Chapter 17

Camille and I waited until we could hear the others spill out onto the street below. Now we were alone, I didn’t know what to say to her. The image of her and Rodin returned and I couldn’t get it out of my head. A crush on our tutor was one thing, but a full-blown and sordid affair was quite another. It made me sick to think of them together. But at least it all made sense now: her fury when she saw Rodin in the Bois, her sadness when she talked about being able to be with the one you loved. I couldn’t understand why, how, she could allow Rodin to make love to her. I’d heard all the stories, of course, about women throwing themselves at him, his affairs with models and society women who posed for him, but I couldn’t see the attraction. I was only in my early twenties then and he seemed so old to me, with his long grey beard and stained suits.

I couldn’t look at Camille, so I moved towards the little stove. ‘Tea?’

She nodded and pulled the silver case from her skirt pocket. ‘Cigarette?’

Once we were settled around the table, our cigarette smoke blueing the air, Camille began to talk.

‘I suppose you’re shocked. I would be if I were you. Enfin, he is our maître.’

‘What age is he – fifty?’

She picked a strand of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. ‘Forty-nine. As if that matters – he is a genius. It is the artist I love, the man, his passion, age means nothing to me.’

I wondered if that ever worked the other way round, if Rodin would make love to a woman more than twenty years older than him; somehow I doubted it. That’s what my worldly-wise mother would say, anyway. I shook my head – that kind of comment would only enrage Camille. But I had to make her realise she was playing with fire.

I took her hands in mine. ‘Camille, think about the risks you are taking. If it got out, your family would disown you and you’d be ruined.’

‘Jessie, please, I need you to understand, I need your help and I need you not to judge me, judge us. I can’t lose you now I’ve found you. I couldn’t bear it if we quarrelled. You mean everything to me.’

She kissed my hands; there were tears on her cheeks. I knelt beside her and wiped her face with my thumbs.

‘Will you help me, Jessie, will you help us, Rodin and me?’

‘You know I would do anything for you, but what can I do?’

‘You could make it possible for us to meet somewhere safe. Not like this. You could take letters between us, arrange meetings, and keep guard so we are not discovered. With you as chaperone no one would suspect, and we would be safe – I would be safe.’

There was a piece of dried clay in her hair. I crumbled it between my fingers. ‘Are you in love with him?’

I came to sit beside her and waited while she stubbed out her cigarette and struck a match to light another. She leaned her head on my shoulder and I held her while she told me about her affair with Rodin.

‘It began last year. Rodin says he fell in love with me the first time he saw me. C’était un coup de foudre. It’s a good expression and for me it was exactly like being struck by a bolt of lightning.’

So it was for me, the day I met Camille.

She told me Rodin had arrived at the atelier one day to replace her previous maître, Bouchon. Camille was eighteen and newly arrived in Paris.

‘I was working on a bust of our old servant, Hélène. He stood in the shadow of the doorway over there for a while before I noticed him. Short, square, powerful as the Minotaur. Je suis Rodin. It’s all he said. He walked up to the sculpture I was working on, the clay was still wet and it smeared his hands. Rodin looked at me with such intensity, as if I were one of his own works, and put his hands on my face, like this.’ She reached up and touched my face, tracing the contours, and I wanted to catch her fingers and kiss them, one by one.

Camille sighed and resumed her story. ‘Later, another day, he did the same, but this time he traced my neck, my breasts, stroked my arms and ran his hands over my hips. It didn’t occur to me to move. He unbuttoned my bodice. I knew his intention but I didn’t care. I felt the power in his touch – he moulded me like a piece of clay. He did such things to me that afternoon, I was enslaved. But so was he. It’s perfect, we have a perfect love.’ She looked at me again, as if waking from a dream. ‘Don’t you see, Jessie, it’s what I’ve always wanted. Rodin is my lover. The great Rodin! Can you imagine?’

I saw limbs entwined: two nudes. But the lovers I conjured were not Rodin and Camille, but Camille and I.

She lit another cigarette and a spiral of smoke wound its way from her lips and hung in the still air between us. ‘Afterwards I lay on a dustsheet spread on the floor, as unabashed by my nakedness as a child. He sculpted me then, and it seemed more intimate than what we had just done. Does that make sense?’

Camille’s dark curls fell into her navy blue eyes as she looked up at me.

‘Perfect sense,’ I said. Camille had found her grand passion, and love trumped everything. What a bore I must seem, droning on about her reputation, when all that mattered was Love, the kind of love I’d never had. Of course, I loved William, and I was excited by Georges, but this was different, and I envied her.

‘Will you help me?’ Camille said. ‘Help us, ma petite anglaise?’

I took her hands in mine and kissed the tips of each finger. ‘Camille, you know I would do anything for you.’

I was rewarded with a fierce embrace. She unstopped the brandy bottle, tipped the liquor into our cups and raised hers. ‘To Art and Love.’

‘Love and Art.’

Camille drank until the cup was empty; she traced the familiar Willow pattern of lovers fleeing across the bridge, two doves flying above them.

‘I’m meeting Rodin at the Louvre tomorrow morning, early, before it opens,’ she said. ‘Will you come with me? He wants to speak with you.’

I stiffened. ‘So you were planning to ask me anyway, if I hadn’t caught you here?’

‘Yes. Are you angry?’

‘No, it makes me feel better,’ I said with a sigh. ‘Now I know your hand hasn’t been forced.’

She smiled. ‘I’m glad there are no secrets between us any more.’

‘No secrets.’ I drank the rest of my brandy and wondered why I had agreed to help them. At least this way I would be close to Camille and I would be part of one of the world’s greatest love stories; I would not be left out.