Mistral's Daughter (5 page)

Maggy hesitated, not knowing
how to begin.
 
No one in her seventeen
years had ever asked her this question.
 
In Tours, where she had lived all of her life, everyone knew everything
there was to know about her.
 
Should she
gloss over the facts?
 
Something about
Paula's eyes disposed her to tell the truth.
 
They were infinitely knowing, yet infinitely kind and Maggy needed
someone to talk to even more than she needed food.
 
She took a deep breath for courage and
plunged in to get the worst of it said as quickly as possible.

"The most important
thing about me has always been that my father died a week before he was
supposed to marry my mother
—
he had smallpox.
 
If he'd lived, I'd have been just another
premature child
—
as it was
—
I'm illegitimate."

"Evidently
—
but
these things happen, even in the best of families."

"But not in respectable
Jewish families.
 
They just
never
happen.
 
I'm the only bastard in the whole Jewish
community of Tours and I've always had my nose rubbed in it."

"Your mother then, why
didn't she just leave Tours and go to live somewhere else, pretend that she was
a widow like so many other women?"

"She died when I was
born.
 
Aunt Esther always blamed her for
dying and escaping the scandal of her conduct."

"Charming!
 
Such sympathy!
 
Did this agreeable aunt bring you up?"

"No, I lived with my
grandmother until she died four months ago."
 
Maggy thought wistfully of the gentle old
woman who had raised her so tenderly in her small house, who had been made
happy by Maggy's smiles, whose uncritical love had made Maggy brave, who had
always resisted Aunt Esther's irrational conviction that somehow Maggy had to
pay for the shame of her birth.

"It was my grandmother
Cecile, my mother's mother, who named me Magali.
 
She always called me that, even though
everyone else calls me Maggy, because it was one of her family's favorite
names.
 
The Lunels moved to Tours from
Provence after the Revolution and in Provençal Magali means
'marguerite'
..."

"So you're from the
South, when it gets down to it?"

"Yes, on my father's
side too.
 
His name was David
Astruc.
 
Astruc means 'born under a lucky
star' in Provençal...
 
but not for him!
 
My grandmother used to tell me stories about
my family to
cheer me up when the other kids called me a
bastard.
 
She said that even though my
parents had made a mistake they came from the oldest Jewish families in France
—
from many hundreds of years before the Crusades
—
and that I should
always remember it with pride."

Maggy gestured with her long
arms in an ardent arabesque, fired by memories of the tales her grandmother had
woven of a life in cities with musical names:
 
Nîmes, Cavaillon, Avignon.

"But what happened after
she died?" Paula asked, touched by Maggy's almost childish sense of
vanished grandeur.

"Ah, that's why I'm
here, that's why I had to leave Tours forever and why I'll never go back. My
aunt couldn't wait to get rid of me.
 
The
funeral was hardly over before the hunt for a husband began.
 
Not in Tours of course
—
there I'd
always be the Lunel bastard
—
but in other cities.
 
Finally she found a family in Lille whose son
was so ugly that they couldn't find a girl who would even go out with him, much
less marry him...
 
and they arranged
it!"

Furiously, Maggy pushed her
hair away from her elegantly positioned ears.
 
"An arranged marriage.
 
In
this day and age...
 
yes, they still do
it.
 
As soon as I heard I started to make
my plans."

As she paused to eat the
marinated lamb she remembered the day on which her rebellion had changed from
an insubstantial dream into a necessary act.
 
The proposed marriage took the idea of running away to Paris out of the
realm of fantasy.
 
She had saved five
hundred francs over the years out of her grandmother's little gifts and she
spent three hundred of them in the department stores on the rue Bordeaux for a
cheap suitcase and a few ready-made garments.
 
Her only extravagance had been the silk stockings, three pairs of them,
but how could she confront Paris in black cotton?

"So," Paula
interrupted her thoughts, "you are, in short, a beautiful, orphaned
Jewish virgin."

Maggy laughed at this
interpretation, on a rising, blithe note, showing the glint of
her
perfect teeth, her yellow-green eyes spar
kling like the target of
a
treasure hunt in the dimness of
the restaurant.

"Nobody ever put it
precisely like that before and I've been called a lot of things.
 
My grandmother used to send me to the rabbi
of our town, Rabbi Taradash, to be properly scolded because she knew that she
could never do it convincingly.
 
And I'd
go to him in
disgrace at least once a month
—
it gave him a
change, he said, from preparing bar mitzvah boys
—
and he'd get so
involved in the logic of
my explanations that finally he'd just make me
promise not to do it again and I never did.
 
I'd do something worse.
 
But
'beautiful'
—
no, nobody but my poor grandmother ever called me
that.
 
Or 'virgin', either."

"Are you a virgin
then?"

"Of course I am!"
Maggy looked startled.
 
She'd been in
trouble all of her life for running wild with a bunch of boys but they had been
companions only, partners in troublemaking.

"So much the
better," Paula said, "at least for the moment.
 
You have everything still ahead of you and
that's the best way to begin in Paris."

Paula had seen generations of
Montparnasse girls come and go.
 
She had
seen them drive off in Bugattis with millionaires and never return and she had
seen them die in a week of a raging form of syphilis; she had seen them marry
artists and turn into proud housewives, and more often, she had seen them marry
artists and turn into harpies.
 
She
didn't believe she'd ever seen a girl with the promise of Maggy Lunel.
 
This girl, she thought consideringly, was
someone
inevitable.

"Well, that's it, that's
all there is to me.
 
Except that I've
made the worst possible start."
 
Not
even a full stomach, not even the novelty of a listener as interested as Paula,
had made Maggy forget her experience with the painter she knew was called Mistral.

"Listen to me, my little
one.
 
You must put Mistral and his
abominable manners out of your mind.
 
Vava tells me he's a genius but if that's true, I ask, why doesn't he
sell?
 
How much of a genius can he be if
he can't afford to eat at my restaurant?"
 
Clearly this was Paula's yardstick of worldly achievement.

"That woman, Kiki de
Montparnasse, does she eat at your place?" Maggy asked curiously.

"She wouldn't dare to
put her foot in the door, that dough-faced bundle of
bones and
pretensions.
 
And her name is Alice
Prin.
 
'Kaki de Montparnasse'
indeed!"
 
Paula's face grew as grim
as its round contours would allow.
 
"To call herself that when she wasn't even born in Paris
—
it's too disgusting."

"But they told me she
was queen of the models..."

"They told you a
lie.
 
They know nothing.
 
Once, and not so long ago
either,
I
was queen of the models but Alice Prin has never rivaled what I was, she hasn't
come close."
 
Paula's lips closed in
an unforgiving line.
 
She could hardly
explain to the innocence of Maggy that the one who called herself Kiki had
stolen not just one but many of Paula's lovers, and then, not content with
those victories, she had boasted to all Montparnasse of them.

"I wonder why she
insulted me? I've never done anything to her."

"Because she is so proud
of herself that she has to make fun of every other woman she sees. But her
little group of sycophants mean nothing.
 
Listen to me, Maggy, you look like no one else in the world.
 
You were
born
to be painted."

"Born?" Maggy
stopped.
 
Paula's words, stated with such
authority, were so unexpected that they robbed her of speech.

"Yes, born, as a
hummingbird is born to seek nectar, as a bee is born to sting, as a chicken is
born to be roasted.
 
But this business of
offering yourself in the street in the
foire aux models,
that's out of
the question for you, understand?
 
I'll
introduce you to the painters who can afford to pay more than fifteen francs
for a three-hour pose
—
they're all my pals.
 
Did Mistral pay you anything, by the
way?
 
No, of course he wouldn't
—
that doesn't astonish me.
 
But from now
on you work only for the maximum.
 
Of
course you have to learn a thing or two first, but nothing I can't teach you.
 
It's all a matter of making up your mind to
take off your knickers
—
how difficult can that be, after all?
 
You see, it is a painter's business to learn
how each woman is made.
 
Whatever we may
think, they need us far more than we need them."

"They do?" Maggy's
voice was astonished.

"But yes. just imagine
it, Maggy.
 
For fifteen hundred years,
ever since the Dark Ages ended, artists have been running after this ordinary
thing, the body of a naked woman.
 
Nothing calls more upon an artist's strength, nothing shows up his
weakness as quickly.
 
Show me a man who
cannot paint a naked woman and I'll show you a man who cannot truly
paint."

"Constantine Moreau
never told us
that. He only said ... that,
well, that Renoir
would have wanted to paint me."

"Perhaps Moreau merely
wanted to keep his job.
 
What, I wonder,
would you schoolgirls have, repeated at home?
 
Well, what do
you say?
 
I
propose to
launch
you!
 
Not just
out of the goodness of
my heart, mind you.
 
I want you to beat that bitch, that
insufferable, intolerable Alice Prin who has the arrogance to think that
because my youth is gone, because I've put on perhaps a kilo or two, that she
has taken my place.
 
Mine!
 
She can't see into the future, but I can, and
one day her youth will go too
—
as will yours, my seventeen-year-old
pigeon
—
even yours. Well, Maggy?"

Before the girl could answer
Paula held up a warning hand.
 
"Are
you sure you're up to it? I don't want to waste my time if you're not.
 
It's boring work, you'll always feel too cold
or too hot, and most of all it's far more difficult than anyone realizes to
hold a pose.
 
You'll want to cry with
pain but you must never let your client know it.
 
When the half-hour is up, then, and only
then, may you move.
 
And ten minutes
later, back to work.
 
So.
 
Shall we make Alice Prin regret the day she
insulted you?
 
Shall we attack?"

"Oh, yes ... yes,
please!
"
 
Maggy sent her glass of tea
crashing to the floor with her instantaneous gesture of impatient
acceptance.
 
Suddenly the old dream lay
within her grasp again all the more precious for the fiasco of the morning,
suddenly she felt that she had only to reach out to hold Paris between her
arms.
 
What did it matter, after all, if
Renoir was dead?

4

Listen to me, Maggy
Lunel," Paula said severely. "Does an egg wear a skirt?"

"Not the eggs I
know," Maggy answered, rolling her eyes disrespectfully.
 
In less than a week's acquaintance she had
learned to love Paula
—
and those she loved, she teased.

"Don't make the mistake
of not taking me seriously, my girl!
 
You
must imagine, with all the power you possess, that your body is a
basket of
eggs,
eggs of different colors and sizes, your breasts the eggs of an
ostrich, your pubic hair the spotted egg of a gull, your nipples the eggs of an
undernourished sparrow.
 
A naked egg is
the most natural thing in the world.
 
It
is so basic, so complete that not even Brillat-Savarin ever suggested that an
eggshell should be decorated."