The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R.

by Carole DeSanti

  A serviceable stretch of sepia-colored material fell under my hand, but no sooner did I tug it out from the pile than I felt an opposing pull. Tired and frustrated, I cried out just like my noisy neighbors and seized it harder, determined to win or tear the thing to shreds. We struggled for a moment, then the other side abruptly let go, nearly dropping me into the lap of the patronne. Astonished, I looked up. My opponent was tall, sloe-eyed; red-gold hair falling from its pins.

  She grinned and dived, tossing a moth-eaten tippet in my direction. I gasped, dodging it. And she came slouching around the bin, irreparably herself, dressed in a man’s smoking jacket over a dress that had seen better days. The patronne glanced up and jerked her chin. Out of here, with you.

  “What are you doing, you little idiot?” Jolie growled. “Don’t you know this place crawls with Brigade boys?” And the world rolled around again—turned up its nether side, and peculiarly, it looked and smelled and felt like relief.

  We passed through high-walled, cobble-broken streets so narrow, we had to flatten ourselves against the walls when a vehicle passed. Workshops sat chock-a-block: an iron filer, a gem polisher, a window of watch chains. Walls painted with advertisements for VINS and BIBERONS. Finally we turned into an alleyway even more cramped and ancient, the walls leaning in so they nearly touched at the top. Rue des Vertus. Haussmann’s work carts had apparently passed it by.

  “Virtue takes a narrow path,” said Jolie. “This street’s all ours.” She parted a set of ragged door curtains, ducked inside. My eyes adjusted to the dimness of a room furnished with a few chipped marble tables barely bigger than plates. A kind of café, a no-name place without window or sign. Jolie dropped her bag, a cloth sack tied with a drawstring (like a thief’s), disappeared, and came back with a pichet of thin-looking wine and two glasses.

  “I used to live up on the corner,” she said. “Six floors up. My window looked onto Gravilliers. Once I thought I’d live and die here. Still—it’s the only café in Paris where we won’t be bothered . . . You’re growing past your clothes; is that why you were at the Temple? You shouldn’t, you know. What’s that on your finger—?” Jolie divided a cache of tobacco. It lay in fragrant, curly little piles; she methodically separated and smoothed cigarette papers and deftly rolled the first.

  “You’re out of there, then?”

  “Bit of a tip-up with Françoise.”

  “Not on my account, I hope.”

  “Well, what if it was?”

  “I’d be sorry to have put you to trouble!”

  “You are nothing but trouble. But no. It was over Bette. Some cigarettes, Françoise’s private cache that she kept to sell to the michés—not cutting the house in on her markup, don’t you know—but I had tipped Bette to light-finger them. Françoise caught her in the business, looking for them under a stack of chemises in the parlor—I’d told Bette where they were! But she doesn’t have the hand of a thief, alas—”

  “Poor Bette!” I had to laugh, imagining the scene, the submistress red as a beet and buzzing mad.

  “I’ve deviled her anyway, Françoise, for selling under the table. But Bette can’t afford to lose her job, she’s got two little brothers to support, and a father with the gout. Jouffroy and Trois weren’t too hard on me; they helped me make an arrangement. Didn’t want to lose their submistress over a pile of cigarettes! Well, it’s summer anyway—a good time for fresh air.”

  She got up and slouched over to the bar for a light. Women relaxed on mismatched chairs, smoked, poured wine from their pichets. They didn’t appear to be the right kind of woman, nor the wrong; and a spectrum of wardrobes was represented: from shopping-arcade gowns to maid’s dresses to eccentric combinations like Jolie’s. All mixed together; these women just were, as though they’d a right to be there. One sat alone reading L’Opinion.

  “You see?” said Jolie, sliding back into her seat. “That’s what I want to do.”

  “What?”

  “Read. Know without asking, for once. There’s a school near where I stay now, just around the corner in the rue Hautefeuille. A teacher there will see me for free. Now—what have you gotten yourself up to?”

  She poured. And poured again; we passed her rolled cigarettes between us. I told her I was staying with Chasseloup, and she eyed the ring on my finger again. “So. Model marries painter, happy ending? I may not read much, but I’ve heard the fairy tales.”

  “It’s a fake,” I said, uncomfortably.

  “Ah.” And then she pushed back her chair. She had to go and meet Louise. Her teacher. When she said the name, her eyes sparked.

  A few flights up the stairs on the Impasse de la Bouteille I stopped to rest, breathing heavily; a few provisions and my stash from the rue du Temple weighed me down. Madame-who-lived-on-the-fifth gave me her fisheye stare through her cracked-open door. Chasseloup was dining out, which was just as well. He and Jolie jangled in the mind like two animals that should not be placed side by side in cages at the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes.

  A sooty stain had accumulated on the wall over the stove because of my enthusiasm for cooking with a more inspiring range of ingredients. I lit the stove, though the coal was down again; tossed a few bones into the pot and cut up a carrot and an onion. Then took up the brown-flecked fabric from the fripperer’s bin. A solid in a dull color, but rich enough to gather into graceful folds.

  From the window, a pool of light from one lamp, then the next, as the lamplighter made his way. He lit the nearest lamp, then the one across from the hat maker’s porte-cochère, and passed on to the rue Montorgueil. It had begun to rain; the street glistened. A lone girl, bareheaded, with her shawl pulled around her, appeared in silhouette under one lamp, then drifted to the next. For a moment her face turned up, as though to look at me, and I shivered with her chill, not my own. The sky was black and I closed the shutters.

  I had planned to use the indigo dress as a pattern to make over the new one, and then use some additional fabric to expand its waistline, to create two serviceable garments. I separated the waistband from its skirt, ripping seams and pleats. Slowly; I was no seamstress. When I checked the soup again, the fire had gone out and a skin of whitish fat had congealed on top.

  After I’d relit the fire and returned to my work, I noticed something had fallen out of the indigo dress’s waistband. A pale square of pasteboard, about the size of my palm, which had been sewn inside. Inscribed with a name—a female name. I knew what it was.

  Carte de brème—carte de brème—it’s only after a few days that it begins to stink! The genuine article, dated and stamped. I had no such carte. But the original owner of the indigo dress did. I’d been carrying it all along.

  Voices from the hall shook me from where I sat staring at it, pins and fabric scattered about. Chasseloup’s voice and another man’s and a third voice, lighter. Feet stamped; umbrellas were shaken. Flare of the gas lamp just inside the door. The flicker lit up a girl’s blonde curls, her elbow-length black gloves, as she tugged at the fingertips with her teeth. Her other arm was linked through Chasseloup’s. When she saw me, the girl’s lips widened into a silent O.

  “Sweetheart,” she began, in a clotted voice.

  “Eugénie! What are you—? Vollard needs a drink, so I invited him up—” Chasseloup’s voice slurred like an idiot’s; his posture was half-reeling. A cloud of liquor over both men, with the chill of the night; the third of the party angled into the tiny room.

  “I just want a look at that canvas you claim is not blank.” Vollard glanced in my direction and began to laugh. “Why, if it isn’t is the ‘unknown girl.’ I’d heard you were back in the picture!”

  You may remember that that year, tropical flowers were the fashion—orchids, hibiscus, and gingers grown through the winter in heated glasshouses. Melodrama was in vogue too; a commodity in itself—it was the kerosene that the empire burned. What was in me was also ready to ignite, although I could afford neither melodrama nor orchids; and a quickening voice might have
told me so, had I cared to listen. But cold fury at seeing the girl hanging on Chasseloup’s arm, and panic and humiliation at the sight of Vollard—whose shoulder I had all too recently dampened on a sofa at Deux Soeurs—carried me, in three steps, across the wedge-shaped room, from the divan to the stove. I flung open the window; with one gesture seized the soup, cold as rain under its sheath of fat, and dashed it to the street, bones and onions and carrots—hurling the pot after it. I wanted to hear the clatter all the way down, six flights, to the street, smash iron against stone. Some buried, long-banked rage—at the whole nauseating faithful ignorant attempt at—what? I grabbed the fresh white ficelle from where it was resting and flung it after the pot.

  Chasseloup had retreated to the cupboard alcove, his back turned. Vollard was pouring himself a drink. The girl had not made a move to leave—just the opposite; she settled herself on the divan. Her eyes were narrow and too close, and her white fingers were smooth. She looked stupid as lead, and determined to get her lousy coin for the evening. I took a look at her, and she at me, before I decided—well, it was hardly a decision, not a strategic move, but a furious, impetuous one, almost a bodily reflex, like vomiting.

  “Wait!” called Chasseloup, but I was done with waiting.

  Down the million stairs, flinging myself around each landing, dizzy at the bottom. Nausea, emptiness at the center, as I headed toward the river and Notre Dame. I walked to keep moving, to keep myself from thinking. Inside me there was a ravenous something, tearing at my guts, keeping me from being still, from any clear thought. Three flights down, I realized that I was wearing only a dressing gown of Chasseloup’s. It was raining. And I had left the carte on the divan.

  The next morning, Chasseloup paced back and forth, jacket smeared with paint, stub-bristled brushes clutched in his hand. Pieces of sailcloth, odd-shaped squares, tail ends of rolls, their corners peeling down, were tacked up over every surface, in various stages of imprimatura; some chalked with figures in green outline; still others, painted over to be started again. The green dress and its crinoline lay in their twin coffins.

  “And where did you find her—the blonde girl with the rat’s teeth?” I’d ended up sleeping in the studio upstairs; hungry and ruing the fate of the soup pot. “You tell me that you care for me—I make soup every night, wait for you to come home, go on sitting for you, not for a sou but for a promise—of what? For you to finish another—pack of lies on canvas for old men to sweat over—and then treat me as you please. Oh, God help me if I ever step up on this box again.”

  He stared at me in rigid fury.

  “Pack of lies, indeed. God help me if I ask you to.”

  “Well, why not? It’s worth it to you to finish. Rack up a second medal; Vollard will get you another fortune—”

  “When you had your tantrum and threw the pot out the window—which, by the way, could have killed an innocent passerby—you left something behind.”

  My hands went cold, then my feet and legs, and the tip of my nose. My hands moved instinctively to my belly. The damned carte from the indigo dress. We both stared at the flimsy square. Chasseloup holding it between his fingers like something putrid.

  “It’s not mine.”

  He gave a sharp, short laugh. “A week ago Vollard told me a story I had the sheer vanity not to believe. He told me . . . because I told him of your condition. I wanted his advice. I had gone to my father, I was even thinking of—God help me—! I believed I had painted an—innocent girl. I refused to believe the picture could be compromised in—this way. Or that you could have been.”

  This time, I was the one who crossed to the studio’s windows and stared at the buttes. Stared a long time. Finally I said, “You left—for Croisset. Let me make your eggs and sew your buttons, and collect your brushes and carry your things to the train, and you waved goodbye without a word. You never paid me what you should have; never bothered to ask where I might stay, nor if I had the means. I was a little fool come in on a train from the provinces. It doesn’t matter. It’s not my name on that carte—”

  “Do I even know your name?”

  “I said it’s not my name. I told you my name!”

  “Yes, an empress and a rabble-rouser; maybe you got it from the papers.”

  “It’s not my name on the carte.” I stopped, and heard myself. “But it might as well be, Pierre.”

  “Gustav told me that when you came back—got out—he even went so far as to pay off what he called your ‘debt.’ What you owed to some Madame So-and-So—because he wanted me to paint you again.”

  “He did that?”

  “He said that otherwise you’d be hauled in by the Morals Brigade and unable to sit. So you hardly have a complaint against him.” Chasseloup’s voice was hard again. “But I don’t care for that arrangement. I reject it. Please leave. Go back to—wherever you came from. I don’t wish to see you. And if it’s true—that you didn’t fall into this situation until after you sat for me—you could have done a thousand things before you went where you did.”

  I stood white and mute. Responses circled, washed through my mind like water sucked down a cesspool. “I was cold,” I said finally. “I’d lost everything, and then I lost you.”

  “Eugénie.” Chasseloup picked up some brushes, hands trembling; mopped his face with a paint-smeared rag. “Is this child mine?”

  Some piece of me splintered, broke away.

  “No, Pierre. No, it’s not.”

  Chasseloup turned away. “Then—please—go. Let me paint in peace.”

  Color bled everywhere—on his flesh, on mine, on the green dress lying embalmed in its casket. On the floating white shawl I’d worn to the Closerie des Lilas; and on the pasteboard carte, in the dust where Chasseloup had dropped it. I picked up the thing before I went. It was the least I could do for her, whoever she was.

  “You’ve really screwed the thing, haven’t you?” Jolie rolled a cigarette and refilled our glasses, wide-mouthed jars from a shelf. The wine was slowing my racing thoughts. “Your Stephan was nothing but a miché, and this Chasseloup is a bébé.”

  “I don’t know what else I could have done.”

  “I’m sure that’s true . . . Salut, chouette. Oh, don’t look like that. It’s not so bad as you think.” Jolie wore a faded velvet wrap over her shoulders; strands of hair were clinging to her skin. A sleek tangerine-and-cream cat dozed on the bed; she curled tighter when a draft rippled the ragged length of lace at the window.

  “That’s Clio, and the furniture is bought and paid for, from Albertine on the rue du Jardinet—”

  “All of it’s yours?”

  “My friend Odette was stashing it for me. She’s an old pal from when we both lived on Vertus—but she didn’t live there long; she moved up in the world! The stove’s in the hall, so there’s no heat, and it’s shared among nine of us. But it doesn’t matter; this place is a palace.”

  It occurred to me that just a short time ago, I would have exulted in this paradise—a tiny silk-festooned matchbox under the slope of the roof, over a café, with Jolie. In one corner was a narrow bed covered with a strip of purple cloth. In the center of the room was a rose-colored chaise, pocked with cigarette burns. A small table was marked with bottle rings, more burns, and streaks of black; a stack of tattered old books—a primer, a book of fairy tales—and the possibility of a decent supper: bread and grapes, cheese, a bit of saucisson. A bag of fish heads for Clio, dripping onto the floor. The cutlery was all silverplate, and mismatched, some of it heavy. Salt cellars and napkin rings.

  “You know what?”

  “What, chouette?”

  “I’m at least half-glad to be here.”

  Jolie had uncorked a bottle and looked at me, eyes half-closed. “All right. First things first. You still owe Jouffroy?”

  “It’s been paid.”

  “I wondered. Otherwise they’d have caught up with you by now.” Jolie gathered the wrap around shoulders and stretched her long arms to the ceiling. She reached fo
r the tobacco, rolled another cigarette. The cat stretched and yawned, jumped down and meowed, brushing against my skirts. She had green eyes as well. “Clio, do you want your fish? Not really a hunter, are you, my cat? She lets the mice run right under her nose.” Jolie hitched up her dress as she bent down to fill a saucer. Her legs were so long that her knees nearly came up to her shoulders. Her skin was like milk, her eyes like stones under water. “So—are you back in the game, going to register as an independent? You’d be good if you wanted to—the muffes know contraband when they see it.”

  I looked down at the ripening fruit of my belly. “I was sick on those men, before, at Deux Soeurs. And now—like this—”

  “Well . . . what, then?” She drained her glass and bit the end off a sausage.

  “I have a little modeling job, for a sculptor.” She was a friend of Pierre’s—Mademoiselle C—who was living off her inheritance and sculpting in a pocket courtyard studio on the Île Saint-Louis. She was intense, slate-eyed; her brow gathered like a storm; her hair a dark mess of ringlets pulled up in a chignon. She had a ferocious excitement; a vibrating tension that bounced off the old sand-colored walls. Mademoiselle C had no patience for conventional art. You might as well visit the morgue as the sculpture rooms at the Palace of Industry during the Salons. White hands. White breasts. Drapery. Wings. White wings, on angels. Scrolls and busts. The same model, in the same pose; copy the academics, bloodless, bleached. They never work from life, she’d said. Her gaze dipping and swimming over the curves and shadows of my swelling belly. “You fell from the heavens. How many enceintes could I get to model for me? I’ll tell you, not one.”