23 November 1909
Sometimes we do not realise how much we have been suffering until that suffering is removed. On her first night in Rue de Seine, as Maud undressed she realised that her hands were shaking. She was a wrecked sailor crawling onto a sandbank and only then acknowledging the pain in her muscles. She wondered what would have happened to her if Yvette, Tanya, Miss Harris and the Morels had not intervened. The thought frightened her so much it hurt her.
Morel had been there when she arrived, to see her trunk stowed into her new room and to host her first lunch in the apartment. It was a pleasure he could not promise himself every day, he sighed. He asked if Maud was happy with the arrangements he had made for her comfort. The daily maid would leave luncheon for them. The ladies were then at liberty to do whatever they wished. Supper would be fetched for them, if they required it, at seven. He would join them when he could; but he expected to dine often at his club.
Sylvie was quiet but pleasant at that first lunch. She seemed content in a self-contained way. Her brother made all the conversation. He asked Maud a hundred questions about herself and gave every impression of finding the answers fascinating. There was nothing offensive about the questions or the way he asked them, but Maud found herself drawing away from him slightly as she gave her usual responses. Not lies, but truths that concealed some of the misery of her youth.
The food was excellent, though he had apologised for it as simple fare just as he had apologised for his palatial apartment. Maud had been subsisting on ten-sou omelettes in the worst of the respectable cafés, so to see game pie and hâchis portugais set out, with cheese on the sideboard for later and white wine dripping with chill … She had to be careful not to eat too quickly. She wondered if, under his flow of talk, Morel had noticed her hunger and was teasing her with his questions when she wanted to eat. She glanced at him. His expression was open and friendly.
‘When did you discover you were an artist, Miss Heighton?’ he asked, filling up her wine glass and piling more potatoes onto her plate.
‘I am not an artist yet, I think. I am just trying to be a painter.’
He laughed. ‘I shall remember that! But you are too modest. To come here as you have, leave home and family, suffer hardships to study here. That suggests a greater calling.’
She shook her head. ‘My mother drew and painted. I think I began by copying her, and I never stopped. Drawing was simply what I did. She was my first teacher and when she could, she would take me to the galleries nearby, and find me books of reproductions.’ The child’s voice in her head whispered in awe, some in colour. She remembered the hours she had spent with those books curled up under her mother’s dressing-table. She had had one with coloured plates from the Louvre and would study each one for an hour before she allowed herself to turn to the next. When she had first seen the originals in the museum the day she arrived in Paris, it had been like seeing much-loved, long-missed friends, but so much brighter and more alive. Her father had sold all of the art books to a London gentleman three months after her mother died. He had been disgusted by her distress when she found them gone. He had got five pounds for them, which was four pounds more than he had thought they were worth. She had been too busy crying to see the blow come that time.
She took a careful sip of her wine; it was fruit and acid on her tongue. ‘All the best moments of my life have been bound up with painting. That is perhaps why I have come here, rather than some great calling, or particular talent.’
Morel nodded to himself, as if this confirmed some idea of his own, and then, by chatting to his silent sister about a letter he had received from home, let her eat in peace.
When Morel left them Maud felt suddenly embarrassed by this enforced intimacy with Sylvie. The maid cleared the table and Sylvie sat down at the pianoforte and picked out a few stray notes. Maud waited until the maid had said her farewells. They had spoken in French while her brother was present, but Maud was thinking of her duties now and switched to English.
‘Perhaps you would like to show me your drawings, Sylvie? So I can see what instruction I might offer.’
Sylvie twisted round from the piano and sucked in her cheeks. ‘I am afraid that you will think I am a great fool. I am not good, not at all. It is my brother’s plan to keep me occupied. He will buy me opium when I show him sketchbooks filled with pictures of fruit. Is that not a strange,’ she searched for the word, ‘trade?’
Maud was shocked to hear her speak about the opium so plainly and wondered if there was some element of challenge in the confession. She said calmly, ‘If you must do them, you might as well do them to the best of your ability, Sylvie.’
The young woman sighed, but with a nod left the piano and returned a few minutes later with a sketchbook covered in green; she sat down beside Maud on the sofa, holding it on her knees for a moment before handing it over. Maud opened the pages with an encouraging smile and looked at the drawings. They had been done in haste, certainly, but they proved that Sylvie could see what was in front of her and had some idea of how to hold a pencil.
‘They are bad, is that not so?’
‘Not at all. You just need a little guidance.’ Maud pointed at the opened page, a drawing of the table in front of them with a lamp-stand on the centre of it. ‘You see, you are drawing what you know is there, rather than what you see.’ Sylvie touched the weave of the paper, apparently concentrating hard. ‘You must avoid drawing outlines if you are to make progress, Sylvie. We see edges to things because of changes in light and tone, not because they have a line around them.’ Sylvie nodded slowly, then slid the book back onto her own lap. Maud was afraid she had discouraged her. ‘The best thing we could do is to go somewhere and try to draw something together.’ She looked up and out of the window opposite, just as the wind threw a scatter of rain against the window like a handful of sand.
Sylvie laughed. ‘The gods say no, Maud!’ Then at once the light faded from her eyes and she yawned. ‘I always rest for a little while after lunch. Perhaps in an hour you could knock at my door and we will go out then.’
‘As you wish.’ Maud was unsure. She had not thought in any depth about her relationship with Sylvie and what it might entail. Her considerations had centred solely on whether the position was respectable, followed by a happy vision of food, warmth and comfort; now she realised she was to some degree Sylvie’s creature, though a polite fiction might be maintained.
‘If you want to go out for a walk before then, Maud, you must do so. This is not a prison. Do as you would at your own house,’ the girl went on. Maud felt she had been dismissed, but on balance was grateful for a little time on her own. She could think more about how to instruct Sylvie – look for interesting places where they might sit and draw when the weather was good.
Sylvie stood and with the sketchbook held loosely at her side, made to leave the room. On the threshold she paused and looked back.
‘There is no need to come into my room, Maud. You may knock at the door and I shall join you here a little while later.’
Maud retreated to her room. There was an envelope on the bed with her name on it. She picked it up and her fingers brushed the cotton of the bedspread on their way to the thick paper. Comfort. The envelope held two fifty-franc notes and a message from M. Morel asking her to make use of the money for any little items she might need to make herself at home with them. He added that this was, of course, in addition to her weekly stipend. Maud sat suddenly on the bed and stared at the pink and blue notes, the paper smothered with engravings of anchors and cherubs. No Empress has ever felt their wealth as wide and inexhaustible as Maud did in that moment. She lifted her head: there was a faint sweet smell in the air, heavy and pungent, reaching into the room. She tucked the money away in the lid of her box of painting materials and left the apartment.
Funeral oil on canvas 64.8 × 76.3 cm
The narrow range of colours gives the suggestion of physical and spiritual chill to this picture, and the framing forces the viewer to be part of the scene rather than the observer. The grave is at our feet; the figures jostling the frame are at our shoulder. In the distance and on the right, a break in the cloud allows a glimmer of sunlight and warmth of colour into the scene, though whether this is hope, or a false dawn, we cannot say. None of the figures surrounding us at the graveside have noticed it; it is a beam of light offered only to the artist and now the viewer.
Extract from the catalogue notes to the exhibition ‘The Paris Winter: Anonymous Treasures from the de Civray Collection’, Southwark Picture Gallery, London, 2010