Luncheon of the Boating Party (60 page)

“
All
our women put the Queen of Sparta and Troy to shame,” Auguste said.

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“Isn’t it time to open the Armagnac?” Angèle asked, tipping

her head onto Antonio’s shoulder. “Too much wine makes the skin blotchy.”

“The perfect time,” Gustave said and poured slowly, all around.

Charles raised his glass to look across it. “A fine mahogany color with an amber surface.” He brought it to his nose to smell the
montant,
the strongest aromas. “An abundant nose, not for the faint of heart.” He swirled it gently and watched it coat the glass. He raised it again for the second nose, the full bouquet. “Vanilla, plum, and spices.”

Charles waited until everyone had enjoyed the aromas. “The perfect sip is always the fi rst.”

“You’re wrong,” Angèle said. “The perfect sip is the one you’re sipping.”

They toasted Gustave. Charles sipped. “Ah, semisweet.”

“With a long, deep aftertaste of prunes,” Raoul said. “A far sight better than your young brandy in that country cask, you’ll have to admit.”

Fournaise took another sip, not willing to accede so quickly. After the third, he nodded.
“D’accord.”

Auguste almost laughed at them rinsing their gums as though it

were a mouthwash. Someone behind him tapped him on the shoulder.

He turned.

“Jeanne!”

Dressed as in the painting.

“Ellen told me you were almost finished,” Jeanne said.

“You came to pose?” He let that hang in the air. “I’ve done without you.”

“Is it here?”

“Yes.”

Make her ask. Even though he was dying to see if the awning worked the way he needed it to, he wanted her to ask.

“I’d like Joseph-Paul to see it.” She gestured to him standing off to the side. “After all, we’re going to have a big wedding in December.”

She got the reaction she wanted, dropping that plum of information.

Congratulations flew across the tables.

Auguste was too full of the sensations of well-being to feel injured.

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He took another sip of the Armagnac before he said,
“Félicitations,”

kissed her blithely on the cheek, and shook Joseph’s hand.

“Another toast,” Paul said, and poured two more glasses.

“The painting, Auguste,” Jeanne said.

“All right. The painting.”

Fournaise and Alphonse carried it onto the platform with the back toward everyone, and Gustave brought the easel. Chest out, chin raised, Fournaise commanded attention by his posture. People all over the grounds quieted. Gustave gave the nod, and they walked it around to set it on the easel.

Applause burst forth from all sides and made him reel.

“The awning!” several voices cried.

“Holding out on us. You might have rolled it out the first day and saved ourselves some sunburn,” Angèle said.

“I needed the light.”

Gustave pumped his hand. “It works! We assume it’s attached to a building we can’t see. Bravo!”

Looking at it now from a distance for the first time, he saw that the divergent diagonals of rail, table edge, and awning contained and united the figures as a group. “Why don’t simple answers occur to us in the beginning?”

“Because we have to wrestle them out of some bedrock within,”

Gustave said.

“True indeed,” Jules said. “I’d venture to say the prodigious effort required is what makes any true artist suffer. As the bard says,
With
what he most enjoys, contented least.
That necessity of torment sets the artist apart from the nonartist, in all fi elds.”

They understood. Despite his principle that he wouldn’t do any-

thing except out of pleasure, the vision had required such effort that anguish and emotional exhaustion were inevitable. He’d had no choice but to endure it in order to give the painting a future.

“There hasn’t been such shimmering opulence in a painting since the Venetians,” Charles said.

Jules nodded. “The whole thing is a symphony of colored vibrations.

Thousands of tones and touches give form by the subtlest of gradations.”

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Swimming in a sea of compliments, Auguste let his pleasure swell and realized at the same time how physically exhausted he was, how tight in his muscles, how stiff his joints. But he’d had the idea always before him expressed moment by moment in the spirit of his friends, and that had sustained him. Nearly two months, eight luncheons, counting today’s, a couple dozen tubes of paint, five women, nine men, a
mère
and a
père.
The sight of everyone who had helped him fl ooded him with joy. For two months the models had been his and he had been theirs. He felt a culmination of his life this far.

His search for the perfect composition, the perfect stroke, the perfect colors, model, woman—did he dare think he had found them? In the morning, or in some distant morning, would he awake and fi nd it had been a night dream that had teased him into taking an illusion for reality?

Could he ever be as good again as he was this moment? As full of hope? If he wanted to say yes, and mean it, he would have to change.

With this painting, he had carried Impressionism as far as he could. At least with figures. The recognition descended as his eyes filled. He had created a revolution that left him out.

The crowd was abuzz, matching the figures in the painting with the models who reveled in their images. Jeanne’s husband looked miffed.

He was outside the frame. Auguste chortled. What did he expect?

“Who’s the mystery man in the center looking at me?” Ellen asked.

“Everyman,
chérie.
” He watched her expressive face show her delight. “A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.”

“What a wonderful meal those people must have just eaten,” Aline murmured.

“It’s more important than a pleasant lunch, Aline,” Alphonsine said in a pinched tone. “It’s the evidence of the healing of France, and Maison Fournaise has played a part as much as Emélie Bécat singing ‘Alsace and Lorraine.’ ” She turned to him. “It sends out a blessedness because we’re in a state of grace on that piece of cloth.”

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It was dear of her to think that, but to his mind, the moment any painter becomes conscious of a message, the work loses its seductive power to unveil any more discoveries. Still, if grace involved love and good deeds, she was right to feel its blessings.

“True indeed, Alphonsine,” Jules said, nodding thoughtfully. “The light of history is glancing off our shoulders.”

“It’s terribly bourgeois, though,” Charles remarked.

“Look again,” Jules said. “These aren’t safely married couples re-peopling France with children. They’re not at church on Sunday. They are,
we
are the fringe element that makes the bourgeoisie nervous.

We’re enjoying ourselves too much.”

Charles threaded his fingers through his beard in a contemplative way. “Some
fl âneur
of the future will look at our faces, hats, and clothes and will deduce our relationships, our occupations, our domestic lives.”

“They’ll have a great deal of guessing to do,” Jules said. “But what doesn’t take any guessing is Auguste’s own identity in all of us. That’s where genius lies, in the flashes of revelation that go from the painter through the subject to the viewer.”

A crewman of
Le Palais
weaved his way toward Auguste. “Nice painting you’ve got there.”

“Thank you kindly.”

“Some fine-looking women. You’ve probably laid every one of them.

How long did it take you? To paint, I mean.”

“Twenty years.”

Gustave snorted. Others laughed.

“It’s true!” His voice rose. “I’ve been working toward it for that long.”

The man swayed. “You’ve got a lot of paint on it. How much did

that cost you?”

“A couple hundred francs.”

The man put his face right into his. Auguste backed away. The man reeked of wine. “You expect to get that much out of it, then? How much do you get?”

“Plenty.” Auguste puffed out air back to him. “I paint pornography

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in the brothels, so I get as much as I want. My success there is so big it’s astounding.”

The man’s friends hooted and he staggered off.

Charles stepped up alongside him. “I want to warn you that someone you know is coming to see the painting today.”

“Not another one like that duffer.”

“Someone important.”

Auguste groaned. “Zola?”

“Guess again.”

“Not Degas, I hope.” He didn’t want to have to spar with that porcupine.

“If you take your eyes off your painting for a minute, you can see for yourself.”

There in the back of the crowd was Paul Durand-Ruel.

“You sure aren’t one for giving a man much of a warning. How did he know to come today?”

“I told him.” Smugness seeped through Charles’s voice.

“But it’s not fi nished.”

Durand-Ruel made his way through the crowd and shook his hand.

“Astonishing.”

“It’s not fi nished.”

Auguste introduced him to everyone. They acted like excited children anticipating the praise of a schoolmaster.

“Keep in mind that I’m not fi nished.”

“Radiant,” Durand-Ruel said. “These women could not have been

painted by anyone else. They have that roguish charm that only you can give to women.”

“I only paint what they give me.”

“The sly, soft eyes of this one tipping her head coquettishly, the arch-ness of her smile. And the pert little nose of that one, her petulance, absorbed in her dog but knowing that Gustave is adoring her. The feline charm of this one looking through the glass. And the black gloves to this one’s ears, forcing us to speculate what she doesn’t want to hear.”

“You must agree that the composition is brilliant,” Charles said, his

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words tumbling out. “Look at the woman holding the dog, how her shoulder and upper arm connect with the boatman’s hand so the line of both their arms enclose the group on the left, and the standing man’s arm and Gustave’s back enclose it on the right.”

“Yes, I see,” Durand-Ruel said.

“And Gustave’s hand lines up with Angèle’s, the woman looking at him,” Charles said. “And the two hands on the chair on the right, the titillation of that.”

“Not to mention the moments of bravura painting,” Durand-Ruel

said. “The luscious still life. The face through a glass is far lovelier than Vermeer’s attempt. The young woman loving her little dog—you’re quoting Fragonard there. And the languor of the one leaning on the railing is pure Ingres. You’ve given the masters a rebirth in Impressionist style and subject.”

Ah, good. His debt to the painters he loved was evident. His whole body released its grip.

“Marvelous, the stories you hint at in the interactions,” Durand-Ruel said.

“There is no story. It’s only a moment.”

“With this, the modern genre painting has fully eclipsed history painting, and art will never be the same again,” Durand-Ruel said.

“You come to me before you offer it to anyone else.”

“It’s not fi nished.”

“It will be a devil to sell, though.”

Auguste bristled. “Why, after what you’ve just said?”

Durand-Ruel raised one eyebrow. “I might love it too much to let it go.”

A turbulence in his chest made him put his hand there. He turned away a moment so the stinging behind his eyes wouldn’t brim over.

A second later he turned right back. “I want it exhibited, Paul, not just hanging in your dining room for a dozen people to see. I want
thousands
to see it.”

“Hundreds of thousands will. They’ll come great distances to see it.”

Aline and Ellen and Angèle and Jeanne had all arranged themselves

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in a row, with Alphonsine in the middle, their arms linked, their faces beaming. A chorus line. He was overcome.

“Toutes mes chères femmes.”
The words came out in a higher pitch than normal. All his dear women, each of them brave in her own way.

“What do you want people to see when they look at this painting in years to come?” Durand-Ruel asked.

“The goodness of life.”

Or, he could have said the painting of love, and the love of painting.

It amounted to the same thing.

Yet, to him, it seemed an image of all things that he was eventually going to give up, maybe sooner than he had thought. His insouciance, the bohemian life, Impressionism. The painting was a directive proclaiming new challenges ahead.

There was no remaining still, in art or in life.

Alphonsine felt a chill as she watched her father and brother carry the painting inside. For some moments, she was adrift in a haze of noise and movement. She tried to steady herself by watching yellow leaves fall into the river. Soon the trees would be bare skeletons. Eventually Auguste’s friends, her friends, drifted upstairs to the terrace, feeling some ownership, she supposed. It was a charmed circle no one outside could enter or understand, not even this dealer who would own the canvas but not their thoughts.

For them, the memory would be more full and vivid than the weeks themselves had been when they had been living them, swept up in the swirl of the process too intensely to reflect on it. Only upon the comple-tion of the painting, and hearing people speak about it, could they com-prehend that they had been a piece of something more complex and more far-reaching than their own single parts in it. It humbled her at the same time as it thrilled her.

Daylight stole away. Dusk in autumn came subtly, but this one was all too sharp to her. What had blossomed here one magical summer would be no more. A thing exists, and then it does not, and a new thing is born. His hands became the work and the work became them, all the