Auguste stepped out of Dr. Guilbert’s office on rue Notre Dame de Lorette and swung both his arms. By God, that felt fine and free. He straightened and bent his elbow to get rid of the stiffness. Having his arm again was like a chance meeting with an old friend after a long absence, both of them so happy in the encounter that they couldn’t stop looking at each other. An urge to work pulsed down his arm to his fingertips. He would take some small canvases back to Chatou.
What should he do next? Walk around Paris waving at people with his right arm like a perfect idiot? Hail a hackney cab just so he could show off how he could stretch out his arm? Take a train to Louveciennes to show his mother? No. He would do that tomorrow. Today he needed to get Charles Ephrussi.
He passed the church where so many young working girls lived. Lorettes, they were called, as if the proximity of Notre Dame de Lorette lent them a dose of morality. The truth was that the church was named after the lorettes of the last century, women kept by wealthy aristocrats in the quarter. One lorette was coming toward him now, her saucy rose-colored hat and veil lending its color to her cheeks. She was carrying two hatboxes as though she were delivering them for a milliner. It was only a ruse. The blithe way she swung the empty paper drums gave her away. So did her deft, practiced motion of lifting her skirt higher than necessary to step onto the curb. A middling prostitute. He could put his right arm around her waist as she passed. Was that philandering? No. He chuckled to himself. It was only celebrating the use of his arm again.
He turned onto rue Lafitte, street of the big banks, and the view changed as he headed toward boulevard Haussmann—from the nubile petits rats of the Opéra slinging their ribboned toe shoes over their thin shoulders, to illiterate lorettes hurrying to dressmakers’ lofts to earn their three francs a day, to their tailor-made clients in silk shantung, cinched-in women careful how they stepped out of carriages, the backs of their skirts layered with flounces, their rings flashing on their way to the private jewelry salons on rue de la Paix. Heavens, how he loved the women of Paris!
It was partially his parents’ doing. If his father hadn’t been a tailor and his mother a dressmaker, he wouldn’t have learned to pay as much attention to fashion and fabric. His earliest memory was sitting on the floor of the parlor, which served as the fitting room, and learning the names of colors from the dresses that women had his mother make. It would have been a shame if he hadn’t had that start. A man unconscious of such things was depriving himself of the erotic force of color, texture, and even the sound of taffeta rustling—all those delights a man must content himself with until the fabric falls to the floor in a heap around two bare legs. He felt incapable of ever satisfying himself with enough beautiful women—both painting them and touching them. It wasn’t lechery. It was devotion. How could he squeeze his broad appreciation into one woman acceptable to Madame Charpentier and her portrait-buying friends?
On rue Favart alongside the Opéra Comique, a woman in an emerald green dress coming toward him cast a quick look backward at Ephrussi’s window across the courtyard and turned in at the stage door. Now, wasn’t that curious?
He slowed his pace as he approached the gray-shuttered building that housed the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. A seed of doubt lodged in his throat. Charles hadn’t bought anything from him for more than a year and it wasn’t because his bank was doing poorly. It was symptomatic of what he knew to be true, namely that his buyers were seeking him out less. As yet, the slide was publicly imperceptible, but he feared it would soon be talked about in the cafés. Charles had been good about introducing him to upper-class buyers like the banker Louis Cahen d’Anvers, who had commissioned a portrait of his wife, the Comtesse Cahen d’Anvers, who also happened to be Ephrussi’s mistress. Charles had a gift for convincing men that they would make a handsome profit by investing in Impressionist paintings. His aesthetic preferences were always governed by an eye to profit. If Charles thought the financial gain might shrink, would his willingness to put him in touch with wealthy clients dry up?
The Chatou painting had to reverse the slide. It was for that reason exactly that he needed Charles in top hat standing in the center rear—Charles, the Renaissance scholar, art collector, financier, man of fashion, flâneur of high culture, and above all, principal contributor to the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Then Paris would have to take notice.
Even Ephrussi’s outer office was redolent with sandalwood incense, the exotic aroma of his past as the heir of a corn-exporting dynasty in Odessa. Although Japanese prints adorned the anteroom, Auguste knew he’d find paintings by his friends in Ephrussi’s private office. Some by Degas, at least. Whether Edgar was still a friend remained in doubt.
Jules Laforgue in his shirtsleeves was sitting at the desk behind stacks of manuscript pages puffing on his Dutch porcelain pipe. “No cast?”
“I’ve cast it in the rubbish.” He made a flamboyant gesture of tossing it aside.
“Formidable! If you want to see Charles, he’s working at home today.”
“Ah, bien. What are you working on?”
“An index to his book on Dürer.”
“As his personal secretary?”
“As his disciple, or so he fancies me. If it weren’t me, it would be someone else. His sense of identity needs that.”
“Indeed. I won’t interrupt. Rue Monceau, is it?”
“Yes, number seventeen. One more thing. I want you to know that you’re doing me a favor by letting me see the process.”
“The struggle to come, you mean.”
A manservant in knee breeches and white hose answered Ephrussi’s door and ushered him past Monet’s La Grenouillère to Monsieur’s study. Thank God Gustave didn’t go in for such costuming of hired help.
Charles, in a red silk Chinese kimono, stood up behind his desk. “Auguste! Welcome! Jules said you were staying out in the country.”
“I am. At Chatou. For my new painting, which is why I’ve come to see you.”
“And I’ve wanted to see you too, to advise you to be cautious.”
“About my arm? It’s fine. See?” He picked up a pen from the marble stand on the desk, stretched out his arm, and pretended to write in the air.
Charles’s cheeks lifted in a brief, indulgent smile. “Impressive, but that’s not what I meant.”
Auguste replaced the pen next to a paperweight of an iridescent blue-winged insect caught in amber. The human condition, Pierre would call it.
“Tea?” Charles asked. “It’s Petrushka. Steeped and ready.”
Auguste nodded and Charles poured two glasses from the spigot of a silver samovar on a carved rosewood table. Behind it was an awful mythological fantasy framed in heavy gold baroque. By Moreau, no doubt. On the opposite wall, a series of pastels, Degas’ ballerinas exercising at the barre.
And between two windows, his own painting of Lise Tréhot. Seeing it after so long sucked the breath out of him. How much coaxing she’d needed to pose nude. He’d kept the painting for years as a remembrance of joyous love until need had forced him to sell it. Everywhere he went lately he ran smack up against his past. Such a tumble of remembrances. Pierre would call them portents.
Charles held up a sugar cube in silver tongs. “One cube or two?”
“Two.”
He dropped them into the glasses in silver filigree holders and brought one on a tray. Auguste took it in his right hand. The glass chattered in the holder. He moved it to his left. It still chattered. He set it down.
“Kousmichoff is the purveyor, by appointment to the Tzars. I have it sent from St. Petersburg. It’s Ceylon tea with cardamon, cloves, almonds, and rose. You’ll find it quite delightful.”
Auguste managed to get it to his lips without catastrophe, but it burned his tongue.
Charles gestured toward two armchairs upholstered in pale yellow brocade, and they sat. Auguste crossed his legs.
“You know, don’t you, that Degas has no patience with you and Claude and Alfred Sisley returning to the Salon?”
“Ah, the self-proclaimed spokesman declaims in holier-than-thou tones.”
“Such a large painting as your Déjeuner des canotiers is surely a signal that it’s intended as a Salon work.”
“Jules told you about it?”
Charles nodded. “A dozen people?”
“Thirteen at the moment. That’s why I came to see you.”
Ephrussi’s face turned serious. “Thirteen won’t stand a chance with the Catholics on the Salon jury.”
“What’s worse, they’re around a table after a meal,” Auguste said. “It will probably be unsalable anywhere unless I get a quatorzième.”
“It will be mocked in a cartoon. The press will be licking their chops.”
“I know, I know. Again, I’m telling you that’s why I’m here, to ask you to be in it.”
“Me?” Charles put up his hand in front of his face. “No, not me. You need another, though, or otherwise scrub one person out.”
“It would be better to have you. You’ll lend authority to it.”
“Jules says it’s as large as your Bal au Moulin de la Galette.”
“It’s intended as a tour de force. It’s intended—”
“For the Salon, which you know I approve of, but—”
“Yes, for the Salon. And I don’t want to just figure honorably, as they say in horse racing. I want to blow the whole stuffy Salon apart with an assimilation of styles they won’t dare deny is genius.” He had raised his voice. Now he held up his index finger and spoke slowly and deliberately. “I want to prove that one can exhibit there and produce original paintings of la vie moderne.” He crossed his legs the other way.
“But you must be aware that if you do a painting this large, word will get around. It signals another Salon entry just when Edgar is on the verge of saying good riddance to you and to Claude and Alfred if you submit there.”
“So they’ll be excluded by Degas because I’m submitting to the Salon? That’s monstrous! Diabolical!” He shifted in his chair. “He’s bluffing.”
“Not so. He intends to fill your spots with his young Realists.”
“Like Raffaëlli, in love with ugliness. Under his brush, even the grass is sordid.”
“At the moment Degas is getting more favorable critical press than the rest of you combined, so it would behoove you to be cautious about any break with him. You could be criticized all the more.”
“Are you trying to talk me out of this painting altogether?”
“No. I just want—”
“If I were criticized for selling out to easy portraits, I’d deserve the censure. But I only want to do what seems to me good work, regardless of its destiny, and a large painting is what I can do now, when the light is right and I have no commissions in Paris.”
“No one is questioning your art.” Charles flicked off a shred of tobacco on a lacquered Russian cigarette box on the table between them. “It’s your politics, I mean the group’s politics, that concern me.”
Auguste waved his hand dismissively. “I have no politics. The world is big enough for all of us. I didn’t come here to debate about Raffaëlli. I came to ask you to be in my painting. You’ll have a spot center back, next to Jules, your top hat silhouetted against open air. Or you and Madame Ephrussi together there. I know you like to spend Sundays with her, so spend them at Chatou.”
“Out of the question. To have her exposed to the riffraff of La Grenouillère? That’s monstrous.”
“It’s not at La Grenouillère. It’s at Maison Fournaise.”
“Not to mention exposing her to the crass eyes of the public scrutinizing your painting. No. I prefer to keep Madame for my own eyes. You’re from a different world, Auguste. You don’t understand the niceties required of people in our position.”
“You mean you are from a different world.”
Charles raised an eyebrow at that. “To sit for a portrait in one’s own home is one thing, but to be painted in that raucous environment, in a genre painting—”
“All right, all right. Not Madame, then, but you.” He leaned forward again and tapped his fingernail on Charles’s desk, once for each word—“I want you in the painting. It’s only right, after all you’ve done for me.”
“You’ve done studies already? An underdrawing to restrain your colors?”
“No studies. I’m painting it directly on a blank canvas.”
“That may be enough to lure me out there, just to see what you’re up to. For your own sake, don’t let any critic see you do that, or see it at all until it’s finished. You’ll be labeled a sensualist seduced by color, a chaotic painter.”
“I don’t care what they call me.”
“You care acutely.” He sipped his tea. “What’s your stand on Raffaëlli?”
“Is your posing contingent on my stance?”
“To a degree.”
“That’s unfair of you, but I’ll tell you anyway.” Auguste tried his tea again, making him wait. Still too hot. “He wants us to expose misery. He spouts lists of character types we should paint, with ragpickers at the top. He even mandates locations. Let him paint what he wants, but we left the academy because subject matter was imposed on us there.”
“He considers artists as social educators, and I commend him for that.”
“Fine. Fine. So will this painting contribute to a social education, by showing that we’re enjoying our lives again. At least most of us. His concern for tramps and ragpickers is all well and good, if he likes to wallow, but birds sing even when they’re hungry.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that there’s a purpose for prettiness—to give joy. Besides, Raffaëlli is not an Impressionist.”
“Degas is committed to him.”
“Enough to risk the breakup of the group? I think not.”
“I think so.”
He could see by Charles’s pinched mouth that he meant it.
“Will you come to pose or are you afraid you’ll be seduced by color? I might as well cut up the canvas to reuse the pieces if you don’t come.”
“I can’t say.”
“Gustave will be there. You can talk to him about Degas and Raffaëlli.”
Outside, Auguste passed two women without even a glance.
Prissy foreigner, protecting his good wife from wholesome riverside society, Auguste thought. No doubt he also protects her from the comtesse, or the likes of the actress in green who looked back at his office window. And to hang that dog of a Moreau painting! Charles was taken in because it has the color of gold in it. Moreau can’t even draw a foot.
But if Charles didn’t show up, he might have to consider Jeanne’s dandy, if he dared to come again. Auguste hawked and spat in the gutter. No, he wouldn’t. He would pose some ragpicker first.
He dashed out in front of a carriage and was cursed by the driver. Auguste cursed him back.
He knew where he had to go next, but Gustave’s two hundred and fifty francs for Sunset at Montmartre was already depleted by yesterday’s posing fees, the doctor, his rent at Chatou. The rest ought to go to Père Tanguy.
When the bell jingled, Madame Tanguy teetered on a chair reaching for a box on an upper shelf. Auguste rushed to her.
“You shouldn’t be doing that. Here, let me.”
He offered her his right hand. She took it with a momentary look of distrust, and stepped down.
“That box of palette knives marked trowel,” she said, pointing.
He reached it easily without the chair, helped her reach a few more things, and carried them to the counter.
“Where’s Julien?”
“At the café around the corner, but he’s shorter than I am. I have to fill this order and take it to the bureau de poste by two.”
“What do you notice about me?” He stood with his arms out, palms up.
“That you have no money in your hands to give me.”
“Aha, but I do!” He made a broad circular gesture with his right arm and patted his breast pocket conspicuously. Grinning, he said, “That’s why I came.”
She gave him a squinty-eyed look.
“Now, don’t pretend that you loathe me. I know it’s an act. I know it was you who slipped in that tube of Prussian blue.”
She pressed her lips together, trying to appear stern.
“And I want another one, quick, before he comes in. And flake white, ultramarine, and cobalt.” He snapped a fifty-franc napoléon on the counter.
“Oh, là!”
“How much do I owe?”
She thumbed through a stack of papers tied with string. “If you see that Cézanne, tell him he owes us two thousand one hundred seventy-four francs.”
“Minus the paintings of his you have.”
“You owe a hundred and forty-one francs, eighty-eight centimes, plus twenty-one francs forty now.” She dropped a slim tube into his chest pocket.
He felt his shoulders drop. He had intended to stock up on colors he knew he would deplete soon, but that would have to wait. He had his models to pay again in three days.
“Will you take eighty for now, until I get more?” He laid out three ten-franc coins next to the napoléon. She slapped her hand down on them, stubby fingers splayed.
“I guess that means yes.”
“I guess I’ll take what I can.”
He blew her a kiss. “You know, that blue dress looks lovely on you. It brings out the color of your eyes.”
She shook her head, hands on her hips. “Monsieur le Flatteur.”
“Have you enjoyed your pâté de foie Julien?”
He patted the contraband tube, then backed to the door waving both outstretched arms to his sides like a bird, trying not to smile.
“Ah! Your arm. No cast!”
“Bonne journée, Madame l’Observatrice.”
Down to thirty francs again. He headed toward Camille’s crémerie. May be she had some luck with the painting of the girls juggling oranges.
He opened the door and saw the wall bare. “Ha!”
Camille’s plump face spread wider in a doughy grin.
“Sold?”
She didn’t say yes or no. She just ladled out some potage crème de légumes, set it on a round table in front of him, and sat down opposite him.
“Eat.” She pointed to the bare wall with her thumb. “You have my daughter, Annette, to thank for that. The shoe shop girl. She ran into that clown Sagot outside the Cirque Fernando and told him she had a painting she knew he’d want. ‘By Renoir,’ she said with awe in her voice. ‘It’s of two circus performers.’ She dragged him here right then. He offered thirty francs. ‘C’est ridicule!’ she said. ‘Won’t you be sorry when I tell you I sold it to a man for fifty!’ ‘Then why is it still here?’ the man asked. ‘The buyer’s coming for it tomorrow,’ she said. She was lying through her teeth, but I let her operate and just watched. She was so pretty with her dark brown hair piled up, and he was looking at her as much as at the painting. In the end, they settled on thirty-five.”
“Bravo!”
Camille sauntered behind the counter in a rolling motion, opened the cash drawer, and clicked the coins together in the air like a Spanish dancer.
“That’s the wife you ought to have. Annette did it once, she can do it again.”
Just this once, he’d promised himself, as a leg up for his Chatou painting. Never again.
Titters came from the next table—Géraldine and Aline, the girls of the quarter, regulars at the crémerie.
“She’s got you under her thumb now, pardi!” Aline said with her pert little nose in the air.
Pardi. Interesting that she didn’t say by God. Pardi was archaic and countrified. A country girl by choice. He liked that about her. She had a freshness that neither the lorettes with the hatboxes nor the femmes de la grande bourgeoisie on the boulevards nor even the actress in emerald green possessed.
“Next thing you know, she’ll want you to paint her daughter,” Aline went on with a lilt to her voice. “That’s how it starts. Then she’ll have Annette deliver cuisine de campagne to your studio every night, and that will keep you from going to the Café Nouvelle-Athènes…”
“…So you won’t meet other women,” Géraldine added.
“And soon you’ll give in, leastways out of gratitude as much as out of the itch of the flesh, and hélas! You’ll find yourself married, and all your bachelor soirées will go up in a puff of smoke.”
“How do you know that I’m not married already?”
At this, it was Géraldine who laughed, while Aline flushed a deep rose.
“Oh, she knows,” Géraldine said brightly. “We have our ways.”