Word: misia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...MISIA AND THE MUSES (212 pp.)-Misia Serf-John...
...Franz Liszt sighed as Misia Sert played the piano, "Ah, if only I could still play like that." Grieg asked her to play the Peer Gynt Suite with him. Ibsen presented her with his autographed portrait. Mallarme wrote poems to her. Verlaine read her his verse and wept. Toulouse Lautrec painted her picture, then tickled the soles of her feet with his brush. Bonnard did murals for her salon. Picasso made her godmother to his first child. Proust called her beautiful. Maillol asked her to pose for sculpture. "In you the image of immortality seems achieved," he wrote her. "There...
Whatever it is in a woman that sends poets, artists and commonplace millionaires into a swirl, Misia Sert had. She was a Polish beauty who was born in Russia, chose to live in France, and found the great love of her life with a Spaniard. Then, to make her Spaniard happy, she gave him up to a younger woman. Misia's memoirs are written in low key. sometimes with the flatness of a diary. But despite her flaws as a writer, her story gives a revealing account of life on the borderland of Bohemia in a bygone Europe...
Kiss for the Mirror. Misia made her bow in society at 15, when she was invited to a ball at the Belgian court. She wore a pale blue tulle dress with a wide sash and was staggered upon seeing herself in the huge mirror at the palace entrance: "When I realized it was really me, I rushed to the mirror and passionately kissed my own reflection in front of an army of astonished flunkeys...
...Misia was not the only one who was impressed with Misia. Before she was 16, she was married to a young Parisian man of affairs, Thadee Natanson, whom she met one evening while out with Alfred Nobel, the dynamite manufacturer, and his American mistress. After blithely spending her dowry of 300,000 francs (then $60,000) on a trousseau, Misia settled in Paris, and while Thadee concerned himself with business, she diverted herself by building homes on the Riviera, helping imprisoned anarchists and bewitching the first of a long succession of assorted geniuses...