DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV
61
her name (a trouble she was to have for many years) and after
certain vicissitudes and wanderings she found her true home in
Paris, where she arrived in October, 1892. She was engaged to
dance at the Folies-Bergere, and with a program of five dances
including the Serpentine she achieved a fantastic success, which
was augmented later in the decade when she returned with new
items. Allover Europe and America she was imitated, but never
successfully, largely because of the care she took to keep secret
the technical apparatus upon which she depended. She was not
overstating her triumph when she said that the usual audience
at the Folies-Bergere was every evening "lost amid a crowd com–
posed of scholars, painters, sculptors, writers and ambassadors."
Outside the theater, students pelted her with flowers and drew
her carriage; the police, about to take brisk action against a pro–
cession obstructing circulation at the Madeleine, held their hands
when they discovered that
all
was in honor of La Laie Fuller.
At the time of her first success she was taken up by Rodin,
who declared that she was "a woman of genius, with
all
the
resources of talent" and "a Tanagra figurine in action." She
painted Nature, he said, in the colors of Turner; she was the
woman on the famous Pompeian frieze. Anatole France, who
wrote a preface for her autobiography in 1908, called her "mar–
vellously intelligent" but added that it was her unconscious that
really counted. "She is an artist ... the chastest and most expres–
sive of dancers, beautifully inspired, who reanimated within her–
self and restores to us the lost wonders of Greek mimicry, the art
of those motions, at once voluptuous and mystical, which inter–
pret the phenomena of nature and the life history of living
things." Other admirers were the Curies to whom she later dedi–
cated a remarkable dance. She knew anybody she cared to know.
Pretty well all the theatrical artists of Paris represented her at
this time, notably perhaps Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec, whose
lithograph is probably the best of
all;
but she asked neither
Lautrec nor Steinlen for posters, preferring their imitators. A
pretty poster drawing by Cheret hung in her dressing room.
