62
FRANK KERMODE
Loie Fuller undoubtedly enjoyed all this. In a Paris that
paid her 12,000 francs a month and was full of women wearing
wide Loie Fuller skirts, she expected a lot of attention. There is
a note of rare disenchantment in an entry in Renard's diary
(1901) which tells how he met Fuller in an omnibus, a shape–
less figure too highly painted, sausage-fingered; intermittently
smiling, as if everybody on the bus was the Public, and with
vague myopic eyes. She was turned off the bus for not having
her fare; Renard wanted to say, "Mademoiselle I know and
admire you;
voila dix sous!"
But he did not. It is surprising to
hear of her using a bus; she lived extravagantly.
Her well-publicized hypochondria did not diminish. She
took elaborate precautions against headache, and informed jour–
nalists that she was threatened with paralysis of the arms. Every
performance ended in what looked like total collapse. Isadora
Duncan, who did not love her, but does nothing to spoil the pic–
ture of Fuller as agreeably mysterious, hypochondriacal and
queer, speaks of visiting her
in
Berlin, where she found her in a
magnificent apartment at the Hotel Bristol, surrounded as usual
by her entourage of beautiful girls who were "alternately strok–
ing her hands and kissing her." "Here," says Isadora, who never
forgave Fuller for launching her, "here was an atmosphere of
such warmth as I had never met before." Fuller complained of
terrible pains in the spine, and the girls had to keep up a supply
of icebags, which were placed between her back and the back of
the chair. Judge Isadora's surprise when, after an expensive din–
ner, Fuller went off and danced. "Had this luminous vision that
we saw before us," asks Isadora, "any relation to the suffering
patient of a few moments before?"
Fuller remained for a great many years enormously popular
in the music halls of Europe. She conquered London, as they
say, in 1893, appearing during the interval of George Edwardes'
In Town,
a show distinguished by May Belfort's performance of
"Daddy wouldn't buy me a bow-wow." But this did not prevent
the English intelligentsia from taking her quite as seriously as
