The journey from Lausanne to Paris is as simple logistically as it is seemingly inevitable artistically. A quick jaunt around the northern and western shores of Lake Geneva to the city of the same name, a bisection of northern France to the Paris-Gare-de-Lyon station on the banks of the Seine in the 12th arrondissement and, from there, the Métro will take you where you need to go. This itinerary remains essentially unchanged since October 1900, when a young graduate of the University of Lausanne’s English Department, in yet another act of defiance against his father, made the trip to work on his thesis.
Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, fresh from graduation, first came to Paris in the afterglow of a truly epic year. The Exposition Universelle opened on April 14, the fifth time the French had deemed themselves worthy of the world’s attention since 1855, though who could blame them for such a feeling when the last one hath wrought Gustave Eiffel’s Tower? Amid the moving sidewalks, motion pictures, and first Olympic Games held outside Greece, the Métro opened its first line. At the time, Paris was the third-largest city in the world by population, with about half as many people as London, and was in the late stages of the Belle Epoque. Viewers of the 2011 Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris will recall the romance between Gil, an author in modern times who longs to live in Paris during the 1920s with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, and Adriana, a mistress of Pablo Picasso who actually lives in the 1920s but who longs to live in Paris during the Belle Epoque. Setting aside that film’s lessons about the hazards of nostalgia, it is safe to assume that times were good during an age that is literally called “Beautiful Era.” The arts scene in Paris during the Belle Epoque was truly staggering. The likes of Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, Camille Saint-Saëns and Jules Massenet, Claude Monet and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Auguste Rodin and Jules Dalou all lived and worked in Paris during the last decades of the 19th century. As the calendar turned to the 20th, even greater heights were reached by some of the very greatest artists, composers, and authors who ever walked the Earth, among them several prominent Russian expatriates who formed a ballet company.
After a few trips back and forth to Switzerland, Ramuz settled permanently in Paris in 1904, but not without first taking one of the most fascinating detours imaginable. The year prior had been spent tutoring the children of Count Maurice (Maurycy) Prozor at the Russian Embassy in Weimar, a job for which Ramuz was recommended by his friend Adrien Bovy, the art critic and historian, who had taught the Prozor children in Geneva the previous year. Count Prozor and his family are quite a tale all to themselves.
Count Prozor “had traveled a lot, seen everything, read everything, and did not flaunt it. He had married a Swedish woman and knew the Scandinavian languages.” That knowledge of the Scandinavian languages led to the Count translating the plays of Henrik Ibsen into French. Prozor’s daughter, Greta, at one point played the title character in Ibsen’s masterpiece Hedda Gabler. Greta subsequently married an art dealer named Walter Havorsen who counted among the artists whose work he sold Henri Matisse. Thanks to this relationship, Greta was the subject of multiple portraits by Matisse, the most prominent of which is in the collection of the Centre Pompidou.
During his tenure in Weimar, Prozor, at the behest of his wife Marthe-Elsa Bonde, joined the Theosophical Society, whose ranks would come to include such luminaries as Wassily Kandinsky, Thomas Edison, Piet Mondrian, and Hilma af Klint. In and around the same time, the author Charles Webster Leadbetter was at work on his book Man, Visible and Invisible, the title page of which includes reference to the work containing a “frontispiece, three diagrams, and twenty-two coloured illustrations.” The author’s note from the publisher acknowledges the illustrations as coming from Count Maurice Prozor, “who drew and colored them for him from the life.” Leadbetter’s book would come to be recognized as a key component in the development of abstract art. Gary Lachman, author of numerous occultist and spiritualist books and also known as Gary Valentine, guy who played bass in Blondie for a while, identified Leadbetter’s book, with Prozor’s illustrations, as one of the key works in Kandinsky’s occult library.
This brief encounter with the Prozors is but one of Ramuz’s deep connections to the world of art. Ramuz had been introduced to art by the Swiss painter Alexandre Cingria, who was in the same regiment as Ramuz during their compulsory military service in the 1890s. After he returned to Paris for good, Ramuz was a near-constant presence at the Louvre and was a devotee of Paul Cézanne. His deep love of art would fully blossom in the ten years spent in the impossible resplendence of the Paris arts scene into not only exposure (he kept detailed journals of his trips to the Louvre, which sadly remain unpublished), but into the two most enduring relationships of his entire life.
Make no mistake, however: Ramuz was a writer, and he had come to Paris to write. Save for student journals, he had not been published until 1903, when a collection of poetry called Le Petit Village, inspired by Ramuz’s observation of the townsfolk of his home, was published by Charles Eggimann of Geneva. That Ramuz had paid for the publication himself, which is to say that his father, apparently no longer against his son’s choice of pursuits, paid for the publication HIMself, was not only beside the point but made that much sweeter when sales of the collection resulted in a net profit. Le Petit Village began as a series of poems which Ramuz had executed in alexandrin, a syllabic meter which, both purely and in increasingly modified forms, had been the style of choice in France for the better part of two hundred years. Somewhere along the way, however, Ramuz glimpsed a sliver of his future and edited the poems into something altogether different, something which would become characteristic of his mature style. “Those beautiful and very even Alexandrines no longer seemed to correspond to its particular nature and life; I needed to find another form, slightly uneven in gait, for it seemed to me from a distance that my country limped; quite happily clumsy, and a little gauche and uneasy as is a peasant in a large town.”
What exactly was Ramuz attempting to capture with his words? Named for two older brothers who died before he was born, he had grown up in Laussane, the largest town in the canton of Vaud, a region of breathtaking natural beauty sitting squarely between lakes to both the north and south and mountain ranges to both the east and west. His grandparents had all lived and worked in the Vaudois countryside and his parents returned there when Ramuz was seventeen. His mature works would be, almost without exception, about the country, its people, its terrain, its hardships, its mysteries. To get to that style, however, would require Ramuz to throw off the shackles of his education, which had afflicted him with that sense of refinement which was antithetical to what he perceived as his true nature. “I should like to attain pure sensation; to paint the complicated with very simple words, not to describe, but to evoke, to go even sometimes, for greater force, as far as breaking up syntax and grammar; I don’t dare risk it yet because of the vestiges of my education, but I am heading that way.”
Ramuz’s first novel, Aline, was completed in September 1904, and was the first of numerous works which Ramuz would have published during his decade in Paris. Among these publications were a work that looks ahead towards his mature style (Le Village dans la montagne), a work that is almost transparently semi-autobigraphical (Aime Paché, peintre vaudois), a work that won him a prize from the Schiller Foundation (Jean-Luc persécuté), and a work that damned near won him the famed Prix Goncourt (Les Circonstances de la vie). The Schiller Foundation cried foul in the citation of their award by exclaiming “[w]e have from him Aline, Les Circonstances de la vie, and Jean-Luc persécuté and he only needed to be French to have won the Prix Goncourt.”
It is therefore ironic that the work which had the greatest impact on Ramuz’s life was the very next thing he published after Aline, a blank verse narrative about a battle between military forces and separatist Catholics in the dying days of pre-Federal Switzerland. La Grande Guerre du Sondrebond, which Ramuz biographer David Bevan calls “a pleasant little work…that without being disastrous shows no real advance beyond Aline,” is nevertheless significant for Ramuz because it was his first collaboration with the Swiss painter René Auberjonois, who designed the cover for the first edition. Auberjonois is not to be confused with his grandson of the same name who has one of the most impressive IMDb pages you’ll ever see, a staggering breadth of film and television roles and voice acting that includes playing Father Mulcahy in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, Clayton Runnymede Endicott III on Benson, Odo on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Paul Lewiston on Boston Legal. Most importantly to me, he played Dr. Larry Meyers on a single episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Ramuz’s relationship with Grandpa Auberjonois would bear fruit in the form of several future collaborations and a deep friendship that would last, with a few rocky exceptions, until Ramuz’s death in 1947.
Ramuz was first introduced to Auberjonois in 1905 at the home of Edouard Rod, the greatest Swiss writer of the time and a mentor of Ramuz, though the two were “at odds about literature.” Wikipedia claims Tolstoy was a Rod fan but also includes an excerpt from a letter by Chekhov in which he describes Rod’s writing in less than favorable terms. “There is a terrible deal of affectation, dreariness, straining after originality, and as little of anything artistic as there was salt in that porridge we cooked in the evening at Bogimovo.” OOH, PORRIDGE BURN! Even acknowledging their shared heritage, it is nevertheless a minor miracle that these two men found one another. Pierre-André Lienhard writes of Auberjonois that “during his lifetime, he will have experienced more affinities for writers…and musicians…than for painters. For his part, Bevan writes of the introverted Ramuz: “although wealthy and witty, Auberjonois was clearly a kindred spirit…and he aroused an immediate warmth in the novelist whose predilection for painters rather than writers was by now firmly established.” Ramuz and Auberjonois appear to have clicked immediately, bonding over their shared love of Cézanne, and spent their days exploring the art galleries around town.
Ramuz’s life was consumed with three things and three things only: writing, art, and that activity seemingly unique to artists, hanging out at a café all day with your comrades, talking of “everything and nothing,” the everything in this case surely referring to the several projects they were constantly scheming together. The café of choice for Ramuz and Adrien Bovy was Jouven's, “at the corner of Boulevard Montparnasse and Rue Leopold-Robert. The tables were so close together that the conversations could not have secrets and the maids, who had to be nimble and thin, circulated in this labyrinth like the ball, in a toy, which makes its way through a forest of nails.” Thankfully, after several months in the cramped restaurant, the sculptor Edouard-Marcel Sandoz introduced the pair to Le Nègre de Toulouse, the same bar that would serve Hemingway cassoulet twenty years on and which would become their “headquarters.” “In this unattractive and tired place, we had space, we could chat, we were as good as a pint from home.”
From the time he began permanently residing in Paris, Ramuz never lived anywhere besides the very heart of Montparnasse, surrounded by art and artists. In total, Ramuz had six residences that were separated by little more than a leisurely stroll down Boulevard Raspail. For ten years, Ramuz lived in this den of rich history, adjacent to the famed cemetery which housed the hallowed graves of Charles Baudelaire, Cesar Franck, and Guy de Maupassant, whose works Ramuz edited, and in the proverbial shadow of the Palais du Luxembourg, whose residents down through the years include members of the House of Medici, Napoleon Bonaparte, and, 25 years after Ramuz left Paris for good, Hermann Göring.
Beginning in 1910, Ramuz lived at 24 Rue Boissonade, a street with dead ends on both sides which contained within its boundaries an insular community of artists. Romain Rolland and family lived down the block until 1912. Several artists had studios on the Rue Boissonade, including Elizaveta Kruglikova, who would go on to found the Soviet Union’s State Puppet Theater. “She had no physical charm, no power of seduction, no desire to seduce. Tyrannical, she would have been happy, but when she dared to be, it only lasted a quarter of an hour…[w]e loved her because she had a lot of heart.” Kruglikova’s sense of hospitality and “great need for the unexpected in life” led to her studio often serving as the scene for costume parties and dances in the evenings. Bovy observed that “at one of these unseemly balls – formal attire, jackets more irritating than new – we had Karsavina and Nijinsky. They weren't dancing. Ramuz either. He watched.”
In addition to Kruglikova, several other female artists had studios on the block. Blanche Ory-Robin, who came to specialize in the new phenomenon of string tapestry, lived on the same side of the street as the Swiss-born Alice Bailly, a key figure in Cubism and Futurism who counted Juan Gris and Francis Picabia amongst her friends and artistic allies. Bailly’s early painting La vieille garde-robe was shown at the famed Salon d'Automne in 1908 among hundreds of works by dozens of artists, including thirty by Matisse. The 1908 Salon also included a painting called Les Tournesols à Knocke by another Swiss-born woman with a studio across the Rue Boissonade, Cécile Cellier.
Ramuz was a handsome and suitably rugged man, a dead ringer for Josh Hartnett as a young man, a sort of sub-Alpine Tom Selleck in middle age, slowly but surely turning into Vincent Price as the years advanced. His friend, the writer Gonzague de Reynold, described him as “tall, thin, a little dark: an elder.” At least two women were suitably smitten with him. Adrien Bovy notes that the summer of 1913 “was spent avoiding meeting a young lady who lived very close to us and who would so much have liked to get to know Mr. Ramuz. She did not succeed.” Her lack of success is attributable to her unknown rival, Mademoiselle Cellier, who had become Mrs. Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz on 18 February 1913. Daughter Marianne was born the same year.
These events marked the end of Cellier’s career as a painter. After the wedding, Ramuz described his wife in a letter to Bovy. “Mademoiselle Cellier has long sleeves, a high collar, a small notary’s necktie, her hair pulled back from the forehead, a large bosom, a very gentle manner, somewhat dreamy, and she will no longer do any painting at all. I have bought her a cookery book, with priced menus. She is learning to knit. She can already do a veal-roast, a stew, and beef casserole. But she is still lazy.” Who says chivalry is dead? For what it’s worth, Bovy claims that Cellier was not utterly devoted to painting and willing to quit, being always “in a good mood, always ready to laugh, and who painted intermittently, having a taste for it without being burned by the sacred fire.” Whether or not Cellier actually felt this way, almost immediately after they were married, Ramuz and Mademoiselle Cellier began plotting their return to Switzerland. Ramuz had already received correspondence from the author Paul Budry to solicit his participation in a new journal, Cahiers Vaudois, which included in its ranks several prominent Swiss artists. Among them were Ramuz’s entire circle, including Auberjonois and one other member of special significance in Ramuz’s life: his dear friend and fellow Vaudois, the conductor Ernest Ansermet.
The two men had been friends for several years, and Ansermet was one of Ramuz’s true confidants. Several letters from Ramuz to Ansermet tell of his loneliness and increasing frustration with Paris. After Bovy moved away from Paris, Ramuz’s life in Paris was “particularly devoid of incident,” his activities as mundane as if he had never left Laussane. “I lead a very regular life - getting up early, having lunch at home, and not going out much until evening or for a few errands in the nearby streets.” By the last days of 1912, Ramuz seems to have reached a breaking point. “I don't go out, because Paris is awful these days, and I hardly have the leisure; I stand in my little room, where I am, moreover, perfectly well.”
Ramuz missed countless significant events during the lonely days spent in his various apartments, none more significant than a night at the ballet in the last months of his decade in Paris. For the third time in four years, the famed Ballet Russes premiered a work with music composed by a young man from St. Petersburg named Igor Stravinsky. Previous successes with The Firebird and Petrushka had grown Stravinsky’s reputation from total unknown to Paris sensation. On 29 May 1913, Paris’s elite took their place in the box seats of the brand new Théâtre de Champs-Elysées, paying no heed to the plebes in the floor seats. Pierre Monteux took his place on the podium in the orchestra pit and cued the bassoon, who began playing at the highest extremes his instrument would allow.
The Rite of Spring would not receive its proper due until the following April when Monteux conducted it in a concert performance. Ramuz wasn’t present then either, not even after receiving an enthusiastic letter from his friend Ansermet recommending that he get tickets early to avoid the mob.