#mabel dodge luhan

‘The girls [Violet and Mary] appeared to their parents to be two docile creatures, not overburdened with beauty, but having an elegance of their own that their Parisian bringing-up had developed in them. Mr. Shillito, having plenty of money, provided governesses and concerts and opera tickets, and all the books and photographs they asked for, and left them a good deal to themselves and lived with his wife apart in the larger rooms of the apartment.

This was the way jeunes filles were brought up in those days and I am sure that everybody in the family was satisfied to have it so.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘[Violet] was weary … weary … weary; the old, exquisite pattern growing dim … civilization coming to pieces … and Violet knowing it … because she had reached the last phase, which is consciousness of the relative state and where, if one belongs to the old order, the wave at its crest sights the shore and falls back into dissolution. Violet was, of all the people I have ever known of the old world (and by the old world I mean the thought, the feeling, and the knowing of the past) the highest evolved, the one who had reached the farthest. She held all the past within her, and she felt the end was near at hand: she spoke often of the debacle that was upon the heels of the world, upon her own heels—of everything going under. She could not do anything about life. She could scarcely live in actions at all: all her living was of the intuition—a culture that she and her psychic ancestors had created and cultivated, carrying its increasing weight through endless generations, and that I and my kind would take over and perhaps painlessly, without effort, carry over into the new life in which she would have no part, her work being ended.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘Nothing had ever deepened me or opened such wide gates as Violet and what she gave me. A whole new world of personalities and experiences in the books and music in her little salon… . the range was wide, going back to the Greek classics and forward as far as José Maria. The great lack was humor. The principal motive was pain in all these lives I touched. The words in Amiel’s Journal that I first found there also sound the weariness of the vision they all celebrated: “Que vivre est difficile, oh, mon cœur fatigué!” This was the note of the fin de siècle—of more than that, of the end of the great era that had lasted for hundreds of years. Since those days I have seen coming into the world something new, something braver than resignation or sorrow nobly borne. Sorrow has had its day, and weariness too. The world has had a rebirth and a new set of values has taken the place of old ones. I think that Violet knew she would not go on into the new life and that perhaps I might. She was old … old … when I knew her. She seemed to have imaginatively lived all lives and sounded every depth. She was like the Mona Lisa, a photograph of whom hung near the piano, and to whom she led me that first day, saying “Vois-tu? Elle est un grand réservoir. Elle sait tout, elle contient tout. Et elle aime tout de même…”’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘Violet played Chopin for me. She had a little grand piano there in the small salon and she used to play late in the afternoons before dark, or evening by candlelight, when I had gone there to dine.

Then, when the limit of romantic love and sadness had been sounded, she would play Beethoven and cut deeper channels for feeling and beauty to flow in—the acceptance of life and resignation to its betrayals. Mary’s tears flowed when Violet played Beethoven.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘I was enchanted to be really there at last in those rooms of theirs that Mary had told me all about. Their little salon was quiet and cool. It had some small chairs and tables of brown Louis XV, the chairs covered with faded green brocade. There were some bookshelves set into the paneled wall, with many small volumes bound in red and brown and green leather. They looked soft and blurred as though they had been in and out of those shelves hundreds of times. I came to know them well. I became acquainted with all those enchanting French people: Alfred de Musset and George Sand, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, and De Vigny. There I read first their books and incorporated into myself their various poignant savors.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘The first glimpse we had of each other, I looked at her [Violet] and knew her, and impulsively felt I would love her best of all the world forever, for I saw her genius and I felt her singular power. And she looked at me and loved me too for whatever she saw in me, and I knew me better, too, better than I knew myself—knew that I would love her and leave her behind without a breath of compassion when it came my time to proceed on my way; knew that I would take her and, without pity or imagination, drop her; knew all this but more than this—knew that that was my destiny, that I could not help myself, that some inner law would always lead me.

I did not seem less significant or less lovable to her because I was not the forever kind. She took to me as I did to her and our hearts bounded to each other.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘[Violet] completely understood and understanding, she forgave. I have never known any man or woman with such wisdom and such love as she had. She knew everything intuitively and at the same time she had a very unusual intelligence—teaching herself Italian for her pleasure in order to read Dante in the original when she was sixteen, learning to read Greek in order to read Plato and the dramatists. She was studying higher mathematics at the Sorbonne the first year I knew her, “for the beauty.”’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘Violet was vivid and glowing… . She was one of those who burned forever with a “hard, gem-like flame.” Her hands were delicious. Very full of character—rather short and round padded fingers and very soft and white. As they lay at ease in her lap, or as they were in use, they were so full of intelligent, involuntary life and expression of their own that it almost seemed they watched one and listened to one and, along with Violet herself, felt love and pity and pardon.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘Violet Shillito did not burst on me all at once: she came into me gradually, opening slowly to my perceptions like a flower that reveals its beauty slowly bit by bit as one looks deeper into it. At the first glance she seemed all brown and dusky, ruddy tones—a red-brown girl of medium height and with a flat, slender body that swayed backwards a little. Her hair was soft and dark and done ina  knot on the top of her head. Her eyes were red-brown and slanted up a little at the corners, while her mouth was drawn over her teeth, which projected ever so little, in a willful way that would keep the lips closed, while Mary with the same defect let her lips gape open to the undisciplined teeth that pushed their way outwards or left her under lip to support their white surfaces. Violet’s nose was the most sensitive feature she had, after her small eyes that smiled a compassionate understanding of everything in life. Her nose was small and high-bridged and delicately pointed out into the world as though she constantly apprehended the unseen with some kind of invisible antennæ that groped and sensed the things about her. Her nostrils were close and fine and constantly trembled with delicate nervousness. Violet seemed to receive her impressions with that sensitive pointed nose of hers. It wasn’t a silly, unbridled nose like those of certain English women, with their ridiculous Peter Newell stupidity. It was a short, high organ of intelligence—aristocratic and discriminating, and a little sensual.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘Mary took me up two floors in a small lift that she ran by pressing buttons, and when we came to the solemn, dark door of her apartment she was trembling a little, for we had all thought a great deal of that moment and here it was. Veeolette and I would soon be face to face. The first moments are blurred, but after a while we were all in their small suite of rooms, talking and laughing. And Mary with her usual emotional nervousness was wiping away some tears that reddened her eyelids and made her blue eyes bluer.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘Mary took me in the open carriage to lunch at her house. We drove through the sunny Rue de Rivoli, through the Place de la Concorde, and along the Champs Elysées, out under the Arc de Triomphe, until we reached the Avenue du Bois, and on the left side of it, behind one of those high walls that secure the desired privacy of French family life, we came to the place where Mary and Veeolette lived, in a neighborhood of silence and green trees.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘Mary Shillito came the next morning after breakfast, driven by the bent-over cocher her parents had had for a long time, driving their two fat black horses. She was not at all the nervous, uncertain child that I had seen at Miss Graham’s. She seemed very poised and inclined to be rather patronizing to me. She was dressed in a beige-colored voile gown very simply made, with écru lace collar and cuffs, and her hat was extremely simple—just a shape of cream-colored straw with a black velvet ribbon. Yet there was a look about her that seemed inexpressibly elegant and choice—even the way her little gloves wrinkled over her wrists, unbuttoned, and the gesture with which her sunshade of white silk was tucked under her arm, made me feel gauche and stupidly dressed.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘When June came my mother and I sailed for Europe. We landed in France and we went that night to Paris to stay at the old Hôtel Meurice on the Rue de Rivoli, because my Cook grandparents had always stayed there on their occasional European voyages, from which they returned with alabaster sculpture and Holy Family paintings reproduced in Italy from old masters. Grandpa Cook never tired of telling how he had stood on the balcony of the Hôtel Meurice and seen Napoleon the Third leave the Tuileries gardens just opposite.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘Mary told me about Wagner. “He is like a god,” she said, and then she told me about the Ring and about Bayreuth, how people went there as on a pilgrimage and listened in the dark to that music that seemed to unchain all the valiant powers of the soul—as well as its demons. She told me of that world of the Nibelungen, and how, once one knew it, one carried it wide awake in oneself ever afterwards.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘I asked to be allowed to go to the Symphony concerts at Carnegie Hall with Mary and, sitting together, we held hands—damp hands—convulsively squeezed when the music penetrated our empty places, filling us with rippling thrills. Beethoven became my master… . Mary and I sat as though alone in the great dark hall and we flowed in and out with the music.

“Beethoven connait [sic] l’âme et Chopin connait le cœur,” she whispered when the light went up. “I felt Veeolette with us here,” I said. “I feel she is part of me—that I have always known her.”’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘Mary, as soon as she found shelter in my ready attention, had assumed a lofty and aloof attitude to everybody in the school, to those ordinary, unimaginative girls who at first had thrown her into confusion and alarm. She felt safe and bound in by our intimacy. I joined with her in the cult of Veeolette, who was to us a vestal of the mysterious properties of the soul. Nothing but spirituality had any interest for me now, though just what it was I could not have defined.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘Mary begged me not to try and go home and leave her there. To her it was even worse than for me, for she felt her soul, her spirit, was starved and imprisoned in that New York School that seemed so barren, so flat, after her life in Paris in the apartment up along the Avenue du Bois where she and Veeolette had their own small suite and their own gouvernante, mademoiselle, who was just there for their use, to take them to beautiful concerts and conférences and musées. There they had their books of poésie andphilosophie, their pictures, lovely brown photographs of their favorite paintings, their replicas of the sculpture of Della Robbia, and Donatello, and the Greeks.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘“Veeolette says, ‘Attendez, l’heure viendra. Faut pas forcer les pouvoirs spiritueles: [sic]laissez faire.’ She says she knows you well already, that she love you but that you need patience—la restrainte. [sic] Tu seras enrichie par le temps perdu: de plus, que le temps n’est jamais perdu.” These deep, wise sibylline utterances of Veeolette’s about me plunged me into an ecstasy of feeling. The little serpents within me coiled and uncoiled. Her words, brought by Mary, with an air of mystery and of secret knowledge that the two shared, outshining anything else in the world for pure marvel, threw a veil of exquisite illusion about me… . Never was such a glamorous being as Veeolette, both before I ever saw her and afterwards.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933