Auguste tried to ignore everything going on around him to finish painting the faces of Jules and Ellen and Paul, but Pierre and the two Alphonses were hammering a raised platform for vaudeville. His other friends were hanging Chinese lanterns under the arches and swings from the maple trees, Alphonsine’s idea.
Merchants were erecting their fish-fry tents and booths for the sale of flags, straw canotiers, and paper parasols. An amusement fair was being installed along the Chatou bank with a carousel, a gymnastic apparatus, and games of chance, and a beer garden was being hammered together at the Giquel yacht works. The firemen’s league was loading fireworks onto a small barge anchored to the Rueil bank. Only Gustave, painting a schedule of activities on a large board, was quiet.
All morning Auguste had been calling up his models as he needed them, but the one he needed most, Aline, was just now hurrying across the bridge, carrying that silly lapdog. Couldn’t she have gotten here a half hour earlier? It might make a world of difference. The good light wasn’t lasting as long.
She came upstairs out of breath. “Have I missed lunch?”
“We wouldn’t start without you, knowing how you and your furry companion like to eat,” Jules said.
She had added a wide red velvet band around her square neckline and a double band of red down the front of her dress. “Très chic!” Auguste said.
Aline traced the band with her fingers. “Do you like it?”
The trim defined the lines of the dress and set off her figure. The red made her face more rosy. She wore coral-red earring studs this time. With the money from Angèle, he’d been able to pay Aline. It had gone to good use.
“I love it.”
When everyone came upstairs to eat, Angèle took one look at Aline and said, “Oh, là là! Aren’t you a smart one! The rue de Temple?”
“Bien sûr!” Aline said, and the r rolled out down the river.
“Just one r will do, not three, if you want to be Parisian,” Ellen said.
“Maybe I don’t.”
“Good for you, chérrrie,” Auguste said.
Louise came upstairs with Anne to give her usual announcement. “If you’d wanted your luncheon on Sunday,” Louise said, “you would have gotten only a slice of pâté on an empty plate. We’ll have our hands full in the kitchen tomorrow. But today I’m all yours. The entrée is barquettes de fruits de mer.”
“Oh, I love puff pastries,” Aline said.
What food didn’t she love?
“They’re in the shape of périssoires!” Ellen cried.
“Of course.” Louise huffed and puffed and moved her arms as though she were paddling.
“With green beans as paddles,” Pierre said.
“For tomorrow’s races.” There was a lilt to her voice. “Picked from my cousin’s garden when they’re needle thin. They have the best taste then.”
“I think this calls for participation. I’m feeling lucky,” Paul said.
“You bet your life you’re lucky,” Angèle said. “You were especially lucky last Sunday.”
“What do you say, Pierre? Shall we enter the périssoire races?”
“Périssoire comes from the word perish, you know,” Pierre cautioned in a deeper voice than usual. “Oh, all right.”
Aline was the first to take a bite. “Oh, madame, I’ve never tasted such delicacies. I wish my mother could have a taste. She adores shrimp.”
“Come into the kitchen before you leave and I’ll wrap some up for her.”
“Oh, merci, madame.”
Alphonsine asked the women to help decorate the musicians’ barge with lanterns and put up streamers in the dining room. The men would help Alphonse anchor a sailboat’s boom over the water for the balancing game.
“And who’ll help me finish this painting?”
After a while, Louise served the main course. “Faisan, chasse du pays sur choucroute.”
“Oh, madame! How did you know?” Aline said. Before she could say another word, Gustave and Angèle and Alphonsine fell into a fit of laughter. “Pheasant reminds me of home. We used to have it every autumn.”
“And sauerkraut, sausages, and carrots too. A wild guess—you adore them, don’t you?” Gustave asked.
Père Fournaise came up the stairs with two bottles. “To be properly tasted, pheasant must be accompanied by a deep red burgundy.”
“I’m going to gloat to Charles about what he missed,” Jules said.
“Why such a special meal?” Paul asked.
“For Auguste,” Fournaise said. “So he’ll have the energy to finish the blasted thing today.”
“He can’t,” Pierre said. “He needs a fourteenth model. How about you, monsieur? Then we can wrap it up today and be out of your way tomorrow.”
Fournaise backed away shaking his head. “Not me.”
“Then you’ve got to find someone, Auguste,” Pierre said. “You keep putting it off, but it augurs ill for us, and for the painting.”
“We defy augury!” Jules declared, his fist in the air. When Pierre gave him a look of annoyance, Jules added sheepishly, “Hamlet and I.”
“Can’t you just do without a fourteenth?” Raoul said.
“And leave thirteen figures around a dining table?” Auguste said. “Raoul, you don’t know a damn thing about art.”
“That’s not my job. My job is to pick the winning horse. You’d be pathetic at it.” Raoul ate a few bites and said, “Aha! I have an idea of someone just right for a boating party.”
“Who?” three voices chorused.
“Maybe I shouldn’t say. I don’t know a damn thing about art.”
“For God’s sake, Raoul. Out with it.”
Raoul whispered something in Ellen’s ear and a mischievous smile came over her face. Ellen whispered to Angèle, who whispered to Antonio. Pierre leaned across the table and Ellen whispered to him.
“That would work!” Pierre said. “Unless it’s one of us.”
“That’s not likely,” Raoul said. “None of us are in more than one race. The rower who earns the most points from all the races is the champion.”
“Would someone mind telling me what you’re concocting? It is my painting, after all.”
“We think,” Ellen said with excitement in her voice, “that for the painting to be a true luncheon of canotiers, the champion canotier of the Fêtes should be in it.”
“That might be someone I don’t even know.”
“Come on,” Paul said. “It’s not like he’s a major figure. He’s just a face. You don’t have to love him.”
Everyone looked at him with eager expressions, waiting.
“This is a piece of art. It’s not a lottery.”
“A champion horse is a piece of art too,” Raoul said.
“Here’s a solution, Auguste. You’re stubborn if you don’t accept it,” Pierre said.
Raoul said to Fournaise, “Monsieur, you can offer the chance to be in a grand painting of the rowers of Chatou to the winner when you award the Coupe du championnat. He can decline, of course, but it’s an honor he can’t refuse.”
“And I can decline too if he turns out to have a mug like a horse.”
“No, you can’t!” Gustave shouted. “You’ve avoided filling in that face in order to convince yourself that you’re not finished so you could keep going over it. You’ll muddy it up by overworking it if you’re not careful. This is exactly what you need. To make you stop. If you keep working on it, the change to autumn light will play havoc with what you’ve done. You’ve got to finish and let it go. The champion rower is the face, and that’s that.”
“All right, all right. I just hope to God he isn’t a gargoyle.”
They cheered and laughed and whooped in one raucous sound.
“Thank God,” Pierre said.
To cinch the deal, Fournaise brought out a bottle of eau-de-vie de poire that he had made from pears grown in their own garden, and Ellen produced a box of Turkish rahat loukoum, jellied candies covered in powdered sugar.
“I regret I must interrupt your gastronomic delight in order to finish what we came for,” Auguste said.
They resumed their poses with an air of excitement for having supplied the answer.
Auguste drew out some strands of Aline’s hair at her forehead and temple—slowly, to prolong the pleasure. He arranged the folds of her skirt, running two fingers deep in the furrows. The shadows formed by the polonaise transformed the inward folds of cotton flannel into velvet.
“All right, try to hold that little pup still now.”
She stood Jacques Valentin on his hind legs.
“Bring him closer to you. That’s it. Perfect.”
The dog’s little nose was visible now against the white of Alphonse’s shirt. When the time came for highlights, a white speck in his eye would link them. His rump showed through the short goblet. There were so many colors in the fur, the same colors as Raoul’s coat, but here he wouldn’t blend them. He would let them be distinct. Ha! An Impressionist dog! A tendon in Aline’s hand lifted and caught the light. Also Impressionist, but in a different way.
The dog rested a paw in that sweet hollow below her velvet neck band. Desire to kiss that tender, vulnerable spot moistened Auguste’s mouth, pulsed in his throat, tingled his hand. With his wet brush he touched her there on the canvas, and left a tuft of fur.
Ever since he’d painted his first woman on a plate, a face fling on a white sea, a goddess in his thirteen-year-old eyes, he’d set out to find her in the flesh, paint her in the flesh, know her in the flesh even before he knew fully what longings, what surrender, what sensations that would produce. Ever since that first femme idéale he’d been looking, relishing the search. And here she was, bloomed to life. The muse of his youth had come to tease him with a fey look directed at Jacques but meant for him. Was it the twenty years between them that made it crack his heart?
With Aline, he felt he was getting close to the best of his capacity. He could paint her forever, until twenty years would shrink to a pinprick of time. Aline was Margot and Lise and Nini and Isabelle and Anna and Henriette and, yes, even Jeanne. All of them in her, and then he came to Alphonsine, who was not funneled into Aline. She was distinct and individual. None like her was ever fashioned.
Now here was Aline, posing for him. Her lips, narrow but full, even fuller when she puckered up to kiss Jacques. The waste of a dog being that close to them. It should be him.
Where should he place a first kiss? Right cheek or left? Temple? No, too avuncular. Chin? No, too odd. Ear? No, too precious. Hand? No, too courtly. There was no other place but where his desire demanded. Full on the mouth. And if he could wait, it would be a time and place where she would welcome it and might even press back, and all desire, all thirst would make her forgetful of the twenty years, and exquisite touch would meld them. He pictured it, he would paint it, and thus he would possess it.
Jacques whined. That was the difference between the man and the dog.
“Set him down. I’ve got him.”
“What will you paint now?” she asked.
“Sh. Let me enjoy this.”
With his brush loaded and juicy, he pushed the wet tip gently into the hidden folds of her skirt, deep blue-violet folds such as had never seen the light of day, and stroked again and again, pushing farther, gently, wet into the wet already there, a rhythm faint at first, then intensifying, an expectation, a tightening, a rush. He knew he was loading his darks as well as his lights, and that was going against the Académie training that all the Salon jurists upheld like the catechism. He was tempting fate, but he was powerless to resist stroking over and over the dark furrows of her skirt, caressing her hidden secrets with the thick, oily paint a lubricant, violet and dark and moist, building up and up as he went down and down into the folds. This would have consequences. It could mean a Salon rejection, and what dealer would take a painting stamped with the Salon’s big red R on the back? Refusée. Refused, as refuse. Trash. It could mean that he was, after all, painting only for his own pleasure as he had told Gleyre at the Académie as a young man. Down and down he went.
He could play like this till dark. With a jolt and a tremor, he pulled himself back. Now was his last chance to paint her surroundings with her. His brush flew, hunting for places to touch down. These very important moments to see it all together. Everything popping out now. Her sleeve seen through the tall goblet. Dragging the red of her velvet trim over the wet blue to blend the edges. A hunk of ruby in a glass. The rhythm building now in the repeats of colors. The poppies the same red as on Alphonsine’s sleeve, the bow at her waist, the band on Paul’s hat, the edge of Angèle’s collar, the red of her lips, of Alphonsine’s, and of Aline’s new earring which hinted at some complicity—all red enough to sing out like a bell.
Aline’s brilliant white ruffle, white sweeps around her saucer. Scrubbing off a narrow trail of her blue sleeve behind her goblet to make the edge a more luminous white. Streaking it on. Globs of white in the base of glasses to create protrusions to catch light and send it back. More later when these globs dried. The white of the silver spigot on the cask, and of Ellen’s silver ring and bracelets. And the white of Angèle’s pearl earring. A nod of gratitude to Vermeer. Angèle, his own girl with a pearl earring, with her face and throat as smooth in its blending of hues as any Vermeer.
And tinted whites. Lavender-and green-white on the tablecloth rendered in distinct Impressionist strokes revealing reflected hues in the shadows, not just in gray as the traditionalists painted shadows. This was his own individuality, this combination of styles on one canvas. It pleased him to the marrow of his bones.
Onward with more tinted whites, blue-white on Angèle’s frilled chiffon collar, frothy, as though her neck and head were emerging from some whipped dessert. Brilliant white for the front of Gustave’s shoulder, lavender-white for the back of his shoulder in the shadow of his hat. And the white of Raoul’s collar, of Antonio’s, and of Jeanne’s cuffs, bright enough to take the viewer’s eye deeper into the picture.
And a white highlight in the dog’s eye. “Hold him up again.” She did, and he caught it with his smallest brush. A rush of air poured out his mouth and he felt for a chair behind him.
He was satiated by this feast for his eyes, and needed to reflect on every morsel of the painting when he was calmer, and alone.
What was left besides the fourteenth face? The deepening of shadows, more and thicker white highlights, more red touches, a balancing, an accent here and there, and especially a brightening if indoor light failed to bring out the colors as he saw them now—he still had that to do, and that made him strangely happy, not to be finished. But the gnawing problem that could kill the whole thing still shouted at him. The problem that had kept him from painting this three years ago when Fournaise had put up the terrace. How to allude to the building. He would be a target for ridicule if he didn’t solve it. He felt the attack coming in his joints.
“I have to finish later, in the studio. It will be viewed inside, so it has to work inside.”
“Then you’re through with us?” Alphonsine straightened up. Her mouth tightened to an ambiguous Mona Lisa smile, and her forehead became a torture of grooves, every part conveying something different. In her face he realized what finishing the painting might mean to her. He felt himself break in two.
He hated to answer. “Let’s just say we’re finished working as a group.”
Angèle shouted, “Youpi!” Pierre swung his hat. Jacques barked. Paul raised both his arms and shouted. “And I was here to see it!”
Mère and Père Fournaise rushed upstairs. Everyone stood up to look.
“Oh, là là! Beautiful, Auguste. Just beautiful,” Louise said with a quaver in her voice, her hands palm to palm against her mouth.
“That’s us,” Aline cried. She held up the puppy. “Look, Jacques Valentin Aristide d’Essoyes sur l’Ource. That’s you!”
“It is different than Manet’s scenes,” Ellen murmured. “He only shows separate people in cafés. This looks like I was talking and just took a sip.”
“Our man Renoir leaves the disintegration of society to Manet and Degas and Raffaëlli,” Gustave said. “Here we have genuine sociability.”
“My children. My beautiful children.” Louise was getting sloppy. She raised her apron to fan herself and wipe her eyes.
Fournaise went downstairs and came up with two bottles of champagne. He poured. They raised their glasses. “To Auguste,” Fournaise said.
“To Auguste,” everyone said, more seriously than their usual toasts.
“There’s a poem I’ve been trying to remember,” Jules said. “For you, Ellen, since you said the painting is lovelier than the reality.”
We’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted—better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that.
“Beautiful words, Jules. Thank you,” Ellen said.
“Isn’t that dandy,” said Angèle. “We’re la crème de la crème to have a poet in the house. You made that up right now just for us?”
“I didn’t make it up at all. An English poet did. Robert Browning.”
“Aw. You could have lied and I would have drunk another glass to you.”
“I have one question,” Aline said. “May I have my mother see it?”
Hardly the most important person to show it to. “Yes, but not in Camille’s crémerie.”
Paul peered at the painting. “This catboat here, let’s call it the Inès. And this sloop coming in to dock, let’s call that…What are you sailing in the regatta, Raoul?”
“Le Capitaine.”
“Then that one is Le Capitaine. And this narrow little racing périssoire, this’ll be Guy de Maupassant’s.” He chuckled. “Now we’ve got all the Maison Fournaise participants represented by their boats except Alphonse.”
“Right,” Alphonse said. “Where’s my jousting barque?”
“Tied to the dock waiting for you to practice, so get at it,” Paul said.
“You know, you have some Venus quality in Angèle,” Gustave said.
Auguste snickered. “That old Titian, he’s always pinching my tricks.”
Louise patted her heart. “You paint what you love, don’t you?”
“A man always does his best work out of love, madame.”
Dear, droll Louise. She had glimpsed the truth. Art was love made visible.