The Last Summer of the World

by Emily Mitchell

  “I went in March to the trenches near St-Omer.”

  “Then you know. I drove down to the front near Chaumont after GHQ moved there. Not much left standing, just broken trees, mud, ruined buildings.”

  He trailed off, his eyes far away. Then suddenly, he turned toward Edward and raised his glass. “To the next German offensive. May it take place in Flanders,” he said. “To your house in the Marne still standing,” he said. “To whatever is left.”

  “Whatever is left,” Edward echoed. He liked this new toast; it seemed apt. “Although,” he went on, “that seems to be less and less. Even in Paris. You know, my oldest friend, in years of age and in years of acquaintance, died just before I arrived in France.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Barnes said.

  “I wanted him to see that I had come back to fight for this country, but I never had the chance. I’m hoping to stop by his old house, where he’s buried, while I’m here.”

  “Where did he live?”

  “Just out to the west of the city,” Edward said, “in Meudon.”

  Rodin in His Studio. Meudon, 1901. Pigment print.

  THE AMERICAN BOY in the jacket with patched elbows is coming toward the house. He’s pedaled up the hill with great determination, a camera case slung across his back and a portfolio balanced precariously on the handlebars in front of him. He is out of breath by the time Rose sees him. He dismounts and wheels his bicycle up the last rise toward the wrought-iron gates at the end of the drive. He stops when he reaches them, taking deep breaths and gazing back at the long street behind him. He raises a hand to shade his eyes. Rose watches him through the curtains of the upstairs bedroom where she has been dusting. She shakes her head and sighs.

  Standing at the front entrance, Edward doesn’t sense the woman looking at him from the dim interior of the house. He puts his head back and swallows gulps of the cool air, and he thinks he can taste the river in it. Below him Meudon and then Paris stretch away to where the Seine wanders gleaming across the distance. He is telling himself that the fluttering sensation in his stomach is just the exertion of the ride; that he isn’t really nervous. Why should he be? All the way up here, in his head, he has rehearsed what he will say. He’s gone over the exact words he can’t count how many times. And if it doesn’t work, well, then he’ll just go back and tell everyone that Rodin said no to his request. What would be so difficult about that?

  But before the imposing black gates he feels his confidence draining away. In Montparnasse, he’d announced brazenly to a roomful of people that he was going to cycle up to Meudon and just ask the mighty Rodin to let him take his photograph. The whole Dôme crowd, Gertrude and Leo Stein, everyone heard him say it. It was late, and they were all somewhere between awfully and exceedingly drunk. It seemed simple at the time. He leans his bicycle up against the railings. He straightens his tie. He buttons, then unbuttons, his jacket. He clears his throat. He pulls the bell chord.

  A dull metallic clanging sounds. He hears it echo, and die away, and for several minutes nothing happens. He begins to feel relief. There is nothing he can do if no one is at home to receive him. He’ll just have to come back another day. But then the front door opens, and a woman comes out. He recognizes her—she was present when Fritz Thaulow brought him here last Saturday for supper, but she wasn’t introduced. He guesses she is probably the housekeeper. She is dressed in a plain dark shirtwaist, a skirt that falls past her ankles, and an old-fashioned mop cap. As she approaches, he sees that she is perhaps fifty, perhaps a little younger, her skin just beginning to take on the softness of age. She is not beautiful and he thinks that probably she never was. But in her dark eyes there is something sharp and certain.

  “Yes?” she asks. Under her gaze, he has already forgotten his prepared speech.

  “Excuse me,” he begins, then thinks it isn’t auspicious to start by apologizing. “Good day,” he tries, hopefully. She doesn’t return the greeting. “I wondered if it might be possible, that is, if there was any way that I could … My name is Edward Steichen.” She is watching him patiently, her arms folded across her chest, her mouth unsmiling. She shows no sign of recalling him. “Fritz Thaulow, the painter, I came to dinner here with him just a week ago.” She is nodding, still waiting. “May I come in?” he tries, at last.

  “Monsieur Rodin is in his studio working,” she says. “He cannot be disturbed.”

  “Oh, well, that’s OK. I could come back. Or I could come in and wait until he’s free. You see, I’d very much like …”

  “You can come in,” she says. “But I don’t know if he’ll see you today.”

  “Yes, please, if that’s all right, thank you,” he says, and she slowly begins to swing the gate open.

  He walks ahead of her down the drive. She watches him striding eagerly toward the house. There is something pleasant and guileless about the way he carries himself. He is good-looking, and he has the enthusiasm, the utter lack of self-consciousness, of the very young. She guesses he must be about nineteen or twenty. She does remember him a little, though she did not sit with the guests at dinner the night he came. Monsieur does not always like her to be around when he is entertaining, especially if the guests are Americans; her lack of English makes things awkward, as does her lack of education. But she recalls that this boy is a photographer, and that his friends, at least, believe he shows much promise.

  He is not the first person to think that they can show up out of the blue and ask to see the studio. For many years no one came to see Monsieur. Meudon was too far away from the fashionable parts of town—that was one of the reasons he’d chosen this villa. But recently there have been many unexpected visitors. Monsieur’s reputation as an artist is growing, and people have started to take more of an interest in him. Most of the unexpected arrivals are art students; some are just members of the public who like sculpture. They appear at the gate at all hours of the day, and sometimes at night, expecting to be admitted. Monsieur himself does not help matters by issuing thoughtless invitations to anyone who, after a glass of port, he takes a liking to—especially women. To counteract this tendency, he has left it to her discretion whether to invite them in or not. He says he trusts her instincts about people.

  She isn’t sure yet why she’s let this boy in. Something about the way he tucks his dark hair behind his ears as he stoops down to look at the sculptures that Monsieur placed beside the path. Something about his smile as he looks back over his shoulder at her and says, “Even his smallest pieces are … are …” He looks for the right word. “Promethean,” he pronounces, obviously pleased with his choice. She grunts in terse acknowledgment and goes to open the front door.

  As far as Edward can tell, everything about the house is ugly. It’s square like a saltbox, and its façade is brick painted a garish red and topped with a steeply slanted gabled roof. Its windows are too small and thin. Its proportions are awkward to look at. Edward thinks, It isn’t the sort of place where you’d expect a great artist to live, a heavy suburban villa, cheaply made. But then where would you expect him to live? Maybe in a cave. He suppresses laughter at this thought as the woman pushes open the front door.

  She shows him into a drawing room.

  “You can wait here,” she says.

  “Thank you …” Edward responds, but she is already gone. He looks around him. The room is high-ceilinged and drafty. It has been kept very clean, but the impression of neglect goes beyond its surfaces. There is no fire in the grate. The furniture is old, the patterns on its upholstery faded. Everything seems to be in some phase of a slow collapse, and he is almost afraid to sit on the chairs for fear that they will disintegrate beneath him. He paces restlessly, fighting down his disappointment, looking for some sign that this is the house of a genius. Through those gaunt windows, the light moves unevenly over the walls. Trees toss webs of branches against the pale sky.

  The woman comes back with a pot of tea on a tray.

  “Wonderful light you get up here,” he sa
ys. She sets the tray down on a wobbly table beside the settee. “And you have such an amazing view of the city. You can see all the way to the river.”

  “He likes it,” she says without looking up. She pours tea into a cup. “Sugar?”

  “Do you like it?” he asks. She peers at him, questioningly. “It must get quite isolated,” he continues. “I mean, you must wish to be nearer to the city, to …”

  “God, no,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to be down in all that nonsense. Who is wearing what this week, who is having secret affairs with whom, though the whole town knows of it. Paris can be unbearable.”

  “Oh, I think Paris is terribly exciting,” Edward says. “It’s so full of life, in all its different … permutations.” He tries on the word like a new hat.

  “Where are you from?” she asks.

  “Milwaukee,” he says.

  “Ahh,” she says, as if that were all the explanation necessary. “You are young, too. The city is for the young. I am glad to be away from it. Besides, we get plenty of visitors. More all the time, coming up here, inconsiderate, unannounced, disturbing him …” She glances up, puts a hand over her mouth, realizing her mistake. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I didn’t mean …”

  “It’s all right,” he says, and sits tentatively down on the couch near her. “I would like some sugar, please.” She spoons white crystals into the warm orange liquid, stirs slowly, then offers him the cup.

  “My name is Rose Beuret,” she says. Though they are seated already, she gives him her hand, and it is so small it feels like a little girl’s when he takes it. “I’ll go and see if Monsieur would perhaps like to come in for some lunch soon. When you’ve finished your tea, you can look around the garden if you like. It’s more pleasant.” She smiles and leaves him, pulling the door quietly shut as she goes out.

  In the garden, sculptures in bronze and marble sit out among the trees; stone steps link different levels of paths, flower beds and lawns. It’s a day of ragged clouds, and the leaves blow a tattered brightness over everything. This, Edward thinks with some relief, is more what he expected. Behind the house an extension with tall windows juts over the grass, and he guesses this must be the studio. In there, right now, he’s at work. What is he doing? He contemplates climbing up onto a windowsill and peering in but decides against it. He is here on sufferance, he reminds himself, and spying doesn’t strike him as a way to make a good impression. Still, it is tempting: to get to see the man at work without him knowing you were there, even if it were just for a few minutes.

  Years earlier Edward had come across a picture of Rodin’s statue of Balzac in a Milwaukee newspaper. He’d encountered it quite unexpectedly one day, flipping through the pages, looking for the baseball scores, and, suddenly, there it was. He remembers how even in that grainy, imperfect photograph, it held him. He’d never seen anything like it before. He thought, This is the artist I want to learn from. He squinted at the caption beneath the picture: Auguste Rodin, Paris, 1894. He traces his desire to come and study in France to that day.

  And so, on his very first day in Paris, as soon as he had installed his few belongings in the small guesthouse room he rented for himself off the Boulevard St-Germain, he went to the World’s Fair and, once there, made a beeline for the Exposition Rodin in the Pavillon d’Alma. He saw it, to one side of the entrance, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, a dark monolith surging off its plinth, the man rising out of the solid sweep of his cloak, just barely distinguishable from it. It advanced on the crowd like a wave about to break over them. He stood in front of it for what must have been ten minutes without moving, staring up, until some passing wag told him he’d get flies in his mouth if he let it hang open that way. He shut his mouth and went on staring.

  Now, waiting in Rodin’s garden at last, he is nervous and elated. In a sunken patio, he sits down on a bench. Then he stands again and begins to pace the length of the stone enclosure. Around the edges there are willow trees, and he puts his head back to gaze directly up through the branches. The long fronds fall straight down toward his face, and he thinks, in a photograph, it would seem as if the branches were growing right out of the sky. He puts his hands up, his thumbs and forefingers as right angles to each other, making a frame for the picture. And then behind him he hears footsteps. He turns around and there is Rodin.

  He comes down the stairs from the direction of his studio, wiping his hands on a cloth. He’s dressed in work clothes, a coarse cotton shirt and dark trousers, and an apron covered with fingerprints in hardening clay. There is clay caught in his long spade-shaped beard and in his hair. He moves deliberately, as though contemplating the possibilities presented by each step: forward or not? The left foot, I think, now—he seems to intend every gesture to be just as it is.

  “I’m modeling today,” he says, indicating the clay in his beard and on his clothes. He encloses Edward’s palm in both of his hands, and Edward can feel their immense, careful strength, the articulation of each finger. The skin is dry and rough in places. He feels like he’s being scrutinized by these hands, appraised.

  “What’s your name?” Rodin asks.

  “Edward. Steichen.”

  “You came here with Fritz Thaulow, last week.”

  “Yes. I study painting at …”

  “Well, of course you do. Only a student would have the time or the nerve to come calling at this hour.” Edward feels himself color. “Where are you from?”

  “Milwaukee.”

  “An American. Your French is not so bad.”

  “My parents are from Luxembourg. My mother spoke French when she was in a good mood, and German when she wasn’t.” Rodin nods at this but doesn’t smile.

  “Well, Edward Steichen from Milwaukee,” he says, “you seem to have made friends with Madame. It isn’t often she’ll interrupt me in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon for a stranger who shows up uninvited.”

  “I … I’m sorry.” He needs to explain himself, give some reason why he is here at all. “I saw a statue of yours, in Milwaukee, in a newspaper,” he blurts. “Two years ago. I’ve wanted to see your studio ever since.”

  “Hmmmph.” Rodin continues to wipe his hands methodically, turning the cloth around each finger in succession. “Well, in that case, you’d better come and have a look at it,” he says. He turns and leads the way back up the stairs toward the house.

  At the Exposition Rodin, Edward had decided he must try to get a photograph of the statue he’d seen. But he was told that only photographers from the press were allowed to bring cameras into the exhibition halls. He argued with the man at the ticket counter hoping to win him over, but he got the same reply: no press card, no camera. He wandered disconsolately through the exhibition, trying to figure out what to do. He thought about trying to sneak the camera in under his shirt, but gave this idea up as ridiculous. He wouldn’t even be able get his coat buttoned up over it, much less make it inconspicuous enough to pass by the ticket collectors. He thought about lying, telling them that he was from the press but had left his card on the train. But he didn’t even know what kind of identification men from the newspapers carried. He sat down on the steps outside, feeling fed up and discouraged. Two men in dark, new-looking suits and bowler hats were coming up toward him. One of them was carrying a Kodak 4. He had a card in his hat with ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH written on it in black letters.

  “Hey,” Edward called out to the men in English. “Are you from the newspaper?”

  “Yeah, kid,” said the one holding the camera. He smiled broadly, but didn’t slow down. The two men hurried past. When they reached the top of the stairs, the ticket collector tipped his hat and waved them through. That was all. Edward stood up. He walked back to the tiny guesthouse where he was staying and took one of the pieces of writing paper from the desk in the dingy downstairs lounge. On the back he wrote, milwaukee daily courier. He looked at his own uneven letters, unconvinced of the efficacy of his plan, but inserted the paper as best he could into the band a
round his hat. Then he picked up his camera and went back to the exhibition. He chose the opposite entrance from the one he’d used before. He walked quickly and purposefully toward the gate, as though he was in a terrible hurry to get the story and get back to the offices. He expected any moment to feel a hand on his shoulder, a voice demanding to know just what he thought he was doing. I should turn back, he thought; I’m sure to get caught. But instead, he waved to the man at the ticket gate and the man waved back. He smiled, an imitation of that broad, bland smile he’d seen the reporters use before him, and strode to the gate. No one stopped him. He went straight to the Pavillon d’Alma.

  After this he thinks he’s discovered a secret, which is this: most people follow the rules because they are afraid not to. All you have to do to successfully break them, then, is act like you deserve to. It is this idea, which has stayed with him ever since, that makes him think he can come to Meudon and ask Rodin if he can take his portrait.

  THE AIR IN the studio is cool, and when Rodin opens the door, a cloud of pale dust swirls up into the shafts of sunlight that come through the long windows. Edward follows him inside. A million things flash through his mind to say, but none of them seem important enough for this moment. Rodin himself says nothing and seems in no particular hurry. There is only that steady, deliberate motion of his to show that he is more alive than his statues. Edward can’t tell if he’s being welcomed or merely tolerated.

  To one side of the room are workbenches covered in small clay models—some torsos, some limbs alone. At the far end of the room are larger forms covered in cloth. Rodin beckons him toward these and begins to remove the sacking from the biggest.

  “These will be shipped to an exhibition next week,” he says. Edward leans his portfolio up against one of the workbenches and moves forward to help him. Together they lift the material off the statue. Underneath is a form in bronze: the figures of six men, arranged in a rough circle, walking or standing still. Each one has a different expression on his face—fear, anger, contrition, resignation …