Luncheon of the Boating Party (46 page)

which have recently undergone thorough and equal cleaning of parts.”

He nodded to the second who retreated to the table and brought the pistols on a tray. “However,” Roy continued, “only one of them will carry a bullet.”

Pierre looked at him in astonishment.

“Combatants shall stand back to back and take ten paces,” Roy said,

“then turn to face each other and fi re at the call. Only one fi ring shall constitute the affair, regardless of outcome.”

Pierre indicated with a tilt of his head to retreat to their table. “This isn’t a duel,” Pierre said under his breath. “It’s a game of chance. You can’t be serious to go ahead.”

“It’s no worse than fifty chances in a hundred.”

“You infuriate me. I will not assist in this.”

“Tell them we demand the right to choose a different weapon. It’s custom that the challenged has the right to choose.”

“It’s a farce, and you know it. You’re a fool if you let it go further.”

“Do what I say.”

Paul and Pierre approached the other men in the center of the fi eld.

“Your proposal, and it is only a proposal, is highly irregular,” Pierre said. “To be an honorable duel and hold any meaning in society, both parties must be equally armed. We demand our right as the challenged to the choice of weapon, as is customary.”

“You have no
parrain,
” Roy said. “If you had, he could negotiate.

Negotiation is not the role of a second.”

Pierre turned to him and murmured, “How about Raoul?”

Paul nodded.

“Hold off. I will fi nd a
parrain,
” Pierre said.

“We will give you one hour.”

“I need two. Our godfather will be the honorable
Baron
Raoul Barbier,
ancien Capitaine de la Cavalerie de France.
”

Roy and Douvaz exchanged a grave look. “One hour and a half,

with five minutes’ grace period,” Roy said.

Paul and Pierre clasped hands and Pierre ran out of the closed fi eld, yelling at the hackman to get in.

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Not One
Canotier
Song

Auguste watched Gustave’s larger boat, the
Inès,
come into the dock too quickly and at the wrong angle. Alphonse had to push

away with all his force to keep it from slamming into the pilings.

“I’ve been out to see Claude,” Gustave called out and stepped off the boat. “He says he’s through with Impressionist exhibitions.”

Gustave plopped into the closest chair on the lower terrace. Auguste sat down opposite him so they could speak quietly.

“He says he’s distraught by the arguments and hasn’t sold enough at our shows for him to continue there. What’s worse, he’s demoralized about his painting. He admitted that he could hardly bring himself to finish canvases that don’t satisfy him and only please a few people. He even talked about giving up painting and trying something else.”

“Trying what? All we know is painting.”

“He told me that even though he’s hurt by Degas calling him a turncoat, he’s going to submit to the Salon again next spring.”

“So am I!” Auguste said. “Don’t you see? If the jury admits us, it will be a triumph for the whole group.”

Gustave opened his hands in a gesture of not knowing. “I wrote to Pissarro to persuade him to join in an exhibition of the original group without Degas’ new tribe. It would show us the public response to
our
work, separate from theirs.”

“With Degas?”

“No. He’ll refuse a show without his friends. We’ve fallen into two camps. Irreversibly.”

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He let Gustave’s sentence hang in the air. No response could mend the crack in Gustave’s hope. “What did Pissarro say?”

“He said that no matter how great the diffi culties, he was going to stick with the Impressionist exhibitions.”

Auguste shook his head slowly. “With a wife and four children to support? There’s a point of being too noble.”

“He even wants the Impressionist group to grow, so he’s not opposed to more of Degas’ followers joining. Or to Raffaëlli’s prescriptions of subjects.”

“Is that any surprise? He’s a socialist.”

Gustave hunched over the table, his cheek on his fist. “He’s making a mistake.”

“What about Berthe Morisot?”

“She’ll stay with the original group, but Mary Cassatt won’t.”

Auguste was almost afraid to ask. “Sisley?

“He’s been evicted. With his wife and children. The Charpentiers came to their rescue to move them to another lodging.”

Auguste leaned back in his chair. “Well, you’re just a bundle of good news, aren’t you?”

“Sisley says we isolate ourselves too much, and that we’re still far from being able to do without the prestige of the Salon. So he chose the Salon for next year.”

Auguste felt responsible for some of this. He was the one who had convinced Claude that if they showed three years running at the Salon, then up-and-coming progressive dealers like George Petit might take their paintings. Maybe he’d been wrong to sway him. He hadn’t meant to cause such a schism.

Gustave scratched at a spot on the table. “The group isn’t ours anymore.”

Auguste lay a hand on Gustave’s arm. “No. It isn’t.”

Under his
canotier,
Gustave looked a little pale. “Are you feeling all right?”

“So-so.”

“The models are already upstairs, except Pierre and Paul. Ellen came.”

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“With Émile?”

“No.”

“You’ve got to do something about that.”

“I know.” Auguste stood up. “Are you coming?”

“After lunch. I have to go over the rules for the jousts with Alphonse.

I’ll try to eat a little something with him.”

Anne served the duck
pâté
to only seven people. Aline was here, this time with a white ruffle around the neckline of her dress. A lovely detail to paint. But no Charles. No Émile. No Jeanne. And now, most worrisome, no Pierre or Paul. Paul would have told him if something intervened.

“You look perky as a bluebird with that ruffle,” Angèle said to Aline.

“The Marché du Temple, just as you said.
Sacrebleu,
but it’s a confused tangle of alleyways. I got lost getting out of there. I nearly cried going around and around until a crippled man selling old shoes set me straight.”

“It’s a fi ne ruffle, and I’m going to like painting it,” Auguste said.

“I showed the dress to the dressmaker I work for. She raised my pay by fifty centimes a day and is going to give me more work.”

“Not quite a gold earring, but we’re right glad,” Angèle said.

“It meant a fair something to me.” She let her country speech spill out a touch of defensiveness.

Her simplicity appealed to him. She was at the stage when a young woman feels some latent power in her beauty but is unschooled in how to use it.

Anne and Alphonsine brought the main course, veal this week, and Alphonsine sat down in Paul’s place to eat with them. “We’re so glad you’re back,” she said to Ellen in a proprietary way that amused him.

“I’ll be here from now on. I can come on Saturday too.”

“No matinee?” Auguste asked.

“I quit the Folies.”

He choked on his seltzer water. Angèle put down her fork. Alphon -

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sine’s hand went up to her mouth. Everyone turned to look at Ellen, stunned, realizing the risk she’d taken. It could mean the crashing fi nish to her career, or it could signal a leap upward.

“You’re really a Folies girl?” Aline asked.

“I was.”

“A dancer?”

“A mime.”

“The best
mimeuse
Paris has ever had,” Auguste said.

“Why did you quit?” Aline asked.

“The audience at the Folies doesn’t care about the nuances of pantomime. They applaud more for dancing blue poodles than for human emotion. They laugh at farmyard noises of animals in heat, at songs picked out of the gutter, not songs of wit. I’ll sell flowers on Pont Neuf if I have to.”

“You’d better think twice about that, dolly,” Angèle remarked.

“What was it like, working there? All that dazzle and glamour.”

Aline waved her forkful of veal back and forth on her last words and Jacques Valentin followed it, mesmerized, swaying his head.

“Huh! I wouldn’t call cramped underground cells dazzling. Freezing in winter, stifling in summer, so hot that your makeup slides down your face before you ever get onstage. Your skin chapped by cake white.

Callers cueing you too late. Congestion in the corridor, your costume torn by a passing sword. Gruff, lecherous men. Unpaid rehearsals that go on till dawn. Only enough time for a croissant and an apple before performances.”

“Oh,” Aline murmured.

“I hated my new mimodrama,
The Siege.
The indecency of showing breasts and derrière I can ignore, but this was indecent in a hurtful way.

We had to fall forward like boards at the boom of drums imitating Prussian guns. People breaking their noses to take cover was supposed to be funny. The producer thinks it’s a way to show that Parisians have put the Siege behind them. I see it as a disgrace to those who died.”

Auguste checked Alphonsine’s reaction. She was stricken for a moment, but recovered and managed to say, “I agree.”

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“What made you stay, then?” Antonio asked. “Money? Curtain calls?”

“Catcalls, you mean. I was just hoping that someone would no-

tice me.”

“Un amoureux?”

“No! A chance to act in a legitimate theater where people come to see performances of real literature and not just to prowl the
promenoirs
for a thirty-franc whore. I want to be in a play instead of in a trivial entertainment. I want to say beautiful words, brave words, unforgetta-ble words. Like Sarah Bernhardt gets to say in
Phèdre.
Words of wit and passion and truth. I want to be a human being onstage, not a cardboard cutout.”

“Commendable of you,” Jules said solemnly. “To Ellen!”

They raised their glasses. Ellen blushed at the outpouring of support.

“I’ll be first at the ticket window to see your debut,” Raoul said. “I love theater. Maybe I’ll become a critic so I can write rave reviews of you.”

“We all wish you well,” Alphonsine said.

“I’m glad you’re free of it,” Auguste said. “The Folies are too tawdry for you.”

“Don’t say that to my face, Auguste. It was my life. I loved it.”

An awkward moment. Angèle stepped in with, “Of course you did,

and rightly too. And now we’re going to love to model.” She signaled to Auguste and Antonio to bring out the painting.

While he was still wheeling it, Ellen cried, “Oh-h!” gliding up and then down the scale. “It’s so far along.”

“It better be,” Auguste said.

“I see the real bottles and glasses on the table,” she said, “the real people, but the painting is so much more intense and beautiful.”

“Mm,” Jules murmured. “Translated into art, at least Auguste’s art, we are all more beautiful. That’s why we come. To feel beautiful.”

He heard heavy footfalls on the stairs and swung around to look, but it was only Gustave and Alphonse, not Pierre and Paul. They weren’t just detained. They weren’t coming. Paul’s reckless side meant he could be anywhere, doing anything. Auguste hoped to God Paul hadn’t an-tagonized that bruiser at the cabaret again.

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Just as everyone took their places, Alphonsine ran down the corridor. “Don’t start!” she called back to them. She reappeared wearing a strained smile and was holding something covered by a tea towel.

Standing by Aline, she flung off the cloth like a magician and revealed a
canotier
decorated with a clump of red-orange poppies in front, tulle around the brim, and white rosebuds in the back.

“It’s for you,” Alphonsine said. “To wear in the painting. And to keep.”

“For me? I can’t believe it.”

That instant with both women, flushed and glowing, Aline’s pretty mouth a perfect O, Alphonsine about to burst, with the hat between them, all four hands on it, what a picture. What a moment. He felt responsible for it, which made him both happy and sad. Not exactly sad.

Concerned. There was only one of him.

“Thank you!” Aline said.

Alphonsine tipped him a glance that had something more pointed in it than the joyful complicity he had come to know. It issued a demand.

She deserved more than Aline’s quick thanks.

“She did that herself, Aline,” he said. “She used to decorate hats in a high-class shop in the seventeenth
arrondissement.
”

“It’s very pretty. I’ve never had such a hat.”

“Put it on,” he said. “Like this, so we can see your face.” He tilted it back. With his hands on it, he felt he was touching both women at once.

“I like the poppies. A nice choice,” Gustave said to Alphonsine.

“You look ducky, darling,” Angèle said. “There’s nothing like a new hat to perk up a woman, body and soul.”

“Look at the bridge!” Jules said in alarm.

Pierre was running across it, dodging people in his way.

“That’s dedication,” Antonio said.

“No,” Angèle said. “He just doesn’t want to miss the dessert.”

Pierre ran up the stairs shouting, “Raoul. We need you.”

“Where’s Paul?” Auguste demanded.

Instantly Raoul followed him out, and they both ran back across the bridge and into a waiting hackney which sped off at a gallop.

“What do you make of that?” Alphonse asked.

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“Some sort of joke, most likely,” Auguste said. A knot formed in the pit of his stomach. Gustave’s wan face showed he didn’t believe him.

He waited some time to calm himself, and set to work on Aline in her hat in profile against Alphonse’s torso so Alphonse could go back to tend the boats. He got the froth of her ruffle against Alphonse’s belly, her waist in front of his white pant leg, the dog’s head, neck, and paw against his raised thigh, Alphonse’s broad hand on the railing against her back.