Dawn of the Belle Époque: The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and Their Friends by Mary McAuliffe (review)

MCAULIFFE, MARY. Dawn of the Belle Époque: The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and Their Friends. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4422-0927-5. Pp. xii + 386. $26.95. McAuliffe’s carefully researched book brings to life not only the individuals singled out in the title but a number of “friends” (Rodin, Morisot, Manet, Edmond de Goncourt, among others) who often figure as prominently as the purported main players in this vibrant account of one of France’s most pivotal periods, 1871–1900. Organizing the study by year (each of the 28 chapters covers one or two) has the advantage of allowing McAuliffe to demonstrate, with her own presentation, the very synchronicity of the lives under scrutiny here. Treating each individual in turn would have instead given the impression of lives lived separately, when in fact they were sometimes surprisingly interconnected. The obvious disadvantage of the year-by-year structure is that it obligates McAuliffe to jump constantly from one individual to the next in order to update us. She generally rises to this challenge, moving quite seamlessly, for instance, in just a few pages, among a cast of characters including Julie Manet, Winnaretta Singer, Prince Edmond de Polignac, Debussy, Goncourt, Zola, Fauré, Misia Sert, Thadée Natanson, Ravel, Satie, Bernhardt, Montesquiou, Whistler, and Proust (229–34). Sometimes, though, this back-and-forth movement results in rather forced transitions: “While Eiffel was contemplating the possibility of building a gigantic iron tower, Rodin was beginning preparatory studies for a far smaller yet nonetheless daunting project of his own” (150); “While Debussy was fighting boredom and despair in Rome, Claude Monet was fighting the ocean along the coast of Normandy” (165); not to mention a plethora of “Meanwhile”s and “In the meantime”s. A related problem is McAuliffe’s tendency, when about to turn to a different key figure, to make statements that are clearly aimed at creating suspense: “[Camille] Claudel, too, was inspired—but only at first” (151); “Debussy still had Gaby to take care of him—at least, for the time being” (218); “Prescient advice, indeed, given what lay ahead” (237) but which fall short because by the time that individual is revisited, readers may well have lost track of his/her previous “status.” Readers may find themselves puzzling, too, over certain observations which verge on the overly categorical, as when McAuliffe juxtaposes Pierre Curie, who found “the woman of his dreams” in Marie Sklodowska, and Zola, who “was similarly enraptured with his mistress and their two children, although not with his wife, who scared the daylights out of him” (262); or when she claims that Morisot “would have strongly agreed” with her daughter Julie, who was “thoroughly disgusted” by the “sleazy tarting up of the human body [...] for male consumption” at the Folies-Bergère (282). The book is refreshingly free of the typos and format problems that are all too common in scholarly publishing these days, though a heavier editorial hand could have eliminated the occasional repetition . We are told on consecutive pages about Monet’s one-man show at the Boulevard des Italiens gallery of La Vie Moderne (102–03), for example, and about how the public’s hostile reception to the Impressionists’ private exhibition “must have been especially difficult for Berthe Morisot,” followed five lines later by “[i]t must have been a challenging situation for Morisot” (46). Those glitches should by no means discourage readers from delving into this absorbing narrative, however. McAuliffe’s lovingly rendered portrait so stimulates all the senses that one can practically see Zola burning in effigy post-J’accuse, smell the horse manure in the streets of Paris, taste the wormwood in la fée verte, 1182 FRENCH REVIEW 85.6 hear Gauguin bellowing “Merde! I wish at least I could draw!” (235), and feel the satin lining of the coffin where Sarah Bernhardt studied her roles. University of Arkansas Hope Christiansen MCLEOD, JANE. Licensing Loyalty: Printers, Patrons, and the State in Early Modern France. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2010. ISBN 978-0-271-03768-4. Pp. 312. $74.95. In the wake of a substantial body of scholarship on the correlation...