Auguste took his empty coffee cup into the kitchen, thinking of the relief and pleasure of painting a compliant model today. Alphonsine.
“You didn’t have to bring that in here,” Louise said. “Do you want something else?”
“No.”
“You know, the one who calls herself Circe? She came flouncing in here on Sunday right when I was cooking for a full restaurant, asking for a bowl of ice water. Ice water! As though we have ice to spare.”
“What for?”
Louise wiggled her fingers. “To dip her hands in to make them white.”
He groaned. “Don’t let her have any flour. She’ll be flouring her face next. She’ll see, though, when my painting is finished, how lovely she’d be with a little sun on her cheeks.”
“Like Alphonsine’s?” Louise’s eyebrows lifted.
“Yes, like Alphonsine’s.”
Louise gave him a quizzical look. “Have you noticed? Alphonsine has been a different woman since you started this painting. So much happier. She sings in her bedroom in the morning.”
“She’s been a delight.”
“She gives more than she takes. That’s her way. A pure soul, she is.”
“Yes.”
She wiped her wet hands on her apron and stepped toward him, lowering her voice. “Can’t you find someone for her, Auguste? One of your fine friends? The only men she meets out here are those looking for a lusty afternoon with an easy grenouille. She’ll have none of that. She hangs on to the memory of Louis. It’s honorable, yes, but so sad for her to be alone. She has to let go.”
“True.”
She folded down his shirt collar like his own mother often did.
“Have you ever thought of her tenderly? It seems at times you do. She’s a faithful woman, Auguste, and she adores you. Can’t you tell?”
He nodded, looking at the floor.
“She’d be furious if she knew I was talking like this. I shouldn’t have said a word.” She flicked her hands at him. “Go on about your business.”
“My business today is to paint her.”
Louise’s eyes widened. “Oh! Then go, right this minute.”
“May I have a table setting and a white linen napkin?”
“So that’s what you came in here for.” She gave him what he needed and hustled him out.
On the terrace, Alphonsine was having a café with her father. A bowl of cherries sat on the table. Perfect.
“Where do you want me?” she asked.
“Sitting next to the railing, facing me but showing some of the chair.” Auguste set out a plate and tableware and handed her the napkin. “Will you fold this to make it stand up like a sail?”
She took great care and set it on the plate, adjusting it until she was satisfied. He positioned her with her left elbow bent and resting on the table, her left hand at her cheek.
“This won’t hold you up on the big painting, will it?” Alphonse asked.
“No. I’d go mad if I didn’t have something to do between Sundays.”
“You’ll finish it on time, won’t you?”
“Close enough.” He hoped Fournaise didn’t detect doubt in his voice.
Auguste put a cherry in his mouth, licked its smooth skin, and bit down, the juice exploding, the sweetness. He placed the bowl closer to Alphonsine. “Eat one.”
She lifted two by the joined stems and tried to catch one in her mouth. Her little mauve tongue curled like a cat’s in search for it. She giggled, caught one, and pulled off the stem. He loved watching her roll it around in her mouth, and bite it to taste its succulence. He cupped his hand under her chin. She hesitated, making a soft purring sound as she chewed, then squeezed the pit out of her mouth and it dropped into his palm. Its wetness, where her tongue had been, an intimate thing.
“Keep that smile. Slightly openmouthed. Good. I’ll call this Alphonsine au temps des cerises.” The time of cherries, so brief.
He tugged on the red-orange bow at the back of her canotier so the streamers would show at the side and lifted her right arm to rest on the railing. Its weight in his hands told him she was relaxed and willing.
“A good model, non?” Fournaise said, patting her cheek. “We’ll hang it in the dining room next to the one you did of me.”
“I’ve got to paint the thing first.”
“Then paint. Don’t let me disturb you. Finish the cherries,” he said on his way downstairs. “They’re the last of the season.”
She was quiet, letting him work, and very still. Her stillness issued from within as a deep contentment, at one with her river world.
A thin layer of high stratus clouds diffused the sunlight. The myriad of minute gradations of hues he saw in her dress he also saw in the river—her form in accord with the background.
“The sky is giving me a gift today,” he murmured. “It’s making lovely color harmonies, you against the river, the trees, alongside the tablecloth.”
He laid in those delicate harmonies—pale lavender-blue for her dress, white for the tablecloth which he would overlay with tints of blue from her dress and yellow-gold from the sun shining softly through the clouds. Light brown for the wooden railing, lavender for the ironwork below it, olive and ocher foliage, deep ocher for her chair, pale ocher for her hat, paler still for the braid on her sleeve, near white where the sunlight lay over her outstretched arm. Every hue surrounding her was reflected in her image. Every shape softened by light. Feathering one shape into the other with small distinct touches would make the painting’s harmony one of stroke and not just of color.
How much farther could he go using separate feathery strokes to diffuse edges? As far as to blur the figure into the background? Would that be so bad, having a female form emerge from a riverscape—the two things he loved? Or from a landscape? The idea excited him, but there was a danger in going too far. He wouldn’t risk it for this painting of Alphonsine. He didn’t want her to dissolve into a swirl of color.
“There’s a sailboat near the railroad bridge the same shape as the napkin, and the curve of your chair back is in harmony with the curve of the bridge support. The bridge is nearly on the same diagonal as the railing.”
“It will mean something to Papa to have the bridge and the railing in the painting. The same man worked on both of them.” Her face lost its peace and her hand tightened its hold on the railing. “And to me.”
A bird trilled a song in the trees. Her eyes moved, looking for it, but she kept her head still. “What would the river be without its sounds?” she said. “And smells too. Wet grass, mud, wild honeysuckle.” Her hand relaxed and peace returned to her face.
“You are a river creature, aren’t you? Maybe I’ll call this The River Goddess Sequana.”
“When you paint a portrait, do you try to see into the person’s soul?”
“This isn’t a portrait. It’s a full genre scene with background. When I paint portraits I have to paint tighter. The men with the bankrolls have to recognize their daughters and wives. But your father understands Impressionism, so this will be softer.”
“Still, do you? Try to see into a person’s soul?”
“I leave that for lovers and priests. I just show that your face is an egg shape, your chin slightly narrower than your forehead.”
“Oh, wonderful. You’re going to paint me like an egghead. A person is more than color and shape, don’t you think?”
“It’s not my job to think. It’s to feel and to see.” He gave her a hint of a smile. “I paint women as I’d paint carrots.”
“And I suppose Madame Morisot paints men like green beans? You’re being obstinate and doltish.”
“Ah, yes, that’s what I’m after. A little fire in your eyes.”
He worked on her face while that expression lasted.
“A person can love carrots, you know,” he murmured.
He accented her narrow waist with a blue sash and lightened the pale blue of her bodice where sunlight rested on her breasts. He had the feeling, like a warm breeze coming from nowhere in the still air, that someday, seeing this painting in the dining room, he would be overcome.
“When I suggested that you paint up here, I didn’t have in mind the kind of big painting you’re making, with all those people,” she said. “I was just thinking of the view.”
“You don’t like what I’m doing?”
“I love what you’re doing! All your friends, all the talking and singing.”
“How’s that different from any other Sunday crowd?”
“We’re doing something together. Nous.”
Ah, yes, that quaint concept of hers.
“Do you want to know what I think of them? The models?” she asked.
“If you wish to tell me.”
“Antonio is his mother’s precious darling. He doesn’t walk. He glides. He’s so far gone on Angèle that I’m worried for him.”
“Ah. Our Carmen who sings of bohemian love. What do you think of our Monsieur Ephrussi?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he never sat down out of fear of mussing himself. His accent reminds me of someone I knew.”
“Who?”
She tapped the railing. “Alexander. The man who designed the ironwork under the terrace. He was Russian.”
“So is Charles, but his wife is French.”
“Why didn’t he bring her?”
“Propriety. What about Paul Lhôte? He’s my closest friend,” Auguste said.
“He laughs like a barge hooting.”
“At everything, even danger. On a bet he went down into the Paris sewers, claiming there were street signs down there and that he could find his way from Pigalle to the Hôtel de Ville in two hours. Pierre waited there four hours in a panic, but he finally climbed out, stinking and filthy. ‘Like a walk in the park,’ he said.”
“Ugh! I think Pierre is funnier, the way he tries to get his hands on Circe.”
“And Raoul?”
“I like the faces he makes. And I like him. His spirit. His leg makes him lurch, but he dances anyway.”
Louise came up the stairs talking. “Auguste, what would you prefer on Sunday, côtelettes d’agneau à la forestière or fritures de la Seine?”
“Hmm. Lamb or fried fish. I’m sure that they’d both be delicious. Whatever you’d like to prepare. Both of them, one this week, one the next.”
“Which one first?”
“The fried fish, I suppose, in keeping with the setting of the painting. I didn’t think there were any fish left in the Seine.”
“I order from Le Havre.”
“We won’t tell anyone, will we?”
Louise raised her shoulders and covered her mouth. “A secret. Will pâté de canard and aubergines à la Russe be all right for the entrées this Sunday? I’ll bet that Russian fellow would like eggplant.”
“I’m sure he would.”
After she left, Alphonsine said, “She’s been planning the menus weeks in advance.”
“Then why is she asking me?”
“She likes you. She wants to feel part of it. That’s why she comes upstairs and announces the dishes. She never does that for anyone else.”
From his side, it was also true—he was feeling part of the family. Maybe too much for his own sense of independence.
He darkened the blue slightly and added a tint of violet for the shadows in the folds of her skirt. “And Jules, our anglophile poet with the irrepressible habit of quoting Shakespeare?”
“I like him doing that.”
“He can’t stop himself. It’s the way he experiences life.”
“I liked him from the first time I saw him gazing at the river with a far-off look on his face. Maybe he was composing a poem. It’s fascinating, I think, to line up words in a way they’ve never been before to allow you to see something differently.”
“Paintings allow you to see something differently too.” He made a pale yellow ocher for the trim on her sleeves. While he had it on his brush, he added green and feathered in strokes for the foliage behind her bordering the river. It was coming along quickly.
“I have to tell you about the women too. Ellen has a serious streak even though she works at the Folies, but Angèle’s frivolous. Angèle’s so funny when she speaks roughly. She’s not the type who would endure hardships for a loved one, man or woman. She’d just go where impulse takes her.”
“She’s a pleasure-seeker, all right. After that cycle ride, Alphonse had better be wary.”
“He is. He’s so wary I wonder if he’ll ever fall in love.”
“Does that run in the family?”
Her eyelids lowered. It took her a moment to answer.
“With me, it’s not wariness. It’s something else.”
Louise came up the stairs again with a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses on a tray. “I forgot what I was going to say. Oh, yes. For dessert—”
“I’ll make the dessert, Maman.”
“You didn’t tell me.” She jabbed her fingernail into his shoulder. “I’m the cook and she didn’t even tell me. So what do you think you’re making?”
“Layered apple pastries drizzled with Chambord liqueur.”
“And where do you think you’re getting the Chambord?”
“Papa’s cabinet, of course.”
Auguste motioned for Alphonsine to take a drink and he did too.
“Have you noticed how these women drink?” Alphonsine asked. “Ellen takes careful little sips, a lot of them one right after the other, sip, sip, sip, but Angèle drinks in a great, hearty gulp followed by a loud, throaty ‘Ahh.’”
“And Circe?”
“Circe drinks with closed eyes, in order to see her inward pleasure. She’d probably want to watch herself making love too, careful to make every move precise. Princesse Circe, dressed by the Salon Clorinde or some other famous maison de couture on the rue de la Paix or rue St. Honoré at ten francs per stripe. Her voice is as sticky as the resin on a pine tree.”
“Where did all that come from?” he asked.
“She’s right,” said Louise. “Don’t be taken in, Auguste. Her fingernails are sharp as claws.”
“That doesn’t worry me as much as getting her to pose the way I want her to. She’s amusing at times, but she’s pigheaded.”
“That she is, truly,” Louise said, standing to go. “I tell you, if she comes into my kitchen again, I’m going to shoo her right out.” She started down the stairs. “Right out the way she came in.”
“You told Circe you don’t want the painting to tell a story,” Alphonsine said. “But you can’t deny people’s interpretations just because you say there’s no story. When my brother gave his contribution, didn’t you see how he was looking at Charles? He was almost laughing at him wearing that top hat. And what about Antonio leaning over Angèle as though he’s going to lick her ear any second? You don’t think there’s a story there? Émile adores Ellen, but she won’t let him near her, and now he hasn’t come back. Something’s going on between them. Something’s going on everywhere in the painting too. There will be mysteries to people looking at your painting, but they’ll bring their own feelings to it, and will imagine they know something. Like Jules said, how things are connected, one thing and then another and another.”
“Ah, the promenaders reminding you of the hat shop. Will you tell me about it?”
“You’re brave to ask.”
He worked on the tablecloth. He loved to paint white, which was never pure white. The pastel tints would tie all the other colors together.
“We lived above it. Papillon et fils, Chapelier, our sign said. It was in the shape of a top hat. We had all kinds of hats, chapeaux hauts de forme like Monsieur Ephrussi’s, feutres, chapeaux de paille, chapeaux mous, English bowlers, French melons a little shallower in shape, like Raoul’s, bérets, mariners’ caps, canotiers, flat-topped boaters for members of the yacht clubs, like Gustave’s. I had a counter for ladies’ hats. We bought the forms wholesale and I decorated them with ribbon, net veils, and silk flowers that I bought in the stalls of Les Halles. It felt like I was a bird building a nest with feathers and tulle. Sometimes I put a little feather bird in the folds.”
He let her tell whatever it was she wanted to at her own pace while he painted her hand on the railing, the high curving arch under her fingers and palm, her thumb relaxed.
“Do you know, it’s ten years almost exactly since the war began?” she said.
Her eyes glistened. He wanted to catch them just that way in his painting, like polished river stones of lapis. The peachy hues of her face made her seem much younger than she was, but behind her eyes, right this minute, lay a realm he had not seen.
Madame Charpentier had told him to find a wife. It would be easy to move right in with the family—he liked them all, and he felt tenderness for her. He hadn’t realized it until she’d picked the grit out of his face. He could see now that Louise was right—Alphonsine was beginning to care for him. It would be satisfying, but that would end sowing his wild oats in Montmartre. Madame Charpentier’s point precisely. No. Put it out of mind.
“Louis was called up.”
The abruptness brought him back to the moment at hand. “So was I.”
“Where were you sent?”
“To the South. I never saw any combat, but I treated myself to a vile case of dysentery. One day my comrade and I were at a wine merchant’s, and the next day, he stopped speaking. The day after, he was delirious and couldn’t stop laughing. A horrible, deranged cackle. Then he was gone. I would have died too if my uncle hadn’t come to rescue me.”
“I’m glad he did.”
A pink blush washed her cheeks. She looked away.
“Did Gustave fight?” she asked.
“He was in the Garde Mobile de la Seine. I didn’t know him then, but I knew Paul. Pierre and I were crazy with worry because he’s such a risk-taker. After the war he told us he’d been taken prisoner east of Metz and interned in a Prussian barracks. He tried to escape and failed the first time, but Christmas night the cell guard was sleeping and he took his clothes and walked right out of the barracks and into a town in the midst of a holiday celebration. Of course, he couldn’t resist having some German beer in a brasserie. He was discovered there in the morning, asleep, and was taken back to the barracks under tight watch. Somehow, he escaped again, and hightailed it back to France.”
That peace in her face dissolved as her lips closed.
“Another Jean Valjean, escaping more than once, Victor Hugo fashion,” she murmured. “Louis died of cholera in a Prussian prison camp outside Trier.”
He stopped painting. It seemed insensitive to go on.
“I lived through the Siege without knowing,” she went on. “Lived on birds and broth and rationed horsemeat.”
To say he was sorry was to say words not normally used when a person learns of a death, but he did feel them. He set down his brush. That was all he could do.
He wished he hadn’t described his comrade’s death in the South.
He imagined her desperate for a letter from her husband while the Siege held Paris in an iron grip. Nothing in, and nothing out. Not a single piece of mail. Not a scrap of food. Alphonsine trapping a thrush on a window ledge, weeping as she broke its neck, plucked it, gutted it, boiled it, drank the broth. If she got word that Louis was dying of disease, he imagined her rushing into the street begging camion drivers to take her across the lines to his field hospital.
He imagined her dazed and silent when she realized Louis would be buried in a mass grave across the Rhine. He imagined her watching Paris burn during the Commune and not knowing whether to cry for the living or the dead. He wanted to hold her and whisper something that would make the memories go away. Words never came easily to him at such times. Touch did, but he remembered her raising the oars in the boat. No touch could erase her loss anyway.
He felt an urgency to dispel the tense silence. “You’ve heard me mention my good friend, Frédéric Bazille, who shared his studio with Claude and me when we didn’t have a sou?”
She was still and quiet, waiting.
“He volunteered for a Zouave regiment from Algiers, the fool, just like Paul. Zouaves were put in the most danger. He felt no political compulsion to enlist. He did it just to demonstrate his manhood that was suspect. I wrote him a note. ‘Triple shit. You’ve no right to do this, you stark-raving bastard.’ The last word he had from me and I called him a bastard. He was killed at Beaune-la-Rolande. A puny little skirmish absolutely without consequence to the outcome of the war.” The words came out pitched high with the effort.
“France lost more than the war. It lost his unpainted pictures,” she said.
“He was a strong talent. I wish you could have known him. We all looked to him. Gustave thinks he could have held the Impressionists together. I can still see his gray carpet slippers with the red straps. Sometimes when I’m alone in my studio, I think I hear him humming Offenbach.”
She sat there blinking away moisture. “Sometimes I think I hear Louis humming Schumann. A piano piece called ‘Papillons.’ Butterflies. So droll. Louis’s last name was Papillon.”
He was stricken. He had just tramped roughshod over her memory, discredited her loss by speaking of his own. This was supposed to be a joyous occasion, painting her, and they’d stumbled together into sadness. Yet he had wanted to lay his grief on her lap like a wrapped stone. To lay his head on her lap too. It might comfort both of them. When words stopped, something deeper took hold. He felt the eggshell fragility of a new intimacy, as though he had already made slow, careful love to her.
Every woman in the painting made his pulse race, his heat rise. Every woman, that is, except Alphonsine. Until now. He wouldn’t say it would never happen, but until now, she had seemed too much like a sister. She had never played the coquette with him. What were they to each other? Something swirling, changing direction, lovely and unpredictable, like an eddy in the river. He ought to be careful. He ought to be very careful.
“When we’re finished today, will you let me take you out in a yole?” she asked.
“If you row.”
“Your hands ache sometimes, don’t they?”
“How do you know?”
“The way you rub your fingers. And sometimes you squeeze your right hand in your left.”
“Nothing slips by you, does it?”
“I wish mine ached instead of yours. I wish I could take it from you.”
“Why?”
“The world doesn’t need my hands. It needs yours.”