With Violets

by Elizabeth Robards

  Poor Papa had such a hard time of it. Three days before Christmas his declining health forced him to retire. Nearly one month to the day later, he was dead.

  Now Maman leans on me for strength. Over the years, I have caused her more than her share of heartache. Now I shall stand strong for her, putting forth a countenance resilient enough for the both of us, keeping my woes to myself.

  “Berthe, dear,” she says from across the breakfast table. “I have learned the hard way I cannot tell you what to do. You are much too headstrong to listen to me. I respect that you have your own way of doing things. But my Bijou, I fear I am not capable of weathering this storm on my own.”

  I reach across the table and take her hand. “Maman, please do not worry. I am here for you.”

  She squeezes my fingers, releases me, and wipes a tear from her eye.

  “I must ask something of you. I know it will not be easy, nonetheless I must prevail upon you.”

  “Anything, Maman.”

  “The Manets are coming for a visit today.”

  This news gives me a jolt. Édouard and I have not spoken in months. My lack of communication with him has spilled over to the rest of the family. I am sure Suzanne is no worse for my absence. She got her way. In fact, I’m sure she is quite happy. However, Eugène and Madame Manet, they did nothing to deserve my silence.

  “I beg you to mend your differences with the family. Make peace with them before we lose their friendship forever.”

  I think about the ups and downs Édouard and I have experienced over the past six years. It gives me pause to consider where we can go on from here. Where do you go when you’ve tested a relationship to its limits and blown a few holes in it while trying. Do all further attempts simply leak out through the wounds and abrasions never mended? Or is this our chance to heal?

  Although a tiny voice inside warns me against hoping for too much.

  “Of course, Maman. I should be happy to help you entertain them.”

  They arrive less than an hour later. Édouard, Suzanne, Eugène, and Madame Manet.

  Édouard carries a small package. He hands it to me and says, “Please open this later.”

  He does not smile. His gaze does not linger about my face as it used to. He simply hands me the package, takes Suzanne’s elbow, and helps her to the sofa. I notice now that she is limp-ing and wonder what she has done to herself.

  Maman gives the package a curious glance, but does not belabor the matter. I excuse myself and take it to my room.

  I set it on the foot of the bed and turn to go, but my curi-osity gets the better of me and I tear off the plain brown paper.

  It is the small still life Édouard had presented to me that last day. The fan, the bouquet of blue violets, the note with that inscription. In the air directly above the letters I trace the words to Mlle. Berthe from E. Manet.

  My heart fills with a hollow longing the likes of which I believe will never be quenched.

  All this emotion brewing inside me like a storm rolling in over the sea. Merci Dieu, it does not slip past the iron barrier I have erected.

  I rejoin our guests in the drawing room. As I enter, I see them all sitting there as they have so often during visits and our weekly soirées. I am overcome by a sense of loss that runs deeper than Papa’s death. I have the feeling that long after Maman and I vacate the house, our laughter and tears will be imprinted on these walls.

  I cannot imagine the memories of so many good times just fading away.

  “Berthe, dear, the brothers Manet have expressed an interest in visiting your studio. Would you be so kind as to take them?”

  Out of courtesy more than genuine interest in her joining us, I cast Suzanne a glance.

  “Would you like to come?”

  “Merci, non. I have twisted my ankle and the doctor has advised me to stay off of it as much as possible. But thank you for asking.”

  A vibration passes between Suzanne and me. It is hard to explain—she is not completely smug, not entirely warm. It is somewhere in the middle. I might call it a certain understanding.

  I don my cloak and lead Eugène and Édouard to the snow-covered garden, with its leaf less trees and frozen ground, toward my sad little studio that sits all alone.

  The naked trees stand dark and barren, silhouetted against the gray sky. I have always wondered at winter’s light. The sky looks a seamless quilt of clouds that hang so low it seems possible to reach up and touch them. I’ve been trying my entire life, yet they’ve always managed to remain just beyond my reach.

  The men’s footsteps crunch the frozen ground as they walk behind me, and I sink deeper into my cloak. Something in the air reminds me of my childhood, makes me wistful. This garden contains so many memories of our family, when we were whole. The sound of children laughing somewhere on the other side of the garden wall. The smell of hot brioche drifting from a nearby home. The steady puff of gray smoke escaping from the surrounding chimneys. Households so alive, and so unaware that time is a bandit that prowls in the night, stealing lives and beauty and purpose.

  I open the studio door to admit the brothers Manet, and snowflakes begin to fall from the sky.

  The men shake them off as they enter.

  “Please excuse the mess.” I rub my hands together to warm

  them. “I have already started packing. Everything is in a bit of disarray.”

  “No need to worry, Mademoiselle,” says Eugène.

  I am surprised to hear him speak up like this. While Édouard, a bit sullen, hangs back, for once allowing his brother to take the lead.

  “If you require assistance with the move,” Eugène says, “I should be more than happy to lend my services.”

  “Merci, Monsieur. I might accept your generous offer closer to the date of the actual relocation.”

  “And when will that be?” Édouard asks. His back is to us as he looks out the window.

  “A fortnight yet.”

  “And what will you do for a studio?” he asks, still gazing out onto the frost-covered lawn.

  “There is an extra bedroom that will work nicely. Not as spacious as what I am used to.” I sigh. “But as I said, it will do.”

  Édouard turns around as if I have uttered something that has grabbed his interest.

  “How is your collection of work for the Anonymous Cooperative Society shaping up? I should very much like to see it.”

  He holds out his hands palms up in an arrogant gesture. A small bolt of ire zags through my veins. He is being proud. Calling me to task because I dared defy him.

  “Monsieur, I have recently lost my father. I have not been in the position to produce much work as my mother has required all my devotion.”

  Édouard looks as if he has swallowed a frog. He bows his head. “Of course, how thoughtless of me. I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle.”

  “But will you show?” asks Eugène.

  “At this point it is unlikely that I will have a large enough body of work.”

  “What a shame,” says Eugène. “From what I hear, the organization sounds like a dynamic outfit.”

  Édouard’s glance is a poison dart. Yet it seems to bounce off Eugène without effect. I am intrigued. Surely Eugène was aware of his brother’s stance on the Societe. Yet he was bold enough to have an opinion to the contrary.

  “I quite possibly might get involved with them myself,” he says.

  Édouard snorts. “What, pray tell, would you show?”

  Eugène turns to face his brother square. “I would not show anything. You are well aware that I am not the artist of the family. What I can do is offer help on the business end. Promotion, tickets, hanging the show.

  “I suppose there is always next time,” Eugène says to me. “Perhaps.”

  Hmmmm . . . perhaps.

  Since I had all but decided not to show with the Societe, I submitted two of my finest pieces to the Salon.

  Both were rejected. This is the last straw.

  Now I have no choice
but to forge ahead with my original plan. Maman will be none too thrilled, but I shall break the news to her gently. She is resilient even in her fragile state of mind. She might surprise me as she was as disgusted with the Salon jury’s rejection of my work as I was.

  The tricky part will be prevailing upon Édouard to lend me the canvas of Edma at the Lorient Harbor. But it is time he and I settled our differences once and for all.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‌

  My queen, my slave, whose love is fear When you awaken shuddering,

  Until that awful hour be here, You cannot say at midnight dear: I am your equal.

  —Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

  Le Charivari—by Louis Leroy—April 25, 1874

  Exhibition of the Impressionists

  Oh, it was indeed a strenuous day, when I ventured into the first exhibition on the boulevard des Capucines in the company of M. Joseph Vincent, landscape painter, pupil of the academic master Bertin, recipient of medals and decorations under several governments! The rash man had come there without suspecting anything; he thought that he would see the kind of painting one sees everywhere, good and bad, rather bad than good, but not hostile to good artistic manners, to devotion to form, and respect for the masters. Oh, form! Oh, the masters! We don’t want them anymore, my poor fellow! We’ve changed all that.

  Upon entering the first room, Joseph Vincent received an initial shock in front of the Dancer by M. Renoir. “What a pity,” he said to me, “that the painter, who has a certain understanding of color, doesn’t draw better; his dancer’s legs are as cottony as the gauze of her skirts.”

  “I find you hard on him,” I replied. “On the contrary, the drawing is very tight.”

  Berlin’s pupil, believing that I was being ironical, contented himself with shrugging his shoulders, not taking the trouble to answer. Then, very quietly, with my most naive air, I led him before the Ploughed Field of M. Pissarro. At the sight of this astounding landscape, the good man thought that the lenses of his spectacles were dirty. He wiped them carefully and replaced them on his nose.

  “By Michalon!” he cried. “What on earth is that?” “You see . . . a hoarfrost on deeply ploughed furrows.”

  “Those furrows? That frost? But they are palette-scrapings placed uniformly on a dirty canvas. It has neither head nor tail, top nor bottom, front nor back.”

  “Perhaps . . . but the impression is there.”

  “Well, it’s a funny impression! Oh . . . and this?”

  “An Orchard by M. Sisley. I’d like to point out the small tree on the right; it’s gay, but the impression . . .”

  “Leave me alone, now, with your impression . . . it’s neither here nor there. But here we have a View of Melun by M. Rouart, in which there’s something to the water. The shadow in the foreground, for instance, is really peculiar.”

  “It’s the vibration of tone which astonishes you.”

  “Call it the sloppiness of tone and I’d understand you better—Oh, Corot, Corot, what crimes are committed in your name! It was you who brought into fashion this messy composition, these thin washes, these mud splashes against which the art lover has been rebelling for thirty years and which he has accepted only because constrained and forced to it by your tranquil stubbornness. Once again, a drop of water has worn away the stone!”

  The poor man rambled on this way quite peacefully, and nothing led me to anticipate the unfortunate accident which was to be the result of his visit to this hair-raising exhibition. He even sustained, without major injury, viewing the Fishing Boats Leaving the Harbor by M. Claude Monet, perhaps because I tore him away from dangerous contemplation of this work before the small, noxious figures in the foreground could produce their effect.

  Unfortunately, I was imprudent enough to leave him too long in front of the Boulevard des Capucines, by the same painter.

  “Ah-ha!” he sneered in Mephistophelean manner. “Is that brilliant enough, now! There’s impression, or I don’t know what it means. Only, be so good as to tell me what those innumerable black tongue-lickings in the lower part of the picture represent?”

  “Why, those are people walking along,” I replied.

  “Then do I look like that when I’m walking along the Boulevard des Capucines? Blood and thunder! So you’re making fun of me at last?”

  “I assure you, M. Vincent—”

  “But those spots were obtained by the same method as that used to imitate marble: a bit here, a bit there, slapdash, any old way. It’s unheard of, appalling! I’ll get a stroke from it, for sure.”

  I attempted to calm him by showing him the St.-Denis Canal by M. Lepine and the Butte Montmartre by M. Ottin, both quite delicate in tone; but fate was strongest of all: the Cabbages of M. Pissarro stopped him as he was passing by and from red he became scarlet.

  “Those are cabbages,” I told him in a gently persuasive voice. “Oh, the poor wretches, aren’t they caricatured! I swear not to eat

  any more as long as I live!”

  “Yet it’s not their fault if the painter—” “Be quiet, or I’ll do something terrible.”

  Suddenly he gave a loud cry upon catching sight of the Maison du Pendu by M. Paul Cézanne. The stupendous impasto of this little jewel accomplished the work begun by the Boulevard des Capucines—Pere Vincent became delirious.

  At first his madness was fairly mild. Taking the point of view of the impressionists, he let himself go along their lines:

  “Boudin has some talent,” he remarked to me before a beach scene by that artist; “but why does he fiddle so with his marines?”

  “Oh, you consider his painting too finished?”

  “Unquestionably. Now take Mlle. Morisot! That young lady is not interested in reproducing trifling details. When she has a hand to paint, she makes exactly as many brushstrokes lengthwise as there are fingers, and the business is done. Stupid people who are finicky about the drawing of a hand don’t understand a thing about impressionism, and great Manet would chase them out of his republic.”

  “Then M. Renoir is following the proper path; there is nothing superfluous in his Harvesters. I might almost say that his figures . .

  .”

  “. . . are even too finished.”

  “Oh, M. Vincent! But do look at those three strips of color, which are supposed to represent a man in the midst of the wheat!”

  “There are two too many; one would be enough.”

  I glanced at Bertin’s pupil; his countenance was turning a deep red. A catastrophe seemed to me imminent, and it was reserved for M. Monet to contribute the last straw.

  “Ah, there he is, there he is!” he cried, in front of number ninety-eight. “I recognize him, Papa Vincent’s favorite! What does that canvas depict? Look at the catalogue.”

  “Impression: Sunrise.”

  “Impression—I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it . . . and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.”

  In vain I sought to revive his expiring reason . . . but the horrible fascinated him. “The Laundress, so badly laundered, of M. Degas drove him to cries of admiration. Sisley himself appeared to him affected

  and precious. To indulge his insanity and out of fear of irritating him, I looked for what was tolerable among the impressionist pictures, and I acknowledged without too much difficulty that the bread, grapes, and chair of Breakfast, by M. Monet, were good bits of painting. But he rejected these concessions.

  “No, no!” he cried. “Monet is weakening there. He is sacrificing to the false gods of Meissonier. Too finished, too finished! Talk to me of the Modern Olympia! That’s something well done.

  “Alas, go and look at it! A woman folded in two, from whom a Negro girl is removing the last veil in order to offer her in all her ugliness to the charmed gaze of a brown puppet. Do you remember the Olympia of M. Manet? Well, that was a masterpiece of drawi
ng, accuracy, finish, compared with the one by M. Cézanne.”

  Finally the pitcher ran over. The classic skull of Pere Vincent, assailed from too many sides, went completely to pieces. He paused before the municipal guard who watches over all these treasures and, taking him to a portrait, began, for my benefit, a very emphatic criticism:

  “Is he ugly enough?” He shrugged his shoulders. “From the front, he has two eyes . . . and a nose . . . and a mouth! Impressionists wouldn’t have thus sacrificed to detail. With what the painter has expended in the way of useless things, Monet would have done twenty municipal guards!

  “‘ Keep moving, will you!’ said the portrait.

  “You hear him—he even talks! The poor fool who daubed at him must have spent a lot of time at it!”

  And in order to give the appropriate seriousness to his theory of esthetics, Pere Vincent began to dance the scalp dance in front of the bewildered guard, crying in a strangled voice: “Hi-ho! I am impression on the march, the avenging palette knife, the Boulevard des Capucines of Monet, the Maison du Pendu and the Modern Olympia of Cézanne. Hi-ho! Hi-ho!”

  PARIS-JOURNAL—by ERNEST CHESNEAU— May 7, 1874

  Le plein air, Exposition du Boulevard des Capucines

  A young group of painters has opened an exhibition on the Boulevard des Capucines. If they had had the complete courage of their convictions or strong enough backs to run and bear the risks they might have managed to strike a considerable blow.

  Their attempt, very deserving of sympathy, is in danger of being stillborn because it is not sufficiently emphatic. To have invited the participation of certain painters who are shuffling around the edges of the official Salon’s latest batch of inanities, and even artists of unquestionable talent, but who are active in areas quite different from their own, such as MM. de Nittis, Boudin, Bracquemond, Brandon, Lepine, and Gustave Colin, was a major mistake in both logistics and tactics.