Diaghilev was an extraordinary acrobat, a recreator of talent and an entertainer of genius. Had he brought to France companies such as the Imperial Theatre Ballet, he would merely have earned a succès d’estime. (The more so since he had only restored to Paris what St Petersburg had once borrowed from her.) But he did better; he invented a Russia for abroad, and, naturally, abroad was taken in. (Petrushka and Schéhérazade were not shown in St Petersburg until ten years after they were seen in Paris.) Since everything in the theatre was only trompe l’oeil, false perspectives were necessary: the Russia of the Ballets Russes succeeded in the theatre precisely because it was built on fictional material.
In 1918, when he had exhausted this seam, Diaghilev changed his style completely, with the introduction of comedy into dance (Massine and Les Femmes de bonne humeur, Pulcinella with Picasso, after Parade). For five years, served well by les Six, he rediscovered his youth; and posterity may be more grateful to him for having created Les Biches, Les Fâcheux and Matelots than for Les Sylphides or Le Spectre, for having inspired Etienne de Beaumont’s Soirées à Paris and given birth to the Swedes.
The flighty, frivolous, fickle Diaghilev was the first to understand that you had to grab hold of masterpieces, that nothing prevented you from dancing in circles so much as dance music did (it’s true that Isadora Duncan dancing to a Beethoven symphony had been a precursor), that you could dance to a painting by Picasso, to Dada ideas, to Claudel’s poetry. Börlin wanted to go even further in this direction, and he came a cropper, but Diaghilev, who was taste itself, never put a step wrong, precisely because he was light-footed. He nearly devised a ballet out of the 1913 riots based on Sacré, that Hernani of our times! After Serge, they danced among black statues, in the ruins of factories of futurism, in museums, to Velasquez and to Berlioz, to Bach and to Handel, to Shakespeare and to Paul Valéry. I know all the criticisms people have made about him, that he tackles dance from the outside, that he subordinates it to other art forms, etc, but one fact remains: Diaghilev dominated his age, and his age, which has been that of Nijinsky, Massine, Lifar, la Pavlova, the Sakharoffs, Argentina, the rebirth of the music hall, negro dance steps, rhythmics and explosive rhythm, etc, was probably the most brilliant period that dance has ever known.
I can see him as he was when he was alive, and how lively he was. He rides roughshod over scores. He hacks into them, without knowing whether it’s dance music. He picks out the best bits, as a gourmet might. He succeeds in the impossible. He ruins himself after having gone banco. He tears at his lock of white hair. He rushes over to Princesse Edmond’s house; he rushes over to Maud Cunard’s; he explains that he needs a thousand pounds, that very evening, that the creditors have seized control, that the curtain won’t rise; he wrings his hands; diabetes makes his forehead perspire.
“I went to see the Princess. She gave me seventy-five thousand francs!”
“She’s a grand American lady,” I say. “I’m only a French dress designer, but here is two hundred thousand.”
With the money in his pocket, he plunges back into the adventure the next day, he disappears, beset by romantic dramas that are as relentless as they are tortuous, and he emerges from the shadows or from America with a new musician and with his eightieth ballet.
Diaghilev sometimes told me about his experiences in Switzerland, during the First World War. He was rehearsing in Lausanne, in a hangar; Stravinsky was working with Ramuz next door; Lenin and Trotsky were waiting on the shores of Lake Leman for the moment when they were to return to Russia, through Germany, in a sealed carriage. 1917. Parade and revolution. The Châtelet and the Poutiloff factories. When I bring together these similar Russias that were unaware of each other, I think that they amount to one and the same thing.
The years go by. He continues to put his trust in genius, to search for genius, as a tramp searches for cigarette butts on a pavement.
In Venice, on his way back from Salzburg, in front of our very eyes, Diaghilev has just died. Present are Catherine d’Erlanger, Misia, Boris Kochno, Lifar.
“My friends, my only friends … it seems to me that I am drunk …”
The next day, a long procession of gondolas leaves the Orthodox dei Grecchi church and makes its way towards the San Michele cemetery, where the cypresses rise above the pink walls bordered in white.
“What will become of the Ballets?”
“Who can take them on again?”
“Nobody.”
I did not prevent Diaghilev’s ballets from collapsing, as people have said. I had never seen Le Sacre du printemps before 1914. Serge spoke about it as if it had caused a scandal and had been a great historical moment. I wanted to hear it and to offer to subsidise it. I don’t regret the three hundred thousand francs that it cost me.
Serge stirred up a world full of ideas, colours, passions and of banknotes: all he left was a pair of cuff links which Lifar would swap for his own at the moment he was placed in the coffin.
MADAME DE CHÉVIGNÉ
I HAD A DELIGHTFUL OLD FRIEND, the Comtesse Adhéaume de Chévigné. When I lived in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, she was staying in the rue d’Anjou, almost opposite me. In this rue d’Anjou salon, in about 1900, all the most respected ‘clubmen’ and elegant women in Paris, from the other faubourg, had streamed by, in the days when one took lunch at half-past eleven, when one called on people at three o’clock, before social gatherings took place, and where the gentlemen came in and sat down, with their top hats on their knees. With her red wig, her loud, hoarse voice that delighted Marcel Proust, her authoritarian manners and her peremptory tone of voice, Madame de Chévigné was a character out of Saint-Simon, parodied by Swann. She looked like an elderly actress; or more accurately, it was Madame de Chévigné whom Marguerite Deval, Moreno, Pauline Carton and all those actresses who specialised in playing the parts of ridiculous old women, down through her son-in-law, Francis de Croisset, did their best to copy. What with the actresses imitating the countess, and she, imitating them in turn, they were soon inextricable.
Madame de Chévigné was the first woman in the world to have said merde.
Her conversation was intoxicating; it was a chronicle, a memoir, an end-of-year revue …
“Today, my dear, young women are ignorant and foolish. Men don’t teach them anything any more. Not even the social graces. In our case, we knew men who had no need to learn manners, they were born into them … I learnt everything I know through making love. A lover teaches you those sorts of things, not a husband. My lover used to take me to the Louvre. You can’t spend your whole time … kissing one another! You’ve got to like those things … As for being hot-blooded, well, Cécile5 and I were certainly hot-blooded … But you have moments of leisure, even in bachelors’ apartments. I’m talking of a time when people had bachelors’ apartments and you wore a veil to go in; nowadays, people do it anywhere, on top of anything, between two doors, in front of the servants. Look, take my daughter (that one, my youngest one, now I can swear that she is certainly by Monsieur de Chévigné. What’s more all my children are Adhéaume’s. No bastards, whatever happens!). Well, my daughter has been learning since she was three years old, now she’s sixty and she doesn’t know a thing!