Beginning of the Bohemian Period: 1887–89

The two years that followed Achille's return to Paris remain among the most difficult to retrace in his life. With practically no correspondence and very few accounts available to us, there is all the more reason to collate carefully what information we do have. The reunions with Marie were happy at first, and Achille confessed in a letter to Hebert that he had “genuine reasons to be happy.” The lovers had no doubt found a meeting place, and he no longer felt the need to be the “begging dog,” pleading for a tryst, as when he had come back in secret from Rome. But all this could not last very long. Marguerite Vasnier, Marie's daughter, declared that “the closeness we had in the past was no longer the same. We had moved, made new acquaintances. With his unsociable and moody nature, stuck in his ways, he no longer felt at ease.” Achille tried to resume the lessons that he had begun to give Marguerite, but this quickly failed because he was impatient and did not know how to meet his student at her level. As we have seen, since 1885 (when Achille departed for Rome), the Vasniers no longer maintained the same summer routines. That year, they spent their vacation in Dieppe (at Le Bas-Fort-Blanc) at the chalet of the painter Armand Constant Melicourt-Lefebvre. At that time, high-society Parisians often visited Dieppe; Countess Greffulhe owned a villa there, where Gabriel Faure spent some time that same summer. And it was there that, one night, the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche was said to have seen Achille climbing a rope ladder, with Marie at the window! The following year, again at Dieppe, Gustave Popelin loaned his bachelor apartment to Achille, who lifted the bedroom curtain in order to see Marie arriving and later made some rather cynical comments about the scene. The jealousy that had tormented the young composer so much in Rome had certainly dulled, and he had grown weary of taking precautions so as not to compromise his mistress. They were already old lovers, and Marie, herself now forty years old, had put on some weight and was much less attractive. When Achille dedicated his Ariettes to her in 1888, he wrote simply: “To Mme Vasnier, in grateful homage.”