In April, Hélène Arpels, a former model born in Monte Carlo to Russian parents now married to Louis Arpels, youngest of the brothers in the jewellery firm Van Cleef & Arpels, was photographed with friends at Longchamp races, all wearing stunning designer outfits. A month later Hélène was snapped at the supremely smart Hippodrome de Chantilly in a dress by Maggy Rouff, a designer intensely proud of her royal clientele, and a white hat by Reboux, the house that had created Wallis Simpson’s wedding-day halo hat two years before.
Since the death in 1938 of Alfred Van Cleef, the family jewellery business had been run by his daughter Renée Puissant, a young widow. Renée had been briefly married to Emile Puissant, a racing driver, whom she met through her mother, Esther, his nurse during the First World War. When Emile was killed in a car crash in 1926, the administration of the firm passed to Renée.
Just as Parisian couture was flourishing, so was high art. That July, serious music-lovers travelled to Bayreuth, the town dedicated to the performance of Wagner operas, to admire the first French woman ever to sing Isolde there. Performing this role was considered a huge triumph for the Parisian-born Germaine Lubin, who seemed to have reached the pinnacle of her career. Wagnerian heroines were invariably German, and the French were proud of her achievement. Germaine Lubin had been educated at the Collège Sévigné, a well-known private girls’ school in Paris founded in 1880, intending to train as a doctor like her father. But she was persuaded to study singing instead at the Paris Conservatoire where Gabriel Fauré, deeply impressed, encouraged her. Her fine voice as well as her statuesque beauty ensured an early success singing roles from operas by Strauss as well as by lesser-known French composers. But, since 1930, she had found a niche tackling most of the great Wagnerian roles including Sieglinde in Die Walküre, Elsa in Lohengrin, Brünnhilde in the Ring Cycle and Kundry in Parsifal, and it was for these that she was renowned.
Although married in 1913 to the French poet Paul Géraldy, with whom three years later she had a son, the marriage was not a success and came to an end in 1926. Lubin was always surrounded by a posse of male admirers, including Marshal Philippe Pétain, whom she first met in 1918 when he was at the height of his fame as the hero of Verdun. A soldier famous for his womanizing, he was immediately smitten and even proposed marriage to Lubin though she was not free.* Instead, the pair conducted a warm correspondence and remained friends until Pétain’s death in 1951. But Lubin was always less popular with female colleagues such as the Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence, another Wagnerian, who found the Parisienne arrogant and overrated.
‘War between me and Lubin was on,’ Lawrence wrote in her memoirs, describing a moment of upstaging when the pair took their bows at the end of a performance of Lohengrin in 1933, in which Lawrence sang the role of Ortrud. ‘Lubin refused to shake my hand when I extended it to her and, being more practised than I in the tricks of the opera trade, she was able to edge herself in front of me and behave as if all the cheering was for her.’?
At Bayreuth, Lubin established friendships with several members of the Wagner family and was even complimented by Hitler himself (a photograph of the pair together would eventually seal her fate) when he told her she was the finest Isolde that he had heard. Lubin hoped to follow up her triumph by taking the role to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, having been recommended to the Met’s management by the Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad. However, she could not travel during the war and was never to sing in the United States.