Velvet gentleman
In early 1893, Satie started a relationship with the painter and former trapeze artist Suzanne Valadon. She kept two cats to whom she fed caviar on Fridays and described as ‘good Catholics’, as well as a goat, who ate any art she wasn’t pleased with. Satie recognised a kindred spirit and the two fell in love. He nicknamed her ‘Biqui’ and wrote a jarring, utterly unromantic, four-bar piece for her called Bonjour, Biqui, Bonjour!: three diminished chords to be played ‘very slowly’. Their relationship fell apart after six months, leaving Satie devastated. He wrote to his brother: ‘I shall have great difficulty in regaining possession of myself … She was able to take all of me.’ Another composer might have poured his feelings into a tempestuous storm of a piece; Satie wrote the infuriating Vexations, a short, creepy-sounding motif which was intended to be repeated a mind-numbing 840 times. The piece wasn’t performed in full until 1963, when John Cage managed it with a relay team of 11 pianists: it took 18 and a half hours. The relationship with Valadon was, as far as we know, the last sexual relationship Satie had.
His despondency slowed down his rate of production. For at least two years, his friend Augustin Grass-Mick recalled, he ‘did absolutely nothing at all’. He came into some money in 1895, and immediately blew almost all of it on seven identical chestnut-coloured corduroy suits with matching hats, acquiring the nickname of ‘velvet gentleman’ from his friends. A couple of months later he was broke again. In 1897 he managed to finish a piece, the sixth Gnossienne (from gnostic? Knossos?), a series of piano pieces he’d started in 1889. It’s perhaps the most alien of the set, jerky and not exactly atonal, but of unstable tonality – one bar in one key, the next in another. But it wasn’t until he cleared out of his garret in 1898 and moved to the suburb of Arcueil-Cachan that he began to feel himself again. Walking seems to have helped. Every day he walked the ten kilometres from Arcueil to Paris, setting off in the morning with his umbrella tucked under his arm, and staggering back in the small hours. According to another friend, George Auriol, he carried a hammer in his pocket for protection as he crossed the bandit-ridden stretch between Glacière and La Santé. Friends would sometimes accompany him and Satie would entertain them with his knowledge of Parisian history. Pierre-Daniel Templier, his first biographer, painted a charming picture of Satie on the move: ‘When talking he would stop, bend one knee a little, adjust his pince-nez and place his fist on his hip. Then he would take off once more with small, deliberate steps.’
