Credits Director: Jacques Berthier
420
14 minutes Color
14 to Adult
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During the night of November 23rd and 24th, 1864, under the sign of thunder and lightning, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Montfa was born. The eldest male heir of a wealthy family that had royal blood in its veins, he was nicknamed 'Little Jewel' by his doting mother, grandmothers and aunts. His early years were those of a carefree prince. Already he could ride, already he thrilled to the sound of the hunting horn. He was intelligent, gay, mischievous, restless, affectionate, beautiful, happy!
And here the man! A bone disease and an accident have turned him into a kind of dwarf. 'Little Jewel!! Who would still think of calling him that, the poor lisping boy of 14? He grew uglier every day. He no longer recognized himself in the mirror. The world of his childhood was thrown into disarray. His horses, his hunting, his dreams, they were all destroyed. In spite of his mother's affection he had to face his predicament alone. He who was tender at heart, who was endowed with 'excessive sensuality, to an almost unnatural degree! What could he read in the eyes of young women if it were not repulsion, or worse even, pity. Pity! At all costs it must not be pity! And so he lost no time in showing that he could play the fool. It was bravado, to be sure! But it was bravery too.
A dwarf and a cripple, Lautrec was stung to the very quick of his being, but accepted his condition as a challenge. That he should sink into the listlessness of a coddled invalid, this he would never accept. And so he painted. Wherever he went he painted. He might have said, as did Rouault: 'For me, painting is only a means of forgetting life. A scream in the night, a stifled sob, a strangled laugh'. And found comfort in the words of the poet Lautreamont: 'I have replaced melancholy with courage'. His life was soon to become a whirlpool of work and pleasure, pleasure and work. He painted everywhere, he drew, he painted incessantly. Moulin-Rouge, Moulin de la Galette, Elysee Montmartre, he lived life to the full. He discovered the raw material of mankind, in its animal reality. Here, in this temple of movement, the most secret and anguished side of his character found respite. Greedily he captured with his pencil all that he could never enjoy. Lost forever were the highly-strung thoroughbreds of his youth! At dances and carnivals his piercing glances, his swift riposte, the vibrancy of all his senses, his frenzy, his exhilaration. This was what the outside world saw in Lautrec. But what was the other side of the coin? The man who had committed moral suicide and who sometimes revealed himself, fleetingly. His double who made no secret of his ugliness and exaggerated in until it became as grotesque as a mask. A fine emblem for the pretty ladies of society! Rejected and despised, he sought out those who are rejected and despised. He went to those places where one simply paid in order to obtain. No-one will ever capture better than he the resigned sadness of these women of pleasure who flaunt bestiality in all its nakedness. When his soul was heavy with anguish he turned to them for comfort. To these women, who, like him, had something to kill in life. Women already weary, with their ravaged eyelids and mouths, their harvested flesh. Are they not his secret sisters in distress? Maybe they too remember a sunlit childhood that has forever faded, a dream of a happy future that has been forever shattered. Love? It doesn't exist, he says. The glass is full, throw away the wine and keep the glass. That way, no one sees through the trick, said poor Tristan Corbiere, the poet. No one was ever to see through the trick. He disguised himself, he played the fool! Life was wonderful! His warder. Toulouse-Lautrec was put away in a rest home. He stayed there only a few weeks. But alcohol had already done its work, alcohol and venereal disease, alcohol and despair. The long-drawn-out suicide was accomplished. He had two more years to live, two years before the night, that long night of agony when he was to see again the faces of friends and loved ones, ones loved in silence. Young girls he had glimpsed. None of them ever knew just how much the little man loved them. Pity? No! Not pity! During the night of September 8 and 9, 1901, under the sign of thunder and lightning, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Montfa died. The life of this painter of genius was a drama, a short-lived tragedy, which he consciously lived to the extreme, but with such discretion, with such abhorrence of pity, that even those who knew him well did not always sense the weight of suffering that he bore. He was, in the fullest sense, a great and noble man, this deformed midget
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