Abigail flipped the pages of the catalog. “Why doesn’t he exhibit here? The Salon rejects him all the time.”
It was a rare moment of thoughtlessness on Abigail’s part. Mary shrugged and looked away. “I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry. What a stupid thing to say.”
This carelessness and Abigail’s quick apology were the first hints of any pity on Abigail’s part. This year, Abigail’s painting, a still life, had been accepted for the Salon, while Mary’s had not. Every year for the past four years, Mary’s work had been admitted, but now, just when she believed her painting had finally begun to take on a life of its own, just when putting brush to canvas, so long an exercise in study, had become a joy, the Salon had rejected her. But if anyone besides Abigail had received more pleasure from an acceptance, Mary could not imagine it. Abigail had written home to tell her family of her great success. A little oil, of which she was so proud. And why not? In the past, Mary had done the same, had bought catalogs and clipped any mention of herself in the newspaper and sent the notices home, proving her success to her father in the concrete way he understood. And Abigail, after all, had her famous writer sister to compete with. But Abigail had neither gloated over her victory nor patronized Mary, though the rest of the members of the American art community had not been above glee at Mary’s failure. At the Palais de l’Industrie, where she had gone to wrap her rejected paintings for the carter, she had seen several of them laughing. Not one friend had come to console her.
“If anyone deserves happiness at beeing accepted by the Salon it’s you, Abigail.”
“Why don’t we start with Edgar Degas? You know you only want to see him,” Abigail said, her voice steeped in the regret of having reminded her friend of her failure. “He has the two back bedrooms.”
Degas was the single reason Mary had wanted to come to the exhibition today. She had admired him for years, seeking out his work in small galleries and colorists’ shops, always hoping she might stumble onto one of his canvases displayed for sale in a window. Now she followed Abigail down the hall, and upon entering the first of the bedrooms, was overcome. Degas’s was a point of view so particular, so specific, so separate from the others’ that it struck her once again as modern mastery. Not that he painted beauty. No. The others painted beauty. Degas painted life.
Abigail said, “But you don’t want to paint exactly in his style, do you, Mary? You don’t want to imitate him?”
“No, of course not, but do you see what he does? Do you see how remarkable the composition is?”
“I see. I think.” Abigail cocked her head, studying the painting of a woman seated at a café table, her hand resting listlessly on a glass of absinthe. “In a Café, he calls it. Actually, looking at this makes me uncomfortable.”
“Degas provokes and reveals our prejudices. Wouldn’t you like to be good enough to unsettle someone in this same way one day?” Though “good enough” was a shameful understatement. Instead, Mary wished she had said, wouldn’t you like to be skilled, sensitive, gifted, brilliant, generous enough, all the things that she, Mary, was not.
“Do forgive me, but I don’t see it. I’ve hardly just begun to understand all that is necessary to paint really well in the old way, let alone the new.”
“The Salon would disagree,” Mary said, but she said it without rancor.
“Do you mind if I go back and peek at the Renoirs instead? I think I might feel more accord with him.”
As Abigail made her escape, Mary began, like the insatiable student she was, to try to discover Degas’s secret. For there was one, she was certain of it, and she believed that if she studied each of his paintings one by one, her ravenous eye might discern the workings of his mind, might detect how he translated his vision to his brush, might appropriate his vision as her own. But as soon as she began, unflattering comparisons between her work and his inundated her mind. The anatomy of an artist’s heart is a desire for perfection, at least hers was, and barring that, at least the ability to express a certain truth, but now she feared that no amount of hunger would infuse her with the ineffable vagaries that made an artist an artist. It wasn’t imitation she was after, as Abigail had suggested. It was that she had been trying for half her lifetime to find her soul, and still she hadn’t, while this man painted with his. It was not a lucky thing to want something as much as she did. To fear that no matter how hard she worked, no matter how much she studied, she might lack the essential talent of seeing. For true art lay in seeing. This was what she had come to, after years of study. A properly chosen palette, a true sense of proportion, an effective brushstroke: These were not gifts; these were technique, obtainable by tireless observation and practice. But sight? Sight, it seemed, was a gift from God. She stood for a while longer, turning in a circle, then drifted from Degas’s room as if she were leaving a funeral.
“Mary?” Abigail asked when Mary found her in the parlor.
“I’ll never be as good as I want to be, Abigail,” Mary said.
“Every artist thinks that.”
“But compared to him, I am nothing.”
“I think you ought to meet him. I’ll write him a letter,” Abigail said.
“You will not.”
“Or perhaps you could write to Berthe Morisot.”
“No one is writing any letters. Besides,” Mary said, distracted by the absurdity of Abigail’s scheme, “you know what it’s like to try to meet a French person. It’s as if you were proposing war and not an introduction.”
“We need your sister,” Abigail said. “Lydia would charm them all in half a second. Soon you would be fast friends with all these artists.”
“Lydia would charm them, wouldn’t she?”
They both missed Lydia, who had returned home to Philadelphia last summer after visiting Mary twice in the previous two years. Though she was older than Mary by seven years, Lydia never seemed a chaperone. She was instead comfort and conviviality in a city that sometimes overwhelmed. But she was often ill, one day well, the next doubling over in pain. Sometimes Mary wondered whether it was coping with illness that had made Lydia the family’s acknowledged center of calm.
They lingered a moment longer, gazing at Renoir’s canvases, then wandered back through the rooms, Abigail asking Mary question after question, the two of them marveling at the bright palettes and thickly textured paint, elements so different from the strictures of Salon art that it was as if these artists had set themselves free. Suddenly it was clear to Mary, in a way it hadn’t been before, that these artists were playing more than they were working, playing at exposing some vision of life that defied convention, exuberant in a way that her painting was not, and could never be, weighted down as she was by the Salon’s censorious rule. Nor were these paintings amateur, as the scolding reviews in the newspapers had admonished. Instead, they were lively, inviting, celebratory. After a while, Abigail urged her to return to Degas’s rooms. Their arms linked, they strolled past the pastels and oils, awed and speechless, Abigail by the strangeness of Degas’s vision, Mary by its mastery. Unlike the other artists, Degas didn’t play, though he was not reverent, either, not unless you believed that you honored life by exposing it.
Outside, they unfurled their umbrellas against the soft rain and kissed one another good-bye, French-style, on the cheeks. They were going in opposite directions, Mary to her apartment at the base of Montmartre and Abigail to the attic room near the Tuileries that she shared with two friends. The Parisian evening glow of glistening raindrops and gray light had just fallen, and despite the gutter’s accumulation of litter and horse droppings, the scene reminded Mary how much she loved the city and how much she would miss it if she were to leave.
“You’re coming tomorrow, aren’t you, to opening day?” Abigail said. “I’ll need your support.”
“I’ll be there,” Mary promised. “I’ll come to the Salon and admire your painting and make everyone look at it.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind?”
&n
bsp; “I promise I’ll be there,” Mary said.
“And you must promise me you won’t go back to Philadelphia.”
Mary looked away. “I didn’t say I wanted to go home.” Though since the rejection, she had been trying to decide whether or not she ought to.
“Paris is the sanctuary of art,” Abigail said.
“And its battleground,” Mary said, kissing her friend once more. “The place where artists live or die.”
“I don’t know what those idiots were thinking,” Abigail said, squeezing Mary’s hand. But as Abigail hurried down the street, Mary knew it wasn’t the rejection that bothered her, not anymore. She turned and looked up at the apartment window, now darkened in the gloaming, yearning for the artist’s vision she feared she did not have and would never have. She was not being defeatist. She was being practical, a distinctly Cassatt trait, one her father would admire for its resolution even as she mourned its pragmatism. To paint or not to paint. That was the Shakespearean conundrum. Even her father considered this question one of life and death. Once, he had said to her that he would rather see her dead than be an art student in Paris, a statement that had sent her fleeing from the dinner table. And at thirty-three, one had to assess. One had to come to terms. One had to confront dreams. The fading daylight blackened into darkness, and the lamplighter lit the gaslights in succession, and pearls of glassed flame flickered like warm stars.
“Paris is shining,” she whispered.
It was then that he spoke, in a voice as familiar as her own. Paint what you see, he whispered. Paint what you love.
Degas’s voice, imagined or real, echoed in the splendor of the Paris night. It followed her up the street, away from the Boulevard Haussmann, shimmering now with carriage lanterns and streetlamps, toward the less glimmering butte of Montmartre, where she had made her home among artists, still hoping to become a true one herself.
Chapter Two
The Paris Salon, the great celebration of spring, of art, of taste, always opened in May and always knotted traffic on the Champs-Élysées into a fist. The perpetual congestion of the City of Light drove its denizens and visitors alike insane, but this morning it seemed to Mary that the throng of carriages, wagons, carts, horses, and pedestrians converging on the Palais de l’Industrie was far worse than she had ever seen. She surveyed the clogged arterial from the seat of her hired fiacre and folded the letter she’d been reading into her reticule.
You desire too much or not enough. I don’t know which it is, but this stubbornness of yours is unseemly. Enough, my dear. Time to come home. Come back to Philadelphia and find yourself a husband before it is too late. You can paint here, with much less trouble, far more economically than you can in Paris.
It was a mistake to reread her father’s letter, and yet she had done it anyway. The missive had been waiting for her last night when she returned home from the impressionist exhibition. Though it did contain a drab sentence or two of solace, she wished now that she had left the letter behind. It bothered her that he had somehow divined the confusion she found herself in now. Last night she had risen twice from bed to write her father, only put down the pen and climb back into bed without writing a word. Now she touched her purse, the letter folded inside. How to explain to him what she wanted when she could barely decide herself?
The driver could not make headway, and soon stopped in the middle of the street. Over his objections, she gathered her slim skirts and launched herself into the stalled traffic, ducking between the restless horses and polished equipages, taking care to guard the plumage on her hat, thinking that she wouldn’t mind the unseemly scramble so much if she actually wanted to be here.
Up and down the avenue, others, too, were leaving their carriages mid-street, having given up hope of a more elegant debarkation at the doors of the palais. A disk of yellow sun glinted in the soft blue sky, a reprieve from yesterday’s gloomy rain, and in celebration fashionable Paris was showing off its regalia; Mary felt underdressed in her simple white blouse and blue skirt. Every where nattily attired men in top hats were guiding women draped in spring silk of Naples yellow and vermillion through the crush of conveyances, pausing to untangle ensnared feathers and ribbons from the leather harnesses. Their finery sparkled against the dull bitumen and the ocher dresses of the less well-off, for all of Paris attended the Salon, including laundresses, waiters, liverymen, and hod carriers, who saved centimes all year. Art was the business of Paris, and nothing else in the city attracted this mass of humanity, unless you looked to the recent past and the Communards, twenty thousand of them huddled behind the tombs of the Père Lachaise Cemetery awaiting slaughter after the country’s failed and bloody civil war. It seemed impossible to Mary now that the upheaval had occurred a mere six years ago, though just who had wreaked more havoc on this city would ever remain in question: the Communards and their barricades; the invading Prussians, who had preceded them by eight short months; or Baron von Haussmann with his army of shovels, who had first destroyed Paris before reshaping the city to Napoléon III’s grand vision. But Mary couldn’t say who had most damaged the city; she supposed she wasn’t Parisian enough yet to understand the wounded city’s heart.
And according to the Salon jury, she wasn’t Parisian enough in the way that mattered the most.
Banishing the self-pity from her mind, Mary stepped onto the overcrowded sidewalk in front of the palais, a stone edifice that rose in imposing splendor from the glorious park grounds, a majestic court compared to the modest apartment building on the Rue le Peletier where the impressionists had just mounted their exhibition. Here, the line to purchase Salon tickets stretched fifty people long at least. No doubt Abigail was already inside, awaiting Mary’s arrival. She had offered to wait for Mary and admit her free as her guest, one of the perquisites of being an exhibitor, but Mary had not wanted to draw attention to herself. At the ticket window, she paid the one-franc admittance fee and another for the thick catalog. She had to stop herself from searching out the C’s, where this year she would not find Cassatt, Mary, and the title of a painting into which she had poured all her hopes. Instead, she pushed through the iron doors and climbed the endless rise of polished marble that made up the grand staircase. The building she had visited in shame to collect her rejected paintings just the week before now echoed with shouts and laughter. Artwork in the Salon was arranged alphabetically, in makeshift rooms of temporary walls erected for the exhibition. Mary entered the exuberant throng and made her way to the “A” room, where Abigail stood in a circle of admirers.
“It looks all right, doesn’t it? I shouldn’t be embarrassed?” Abigail asked Mary after she greeted her, pointing out her picture, hung on the line amid a wealth of canvases that covered the entire wall from floor to ceiling. It was a huge honor to be featured at eye level; it meant that the jury thought the work merited the most advantageous placement. Mary thought Abigail’s painting—the rendering of a bowl of fruit, an exquisitely shaped pitcher, and a faithfully reproduced bottle of olive oil—strong, if a bit simple. Though Mary would have been proud if it had been hers, she didn’t much care for still lifes. With no emotion to evoke, no difficult hands to reproduce, no flesh to render, they offered little challenge other than light and form.
“Congratulations, Abigail. You should be well pleased with yourself.”
A dozen well-wishers crowded around Abigail, and Mary kissed her on the cheek and left her to the ample affections of her admiring friends.
It was now little more than an hour after opening, and the crowd in the palais had swelled by the thousands. People bottlenecked the doorways, then surged into the rooms, sometimes stumbling in the press of humanity, tripping over trains, and catching petticoats in heels. Once safely inside a room, everyone was reluctant to return to the fray. After craning their necks to see the pictures that had been skied out of sight—paintings placed so high it seemed they had been hung in the clouds—the visitors milled about, closing in on pictures they liked and refusing to budge, ma
king the traffic inside the palais as impenetrable as it was outside. Mary assiduously avoided the “C” room but otherwise let the crowd carry her along, taking in the artwork in desultory spurts and starts. There was so much to see—two thousand paintings alone—that they all began to blur, and she hadn’t yet reached the statuary or architectural displays that dominated the other wing of the palais. By the time she reached the “M” room, her feet were sore and her spirits low. Someone abandoned a seat on a lone causeuse in the center of the room, and she sank onto its edge, contemplating her escape route and hoping that she would see no one she knew.
• • •
Edgar Degas stood in a flood of sunlight streaming through the glass ceiling. The harsh light was washing out every nuance of the exhibited paintings, only one of Degas’s many reasons for despising the Salon. The jury’s selections covered every inch of the high-ceilinged rooms and would, Degas was certain, have been suspended from the ceiling had painters not complained. Most of the artwork relegated to the rafters was invisible anyway, and artists were breaking down at every turn. Here and there clusters of consoling friends surrounded the afflicted, seeking to keep them from committing suicide on the spot. Their disappointment was a pitiful sight. Years before, Degas had written a letter to the director of the École des Beaux Arts, the state-sponsored school under whose purview the Salon lived, suggesting that rather than covering every inch of free wall, the canvases ought to be hung in rows of two at proper intervals so that each could be appreciated on its own merits, but his suggestion had gone unanswered and unheeded, as his uninvited suggestions usually did.
But Degas would not miss the Salon for anything, not only to discover what Corot and Daumier were up to, but also to fete his beleaguered friend Édouard Manet, who was pacing at his side, anxious about his painting’s reception. His Portrait of M. Faure, in the Role of Hamlet, was good, though not nearly as good as his Nana, the other painting he had submitted, which the jury had spurned. Henriette Hauser had modeled for that one. She was a well-known courtesan, whom Émile Zola was also glorifying in a book about her life. In the painting, Manet had included a man at the edge of the canvas observing her toilette. This had seemed to bother the jury, who also did not like the daring Zola, or the infamous Flaubert, for that matter, whose Madame Bovary had thrilled all of Paris twenty years before.
I Always Loved You Page 2