French was so flashingly fast that I scarcely followed a word.’ The Ps were ‘rare friends’, ‘young, rich’, with ‘charm and wit’, her ‘skylight to a different Paris’. Kathleen introduced Eileen to the Ps—she had still not realised that her nervousness with Eileen and sense of inferiority were actually an unacknowledged dislike, and tried to please her with introductions and attentions. ‘I was baffled about Jocelyn, and made repeated efforts to disperse that intimate, slightly scoffing regard with which she seemed to look with mockery into the deepest recesses of my heart, and find there nothing but the commonplace and the trivial.’
She did, however, realise that it was time to get a place on her own, but not before Eileen had played a trick on her of dressing up as a boy. She announced the arrival of a cousin; could Kathleen entertain him for the evening because she Eileen was otherwise engaged? Certainly Kathleen could. She was completely taken in by the slender youth in a baggy Norfolk jacket, and when Eileen made her true identity known Kathleen’s reaction was mixed. She laughed, she claimed to have thought it was fun, but she felt sick too. Her love of her own freedom was always slightly charged by her distaste for the way the people around her in that easy-going milieu used theirs.
The day after Eileen’s trick Hener gave Kathleen vicious Chinese burns, demanding to know what had been going on. Eileen had sworn Kathleen to secrecy, so she didn’t tell. Hener got his own back by telling Kathleen that there was a Swede about who wanted to kill her, who was at that moment asleep in a drunken stupor on Hener’s studio floor. Hener had discovered him lurking with a revolver, threatening to shoot Kathleen. ‘What have you been doing to Sternstrom?’ Hener demanded. ‘He said he loves you, and that he is a god, and that it’s not fitting that a god such as he should be slighted. Later he wept and said you were so lovely you had better be killed before you got less so.’ Kathleen was less upset about the revolver (she knew about that anyway, and only hadn’t told Hener because she thought it might give him ideas) than about the drunken stupor. She decided to bolt to Chartres, where at night she read in her room at the Chariot d’Or, and by day communed with the statues on the west face of the cathedral, loving the stained glass, far away from ‘violent cousins, jealous painters, sinister Jocelyns and murderous Swedes’. Cathedrals gave her great pleasure. Such religious beliefs as survived her childhood had been waning for some time, but cathedrals were something else. ‘Could worship anything of which Cologne was emblematic,’ she wrote after a visit in August 1901.
When she got back to Paris she moved house.
On her first night in her new room, a long narrow studio overlooking a courtyard with a pump, she observed her opposite neighbour across the yard. ‘He was a young bearded Frenchman, animated and rather good-looking, and despite the beard I thought he might be an amusing neighbour.’ He seemed to be giving a party; there were a lot of people, a lot of late-night toing and froing. In fact he was doing a moonlight flit. She was rather disappointed.
The next occupant of the opposite studio hanged himself: she saw his dark figure through the window, fixing something to the ceiling. The afternoon before he died she had had her first conversation with him, and she tormented herself with feelings of guilt. ‘He could have been planning these ultimate measures while I stood beside him unawares. How dreadful were these unawarenesses! It is impossible to take on the responsibility of intimacy with everyone who stretches out a hand… I found it difficult to believe that my sympathy had been so dormant. I was well, healthy and happy. How unspeakably grim.’ Quite soon she moved again.
Her new studio had a flat roof; she rigged up a mackintosh awning and slept out, rain or shine, pulling the mackintosh this way or that according to which way the rain was blowing in. It was in this studio that she entertained Rodin to lunch.
She had taken to visiting the great sculptor in his studio on Saturdays; though he had no official students at that stage he liked her and allowed her presence. The lessons she learnt from him were simple and essential, and she followed them all her life: to love the great masters, to have absolute faith in nature, and to work relentlessly. He wrote, and she followed: ‘All life surges from a centre, expands from within outwards. The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!’
I would walk with him round his studio, he would open small drawers, such as one is used to finding birds’ eggs in, and show dozens and dozens of exquisitely modelled little hands or feet, tiny things of a delicious delicacy to compare with the grand rough Penseur or his Bourgeois de Calais. He would pick them up tenderly one by one and then turn them about and lay them back. Sometimes he would unwrap from its damp cloth, generally an old shirt, his latest work and, spreading out his hands in uncritical ecstasy, exclaim ‘Est ce beau, ça? Est ce beau?’ [Is it lovely, that? Is it lovely?] Sometimes he would call a model to pose for him, and taking pencil and water draw, never taking his eyes off the model, never looking at all at his paper. Sometimes he signed one and wrote my name on the back and gave it to me.
Rodin asked if he could come and have lunch in her studio. She improvised a lunch table from a couple of boxes, fried some eggs, provided ‘some lovely coloured pomegranates’ and hoped he would not be too hungry. ‘Brave peasant that he was, he would eat bread and cheese.’ He did, but he also ate a pomegranate. ‘Suddenly I became aware that he appeared to be eating the pomegranate hard pips and all. Anxiously I watched. No pips appeared. I was deeply concerned, but much too shy to comment. Long after lunch I saw in a looking glass the old man hastily approach my open window and rid himself of the million seeds. But for his beard he could never have kept up for half an hour such good manners!’
On another occasion when he was to visit she was distracted by a neighbouring student threatening suicide: she rushed off to help dissuade him, squashing the clay statuette she had been working on as she went, and by the time she got back Rodin had been and gone.
She kept very quiet about her friendship with him, learnt from him and treasured his compliments to her work. One of her most valued possessions was the first letter in which he addressed her as Cher collègue (Dear Colleague) rather than Chère élève (Dear Pupil). He called her ‘un petit morceau grec d’un chef d’oeuvre’ (a little Greek fragment of a masterpiece), ‘and I would look at my stalwart arms and legs and not feel at all fragmentary. But I looked for the days when I was allowed to lunch with him at Meudon and watch him work. Those were days not wasted.’ She had no desire, however, for the kind of mentor with which many female artists found themselves lumbered. And Rodin was notoriously amorous. Gwen John had gone to Paris to escape the influence of her brother Augustus and had ended up with Rodin, who rendered her (in her own words) ‘un petit morceau de souffrance et de désir’ (a little fragment of suffering and desire); Camille Claudel’s reputation both personal and professional was inextricably tangled up with him. Marie Laurencin had a similar problem with the writer Apollinaire. Kathleen remained independent. Many years later some people assumed she must have ‘more than studied’ with Rodin; it would have infuriated her had she known.
On a special train taking guests to a picnic to celebrate Rodin’s birthday Kathleen noticed a young woman talking ‘exceedingly bad and ugly French’. She was most upset when she realised that it was the great and revolutionary modern dancer Isadora Duncan. Only days before she and Hofbauer had seen Isadora perform and had wept aloud at the beauty of it. ‘The dancer had seemed the most remote, the most intangible expression of ultimate beauty. And here she was sitting in a crowded railway carriage talking the most Barbaric French.’ Kathleen closed her ears and looked out of the window to deny that her ‘vision glorious had been made flesh’. Later, at the picnic, someone played the fiddle and Isadora danced in her petticoat and bare feet. Kathleen was ‘blinded with joy’; Rodin was ‘enchanted’; ‘everyone was enchanted, save the few inevitable detrimentalists who seem to creep in almost everywhere.’ If there was one thing Kathleen could not abide, it was a detrimentalist. Then ‘Rodin took Isadora’s and my hands in one of his and said “My children, you two artists should understand each other.” And so began a long-lasting relationship of the most
