Painted by Renoir… but one would be murdered by the Nazis
Renoir’s delectable 1881 portrait of two little French girls, known as Pink And Blue, hangs in the Museum of Art in Sao Paulo. It’s the painting most beloved by visitors and is described by Catherine Ostler in her profoundly moving new book as a snapshot of ‘Belle Epoque loveliness’.
Elisabeth and Alice Cahen d’Anvers
The two sisters were Elisabeth and Alice Cahen d’Anvers: Elisabeth, seven, in the blue sash and Alice, five, in the pink one.
Their bright eyes and rosy-cheeked faces glow with health and ‘peachy softness’. Their well-brushed hair, ribbon hairbands, lacy dresses, matching socks and buckled shoes are redolent of the household they grew up in: a haven of wealth, good manners and French good taste.
‘There are enough unpleasant things in the world without us producing more’ was Renoir’s justification for the (some might now say rather chocolate-boxy) way he painted portraits. As it happened, the girls’ parents Louis and Louise Cahen d’Anvers didn’t much like the painting. They were late to pay Renoir, and they hung it out of sight on the sixth floor of their grand Paris house.
‘I really give up with the Jews,’ Renoir said, while chasing payment. Casual anti-Semitism like that was rife. The Cahen d’Anvers were a Jewish banking family, co-founders of what would become Paribas.
And, bubbling under the surface of the Parisian high life they embraced and shone in – the balls, races, polo matches, salons and acquisition of new Impressionist art – was an increasingly seething resentment of their wealth and success.
That anti-Semitism would spill out with the Dreyfus Affair of 1894, when a Jewish officer was wrongly convicted of spying: a gross miscarriage of justice. It would spill out again, in unthinkably vile ways, during the Vichy regime, in what Ostler describes as ‘a shocking betrayal by France of some of its most loyal and generous supporters, in a dehumanising and toxic swamp of suspicion, judgment and envy’.
It almost beggars belief that, 63 years after that portrait was painted, one of those girls – Elisabeth – would be loaded onto a cattle truck for Auschwitz.
The Renoir Girls
How on earth did that moment of pure innocence and beauty connect to the moment of bestiality when, aged 69 and suffering from rheumatoid arthritis so bad she could hardly walk, she was bundled on to that train of death?
With consummate skill and impressive research, Ostler tells the story. Reading the early chapters, when the Cahen d’Anvers family were at the pinnacle of Belle Epoque high life, I felt I was inside an Impressionist painting, dazzled by colour and fun.
Describing Trouville in summer, she evokes the stripy tents, fluttering flags and white-horse waves on the choppy sea: a place of leisure and pleasure for the ‘Haute Juiverie’, as high-born Jews were known.
Scanning the social calendars of the time, she lists the names – too many names, sometimes – of ‘le tout Paris’ who attended the balls, races, salons and society weddings. Like many wealthy Jews, the family longed to assimilate into French life, and one way of doing this was to buy new art, and to be patriotically French.
The two girls had an elder sister Irene, who was also painted by Renoir in the portrait known as Little Irene. She married Jewish banker Moise de Camondo, and they had two children, Nissim and Beatrice.
Nissim would fight and die for France during the First World War. Heartbroken, Moise bequeathed his house in Paris, 63 Rue de Monceau, to Les Arts Decoratifs, to become a museum for the nation in Nissim’s memory. The girls’ younger brother Charles inherited their parents’ glorious Chateau Champs-de-Marne near Paris, and also donated that to France between the wars.
As Ostler writes: ‘If Moise de Camondo or Charles Cahen d’Anvers thought such generosity might merit some form of gratitude on the part of France towards the family in future, they were much mistaken.’
Well done, Alice, for marrying an Englishman, and thus being spared some of the horrors. She became a British Army wife, married to Charles Townshend, who had a disastrous time during the First World War.
His troops were besieged at the Siege of Kut and he was forced to surrender to the Turks: an embarrassing defeat. He never recovered, and died in 1924. But at least Alice was now British. When the Germans invaded France in 1940 she managed to get her half-French grandchildren onto the last freighter to depart from the west coast, just as the Germans moved in to occupy Bordeaux.
Elisabeth had been baptised Catholic in 1897, which gave her an illusion of safety. She’d been married twice, to non-Jews, and divorced twice.
Her tragic mistake was to list her racial origin too accurately on the register demanded by the wartime government. ‘My father and mother were attached to the Jewish religion, as well as their respective parents.’
‘In this anodyne sentence,’ Ostler writes, ‘lay her fate.’
It so happened that the mayor of the commune of Juigne-sur-Sarthe, where Elisabeth lived in a cottage for the first four years of the war, happened to be a far-Right ‘Petainiste’ – collaborating with the Nazis and very keen to do their bidding.
Irene had the presence of mind to lie about her antecedents. She claimed that her maternal grandparents from Trieste had been born Catholic. She survived the war, and some of her living descendants think she and her daughter, nicknamed ‘Pussy’, did so by collaborating with the Nazis to save their skin: ‘disgusting people,’ as one family member said to Ostler.
This gives us a glimpse of the resentments and suspicions that still fester inside French families, over 80 years later.
Elisabeth was arrested on January 26, 1944 and bundled into the back of a Gestapo car with a suitcase. She arrived at the holding camp, Drancy, two months after Irene’s daughter Beatrice’s children Fanny and Leon, aged 21 and 24, had been deported to Auschwitz. Beatrice was the next to go, on convoy 69. Then it was Elisabeth’s turn: she was on convoy 70 out of the 77 which took about 77,000 French Jews to the death camps, 100 people crammed into each windowless carriage.
Ostler imagines her waiting on her crutches to board the bus to Bobigny station and the train for Auschwitz, where she would be murdered on arrival (if she didn’t die of suffocation, thirst and fright on the 57-hour journey: no one can quite be certain).
As a survivor of one of those journeys wrote: ‘The last vision of a civilised world vanished at Bobigny station. Hell began.’