The Mother

2: Artist among the Artists

It was not becoming for a girl of the better classes to take up art as a career. It would have been tolerated that she did water colours or painted fans and screens, but not paintings on canvas! This was not included in the catalogue of the conventions of the higher bourgeoisie.¹

– Jean-Paul Crespelle

The Julian Academy

In 1893, when she was fifteen, Mirra passed her final school examinations and joined an art studio, the Académie Julian, one of the many private art schools in Paris. She would attend its courses for four years. ‘The name of the institution to which the studio belonged is not mentioned in her [the Mother’s] recorded talks or in any available documents. However, it can be inferred with reasonable certainty from several facts.’ ² This important, self-chosen step in her life, had no doubt repercussions in the family. Her father may not have cared much, but her mother surely did; for Mathilde, as for any respectable member of the bourgeoisie, art and artists belonged to a shadowy, suspect social subgroup on the margins of society. Artists belonged to la bohême, the ‘bohemian life,’ a term made popular by Giacomo Puccini when he chose it as the title of one of his operas (1896), and meaning a world where society’s moral code was not observed.

There are no published texts documenting this turn in Mirra’s life, except a passage in a play she would write many years later. ‘Born in a thoroughly respectable bourgeois family where art was considered as a pastime rather than a career and artists as rather unreliable people, prone to debauchery and with a dangerous disregard for money, I felt, perhaps out of contrariness, a compelling need to become a painter.’ ³ This certainly points back to her own experience.

Not only did Mirra feel attracted to an art she had practised since an early age,⁹¹ she also distanced herself in a dramatic way, ‘out of contrariness,’ from the drab, shallow and hypocritical bourgeois world in which she was brought up, in ‘that age of extreme and practical philistinism, the Victorian age [in England] and in France the Second Empire.’ ⁴ One can only guess at the reactions of her parents, but it was probably in the following couple of years that she had to varnish her fashionable boots because they were cracked and she did not have money to buy a new pair.

The most important painting school in Paris was the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts. Successful study at that institution was a prerequisite for anybody who wanted to pursue a career in the arts world. Yet it seems that in spite of all the laurels bestowed on it by officialdom, the Beaux-Arts was not the first-rate place it is supposed to have been in matters of teaching, and of art itself. Its professors, highly esteemed and officially rewarded painters, did not always show up to teach their courses, for they were too busy with their own pursuits and with the private schools they were running. The result was that the Beaux-Arts had become a place where rough camaraderie and practical jokes often took precedence over the study and contemplation of harmony and beauty. It was also notorious for its bizutage, the French word for ‘ragging,’ ‘badgering’ or ‘hazing’; this was the abusive and humiliating ritual of bullying and ridicule all newcomers were subjected to.⁵ However, women were not admitted at the Beaux-Arts before 1897 – and Mirra was not interested in an artistic career, but in the practice, mastery and enjoyment of art itself.

The Julian Academy, ‘the only serious art school for women,’ was founded by the painter Rodolphe Julian in 1868 and had several branches in Paris. Like the Académie Suisse and other Parisian schools of the kind, it was a place of great freedom. There were no entrance examinations, one did not necessarily have to submit one’s work for approval or corrections, and the teachers never imposed their view or their authority. (And the fees were not very high.) Rather it was the general atmosphere of the place, which was totally devoted to painting, that acted as the instructor. One worked, one discussed, one compared, one frequented the same cafés and restaurants, one became a member of the profession known to co-disciples and would-be artists from other institutions. And there were the models, too expensive to be hired in private – probably on the usual basis as at the Académie Suisse: for three weeks (older) men would pose as mythological and biblical figures, for one week women as Venuses and Virgins.

How did Mirra come to meet Henri Morisset, who was eight years older than she? It was grandmother Mira, who had known Henri’s father, Edouard Morisset, for many years, who introduced the two. Edouard was one of the artists from whom in former years Mira, the grandmother, had ordered portraits of the Egyptian princesses ‘to be done from photographs.’ Mirra may also have met Henri, already a painter of established reputation, in one of the many places where the artists’ crowd met. He had actually visited the Julian Academy while he was a student of the famous Gustave Moreau at the Beaux-Arts.

Henri and Mirra married on 13 October 1897 in a civil ceremony in the town hall of the VIIIth Arrondissement. They went to live at 15 Rue Lemercier, behind the Porte de Clichy, i.e. near Montmartre and in the heart of artistic life of Paris. As one can see in many paintings of that time, the quartier looked quite different then.

Impressionism

Modern art is an effort, still very awkward, to express something other than the simple physical appearance.⁶

– The Mother

Together with Mirra we have landed in the middle of an upheaval in the artistic world, of which the consequences are still very much with us today, although its real scope and significance are not sufficiently realized. We are talking about the revolutionary artistic movement called Impressionism.

In the early 1860s a group of painters, for reasons they were mostly still unable to formulate, started working in a way that ran counter to all the standardized, academic rules of the day. Instead of painting scenes from the Bible, from Greek or Roman history, or from traditional European history, they chose as their subjects everyday life – as they saw it. They painted scenes from Paris, its streets, churches and monuments, its cafés and dancing halls and their customers, its circus and theatre life, its folksy types; and they went out into the countryside, as Mirra Alfassa would do,⁹² and painted – rapturously – the unending and ever-varying wealth of landscapes, river views, and everything else that struck their eye as beautiful and worth painting.

A dam had burst; the artificial bourgeois world was being discredited and discarded, and the plunge was taken into reality as it is directly, genuinely experienced, in this case by the artist’s eye. The bourgeois society of the nineteenth century was the successor of a European caste society, which was as sharply divided as that in India. During the Ancien Régime, with its roots in the Middle Ages, society had consisted of the classes of the clergy (brahmin), the nobility (kshatriya), the merchants (vaishya) and the common workers (shudra), most of whom had been serfs, in other words, slaves. Thanks to the philosophical evolution of the European mind during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the dominant classes of the clergy and the nobility had lost most of their privileges and the bourgeois class had taken over. (A look at the environment in which young Mirra grew up has given us an idea of the life of the bourgeoisie at the end of the nineteenth century.)

This new dominant class, however, had no history of its own, for European history had been made, at least in the opinion of the premodern historians, by the Church and by the blue-blooded families of kings, counts and barons. The bourgeoisie had no historical or mythological roots; they were upstarts who had to borrow their past from the previous classes in power. This borrowing smelled strongly of imitation, plagiarizing and unnaturalness, and led to a set of public morals that were felt to be artificial and hypocritical by sincere people: ‘Everything was permitted on condition that a façade of conventional dignity remained in place.’ ⁷ This lack of sincerity, of authenticity in social mores, was what Mirra revolted against, and the lack of the same qualities in the artistic experience was what Impressionism revolted against; both attitudes were closely connected in her person as well as in the great painters known as the Impressionists.

At the end of all myths and stories, humanity stood confronted with itself. Mirra was born at a time when the human being turned inwards and subjected to close scrutiny all that had gone before. This happened in literature (Proust, Rimbaud, Mallarmé), philosophy (Nietzsche and Bergson), psychology (Freud and Jung), biology (Darwin, Pasteur) and physical science (the Curies, Planck, Lorentz, Einstein). The incredible twentieth century, the greatest show in all history, was being prepared. And Impressionism – thanks to the passion for perceptual honesty in that group of diverse characters, who all possessed a stroke of genius – was the first movement leading to an era of profound change, the end of which is not yet in sight.

The Mother said more than once that all the great cultural periods in history have been brought about by ‘families of souls’ incarnated to that end. ‘There are large families of beings who work at the same task, who have gathered in a certain number and who come in groups as it were.’ ⁸ ‘From an occult point of view it is almost always the same forces and the same beings who incarnate during all the ages of artistic beauty upon earth … It is the same forces which are at work, and they are grouped according to their affinities … They reunite at a certain place, and in this place there develops a new civilization, or a special progress in a civilization, or a kind of effervescence, a blossoming, a flowering of beauty, like in the great ages in Greece, Egypt, India, Italy, Spain …’ ⁹ There is little doubt that the Impressionists were such a group. One finds this indirectly confirmed by a neutral witness like Jean-Paul Crespelle, who writes: ‘One of the aspects of the life of the Impressionists is their liking, not to say their need to work together, even to live together in spite of their differences … All felt the need to know what the others were doing, to compare their work and to exchange their ideas.’ ¹⁰

The Artist’s Life

For ten years Mirra would live as an artist among artists. ‘I knew all the greatest artists of [the end of] the last century and of the beginning of this century.’ ⁴¹ ‘All the artists I knew at that time were truly artists, they were serious and made admirable things which have remained admirable. It was the period of the Impressionists, it was the period of Manet. It was a beautiful period, they made beautiful things.’ ⁴²

Henri and Mirra seem to have been rather well-off, maybe with some help from father Edouard. In Rue Lemercier they rented an apartment on the first floor, connected by a footbridge with their glass-topped studio in the ‘fairly large’ garden.

‘When [Mirra] was married to that painter, she went on holiday to Beaugency, on the river Loire, where they had a country house. It’s a very beautiful place and they made some paintings there. It’s a region in France where, during the Renaissance, the kings had their chateaux, and those chateaux are visited as historical monuments. One day, she was in one of those chateaux. I think it was the one at Blois where there was a series of portraits of a royal family done by the painter [François] Clouet. She was stopped in her tracks before one of those portraits and said [aloud]: But why has he given me that kind of hairdo? Then she saw that people were staring at her and she stopped talking. But she had been that lady in a past existence, and in front of that painting the whole memory come alive again, and she remembered that she had not been wearing that dress, that her hair had not been done like that. And [when later telling this story] she added: “I stopped talking aloud, for the people would have thought that I was mad!”’ ¹¹ That lady in a past existence was Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615), the highly cultured queen of France and Navarre. ‘It was positively me. That was my portrait, that was me!’ ¹² The portrait is now at the National Library in Paris.

Then we find Mirra in Pau, a town in the south of France with a magnificent view of the Pyrenees, the mountain range that separates France from Spain. Henri had been invited there to paint a series of murals in the Church of Saint James the Great. He did four: The Vocation of James the Fisherman, Saint James Preaching to the Masses, The Martyrdom of Saint James and The Apotheosis of Saint James. All are still there (though somewhat ‘faded by time,’ according to a recent visitor) bearing Henri Morisset’s signature and the date 1898. In the Bénézit, a French dictionary of artists, Henri Morisset will be mentioned mainly because of these murals.

The principal place of veneration of St James the Great was Santiago de Compostela, like Rome and Jerusalem the goal of a famous religious pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. Santiago de Compostella is a town near the northwest coast of Spain, and legend has it that the body of St James the Great, brother of St John the Evangelist and a major apostle of Christ, had arrived on that coast in a miraculous way. Many thousands of pilgrims still flock there on foot from all over Europe as penitents or to ask favours from Santiago. In the former unsafe times the pilgrims followed fixed and partly protected routes, and Pau sat on one of those routes which went across the Somport Pass through the mountains; this was called the Camino Frances or French Road.

Mirra collaborated with her husband on the panel called The Apotheosis of Saint James. It represents a scene from the Battle of Clavijo fought in 844 between the Spanish Christians and the Muslim Moors, who occupied a large part of the peninsula. The battle was fought because one hundred promised virgins had not been delivered to the Caliph of Cordoba. At the crucial moment St James, wearing shining armor and ‘in golden light on a white horse, almost like Kalki,’ ⁹³ appeared on the side of the Christians and attacked the Infidels, thus carrying the day for the Christians. Since then Santiago Matamoro (Saint James killer of the Moors) has been the patron saint of Spain.¹³ ‘It was I who painted the slain and struggling Moors,’ the Mother said later, ‘because I couldn’t climb up. One had to climb high on a ladder to paint. That was too difficult, so I did the things at the bottom.’ ¹⁴

There may have been an additional reason not to climb ladders, namely the fact that she was pregnant. Her son André was born on 23 August 1898. Very soon after his birth she began to suffer from a ‘floating kidney’ and had to stay in bed for five months. During these months she read, according to her own report, hundreds of books and developed out of sheer boredom her occult faculties. One of her exercises consisted in extending her occult body in such a way that she could perceive what was going on in adjacent rooms. In this way she even managed to be invisibly present in the studio.

Little André was fascinated by this studio, ‘which I considered the most wonderful place in the world,’ ¹⁵ with its glass roof, its colors, its smells of oil paints, turpentine and wood, and the many interesting people who came to visit his parents. Late in life he still remembered that there he was once introduced to Madame Fraya, ‘a very pretty lady with a very big hat and a pleasant way of talking.’ Madame Fraya was a clairvoyant and became so famous that most of the great politicians of the time – Briand, Clemenceau, Jaurès, Daladier, even President Poincaré – consulted her, and a book was written about her, Une Voyante à l’Élysée (‘A Clairvoyant at the Élysée’; the Élysée is the presidential palace in Paris).⁹⁴

André was mostly brought up in Beaugency with his father’s sisters, his grandfather Edouard and his nanny. ‘What struck me most were the visits which my parents paid to me in their motor car. It was a Richard-Brasier [a short-lived model from the beginning of the century] and didn’t have to bear a number plate because it could not do more than thirty kilometres per hour … My parents used to carry with them a couple of bicycles “just in case.” As a matter of fact, on the first hundred-and-fifty kilometre trip to Beaugency the steering gear broke after fifty kilometres, at Étampes, and the car stopped inside a bakery. They stayed there overnight, used the cycles to visit the place and left the next day, the car having been repaired by the local blacksmith.’ ¹⁶ One may recall that at that time bicycles were almost as novel as automobiles. The pneumatic bicycle tyre was introduced by John Dunlop in 1888; this, combined with the improved safety bicycle, suddenly made bicycling a popular pastime.

Mirra Alfassa had paintings of hers accepted by the jury of the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. This was then the foremost official art show in Paris, not to say in the world, in which no less than three thousand artists participated every time. Mirra’s paintings were exhibited in 1903, 1904 and 1905. Their names, as listed in the catalogues, were: Dans l’atelier and Salon (1903), Nature morte and Vestibule (1904), Bibelots and La console (1905).

It was not her intention to build up a career as a painter and become famous – she called herself a ‘very ordinary’ artist – and one may suppose that the necessary approaches to the members of the jury were made by her husband. She observed the whole business with a penetrating and rather ironical eye, and remarked later: ‘I am reminded of the annual opening of the Arts Exhibition in Paris, when the President of the Republic inspects the pictures, eloquently discovering that one is a landscape and another a portrait, and making platitudinous comments with the air of a most intimate and soul-searching knowledge of painting. The painters know very well how inept the remarks are and yet miss no chance of quoting the testimony of the President to their genius.’ ¹⁷ It should moreover be remembered that the Impressionists, the foremost artists of the time, found no place at the Salon and had to organize their own exhibitions. The official authorities and the art critics would begin recognizing them only in the years preceding the First World War.

Mirra seems to have known Auguste Rodin, the great sculptor, fairly well for she would tell later how he asked her advice in an affaire de coeur: ‘How can one prevent two women to be jealous of each other?’ Before sculpting his statues in marble or casting them in bronze, he usually moulded them in clay. To prevent the clay models from drying up and crumbling when the master was absent for a couple of days, they had to be covered with wet cloth, and this cloth had to be sprinkled with water every day. Both his wife and his ‘favorite model’ had the key to the studio and both rivals sprinkled water on the clay models, although it was obvious for the woman who entered second that the job had already been done. The result was that on his return Rodin would find that the clay had run and that his work was spoiled. (The Mother did not remember what advice she had given him.)

Rodin was forty years older than Mirra. ‘He was an old man, already old at that time. He was magnificent. He had a faun’s head, like a Greek faun. He was short, quite thick-set, square. He had shrewd eyes. He was strikingly ironical and a little –. He found the problem amusing, but he would all the same have preferred to find his clay models unscathed.’ ¹⁸

Another artist Mirra seems to have known well was Henri Matisse. He had, after all, been a student of Gustave Moreau at the Beaux-Arts at the same time as Henri Morisset. She had a very high opinion of Matisse as a painter, and she also bears witness to an important moment in the rapid evolution of Post-Impressionist art.

Matisse, she says (without naming him), was doing his very best as a painter, but he had to struggle with the fate of so many Parisian artists at the beginning of their career: he could not sell his work, which means that he went hungry. One day, somebody who wanted to help him brought an art dealer to his studio. The art dealer was not impressed by what he saw, till he found a canvas on which Matisse, after each painting session, had smeared the remainder of the colors from his palette, giving free rein to his fantasy. The art dealer, in search of new sensations, grew ecstatic. ‘Give me as many paintings as you can in this genre, twenty, thirty a month, I will sell them all and make you famous!’ And famous Henri Matisse became: he was the first and perhaps most refined painter of a new school called Fauvism.¹⁹

Later, talking to the youth of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram School, the Mother would often look back on her years among the Parisian artists. She would explain the role of photography in the sudden transition from the mediocre art productions of the Second Empire to the ecstatic plunge into the direct artistic perception of the Impressionists. She would consider the unbridled evolution of painting in the wake of Impressionism, and point out how the horrors of the Great War had profoundly upset the sense and creation of beauty in all its aspects.

When asked: ‘Why is modern art so ugly?’ the Mother answered: ‘I think the main reason is that people have become more and more lazy and do not want to work. They want to produce before having practised, they want to know before having studied, and they want to become famous before having done anything worthwhile.’ ²⁰ But: ‘Now, to tell you the truth, we are climbing up the curve again. Really, I think we have gone down to the depths of incoherence, of absurdity, of ugliness – of the taste for the sordid and ugly, the filthy, the outrageous. We have gone, I think, to the very bottom … There are signs that we are going up again. You will see, in fifty years we’ll perhaps have beautiful things to look at.’ ²¹ She said that in 1951.

A few years later she noted: ‘At one time, when I looked at the paintings of Rembrandt, the paintings of Titian or Tintoretto, the paintings of Renoir, the paintings of Monet, I felt a great aesthetic joy. This aesthetic joy I don’t feel anymore … That subtle something that is the true aesthetic joy is gone, I don’t feel it any more. Of course, I am miles away from experiencing it when I look at the things they are making now. But it is nevertheless something behind this which made the former [joy] disappear. So perhaps by making just a little effort towards the future, we will be able to find the formula of the new beauty. That would be interesting.

‘It is quite recently that this impression has come to me, it is not something from long ago. I have tried [to look at classical paintings] with the utmost goodwill, abolishing all kinds of preferences, preconception, habits, bygone tastes and all that. All that being discarded, I look at their paintings and I don’t succeed in getting any pleasure. They don’t give me any. Sometimes they cause an aversion in me, but above all the impression of something that is not true, an unpleasant impression of insincerity. But then quite recently, I suddenly had the sensation of something very new, something of the future pushing, pushing, trying to manifest, trying to express itself and not yet succeeding, something that will be a tremendous progress over all that has been felt and expressed before. And at the same time was born the formation of consciousness which turns towards this new thing and wants to get hold of it. This will perhaps be interesting.’ ²²

Mirra, who was becoming more and more conscious and therefore very sensitive, was also acutely aware of the tensions in all creative persons she met, painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, dancers or whomever, a tension caused by the discrepancy between the aspiration towards the artistic ideal and the downward pull of the body, by the lower layers in the being and by everyday life in an all-too-human world. ‘When one saw the artist at work he lived in a magnificent beauty, but when one saw the gentleman at home, he had only a very limited contact with the artist he was, and he generally became a very vulgar, very ordinary man. Many were like that, I’m sure. But those who were [inwardly] unified, in the sense that they really lived their art, those were not like that, they were generous and good.’ ²³

The Early Sadhana (continued)

If the Mother stressed one thing about this period in her life, it is the fact that she was an inveterate atheist, positivist and materialist, just like her parents. She accepted only what she could touch and see, and she never sought for explanations elsewhere than on a material basis. This did not prevent the inner experiences from happening, nor did it inhibit her from feeling that inner ‘Presence’ for which she had no name and about which she could talk to nobody. She most certainly would not have called it God. ‘The feeling I have had all my life long was that [^‘God’] was a [mere] word, and a word with which people covered a lot of very undesirable things. You know, the idea of a God who wants to be the one and only … It is what had made me completely atheistic, if one may put it that way, in my childhood. I did not accept a being who declared himself to be the one and only and all-powerful, whoever he might be.’ ²⁴ ‘All I knew was the God of the religions, God as men have created him, and I didn’t want him at any price. I denied his existence, but with the certitude that if such a God did exist, I detested him!’ ²⁵

The Mother deemed herself lucky that she had been brought up like that, and said that it was one of the reasons why she had chosen those very parents. Taking into account her numerous inner experiences, her hereditary constitution was the best possible base for her not getting trapped in mental or other aberrations and to prevent her from drifting. Thus she was assured that her experiences were no mystical reveries, for she said that her body, her constitutional make-up, had nothing mystical about it.

Still, inwardly she felt alone – while in her surface life she experienced the vibrancy of Paris around the end of the century, a period sometimes called la belle Époque (although, as we will see, the beauty of that period was blemished by a lot of dark spots). ‘I remember, when I was eighteen years old I had in me such an intense need to know. Experiences I had – I had had all kinds of experiences – but due to the milieu in which I lived, I never had any chance to obtain an intellectual knowledge which would have given me the meaning of all that, I could not speak about them. I had had experiences upon experiences. For years together, at night, I had experiences, but I was careful not to breathe a word about them – all sorts of memories of past lives, all sorts of things, but without any basis of intellectual knowledge.

‘The advantage was of course that my experiences were no mental fabrications, they came absolutely spontaneously. But I had such a need to know in me … To know, know, know! You see, I knew nothing, but nothing, except the things of the ordinary life, the external knowledge. Whatever was given to me to learn, I learned. I learned not only what I was taught but also what my brother was taught, higher mathematics and all that! And I learned and I learned and I learned – and it was nothing. Nothing gave me any explanation, I could not understand anything!’ ²⁶

But when a soul has a strong need to progress or to develop, an answer will be given, usually in a most unexpected way. ‘Between the age of eighteen and twenty, I attained a conscious and constant union with the divine Presence and I had done it all alone, with absolutely nobody to help me, not even books. When I found one – a little later I got hold of Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga – it seemed to me such a wonderful thing, you see, that somebody could explain something to me! This made me gain in a few months what would perhaps have taken me years to do.’ ²⁷

And again a little later, when she was ‘perhaps twenty-one then, either twenty or twenty-one,’ she met an Indian who gave her the key to reading the Bhagavad Gita. ‘There was a [French] translation which, by the way, was quite bad’ – but at the time Mirra would not have been able to read it in another language – ‘and he advised me to read it and gave me the key, his key … He said: “Read the Gita and take Krishna as the symbol of the immanent God, the inner Godhead.” This was all he told me … But in one month the whole work was done … The first time I knew there was a discovery to be made within me, there was nothing else more important … I rushed headlong into it like a cyclone, and nothing could have stopped me.’ ²⁸

That Indian was Jnanendranath Chakravarti, then professor of mathematics and later vice-chancellor of Lucknow University. His wife, Monika Devi, ‘a great lady of birth and breeding with the innate personal charm of a born hostess, aristocratic to her fingertips,’ ²⁹ would renounce the world, adopt the name Yashoda Ma and found an ashram (a spiritual community) near Almora, in the foothills of the Himalayas.⁹⁵ The household of this remarkable couple seems to have been a centre of devotion to Shri Krishna.

Jnanendranath Chakravarti was also a member of the Theosophical Society and in close contact with Annie Besant, later the head of that society. ‘[Annie Besant] travelled to America [in 1893, to represent the Theosophical Society at the World Parliament of Religions] with one of the other Theosophical delegates, Gyanendra Nath⁹⁶ Chakravarti, a brahmin, professor of mathematics … A brilliant speaker, an ardent Hindu and an attractive man, Chakravarti captivated Annie … Mrs. Besant told her friends that, at last she had found her own guru. She was so besotted with the professor that she proclaimed Chakravarti’s daughter to be the reincarnation of the recently deceased Madame Blavatsky.’ ³⁰

Mirra must have met Chakravarti on one of his subsequent trips to Europe, in 1898 or 1899. The occasion on which he gave her the key to the Gita was probably the only time she met him, but it proved to be an important meeting indeed; it was also the very first time (as far as is known) that she came into personal contact with somebody from India. She was evidently on the lookout for any meaningful help she could get in her quest. The inner experiences continued to come frequently, and so did the memories of past lives, as they had done even long before she had the slightest idea of reincarnation.

Eager for knowledge and understanding of her experiences, she read everything she could find about spirituality, including the Dhammapada and other Buddhist texts. But she was never satisfied with mental knowledge only and always tried out in practice what she read. We may suppose that it was at some time during these years that the Minister of Fine Arts invited her into his box for the first performance of an opera, probably by Jules Massenet. (The Mother was not sure about the name of the composer.) Such a ‘première’ is a glamorous affair. ‘The subject was fine, the script was fine, and the music was not unpleasant.’ The Minister had only recently become a member of the cabinet. He was a rather simple man from the province and still enjoyed in a childlike way everything Paris had to offer him. But he was also well educated, of course, and had offered the best seat in his box to the lady who was his guest, but whose seating position prevented him from having a full view of the stage. Mirra became aware of his plight. She discreetly drew back till the Minister could enjoy the performance without any hindrance, she in the process forsaking seeing it.

When the Mother told this anecdote, she did not mention herself by name but added the following: ‘Well, this person, when she sat back and gave up all desire to see the performance, was filled with the sense of inner joy, a liberation from all attachment to things and a kind of peace, content to have done something for somebody instead of having sought her own satisfaction, so much so that the evening brought her infinitely greater pleasure than if she had actually seen the opera. This is a true experience, it is not some anecdote read in a book, and it happened exactly at the time this person was studying Buddhist discipline, and it was in conformity with the sayings of the Buddha that she tried out this experiment.’ ³¹

At the Epicentre

As we have already seen in passing, the world was in turmoil during the years of Mirra’s marriage and Paris was the epicentre of the profound changes that would churn up humanity. We do not have any of her writings from that period – if she wrote anything at all – but it happens that we get a glimpse of those years in some of her later conversations.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century the second Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and accelerating. The main elements of the first Industrial Revolution had been coal, steam and iron. The Eiffel Tower, erected for the World Exhibition of 1889, may be seen as its apotheosis and symbol. But in the meantime the second Industrial Revolution was under way, driven by electricity and petrol; its symbol was the spectacular ‘Palace of Electricity’ at the World Exhibition of 1900, which again took place in Paris. The industrial revolutions went hand in hand with the rapid progress made in all branches of science, thus strengthening in ever greater measure the grip of humankind on nature. Yet there was a price to pay.

‘The marvellous strides of science [and technology] had brought the human race to a stage of material welfare ready to prove the faith of the Nineteenth Century that the better-off man became the less aggressive he would be. Society now had running water and lighted streets, sanitation, preserved and refrigerated food, sewing machines, washing machines, typewriters, lawn-mowers, the phonograph, telegraph and telephone and lately, beginning in the nineties, the extraordinary gift of individual powered mobility in the horseless carriage. It seemed impossible that so much physical benefit should not have worked a spiritual change, that the new century should not begin a new era in human behaviour, that man, in short, had not become too civilized for war.’ ³² (Barbara Tuchman)

Both industrial revolutions, fast shaping the world as we know it, were accompanied by philosophical ideas that would in part direct them: positivism, socialism, communism and the idea of continuous material progress leading ultimately to a Utopian world on Earth. Auguste Comte’s Course of Positive Philosophy was published in six volumes between 1830 and 1842, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in 1848 and Das Kapital in 1867, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859.

Mirra saw them around her, in ‘that crawling mass on the move’ that was Paris, the ‘thousands of lowly employees and workers, all those oppressed, luckless, downtrodden, struggling for an amelioration of their miserable existence.’ ³³ ‘The transformation [^‘haussmannization’] of Paris having forcibly pushed the workers’ population from the centre towards the circumference, the capital had become two cities: one rich and one poor. The latter surrounded the former.’ ³⁴ Even today Parisians immediately place their fellow citizens socially according to the arrondissement, i.e. the administrative subdivision of the city, in which they live.

So blatant had the gap and the tensions between rich and poor become that a solution was urgently needed, but it might be a violent one. Some philosophers fantasized about possible solutions and in their short-sighted goodwill concocted the most fanciful social prescriptions. These were the social utopias of Enfantin, Fourier, Blanqui, Blanc, Proudhon and others. All contained a grain of truth, yet all lacked realistic insight into human nature and its ways. Marx had a larger view, even presenting it as ‘scientific.’ And there were the anarchists, impetuous and not less utopian than the others, who, wanting to force an immediate change upon society, were ready to pay for it, and to make others pay, with their lives.

Ravachol, the author of numerous bombings, was guillotined in 1892. Emile Henry threw a bomb in Café Terminus. Auguste Vaillant took a bomb with him into the public gallery of the Lower House. It detonated ‘with the roar of a canon’ and wounded several Members of the House but killed none. ‘The city was absolutely paralysed with fear. The upper classes lived again as if in the days of the Commune. They dared not go to theatres, to restaurants, to the fashionable shops in the Rue de la Paix or to ride in the Bois [de Boulogne] where anarchists were suspected behind every tree.’ ³⁵ The Russian revolutionaries who would come to ask for Mirra’s advice a few years later, would complain that they were constantly shadowed by the police, who suspected them of being anarchists.

And there was the Dreyfus Affair, tearing France apart from 1894 to 1906. Artillery Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was accused of having provided arch-enemy Germany with secret military information, thereby committing treason. Though steadfastly maintaining his innocence, he was found guilty by court-martial, publicly reduced in rank, and transported to the infamous Devil’s Island. As more and more proof of his innocence became available, ‘the volatile France of the 1890s’ was divided into two camps. On the one side there were the militarists, nationalists, Catholics and anti-Semites, fanatically standing up for the honour of their country and therefore consenting to the covering up of the truth; on the other side there were the liberals and ‘intellectuals’ (philosophers, writers and journalists), Protestants, Freemasons, leftists and internationalists, battling to bring the truth to light. The rift split the nation in an outburst of passion seldom seen before or after; it ran through marriages, families and formerly close friendships, including artists. The novelist Emile Zola became internationally known for his letter published on the front page of a much-read newspaper under the banner ‘J’accuse’ (1898) and his dictum la Vérité est en marche, (Truth is on the move). Captain Dreyfus’ innocence was finally established. He was fully rehabilitated, even promoted to Major, and would serve honourably in the Great War.

All this formed the background to Mirra’s daily life, to the newspapers she read and the conversations which she heard or in which she was involved. One finds references to these happenings in numerous future conversations, for she was always attentive to all aspects of life, the significant as well as the apparently insignificant, and ‘never forgot something she had seen even once.’ It is, however, typical that she transmuted many of the experiences of her youth into a spiritual dimension. ‘Progress,’ the keyword of the nineteenth century, became the keyword of her life too, but widened in a way our story still has to discover. And one day she would quote Zola’s phrase, la Vérité est en marche, giving ‘Truth’ a meaning that Zola, or anybody else at the time, could not have comprehended.