When I met Marcel Duchamp for the first time, I had just turned twenty-four. No, but I was good at sport. There were two things that pleaded in my favour: I had had an unhappy love affair when I was an adolescent, and I was leading an idle existence with no idea what to do with myself.
My father wanted to untie the knot in order to marry Jeanne Montjovet—who was still Madame de Morsier—and my mother was in tears all the time, desperately trying to keep her family together and win back the husband she loved.
It was a ploy to win time, for she still hoped that this flash in the pan would fizzle out in due course. She had, however, laid down one condition: no divorce until I was married, which was tantamount to putting the thing off indefinitely, since there was no one in view and, better still, I had just given a couple of hopefuls their marching orders—they were impossible anyway.
So the atmosphere at home was tense to say the least. Everyone was looking after number one and nobody paid any attention to me while the crisis was on. What was I going to do? Get out, run away from home, find a place to live, somewhere I could breathe!
But although I was desperate to live my own life, I knew deep down that I could never throw in my lot with the first young man to come my way, especially if he turned out to be a goody-two-shoes I could never see eye to eye with.
