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was chafing against their relationship, recalling the deliberately provocative way the young Vaslav had behaved towards his father before he left Eleonora.
    Bronia hoped a romance might blossom between Vaslav and Maria Piltz, whom they had known since schooldays and who was replacing her as the Chosen Maiden; she thought Piltz was ‘a little in love with him ’. Piltz told an interviewer in 1968 that Vaslav had asked her to come with him for a ride through Paris fifty-five years earlier, but as she got into the carriage someone pulled her from behind. It was Diaghilev: ‘Get out . You’re not going anywhere with him.’ She remembered Vatsafondly. ‘He was so nice! But he was strange … He used to joke around with me. Once I asked him, “What do you love best in the world?” He laughed and replied, “Insects and parrots.”’
    Vasily Zuikov was still shadowing Nijinsky on Diaghilev’s instructions. When he and Rambert were working together, Zuikov would interrupt every few minutes to open or close the window, although Rambert recorded that ‘Nijinsky didn’t take the slightest interest in me as a woman. It never occurred to him, it never occurred to me. We were only discussing the work in hand.’ Afterwards they would go to Pasquier’s and drink hot chocolate and eat cakes. Rambert didn’t realise then that she was falling in love with Vaslav, but Eleonora noticed. Ever watchful for women trying to ensnare her son, she warned Vaslav that Rambert admired him; he assured her there was ‘no danger ’. Something else would be needed to help him break free of Diaghilev’s hold.
    Whatever his feelings for her, Rambert was enthralled by Nijinsky, as a man as well as an artist. He possessed a great feeling for literature and she found him observant, with a gift for summing people up with a choice phrase, and was drily funny. One of the most fundamental things Nijinsky’s life seems to me to have lacked was humour. Everyone around him took themselves so painfully seriously – unless the sources just conceal it (which is of course very possible) – perhaps easy laughter was yet another of the sacrifices they offered up on the altar of artistic immortality.
    Many years later, Rambert remembered watching Vaslav’s ecstatic performances when he taught the Chosen Maiden’s solo to Piltz as ‘the greatest tragic dance I have ever seen’. ‘His movements were epic . They had an incredible power and force, and Piltz’s repetition of them – which seemed to satisfy Nijinsky – seemed to me only a pale reflection of Nijinsky’s intensity.’ For Rambert, Piltz could be no more than a ‘picture-postcard of a great painting’.
    Others were less convinced. At one of the last rehearsals, Diaghilev asked Enrico Cecchetti, venerable
maître de ballet
and guardian of the old style of dance, what he thought of
Sacre
. ‘I think the whole thing has been done by four idiots,’ Cecchetti replied. ‘First, Monsieur Stravinsky,who wrote the music. Second, Monsieur Roerich, who designed the scenery and costumes. Third, Monsieur Nijinsky, who composed the dances. Fourth, Monsieur Diaghilev, who wasted money on it.’ Diaghilev just laughed.
    The people who crowded into the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on the unseasonably warm evening of 29 May 1913 (the anniversary of
Faune
’s premiere) were a mixture of types – as Cocteau would put it, ‘the thousand varieties of snobbism , super-snobbism, anti-snobbism’. Many were bejewelled ladies from the highest ranks of society, accompanied by men in white tie, the grand music-lovers who had been Diaghilev’s earliest supporters in Paris. Others were younger, intellectual and rebellious – refusing to wear stiff collars and tailcoats (which anyway they could not afford) as a mark of their rejection of the traditional and outdated.