To Capture What We Cannot Keep

by Beatrice Colin

  Émile purposely waited until he was right in the center of the gallery be­fore he looked at the work. A woman reading a book; a woman gazing at herself in the mirror; a woman asleep in bed, her face turned away; a woman naked, her hair filled with flowers, her face caught in a smile.

  “You like them?” the painter asked.

  It wasn’t Gabrielle; the limbs were too clumsy, the line wasn’t fluid, the turn of the chin was not graceful enough. And yet, it was.

  “I do,” he said. “Very much.”

  Later, Émile stood at the window of the cloakroom and watched a line of carriages roll through the rain on the Champs-Élysées. A man with one arm stepped out from beneath a tree. He unbuttoned his filthy shirt and splashed water around his neck and chest. And then he rubbed his beard, his face, his body, his stump. But this was city rain, the kind of rain that left streaks of black down polished windows and smuts on clean washing. Émile suspected that the man would soon be even dirtier than he was before the rain began.

  Had the man been in Paris in May 1871, he wondered, the “bloody week” when the streets of the city had been piled with the corpses of insurrectionists and the air thick with smoke as Paris burned? Was that where he had lost his arm? Émile had missed the siege, had been away working in the Austro-Hungarian Empire on a bridge over the Tisza River. He had not suffered.

  Once, when she had drunk too much, Gabrielle described the sound of the wind in the eaves mixed with the distant stutter of gunfire. She told him that she had spent that week in their rooms in the upper reaches of Belle­ville with her younger sisters, half-starved by the Prussian siege, waiting for her father, a member of the Paris Commune, to come home and bring them some bread. He didn’t return that night or the following day. It wasn’t unusual. He often disappeared for days after he had administered one of his beatings. But this time he didn’t come home at all. Her mother had eventually been called to identify his body in a pile beside a wall in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. As the eldest daughter, she went too. Here they learned that her father, after being pursued past the last resting place of Balzac and the poet Delavigne, had been caught, tied up, placed against one of the perimeter walls, and executed by a firing squad.

  “When I saw him, all I felt was anger,” she told Émile. “His pockets were empty. He didn’t have any bread. All he left us were bruises.”

  Although it was the Prussian Army who surrounded the city, who cut it off and forced the inhabitants to eat anything they could find to survive, to slaughter the animals in the zoo and harvest rats, the killing of the Communards was done by the government troops once a treaty had been signed and the enemy had withdrawn. Gabrielle rarely talked about her childhood, and maybe it was no wonder: an abusive father, a mother who had died of syphilis, two sisters who succumbed to consumption, a spell herself of scar­let fever, which had weakened her heart . . . a catalogue of ill health and violence, of poverty and bitterness.

  And yet, unlike others from the slums, people whose cheekbones had been sharpened by a hunger that never left them, none of the past showed in Gabrielle’s face. In fact, her looks had quickly taken her out of Belleville. At twelve, she had been spotted by a painter and hired to model. For the next fifteen years, she had moved from one artist to another, from filthy garret to drafty attic. Aside from acquiring a husband along the way, her up­ward trajectory was slow but steady. She gradually grew more elegant, gathered admirers, and built social currency. She no longer was paid by the hour; she was above that. Her lovers, her artists, her friends reimbursed her in other ways, in paintings or dresses, jewelry or outings to the opera. Soon it was almost impossible to tell where she was from. Her neck was long and aristocratic, her voice low and cultured. Émile had thought her melodramatic when she had told him that she carried nothing with her from her girlhood but her soul. As he got to know her, and her soul, a little better, he realized it was true. But sometimes he still saw the girl in her, the girl who starved and sobbed for bread.

  The racks of coats and hats smelled of wet wool and camphor. But at least the cloakroom was empty; at least it was quiet. Émile sat down on a divan and ran his fingers through the tugs in his hair. He looked down at his hands, hands that were growing old. It was time to move on, to disengage, to take responsibility. What was he doing with his life?

  With a twist of the handle, the door opened.

  “Here you are!” said Gabrielle, standing in the doorway. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. In fact, I was just about to give up.”

  There was the catch of blame in her voice, as if it were his fault that he had made himself so hard to find.

  “It’s too crowded,” he explained. “I needed some air.”

  Gabrielle closed the door behind her. She took a deep breath and sighed it out again. And then she smiled.

  “Anyway,” she said, “you’ll never guess what!”

  He shook his head.

  “He sold them,” she said. “He sold them all.”

  Suddenly he saw that her eyes were shiny and her cheeks were flushed.

  “I knew it,” she went on. “I knew it would happen eventually. We’re all going out to celebrate!”

  And then she paused. “I’d love it if you came too,” she said, “if you’d like to, that is, but of course I would understand if you’d rather not. I mean, don’t feel obliged.”

  She invited him and uninvited him in the same breath. That was the way she was.

  “Actually,” he said, “I have to work.”

  Gabrielle nodded. That’s what he did. Work. Slaving away in some face­less office. She’d once asked him to explain his profession but stopped him after a couple of minutes.

  “It’s as if you’re talking Russian,” she had said. “I don’t understand a word!”

  Outside, a man let out a shout of a laugh. A woman called to another and asked her to wait. There was a shift in the air—people were starting to leave. Gabrielle swept back a strand of hair, then leaned down to kiss him.

  “Well, at least you’re here,” she said. “Thank you so much for coming.”

  “Incidentally,” he asked, “who bought them?”

  She paused, her mouth still a few inches from his, as if the idea had never occurred to her before.

  “Some dealer or other, I expect,” she said, standing upright again. “No one else—I mean, no one who matters—has sold more than a study or two.”

  “Not even Seurat?”

  “Certainly not Seurat.”

  For a moment she was still. And then her eyes fell on Émile again and she blinked twice.

  “It wasn’t that bad, was it?” she said.

  He buried his face deep in the folds of her blue silk dress, the dress he had helped choose and pay for, the dress that she had yet to thank him for, and inhaled.

  “Did you like the paintings?”

  “Not as much as I like the sitter. Let’s lock the door and do it now,” he whispered. “Among the coats.”

  She laughed. “Don’t you ever think of anything else?”

  “No,” he said. “Never.”

  And then she seemed to freeze.

  “What?” he asked. “What is it?”

  “It’s nothing,” she replied, looking away.

  “Gabrielle?”

  “All right,” she said. “I hate to ask, but can I borrow twenty francs?”

  He pulled away from her, took a note from his wallet, and handed it over.

  “It’s a loan,” she said.

  “Of course it is,” he said.

  “You’re sweet,” she said, and kissed him on the top of the head. “What do you think? Of the dress?”

  “Exquisite,” he replied.

  She spun around, and Émile circled her waist. Hanging beneath her over-skirt was a small, soft leather bag with something hard inside.

  “What’s this?” he asked, and drew it out.

  “It’s nothing,” she said, and tried to snatch it from him.

  “It doesn’t fee
l like nothing,” he said, holding it just out of her reach. As he opened it, a small object fell out and rolled across the floor. He picked it up before her corset would allow her to bend down and fetch it herself. Her smile had gone.

  “Give it to me,” she said, her eyes dark with a hostility he had never seen before.

  He placed a small, silver-plated syringe in her open palm. She closed her hand, dropped it in her bag again, and without another word, she left.

  5

  ____

  IT WAS EARLY and the city was still veiled with mist, the high reaches of apartment buildings softened, smudged, as if run over once with a piece of artist’s putty. Eiffel’s workshop in Levallois-Perret was a short cab ride away from the city center, in the seventeenth arrondissement just to the north of the Bois de Boulogne.

  “I hope you appreciate how incredibly exciting this is going to be,” Jamie said. “We’re going to meet Gustave Eiffel. The man’s a genius!”

  “The Committee of Three Hundred don’t seem to think so,” Alice said. “What did they call his tower? Useless. Monstrous.”

  “Who told you that?” he asked.

  “You did,” she replied. “It was in the newspaper, don’t you remember? You read it out to me.”

  Jamie wiped the condensation from the window and stared out toward Fort Mont-Valérien in the distance. “What do they know?” He shrugged.

  “Quite a lot, I’d imagine,” Alice countered.

  “It will be the tallest tower in the world, Alice,” he said, turning back to her. “Three hundred meters high. And what’s more, it will be made of iron, nothing else but iron, like a bridge. Mrs. Wallace, what do you think?”

  “Hard to say. It could, in fact, be wonderful,” she replied.

  Alice sighed out loud and then turned on her brother. “It will be a building without a skin, not wonderful at all but utterly grotesque. I can’t believe you’ve changed your mind, Jamie.”

  He leaned back and smiled. It was unlike him not to say something inflammatory in return, to make a pointed remark. But there was a buoyancy, a new lightness, about his manner. Only a few days before he had seemed to be suffering from claustrophobia, his movements tense, his sighs provocative, as if he were straining at the leash, desperate to escape from the confinement of their company. And suddenly it seemed as if a door had opened somewhere and he was already halfway through it. He was relaxed, resigned, beyond them somehow.

  A change of subject was clearly what was needed. Alice rose to the challenge.

  “Did you hear?” she said. “Miriam Morrison, the daughter of your Latin master, is in the family way.”

  “Who told you that?” Jamie said.

  “I had a letter from Tiffie yesterday. The family tried to keep it secret, to send her off to some place in Dumfries for unmarried mothers, but word got out.”

  “The poor girl,” said Cait.

  “Haven’t seen her for years,” said Jamie, and stared out the window.

  “Where were you last night?” Alice asked. “I knocked on your door and there was no answer.”

  “Not with Miriam Morrison anyway.” He laughed.

  “James!” Alice said. “It’s not a joke.”

  He paused before answering, as if working out which lie to tell.

  “It was too hot in my room,” he said. “I just popped out for a breath of air.”

  “Why didn’t you just open a window?” Alice asked.

  Cait, sensing another argument was about to develop, stepped in and agreed that yes, the hotel overheated the bedrooms, but if you opened the window the noise from the street was bad.

  “I had to open the window in the water closet,” she admitted.

  Alice and Jamie both stifled a snigger. This was how she appeared to them most of the time; eccentric, contrary, and she encouraged it.

  “Just be careful,” Cait said.

  “We don’t want to find your body floating in the Seine,” said Alice.

  Out of the center of Paris, the streets were narrower, the buildings taller, the walls hung with strings of damp washing or painted with advertisements for absinthe or cointreau. Children threw rocks into dirty brown puddles while girls only a few years older, with strings of imitation pearls around their necks and jewels of rain in their hair, waited in doorways for customers. It had shocked Cait at first, the poverty, the brazenness with which young women sold themselves, the casual attitude toward destitution and morality.

  And yet Paris, Cait realized, put on a good face. With its grandiose new layout, vast open spaces, great monuments, and a brand-new sewer network six hundred kilometers long, the city had been constructed for one class at the expense of another. There were thousands of sumptuous apartment blocks and there were enough fabulously wealthy, titled, fashionable, and rich people to live in them. But they were virtually invisible, cosseted away in carriages and behind ornate metal gates; they ate behind heavy curtains in restaurants like Paillard’s on the rue de Rivoli, and spent the summers at Cabourg or Deauville, Biarritz or Baden-Baden.

  The previous residents of the center of Paris, however, the ones who had once lived in shacks beside the Louvre or in the narrow streets of the Île de la Cité, the ones whose great-grandfathers and -grandmothers had stormed the Bastille, proclaimed France a republic, and dropped the guillotine on the necks of the monarchy and their supporters almost a hundred years earlier, had been pushed to new, poorer housing in the outer arrondissements. But they came back, to Les Halles, to the rue de Rivoli, and to the Bois, bringing with them all the noise and commotion they had always brought. And then there were the hungry, the homeless, the lost, the insane, and the terminally sick, who stared out at you from the polished steps of the Opéra Garnier, or from beneath the neatly trimmed trees on the avenue des Gobelins or boulevard Saint-Michel, because they had nowhere else to go, because although Haussmann would have liked to suggest otherwise, it was still their city as much as anyone else’s.

  Although it was now a capital laced with balconies and verdant parks, with public squares and lavish theaters, there was also something about Paris that could not be bricked over, that could not be rationalized with straight lines and regulated facades. No matter how it looked, the city would always be much more than just its architecture. There was a friction in the air; it was in the churn of the river and the taste of resin from the vast forests that spread out almost all the way to Beauvais in the north and Orléans in the south. The medieval and the modern age mingled beneath the bridges of the Seine, while above the city the white, white dust from the construction site at Sacré-Coeur mixed with black soot and stink that rose from the slums of the Marais or the dilapidated streets that lined the railway in Montparnasse, to create a fog that in the right light looked almost silver.

  Levallois-Perret had once been a small village on the outskirts of Paris. Haussmann’s arrondissements had pushed most of the industry to the edge of the city, and the village had become an industrial zone where warehouses and factories sat beside small abandoned gardens. Eiffel’s factory was surrounded by a high wall but was easily identified by the constant stream of heavily laden horse-drawn wagons heading out of its wooden gates and the stink of sulfur and burning charcoal. As the carriage approached the main gate, Jamie inhaled deeply.

  “Doesn’t that remind you of home?” he asked. “Of the Dalmarnock works?”

  He looked across at his sister but she was silent, her mouth clenched shut.

  “Why are you like this, Alice?” Jamie snapped.

  “Like what?”

  “Don’t you want to make something of yourself?”

  “I want to make a good marriage, if that’s what you mean. What else would you suggest?”

  “You mean you want to go back to Scotland and molder.”

  “It’s where we happen to come from,” she replied. “And I don’t intend to molder anywhere for a second.”

  “Both of you,” Cait said, “just stop.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather sta
y here,” he continued, “if you could? I mean, what is there in Glasgow for any of us?”

  “I don’t know what you have planned, but the answer’s no,” Alice said. “And you can’t make me. For one thing, I don’t even know him.”

  It took a moment for Jamie to work out what she was talking about.

  “You mean the French engineer? The dashing Monsieur Nouguier?”

  “Is that what his name is?” Alice said, and stared out the window.

  “Isn’t this all a little premature?” said Cait. “As Alice said, she met him once, in passing.”

  “Has that ever been a prerequisite for marriage?” said Jamie. “I hardly think so.”

  “And besides,” said Alice, “I am expecting a proposal.”

  “If you mean from Pig-nose . . . could you set your sights any lower?”

  “Enough,” Cait warned.

  “His name,” Alice said pointedly, “is Hogg. Mr. Arthur Hogg.”

  “Whatever you want to call him, he has money but he has no sense of humor. The perfect husband!”

  Alice’s face had turned scarlet. She looked close to tears.

  “Don’t listen to him,” said Cait. “Jamie, I think you should apologize to your sister.”

  “For what? For stating the obvious? She thinks it too. Don’t you, Alice?”

  Alice opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

  “See!” said Jamie.

  The carriage pulled to a halt.

  “Just don’t call him Pig-nose,” said Alice.

  A side door opened onto the covered stockyard. Twice the size of Arrol’s Dalmarnock works, it was piled high with short lengths of iron and wooden barrels filled with metal bolts. On the main floor dozens of workers were carrying girders or lifting sacks, stoking fires or bolting lengths of metal together; at one side was a line of huge radial drills, on the other, a series of pulleys and hooks that hung from the ceiling. The atmosphere was opaque with dust and the smell of hot metal, with the dull thud of the hammer on the anvil and the high-pitched whistle and whine of the drill.

  “Impressive,” said Jamie.

  “Filthy,” said Alice. “So where now?”