A Dangerous Woman Read online

  The founding owner of the paper, a dyed-in-the-wool reporter and printer, Alfred Chaigneau, had immigrated to San Francisco back in 1849 at the height of the Gold Rush. Learning his trade on a French journal called Le Phare, Chaigneau launched his first title in 1886 in competition with pioneer journalist Edouard Debrec’s L’Echo du Pacifique. A year later, the two French newspapers merged to form a daily and a weekly under the united title of Le Franco-Californien when Debrec lost the last of his several fortunes and became an inmate at the French Hospital of San Francisco. In 1898, Chaigneau sold out to a consortium of investors—while retaining a modest shareholding—headed by Auguste Goustiaux. It was Goustiaux who became the outspoken champion of the French colony in San Francisco.12

  Goustiaux and by extension his city editor, Maximin Lacaze, were valued members of the press and San Francisco’s thriving Bohemian Club. Bohemianism began, of course, as an international movement inspired by Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie bohème in 1845–49, in which the artist rejected the significance of money and suffocating social conventions of the day. Instead, bohemians embraced the life of a free spirit, something that suited many newcomers to San Francisco in their pursuit of gold.

  Yet Yankee San Francisco adopted bohemianism with a significant western twist. Bret Harte, the author who so vividly depicted the miners, gamblers, and other rapscallions of the California Gold Rush, wrote that “Bohemia has never been located geographically … but any clear day when the sun is going down, if you mount Telegraph Hill, you shall see its pleasant valleys and cloud-capped hills glittering in the West.…”13 Writers and journalists headed the roster of members at San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, which was formed in the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle. Soon, it encompassed all important members of the chattering classes, including those from the twenty-odd foreign-language press corps. Their bohemian ideals would leave an indelible imprint on Florence’s upbringing, too.

  * * *

  Despite her tendency to exaggerate, some of Florence’s truthful recollections of San Francisco shine through. The morning fire drills at school remain a common practice today. Unsurprisingly, the comic strip Buster Brown, about the disturbingly pretty boy with a mischievous streak for practical jokes, was her favorite and she spent happy hours reading about his latest adventures. Then there was the abiding and fascinating memory of the family’s Chinese manservant, who would spit on the freshly washed laundry as he ironed.14 Still, why didn’t she mention any childhood friends or family social engagements? Did she feel that these were not grand enough for her powerful adult image?

  In truth, Florence frequently “summered” with her mother at private homes or hotels outside San Francisco. In September 1902, the social-climbing Berthe Lacaze placed a personal advertisement just below the society column in the San Francisco Call, announcing her week-long sojourn with “her little daughter Florence” at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Chaigneau at “Fern Grove, their beautiful home in Guerneville.”15

  The personal advertisement speaks volumes. A society column placement announcing the week-long stay of Mrs. Lacaze and her daughter at the Chaigneau home was, of course, placed in Le Franco-Californien. The San Francisco Call, however, did not deem either Mrs. Lacaze or the retired Alfred Chaigneau’s social agenda of sufficient interest to the Yankee community to merit a society column’s free placement. Yet, by 1904, the San Francisco Call did include the vacationing Berthe and Florence at Skaggs Springs in their society column, along with other glitterati of San Francisco, demonstrating Maximin’s rise in significance in the city. That said, neither Mr. Lacaze nor little Isabelle accompanied them.16

  Despite Florence’s invented memories and embellishments, the San Francisco earthquake utterly changed the Lacaze family’s future. Their wrangling over remaining or leaving the city would divide them forever. Maximin was a lone male voice amid a determined, terrified female chorus.* Later, Florence’s rose-tinted memory imagined her father bundling her into a boat along with her sister, mother, and grandmother and escaping through the “two great walls of flames.” Like so many of Florence’s recollections, it was a colorful fiction.

  Over 300,000 inhabitants of the city were evacuated by the Southern Pacific Railway free of charge; approximately 25,000 other inhabitants were evacuated by the navy from Fort Mason; and thousands more escaped via the Union Ferry Building in San Francisco to Belvedere’s near-neighbor, Oakland Pier. Given their position north of the city and proximity to the railway line, it is probable that Florence and her family were among the 300,000 evacuees aboard the Southern Pacific Railway. Interestingly, her future brother-in-law was one of its owners. The railroad was built by San Francisco’s great entrepreneurs, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, Collis P. Huntington, and Leland Stanford, back in the days of Jay Gould. Only later would Florence discover that one of the Goulds’ bêtes noires, Edward H. Harriman, had muscled his way into the Southern Pacific’s ownership and had squeezed millions away from Jay Gould’s son, George.

  Florence’s memory might have been clouded by a simple, veiled, youthful wish. The bay became symbolic of her need to quench the family fire that raged at home, with her father arguing to stay, her mother and grandmother militating to leave. Within minutes, the quake had robbed Florence of her cherished childhood. Le Franco-Californien’s presses were destroyed. So, too, was the real estate Florinte had inherited from her husband on Montgomery Street, Spofford Alley, Clay Street, and Stockton Avenue. Literally, her vast wealth had crumbled to dust and ashes. Devastated at her losses, Florinte swatted aside any hint of her son-in-law’s objections: her daughter and granddaughters would be brought to the safety and civilization of Paris.17

  Like any good newspaperman at a time of peril, Maximin resolved to remain amid the chaos. He would rebuild his life and earning capacity, despite his mother-in-law’s and wife’s determination to go. He would oversee the rebuilding of Florinte’s property holdings, in the hope that she would relent and bring the family back. As the women left San Francisco on the train to take them east, Florence etched the ruined city into her memory. Would they ever return? Would she ever see her father again? Maximin undoubtedly assured her that she would. For Berthe Lacaze and her mother, San Francisco was an experiment that had failed. In their opinion, it was no longer a fit place to bring up two little girls.

  2

  FROM FIRE TO FLOOD AND DEATH

  So quietly flows the Seine that one hardly notices its presence.

  —ARTHUR MILLER

  Long before the Lacaze women disembarked at Le Havre, San Francisco was a semi-functioning city once again. Within days, newspapers were printing, precarious buildings had been dynamited, and the rebuilding program begun. Even Maximin Lacaze’s journal, Le Franco-Californien, shared a printing press and managed to run off a limited post-earthquake edition. Disaster aid and community spirit were lavish and quick back then.

  Florence never mentioned her first trans-American journey by train, nor her first Atlantic crossing. It was her one and only adventure by train beyond the San Francisco Bay area, through the heart of the ever-changing early-twentieth-century landscape of America. More is the pity, too, as Florence was a keen observer and consummate storyteller when the mood struck her. Worse still, she never said if she regretted leaving San Francisco, or if she was looking forward to settling in France with her mother, sister, and grandmother. She would have been a hard-hearted child not to have held a tremendous sense of loss for what had been and would, more than likely, never be again. Florence knew that her mother, Berthe, by now nicknamed “Pompon” by the girls, and grandmother Florinte saw themselves as Parisians. Both women steadfastly believed that all culture and society worth knowing—and knowing about—emanated like a blinding sunbeam from the City of Light.

  After the usual flurry of activity on arrival, Berthe, Florence, and Isabelle settled in a sumptuous apartment at 2 rue de Fleurus on the corner of rue de Luxembourg* in the Odéon quarter of the sixth arrondissement. Adjacent to t
he western edge of the Jardin de Luxembourg, the apartment was ideally located near the Seine River, and near the heart of the city’s bohemian Left Bank. Their close neighbors were two fellow Americans, Leo Stein and his sister, Gertrude, who lived at number 27. Yet neither the Steins nor Florence ever alluded to meeting in their years living on the same street.

  In the apartment block on rue de Fleurus, Florence met her lifelong friend, Cécile Tellier. Exact contemporaries, the two girls became instantly close. Florence’s wonderful tales of her distant, sunny California oddly created a strong bond, since Cécile longed to travel. One day, while chattering in the way girls do, Florence told Cécile, “You’ll see, one day I’ll be a great singer.…” It was more than a pipe dream. Berthe was paying dearly for private tutoring for Florence with a musician known only as an “old professor of music,” who lived on the aptly named avenue Mozart. He, too, believed that Florence’s voice could be trained for the opera.

  Naturally, the Lacaze girls were enrolled in school in the autumn of 1906. As Florence later claimed with charming embellishment, she had to attend accelerated French language classes.1 More than likely, she trailed behind other French children at school due to her American studies and lack of Catholic teaching, and needed some private lessons to catch up. Then, as now, education in France was more rigorous than in America.

  By the spring of 1907, when Florence and Cécile celebrated their Holy Communion together at Notre-Dame-des-Champs, the girls had become inseparable. They attended the same private elementary and middle Catholic school, Dupanloup, and later, went on to the private Catholic Maintenon College together.2 Cécile remained invisible, at times the wallflower languishing in Florence’s shade by dint of the American’s exuberant and, at times, outrageous personality. Yet nearly always, Cécile would be at Florence’s beck and call, the beneficiary of her friend’s legendary generosity.

  Unlike Cécile, Florence was a bright student who, aside from music, loved history. Given Berthe’s aversion to her own Catholic education, it seems astonishing that she should have sent her girls to private Catholic schools. Yet she wanted the best for her daughters. The stain of Berthe’s illegitimacy and birth into poverty, so powerful in those days, could not be erased. But she knew she must try. If the girls were to mix and make proper matches with “good” families, the groundwork for the “right” connections could never be concocted by attending a public school—no matter how good. Berthe was quite aware that they lived in an era when women of quality did not work or forge their own way in the world, and she so wished for Florence to be that sort of woman.

  Young Isabelle tried to shine as bright as her sister but was doomed to remain a poorer reflection in Florence’s shadow. Apparently, Isabelle talked nineteen to the dozen every waking hour. Annoyed at her jabbering, Florence often claimed that in the time she said, “Isabelle, be quiet,” her sister could tell two separate stories. Visitors from America thought that Isabelle was the more extravagant of the two sisters and had become more French, more coquettish, than Florence. She was proud of losing her American accent within weeks. Florence could have done so, too, if she wished, but being American and treasuring her accent were as critical to her living well as breathing. Florence was hardly a coquette, as the boy next door from Belvedere, California, later described his future sister-in-law, Isabelle. By her teens, Florence had honed her feline walk and vamp’s ways to perfection and could ensnare any male victim she chose to achieve her ends. In these circumstances, the sibling rivalry between the Lacaze girls could only grow over the years. Florence was not about to relinquish center stage, then or ever.

  By the end of 1907, Maximin was flourishing once more, and traveled to Paris to reclaim his family. Soon he realized that, already, he was too late. Not only did he meet with his wife’s intransigence because she believed that the girls were better off and safer in Paris, but his little girls shrieked at the thought of being uprooted a second time.3 Florence would argue that she could become a great opera singer only in Paris—after all, her “old professor” had told her so. Isabelle had quite forgotten San Francisco’s attributes in the year since they’d left, and perhaps, too, felt that their father was alien to their new way of life. After spending the Christmas holidays en famille, Maximin returned alone to San Francisco early in 1908, arriving in New York aboard the ship La Touraine on February 23.4 It was the last time Florence and Isabelle would see their father. On June 7 of that year, Maximin began his annual vacation in Santa Barbara at Villa El Verano in the company of a French widow, presumably resigned to his estrangement from Berthe and his daughters.5

  * * *

  The Paris that Florence grew up in, and loved, was Haussmann’s Paris. In 1853, to modernize the city—as well as to avoid the infamous barricades to which law and order had fallen victim previously—Napoléon III gave his prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, broad powers and authority to rebuild much of the city. Haussmann’s Paris sported new grand parks open to everyone and an exquisite opera house with a copper dome and golden statues designed by Charles Garnier that Florence gawped at, dreaming of her future singing accomplishments.

  There were wide boulevards, designed to consign the revolutionary barricades of the city to a distant memory. These grand avenues were, in turn, fringed with chic new apartment buildings topped with mansard roofs and beaux arts decorations that dotted the streets to beautify and encourage les flâneurs, those urban explorers of a literary penchant engaged in the opposite of nothing—a “gastronomy of the eye,” in the words of Honoré de Balzac.

  New sewers were dug to cope with a near doubling of the city’s population, with nine new arrondissements and the corresponding civil administration to manage Haussmann’s sweeping changes. Haussmann himself credited Napoléon III for bringing medieval Paris into the modern era: “The city is improved as no other ever was … by … the present Napoléon and he will thus … leave the grandest monument to his genius and power the world has seen.…”6 Haussmann’s Paris was also largely responsible for the next force of nature that Florence and all Parisians would miraculously survive.

  New Year’s Day 1910 was unseasonably warm, bathed in midwinter sunshine, and a stunning forty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Florence, like all Parisians, might have felt within her rights to think they were blessed. Though warm temperatures continued into the month, by the beginning of the second week of January, the sunshine was a mere memory. A low-pressure weather system churned slowly, gathering more and more moisture, off the coast of Brittany. For days on end, it hardly moved and relentlessly pitched its heavy rains onto northern France, the Netherlands, and England. By the third week in January, the water table in northern France had risen to near ground level and its rivers were swollen to bursting.

  On January 21, only fifty miles southeast of Paris, the Loing River, one of many waterways feeding the Seine, was surging faster than anyone could remember. That morning, in the small coal mining town of Lorroy, miners loaded their coal, dug from the mines in the hillside on the edge of town, onto barges. These floated on the man-made canal that supplied Paris with its coal, the only means of warmth in the city during the winter. At midday, the miners trudged homeward through the congealed mud for their meal, as they had done every working day of their lives. Some never came back again. Suddenly, the entire village began to shake violently. Furniture and people were tossed like rag dolls in their kitchens with a force redolent of an earthquake. The unstable hillside—their very source of steady income for generations—collapsed in a terrifying avalanche of rock, mud, and trees, burying the miners and their families alive.7

  That same afternoon, Parisians could see that the Seine was rising, too, but there was no panic. The river had flooded countless times since the city was first built—but only once, in 1896, subsequent to its redesign by Haussmann. The Seine’s high walls were reinforced with sand and stone, nonetheless, as a precaution. By January 21, a portion of Quai de Valmy bordering Canal Saint-Martin on the Right Bank had
sunk, collapsing a portion of the pavement. Still, the Lacaze family could not see the flooding from their rue de Fleurus apartment, and did not panic.

  Water rose, too, through the basements of buildings. The number 12 Métro Line was flooding. Paris’s prefect of police, Louis Lépine, became the man of the hour—the real-life, dogged Inspector Javert straight from the pages of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Like Javert, he felt the pulse of the city as a hands-on prefect with a zero tolerance for crime. Armed with little more than his thick mustache and goatee, he exuded a stoic calm that faced down gangsters and angry protesters alike. His singlemindedness to make Paris safe and a proper place to live—fighting the vices of pornography, panhandling, prostitution, vagrancy, and any other moral offense that irked his sense of duty—made him the darling of the bourgeoisie.8

  Nonetheless, on January 21, Lépine was deprived of any information from the Hydrometric Service simply because the rivers flowed too quickly. Measuring stations along the Loing River could no longer report due to the raging floodwaters whipping away the telegraph lines. In the absence of real knowledge, Lépine simply looked at the seething waters and halted all river traffic immediately. Then he urgently ordered the civil engineers employed by the city to build a clay wall parallel to the Seine. It was too late.

  The floodwaters short-circuited the power plants at Bercy and Saint-Denis just north of Paris, freezing the Métro to a standstill as water swamped the tunnels. Parisians began improvising: Women threw modesty to the winds and hiked their skirts up to their knees, some hitching a ride on passing river barges that replaced cars and horses. Temporary duckboards were erected on bricks to help people get about. Makeshift barricades were set up to close the underground station entrances, but the surging water was already cascading in great waterfalls down the stairs from the street above. Initially, Florence thought it was fun.