The Fountain of St. James Court; Or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “Do describe the Greek party,” Caroline urges, though her father, my brother, had been one of those present, and she had surely heard it described a number of times.

  So I speak of how the idea first presented itself and how the party later caused people to gossip, almost immediately, about my high mode of living and my spendthrift nature, a calumny that followed me even after I left France, all across Europe and even to Russia.

  “Your father, dearest Caroline, my beloved brother, had come to my apartment early (M. Le Brun was still building the house in Rue du Gros-Chenet), and he suggested we dress in Greek costumes, eat food with Greek sauces, and listen to recitations about the Greek way of life.

  “I also knew that M. de Vaudreuil, one of the most kind and charming, pleasant, and witty men in the world, was planning to arrive late with M. Boutin, and we would surprise them by appearing to be a company of Greeks from the past, amazingly present in Paris.

  “And as they came in, we even sang Gluck’s chorus ‘Le dieu de Paphos et de Guide,’ with M. de Cubières playing his lyre.”

  “Paphos,” Sylvie interjects. “Did not Saint Paul visit the Greek isle of Paphos?”

  “Indeed he did,” Caroline replies. “But more important to the occasion that our dear hostess has described to us is the fact that Paphos was the mythical birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty; Venus to the Romans.”

  “We enjoyed two vegetables and a honey cake with Corinthian raisins,” I continue. “Our only extravagance was a bottle of very old, very fine Cyprus wine. It had been given to me as a present.” For a moment I feel embarrassed that we in Louveciennes are now eating such straightforward, untheatrical fare.

  “Well, now you have the tale, inside and out. M. Vaudreuil and M. Boutin were so pleased with the evening that they talked about it all the next day till Paris was buzzing. Several ladies from the court asked me to repeat the evening, but I declined to do so, for a variety of reasons. I’m afraid they may have been offended by my firmness in the matter. Word spread of our glorious event even to the king, and as the word was spread people began to exaggerate quite greatly the cost of the staging of such an authentic, delicious, and original surprise. People claimed it cost twenty thousand francs.

  “Then I learned the king was displeased to hear of such extravagance, but very fortunately for me (for I wanted nothing to suggest I lacked judgment, being so close to all the royals and especially the queen; and certainly nothing that hinted I was being lavishly overpaid for my paintings) one of the people to whom the king made inquiry was the Marquis de Cubières, who had played his gilded guitar-lyre for our singing.

  “Since he himself was a guest at the party, the marquis could quickly convince His Majesty that the rumor concerning the cost of the party (not its appeal and charm) was a scandalous exaggeration. But the truth did not quell the rumor.

  “When I was in Rome, after 1789, I was asked if the Greek dinner had not cost forty thousand francs; in Vienna, still later, I heard directly from the Baronne Stroganoff, to my immense surprise, that without blinking an eye, I had lavished sixty thousand francs on my Greek supper. By the time I was preparing to paint the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia in St. Petersburg, the rumor had reached a figure of eighty thousand francs.”

  At the mention of increasing sums of money, all my listeners stir in their seats in an excited way.

  “How much did it really cost?” young Sylvie allows herself to inquire.

  “About fifteen francs!” I promptly reply, for I have already mentioned the sum in my Souvenirs, which apparently young Sylvie for all her expressed admiration of my life as an artist has not yet found time to read. I smile at her warmly.

  “Not fifteen thousand?” Sylvie asks.

  “A mere fifteen.”

  “With your words you have done more than paint a picture,” Eugénie remarks. “You have animated a scene.”

  “Thank you, my dears,” I say to them, “for letting an old woman relive one of the most enjoyable evenings I can remember. I know you must all be tired. Shall we retire and commence our conversation again in the morning?”

  Everything has happened as I have planned; I know it has been a lovely evening, ending in such a way that no one is overly tired. As I rise from my chair, I fully experience the coziness of this very moment, of the warmth and love of my dear nieces and of the awestruck face of Eugénie’s pupil.

  Yes, I have shared a shining memory with her of times she will never be able to witness. Is it possible that such perfect pleasures existed? I smile at these three women again, one by one, enjoying the face, particularly the eyes, of each. I add them to the gallery of images I keep locked in what I pray is the inviolable library of memory which neither moth nor rust can corrupt. And I remember those lost in the Terror.

  For my unique delight, I recall once more the expression of amazement and unbridled joy that crossed the face of the Comte de Vaudreuil, who always looked at me throughout those Versailles days (though he was the lover of the Duchesse de Polignac, who was the queen’s best friend for a number of years) with pleasure and admiration.

  And then I let go of the past; it evaporates. Most tenderly I kiss in turn the dear and real cheeks of these three faces here before me. This moment. This beloved house. This supper.

  NOW MY THREE GUESTS are in their separate rooms, each alone, even as I am. I take off my shoes by myself, but I allow my maid to help me undress; she unfastens all those neat little covered buttons and their loops so tenderly, I can scarcely feel her fingers moving down my backbone.

  Perhaps we all, my guests and I, are each imagining the others and remembering a moment of conversation, or repeating some remark we’re glad to have made, or regret and would amend, if we could. With the removal of my garments, my balance wobbles a bit. I appreciate my steady maid’s assistance in donning my nightgown. She has eyes brown as chestnuts, and she smiles at me.

  Ah, bed is a pleasant place to be. Doesn’t the world contract a bit when one is cozy in bed? Bonsoir; merci beaucoup to my maid, who blows out the candle.

  BUT STILL I SEE, through the paired eyes of memory and imagination. I picture my guests in their assigned chambers, among the objects and furnishings I have provided, each with its charms and congruences, its ambience, matched to the character of the inhabitant.

  By candlelight, I am sure my Caroline has noticed her room faces east. In the morning, my Caroline will like the early fresh light at her window, for it matches her own forthcoming liveliness.

  And when Eugénie, my niece who paints, first walks into her room, she will savor the way the colors and textures honor and contain her. Ripeness is artificed here: muted burgundy on the walls and reddish brown in the furniture, a slice of orange tending toward gold for the wool cloth draped over a satin chair.

  And Sylvie? For her a light youthfulness to every aspect of her surroundings. She will like the glimmers of silver (the base of the candlestick with a twisted rope edge, a silver frame around one of my little watercolors, the carved silver vase holding three ivory tulips and sprigs of square-stemmed mint). To think that nature can grow a perfectly square stem when she wishes! The vase has a nice bulge to it, a generous, fecund shape that pleases hopeful maidens. Sylvie herself, her graceful, slender curves: like the new moon when I first saw her.

  My fingers enjoy the deep lace edge at the top of my sheet, and I pull it up under my chin. Ah, luxury! I like to think of my portraits as I fall asleep.

  THEY ARE SCATTERED—France, Italy, Austria, Russia, Switzerland, Germany, England, perhaps the Americas.

  The house has grown still. We four women—one young, two middle aged, one very old—are each abed in our chambers. Even the footsteps of the maids, their breath as they blow out the candle flames, and the shuffling sounds from the kitchen are unheard now.

  In this silence, I will remember two self-portraits. One that I painted in Italy, while Julie was still a little girl. And one that I painted in Russia, when only t
he attraction of my work saved me from despair.

  After our trip to Flanders, when I painted myself wearing a straw hat, in the daylight, stepping forward with such youth and confidence, holding my palette and brushes for the first time in a self-portrait, I painted the Duchesse de Polignac again. (Let me linger again in France, before the self-portraits of Italy and Russia.) I painted her in a way that possibly could have reminded a viewer of the portrait of myself, for she too is in a straw hat, decorated with flowers, but the bouquet on her hat is to one side.

  The dress of the duchess has a ruffled décolletage similar to mine, as is the sash tied just beneath the bosom. The bows of each of our gowns are limp and floppy. A black lace shawl entwines our arms in both cases, and our hair is arranged in much the same fashion. Our expressions are quite different, mine being eager and happy, smiling slightly; the Duchesse de Polignac looks pensive rather than animated. While I am pictured outdoors, striding forward, she is in repose, with her elbow leaning on the top of a cabinet.

  Of course the duchess could not carry a palette and brushes; in her hand I placed a rose, the symbol of beauty, as I often did when painting the queen, and the hat of the Duchesse de Polignac also has a plume as does the straw hat of the queen when I painted her (scandalously, as it turned out) in a similar simple dress.

  Some viewers would see an implicit comparison, a likeness, between the queen and her most dear friend, though in the crises of the Revolution the duchess fled, leaving Antoinette alone; on the other hand, a friend less in favor, the Princesse de Lamballe, forfeited her freedom and eventually her life in order to befriend the imprisoned queen with her company.

  I have always wondered if a certain someone who knew well both the Duchesse de Polignac and myself, and who frequently enjoyed our company, looking at that portrait of the Duchesse de Polignac, might not also think of me, as well as of the queen. Would not such a someone think that I, though lacking titles, am the one of the three who is most filled with life? For I did capture that vivacity—how fully I felt my own alive hopefulness as I painted, in my self-portrait of 1783, alone, under the hue of heaven, with my palette and brushes, stepping forward, toward you.

  May not an old woman, waiting for sleep, give herself permission to indulge in a bit of smugness: that she has left a secret for history to discover? Of course, no one ever will. That secret of unexpressed attraction will die with me. I never knew even if the object of my affection was aware of how I felt. And I feel smug about that, too.

  In the self-portrait of 1790, I stand in Rome, before a canvas, depicted this time in the very act of painting, not merely holding my tools. The old days of life in Paris before the Revolution are behind me. I am standing in a city which I, like any artist, longed to visit, but I am painting, from memory, Marie Antoinette, queen of my country from which I have fled.

  There is sadness in my face, in 1790. I am not the attractive young artist striding forward with blue sky flung about me. Again, in my left hand, I hold the palette and a number of waiting brushes.

  The most interesting thing in the painting is the hand that paints. The tip of my brush is at the very edge, straight and limiting, of the canvas, but that position almost suggests that art can go beyond its boundaries. A mille-measure more and the boundary between art and life would be bridged.

  The colors in the self-portrait painted in Rome, but housed in Florence, are stark: I wear a black dress with a flowing red sash. My face is held between two horizontals: my fluffy white collar and a white turban of almost equal size. The flesh tones of my two hands and my face triangulate the focal points of the painting.

  Even now I feel happy to think of the ingenious magic of this painting, for in it, the painting hand, holding the brush tip to the edge of the canvas, also casts a shadow. I cannot say how much it pleases me to have rendered this very lifelike shadow of my painting hand. I still look directly out, but my expression is one of reverie; it is as though I am looking at a different land, at my queen in France, and yet my hand casts a shadow in the here and now of that moment.

  During the ten years that pass, I travel Europe. During this time Julie and I live at the court of Vienna, where I am most hospitably treated for the sake of the queen, and I am there when I learn of her execution in 1793, and of the king’s that same year, some nine months before her brutal death. A pall of sorrow drops over all of us in Vienna, at court. Life is shrouded.

  Because I am told that many congenial French aristocrats are to be found in Russia, I go there, to the court of Catherine the Great, who engages me to paint her. I begin that work, but it is never finished due to her death.

  When the century turns to 1800, I am hopeful that the new century will be the stage for more peace and joy than the last one. For all humankind. But it is ten years after my last self-portrait, an important ten years in the life of a woman who journeys from thirty-five to forty-five; my daughter is now nineteen. I wear a tight sleeve around my throat, to bind it up, for my throat is no longer beautiful. I depict myself in the act of drawing the queen with white chalk.

  Again, my dress is black. Again, as in the portrait I painted in Rome for the Uffizi, I contrast the black with a red scarf, but this time I have twisted the red scarf under my breasts and around my shoulders and tied it high in the middle of my back. (I do not use the sash to define my waist, which has thickened a bit.) I wear a turban of twisted fabrics, gold and sheer white, fascinating in themselves. Only a bit of my hair, short, curly, and graying, peeks from under the edge of the turban. To ornament myself I wear a heavy gold chain, braided like a plait of hair, around my neck. This time I am facing to my left, and in three-quarter view. This new pose for a self-portrait has animated the whole effort with a certain freshness. I remember that it was rather fun to use my oil paints to represent chalk marks on the canvas.

  What I like particularly about this portrait that makes me prefer it to the similar one when I was in Italy is that in the Russian painting, I seem actually to be looking at my model. Much more authentically than before, when my face seemed dreamy, I have the keen, focused expression of an artist at work. And I have truly achieved moments of happiness. I am happy, curious, and content, knowing and interested, pleased and expectant, to be at my work. It is my consolation, for Julie has turned away from me. And I turn to my work. What else can I do? Adamantine, the barrier she places between us. I must find the courage to paint, to continue to value myself. I did. And I do.

  And so it has continued with me all my life. In the Russian painting, I feel no need to stride toward the world in all my youth and beauty, as I did in 1783. Now, in the year that has turned the century to 1800, I give my attention fully to the act itself of painting, for in that lies my happiness.

  But it is hard to believe that now it is more than forty years later that I am alive in 1841. The time, especially the last twenty years, seems but a blink. I scarcely know anyone as old as I am. But I can remember Voltaire in 1778, who lived then to be as old as I am now, and how the ancient man was chaired into a huge ceremony in his honor. I am in better health than he was near the end of his life.

  So I have revisited my gallery of self-portraits; my bed has been my boat to the land of memory. I have left my oil paintings, my legacy. My nieces will do what they can for them. It is said that Voltaire left more than two thousand discrete examples of his writing, books and pamphlets. Probably they are a very complete record of his thinking. But my paintings perhaps give more nuances of spirit and feeling, and the medium of my art is directly visual. It makes one see, but the thoughts of my viewers remain their own.

  Tomorrow night, if I am wakeful, I will give myself the pleasure of reviewing my paintings of the queen and her children, and the next night my great painting of Hubert Robert, with his palette and brushes, shall stand before me in all its triumphant detail, and then paintings of other particular friends and patrons—but I am too tired tonight. I am happy that I was able to paint my beloved mentor Joseph Vernet, in 1789, before I left P
aris. And he too is painted with his palette and brushes so that history may know him as an artist.

  I think that my self-portraits have a direct truthfulness to them, a connection between the outer appearance and the subject’s inner working of thought and feeling and knowledge and life that is found less reliably in my portraits of others, except when I was painting other artists, such as Hubert Robert and Joseph Vernet, whose inner lives I did know, or other intimates whom I knew well, my brother, my mother, my daughter.

  I will remember my portraits of my daughter. I painted her once as Flora, her garments streaming in the wind, for Zephyr was the mythical lover of Flora. But there is more pleasure for me in remembering her as she actually was in life, our adventures in Italy, than to recall the portraits. None of them was good enough.

  Still I can taste the vinegar and salt in the sauce for the eel à la grecque. A bit of anchovy to please the Comte des Plaines? Still I can picture, forever unchanging, the surprise and delight of the face of the Comte de Vaudreuil. Completely enchanted, if only for the moment.

  Sleep comes shod in velvet. I hear her dusky feet crossing the carpet toward my bed. I sigh. I am eager for the next bright day.

  Long ago, after a controversial performance by actors from the Comédie-Française of Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro, the Marquis de Montesquiou made out horoscopes for a group of us. He forecast that I would possess a long life and that because I was not a vain person, when I had lived that long life I would be well loved as an old woman. I knew intuitively that my horoscope would be true. Or at least partly true. I have lived long.