The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R.

by Carole DeSanti

  We citizens of Paris, whose world once appeared whole, saw it splintered to fragments while Wilhelm I of Prussia was crowned Kaiser of the Germans at Versailles. We gathered in cellars, filled more pails, stacked more sandbags, bound wounds with whatever fabric was to hand—the next action raggedly begun before the last was completed, a chaos of urgencies. At the rue du Mail we left the bath half-filled in case of fire, and between nursing shifts, Finette and I made a constant circuit up and down the stairs to watch from the roof.

  Now, to our ambulance came a steady stream of the wounded, soldiers and civilians alike. Our cots and stretchers, provided by the city, were nearly filled. An English doctor had come through and taught us how to distinguish wounds from chassepot rifles from those made by shell fragments; how to wash an injury with dilute alcohol, to close its flaps and even to stitch them and dress the area in good-quality wadding called charpie. For a surface wound, we used a bandage with charpie; compressed it and applied linseed. We learned to distinguish between pyemia, septicemia, gangrene, necrosis, and frostbite. How to recognize the triage cases, which had to be sent to the larger tent hospitals run by the Americans, the Italians, the French, or the English. The doctor informed us that the amputees at all of these places were dying, and that the orderlies were drinking themselves to death.

  My hands were red with the blood of a soldier of the National Guard usually stationed at the Fort d’Aubervilliers, but who had not made it to work that day. Finette attending, I bound a gash in his leg with a piece of an old nightdress while he clenched his teeth around a strip of corset baleine. We were now short of bandages; but it was only a flesh wound and I could help him with that. I had learned my limits, and those of our tools. This one was within my capacities. He would survive. He was even joking with me through clenched teeth when I heard footsteps close behind me, and looked up.

  “You don’t have to start like I am a German shell come through the door.”

  The man’s trousers hung as though roped to his hips; he was hollow-eyed with siege pallor. He was passing by the rue du Mail and ducked inside. Pierre Chasseloup.

  “Help me, then. This man needs to be lifted—over there, by the stairs.” Our ministrations proceeded, absurdly, under the feet of cherubs, the curling tree roots where bacchantes resided in an unchanging frieze of pleasure—but we were now accustomed to such juxtapositions. I washed my hands in a bowl of bloody water. The iron smell no longer made me gag. My guardsman seemed to be resting, and I said I would get him whatever could be managed—horse broth and brandy.

  Chasseloup said, “Do you have any more of it? Last night I—I can’t even say it. What I had to eat.”

  “Come up, then. Take off your boots, they are full of merde.”

  “There is no merde. Nothing is left to produce merde.”

  Then I saw how weak he was, that I had to lead him by the arm to climb the stairs, to sit him down at the table by the window, on the silk-tufted chair. My provision shelf offered salted herring, pâté, dried apples, a rind of English Stilton. A few of Mitra’s flatbreads, and cold green tea—a stewed bitter—from the morning pot.

  “My God, it’s Balthazar here. You are eating foie gras?”

  “It is what you can get.”

  “From where? For how much?”

  “It was a gift. It’s all they ate at Strasbourg.”

  “It is not what most of us are eating. Coffee?”

  “Yes, for the ambulance, but you can’t drink coffee, not in the shape you’re in. It will destroy your stomach. You can have my ration; I can’t hold down horseflesh. Where is your blessed father?”

  “Furious that I took a job with the Artist’s Federation instead of the so-called Government of National Defense. Left me to rot. I’ve been sandbagging the Louvre.”

  I set out some apple slices, cold tea. “Eat slowly. If you can keep it down, you can have something more. Now wait, while I see to my guardsman.”

  Chasseloup was stretched out on the divan, asleep, when I returned, and when he woke, I fed him again and told him he could stay the night. By then I was tired too, and in no mood to go out and watch the bombardment, or even climb up to the roof. The past few nights it had become a gruesome entertainment; even a relief after the siege ennui, but now, one just desperately wanted it to end. Perhaps it will never end. Perhaps—

  Chasseloup said, “I wrote to Maillard with my plan to take An Unknown Girl out by balloon. I can get it done; I know how. But he has declined, said that the painting is perfectly safe and he must spend his time seeing to the security of living Parisians.” Chasseloup paused, almost out of breath. “The man is a cretin, he knows nothing about art . . . What is this I’m eating?”

  “An Indian flatbread, with spices to purify the blood. Anyway, at Neuilly, An Unknown Girl is practically under the protection of Prussian guns.” I knew where it was because Stephan had arranged to see it, just before the Great Sortie and before I had been ill. I did not know what he thought; when I saw him shortly afterward, he did not raise the topic, and I did not ask. Jolie had said that Stephan was not sentimental, but he had been sufficiently so to seek out Maillard and the picture. I didn’t know what to make of it, really.

  “You know where it is?”

  “Don’t get mad ideas, Chasseloup. I can’t help you with Maillard. I’ve never met the man. And his carpets are probably worn out with the number of people marching to him for one favor or another.”

  “He cares about his factories and his men, but I am a madman for trying to protect my own work—my legacy?”

  A shell whined; it seemed unusually near and the explosion rattled our teacups in their saucers. Pierre and I both jumped and peered out of the window, where we could see nothing. It was peculiarly maddening to hear and know and even smell the smoke, but not be able to see what was happening; even though that meant that the damage was still a distance away. Disaster was highly localized and omnipresent all at once. Pierre raked his fingers across his scalp. His hair was noticeably thin, and gray.

  “Every time one of those goes off, I have some kind of nervous attack. My brains are rattling loose, my hands are always shaking. I can’t hold a brush. That last shell probably hit the Sorbonne but it felt as though it was on top of us! I have been reading at the Sorbonne library when it is open. The damned Prussians aim for churches and hospitals and asylums—Christ, they may have to haul me off to one if they don’t bomb it first.”

  “Have some more tea. It is much better for you than black.”

  “I may be dead by tomorrow morning. The painting is my legacy, and—”

  “Chasseloup. Do you remember the story you once told me? About the artist, what was his name? With his sculpture of Mercury that he believed was his masterpiece—but he was on the street in the dead of winter and put his cloak around it so the clay would not crack, and it did survive—but he froze to death? What an idiot he was, you said! He could have lived to make another.”

  “Ha! I will never paint another. Old Badinguet once said that his purpose was to ‘encourage the arts but discourage the artists.’ That’s how he wanted it, and it worked. Good God, before I met you I was cleaning rooms for half a loaf of bread and a slice of meat. Too humiliated to go to my father. I didn’t want to paint you, you know. I already knew that I was beaten and Badinguet had won.”

  “But you did paint it!”

  Chasseloup sat back. He said slowly, “Do you want to know how it happened? At Croisset, I could not do any of the scenes I had planned. I was preoccupied and out of focus. My training had been to study a scene, memorize it—a flower, a tree, a scene from nature, even a face—and paint it exactly, from memory. I hadn’t done that for a long time, but that is what took over. At first I thought it was a hallucination, or the effects of absinthe. I was possessed by recalling every detail, like a dream where I was living it again, your skin against mine, the curve of your lips, the way your hands fell when they took a natural position—the way you stood when you were tired on the b
ox and trying so hard to be still, because I had some insane idea that if you just stayed absolutely still I could capture you. The way you opened the door so quietly when you brought up the soup bones for us—I sobbed my way through the painting because my stupid rules did not matter at all. It did not matter if you were still. It did not matter that you were not there. It mattered that you had cared for me, we had cared for each other, and I did not eat or drink or sleep until I had poured everything into the canvas and it wasn’t even done by the time I had to bring it back to Paris to hang it. Even on the train I was seized with new details; I was delirious by then. But I knew that I had done something good at last.” He poured some more tea into his cup; his hand trembled. “Now, look at my hands. I will never lose this shake.”

  “It is just the bombardment, Pierre. We are all sick with it.”

  “That Mercury is at the Louvre. I crated it up.”

  “Whenever they end this—the shells will stop falling and your hands will be steady again, you’ll see. And time—it’s another trick of the mind, holding on to the past. I’ve had to learn that. I am always learning it.”

  “You’ll see, the way they will end this war. Our so-called government will capitulate. They are already negotiating with the Prussians against Paris, which they can only see as the mob. That’s why this has dragged on for so long. The National Defense will have the Prussian army occupy the city, and the working man won’t stand for it. Belleville will rise up, the levée en masse at last—and we will have civil war. But the National Defense will have the Prussians to back them. They are all waiting us out. It’s a travesty but it is the truth.”

  “What do you think about the Commune?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t support the standing government, but I don’t trust these Communards either. They are—a jumble of ideas, a shifting sand, they are grandiose; hotheads—idealists—they pin their hopes on Blanqui like he is Christ himself. I’ve heard enough of all of this from Courbet, dearly though I love the man, and he saved my life. At least, so far.”

  “So you want to escape in a balloon with your painting.”

  “Do you ever offer a man a drink in this place?”

  “Wine and nothing stronger for you.” I went to the sideboard and opened a bottle. Cahors red. Good for the blood.

  “This—what is it, a sort of cake?—beats pain de Ferry by leagues. What did you say it is made of?”

  I poured twice. Pierre wrapped his long fingers around the glass. Legs incongruously long in rough trousers amid my little rosewood furnishings. He smelled like a sick man, but I was used to that.

  “It’s a little piece of heaven here,” he said. “Eugénie, I am just looking at you now. If I still could, I would paint you at this very moment. You have become dimensional.”

  “Stay as long as you like. Here, I will make a little fire. My scavenger just brought me a good quantity of tree bark and a few branches. I’ll be back after I see to things downstairs . . . You know, it will start again soon, Chasseloup.”

  When I got back he was sitting in front of the hearth, sketchpad in his hand, a piece of charcoal in the other. God knows where he found it.

  “Are you feeling better? It’s good to see you drawing,” I said gently.

  Chasseloup dug into his pockets and extracted several folded and crushed bits of paper, furiously written over, with notes and crossings out.

  “Do you know, I think that our creations are not much ours at all. That is, they are not really acts of genius and will by a single individual in the way we pretend they are. Imagine,” he said, turning his glass and staring at the ruby liquid. “A kind of rag shop of heaven, and angels like old triqueurs sorting through the rags and bones and burned flesh we have left behind. These rag-picking angels are busy harvesting the soul stuff, separating it from the dross, the gross material. There isn’t enough to go around, because we are careless down here. We fling it around and dissipate it; we don’t know what it is that we are made of. And I want to find it, I want to make it. And then—paint with it. Do I sound mad?” He trembled violently. I picked up his hand again. Knuckles red and raw, trembling, his long painter’s fingers.

  “Chasseloup, I think you’ve found it. Your painting was all— made of that.” And there it was, for the world to see. For me to see, if I opened my eyes. I turned to him and rested my head, just briefly, against his shoulder and did not get the sick odor; just the heart beneath it. But my eyes were blinded with tears, and I blinked in the cold, bright winter light. This siege made for strange thoughts, impossible conversations; the bombardment was a hallucination; it made us mad.

  “You allowed the world to see it; the judges saw it; Maillard saw it. I saw the painting too, Pierre. I stood before it and was furious, at it, at you, at Maillard for owning it—and caring so little for me. But when I remember it now I feel differently. It’s hard to describe—” She was half-turned, looking over her shoulder, her cloudy shawl. The hair, dark; her skin, pale. A hand. At rest. A hand. A loved hand. And the face, mirrored back to me . . . We were green. I reached out, took Chasseloup’s hand in mine. He accepted it. He was no longer trembling.

  Another searing whine, another explosion—this one, closer. Shatter of glass, somewhere near. Pierre said, “You know, what worries me is not that the bombs will come all the way here, but—”

  Silence . . . I heard it; I must still be breathing.

  Pierre? Did you hear it? That one was close, wasn’t it? Oh, your arm—don’t worry—just a bit of glass, from the reverberation. I should have taped these windows; the glass is too brittle. I can bind it up. Just wait. Wait while I go down to the ambulance . . .

  How does the page on which one writes become neither the accuser, the accused, nor a justification, but a vessel—the place where all can be held; can putrify, distill, and fall apart? It is not by listing events as they are said, or even as they seem to have occurred. I do not understand how events die away, turn on themselves, one leading to the next—and when written, seem insufficient to tell the tale. I am afraid that mine is a hungry, careless pen, scraping across the page. And when I look back at what I have written, it is a fever dream, a half-gesture, the glance over the shoulder; a catalogue of surfaces.

  The siege, the war. Its story is a thin gruel, like ersatz milk made of oil and albumen, invented by the Academy of Sciences when there was no natural milk in Paris. Not nourishing, not life giving. Just going on forever in lonely pieces. One could write oneself into a starvation of fragments. I do not know how to hold such suffering on a page. There was a siege; some lived through it and others did not. They say that shells did not reach past the Pont Notre Dame, but there was broken glass that night on the rue du Mail, a singing lance pirouetting off Chasseloup’s arm, severing an artery, the profunda brachii, according to the surgeon, once I had located a surgeon. Once I realized that my own bindings of Pierre’s wound were insufficient.

  Chasseloup died in my arms that night. But at least—at least we spoke, after such long silence. Forgave each other, and just in time. What drew him to my door that day? There were small miracles, as always. Life-and-death miracles, even.

  And one day when they ask for stories of the siege, they will ask only, “Mon Dieu, did you eat the rats?” Oh, we ate them. We all ate them.

  BOOK V: Degrees of Justice

  Time passed, and the unknown protector was not coming.

  —Mogador, Memoirs

  27. Surrender

  THE SIEGE HAD LASTED three months; the bombardment three weeks. When the Paris gates opened at last and fresh winds blew in, we were surprised at the effects of our own stink—the wagoners and provisioners held handkerchiefs over their noses, coughed, and spat out the saturated odors of rum, horseflesh, and charred garbage; of a city’s population living without laundry soap or hot water. Food carts barreled through the gates and we fell to our knees to look on such things as fresh-cut kindling, green cabbages, golden potatoes, rosy onions, and sacks of milled wheat. Fresh horse dro
ppings on the cobbles were a source of wonder.

  We had forgotten how to eat. Hungry, but unable to digest the goodness of food, we took bismuth with quince syrup to soothe our protesting, shrunken bellies. It sounded suspiciously like Bismarck but we took it anyway.

  And we had lost this ill-conceived, badly fought, bellicose belch of a war; no quantity of leeks and carrots and flour could make up for that. Paris had suffered so thoroughly that we could hardly believe there would be no reprieve. On the walls was a war of proclamations and retorts.

  HAS THE GOVERNMENT OF NATIONAL DEFENSE FULFILLED ITS MISSION?

  FUTILE SORTIES, MURDEROUS AND INCONCLUSIVE BATTLES, REPEATED FAILURES.

  THOSE WHO GOVERN HAVE LED US TO THE BRINK OF THE ABYSS.

  YIELD TO THE PEOPLE! YIELD TO THE COMMUNE!

  ***

  THE GOVERNMENT OF PARIS WILL NOT CAPITULATE

  Adolphe Thiers, a wizened old goat born in the era of the first Bonaparte, replaced Trochu at the head of the government, and Léon Gambetta, Amélie’s hero, decisively lost. Thiers stood for “peace at any price,” and the first mission of his new assembly was to set terms with the enemy.

  Opposition papers called him the “Laughing Man” and printed political cartoons showing the voluptuous body of France, sacks of coins spilling around her; caricatures of Thiers sniggering while he severed France’s limbs, the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. The Kaiser hauled these territories off as the urchins had lopped branches from the trees during the siege.

  The Prussian army made a triumphal march through Paris, and all of the statues in the capital were shrouded in black. German soldiers lounged in the streets and gathered at the few cafés that would serve them, and they appeared very round, thick, and healthily pink like the pork sausages they munched while we wraiths looked on. We were told that they had relinquished their arms, but who was going to believe that? We had swallowed so many lies. And now we were sure we’d be shot in our beds, but not before the rent was paid.