An Artist in her Own Right

by Ann Marti Friedman

  “It would be an honor to view the galleries of Rome in the company of your husband, Madame Gros. I would learn a great deal from the experience,” he said formally. I winced – it was not my company he looked forward to. “But you must remember the circumstances of his first visit. He was there on the orders of Bonaparte to select the greatest of Rome’s treasures for France. Despite the promise of restitution made by our present King, few items have in fact been returned. It has been twenty years but Monsieur Gros’s name is still remembered with great bitterness. He would not find himself welcomed were he to return.”

  “Oh,” I said meekly, my indignation deflated. “I had not thought of that.”

  “I tell you this in confidence, Mesdames.” He looked at Josée before turning back to me. “Your husband is a sensitive man and I would not wish to hurt him by repeating it. As he has no desire to go, there is no point. I urge you, Madame Gros, do not press this visit upon him. It would come to no good.”

  There was nothing I could reply to that.

  “I fear I have introduced too somber a note into our pleasant discussion. I will take my leave of you now.” He got up, bowed to us, and left.

  Josée and I were silent for some minutes after he left. I closed my eyes in exhaustion, hearing his voice and the passion with which he spoke, seeing the large ungainly hands as they gestured to emphasize his point. The passion had not been for my sake, but a wave of desire washed over me nonetheless. Tears of humiliation burned my eyes.

  “Augustine.” I opened my eyes with a start; I had forgotten Josée was there. “Why don’t we plan a trip to Rome, the two of us?” She smiled and reached forward to squeeze my hand.

  I felt a small spurt of hope before practical considerations arose to counter it. “Do you think we could? Neither of us has much money.” The four thousand francs Antoine had given me for Charles’s portrait had been spent long ago, and I knew that Josée was dependent solely on her art to bring an income.

  “True, but if we wait for these men to take us, we will never get there! I feel more confident taking matters into our own hands.” I managed a small smile at that. “Besides,” she continued, “if – I mean when – we go, I want you there with me.”

  Her kind words achieved what Géricault’s brusqueness had not. I cried in earnest, while she stroked my hair and murmured comforting words. When my tears subsided, she brought me a glass of cold water and a clean handkerchief so that I could wash my face.

  “I apologize for weeping,” I said in a low voice. “It’s just that it felt so good to have someone care about my feelings.” I blinked back more tears. The need to indulge in self-pity was gone. I wanted to stay close to this marvelous creature who cared about my feelings, held my hand when I was upset, and encouraged me to dream.

  A nearby church clock struck six. Wearily I sat up and thought of the dreary evening before me. “I need to go home to give orders for supper.” I had no appetite, but Antoine and Maman Madeleine would want a full meal as usual.

  “You can’t go in this state. I’ll go out to get something to eat. Write a note for your cook and I will see it is delivered.”

  While she changed into her street clothes, I did as she instructed, suggesting our cook make a dish that I knew was a favorite of Antoine’s. I hoped this would make up for my absence.

  It was pleasant being alone in Josée’s studio, which was both living and work space for Josée. A large folding screen and curtain at one end served to create a bedroom with a simple iron bedstead and battered armoire, and a plain cotton rug underfoot. I changed my clothes there as usual and hung my studio dress and apron on their hook. The studio part, its walls hung with drawings by Josée and her friends, including a portrait sketch of her by Géricault, doubled as salon with a threadbare sofa and upholstered chair. A plain wood table and chairs served as dining space, desk, and drawing table, while a stove in one corner provided heat and a minimal cooking surface. Large windows faced north – good light for a painter, but they would make it cold in winter. I shivered at the thought. It was a far cry from the fashionable furniture and ornaments I had purchased upon my marriage. Clearly Josée chose not to spend what modest funds she had on the comforts of a bourgeois home. But she had generosity and independence of spirit.

  I wished I had taken her path, managing my own money and devoting my time and energies to becoming as good an artist as she, instead of turning them all over to the Gros household to be frittered away. But I had not known, at nineteen, that such a life was possible. Even if I had, would I have had the courage to pursue it, without Josée to show me the way?

  I stood for a long time at the window watching the sky change from blue to aqua with a golden haze on the horizon as dusk came on, while the clouds went from white to orange-red to grey – effects Josée captured time and again in her landscapes. In the houses below on the rue de Condé, I saw lamps and candles being lit, people moving about, meals being prepared. I felt as if I were standing outside myself, watching my ordinary life go on out there.

  I came out of my reverie when I heard Josée’s step on the stairs. I lit candles and began to set the table. She brought with her the makings of an informal supper – bread, ham, cheese and apples – and held aloft a bottle of champagne. We opened our supper with a clink of glasses in a celebratory toast.

  In the following months, Josée and I made detailed plans of what to see, whom to contact, and where to stay. We bought the latest guidebooks, calculated the amount of money we would need, and set up a moneybox in her studio to which we contributed something each week, with a ceremonial clink of coins. I took great comfort from this activity.

  Elaborating my travel plans with Josée did not quite blot out the thought of Géricault, who stayed in Rome for several months and resumed his place in our circle of artist friends upon his return to Paris in the summer. I found my attraction to him was as strong as ever. He had never completed his panoramic Roman horse race and was now, in 1818, planning to use that canvas for a subject inspired by the recent scandal of the wreck of the ship Medusa and her abandoned passengers. Despite his excitement over this new subject, he revealed few details about it. “Last time I dissipated my energies in talk instead of work,” he told us. “I don’t want to make that mistake again.” Gros was one of the few whom he invited to his studio to see it in progress. As the invitation was given at our dinner table, it was extended to me as well. Clearly I was an afterthought, but it was an opening I was determined to take advantage of.

  I let a week go by, waiting for a day when Antoine would be at his Versailles studio, occupied with his monumental canvas of the Duchesse d’Angoulême. As soon as Maman Madeleine had gone to her room for her after-lunch nap, I dressed with care, choosing silk undergarments and a filmy cotton dress.

  Because of the warm weather, I took a fiacre most of the distance. I had the driver drop me off at a little distance from my destination and walked uphill the rest of the way. Géricault’s studio on the rue des Martyrs, near the top of Montmartre, was almost at the edge of Paris. I could see and hear the creaking windmills that dotted the landscape beyond it and the huts of those who worked in the city but could not afford to live there. The conditions and population of the street were better than that, but not by very much, I thought, wrinkling my nose at the smells that assailed it. I wondered why the wealthy Géricault had chosen to live in an area so far below his means. It must be because of the studio, I realized: spaces that could accommodate so large a canvas were difficult to come by in the better neighborhoods.

  Arriving, somewhat out of breath, at number 23, I hesitated, but only for a moment. Telling myself it was now or never, I let myself in the unlocked street door. As I crossed the courtyard, I took off my hat and shook my hair free of its pins, as I had imagined wearing it in my Roman fantasy – long, luxuriant and brown, abundant and curling. I reached a hand to the bodice of my dress to reposition my breasts to make a more seductive neckline but decided against something so obvious. I kn
ocked tentatively on the studio door.

  There was no response. I knocked more firmly.

  “Just a moment!” A long moment, as it turned out: he was still wiping paint off his hands as he opened the door. “I’m coming, I’m coming!” His face broke into a big smile at the sight of me and my heart leapt. “Madame Gros!” he boomed, looking around for the husband he assumed was at my side. The look of welcome faded, to be replaced by concern. “Monsieur Gros is not with you? Is he ill? Have you come for my help? Just give me a minute to clean up––”

  “No, not at all, he is quite well, painting at Versailles. I came to see – to take up your invitation to see – the shipwreck scene you told us about.”

  “Oh.” Clearly he was taken aback. “Is Josée coming, then?” he asked.

  My heart sank, but I forced myself to smile and speak lightly. “No, not today – you will need to find me sufficient on my own.”

  He winced at this implication of his rudeness. “Of course you are welcome by yourself,” he said formally. “It’s merely that I am used to seeing you in the company of others. When one catches sight of Melchior, one automatically looks for Gaspard and Balthazar.”

  I laughed at the analogy to the Wise Men and the tension between us dissipated. “Entrez, entrez,” he urged me, holding the door wide so I could do so.

  “Who is it, Théo?” called a masculine voice.

  Damn! It had not occurred to me that he might have company.

  “It’s Madame Gros, Eugène. Are you decent?”

  “As long as I am lying face-down, yes.” The amused reply came from a youth with a shock of wildly curling black hair and a smooth expanse of back and buttocks who was posing for one of the figures on the raft.

  “I will ask her to face the other way for a moment.”

  I obliged, and there was the rustle of silk fabric behind me.

  “You may turn around,” said the youth. I did so.

  “Madame Gros,” Géricault said formally, “may I present Eugène Delacroix?”

  It is a name the world now knows, of course. At the time, however, he was merely Géricault’s friend, and his presence threatened to thwart the purpose of my visit. Despite this I could not avoid drawing breath in pleasure at the sheer beauty of him. He knew it and instinctively struck a pose that showed him to best advantage. He wore his dressing gown naturally, without embarrassment. The thought crossed my mind that it was a pity it was not he whom I had come to seduce, for I suspected he would be much easier than his friend.

  “Gros – as in the painter of Jaffa?” he inquired, his eyes lighting up.

  “That is my husband’s work. I, too, am a painter, under my own name, Augustine Dufresne.” His eyes did not light up this time.

  “I am a painter also, but I am here for Théo.” He gestured at his figure on the canvas, and we turned our attention to it. It lay face down on the raft. Around it, other dead and dying men trailed limbs in the water. Drawing the eye upward, a pyramid of finely muscled men signaled to something in the distance, a ship so small in that vast ocean of canvas that Géricault had to point it out to me with the long handle of his paintbrush.

  The wretched tale of the Medusa – how her incompetent captain wrecked her and set most of her passengers adrift on a raft, and the harrowing struggles of the few survivors, who were forced to resort to cannibalism – had shaken Paris considerably the year before. The one hundred and fifty deaths that would have been deemed the casualties of a mere light skirmish in the time of Napoleon assumed during the peace the stature of a full-blown massacre. Those in opposition to the government pounced on it as symptomatic of the blundering Bourbons in general and Louis XVIII in particular. Even I, with my strong loyalty to the Bourbons, had been repulsed by the newspaper’s illustration of the ragged band of almost skeletal survivors in their tattered clothing and wondered how Louis XVIII so readily managed to squander our good will again and again.

  The newspaper engravings were in my mind as I beheld the unblemished well-muscled flesh of the men in the painting, like marble sculptures of antiquity or of Michelangelo brought to life. Sketches for some of the figures hung on the walls of the studio. A severed head and limbs, painted in one of the hospital dissecting rooms, brought to mind the legend of Saint Denis, walking from the center of the city and up this very street after his execution, holding his head in his hands. I remember also the head of a drowned man with grey flesh and opaque unseeing eyes and a portrait of the Negro who posed for the pinnacle figure of the human pyramid – but the whole painting went beyond these details. Radical though Théodore may have been in some ways, his painting, like Jaffa, was cast in the academic tradition, transcending “mere” truth to create an image that took its place in the traditions of art. The Raft of the Medusa reduced the struggle to its most elemental – man versus the wind and waves. Gone were the politics that had been so prominent a part of the newspaper accounts. I doubt whether anyone would even remember the scandal today, a quarter-century later, were it not for the painting.

  So absorbed was I in looking that I had forgotten the two men until Géricault brought in three glasses of wine and Delacroix came to stand beside me. He had changed from the dressing gown into a dark green suit and applied cologne with a pleasant lemon smell. Charles would have envied his beautiful boots of supple brown leather. He smiled easily at me. “Théo’s conception is extraordinary, is it not?”

  “Indeed,” I agreed warmly, turning my head and smiling in return. It was impossible to look away from this beautiful young man. He wore his hair rather long and unkempt, but his mustache and van Dyck beard were neatly trimmed, and his eyebrows had a natural arch many women would envy. The almost hypnotic gaze of his black eyes held the promise of much but the offer of very little. He was, I was disappointed to realize, one of those men for whom the pleasure of the conquest was not so much in bedding a woman as in eliciting from her the desire to be bedded. I had met his kind before and knew better than to be flattered by his attentions. It was not so much that he found my person attractive as that my married status was a challenge. There was only one way to reply to such games: I yawned.

  He dropped his eyes. I turned my attention back to the painting.

  “Théo has benefited greatly from studying your husband’s work,” he said, pointing out figures whose poses I recognized. There was even a group of father and son inspired by the dying doctor and his patient in Jaffa.

  “So he has – Antoine will be pleased,” I replied. Privately I wondered how truly flattered Antoine would be by this admirer whose imitation so often led to surpassing his idol. There is a limit to the patience of even the best of mentors.

  “I regret I must leave now for another appointment. Please tell your husband, Madame, how much those of us who admire his work regret it had to be put away for political reasons. We hope that one day it will again claim its rightful place on the walls of the Louvre.” He gave us a small formal bow in parting.

  “I wish he would not so firmly Madame me,” I said to Théodore afterward, as he refilled our wineglasses. “I am not so old as that.”

  “Ah, do not underestimate the attraction, for a very young man, of someone he considers an older woman.” He smiled and raised his glass in a toast. We drank.

  I took courage from the wine. It was now or never. “What about the attraction for a man of a woman his own age?” My heart was thudding in my chest. I had to force myself to look into his eyes.

  “Well, yes, of course,” he replied, beginning another easy laugh that stopped abruptly as the meaning of my words and look sank in. He spluttered in his wineglass, inhaled some of the liquid by accident, and surrendered to a fit of coughing that would not lessen until I had thumped him on the back several times. It was not how I had envisioned laying hands on him.

  At last the spasm subsided and he could speak.

  “Madame Gros,” he croaked, “you forget yourself.” A milder fit of coughing took him; this time I kept my hands at my sides and le
t him deal with it himself.

  “You are asking me,” he gasped, “to dishonor the man I revere more highly than any other painter in France.” More highly, it was clear, than the painter who now offered herself to him. He started to cough yet again.

  “No,” I would have liked to tell him. “I do not ‘forget’ myself. I have come here fully consciously, knowing what I want.” But it did not seem likely that saying this would bring me any closer to achieving what I desired. Or had desired, for the moment had passed.

  “Thank you for showing me your painting, Monsieur. I wish you a speedy recovery from your cough.” The noise of it followed me out the door, across the courtyard and into the street.

  Outside, I began to shiver despite the warm sun. I walked away quickly, not caring which direction I took. I was churning with emotions I could not express out loud in public: furious at myself and him, ashamed of pursuing a lover, yet proud of having the courage to do so. I did not for an instant think he would tell Antoine, but could he resist the temptation to tell his friends? Would my name become something for Delacroix and others to snigger about?

  “Do you know why she was really here, Eugène?”

  “Oh, I think that was obvious from the start!”

  I walked even faster to get away from the mocking laughter that seemed to follow me, feeling more and more a fool with each step. I did not think about where I was going, but my feet of their own accord found their way to the rue de Condé. Josée was not there, but the concierge, who knew me, let me in. Safely hidden from the scrutiny of others, I could let loose the tears I had been holding back.