Fernande was an unwanted child, or at least, so she was told. Her transition from unhappy orphan to fulfilled bohemian in Montmartre, where she finally found her niche, would take many years. By the time she met a promising young painter named Pablo Picasso, she had endured barely imaginable cruelty first at the hands of her adoptive aunt, then her brutal husband. She left him, and in the village of Montmartre began meeting new men and modelling for painters, always searching for independence. Fernande was a talented, complex woman, and Montmartre at the turn of the twentieth century was the perfect place for her to seek new opportunities amid a community of fellow outsiders and bohemians. At the summit of the hillside, penniless artists enjoyed a liberated lifestyle, there were cheap rooms and studios for rent, the bars were busy until the early hours, beautiful women strolled through the streets in colourful clothes and gaudy make-up and there was cheap entertainment, especially (on the boulevard de Rochechouart) the Cirque Medrano, where everyone enthusiastically gathered. When Fernande embarked on her relationship with Picasso, she was happy there and the lifestyle of Montmartre suited her. By the time we glimpse her in Picasso's studio, eating chocolates, reading novels, luxuriating in her new freedom and in the joy of being adored, she has earned her happiness. The question with which her story opens is: would she manage to keep it?
Her name was Fernande Olivier - or Fernande Percheron, or Amélie Lang, or Fernande Bellevallé (which she spelled in various ways, including Belvalet). She was born in 1881 to a married man and a young girl who gave her up at birth. When Fernande was still a young child, her father's half-sister married, and she and her new husband (Fernande's aunt and uncle), the Bellevallés, who also lived in Paris, took over her care. In the way of things in those days, people did this in exchange for cash, or some small regular income.
The story of Fernande's life before she lived with these relatives is shrouded in obscurity. She was told only that she had been fostered by an aunt of her uncle, who had brought him up, and whom they knew as Maman Aubert. She it was who had the child baptised at ten months old; and that was all Fernande knew. She sensed there was more - some mystery being covered up - but her aunt refused to discuss it with her. When she noted in her journal that both her parents were dead, this was not in fact true; the whereabouts of her father were unknown but (though Fernande did not know it) her mother was still living. A kindly godmother, possibly a friend of her mother's, visited Fernande once a month. During those visits she was given cakes and chocolate, and affection; but those were special occasions. Normally, affection at home was reserved for her cousin, on whom her uncle and aunt lavished blatant adoration, while her aunt treated Fernande with gratuitous cruelty.
Fernande's age when her aunt and uncle took her on is unrecorded, and she later noted only that her childhood feelings of loss and bewilderment abated as she grew older. Her story (recorded with great fluency in her journal) of cruelty in childhood, an abusive early marriage and seeking refuge as an artist's model in Montmartre may not have been uncommon, but her memoirs reveal her extraordinary fortitude in the face of truly horrendous treatment, first by her aunt, then later in her marriage. That abuse - and the burden of secrecy, of not knowing who she really was - scarred her, but she kept hoping that one day she would find a better, even a more creative way of living.
Keeping her journal (later revised, by her, and eventually published in full only after her death) was an important outlet, along with her reading. She could lose herself in books, escaping into the world of her imagination. She told herself she could put up with most things, so long as she had something to read. She read classical poetry and jotted down lines of it in the notebook she kept under her pillow. But there was no privacy in the household. Even though she shared a room with her cousin, at night when she was asleep her aunt regularly crept into the bedroom and went through all her things. However, no one could permeate the locked world of her mind. In childhood she read about adventure, freedom and escape in Robinson Crusoe and Uncle Tom's Cabin. Later she read Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo (Les Misérables) and novels by Alphonse Karr, as well as Daudet's Le Petit Chose, where she discovered that life could be romantic, even beautiful. At school she won first prizes for French composition, history, recitation, reading and English, and second prize for drawing.
Her aunt (Alice, though Fernande could never bring herself to call her by her name) was just as cruel to her maids, despising them for what she regarded as their liberated ways. (She herself had been brought up in a convent - as she constantly reminded Fernande.) Her husband was a much kinder person, but Fernande would have loved him more, she wrote in her journal, had he not been so obviously under his wife's thumb. He was a merchant of silk flowers and feathers for the fashion trade - a reasonably lucrative business in those days, when hats and millinery accessories were not only fashion items but also a social statement of relative wealth and taste. The shop was at the corner of the rue Réaumur and the rue St Denis, a busy commercial district, and their living quarters were above and at the back of the shop. Fernande loved being with her uncle in the shop, sorting the flowers and feathers, wrapping them carefully in tissue paper, then laying them carefully in boxes for delivery to customers in the provinces. From the neighbouring property, which her aunt (snidely) referred to as the convent (who was she kidding?), heavily made-up, startlingly dressed women occasionally emerged, to lean in the doorway or look up and down the street - another of the mysteries never discussed.
At sixteen, Fernande was taken by her uncle to see Les Diamants de la couronne, an enduringly popular comic opera by Daniel-François Auber about a Portuguese princess who, forced to sell her diamonds, falls in with bandits. Fernande could not stop thinking about it, and decided she wanted to be an actress, which horrified her aunt. 'Well! That's all we need,'1 she said. She was not surprised, she added darkly: 'blood will tell'.2 (Can it be deduced from this that Fernande's mother was an actress? In those days, acting, like modelling, was practically on a par with prostitution, actresses reputedly having such libertine lifestyles.) Fernande's aunt had clearly expected to control her niece until she found her a suitable husband. Though Fernande made friends, she was never allowed to bring them home. All this was horribly restricting; she could only dream that one day, somewhere, somehow, she would find a better life. For the time being, she had to resort to her imagination; when she was not reading, she was daydreaming - and staring out of the window at the young shirtmaker who sat in his window across the street. Meanwhile her aunt, behind her back, was plotting to marry her off to the family accountant.
Fernande had no interest in him, but she made friends with Hélène, an easy-going girl who worked in her uncle's shop, and who told Fernande that her twenty-eight-year-old brother-in-law had caught sight of her and wanted to meet her. Once they had been introduced, and pausing only to tell her aunt she had no intention of marrying a boring old clerk (the accountant was, in fact, also twenty-eight), Fernande set off for a secret tryst with Hélène's brother-in-law, Paul Percheron. He took her to the Bois de Boulogne, where they rode in a carriage and afterwards had tea and cakes at a little table beneath the trees. When it got late, she told him she dared not go home. Don't then, he said. She should just stay with him. Then he would ask her uncle for her hand in marriage. Before she knew it, she found herself shut up in a tiny apartment that she dared not leave, terrified of being discovered there by her family. Now there would really be trouble.
The narrative of her relationship with the vicious Paul Percheron, beginning in summer 1899 and documented in her journal, makes gruelling reading. It also reveals the extent of the cruelty perpetrated, at the end of the nineteenth century, on women of no means, with no independence and no agency. Illegitimacy was an irremovable stigma; lack of financial means tied a woman to the spot. The only ways to survive were a job (housemaid, model or prostitute; or, for the educated, governess or teacher) or marriage. The problem with Paul was that Fernande found him physically repulsive. After a week with him she was desperate. She could not even run away: Percheron had hidden her shoes and (just as disastrously) her hat. A few weeks later and with no warning her aunt arrived with her godmother (impotently standing by) and a policeman, who said he could arrest Percheron if Alice lodged a formal complaint for the abduction of a minor, but it was up to her to decide what to do with her niece. No question about that, declared the aunt, Fernande would be married. If she refused, she would be sent to a reformatory. When Percheron said he would marry her as...
