Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  “Pissarro.”

  Standing before the next one, I had no idea what painter would paint flat slabs of rock. “Who?” I had to ask.

  “Cézanne. It’s a quarry.”

  Beside the stairway hung a still life of fruit. “Oh, this could be anyone. Manet?”

  He shook his head.

  “Gauguin?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Fantin-Latour?” I felt proud to name a lesser-known artist.

  “Non.”

  “Renoir.”

  “Non encore.”

  “Then it must be Cézanne.”

  “You’re right! It can’t be anybody else.”

  “But that awful one. Who would paint faces without bodies?”

  He shrugged and held out his arm for me to come to him. In a plaintive voice he asked, “Do you want to know the real reason I wrote that desperate letter to André?”

  “Yes, I most certainly do.”

  “I want to tell you and André everything about these paintings and the men who created them while I still have time, while I can still remember. I’ve been afraid I would forget if I waited”—he broke off for a few moments before he added—“until the end. I want you to understand how important they are so you will care for them. Those painters used the ochres we mine here.”

  “Were you a miner? With Maurice?”

  “When I was young and spry.”

  “You were pretty spry yesterday, lunging to toss that boule.”

  “It’s the getting up that’s hard. I am not strong. Then I was strong. Going down into the mine at daybreak and working until nightfall, never feeling the sun on my face, damp to my bones, coughing all the time—what kind of a life was that? I begged to be allowed to work in the ochre drying beds as a washer, like I had done as a child. A child, Lisette. Fourteen years old. The chef des opérations wouldn’t hear of it. I had to put in more time in the mine before he moved me to the factory furnaces. They weren’t much better. We breathed dust and got so covered with ochre powder that it lodged in our pores. Walking home with our lunch tins, we looked like the ochre pinnacles in the canyons. I couldn’t accept that I had been put on earth for that.”

  “So how did you get out of it?”

  “I was young and brash and full of big ideas. I bragged that I could double the sales of our pigments in Paris by making calls on art supply stores. I had this crazy notion that they would buy more from a true Roussillonnais who had dug the ores with a pickax.” Here Pascal chuckled. “I kept pestering the chef until he relented, saying that I was a thorn in his side.

  “It wasn’t long before I knew which color suppliers still sold powdered pigments for artists to mix into paint, and which dealers sold only oil paint in tubes. Julien Tanguy sold both.”

  “But how did you become a frame maker?”

  “That happened in Julien’s shop. He was a pudgy little man with one eye much larger than the other, homely but amusing. I liked him because he was a provincial too, from Brittany, and wore a straw farmer’s hat. I appreciated his politics. He had been a Communard, had gone to prison for it. Artists adored him. They called him Père Tanguy because he slipped tubes of paint into the satchels of the poor ones whose talents he believed in when his eagle-eyed wife wasn’t looking. And he hung their paintings on his walls to try to sell them in his shop. He’s gone now, of course, but that shop still bears his name.”

  “I remember it. On rue Clauzel. It’s bright blue.”

  “When I came through the doorway to his shop once, the little bell rang merrily, but I saw a sobering sight—a grown man, bearded, wearing a worn suit of black, weeping. No sound, but his eyes were soaked with sorrow. He was telling Tanguy how he and his wife had just buried their young daughter. Her name was Jeanne, my mother’s name. Amazing that a person can remember such a little thing.”

  “How old were you?”

  He thought a while and scratched his bald spot, round as a monk’s tonsure. “I’ve got to write these things down. There’s so much to tell you. It must have been around 1874 or 1875, whatever was the year of the first Impressionist exposition, so I would have been twenty-two or so. What a marvelous time to be young and in Paris.”

  Pascal seemed to retreat from the present moment. I thought he had finished, so I stood to wash the dishes. His hand shot out to stay me.

  “I’ll never forget the way the painter’s clasped hands shook, so full of anguish he was. ‘Such a thing,’ the man mutters, ‘just before our first big exposition. I need frames. I can’t hang my pictures without frames. That would disgrace my friends’ paintings.’ ”

  I could tell by the softening of his voice that Pascal had stepped into the past with both feet. He told how a painting leaning against a cabinet had caught his eye.

  “It was that one.” He looked at it hanging in the row of four. Cottages, a vegetable garden, a girl and a goat on a path going up a hill and around a bend. “It struck me then. The path was the same yellow-ochre I had dug out of the mine! Imagine that. The very hue I was selling as pigment, and here it was on a painting! It made me feel important in a way I had never felt before, and that Roussillon was important too. I had brought something out of the earth, and it was used to make something beautiful. I was part of a creative process. Can you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said, and with this understanding came respect.

  “See how the painting shows the light bouncing against the ochre houses and softening the edges of everything? The light does that here in the south. It makes things quiver.”

  He gazed lovingly at the painting on the wall, and I did too, and saw what he meant. The sunlight shimmered with life.

  “Ah, but the graybeard had a problem,” Pascal said. “ ‘I have to pay my share of the costs to the group,’ the painter says. ‘Then who will pay the rabbi and the cantor and the grave diggers?’ The poor man’s voice wavered, I remember. Think of it, Lisette. An old man like me remembering such a thing.”

  “You have a fine memory.”

  A rabbi and a cantor. I had seen Jews in the Marais quarter coming out of a large synagogue in rue Pavée, had noticed the fringes of the men’s shawls hanging below their coats, and had heard them speaking beneath their broad black hats what might have been Yiddish or Hebrew, but I had never known any Jewish person. I remembered the women in their long dresses with long sleeves; I had smiled at them, wishing I knew just one friendly word to say to them that they would understand.

  Pascal continued, “In that same instant, my heart cracked for the man who had made this painting with a substance that we had dug out of the earth right near our village. I would have thought Madame Tanguy’s heart would have cracked too, but she was shielding herself from pity by holding a newspaper in front of her face.

  “I told him that I wanted to help. He raised one eyebrow and asked if I was a frame maker. I told him I knew wood and had made panetières, so I could learn to make frames.

  “ ‘Puh!’ he says. ‘In a dozen years. That’s how long it takes to be admitted to the Guild of Encadreurs. That’s the frame makers’ guild. I need five frames in a week,’ he says, and his head sank down. I asked him if he would be content with simple uncarved molding. He didn’t answer. I asked Julien if he knew where I could buy molding and borrow tools.

  “From behind her newspaper, Madame Tanguy declares, ‘No framer is going to lend tools to an upstart who is not in the guild.’

  “ ‘Then let’s borrow one tool from five different people,’ I say.”

  It was amusing, the way Pascal told it, how excited he became.

  “The painter raised his head. ‘I have a tack hammer.’

  “ ‘Four people then,’ I say. ‘Tell each one you need it to repair a chair.’

  “Then madame lowers her newspaper and names some widow who might still have her husband’s miter box and saw. So I ask Julien if I can use the alley behind the shop. The painter nods in quick jerks of his head, but Julien says no, that I must not be seen, so h
e offers to clear a space in his back room.

  “I ask him if he has any glue, and Madame Tanguy snaps, ‘Bien sûr, we have glue. What kind of a shop do you think this is, young man?’ She crumpled the newspaper and thumped a jar on the counter. ‘Sixty-five centimes. Up front. No negotiation.’

  “I smacked the coins onto her open palm, and she dropped them into a drawer and slammed it shut.”

  “This really happened?” I asked.

  “It did, Lisette. It’s the very truth, I swear. Now the painter, he has hope beginning to shine in his eyes, so he tells me that wide molding painted white would do, and madame produces a jar of white gesso from a shelf. ‘One franc forty.’ She slaps the counter, and I count out the coins.”

  I stared at Pascal in wonder. “How can you remember what people said? Or those prices?”

  “When something changes your life, Lisette, you remember everything. Someday you’ll see.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Each day the painter shuffled into the shop as though the world would end soon and watched me work. I learned how to miter cleanly, and peg the corners as my uncle and I had done on the panetières. By the end of the second week, I had four frames, simple but acceptable. I inserted the four paintings. He called them The Orchard, A Morning in June, A Garden of Pontoise, and I can’t remember the fourth. He was astonished, Lisette. He had tears in his eyes. Four simple frames, and he was astonished.”

  “I am the one astonished, that you can recite their names.”

  “ ‘The white makes my colors glow,’ he says. ‘But I left five paintings here. Where’s the fifth? The one of Louveciennes?’

  “ ‘Madame is holding it behind the counter,’ I say timidly.

  “With her hands on her hips, she declares, ‘A negotiation. I consider four frames made without charge and on short order worth that one small painting.’

  “The painter flinched and cast his eyes at the painting. Finally, he turned to me with resolution and said, ‘And so do I, young man.’

  “He shook my hand, and I became a frame crafter, a collector, and a friend on the spot.”

  “And he was Pissarro?”

  “The very man. Camille Pissarro.”

  I clapped my hands for him, the second time since we had arrived, the only appropriate reaction to his tale.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PASCAL, PISSARRO, PONTOISE, AND PURPOSE

  1937, 1875

  AFTER WE WERE IN ROUSSILLON A FEW WEEKS, ANDRÉ WENT to Maurice’s house to ask if he knew of any frame shop in Avignon when Pascal came out to the courtyard, where I was shelling peas in the shade of the lean-to. He sat close beside me, shaking a half sheet of paper.

  “Almost boules time,” I said.

  “This first. I slept in fits and starts last night, because I was so afraid that I might forget something.”

  “About what?”

  “Pissarro, of course. He told me to come to Pontoise on the Jewish Sabbath. That’s where he lived when he was not visiting other painters in Paris. I remember him saying, ‘On the Sabbath Julie always reminds me that I must not paint, and because all the colors of the rainbow are in her eyes, I cannot refuse her. Sometimes, though, if the fire in me is burning hot, I must, but I always apologize with a kiss.’ ”

  “That’s nice.”

  “His house clung to a hillside near a stream in the quarter called the Hermitage. He wore a stained, broad-brimmed felt hat and rumpled trousers tucked into tall, mud-caked boots.”

  I looked at Pascal’s own rumpled trousers. “Like the men do around here?”

  “Try not to interrupt me, Lisette. I’m sorry, but it makes me forget what I was saying.

  “So on that same day he welcomed me with outstretched arms, took me inside, and introduced his wife and children to me, all of them busy and making noise, but amid all that hubbub, Camille wore an expression of absolute contentment. He had an amazing capacity to lift himself out of sadness.”

  “What do you mean? How?”

  “Please. Just listen. That first show of his group failed, and they lost all their investment. He only sold one painting for some pitiful price. The press cut them all to shreds. I thought he might give up, but no. He was working with fierce energy for the second show, as if some great success had spurred him on.”

  “Did you bring him a frame?”

  “Yes, I did, made according to a note he had sent to Julien. In between calls on pigment customers, I had made half a dozen frames over a year’s time and had begun to carve the moldings with simple leaves or arabesques at the corners. I had taught myself how to design a curve loosely so that I could carve it more easily, how to make a smooth, shallow groove with a U-gouge, how to prevent the V-gouge from digging too deeply by pressing down and forward on its handle instead of tapping with the mallet. I brought him the last of them, my most complex, with arabesques all around.

  “He admired it, Lisette, and said that I had progressed rapidly. Can you understand what that meant to me?”

  I did understand it, and it revealed him to me in a new way. I saw the humility in this man whom I would have loved to have had as a father.

  “So Camille says to me, he says, without bitterness, as though it were the lot of all painters, ‘I haven’t a sou, but you can choose a painting from this row for yourself.’

  “Just think of that, Lisette. He let me choose. He went back outside, and I was left to look at the paintings. Sowers, plowmen, hay wagons, haystacks, barges on the Oise, the hillside of cultivated land behind the Hermitage, a town square on market day. It was agony to choose.”

  “I should think so,” I remarked. I tried to plant these subjects in my mind so that when we went back to Paris I might be able to pick out a Pissarro painting in a gallery, but I was afraid my memory wasn’t as good as Pascal’s.

  “Later Camille asked what I thought of them, and he chuckled like a bashful boy, this grown man with a long, untrimmed beard. He was starving for a mite of praise from somebody outside his group of painters. The dear unwanteds, he called them.

  “ ‘What about praise from an ochre miner?’ I asked him. ‘What’s that worth?’

  “ ‘From a pigment salesman with a good eye for color? Plenty,’ he said. I’ll never forget that. I only claimed an eye for the seventeen hues we made from ochre. I think I told him that his colors were in harmony, and that his little dabs that didn’t mean anything up close looked like the real thing from a distance. I felt like a fool talking like that. All I wanted to do was to look at more paintings. He stood like a carved hunk of wood, waiting for me to say more. I could feel him suffering there, waiting, so I said something like this: ‘You know, the painting you gave me, of the yellow-ochre path? It makes me notice the range of ochres in all paintings. They make me think I’m doing something good selling those pigments. And the world you paint is one I know. It’s not just beautiful. It’s true. To the countryside. The light.’ That seemed to please him. I wanted to please him, Lisette.”

  “I’m sure you did please him.”

  “I was overwhelmed by so many paintings and told him so.

  “He let out a kind of snort and said he had fifteen hundred once. When he went back to Louveciennes after the Prussian war, he discovered that Prussian soldiers had been living in his house. They used his frames as firewood and made pathways of his paintings so they wouldn’t muddy their boots. Imagine that, Lisette. They kept their horses indoors in winter and slept upstairs. They used his studio to butcher sheep and his paintings as aprons. He had to dig out from the floor a thick layer of dung and dried blood that covered more paintings. Twenty years’ work, and he was able to save only forty canvases.” Burning with outrage, Pascal bellowed, “The barbarians!”

  I flinched and dropped a pea pod on the ground.

  “That painting of the girl and the goat?” I asked. “You said it was done in Louveciennes?”

  Pascal nodded.

  “Then it must have been one of the forty.”

&n
bsp; The stark realization of its narrow escape made it more valuable in my eyes, made me want to be in Paris all the more in order to search out all the other Pissarro paintings of Louveciennes.

  Pascal passed a moment in reflection before continuing.

  “Camille just stood there, this big man, watching me sputter, needing me to sputter, me, a laborer who knew nothing but what I loved. Do you understand, Lisette? He was heroic to keep on going. Unaccountably heroic. For years afterward, dozens of women wore the canvases of his looted paintings as aprons while doing their laundry along the Seine.”

  “What a pretty sight that must have been, all of them lined up along the bank, wearing his paintings.”

  “You don’t understand! It was a crime! They had stolen them! And they glared at him when he returned to Louveciennes because he had spent the Prussian war safely painting in England.”

  Maybe they had lost their sons or husbands, I thought, but that justification didn’t satisfy me. I could only imagine one day having the chance to tell the rich gallery visitors in Paris this story. I wanted them to feel the outrage and injury Pascal and I felt. In that moment, I was beginning to glimpse my purpose here.

  I finished shelling the peas and stood up to take them inside.

  “Sit down. There’s more I have to say.”

  I overlooked his rudeness. It was only his passion to be sure someone heard his story. “There’s more?”

  “He told me about a fine painter in his group who encouraged everyone else. Frédéric Bazille was his name. Idealistic but stubborn, Camille told me. The army wouldn’t admit him because he refused to shave his beard, so he joined the Zouaves, which had no such regulation. They were engaged in the fiercest fighting. He was killed in Beaune-la-Rolande, an inconsequential battle. ‘We grieved for the loss of that good man,’ Camille said, ‘so what sense does it make to mourn the loss of paint on cloth?’ ”

  To think of the great paintings that might have been, Pissarro’s and this man Bazille’s, was enough to make me grieve. Pascal might have collected a painting by Bazille, and I would be able to see it hanging here with the others.