Noailles, Marie-Laure de (1902–1970)

French patron of the arts and salonnière who was one of the most important influences in the artistic and intellectual life of Paris for many decades. Name variations: Marie Laure de Noailles; Viscountess de Noailles; Marie-Laure Bischoffsheim. Born Marie-Laure Henriette Anne Bischoffsheim on October 31, 1902, in Paris, France; died in Paris on January 29, 1970; daughter of Maurice Bischoffsheim and Marie-Thérese de Chevigné; married Vicomte or Viscount Charles de Noailles; children: two daughters, Laure de Noailles and Nathalie de Noailles .

Born in a palatial house in Paris on Halloween in the year 1902, Marie-Laure Bischoffsheim would grow up to become Marie-Laure de Noailles, one of the 20th century's most generous and imaginative patrons of the arts. When Noailles was only 18 months old, her father Maurice Bischoffsheim died of tuberculosis, and she inherited his vast fortune. Her father belonged to an enormously wealthy Jewish banking family that could easily stand comparison to the Rothschilds. From her mother Marie-Thérese de Chevigné 's family, the little girl inherited not money (by aristocratic standards, they were quite poor) but tradition and breeding. Her mother's family was descended from three famous literary figures of quite different traditions. The most venerable of these was Laure de Noves , the beloved Laura of the Renaissance literary giant Petrarch. Marie-Laure's maternal grandmother, the elegant Comtesse de Chevigné , became the model for Marcel Proust's duchesse de Guermantes in his monumental novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Another ancestor had a less reputable literary connection: the notorious Marquis de Sade. As well, Noailles was a descendant of the Marquise Marie Adrienne de Lafayette and the Marquis de Lafayette.

As a child, Marie-Laure was in frail health, but by the time she entered her teen years she had become quite hale, "an anorexically svelte tomboy, aware of posture, dressed to kill," said her friend Ned Rorem. As an adult, Noailles thought she looked like Louis XIV. She did possess a striking physiognomy, and Janet Flanner has described her as having "a strange, fascinating medieval face, horizontally cut in half by a high forehead that shortened the even features and seemed to separate them from the intellectual cranium above, beneath which her black eyes shone or stared haughtily." A voracious reader from her earliest years, Noailles kept abreast of literary trends but was also well read in the great works, having completed a 24-volume set of Henry James, as well as most of the French, German, and Russian classics, along with Dickens, George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans ), and Thomas Hardy. She also had a good command of poetry, being able to recite from memory countless poems. Of the many anecdotes about her erudition, one refers to her honeymoon voyage to Cuba in 1922, after she had wed, in an arranged marriage, an equally wealthy aristocrat named Viscount Charles de Noailles. Marie-Laure declined to disembark in Havana, being much too immersed in Sigmund Freud's General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. One of Charles' more interesting gifts to his wife in the early years of their marriage was a portrait drawing of her by Pablo Picasso.

Although Viscount Charles was bisexual, two daughters—Laure and Nathalie—were born to the couple. The marriage was in many ways happy, despite the absence of a shared bedroom. Charles was an expert on French gardens, had exquisite taste, and like Marie-Laure was interested in the arts. In 1930, Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles funded (for a million francs, a fabulous sum during that first full year of the world economic depression) an innovative film by two eccentric Spanish geniuses, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. The film, L'Age d'or, now a classic, was then considered by many to be, in the words of James Lord, "blasphemous, indecent and scandalous." The premiere screening took place in the opulent ballroom of the de Noailles mansion on the Place des États-Unis. The ballroom, all gilt and mirrors transported piece by piece from a Sicilian palazzo, with a ceiling painted by Solimena, had been altered at great expense, without, however, blunting the room's rococo splendor, so that films could be shown. The mostly aristocratic audience was amused (or staggered) by a film in which one bizarre image followed another, and as a climax there was an invocation of a personality greatly beloved by the Surrealists, Marie-Laure's outrageous ancestor, the Marquis de Sade, complete with the principal figures of his most shocking work, The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, presented not as themselves but as Jesus Christ and his disciples. Not surprisingly, when L'Age d'or was shown publicly some months later, it caused a riot, with fascist toughs throwing stink bombs in the theater and the press debating its social value, if any. A week after this, the film was banned by the authorities and all available copies were confiscated.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Noailles was an enthusiastic music patron, especially supporting the remarkable group known as Les Six. The six composers (Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre ), whose shared philosophy was one of opposition to the then-dominant impressionist and romantic traditions of French music, all had compositions commissioned by Marie-Laure and Charles. Among the most important works made possible by the generosity of the Noailles' were Francis Poulenc's Aubade and Le Bal Masqué. Aubade was given its premiere with original choreography by Bronislava Nijinska before a select audience at the Place des Etats-Unis. Writes Lord: "On a stage mounted in the garden, there were entertainments of various kinds: Gothic dances in the 'heraldic' style of the Beaumonts, a magic lantern projecting Jean Hugo's drawings with music by Georges Auric, and finally Francis Poulenc's Aubade, commissioned by the Noailles, with the composer himself at the piano, surrounded by eighteen instrumentalists."

Other composers whose work was made possible by the Noailles' patronage included Henri Sauget, who composed a commissioned opera, La Voyante (The Seer). Even non-French composers, including the brilliant Kurt Weill, creator of Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), benefited from their generosity. In December 1932, only weeks before Adolf Hitler became Germany's chancellor, Weill saw the Paris premiere of his school opera Der Jasager (The Yes-Sayer), made possible by generous support from Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles. For a number of weeks in 1933, Weill, by now a refugee from a newly Nazified Germany, lived at the Noailles palace. There, he composed one of his most impressive works, Die sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins), described by Weill as a "spectacle in nine scenes" and dedicated to the viscountess and viscount. After World War II, Marie-Laure continued to scout out and support talented young composers, including the American Ned Rorem, who went to Paris in 1949 intending to stay a month. Instead, he stayed for nine years, many of them as a guest at the Place des États-Unis. Recognizing his talent, Marie-Laure was his patron and introduced him to Paris high society.

Throughout the 1930s, despite the world economic crisis and political chaos in France and elsewhere, the intellectual and artistic life of Paris remained brilliant, in no small measure because of the generosity and imagination of Noailles and her husband. In their mansion, invited guests discovered more than an inherited treasure house. In later years, one could find inside the entrance a Frigidaire-sized, compressed automobile by César standing next to an ancient Greek marble Apollo. Besides the resplendent statuary, which included a gilded Bernini bronze, there were rare tapestries, magnificent furniture, and thousands of volumes in precious leather bindings. In Marie-Laure's sitting room hung her portraits by Picasso, confronting one of her pair of inherited (from her paternal grandfather) Goyas. (There were three Goyas in the palace, two of which were generally held to be among his great masterpieces.) In the parchment-lined salon, designed by Jean-Michel Frank, a Dali hung opposite a Rubens. A daring collector, Marie-Laure was among the first to purchase works that would later be deemed modern classics, including ones by Bérard, Chirico, and Chagall. She had hung in the dining room a huge Italian equine portrait, a large horse viewed from its hindquarters; the guest of honor was always placed facing the painting. The treasures held in the Noailles residence included canvases by Braque, Degas, Delacroix, Géricault, Klee, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Watteau.

Many paintings by her own hand could be seen displayed in the palace as well. These were by no means works of inferior quality; a talented artist, Marie-Laure de Noailles showed her pictures at the prestigious Salon de Mai. Structurally informal, rather like the visionary canvases of Turner, they sold well. She also wrote three novels, and Aldous Huxley said that her fiction was among the few contemporary novels that he felt certain would survive (though they have not stood the test of time). Her novella La chambre des écureuils (The Squirrels' Room), which was privately printed and publicly distributed in France during World War II, recounted Marie-Laure's experience of having been sexually abused in her youth by her stepfather Francis de Croisset. The story bore, as far as she was concerned, a striking resemblance to Françoise Sagan 's hugely successful 1954 novel, Bonjour tristesse. Marie-Laure wanted—but finally decided not—to sue Sagan and her publisher for plagiarism. The viscountess de Noailles also wrote a book of poems, Cires Perdues, which in Janet Flanner's opinion was "imbued with the illogic and ambiguity then fashionable."

Although her books and paintings reveal considerable talent and intelligence, Marie-Laure de Noailles' greatest achievement was her ability to preside with style and understanding over Paris' outstanding center of intellectual and artistic energy, her palace on the Place des États-Unis, for more than 40 years. Her intimate "Déjeuners littéraires," to which no more than eight top artists and thinkers would be invited (including such superstars as Jacques Lacan), set the tone for future decades of French—and Western—intellectual development. On other occasions, balls with 200 guests were as dazzling as any such affairs in the past centuries. Wrote Lord: "Her generosity, in fact, was exceptional and an interesting, contradictory aspect of her nature. Though unusually acquisitive and possessive, she was virtually extravagant in the largesse she distributed to those she cared for, especially if they happened to be in straitened circumstances."

The viscountess' choice of friends and lovers was eclectic (among others, she had extended relationships with the brilliant conductor and composer Igor Markevitch, as well as with the lessthan-brilliant Spanish painter Oscar Dominguez). During World War II, Marie-Laure, who was one-quarter Jewish according to the Nazi Nuremberg Racial Laws, engaged in a love affair with a German officer of Austrian birth. Seeking new experiences into her advanced years (she supported the student uprising of 1968 by attempting to communicate and share ideas with the radicals), Noailles exhibited a lust for life to her very last days. Shrieking "I don't want to die," she expired at her mansion, Place des États-Unis No. 11, on January 29, 1970.

sources:

Boissiére, Jean-François. Traité du Ballet, illustré de gravures a l'eau-forte par Marie Laure. [Paris]: Édité par Le Degré Quarante et un, 1953.

Buckland, Sidney, and Myriam Chimenes, eds. Francis Poulenc: Music, Art and Literature. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1999.

Buñuel, Luis. L'Age d'Or: Correspondence Luis Buñuel—Charles de Noailles: Lettres et Documents (1929–1976). Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993.

Drew, David. Kurt Weill: A Handbook. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987.

Emden, Paul H. Money Powers of Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Reprint ed. NY: Garland, 1983.

Flanner, Janet. "Foreword," in Horst, Salute to the Thirties. NY: Viking Press, 1971, pp. 3–10.

Gold, Arthur, and Robert Fizdale. Misia: The Life of Misia Sert. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980.

Heyden-Rynsch, Verena von der. Europäische Salons: Höhepunkte einer versunkenen weiblichen Kultur. Munich: Artemis & Winkler Verlag, 1992.

Laure, Marie [pseud., Marie-Laure Bischoffsheim, Vicomtesse de Noailles]. Cires Perdues. Paris: Pierre Seghers, [1953].

Lord, James. Six Exceptional Women: Further Memoirs. NY: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994.

Milhaud, Madeleine. Catalogue des Oeuvres de Darius Milhaud. Geneva and Paris: Slatkine, 1982.

Rorem, Ned. Knowing When to Stop: A Memoir. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

——. The Paris and New York Diaries of Ned Rorem: 1951–1961. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983.

——. Setting the Tone: Essays and a Diary. NY: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1983.

Schmidt, Carl B. The Music of Francis Poulenc (1899–1963): A Catalogue. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

"Viscountess de Noailles of Paris, Patron of Avant-Garde, Dies," in The New York Times Biographical Edition. January 30, 1970, p. 247.

John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia