And Bertin replied, “Well mademoiselle, what about liberty, equality, and fraternity?”
She pouted as if to say, “Tell that to somebody else.” And continued, “There could be a park for public cabs—in Vincennes, for instance.”
“You’re a little behind the times, young lady—don’t you know we’re in the flood tide of democracy? However, if you’d like to see the Bois free from all adulteration, be sure to come here in the morning—then you’ll see only the finest flower, the absolute cream of society.” And he described a picture, one of those he painted so well, of the Bois in the morning with its cavaliers and its amazons, all belonging to that choicest of societies where everyone knows everyone else by names and surnames, by relations and titles, by virtues and vices, as if they all lived in the same quartier or in the same village.
“Do you come here often?” she asked.
“Very often. It’s really the most charming part of Paris.”
“Do you ride horseback, mornings?”
“Of course.”
“And then, in the afternoon, do you pay calls?”
“Yes indeed.”
“Then when do you work?”
“Oh, I work . . . sometimes, and for those times I’ve chosen a specialty according to my tastes; since I’m a painter of beautiful women, and since I must look at them, I follow them, a little, wherever they go. . . .”
She murmured, still without laughing, “On foot or on horseback?”
He shot her an oblique and quite satisfied glance that seemed to say: Now there’s some spirit already, you’ll do very nicely.
A gust of air passed from far away, from open country not even awake yet, and the whole woods, that chilly, coquettish, and worldly Bois, shuddered.
For several seconds the breeze made the leaves sprouting on trees and the silks on women’s shoulders tremble. With virtually the same gesture, each woman pulled around her arms and neck the garments that had fallen behind them, and the horses began trotting from one end of the promenade to the other, as if the stiff breeze that had suddenly risen whipped them as it touched them.
They returned quickly, to the silvery accompaniment of jingling curb chains under an oblique shower of setting sunbeams.
“Are you going home now?” the countess asked the painter, whose every habit she knew.
“No, to the Cercle.”
“Then we’ll drop you there on our way.”
“Just what I hoped.”
“And when are you inviting us to breakfast with the duchess?”
“Name your day.”
This unofficial painter to the Parisiennes, whom his admirers had baptized “a realist Watteau” and whom his detractors called “the official photographer of gowns and furs,” often received at various mealtimes the lovely persons whose features he had so often reproduced, as well as others, famous for other reasons, all of whom were regularly diverted by these little parties in bachelor quarters.
“The day after tomorrow, does that suit you, the day after tomorrow, my dear duchess?” inquired Madame de Guilleroy.
“It certainly does. What a charming idea! Monsieur Bertin never thinks of me for such occasions. It’s quite clear I’m no longer young.”
The countess, accustomed to considering the artist’s residence as something of her own, replied, “Only the four of us—the landau four: the duchess, Annette, you, and I—shall that be it?”
“No one but ourselves,” he said as he alighted, “and I’ll order something special for you: some crabs à l’alsacienne.”
“Oh! You’ll give my little girl ideas!”
He bowed, standing at the carriage door, then quickly entered the vestibule of the main entrance to the Cercle, tossed his overcoat and cane to the footmen who had risen like soldiers at the passing of an officer, went up the wide staircase, encountered another body of servants in short breeches, pushed open a door, feeling suddenly as alert as a young man, hearing at the end of the lobby the continuous click of clashing foils, the stamping of signals, and shouted exclamations: Touché! À moi! Passe! J’en ai! Touché! À vous.
In the fencing hall the masters, dressed in gray linen with leather vests, trousers tight around their ankles, a sort of apron falling in front of the body, one arm in the air, the hand falling back, while the other hand, encased in a huge glove, held the thin flexible foil, extended and recovered with the abrupt agility of a mechanical jumping jack.
Other fencers rested, chatted, still out of breath, flushed, perspiring, handkerchief in hand to sponge their face and neck; still others, sitting on the square divan lining the entire hall, were watching the fencing: Liverdy against Landa, and the club master, Taillade, against the tall Rocdiane.
Bertin, smiling, quite at home, shook hands.
“I’m speaking for you,” shouted the Baron de Baverie.
“I’m with you, my dear fellow.” And he stood up and walked into the dressing room.
It was a long time since he had felt so agile and vigorous, and realizing that he must do well, he was dressing with the impatience of a schoolboy for his play. As soon as his adversary was in front of him, he attacked with great energy and in ten minutes had struck him eleven times, and so exhausted the baron that he begged off. Then he fenced with Plunisimont, and with his colleague Amaury Maldant.
The cold shower that followed, icing his panting flesh, reminded him of his swims at twenty, when he would dive into the Seine from the suburban bridges in mid-autumn, to amaze his plebeian audience.
“Are you dining here tonight?” Maldant asked.
“Yes.”
“We’ve got a table with Liverdy, Rocdiane, and Landa. Hurry up, it’s seven fifteen.”
The dining room filled with men and the hum of their voices. And filled with all the nocturnal vagabonds of Paris, idlers and toilers, those who after seven at night haven’t a clue what to do, so they eat at the Cercle to grab a chance to meet someone or something chance might offer. . . .
When the five friends sat down, the banker Liverdy, a vigorous heavyset man of forty, said to Bertin, “You were wild tonight.”
The painter answered, “Yes, I could have done surprising things today.”
The others smiled, and the landscape painter Amaury Maldant, a skinny, bald, gray-bearded little man, said shrewdly, “Me too, I always feel the sap returning in April. It makes me sprout a few leaves, half a dozen maybe. Then it runs to sentiment, and there’s never any fruit.”
The Marquis de Rocdiane and Count de Landa pitied him; both of them older than Maldant, with no eye able to determine their ages, clubmen, horsemen, swordsmen, their incessant exercise had given them bodies of steel; both constantly boasted they were younger than the enervated scapegraces of the new generation.
Rocdiane came of good family; you could see that in every salon, though he was suspected of all kinds of financial involutions, which Bertin said was hardly surprising, having lived so long in gambling dens. He was separated from his wife, who paid him alimony, was a director of Belgian and Portuguese banks, and carried high on his energetic Don Quixote face the somewhat tarnished honor of an aristocratic factotum, burnished now and then by the blood following a sword thrust in a duel.
Count de Landa, an amiable colossus proud of his size and shoulders, though married and the father of two children, dined at home three times a week with great difficulty, and on the other days remained at the club with his friends, after his hour in the fencing hall.
The club, he would say, is a family for those who don’t yet have one, for those who never will have one, and for those who find their own a bore.
The conversation, beginning with the subject of women, passed from anecdote to reminiscence, from reminiscence to boasting, and then as far as indiscreet confidences.
The Marquis de Rocdiane allowed his mistresses to be surmised by precise indications—worldly women whose names he omitted so they could be more readily guessed. The banker Liverdy designated his by their first names. He would
say, “At that time I was on the best of terms with the wife of a diplomat. Now one evening, upon leaving her, I said ‘My darling Marguerite—’ ” He broke off amid the company’s smiles. “Humph, I let something get out. . . . One should adopt the habit of calling all women Sophie.”
Olivier Bertin, very reserved, was in the habit of declaring, when questioned, “You know me, I’m content with my models.”
Everyone pretended to believe him, and one evening Landa, by now a regular womanizer, grew enthusiastic at the thought of all the pretty girls running around the streets and all the young persons who posed for the painter at ten francs an hour.
Gradually, as the bottles emptied, these graybeards, as they were called by the young men of the Cercle, all those grisons whose faces were growing crimson, kindled now, stirred by revived emotions and fermented fantasies.
Rocdiane, after the coffee, fell into more veridical indiscretions and forgot the femmes du monde in order to celebrate pure, or at least simple, cocottes. “Paris,” he claimed, a glass of kümmel in his hand, “is the one city where a man doesn’t age, the only one where at fifty, provided he’s kept himself together, he can always find a girl, eighteen and pretty as an angel, ready to love him.”
Landa, finding again his Rocdiane after the various liqueurs, enthusiastically approved, enumerating the various petites filles who still adored him tous les jours.
But Liverdy, more skeptical and claiming to know exactly the worth of les femmes, murmured, “Yes, they tell you they adore you.”
Landa retorted, “They prove it to me, my dear fellow.”
“Proof like that hardly counts.”
“For me they suffice.”
Rocdiane shrieked, “But they believe it, good Lord! Do you suppose that a pretty little piglet of twenty who’s already been entertaining herself for five or six years in Paris, where all our mustaches have instructed her and spoiled the taste of kisses, can still distinguish a man of thirty from a man of sixty? Nonsense! She’s seen too much and learned still more! I’ll bet she prefers, deep in her heart, really prefers an old banker to a young buck. Has she given some thought to the matter? Do men even have an age here? My dear fellow, we old gray men grow younger as we grow grayer, and the grayer we grow the more they tell us they love us, the more they show it, and the more they believe it!”
They got up from the table, their blood congested and stimulated by alcohol, ready for any conquest and beginning to deliberate on ways of disposing of the evening, Bertin talking about the Cirque, Rocdiane the Hippodrome, Maldant the Eden, and Landa the Folies-Bergère, when the faint sound of violins being tuned reached their ears.
“Hallo!” said Rocdiane. “The Cercle has music now?”
“Oh yes,” answered Bertin, who was fond of concerts. “What say we stop in for ten minutes before going out?”
“Say we do.”
They crossed a drawing room, a card room, a billiard room, and reached a sort of lobby over the musicians’ gallery. Four gentlemen, buried in easy chairs, were already waiting in a contemplative attitude, while down below, surrounded by rows of empty chairs, a dozen others were chatting, seated or standing.
The conductor rapped on his music stand with a series of light taps, and they began.
Olivier Bertin adored music the way opium is adored. It evoked dreams.
As soon as the sonorous instrumental flood reached him, he felt carried away in a kind of nervous inebriation that rendered his body and his mind incredibly vibrant. His imagination vanished like a madwoman, intoxicated by the tunes through gentle reveries and blissful reflections. Eyes closed, legs crossed, arms inert, he heard sounds and saw visions that passed before his eyes and sank into his mind.
The orchestra was playing a Haydn symphony, and the painter, once his eyelids had closed upon his vision, saw again the Bois, the crowd of vehicles around him, and facing him in the landau, the countess and her daughter talking to each other. He heard their voices, made out their words, felt the landau’s movement, inhaled the air rich with the scent of leaves.
Three times his neighbor, speaking to him, interrupted this vision, which three times began again, the way a bed’s immobility begins again after crossing the sea.
Then the vision extended into a long voyage with the two women still sitting in front of him, now on a train, now at a foreign country’s table d’hôte. During the whole time the music lasted, they accompanied him in this fashion, as if during this sunlit promenade they had left the image of their faces printed on his retina.
A silence, then the noise of chairs being moved and voices dispelling this vaporous dream, and now he saw his four friends dozing around him in the naive postures of attention transformed into sleep.
When he had awakened them, he asked, “Well, what shall we do now?”
“I feel,” answered the candid Rocdiane, “like sleeping here a little longer.”
“Quite frankly, so do I,” replied Landa.
Bertin got to his feet. “As for me, I think I’ll go home, I’m feeling a bit weary myself.” He felt, to the contrary, quite lively, but he longed to escape, dreading those endless evenings he knew all too well around the Cercle’s baccarat table.
And so he went home, and the next morning, after a night of nerves, one of those nights that put artists in the state of cerebral activity known as inspiration, he decided to spend the day at home and work till evening.
It turned out to be an excellent day, one of those days of easy production, where the idea seems to descend into the hands and attach itself on the canvas by its own means.
With doors shut, detached from the world, in the tranquillity of a household closed to all, in the friendly peace of the studio, eyes clear, mind lucid, overexcited, alert, he tasted that happiness granted solely to artists who give birth to their work in good cheer. Nothing now existed for him, during those laborious hours, but the piece of canvas where an image was being born under the caress of his brushes, and he experienced, in his crises of fecundity, a strange and happy sensation of abundant life which diffused itself intoxicatingly. At night he was exhausted as though by a healthy fatigue, and he went to bed with the agreeable anticipation of tomorrow’s lunch.
The table was covered with flowers, the menu carefully chosen for Madame de Guilleroy, a refined epicure whom, despite an energetic though brief resistance, the painter had forced, along with his other guests, to partake of champagne.
“The child will be drunk,” the countess complained.
The indulgent duchess answered, “Mon Dieu, there has to be a first time.”
Everybody, as they returned to the studio, felt a little exhilarated under the influence of the light gaiety that elevates as though wings had grown on the participants’ feet.
The duchess and the countess, obliged to meet with a committee of French Mothers, had agreed to take the young girl back before going to the society, but Bertin offered to take her for a walk before returning her to the boulevard Malesherbes, and they left together.
“Let’s take the longest way,” Annette said.
“Would you like to wander through the Parc Monceau? It’s a lovely place: We can see all the kids and their nurses.”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
Taking the avenue Vélasquez, they entered through the monumental gilded grille that serves as the sign and entrance to this loveliest of elegant parks, displaying in the middle of Paris its artificial and verdant grace ringed by a belt of princely mansions.
Along the broad walks that unroll their masterly curves through lawns and groves, a crowd of men and women, sitting on iron chairs, watch the passersby, while on the smaller paths that lead beneath the shade, winding like streams, swarms of children crawl in the sand, skip rope, and run under the indolent eyes of nurses or the anxious attention of mothers. The enormous trees rounded into domes like leafy monuments—the gigantic horse chestnuts whose heavy foliage is splashed with red or white clusters, the conspicuous sycamores, the ornamental plan
e trees with their highly polished trunks—set off the fields of tall waving grass into enticing prospects.
On warm days like this, the turtledoves are cooing in the foliage and visiting each other from one treetop to another while sparrows bathe in the rainbow made by the sun and the spray sprinkling over the fine grass. In this green freshness, even the white statues on their pedestals look happy. A marble boy relieves his left foot of an indiscernible thorn, as though he had just pricked himself pursuing the Diana who flees down below toward the little lake imprisoned within the groves that shelter a Greek temple.
Other statues, amorous and cold, embrace on the edge of the groves or else sit dreaming, one knee in hand. A foaming cascade rolls over a series of lovely rocks. A tree trunk, like a Greek column, supports an ivy vine; a grave bears an inscription. The shafts of stone, erected on the greensward, no more represent the Acropolis than this elegant little park evokes wild forests.
This is the artificial and charming place where city dwellers go to examine flowers grown in hothouses and to admire, as we admire the spectacle of life in the theater, this pleasing representation of la belle nature, given in the heart of Paris.
Olivier Bertin, for years, came almost daily to this chosen site to see Parisian ladies move in their proper place. “It’s a park made for dressing up,” he would say. “Ill-dressed people are shocking here.” And he roamed for hours, recognizing all the plants and all the habitual inhabitants.
He walked beside Annette along these avenues, his vision obsessed by the gaudy variety of life in this garden.
“O love!” she cried. She was staring at a little boy with blond curls who was staring back at her with the same blue eyes, and an expression of surprise and delight.
Then she passed all the children in review, and the pleasure she took in seeing these living beribboned dolls made her communicative, made her expansive.
She walked slowly, taking tiny steps, making her observations to Bertin, her reflections about children, about nurses, about mothers. Big children drew exclamations of joy, the puny ones moved her to pity.
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