A CLOUD IN TROUSERS

A GREAT PARIS LOVE STORY

Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon in the early 1930s.

On November 6^th, 1928, a tall, quiet young Frenchman entered La Coupole, Paris’s newest café,  to be halted by the shout “The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky asks you to come and sit at his table!”  It wasn’t an invitation one could ignore, so Louis Aragon joined the two-metre tall Russian, who had just arrived from Moscow. Though they had never met, Aragon knew his stirring poetry:  “Too slow, the wagons of years,/The oxen of days – too glum,/Our god is the god of speed./Our heart our battle drum.”

Vladamir Mayakovsky, the “cloud in trousers.”

They met again the following afternoon. This time Mayakovsky was accompanied by a petite blonde in a beige toque hat, a brown fur cloak and a short black dress that showed off her attractive legs. She was so obviously in love with Mayakovsky that it surprised Aragon to discover Elsa Triolet was not his girlfriend but his sister-in-law. More than thirty years later, he immortalized that meeting in the poem Eyes and Memory. “ Pass my madness memories oh my years;/And you came in November and on a few words/My life suddenly turned completely different/One evening at the bar of the Coupole.”

A few nights later, Aragon and his house-mates George Sadoul and André Thirion threw a party for Mayakovsky, who arrived with a different woman on his arm. Triolet, who was also invited, was so obviously put out that, to distract her, Aragon and Thirion showed her around the house, which they had decorated in Dada style with green walls and distorting mirrors.

On the first floor, she peeked behind some curtains to find an alcove and a large armchair. “What do people do here?” she asked. “Make love?”

It was a defining moment and Aragon seized it, spontaneously drawing Elsa behind the curtain and gathering her in his arms as Thirion watched in astonishment. “She kissed him with open mouth,” he said. “I could see what was going to be the outcome.” 

Elsa Yureyevna Kagan and her sister Lilya/Lili belonged to the intellectual elite of Czarist Russia. Small, beautiful, intense and precocious, they spoke French and German from childhood. In 1912, when Lily was twenty, she married Futurist poet Osip Brik. The marriage was happy until, in 1917, on the eve of the October Revolution, Elsa encountered Mayakovsky. In the spirit of “Look what I’ve found !,” she brought him to meet her older sister, only to watch, helplessly, as the two were drawn irresistibly together.

Lily arranged for Mayakovsky’s poems to be published and staged a reading for family and friends, none of whom were aware, as they chatted and took their seats, that the guest of honour had his hand up the skirt of their hostess and was insistently stroking her legs. The reading was almost as exciting for the audience as for Lily; nobody interpreted his work more effectively than Mayakovsky himself. “If you like, I’ll be furious flesh elemental/Or, changing to tones that the sunset arouses,/If you like, I’ll be extraordinarily gentle,/Not a man but a cloud in trousers!”  When Lily told her husband they had slept together, Brik said calmly “How could you refuse anything to that man?"  Mayakovsky moved in with the couple and became, de facto, a second husband.

A jealous Elsa looked for a way to escape from both a Moscow impoverished by civil war and the pain of watching her sister with the man she loved. She found it in a young French army officer, Pierre-Marie-André Triolet. They married in Paris in 1919 but the relationship didn’t survive his next posting, to Tahiti, and they separated when they returned to France two years later.  After that, Elsa pursued a footloose literary existence in Germany and France, ending in Montparnasse. At the suggestion of her friends Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, she moved into the tiny Hôtel Istria, next to Man Ray’s studio and a few blocks from the house occupied by Sadoul, Thirion and Aragon.

Aragon, Triolet, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard (with hairy friend) and Eluard’s wife Nusch, 1930s

Despite its promising beginning, the romance between Elsa and Louis didn’t immediately blossom. Aragon attracted women with an ease André Thirion called “diabolical” but existed in a permanent state of psychological and sexual confusion, characterized by what Triolet’s biographer called “a capacity for infatuation and an almost masochistic vein of willing suffering.” 

A few weeks after their first meeting, Aragon invited Elsa to see in the new year of 1929 at a Montmartre club called The Jungle, where wild animals occupied cages around the dance floor and customers sat on balconies above them. She arrived to find only Thirion waiting for her. Aragon had sent him to explain that he couldn’t be her lover, since He was having an affair with the actress Lena Amsel and still hadn’t quite got over an attachment to Nancy Cunard. As she struggled to absorb the news, not to mention the bizarre decor, Aragon appeared with Amsel. To find Triolet still there startled him and he and Thirion fled, leaving Amsel and Triolet together.  

Later that night, the two women arrived at the house, arm in arm, to announce they’d amicably settled the matter. As Triolet really loved him while Amsel wanted him only for sex, there was no conflict. Next day, Triolet moved in with Aragon, whose life she would share until his death. (Amsel’s story was more tragic. On 2 November 1929 she challenged painter André Derain to a race in Bugatti sports cars just outside Paris. Hers crashed and caught fire.  She and her passenger died.)

The couple scratched a living through the depression. Aragon as a prolific political writer and editor in the Communist cause. Triolet designed and manufactured jewellery for Elsa Schaparelli and translated Russian literature, including the poems of Mayakovsky, who had committed suicide in 1930, melodramatically shooting himself in the heart.

They married in 1939. When the Germans invaded, Aragon joined the French army and fought courageously, winning the Croix de Guerre. After France capitulated in 1940, he and Triolet stayed in Paris, Aragon writing pamphlets, editorials and patriotic poems, which were published in pocket-sized booklets by the clandestine Éditions de Minuit.

As the Gestapo closed in, they moved south, into the area controlled by the puppet Vichy government. Almost immediately, their shared commitment was challenged. For security reasons and to make best use of limited numbers, the Party forbade married couples or partners from working together. If Elsa wished to participate, they would have to split up - which she was ready to do.  “I cannot allow the idea,” she said, “that we shall get to the end of the war and that people will ask me ‘What did you do?’ I shall have to say ‘Nothing’.” The conflict was resolved when Elsa, having made a dangerous journey in bad weather to collect false papers, collapsed on returning to the barn where they were hiding. The strain brought on heart problems from which she would suffer for the rest of her life.

           Even on the run, sometimes sleeping rough, and in constant fear of betrayal, they found time to write. Convalescing in Lyon, Elsa completed the novella Les Amants d’Avignon/The Lovers of Avignon. Its heroine smuggles documents and money for the resistance. After the betrayal of her network, she finds refuge with another resistant in the ancient Provençal city of Avignon. They bond over the graffiti which anonymous lovers of the past have carved into its walls.  Éditions de Minuit published Les Amants d’Avignon in 1943 under the pseudonym Laurent Daniel. It won that year’s Prix de Goncourt, France’s highest literary prize, the first time it was presented to a woman. 

           Aragon continued to write about Triolet, whom he idealized, creating what some called “the cult of Elsa.” One of his poems, Elsa’s Eyes, became famous. “Your eyes are so deep that, leaning down to drink/At them, I saw all mirrored suns repair,/All desperate souls hurled deathwards from their brink./Your eyes are so deep my memory is lost there.”

           Following Germany’s defeat, Aragon’s fame and popularity as novelist and poet increased, with Triolet his closest collaborator. The two were informally recognized as the uncrowned king and queen of France’s political left. Aragon called Triolet "the intellectual adventure of his life" and never missed an opportunity to acknowledge her influence on his writing, sometimes describing himself as only “the shadow of her thoughts.”  Champions of her work protested that, in deferring to Aragon, she sacrificed her own talent. She disagreed.  “I know that I have done a lot,” she said, “but it was done like that because we are made for each other.”

(Adapted from an essay in OF LOVE AND PARIS.)