Nine bells from Notre Dame de Lorette awakened him. His body remembered before his mind did. Gingerly, he rolled onto his side to find a position in which his neck, jaw, ribs, stomach didn’t hurt. He wanted to stay that way all day, in oblivion. He dozed until eleven relentless bells clanged in his head. He opened his eyes to his dear old basket of paint rags on the floor. Safety. He was in his studio. He couldn’t remember how he’d staggered home, what streets he’d taken. Down and down, every step jarring his ribs, leaning on the building, hand to his face, waiting for the concierge to come, dragging himself up six flights of stairs, opening his wallet, finding nothing.
He wished he’d given Fionie Tanguy all he had, but he’d thought he should hold out some for a new model. Now what? It was deceitful to ask a woman to pose when he knew he couldn’t pay her.
Hunger forced him to rouse himself. Slowly, he swiveled to sit on the edge of the bed. He found a bruise on his ribs in the shape of a boot. He stared at it with a cold fascination. One Prussian blue boot. Nine francs forty remained in the jar. Not even one person’s modeling fee. He took it and looked for his bicycle cap. Gone. The ultimate injury. He’d spent a good deal of time getting acquainted with that cap. If he ever saw it on a head in Montmartre, he would…he didn’t know what he’d do. Montmartre was brash, raw, anarchic, and licentious. A young person’s quarter. It was also charming, tender, and forgiving. He was on the cusp of being too old for it either way.
He crept down the stairs, holding his ribs, and crossed the street to Camille’s crémerie. Opening the door required excruciating effort. Two girls from the quarter and three blue-smocked workmen with plaster dust on their sleeves were eating lunch. With just three tables, the only seat left was with Annette, Camille’s daughter, who was turning the pages of La Mode du Jour, a fashion magazine. Carefully, he sat down opposite her.
“I’m much obliged to you for selling that painting. It helped me out when I was pinched.” He was surprised his voice still worked.
“I was happy to do it,” Annette said. “Maybe I have a future as a dealer, oui?” The look on her face was just a bit flirtatious.
He hated to disillusion the poor girl. “Who knows?”
Camille took a closer look at him and said, “You need an omelette.”
He heard her crack three eggs and whip them for a long time, the same furious rhythm as his mother’s, whipping in the same clockwise direction that was de rigueur in his mother’s kitchen. Neither Camille nor his mother could be hurried in this sacred task. Another crack and more whipping delayed it further. That was like his mother too, always slipping him an extra wedge of cheese or spoonful of sauce or cream for his café, to try to put meat on his bones, even these days on his weekly visits. God love them both.
“Everything all right with you otherwise?” Camille asked, her back to him. “What’s lurking beneath your beard? It looks swollen. So does your ear.”
“Eh, good and bad. Like life.”
“Another cycle accident?” She dropped butter into a pan. The homey sound of it frizzling comforted him.
“No. You’ll be happy to know I sold it.”
“Ah, you finally came to your senses.”
“Don’t say that, Maman,” Annette said. “I was hoping for a ride.”
“Too late,” he said.
Something was slightly wrong with the proportions of Annette’s face. Her eyes were too high. It made her chin pronounced, and that meant stubbornness. He couldn’t risk another stubborn model.
He didn’t remember if the other daughter had this defect. Camille would push one of them on him if he told her what was on his mind. At least they’d be reliable, but they weren’t beautiful. He could make one beautiful, he supposed, lower her eyes, paint what he wanted to see rather than what he saw. It would be doing Camille a big favor, and she had always been good to him. But that would be painting from obligation again, not adoration.
It amused him in a distant sort of way, that he was just going ahead, flat broke, aching all over, his painting on the brink of disaster, four models short, without considering abandoning it. Alphonsine would be pleased.
He glanced at the two lorettes. One had a face that could stop a clock. Nose like a pear, lips like sausages. Hardly any lips at all on the other. Thin lips gave a suspicious look to a woman. Hair too dark anyway.
Camille served him the omelette with bread and butter, a voluptuous, rose-gold peach, and a café crème. “Tell me what happened.”
He took three bites first.
“Two thugs worked me over on place du Tertre. The bastards cleaned out my wallet and left me half conscious in the gutter.”
“Now you see,” she whispered, tapping his forearm with her finger. “If you were married, you’d have been home with your wife and not out catting around all night.” She tipped her head ever so slightly toward Annette.
“Maman, behave yourself.” Annette lifted the magazine in front of her face.
He patted Camille on the cheek. “You’re absolutely right.”
The eggs slid down easily and he didn’t have to chew much. She had chopped the mushrooms and ham and shallots in small pieces and the cheese had melted perfectly. He felt his shoulders beginning to relax. Soon he’d be able to think. He supposed he had Angèle to thank that they hadn’t done permanent damage to his vital parts, all for a measly thirty-some francs. It served them right that it wasn’t more.
With his knife, he peeled the peach methodically, watching the skin pull away from the succulent flesh, thinking of Cézanne. His peaches, and his dedication. Expensive vermilion mixed with chrome yellow. He wanted to rip the color out of nature and drink it, chew it, inhale it, make it part of his being, feel it in his viscera right under the Prussian blue boot, so he could take it out and use it whenever it pleased him. He ate the peach reverently, closing his eyes a moment, then finished his café crème.
“This peach is a lifesaver. Merci.”
“Another café?” Camille asked.
“No. One is fine. I had intended to pay up some against my account.”
“It can wait.”
“You’re the peach.”
He shouldered the door open just as Aline was about to enter.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Renoir. Géraldine has been worried about you.” Her eyes flashed with mischief. “Oh, mon Dieu, I can see why.”
A jolt. A shiver. In the sunlight of the doorway her round, peach-tinted cheeks acted like a magnet. Hm, lively eyes. Rose-petal ears. Full, sensual lips. Part of the background of his quarter come to life. He swung around. “On second thought, Camille…”
She nodded. “Another cup.”
Annette looked up over her magazine. “You can have this table. I’ve got to get back to the shoe shop.”
It was a quick, calculated exit, full of grace. Annette knew when she was beaten.
Sitting down with him, Aline raised her hand as though she were going to touch his cheek but held it carefully away. “Tch, tch. At least no cast. What happened this time?”
“Last night,” Camille said, “in place du Tertre, the poor man was violently attacked by notorious criminals of the worst sort, beaten near to death, and left to rot in the gutter.” Camille brought them each a café. “Omelette?”
“Petite, s’il vous plaît,” Aline said.
Three eggs cracked in Camille’s bowl.
“We haven’t seen you for a while,” Aline said. “Shall I tell Géraldine you’re all right? She would want to know.”
He could lose himself in her. A peach among peaches. Flecks of gold and green in her slate blue eyes splintered light and sent it back to him charged with an impish spirit. She had a kittenish face that made him want to tickle her under her chin. Reddish blond hair swept up into a chignon round as a country bun, an eggshell complexion, turned-up nose, almond-shaped eyes at the right position—the imagined face he’d painted on all those plates as a boy, telling Monsieur Lévy it was Marie Antoinette. And his Venus on a vase, it was Aline’s face before she was born. How had he not noticed before? He’d found his shoe on his own foot. Timing. Timing was everything.
“How much time do you have for lunch?” he asked.
“Half an hour.”
He had to get to the point quickly, and quietly.
“I’m sorry about your accident,” she said. “I suppose I would call it an accident, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Are you normally busy on Sundays?”
“My mother and I often go to the Jardin du Luxembourg. We like to walk among the pine trees and watch the wood pigeons. They remind us of home.”
“Are you going this Sunday?”
“Or Géraldine and I go to La Grenouillère. She knows how to swim. Are you hurt badly? Did they punch you in the stomach?”
“Do you know the Maison Fournaise?”
“Oh, yes. Where did they hit you hardest?”
He couldn’t tell her that, but he could play her little questioning game. “Do you like le canotage?”
“Yes, but did they kick you too?” She spurted out her questions more quickly that her usual slow, rolling way of speaking.
“Would you like to go there this Sunday?”
“Did they filch your money?” Her lips pushed out in a pretty little pout.
“Do you have a dark blue dress and a canotier for the sun?”
“Does your jaw give you a pain when you talk?”
“Only when you don’t answer my questions.”
“Oh.” Her hand went up to her mouth to cover a giggle. “And all along I thought you weren’t answering mine.” Her scampish eyes sparked. Such a playful spirit would fit right in.
Camille clunked down a plate in front of Aline with an omelette nearly as big as his. “This is the craziest conversation I’ve ever eavesdropped on. Get to the point, Renoir. You want to take her boating.”
“No! Well, maybe. I want her to pose in my painting. I’ve started this monstrous painting with fourteen people in it on the terrace of the Maison Fournaise. Well, it’s supposed to have fourteen people in it, but one, quelle peste! I scraped her off so now I have a hole in my painting.”
Aline attacked the omelette with vigor and her little cheeks bulged.
“A real hole? That you can see air through? You want me to plug a hole?”
“No, just a big, scraped-off, smeared spot. She was one of the main figures. You would be perfect for it, and I’d be much obliged, but you’ve got to pose in profile and I need you to have a dark blue flannel boating dress so as to cover the shadows left from the other model.”
Her dainty nose poked up. “Tch, tch. If you had asked me first, you wouldn’t have this problem.”
“I know, I know. Would to God I had.” And while you’re at it, God, please give her a cooperative nature.
“So you’ll come?”
She tipped her head toward her raised shoulder. “May I bring Jacques Valentin Aristide?”
His hopes plummeted. Not another arrogant bourgeois bringing tension to his happy, harmonious group. “Who is this Jacques Valentin Aristide?”
“Truth to tell, his name is Jacques Valentin Aristide d’Essoyes sur l’Ource. You’ll like him. He’s very handsome with his hair in his eyes.”
He felt himself tense up, and his ribs ached. A parvenu trailing a false name and needing a haircut. He didn’t expect this simple girl, a laundress or seamstress with a Burgundian accent, to have such ambitions. He steeled himself. “Tell me who he is.”
Aline blinked a few times, apparently enjoying his anguish.
“My new puppy.”
“Puppy or puppy love? Human or canine?”
“He’s a dog, monsieur. A little terrier. Oh, so sad. Sunday is the only day I can take him out for a good long walk. He’ll be cross if I don’t.”
He let out a breath, then remembered Madame Charpentier’s dog which had jolted him with surprise snorts. At least Aline didn’t ask that the mutt be in the painting. He had sworn he would never paint another dog.
“And you, do you have a long name trailing behind Aline? Something Greek? Pandora, maybe?”
“No. Just me. Aline Charigot. I’m the one from Essoyes, in Champagne near the Burgundian border, not my dog. It’s on a tributary of the Seine called the Ource.” Her voice thickened and she rolled the r in Ource forever.
Camille barreled toward her and smothered her in a hug. “I just love to hear you say Ourrrce that way.” She turned to Auguste. “I’m from Champagne too, from the Aube region, and hearing Aline brings it back to me.”
Camille put one hand on her hip and wagged the index finger of her other hand at Aline. “Don’t tell your mother, girl, if you’re going to do this posing. When Auguste’s painting of the two juggler girls was on the wall, she took one look and said, ‘Eh, là, he must have paid you handsome to hang that thing in your crémerie. Pity those poor innocent girls posing for lascivious painters’ eyes. They’re thick as thieves around here ogling the lorettes, and they’re all the same, and none of them are honorable.’ Oh, she has a monstrous dislike for painters.”
Aline’s happy expression drooped. “True enough.”
“Respectability is everything to her,” Camille said. “I know for a fact that she prays, ‘Our Father who art in a respectable heaven, swept daily,’ so you mind your manners, young man.” She pulverized his shoulder with the bowl of a spoon, and stepped back to her stove.
He turned to Aline. “Will you still come?”
“I would have to tell my mother that I’m going with Géraldine to La Grenouillère.”
Auguste chortled. “If she’s set on protecting you from lascivious eyes, don’t tell her that either. That’s out of the frying pan into the fire.”
“I could say Géraldine and I are going rowing. She knows I like that.”
“So do I.” His arm might be strong enough, but now his ribs would be the problem.
“I don’t know if Jacques Valentin Aristide likes it.”
All this time she was saying with her eyes, Convince me. He ought to tell her he would pay the modeling fee, but could he?
“If you pose for me, I’ll make sure we’ll take him for a ride.”
Had he lost his mind? “If not this Sunday, then the next. I’ll need you three Sundays, at least.”
Her eyes widened. “Three Sundays? I don’t know, Monsieur Renoir.”
“Ten francs each sitting.”
“Mm.”
She’d finished her plate and was patting the napkin against her puckered mouth. He chuckled. “I can feed myself just by watching you eat.”
“That’s one thing. I do like to eat.”
“Every Sunday we have one of Mère Fournaise’s delicious meals. So far we’ve had canard à la paysanne with artichauts à la vinaigrette, poulet forestière with asperges d’Argenteuil en conserve, lapin en gibelotte, friture d’ablettes, de gardons et de goujons.”
“Mm. The duck must have been nice, but I’m sorry I missed the rabbit stew. It reminds me of home.”
“And for dessert, raspberry tarts and apple pastry.”
“Ooh, I would have loved that. What are you having this Sunday?”
What had Louise told him? “Côtelettes d’agneau à la forestière.”
She rolled her eyes. He was making progress, thanks to Louise.
“Oh, I adore lamb, and mushrooms too.”
He almost had her. He felt the room spin.
“You didn’t answer me. May I bring Jacques Valentin Aristide d’Essoyes sur l’Ource?”
“Yes, but I must draw the line. No cutlets for him.”