John Singer Sargent and His Muse by Karen Corsano & Daniel Williman

Author:Karen Corsano & Daniel Williman [Corsano, Karen & Williman, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.3. Paul Renouard, Learning to Be Blind. Paul Renouard was a master etcher of important scenes for the Parisian press and public. He found “the most moving models,” including Rose-Marie (third nurse from the left), at the rehabilitation hospital for blinded soldiers at Reuilly. L’Illustration, 28 May 1915.

Rose-Marie joined the volunteer nurses, probably at the suggestion of Pastor Marc Boegner, soon after Reuilly opened its doors, some seven months after her last sight of her husband. In the brief year of her marriage Rose-Marie had come to know the Boegner family and had become best friends with Geneviève “Vivette” Boegner. In 1913 Vivette had taken on the direction of a corresponding society for chronically ill women, Les Coccinelles (Ladybirds), founded by a Swiss woman, Adèle Kamm (1885–1911), a few years earlier. The incurably tubercular Kamm had initiated the idea that shut-ins, frequently institutionalized and shunned by their family and friends, might join with each other, break out of their isolation and depression, and sustain their spirits by exchanging journal entries that ranged from the banal to theological discussions of the meaning and worth of their suffering. Vivette provided Rose-Marie an example as she took on the burden of confronting and allaying the despair of the newly blinded.

For her new life Rose-Marie wanted her own home where she could live alone with Robert’s spirit, surrounded by the furniture and décor that she had shared with him. She was not abandoning her parents-in-law: their daughters Juliette and Madeleine Vermeil with her children were living at rue Claude-Bernard. Rose-Marie’s new flat was just five minutes’ walk away in a new Beaux-Arts building of white limestone with a swag of flowers and fruits above the street door, 7 rue Pierre-Nicole prolongée. André Michel may have suggested the place, Bonne-Maman probably paid for it, and Rose-Marie surely dined with the Michel family frequently, even daily. Her journey to work was simple and safe. She would put her letters in at the post office on the corner of rue Claude-Bernard and rue d’Ulm, then board the Q tram for Châtelet. André Michel might accompany her that far on his way to his office at the Louvre. At Châtelet she would take the Métro, direction Porte de Vincennes. The fifth stop was Reuilly (now Reuilly-Diderot), one long block from the hospital. Going and coming in her nurse’s whites, she would be saluted by every French officer who passed her.39

Her journal shows her devotion to France and to Robert—really a religious fervor—as the cause that guided and nourished her. On the last day of 1915 she reflected on all the men, beloved as her Robert had been, who had died in battle.

They all live no longer except through us, to whom they have confidently left the achievement of their thought and of their ideal. Our enthusiasm has been transformed through sorrow into will, and each day’s suffering has made us those “who have much received,” and who have learned to love much. Each sacrifice has made us realize better our debt toward France, I mean the subordination that we individuals owe her.

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