“Weren’t you afraid?”
“I didn’t sleep. Every sound mocked me.”
Why was he telling her this? To impress her with his bravery?
“Damp and cold crept into my bones, and in the morning, I was stiff. I couldn’t move one of my legs at all. It pained me from hip to ankle as acutely as if it had been shattered by mortar fire. I feared paralysis.”
This struck a false note. It didn’t belong in the telling.
“With the dawn warming the river by degrees, it became numb. I was able to move my arms, so I tugged at the anchor line but it was still caught. I thought I might be able to drag the thing to shore, so I set the boat crosswise to the river and pulled on the oars as hard as I could. After an hour or more of strenuous rowing, I’d made no progress. No one, not even your brother, could have.”
“So what did you do?”
“Eventually a steam tug came by and I hallooed until I was hoarse, and it came athwart, tied itself to me and dragged me and the thing ashore.” He leaned forward here, raised both eyebrows, and spoke in a low, unctuous voice. “Lady, the thing was a body. I’d been tied to a corpse all night.”
He waited for a sympathetic response.
“That’s an awful thing to tell me.”
He sat back. “I’m sorry, lady. I should have known it might be too raw for your tender sensibilities.”
“That’s not why. It didn’t really happen. That’s why. At least not to you.”
“Ma chérie, but it did.”
“Mon cher Baron, but it did not. It’s a story by Guy de Maupassant. It’s called ‘En canot.’ And it didn’t have anything in it about an aching leg.”
It irritated her that he assumed she didn’t read literature.
His shoulders sagged, and his face reddened. “I’m sorry, lady. I misreported myself.” His whole demeanor became troubled.
She guessed then why he had told a borrowed story as his own. Not to impress her. It was a substitute for his own. The mortar shell. The truth still too sharp and too personal to reveal, but the need to tell still aching. She understood all about needing to tell something. She felt a wave of empathy for him.
“That’s all right,” she said.
“You’ve got to admit that it’s a good story,” he said.
“Not as good as some of his others. I read everything he writes, and everything else he tells me to.”
“Do you know him?”
“Of course. He stays here sometimes. Alphonse takes care of his boats.”
“So do I know him. We go about together in Paris.”
They passed the place where she’d found the two bodies after the flood. She had made Alphonse promise not to tell Guy because she feared he would use it in a story and make the couple appear foolish and shallow. She wouldn’t tell Raoul because he might tell Guy. Telling him would be triumphant of her, but it was such a private thing.
“That’s not to say there aren’t bodies in the river,” she said. “You know the big dredger that shoots up sand through a chute onto a hill to be carted away? All sorts of things are flung out too. I’ve watched carriage wheels, trunks, rudders, goats thrown up. Once I saw what looked like a mud-covered dog, but it wasn’t. It was a boy.”
He looked abashed, as if he knew that hers was the true story, which it was, and his had been plundered cheaply. But hers of the boy was a substitute too.
“I’m sorry I lied,” he murmured.
This man at the oars, sorry. This man who limped, wearing a fine bowler, who had tried to entertain her, had been trying all afternoon, in good humor, calling her “lady,” this man who had cheerfully turned the way Auguste wanted even though that meant no one would be able to identify him in the painting.
“That’s all right. I like the way you told it. In your personal way.”
He wore his melon just right, not on the back of his head. There had been that man who came into the shop wanting a melon and she advised him how to wear it. And just before him, that moment of cold horror when, after the Siege, the surrender, the Commune, they told her—the two army officers with serious faces, their eyes darting to the display of umbrellas on that gray day, and she had asked if she could help them find something, though she knew all along. Otherwise Louis would have been home by then. He would have wasted no time coming back to her. It rained that afternoon—better if they had come for umbrellas—not a hard rain, just the slow, fine, interminable drip of tears.
As the officers left, their message delivered, the door still open, that customer had come in wanting not just any bowler, but a French melon. Thousands of Communards in Montmartre not even buried yet, and he wanted a melon. He must have been a Versaillais official. They’re frightfully dear now, she had said. All English imports. She spent a long time advising him the way she remembered Louis doing with customers. It was so dreadfully important to her that he would be satisfied. And he was, and left the shop smiling, and then she was alone.
“Shall we go back now, and have a brandy with the others?” Raoul asked.
“My father does have some Menuet Hors d’Age. I know where he keeps it in the cellar. He won’t miss a glass.” She pulled the right steering cord so that the boat made a wide loop.
“It is a beautiful afternoon, isn’t it?” All the oiliness had left his voice.
“The river flowing calmly, a light breeze, just enough to rustle the leaves, birds chirping in the branches.”
She hoped he would take her smile to be one of understanding. “But we did have luck in fishing,” she said softly.
After everyone left, she and Auguste went up to the narrow balcony that wrapped around the building, and watched the sky on both sides of the island play out its tribute to the day. Turquoise spread with wisps of rosy chiffon blushed the river with a lighter rose.
“La vie en rose,” she murmured.
Auguste kept tapping the railing with his fingernails.
“What’s the matter?”
“Gustave paid for everyone’s meal today.”
“That’s because he saw the day as an idea.”
“What idea?”
“Friendship. Collaboration. Nous.”
One corner of his mouth turned up. He was never one for big smiles.
“Did you enjoy the company of our titled buccaneer?” he asked.
“Yes. He tried to impress me with a story, and he did, but not in the way he had intended.”
“Did he tell you about himself?”
“Not directly. Would you mind if I asked how he got his limp?”
“He was wounded in battle twice,” Auguste said. “As a young recruit in the Crimea and again at the Battle of Reichshoffen. He was a cavalry officer by then. He dragged himself on his elbows through Prussian lines. At a field hospital in Alsace, some army surgeon threatened to amputate, but he screamed bloody murder and walked out with only a cane, shouting, ‘I have more life to live.’”
“Does it still pain him?”
“He won’t talk about it.”
That might mean that it did. And yet he danced the chahut last Sunday, overcoming pain with joy.
Too moved to speak, she could only watch the rose sky deepening.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
School for Wives
Sunday morning again. The applause last night. The slippery satin sheet under her. Hers at home were cotton. These had the monogram of l’Hôtel Crillon. Still feeling the delicious lassitude of having been loved nearly to death, tumbling on a high cloud, she didn’t want to move, didn’t want to breathe except in time to the rise and fall of his chest with the black curls so close to her. She ran her hand over his arm. He rolled onto his side toward her and she threaded her fingers through the springy hair.
He leapt out of bed. “We have to decide on a date.”
He reached into his coat pocket and found his small engagement calendar. She steered him clear of her rehearsals and costume fittings. They settled on the second Friday in August, less than two weeks away, at
a village outside Pontoise where they were unknown. They could get there and back to Paris in a day and no one would be the wiser, and Joseph-Paul would tell his father at the right moment that it was a fait accompli, and Monsieur Lagarde would just have to get over it in time for a grand winter wedding in Paris. After all, Joseph was doing what the old man wanted, taking his place on the Exchange even though he loathed it, so he could live out his father’s obsession of wearing a diamond lapel pin and salting away cash.
“I’ve been creeping up on the subject with my father,” Joseph-Paul said. “He still carries on about actresses.”
“What does he say?”
“‘Comédiennes have been excommunicated for appearing in certain roles. You know what that means, don’t you? If they die without absolution, their children are condemned to hell.’”
The way he told her was as though it were his opinion too.
“That was in 1815!”
“What happened to Mademoiselle de Raucour could happen again.”
“You can’t be serious, Joseph.”
“She was refused absolution—”
“Until all the players in Paris threatened to become Protestants.”
She had to do something quickly to get him to shake off his father’s declaration.
“Just imagine,” she said. “Actors and actresses going from theater to theater, gathering more members until the troupe became a mob, spouting lines from Tartuffe. From Phèdre. Imagine the mob singing arias in the streets, shouting, ‘We will never play again, or sing again unless Mademoiselle de Raucour is granted absolution! This will be the last time the streets of Paris will ring with lines from Racine or Corneille!’” She was shouting now. “‘Le Cid will become unknown. The French stage will die!’”
Joseph-Paul was laughing, so she pushed her advantage, stood up on the bed, arms pumping, and sang, “Marchons, marchons!” to spur on the mob. She thumbed her nose at the archbishop and shouted, “No more Molière! No more Racine!” She bounced to the chant until they had wrung themselves out laughing at the absurdity, laughing down the powers of social control and outmoded institutions, and declaring the reign of la vie moderne.
Out of breath, she said, “I wish I could have been one of them.”
She had won him over, and had done so in the spirit of Molière himself. He’d said to his king that the duty of comedy was to correct men by entertaining them, and she had. The issue was closed, at least for today. She bounced down onto the bed, breathing hard.
After some time of silence, he brushed her hair back from her face and took her hand in his. With only a touch of sadness but with gravity, he said, “Someday, you just might have to give up theater.”
Stunned. Her lungs empty, yet she couldn’t inhale.
Monday morning she opened her upstairs window and leaned out over Avenue Frochot. She hadn’t slept well. She had lost her edge yesterday. Lost the chance to pose for Auguste. She had been victorious once, but at a cost too great to pay each Sunday.
Some little bird sang its four-note tune over and over—tum, ta-ta, twee—the two middle notes low and quick and the last one high and long. Poor thing, that’s all he knew.
Joseph-Paul hadn’t said she had to stop performing now. It was only a warning of things to come. She picked up her script. She could memorize her lines outside as well as in. Downstairs she passed her father working out a composition on the piano, the same three bars over and over, and then a bit more, and then more, making something out of silence. She opened the wrought-iron gate to the avenue, and passed Madame Galantière’s ornamental pear tree. Molière could wait. A little walk would clear her mind from yesterday.
The shutters were open in number eight, Gustave Moreau’s reddish stone house. Peering through one of the pointed arched windows, she saw him standing before an enormous canvas on his easel.
There was Eva Gonzalès in her garden at number four, painting to Papa’s rhythm. She was surrounded by orange puffs of marigolds, and behind her, yellow honeysuckle trailed down the garden wall like a veil. “You look like a painting yourself,” Jeanne said.
“A glory of a day. I couldn’t stand to work inside.”
At the base of the crescent, near the iron gate separating avenue Frochot from rue Laval, she listened awhile to a soprano voice pouring out of Victor Massé’s window at number one, auditioning, perhaps, for a new opera. She thought how she had grown up singing the “Song of the Nightingale” from his opera The Marriage of Jeannette.
The tapping of the playwright’s writing machine made her go back to Madame Galantière’s bench in front of her ivy-covered cottage and open the script, Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme. She underlined all of Nicole’s lines. Papa played the same three bars, adding the bird’s tum, ta-ta, twee, tripping deftly up the scale. Then he switched instruments and tried it out on the violin. How dear he was, working so methodically. Avenue Frochot beat with creative life more passionately, it seemed, knowing it would soon lose its actress. By Christmas, she would be gone.
That made her grip the bench where she’d fallen in love for the first time, with Molière when she’d read her first play, and had said some of the lines aloud. It was his School for Wives, a silly play, she’d thought at the time, yet she’d loved how that old fool, Arnolfe, had gotten his just deserts for imprisoning his would-be wife, body and soul, and the girl, Agnès, had outwitted him in spite of his attempts to keep her ignorant. A simple comedy targeted at the stuffy, rigid bourgeoisie. She was only fifteen when she’d read it, and Madame had said in astonishment, “My dear, you ought to be an actress.” And three years later, she played Dorine in Tartuffe at the Comédie-Française. Audacious for one so young, the reviewers said.
She felt a pang, thinking that on this bench Madame had opened to her a future. She would have to leave this street she loved in order to live in an apartment above a grand boulevard and go to parties with stockbrokers and bankers and their boring wives.
And leave theater too? Unthinkable. Unspeakable. This would require all the artfulness of Agnès. To Joseph-Paul, esteem was the higher aim. To her, it was admiration for creation. He had to assert himself over a woman more popular and better known than he was, for the sake of esteem. She had to find a way to work around his assertions.
There was that bird again, peeping out his four notes. She tried to whistle it. It came out too breathy, but identifiable. She could whistle it in her new role at inappropriate moments. Better yet, she could try to whistle it and just blow air, even blow air in a coarse way, but concentrate so hard on it, so innocently, and screw up her face so comically. She practiced it now until she burst out laughing at herself. Yes, it did sound like a particular, unfeminine thing. She hoped no one heard it. She could get a laugh that way as Nicole, earnestly trying, only to have it sound like something unmentionable. Amusing, that one little bird could have an influence on music and theater.
“A wife in our social position needs to exhibit a certain level of decorum,” Joseph-Paul had said, sounding for all the world like the character Arnolfe delivering one of his pedantic maxims for good wives. “She should have Wednesday afternoon salons, not Wednesday afternoon rehearsals.”
And certainly not Monday morning practices of unmentionable sounds.
What about modeling? Would he try to curtail that too?
She had to plant her feet in what she knew to be her being, and learn to say no, cleverly, firmly. I love you, Joseph, I can’t live separate from you, but no. She had set a bad precedent yesterday by bending to his demands and not showing up for Auguste. She practiced a line. In all other ways I will honor you, Joseph, but not in this. I must have theater and I must have art.
She went inside, changed into her dark blue dress, and took the script to memorize on the train. In the foyer, Maman waved her arms to Papa’s music. “He hasn’t told me, but I think that will be your wedding waltz.”
Jeanne went into the music room and circled around Papa with his bow raised, waited an instant s
o she wouldn’t be impaled by it, and aimed a kiss on his temple. “I love it, Papa. It’s lovelier than birdsong.”
“I’m going out,” she told her mother, putting on her gloves.
“Black gloves on a summer day? To the theater or to lunch with Joseph-Paul?”
“To pose.” Looking in the hall mirror, she positioned her felt bonnet with the maroon feathers. “For Auguste.”
Maman’s hands flew up. “Ah, wait a minute.” She hurried into the kitchen and cut an enormous piece of cake. “Chocolate, just like he likes.” Maman grasped her wrist. “If it had been him instead of Joseph-Paul, I would have been just as happy.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Remembrance of Times Past
The still life was coming along, the bottles, the footed white compote of grapes, figs, and pears, the glasses with a sip of cassis left in some, wine in others. His table would be as rich and sparkling as the one in The Marriage Feast at Cana. Prussian blue with rose madder for the wine in bottles. A touch of cobalt with white for the lit side of the bottles and the grapes. The last of the season, Louise had said, so he had to finish them today. A change of brushes, a thick daub of white at the bottom of the empty glasses. He reveled in the gooeyness of it. Only a preliminary laying in of the whites. When these were dry and the painting was finished, he would build up another layer of them so they would protrude and catch the light and send it back brilliantly. Let them see in that the workings of his hand. If viewers saw only the things depicted and not the act of painting, they were missing half the pleasure.
Feet stomped up the stairs, fast as a drumroll.
“Auguste,” Alphonsine said. “She’s here. Mademoiselle Samary.”
He shot up and his chair tipped backward with a clatter.
She came up the stairs and Alphonsine disappeared down the hallway.
The slight opening of her lips announced, I’m here. Simply that. An expectant curtain call on a stage.