One of the Gayest at Montmartre

Eugénia Fenoglio was born in 1866 in Toulon, France.  Her father, an alcoholic tailor, battered his wife, who often fled with the children to seek shelter with relatives.   The day came that her mother left her abusive husband for good, but not long after, he sought the family at their new residence and killed his wife and then himself in front of their daughter.

As a child, Eugénia had loved theatrics, and had written, directed, acted in, and even designed the sets for plays she staged with her friends.  Not long after her parents' murder-suicide, she made her way to the capitol, where, encouraged by a lover, she tried her luck on the stage and met with phenomenal success there.  She took the name Ève Lavallière, after a mistress of Louis XIV who, incidentally, had become a penitent and had died a Carmelite nun.

According to CatholicIreland.net:

"The sudden death of one of the leading actresses of the theatre became the opportunity for Ève and she did not disappoint. Her voice was exceptional and she was able to use it to convey every sort of emotion - from silence to violence, from authority to disgust.

"Listening to Ève conveyed the audience into the very heart of the tragedy or comedy . . . she was playing. Even the great contemporary actress, Sarah Bernhardt, told her, 'What you do is innate: you create - you do not copy the characters. You give birth to them from within yourself. It is very beautiful.'"

La Lavallière became the most popular and successful actress-singer of the Belle Époque.  She was fabulously wealthy and a critical success.  At the same time, her personal life grew more and more chaotic and disorderly.  Before achieving fame onstage, Ève had supported herself as a Parisian courtesan; after, she was the mistress at one time or another of an assortment of prominent men, and bore a child out of wedlock -- a daughter, who would cause her mother great despair as an adult by living openly in a lesbian relationship.

During the First World War, on holiday in a small village while preparing for a tour of the United States with the Théatre des Variétés, Lavallière experienced a dramatic conversion after meeting a local priest and mentioning to him lightly that she had sold her soul to the devil in order to maintain her youth.  The priest, at first outraged, lent her a book about St. Mary Magdalene, which she read in a state of gradual awakening to the reality of her life of sin, and in a spirit of deepening penitence.  She cancelled her participation in the American tour and retreated to the countryside with her dresser from the theater, Leona, who accompanied her conversion with every step.  Lavallière applied for entrance as a Carmelite postulant, but was denied on account of her poor health (and perhaps too because her fame both as an actress and as a libertine had penetrated even into the cloister of the Carmel).  Instead she became a Franciscan tertiary, and after an attempt at missionary work in Tunisia, spent the rest of her life in solitary prayer and penance.

Some years after Lavallière's abrupt renunciation of the stage, a French reporter managed to track her down.  The New York Times published a story about this encounter in 1921:  "Once talk of Paris, Actress is Recluse," proclaimed the headline. "One of the Gayest in Montmartre . . . Lives Apart from the World Except for Village Poor."  The article, which can be downloaded here, mentions that the reporter asked Lavallière's maid if the former actress "ever [thought] or [talked] about the past." 

"Never," was the maid's answer.  "When she gets letters from her old friends she sometimes smiles, for she has no bitterness about the past, but she doesn't think about it.  She thinks only of the present and the future." 

I first learned of Ève Lavallière five years ago, while doing my dissertation research on music and penitence.  Raïssa Maritain had written of her friend that, after her conversion, Lavallière's eyes were always wet with the tears of contrition.  I remember reading at the time that Pope John Paul II had beatified her, but have not been able to confirm this on the web.  Nonetheless, I have decided to start a home-made novena to her in advance of the anniversary of her death, July 10.  I am closing each day with a prayer written by Lavallière herself: 

Oh my beloved Master, by Thy hands nailed to the Cross, I beseech Thee to wipe away all of the sins committed by my criminal hands.  My sweet Jesus, by the painful fatigue endured by Thy blessed feet, by the divine wounds They suffered when They were pierced, wipe away the filth left by my guilty feet.  Finally, Oh my Master, Oh my Creator, Oh my Savior, by the dignity and innocence of Thy life, by the holiness and purity which characterized it, wash away all of the stains of my impure life.  May that abominable life exist no more in me, may the ardor of Thy love hold me entirely, for Thou art, Oh my King, the sole refuge of my soul; grant that I may be unceasingly consumed with the ardor of Thy charity.  Give me, my Redeemer, above all, Holy Humility. 

For more on Lavallière, go here. 

Maria Magdalene et altera Maria

Joyous Easter to everyone.

Apostola Apostolorum

 From the blog Laodicea:  a compelling argument for the Western conflation of four figures -- the sinful woman who washes Jesus' feet with her tears in a dramatic act of penitence in Luke 7:37-50; another unnamed woman who commits a similar gesture of anointing, pouring perfumed oil on His head, in Matthew 26:6-16; Mary of Bethany; and Mary of Magdala -- into one, the great Saint Mary Magdalene (called, by Saint Catherine of Siena, the greatest saint after Our Lady, and known in the Middle Ages as "Our Lady Magdalene").

May Saint Mary Magdalene, the Apostle to the Apostles and the protectress of penitents, pray for us as we approach the Paschal Triduum.

(Above:  Mary Magdalene, by Piero di Cosimo, 1462-1521.)

Song for Mary Magdalene

By the Irish patriot and martyr of the Easter Rising Pádraig Pearse, whom Yeats names in his eulogy "Easter 1916."

O woman of the gleaming hair,
(Wild hair that won men's gaze to thee)
Weary thou turnest from the common stare,
For the shuiler Christ is calling thee.

O woman of the snowy side,
Many a lover hath lain with thee,
Yet left thee sad at the morning tide,
But thy lover Christ shall comfort thee.

O woman with the wild thing's heart,
Old sin hath set a snare for thee:
In the forest ways forspent thou art
But the hunter Christ shall pity thee.

O woman spendthrift of thyself,
Spendthrift of all the love in thee,
Sold unto sin for little pelf,
The captain Christ shall ransom thee.

O woman that no lover's kiss
(Tho' many a kiss was given thee)
Could slake thy love, is it not for this
The hero Christ shall die for thee?

Magdalene virginis

This is a re-post from earlier this year, in honor of the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, patroness of penitents.

The sinful woman who, in a dramatic gesture of penitence, washes Christ’s feet with her tears in Luke 7:36-50 is never identified as Mary Magdalene, the sinful woman from whom Christ drove out seven devils (Luke 8:2-3), but Pope Saint Gregory the Great, in his thirty-third homily, conflated the two women, also declaring Mary of Bethany (mentioned in Luke 10:38-42 and John 11) to be one and the same.

The Vatican reversed Gregory’s conflation in 1969, but it has always seemed to me, as it has to millions of believers from the seventh century on, that he knew what he was about: his conflation gave the Church a powerful figure of repentance and spiritual renewal, at once a reformed prostitute, a watcher at the Crucifixion, the first contemplative (in her identification with Mary of Bethany), and, finally, as the first witness to the Resurrection, apostola apostolorum -- the Apostle to the Apostles. In the Middle Ages, Mary Magdalene also came to be identified with with the woman taken in adultery (John 8:1-11), and with the Samaritan woman living, without benefit of marriage, with her sixth “husband” (John 4:1-42).

If we read the Gospels as a linear narrative, then the incident in which the penitent sinner anoints Christ's feet at the house of Simon the Pharisee precedes the similar incident described in John 12:1-11, in which Mary of Bethany anoints His feet at another dinner, six days before the Passover seder that precedes His arrest. It seems to me that these are meant to be two separate incidents, not two different retellings of the same one. We recognize Mary as the penitent sinner because she has performed once again her unique and beautiful act of penitence and reverence.

Devotion to the Magdalene was strong in the Middle Ages, when popuar belief held that, after her conversion, she had been miraculously restored to the state of virinity. A thirteenth-century calendarium refers to her as “Magdalene virginis,” and a sermon by a Syrian monk from the eleventh century calls her “Our Lady Magdalene." Saint Godric, a twelfth-century English hermit, received a vision in which the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene appeared to him together and taught him a song, a striking example of two saints who seem in our time to possess distinctly different, almost opposing, ethoi, mystically joined together in the practice of music.

I used to wonder about the passage in Luke in which Christ declares to Simon: "Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much." Did He mean, I wondered, that He forgave her because she showed her love for and faith in Him so dramatically? However, I believe now that somehow she knew, in a motion of the heart, that she was already forgiven; and that therefore she gathered up her ointment and rushed off to Simon's house in an outpouring of love.

Our Lady Magdalene

The sinful woman who, in a dramatic gesture of penitence, washes Christ’s feet with her tears in Luke 7:36-50 is never identified as Mary Magdalene, the sinful woman from whom Christ drove out seven devils (Luke 8:2-3), but Pope Saint Gregory the Great, in his thirty-third homily, conflated the two women, also declaring Mary of Bethany (mentioned in Luke 10:38-42 and John 11) to be one and the same.

The Vatican reversed Gregory’s conflation in 1969, but it has always seemed to me, as it has to millions of believers from the seventh century on, that he knew what he was about: his conflation gave the Church a powerful figure of repentance and spiritual renewal, at once a reformed prostitute, a watcher at the Crucifixion, the first contemplative (in her identification with Mary of Bethany), and, finally, as the first witness to the Resurrection, apostola apostolorum -- the Apostle to the Apostles. In the Middle Ages, Mary Magdalene also came to be identified with with the woman taken in adultery (John 8:1-11), and with the Samaritan woman living, without benefit of marriage, with her sixth “husband” (John 4:1-42).

If we read the Gospels as a linear narrative, then the incident in which the penitent sinner anoints Christ's feet at the house of Simon the Pharisee precedes the similar incident described in John 12:1-11, in which Mary of Bethany anoints His feet at another dinner, six days before the Passover seder that precedes His arrest. It seems to me that these are meant to be two separate incidents, not two different retellings of the same one. We recognize Mary as the penitent sinner because she has performed once again her unique and beautiful act of penitence and reverence.

Devotion to the Magdalene was strong in the Middle Ages, when popuar belief held that, after her conversion, she had been miraculously restored to the state of virinity. A thirteenth-century calendarium refers to her as “Magdalene virginis,” and a sermon by a Syrian monk from the eleventh century calls her “Our Lady Magdalene." Saint Godric, a twelfth-century English hermit, received a vision in which the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene appeared to him together and taught him a song, a striking example of two saints who seem in our time to possess distinctly different, almost opposing, ethoi, mystically joined together in the practice of music.

I used to wonder about the passage in Luke in which Christ declares to Simon: "Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much." Did He mean, I wondered, that He forgave her because she showed her love for and faith in Him so dramatically? However, I believe now that somehow she knew, in a motion of the heart, that she was already forgiven; and that therefore she gathered up her ointment and rushed off to Simon's house in an outpouring of love.

Saint Mary Magdalene, Sinner and Bride

One of the topics of my recently-defended dissertation is the patristic concept of the flux between sin and grace in the human soul (what this has to do with music is best left for another post). Some of the Fathers of the Church symbolized this flux with a hermeneutical pairing of Saint Mary Magdalene with the Mother of God.

The Church began to identify with the Virgin Mary in the twelfth century, but remnants of an earlier tradition remained, a tradition that looked to Saint Mary Magdalene, the penitent sinner, as its herald. An example of this tradition can be found in the commentary Origen (above) wrote on the Song of Songs in the third century. In a detalied exegesis of verses 1:5-14, in which he expounds virtuosically on the dichotomy of light and dark, Origen further suggests the similarity of the Bride to Mary Magdalene:

I am beautiful through penitence and faith . . . she who now says "I am black and beautiful" has not remained in her blackness . . . She became black . . . because she went down, but once she begins to come up . . . she will shine with the enveloping radiance of light . . .

[The bride] has repented of her sins; beauty is the gift conversion has bestowed; that is the reason that she is hymned as beautiful.

Origen thus conflates both the individual soul and the Church with, simultaneously, the sinful woman of Luke 7:36-50 and the bride of Christ -- a bride in need of purification, "black by reason of her sinfulness but comely . . . because of her repentance [and] because she was loved by Christ." The bride's darkness, as Origen construes it, is not a physical trait but a spiritual one, for, though she is penitent, she is not yet wholly purified from her sin.

What's more, according to medieval legend, the Magdalene was herself a bride -- the bride at the wedding at Cana where Christ performed his first miracle (John 2:1-11); and her bridegroom was none other than Saint John the Evangelist, who, upon witnessing the apotheosis of Christ's divinity in the miracle of the wine, abandoned his bride to become the Beloved Disciple. In anger, Mary Magdalene embarked upon a life of carnality, until, encountering Christ herself, she was called to conversion, and eventually, through years of penance, rose from the depths of sin to the height of heavenly glory.

As Pope Paul VI noted in Lumen Gentium, the Church, "clasping sinners to her bosom, [is] at once holy and always in need of purification, [and] follows constantly the path of penance and conversion."

And as Bob Dylan says in the song "Ring Them Bells": "Time is running backwards, and so is the Bride."

During this season of Advent, when we, in all senses, step outside of ordinary time, may we reflect on these mysteries and seek to be truly converted ourselves.

Saint Mary Magdalene, Penitent

Today is the feast day of Saint Mary Magdalene, apostle and penitent. She is mentioned by name in all the gospels, and is identified as the woman from whom Christ cast seven demons. In the sixth century, however, Pope Saint Gregory the Great conflated Mary of Magdala with the nameless woman who washed Christ's feet with her tears (Luke 7:36-50), and with Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus (Luke 10:38-42 and John 11), giving the Church a powerful figure of repentance and spiritual renewal: at once a reformed prostitute; one of the very few who stayed with Christ at the Crucifixion; in her identification with Mary of Bethany, the first contemplative; and, as the first witness to the Resurrection, apostola apostolorum, the Apostle to the Apostles. In the Middle Ages, Mary Magdalene came to be identified also with the Samaritan woman, living in sin with her sixth "husband," who Christ asks for a drink of water (John 4:1-42), and with the woman taken in adultery (John 8:1-11).

Nonetheless, on today, her feast day, the Common of Virgins is read. It was believed in the Middle Ages, when there was a strong popluar devotion to the Magdalene, that after her conversion her virginity had been restored; indeed, she was even called "Our Lady Magdalene." Mary Magdalene's ethos is reversal: she embodies not only the miraculous transit from great sin to great sanctity, but also the mysterious paradox of Christianity itself, whereby one state can be transformed by the grace of God into its complete opposite. As Christ says in John 16:20, "Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy."

May Saint Mary Magdalene intercede for us all.