“I’ll be quiet again soon, but I want to tell you,” Angèle said. “I saw a newfangled kind of velocipede with three wheels in Jardin du Luxembourg.”
“Auguste owns one,” Alphonse said eagerly. “It’s right here.”
“You’ve been holding out on me? I’ll pose free today for a ride.”
Had she forgotten that he’d given her forty francs? “It’s broken,” he said to close the matter.
“A crying shame, that,” she said.
“Besides,” Auguste said, “women shouldn’t muddle around doing mechanical things.”
“You think I care a fig?”
“I can give it a temporary fix,” Alphonse offered.
“I understand it can give a woman quite a tickle.”
“You won’t be able to ride it in a dress,” said Auguste.
Alphonsine piped up, “I’ll lend you my swimming costume.”
Angèle tempted him in a singsong voice. “I’ll pose free on Sunday too.”
“Watch out, Auguste,” Gustave said. “She knows right where to get a man.”
Angèle tipped up her chin. “Hang me if I don’t.”
“All right. You’ll get your ride.”
During their break for lunch, Alphonse went into the boathouse. They heard clanking on metal, some wrestling and banging, and then swearing.
Alphonse came back wiping grease from his hands. “It’ll do for a trial run.”
“Not until I have my fill of you today,” Auguste said, and started painting Angèle’s dress. A nest of tulle bordered her neckline like froth spilling over her blue flannel. If only he could take her dress all the way today, even to the red edging on the tulle.
“I’ll have you know, Angèle, that I’m using one of the most expensive and cherished pigments for your dress. Ultramarine blue made from the precious stone lapis lazuli. In the Renaissance, it was used exclusively for the Virgin.”
“And it’s had a coming down ever since,” she said.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Antonio said.
“Nor I. Mixed with cobalt and rose madder, it makes a gorgeous violet shadow on your skirt.”
He was doing too much guessing of hues and sizes in the areas where today’s figures touched the models not present, but eventually he got Angèle’s right hand close to Gustave’s, and her left curling around the empty chair barely touching Antonio’s thumb. He liked the way she encircled Gustave, and Antonio encircled both of them.
A large cloud rolled overhead, darkening the terrace. He had to quit.
“You can have your ride now, but for God’s sake be careful,” Auguste said.
Alphonse thumped down the stairs, and Alphonsine crooked her finger, signaling Angèle to follow her down the hallway to her room.
Auguste saw in his mind’s eye the painting of Angèle as it would be when he’d be finished. “The glint in her eyes, the tilt of her head, and the lean of her body tell you all you need to know about her to love her.”
“I can’t keep my eyes off her,” Antonio murmured.
“Ha! You must be becoming an Impressionist!”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you must have had some enjoyable impressions during the posing.” Trying for a deadpan look, he mimicked Antonio’s pose gazing down.
“As any Frenchman would,” Antonio said.
Auguste worked at cleaning his brushes—even that a joy—until he heard the women chattering in the hallway.
Angèle leapt onto the terrace, arms out, in Alphonsine’s red-and-white-striped blouse and blue bloomers. Bare arms, bare calves, bare feet.
Antonio let out a long whistle. “Madre di Dio! Che bella!”
Auguste chuckled as much at Antonio as at Angèle.
“Skimpy enough to make me cut capers, oui?” She kicked her heel out to the side as in the chahut.
“You need shoes,” Auguste said. “I won’t let you go without shoes.”
“Voilà!” Alphonsine held up her canvas espadrilles she used for boating.
Downstairs, Alphonse wheeled out the cycle, steam hissing already.
Angèle turned to Alphonsine. “Will you stand me some redfire before I mount that thing?”
Alphonsine retreated to the kitchen.
Alphonse and Auguste told her the parts of the steam-cycle she shouldn’t touch, where to put her hands and feet and where to sit.
“How do I get up there?”
Alphonse lifted her onto the seat as if she were as light as a cat. She squealed in delight. Alphonsine handed her a glass of brandy.
“Upsee down.” She threw back her head and quaffed it in one gulp. “How do I make it go?”
Alphonse released the brake lever and the cycle lurched forward. “Ooh, it vibrates!” She kicked her legs out, shapely legs tapering to dainty ankles.
“If anything goes wrong, pull this lever as hard as you can. Ready?”
She blew noisy kisses over her shoulder. “In case I never come back.”
Alphonse cracked open the valve and trotted alongside with his arms out ready to catch her.
“Don’t let her stand up,” Auguste called after them.
Mame barked at the sendoff, and Gustave had to restrain her.
Alphonsine brought out a platter of sliced sausages, Roquefort, a baguette, and red wine. Angèle and Alphonse were gone a long time, longer than it would take to ride to the upstream tip of the island and back.
Antonio ground his heel into the gravel. “I should have gone with them.”
“Don’t worry,” Alphonsine said. “My brother will take care of her.”
“Gustave, will you sail up to the point and see if they need help?” Antonio asked.
“No. Leave them be,” Gustave said.
Eventually they heard the rhythmic scraping of a front wheel against the frame and Angèle’s whoop of triumph. Mame barked at their approach.
“What a bone-rattler that thing is! It shook the eggs right out of me.” Alphonse helped her down. She winked at him, flushed, her hair unpinned and loose. “Not to worry. There’s plenty more berries in the basket.”
“She did fine,” Alphonse said, out of breath. “She took to it like a jockey. I had to run to keep up.”
“I’ll bet you did.” Auguste folded his left arm over his cast.
“Natural balance, she has.”
“Hm, no doubt.”
“And so quick to respond.”
“Indeed, very responsive.”
Alphonse was more talkative than he’d ever seen him. Alphonsine stared at her brother in disbelief. As for Antonio, he was notably silent, his eyebrows pinched together.
“A few more adjustments and it will be as good as new,” Alphonse said.
Auguste would never have guessed that Alphonse could wear an expression of rapture, but he definitely did now. Good for him, then.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Paris Encore
Auguste stepped out of Dr. Guilbert’s office on rue Notre Dame de Lorette and swung both his arms. By God, that felt fine and free. He straightened and bent his elbow to get rid of the stiffness. Having his arm again was like a chance meeting with an old friend after a long absence, both of them so happy in the encounter that they couldn’t stop looking at each other. An urge to work pulsed down his arm to his fingertips. He would take some small canvases back to Chatou.
What should he do next? Walk around Paris waving at people with his right arm like a perfect idiot? Hail a hackney cab just so he could show off how he could stretch out his arm? Take a train to Louveciennes to show his mother? No. He would do that tomorrow. Today he needed to get Charles Ephrussi.
He passed the church where so many young working girls lived. Lorettes, they were called, as if the proximity of Notre Dame de Lorette lent them a dose of morality. The truth was that the church was named after the lorettes of the last century, women kept by wealthy aristocrats in the quarter. One lorette was coming toward him now, her saucy rose-colored hat and veil lending its
color to her cheeks. She was carrying two hatboxes as though she were delivering them for a milliner. It was only a ruse. The blithe way she swung the empty paper drums gave her away. So did her deft, practiced motion of lifting her skirt higher than necessary to step onto the curb. A middling prostitute. He could put his right arm around her waist as she passed. Was that philandering? No. He chuckled to himself. It was only celebrating the use of his arm again.
He turned onto rue Lafitte, street of the big banks, and the view changed as he headed toward boulevard Haussmann—from the nubile petits rats of the Opéra slinging their ribboned toe shoes over their thin shoulders, to illiterate lorettes hurrying to dressmakers’ lofts to earn their three francs a day, to their tailor-made clients in silk shantung, cinched-in women careful how they stepped out of carriages, the backs of their skirts layered with flounces, their rings flashing on their way to the private jewelry salons on rue de la Paix. Heavens, how he loved the women of Paris!
It was partially his parents’ doing. If his father hadn’t been a tailor and his mother a dressmaker, he wouldn’t have learned to pay as much attention to fashion and fabric. His earliest memory was sitting on the floor of the parlor, which served as the fitting room, and learning the names of colors from the dresses that women had his mother make. It would have been a shame if he hadn’t had that start. A man unconscious of such things was depriving himself of the erotic force of color, texture, and even the sound of taffeta rustling—all those delights a man must content himself with until the fabric falls to the floor in a heap around two bare legs. He felt incapable of ever satisfying himself with enough beautiful women—both painting them and touching them. It wasn’t lechery. It was devotion. How could he squeeze his broad appreciation into one woman acceptable to Madame Charpentier and her portrait-buying friends?
On rue Favart alongside the Opéra Comique, a woman in an emerald green dress coming toward him cast a quick look backward at Ephrussi’s window across the courtyard and turned in at the stage door. Now, wasn’t that curious?
He slowed his pace as he approached the gray-shuttered building that housed the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. A seed of doubt lodged in his throat. Charles hadn’t bought anything from him for more than a year and it wasn’t because his bank was doing poorly. It was symptomatic of what he knew to be true, namely that his buyers were seeking him out less. As yet, the slide was publicly imperceptible, but he feared it would soon be talked about in the cafés. Charles had been good about introducing him to upper-class buyers like the banker Louis Cahen d’Anvers, who had commissioned a portrait of his wife, the Comtesse Cahen d’Anvers, who also happened to be Ephrussi’s mistress. Charles had a gift for convincing men that they would make a handsome profit by investing in Impressionist paintings. His aesthetic preferences were always governed by an eye to profit. If Charles thought the financial gain might shrink, would his willingness to put him in touch with wealthy clients dry up?
The Chatou painting had to reverse the slide. It was for that reason exactly that he needed Charles in top hat standing in the center rear—Charles, the Renaissance scholar, art collector, financier, man of fashion, flâneur of high culture, and above all, principal contributor to the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Then Paris would have to take notice.
Even Ephrussi’s outer office was redolent with sandalwood incense, the exotic aroma of his past as the heir of a corn-exporting dynasty in Odessa. Although Japanese prints adorned the anteroom, Auguste knew he’d find paintings by his friends in Ephrussi’s private office. Some by Degas, at least. Whether Edgar was still a friend remained in doubt.
Jules Laforgue in his shirtsleeves was sitting at the desk behind stacks of manuscript pages puffing on his Dutch porcelain pipe. “No cast?”
“I’ve cast it in the rubbish.” He made a flamboyant gesture of tossing it aside.
“Formidable! If you want to see Charles, he’s working at home today.”
“Ah, bien. What are you working on?”
“An index to his book on Dürer.”
“As his personal secretary?”
“As his disciple, or so he fancies me. If it weren’t me, it would be someone else. His sense of identity needs that.”
“Indeed. I won’t interrupt. Rue Monceau, is it?”
“Yes, number seventeen. One more thing. I want you to know that you’re doing me a favor by letting me see the process.”
“The struggle to come, you mean.”
A manservant in knee breeches and white hose answered Ephrussi’s door and ushered him past Monet’s La Grenouillère to Monsieur’s study. Thank God Gustave didn’t go in for such costuming of hired help.
Charles, in a red silk Chinese kimono, stood up behind his desk. “Auguste! Welcome! Jules said you were staying out in the country.”
“I am. At Chatou. For my new painting, which is why I’ve come to see you.”
“And I’ve wanted to see you too, to advise you to be cautious.”
“About my arm? It’s fine. See?” He picked up a pen from the marble stand on the desk, stretched out his arm, and pretended to write in the air.
Charles’s cheeks lifted in a brief, indulgent smile. “Impressive, but that’s not what I meant.”
Auguste replaced the pen next to a paperweight of an iridescent blue-winged insect caught in amber. The human condition, Pierre would call it.
“Tea?” Charles asked. “It’s Petrushka. Steeped and ready.”
Auguste nodded and Charles poured two glasses from the spigot of a silver samovar on a carved rosewood table. Behind it was an awful mythological fantasy framed in heavy gold baroque. By Moreau, no doubt. On the opposite wall, a series of pastels, Degas’ ballerinas exercising at the barre.
And between two windows, his own painting of Lise Tréhot. Seeing it after so long sucked the breath out of him. How much coaxing she’d needed to pose nude. He’d kept the painting for years as a remembrance of joyous love until need had forced him to sell it. Everywhere he went lately he ran smack up against his past. Such a tumble of remembrances. Pierre would call them portents.
Charles held up a sugar cube in silver tongs. “One cube or two?”
“Two.”
He dropped them into the glasses in silver filigree holders and brought one on a tray. Auguste took it in his right hand. The glass chattered in the holder. He moved it to his left. It still chattered. He set it down.
“Kousmichoff is the purveyor, by appointment to the Tzars. I have it sent from St. Petersburg. It’s Ceylon tea with cardamon, cloves, almonds, and rose. You’ll find it quite delightful.”
Auguste managed to get it to his lips without catastrophe, but it burned his tongue.
Charles gestured toward two armchairs upholstered in pale yellow brocade, and they sat. Auguste crossed his legs.
“You know, don’t you, that Degas has no patience with you and Claude and Alfred Sisley returning to the Salon?”
“Ah, the self-proclaimed spokesman declaims in holier-than-thou tones.”
“Such a large painting as your Déjeuner des canotiers is surely a signal that it’s intended as a Salon work.”
“Jules told you about it?”
Charles nodded. “A dozen people?”
“Thirteen at the moment. That’s why I came to see you.”
Ephrussi’s face turned serious. “Thirteen won’t stand a chance with the Catholics on the Salon jury.”
“What’s worse, they’re around a table after a meal,” Auguste said. “It will probably be unsalable anywhere unless I get a quatorzième.”
“It will be mocked in a cartoon. The press will be licking their chops.”
“I know, I know. Again, I’m telling you that’s why I’m here, to ask you to be in it.”
“Me?” Charles put up his hand in front of his face. “No, not me. You need another, though, or otherwise scrub one person out.”
“It would be better to have you. You’ll lend authority to it.”
“Jules says it’s as large as your
Bal au Moulin de la Galette.”
“It’s intended as a tour de force. It’s intended—”
“For the Salon, which you know I approve of, but—”
“Yes, for the Salon. And I don’t want to just figure honorably, as they say in horse racing. I want to blow the whole stuffy Salon apart with an assimilation of styles they won’t dare deny is genius.” He had raised his voice. Now he held up his index finger and spoke slowly and deliberately. “I want to prove that one can exhibit there and produce original paintings of la vie moderne.” He crossed his legs the other way.
“But you must be aware that if you do a painting this large, word will get around. It signals another Salon entry just when Edgar is on the verge of saying good riddance to you and to Claude and Alfred if you submit there.”
“So they’ll be excluded by Degas because I’m submitting to the Salon? That’s monstrous! Diabolical!” He shifted in his chair. “He’s bluffing.”
“Not so. He intends to fill your spots with his young Realists.”
“Like Raffaëlli, in love with ugliness. Under his brush, even the grass is sordid.”
“At the moment Degas is getting more favorable critical press than the rest of you combined, so it would behoove you to be cautious about any break with him. You could be criticized all the more.”
“Are you trying to talk me out of this painting altogether?”
“No. I just want—”
“If I were criticized for selling out to easy portraits, I’d deserve the censure. But I only want to do what seems to me good work, regardless of its destiny, and a large painting is what I can do now, when the light is right and I have no commissions in Paris.”