Mistral's Daughter (6 page)

"What about Russian
Easter eggs?" Maggy protested, but sooner than she would have believed
possible, she learned how to feel genuinely unconcerned as she exposed her body
to the eyes of the painters who first gave her work as Paula's
protégée,
only
to quickly find themselves in hot competition with each other for her
time.
 
If she felt a blush about to
betray her, Maggy learned to shield her face with her hair for the few seconds
it took to recover the egg image, but within weeks she moved easily from pose
to pose, her body just an object.

Pascin painted her with roses
in her lap, an icon of sensual authority;
 
Chagall painted her as a bride flying in wonder through a purple
sky;
 
Picasso painted her over and over
again in his monu
mental, neoclassic style and she became the preferred
odalisque of Matisse.
 
"You,
popotte," she said to him, "are my favorite client.
 
Not for your beautiful eyes, but for your
oriental carpet.
 
Here, at least, I can
sit down
—
it's like a week's vacation."

The day after she met Paula,
Maggy moved out of her hotel into one room with a fireplace and a sink and a
bidet, high up in the building next to La Pomme d'Or, Paula's restaurant.
 
It cost her eighty-five francs a month,
furnished only with a big, gilt-trimmed bed.
 
Maggy bought herself fresh new bedding.
 
Paula gave her an overstuffed chair, she picked up a battered table and
an old armoire in a junk shop and once they were installed she had no more
space for anything but a mirror above the sink.
 
When Maggy looked out of her window at the mansards and chimney pots of
the gray-white roofs of Montparnasse, outlined against the ever-changing skies
of Paris, she wished for no other view on earth.

The building in which she
lived boasted that rarest of creatures, a good-natured, happy concierge.
 
Madame Poulard sat in her dark loge working
all day at her Singer sewing machine, toes up, heels down, toes up, heels down,
petite couturière
to the immediate neighborhood. Childless, she adopted
all the girls for whom she sewed, pouring over
Le Journal des Modes
with
Maggy as they looked for designs to copy, since the two ready-made skirts and
two blouses Maggy had brought from Tours were totally inadequate for her new
life.

By October of 1925 Maggy had
established herself as Kiki's only rival and equal and even if Kiki was still
"de"
Montparnasse, Paula gloated over the fact that Maggy needed no such
qualification after her own name.

It was just as Maggy, unique
Maggy, the one and only Maggy, who always sported a fresh red carnation in her
buttonhole, that she jumped in and out of taxis, too busy to walk from one job
to another; it was as Maggy that she danced all night at Le Jockey and La
Jungle to the music of a tango or a shimmy; as Maggy that she moved to the
insinuating melody of the beguine at La Bal Nègre where she felt as foreign to
that world of dancers who had been born in Martinique and Guadeloupe, as did
Cocteau and Scott Fitzgerald, who danced there as well.

Maggy was invited to the
twenty-round boxing matches at the Cirque d'Hiver, which she attended with
several masculine admirers to protect her from the rough crowd, and she went
often to the steeplechases at Auteuil, cheering when her horse cleared all the
jumps and lavishing all her winnings afterward on champagne for her pals.
 
She never went to the races without a tip on
a horse and she rarely lost because the tips were excellent, given in return
for a smile and a sudden hug from her strong, slim arms.

When Maggy arrived at La
Rotonde or La Coupole, there was always a chair for her as she joined first one
table and then another of her
copains.
 
Now Montparnasse felt like her own village too and that fall she
celebrated her eighteenth birthday with a party in her room.
 
Maggy decorated the bidet by filling it with
bunches of red carnations, piled the one table high with bottles of wine and
invited a hundred people.
 
Everyone came,
bringing friends, and they sat drinking and singing on the staircase until the
police finally arrived.

Occasionally she would spend
an evening alone at home, on her quilt, watching the sky from her window and
trying to arrange in her mind all the new things she had seen, all the new
people she had met.
 
Rabbi Taradash would
have disapproved deeply, Maggy smiled to herself, if he knew how she earned her
living, in fact he wouldn't have believed it possible, but she suspected that
he would still call her, as he used to, "my little
mazik
," a
Hebrew word used to describe a beloved child who is also a swift, clever
prankster.

She wasn't homesick although
she still grieved for her grandmother, particularly on Friday evenings when,
on the eve of the Sabbath, peace and cheer had filled their small house with
the illumination of the two candles on the dining room table and the blessing
of the light and the wine.
 
None of the
Lunels had been particularly observant or pious Jews yet this weekly ceremony
had been comforting to Maggy and every year she had looked forward eagerly to
kindling an additional candle on her grandmother's fine Chanukah menorah day by
day, until all the candles blazed sweetly in memory of those flames that had
once burned in the Temple in Jerusalem for eight days with only one day's
supply of oil.
 
Now all that belonged to
a life she had put behind her.
 
Certainly, she thought, she didn't miss the family seder on the eve of
Passover that had always taken place at Aunt Esther's house.
 
Maggy's gathered relatives had somehow never
failed to make her remember her shameful status; each year she would once again
feel that her mere existence was a stain on their family's good name...
 
no, she thought defiantly, no, I couldn't
have endured that existence a minute longer and now I can forget it forever.

Maggy needed these occasional
quiet hours of reflection as a balance to the many nights of dancing when she
escaped from the immobility of her hours of posing into the wholehearted dash
toward pleasure, ever more pleasure, never
enough
pleasure, that made
Montparnasse the center of all that was mad and joyous and abandoned in Paris.

As Paula never failed to
point out to her, there was a dark side
to Montparnasse life, a world in
which drink and drugs were a constant.
 
But even without her warnings, Maggy would have gamboled immune through
the never-ending party of Montparnasse nights.
 
She would have been untainted by that sky that burned so red,
illuminated as it was by the dozens of nightclubs and bars that attracted all
of Paris to its lights.
 
She still was
shielded by essential and untouch-able innocence, the legacy of seventeen years
in her grandmother's house.

Often Maggy danced barefoot,
not just for comfort, but because she was taller than many of her
partners.
 
She still refused to cut her
hair.
 
Before she went out at night, in
one of the simple sleeveless chemise dresses with low necklines that Madame
Poulard made from the ends of bolts of material Maggy found on sale at Le Bon
Marché, she parted her hair in the middle and coiled it over her ears, or she
wrapped a sequined scarf around her head, knotting it on one side and letting
it fall over a shoulder.
 
But do what she
would to simulate the hairstyle of the time, after half an hour on a dance
floor, Maggy would find that the scarf had slipped off, or that the tight coils
of hair had somehow come undone and the masses of her hair were swinging from
side to side as if she were galloping about in open fields.

It was not just a whim that
prevented her from adopting a more modish hairstyle; the painters she posed for
preferred it long, and even paid a few francs extra because of it.
 
An artist's joy in a woman is based on her
flesh in all its manifestations, from her toenails to the crown of her head,
and, to a man, they detested the style that decreed that a woman's hair should
be cropped and flat.
 
However, like most
of the other women in the Western world, Maggy had adopted the line of dress
imposed by fashion, the waist barely marked at the hips, the breasts
flattened.
 
That whimsical painter, Marie
Laurençin, protested that a woman was not a stick, but Chanel and Patou and
Molyneux had decreed that she must try to look as much like one as possible,
and within her limited means, Maggy tried to follow fashion.

"You needn't give
yourself airs and graces," she cheerfully assured Picasso, as she cocked
an eye at the way he had distorted her body in his paintings.
 
"It's not only your own idea,
chouchou,
for we women too can reinvent anatomy.
 
Did you notice my new dress, ch? And don't forget it, they belong
strictly to us, those breasts and thighs and all the other bits and pieces you
play fast and loose with.
 
No
touching!"

For her work she had bought
herself an apple-green silk robe and during her minutes of rest she would often
wrap it around her body and walk around the artist's studio, stalking the
unfinished canvas like a heron.

"So that's the way I
look to you, is it? Well, I may not have a full-length mirror in my place but I
have only to look down to see that both my nipples are the same color.
 
D'y' see that you made the right one look
like a raspberry and the other like a strawberry out of season?
 
And my eyes
—
do they really have so
many different shapes?
 
I've heard that
the Eskimos have twenty-five different words for snow
—
are you of the
Eskimo school then?
 
Still, you might
have a lick of talent.
 
Who knows?
 
I'm no expert certainly."

On her clients,
"mes
popottes,"
Maggy lavished her sarcasm, her generosity and her
incurable impudence.
 
On Paula she
bestowed a solid love that was untouched by capriciousness and suited the older
woman very well.
 
She regarded all of
Maggy's triumphs as if they were her own and from time to time, as the two
women ate an early dinner together in the kitchen of La Pomme d'Or, Paula noted
that the girl had still not found a man.
 
Not with that monstrous appetite of hers, the appetite of someone who
had never known a lovesick day.
 
Time
enough, she thought to herself approvingly.

While Maggy conquered
Montparnasse, Julien Mistral found himself facing a financial crisis.
 
For years he had carefully eked out the
modest patrimony he had inherited at the death of his mother, almost three
years earlier, but now, he realized with a shock, it was almost gone.
 
Yet no strict economies were possible to an
artist who used paint and canvas as lavishly as he did.

He had always bought in such
quantities that he had persuaded Lucien Lefebvre, the owner of Lefebvre-Foinet,
the art supply store on the rue Bréa, to give him a small
discount.
 
There were cheaper paints to be sure, but
only Lefebvre ground his by hand and mixed
them with poppy-seed oil
instead of the usual linseed oil so that they smelled like honey, and
possessed, Mistral was convinced, a richness of tone that other paints didn't
have.
 
But even with the discount he had
run up an uncomfortably large bill.
 
Yet
to limit himself?
 
Impossible!

Restraint, economy,
husbanding of resources, living within hit means; all of these virtues Mistral
practiced in his daily life, drinking only a little cheap red wine in cafes,
and paying almost nothing for rent or food.
 
Women, he thought, as he got ready to leave home
on the evening
of the Surrealist costume ball, to which he'd been invited by a rich young
American woman, Kate Browning, were no expense.
 
As plentiful in his life as the burrs on a dog, not one of them had yet
cost him a centime.

Mistral stretched and almost
hit his head on the ceiling of his bedroom.
 
He decided not to bother shaving or brushing his tangled red curls,
since his only concession to the need for a costume was an old-fashioned,
wide-brimmed, black hat he had picked up in some secondhand clothes store.
 
He was not disposed to take any more
trouble
for the Surrealists whose definition of beauty
—
"the chance
encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table"
—
was, to him, an abomination.

All "isms" were
equally loathsome to him, and in that group he included political parties of
every type, all religious groups and any one who believed in some clearly
formulated system of morals.
 
Art had
nothing to do with words like morality or immorality; it was above morality,
above definitions of beauty.
 
Why, he
often wondered, did people bugger themselves up by getting involved in ideas ,
instead of paint?