The Witch of Painted Sorrows (The Daughters of La Lune)

by M. J. Rose

  Cherubino was in Paris on a commission from King Henry to paint a series of frescoes in the Louvre, and in his search for a model for his Virgin of the Rocks, he visited La Lune. All through art history, prostitutes had modeled for artists and wound up as Virgins and saints. La Lune was not the first and would not be the last woman to pose as the mother of Christ. But she was one of the most provocative.

  Initially it was a business arrangement between La Lune and Cherubino. She modeled for him, and he paid her by teaching her to draw. He started with simple things. A wooden cube. An egg. It was difficult because she was impatient and not a good student.

  He was falling in love with his paintings of her, and she was falling in love with learning to sketch, but they were not yet lovers.

  Once the king saw the first fresco featuring La Lune, he insisted on meeting her and found her so fetching, he took her as his paramour. For her ministrations he bestowed so many gifts on her that she didn’t have to take other men to her bed. Not then or for the rest of her life.

  In addition to all the jewels he bestowed on her, the king gave La Lune a plot of land that sat between rue des Saints-Pères and rue du Dragon. Once a church had occupied the spot, but now there was a fine house in only slight disrepair that was connected to an abandoned bell tower. She hired an architect to help her restore what would become Maison de la Lune.

  Cherubino painted La Lune more than twenty times for the king during the next year, and for every sitting, she received a drawing ­lesson. That was all.

  And then came the day that changed their relationship, when Cherubino walked in on La Lune, who was in her bed, servicing the king.

  Cherubino’s jealousy was a wild and living force. It took him by surprise and left him defenseless. Soon his paintings of her showed her in suggestive poses. No longer a Madonna or saint, she was now a seductress. Cherubino left one out to dry, and that night the king discovered the erotic painting and, without asking, took it for himself.

  When Cherubino found out, he went mad. Screaming and shouting, he demanded that La Lune ask for it back. It was not hers to give away. When she refused, saying she could never ask that of the king, Cherubino stormed out of her rooms and didn’t return for days.

  After a week without him coming around, La Lune was bereft. Her education was incomplete. She hadn’t mastered spatial relationships. She didn’t understand perspective. She needed him back.

  So La Lune told the king that Cherubino had been approached by the duke of Milan to paint her for his palace and that Cherubino was considering leaving the French court.

  It was a lie, of course. But she needed to do something to force the king into action. She’d correctly guessed that the idea of her face and her body gracing some other royal chamber would disturb him.

  The next day Cherubino returned, saying that the king had commissioned a second set of paintings, but only if La Lune was the model. So relieved that he’d returned, La Lune threw her arms around him and kissed him.

  Until they touched that first time, neither of them had known they desired each other. La Lune believed she only craved art lessons. Cherubino believed he only wanted a muse.

  In a fever, I painted them that afternoon consummating their affair. In one panel La Lune lay under Cherubino’s body as he thrust into her and she received him with delight. In another she hovered above him, her breasts grazing his cheeks. I painted him kissing the lips on her face and those between her legs. I painted her wanton expression. The sweat on his forehead. The single bright drop of blood on her lower lip from when she bit herself as she exploded with him inside of her. In my mural were sexual positions I had never known about—never experienced with my husband, nor with Julien.

  In my delirium, I not only saw the lovers; I heard what they said, too. Cherubino promised that these embraces were for her alone and that these intimacies would bind them together forever.

  Her poses for his private paintings became more lewd. He positioned her with her legs spread and her hand touching her nether parts. He painted her bathed in sweat and writhing with passion. When she saw how provocative the paintings were, how much of her soul he’d captured, she made him promise never to show them to anyone.

  “No one will ever see them,” he swore. “They are for our own gallery. Just for our pleasure,” he told her. “To commemorate for all time the wonder of us.”

  And it was wondrous. La Lune had taken men to her bed in exchange for payment since she was fourteen years old. She had been well schooled in the art of pleasuring. She knew how to be a lover, a confidante, a model to painters, a muse to poets and writers, and, when necessary, a mother. But she had never craved a man. Never been moved by one.

  “I don’t just want to know how to draw . . .” she told him one night as they lay in bed, smelling each other’s sweat as their skin cooled.

  “What do you want?” he asked as he stroked her hair.

  She raised up her face and mouthed the words against the pink shell of his ear.

  “To learn to paint,” she whispered.

  “If I teach you, it has to be in secret. Here. Under the stars. With only the bells to know.”

  “Won’t I need a model?”

  “I will be your model.” He laughed.

  Over and over she painted him, laughing with delight as she began to manage his likeness. He would stand behind her and correct her. Sometimes even taking her hand, putting his fingers on hers so she would feel the fluidity of the line, so she could sense how sensuous a movement painting a body should be.

  Sometimes when her lover slept, La Lune sketched him, trying to capture the expression on his face while he dreamed. Painting each other was an extension of their lovemaking. They caressed each other all over again with brushes and sensuous oils.

  Then came the scene of Cherubino opening a letter with a royal seal. Emperor Rudolf had invited him to Prague, to bring La Lune and create a royal gallery of secret erotic paintings. Gold coins came with the letter, along with a promise of more awaiting them.

  It was almost as if the lie La Lune had made up for the king had come true.

  “But how did he know about your erotic paintings?” La Lune asked.

  “I sent him one as a gift.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “He is well-known to collect paintings of a suggestive nature. The more explicit and varied, the better. He pays far more for them than your king is paying for my murals.”

  La Lune hurled her paints at her lover, shouting that he had promised he would never show those paintings to anyone. That he had given her his word.

  “So many men have seen you, what does one more matter?” he asked.

  She slapped him for insulting her and not understanding, and then collapsed weeping, realizing she had done the unthinkable. Broken the golden rule that her mother had taught her, that her mother before her had taught her: Never fall in love. Do not become vulnerable.

  “No man has ever seen me as you have seen me. With emotion on my face!” I was shouting the words. I was feeling the sting of the slap on my fingers. And when Cherubino bent to whisper to her and apologize and cajole her, I felt his lips on my lips, and I felt myself forgive him for what he had done to my ancestor more than three hundred years before.

  Chapter 20

  My grandmother’s scream contained no words. Neither was it the shriek of a woman in pain. It was an inhuman sound containing all that was terrifying about the dark, dreadful about a fire, and sickening about a massacre. The noise made me drop the brush. I saw crimson paint splash on the yellow carpet. I stared at the stranger in front of me.

  Unrecognizable in her shock, my grandmother stood in the doorway to my room. Her face contorted with terror while her body spasmed in a series of tics. Her mouth was frozen open, and what emerged was never-ending.

  What was wrong?

  I turned
away from her and looked at what she was staring at. Saw it all as if for the first time. But how was that possible? I must have been the one responsible for the mural. My fingers were paint-stained. I still held the palette. And yet I didn’t remember having painted what I saw.

  The walls were ablaze with colors. I’d used bold strokes and painted better than I ever had before. As frightened as I was, for a moment I thought of Monsieur Moreau and how proud he would be that I had given voice to what was inside of me. Maybe I could bring him here to show him what I’d done. I was certain he would respond.

  But what had I done? How had I done it? Fleeting memories of the last hours came to me as I concentrated. I began to remember how I’d felt while I’d painted, as if I were in the audience watching a drama unfold and simply illustrating the story.

  What power had taken over me? From whence came what my brushes had painted? I had no answers but was certain the tale I’d told contained information that was crucial for me to know and understand.

  “See, Grand-mère.” I pointed to the walls. “I found our history.”

  She grimaced. It made me strangely pleased that I was causing her some distress. She had held this story back from me. She’d been at fault in doing that.

  “I didn’t need you to tell me after all. Cherubino met La Lune when he came to Paris to paint for the king. They lived in the bell tower that belonged to a church on rue du Dragon, and that’s part of your house.”

  “But how did you learn all of this?” She was staring at the walls.

  “He came to the salon, a painter from Italy, looking for a model and a muse, and he found La Lune,” I continued.

  My grandmother came to me, took me by both hands. Her eyes flitted from mine to the ruby necklace around my neck and then back to my eyes.

  “You don’t know what you are opening yourself up to, Sandrine. Please let me help you. Take off the necklace.” Her voice was anxious and hoarse from the scream.

  I wrangled out of her grip, put my hands up to my neck reflexively, and protected my treasure.

  She pried my fingers away and grabbed for the necklace.

  I jerked back and moved away from her before she could touch me. “Leave it alone.”

  She came after me. My beautiful grandmother who entertained dukes and counts and Paris’s elite looked half mad as she lurched at me and the necklace, preparing to rip it off my neck. Maybe I should take it off? Maybe she knew something I didn’t? I reached up to help her. Found the clasp.

  Suddenly, sickening nausea overwhelmed me. I wanted desperately to throw up, to get rid of something poisonous inside of me.

  My grandmother was still pulling. The necklace dug even deeper into my flesh—it was choking me, it was going to break apart, it had to, it couldn’t hold under all her pressure—but miraculously, the necklace remained intact.

  The nausea came again. I started to cry. Part of me wanted to take the necklace off for my grandmother’s sake, but instead I pried her fingers away and pushed her.

  I watched her stumble and fall backward, landing in a heap on the floor. She only missed hitting her head on a chair by fractions of an inch.

  What had I done? Why had I done it? I had shoved my grandmother. Almost hurt her. With shaking fingers I pulled my robe tight and tied it so my neck was covered, so she couldn’t see the rubies.

  “What were you doing to me? You could have choked me. What are you trying to stop?”

  She was still on the floor, staring up at me. Her fiery hair had started to come undone, and her own necklace was askew, the string of opals half flung over one shoulder. Her eyes blazed.

  “You have to let me help you,” she pleaded, and gestured to the walls. “You can’t have guessed at this story. How did you discover it?”

  “It came to me.”

  “Yes, yes, it did. Don’t you understand what that means? Do you think it came unbidden? This should be all the proof you need that you aren’t yourself. The witch has taken you over. You need help. This isn’t your story, Sandrine. Don’t you see?”

  “Not my story? Of course it is. Cherubino came to Paris to paint for the king and found the most important muse of his career. Because of him, the king gave her so many jewels and so much land she never had to lay with anyone who didn’t please her again. Not the way you do. If they are stinking or fat or ugly, you still have to open your legs for them to keep yourself in style. But not La Lune.”

  “Stop!” she cried.

  “Why? You don’t like the truth? You want to pretend that she didn’t exist? But she did. And Cherubino did. He chose her for his model, and he taught her to paint. To paint like a man. It was all she’d ever wanted. And when he went to Prague to paint for the emperor, they went together.”

  My grandmother put her hands over her ears.

  “No, you have to listen,” I said. “You need to hear all of it. Cherubino fell under Rudolf’s spell, or perhaps it was the other way around. But either way La Lune was of little interest to Cherubino any more as a lover. Yes, he still painted her, still needed her to pose for his sensual paintings . . . and she obliged, so he was able to create painting after painting of the most depraved acts. The more disturbing the sex act, the more Rudolf adored the painting. Cherubino posed her with other women, with other men, with several at once in orgies. Using myths, he painted her as Europa with the bull, Leda with the swan . . . He painted her debauched and conquered. And while he painted her, she would look at her lover and long for him to touch her again. To come to her bed. She asked him once why he stayed away, and he turned on her, railing and shouting and asking her if all that he was giving her wasn’t enough. She was living in a palace, had no want for anything. There were treasure chests of silks to dress in and expensive jewels to wear.

  “But he never admitted the reason he’d left her bed, never told her what she suspected and then finally proved. He never came to her any more because Cherubino had become Rudolf’s lover.”

  My grandmother talked softly as you would to a child. “You have to let me get you help, Sandrine. You desperately need help.”

  I pushed her arm away. Took her by the wrist and pulled her over to the wall, pointing at the painting. “Why are you afraid of this story? It’s our story. Look at her. She’d learned from her mother that pining away for a man, giving your heart to a man, was to invite disaster and risk sorrow. Pain was not for her. No, never. Not for La Lune! Never for La Lune. But there she was in Prague, pining away for Cherubino, and he was lost to her.

  “And so she went to the gold maker’s lane.” I pointed to the next section of the mural on the wall. “You can see it here. A winding road just behind the castle. Here in these eleven small shops all of Emperor Rudolf’s alchemists lived and engaged in a darker art than the making of trinkets. Rudolf was convinced that if he brought the finest minds to Prague—mathematicians, astrologers, mystics, scientists—together they would discover the secrets of the universe. These men all engaged in the search for the philosopher’s stone, the Elixir of Life, that fabled and elusive preserver of souls. There, on the golden street, magick was for sale. And La Lune had the money to pay for it—”

  “Don’t you realize that you could not have found this out on your own? There is no way you could have learned this any other way?” my grandmother interrupted.

  “La Lune visited the street every day for one month, working with the astrologer’s wife, Hertwig, whose magick was rumored to be the strongest of anyone’s in the city. First Hertwig made brews to mend La Lune’s heart so she would start eating again and regain some of her beauty. Sadness had robbed her of her appetite, and she no longer interested Cherubino even as a model. Too thin, she no longer fit the image of the lusty woman in the paintings.”

  My grandmother had been standing, but now she sat down on the edge of the bed. She looked pale and pained, and part of me wanted to soothe her, but the other part
of me didn’t care about anything but the story.

  “Hertwig’s teas and infusions helped. La Lune’s appetite returned and with it the luster to her hair and the glow to her cheeks. Cherubino began to paint her again, but not to make love to her. She was determined to have him back. They had to be as one, the way they had been before they’d come to Prague. And to do that she needed to be more than a moist nest for him when he wanted a female vessel. She had to be irresistible.

  “She told Hertwig she would give her anything she wanted if she would just help her win Cherubino back and make him sick at the thought of laying with anyone else, be it woman or man.

  “And so began her education. Day after day, when Cherubino was with the emperor, La Lune was with the crone, learning her secrets, memorizing her spells. In exchange Hertwig wanted beautiful things, and La Lune had them to trade. Pearls, emeralds, sapphires. ­Hertwig’s lust for jewels was as strong as La Lune’s was for ­Cherubino. She traded one fortune for another. A lustrous pearl necklace for the secret to making brews that ensured health. A bracelet of moonstones for the spell to fell your enemy. An emerald ring for the spell to make you see in the dark. It was Hertwig who told La Lune about the legend of the rubies. Inside of each one, she said, was a drop of blood that contained the secret to immortality. She showed La Lune her own necklace. Five ruby flowers strung together on a platinum chain with an Ouroboros clasp. She said that each ruby had been made of blood. How she had come to own it, La Lune could guess. Hertwig was a good trader. She had probably sold someone the secret to poisoning an enemy in order to get that necklace.

  “And so the time came for La Lune to finally learn how to mix the potion to make Cherubino love her again. First, Hertwig needed items that took weeks to gather. Strands of his hair. Clippings from his fingernails. And six drops of his blood. But how could she draw and collect his blood?