After work in Madame Carnot’s Atelier de Couture in Montmartre d’en bas, Aline Charigot climbed the steep streets toward the Moulin de la Galette until she found the cardboard sign for Chez Hortense, Ladies’ Clothes to Let. She’d been curious about this place but had never gone in. A bell tinkled when she opened the door. In the narrow, dim interior, two racks of dresses hung from suspended iron rods. She walked through the aisle looking for a blue one, not touching anything.
A woman with a shadow of a mustache shuffled toward her in violet mules, Madame Hortense she assumed. “Bonjour, madame,” Aline said and smiled.
The woman returned the greeting but not the smile. “What might you be wanting?”
“I’d like to rent a dark blue dress, a pretty one.”
“All my dresses are pretty, mademoiselle.”
“Then I’ve come to the right place.”
With that, a smile stretched across the woman’s splotchy cheeks. “Blue, you say?”
The woman slipped into the familiar tu form. The informality struck her as false, but then this was Montmartre d’en haut, the Butte. Maybe she was being motherly.
“Why not this green one?” Madame pulled out an elegant dark green dress with draped side panniers trimmed in violet braid.
“No, it’s got to be blue.”
“This one?”
“No, dark blue.”
“Mon Dieu, you’re a picky one!”
“It doesn’t have to be a fine fabric. Canton flannel will do.”
“I’ve got this one, but it will hang on you like a sack. I can stitch it up for you, though.”
It was the dark blue of boating dresses, and had dark red braid around a deep square neckline and down the front. A lace ruffle lay inward along the braid at the neckline. She felt pinpricks of excitement. “May I try it on?”
“Bien sûr. It’s a good choice. A nice demi-polonaise drawn into a modest drape over the derrière. Not too bouffant, but enough to wag when you walk.”
As it fell over her head in the back of the shop, it was like putting on a holiday spirit. She’d never had a dress with a polonaise drape.
Madame fastened the back hooks. “Such a clean one for a country girl. Your neck is as white as a swan’s. Sometimes I have to give the girls a scrubbing they’ll never forget before I let them have a try-on.”
“How do you know I’m from the country?”
“You take a week to say anything. And your r’s.”
With warty fingers, Madame Hortense went to work pinning the side seams. “This won’t take but an hour. Then you can get started tonight.”
“I won’t be needing it until Sunday.”
Madame Hortense shook her head, pins pinched in her mouth. “Sunday’s the worst day to start. They’re with their wives on Sunday.”
Madame made basting stitches up the side bodice. “You’ll be needing a place to take them, so you come back here tonight. The key for a tithe, by the hour. Two hours, two tithes. Discreet and clean. Mind you, bring this dress back as clean as I’m giving it to you. No grease spots from man or beast.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Oh yes I do, certain enough. No need to be coy with Mère Hortense. Eventually you’ll be needing a hôtel de passe. It’s good to keep up good relations with the proprietor. Bring him little cakes once in a while. Then, if you run over your hour by a few minutes, he won’t charge you for two. Try Hôtel Maître Renard on boulevard Rouchechouart.”
“I only want the dress, madame. Not a recommendation.”
Madame Hortense scowled. “For how long do you want it?”
“Just three Sundays. Maybe more. You can have it back in between.”
“Just Sundays! C’est ridicule. Raise your arm.”
“Please, madame, I want the dress. It’s perfect.” She touched the narrow lace ruffle at the sleeve, coveting it.
“No. I can’t be letting the dress on again, off again. As good a dress as this is? No, it’s steady customers I need, night after night.” Mère Hortense lifted Aline’s arm, but Aline resisted until she saw a razor in her hand. Madame ripped out her stitches with one swipe of the blade. “Let go of the dress.” Madame unhooked the back, but Aline held the bodice to her chest. “Let go.”
“What if I paid you a little more?”
“Impossible.”
Aline let the dress fall in a billow around her, flattening sadly, like a deflating soufflé.
“Step out.” Madame Hortense flicked her hand. “Out. Out.”
“How much would the dress cost to buy?”
“A far sight more than what you’ve got in that string bag of yours. This dress is a prime moneymaker. It wouldn’t do me any good to sell it. Out.”
She stepped out and into her own gray muslin.
“You come back if you want it on my terms.”
She nodded, picked up her drawstring bag, and left.
She couldn’t afford a ready-made from Le Bon Marché or even La Samaritaine, the least expensive department store. It meant only one thing. She’d have to make one. Four days! She’d never made a whole dress start to finish, much less in four days. And she could only work on it in the evenings and Saturday after half-day work. Maman could do it with time to spare, but she would ask what it was for, and if she told her, there would be war. A fine pickle she’d gotten herself into. Géraldine would have to help.
She went to the charcuterie where Géraldine worked. Closed. She went to Camille’s crémerie. Not there. She went to Aux Tissus de la rue Blanche, the boutique de tissu that Madame Carnot used when a fine lady like Madame Galantière of the avenue Frochot ordered a dress. Through aisles of bolts—crêpe de Chine, mousselline de soie, brocades, striped satin du Barry—her mind spun with fantasies of Monsieur Renoir being astonished at her beauty, but the plain dark blue he wanted was all she could afford.
The shopgirl recognized her from the times she’d been sent to pick up Madame Carnot’s orders, and inquired what Madame needed. When she learned it was only cotton flannel for her, she brought out the right nautical blue and gazed out the window in complete disinterest.
Aline stroked the cotton nap. “I have no idea how much I need.”
“What does your pattern say?”
“I don’t have one. I was hoping to use one of Madame Carnot’s.” That would save some money. If she waited to find out for certain, she would lose a day. “Can we just make a good guess?” She described the dress with the demi-polonaise in back. “It only drapes from the sides, and the skirt is narrow.”
“To be safe, you had better buy five meters.”
“How much would that be?”
“One franc sixty-five per meter. That’s eight francs twenty-five.”
“That much?”
“If you want the polonaise.”
Oh, she did. A polonaise was what separated the bourgeoisie from the working girl. She counted all her coins and watched the long metal blades of the scissors follow an invisible line across the flannel, cutting future from past. She waited until the piece was cut to say, “I’m short by two francs eighty-five. Would you trust me for that until tomorrow? You know I work for Madame Carnot.”
“You should have counted before I cut.” She went back to confer with someone and returned. “We’ll save the piece if you pay what you can now.”
“I’ll come back midday tomorrow.”
“We close from noon to two.”
Now she had to find Géraldine. She’d be good for two francs eighty-five until Saturday noon when Madame Carnot paid her girls for the week. On rue Saint-Georges she asked the concierge at Géraldine’s flat to buzz her. She waited ten minutes, perspiring into her dress. Géraldine didn’t come down.
Why wasn’t anything easy? Four nights, nearly three francs short, no pattern, and no money for red braid or lace. She went home discouraged until she heard Jacques Valentin Aristide bark as she opened the door.
“Oh, you poor thing, home alone all day.” She scooped him up and cuddled him. “Mon grand, mon grand,” she cooed. He squirmed to lick her cheek with his small pink tongue.
“I took him out. He had already made a puddle,” her mother said.
“I’m sorry.”
She avoided her mother’s glance, ate a slice of terrine de campagne and some fried potatoes, and slipped a morsel to Jacques Valentin.
“Where have you been?” her mother asked.
“With Géraldine. She’s going to make a dress, and I went with her to choose the fabric.” The wings of a trapped bird beat in her chest. “I might help her sew it too.”
Maman’s left eyebrow wormed up into an arch.
She didn’t want to say more. She took Jacques to bed with her, feeling terrible for having lied when Maman had done nothing to deserve it. She fell asleep worrying where the lie would lead.
Wednesday already. At the crémerie in the morning she explained it all to Géraldine, who dumped out on the tin tabletop all she had and drew back enough to feed her for the day. Two francs thirty were left.
“What will you say when you bring the dress home and wear it on Sunday?” Géraldine asked.
“I didn’t think of that.”
“You’d better have your story rock solid,” Camille said, “or your mother will call you a trollop traipsing after artists, and take after you with a broomstick.” Camille snapped one franc onto the table and pushed the thirty centimes back toward Géraldine.
Aline flung her arms around her. “Oh, thank you for eavesdropping again. I’ll pay you both back as soon as I can.”
She arrived out of breath at Madame Carnot’s atelier. It was an old-fashioned workshop with only one Hurtu-l’Abeille sewing machine, which only Madame’s protégée, Clarisse, was permitted to use while she and Estelle worked by hand. Her mother worked in a better atelier that had three machines.
Madame took one look at her. “Early? That’s not like you.”
“I need to make a dress in four days.”
“You know I don’t allow my girls to take on private clients.”
“It’s for me. A boating dress. I’ll have the fabric today, just cotton flannel, but I don’t have a pattern. Is it possible…would you let me look through your pattern file? I want a square neck and a small drape in back. After work, would you let me use the cutting table? I’ll pay for the thread.”
“Slow down, Aline. I’ve never heard you talk so fast. What’s this for?”
“You have to promise not to tell my mother. It’s so that I can pose in a painting. She doesn’t want me running with artists. I need it on Sunday.”
“We have orders backed up, you know.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think of putting mine first. I just need the cutting table today after the atelier is closed. Please, madame.”
“You’ve never done a set-in sleeve. Or buttonholes.”
“I know. But leastways I can try.”
“Can’t it be next Sunday?”
“No, I have to fill a hole in a painting this Sunday. Oh, I so want to help this man. I’ve been watching him at the crémerie where I take my meals. A nice, funny man. A good man, I think. This is my chance, madame.”
“My chance to lose you, you mean.” Madame smiled in a motherly way. “You’re not usually so jittery. Take a look in the pattern file and show me what you choose. Only the commercial patterns, not my own designs, mind you.”
“Yes, yes. Merci, madame.”
The drawings on each envelope showed copies of dresses from chic shops on the boulevards. She found one with a square neck, but it didn’t have a polonaise, and one with a polonaise, but it didn’t have a square neck. She had her heart set on the square neckline. It was more nautical. She brought the two patterns to Madame. “Is it possible to use this bodice with that skirt?”
“Yes.”
“How much fabric will I need?”
Madame read the two envelopes. “Five and a half meters.”
“Oh, no!” Heat went to her throat. “I only have five.”
“You should have asked me first. Au travail! Do Madame Galantière’s hems now. Remember, she inspects them for any stitch showing through.”
“One other thing. May I take my lunch early to get to the boutique before they close for midday?”
“You are a tumble of requests today, aren’t you?”
“You won’t get a stitch less out of me for your clients, I promise you.”
The hours ticked by at a snail’s pace, but she got the fabric, and hugged it to her chest while hurrying back to Montmartre d’en bas, giddy all the way despite the heavy humidity. She tried to be more agreeable than usual, more careful with her stitches, and six o’clock finally came. Estelle and Clarisse left, Madame cleared off the long cutting table, and Aline unfolded her fabric and began to place the tissue shapes.
“All the same direction,” Madame warned. “See the arrows? Flannel has a nap. Double lines mean to place it on the fold.”
She placed them the same way and had one tissue shape left over.
Madame was getting ready to leave.
“Wait!” Aline held up the piece.
Madame looked at her as though the answer was obvious to anyone with half a brain. “You’ll have to buy more.” She pressed a key in her palm. “Don’t stay past seven-thirty. It will be too dark to work past then anyway. Be sure you clear off the table when you’re finished.”
She felt like a marionette whose legs were collapsing.
“You’ll do fine. Just read the instructions before you do anything. Bon courage!”
The door closed. Buy some more. Read the instructions. She might as well have said, Climb to the moon. When had there been time to learn to read more than simple words in short strings? Fourteen she was when Maman had brought her here to launder and press. Three years of that before Madame ever put a needle in her hand. One year spent in doing only hems, another to learn seams, and now, bon courage! She needed more than good wishes to put this dress together. She needed an act of God!
Her hand trembled when she made the first cut. She made the second. The third. She stacked the cut shapes until there was only the leftover pattern piece without fabric. She took it with her and locked the door behind her.
The boutique de tissu was closed. That meant another night of worry. What would be missing from her dress if they’d sold the rest of the bolt?
The next day, Thursday, she asked Madame for two more favors—to adjust her lunchtime again so she could go to the boutique de tissu, and to be paid her two francs twenty-five each day this week instead of the total on Saturday noon. “I borrowed to buy the fabric and now I need to buy more and pay back my friends.”
Madame agreed, and Aline took the pattern piece to the boutique at lunchtime. All afternoon, doing the hems on a three-tiered visiting dress for Madame Galantière who had never sewn a stitch, she thought only of the puzzle of the cut shapes.
At six o’clock Madame said, “Do a running stitch around the arm scyes and corners of the neckline first,” and shut the door.
How did a person spell scyes? She laid out the shapes. Which pieces were they? She would die of humiliation if Madame found out that she couldn’t read the instructions. She held up the pieces against her body to see where they fit. With no one in the atelier, she examined dresses partially assembled and guessed the order of things. She did the running stitch, the darts, basted the bodice seams, and stopped. What next?
On Friday, she skipped lunch to work on her dress, worked after everyone left, and at half after seven took the pieces to Géraldine’s flat to work some more.
On Saturday morning, she arrived at work early and showed Madame what she’d done.
Madame shook her head. “I hope you’re not dreaming of ever becoming a first hand in a good fashion house on the place Vendôme. It’s as unrealistic for you as becoming a prima ballerina at the Opéra.”
“I’m not hoping for anything like that. I’m just hoping to finish this dress.”
“This must be very important for you. This posing, this man.”
“Yes, madame.”
“Just don’t get it into your head to become a model. I don’t want to have to go looking for a replacement.”
“No, madame.”
“You’ve sewn the side seams on the skirt before sewing the polonaise into them. You’ll have to rip them out.”
She felt like screaming. Silently she cursed her ignorance, and bent her head to hide her tears.
“Take today for your dress. You can make up the half-day next Saturday.”
“Merci, madame.” She choked on the words and started ripping. By eleven she’d reassembled the side seams. Madame gave her a bodice fitting before she shut down the shop for half-day. “Leave by six,” Madame said.
She nodded and blubbered through her thanks.
If she had no blue dress, she couldn’t model. Auguste was depending on her. If she failed, how could she ever face him in the crémerie? She eyed the sewing machine. With a machine, she could do the bodice seams and sleeve seams and maybe even attach bodice to skirt before six o’clock. It could save her. She studied the way the thread went through the loops. She could do it. She’d watched Clarisse. But then Madame would see machine stitching and chastise her. She might even lose her job. A worse disaster.
She threaded her needle and went to work by hand. At six she took the pieces to Géraldine.
“Whatever made me think I could make a dress like fine ladies wear for boating in four nights?”
“Do you want an honest answer?” Géraldine asked.
“No.”
Géraldine reached for a sleeve and began putting in the seam. “You like him. More than like him. That’s why. I can tell by your eyes whenever he comes in the crémerie.”
“That skinny, fidgety, brittle-looking man twice my age? He could have any model in Montmartre he wanted. I have no dreams. He could never care about me. He only needed someone quick to plug a hole. I could tell he was desperate by the way his cheek twitched under his eye.”
“Then why are you breaking your neck to make this dress?”
She shrugged. “I’m just doing a favor for someone. To be nice.”
Géraldine wagged her head and hummed a popular romantic song, her smile a tease. Aline didn’t look at her, but burst out laughing anyway.
She went home just after ten. The dress was unfinished, but she still had the morning. She’d get up at three. She’d go with it pinned if she had to.
“I was at Géraldine’s. We were fitting her dress,” she explained. Only one word was a lie.
Her mother put a bowl of cabbage soup on the table. “Why didn’t she come here for a proper fitting? I know a far sight more than you do.”
She was caught short for an answer, and kept her nose down to the bowl.
“Aline. Do you know what it feels like to be lied to?”
She raised her head. The grooves that ran from her mother’s nostrils to the corners of her mouth seemed deeper than she remembered them.
“It makes a person feel no better than a mangy dog in the street.”
Her eyes stung.
“The first night when you said you were with Géraldine, she came here.”
“Why didn’t you say so then?” she wailed.
“I wanted to see just how deceptive my daughter could be. It wasn’t a happy lesson. First my husband, the biggest deceiver of all, and now my daughter. A small lie, granted, but lies grow. They require bigger deceptions.”
Aline dove onto her mother’s lap, and Jacques Valentin skittered away. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Maman let her stay there but didn’t offer a comforting touch.
“Can you tell me what you’re doing?” Her voice softened. “Is it a man?”
She felt her mother stroke her hair. “No. It’s a dress. It’s for me, not Géraldine. I’m in an awful fix. I have to finish it by tomorrow noon.”
“And you keep it a secret from your mother, a dressmaker?”
“I had to,” she said into her mother’s robe d’intérieur.
“What kind of a dress is it?”
“A boating dress with a polonaise. I had trouble because I couldn’t read the instructions. I’ve made mistakes. I didn’t want Madame Carnot to know I can barely read.” She cried into her mother’s lap. “I’m so stupid. When other girls were going to lycée in their pleated jumpers carrying their books on a strap, where was I? Bending over a washtub scalding my arms.”
“Do you really think that’s what I wanted for you? We do what we have to, the two of us. And if we let our twosome break apart, we’ll have nothing.”
“I know.”
“And so you want a rowing dress like a proper bourgeoise to go promenading along the river. It’s either with a man or to attract a man. Which is it? And where? At La Grenouillère where all the hussies go?”
“No.”
“Why by tomorrow?
She backed away. “It’s to pose in a painting at Chatou.”
“Eh, là! After all I’ve said about painters, warning you.” Maman shot up and began to pace. “They use one girl after another. It starts by painting her in a pretty dress, and before long she’s posing nude, and then she’s in a family way and the genius painter has dropped her because he doesn’t want to paint her when she’s lost her figure, and he can’t support her, so he’s gone on to another. One after another, a string of broken, used-up women behind him.” She flung her arm backward. “Abandoned.”
“Any man can abandon a woman, not just a painter. Even a man with roots in the soil of France.” Maman froze. “A man with centuries-old grapevines.”
Maman’s hand covered her heart. “She’s not only a liar. She’s cruel too,” she said to the wall, then turned back. “You might as well have slapped me in the face.”
“A man with a daughter.”
Her mother’s eyes filled even as her own were filling. She was not going to be the first to look away. Their shared pain rose up like a great lumbering beast awakening from a cave, and she wept for the thoughts Maman would have to battle tonight.
“Who is this man?” All the anger had drained out of her voice.
“Auguste Renoir,” she murmured. “He eats at the crémerie.”
“I’ve seen him. He wears overalls.”
“He promised to pay ten francs a sitting. It would take me a week to earn that. And there’ll be three sittings. Maybe more.”
“Respectability is more important than money.”
“Money can buy respectability.”
Maman slumped on a chair and took out her hairpins.
“Show me the dress.”
Aline unfolded the paper wrapping and showed her the skirt still separate from the bodice, the bodice without sleeves or buttonholes, the sleeves and skirt unhemmed.
“Ten hours, at least, if you can stitch as fast as I can.”
“You know I can’t.”
“Then you’d better keep working. Attach the sleeves before you stitch the waistline seam. I’ll show you how to make buttonholes in the morning.”
Maman hadn’t offered to help, but she would have said no if Maman had.
She watched her mother braid her hair for bed. She watched her chest rise as she sighed. She watched her carry the oil lamp into her bedroom and close the door. She heard her pour water into her washing bowl. In a few moments, the thin rod of light under the door went out with a fitz.
Maman’s dazed look, the single braid down her back with sadness plaited in, the slowness of her steps, like a sleepwalker, defeated—she wished she hadn’t seen her that way.
Around two o’clock she began to indulge herself by letting her eyes close as she pulled the thread, and wrenching them open again to take another stitch. It was hopeless. She would never make it. She turned the metal knob on the gas lamp and lay on the sofa and closed her eyes. She still saw the needle go down and up through the blue fabric, like the progress of a narrow silver boat over the waves and across an ocean—to America, where somewhere in that big land Papa lived, where Maman’s thoughts would be forced to wander tonight, because of what she’d said.