valentin first came to Montmartre in 1860 just to dance but he remained to entertain, and to teach. Thirty years later, Lautrec painted a marvellous canvas, 'Dres- sage des nouvelles par Valentin le Desosse", showing him coaching one of the new girl customers, still in her street clothes, how to dance and lift her skirts, while others look on and wait their turn. According to Lautrec's artist-friend Gauzi, the girls 'considered it an honour to dance with this skeleton-like character'.
If one of these working-class girls shaped up well, she might be given a regular job in the quadrille, and paid. That is how La Goulue (`Greedyguts') got her start. But Valentin remained an amateur to the end and refused a salary. He loved dancing for its own sake. He obviously had money. His real name was Jacques Renaudin, and dur- ing the day (it was said) he worked as a wine-merchant or in the offices of his broth- er, a lawyer. He came from a well-off family of rentiers, and kept his own carriage and pair. Once or twice he was even seen giving La Goulue, his favourite partner, an airing in the Bois de Boulogne. But, according to Lautrec, he liked to keep the two sides of his life separate and was not pleased to be greeted by his Montmartre friends while in the Bois. The only photo of him that I know of, wrongly dated 1892 but which must have been taken earlier in his career, shows him with a moustache, doing the splits in black tights, and bears no resemblance to the Valentin of Lautrec. When the artist knew him, he always danced with a top hat tipped to the front, a monstrous chin jutting out beneath a powerful aquiline nose, fierce tight mouth, reddish (dyed?) hair, ravaged cheeks, turkey neck, vast bony hands and an air of faded gentility maintained by rigid discipline of the flesh. A formidable silhou- ette, not without a reptilian hint.
By contrast, La Goulue was a big, blowsy, common boule de suif, a superb natural dancer whose avid desire to gobble up all life had to offer, to compensate for her deprived childhood, was obviously going to end in tears. She pulled in the crowds when Lautrec first knew her in 1885-7, but she found it increasingly difficult to pull in her waistline. By 1895 she had been dropped by the Bals, and was trying to run her own show in a baraque (tent) on the boulevards, where she performed a Turkish belly-dance, a revealing comment on the state of her figure. She appealed to Lautrec to help her attract cus- tomers by painting the front of her tent. Lautrec, an exceptionally soft-hearted man, obliged and did two huge panels. The left- hand one showed her lifting her skirts, with Valentin in attendance, and in the right- hand one she is doing one of her famous high kicks — she once won a competition as the highest kicker in Paris. Looking on are various well-known characters, including Oscar Wilde, who was in disgrace at the time. A photo of the baraque with its panels appeared in the Figaro Illustre in April 1902, after Lautrec's death, so evidently La Goulue was still going strong with her belly- dancing as late as that. Some time after, however, she gave up, the panels were sold, cut up into eight strips, dispersed, but finally brought together and purchased by the Lou- vre in 1929. That, as it happened, was the year La Goulue died, a penniless mountain. A photo taken shortly before tells a sad tale.
Oddly enough, one of the strips, the one containing the full-length of Valentin le Desosse, was missing. Some time elapsed before it was reunited with the others, restored and sewn on. The two panels can now be seen in the Musee d'Orsay, though it is evident they have been through hard times. What, however, happened to Valentin him- self? I don't know, and would like to know.
Previous page
