Alice B. Toklas was born in San Francisco, California. Her ancestors included a pioneer who came to California in 1849 and a colonel for the French conqueror Napoleon. However, Toklas had a more pacific temperament, preferring art, music, and domestic pursuits. As a girl, she admired the novelist Henry James and even wrote to him, saying that she wanted to dramatize his novel The Awkward Age. Until the age of 20, Toklas was a serious music practitioner; however, the death of her mother caused her to realize that the piano was not her true passion. Similarly, while Toklas felt her young adult life in San Francisco was “reasonably full,” she was “not very ardent in it” (3).

Her life changed course permanently after the San Francisco fire, when Gertrude Stein’s elder brother Leo and his wife returned to the city from Paris. Toklas was transfixed by the three Matisse paintings Mrs. Stein had brought and her stories of Paris. She told her father she was going to go to Paris. When Toklas met Gertrude Stein there, she was impressed by her voice and her “genius” and began to form her new life around it (4).

Toklas describes her initial encounters with Stein and the artists who surrounded her. She remembers coming to Stein’s place, 27 rue de Fleurus, for dinner. Before dinner, Stein took Toklas to an atelier where she saw paintings so intimidatingly strange that she could not bear to look at them. Stein was so used to such a response that she remained nonchalant. The paintings, which in the 1900s were illuminated by gaslights, included the work of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Entry to the atelier was open, as long as guests could provide the name of the person who had invited them.

Toklas met Picasso and his then sweetheart Fernande Olivier and was immediately impressed by Picasso’s powers of observation. Meanwhile, Picasso painted a portrait of Stein and claimed that Stein would increasingly grow to look like the picture.

Toklas imagined that she would write a book titled “The wives of geniuses I have sat with” (12), reflecting her role of repeatedly entertaining the consorts of the great men who visited Stein. In the early years, Toklas spent much time with Fernande, who was beautiful but shallow. Looking forward in time, Toklas insists that Picasso and Stein continued to regard each other with mutual tenderness, despite the changes in their relationship.

After the first dinner at Stein’s, Toklas and a friend went to the salon indépendent, which hosted the avant-garde art that had been rejected by the official academy and which was prone to scandals due to the daringness of the works exhibited. The salon occupied a temporary building at that time and was later replaced by the Grand Palais. At the event, Stein asked Toklas and her friend to take French lessons to help Fernande, who had separated from Picasso. Meanwhile, Toklas was amazed at the number of men looking at the pictures because in San Francisco, art was considered a female pastime.

About 10 days later, Toklas and Stein went to Montmartre. Toklas remembers going to Picasso’s studio and seeing him in his monkey painter’s overalls—so called because his unfastened belt hung down his back like a monkey’s tail. Toklas found Picasso’s pictures strange but also believed they conveyed powerful feelings of beauty, pain, and entrapment. Picasso remarked that the process of making avant-garde works was so complex that they were always ugly, but after a while, the public grows accustomed to them as new forms of beauty. Picasso liked Toklas so much that he gave her a drawing.

Toklas closes the chapter by stating that she and Stein, two Americans, chanced to be at the center of an art movement the world knew nothing about.