Niagara Moments Magazine For The Arts

When I said to my girl friend Jeannette that yes, I would be able to take a bus and come spend the day with her at her house on Sunday, we were bouncing with joy. I had been there once before when I had the cash. For me, in those days, to be able to buy a bus ticket to travel from downtown Nice to the village of Vallauris meant selling some of my primitive art to get a small amount of cash in my pocket. A high class store owner on La Promenade Des Anglais had taken pity on me when he saw his manageress politely showing me the way out of the shop. He had noticed my disappointment, looked at my painting on a square piece of satin, and said to his manageress ” Oh yes Mademoiselle Martin, of course I shall buy it, it is charming”. The lady, pinching her lips, could not help but reach for a beautiful painted taffeta skirt that someone had sold them earlier, comparing it to my miserly small piece of painted fabric. I did not care about how lovely the painted skirt was and how much a rich tourist would pay for it; all I knew is that I could now buy that bus ticket.

“We shall speak about our plans with my parents” Jeannette said when we met that afternoon, “they are always very supportive of our ideas”. Her family had moved from Paris when her sickly artist father had taken an early retirement in sunny Provence. She and I had met a few months before while taking an esthetician course in Nice and we were dreaming of starting a sort of health   spa / art studio in her new home village of Vallauris. Today, looking back, I wonder how we could have been thinking such dreams when both of us were so poor. The war had been a long ordeal and although times were improving they were far from being  what we call now The Good Old Days.

For some reason, the village of Vallauris had attracted artists and communists after the war. I was just about 18, had worked on menial jobs, had been a part time telephone operator in my birth village and had daringly gone after a job that offered working every morning on a chicken farm in an area called the Vinaigrier, in the hills dominating the city of Nice. The owner of the chicken farm was a distant friend of our family thus making the opportunity almost acceptable by my parents. It had taken a lot of talking on my mother’s part to convince my father to let me go to the other side of France. I should point out right now that girls of my generation were under tutelage in their father’s house until they reached the age of 21, the “majority” or the coming of age. Mothers had little to say in my old Vendee, a department of France that had the reputation for being home to extremely stubborn people and very strict parents. The fear in every family was for parents to see a daughter arrive with a little bundle on her arms. I recall my father one day making an allusion that should the possibility of such an emergency happen in our home, I would be done away with, simple as that. We children were held in such regime of fear and restrain during and after the occupation that I can easily guess how the girls of my generation were not at all prepared for the real life ahead of us.When I hear the complaints of today’s youth, I scratch my head in wonder. I wish my own young years had been as carefree, exciting and full of opportunities as theirs are now.

 The third class price of the train ticket to reach Provence from my hometown had been sent by the potential employer, along with an “understood contract” providing me with room and board and just enough cash to pay for some schooling. Now, getting to the distant train station of Poitiers, to catch a passenger train was another obstacle I had to surmount by myself. Accompanied by my father, I went to speak to a cattle dealer of my area who traveled every week to the distant city. He accepted to give me a ride the very next day, and for free, since he and his brother were the only passengers in his truck. At 4 the next morning I was on my way with a small bag containing some clean clothing, my mother’s old paint box and brushes, and, of course, food for the trip. I did not even know and did not need to know that there was such thing as a dining room on a train.Reaching the old city of Poitiers where by the way in the year 732 AD Charlemagne’s grand father stopped the advance of Islam, I found the train station and directed myself southbound towards Provence. After what appeared to be an eternity, and 2 or 3 transfers, late that night I arrived in Nice.  To my surprise, someone was waiting for me with a car, an old topless B2 Citroen. I went to settle in my new position happy with the wonderful feeling of freedom that came with it.

 One day, while reading “Nice Matin”, I had seen an ad that bragged about issuing a “diploma” to achieve a “liberal profession” when attending afternoon training to become estheticians. In truth, it was a MickeyMouse type certificate but a paper that could be framed anyway and open a door to a hard to find job. Since I was working mostly mornings, I could swing that course with my meager pay. I walked for miles every day to and from the training center and was as fit as any young girl could be.

 So it was that after enjoying about 6 months of the beautiful climate of Provence between work and studies, I was going to surprise my friend and   took the earliest bus to Vallauris. I remember sitting next to a young girl about my age. We chatted and I learnt that she had been born in Provence and never wanted to go anywhere else. She said:” I am happy here, I never want to leave this paradise”. I was thinking that I would not either if I had been fortunate to be born there.

 It was still early Sunday morning when I reached Vallauris, got off the bus and started walking up the hill. Nobody on the street, no barking dogs, only a fresh breeze, the chirping of birds and the smell of flowers.

Suddenly I heard a man’s voice with an accent…I jumped! ”bonjour mademoiselle” he said. I stopped, stared at him while shyly replying “bonjour Monsieur”…I suddenly felt like I would become paralysed, I felt like I could faint. There he was in his full glory, his entire splendour, only a few feet away from me, ten feet at most, same age as my maternal grandpa, The  GREAT  PICASSO! Here I was, facing the greatest artist the world has ever known, the revolutionary, the great visionary, the great lover, the breaker of hearts. Newspapers were full of him every day. Somehow he was shorter than I imagined him to be, here he was, facing me, his glaring eyes were burning through my entire being, like devouring me, and I, almost paralyzed with shock was desperately trying to put my brain back in focus.

 The GREAT PABLO was standing among the flowers and the greeneries of Provence, in his underwear, yes, in his underwear! I had never seen even my own father undressed, not even when the family went fishing for shrimps in the Atlantic ocean. But the great Picasso’s beautiful body was tanned to perfection. The man who used to boast that he was NOT A GENTLEMAN was barefoot, his almost bald head uncovered, he was holding a cup He held no cigarette in his hand contrary to the numerous newspapers’ photographs. I noticed the absence of cigarette but please do not expect me to tell you the color of his underwear or the size of the cup. I was totally smitten with emotions, was I maybe falling in love for the first time? needless to say I was still a virgin.   Absolutely overcome with surprise, shyness and a sort of fear all wrapped in one that after that exchange of greeting and a reply to the trivial statements about the weather, I found myself hurrying away. Yes, stupid me, I hurried away, my face red as a tomato, my heart pounding in my chest, my whole being shaken with embarrassment. I thought I would faint. The look in Picasso’s eyes is not a vision you can easily forget

 When I arrived at my friends’ house I told Jeannette and her parents about my encounter with the famous artist. “Oh yes they replied, he is very involved with ceramics right now and the people say that he has just moved here with his young family, his presence will be a shot in the arm for Vallauris…”.  Of course history has told us that it was. Picasso did place the old Roman village of  Vallauris on the map. I think Francoise Gilot, his most famous muse, his companion, his model, his wife at the time, the mother of two of his children, was actually the better artist of the two. He painted her in very unflattering displays of emotion and destroyed their relationship. How sad.

 The next day, I reflected on my meeting with Picasso and of course asked myself why I had not calmed my nerves down and made a proper connection, it would have been easy. I had been just too shy. My art would certainly have been better than it became and I might have been able to make a living from it. I liked ceramics and the mysteries of clays and glazes. I so loved the arts.

 I made the mistake of writing to my parents that I had met Picasso, the reply was an order from my father, I was to return home immediately. There was no choice, my father found me an au pair job in a spa, close to home. Once again I was under his tutelage and stayed that way till December 1951 when I went to work as a nanny in England, free at last.