Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling

10 Dancing with Isadora

10 Dancing with Isadora Before coming to Paris in 1900, where she was wafted along on the heady breeze of French culture and first discovered what she termed “the crater of motor power,” 22-year-old Isadora Duncan had survived a California childhood of feast and famine, semi-starvation as a young hoofer in Chicago, and a hotel fire in New York, where her name first began to appear in newspapers and on the lips of astounded patrons of the dance. Now she was hoping to make her name in Paris, la ville lumière, though she must have first made plenty of heads turn with her dashes about the Louvre galleries with her long-haired, Grecophile brother Raymond, exclaiming over mythological figures incised on vases, and by her spirited defense of Rodin’s oeuvre at the Rodin Pavilion at the 1900 Exposition. In 1901 Duncan, her accompanist mother, and her brother took up residence in an apartment in the eighth arondissement, at 45, Avenue de Villiers, which would serve as a combination laboratory and instruction studio for expounding her ideas of the truth of the dance. Certain fashionable upper-class hostesses of Paris, notably American heiresses Winnaretta Singer (the princesse de Polignac), Anna de Castellane (née Gould, later duchesse de Talleyrand) and Clara de 100 Imperial Masquerade Caraman-Chimay (née Ward of Detroit), were drawn to the free-flowing moves of this plucky girl from their homeland, and Isadora was invited to perform in their drawing rooms, where she was observed and approved by a mixed crowd of artists, writers, composers and countesses. “I . . . sought the source of the spiritual expression to flow into the channels of the body,” Duncan wrote later, “filling it with vibrating light — the centrifugal force reflecting the spirit’s vision.” And it was only great music — not the dizzy, pizzicati-dotted tunes of ballet scores, but the symphonies of Beethoven, the mazurkas of Chopin, and the fugues of Bach — that could “start the motor in my soul.”1 By the time Duncan was beginning to impart her precepts in her Rue de Villiers studio, on the walls of which Raymond had painted pretentious Grecian-style pilasters, Der Ling and her family had returned from Switzerland and moved back into the apartment on Avenue Hoche. After the dust-covers came off the furniture and the chandeliers, and the necessary business of the Chinese legation had begun again (the backlog of paperwork resulting from the now extinguished Boxer incident had overflowed from file boxes onto desk tops and down to the floor), Louisa began to take her daughters, much to their delight, on her social rounds. It was the first time they had been able to move freely in Paris since before summer 1900. According to Der Ling, Louisa had many friends among the vaguely demimonde artist-aristocrat circles that could flippantly make dinner partners of the flamboyant transvestite, the Comte de Montesquiou, and the reserved, mystical composer Claude Debussy. Thanks to Paris society’s wide-ranging net Louisa and the girls also came to know the Académie Julian-trained American artist, Katherine Carl, who would become a friend of Der Ling’s and would later paint both her and the Empress Dowager’s portraits in Beijing. They also met the travel writer Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, who had just published a perceptive if derogatory book about China, pointing out that “There is little sympathy, no kinship nor common feeling, and never affection possible between the AngloSaxon and the Chinese,” and painting yet another foreign portrait of the Empress Dowager as she-devil.2 It was at one of these parties that Louisa must have first met Isadora Duncan. Der Ling had been as fascinated by Loie Fuller’s “butterfly 101 Dancing with Isadora dance,” demonstrated at the Paris Exposition, as Isadora would be when she first saw Loie perform in Berlin in 1901, and had begun to stretch her own creative wings. Der Ling knew she wanted to be a performer — an actress or a dancer, she had not made up her mind which. She and her siblings were already delighting in dressing up in costumes, as evidenced by the Carneval pictures taken of them by French society photographer Chusseau-Flaviens. She also knew that aspiring to either of these professions, while not immediately frowned upon by her parents, would have lowered the full weight of conservative Chinese censure on...