The Dancer and the Dwarf

Jane Avril was the last surviving member of the most celebrated cancan team-of Montmartre's Moulin Rouge. She was also the favorite model of Painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. From Bern came word last fortnight that Jane Avril had died in Paris, at the age of 75.

In the Moulin Rouge, to the booming of a spirited orchestra, France's bons vivants of the last century watched platoons of girls abandon themselves to the high kicking dance which offered teasing flashes of white, gartered thighs between black silk stockings and foaming whirlpools of petticoats. There, too, at a table always reserved for him, sat dwarfed, aristocratic, dipsomaniac Toulouse-Lautrec, watching, sketching, sipping.

Jane Avril was described by English Critic Arthur Symons as having "the beauty of a fallen angel; she was exotic and excitable. ..." Lautrec's biographer Gerstle Mack described her differently: "She never allowed herself to lapse into vulgarity. ... Her friends were generally writers or artists, cultivated men in whose company she felt at ease." Lautrec immortalized Avril in numerous poses: as a Moulin Rouge spectator, in conventional garb leaving the cabaret, dancing a pas seul with her skirts flung high to reveal legs of startling thinness. Lautrec's most famous poster, Le Divan Japonais, featured Avril with her flaming red hair under a large black bonnet, listening with a toppered escort to a song by the disease, Yvette Guilbert.

Born in Paris in 1868, Jane Avril was the bastard daughter of an Italian nobleman and a morbid demimondaine whose cruelty for a while sent Jane to an asylum. Avril never had a dancing lesson. She and Lautrec probably first met at the Moulin Rouge in 1889. She had a son,* and in the year Lautrec died (1901) took the boy to New York, but returned in a month to her beloved Paris.

After an unsuccessful trip to Madrid--she was still in her 305--Avril decided to retire. She married a respectable "protector," one Maurice Biais (who died in 1926), and withdrew to a quiet life in a Paris suburb. In 1933, almost destitute, widowed Jane was obliged to abandon her house, enter a Paris home for the aged. Only once again did the world hear of her. That was on May 31, 1935, when 67-year-old Avril emerged to dance once more at a Toulouse-Lautrec ball. Wrote the old lady in 1937: "In this retreat I have nothing to keep me company but my precious memories."

*Her nickname was "High Explosive," two of her colleagues': "The Glutton" and "Sewer Grating."

*Not by Lautrec.

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