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By Root 740 0

should their subject now be, and how should it be presented? A savage, nihilistic atmosphere, emerging from the brutalities of the war, meant that many artistic and cultural values were now unceremoniously hurled out, until the artists arrived at the anarchy of Dada. One of its founders, Gabrielle’s friend Tristan Tzara, said that Dada meant nothing and this was the point: nothing. Dada was to be “an inventory of the ruins of art and society left by the void of war.” While Gabrielle was in one sense party to these sentiments, she was also more interested in asking herself what she could do to move with her chaotic times. And at the center of events, she made her own definitive contribution. She lived an unusually progressive and unbourgeois life, her independence and sexually liberated attitudes reflected in Gabrielle’s short hair and ruthlessly simple clothes.

At the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, she threw herself into what became the most expansively sociable period of her life, and one of her first undertakings was to have a fine piano brought in and placed in an otherwise empty room. Seldom relinquishing the luxury of friendship with a former lover, Gabrielle was by this stage once again on close terms with Stravinsky. And Stravinsky now came to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré along with society and artists. These included Diaghilev, his lovers, Ballets Russes dancers, Misia and José Maria Sert, Erik Satie, and a series of other performers and composers, including Les Six, who in turn included Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc. The musicians played and partied with Gabrielle’s society and artist friends, including the likes of Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani, Juan Gris and Francis Picabia, long into the night.

On the upper floor, meanwhile, Comte Pillet-Will found the clamor of their contemporary music unendurable, and he and his tenant came to an amicable accommodation. She would pay handsomely for the rest of his vast residence, and the count would take himself elsewhere.

Jean Cocteau’s offering for that year, 1921, was Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, a parody of a Parisian wedding, again with the anarchic high spirits of his ballet Parade. Olga Picasso had insisted that she and her husband take a villa outside Paris for the first months of their baby son’s life. Picasso was now invited to join Misia’s box as Gabrielle’s escort for the ballet’s premiere. Picasso was always in two minds about Cocteau, whom he infuriated by teasing him. But he and Gabrielle enjoyed Cocteau’s verbal sparkle, his spiteful tongue and his urgent and shamelessly insincere need of the friendship of the haut monde. Had Picasso and Gabrielle seen Cocteau’s diary, they would have reveled in his remark about “the actresses without theater that are society women.”3

By this point, Gabrielle had known Picasso for some time. Indeed, she was one of the small group of guests at his wedding in 1918, when Olga wore a Chanel dress and Cocteau had written, “Olga in white satin, tricot and ulle—very Biarritz.”4 When Picasso became claustrophobic in his villa and came into town in search of his friends, he wouldn’t stay alone at night in his and Olga’s apartment. He was apparently terrified by the prospect of loneliness. So Gabrielle had one of her light, airy rooms at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré made permanently available to him. She saw a good deal of Picasso at this time and was, in her own words,

. . . seized by a passion for [him]. He was wicked. He fascinated me the way a hawk would; he filled me with a fear. I could feel it when he came in: something would curl up in me; he’d arrived. I couldn’t see him yet, but already I knew he was in the room. And then I saw him. He had a way of looking at me . . . I trembled. 5

Misia had observed this attraction between her two friends, and did her best to foil any real intimacy developing between them. But any control she might previously have exerted over Gabrielle had evaporated when Gabrielle wrote the check for Diaghilev’s presentation of Rite of Spring. Characteristically, Gabrielle was not particularly