. . . said to be the consequence of many years’ exposure to costume paint.
LE FIGARO, 1928
April 20, 1905
Dear Professor-No, my dear Madame,
English is my language, so I write
in that, although I am no writer at all
but a sort of daytime insomniac whose ink
has American notions of its own-but since
you have visited my country, I must hope
you make me out. . . . I write to you, Madame,
rather than to your husband (though you both
might be addressed as Dear Professor, no?)
for you and I, in Paris, I perceive
are equally outsiders, and I trust
this may, between us, prove a bond.
We foreigners learn a busy lesson here:
the cure for loneliness is solitude.
Perhaps because the two of us are each
inside a place which by no accident
is known to the world as the City of Light,
my plea will strike you as appropriate
(a little like my dancing: something alive
and flexible, not going on too long).
The silver card you find enclosed admits
you and your party, any night you like,
to my box at the Folies-Bergère. You may have heard
of my endeavors on the stage: the Dance
of Wings, of Wands, the Meteor of Fear,
the Flame, the Lily, and the Butterfly. …
But I am sure that if I were to bring
my efforts to your own inquiring gaze,
the chances of convincing you would be
far beyond what my uncertain words
might win-indeed beyond the winged ones
of Monsieur Anatole France himself, or those
of a greater master still, by some accounts,
Monsieur Auguste Rodin, who is my friend
and good enough to speak on my behalf:
I add their letters to my own appeal,
though I believe that what you see, yourself,
will work upon you more than any words,
even theirs. Let me persuade you by
all the liberal magic I have learned
to wield—another mode of creating life,
the poetry of an incarnate Now~
in order that you may capacitate my art
to cast a deeper spell. For once you see
I know you will help me to be better seen. …
My dancers have to move against a light
which cannot move: its source is fixed
yet what if light itself could move-could dance?
The very darkness would be visible!
As I gather, you have found the way
our costumes and our limbs themselves might be
made luminous, without depending on
the placement of a lamp or two offstage. …
Endued with the substance I hear you have named
by a happy inspiration radium,
we’d have no further need of phosphorus
which blackens in no time on human skin.
They say your new-found, final element
generates a light within itself
and would inspire-were you to let me have
the merest feather-touch of such a thing
a freedom unsuspected by the world
of illusion which we artists live within.
I do not ask for charity, Madame
only your presence, which I know would make
the soul of kindness the body of kindness too.
Come see my dancers, come see me! and if
you judge my craving worthy of my craft,
I know you will be generous. . . . My warm
respects to your husband, and to you my hopes,
L. Fuller, or as they call me here, La LOIE
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