The Painted Girls

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  I knew, then, always he would see his way to giving me a second chance. Same as before the retching onto pressed trousers, with the sixteen fouettés en tournant came spread-open wings, a lowly scuttling rat raised up to a swan. It was in that moment, half a year ago, when I knew already I was his protégé.

  Once Monsieur Lefebvre finishes emptying the kettle into the zinc tub, he moves to behind the easel, and I step ankle-deep into water hot enough to sting.

  “Wet yourself,” he says.

  I crouch, pick up the sponge he put beside the tub with a cake of soap and a pitcher of water with steam rising above. I pass the sponge through the water, squeeze it over my shoulder and feel warm rivulets running down my back. Monsieur Lefebvre lifts his arm, preparing to draw. With the smallest of glances, I see the concentration on his face, and the ache between my shoulder blades lets up. Daylight, like always, chases away the blackness of night, the wide-awake hours of knowing Monsieur Lefebvre and I are playing at something that is not drawing, something that an easel and charcoal lets the both of us pretend is nothing at all.

  I come to the apartment on Tuesdays before heading to the Opéra for the quadrille’s afternoon class and the rehearsing that comes afterward. There is never a maid nor a wife nor the son he once told me showed a scientist’s mind with his fondness for dissecting frogs and mice. I asked once where everyone was, and Monsieur Lefebvre said, “I gave the maid the day off and Madame Lefebvre prefers our other apartment, in the Avenue des Ternes, and Antoine attends the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.”

  Still crouched with my belly tight against my thighs, I again squeeze the sponge over my shoulder. “Shall I warm up the water, Marie?”

  There are two fireplaces, one at each end of the room. Flames fill the mouth of the closest, and in the other a large kettle, with steam spilling from its spout, dangles from a hook above a bed of glowing coals. “Might just be the warmest bath I ever had.” Even Monsieur Degas, who has nowhere near the same wealth, would never stoop to hauling a kettle himself. He would call Sabine to warm up the tub.

  “Perhaps you might stand a little straighter? You’re all knees, crouching like that.”

  I had grown used to modeling naked for Monsieur Degas, but now with Monsieur Lefebvre’s strange ways and my own body altering by the week, there is a new wariness. The hair that was gauzy between my legs, beneath my arms, has thickened to a mat. Bones no longer jut from my hips, not with the meat the modeling for Monsieur Lefebvre allows. The small mounds of my breast have swelled, like an apricot cut in half one day and then a yellow plum the next. It meant the fastening hooks of my practice bodice pulled too tight and tore three little holes where before there were none. I said to Monsieur Lefebvre how with the bodice I felt I could hardly open up my ribs to breathe, and a day later, I was being measured by a seamstress after class, and a week after that, I was wearing a new one with a layer of ruched tarlatan adding to my new fullness across the front and a neckline trimmed with lace. Such prettiness, for practicing! In my satchel were two more bodices, one with a low, scooping back and the smallest of pink rosebuds upon each shoulder, and the other with such ruffles that I feared Monsieur Pluque scolding me. I wore it anyway and saw him eyeing me once. He said not a word, though, and I figured out that he knew such a bodice could only be a gift from an abonné, from Monsieur Lefebvre.

  I straighten my knees to standing, arms hanging at my sides, dripping sponge clenched in one hand.

  “Wash yourself,” he says. “You’re bathing. I’m not even here.”

  I pass the sponge over each arm, both legs. I keep up the bending and straightening, the soaking of the sponge, the washing of my shoulders, my neck, until the water grows cool and my skin is like gooseflesh. “Enough,” he finally says.

  I have not held a single pose, which proves he does not know the first thing about how to draw. He takes a towel from the top of the sideboard and whirls his finger through the air, telling me to turn. “I’ll dry your back,” he says, and because he expects it, I shuffle my feet in a slow circle, stopping only when I face away from him. He is gentle, taking his time, and I can tell he is very close by the heat rolling off him, by the sound of his breath heavy in my ear. Then he moves low, upon one knee, and the towel passes over half of my backside, travels down one leg. Its roughness is upon the other cheek and then still and there is what feels like two fingers, prodding, through the towel, at the softest of spots between my legs. I snap to rigid, faster than a thought, just like the other time Marie the First had me flinching from his finger on my spine, and he pulls away.

  He nudges the towel against my hanging hand, and, taking it, I scuttle from the tub, slopping water onto the carpet with its pattern of laurels and vines. It is the kind of mistake that in a wink switches him from kindly to mean, but today he only flops down into the swan-armed chair and puts his face in his hands.

  Behind the screen, I drop the towel, tug on my drawers; my stockings, not bothering to pull them up past my knees; my skirt; my blouse. My boots, I leave undone.

  “Take your money from the middle drawer in the sideboard,” he says. “Take thirty francs.”

  Without truly glancing toward him, though I can see, from the corner of my eye, the black outline of him still slumped in the chair, I open the middle drawer to find it heaped with coins, some bronze, mostly gold. There are stacks of notes—tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds. I put my hand upon the tens, peel back three notes, but I let one settle back onto the pile. “I’m taking twenty,” I say, and he looks up, an old man. “All right,” he says. “All right.”

  What I know is I have to tell Antoinette. But how to get to two prodding fingers when I have not said about never holding a pose or the maid who is not there or the draperies blocking the light. All of it seems like the whining of a child. And already she is gloomy and grumpy and pacing the plank floor of our lodging room, wringing her hands on account of that boy. With two ten-franc notes inside my pocket, I open the door and close it quietly behind my back and then stand in the vestibule, a steadying hand on the cool marble of the wall.

  Antoinette

  I am rushing in the dark, dodging the ridges of ugly, yellow slush masking the pavements. My boots are filthy and soaked, no different from the hem of my skirt. How I hate the month of December, the sun that don’t show itself until after eight o’clock in the morning and then has the nerve to disappear before five o’clock in the afternoon. And this at a time when bones are aching with damp, shivering with cold, craving a needle of sunshine hot enough to breach the wool of our winter cocoons.

  I intended to leave our lodging room early and, by eight o’clock, to pass under the great archway of La Roquette, the prison where Émile and Pierre Gille been sent to count the hours. They wait, like all the others there—most for transport to New Caledonia; some for the dawn they greet the guillotine; Émile and Pierre Gille for word from the president, news of their fates.

  It was Marie kept me from leaving on time. “Can you spare a minute?” she said, pushing herself up from the table, traipsing after me to the door. Same as always, when preparing to open her trap against Émile, she wore a particular look—nervous as a whore in church.

  Her heart was cold and black, rigid like a rock when it came to Émile, and there was no way to think of it except that she did not love me all the way through. I was a good sister and a decent laundress, but also a failed ballet girl and a walker-on who had let down Monsieur Leroy, and all of that was just fine with Marie. Such was not the case, though, for the part of me that was the lover of Émile. That part she would feed to the dogs. And it stung, her hateful talk, the way she did not love me enough to shut tight her trap.

  Tugging my shawl up over the back of my head, I said, “Tonight.” She would be out, at the Opéra, rehearsing for her debut in La Korrigane, and I was done with her poking a finger at the newspaper, all those stories cropping up about whether Émile was deserving of clemency. Never once did she think to keep from my ears the arguments favoring
the guillotine. In all the long months since he first got hauled off to Mazas, her yammering has not let up, not a bit, not even with his “Story of a Man Condemned.” No, after that, all she bothered to spit out was “He says, ‘It’s more important to judge the heart of a man than a moment of panic.’ A moment of panic! He confessed to slitting a woman’s throat.” It was the beginning of the hundred times I would say to her, “He was only showing remorse, Marie, saving his own neck. Monsieur Danet decided what to write.”

  This morning, just like always, there was no dodging the girl. She put herself between me and our lodging room door and touched my arm. “A minute? A single minute, Antoinette?”

  “Émile didn’t have a papa like our own,” I said, cutting her short. “There wasn’t a papa putting sprigs of lavender upon his mattress or bringing home a figurine of Taglioni hovering above the earth. Émile didn’t get none of that.”

  Her bottom lip quivered. She sucked it into her mouth, and I felt sorry for stirring up the memory of Papa. I let my face go gentle, and it was enough to bring about her cheek against the matted wool of my shawl.

  I counted to ten, before I said, “I need to go, Marie. I really do.”

  She looked up, like a starved dog snuck into a café. “Please.”

  “Not a word against Émile,” I said.

  She rattled her head, like all her harsh words were only something I dreamt up. “It’s about modeling.” She bit her lip.

  “Don’t got all day.”

  “Monsieur Lefebvre, he doesn’t have a proper workshop.”

  “Those artists up in Montmartre, half of them paint in the same rabbit hutches where they sleep.” Her lip was again between her teeth. “If you’re worrying, don’t see why you wouldn’t ask to be paid up front.”

  “It’s not that.” She looked as earnest as a cat after a bird. “He isn’t much of an artist at all.”

  “Christ, Marie.” Always she was complaining about Monsieur Degas cutting off feet.

  “He does more looking than drawing.”

  I shrugged.

  “He had me standing in a tub the other day. Bathing.”

  Was she going to ask me to accompany her, like that first time she went to Monsieur Degas? I missed a day’s wages from the Ambigu and was sent home within five minutes of arriving at his workshop. “The water was warm?” My voice was like the edge of a knife.

  She nodded.

  “Sounds rosy, getting paid to take a bath.” I pulled my shawl tighter, and she cleared out of my path. The skin below her lips was pink with the rawness of being grazed by her teeth, and a rotten feeling came into my gut, but already the street outside our window was waking up. Already I would be running and panting half the way to La Roquette.

  Close to the prison the streets grow congested with carriages and carts. The cobblestones are crawling with street hawkers, as if all the flower sellers and coal peddlers suddenly got word the rue de la Roquette was the best place in all of Paris for selling their wares.

  A boy, no more than ten, grabs at the sleeve of a shorter one. “Hurry up,” he says. “Dawn is nearing.” And it comes to me that this morning, set up on the five smooth stones not twenty paces outside the arched doorway of La Roquette, the guillotine looms. Already those boys watching the shed in the rue de la Folie-Regnault, from where it was brought, ran the boulevards, hollering the news. I lurch, clutch the lapels of the taller boy, tug him close. “Who?” I say. “Who is facing the guillotine?”

  “Billet.” The boy struggles, and his lapel tears. “The butcher who hacked his wife to death.”

  I let go, run my hands over my skirt while the boys scramble away, each looking over his shoulder from a distance before slowing down.

  I sit on the sill of a low window, put a hand over my heart, racing more wildly than when I was hurtling along the pavements. And in that moment I feel myself shifting, believing in the realness of Émile’s bare neck upon the lunette of the guillotine. The tale I was clinging to, the one with him free on the streets of Paris, his fingers on my back, steering me around corners, like that first time we met, I see with an icy, new clearness it is a memory, something past, nothing that is yet to come. Never again will that tale be coaxed into my dreams at the end of the day, drawn there by longing and hope. For Émile there are only two options—New Caledonia and the guillotine. And knowing it is a blow to the gut.

  Eventually I push myself up from the sill and put one foot in front of the other, following the crowd. Not once before did I join the horde gawking at the misery of another; and maybe it was a mistake, the blunder that allowed the tale I went to sleep with at night. I conjure up what Billet has already this morning endured: a flash of lantern light in his sleepy eyes, a jailer calling him from his cell, the prayers of the chaplain, the promise of forgiveness, the disbelief crippling his knees, the cold steel of shears touching his flesh, the hair clipped from the back of his neck.

  I shoulder my way through the crowd, until the scaffolding of the guillotine comes into view—the two straight posts supporting the lintel, the struts of the base. In the darkness of early morning, only the light of the blazing faggots glints from the blade. Between the two posts, it hangs from the wheel of a pulley, like savagery forged into a shape.

  A man all Paris knows by name—Monsieur Roch, the custodian of the guillotine—walks in a broad circle around the machine, the eyes of the gathered tinsmiths and bankers and fishmongers following him. Without touching the cigar hanging from his lips, he puffs smoke from his nose. Three times, he hauls on a rope, causing the blade of the guillotine to slide up and down. Then he strokes the lever, testing. The blade falls with a thud upon the wood below, and a contented look comes to his face.

  The gates of La Roquette swing open, and there, between the two aides of Monsieur Roch, is Billet. The moment he is brought into open air, he surely sees the rosy tints of morning appearing in the east and knows with daylight his time has come. Pale, he faces the gawking, hushed crowd. He takes a few steps, stumbles but is pushed forward, his feet lagging, his eyes moving up and down the guillotine at the end of his path. Once there, his waistcoat and shirt are removed, leaving him in trousers and a knitted undershirt. His hands are tied, and he turns toward another man all Paris knows—the Abbot Crozes, chaplain to the condemned. Billet kisses him upon the lips. “Good-bye, my father,” he says, in a trembling voice. Monsieur Roch draws the straps and fastens Billet to the plank of the guillotine. The plank turns over on its pivot, laying his neck upon the lunette, and the yoke with its slit for the passage of the blade comes down.

  Quick as quick, Monsieur Roch puts a hand upon the lever, and there is a dull thud and the severed head of Billet falling upon the mound of sawdust piled in a large basket. I stagger backward at the quickness of life snuffed out, and Monsieur Roch and his two aides send the rest of Billet rolling into the basket after the head. A cover is put into place.

  I want to erase the memory of that severed neck—the glistening white bone, the pale flesh, a second later turning dark with seeped blood, and a further second after that, awash in the brightest of reds. I lift my eyes to the sky turning from grey to blue, strain to hear a bird warbling its morning carol even if there is no chance with wintertime all around. I want New Caledonia for Émile.

  If I could feel the glow of hope instead of the knife’s edge of dread, I might imagine myself to be back in a visitor’s cell at Mazas rather than at La Roquette. The bare plaster walls, the brickwork floor, the two sets of iron grates, the intervening passageway—the stench of it all is exactly the same.

  The door of the cell opposite my own opens up a crack, and the low voice of Émile reaches my ears: “When the Abbot Crozes gets back, you’ll let him know I want him to come to me?”

  A jailer answers back, saying, “You sure it isn’t the warden you want me to tell?” And then with his tone changing to that of a child, he adds, “Monsieur Warden, that Émile Abadie, he is consumed with remorse. Be sure to let the president know.”


  The door opens fully and there is Émile, sunken hollows under his eyes and lines etched upon his brow. “Just tell the abbot,” he says.

  He slumps onto the chair waiting in his own cell, and the door closing behind him, his shoulders heave. “Old Billet went to the guillotine this morning,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  He slumps further, eyes closed, arms now wrapping his waist. “I can’t take the waiting.”

  “It’s a good sign. You said so yourself.”

  “Old Billet was hoping for clemency.” Émile looks up.

  “Never mind about him.”

  “I’d hang myself if I had so much as a belt. I could braid strips of sheet. Make a noose.”

  “New Caledonia,” I say. “You got to keep your mind on that.”

  He waits, staring hard, his chest rising and falling. “You’ll follow me?”

  A promise to follow him to New Caledonia don’t seem like much, only words to bring comfort to a boy. But what if it turns out the promise is more than just words? With all the ink spilled daily in the newspapers about youth and remorse and reform isn’t there a chance? Even Marie is not against hard labor and New Caledonia for Émile and the rest so long as not a single one ever comes back to France. I think of Maman, her sodden snoring, her reeking breath, her life of widowhood and soiled linens and a tipped bottle of absinthe. I remember the old chaise in the storage room, about being adored, how I felt so awake, like nothing in the world was dusty and grey, not the colors or the creaks of the chaise or the feel of his breath, the smell of the smoke in his hair. He chose me above the rest, and my world was shifted to dazzling and sharp.

  I nod. Marie and Charlotte have each other. They have the Opéra.