Slipper

by Hester Velmans

  “You know, Missus, I was talking to Maria Verklapper, and she thinks you really ought to hurry up and get married again soon—”

  “Dieneke. Please!”

  “She thinks it’s asking for trouble. She says everyone’s talking about you.”

  “They don’t know a thing about me, Dieneke.”

  “No, Missus. But they—there’s talk.”

  “Ha! Such as…?”

  “Such as? Well, such as, everyone thinks Liesbet weren’t Master’s child.”

  “It’s none of their business. It’s none of yours, either.”

  “Of course not. Sorry. I’m sorry, Missus.”

  “That’s all right, Dieneke.”

  “Still, Missus…”

  “What now, Dieneke!”

  “It’s just, they don’t understand why you don’t pick someone nice, like Joop de Gijn or Johannes Stoer, you know, then there would be no reason for no more talk…”

  Lucinda did not lose her temper. She understood that there was no malice intended. Her neighbors were all good, kind people, who had only her best interests at heart.

  But she longed to get away, she longed for a place that was less comfortable, less cozy, less spotless. She longed for a vile, vast, chaotic place where nobody knew her business. And she also had to get away from the bells, that maddening carillon outside her window, it was driving her insane—

  Ah, my darling Augustine, Augustine, Augustine

  Ah, my darling Augustine

  Everything gone.

  The children used to dance to that ditty, holding hands. Such solid grace they had. Such unquestioning acceptance of their own existence. She could see Liesbet hauling her little brother around and pulling him down on the final “gone,” landing hard on their bottoms, shouting with glee.

  Her voice sounded reedy, forced. “I’m leaving, anyway. I have made up my mind. As soon as the house is sold.”

  “Yes, but, Missus—”

  “Are you coming or not?”

  “But, Paris!”

  “Yes, Paris.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “You don’t have to come. I am giving you a choice.”

  “I’ve never been away from home, Missus…”

  “I know. It is not an easy decision to make. I understand that.”

  “I’m not used to foreigners.”

  “Well, suit yourself.” She turned, and looked out the window. The bells, mercifully, had stopped, but the shrill vibrations still lingered.

  “Missus!”

  “Yes, Dieneke.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “You’ll come?”

  “Maybe I will. That’s what I said.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know that.”

  Not long after this, the house in Amsterdam was sold, and Lucinda moved to Paris with her son and her maidservant. With the help of the French ambassador, she was able to find suitable lodgings, and they were soon settled comfortably in one of the city’s more fashionable neighborhoods.

  As it turned out, Lucinda was indeed a sensation in Paris, albeit a minor one. In a very short space of time she had more portrait commissions than she could handle. This was in part because she had a fresh, candid approach to portraiture that the French found intriguing; but also because she was young, and attractive, and society immediately ruled her irresistible, and once society had ruled such a thing, nothing would do but to have oneself driven to the Rue Saint Louis and to have oneself painted by la petite Anglaise, the little Englishwoman, herself.

  53

  A CARRIAGE

  In Paris it did not take Lucinda long to find out that if you are blessed with some measure of wealth or fame, you will have people falling all over themselves in their eagerness to do you special favors. Therefore, although Lucinda was paid handsomely for her portraits, and so for the first time in her life felt perfectly capable of seeing to her own affairs, she now found herself overwhelmed with advice and offers of assistance. She did find this rather ironic, since when she had been starving and destitute, and could have used a little help, none had been forthcoming. She understood, however, that it was best to accept such favors gracefully, on the understanding that the goal was as much to gratify the donor, and make him feel important, as to do her a good turn.

  It was thus that in a very short space of time Lucinda had gained an apartment in a most desirable location, all sorts of intriguing invitations, and a client list of truly impressive proportions.

  One of her most persistent benefactors was the Marquis de Quelquonque, who had decided to make it his mission to transform the rather provincial but talented little foreigner into a star of Paris society. Naturally—to be blunt about it—the marquis did have ulterior motives in doing so: he was tiring of one of his current mistresses, and thought that Madame Sunderland, with just a little polishing, might make a perfectly satisfactory substitute.

  Madame Sunderland had just turned down the marquis’ offer to procure for her, at a very reasonable price, an equipage which had until recently belonged to a penurious Polish princess.

  “A carriage—no, no, I go out so rarely, Monsieur le Marquis,” she demurred, “it would be a waste.”

  “But Madame must be seen in public more often!” he said. “All Paris ought to be granted a glimpse of such…simple charms!” His right eyebrow shot up as he looked her up and down, not altogether approvingly.

  Lucinda tucked a strand of stray hair behind her ear, then folded her paint-smudged hands in her lap. “Sir!” she said. “You flatter me. Forgive me. I really don’t think…you see, I must needs devote myself to my work…”

  “As you wish!” he stated coolly. “Madame will think it over, of course.”

  “Certainly,” she said.

  “And now,” said the marquis, getting to his feet, “before I take my leave, I have just one other small boon to ask of Madame, and I trust Madame will not refuse me there.”

  “I do hope not!” she murmured.

  “I have taken the liberty of recommending Madame to the Superintendent of the Royal Buildings. This gentleman has expressed an interest in having his portrait done. I pray that Madame will not turn him away. His name is Charles Perrault. He is not a nobleman, you understand, but Madame will find him a most valuable patron nonetheless. He is Minister Colbert’s right-hand man, and wields a certain influence. He is a member of the Académie, and has been entrusted, moreover, with refurbishing the state rooms of the Palace of Versailles. He is always looking for painters and sculptors.”

  “Marquis!” stammered Lucinda. “You are too good!”

  “This is what they always tell one,” said the marquis, patting his elaborate peruke. “Madame is by no means the first to say it, but I do not lie to Madame when I tell her I am not, I am veritably not that good!”

  There were no daydreams anymore, her daydreams were gone. Taking their place were the night dreams—unflattering, unhinging self-recriminations that stole into her mind in the dead of night. They replayed for her the most shameful moments of her life. Her feeble, giggly attempts to ward off Uncle Edmund. Her idiotic misjudgment of Henry’s affections. Her failure to speak up for herself when Vauban took her for a common whore. The humiliations of beggardom and the pauper’s institution. Marrying Arent not for love, but for a better life. The anger and pride that had made her turn her back on what may have been her one and only chance at love…

  But one nightmare loomed more horribly than all the others; one in particular haunted her mercilessly, and she dreaded falling asleep because of it.

  In this dream she was standing outside Arent’s room, leaning against the wall. She had to lean because her knees were knocking together like two bowling pins. Dieneke was shouting at her. “The Master! Missus! Oh Missus, Missus, help him. Help us! What are we to do?” But she was paralyzed, pinned to the wall, glued to the floor, unable to move, unable to make her shaking legs carry her over the threshold into that room where a horribly bli
stered Arent lay screaming.

  In the end it had been Dieneke who had stayed with him, Dieneke who had nursed him, and Dieneke who had washed and wrapped the ravaged body and carried it gently down to the death wagon.

  Waking up in a sweat, she tried to focus on the time, a little later, when her darling, her Liesbet, was smitten in turn—her courage had not failed her then! How she had toiled over her, how she had wept, how she had kissed her and hugged her and slobbered over that little body, drinking in her pain, not caring for her own safety, praying, imploring death to take her if that would save her child! No, there was nothing more she could have done for Liesbet. But what had she done for Arent, what had she done to save Thomas, what about Bessie, Zéfine, or the rest of the camp followers…?

  This was the reason she could no longer find solace in the world of daydreams. She had lost her own untainted self. Never again would she be the pure, unblemished innocent—the brave young heroine her dream scenarios required.

  That world was now barred to her forever.

  Lucinda had discovered that the most effective way to capture a sitter’s personality was to engage the client in conversation during the preliminary sketching. It was the secret of her success. Unlike the more traditional portraiture, which showed fashionable people frozen in haughty poses, Madame Sunderland turned out animated likenesses that caught her subjects gesticulating or on the verge of speaking, often revealing some vulnerability as well as whatever warmth or charm they possessed.

  In the Superintendent of Royal Buildings and Works recommended to her by the marquis, Lucinda found an uncommonly unglamorous subject, endowed with a swagged chin, heavy paunch and garnet complexion. But after a rather awkward first interview, she discovered in him a refreshing gruffness and keenness of mind that made him, in her opinion, the most satisfying subject she had painted to date. By the second sitting they had dropped the conventions of polite conversation and were so deeply engrossed in discourse that they were dismayed when Dieneke knocked on the door with the news that Lucinda’s next subject was tapping her foot in the front parlor.

  Never before had Lucinda found such an excellent sounding board for her unschooled ideas on art, and she was astonished that this important, learned Frenchman should be genuinely interested in her own history, or that he liked to talk about the very subjects that were close to her own heart.

  But, some may object, isn’t this just another example of the deception of the flesh, which so often persuades us that we have found a soul mate when it is in fact the other kind of mating that’s intended? Certainly, it cannot be denied that Superintendent Perrault enjoyed Lucinda’s company as much for her looks as for her talents and conversation; however, he never gave any hint that he might have improper intentions. Indeed, he often spoke openly, lovingly even, of his dear departed wife and his four young children—this in refreshing contrast to the marquis, who breezed through his courtship of Lucinda without ever letting on that he had a wife who was still very much alive, in addition to not one, but two troublesome mistresses. In any case, Lucinda eagerly looked forward to the superintendent’s visits. Even though she could not always agree with him, he brought her a tidy, optimistic view of the world, which not only helped to place her failures in a more positive light, but also reminded her strongly of Bessie.

  “You sound like my old nurse,” she told him wistfully. “She was always telling me to look on the bright side.”

  “Is it not right to wish for a happy ending?” he asked. “You speak as if your life were over. You are resigned to your lot, you say. But you are so young yet! I may be more advanced in years than you, but I wake every morning inspired by all there is yet to achieve.”

  “Ah?” asked Lucinda.

  “Yes, Madame, I do not look back. I have faith in the future, in all that is to come. We are in the modern century, nom de Dieu (Madame will forgive me), the century of progress, of new and exciting inventions! I have not the time to dwell on the past!”

  “I don’t dwell on…” Lucinda began, then stopped. She realized that her thoughts were indeed mostly on the wretched past. She was not inclined to give herself anything to look forward to.

  “For instance,” he went on, “at present we are looking into diverting the course of the Loire, so that it will flow past the palace at Versailles. Won’t it be grand, for the king some day to be able to behold that majestic river from his royal apartments? How fortunate we are to serve a monarch who possesses such vision! It will solve the water problem too, since the plans call for Versailles to have far more working fountains than it has today, and the flow is not sufficient even now.”

  She could not help laughing. “So you are able to move rivers? What next? Mountains?”

  “Indeed. Nothing is impossible. Although the Loire, I grant you, does present a fair bit of difficulty. I have sent out my surveyors to take its level in various locations, and my engineers advise me there may not be sufficient incline for the scheme to be workable. However, all is not lost; for we have already succeeding in diverting the waters of the Seine for the fountains, and the Eure is another excellent candidate.”

  Lucinda pondered on that a while. “I wish I could believe, as you do,” she finally said, putting down her brush, “that I could move rivers. That there was nothing I couldn’t do.”

  “Yes! We live in an age, Madame, unprecedented in the history of man. We have the greatest minds in the world, men of science, the arts and architecture, all engaged in carrying out the wishes of our monarch, the Apollo of our time. We are truly blessed to live in such an age. If that is not reason to rejoice, what is?”

  The Marquis de Quelquonque was most persuasive, and in the end Lucinda had to give in, and found herself the owner of an open carriage and two horses, a coachman, a footman, and a groom. This rash acquisition also forced her to move, because the apartment in the Rue Saint Louis had neither stable nor servants’ quarters. Her new home, which the marquis assured her she would come to love as much as the old one, was a rambling mansion near the Palais-Royal.

  “Oh, Missus!” said Dieneke. “How are we ever going to make this cozy? All these rooms! I’ll need more help. It’s much too much for us to manage!”

  Lucinda looked around the cavernous reception rooms. She sighed. She had known from the start the carriage was a mistake. When was she ever going to learn to say no, to stop trying to be nice and please others, and follow her own instincts instead?

  “I am sure we’ll be very comfortable here,” she said defensively. “And when in Paris, do as the Parisians do. What I mean, Dieneke, is that you really don’t have to polish the place from top to bottom, as you did at home. No one here notices.”

  Dieneke sniffed. She had already told Missus how she felt about the appalling housekeeping standards of the French. She took a cloth out of her apron pocket, and started rubbing furiously at a tarnished doorknob.

  Lucinda’s very first client and friend in Paris had been the French ambassador’s sister, Marie-Lise, Countess Bienmaline. It was she who had provided Lucinda with an entrée into Paris’s high society. She was enchanted with her portrait, in which Lucinda had depicted the countess seated pensively at a desk, an open book at her elbow. Marie-Lise was a widow some years older than Lucinda, enviably elegant and world-wise; she belonged to a group of influential ladies who devoted themselves to intellectual and artistic pursuits, and were tolerant enough to take the talented foreigner under their wing.

  It was the countess whom Lucinda first told of her dilemma. “This move will ruin me,” she confessed. “Even if I were to start charging twice as much for my pictures, I would never have the funds to pay for all this.”

  The countess shook her head. “Then why not get rid of the carriage, and let me find you a smaller place?”

  “Oh, but,” she said reluctantly, “I really don’t want the marquis to take offence, he has been so kind…”

  “Ah! The marquis! Tell me, my dear, has he offered to help you to meet your expenses?”


  “Actually, he has,” she said, “He has offered to pay for it all, but of course I could not accept…”

  “Clever man! Of course he has!”

  “What do you mean, Countess?” she asked.

  “Don’t you see, my dear? It is one of the oldest tricks in the book.”

  “It is?”

  “Just think. What is his motive in encouraging you to incur expenses you are not able to meet?”

  “Oh. You mean…I might have to accept his offer, and then…”

  “And then, out of gratitude, of course, one must needs surrender—” The countess mimed her point by lifting her dainty feet off the floor as if she were about to fall backward, legs spread in a most unladylike posture.

  “I see!” Lucinda said. She laughed shamefacedly. “What a fool I am!”

  The countess patted Lucinda’s hand. “We are all fools, chère, until we learn to play the game. And then, of course, we are known as scheming bitches.”

  54

  BELLE OF THE BALL

  Now that she had a carriage, she felt obliged to use it. She ventured out timidly at first, making short excursions to the Tuileries or Boulevard du Temple. She did not know what to make of the French. On the one hand, there was the hostile indifference that branded her an interloper in a very closed society. On the other hand, there was genuine interest in her as an artist; her status as an ambassadress of culture opened doors that would be barred to her otherwise.

  She even found herself attending, one night, a lavish bal masqué given by her first patron, the ambassador to the United Provinces of the Netherlands, to mark his return to Paris.

  “I couldn’t possibly go,” she had said to the countess, showing her the engraved invitation, “but it was very kind of your brother to invite me.”