Sert was an enormous gnome who, inside his hump, like a magic sack, carried gold as well as rubbish, extremely poor taste and exquisite judgement, the priceless and the disgusting, diamonds and crap, kindness and sadism (Cocteau claimed that he cut off stork’s beaks), the pros and the cons (“Sert yes, Sert no,” Cocteau again used to say). Virtues and vices on a staggering scale. I remember that with Sert we used to play at “what-shall-we-buy-if-we win-the-jackpot”; and Sert, who loved the impossible, would say:
“I would commission a miniature … from Sert.”
It was impossible, too, to talk to “Môsieur” Sert about his painting. These gigantic constructions, the hard work of his assistants (for he insisted, in person, on being faithful to his maquettes), the excessive use of silver and gold that failed to conceal a basic deficiency, those streams of redcurrant jam, those swollen muscles, those demented contortions of figures, those riotous shapes, left me feeling confused, and praise stuck in my throat.
“I can sense that you loathe that,” Misia whispered to me, “but don’t let him notice.”
“Madmachelle, Picasso doesn’t know how to draw … don’t drink this Orvieto wine, it only costs three liras … Stick with this Château-Yquem 1893; smell the sap, the bouquet! The lords of Yquem (who included Montaigne among their forebears) sold the vineyard in 1785 to the Marquis de Lur Saluces (who include among their forebears the husband of the gentle Grésilidis, the one who tempted the devil). Speaking of the devil, I will show you the Satan by Leonardo da Pistoja; it’s a female Satan, Madmachelle; Diornède Carafa, the Bishop of Ariano, had the artist portray his mistress with the features of Satan …” So his erudition generated endless connections.
Catalans are always on bad terms with whichever Madrid government is in power. The Catalan Sert, on the contrary, always got on well with the authorities, whoever they were. He drove around in cars with CD number plates, sometimes he displayed the Republican colours on his houses, and sometimes the yellow and gold; he knew how to reconcile the contrasting figures of Quiñones and Lequerica;4 he had decorated the Vickers building; he had also covered the directors’ board rooms in Essen with his paintings; the Rothschilds fed him and the Germans heated his studio: Guelphs may pass, as well as Ghibellines, but art remains. Sert was passionate about great houses … in every sense of the word: the Sassoons, Lady Ripon, the Saxton Nobles, the SDN, the Fauchiez Magnans, the Newport villas, the Palm Beach palaces did not offer sufficient spaces for his inventive, gilt-edged genius.
3 In the original French, Coco Chanel takes great pleasure in affectionately mocking Sert’s accent (“Je vois”, for example, becomes “Che voà”; “architecture” is written as “ârchitechtûre”, etc.) For her, too, he was always “Môsieur Sert”. [Tr]
4 Two prominent members of the exiled Spanish opposition. [Tr]
MISIA
“FORGET THESE BOTTICELLIS; these da Vincis, they’re appalling, what rubbish!” Misia would say to me. “Let’s go and buy corals to make Chinese trees.”
Whoever mentions Sert, mentions Misia.
She has been my only woman friend. (My feelings for her, what’s more, were more those of liking than of friendship.) This obliges me therefore to describe how I see her, what she meant to me, and what she is. I have seen her appear at the moment of my greatest grieving: other people’s grief lures her, just as certain fragrances lure the bee.
We only like people because of their failings: Misia gave me ample and countless reasons for liking her. Misia only devotes herself to what she doesn’t understand; yet she understands almost everything. Me, I remained a mystery to her; out of this came a loyalty that was always belied, but which, after some differences, reverted to normal. She’s an unusual human being, who only appealed to women and to a few artists. Misia is to Paris what the goddess Kali is to the Hindu pantheon. She is simultaneously the goddess of destruction and of creation. She kills and scatters her germs, without realising. Satie called her “mother kill-all”, and Cocteau “the back-street abortionist”. That’s unfair. Misia certainly doesn’t create, but in certain dim lights, she performs her useful and kindly act like a glow-worm in the dark.
There’s no denying that, in her case, she’s unaware of her influence; but this Polish woman’s Oriental fondness for destroying and falling asleep after the disaster, the calm soul in the midst of the ruins, is entirely conscious.
Misia has no sense of moderation. “French rational clarity” and the “blue line of modest hills” mean nothing to this nomad from the steppes.
She has an acute thirst for success and a deep and sacrilegious passion for failure. For herself, whom she loathes, for the man she serves, her tactical knowledge and her promotional strategy are always on the alert.
Misia loves me. “You must realise,” Lifar said to me, “that Misia has done for you what she has done for no one else.” It’s true. She craved my affection. This love comes from a great basic generosity mixed with a devilish delight in denigrating everything she gives. Shallow people say she’s “highly intelligent”. If she had been, I would not have been friendly with her. I am not sufficiently intelligent for “highly intelligent” women. “We live,” Misia used to say, “on a reputation for usurped intelligence.”
From the age of fifteen, ever since she posed at Valvins, with her hair in curlers and her blouse rolled up, as women from a brothel for Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Vuillard and Bonnard, up to the time of Picasso, Stravinsky and Diaghilev, Misia has spent fifty years living among the greatest artists and she is completely uncultured. She has never opened a book.
“Take this book, Misia.”
“What for? I wonder when you find the time to read?”
She doesn’t even read her own letters. She has imposed herself on all the great artists of her time, but she has lost them, for they are creators, and she deprives them of oxygen (she only sees them again so as to make sure I don’t see them); she would like them to be without soul, without talent, for her alone, just as her Chinese trees are without leaves.
“Ah! How long it is!” moaned Misia at Bayreuth one day, as she was listening to Parsifal.
An irritated German, sitting next to her, turned to her:
“Are you sure, Madame, that it is not you who are too short?”
Misia has a sickly heart; in friendship she squints and in love she limps. And since she is intelligent enough to tolerate it, this makes her attractive. She aspires to greatness, she loves to mingle with it, to sniff it, to control it and reduce it. The sublime in art, with the deep feelings that accompany it, does credit to her. If having good taste means saying no, Misia is taste itself.
This eternal no, as a natural effect of divine wrath, leads Misia to surround herself with nothing but rubbish, with ghastly little trinkets, with dubious people, who are indecisive even where their sex is concerned. All she likes is mother-of-pearl; a nostalgia for vases probably. Luxury for her is the opposite of luxury. For Misia, it’s the flea market.
So what about her fondness for me? I repeat that it comes from the fact that she has never been able to destroy me, that is to say prove her love to me. “She loves you, Madmachelle,” Sert used to say, “because she has never been able to trick you.” She was never able to find the chink in the armour, which nevertheless exists. For a quarter-of-a-century, the worm has made its way around the fruit without ever being able to get inside it. The steppe has never prevailed over the French countryside. “Monsieur le Président,” Hitler said to Laval one day, “what Poland lacks is a Massif Central.”