good fortune is a cage and a canary
spFernande Barrey regularly took her coffee at the Dome, a café in
Montparnasse. In 1917, she met Tsuguharu Foujita.
(photo credit: Tsuguharu with lover: Louci Badoul who he called Youki or “rose snow”)
She was 25, with laughing eyes, short hair, a turned-up nose, and slangy Parisian speech, her accent being
Picardy. For Foujita, it was love at first sight, but she was not impressed by the unusual Japanese man with earrings and strange clothing. He rose and approached her, bowed ceremoniously. They exchanged a few words, he paid her compliments about her dress. He then retreated.Foujita had a gift of making dresses from nothing. He spent that night sewing a blue blouse for Fernande and brought it to her room in the morning. Foujita complained of the coldness of Fernande’s room and as she did not want to appear lacking in generosity herself, after Foujita’s wonderful handmade gift, Fernande picked up a hatchet and hacked up the only chair she owned to provide him with some firewood.They married several days later, on March, 27th, 1917 at the town hall of the 14th Arrondissement. Foujita borrowed the 6 francs needed to publish the wedding banns from a waiter at the Rotonde, whom he reimbursed by painting a portrait of his wife.Fernande gave up her own artistic activities to devote herself to her husband’s career. A few weeks after their marriage, story has it that she left home with a portfolio of drawings under her arm. She walked to the right bank, where most of the art dealers operated. Caught in an unexpected downpour, she went into Cheron’s, a very well-known art dealer, offering him two watercolors in exchange for an umbrella. She returned to Montparnasse without having sold a thing. But she had won over Cheron. For after he had studied the watercolors attentively, the dealer crossed the Seine to the rue Delambre. He asked who this artist was and where he kept his works. He bought everything he saw, providing some welcome security for the young couple: seven francs fifty for each watercolor, as a minimum, and four hundred fifty francs for a month’s production. To celebrate their good fortune, Foujita gave his wife a cage and a canary.t that night sewing a blue blouse for Fernande and brought it to her room in the morning. Foujita complained of the coldness of Fernande’s room and as she did not want to
Awww. What a lovely story. Thank you for sharing.
minirobot
February 6, 2007 at 2:26 am
this is a great love story! i am going to tell it again and again. i won’t even have to embroider it with details, as there are so many good ones that are true.
thanks!
i love it!
February 6, 2007 at 1:57 pm
More to the point, perhaps, is the love story of Youki and the great French surrealist writer, Robert Desnos, for whom Youki eventually left Tsuguharu — they were married shortly after.
Later, Desnos died in a Czech concentration camp — from typhoid, ironically, weeks after the camp’s liberation. One of his most famous poems, “Letter to Youki”, was written for her after his initial arrest and deportation to Auschwitz.
Here is his last poem as translated by Kenneth Rexroth. It seems to be to Youki, as Keats’s “This Living Hand” might well have been to Fanny Brawne.
LAST POEM
Terezina Concentration Camp, May 1945
I have dreamed so much of you,
Walked so often, talked so often with you,
Loved your shadow so much.
Nothing is left me of you.
Nothing is left of me but a shadow among shadows,
A being a hundred times more shadowy than a shadow,
A shadowy being who comes, and comes again, in your sunlit life.
– Robert Desnos
Jeremy Needleman
October 5, 2009 at 9:45 pm
One last thing: Here is what makes Desnos’s relationship to Youki lastingly noble:
Youki and the great French surrealist poet were married shortly after they met at La Coupole. We do not know about any grand gestures that might have occurred during courtship. We only know of the ones that followed after:
The Gestapo came to the couple’s rooms on February 22, 1944 looking for a list of names of Resistance workers. Robert Desnos alone was there and refused to give the list to them — though they found it eventually hidden at the back of a book binding. Even then, he would not give up his friends, insisting to the Nazis they’d only found a list of art critics.
Loyal to his wife until the end, Desnos had received a call warning him to leave before the Nazis arrived. He chose not to flee, since he feared that Youki Desnos would be tortured in his place. Instead, he helped another man, Alain Brieux, to escape. “Robert had time to escape,” Youki wrote later in her memoirs. “He stayed there just to protect me.”
Jeremy Needleman
October 5, 2009 at 10:57 pm
beautiful. thank you for the comments and for the reminder of desnos. i recall reading that foujita, because he had fallen out of love with youki, had put her in the arms of his friend robert.
i had no idea she had a memoir–do you know the title?
theuglyearring
October 6, 2009 at 4:34 pm