“Yes,” I said. “That substance is for eternity.”
Maman does not know of Antoinette’s endeavors with needle and thread or of Charlotte’s triumph at the Opéra. She never met Matilde or Geneviève. She set out for the washhouse one morning but never did arrive according to Monsieur Guiot. “Was she assigned to the wringing machine?” Antoinette said, and he nodded, loosening his cravat. She had up and left us, disappearing in those dark days when Antoinette was mending for Monsieur Guiot without getting paid a single sou. She was, she said, fulfilling a pledge—to mend to perfection all she was asked, to allow him to inspect every stitch for three months. If she succeeded, only then would he waste a minute deciding whether to give her the work for good. I was not working, not at all. No. I was resting up—Antoinette’s words—even if every day the sun was out she made me climb the height of Montmartre and then back down. We had only Charlotte’s regular wage from the Opéra and the three francs extra she earned each night she danced upon the stage. Already Antoinette had given Monsieur LeBlanc the pouch of coins she brought with her from Saint-Lazare, this after extracting from him a steep discount for paying three months’ rent in advance. For meals we ate the broken orange Madeleines and scorched loaves Alphonse sent up to our door. Licking crumbs from her fingers, Antoinette would put on a cheery voice and say, “How many trays can a boy drop? That boy, his papa is going to wring his neck if he burns another loaf.”
The two of them—Antoinette and Alphonse—argued once. They were on the pavement, and I was setting out to climb Montmartre but still behind the door of our lodging house, listening to what I was not meant to hear. “Not yet,” Antoinette said. “She still isn’t herself.”
“I don’t know how long Papa will wait,” he said. “That girl we have doing the kneading rubs her back, stalling, the minute he turns away.”
“Well, you got to do this thing for Marie. You got to make your papa wait.” I put my shoulder against the door, but I did not push.
“And how do you suggest I accomplish that, Antoinette?”
“Pat that slothful girl on the rump from time to time. It’d make a girl work harder, thinking she stood a chance with the son of the owner. A few months of slaving and she saves herself a lifetime of drudgery.”
“I wasn’t patting Marie.”
“Marie don’t need patting. She was born working harder than an ox.”
I pushed the door open, and Alphonse took off his baker’s cap and wrung it in his hands. I felt my color rising, same as his, and I did not mention the kindness of the ruined loaves. I dipped my chin and spun away, striding off quicker than a rabbit escaping the stewing pot.
I am pretty sure I know the exact moment when Antoinette changed her mind about Alphonse telling me his father wanted me back at the bakery. She was mending at our little table, and I came in from climbing Montmartre and said how I had seen colors—oil leaked from the battered old lantern lying there—floating on the wet pavement. “I dipped my boot into the puddle and gave a little swirl. Those colors, how they were shining and drifting.” Antoinette set down her mending and put her hand on my cheek, and I saw joy well in her eyes.
I knead at a little table pushed to the front window of the bakery, a spot where I can keep an eye on Matilde and Geneviève in the street. Alphonse, as he sometimes does, lingers, stroking my arm. His brawny baker’s hands are soft as velvet with their dusting of flour. I say to him, over my shoulder, that such silky hands feel like a trick, and he says back how he could never devote himself to a woman with fleshy arms. “All those hours in the practice room gone to waste,” I say, “all those hours learning to make my arms appear soft.” I feel him watching, wondering if this morning will turn into one where I miss the Opéra, those moments of being lifted up. But today I think of Matilde catching such a moment and basking in the golden glow. I push the heels of my hands into the dough, turning the ridge of muscle beneath his fingers to hard, so he will know I am not dwelling, lost.
Antoinette comes in for the croissants she collects each morning, one for herself and one for the girl she has taken on as apprentice. “And how is Agnès?” I say. Every day there is a story: How she claimed to be sixteen when that age was still more than two years away. How she stole a sewn-up bonnet that turned up in the window of a pawnbroker in the rue Fontaine. How she called Antoinette a cow for making her rework a sloppy hem and then hurled a spool of thread when Antoinette said back, “If you’re saying I keep you in milk and cheese, then it’s absolutely true.” In Agnès, Antoinette gained exactly what she asked for when she took on a second washhouse and the mending piled up. “I need an apprentice” is what she said to the Superioress at Saint-Lazare. “A girl who isn’t quite thundering through those pearly gates.”
Antoinette gives her head a little shake. “Yesterday she told me an account of being robbed on Saturday evening and asked me could I advance her a few sous.”
It is not a reason for a pair of eyes to gleam hopefulness, but just now it is what I see in Antoinette’s.
“Well,” she goes on, “I put my hands on her shoulders and said, ‘Now, Agnès, was the robbing before or after applying the scent clinging to your hair, before or after putting the new laces in your boots, before or after enjoying the red caramel still streaking your teeth?’ By the time I finished, her hands were in her lap and she was looking mournful as a wilted rose. I gathered up the ham from the larder, the onions and potatoes from the root bin and set them at her feet. ‘Don’t know why you’re lying,’ I said, ‘but I can see you are in need.’ And then she was bawling and saying about being a dunce and going out to the Chat Noir and waking up with nothing more than a thick tongue and a blaring head and a whole lot of sorrow about wasting what she worked so hard to earn.”
“There is such goodness in you, Antoinette,” I say. “In no time, you’ll have Agnès ripened up to an honest working girl.” A girl like herself, industrious as a bee, honest as a looking glass.
Antoinette sticks to the truth, always, now, even when it means saying to Charlotte that, no, her set decorator does not have a regal look or to Alphonse that she would not agree his meringues are the best she ever tried or to me that, yes, it is true Matilde does not match Geneviève in humility and then, after I sucked in my lip, “Christ, Marie. You know lying isn’t for me.” Sometimes there is a gap, before she says her wounding words, like she is arguing with herself about the supremacy of truth, and what I figured out is always when such a gap blooms, the asking was a mistake.
She swallows, laughs, and I do the same, because no one coming in for his morning loaf wants the awkwardness of finding the baker’s wife and her sister misty-eyed at the front of the shop. We take a moment—Antoinette and I—standing side by side, shoulders touching, and peering through the window into the rue de Douai. Matilde holds a feather, rose-colored and magnificent with long strands of the vane wafting in the breeze. She draws the feather over her cheek, along her neck, taking pleasure in the tickling. “One of yours?” I say to Antoinette.
“From an ostrich. Must’ve fell from a lady’s hat.”
Matilde tilts her head, the way she tends to when she is making up her mind. And then she is off, running like a dog is nipping at her heels. She stops, abrupt, a few steps short of Geneviève and holds out her find. She gives it the little nudge that makes Geneviève understand, and she reaches for the feather, those wispy tendrils of love offered by her sister as a gift.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply indebted to my agent, the brilliant Dorian Karchmar. I count the day she offered representation as the day I was hauled from the murk of the woods onto the lit path. I am immensely grateful to my editors—Sarah McGrath and Iris Tupholme—for their tremendous intelligence and diligence in shaping this book and finding its readership. A writer could not ask for more capable, dedicated allies.
A heartfelt thank-you to the following: Ania Szado, my first reader, for encouragement and thoughtful criticism; Sarah Cobb, for patience and skill in trans
lating primary source material; Jack and Janine Cobb, for expertise in proofreading; my parents, Ruth Buchanan and Al Buchanan, for being guiding lights; Nancy Buchanan, for being my best friend in all the world; my boys, Jack, Charlie, and William Cobb, for making me laugh (and yes, cry) and love being a mother; my husband, Larry Cobb, for the gift of time to write and most of all, for love.
I am grateful for the generous assistance provided by David Baguley, author of Émile Zola: L’Assommoir; Douglas W. Druick, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of “Framing The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” (Degas and the Little Dancer, Yale University Press, 1998, 77–96), his groundbreaking essay detailing the link between Little Dancer Aged Fourteen and Degas’s criminal portraits; Martine Kahane, author of “Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen—The Model” (Degas Sculptures: Catalogue Raisonné of the Bronzes, International Arts, 2002, 101–7), her seminal essay on the circumstances of the van Goethem sisters’ lives; Sylvie Jacq Mioche, History of Dance teacher at the Paris Opéra Ballet School; Pierre Vidal, director of the Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra.
Many books were important in researching this novel, particularly David Baguley, Emile Zola: L’Assommoir, Cambridge University Press, 1992; Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall, Degas and the Dance, Harry N. Abrams, 2002; Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, Degas, Abradale, 1988; Ludovic Halévy, The Cardinal Family, George Barrie & Sons, 1897; Richard Kendall, Douglas W. Druick, and Arthur Beale, Degas and the Little Dancer, Yale University Press, 1998; Leo Kersley and Janet Sinclair, A Dictionary of Ballet Terms, Da Capo, 1979; Charles S. Moffett, Ruth Berson, Barbara Lee Williams, and Fronia E. Wissman, The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886, Richard Burton, 1986; Spire Pitou, The Paris Opéra: An Encyclopedia of Operas, Ballets, Composers, and Performers, Greenwood, 1990; Émile Zola, L’Assommoir, Orion Group, 1995.
The newspaper account “Criminal Man” that appears in this novel draws on a translation of the article “Fous ou Criminels?” La Nature (August 23, 1879), 186–87. The newspaper account “Concerning the New Painting Exhibited at the Gallery of Durand-Ruel” draws on the translation of Louis Emile Edmond Duranty’s 1876 essay “The New Painting,” which appears in The New Painting, Impressionism, 1874–1886, 38–47. The newspaper account “Degas and the Sixth Exposition of the Independent Artists” draws on Fronia E. Wissman’s essay “Realists Among the Impressionists,” which appears in The New Painting, Impressionism, 1874–1886, 337–50. The critiques of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen draw on critiques presented in the aforementioned essay; Degas, pages 206–7; George Shackelford, Degas: The Dancers, W. W. Norton & Company, 1984, 69; and Charles W. Millard, The Sculpture of Edgar Degas, Princeton University Press, 1976, 28. The remaining newspaper accounts and excerpts of court transcripts draw on translations of articles that appeared in Le Figaro between March 1879 and August 1880. Text by Edgar Degas is from Huit Sonnets d’Edgar Degas and is used courtesy of Wittenborn Art Books, San Francisco, www.art-books.com. The translation is largely from Degas and is used with the permission of the estate of Andrew Forge.
About the Author
Cathy Marie Buchanan is the author of The Day the Falls Stood Still, a New York Times bestseller, a Barnes & Noble Recommends selection and one of the Canada Reads Top 40 Essential Canadian Novels of the Decade. She holds a BSc (Honours, Biochemistry) and an MBA from Western University. Born and raised in Niagara Falls, Ontario, she now resides in Toronto. Visit her online at www.cathymariebuchanan.com or on Facebook, or follow her on Twitter @CathyMBuchanan
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Author’s Note
The Painted Girls is largely in keeping with the known facts of the van Goethem sisters’ early lives. In 1878 Marie and Charlotte were accepted into the dance school of the Paris Opéra, where their older sister, Antoinette, was employed as an extra. Their father, a tailor, was dead, and their mother was a laundress. They lived in the ninth arrondissement, settling in 1880 in the rue de Douai on the lower slopes of Montmartre, a few blocks from Degas’s rue Fontaine studio. That year Marie passed the examination admitting her to the corps de ballet and made her debut on the Opéra stage.
Between 1878 and 1881, Edgar Degas drew, painted, and sculpted Marie in numerous artworks, most famously in Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, which appeared at the sixth exposition of independent artists in 1881 alongside Degas’s pastel of convicted criminals Émile Abadie and Michel Knobloch, Criminal Physiognomies. Critics lauded Little Dancer as “the only truly modern attempt at sculpture,” and saw a street urchin, her face clearly “imprinted with the promise of every vice.”
A half dozen years ago I happened upon the BBC documentary The Private Life of a Masterpiece: Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. It questioned Degas’s intention in exhibiting Little Dancer alongside his portraits of convicted criminals. Was he hinting at the future criminality of the girl in the vitrine? I was inspired to investigate the notion that—not unlike Émile Zola, who was simultaneously putting forth arguments for a scientific literature, one that presented a deterministic view of human life—Degas bought into the idea that certain facial features hinted at a person’s innate criminality and sought to incorporate it into his artwork. How might such perceptions have affected the life of his teenage model?
At the same time, I delved into the stories of Émile Abadie and Michel Knobloch. According to the historical record, Abadie was implicated in three murders. The woman Bazengeaud was murdered in Montreuil when her throat was slit by Abadie and Pierre Gille. Each was sentenced to death, sentences that were commuted to forced labor for life in New Caledonia after Abadie published “The Story of a Man Condemned to Death.” The widow Joubert, a news seller in the van Goethem’s neighborhood, was beaten to death, prompting further investigation of Abadie and Gille. Though neither was convicted, the proceedings went far enough to determine the pair had ample opportunity to carry out the murder between scenes when they were absent from the stage of the Ambigu Theater, where they were extras in an adaptation of Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir. A grocer’s boy was murdered in Saint-Mandé, and Knobloch confessed and named Abadie as accomplice. Both were convicted, though the evidence was scant and Knobloch repeatedly claimed in court to have made up his confession as a means of getting to New Caledonia. For the sake of this story, I collapsed the three murders into two and took liberties with dates. The newspaper articles, court transcripts, and critiques of Little Dancer throughout the story are faithful to the tone and, in many instances, the content of the original documents.
In the year that followed the exhibition, Antoinette served a three-month sentence for stealing seven hundred francs, and Marie was dismissed from the Opéra after a string of fines for being late or absent. Charlotte, however, prevailed, becoming a dancer of some distinction and teacher at the dance school during her fifty-three-year career with the Opéra.
There is no evidence the van Goethem sisters knew Abadie, Gille, and Knobloch. The intertwining of the sisters’ story with theirs, that fateful day when Antoinette met Abadie behind the Paris Opéra and later swallowed the mussels with parsley sauce he fed into her mouth, is nothing more than imagination and ink.
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen remained in Degas’s studio all his life. Despite his reluctance “to leave anything behind in bronze,” in the years following his death, his heirs arranged to cast the twenty-eight bronze repetitions that appear around the world. The original wax sculpture is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
More Advance Praise for The Painted Girls
“Part mystery, part love story, The Painted Girls breathes heart and soul into a fascinating era of the City of Light. One can’t help but be drawn in by this compelling and lyrical tale of sister love and rivalry.”
—Heidi W. Durrow, author of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
“The Painted Girls is historical fiction at its finest, awash in period details of the Paris of De
gas and Zola while remaining, at its heart, the poignant story of sisters struggling to stay together even as they find themselves pulled toward different, and often misunderstood, dreams. Cathy Marie Buchanan also explores the uneasy relationship between artist and muse with both compassion and soul-searing honesty.”
—Melanie Benjamin, author of Alice I Have Been
“The Painted Girls holds you enthralled as it spools out the vivid story of young sisters in late 19th-century Paris struggling to transcend their lives of poverty through the magic of dance. The author opens a rare window into the hard work, pain and determination behind the graceful art of ballet; even more, into the hard and sometimes cruel choices faced by young girls of that time. I guarantee you will never look at Edgar Degas’s immortal sculpture of the Little Dancer in quite the same way again.”
—Kate Alcott, author of The Dressmaker
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