with me; I wanted them to because I liked them and it was fun; but I would tell my two dignified friends that it was a good way of learning French.’ (Kathleen had learnt French at school, but had what Podge called ‘the most atrocious accent I ever heard. Where you got it from I can’t imagine.’ This may be why Kathleen’s version was that she spoke no French at all when she arrived in Paris.) ‘I thought their expressions accused me of behaving like a kitchen maid. In any case, no young men hovered around them, I had no notion why; and I thought them very nice and well-behaved, and myself very inferior. The nuns would approve them and reproach me, but it was all so exciting, so stimulating, and so sunshiny.’
Her song for leaving Britain, her childhood and her family behind went: ‘I won’t be my father’s son, and I won’t be my mother’s son, but I will be the fiddler’s son, and have music when I will.’ For an orphan, this was realistic as well as romantic, but it was only for when she was feeling brave. In weaker moments she would quote Keats: ‘To bear all naked truths and to envisage circumstance, all calm, that is the top of sovreignty’. She found herself, in Paris, to be naive and innocent. Sometimes
everything and everybody seemed rather ugly and terribly wicked, but I was fully determined there must be no half measures. I must appear surprised at nothing. I must allow no one to suspect my pitiful ignorance, my still more pitiful innocence. When strange, unknown things happened, I registered them, but from no one did I ask an explanation, and of many things the explanation did not occur to me till twenty years later.
One such episode involved Madame from the pension. To Kathleen ‘this repellent woman was a formidable pillar of propriety and austerity’, but with hindsight perhaps she was not. ‘Madame slept on the ground floor, her window giving on to the street. I slept directly above this, and used to drag my bed across to the window to get the maximum of air. One night in the small hours I awoke, hearing a disturbance below. Looking down, I saw a quite young man jumping out of Madame’s window. “A burglar,” I thought, and was about to fly to the rescue when Madame’s head popped out of the window, pleading, noisily, “Ah, Marcel, si tu reviens, je te donnerai encore un louis!”’ (Marcel, if you come back, I’ll give you more money.) Very Anaïs Nin, but it made no sense to Kathleen.
One of the first things the convent girl with her bathtime chemises had to accept was the nude model. On her first day at Colarossi’s,
passing an open door of one of the studios, I saw Hermione standing at the back of the room near the door and went to join her. Hermione was standing composedly with her head critically on one side. At the end of the studio passed, one by one, a string of nude male models. Each jumped for a moment on to the model throne, took a pose, and jumped down. The model for the week was being chosen. Before reason could control instinct I turned and fled, shut myself into the lavatory, and was sick. How could my lovely Hermione stand there, so calmly appraising? How could she, how could she? Then I shook myself. ‘Fool! Puritan! They’ll guess how you feel if you’re not careful. Go back this moment and copy Hermione’s nonchalance, you vulgar little thing!’
To begin with Kathleen painted. Though there were classes for men and women together, she started out with the dames seules. It didn’t last. ‘What are these folks?’ she found herself thinking. ‘Middle-aged women eating their hearts out year in year out, and for what? In order that on some day of an impossible future she may have a picture in the Salon. In ten years I shall be like that. Exactly like that.’ The nickname for the dames seules was the ‘damned souls’. Enough! she felt, and packed up to leave.
As she was walking out of the building she heard the cheerful sound of Norwegians singing from another studio, and looked in to see what was going on. It turned out to be the sculpture class, and she thought it looked rather fun. So it was, once she had overcome the initiatory trauma of ‘tous les nouveaux payent un ponche’. This mysterious rule had been chalked up on the wall; there was also laughter (not entirely friendly) and looks (knowing, in her direction). ‘All the news pay a ponch,’ she thought. What on earth was a ponch?
Presently a courteous Norwegian approached me and said, ‘It is a custom that any new student stands punch to the others,’ and returned to his place. What an unexpectedly grim affair! How on earth was it to be done? Was I to take them to a café? Oh dear, this was terrible; and how much would it cost? Would I have the money? What a well-thought-out torture for a terrified puritan! There was only one other girl in the class, a German with lank hair. I was not going to consult her. While I hesitated, an ill-bred little Italian started in a half-singing drone ‘tous les nouveaux payent un ponche’. One by one took it up until a great chorus of it filled the room. Suddenly, nearly crying with uncertainty and my heart in my mouth, I too joined in the chorus. ‘Tous les nouveaux payent un ponche, je suis nouveau, je paye.’ [I am new, I pay.] A general bravo, and much good-humoured laughter.
The kind Norwegian arranged for the punch to be sent in from a café, and lent her the money to pay—six francs.
At a quarter to eleven someone called ‘c’est l’heure’ (It’s time). The model, an Italian youth, got down from the throne, stretched, yawned, and went over to the stove. The door opened, and a large bowl of steaming alcohol was brought in, and sixteen glasses. Thank goodness, there was enough to go round and some left for the model. Hoping so much I was looking quite normal and at my ease, I took my glass and tasted it. It was the first time in my life except at Communion that I had tasted alcohol, and rum was rather a stiff beginning. How it burnt! At Communion one had to take such a tiny sip of the horrid stuff, but this I must drink to the dregs. But no! As with my mutton fat, so with my rum. I found a way.
She seems to have forgotten, writing in 1932, ‘drinking champagne and being amusing while seeing Millicent off to Capri’ in 1901, but that one lapse with Millicent does seem to be the only time in her life that she found alcohol at all amusing.
Sculpture proved a success. Within three months she had a statue of a woman and child accepted for the Salon. Though in later life her portraits and larger-than-life public monuments were well known, it was her naked mothers and children, or fathers and children, which were the most beautiful and most touching of her work, the result of what she called ‘a tender quality’ which made them ‘personal and lovely’.
That early mother and child won her a medal and the desirable post of massier. The massier would select the model for the class, pose him (or her), stoke the fire and open the windows at lunchtime, and call ‘C’est l’heure!’ a quarter before every hour, for the model to rest. In exchange for these duties, the massier was relieved of class fees. To Kathleen this made a big difference. A reasonable estimate of expense for an unextravagant art student at the time was £95 per annum; she had but her £72. Her daily expenditure on food was:
| Breakfast: | a croissant–5 centimes |
| Lunch: | two sardines and butter–15 centimes gâteau de riz–15 centimes (20 with apricot jam) bread–15 centimes |
| Dinner: | a demi-ragoût (stew)–25 centimes mendiants (nuts and raisins)–15 centimes |
| Tip: | 10 centimes |
| Total: | 1 franc, or 1 franc 5 centimes with jam |
Six francs on punch was nearly a week’s food allowance.
Once acclimatised, Kathleen and Eileen ‘made so bold as to emancipate ourselves, and took a tiny flat together’. Taking a flat was a symbol of freedom; the first step away from being one of the protected group of foreigners; an escape from the art student ghetto. Kathleen and Eileen had two rooms and a kitchen.
It was unfurnished, and so it really remained until the end of our tenure. The front room was small and light and looked on to a court; the back room was larger and dark. By common consent I was to have the small room and Jocelyn the dark room; but my room must serve as a sitting room and be kept neat. Very resourceful was I. A second-hand box mattress on
