The Witch of Painted Sorrows (13 page)

I looked out the window at the ordinary street scene. Talking about my father had made me sorrowful, and I was glad that we had reached our destination and that this conversation was at its close.

“Could you hear what the woman in your dreams said?” Julien asked.

“I don’t really know. When I try to remember, all that happens is that in my mind I see white light mixed with the colors of the rainbow.”

“You try to remember words and see colors?”

“Yes, I know it makes no sense.”

“Dujols says there are so many mysteries that we have yet to explore. I suppose he’s right.”

“Didn’t you think he was right before?”

“In theory, yes, but it’s what I’ve seen since you came to the house. How did you open the door to the artist’s studio?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Are you familiar with Debussy, the musician?” Julien asked.

I shook my head.

“He and Erik Satie are creating music that fits the world you’re talking about. They believe that there are symbols in sounds as well. They are often at Dujols’s.”

We had arrived at rue des Francs-Bourgeois. The carriage stopped in front of an imposing building where a long line suggested pawning was quite popular in Paris.

“I’m not sure why, but I didn’t imagine there would be so many well-dressed people here,” I said to Julien as we got on the end of the line.

“Pawning is practically a national pastime. Victor Hugo used to come here when he was short of cash. Auguste Rodin often had to hock his tools. Artists and musicians and writers are frequently in and out of trouble and visit their ‘aunt’ for help. There are stories of women who bring their mattresses in the morning, use the money to buy potatoes in bulk in the market, proceed to sell them for a profit,
and come back at the end of the day to redeem their mattresses and start the whole process again the next week.”

The line snaked from the street, through a large stone courtyard and into the building itself. Half of Paris must have been there that day. I saw women wearing large hats and elaborate costumes walk in with jewels and exit without them. A fancy gentleman carried a violin case. An old woman, an ornate and ugly painting. A couple struggled with an oversize garish gold clock. The courtyard teemed with activity as those on line talked to others behind and in front of them, and a street vendor hawked roasted chestnuts.

The man behind us had a rococo chair that he kept picking up, moving, and then putting down again as the line progressed. Behind him, an elderly couple each lugged a sack of books. The man in front of us pulled a large Louis Vuitton trunk on a trolley. It was the same luggage my grandmother used, and I felt a pang of remorse that I was here without her knowledge. But my excitement was enough to dispel it. The whole of the Paris art world waited for me.

Inside we finally sat down at a worn wooden desk opposite a dour-faced bureaucrat who eyed my offering, carefully examining the frog with a jeweler’s loupe.

The sum he offered was adequate, but not what I’d hoped for.

“Can you give us any more?” I asked.

His eyes lighted on my necklace.

“That should bring in quite a bit more. If those are real, they are very large rubies.”

I put my hand up to my throat and touched the rosettes. Why not? I would be able to come back and retrieve all these things as soon as I figured out how to get some of my money from my father’s banker in New York.

Reaching behind my neck, I tried to open the clasp to the necklace, but the mechanism wouldn’t release. I tried again, but it didn’t budge. The stones felt warmer, almost as if they were heating up as I touched them. Almost as if I might get burned.

“Julien? Can you help me?” I turned to him.

“There seems to be something wrong with the clasp. I can’t get it open.”

“What’s going on there? We are waiting—you can get undressed at home,” a man behind us shouted.

Raucous laughter.

“Is there a holdup? They’re closing soon, and we all want our money,” a woman said.

“It’s all right,” I told Julien. “This will be enough for a while, and we can always come back.”

As the bureaucrat wrote out the slip we were to take to the cashier, my fingers worked the clasp. I no longer was intent on pawning it, but it seemed odd that it was stuck.

Back in a carriage on our way to a clothing store, my fingers crept to my neck again, and this time I unlocked the necklace without any trouble at all. My neck felt suddenly bare and exposed, and I reclasped it. But the mystery remained. Neither of us had been able to unlock it while we were inside the Crédit Municipal. And now it was incredibly easy. How was that possible?

Chapter 11

With the count being in town for an extended stay, my grandmother’s days and nights were busy and preoccupied. The next morning, when she invited me to her room for our usual pot of chocolate, I walked into a flurry of activity. As the maid did up Grand-mère’s hair, she gave the housekeeper instructions for that evening’s salon.

“Caviar . . . there must be enough caviar. And oysters. The count loves oysters. Do we have enough champagne?”

I had been concerned about what kind of excuse to make up for my going out without her that day, and had concocted a lie about a friend of mine from New York being in Paris. But before I had a chance to offer it up, my grandmother made her apologies for not being able to spend the day with me.

“I need to visit the dressmaker and the hairdresser and then meet the count at Cartier.” She was looking at me in the mirror, not facing me directly. “He wants to buy me an anniversary gift.” She smiled, and her fire opal eyes lit up.

“How exciting. Do you know what it’s going to be?”

“He said it is to be something of my choosing.” The maid pulled Grand-mère’s hair too tight, and for a moment the smile left her face. “Alice, do be careful.” Her eyes returned to mine. “I wish you would let me put some makeup on you and bring out the warm tones in
your hair and the red in your lips. You’re so pale, Sandrine.” And with that she applied another dusting of powder to her own face. “What will you do to keep yourself occupied today?”

I told her about my made-up friend.

“Oh, wonderful. Will she be in Paris long?”

“Quite long, I think. Perhaps the whole winter.”

“You’ll have to bring her around for tea.”

“I will, of course,” I said, hoping that my grandmother would be too busy with the count to remember about the invitation.

“What is her name?”

“Eloise Bedford.” I named one of the girls I’d gone to finishing school with.

“Is her family French?”

“No. Her father works for the government and has been posted here.” I assumed that would keep Eloise and her family off Grand-mère’s invitation list. She found government officials boring and preferred filling her salon with artists, writers, musicians, and dilettantes.

“Government men don’t make good lovers,” she said. “They are too obsessed with proving their power, and too often they prove it with force. I pity Madame Bedford.”

Two hours later I was looking at myself in a very different mirror in one of the fantasy boudoirs in the Maison de la Lune.

Julien had left me alone to undress. I’d taken off all my clothes and removed the ruby necklace. But I felt strange without it around my neck. Diminished somehow, and even though it was impossible, weaker and less capable, as if it were some ancient talisman created to give me strength and power.

I put it back on, covering it up first with undergarments and then a shirt and finally the cravat I’d bought the day before. I finished dressing just as Julien knocked on the door.

“Are you decent?” he asked.

“Yes, come in,” I said as I slipped on a black suit jacket, “and meet the newest applicant to École des Beaux-Arts.”

Julien stood on the threshold and examined me in the mirror. For a few moments he didn’t say a word but just stared. I watched him trying to make sense of the illusion that stood before him.

It was difficult even for me. Not only did I look different, but I felt different, too. These clothes were unlike anything I’d ever worn. The fabrics were heavier and rougher than my frocks, but from the first step I took in the pants, I adored the freedom the masculine garb allowed. There was also another benefit to my costume, a comforting one: if Benjamin did manage to trace me to Paris, dressed like this, I’d be that much more difficult to spot.

“I don’t know what I’m seeing. Or not seeing,” Julien said. “You aren’t there.”

I knew what he meant. I was looking in the mirror, too, and
I
wasn’t there. A young man I didn’t know was looking back at me. My costume concealed the most obvious female curves. The wig I had bought at the theatrical supply store hid my soft auburn curls, and this darker brown hair hung loose to my shoulders. A mustache, also purchased there, was glued to my upper lip. A pair of spectacles completed the transformation. There were traces of my face left: the jut of the chin my father called impish, the lips that were almost too full to belong to a man.

But if you weren’t searching for Sandrine, you’d never see her, never recognize her. I was missing. And that was as it should be, for
I
wasn’t applying for admission to the École; Monsieur Verlaine was.

I took off the wig.

“What are you doing?” Julien asked. “It’s perfect the way it is.”

I picked up some scissors and cut my hair scandalously short, with the curls reaching just as far as my shoulders, the length only men wore theirs.

“The wig is too uncomfortable. This will work just as well.”

“Your voice?” he asked. “Sandrine, how are you disguising your voice?”

“When we put on plays at school, some of us had to take on the male roles. Since I’m tall, I got more than my share. To create the illusion we really were men, our teacher taught us to how to speak from our diaphragms in a lower register. Most of us couldn’t fool anyone, but my voice is deep to begin with, so it was easier for me. All that practice, according to your response, seems to have paid off, yes?”

With Julien accompanying me, I had no trouble being shown to the admissions director’s office at the École des Beaux-Arts. Julien introduced me as Monsieur Verlaine, and Monsieur Girraud didn’t give my appearance a second glance. He welcomed me and proceeded to rifle through my portfolio. At first he hurried, but then he slowed and really examined the drawings and paintings.

As he did, I tried not to think about the painters who taught here and how much I wanted to study with them. Especially the symbolist Moreau. He would know how to help me invoke the visions that I had been seeing both waking and sleeping since coming to Paris.

“Where have you studied?” Girraud asked.

“In New York City at the Art Students League,” I said, speaking in my best mock male voice, naming the institution that I had walked by dozens of times without much interest.

“These do indeed show promise and skill. A certain force that is unusual. There’s no doubt you have talent, but you would be coming in halfway through the year, and all our classes are full. A stumbling block, you see?”

“It would be a favor to me, Girraud, for you to consider making an exception,” Julien said. “Since his accident, Monsieur Verlaine has been disconsolate.” He gestured to my hand, which I’d wrapped in a linen bandage, suggesting a calamity.

Julien continued: “It was my idea for him to come and get his hand back in practice, and I would feel terrible for having encouraged him to apply if you were to dismiss the request so rapidly.”

Girraud closed the portfolio. “All right. I won’t make the decision on my own. Let’s show your work to Monsieur Moreau.”

I was more than pleased he’d mentioned the one teacher I’d wanted most of all. As we set off, the three of us down the august hallways of one of the greatest art schools in the world, I thought of my father and how much he’d appreciate this scene. And how excited he’d be for me, knowing I was about to meet and speak with a painter whose work we’d both admired. Moreau was the best-known symbolist of the time. He concentrated on religious, historical, and mystical mythical subjects, the kind that appealed to my father and to me. A Moreau painting of Leda and the Swan was hanging in our Fifth Avenue home in my own bedroom. For my twenty-first birthday my father had given me a choice of a painting done by any living artist, and I’d chosen Moreau. Now I was going to be given the chance to meet him, and I hoped I could convince him to take me under his painterly wing.

My hands were trembling, and the portfolio shook.

“Moreau has stirred a lot of controversy,” Girraud said as we turned a corner. “He treats historical art tradition as a mystery religion or cult of the dead, and his poetic interpretations have tried critics’ souls. There is still much discussion over his theoretical approaches to subject matter, but as a teacher he is committed to his students’ mastery of the human form, as we all are, and seems to have quite a gift for bringing out what is best in each student as opposed to pushing them into a uniform style.”

We’d reached an enormous room covered by a glass roof supported by an ornate metal structure. The walls were painted in a wonderful Pompeii red-orange. Light poured into the grand space and illuminated the terra-cotta floor tiles so that they appeared to be on fire.

More than a dozen rows of plaster casts of famous sculptures created aisles. I counted six full-size horses, eight Greek and Roman warriors, a dozen gods and goddesses, several copies of treasures
from the Louvre like
Winged Victory
, and too many academic plasters to count.

The room was so beautiful and overwhelming that at first I didn’t notice a group of men at the far end, each standing in front of his own easel, painting from life. The nude on the raised platform was posed like Diana, goddess of the hunt, whose visage was all over Maison de la Lune. The artists were so quiet they might have passed for more of the sculptures if only their hands had been still.

An older man with a heavy white beard and a dark, rumpled suit stood beside one of the students, pointing to his canvas and speaking in a quiet voice.

He looked familiar, but at first I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t until we approached and I could hear his voice that I realized I had seen this very man in the Louvre, talking in a similar way to a student who was copying the Witch of Endor painting by Rosa.

“Monsieur Moreau?” Girraud said, interrupting.

Moreau turned, excused himself from his student, and came over to our small group. Introductions were made.

After hearing Girraud’s explanation for the interruption, Moreau looked at me with deeply penetrating brown eyes. I could see sadness there. He, too, had loved someone who had died. Two people. Recently. His mother and a lover.

I felt a trickle of perspiration travel down my back. How did I know that?

“Any artist who studies with me walks a difficult path. Are you sure you are prepared to embark upon it?” he asked.

My throat was so dry, the words came out as a croak. “Yes, yes, I am.”

I’d spent so much time visiting galleries and museums with my father, never dreaming of creating art, just happy to be enjoying it. Now he was gone, and all that mattered to me was learning how to paint. As if my very existence depended on it.

“Then let me see what you have,” he said kindly.

I offered my portfolio with a hand that still trembled. Everything depended on what this one man thought.

Moreau studied La Lune’s work even more carefully than Girraud had. He examined the first drawing for a long time. Then the next. Scrutinizing a third, he stroked his beard while Girraud explained about my hand. Only after Moreau had studied the canvases, did he turn his gaze to me.

Did he somehow know that I hadn’t painted them? No, that was impossible. Then what was it? What was he trying so hard to figure out?

“There is a lot you need to address. For instance, here”—he pointed to the thigh section of a seated nude in one of the drawings—“the articulation is awkward. From your sketches I can see that you know your anatomy, which is good. Nudes are part of the academic repertoire. But your technique is a bit tentative and sometimes lazy. Your composition is interesting. You have a solid classical sensibility but no unique style. You need to be developing one that is wholly your own. How long have you been studying?”

“Five years, Monsieur.”

“Where?”

“In New York City.”

Moreau once more returned his attention to the canvases.

Julien glanced at me. I met his gaze. His expression was curious. Was he warning me about something? I couldn’t read his face well enough to know.

“Where do your interests lie?” Moreau asked.

Until he asked, I would not have had an answer, but there it was. “I’m interested, like you, in allegorical work.”