“How,” people said to her, “could you have complimented that lady on the frightful hat, with its gaudy colours and extravagant shape, which she wore when she made her sensational entrance to your house? Could you really have admired it?”
“I’d prefer anything as long as I didn’t have to talk to her about it,” Anna replied.
Inverts are always at women’s feet: “My lovely, darling, my angel, my enchantress …” They think there can never be too much praise; women do too. They toss garlands of compliments around their necks, strings of flowery flattery, with which they strangle them. Their beautiful lady friends are delighted: women don’t dress to please men, but to please homosexuals, and to amaze other women, because they love what is excessive.
“They are charming! They have so much taste!”
They like plucked eyebrows—once they have reassured themselves that they make their rivals look like calves’ heads—blond hair that is dark at the roots, orthopaedic shoes that make them look like invalids, their faces laden with foul-smelling grease that will repel men. And should they succeed in having their breasts removed, how they would gloat, Juvenal, how they would gloat!
The number of women I’ve seen die under the subtle, heady influence of the ‘ghastly old queen’: death, drugs, ugliness, ruin, divorce, scandal, nothing is too good to destroy the competition and take one’s revenge on the woman. Queens want to be women, but they are very bad women.
“They are delightful!”
To get the better of her, they follow her around like shadows everywhere, except to bed; queens work as interior decorators, hairdressers, designers(!), and, above all, as couturiers. They plunge them into a deadly kind of eccentricity, into their artificial hell; in the depths of the abyss I can see them all, my dear friends of yesterday: Béatrix, Florimonde, Clarissa, Barbara, I can name them, count them, but alas not on my fingers.
When I say “homosexuals”, I’m talking about the homosexual spirit, naturally enough, for we all know some excellent, doting fathers, who play the wallflower at dances, who are on the look-out for a good match for their daughters, and who are merely subconscious inverts. Social bodyguards, leaders of decadence, they are the microbes of this gorgeous epidemic, the instigators of truly slanderous hats, the lauders of unwearable dresses, the long-winded and deceitful critics of stiletto heels, the virulent propagators of furniture padded in white satin. They are the only men who like make up and red nails. They form part of the sly, gossip-mongering army of which the cynical, bearded, dirty homosexuals, with their filthy hair in a bun, their gnawed fingernails and their greenish teeth are only the advance guards; they haven’t the avant-garde tastes of this old guard, but they maintain the link between it and women; they create the climate. And their favourite vehicle is the poetry of couture.
… And there’s no more art of couture! I repeat: couture is a technique, a job, a business. It may be that there is an awareness of art, which is already a great deal, that it excites artists, that it accompanies them in their cars, on the path to glory; that a bonnet with ribbons should be immortalised in an Ingres drawing, or a hat in a Renoir, so much the better, but it’s an accident; it’s as if a dragon-fly had mistaken Monet’s Waterlilies for the real thing and had alighted there. If an outfit attempts to match a fine, statuesque body or to enhance a sublime heroine, that’s wonderful, but it does not justify couturiers persuading themselves or thinking of themselves—or dressing or posing—as artists … they’ll eventually fail as artists.
Three years before the war, I was the target for a great offensive from journalists-poets-couturiers. Their leader, Bébé Bérard, had organised a campaign: he was infuriated by my friendship with Dali.
ABOUT WEALTH
MONEY IS PROBABLY AN ACCURSED thing, but does not our entire civilisation derive from a moral concept based on evil? Without original sin, there would be no religion. It is because it is an accursed thing that money should be squandered.
I judge people according to the way they spend.
I would say to women: never marry a man who has a purse.
Yes, you don’t need enthusiasm in order to earn money, you need it in order to spend it. Money that is earned is merely material proof that we were right: if a business or a dress is not profitable, it’s because they’re no good. Wealth is not accumulation; it’s the exact opposite: it serves to free us; it’s the “I’ve had everything and that everything is nothing” of the emperor-philosopher. Just as true culture consists in chucking a number of things overboard; just as in fashion, you generally begin with something that is too beautiful in order to attain simplicity.
I’ll return to this when I discuss fashion; I will merely say in passing that one can be elegant and not have money.
But money for money’s sake, that grim obsession with wealth, has always struck me as an abomination.
Money is not attractive, it’s convenient.
When women love money for what it procures, that’s natural, but when they are in love with it, that’s appalling. The face of a pretty girl who talks to you about contracts, rent, or life or term assurance becomes so ugly! As for me, I belong to that breed of foolish women, women who think only of their work, and, once work is done, think of fortune-tellers, stories about other people, daily events and nonsense.
The only thing I really like spending is my strength. I would willingly use all my strength in persuading and giving. (A little later on I will tell you that fashion is a gift couturiers make to the age.) It pleases me infinitely more to give than to receive, whether it be at work, in love or in friendship. I have squandered millions. The richest men I have gone out with are those who have cost me the most.
I love buying; the dreadful thing is that once you have bought, you possess. I’m enchanted by small boutiques, haberdashers, second-hand shops, middlemen, clothes dealers. I love antique shops that look like those in Dickens or Balzac’s Peau de chagrin. Whenever I arrive in a town, I run away from the ‘pretty boutique’ full of those inept creations I designed ten years previously.
I have a hatred of hanging on to things. I prefer not to have to see the money, the books, the objects, the people that I have lent.
I only care for trivial things, or else nothing at all, because that is where poetry takes shelter. Almost all our emotional, social and moral troubles stem from the fact that we don’t know how to give anything up.
Love of money is a physical thing; it’s contagious, like a disease. I’m going to tell you a true story, which is rather like a tale by Maupassant. I was staying at my house in Roquebrune, on holiday. I summon my accountant, M Arsène, who comes down from Paris with his lady and his daughter, on the day train, second-class, a respectable gentleman free of any liabilities. M Arsène and his family are my guests for three days. On the third day, once work was over, I discover that M Arsène had bought himself a dinner jacket to come to the South of France and that he didn’t want to leave without having worn it for the first time. “Very well, M Arsène, I’ll take you to Monte Carlo this evening.” We walk into the gaming room.