Pont des Arts oil on panel 29.3 × 23.6 cm
Though this also seems to show the Seine in flood, the focus is on the effect of the lamplight on the snow that has gathered along the railings, and the landmarks of Paris have disappeared into the darkness behind it. The mood of the painting is simultaneously one of calm and threat. We are drawn towards an absence in the centre of the frame.
Extract from the catalogue notes to the exhibition ‘The Paris Winter: Anonymous Treasures from the de Civray Collection’, Southwark Picture Gallery, London, 2010
‘Mademoiselle! By all that’s holy!’ Maud felt a hand on her shoulder. A policeman in gaiters and a short cape was holding her back. She could see Sylvie on the bridge ahead of her, lit by a gas-light on the centre of the bridge. The river roared around her.
‘Let me by, I don’t mind getting wet.’
‘That’s your choice, mademoiselle, but the road is unsafe. It falls away under you, look!’ He pointed along the quay, to the men building up the embankment in the sullen yellow glow of oil-lamps. The trees fell sideways like drunks, and the lamp-posts had sunk and tilted to their knees, though some were still lit, struggling to do their duty, to lift their lights above the water.
‘That woman on the bridge – I know her.’
He turned round, and seeing Sylvie sitting on the railings of the bridge, he swore and blew his whistle till another policeman some twenty yards along the way signalled that he’d heard and pointed towards the bridge.
‘Let me go to her,’ Maud said.
‘We’ll go across together,’ the policeman replied. ‘If one of us falls in a sink-hole, the other one has to try and drag ’em out. You’ll be soaked, you know.’
‘I don’t care.’
Tanya took Maud in her arms and held her a moment. ‘You must come back to us, Maud. All will be well if you come back to us.’
The tenderness in her voice made Maud’s throat tighten and she found she couldn’t reply.
The officer took her arm and together they battled through the dark waters which showed parchment yellow where the light reached them till they reached the steps up onto the bridge. Maud was soaked to her waist and felt as if she was dragging the river up with her as her heavy wool skirt pulled and coiled around her legs. She looked up. There was someone else on the bridge now with Sylvie. Another policeman was standing some yards from her, to the north. He held his hands wide and low like a man trying to urge a dangerous animal back into its cage. Maud and her guardian approached from the south.
‘Good evening, Maud,’ Sylvie said lightly, though she was still looking at the other man.
‘Sylvie.’
‘She has a gun,’ the officer to the north said, his voice calm but loud enough for them all to hear.
Sylvie nodded. ‘Yes, I do. That is true. I do have a gun.’ She held it up into the lamplight to show them, clasping it between her two hands, a finger around the trigger, but somehow relaxed. ‘Gentlemen, I wish to have some private conversation with this lady. Would you be so kind as to retreat a little way?’
‘I shan’t leave you with a gun pointing at you, miss,’ the man on Maud’s side said. She looked at him. He had a kind face, and was probably not much older than herself. There was no sign of fear on him. Only determination. She had a sudden vision of him walking down the Champs Elysées with his girl on his arm.
‘Please do as she says,’ she told him, and when he hesitated, ‘I promise she can’t hurt me. Let me talk to her.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘I know you don’t.’
He looked into her face and she met his gaze steadily, evenly.
‘If she aims,’ he said, ‘don’t think, just run.’ He nodded to his colleague to the north and they both stepped backwards slowly a yard or two, while Maud advanced until she was in the middle of the bridge and facing Sylvie. Morel’s wife looked lovely in the lamplight. She was wearing a dark blue dress, close-fitting, with her fur-lined coat open over it. The snow fell silently onto her hair and shoulders, and along the railings either side of her while the river lunged and roared beneath them.
‘Aren’t you afraid I’ll shoot you?’
Maud realised she had never thought of this moment. She had wanted Morel to suffer, imagined him suffering. When she thought of Sylvie it was only in the past. Sylvie walking in Père Lachaise, Sylvie stretched out reading in the drawing room, Sylvie lighting a cigarette and laughing. Sylvie stepping over her body. She looked just as beautiful as ever, just as graceful, as kind. Maud thought of how it had felt when she had rested her head on Maud’s shoulder, rested her light weight on her arm.
‘How many times can you kill one person, Sylvie? I think if you are holding the gun, the bullets would pass straight through me.’
‘Careful, Maud. You’ll make me curious to try. Strange. You were such a slight breath of a girl, tiptoeing about. You seem different.’
‘What can I possibly fear now?’ Maud asked.
The slightly mocking smile fell from Sylvie’s lips and she looked sideways and down into the waters surging just below the bridge, their suck and groan as they pushed through the arches, carrying their loot of debris, planks and barrels with them. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
She nodded and continued to watch the waters while she spoke. ‘He shut me in at Rue de Seine – it took forever for the concierge to hear me. I ran out after him, and all I saw was you and your friends being led away from Cour de Rohen. I followed you to those rooms. I hoped perhaps he’d been arrested, but there were no police. I went back to the cellars and saw they were flooded.’ She paused as if trying to work out some impossible puzzle and her voice was wondering when she said, ‘I couldn’t calm him. I could always calm him – but not today. He thought he had seen your ghost, that you were in league with the river and coming to take him. He didn’t say “The river is flooding the cellars”; he said, “She is doing it – She is coming to take them. To take us”. Oh, I told him he was wrong, that he was imagining it. But he grew nervous when we couldn’t sell the diamonds and you began to appear to him. You never showed yourself to me, did you?’
‘No. Only him. It was he who threw me in the river like rubbish.’
‘Yes, but the plan was mine.’
The words struck Maud in the centre of her being. It seemed to smash some dam inside her – and her feeling was one of release. Grief flowed from her and the river carried it away.
‘Have you ever loved anyone, Maud? Other than me? Someone who might love you back?’
Maud shook her head.
‘You cannot know then, what it is like to love someone and not be able to save them. The pain of that! It leaves you breathless.’
‘I think I do know what that feels like, Sylvie.’
She looked up at her under her long lashes and smiled suddenly, sadly. ‘I understand. Yes, perhaps you do.’ She lifted her chin and looked along the river behind Maud. ‘Paris is beautiful tonight. All this water, the way the light swims in it. Notre Dame behind you, covered in snow. It looks like a palace. Oh Maud! I loved him so very much, my handsome man. It’s strange. I knew he was dead before you told me. The moment I lost sight of him as he ran up the street this afternoon I felt my heart stop, my soul just snap out of existence, like turning off an electric light. I knew I’d never see him again.’
The water from Maud’s dress was pooling beneath her like an extra, deeper shadow in the lamplight. Sylvie made a noise halfway between a sob and a laugh. ‘Such a little thing. A tiny movement of the wrist. A drop more laudanum and you’d have drowned, just disappeared, and he would be alive and we would be happy. Damn it.’ She tilted her head back and blinked rapidly, not letting her tears fall. ‘I was such a fool! I was afraid you would taste it in the wine. I should have known I could have added the whole bottle and you’d have drunk it all down like a good girl and thanked me. Always so grateful! So helpful! It made it so easy. I couldn’t believe we had found such a sweet fool. And now here you are to judge me. Perhaps you do look like a ghost, after all. Perhaps you are dead. Surely my dear Maud would be leading me to safety by now? But you just stand there and judge. Not like nice helpful Maud at all. Are you real? I’d like to know.’
Maud looked straight into her blue-grey eyes: they were calm, curious. She took in the curve of her waist, the tight cut of her dress across her shoulders, the lace on her chest, the curls of blond hair over her small ears, the single pearl earrings, caught like globes of smoke. ‘I am Maud Heighton. You and your lover tried to kill me, but I lived. I told the Countess what you had done, and we stopped you selling the diamonds. I let Morel see me, hoping it would make him mad. And yes, I do judge you.’
Sylvie swallowed, then licked her lips and took a great shuddering breath. ‘What a beautiful night this is.’ She looked up into the sky. ‘Oh, the glory of it! Very well, Maud. You have that right. Judge away.’
She lifted the gun and placed it between her teeth and pulled the trigger. A mist of red appeared in the air behind her. Maud lurched forward, but while the sound of the shot was still cracking in the air, Sylvie’s body crumpled and fell backwards into the black waters. The policemen ran forward from either side of the bridge and Maud collapsed onto her knees. The officer who had helped her across, crouched at her side. ‘Are you injured?’
She shook her head and he left her. She couldn’t breathe. It was as if the air stuck in her mouth. She put her hands on the ground in front of her and tried desperately to make her lungs open and find air. The world swam and quivered around her; whistles blew and somewhere she could hear Tanya screaming. With an enormous effort, she struggled to her feet and ran from the bridge, lurching through the vile waters, until she felt her friends’ arms around her again, gathering her up and pulling her free for the second time.
* * *
When Paul Allardyce returned to his rooms that night he found they were filled with sleeping women. They had made nests for themselves on his sofa and chairs. His fiancée was asleep on his second-best greatcoat by the stove and her maid snored next to her on an armchair, using his steamer trunk as a foot stool. He crept through them and collapsed on his bed, where he slept dreamlessly in his dirty clothes.