The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R.

by Carole DeSanti

  “Mademoiselle! Are you with us?” Shake, shake—my arm shuttled to and fro by a dark arm, which was attached to an evening coat. Eventually a smooth-trimmed beard came into focus. “What spiteful fairy has cast her spell here? Why, I’d swear it is she, Pierre Chasseloup’s mysterious model. The girl from nowhere, who knows no one—”

  A familiar beard.

  “Champagne?” he said, to someone I could not see. “Of course, champagne!” Then, “I have been turning over every cobble in Paris looking for you. That poor fool Chasseloup is beside himself.”

  Gustav Vollard looked around and settled himself next to me on the divan, crossing his legs and tipping back his glass. Leaning in. “So, tell me everything. The last I knew you were staying in a fleabag near the Tivoli Gardens.”

  9. Salon News

  AT THE CLOSE OF business—that is, dawn—my compatriots, still rouged and dressed in salon wear, tore into brioches, poured coffee, and gossiped. Breakfast was the only meal during which speaking at the table was allowed. The party had been a success: a well-known actor had attended; an acclaimed poet had stood on a tabletop and in the small hours delivered his epic based on the first Napoleon. The Russians had shouted him down and scattered pocketfuls of louis, setting off an orgy of coin tossing that ended only when someone began to set fire to franc notes. At six, a fleet of cabs still waited on the rue du Temple. Françoise was setting about organizing gentlemen’s breakfasts; this at the hour usually reserved for digging stray coins from the folds of the sofas in Salon Trois. I had missed most of it. Sometime after seeing Vollard, I noticed Bette off to the side, refilling glasses. Desperate by then, I begged her to allow me upstairs. “It’s the ergot,” I muttered, figuring she knew everything. “Tell Françoise.”

  Alone, then, in the attic sleeping quarters while everyone worked the party below, I sat by the stove, poking at the ashes. The rows of cubbyholes for our pallets gaped emptily behind sagging curtains; double-decked like some evil coop, our tiny bolt holes overhanging the large central room. Mingled odors of scorched linen, tobacco, burned hair, perfume, and soap lingered from the earlier toilette. A love novel, its spine broken and stripped of its covers, lay open on the card table where one of the Mignons had been reading it. The girls liked this one. Passed it hand to hand.

  On another slant-legged table, someone’s embroidery had been left behind: twists of red and yellow and blue silk dangled from a wooden hoop. From the stove doors hung curling irons, and on the grill, scattered pieces of burned cork. For once darkness reigned behind the bolted venetians, not that it made any difference what time of day it was. Skitter of mice in the walls.

  To Vollard I had poured out a raw and disordered tale. I didn’t know what to emphasize or suppress, and the man’s attention kept straying to the phantasmagoria swirling around the room.

  “What? Since when?” he kept asking—when exactly had I wound up at the Préfecture de Police? Become inscrit, as though turned into an object? “After you modeled for Chasseloup? You mean, sitting for that poor sufferer was all that kept bed, board, and virtue intact at the Hôtel Tivoli?” He laughed. I could see that he thought I’d told a mouthful of lies. What were we, anyway, but liars and cheats, wallet stealers, heart eaters, mendicants, and fakes? From what I’d gleaned, most of the girls did slip and slide around when they’d hit the Register; or, “outside,” dropped the matter entirely, as convenience suited. My story ended with the requisite sooty tears pouring down slabs of rouge, a scene that would have made a more gallant knight than this one glance over his shoulder, and I sobbed in shame at my own stupidity.

  Even so, I came to my senses and begged. He’d paid my way once, at the Tivoli when Chasseloup required my modeling services—would he help me again, settle up what I supposedly owed to the maison—set me at liberty ? Vollard shifted uncomfortably, looking for the champagne girl. Muttered something about certainly not wanting to upset Nathalie—and at any rate, he had other news.

  “So, our Chasseloup went away and painted like a lunatic—entirely in character, of course. On the last day he ran all the way to the Palace of Industry with three paintings on his head. Pushed through the crowd, with all of the rest of that horde who ply their brushes until the last minute and then rush the doors. But there you have it. He was accepted. And do you know it was not his damned plate of trout that carried the day? An Unknown Girl won third place! I gave a party; you would have come if either of us had seen a hair of your head. So wipe your nose and have a drink . . . our friend will have to be revived with salts if he hears about this. Quite the prude, for all of his artistic airs. Not a bone of his father in him . . . Or perhaps I shan’t tell him at all!” He winked. One of the champagne maids finally circled back; she looked at me twice, and I knew that Françoise would be in this corner next. Vollard took two glasses.

  “Don’t give me that!” I said, and began to cry all over again. “It shall cost me I don’t know what. We girls are drinking colored water.”

  “If you ask me, he should marry a girl who will scrape his palettes and cook his onions. But Papa doesn’t want to pay for his paint boxes forever.” Gustav drained his glass and stood. “Salut, then, my dear. Be brave.” His back, dark and slim in coattails, retreated into the sea of color, into the bird wings of tulle and the fizz of drinks.

  That I did not explode or disintegrate, after all of the evening’s events, was my first astonishment. I had slept through the first breakfast bell and trickle of real daylight that filtered in through a high, tiny window. The attic quarters, usually a din of chatter and shrieks, were quiet; Lucette’s place next to me on the pallet empty.

  I swung a leg over the side and examined my thighs and calves; then each arm—cautious at first; afraid of what I might find—visible blackenings, blots, signs of decay; I touched gingerly for sensitive places. Some evidence of my body’s further dissipation in the Josephine Room. (Though others wallowed in every known voluptuous act, I had absorbed the notion that anything resembling my own desire, respite, or pleasure was likely a punishable transgression.) But my arms and calves and breasts were exactly as they had always been; my belly gently rounded, flesh clear and white and supple as wax. My eyes, if anything, looked clearer in the glass, and for the first time in weeks I did not have to take hold of a slop pail and retch.

  The second bell rang, distantly. Resting in the hollow where my pallet mate had been were four oranges, thick-fleshed and bright in a cracked kitchen bowl. A flush traveled from my knees and calves all the way to my fingertips as I touched one’s dimpled rind, then split it with a fingernail, inhaled its bright, cool, astringent release . . . Have you ever been in prison, and smelled an orange? I pulled off a section, held it for a moment between my teeth. Then bit into the membrane, releasing its small flood of flowery juice, bright as the Spanish sun.

  Before I went downstairs, I stashed the emptied ergot bottle under another pallet, not mine. Its contents had gone into a potted palm that was probably now not long for Salon Deux.

  At the breakfast table I did not join the clamor and babble but instead read the newspapers that were tossed amid crumbs and coffee slops; Madame Jouffroy had decided the girls must be more up-to-date on current events, so Françoise had permission to place a selection of current broadsheets to the side of the breakfast room. (I have never looked at one since without remembering reading them on those bleary, ragged-edged mornings.) Devouring the words of those who enjoyed daylight and self-sovereignty; who wrote of daily affairs with careless privilege.

  Apparently, it was spring outside.

  I read:

  The horse show has now departed from Paris’s palace-for-showing-and-selling on the Champs-Élysées. Before the horses (who have left an equine odor behind them) were swine, sheep, and poultry; insects behind glass; flowers, cheeses, and cartes de visite. Now, to our drafty industrial palace stampede the artists at last. The paintings alone number in thousands, filling the walls to thirty feet. The organizing principle is that of the alpha
bet, a choice notable for its lack of originality. Yet all of Paris—not to mention tourists in droves—set up their ladders and peer through opera glasses to see. If you lack time and patience for such a display, and really intend only to admire the contours, the various shapes and sizes of Italian beauties, do not this year omit the demurely titled third-place winner, An Unknown Girl, by first-time exhibitor Pierre Chasseloup. —Le Petit Parisien

  The peculiarity of An Unknown Girl, and possibly its appeal to viewers—although the present opinion demurs—lies not in the blunt discursion on our present-day crisis of art. (At the left of the canvas, a trio of cartes de visite on a drying line reference the photographer’s atelier; to the right of the figure stands the broken urn of Greek classicism.) It is the figure itself that arrests the eye: a woman of contemporary France, without question; her dress modern, though ambiguously so—M. Chasseloup is no avid chronicler of a lady’s boudoir, and he has not indulged in an excess of fabric. The sitter appears to us not as the peasant of Courbet, nor the genteel sitter of Fantin-Latour, of whom there is more than a whiff in these brush strokes; in fact, the viewer does not know if she arises from town or province; educated or illiterate, if she is daughter, sister, grisette, or Madonna. Yet, as the murmurs and mutters in the crowd surrounding this piece attest, one is drawn back again and again to her particularity. The head and shoulders, so bravely confronting us, speak to us not as a portrait, but an evocation of our era: one in which our hearts ache with nostalgia, while all necks crane toward the future—possibly thence to be broken . . . One might even say Chasseloup has captured for us an innocence on the spinode of loss. —Le Charivari

  This writer lies at the feet (though they are distressingly unseen) of An Unknown Girl, and makes his quarrel only with the judges, who have awarded this phenomenon of the Salon only a grudging third. First, we must have the identity of this Unknown; it is she who has wrung the hearts of this spring’s Salon. —Paris Illustré

  In the famous words of Couture (Romans in the Decadence of the Empire, 1847), “Personality is the scourge of our time.” Chasseloup’s model has defeated him; biography has trumped art, and we are in all the more danger for it. —Félix Duport, “The Mosquito,” Figaro

  It is an overtly social work. The dress of An Unknown Girl, pearl-colored and shadowed in absinthe, makes bilious reference to a social plague of our day. But does a painting say more when it moralizes at us? Only one thing is certain about M. Chasseloup’s Unknown Girl, that is, that everyone is, for some reason, talking about it. —La Gazette

  The final word on this is that it is a moderately good painting, and possibly even deserved its third as a work that both engaged the critics and spoke to the public. But the so-called investigation of the identity of the model is absurd. Once we insist upon hanging creative works on literal ropes, we are hangmen of Art. After all, why do paintings matter so to us? Not because their flesh-and-blood analogues may be stepping aboard an omnibus, or buying a loaf.—Félix Duport, “The Mosquito,” Figaro

  Jolie dragged a hand over her eyes. She was slouched on a chair in the Josephine Room, skirt hiked past her knees, looking as though she’d been pulled from bed and would rather still be there. I’d gone to some lengths to get her here—passing a note through Bette, because I hardly ever saw her upstairs, and never alone. Now I wasn’t at all sure it had been a good idea.

  “Look at these,” I said, my voice shaking, holding out the clutch of papers I had taken, Figaro, Gazette, Paris Illustré—stuffed them under my pallet. “This painting they are writing about—”

  Jolie stared at the clippings, first one and then the next, then said at last that I should just tell her what they said so it didn’t take her all day to figure it out. Jolie had no idea what the Salon was and could care less. When I finished my explanation she said, “I don’t know what those michés get up to on the Champs-Élysées. Art modeling’s worse than the stage. After the show there’s nothing in it. And these artists come around here all the time, adoring themselves. Think that a paint box gives them license for anything; they always want to draw you and not pay a sou. So, is he rich and old, this one?”

  “No, poor and young.”

  “Ah. So you’re just like those stupides upstairs, waiting for your boyfriend to come love you back?”

  “No . . .”

  “What, then? . . . You want out, and my help with it, I guess. You might think again, being such a favorite around here.” Her voice was cold, or tired. Her face unreadable; tangles of hair, like fine-spun, wavy gold, shielded her eyes, the curve of her mouth; her eyes were shadowed.

  “Hardly!”

  “You have no idea, do you? You wonder why the others don’t like you, but you’ve no idea what they’ve been through, most of them. While Françoise is giving you bottles and sending you up here for a rest cure, letting you slip the passe. Oh, I’ve heard. If you’re not careful, you’ll be traded at Brussels . . . And you don’t want that, let me tell you, because this place is a palace compared to anywhere else.” Jolie stared at the draperied window. Her voice trailed off and she pulled off her shawl, cheap silk in acid yellow. Underneath she had on a too-small camisole with thin black straps, tight across her shoulders and breasts, and a dark underskirt, ruched in tiers like a petticoat, faded and marked with cigarette burns. Even though the Josephine Room’s hearth was unlit, the warmth of the whole house was extravagant enough for bare shoulders.

  “So, why are they letting me off?”

  “Françoise wants mesdames to think she can drag in the talent. Why do you think she trawls the Mont de Piété on her days off, watches the line, sees who hasn’t picked up her pocket watch? She goes to the maternity hospital with dresses and hats too. Françoise just loves to hook them at La Maternité. First to the tour to hand off the brat to the Sisters of Charity. You are her acquisition, chouette, so she’s in the mood to spoil you.” Jolie got up and rummaged by the bedside for cigarettes, found one, and struck a match.

  I considered this. “I thought they turned away dozens of girls every week.”

  “Not the ones they want, I suppose.”

  “I watered a plant with the ergot.”

  “Fine, then you can suffer the same fate.” Jolie glowered. “Anyway, do you think you can get away with that? The Dab will catch you out.”

  “Already has. Now she says I must go to the midwife.”

  “You could say she’s trying to spare you, Eugénie.” A veil of hair fell over Jolie’s eyes as she dragged on her smoke.

  It was startling, to hear her speak my name; I would not have made a bet that she’d remember it. I took a breath. “That other girl never came back. Delphine?”

  “They sent her to the angel maker, sure. But that’s not the whole story. Nathalie was done with her around here.” Jolie smoked until she burned her fingertips and tossed the butt into the cold hearth, shook out her hair, and ran her hands through it. “Look—I’m trying to help you. It’s no good outside right now. Unless you think the painter will take care of you.”

  “I have my doubts.”

  “Well, then, what? Look, you’re on the books now. You understand that, right?”

  She stopped and stared at me, took stock of my actual state of ignorance—humiliating, provincial—all the same, I didn’t know. She took a breath, gave a short laugh. “Listen. You are what they—the Register, the Morals Brigade, the Dabs, the madames—say you are. You aren’t anyone else, in the city of Paris—well, even in all of France, I think, though I’ve never been anywhere else.”

  “There’s nothing like this place where I came from, I can tell you that.”

  “Well, girls get traded away to Marseille and Toulon all the time. Lyon. Other places. You’re on the books, registered, inscrit unless you can figure a way off, which is a good trick if you can do it.” She paused briefly; elaborated. “First of all, if you bolt and leave a debt behind, they will put the Brigade boys on you straight away. You’re playing into their hands, really, by doing tha
t. It’s how they break a girl down, a stint at Saint-Lazare, and if you get out alive, you come back with a warning—or Brussels.”

  I looked at her. Who was this Jolie creature? Trickster, prankster, comrade, spy?—So beautiful, with her tangled flame of hair and heavy-lidded eyes, in her strange costume. No wonder she had special privileges; they must all be half in love with her.

  “But even if you work off what they say you owe, or get someone to pay it off, it’s different ‘outside.’ The rules change.” She ticked them off on her fingers.

  “Carry a carte and produce it upon request. Health check and re-registration at the Préfecture every fifteen days. Walk only on certain streets, at certain hours. Stay away from windows, churches, and schools. No living in furnished rooms; you have to buy your own furniture, which puts you in hock and the chair and table men are all souteneurs—at least, I never met one who wasn’t. If you go around the corner, say good morning to the baker, it might be ‘procuring off location’—two charges against you. You are in and out of the lockup, and no leaving Paris unless a madame somewhere else sponsors you, so don’t think of that. No women friends if they are also inscrits. But who else would be your friend? Other than your souteneur, and you can bet he’ll be in the picture, robbing you blind in the name of ‘protection.’ Sitting here and talking, like we are doing, is breaking the law, if we’re raided and caught—” She took a breath and turned aside. “Damn, I need another cigarette, and I’d better not steal anymore. Even Bette counts them.” Jolie pushed her hands over her face; her nails were bitten. All the girls smoked as though a cigarette were a lifeline off a sinking ship.

  In the end that was why girls preferred the houses, she said: for the company. “And everyone wants to come to a place like this. Look—” She flung her bare arm in a gesture that took in the whole room. “Satin on the bed. Four meals a day. Off hours, we sit around playing cards, and they handle the Dab and the police.” She got up abruptly, hunted around the room, found half of someone’s butt tossed into the hearth, crushed. She smoothed and lit it. Sucked in her smoke and exhaled; gray air drifting toward the dark cordoned drapes. Then she came closer, nestled near my feet; reached up and wrapped her arms around my knees—part caress, part the casual use of a convenient support. Warily, as though it might burn, I let my hand fall so it touched her hair, that tousled skein of soft-flaming thread. She smelled of cigarettes and bed linens.