by John Jakes
He was halfway to the arch leading to the kitchen when the front door banged open again. Paul’s head had sunk onto his arms and he appeared to be dozing as Matt turned, saw the new arrival, and exclaimed, “Sime!”
Carrying a carpetbag in one hand, Strelnik rushed toward him. “Thank God. I left the house in such a rush, I didn’t have a chance to ask Dolly where you were. I was hoping you might be here.”
Matt had seldom seen his friend so agitated. “Sime, what’s wrong?”
“I’m afraid I may be in very serious trouble.”
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Lisa strolled up behind Matt and leaned on his shoulder, absently reaching down with her left hand to tweak his rump. Strelnik couldn’t see. He gave the barmaid a suspicious stare, then said to Matt, “I must talk to you privately.”
“All right. Excuse us, Lisa.”
She shrugged and disappeared again. Matt led the agitated little man to a table against the far wall, six or eight feet from Paul, who was snoring and making maudlin noises.
Strelnik jerked off his shabby cap and twisted it in his hands as he leaned forward. “I have to be gone for a few days, Matt. Will you look after Leah and the baby for me? See that nothing happens to them?”
Matt started to laugh. “What do you mean? What could possibly happen to them?”
“I don’t know,” Strelnik replied, nervously raking fingers through his bright red beard. “But I fear I’ve become a dangerous man to know. I want you to be aware of that before you agree to anything.”
Strelnik’s statements struck Matt as pretentious and melodramatic. Yet what he saw in the Russian’s round, dark eyes was the kind of fright that precluded laughter.
“I wish you’d explain that, Sime.”
“I’ll try. I’m still rather shaky. This afternoon certain—associates of mine sent a coded telegraph message. From Berlin.”
Matt was slow to realize the significance. Strelnik blurted, “My brother’s been arrested!”
“Your brother? I’m sorry to hear it. But how does that involve you?”
“I’m not sure. But I was advised to go into hiding. You see, Matt, my brother, Yuri, is allied with certain groups that oppose the monolithic state Otto Bismarck is attempting to build in Germany. Yuri had been trying to discover what position the Premier has taken in regard to the throne of Spain.”
Matt didn’t understand, and said so. Strelnik cast another anxious look toward the street entrance, then explained.
The throne of Spain had been left vacant after a political upheaval in 1868. It was still vacant because various claimants and candidates were maneuvering behind the scenes. Yuri Strelnik had learned that Bismarck was promoting Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Simaringen, a member of the ruling house of Prussia, for that kingship.
Bewildered, Matt shook his head. “Sime, forgive me. I still don’t follow.”
“No, I realize you don’t take politics very seriously, Matthew. But some men take it with deadly seriousness.”
“I know. I lost a brother because of men like that. Go on.”
“Yuri and his comrades wanted to expose the Hohenzollern candidacy. If it became a matter of public record, France would react violently, since the news would mean Prussia’s sphere of influence may soon extend to Spain.”
“I never imagined you and your crowd here in Paris were friends of the Emperor, Sime.”
“Definitely not! We’re interested solely in the people’s cause. However, any international friction that embarrasses Bismarck and blunts his drive for power works to the advantage of the German people. Bismarck wants to enthrone William, the Prussian king, as kaiser of a unified, militaristic-Germany. By hampering his plan we foster ours, which is the eventual overthrow of Bismarck’s regime.”
“And your cause is helped by exposure of a meaningless candidacy for a meaningless throne?”
“Believe me, the exposure would not be meaningless. France will not view it that way. The Emperor will consider Bismarck’s maneuver to be provocative. And doubly insulting because Bismarck kept the candidacy a secret until the Spanish parliament approved it.”
“You don’t mean France would declare war over a breach of protocol?”
“Oh, no, certainly not. That would be going too far. But severe diplomatic repercussions—those are virtually guaranteed.”
“All right, Sime, that’s reasonably clear. Just explain why you have to go into hiding.”
“Because Yuri finally obtained documentation of the Hohenzollern candidacy!”
“Have you seen it?”
“I have not. But the Prussians may think I have. Yuri and I correspond all the time. You know that. I’m sure they do too. And the Prussian eagle has talons that reach a great distance,” Strelnik declared with breathy emphasis. “A great distance.”
That much Matt was willing to grant, given the presence in Paris of men such as Lepp. Perhaps Strelnik had good cause for fear, though Matt did find if ludicrous that there could be such furor over an obsolete kingship. On the other hand, Jeremiah had been lost because of hotheaded partisanship for slavery, an outmoded and immoral institution, and for secession, a windy debating platform topic not worth one human life.
“You can count on Dolly and me to watch out for your wife and boy. Don’t worry about them.”
Strelnik put on his cap and picked up his carpetbag. “I’ll try not to, Matt.”
“Does Leah know where you’re going?”
“No one knows but the people who will be hiding me. I’ll come home as soon as I’m told that it’s safe. Meanwhile”—he pumped Matt’s hand—“thank you from the bottom of my heart. Yesterday you paid me a sort of reverse compliment. Now it’s my turn—”
One more swift look at the street door. “You are a decent man, Matthew—even if you do have no comprehension of what powers actually move the world. One of them isn’t a paintbrush. That much I’ll tell you. I fear that long after the cleansing revolutionary fire has burned out the old order you’ll still be standing in the ashes scratching your head and wondering what happened. And you’ll never understand why the old order had to die to make way for the new.”
“No, I won’t,” Matt agreed. “In case there’s an emergency, I do think I should know where to find you.”
“No, you shouldn’t!” Strelnik shot back with an alarmed look. “It will be safer that way.”
He picked up the carpetbag, paused at the door to look both ways along the avenue, then rushed off into the gathering twilight. For some reason, the little man’s last remark made Matt shiver.
Chapter VI
In the Studio of the Onion
i
NEXT MORNING HE woke before dawn, trembling in the spell of a dream in which he’d clearly seen himself standing before the finished painting of the Matamoras cantina.
The painting had been equally clear—a huge, crowded canvas conveying a sense of boisterous and bawdy life. From the central figure of the dark-haired dancing girl to the dim groupings at the tables around the perimeter, the images seemed to pulse with a kind of arrested motion. In the workroom of his dreaming mind, the painting had come out perfectly. But then Fochet was fond of saying, “Here is a truth that will prevent disappointment and self-satisfaction. The picture on your canvas is never as good as the one in your head.”
Details of the dream began to fade almost immediately. He left the bed quickly. When Dolly murmured and reached for him, he was already in the outer room. He lurched about, lighting a lamp and locating paper and a stick of charcoal.
He began scribbling a series of little scenes from the dream painting. A fat proprietor with mustachios like opposing horizontal question marks. Three Confederate captains bent over cards and tequila at one of the tables. A flamboyantly dressed vaquero practically cross-eyed with drink, reaching out to pinch the dancing girl. He finished four sketches before the dream slipped completely away.
In the summer he always slept naked, and tonight was no exception. Though the flat was co
ol, his body still felt warm from the fever of excitement. His heartbeat was unusually fast, his breathing quick and raspy.
He glanced up at the skylight, saw only brilliant stars against blackness. It wasn’t even close to morning. But he knew he couldn’t sleep. He dressed, then bent to kiss Dolly’s temple.
She lay on her side, snoring lightly again. Gently he touched her upraised hip, as if to bless and protect the unborn baby in her womb. In some curious but certain way, he already knew the child would be male.
How in God’s name could he let her even think about destroying their son? He couldn’t. At the same time, he could not—would not—surrender his independence.
All at once he had what struck him as an inspired idea. Perhaps Fochet would help resolve the dilemma!
The more he thought about the idea, the more he liked it. He was whistling as he passed from the garden into the Rue Saint-Vincent and set off at a brisk pace.
Just as false dawn broke, he let himself into the building which housed the atelier of Étienne Fochet on its second and topmost floor. The building was located halfway down the east slope of the hill crowned by marble-columned Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, the old church which elderly residents of the village said had once been a Roman temple. At the head of the stairs Matt unlocked the outer door of the studio. All the walls on the second floor had been knocked out to create one huge, loftlike room in which he quickly got to work.
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By lamplight he hammered a frame together, using scrap lumber Fochet kept for that purpose. The frame was six feet high, nine feet wide. Then he stretched and tacked a huge new piece of linen onto the frame. By nine o’clock, when the other students began to drift in, he had the linen prepared and the frame fitted into two small easels. The top of the frame leaned against the studio’s east wall.
Matt stood on a small box, applying the ground with swift, broad strokes. For the moment he’d forgotten everything else: Strelnik; Dolly; the problem of the baby; the fact that he hadn’t eaten breakfast; even where he was. The fever, the joyous fever, had claimed him again.
Soon, though, activity in the atelier made it impossible for him to totally shut out his surroundings. Fochet had thirty-one students. About half were present on any given day, the rest off doing copy work at the Louvre, sleeping with their mistresses, recovering from drinking bouts, or just loafing. Only ten of the students were still receiving formalized instruction. They and all the others paid the teacher a small fee which went toward the rent and the wages of whatever model he hired off the street that week. Fochet actually charged nothing for his occasional lectures or for individual instruction. A good thing, too, the students joked. The teacher’s usual manner was one of outrage, as if he really hated to be burdened with pupils. The truth was, he preferred teaching above everything else.
Shortly the atelier was in a state of hubbub. Matt kept working away at the ground while the day’s first fight broke out. Three students who had been loudly debating the artistic merits of Offenbach’s highly popular music decided to settle their differences by punching, kicking and biting each other. Most of the other students paid no attention. Two were guffawing like donkeys over a sketch one of them had done. The picture was a cruel caricature of the pendulous breasts and scraggly pubis of the naked fat girl who sat on a box on the dais in the center of the room. The poor creature looked baffled and vaguely alarmed as she stared out at the ring of young men around her, the clutter of easels and work cabinets, and the combatants tussling and screaming obscenities in the background.
All at once a door crashed open. Fochet stormed in to break up the fight. “Louts! Farmers!” He flailed about him, boxing ears. “Get to work or get out of here!”
The three brawlers separated, called him all sorts of filthy names, then went placidly back to their easels. Fochet shook his head in disgust and moved on, stopping here to observe, there to deliver a scathing critique. He lectured one pupil for five minutes, seized the brush from another’s hand and made a few swift corrections. No matter how harsh his criticism or how brusque his manner, the pupils didn’t complain. He was fierce, but he was respected.
Étienne Fochet had come from Limoges, the home city of a member of the Batignolles group, Auguste Renoir. Fochet had served an apprenticeship in the decorating rooms of a Limoges pottery factory, painting eighteenth-century swains and shepherdesses on an endless array of plates, jugs and cups. Renoir, coincidentally, had held a similar job as a boy, though in Paris. Renoir, however, was still a year shy of thirty. Fochet would never see fifty again.
As a much younger man just come up to Paris with ambition but no training, Fochet had studied with Courbet, who was almost exactly his own age and already doing revolutionary work. Courbet had rid his own painting of literary and mythological elements, and taught his pupils to do the same. He had forever changed the direction of contemporary art by painting subjects from everyday life. In fact, Fochet claimed to be one of the people depicted in what was perhaps Courbet’s most famous work—The Painter’s Studio, his 1855 canvas showing the artist at work in his crowded atelier. Fochet said he was the bearded man seated next to a pair of dogs at the extreme left. Matt had seen the picture several times and didn’t consider the resemblance pronounced.
Courbet had emphasized traditional technique blended with fidelity to observed detail. Fochet’s theory and practice went one more step. Slavish adherence to old-fashioned rules of technique was entirely secondary to what the artist observed. Only that which was optically apparent should be included in a painting. As he often put it, “The impression, only the visual impression matters! Nothing else is reality!”
A powerful smell told Matt the teacher was coming up behind him. Fochet constantly munched bits of stale red onion which he carried in a pocket of his paint-spotted blouse. His pupils called him l’oignon half derisively, half affectionately—but always behind his back. He was a short man, barely five feet, with an immense belly, kinky gray hair and lively brown eyes that could be fiercely intimidating. In his youth he’d worn a beard, but it was gone now, revealing heavily pitted cheeks.
“Well, Kent!” he exclaimed. “A picture in work at last! Good, good. You haven’t done much of anything for the last six months. In fact I was planning to ask you to move out so I could replace you with someone actually interested in painting. I had reached the conclusion that you continued to rent space here merely so you wouldn’t have to spend a hard winter on the streets.”
Matt was too excited about the new painting to let the sarcasm bother him. Fochet took notice of the huge frame, circumscribed it with choppy motions of one hand as he went on: “Ambitious. I doubt your talent’s up to handling anything that large, but I’m glad you’re trying. What’s it to be?”
Matt put his palette aside and wiped his hands with a rag dipped in diluent. “A café in Mexico.”
Fochet brightened perceptibly. “Something you’ve seen firsthand?”
“Yes, I drank there quite often when we took cargo up the Rio Grande river during the war.”
“Capital! I’ve always thought you were an idiot to ignore all the fascinating subject matter in your personal experience. Not to mention that in your homeland. When I was younger, Captain Catlin and his Indians convinced me America was a veritable trove of colorful subjects.”
“You mean George Catlin?”
“That’s right, the fellow who traveled and painted the western part of your country twenty or thirty years ago. He came to Paris in the forties. Exhibited his canvases and a band of Iowa Indians. My sister was a chambermaid at the Hotel Victoria, where he kept the savages. She smuggled me in so I could observe them. The beds were removed so the Indians could sleep on the floor. The sight of their sharp teeth gave my poor sister nightmares about cannibals. But Catlin made quite an impression over here. Quite an impression on me, too. I sometimes think Frenchmen are more appreciative of your country than you are, Kent.”
“I agree.” Matt grinned. “I don’t care if I
never see it again.”
“Stupid attitude.”
Matt stopped smiling, red-faced.
The teacher gestured at the linen half covered with the sand-colored ground. “Tell me more about what you’re planning.”
“The central figure’s to be a young Mexican dancing girl with combs in her hair. Here, I did a few preliminary studies—”
Fochet popped bits of onion in his mouth. He chewed while he examined the sketches. Presently he uttered a few monosyllabic grunts. Matt felt almost delirious with pleasure. Fochet’s grunts were virtually his highest form of compliment.
The tutor handed the drawings back, picked a speck of onion from the corner of his mouth and said with mock innocence, “Then I really needn’t concern myself with renting your space to someone else?”
“Oh, yes, you still may have to think about that. I don’t know how smoothly this is going to proceed. Dolly’s given me something besides work to worry about.”
Fochet frowned. “Is there trouble between you and your young lady?”
“Yes, I guess you’d call it trouble.”
“I can’t imagine that. She’s always seemed to be a fine sort—for a woman, that is.”
“She is a fine woman.” Matt nodded. “You know how I feel about her—”
“Don’t get too fond of her, Kent! I keep telling you that’s very bad for a painter. Sometime, if you wish, you may tell me the nature of your problem.” He shrugged as if it didn’t matter much. That was his usual way of inviting a student to pour out his deepest woes.
Matt lost no time. “The trouble is, we’re going to have a child.”
“Unexpected?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re certain?”
“Dolly says she is.”
“Hmmm. Well, I suppose congratulations are in order.” He sounded dubious. “Just don’t spend too many hours dandling the infant on your knee”—pieces of onion flew as Fochet waved at the oversized frame—“not if you really plan to complete a painting the size of one of Manet’s.”