52. Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Diana S. |

“It is fresh, and free.”

― Paul de Charry, art critic

This week, we’re kicking off the fourth year of the podcast with some hot fun in the summertime! It’s hot in Paris – too hot – and a listener question got me thinking about historical ways to beat the heat. This question led me on a journey – a short, shady journey to a little island that brought a generation of Parisians artistic inspiration and some much needed relief from the city heat. This week, I’m talking about the island of Chatou, the creation of Auguste Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party” and sharing a BIG announcement about the show!

Episode 52: “Luncheon of the Boating Party”

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Transcript

Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and before we start today’s episode I have a really, really exciting announcement: The Land of Desire newsletter is coming back! Starting next week, I’ll be sending out newsletters full of entertaining articles, recommendations, French music and recipes, and anything else that I think your Francophile hearts will enjoy. The newsletter comes in two flavors: free and paid. Free subscribers will receive one newsletter every quarter, and paid subscribers will receive a newsletter at least once per month. To subscribe to either version, go to thelandofdesire.substack.com – that’s thelandofdesire dot s u b s t a c k dot com. I can’t WAIT to send out the first issue – there are some really juicy stories inside. Sign up today so you can receive the first issue!
 
Last month, the temperature reached 108 degrees in Paris, a new record. In the middle of the heat wave, an old friend reached out to me: Help! There’s no air conditioning in this city! It’s true: in an old city like Paris, where electricity comes at a premium and 200 year old buildings lack the infrastructure to support modern air conditioning, the city descends into madness and mayhem pretty quickly when the mercury rises. I worked to cobble together a hot weather itinerary for my friend and while I was doing so, I began wondering to myself: how did Parisians historically beat the heat?
 
On August 26th, 1837, an exciting new curiosity arrived in the village of Chatou. The sleepy little village on the banks of the Seine lay downstream from anywhere, a collection of fishermen, tradesmen and their families, kept themselves to themselves and tried to stay out of the history books. Other than the occasional foreign invaders passing through on their way to nearby Paris, 10 kilometers up the river, the villagers saw the same people every day of their lives. But on that day, a new arrival pulled into town: a shining new steam locomotive train, direct from Paris. The railroad tracks on which it sat were the first of its kind: the first railway line built from Paris, and the first railway line meant to carry people, instead of goods. For the past two years, the entire rural area had swarmed with activity, as hundreds of workmen passed through, clearing territory, building reinforced bridges, and finally, laying down tracks. A few days earlier, the inaugural run had passed through, carrying railway officials and members of the press. Now, on that hot, sleepy afternoon, the French public had their first opportunity to experience the new train, and absolutely everyone wanted a ride. Over the course of the day, 18,000 passengers rode the new stretch of track, marveling at the speed of travel. “We were struck to the highest degree,” wrote one newspaper, “by the magic of this communication so fast, practically instant.” Exciting as the new technology was, however, its usefulness wasn’t yet clear. The newspaper continued: “The odd choice of stations along the route make the line an object of curiosity and exhibition rather than utility and exploitation.” It was, by all appearances, a train to nowhere. But it was going nowhere fast! Only a week prior, passengers traveling from the downtown Paris to this stretch of the countryside took a six hour carriage ride. Now, a journey from the capital to the countryside took a mere 15 minutes! No doubt every villager in Chatou watched the spectacle that day, wondering what the new technology would bring to their tiny pocket of France. On that day, the villagers stood poised between the past and the future. In front of the villagers sat the new steam train, huffing and puffing briefly in the station before continuing its lightning journey. Behind the villagers gurgled the Seine: ancient, familiar, the oldest, fastest means of travel, suddenly obsolete. All day long, Parisians stepped off the train at Chatou for the first time, waving, admiring the rural beauty, breathing the fresh air. The disgusting, squalid city, with its steaming, overcrowded streets, hot garbage piles and polluted air, seemed like a distant memory. Here was a beautiful countryside, right in their backyard! The future had arrived in Chatou, and nothing would ever be the same.
 
In the summer of 1850, Alphonse Fournaise had an idea. Over the past 13 years, ever since the arrival of the train that changed everything, Chatou had undergone a dramatic transformation. Parisians now had access to two exciting novelties: cheap, fast transportation and leisure time, now that most French workers got Sunday off. As this first generation of weekend warriors poured into Chatou, the locals rose to their demand for cheap entertainment. Now that the Seine carried less shipping, it could carry more canoes, and boating and rowing became the hip new pasttimes. Alphonse came from a long line of boat builders, and he saw an opportunity. In the middle of the Seine river, next to the train station of Chatou, was the ile de Chatou, a tiny spit of land in the water. That year, he and his entire family opened up the Maison Fournaise on the ile de Chatou, a one-stop shop for a perfect weekend. Alphonse built boats. His son, Alphonse Junior, rented, leased and sold the boats, and helped pretty young ladies in and out of them. His wife, Louise, ran a homestyle restaurant downstairs and rented rooms for tourists upstairs. Finally, his daughter, beautiful young Alphonsine, waited tables and charmed customers. It sounded good on paper, but would it pay off? Alphonse stocked up his workshop, and glanced around at the sleepy river, and prayed.
 
Claude Monet had to escape. It was 1869, he was 29 years old, and he couldn’t keep his young family in Paris. There was no money! The rent was too damn high! He was on the edge of starvation. That summer, Monet sold a few paintings to a friend who took pity on him, and used the money to up sticks to the suburbs. Monet, his lover Camille, and their young son packed up their meager belongings and stepped on board one of the new trains. They stepped off the train at Bougival, a pretty little village with cobblestone streets, quiet courtyards, access to the Seine and cheap rent. Their new home was charming, and affordable, but it wasn’t quiet, not with all those children. Monet needed inspiration, and he needed a friend. Luckily, he had one, and that friend was just upstream.
 
Auguste Renoir, 28 years old, may have been a radical painter, but he was also a dutiful son. His middle-class parents were spending the summer in their place outside the city, and Renoir was happy to visit them. During the week, Renoir spent his days strolling along the riverbank, eating dinner with his parents and sneaking the leftover bread and tobacco into his room. On Sundays, Renoir hopped a train, or better yet, floated down the river, to visit his friend Claude, bread and tobacco in hand. The two men were restless: they refused to stay cooped up with their families when there was so much work to be done! Monet and Renoir were young men, and they wanted to capture the changes that surrounded them on all sides: changing qualities of light and shade, rippling, inconstant water, and especially the changing landscape. That summer, the two men floated down the river a few miles, to a spot just past the village of Chatou, then further down past the island of Chatou, where the Seine forked in two. It was there, between the stretches of the river, that the men encountered a tiny island. 
 
The island was a lazy, sleepy jungle, covered with poplar trees and weeping willows, and in the still, hot air of summer, you could hear the island before you could see it. At the point where the Seine divided itself on the island’s banks, a rickety jetty stretched out over the surface of the water. The jetty connected the small island to an even tinier spit of ground. This tiny little sandbar wasn’t even big enough to constitute a proper island, only enough room to host a single weeping willow, so the locals called it the camembert, or “flowerpot”. There, on that floating bridge between the island and the camembert, sat the open air cafe which Monet and Renoir would call home that summer, La Grenouillere.
 
Located on the tiny ile de Grenouillere, the open air cafe La Grenouillere was what was called a guinguette. The tradition of the guinguette began in the 1700s, a few decades before the Revolution, when a few wily French figured out a way to get out of the king’s appalling taxes on consumer goods. Anything that made its way through the city gates was subject to customs duties – so what if the goods never quite made it through the gates? All along the outskirts of Paris, handy locals built up cheap, rickety cafes, mostly along the riverfront so Parisians could float out of town quickly. These ersatz cafes were dubbed guinguettes after the wine that was served there: a variety called guinguet, which was local, green, sour and above all, cheap. By 1750, Parisians – especially  working class Parisians – established a tradition of floating down to a guinguette for cheap, relaxed fun on Sundays. Now, the trains made it easier than ever to visit a guinguette on a Sunday. Crowds packed onto benches and under trees, getting drunk on the local stuff, enjoying the outdoors, falling in love and even, if they’d had enough guinguet, falling in the water and splashing around for a bit.
 
La Grenouillere was a guiguette par excellence. It had everything you needed: a beautiful view of the river’s divide, shady willows, cheap alcohol, and an interesting, socially diverse clientele. The Frogpond was a spot to rub elbows with all sorts of people: men and women of money, especially bored young heirs; laborers and artisans on their days off; artists like Monet and Renoir looking for inspiration and intoxication; young bohemians, and, of course, the grenouilles themselves. The cafe’s name was a play on words: of course, the river banks surrounding the cafe were filled with frogs, but la grenouille was also a slang term for a particular kind of woman. Not a prostitute, exactly. As Renoir’s son, the director Jean Renoir, wrote in his memoir, “a grenouillere was a class of unattached young women, characteristic of the Parisian scene at the time, changing lovers easily, satisfying any whim, going nonchalantly from a mansion on the Champs-Elysees to a garret int he Batignolles.” According to Jean, his father considered the grenouilles a “very good sort”. They were charming, beautiful, relaxed about propriety and game for anything, including sitting for a painting. For Monet and Renoir, it was a painter’s heaven.
That summer Monet and Renoir set up their easels side by side, painting up a storm. For Monet, Chatou’s main interest lay in its position at the center of social upheaval. Monet studied environments in flux: changing qualities of light and shade, rippling water, and changing landscapes. That summer, the landscape was certainly changing – fast. That summer, Monet began sketching a work which would eventually become “Train in the Countryside” – a beautiful scene in which we see ladies with parasols and small children walking around in or on the lawn on a hot summer day. Behind the group stretches a train, billowing steam as it chugs its way through the landscape. Presumably, the same train brought these women and children here to the countryside, where they could escape the noise and grime of Paris and enjoy the healthy activities of the country. The train to Chatou, barrelling down those braind new railway ties, funneled Parisians to the island every hour in the summertime, and carted them home at the end of the day. 
 
In the late evenings, Monet and Renoir decamped for La Grenouillère, where, according to the author Guy de Maupassant, the two artists smoothed out the rougher edges of the crowd, producing scenes and subjects a bit more sedate than their real-life counterparts. I’ll let the author Sue Roe take over here, as she describes an afternoon at the Frogpond:
 
The crowd they painted all came brightly decked out, the women with dyed hair, cheap scent and scarlet lipstick. The young men posed in fashion-plate frock-coats, pale gloves, canes and monocles. In the Grenouillere itself, as the afternoon wore on, people got steadily tipsier, singing with abandon, dancing the quadrille and flirting recklessly. Everyone came here: drapers’ assistants, third-rate actors, infamous journalists, shady spectators, revellers and roisterers. Along the riverbank was a line of tents into which the revellers disappeared. They reappeared dressed in striped bathing suits or frilled pantaloons, tunics, frilled hats and espradilles, jostling and pushing one another into the water, the women bobbing up again to expose plenty of cleavage and wantonly streaming wet hair.…The pontoon was lit up with lanterns. Courting couples spilled out on to the riverbank, tot he music of accordionists. High on wine and absinthe, they danced the night away.
 
That summer, the ile de Grenouillère was the place to be. Monet and Renoir met Guy de Maupassant, an avid boater who had taken to rowing around the Frogpond with his mistress. They would have met bohemian artists and rowdy local girls, but they would also have crossed paths with none other than Emperor Napoleon III and his Empress Eugenie, who visited the Frogpond that same summer. As a young engraver from Belgium wrote to his friends, “As for La Grenouillere, from 7:30 PM to midnight, it’s the most charming place imaginable…the women are lying in the grass in pink bathrobes, turning blue from the water, and what women! The prettiest of the prettiest tenth in the world. The only people getting freaked out by the crowd are uptight old moralists.”
 
Like the train tourists, Monet’s residence at Chatou was only temporary. The island getaway gave him contentment, inspiration, and a temporary relief from the pressures of family life, but it wasn’t home. Monet was distracted by domestic pressures: Camille’s family were appalled to see her living in sin with a penniless artist, and they were getting evicted from their charming cottage for a failure to pay rent. Within a year Claude and Camille returned to Paris, where they finally married, with Gustave Courbet serving as the witness. Trying to stay one step ahead of their creditors, the newlyweds and their child travelled all the way to London – just in time to avoid getting drafted for the Franco-Prussian War. Monet would never return to Chatou, but that didn’t mean the experience had pass through him entirely. After the Franco-Prussian War ended, and it was safe for the young family to return home, the Monet family set up residence in Argenteuil – another riverside tourist town, just like Chatou. If Chatou had been only a dalliance, Argenteuil was true love – Monet lived there for the next decade, painting on a small boat he’d turned into a floating studio, producing some of his most famous, groundbreaking works. 
 
Renoir, too, had moved on from the Frogpond – but he hadn’t gone far. Chatou was home for Renoir, but the Grenouillère was turning into old news. In 1872, that heroic friend of the Impressionists, Gustave Caillebotte, invited his starving artist friends out to the ile de Chatou, the first island next to the train station, one which Renoir and Monet had been sailing past this whole time. Gustave was taking his friends out, on his dime. When Caillebotte wasn’t busy encouraging his friends when they felt low, or buying their works when they weren’t selling, he enjoyed sailing, and kept several boats tied up at the Maison Fournaise, on the ile de Chatou. That summer, Caillebotte brought his friends down to the Maison Fournaise and used his own boats to teach them all how to row and sail. It didn’t take long for the charms of the boathouse and restaurant to enchant the artists. Within a few years,  the fashionable crowds had moved in. Alphonse’s plan to build a summertime retreat had paid off beyond his wildest dreams, and over the course of the past 20 years, he’d earned enough money to expand his restaurant and boat house, add a dining room for large parties, and construct a balcony all around the upstairs, lined with a beautiful cast iron fence. 
 
“I was always crammed in at Fournaise,” Renoir recalled decades later. “I found as many beautiful girls to paint as I could desire. It was a perpetual party, and what a mix of people!”
 
Unlike the Grenouillère, the Maison Fournaise was cheerful and respectable. Anyone who was anyone visited, or even lived above, the restaurant. There was Guy de Maupassant, who was perhaps the first island-hopper to recognize the restaurant’s potential, probably in the course of renting one of Alphonse’s rowboats. But it wasn’t just boating enthusiasts: Manet, Sisley, Pissarro, Caillebotte, and Monet’s old wedding witness, Courbet, all swung through at one point or another. Berthe Morisot visited frequently, since she had a summer home in the nearby village. Edgar Degas loved rowing, and was an old friend of the Fournaise family. Filled with food, flirtation and friendship, it’s little wonder that Renoir fell in love with the Maison Fournaise.
 
Over the course of 15 years, Renoir held a residency at Maison Fournaise. Every summer, you could find him in a crowded table at the restaurant, or set up with his easel on the river bank, or perhaps sleeping in a bed upstairs. Mostly, however, he could be found searching for a pretty girl to paint. “The chic thing,” he remembered to his son, “was to bring your girlfriends to Chatou on Sundays and to take them rowing. Some even left them there for several days to get the full benefit of the fresh air.” But don’t let it be said that he was trying to seduce them: “My friends knew that for me, a woman was only a pretext for painting.”
 
This included the beautiful Alphonsine Fournaise, gracious host of the Maison. Alphonsine had married Louis Joseph Papillon a few years back, but only strangers called her Madame Papillon. Louis Joseph had died in the Siege of Paris only a few years after their marriage, and nestled back in her childhood home, she was Alphonsine Fournaise again, part of the great family which kept the good times rolling on the island. Alphonsine was the perfect hostess: funny, witty, charming, intelligent, beautiful. There was always a seat waiting for Alphonsine at any table she wished, and every artist who passed through Chatou tried to get her to sit for him. In 1879, it was Renoir’s turn, and he turned out a splendid portrait of Madame Papillon. The painting was both an artistic endeavor, and a thank you note to a family which had given him so much over the years:
 
“I brought a lot of customers to Alphonse Fournaise, by gratitude he commissioned a portrait of himself for two hundred francs, as well as a painting of his daughter, the gracious Madame Papillon. I painted Father Fournaise with his white lemonade jacket, about to drink his absinthe. This canvas, which passed for the height of vulgarity, suddenly became a distinguished bill, when my work began to command high prices at the Hotel Drouot. And those same people who speak today with the most conviction of the refined manner of Father Fournaise’s portrait would not have split five louis for me at a time when five louis would have rendered me so many services! All that I could obtain then, I could obtain from my friends and my mistresses. Such good girls!”
 
And Alphonsine was the best girl of all: she appears in one composition after another. Mademoiselle Fournaise was followed by “Alphonsine With Fringe” and “Girl with a Fan” and “Woman with a Straw Hat” and “On the Balcony”. She became the face of Chatou, with her elegant face smiling out from paintings by Renoir, Degas and others. 
 
In 1879, ten years after he’d first set up an easel on the island next to Monet, Renoir was struck with a vision. Was it possible – was it even possible? – to capture the good life Renoir found at the Maison Fournaise in a single painting? That fall, he wrote to a friend, “I hope to see you in Paris this fall, for I am now in Chatou. I am working on a painting of some boaters, something I have been dying to do for a long time. I am starting to get old, and I didn’t want to delay this festivity any further…It’s expensive enough already. I don’t know if I will even complete it, but I told my patron about my hardships and he agreed with me that even if the great expense did not enable me to finish my painting, it will still be a step forward: every once in awhile you must attempt things that seem too difficult.”
 
And nothing sounded more difficult than the project Renoir had in mind. An enormous canvas, four feet by five feet tall, on which Renoir would try to fix a moment, a fleeting image, of everything the Maison Fournaise had to offer. He had one perfect idea which encapsulated everything he loved about life on the island: a boating party lunch. Alphonse Fournaise loved to drum up publicity by organizing boat races around the island. He’d lend the competitors boats from his own stock, gather the crowds to watch from the shore, and when the winners were declared, everyone was invited to party upstairs, eating lunch on the grand balcony. It was a perfect distillation of summertime bliss, and it would be a perfect disaster to coordinate.
 
That summer, Renoir began herding his friends and loved ones upstairs onto the balcony. An enormous crowd comprising all of Renoir’s favorite, familiar faces squeezed in front of the railing, eating, drinking, flirting, shrieking with laughter. It was an artist’s nightmare. Recent X-ray analysis of the finished work showed that every single figure in Renoir’s work had been readjusted, over and over again. Renoir struggled to figure out where to place the river, the boats, the bridge, the canopy, the hats, the men, the women, the forks, the spoons and the direction of a man’s glance. At the end of the summer, Renoir returned to Paris, but continued taking the train back and forth to work on his canvas, until disaster struck: in February 1880, Renoir fell off his bicycle and broke his right arm. To everyone’s astonishment, this only put a dent in his productivity. Writing to reassure his patron that the very big, very expensive painting had not be shelved, Renoir explained, “I have been enjoying working with my left hand; it is a lot of fun and it’s even better than what I did with my right. I think that it was a good thing that I broke my arm. It allows me to make progress.”
 
And progress was necessary. Eleven months after he’d started his painting, Renoir was still hard at work on his painting. In a letter, Renoir asks a friend, “Tell Madame Alphonsine that I’m thinking to go to Chatou around the 8th of September, unless the weather is bad. I would like to finish my luncheon of the boaters.” A month later, Renoir was back in town. It was now a full year since Renoir had begun working on his painting, and he was losing patience. “My dear friend, I still have to work on this blasted painting because of an upper crust tart who had the audacity to come to Chatou and demand to pose. This has put me fifteen days behind in my work…I am more and more irritated. I will waste just another week here, since I have done everything, and I will return to doing my portraits. I will write to you next week. I hope that I finally will have finished. Ah! I vow that this will be the last large painting.”
 
Finally, in July 1881, sixteen months after beginning, Renoir finished his enormous painting, titled simply “Luncheon of the Boating Party.” It was a masterpiece. As the New York Times described the work more than a century later: “Blessed with a vast and contagious conviviality, it portrays a completely harmonious world: pain and self-doubt play no part in it, nor do cruelty and rejection. Nobody fights for center stage. Even midge and mosquito have taken the day off. Just for an hour or two, an earthly paradise has been set up in a little restaurant.”
 
The crowd is flushed with excitement and activity, and you can feel Renoir’s deep affection for each of his subjects, starting in the center of the painting, where a young woman sits petting a dog. This is Aline Charigot, a pretty young seamstress Renoir had met just as he’d begun working on his painting, and a few years later, she will become his wife. Across the table, wearing a straw hat, is a young, athletic Gustave Caillebotte, the heroic friend with deep pockets and deep loyalties. In the background, wearing a silk hat, is Charles Ephrussi, patron and collector, who would purchase many works from Renoir and Monet, always trusted to pull an artist back from the brink of starvation. Eventually he will amass one of the world’s first great personal collections of Impressionist art. Then, he’ll develop a collection of Japanese netsuke, which will make him famous one hundred years later in the bestselling book, The Hare With The Amber Eyes. Drinking deeply from a glass is Ellen Andrée, a fashionable actress who’d already modeled for Renoir in the past, as well as Manet and Degas – one of those very good girls who was always game to play a part. A mix of other actresses and critics hover around in the background, making conversation and flirting. Finally, leaning against the cast iron fence of the balcony are the children of the house: Alphonse Jr. leans back behind Aline and her dog, and right in the center of the painting, speaking to a man in a bowler hat, who it turns out is the former mayor of French Saigon, is Alphonsine Fournaise herself. I find Alphonsine particularly arresting in this work – compared to Aline and her little dog, or all the flirting actresses, Alphonsine is bemused, not smitten. She looks utterly at ease, as well she should, surrounded by friends in the comfort of her own home. Together, this mixture of locals, tourists, actresses, athletes, art critics and friends created an instant sensation to all who saw it. One art critic at the time wrot4e, “It is fresh and free without being too bawdy.” And another critic wrote, “It is one of the best things Renoir has painted.” It didn’t take long before Luncheon of the Boating Party was purchased by Victor Chocquet, the visionary art collector who defended Impressionism against its most vehement critics from day one. Thanks to the sale of this and other works, Renoir was able to move back to Paris with Aline, where they would have their first child a few years later. He spent the next few years traveling to Algeria and Italy and the island of Guernsey before returning home to build a life with Aline.
 
In 1886, Paul Durand-Ruel, the great art dealer of the Impressionists, who had probably singlehandedly kept Monet alive for a few decades there, took a trip to the United States to see whether Americans could recognize the beauty of Impressionism in a way the French, apparently, could not. The show was an astonishing success, and a turning point in the lives of all of the artists – after 1886, the artists were celebrated, and more importantly, paid. As Durand-Ruel remembered later, “The American public bought moderately, but thanks to that public, Monet and Renoir were enabled to live and after that, the French public followed suit.” In 1890, flush with the success of the London exhibitions, Renoir and Aline were officially married. Renoir’s days as a bachelor were over, he was growing up and the Impressionists were moving on. But as the Impressionists moved on, they left behind a world on the river, and those who had called it home.
 
In 1899, Guy de Maupassant moved his boats from the storage sheds of the Maison Fournaise to the village of Poissy. It was a sad acknowledgement that the days of the Frogpond were numbered. “Life in Chatou was no longer tenable,” he explained to a friend, “because of the neighborhood. There were really too many half-worldly women. It makes me sad for Alphonse and Madame, who have always been very kind and who took great care of my boats.” That same summer, the Grenouillère, that slightly passé floating cafe where Monet and Renoir had once sat side by side behind their easels, painting the girls dancing amid the fireflies, burned down in a terrible fire. The crowds were moving on, like Renoir and Maupassant, to newer, hipper islands, or else settling down for more sedate pasttimes. One can only imagine Alphonsine and her brother, looking out over a balcony which had once been so full of life, now empty.
 
The fashionable crowds were no longer interested in rowing, distracted by bicycles and eventually, private cars. Alphonsine took over ownership of the Maison Fournaise, lonely as it may have been. From time to time, an artist would show up, often traveling in the footsteps of the Impressionists. A young Henri Matisse came to study in the wake of the great artists who had stayed on Chatou, and a handful of daring artists who lived in Chatou would go on to lead the Fauvism movement at the turn of the century. Over the years there was only one constant for Alphonsine, one reminder of the Maison Fournaise’s glory days.
 
In 1875, a few years before the birth of Luncheon of the Boating Party, a young painter named Maurice Realier-Dumas came to visit his father’s new vacation home on Chatou. Before long, Maurice clearly fell in love with Maison Fournaise…and Alphonsine Fournaise. At once, young Maurice commissioned a portrait of her from Renoir, the lovely “Lady Smiling” which gives us Alphonsine’s sweet face, her intelligent glance, and her wry little smile, with no background, no distracting detail to take our attention away from the beautiful woman depicted. Young Realier-Dumas was 14 years younger than Alphonsine, but his affection was strong, and durable. This was his family, and the Maison was his home. How to pay tribute to the home of so many itinerant artists? Eventually, Realier-Dumas began an epic composition of his own: a series of four gorgeous frescoes depicting the four stages of life, painted directly onto the walls of the restaurant itself. Infancy, adolescence, maturity and old age: the entire life cycle walked across the walls. Alphonsine would watch Realier-Dumas pass through them all, as his own career began to flourish. By the turn of the century, the young artist had come into his own, and it must have felt wrenching to think that he would be leaving her behind, like so many others. But, to her astonishment, Maurice remained. For fifty years, Maurice made Chatou his home, even as his work launched the Art Nouveau movement and catapulted him into fame and earned him a spot in the Legion of Honor. Together, Maurice and Alphonsine continued to keep the spirit of Chatou alive, filled with art and love and tenderness. One day, many years after his arrival on Chatou, Maurice decided to paint his own portrait of Alphonsine. She’s holding an umbrella, and looking directly at the artist. It’s an intimate gesture, an intimate painting, a secret smile passing between two people who have found love in unexpected places.
 
But eventually, even this unexpected period of tranquility came to an end. The artists simply weren’t coming anymore, and civic engineering efforts to redirect the Seine were making it harder than ever for tourists to row to and from the island. In 1906, a blind, elderly Edgar Degas paid one final visit to his lifelong friend. A year later, Alphonsine closed the Maison Fournaise for good. In 1924, the reconstruction on the Seine washed away the little camembert island where so many young couples had danced that first summer at the Frogpond. Times were hard, and Alphonsine began parting with the treasures she’d held so dear. In 1925, Alphonsine sold a small painting: a landscape, painted especially for her by Renoir. It was a beautiful treasure, one which she’d held on to for nearly forty years, and she must have known that it would have commanded a large price by then. But Alphonsine was desperate, and she parted with the landscape for only 5,000 francs – the equivalent of about $2.700 in today’s dollars. Only a few months later, an heiress would purchase the same painting for ten times that price, and the painting would set off on a mysterious journey. A few years later, Maurice Realier-Dumas, Alphonsine’s surprise, late-in-life lover, died at the age of 68, and was buried on Chatou. In 1935, Alphonsine died, possibly in great debt, certainly in obscurity.
 
Meanwhile, the painting which captured Alphonsine, her family. and her home in all their glory had gone on to international fame, all thanks to a luncheon of another kind. In 1923, Joseph Durand-Ruel, son of the famous Impressionist collector, invited an American couple to lunch. Duncan and Marjorie Phillips sat down at the table, looked up, and gasped. Hanging above them was Renoir’s masterpiece, and the couple fell in love immediately. They made an offer to Joseph on the spot, equivalent to no less than $1.2 million dollars in today’s money. Marjorie Phillips later recalled that she could not resist ‘that fabulous, incredibly entrancing, utterly alive and beguiling Renoir masterpiece.’ Luncheon of the Boating Party became the star acquisition of the Phillips Museum in Washington, D.C., where it resides to this day. While millions and millions of tourists visited the painting in D.C., back on Chatou, the Maison Fournaise was falling into decay. By 1979, the entire building was slated for destruction, when the town fought back. Purchasing the property itself, the town petitioned the government to help restore this landmark of art history. For nearly two decades, a fleet of experts worked to restore the restaurant to its former glory and in 1990, the Maison Fournaise finally reopened to the public. The restaurant kitchen served up food once more. Maurice Realier-Dumas’s delicate frescoes were uncovered behind some wallpaper, and put on display in a little museum dedicated to the restaurant’s heydey. Most importantly. the upstairs balcony, with its curling cast-iron balcony, is open for business, with large crowds of art enthusiasts crowding in for their own luncheon. There was only one part of the restoration that went unfinished: when conducting an inventory of the artwork, Maurice’s intimate portrait of Alphonsine was the only work they couldn’t find. “We know it is here somewhere,” the curator says, “but whoever owns it has never been prepared to let us see it.”
 
Now, as Parisians swelter in the heat, the Maison Fournaise hums with activity, surrounded by boats pulling through the river water, while all around, the water of the Seine flows steadily on. It recalls the words of Guy de Maupassant, in one of his final stories written on Chatou, subtitled, “Reminisces of a Rowing Man.” Melancholy as he packed up his rowboats and moved on to other shores, Maupassant wrote that, “For ten years, my great, my only, my absorbing passion was the Seine, that lovely, calm, varied, stinking river, full of mirages and filth. I think I loved it so much because it gave me the feeling of being alive.”
 
And now we return to the question which initially inspired this episode: how did Parisians historically beat the heat? Of course, one answer is that Parisians never had to beat this heat. Climate change is driving more and more extreme weather, and last month’s heat wave comes as no surprise. The heat wave of 2003 killed 14,082 people, and the record set during that heat wave was broken again in 2015, and then again last month, when the temperature topped out at a ghastly 114 degrees Fahrenheit. How to cope with heat waves that get hotter and hotter, and arrive more and more frequently? In 2019, Paris turns again to its oldest source of relief: the Seine. Without pleasure boats and shaded jettys, without clean water to swim in, the Seine nevertheless continues to provide quiet, invisible relief. Underneath the streets of Paris, a 49 mile network of pipes pumps water from the Seine, chilling it in pipes deep underground, and swirling the chilled water underneath the biggest buildings in Paris. Last month, a pump station near the Eiffel Tower pumped water from the Seine into a production plant, which chilled the water to a temperature just above freezing. From the production plant, the Seine swirled into the network of large, wide pipes, where it swam blow the city streets, shimmering in the heat, below the parks filled with melting Parisians, until it reached its delivery station. The ice cold water of the Seine swirled up, up, up, through the walls of the Musee d’Orsay, where it cooled the great galleries, keeping safe the visitors and the artwork inside. The water swirled up to the highest floor of the museum, running through a wall hung with Renoir masterpieces. There, in room 30, the cold waters of the Seine rushed behind a portrait of Alphonsine Fournaise. She sits at a table, wearing a fashionable hat, leaning on an elbow on a table set with a white tablecloth. Her other arm rests, outstretched, on a railing. Beyond the railing, the island of Chatou stretches out like a lazy, lush paradise, before falling away into the river beyond, so close you can almost hear the sound of the water lapping against the shore. The sun pours over her shoulders, as she looks off into the distance, beyond the artist. We cannot see what she sees, but whatever spectacle is taking place at the Maison Fournaise, her family’s oasis, small, hidden, doomed and yet destined for immortality, whatever it is that Alphonsine sees, she is relaxed, she is happy and she is smiling.
 
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire! As a reminder, sign up for the brand new Land of Desire newsletter at thelandofdesire dot substack dot com so you can receive the first, free issue next week. Paid subscribers will receive their first episode soon thereafter, and you won’t want to miss it. Remember that little landscape by Renoir which Alphonsine was forced to sell in her old age? That little landscape ended up on a wild and crazy journey, a 60 year mystery which reads like something out of a movie, and I’ll be sharing the story in the first paid subscriber issue of the newsletter. Paid subscribers will also be able to participate in the discussion threads I’ll be running about this episode and the newsletter. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts! Until next time, au revoir!

Sources

I can’t believe that I forgot one of my favorite books in last week’s Listener Q&A and in my new recommendations page! Everyone who is even the slightest bit interested in Impressionism should grab a copy of Sue Roe’s The Private Lives of the Impressionists. I’ve reread this book at least 3 times through, and it was one of my original inspirations for the podcast! It’s a fun, educational and sometimes scandalous read and I learn something new every time I pick it up. Highly, highly recommended.

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