Moulin Rouge

Moulin Rouge: A novelbased on the life of Henri de Toulouse-Lautec
by Pierre La Mure

Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin

Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin was painted byVincent van Gogh in 1887. Agostina Segatori owned the Café du Tambourin that Van Gogh knew intimately. It was a gathering spot for Parisian artists, a place where their work was exhibited. Van Gogh, unable to pay in cash for his meals, exchanged paintings for his fare. The paintings then adorned the restaurant. He held a special exhibit of his Japanese prints in the café as well. His connection with Agostina and the cafe came to a sad end when she went bankrupt and Van Gogh's paintings were confiscated by creditors. This painting, however, demonstrates an artistic discovery that culminated in his unique, creative style not quite on the brink of being understood and revered.

Van Gogh's influence in Paris

In 1886 Van Gogh left the Netherlands, never to return, for Paris and the guidance of his brother Theo van Gogh. He entered Paris as a shy, somber man and while his personality would never change, he emerged artistically into what one critic described as a "singing bird". While Van Gogh had been influenced by great Dutch masters, coming to Paris meant that he was influenced by Impressionists, Symbolists, Pointillists, and Japanese art. His circle of friends includedCamille Pissarro, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard and others. The works of Japanese print makersHiroshige and Hokusai greatly influenced Van Gogh, both for the beautiful subject matter and the style of flat patterns of colors without shadow. Van Gogh explored the various influences and molded them into a style that was uniquely his own. In the two years, from 1886 through 1888, Van Gogh emerged as a sophisticated, thoughtful and provoking artist. This painting demonstrates his journey of creativity of that period

The painting

In the painting Agostina, a woman in her forties, can be seen smoking a cigarette while having her second glass of beer, evidenced by two saucers under the mug of beer. In demeanor and style, such as her clothing, make-up and hairstyle, she is a modern woman. She is wearing a fashionable hat. According to the style at the time, her jacket is a different design than her dress. A parasol sits on one of the seats next to her.

Van Gogh used the theme of a woman sitting at a small table, introduced by Impressionists, such as Edgar Degas andÉdouard Manet. The table and stools were in the shape of tambourines, befitting the café's theme. On the wall behind her are Van Gogh's Japanese prints, which he began exhibiting at the café in February 1887.^[2][3][4]

Café du Tambourin

Van Gogh occasionally visited Café du Tambourin run by Agostina Segatori, the subject of this painting. Previously an artist's model

This affective instability was hurting George Sand, the meeting with Chopin would end there for several years

It is in the living room of Marie d'Agoult, to the Hotel de France, George Sand made the acquaintance of Chopin in 1836, but their relationship did not begin until June 1838. Their loves were discreet because Chopin feared reactions of his family, and that first summer was a happy summer. In the fall, to escape the jealousy of Mallefille for health Maurice, who had rheumatism, and especially for that of Chopin coughing ominously, Sand decided to leave and take everyone in the Balearics. They sailed to Majorca, November 7, 1838, settled first in Palma, then the Carthusian monastery of Valldemosa.

After a disastrous stay, they left the monastery to Marseille where they arrived on February 24, 1839. Chopin was very bad, he had to rest. They settled in the Beauvau hotel where they would stay three months. Vacationing studious, during which they worked and agreed that a trip to Genoa.  The art of the fin-du-siècle Silver Age of the Empire is matched with the Waltz nr 9 "l'Adieu" of Chopin. Of course, no one knew that the world would collapse in the chaos of 1917-21, and no one was aware that they were "dancing the last waltz".

He thought of giving her the balance, but checked himself. She might leave him…”It won’t be long now, you’ll soon have enough.” He said.

“Almost three hundred frances”. She was excited as a child.

“Look!” she cried waving a bank book. “And the man didn’t ask any questions. Only my name, just like you said.” There it was neatly written in flowery cursive for Marie Francoise Charlet. And the amount. The price of her nights, of the dreary hours spent with him…. It was out of her purse, held it in her hand. She talked about it, thus it does indirectly came to talk about herself.

            “Ever been to Rue MouffetardM” she asked one day, unexpectedly, “That’s where I was born…”  Her simply words brought to life the putrescence of the slum, the livid abjection of a swarming, horny-handed humanity of cooperd, bottlers, warehousemen in grimy leather aprons and hobnailed shoes. She described the rumblings of Percheron (a breed of large fast trotting draft horses)-driven wine wagons, the hammering of barrel corks, the various slime over the cobblestones, the stench กลิ่นเหม็น  of fermenting vats หม้อขนาดใหญ่ mingling with that of rotting grape vines. She told her about her games with other pig-tailed gamines in dank courtyards, the cold hungry Saturday nights when her parents were too drunk to think about dinners, her mother’s slaps, her father’s beatings followed by fits of ambiguous tenderness. “First he makes me take off my culotte – knee length trousers made full in the legs to resembles a skirt, worn by women and girls, then he trash me. Then when I was crying in bed he’d come and kiss me, and beg me to forgive him.”

            Abruptly she would stop in the middle of her reminiscences, squint at him with the malevolence of the poor for the rich,
            “I don’t know why I tell you these things. You’ve never been hungry; you can’t understand…”

            He did not press her, and unexpectedly an hour or a week later she would resume her confidences. “One Saturday night – I was fourteen then a man took me in the hallway of our house, behing the stairs. He was a cooper in the same warehouse where my father worked. He was drunk, but just the same he gave me a franc for finished it with me, with the money I bought a knot of ribbon for my dress.” After the inevitable brawl, she had fled from home and joined her sister in the Sebastopol district. There under the tutorial of her elder sister, she had become a street walker. In naïve, ingenuous words she described the rapture of her first hat, her first scrap of lace, the wonder of easy money, the thrill of the evenings in smoke – filled snooker salon, the first waltzes with pomaded  ขี้ผึ้งใส่ผมครีมใส่ผม louts คนที่โง่งุ่มง่ามและมีมารยาทเลว. “Perhaps you’d like to go to the theatre? Sarah Bernhardt is playing La Dame aux Come’lias at the Renaisance….Perhaps you’d like to go to music hall?”

            “I don’t want to go to nowhere with you. She replied with sudden violence.” “Think I want people to see me with a cripple?”

            He turned white and limped away.

            Boredom sharpened her latent cruelity, She hurt him for fun, to pass a moment. AQn obscure class-hattered, the immemorial enmity of the poor toward the rich, goaded her into tormenting him, to see how much the wealthy cripple, who had never been cold or hungry, would endure from her.

            She jeer at his fastidiousness, his habits of meticulous cleanliness. “Fussy, ain’t you? Fond of yourseld?”

“The men I know don’t go in for so much brushing and washing. But then they are real men don’t cripple like you.”

            She knew the word cripple made him wince, and she began to use it constantly, just to see the reflex of pain on his face.

            They were quarreled as he stunned by the violence she made no argue just shouted, made obscene gestures that enhances him. When she sensed he reached th e limit of his endurance, Marie would sidle to him, beg his forgiveness,coax him to the couch. Quickly, in one of her swift and graceful gestures, she would unfastened her blouse, pull up her skirt. And once again an old magic would succeed .In the moist fusion of their breaths.

            “Don’t ask me how you can hate a woman and want her at the same time. I don’t know. But one thing I know: hatered is probably the most powerful aphrodisiac of all, and love performed in the heat of anger is perhaps the most thrilling of all.” For an instance he desire at the ceiling. “The only trouble with that kind of love is that it doesn’t quench your desire, doesn’t bring you either piece of relief, doesn’t solve anything and…”

            ”…and slowly drive you nut.” He stopped abruptly, “Do I make any sense? Can you understand me at all? Perhaps it’s her indifference. The maddening way she has of looking at me as if she didn

T see me. I don’t expect you to understand, for you are not a cripple, and a girl never looked at you like that. There is something deeper more complicated than sex, it is pride, not social pride but the human’s pride”. She looked at me as if I were a toad masquerading into human, that’s insult can drive you crazy. That day he had come across the bank book on the bath room shelf and found it’s empty. An uncontrollable jealousy had swept over him. In a spatter of insult he had ordered her out, raised his voice first and then his cane at her, and would have struck her if she hadn’t swiftly stepped aside.

            That was two weeks ago. Now his anger has spent itself when pain hadset in. Every hour has brought its torment of longing. First her body’s fragrance has haunted him, the memory of her small breasts, of her yielding thighs had agonized his nights, although, he had tried to applaud himself for his courage, assure himself he was delighted to be rid of her. But it was no use. You didn’t placate the hunger of your body with self awarded tributes. He had spent his evening at home, he had scoured the nights in search of her, peere3d into obscure bistros. Now he knew she would never come back.

            That morning it was the twenty- seventh of May, he was sitting on the edge of his couch gazing at the small carpet of sunshine on the floor, when he heard the sound of footsteps outside. Once more the senseless hope soared.

            It wasn’t Marie. These were a man footsteps, heavy, thudding and tired. Hurriedly he got up, tottered to his easel, started loading his palette. There was the knock at the door. “Entrez!”

            As the door opened, his voice rose to an exclamation of joy.

            “Vincent!” He dropped the tube of paint he held in his hand, matched his cane. “When did you arrive? How long are you going to stay? Come and sit on the couch and let me look at you! How do you feel?”

            “I’m glad you’re back Vincent. I’ve been thinking about you a lot, Montmartre hasn’t been the same since you left…Remember Cormon’s?”

            “Yes I wish I’d gone to the atelier French  that winter instead of painting at home or in the streets as I did.”

          “I’m now care free for anatomy”

          “To hell with anatomy! You have life. You’re really found yourself at last.”

          “yes, I suppose I did, it almost killed me though. But perhaps it was worth it, even the asylum….”

 

Marie was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, as Marie Catherine Sophie de Flavigny, the daughter of Alexander Victor François, Vicomte de Flavigny (1770–1819),

En 1822, elle rencontre le baron François Casimir Dudevant qu’elle épouse le 17 septembre de la même année. Le couple a deux enfants : Maurice en 1823 et Solange en 1828.

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Eventually married to Count Charles d’Agoult, Marie moved in high social circles, became increasingly interested in politics and hosted her own highly successful salon in the early 1830s.  About this time she met the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt. In 1835 she left her husband and children for Liszt, openly defying the social conventions and allying herself with the artists and intellectuals of her time. She and Liszt had three children.

What the novel does not go into is Marie’s life beyond her affair with Liszt.

Writing under the name Daniel Stern, she became a noted journalist, novelist, and historian.  Her three-volume History of the Revolution of 1848 is still highly regarded as a perceptive and multi-faceted chronicle of this event. One American historian recently wrote: “Her incisive portraits of political leaders, and her reasoned analysis of the social factors influencing the outcome of the revolution, would have a profound impact on many subsequent treatments of 1848.” (James Chastain, Ohio University, 2005) Devoted to democracy and social justice despite her aristocratic background, Marie d’Agoult is a provocative figure of her age–a sort of French Mary Wollstonecraft who argued strongly for a better world, including improved educational and property rights for women.

Sand's biographers often see Chopin as a millstone around the neck of an extraordinary and diversely-talented woman. Chopin's biographers are more likely to depict Sand as responsible, in some way at least, for the early death of the composer by relinquishing her care for him in his last years. This is also, of course, a tacit admission that we have her to thank for keeping him alive for so long and well enough to compose. As she had discovered early on in their relationship, on a trip to Majorca in 1838, Chopin was peculiarly vulnerable to illness, his constitution undermined by tuberculosis. He might well have been carried off before the 39 years allotted to him had George not taken him into her care at Nohant and in Paris. She gave him the right conditions in which to compose.

The last waltz