The Emperor of Paris (14 page)

But I could be that girl, Isabeau said, fighting tears and fumbling with her scarf. Please, madame. A chance is all I ask.

Madame T looked up from a reluctant flake of varnish and slid her magnifying glasses to her forehead. Many a hopeful apprentice had sat before her over the years. She had stared into more portraits than she could count. She could take the measure of someone, in life or in oils, with little more than a glimpse.

She watched Isabeau and waited for that moment, that dullness crossing a young woman’s vision and marking her as another daughter of privilege who would not last a week.

It never came. There was something in this one’s fidgeting, Madame thought. Certainly not idleness. Perhaps this one was indeed genuine, perhaps the girl did truly love the paintings. Madame T knew they had been her friends all these years, could they not be this girl’s as well? Her scowl fell away.

As I said, mademoiselle. On the face of it. But here in the cellars we have an expression: there is always another face.

Madame T lifted Isabeau’s chin.

Eyes up. You are in the Louvre, mademoiselle, not the Métro. You will not see anything by looking at your shoes.

Isabeau’s uniform was a sad drape of smock with a variety of pliers, tweezers, scrapers, knives and brushes bulging the pockets. On her worktable she had arranged an array of mysterious emulsifiers, each jar and tin neatly aligned with the next. She could turn small wads of cotton across her knuckles—improves the dexterity, Madame T had explained—like a gambler might roll a coin as he considered his next wager.

Removed from the galleries, stripped of their frames and laid flat, the art in Isabeau’s care would take on a strange perspective. Hanging on a wall the subject might lock eyes with the visitor and follow them around the salon, but on her table focal points moved elsewhere. Weak chins jutted out, warts and freckles sprang to life; wrinkles and lumps and scars and pocked complexions came to the fore. As though the subjects in the paintings, from the saintly to the common, had found themselves in their physician’s
office with their pantaloons around their ankles, their socks drooping off the end of the table.

So lay the fourteenth Louis, covered with a film of yellowing gesso and peeling tempura: the accumulations of breath and smoke and stale air stirred by an endless stream of viewers. In defiance of this glaze the Sun King still wore his finest blouse, a lace cravat, silk hosiery; his jowls framed by a mass of black curls. While one hand balanced the royal sceptre the other was tucked against his ample waist, pulling aside his Versailles robes to reveal a pair of dainty red-heeled shoes.

At a nearby table Madame T was bent over a gothic altar screen. How is your man? she said without looking up from her work.

Isabeau hovered in close to Louis’ well-turned leg. A few more spots and we will be done, she said.

Not that man,
your
man. Your Sunday fellow. I suppose you’ll be wanting to rush up upstairs to see him now?

Isabeau ignored the question.

Frankly, Madame said, I do not quite see the attraction. The way he lurks around the galleries with that crooked old fellow on his arm. Not an ounce of muscle between them. Chattering away at this picture or that. On the face of it I find nothing to recommend him at all.

But on another face? Isabeau said.

You have me there. I admit I have heard the custodians talk. Apparently, some of the more impressionable visitors have taken to swooning.

The woman dipped a swab in a foul-smelling liquid and began wiping a face wailing in the dirt of Calvary. And so to you, my grubby little darling, she said.

A half-circle of schoolgirls fussed with their excursion dresses in an alcove off the Grande Galerie. In front of them hung a riverside scene of modest size. Amid the watercolour’s greens and blues of poplars, river grass and calm water a couple could be seen strolling the bank. She wore a yellow dress dappled with sunlight. Her companion lacked any detail; he was merely a dark shape obscured in the shade.

The teacher clapped her hands. The girls ignored her. They were intent on the two men standing in front of the painting. The pair were thin and wiry; their shoulders sloped as each leaned in to examine the watercolour. They wore rumpled suits and scuffed shoes. The young one’s hands, folded behind his back, held a soft-brimmed hat. The older one trembled as he gripped his companion’s elbow.

The girls’ tittering grew louder.

The young man tilted his head to one side and
bounced the hat behind his back. Back and forth went his head, up and down flopped the hat. Every so often he would murmur something. After a moment, the older fellow would respond in kind.

More giggles, spreading now like a fever.

In desperation the teacher pressed a finger to her lips. The resulting silence filled with the voices of the two men: one quiet and deep, with a hint of laughter; the other louder, more abrupt, as though the old fellow were having trouble hearing.

Sweethearts, the young man said.

A duke, said the old one.

And his fiancée—

The famous actress—

Very dramatic.

Strolling along—

Suddenly the skies grow dark.

Looks like rain, he says.

How I hate the rain, she says—

dramatically.

But my darling, says the duke—

do you love me?

The actress turns away.

I do not, monsieur.

But why?

I do not wish to—

to be—

to be—

a duchess!

She pushes him—

in the river and—

and laughs—

and opens her umbrella.

The water—

is only up to the duke’s knees—

He flaps his arms—

like he is drowning.

My sweet duke, says the actress.

Of course I love you.

But you pushed me, says the duke.

I was only practising—

says the actress—

my acting,

and you thought—

you were drowning—

silly man.

The duke starts—

laughing.

What is so funny? says the actress.

My darling, says the duke.

It was I who—

who—

was acting!

The young man had mimed along with the tale: a push, a laugh, the flapping arms, another laugh. The schoolgirls could hardly contain themselves.

The two men turned to find a dozen beaming faces staring up at them. The young man fumbled with his hat, his eyes searching the room as though the alcove had abruptly gone dark. The old man simply grinned. With nowhere to run, the young man extended his arm to one side and bowed deeply.

One of the girls threw her hand in the air.

Monsieurmonsieurmonsieur. Who are they?

The young man was still bent at the waist. Who are who, mademoiselle?

The duke and the actress. Should we give them names?

He looked back at the painting. I suppose we should.

Romeo and Juliet, the girl said.

The young man stroked his chin. Funny names for a duke and an actress, don’t you think?

Well they
were
very funny.

As you wish, mademoiselle. The young man straightened, pushed his hat on his head, bowed again to the girls, turned and bowed to the teacher, then took the old man’s arm.

——

Isabeau turned away as they brushed past her. She managed a glimpse of the young man’s face. She smiled, hoping he might look her way. Remembering herself she adjusted the scarf, a fleeting image of his bright eyes, their corners creased and happy, and his cocked eyebrow still as clear as if he had paused and looked at her. She turned back only to see the two men disappear into the crowded Grande Galerie.

Madame T did not look up from the altar screen.

I do not care to know, Isabeau. It is not my concern what you hope to accomplish or why your man comes here every week or what possesses him to wear the same suit Sunday after Sunday. Do not make excuses about his hat, or retell his stories that have nothing to do with our treasures, or try to explain away his strange companion. I do not want to hear you say words like charming or handsome or clever and please do not say it is because he loves the paintings because I have heard that one before.

If you must know, madame, it is his eyes, Isabeau said.

Let me guess. Pools of mystery?

The brightest grey, madame.

The brigade retreats from the rooftop. The baker seems to look in the young woman’s direction, his unseeing eyes, like those of a trapped animal, sending a shiver through her. She turns away, hunching her shoulders and shrinking herself, willing his dark stare to glance off. The cold damp of being noticed, called out and pointed at, spreads down her back.

The baker looks away and shuffles through the crowd. The young woman hears a few hushed voices.

If there is anything we can do, monsieur.

Anything at all. You need only ask.

I can lend you a few books, monsieur.

If it would help you start again.

The woman hides in the crowd, moving as far from the baker as she can. She squeezes herself against the bakery’s windows.

The firemen emerge from the cake-slice, wiping their faces and lighting their cigarettes. The captain barks and they merge again into one creature, rolling its hoses, storing its equipment, leaving its sooty footprints unattended.

The snow begins to ease.

H
er work would begin before sunrise; the painstaking search for cracks to be filled, dust to be uprooted, flakes of colour to be returned. Her back ached, hunched over her table for hours at a stretch. Her eyes stung, unable to blink for fear of missing something in the poor early light of the cellars.

Isabeau Normande would take her lunch by the boat pond. A few slices of apple, a bite of sausage, a small wedge of cheese; a book, a chair, and a blissfully straightened backbone.

She would select a chair from under the trees and
pull it to a habitual spot. Noting the height of the sun, she would push its legs into the gravel and settle herself. If the day were warm she might remove her shoes, roll off her stockings and dip a foot in the water, giving her toes a painful stretch. Then she would begin reading, ignoring the children launching their toy boats as they puffed their cheeks to fill the sails.

A few pages along and something would cause her to rummage for a pencil. She would then underline with deliberate strokes, write exclamation points in the margins. In other books on other days she might circle whole paragraphs, marking them with a flurry of question marks. She folded corners, filled gutters with strips of paper, drew giant Xs through page after page, or traced a box around a phrase or opinion and connected it with a wandering line to another box she had drawn at the bottom of the page. There, in a determined hand, she would write down her own thinking on the matter.

Absorbed in such conversation, Isabeau might forget about eating altogether. It could be days later when Madame T would sit up from her own table, look over at Isabeau and ask if anyone had noticed the smell of rotting fruit.

On those warm days the Pont des Arts seemed to be the centre of the city. The latest fashions strolled across and
back—one could mark the seasons, the years, by the length of uncovered legs, the width of hips, the reveal of cleavage. Lovers with timid natures or brazen embraces draped themselves along the railings. Picnickers unrolled their blankets, shared their confits and poured their wines. Protesters marched shoulder to shoulder with banners demanding justice or anarchy, more wages or less work. Only the view from the bridge, together with the number of dogs, remained unchanged.

For Jacob Kalb, the picnickers would leave too many remains of their luncheons to blow and scatter underfoot. The protesters would break ranks and run amok, scattering the dogs that would then threaten to upend his easel. The fashionables would offer too many opinions as they stood peering over his shoulder.

Wishing for a good rain to dampen the crowds, Jacob would pack his carpetbag and move along to the Tuileries. There he would draw portraits for those willing to stop moving back and forth and just sit quietly, or perhaps spend a coin or two on something to hang in the parlour.

He came to recognize the garden’s habitual visitors. The card sharps, a pair of old men who arrived on Thursday mornings to play a hand or two of
belote
under the statue of Diana. The one who calmly worked his pipe always
held the winning deal, the one with the dangling unlit cigarette then cursing the heavens and throwing his cards at his opponent. Tuesdays brought forth the knitters: sitting with their backs to each other, gossiping about their menfolk like women half as young, turning out hand after hand of thick red mittens. And on Sundays the reader: a young woman sitting alone by the boat pond. Jacob would watch as she selected a chair from under the nearby trees, dragged it to the same spot and propped her feet at the pond’s edge. Her face always hidden by a lock of hair; always buried in a book.

Jacob had decided the young woman was a native of the city. She seemed unconcerned with what was going on around her, and he had been turned away by enough aloofness to know better than to ask. He would continue strolling the gardens, searching for someone else’s money to pay for a new page in his sketching book or a bowl of soup for his belly.

But for one day. As he turned his back on the young woman and began heading in the direction of the trees, Jacob Kalb remembered something the Barbarian had said. Long before, in those first good days at the Academy.

They were practising the rendering of drapery: folds, highlights and shadow, weightless volumes, suggestions of form beneath the peaks and hollows of fabric. Jacob sat
with a small drawing table covered by a few sheaves of paper balanced across his knees. At the front of the room a model reclined on a chaise, the man’s thick body covered in swaths of brocade. He lay with his flabby arms behind his head, his eyes half closed and roaming the ceiling in boredom. The drawing master sat in a corner, timing the students with a pocket watch.