Gregory Curtis (20 page)

This was only a spur-of-the-moment improvisation, but the subject is revealing. Reinach had the fetishist’s obsession with the parts of a woman’s body as well as with their representations. He once wrote a paper proposing a method of dating Greek statues of women based on the variations in the distance between their breasts. But he also had the fetishist’s confusion when confronted with the woman’s body in the flesh.
Liane de Pougy, a beautiful former courtesan and actress who occupied much of Salomon’s time and imagination during the last decade of his life, once lifted her dress while in a feline mood to show him a scar on her thigh. This sort of thing was how she had made her living when she was young, so she knew the effect it
would have. Reinach was confused, tormented, attracted, repelled. She later remarked, “It’s said that the only nakedness he has ever seen is that of statues.”

This observation may not have been literally true, but it was accurate in its way. Reinach tried to conceal his fears and confusion by adopting a pretentious courtly manner with women. He made a display of elaborately kissing their hands. Afterward, given the slightest chance, he liked to play the role of an all-knowing instructor to women, particularly if they were young and pretty. He once pulled
Bernard Berenson’s wife aside with an air of mystery and said to her, “Tell me then, these things that your husband has written, are they things you believe one could explain to young girls?” He even wrote a series of instructional manuals, each of which was addressed to a teenaged girl:
Eulalie or Greek Without Tears, Cornelie or Latin Without Tears, Sidonie or French Without Pain
, and
Letters to Zoe on the History of Philosophies
(in three volumes!). Although Reinach could lecture charmingly in person or in print—
Eulalie, Cornelie, Sidonie
, and
Letters to Zoe
all sold so well that new printings were constantly in demand; in fact, except for
Zoe
, they are still in print—this social strategy preserved a professorial distance between him and women. Berenson, who saw what Reinach was doing to himself and how it made him unhappy and even ridiculous, said in a letter to a friend, “Much more romance, and yearnings, and even passion hides behind his pedantries than many a professed ladies’ man has ever known.”

Reinach did have a wife. In 1891, when he was thirty-three, he married a woman named Rose Morgoulieff, whose family had fled Russia. She had a life of her own as a doctor who directed a hospital for unwed mothers. She worked so selflessly for the hospital and its patients that she was awarded the Legion of Honor. Although she was proper, solemn, and admirable, she seems to have been entirely out of her husband’s erotic range, whatever its exact nature may have been. They had no children. The reason—or the excuse—was that he had been influenced by the theories of Malthus and worried about overpopulation. But
some connection existed between them. They were married for forty-two years. He donated massive sums to Jewish causes in Russia because of her. Just weeks after he died, in his own home in 1932, Rose too passed away.

There were, however, three women whom we know he deeply loved. They all shared two characteristics: a taste for literary artiness and a passionate lesbianism. In 1914 he became obsessed by the poet
Pauline Tarn. She was an English-American woman who wrote in French under the name Renée Vivien. Five years earlier, she had died of alcoholism and anorexia at the age of thirty. Love between women is the principal theme of her poetry. After reading all of her work—nine volumes of poetry, including translations of
Sappho and variations on some of Sappho’s poems, a novel, and two volumes of prose—Reinach became convinced that Pauline Tarn had been a genius. He began placing letters in literary journals in England and France asking for information about her, and he made diligent, if not annoying, inquiries among people who might have known her while she lived in Paris.

Pauline’s first great love, a Parisian girl named
Violet Shilleto, had died when Pauline was twenty. After that, living on an inheritance from her deceased father, Pauline had wandered the world aimlessly with a succession of lovers or lived alone in a shuttered room in Paris. Her sad life, her love for Greek culture, her sexuality, even her recourse to a pseudonym all fascinated Reinach. He placed the material he gathered—reminiscences, letters, and so on—into files left in a library in Aix-en-Provence that were to be sealed until the year 2000. To those friends who found this obsession just the least bit odd, he replied that if someone had preserved similar material about Sappho after her death, wouldn’t we be thankful today?

One day a friend took an excited
Salomon Reinach to meet
Natalie Clifford Barney. Although she came from Cincinnati, where her father had made a fortune manufacturing railroad cars, Natalie Barney had attended school in Paris and lived there most of her life. Known for her beautiful, slightly archaic
French, she was a voluptuous, charismatic woman, a writer, and the hostess each Friday afternoon of a salon at her house at 20 Rue Jacob. Everyone important in arts or literature went there, including Auguste Rodin,
Colette,
James Joyce,
Gertrude Stein, Anatole France,
Count Robert de Montesquiou (on whom Proust patterned Baron Charlus),
Isadora Duncan,
Ezra Pound,
Max Jacob,
Jean Cocteau, and many others.

But for Reinach all that paled beside one fact: Natalie had had an intense love affair with Pauline Tarn. That, together with Natalie’s powerful physical presence and formidable personality, overwhelmed Reinach. He arrived at her house on the Rue Jacob in love with one unattainable woman, the dead poet. When he left, he was in love with another.

“She reads nothing, knows nothing, intuits everything, this wild girl from Cincinnati,” he said of her. When she was young, she had a huge mane of blond hair that fell in waves well below her shoulders and a full, athletic figure that exuded sexuality. She had never been interested in men, although she attracted many suitors. Instead she became a predatory seductress of women, often arriving to court them dressed as a page. She liked to pose for photographs kissing another woman or reclining completely nude in a forest. Now, in 1914, she was thirty-eight to Reinach’s fifty-six and had begun to appear blocky and mannish. But her eyes were still radiantly blue, her manner was free and enthusiastic, and she had a pointed wit. What excited Reinach most of all was that she was an open, unapologetic lesbian.

Reinach saw her often. At a party at his house he introduced her to
Bernard Berenson, saying, “Surely the wild girl from Cincinnati and the sauvage du Danube were meant to meet!” Berenson fell for her too, attracted by what he called her “physical radiance.” And Natalie, who indulged and teased Reinach more than she really liked him, was taken with Berenson. “I was madly in love with you,” she told him, “until I suddenly woke to the realization that you were a male.”

When he was with Natalie Barney, Reinach constantly tried
to turn the conversation to her sex life. He called lesbianism “the island,” and he could never seem to get enough of the details. Years earlier, when she was just twenty-one, Natalie had seen a radiantly beautiful woman, just a few years older than her, riding in an open carriage in the Bois de Boulogne. Natalie learned who she was, began sending flowers and gifts, and came to call in her page’s costume. Without too much difficulty the woman succumbed; afterward, she wrote a barely disguised novel about the affair called
l’Idylle Saphique
, which was a scandalous success when it was published in 1901. Natalie, whose character in the novel is named Flossie, told Reinach about the book, and he, of course, devoured it.

But even its explicitness did not satisfy his curiosity. He wanted to know still more. He wanted to meet the author, Natalie’s former and still occasional lover. He pressed Natalie until at last, in 1918, just after the war ended, she took him to the Majestic Hotel in Paris to meet
Liane de Pougy. She too had known Pauline Tarn, and as Natalie’s lover she knew the most intimate details of life on “the island.” Reinach could not resist her. She became the third of his great unattainable loves.

Madame Reinach admitted Natalie to her home, but she would not allow Liane de Pougy there until one afternoon shortly before Salomon’s death. Liane had been one of the most notorious women in Paris at the turn of the century, but now, by marriage to an epicene Romanian noble many years her junior, she was the Princess Ghika. Reinach had seen her during her years of blazing glory in the theater. She had no talent as an actress, which even she admitted, but she was so beautiful that she could command an audience, especially the men, simply by appearing onstage in a daring costume. She lived off a succession of lovers and admirers, who competed for her by giving ever more expensive presents. The press chronicled the splendor of her jewelry, the luxuriousness of her homes in Paris and the French countryside, the extravagance of her carriages. Sometimes she received her lovers wearing a sumptuous, transparent negligee and lying on a polar bear rug. (At the height of their
affair, she gave the rug to Natalie, of whom she wrote, “We were passionate, rebels against a woman’s lot, voluptuous and cerebral little apostles, rather poetical, full of illusions and dreams. We loved long hair, pretty breasts, pouts, simpers, charm, grace; not boyishness. ‘Why try to resemble our enemies?’ Natalie-Flossie used to murmur in her little nasal voice.” The rug was still on the floor in Natalie’s apartment in Paris when she died in 1972 in her ninety-sixth year.)

Although Liane was not above a joke or two at Reinach’s expense when he was not around, she developed a genuine affection for him. She was in her early fifties when they met, and she enjoyed his talk and admired his knowledge and intelligence. “Torrents of rain all day yesterday,” she wrote in her diary on July 6, 1920, “broken by a pleasant but too-short interlude: Salomon’s visit. What an agreeable talker! What a charming reader! He read us Bossuet and tried to read Cocteau but threw the book aside, laughing.” Liane even pitied him a little for his erotic confusion. After giving him some letters she had from Pauline Tarn, she wrote, “No doubt he will bequeath them to posterity, fully annotated, according to his habit. I don’t think I could possibly give a greater pleasure to Monsieur Reinach, in love with a ghost.”

Occasionally he wearied her—she once wrote:

—but generally Liane didn’t mind when he obsessively turned the conversation to “the island.” In particular he enjoyed bringing her gossip about Natalie Barney, whom they always called Flossie. “A charming note from Salomon,” she wrote in her diary, “commiserating with my sorrows and scolding Flossie who is still tucked away at Samois with ‘someone.’ Mystery and discretion. It enrages Salomon who loves our Flossie more than
he admits—perhaps more than he realizes.” And sometimes she treated him as if he belonged on the island after all: “I received Salomon like the Queen of Sheba, reclining in a mass of mauve and blue chiffon, lace, scent, cushions, and silk with the Italian greyhound lying at my side. We sipped beverages from China, nibbled sweetmeats from the South and pastries from the Ile de France. I read him some poems by Verhaeren. We talked about Renée Vivien and Flossie.”

In addition to Reinach’s frequent visits to her, the two also carried on an intense correspondence that began in 1920 and lasted until 1932, when Reinach died. (She did the same with the surrealist poet
Max Jacob, who, although homosexual, also fell under her spell.) There is plenty of gossip about Flossie in the letters, but there is also high-minded and erudite discussion of religion, art, and history. And there are moving personal moments when Reinach confesses his fatigue or loneliness: “I blame myself ceaselessly for my life in a shell.”

They aren’t love letters;
Salomon Reinach could not have written a love letter. When in one letter he did write
about
love, he said that love was essentially an illusion and quoted
Theophrastus, a student of
Aristotle, who said, “Love is the passion of those who have nothing to do.” But if they aren’t love letters, they are at least letters of a profound friendship. Liane admired his intellect while he admired her taste. His own was deeply conservative. She had him read contemporaries like Max Jacob and
Jean Cocteau, whom he had considered “charlatans” and “literary Bolsheviks” but who, he grudgingly admitted, had some value. And there was an emotional bond as well. Liane had, after all, revealed to him her alluring life of sensuality, a life he longed for but could not escape from his shell to enjoy.

T
HOSE WHO
knew Salomon Reinach only professionally or who were not inclined to speculate about his relations with
women would have been surprised to know he thought he lived in a shell. He was by far the most public archeologist and critic of his time. His lectures at the Louvre were always filled with a faithful following of adoring matrons. His writings appeared everywhere. And he often wrote on current politics, joined activist committees, and contributed to a variety of political causes. He was made to seem even more open and public by his brothers’ positions as members of the Chamber of Deputies.

Joseph Reinach in particular was prominent. While the
Rothschilds represented the height of Jewish economic power, he was at the height of Jewish political power. He was also the most virulently attacked Jew in the scurrilous, anti-Semitic press of the day, and when he publicly defended Colonel Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer wrongly convicted of treason, the attacks became even worse. He was called a “microbe,” a “Jewball.” One paper said, “While his monkey face and deformed body bear all the stigmata, all the defects of the race, his hateful soul swollen with venom sums up even better all its malfeasance, all its deadly and perverse genius.” Each day Joseph was caricatured as some kind of animal, usually an ape. Once he was assaulted by a mob shouting, “Death to the
Jews! Down with Reinach!”