Luncheon of the Boating Party

  “No, frankly, I can’t,” Auguste said.

  “Can’t you see now that all this squabbling over poster design of a single exhibition is ridiculous and small?”

  Now Durand-Ruel was looking at him, not at Auguste, and he did feel small. His aims were small, and Auguste’s were big. Durand-Ruel’s were even bigger.

  “It will be out of your hands. Let Degas have his exhibition. You come to me,” Durand-Ruel said. “Or I’ll come to you, to your studios.”

  Gustave saw it clearly now. The die was cast against his idea of a purist exhibition. He felt some vital energy drain out of him. He lost track of what they were saying in the happy memory of Auguste working with him on the 1877 exhibition—doing the publicity, writing the invitations, discussing each painting, designing an arrangement on the walls, working through the night and being surprised at the dawn of a new day. How happy he had been to provide the funds for the expenses, to feel part of something important.

  He was going to lose this, the very thing that had given his life meaning for the last half dozen years.

  “At the Maison Fournaise? A dozen figures?” he heard Durand-Ruel say. “When can I see it?”

  “When it’s finished.”

  “Not even the moment before the last brushstroke?” Durand-Ruel cajoled. That was his way of operating, jollying people into selling and buying so everyone came away feeling they’d made a good deal. Durand-Ruel was an expert at it.

  “Soon.”

  “And my arrangement?” Durand-Ruel asked.

  Gustave let Auguste answer. He suddenly didn’t care whether his own paintings sold or not.

  “I’ve never been able to know the day before what I’ll do the next day,” Auguste said.

  A good response, under the circumstances. They got out of there into the fresh air of the street.

  They stopped at Gustave’s apartment to get Mame and walked toward the Jardin des Tuileries. He could tell by Auguste’s far-off look that he was going over Durand-Ruel’s proposal, but the breakup of the group was what churned in his own mind. The sight of Durand-Ruel saying no to his proposal and yes to Degas’, without blinking, without an apology, cold as the eye of an enemy soldier, flashed in his mind. What a dour pair they were, Auguste and himself. Who would lay out his feelings first?

  “He’s a hybrid,” Gustave said. “Aesthete, businessman, politician.”

  At the garden café in the Tuileries they ordered glorias, sugared cafés with brandy, and an assortment of pastries. He stroked Mame’s back until she settled beside him.

  Auguste said, “I knew at the time I was being rooked when Murer bought that portrait of his sister, but my rent was due.”

  A heavy silence settled on them. Their pastries were served, but Gustave couldn’t eat. Auguste started with a mocha buttercream square. Eating seemed to hearten him and he spoke to the point first.

  “What bothers me is that giving an exclusive leads to speculation.”

  “It might benefit you in the long run,” Gustave said.

  “He wants a monopoly and that opens the way to lower prices. He cornered the market on the Barbizon painters. He owned their souls, in fact.”

  Gustave sipped his gloria. “A gentleman’s way to snatch the best of a painter and expect lifelong gratitude.”

  Auguste rubbed the side of his nose. “With that power, he could force collectors of taste with moderate resources out of the market and sell only to rich clients who know nothing about art.”

  “Men who buy pictures like shares of stock,” Gustave added.

  “I despise the idea that paintings are investments,” Auguste said.

  “Why not hang a Suez Canal stock certificate on the wall? A one-page slice of world shipping, bound to go up in value, and it lends prestige in the meantime. Especially if it’s framed in that Louis XV frame you coveted.”

  “What’s a painting by comparison? You can’t funnel ships through it.”

  Gustave smacked the table. “I’ve got it! We’ll go there and paint it. We could make a deal that for every ten thousand shares the investor would get a genuine Renoir of the canal if they preferred loose strokes that Zola would criticize, a Caillebotte if they liked a tighter image, that Zola would criticize.”

  They laughed at the ridiculousness of it.

  Auguste took a bite of rose-shaped chocolate duja, and then another. “Mm, try these.”

  “I visited George Petit’s gallery.” Gustave paused, not wanting to destroy Auguste’s moment of pleasure, but he thought he’d better tell him.

  “Well? Out with it.”

  “I heard him say to a gentleman that Durand-Ruel is constantly on the verge of ruin, that he only gives the impression that he’s rich.”

  “Then we shouldn’t put all of our hens in his sack. Think where we’d be if there were paintings from the group hanging in every progressive gallery in Paris. Our movement can’t be made to seem only a whim of Durand-Ruel.”

  Auguste wiped his mouth with his napkin, took a bite, and continued. “What’s to prevent him from leaving our paintings to his children if he wants to? Or what if he has more financial setbacks, and Petit or other dealers don’t, and we’ve sold our souls to Durand-Ruel? We’ll be ruined.”

  “And what’s to attract the public to a one-man gallery show compared to a large exhibition of all of us that would get press attention?” Gustave asked. “What if he sends all our work to America? What good would that do us in Paris?”

  “What if what if what if.” Auguste finished the pastries and his gloria.

  “Degas won’t organize under my terms. I won’t under his. Point-blank, tell me. If I tried to mount an Impressionist show without Degas, would you exhibit?”

  Auguste rolled a cigarette, lit it, and took a couple of puffs.

  “Come on. Don’t keep me waiting.”

  “Point-blank. No.” Auguste stubbed out the cigarette. “I don’t even know whether I’m an Impressionist anymore.”

  “Then let them have their exhibition. I don’t have the stomach to fight it.” His mind flew backward. “Degas was my mentor when I started. We used to be comrades.”

  Two women came to sit at a table near them.

  “Would you look at the nénés on that one,” Auguste murmured.

  “Damn it, Auguste. Stick with the issue.”

  Auguste ordered another gloria, grinning to the waiter idiotically, and leaned across the table. “I hope I die before I reach the age when I can’t take any pleasure in seeing a woman and imagining her on a rumpled bedsheet.”

  “I wouldn’t worry if I were you.”

  Gustave finished his gloria. It felt warm and smooth going down, a comforting sensation. He was worn down by being the stretched cord holding the group together. What was he actually doing artistically to preserve the group identity? Not much stylistically. Only his subject matter and his perspective on la vie moderne. That and his funding and his skills for organizing and promoting, but if Durand-Ruel could deliver on his promises, his own help would be less needed. Where would that put him? A willing organizer with no one to organize.

  On the way to the river, Auguste said, “I had a bizarre dream last night. I had gone to sleep thinking of Paul Lhôte. In the dream I was in the Salon the night before it was going to open to the public, in front of my boating party, and all the jurists stood in a row, hands across their chests. They all had the same cravats and the same face, as hard as stone. Unreadable. I shouted epithets at them, but they were deaf. The floor was heaving like I was in a boat on the ocean and I was dueling with Zola, but his sword was longer than mine.”

  “En garde!”

  “Then Zola changed into Degas and Degas’ sword was sharper than mine. Then Degas became Raffaëlli, and Raffaëlli’s sword was only a wooden ragpicker’s hook.”

  “Did you skewer him?” Gustave executed a fencer’s lunge.

  “Right through his gut.”

  “Ah, bravo!”

  They chuckled, but inside,
Gustave shivered.

  They took the steps down to the quay to watch the pleasure boats go by, the unloading of barges, the bargemen calling out to each other, the young men stripped to the waist on the horse-washing barge. He liked the feeling of Auguste standing next to him, shoulder to shoulder, appreciating with him the green water bronzed with highlights of ocher and gold. On the opposite bank, beyond the quay wall draped with ivy like a green shawl, the ruins of Palais d’Orsay burned by the Communards shone pale yellow in the low-angled sunlight.

  “Look there, Auguste, across the river. Proof of what Durand-Ruel said. Old institutions torn down.” Auguste only grunted.

  He unleashed Mame and threw an imaginary stick to see her run along the quay looking for it. If he lived right on the river in Petit Gennevilliers, Mame would have the right sort of place to run. And he wouldn’t have to pass a gallery window every time he stepped out of his house.

  At the beginning it was so spirited—the late-night talk in Café

  Nouvelle-Athènes, praising each other for a new motif or an original composition, loving each other’s brushstrokes, rejoicing in every small victory, feeling no divisions among them despite the individuality in their work, working shoulder to shoulder, advancing on the bastion of tradition as a solid force, Montez la garde! Avant-garde, à gauche, gauche! Taking them on eye to eye, sword to sword, with esprit de corps, Marchons, marchons!

  “Gone,” he said, facing the river.

  Auguste shot him a look of alarm. “That’s a hard thing for you to say.”

  “We’ve lost something precious.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Love Made Visible

  Auguste tried to ignore everything going on around him to finish painting the faces of Jules and Ellen and Paul, but Pierre and the two Alphonses were hammering a raised platform for vaudeville. His other friends were hanging Chinese lanterns under the arches and swings from the maple trees, Alphonsine’s idea.

  Merchants were erecting their fish-fry tents and booths for the sale of flags, straw canotiers, and paper parasols. An amusement fair was being installed along the Chatou bank with a carousel, a gymnastic apparatus, and games of chance, and a beer garden was being hammered together at the Giquel yacht works. The firemen’s league was loading fireworks onto a small barge anchored to the Rueil bank. Only Gustave, painting a schedule of activities on a large board, was quiet.

  All morning Auguste had been calling up his models as he needed them, but the one he needed most, Aline, was just now hurrying across the bridge, carrying that silly lapdog. Couldn’t she have gotten here a half hour earlier? It might make a world of difference. The good light wasn’t lasting as long.

  She came upstairs out of breath. “Have I missed lunch?”

  “We wouldn’t start without you, knowing how you and your furry companion like to eat,” Jules said.

  She had added a wide red velvet band around her square neckline and a double band of red down the front of her dress. “Très chic!” Auguste said.

  Aline traced the band with her fingers. “Do you like it?”

  The trim defined the lines of the dress and set off her figure. The red made her face more rosy. She wore coral-red earring studs this time. With the money from Angèle, he’d been able to pay Aline. It had gone to good use.

  “I love it.”

  When everyone came upstairs to eat, Angèle took one look at Aline and said, “Oh, là là! Aren’t you a smart one! The rue de Temple?”

  “Bien sûr!” Aline said, and the r rolled out down the river.

  “Just one r will do, not three, if you want to be Parisian,” Ellen said.

  “Maybe I don’t.”

  “Good for you, chérrrie,” Auguste said.

  Louise came upstairs with Anne to give her usual announcement. “If you’d wanted your luncheon on Sunday,” Louise said, “you would have gotten only a slice of pâté on an empty plate. We’ll have our hands full in the kitchen tomorrow. But today I’m all yours. The entrée is barquettes de fruits de mer.”

  “Oh, I love puff pastries,” Aline said.

  What food didn’t she love?

  “They’re in the shape of périssoires!” Ellen cried.

  “Of course.” Louise huffed and puffed and moved her arms as though she were paddling.

  “With green beans as paddles,” Pierre said.

  “For tomorrow’s races.” There was a lilt to her voice. “Picked from my cousin’s garden when they’re needle thin. They have the best taste then.”

  “I think this calls for participation. I’m feeling lucky,” Paul said.

  “You bet your life you’re lucky,” Angèle said. “You were especially lucky last Sunday.”

  “What do you say, Pierre? Shall we enter the périssoire races?”

  “Périssoire comes from the word perish, you know,” Pierre cautioned in a deeper voice than usual. “Oh, all right.”

  Aline was the first to take a bite. “Oh, madame, I’ve never tasted such delicacies. I wish my mother could have a taste. She adores shrimp.”

  “Come into the kitchen before you leave and I’ll wrap some up for her.”

  “Oh, merci, madame.”

  Alphonsine asked the women to help decorate the musicians’ barge with lanterns and put up streamers in the dining room. The men would help Alphonse anchor a sailboat’s boom over the water for the balancing game.

  “And who’ll help me finish this painting?”

  After a while, Louise served the main course. “Faisan, chasse du pays sur choucroute.”

  “Oh, madame! How did you know?” Aline said. Before she could say another word, Gustave and Angèle and Alphonsine fell into a fit of laughter. “Pheasant reminds me of home. We used to have it every autumn.”

  “And sauerkraut, sausages, and carrots too. A wild guess—you adore them, don’t you?” Gustave asked.

  Père Fournaise came up the stairs with two bottles. “To be properly tasted, pheasant must be accompanied by a deep red burgundy.”

  “I’m going to gloat to Charles about what he missed,” Jules said.

  “Why such a special meal?” Paul asked.

  “For Auguste,” Fournaise said. “So he’ll have the energy to finish the blasted thing today.”

  “He can’t,” Pierre said. “He needs a fourteenth model. How about you, monsieur? Then we can wrap it up today and be out of your way tomorrow.”

  Fournaise backed away shaking his head. “Not me.”

  “Then you’ve got to find someone, Auguste,” Pierre said. “You keep putting it off, but it augurs ill for us, and for the painting.”

  “We defy augury!” Jules declared, his fist in the air. When Pierre gave him a look of annoyance, Jules added sheepishly, “Hamlet and I.”

  “Can’t you just do without a fourteenth?” Raoul said.

  “And leave thirteen figures around a dining table?” Auguste said. “Raoul, you don’t know a damn thing about art.”

  “That’s not my job. My job is to pick the winning horse. You’d be pathetic at it.” Raoul ate a few bites and said, “Aha! I have an idea of someone just right for a boating party.”

  “Who?” three voices chorused.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t say. I don’t know a damn thing about art.”

  “For God’s sake, Raoul. Out with it.”

  Raoul whispered something in Ellen’s ear and a mischievous smile came over her face. Ellen whispered to Angèle, who whispered to Antonio. Pierre leaned across the table and Ellen whispered to him.

  “That would work!” Pierre said. “Unless it’s one of us.”

  “That’s not likely,” Raoul said. “None of us are in more than one race. The rower who earns the most points from all the races is the champion.”

  “Would someone mind telling me what you’re concocting? It is my painting, after all.”

  “We think,” Ellen said with excitement in her voice, “that for the painting to be a true luncheon of canotiers, the champion canotier of the
Fêtes should be in it.”

  “That might be someone I don’t even know.”

  “Come on,” Paul said. “It’s not like he’s a major figure. He’s just a face. You don’t have to love him.”

  Everyone looked at him with eager expressions, waiting.

  “This is a piece of art. It’s not a lottery.”

  “A champion horse is a piece of art too,” Raoul said.

  “Here’s a solution, Auguste. You’re stubborn if you don’t accept it,” Pierre said.

  Raoul said to Fournaise, “Monsieur, you can offer the chance to be in a grand painting of the rowers of Chatou to the winner when you award the Coupe du championnat. He can decline, of course, but it’s an honor he can’t refuse.”

  “And I can decline too if he turns out to have a mug like a horse.”

  “No, you can’t!” Gustave shouted. “You’ve avoided filling in that face in order to convince yourself that you’re not finished so you could keep going over it. You’ll muddy it up by overworking it if you’re not careful. This is exactly what you need. To make you stop. If you keep working on it, the change to autumn light will play havoc with what you’ve done. You’ve got to finish and let it go. The champion rower is the face, and that’s that.”

  “All right, all right. I just hope to God he isn’t a gargoyle.”

  They cheered and laughed and whooped in one raucous sound.

  “Thank God,” Pierre said.

  To cinch the deal, Fournaise brought out a bottle of eau-de-vie de poire that he had made from pears grown in their own garden, and Ellen produced a box of Turkish rahat loukoum, jellied candies covered in powdered sugar.

  “I regret I must interrupt your gastronomic delight in order to finish what we came for,” Auguste said.

  They resumed their poses with an air of excitement for having supplied the answer.

  Auguste drew out some strands of Aline’s hair at her forehead and temple—slowly, to prolong the pleasure. He arranged the folds of her skirt, running two fingers deep in the furrows. The shadows formed by the polonaise transformed the inward folds of cotton flannel into velvet.