Patrick Bade
Romanian Musicians in Paris

Patrick Bade - Romanian Musicians in Paris

- I am going to look today at famous Romanians who came to Paris and participated in the cultural life of Paris. And as I said last time, Paris was effectively the cultural capital of Romania for much of the 20th century. The elites, the intellectual cultural, and social elites of Romania were extremely Francophile. I’m going to start off with four very glamorous women. They are Marie Cantacuzene top left, Marthe Bibesco on the left bottom, Anna de Noailles in the middle, and the Queen of Romania on the right hand side. And the first of these ladies, Marie Cantacuzene, she came from the prominent Cantacuzino family of Romania who claimed descend from the ancient Byzantine emperors. She married a cousin, also from the same Cantacuzino family. That marriage was very short lasted. They came to Paris, the marriage soon broke up and she became involved with an artist called Theodore Chasseriau, you see his self-portrait on the right hand side. I think these days, a somewhat underrated artist. He was a favourite pupil of Ingres. Very, very gifted artist. But he was the first of many French artists who had the ambition to combine the best qualities of the rival artists, Ingres and Delacroix, to combine the line, the expressive line of Ingres with the expressive colour of Delacroix. He died relatively young of tuberculosis and it was towards the end of his life, over a period of two years, he had an extremely tempestuous relationship with Marie Cantacuzene. It was in his studio that she met the man with whom she was to have a relationship for the last 40 years of her life. And this is the great symbolist artist, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. And this is his portrait of her painted right at the end of both their lives. They actually married in the last… They both died in 1898.

And they presumably knew that they were coming to the end and they decided to regularised their relationship and marry in the last year of their lives. So I don’t know how you describe her, really. I suppose you describe her as a muse to two great artists. And my next very glamorous lady is Marthe Bibesco or Martha Bibescu in the Romanian version of her name. And so she was born into a very grand Romanian aristocratic family. Her first language was French because her nanny and her governess were both French. That was normal at the time. And this… This is I suppose the most famous image of her, it’s a very famous image altogether. It’s a painting by Giovanni Boldini. And it’s one of the most successful and glamorous of his portraits. And it’s become a kind of icon of the Belle Epoque, this very glamorous period between the turn of the century and the First World War. She was, as you can see, a very beautiful woman. And it’s a painting that epitomises all the qualities that one associates with the Belle Epoque. She was a very lovely girl. And when she was 16, she married her cousin again, the Prince George Bibescu. And I suppose you’d say it was on some levels, it was a happy marriage. They had six children. They stayed together despite multiple infidelities on both sides. He was into fast cars and fast women. She was into all sorts of intellectual pursuits. And as we shall see, she also had a number of quite high profile love affairs. But they decided to stay together. I think in the long term, it was a successful and an affectionate marriage.

They tolerated each other. Here, she’s back in Romania in one of her country houses, a smaller one called Posada. They also had a very grand, new Byzantine palace. And I think, I’m not even going to attempt to pronounce it ‘cause I know I’ll get the pronunciation wrong, or maybe I will, Mogosoaia. I think it is Mogosoaia. If Andrew Pope is listening, he’ll tell me at the end, how to pronounce that. And so I think she was a little bored in her marriage. And I said he was off driving fast cars and chasing women. But he was sent on a diplomatic mission to the Middle East and she accompanied him. And the result of that was a non-fictional book, really describing her experiences in the Middle East. And the title in French is “Les Huit Paradis,” “The Eight Paradises.” And this was published in 1908, and it was a literary sensation. It was universally admired. And so she’d really found her vocation as a writer. She wrote exclusively in French, not in Romanian. And she wrote fiction and non-fiction. Her most successful novel came out in 1923, it’s called “Le Perroquet Vert,” “The Green Parrot.” But she had a double life actually as a writer. Her more serious books, her more serious novels, and travel books and so on, were published under her real name, La Princesse Bebisco. But she also… I think this is rather wonderful. She published sort of pulp romantic historical fiction under a completely different name. As you can see, Lucile Decaux. And these actually were hugely successful. And later in life, when they lost access to their remaining fortune, these novels, these successful romantic novels helped to keep the pot boiling.

Well, she kept her beauty for a long time. In fact, I think she was one of those women who was always beautiful. And even as a very old lady. And here, we see her in the interwar period in a photograph, still looking very glam. Totally different look, isn’t it? Completely different look from the Belle Epoque of Boldini. And on the left hand side, a portrait by the ex-Nabi artist, Edouard Vuillard, who by the 1920s had transformed himself into a fashionable portraitist. So she had a number of really quite intense, quite serious love affairs. Perhaps, the most intense was with a French aristocrat. You see he’s top left, he’s Prince Charles-Louis de Beauvau-Craon. That’s a mouthful of a name. Next in is the diplomat and writer, Henry de Jouvenel, who is, I suppose these days, is most remembered as the husband of the writer Colette. And it was actually… This is going to get complicated here. It was actually Colette’s affair, her love affair with his teenage son that inspired her most famous novel, Cheri. Next in, second from the right is a British soldier and diplomat, Christopher Thomson, later, Lord Birdwood. He was an influential figure during the First World War. He was with the British Army that inadvertent commerce, liberated Jerusalem from the Turks at the end of the First World War. He also got Marthe Bibesco involved in backstage diplomacy. She was very keen to involve Romania on the allied side, on the Entente Cordiale side in the First World War, which eventually happened. And finally on the right hand side, she also had a brief but intense love affair with the last King of Spain before Franco, King Alfonso XIII, you see him on the right hand side.

But she had a special gift. I think it’s a very French thing actually. And it’s a kind of relationship that I certainly enjoy very much. For , that’s loving friendship. So I don’t think she actually had physical affairs with any of these men, but she had long-term, very loving relationships with them. On the left is the Crown Prince of Prussia, the son of the last emperor, Wilhelm II. Next in, the British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. And she had a lifelong history affair with him, really. They exchanged very loving letters of one another. Next in, another very loving friend, Winston Churchill. So she managed to be very friendly on these terms of , both with Winston Churchill and with Charles de Gaulle, who you see at the end on the right. And she also had very loving friendships with various writers. These were certainly, I think non-sexual, certainly with Proust, top left, Cocteau, top second from the right, and Max Jacob on the bottom 'cause all three of those were were homosexual. But Proust was a great, great admirer of her writing. And she’s also a model for characters in “A la recherche du temps perdu.” The other two here are Rilke and Paul Valery. So she just knew everybody who was anybody. And she had a kind of literary salon. After the Second World War, of course, all her properties in Romania were confiscated by the communist regime. So she was somewhat reduced in circumstances.

But I don’t think we’re going to need to feel very sorry for her 'cause she still had her wonderful Paris mansion, which is 49 Quai de Bourbon on the Ile Saint-Louis. You could hardly find a better address, I would think in Paris. What a lovely place to live. And so she had to refurbished it to move in for the rest of her life. And she was able to stay at the Ritz for two years while that house was being refurbished. It’s still there, but I’ve checked and it’s now six different apartments. And here, you see her as a grande dame, a rather beautiful old lady on the left hand side. And she carried on her literary salon right up until the time that she died. My next glam Romanian is Anna de Noailles. Noailles is of course, a French name. Her birth name was Princess Anna Elisabeth Bibesco-Bassaraba de Brancovan. And she’s born in 1876. And she didn’t live as long as the previous two. She died in 1933, but she… In 1897, she married a son of the Duke of Noailles, that’s one of the grandest old French aristocratic families. So she had entree into the very highest levels of French snobbish society. But I think she was rather more interested in artists and poets and intellectuals. She also had a kind of salon. And she was a quite a prolific writer of novels and particularly poetry. Her poetry was hugely admired at the time. Won all sorts of prizes and distinctions. I’ve asked my French friends from my little kind of club, La Fresque in Paris, if anybody still reads her poetry and they didn’t think… They said, “No. That she’s not really considered to be a major poet anymore.

But she was certainly amusing. She actually had this very striking, unusual beauty. And that certainly fascinated artists. You could make a very… Actually, you could make a fantastic exhibition really from all the women I’m talking about in this lecture. These glamorous Romanian women in Paris. I’m surprised nobody’s thought of it. You could even do a very nice little mini exhibition of portraits of Anna de Noailles. This is by Forain. This is by an artist that I don’t know much about, Jean de Gaigneron, but a very charming and attractive picture. Like Louis XIV, she had a sort of . She liked to stay in bed well into the day and surrounded by books, as you can see. And she would receive the homage of visitors in her bedroom. This is a sculpture of her by Rodin. Great honour, of course, to be sculpted by Rodin. This is by the Spanish artist, Ignacio Zuloaga. She looked rather fatale here, doesn’t she? A sort of Cleopatra pose. And here, practically a flapper, very 1920s. And this is by another Spanish artist called Antonio de La Gandara, a very fashionable portraitist in the Belle Epoque and after the First World War. So this, although, you know, from her clothing, I think this must be… I think, well, it could be around the time of the First World War. But here, we see her looking very into war rather art deco, in this portrait by Kees van Dongen.

The most famous portrait. This is a sketch for the most famous portrait of Anna de Noailles, which again is by Edouard Vuillard. And here is the final portrait. And one day when he arrived for sitting, 'cause she wants to be painted again, sitting in bed, ready to receive visitors. And he was outside the bedroom. And through the door, he could hear her shouting at her maid, "For God’s sake, put away that jar of vaseline. If Monsieur Vuillard sees it, he’ll only include it in my portrait.” My next glamorous lady is only Romanian by marriage. She was very, very French. And this is Liane de Pougy, born in 1869. And she was one of the most celebrated, I suppose you could say notorious grande horizontale. She was a courtesan. But when she… In 1910, she was 41. And I think she decided, “Hmm. My time is probably up as the courtesan.” And the whole of French society really took a deep breath when she married a Romanian prince, much younger. She was 41, he was 25. This was the two of them some years later, of course, towards the end of their lives. So from Liane de Pougy became Princess Georges Ghika. She was… 'Cause all these grande horizontale, they had in a way to present themselves to the public. So they developed stage careers usually as somewhere cover of what they were doing, and to attract the clients. She was normally a dancer, but I don’t think that involved a great deal of dancing activity. I think she just went on stage and she moved into a series of what you could call pose plastique. And the aim of this… I mean, the reason people pay, well, they wanted to see her, of course. They wanted to see her jewels. In particular, they wanted to see her pearls. She had the most amazing collection of pearls.

And there’s a very famous story about her. So she went one of her… Her greatest rival was another courtesan called Otero. And the two of them used to compete at the Paris Opera, walking down the staircase laden with incredibly expensive jewels. But Liane de Pougy won in the end by walking down the stairs of the opera, just wearing a pearls and no other jewels, but followed by a maid with a tray loaded up with the ill-gotten gains. Her other attraction apart from her fabulous pearl collection was apparently her exquisite behind, she had the most beautiful buttocks in Paris. They were very famous. The postcards you buy of her at the flea market thereof, you can see she’s often posed to suggest the beauty of her buttocks. One of the most famous stories of the Belle Epoque was that she was briefly married and her husband caught her in bed with a lover. And he shot her in the backside. And she was very distressed about this 'cause she was afraid that the perfection of her buttocks would be scarred or spoiled. And she apparently said to the doctor, treating her, “Doctor, doctor, will it show?” And he said to her, “Madam, that depends upon you.” Well, that was a story, of course, that was passed around Paris. The marriage lasted. Although, there was a period towards the end, where he dumped her for a younger woman, but he came back to her, and then she outlived him. And like many of these great courtesan she… At the end of her life, she turned to religion.

And she took tertiary orders. There were several of them who did this. Ida Rubinstein did it. Taking tertiary orders was really quite a nice option 'cause you have all the glow of party of being a nun without actually having to go into a convent and do all the less agreeable things that nuns probably have to do. And when she became this quasi-nun, she took the name Sor Anne-Marie de la Penitence. Seems a very good name for a nun who started off life as a courtesan. But now the greatest, the most glamorous of all the Romanian women was Queen Marie of Romania. She’s the most famous Romanian woman of the 20th century. A figure who was idolised and loved, a sort of mythical figure in Romania. Because she wasn’t actually Romanian at all. She was English. She was a granddaughter of the Queen Victoria. And she was also a granddaughter actually of Tsar Alexander II of Russia. So she obviously had very, very grand ancestry indeed. This is Eastwell Hall where she was born and spent her early childhood. And on the left is a painting of her as a child by Millais. As you can see, she was a very, very pretty girl and a woman of enormous charm. Briefly, she was considered as a bride for the heir to the British throne, George V. But Queen Victoria disapproved, partly, because they were first cousins. And there were other political reasons why the marriage didn’t go ahead. I’m sure that was a great escape for her, I think, being married to George V. He surely one of the most boring princes of all time.

So I think she got off lightly marrying the Crown Prince of Romania, Prince Ferdinand. Here you see them at the time of her marriage when she was 18. And once again, it’s a marriage that actually not dissimilar from that of Marthe Bibesco that there were plenty of infidelities on both sides. But I think they tolerated each other. They got on with one another. And it turned in, again, I think into a very successful and affectionate relationship. And she was really taken to the hearts of the Romanias. And she went full native. You know, she liked dressing up in Romanian clothes, wearing Romanian jewellery. She certainly took the Romanian people to her heart and they took her to their heart as well. Here, you see her in later life. She had a few nice jewels, but… On the whole, she was pretty smart. She was a very clever woman. But she made one very bad move. When the First World War broke out, she decided to send her jewellery collection to Russia for safekeeping. So obviously, after the Russian Revolution, she never got it back again. She became queen in October 1914, so just after the outbreak of the First World War. And rather like Marthe Bibesco, she also played a role. She was the one who really wore the trousers in the relationship with her husband, Ferdinand. She had a big influence on him. She had a big influence on political policies. And she was obviously very, very keen to involve Romania in the First World War on the allied side. And that happened. Initially, it actually wasn’t so brilliant because the Austrians occupied a large part of Romania.

And of course, when Russia was knocked out of the First World War in 1917, Romania was extremely exposed and really forced to do a deal with the Austrians and the Germans. So they actually prematurely signed a peace treaty with Austria, Germany, which could have affected them in a very negative way. But I’ll explain about that in a minute. So having lost her fabulous jewel collection, what to do? In 1921, her loving husband bought her one of the biggest sapphires in the world. It is enormous and it’s… Not that this means very much to me, but it might to you. It’s 478.68 karat sapphire and it’s known as the Queen of Romania Sapphire. And it was sold at Christie’s in 2006. Here it is on the right hand side at the time it was sold, on the left. I can’t see it 'cause there’s something in the way. But this is a painting by Philip de Laszlo from the 1920s of the Queen of Romania wearing her fabulous, outsized sapphire. During the First World War, she gained in popularity with the Romanian people because she really got down and dirty and worked in hospitals looking after wounded soldiers. This is her in a hospital during the First World War. But her great moments of glory was actually after the war at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

So, I mean, that’s my reason for including her in this lecture, really. It is the pinnacle of her fame and her glory. As I said, the Romania came out of the First World War not officially one of the victors. So when Europe was all redivided in 1919, Romania was not really in a strong position. So the king, Ferdinand, and the government decided to send Marie to Paris where she totally conquered the city and the Versailles conference with her extraordinary charm, intelligence, her persuasive powers. And Romania actually came out of the Versailles conference extremely well. It doubled in size. And I think you can really attribute that to the charm and the diplomatic skills of Queen Marie. Here she is again, at the Versailles Conference. In 1926, Ferdinand died. And the last decade of her life is in a way, a sad anti-climax. I’m sure you’ve heard about this already in other lectures. It’s a very complicated dynastic situation in Romania. Her oldest son who became King Carol I was forced by the then king, that’s Marie’s father-in-law, to renounce his rights to the throne because he’d left his official wife, Helen of Greece. And he took a morganatic marriage with his mistress, a Jewish mistress. I’m sure that may not have gone down all that well with the Romanian royal family. But so it was in fact his eldest son who should have become king of Romania, but Carol I reneged on his renunciation and he took the throne. And he had a very difficult, really, I would say, quite hateful relationship with Marie. He made the last part of her life very difficult, very unhappy. And so her reputation… The problem was for him, I think, that she was so popular and she was very loved.

And that was also a problem later for the communists. So you have two sets of people. You’ve got her older son who’s the king, and you have the later communist who had an interest in blackening her reputation. Now she certainly wasn’t the perfect wife and it’s known that she had lovers and it’s thought that she may have had an illegitimate child. But all of this was hugely exaggerated and blown out of proportion. And she was depicted as a depraved, immoral woman organising orgies, and living a terribly illusioned, depraved life. Didn’t help matters that she died of cirrhosis of the liver, but apparently she wasn’t a drinker at all. I think is possible to die of cirrhosis of the liver without high alcohol intake. Now I’m moving on to some Romanian gentlemen who played a very distinguished role in Parisian cultural life. So we have Constantin Brancusi, one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century, top left, Victor Brauner, he’s a Surrealist artist, Tristan Tzara, he’s a Dada, he’s poet, and Ionesco, who is an avant-garde playwright. All four of them living their lives and their careers in Paris even though… Of course, Romanians are very, very proud of them. So all have been celebrated by commemorative stamps in Romania. This is Victor Brauner. And they’ve all become permanent resident of Paris because they’re all buried in Parisian cemeteries. Parisian cemeteries are really wonderful. Trudy’s coming over to Paris next week and we’ve already been discussing which cemeteries we go to. We always go to a cemetery or two when she goes over to Paris.

Her particular favourite is Montmartre. And she’s very keen and got to go and play her respects to the great German poet who’s buried there. But between the Pere-Lachaise, Montmartre, Montparnasse, those three cemeteries really, it’s a who’s who of the cultural life of early modernism. So we’ve got Brancusi’s grave here in Montparnasse, and we’ve got Victor Brauner’s in Montmartre, on the right hand side, and two more of the graves, Tristan Tzara and Eugene Ionesco, which are both in Montparnasse. So Brancusi arrived in Paris in 1903. Paris was such a mecca at this time. This is really the birth of the famous Ecole de Paris which is almost entirely made up of non-French people. There are very few French members of the Ecole de Paris, a high proportion than being Jews from Eastern Europe. Brancusi himself was not Jewish. But he soon moved to Montparnasse, which is the capital of Ecole de Paris. But he made nightly visits up to the north part of Paris where I live. This is the station of Barbes-Rochechouart, which is about five minutes walk from my flat in Paris. This is line number two, which is raised. It’s one of two sections of the metro in Paris that’s aboveground rather than underground. It has to be because of the railway lines going into the Gare de l'Est and the Gare du Nord, and because of the canal system in that part of Paris.

This was being constructed between 1900 and 1904. And here you see, Brancusi sitting on some sleepers, some wooden sleepers, he used to go up at night to steal these to turn them into sculptures. When he first arrived, and he was obviously, extremely talented, and he attracted the notice of Rodin. And Rodin invited him to work in his studio as an assistant. And he did so for about two months, but he left saying that nothing grows in the shadow of big trees. And I think that was a very wise decision on his part. This is a work by Brancusi of that time, which you can see is very rubenesque. It looks like it’s emerging from the rough-hewn rock. It’s very much a technique and a style used by Rodin. But he’s really the leader of a generation that were reacting against Rodin. Rodin was such an incredibly dominant figure. You know, he was treated as a kind of god or a king wherever he went, he was universally regarded as the greatest artist in the world. And when you have a… He’s a bit like say, Michelangelo was or Raphael in the 16th century. So you could have a whole new generation of artists saying, “Oh, what next?” “No, no, we’ve got to do something totally different.” And they also… I think they were very critical of Rodin 'cause they felt that he was too much about surface.

And this is really about surface as well, isn’t it? And they felt it was not… That they were very keen on the idea of essential form of really pairing things down. So if you keep this in mind and then look at this, you can see how Brancusi is reacting against Rodin and going off in a totally, totally different direction. And here again, a torso by Rodin on the right hand side and a torso by Brancusi on the left, Everything reduced to its absolute essential form. And if ever there was an anti-Rodin piece of sculpture, it must be this very witty piece by Brancusi. This is Brancusi’s kiss, which I think is definitely a statement in a way about Rodin’s kiss that you see on the right hand side. Another thing is that where Brancusi is really moving off in another direction is in his use of direct carving. Rodin, of course, was not a carver at all. That’s why today, on the whole art historian and critics prefer his bronzes to his marbled sculptures. 'Cause he didn’t really touch the marble sculptures. Rodin made his sculptures, he modelled them. He’s a modeller. And then he had assistant like Brancusi who had actually carved the model from the models that Rodin had made. Well, carving came very naturally to Brancusi. It came out of… He came from a peasant Romanian background, so very different from all these harristers I’ve been talking about up till now.

And so he acquired, you know, the craft of carving really from the earliest days of his background. These are carvings, wood carvings. That’s a medium, of course, that was completely ignored by Rodin. And here is Rodin’s… Here is Brancusi’s studio, which you can see in Paris. It’s actually not in the original building. It’s been reconstructed in a especially built small studio right next to The Centre Pompidou in Paris. And this is Victor Brauner, a major figure of the Surrealist movement, which emerged in the 1920s surrealist manifesto of Andre Breton. Very influenced by the ideas of Freud. The idea that we have this unconscious. This is the essential us, the unconscious. That it has from day one, you know, from our training as children that is suppressed. And the purpose of the artist is to liberate the unconscious. Victor Brauner had an odd obsession with eyes. And this, on the right hand side, is a self-portrait he made. He’s quite a young man, as you can see. It’s called self-portrait with enucleated eye. His eye is actually completely destroyed and pouring down his face. And when he made that portrait, he couldn’t know that this would actually happen to him. He got mixed up in a brawl in an artist’s studio, he got a broken glass in his eye and he lost the eye. 'Cause all the other Surrealists were very, very… They thought, “Oh, that’s so cool. That’s so impressive.” They really like that. Here are two more of these strange pictures by Victor Brauner showing his obsession with the human eye.

And this is Tristan Tzara. He was a leading figure of the Dada movement during the First World War. In fact, he was in Zurich, he was in Switzerland, came to Paris after the First World War. Dada is a predecessor of Surrealism. It’s anti-art, it’s a kind of artistic anarchism. It was really a reaction to the horror of the First World War. The totally senseless violence, cruelty, barbarity, I think young artists thought, “If this is what’s western civilization has come to, then we don’t need it, we want something else.” So as I said, it’s a kind of cultural anarchism. This is his portrait, Tristan Tzara’s portrait by the cubist artist, Robert Delaunay. Tristan Tzara has also left his mark on Paris because he commissioned this modernist house by the Austrian modernist architect, Adolf Loos. So this is the only building by Loos, I think outside the former Austro-Habsburg area. That’s in the north, it’s on the slopes of Montmartre in North Paris. And here is his tomb in Montparnasse and his Romanian postal memorial. And I’m going to finish with two people who made an important contribution to the Paris Theatre. I think you can say for up until the 20th century, up until the second World War, in beyond Paris was the theatrical capital of the world. So on the left, we have an actress called Elvira Popescu, and on the right is the great writer Eugene Ionesco. Ionesco was born in Romania but came to France as a child. So he really spoke French. He was completely bilingual. All his major writings are actually in French and not in Romanian. And just after the Second World War, he launched alongside the Irish playwright, “Waiting for Godot.” Come to me in a minute.

A revolution in theatre. The theatre of the absurd. His first breakthrough play was “The Bald Soprano” in 1948. And here is his tomb in Montparnasse and his memorial stamp. I finished with the delightful and lovely, Elvira Popescu. She arrived… She’d already had quite a significant career as a serious actress in Bucharest. When she arrived in Paris in 1923, and she had a tremendous success. The Parisians really took her to their hearts despite the fact that she never lost really quite a strong Romanian accent. But she was a woman of enormous effervescence and charm. And she had a really major career in Paris in a very different type of theatre, of course, from Ionesco. She was in rather more conventional plays, Boulevard plays. And then in the 1930s and the 1940s, she took many cameo roles in French films. So if you’re a devotee of French films of that period, you are quite likely to have come across her. I suppose that’s what she’s mainly remembered for today. And there’s a theatre in the centre of Paris, Sile Popescu, which is named after her. There it is on the left hand side. And here is her tomb in the… this is in the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise. So that’s all I have to tell you today. Let’s see what you have to tell me.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: “Do I think these women knew each other?”

A: Yes, I’m sure they all knew each other. They absolutely knew each other and they must have gone to each other’s salons and mixed a lot.

This is Marian saying, “If you read French,” she recommends a novel “Eugenia” by Lionel Duroy. set in Romania in the 1930s. That sounds interesting.

Hazel is saying, “There’s a wonderful museum called the Maryhill Museum, which has some of Queen Marie’s possessions, furniture, in the Columbia River. I wonder on how on Earth it got there. We can’t remember how it got there, but that is rather extraordinary.

Oh, this is Dennis giving us the answer to what we want to know. That Marie was a personal friend of the tycoon, Sam Hill, who founded the museum. Oh yes, I did know that. Yes, 1926 she went to America, hence the cover of "Time Magazine” that I showed you in my talk early on. Just as she’d taken Paris by storm in 1919, she absolutely took America by storm. The Americans really took her to their hearts. She was obviously, a woman of enormous charisma and charm. Beckett, thank you. That is why these names allude me sometimes in lectures.

“Any comments on George Enescu.” I had my whole talk on George Enescu last week, so I don’t think I have more comments on him today.

Yes, that photo of Ionesco is by cash. Joseph. Hi, Joseph. Yes, we’ve just been hearing about… Thank you very much, Joseph. If I ever get to America again, I must go and see that.

“She gave a hundred pieces to the museum, including replicas of her throne room furniture, which she designed her own watercolours.” Very interesting. Thank you. And an archive, yes. Of course, there is another rumour about Queen Marie, and I don’t know whether it’s true at all, is that she was bisexual and that she had a relationship with the dancer, Loie Fuller, who is definitely lesbian.

Bald Prima Donna, thank you.

Thank you, Rita. Yes, 'cause Ionesco, I think they’re still done. There’s one play, isn’t there? By Ionesco. Which has the world’s record for the longest running play. I think it beats “The Mousetrap.”

Thank you, Erica. “La Cantatrice chauve” is the title, of course, of “The Bald Soprano” I don’t think I know that book, The Grand… There have been a lot of books about the “Grande horizontale,” both collectively and individually. In fact, I just pulled out three books. There are no less than three different books on Liane de Pougy. Actually, the most interesting, I would say, I think it’s called her Blue… Is it “Blue Notebooks”? It’s actually effectively a diary of Liane de Pougy, who was obviously a very intelligent and interesting woman.

Oh, great, you’ve done a little drawing. Thank you. No, of course. I’d love to… Do send me a photo, I’d love to see it.

“Why does Ionesco…” I don’t think he was Jewish. He had a… He was very pro-Jewish. And I know that he was honoured in Israel for some reason, I’m not quite sure why. And he did have, I think a grandmother or even a great-grandmother who was Jewish, but I don’t think he was actually Jewish.

Q: “Did people plan their tombs?”

A: Sometimes they did. Sometimes they did, but not always.

Thank you very much. And of course, we move on to a whole new series next week, we’re moving on to Germany. And I look forward to seeing you on a week today. Thank you. Bye-bye.