Sometimes Degas stopped by. “It is memory,” he said to Katherine. “Mary is remembering you. It is all the life and love you have given her that she uses to paint you.”
“Memory?” Katherine asked.
“If an artist reproduces only what he sees, then where is the artistry?”
Degas seduced Katherine’s warming regard with a display of impeccable manners on his subsequent visits, which were suitably brief, and which Katherine thought showed a respect for propriety. Since that first disastrous dinner, there had been other, better evenings, with suggestions of joint summer excursions to the Bois de Boulogne for the horse races, to seduce Robert, who was a lover of racing, as was Degas. He even invited Robert to his studio to see some of his paintings of horses, which Robert, not knowing what a great exception this invitation represented, had yet to accept.
When Katherine’s portrait was finished, Mary painted Lydia, who had recovered sufficiently by February to both sit for her portrait and get about town, accompanying Mary to the Opéra, where the gilded chandelier and searing limelight ameliorated the oppressive dark of winter. Mary, in need of ever-widening subjects, carried a small sketchbook in pockets she had sewn into her evening dresses for the purpose. Sometimes she and Lydia met Louisine Elder and Mary Ellison there, who forgave the rasp of Mary’s pencil during the performance as she sketched the theatergoers, the embellished ceiling of painted cherubs floating in a blue sky, and the ornate curves of the crystal chandelier from their box, composing pictures in her mind, bending over her book to finish even as the performances ended and people stood to applaud. Mary avoided Degas’s night, which was Monday. She did not want to greet him on the fishbowl of the grand staircase, where every turned head was remarked on, and every whisper repeated the next day.
Lydia loved the portrait that Mary was painting of her. In it, she wore her most daring evening gown and a string of tight pearls, and she was being painted as if she were seated in a loge at the Opéra. She had begun to feel much better, despite the loathsome visits to the abattoir, though she didn’t like the bemused and sympathetic expression on the doctor’s face even when she was feeling her best. Mary insisted that her skin shone with such luminosity that she would certainly be better now for all of time. Lydia hoped that was true. The swelling in her hands and face had exhausted her and the headache had felt like death. In the weeks afterward, it had been difficult to go out, for she could hardly appear in public when her face took on that chipmunk puffiness and her stomach swelled to twice its normal size. And she descended into such a fog. But it was true, all the dullness in her skin had disappeared, and she was happy to be in Paris again.
“Is my picture to be an answer to Monsieur Degas’s danseuses?” Lydia said. “Degas paints the dancers and you paint the audience?”
“Not as an answer, no,” Mary said, hoping that no one else would draw the same conclusion, though the picture was an answer, of sorts. One had to paint something, and she could not draw cafés or bathhouses as the men did, nor did she wish to impinge on Berthe’s glorious dressing rooms. The answer had come to her one night as she despaired. She didn’t want to sit women in chairs forever and paint them as if they spent all their lives embroidering. Her portraits needed a context, and the Opéra was perfect. But Lydia’s painting was taking longer than usual. For the first time, Mary was painting a detailed background: It wasn’t just a picture of Lydia; it was a picture of Lydia at the Opéra. And she was still learning the new technique. The style change mystified her family, who had been schooled by Mary to believe that academic art was the ideal art and that all her training had been leading her toward success in that realm. Mary had fueled that belief over the years by sending home newspaper clippings of her triumphs at the Salon. Now she was declaring that she’d been set free from the prison of the Salon. She talked on and on of rendering form by indicating it with color rather than establishing it with line, of lightening her brushstrokes and palette, of abandoning the formal for the informal. She detailed the best ratio of poppy seed oil to paint, varying it as she painted layer upon layer, pushing the pure colors out of the way with her wet brush laden with yet another color, juxtaposing tones so that she could render high and low lights. Day after day she talked of applying the new techniques she was finally inhaling from her conversations at the Manets’ Thursdays, where she had given up being the polite newcomer and cornered Pissarro when he was in town, or begged Renoir to discuss tones and values. Her family had yet to go with her. Robert said he would rather die than suffocate in a parlor of writers and artists, and Katherine claimed that she was still too American to plunge into such a bohemian crowd.
• • •
Winter gave way to a warm, if wet, spring, and across Paris artists were once again in the clutches of Salon fever. For the first time, Mary was not at the mercy of a jury, but the impressionist exhibition was scheduled for June and by the beginning of April she had only four canvases ready: a portrait of her father, one of her mother, and two of Lydia. She was beginning to despair. What else to paint? She was not Degas. She couldn’t find a thousand ways to paint a woman in a loge. They would always be elegant, always coiffed, always caged. Daily, the sense of panic widened. Unable to afford a model, unable to paint outside in the rain, unable to think of another pose for her family, she fretted her time away in the studio. She set her easel at the window to try to capture the street scene, only to fail miserably. She stalked people in the Place d’Anvers, hoping someone would sit so that she could sketch them surreptitiously, but everyone flew past in the blustery wind. She even considered visiting a café, but the horror of being a woman alone defeated her.
To distract herself, Mary went with Lydia to the Opéra on a Monday night, the only night that week that Mary could obtain cheap tickets. During intermission, they ran into Degas in the doorway of the grand foyer, a strategic location from which he liked to observe the ascending and descending patrons on the grand staircase, with their stunning dresses of silk and brocade, their headdresses bobbing in the shimmer of the thousand candles that graced the crystal chandeliers set high above the staircase. One had only to stand and gaze at the architecture to be amazed; the dancing and singing onstage were mere dessert.
Degas took one look at Mary and grasped her by the elbow, steering her to a balcony overlooking the grand staircase, out of the crush of patrons crowding into the foyer in search of mid-show sustenance in the form of champagne. Lydia trailed behind, but turned her back on them, enacting the faithful blindness of sympathetic chaperones throughout time. She gazed over the staircase and sipped from her own flute of sustenance, bubbling water in deference to the doctor.
“What is the matter?” Degas asked Mary. “Are you ill? Or is it something worse?”
“I don’t know what to paint. I can’t do another portrait of my family or I shall go mad. Not that I don’t love you, Lyddy dear,” she said over her shoulder.
“Of course not, darling,” Lydia said. Chaperones might be blind but they were never known to be deaf. Besides, she wasn’t certain she wanted to sit again for Mary. The brief spate of good health she had enjoyed in February seemed to be abating. It was little things, noticeable only to her. Her rings too tight on her fingers, the darkening of her urine. It was embarrassing being ill with such an indelicate malady, one so private that she felt shame even with the doctor, who examined her with a serious but furtive air, and who studied the contents of her chamber pot even while she was in the room. Coming to the Opéra with Mary was a way to forget, as well as to appease her mother’s worries over the nature of Mary’s friendship with the French artist she feared might hurt her daughter, but about whom Lydia had no reservations. Besides, it was nice to be out and pretend she wasn’t ill; she told no one, but she counted every day as possibly her last, a grim yet realistic approach Mary would consider too dire and dramatic. Mary wanted Lydia to believe, and so she pretended to believe, to make Mary happy.
“I have no money to pay a model,” Mary said t
o Degas. “I don’t know what to do.”
“You must find your subject.”
Mary said, “Like yours? Ballet, horses, brothels?”
“Obsessions are an artist’s gift. Obsession is poetry,” Degas said.
The intermission chimes rang and they parted, but not before Degas asked Lydia about her health, pressing his hand into hers, taking from her the champagne flute and hunting down a waiter so that she wouldn’t have to be bothered.
Chapter Twenty-One
Édouard and Eugène Manet were seated on a bench in one of the many alcoves along the vaulted hallway of the Île de la Cité hospital, awaiting Édouard’s turn with Monsieur Siredy, the family’s doctor friend who would no doubt have come to the house had Édouard asked. But Édouard had not wanted to alarm Suzanne, who could be impossible when she was frightened, and he deemed it better, on the whole, not to arouse trepidation in a household full of women who might feed his barely contained panic. He was having a hard enough time as it was. His note to Eugène had been deliberately cryptic. Would Eugène meet him, please, on the Pont Neuf, the following morning at nine o’clock? Eugène had only learned of their destination after Édouard had picked him up and given further directions to the hack driver.
The pain had attacked one morning when Édouard had been wandering down the Rue de Rivoli, following a fetching laundress he had spied. He’d been enjoying the undulations of her hips and the plump strength of her arms when a lightning bolt struck his leg, traveling from his hip down the inside of his leg to his ankle, a pain that caused him to buckle and cry out as the girl swayed away, oblivious. Two passing men leapt to help, asking whether he’d been shot and where was the blood, but there was no blood, only the sharp memory of pain.
It happened again a week later, a violent assault that, because he feared its return, terrified him. Once was an aberrancy, but twice was a warning. The pain inhibited Édouard’s favorite aspect of life in Paris. The pleasure of Paris was to be outside and to walk its narrow streets and wide boulevards, to swagger along the Rue de Rivoli and peer into the shops, to wander the quays of the Seine to look down onto the river and the sequestered lovers on its shores, to navigate the places and squares on his way to a café, to experience the delight of the women of Paris—to look at them and dream of them and flirt with them.
The pain struck a third time one day as he stood at his easel, painting. A third time was a prophecy: It would happen again and again. To deny it was to invite destruction.
He told no one but Eugène, and only just this morning. To display his weakness to his younger brother was the kind of odd development that the pain was engendering. But he could not have sat so calmly in the bedlam of the hospital were it not for Eugène’s diffident company. If Eugène suspected Édouard’s love for Berthe, it did not seem to impinge on his brotherly sympathies. They sat waiting together, Eugène stalwart and present, for the better part of an hour, until the doctor called him in. Eugène went into the surgery with him. If the doctor thought the brothers unusual for coming together, or for coming to see him at the hospital rather than requesting that he see them at home, he did not say.
Édouard told his story, and Eugène, unaware of the multiple occurrences of the attacks, listened with an impassive yet attentive affect. When Édouard was finished, the doctor asked a series of questions. Of late was he particularly irritable? Was he prone to ideas of grandeur?
Édouard shook his head and the doctor looked to Eugène.
“He is a painter,” Eugène said, shrugging.
Monsieur Siredy pulled a rubber hammer from his coat pocket and tapped Édouard’s knees. His legs flew off the table and swung back in a display of limitless exuberance. The doctor asked more specific questions. Had his speech changed? Had he become forgetful? Had his muscles weakened and that was why he had fallen?
“No and no,” Édouard said. “The pain made me fall.”
“Are you having trouble forming sentences?”
“Do I seem it?” Édouard said.
Again the doctor looked at Eugène.
Eugène said, “I have never known my brother to be at a loss for words.”
“And, how often, my friend,” the doctor asked, “do you visit the brothels? Have you had any rashes, any sores? How long ago? Did you ever lose your hair? Think, now. This could have occurred some time ago.” Though the police regularly examined the brothel denizens for venereal disease, there was always the chance a prostitute could blossom into fulminant contagion the second she stepped outside the doctor’s surgery. It was a chilling thought, one that sobered every Parisian male whenever the prospect was mentioned, and it was mentioned often, usually in asides and whispers, whenever an entertaining night on the town was proposed.
With a rush of terror, Édouard understood what the doctor was implying. His father had died of Neapolitan disease; he had suffered enormously. But how did a man remember a rash? When it appeared, its nature? When he’d been young, when his father had banished him from art to force him to find a more respectable career, Édouard had joined the merchant marine. They’d sailed to Rio. There had been the carnival, the freedom. And afterward, there had been Paris and the brothels, Suzanne, and other willing women. But he was careful. Some of the time. Most of the time.
Édouard said, “A man lives. You understand.”
The doctor nodded. “We can watch this. It’s possible there is another explanation.”
“Something benign?” Édouard said.
The doctor pressed his lips together. “Come to see me if the pain recurs.” He turned to Eugène. “Are you having the same troubles?”
Eugène shook his head, and Édouard thought that it must be the first time in Eugène’s life that he was happy not to have imitated him.
Outside, Édouard said, “Don’t tell Berthe.”
“She would only worry,” Eugène said. “Will you tell Suzanne?”
“And suffer her hysteria?”
Édouard took the carriage, but Eugène crossed the Pont Notre-Dame on foot to catch the omnibus that ran along the Rue de Rivoli. Édouard envied his brother’s galloping gait. Who would have thought after all these years that Eugène would be the lucky one in everything?
Chapter Twenty-Two
Several days after Mary and Lydia had seen Degas at the Opéra, Mary received a note at her studio.
My dearest M,
Are you alone?
D
She paid the urchin a sou to return her brief answer.
Oui.
Less than half an hour later, Degas was knocking at the door of her studio, holding the hand of a little girl he hoisted into his arms as they stepped inside. The girl flung her arms around Degas’s neck and peeked at Mary from the safety of the folds of his plaid woolen scarf. He untied the child’s hat, revealing a mass of dark curls that cascaded down her back.
“You brought a chaperone?”
“I did. You said you were alone.”
“Is she yours?” Mary asked. She had never seen him with a child before.
He laughed and petted the girl’s curls. “She belongs to some friends. But she likes me very much—don’t you, sweetheart? Eloise, meet Mademoiselle Cassatt. Mademoiselle Cassatt is very nice, but she is very sad because she doesn’t know any little girls in Paris.”
Eloise squirmed in his arms and he set her down. The coal stove hadn’t yet heated the studio, so Degas unwound his scarf and gave it to the girl. She dragged it across the floor and climbed onto the blue armchair Mary had brought from the apartment after her father expressed his distaste for its tufted flowered upholstery. The girl dangled her legs, her expression a cross between patience and boredom. Mary’s dog circled the chair, then huddled into a mop near the stove.
“When I said I was going out of my mind at the Opéra, I didn’t mean that I was pining for a child,” Mary said.
“You should paint her,” Degas said.
“Paint her?”
The girl’s coat had scrunched a
bove her knees, and she was kicking her legs, sprawled on the seat of the blue armchair, one hand propped behind her head, the scarf entwined about her waist. Mary set down the sketchbook in which she’d been struggling to devise an idea, any idea. She’d been staring out the window when she’d received Degas’s note, wishing she painted cityscapes, landscapes, anything, just so that she could begin.
“Tell me the truth. Did her parents ask for you to do her portrait?”
“Yes, but I told them I would do their darling child no justice and that I had a friend who possessed the most sublime ability to express a child’s spirit.”
“You want to give me an obsession? Obsessions aren’t adopted. Obsessions seize your soul,” Mary said.
“I have no control or concern over what you paint next. But this child is beautiful and she deserves your brush.”
“But I’ve never painted a child before.”
Eloise was playing with Degas’s scarf, singing to herself, calling to the dog, who sidled up to the chair and collapsed at her feet. Despite the cold, she threw off her coat, revealing a white dress and petticoats, and then slumped back again, dragging Degas’s scarf across her dress. The tartan clashed with the upholstery in a beguiling contrast.
“Will she hold a pose?”
“Realism, my dear. How do children really behave? You don’t need to lie. That’s the problem with bad art. It lies.”
The exquisite terror of beginning flooded through Mary as an idea formed in her mind: something new, not quite a portrait, but something else, something about being a child in an adult world.
I Always Loved You Page 14