Alphonse tipped his head and raised both eyebrows. “One hundred francs.”
“It’s yours for one hundred. Give fifty to your father and fifty to me.”
Alphonse left and came back with fifty francs.
“I’m much obliged.” Zut! There, he’d said it again. “Tell Alphonsine that I’m off to buy more paint.”
He mailed the letters at Gare Saint-Lazare and stepped out of the cool marble station into the hot sun. If he didn’t do the most difficult thing first today, it might not get done, and the loss might be inestimable. But on the way he might find a model.
In front of Au Printemps, he stopped. The big department store might provide just what he needed. What should he do if he found a woman he liked? Trot after her through the lingerie department? Say, Excuse me, I think you’re beautiful. Will you model for me? How would he know if, after one Sunday, she would come back for the next two? Trusting a stranger was risky.
He walked down the glittering avenue de l’Opéra. Plenty of high-class shops. Plenty of beautiful women buying kid gloves from Argentina and silk scarves from Milan, living prosperously off someone. Why would any one of them be enticed to give up the last summer Sundays to a stranger for a mere ten francs a day?
He hurried past the Comédie-Française and crossed the Seine. The dark dome of the Institut on the Left Bank did not give him any comfort. It was the bastion of the Académie, the Salon, the jurists, all that could still decide his fate. All that made him put one foot before the other until he came to Madame Charpentier’s hôtel particulier.
He ran through the reasons why he had to lift that lion’s-head knocker. If his Salon success the year before was in fact due to Madame Charpentier’s maneuvers for a good position for her own portrait, he owed her an apology. After she heard what he had to tell her, she might withdraw her influence. Circe was dead right about that. But if the Salon rejected it, he didn’t want it to be exhibited with the Impressionists even though not exhibiting with them would crack Gustave’s heart. It might be placed next to Degas’ second-rate disciples, and he’d be seen as losing ground. It wasn’t entirely Impressionist anyway. He needed the Salon to authenticate it as a masterpiece, and to prove that his Madame Charpentier and Her Children was the precursor of many successes. But getting it in the Salon among thousands wasn’t enough. It had to be hung prominently. Even Circe was smart enough to know that. He sounded the knocker.
The butler ushered him to the Japonaise room with the carved lions as company. If stone could move, these beasts would be devouring him by now. Madame’s commanding steps assaulted the parquet before he saw her round the corner, bosoms first, in a robe d’intérieur, her hair uncoiffed.
“Auguste, what a surprise.” Those were her words. Her eyes said something different. She did not invite him to sit down.
“I came to talk to you about Circe.”
“She already has. You’ve humiliated her.”
“She brought it on herself.”
“That may be, but you’ll still have to apologize and let her pose full face.”
“I came to apologize to you, not to her. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. At first I thought she would be fine because she’s always posing. All she does is pose. Her sweetness is a pose. She is nothing more than a pose. Life is a pose, on her terms.”
“She told me you propositioned her to take off her corset.”
He slapped his forehead and turned away from her a moment. “That was no proposition. I suggested that she pose without it under her dress. You can’t tell a thing about a woman’s body with such a contraption. She couldn’t move inside that cage. She was as stiff and brittle as glass.”
Madame smiled in a maternal way. “Yes, she does have a certain grace in her bearing.”
“It’s not grace. It’s rigidity. As rigid in her body as in her mind. I couldn’t get her to stay in the position I wanted for more than five minutes at a time. It was driving me crazy.”
“Did you like her dress? I was with her at the couturier’s.”
“I have no complaints about the dress. It was gorgeous. She’s gorgeous, but it’s her mouth.”
“I think she has a very pretty mouth.”
“Yes, but pretty is as pretty does. And what she wants, she wants, no matter what I want. Her favorite words are, ‘I insist.’”
Madame’s heavy, shapeless eyebrows met in a scowl. She was not won over. If he went on, she might stop inviting him to her soirées, and there would go the portrait commissions of her friends. His words here would have consequences.
“Between painter and model there has to be a oneness to their endeavor. With Circe, that will never happen. She’s all for herself. She’s perverse in that way.”
Madame Charpentier tapped her tooth with her fingernail. “What if I spoke to her? I think she’ll listen to me.”
“Too late. I’ve already scraped her off the canvas.”
“You can scrape her back on, can’t you?”
“She’s already set me back four weeks. I’m out of time and out of patience. If you hadn’t forced her on me, I’d be a far sight better off. You’ve done me no favor, Marguerite. Didn’t you know she could be a pain in the ass? What were you thinking? Only your personal little morality campaign to get me safely married. I tell you, what you see as philandery, I see as inspiration.”
Madame crossed her arms. “Using one woman after another.”
“It’s not using them. I really love them, each in a different way. I can’t paint a beautiful painting if I don’t have a beautiful feeling about the woman in front of me. How do you think your portraits would have turned out if I didn’t care for you and your children? What I need is someone who feels at one with the endeavor and wants to do all she can to help. When a painter finds someone like that, and pretty too, he’s so grateful for her, so thrilled by what they do together, that it’s natural to want more, to ride his excitement farther by loving entry into the depths of her, and to bring her into his ecstasy. A shared passion. That’s not philandery. It’s sacrament. It’s communion.”
Her face was tight with disapproval. “If you never marry, you’ll never belong to the bourgeoisie.”
“I don’t give a damn. I just want to live well enough and to love well enough to paint what I want the rest of my life. And that doesn’t include whores in cafés like Degas’ subjects. Talk to him about morality.”
“Circe’s rich, Auguste.”
He snorted. “Rich in vanity. Stop feeding a dead mule, Marguerite.” He raised his voice. “Cécile-Louise is not the answer to my life.”
“Then find someone who is.” Her voice rose to match his.
The spasm of twitching under his eye was maddening. He pressed his fingers against it and blew out a breath. “I’m sorry. I don’t like to leave things raw. You can tell her I’m sorry, if it means anything.”
“It might.”
He moved toward the door. “One more thing. She wears Patchouli. Every tart in Montmartre wears it. Place Pigalle reeks of it. If she wants to carry out her pose as an aristocrat, she ought to refine her tastes.”
“I’ll be sure to tell her,” she said with an edge.
“Take her to a proper parfumerie on avenue de l’Opéra. If I had money to throw around, I’d buy her a bottle myself, but I can’t.”
She stepped up to him. “It’s the thought that counts.” She patted his arm and noticed that the cast was gone. “Monsieur and Madame Beloir were extremely disappointed.” When he didn’t respond, she asked, “Did Jeanne come?”
“Twice. I doubt that she’ll come a third time.”
“Hm.” Her eyebrows drew together again. “Émile Zola was here. He’s curious. Charles told him about the painting. He wants to see it. Shall I tell him he can?”
“No! Let him chew on his curiosity. Let him see what it’s like to live on that. I’m not some Sunday painter in the Bois painting for passersby to chatter about. Tell him to stay away.”
With that he left,
knowing that he may have just burned his most profitable and essential bridge. He crossed the street and kicked one of those soggy carpet rags directing the water coming out of the grating to flush the street. “Zola. Maudit soit-il!” he muttered and stormed toward the Seine, the curse vile on his tongue.
On the bridge, he looked down at the water moving. He would not be a cork pushed around in a current. A curse on pushy matrons who want to mold a man to their specifications! A curse on obstinate arrivistes with phony names longer than their diamond necklaces! A curse on ambitious actresses and their arrogant admirers! A curse on models from Île Saint-Louis to whom ten francs per sitting means only a pâtisserie at Café Riche!
It was a simple Montmartroise he wanted, like the girls who posed for Moulin de la Galette. Like Margot. Or Alphonsine. Someone with the physical qualities plus the insouciance fitting the mood of the painting. She’d have to be personable so the others would take to her quickly and that easy banter and enjoyment of each other would continue. He headed toward Montmartre.
Madame Charpentier hadn’t offered him any food this time. Any other time when he was hungry he avoided the streets with high-priced sidewalk cafés, but now he was looking. This was urgent business. On the sidewalk terrace of the elegant Café de la Paix at place de l’Opéra, a waiter carried two plates of tournedos chasseur topped with discs of foie gras, trailing the smell of the Madeira sauce, but the women he served it to were homely beyond imagining.
Some flâneurs thought that the boulevard des Italiens was the center of the world, and on it, Café Tortoni was the boulevard, with the best tables in the city. Crowded, of course. No one wanted to be inside on such a warm end-of-summer day. Surely he’d find someone here. A long-necked blonde was a possibility until he glanced at her plate and imagined he saw what Alphonsine had described as the menu here during the Siege—an entrée of terrine of giraffe. The brunette opposite her raised a forkful of stuffed donkey head to her open red lips. He cringed in horror. After that, all the women he saw looked like donkeys or giraffes. Perhaps it was his mood.
He walked several blocks. Of course it was his mood! How could he even see straight when he was boiling with resentment? That was not like him. It was not him. Out of his past came the voice of Gounod, his choir director: A singer can’t delight you with his singing unless he himself delights to sing. The same with painting. How far he had strayed from his principle of joy. He had to repair his mood before anything would come right.
He headed toward Tanguy’s shop, for more than paint. It was in that northern part of the ninth arrondissement which caught whiffs of the ether of Montmartre in acts of creative genius and kindness. He needed to inhale deeply of both.
Julien bowed when he came in the door, taking off his greasy cap and bending low, in the manner of the old school. “An honor to see you here again, my friend.” He pushed the curtain behind him aside and said into the back room, “Fionie, look who’s here.”
Madame Tanguy came out, chewing. He suspected that they were living in the back of the shop. She swallowed and said, “We thought we’d see you again soon.” She gave him a genuine smile that made him feel wonderful.
“Look what I have for you, madame.” He laid twenty-five francs on the counter, half of what he’d gotten from Alphonse.
Fionie’s eyes darted to it like a small animal’s. He could think of her as Fionie now that she’d slipped him the Prussian contraband twice, but he still used the formal vous when addressing her, to make her feel respected.
Fionie put her index finger on the louis and said, “You need more paint for that monster of a canvas, no?”
“How is it coming?” Julien asked.
“Fine if it weren’t for a pigheaded model. Fine if I can get the perspective right. Fine if I can find a quatorzième. Fine if I can suggest the spatial context. Fine if I can find a model who will make me want to finish, but right now it’s got half a dozen bare places where I’ve had to scrape.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” Julien crooned, as though speaking to a small boy who had just skinned his knee.
“Then you do need more paint,” Fionie said.
Her assumption that he would finish the thing grabbed hold of him. She was as single-minded as Circe.
“True,” he heard himself say. He named the colors, fewer this time, and Julien laid them out.
“Has Cézanne sent you any new paintings?” Auguste asked.
“Ah, he has indeed.” Julien’s mouth and wide nostrils spread wider. He waddled to the back of the shop where unframed canvases leaned against the wall. Auguste mouthed to Fionie, Prussian blue, and followed him.
“I think there are two kinds of Impressionists,” Julien said. “I call one les synthétistes, those concerned with issues of form, like Cézanne, and the other, les luministes, those concerned with issues of light and color, like Monet and Pissarro. Am I right?”
“I suppose you can look at it that way. It’s more like a continuum.”
“But where do I put you?”
“I guess I’m floating back and forth in the middle.”
“Look at this!” With all the adoration of a mother, Julien showed him a still life of apples and peaches. “It almost makes me cry, that peach among peaches, the shape of the crumpled napkin like Montagne Sainte-Victoire under snow. The angle of the table offering it to us.” He looked over the top of his spectacles at him, rapt. “The man’s a saint.”
Something of Cézanne himself was here in this shop, more than just paint on canvas. His humble striving to reach the essence as well as the form of something humble like an apple no less than something grand like a mountain, and to express in matter the spiritual relationship between that apple or that mountain and himself. The man pressed on through solitude and howling criticism, finding his ecstasy in laying his individuality on canvas after canvas.
“With a saint’s devotion,” Auguste added.
Julien nodded thoughtfully.
“When my parents took me to Notre Dame for the first time as a little boy,” Auguste said, “they showed me the saints in the stained-glass windows, and I thought that a saint must be a person with light shining through him. In a way, I still think that.”
Today, Cézanne was shining his steady light on him. In their finest moments, that was what the members of the group did for each other.
He looked back and Fionie was wrapping the tubes. Her eyes revealed a spark of trickery. She totaled the bill and smacked it down in front of him. “You would almost be paid up now if you hadn’t done that fool thing and scraped off.”
He swallowed his anguish at having to say once again, to her especially, “I’d be much obliged if you trusted me again.”
“We will. Of course we will,” Julien said.
“It’s a good thing I learned how to make a new dish,” Fionie said before he could thank them. “Fricassée de sot Julien.”
She had folded her hands as a nun would do, content.
“Delicious, I’m sure.” Since sot could mean deceived as well as foolish, he knew a tube of Prussian blue was in the package. He picked it up and asked, “Do you remember that teacher I drew with my left hand? Do you know her name?”
“Marie, or Marguerite. No. Mélisse,” Tanguy said, scratching his beard.
“It’s Hélène,” Fionie said. “Don’t trust his memory. It’s soft, just like his heart.”
“Madeleine. That was it. Madeleine,” Julien said.
Auguste stepped across the street and greeted the concierge of the girls’ school through the iron gate. “I have an inquiry for Monsieur le directeur, s’il vous plaît.”
“Who are you?” the concierge asked through a bushy white mustache stained from tobacco.
“One of your teachers is my niece.”
“Who?”
“Marie.”
“No one works here by that name.”
“I meant Madeleine. We sometimes call her Marie.”
The concierge drew his mouth to one side.
r /> “You know, Marie Madeleine, from the Bible. Her middle name is Hélène.”
The concierge flung out his arm. “Move along. I’m not paid to admit any stray voyeur to ogle our girls.”
Auguste walked away, but at the corner he turned back. “Look,” he said to the concierge, “I’m sorry I tried that ruse. I’m a painter, and once a pretty young teacher came into Tanguy’s shop across the street, and I drew a sketch of her. Medium height, dark blond hair, slim. I’d like to ask her to model. My intentions are honorable. You can ask Julien. I’ll go get him.”
He made a move to cross the street.
“No, no. Don’t bother him.” The man came to the gate with a key. “Main entrance, then turn left. The school’s still closed for the summer, but you’ll find the director in his office. Monsieur Lepage. I don’t know which teacher you mean. Go directly, and know that I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”
“Merci.”
It was stuffy inside. That girl would appreciate a few days on the river. He’d prefer to roam and see if he could find her, but he thought better of it and stepped into the office.
“Bonjour,” he said to a lady at a desk. “S’il vous plaît, might I have a word with Monsieur le directeur?
“Your name?”
“Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He doesn’t know me.”
She poked her head through an open doorway, murmured a few words, and came back. “You may go in.”
“Merci.” He felt hopeful for the first time today.
Kindly-faced with deeply wrinkled cheeks, Lepage winced as he straightened up from his desk. Auguste delivered as polite a request as he could, explaining how he had met the woman at Tanguy’s, how he’d drawn her, and how he would be much obliged if he could ask her to consider posing in a group painting.
“Absolutely not. Our teachers are ladies of honor and seriousness. It is not allowed.” The old man flicked his hand at him and bent to his work.
Auguste left, ignoring the concierge on the way out. He was losing time. He was tired and hungry and frustrated with himself for not having someone he could call upon in a pinch. No one could help him do this. He had to do it himself. It felt cheap and unwholesome to be on the prowl like this. He wanted a wholesome girl, not some rummy who looked as though the ten-franc model’s fee would keep her from needing a hôtel de passe. He didn’t want to eat at Nouvelle-Athènes because he might find Degas or Manet there and they’d ask how he was doing and that would make him more miserable.