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Chapter 19Paris Preuschen ExhibitionPARISER PREUSCHEN-AUSSTELLUNG

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And then at last, after manifold attempts, I succeeded in realising my long-planned Paris Preuschen Exhibition. In the summer of 1900 I had come to Paris once again, for the great World's Fair, and had secured myself premises there for November, in the Rue Caumartin, in the Galerie des Artistes modernes. In that month, then, I returned there with all my pictures. It was a gigantic labour this time, but it gave me joy. Everything presented itself quite excellently, and after all the pains and costs I had an indisputably great success.

What that meant in Paris, I was fully conscious of. The critic of the “Figaro,” Arsène Alexandre1, known as incorruptible, brought six aperçus and one long review of the exhibition within fourteen days.

Proudest of all I was made by the pronouncement: “C'est une nature, c'est une révoltée, dont les défauts même valent cent fois les qualités négatives des autres.” In the end seventeen pictures were sold, and it was mostly packed full, head to head. —

I was as if intoxicated — how golden the world seemed to me then, and to force it one day really under my feet, child's play! Had I not conquered Paris!

And today2 — all my enemies have triumphed, and the “outsider,” the “Mors Imperator publicity-heroine” is pushed back step by step into her lonely embitterment. —

In other ways too I liked Paris very much in those days! I was now in the “Babel on the Seine” for the ninth time and was beginning to feel fairly at home there. Besides, I had brilliant recommendations to the then ambassador, Prince Hohenlohe3; — spent much time at the Palais Gortschakoff, although the Princess herself was staying in Egypt; only her English “ministre plénipotentiaire” and his mother were sunning themselves there. But they made me comfortable with them.

And then in Paris I had this up and down of life's circumstances that I have always loved: for example, I stayed in a dreadful pension with Elisabeth Meyer-Förster, the writer who died soon afterwards, ate my midday meal with her in a bricklayers' eating-house of the Rue Caumartin, after breakfasting earlier that morning at a crémerie for six sous. Then I was fetched to a concert in the princely Hohenlohe equipage and brought back again to my more than modest pension. Or I was invited to pompous dinners, at which I appeared in full dress.

That, I believe, is the difference between the correct people and the gypsies! With the correct, as with my sister for example, everything must “add up.” With the gypsies it is the ever-changing, the “vicissitudes of life,” that makes up the charm and magic of living. — How terrible, armoured round with “gentility,” to be forever cut off from everything colourful and accidental! Just as terrible as never being able to look into the highest strata of life. That, I believe, is why I love travelling so much, because it offers us something of everything at the table of life, of everything! — But my sister says, with the correct people: “Everything must add up together, after all.” (Like an arithmetic problem, on which the proof is worked.)

Yes, my Paris success had strengthened me greatly in soul. How much I hoped from it for my German exhibitions. And how greatly I was to be mistaken. At most it awakened the envy and annoyance, and therefore the opposition, of the German art mandarins whose mood my Mors Imperator had once so violently spoiled. —

But the chief success of my exhibition in Paris was reaped by “Vampir Sehnsucht” — perhaps because it seemed the most alien to the French spirit. —