Sun in Splendour

by JH Fletcher

  Because it is my home. But she did not say so, knowing her mother would despise such a notion. ‘Give me the address where we lived,’ she said.

  Eugénie’s eyes were affronted by such an extraordinary notion. ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘Because I’d like to go and see it.’

  ‘You are a romantic,’ she said severely.

  Marie understood that she meant it as a criticism, but did not care. ‘I know,’ she said.

  4

  Marie and Brett arrived in Paris in the last week of January, 1910, on a day of lowering cloud, bitter cold and endless rain.

  ‘What have we come to?’ Brett wondered.

  What, indeed. The city was flooded. Most of the trains had stopped running, the Métro was closed. The Seine was reported to be three times its normal level; thousands had been evacuated from the low-lying sections of the city.

  They found a hotel, had to pay a fortune for a room. They complained, but the proprietor spread his hands, indifferently. They could pay or sleep out in the rain: it was all one to him. They paid.

  In the morning, after a wretched night, Marie set out through the still pouring rain to find Monsieur Hibou, impresario and sub-agent to Stanford Harris.

  Although her rusty French was good enough to communicate with passers-by, not everyone was willing to answer as she tried to ask her way through the confusion of streets and traffic. By the time she had found the right address, she was bedraggled, drenched, thoroughly out of temper with Paris and the weather.

  Monsieur Hibou, short, fat, button-bright, in a frock coat that had seen better days, greeted her with enthusiasm and arms that clasped her wet form as though it were the most precious thing he had seen in his life.

  ‘Madame, you should have sent a note. I would have arranged for a cab to bring you here to me. Tell me, when did you arrive in Paris?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘And your hotel. He is comfortable, yes?’

  ‘No. He is very uncomfortable.’

  ‘But that is terrible! And this rain … What will you think of us?’ But brightened, despite his doubts, and wiped his moustache, eyes beaming at her. ‘Never mind! I shall arrange everything. Your husband, he is with you, yes?’

  Easier to agree than explain. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Magnificent!’ Monsieur Hibou was clearly a man of enthusiasms. ‘And you are visiting France for the exhibition of your work that I am arranging? And in order to paint? Yes?’

  ‘To trace my family, too, if I can.’

  ‘You have relatives in Paris?’

  ‘None that I know of. My mother comes from Nantes.’

  ‘Nantes?’ He waved away the name scornfully, a Parisian to whom the provinces were lands peopled by savages. ‘You have the address where your parents stayed in Paris, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes. But that isn’t the point.’

  He did not understand. ‘Then what is the point, Madame?’

  She was seeking, not a person, or people, but the ephemeral pulse that would identify for her the sense of belonging that she believed she must find, if her life and art were to establish a solid basis for their existence. She could not explain it properly even to herself; with this welcoming little man who was, nonetheless, a stranger, she did not intend even to try.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Old church records,’ he suggested and shrugged, the unconscious gesture that she had seen her mother use so often. ‘Well, we shall see.’

  ‘Does it always rain like this?’

  ‘All the years of my life, I have known nothing like it. In some parts of the city, people are even using boats. They say that the Louvre’s Sculpture Gallery may be under threat.’

  ‘Hopefully it will end soon.’

  Shrug, shrug. ‘Who can say?’

  With Hibou’s help, they found inexpensive rooms off Notre Dame des Champs, in Montparnasse, that district of artists. It was decrepit, inconvenient, adorable; dark, damp, secretive walls framed by trees whose black branches sawed all night against the top of a mouldering wall. There was no power; all the cooking had to be done on a tiny charcoal stove.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Marie told Brett. ‘I’ve come home. I can feel it. I shall do such work … I promise you, this is going to be a place of marvels.’

  She was so excited that she could have run pell-mell through the cobblestoned streets, full of all the wonderful things that she was sure would happen to her in this picturesque, dirty, crowded city.

  ‘My city,’ she exclaimed, eyes glowing.

  She set up her easel here, there, everywhere, waiting for miracles of composition and insight to flow from the fact that she was in Paris at last.

  Miracles did not happen, but her work continued to improve and Hibou was delighted, promising great things from the show that he said was scheduled for the autumn.

  ‘I told you,’ she exulted to Brett. ‘There’s something in the atmosphere of this place. I can taste it on my tongue.’

  Her joy frothed, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Her energy, like her excitement, was endless.

  Brett was also painting, although more quietly. Selling pictures, too, which was as well. Even with Horace’s money they would have been hard put to survive without Brett’s input; like all cities, Paris was no place to be if you were hard up.

  Brett made contact with a group of Russian radicals. For a while they spent every evening with them, plotting the overthrow of the existing order in cafés where the tobacco-stained air was ferocious with promises of the violence that would purge evil from the world.

  During these discussions Marie said nothing, but sat a little apart. In the company of plotters, she did her own plotting: light and line and movement, paintings-in-the-making that she reproduced, next day, in the apartment: of clustered figures, bearded and vociferous, brandishing fists and arguments in the smoke-filled air.

  After she had exhausted the visual possibilities of café society, Marie got sick of the discussions, the bombast and argument and rage.

  It all seemed so futile.

  ‘All they do is talk,’ she complained.

  Not quite. There was the occasional bomb which, as far as Marie could see, achieved nothing except for the one that blew up the anarchist who had been placing it against a railing in the Luxembourg Gardens.

  ‘Why there, for heaven’s sake? Who could it possibly kill there?’

  ‘It wasn’t intended to kill anyone! It was a gesture, to focus attention on the discontent of the masses.’

  Brett spoke as though quoting from a textbook on revolution. Perhaps he was.

  ‘Such talk … Like wearing someone else’s clothes. Don’t you have any thoughts of your own, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘They are my thoughts.’

  Even if they were, it made her no happier; she had no patience with gestures that blew young men to pieces without achieving anything. Yet, while she refused to join in the arguments and abuse, she remained tolerant of Brett’s enthusiasms. She was painting well, and they had enough to eat. That was all that mattered.

  She looked for their old apartment, but Hibou had warned her that the district had been redeveloped and she got no closer than the Père Lachaise cemetery where, Eugénie had told her, the revolutionaries, and others, had been butchered against the wall.

  It was a warm day; the leaves of the plane trees hung limp. Among the gravestones and the dead, the atmosphere was peaceful, now. It was hard to believe that there, against that wall, the soldiers had carried out the executions that Eugénie had described so graphically, that later on her own father had been one of those who had died.

  She ran her fingers over the surface of the whitewashed wall. No hint, now, of what had happened. She looked over the wall at the people, walking this way and that along the street. The air bellowed with gunfire, but no-one would have known; no-one, as far as she could tell, remembered or cared.

  ‘Talk …’ She spoke aloud to the soft green shadows beneath the tree
s. ‘It’s all they ever do. What’s the use of it?’

  Again Marie searched for the address her mother had given her, but had no luck. The apartment, like her father, might never have existed. As her past, in this place, might never have existed. As she, the flesh and bones and sinews that comprised Marie Desmoulins, had never existed, in this place.

  Because she was no longer what she had been. She was herself, a grown woman, over a third of her life already completed. Those years had changed her, and the material substance of her body. She had read that every seven years the cells of the body replaced themselves. When the process stopped, the body died. The mind must change, too, she thought. If she were not the woman she had been, it also meant that she was not the being she would become. Would she look back, some time in the future, and remember this moment? Would she mock the little sadnesses that now loomed so large?

  She wanted to go on, always. She wanted to change, yet the idea of change frightened her. To be unknown, even to herself … There was conflict in that, too. For, if past and present were one, time was not a progression, but a constant is. So the future was also the present, she thought.

  She left the cemetery and walked slowly downhill in the direction of the river. Her mother had told her that this must have been the way her father had gone, after he had left the apartment. He and the young woman he had been trying to save. Perhaps the soldiers had caught them here? Or there, under that tree?

  She came eventually to the road that ran alongside the water. The river was grey, choppy in the wind that had sprung up. Perhaps he had died here? Perhaps he had drowned? Perhaps the soldiers had killed them both and thrown their bodies into the water? Perhaps he had not died at all, but abandoned them, gone with the young woman to another place, another life?

  Eugénie had always insisted that Alain was dead; it was the most likely explanation. But Marie would never be certain and, without certainty, there would be no end to grief.

  Yet the river drew her, and she remembered the holiday on the New South Wales coast, shortly before the break-up of her marriage, and the rowing boat she had hired.

  The following week she wanted Brett to come with her while she explored the reaches of the Seine outside the city.

  He would not. ‘I’ve things to do.’ But would not say what they were.

  ‘Please yourself.’ She took her gear, caught a bus to the outskirts and walked through the water meadows beside the river, seeking what she might find.

  She found a meadow bright with golden flowers. She stopped to sketch, but could not settle. Instead, she wrote notes of the colours she had seen and moved on. Art should be representational, she thought. But representational of what? She stopped, staring across the river at the far bank. The impact of the water, the colour, the light. The sun, shining in splendour … That was truth, certainly, but only one of many truths. She turned on her heel to look behind her at the flower-bright meadow stretching away. That, too, was truth. She was in the midst of it, immersed by what she could see and what she could not.

  She broke a grass stem, chewed the end. The taste was also truth. She split the stem with her thumb nail, bent her head to examine more closely the fibre of the grass which, until that moment, had been invisible. Also the truth. And what about the rest, the invisible world of atoms and whatever might lie beyond the atoms, the thoughts and joy and sorrow, the essence of being?

  ‘How do I do it?’ Voice raised, she appealed to the light, the river and colours and shadows. ‘How can I hope to capture truth?’

  She climbed a stile, came to an inlet that the current had carved out of the bank during some past flood. Here were children who shrieked as they flung themselves joyously into the bubble-frothed water. There was the smell of damp earth, the insinuation of emerald-green shoots, emerging silently from the rich mud.

  How do I paint the joy?

  She sat by a hedge, ears filled by the shrilling voices, mind perplexed by all the things she wanted to do. Without which, she told herself, her life would have no meaning.

  What meaning should it have? People had lived on the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. Each one was born, lived, died. All had meaning, or none of them. How to portray the truth of that?

  She noticed a flat slate, like a gravestone, beside the hedge. She looked more closely. It was a gravestone. Someone who had drowned, she guessed. There was no way of being sure, nor did it seem to matter. We live, we die, we lie among the anonymous and unnumbered dead.

  Yet … Her mind was disturbed by an unexplained resonance. She stood up and walked on. Around the next bend was a village. She spoke to a man and arranged to return the following weekend, to hire a boat that she would use to explore, and paint, the river. Meaningless or not, her life still had to be lived.

  One more thing: ‘That grave on the river bank, half a mile upstream? Do you know whose it is?’

  ‘They say it was a man. We never knew his name.’

  Again the resonance, like a harp string plucked in the warm summer air. ‘Someone who drowned?’

  ‘No, Madame.’ His expression was stern. ‘Someone who was shot.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Long ago, now. In my father’s time. After the Commune. They say he came down from Paris in a boat. Perhaps to escape: who knows? Something happened to the boat and he swam ashore there, on the point. The soldiers shot him. There were many who died, in those days.’

  ‘Alone? Or did he have a woman with him?’

  ‘I heard nothing about a woman.’

  She walked across the meadow until she regained the road.

  We never knew his name. Yet Marie knew. She could not; it was impossible. Yet she did.

  After a while a bus came and she returned to Paris. Under the hedge, the grave with its slab of slate remained, as did the air of the river bank, scented with flowers, bright with the cries of children.

  5

  In the city, there were roadblocks everywhere. Even the bus, and its passengers, were searched by bullying police.

  ‘What are they looking for?’

  No-one knew except, perhaps, the police, and they weren’t saying.

  ‘You should have come with me,’ she told Brett when she got back to the apartment. ‘It was nice by the river.’

  ‘I had things to do.’ He spoke sharply.

  She stared at him. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Why should anything be the matter?’ Yet her question had made him jerk, as though she had stuck him with a knife.

  ‘Where did you go, anyway?’

  ‘I’ve been here all day.’

  ‘But you said —’

  ‘The meeting was cancelled.’

  ‘Something’s on the go in the city,’ she told him. ‘There are flics everywhere.’

  ‘Did anyone follow you home?’

  She laughed. ‘I should be so lucky.’

  ‘It’s nothing to laugh about.’

  Certainly, Brett was far from laughing. His eyes were starting in his head as though … Frightened? she thought, perplexed. What’s he got —? And things fell into place.

  His refusal to go down the river with her. The cancelled meeting. His insistence that he had spent all day indoors. The police.

  Oh God, she thought.

  ‘What have you been up to?’

  Nothing, he told her. There was supposed to have been a meeting …

  She did not believe a word of it. ‘Who with?’

  ‘Friends.’

  ‘Which friends?’

  ‘You don’t know them.’

  ‘What was the meeting about?’

  ‘Stop cross-examining me!’ he shouted, while his eyes zigzagged like bats about the room.

  ‘Tell me!’

  Eventually, sulkily, he gave ground. There’d been talk of a strike, he said.

  ‘And the police?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘I begin to wonder.’ She was more and more convinced that he knew exactly what was going on.
It made her furious, not because of whatever he had done, but for not trusting her enough to tell her about it. I deserve better than that, she thought.

  ‘Another bomb?’

  ‘No!’ His denial more shrill than ever.

  ‘You might as well tell me,’ she said. ‘It’ll be in the papers tomorrow.’

  She got it out of him in the end; almost wished she hadn’t.

  ‘The Mona Lisa?’ she said, her voice as shrill as his. ‘You’ve stolen the Mona Lisa?’

  ‘Not me,’ he protested.

  ‘Thank God it wasn’t. What happened?’

  They had wanted to do something to catch the headlines.

  ‘You’ve certainly done that,’ she said.

  The idea had been to raise money for the poor.

  ‘We plan to write letters to the papers, telling them why we’ve done it. When they pay the ransom, we’ll let them have the painting back.’

  He made it sound so reasonable; it was lunacy. She tried to remain calm, and patient. ‘How did you do it?’

  It had been easy, he told her. One of them had walked into the Louvre, waited until the gallery was clear, taken the picture off the wall —

  ‘Who?’

  ‘An Italian house painter, mad as a hatter,’ he said. ‘You don’t know him. It was his idea.’

  ‘To steal it for the poor?’

  ‘Well …’

  That had not been the painter’s plan. He was obsessed by the idea that the Mona Lisa had no business in Paris, but should be returned to Tuscany, where Leonardo had painted it.

  ‘What’s he going to say when he hears you plan to sell it back to the government?’

  ‘What can he say?’

  ‘He could start by giving the police all your names.’

  ‘Not without betraying himself.’

  ‘He may not care about that, if he’s crazy.’

  It was clear that Brett had never given the matter a thought. ‘He wouldn’t do that,’ he said uneasily.

  ‘I thought you were planning revolution,’ Marie said, ‘not stealing pictures out of museums.’

  ‘Not stealing!’ He was defensive, angry. ‘Promoting the revolutionary cause.’