Katherine Keenum (11 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

M. Bouguereau

S
hort and stout, William-Adolphe Bouguereau exerted gravitational pull as he moved through the studio; no one had to look to know exactly where he was. While the students worked on, or pretended to, he made a methodical progress through the room, pausing at each easel with Miss Richardson in his wake. Little disturbances arose as stools were shifted to make room for them or students stepped out of the way.

“A good thing we’re this far across the room,” Jeanette whispered to Emily beside her. “Maybe I can still shade the curve of this shoulder.”

“You can always turn it front to back if you want, and he’ll pass you,” Emily whispered back.

Jeanette was nettled by the suggestion that she might wish—or need—to avoid criticism. It was true that she felt rushed trying to ready her piece in the instructor’s presence, but comparing her sketch to Emily’s work emboldened her. There was no doubt of Emily’s delicacy of touch and exquisite rendering, but her own figure had more vigor.

“
Pas mal, pas mal
,” she overheard, somewhere to her left. Not bad; keep working. Well, that wouldn’t be much help, but neither would it hurt—unless there was, perhaps, a note of sarcasm in M. Bouguereau’s voice?

A cool morning illumination from the skylight threw no strong shadows to help with the modeling, but enough for the shoulder and curves of the spine. She already had a passable foot; she was good at feet.

M. Bouguereau came nearer. Jeanette tried to work faster. A few stations away, he sat down on a woman’s stool. He frowned; and while he rumbled something inaudible, his thumb made a decisive gesture downward, as though he were rubbing something out or smearing in a contour. He looked up from under bushy eyebrows to ask the student whether she understood.

“
Oui, monsieur, merci
,” she said, frowning intently as she looked back and forth between her work and the model.

“Bon.”
He slapped his knees and rose to move on to the next easel.

When M. Bouguereau finally reached Emily, he bowed slightly with a hand at his jacket button.
“Mlle. Dolson.”

“
Bonjour, monsieur
,” she said, softly, keeping her eyes down.

He turned to her pale drawing. Mmm, beautiful as always, but . . . In a corner of the page, he sketched in a quick study of the underlying musculature of a shoulder, followed by an adjacent rendering of the visible flesh. Jeanette looked from its perfect accuracy to her own work, which now appeared unsupported and false. He was telling Emily she must study anatomy. For half a smug instant, Jeanette prided herself that anatomy lay ahead as part of the Vassar art curriculum, then remembered with a lurch that she was cut off forever from what had been hers. Where in Paris, she wondered, could a woman receive instruction in the bones and muscles of the human body? She must begin by asking Emily to let her copy those two instructive little illustrations; but before she had time to follow her train of thought, she was being introduced by Miss Richardson as a student who had joined the class the day before.

“
Monsieur!
” she said, with her heart in her throat, all but bobbing a curtsy.

The breadth of M. Bouguereau’s wide shoulders pushed into and occupied all the space in front of her easel; the fibers of his dark suit, a bit too tight where only the top button of his jacket was fastened over the waistcoat, were imbued with cigar smoke. His silvery, reddish-brown hair had receded from the temples, but it was still thick where it was combed back in waves; his brown beard and mustache were bushy and full, touched at the ends with gray. He had a face that could be avuncular and bland as it was now, but she had already glimpsed it sharpen several times that morning. Indeed, his eyes briefly assessed her as penetratingly as they regarded the model. It made her uneasy. But his rosy face when he turned to her drawing betrayed nothing.

“The work of one day?
Bon. Vous avez talent
,” he told her, after a silence. She had talent. When he had moved on, Amy Richardson pressed Jeanette’s arm. “Good show,” she muttered.

*   *   *

“
Monsieur
,” called La Grecque, loudly, when M. Bouguereau finally stepped away from the last student. In liltingly Italianate French, she begged him to remember how long she had held position that day. Past the break. He would use her again sometime, eh?

As she had the day before, she came out of her pose with catlike stretches, only today they were slower, more sensual. Her head rolled before she closed her eyes, arched her back, and lifted her elbows wide, displaying her breasts to the full while she held the back of her neck with strong fingers. Her nipples were erect. She fell back and pulled the tissue up to cover herself, looking down at herself from one side to the other as she adjusted the cloth.

“Or perhaps my little girl. She is four years old, you know. She learns the trade. You still paint little girls,
n’est-ce pas
?”

“Signora Antonielli!” exclaimed Miss Richardson.

M. Bouguereau, who for a moment had parted his lips as if to speak, pressed them together angrily. His silent stare from under drawn brows held La Grecque and the whole room motionless, until he said coldly that he did not take the Erinyes as a subject and began making his dignified way through the students. Never taking her eyes off him, the model stepped into her slippers and down onto the floor. She started to call out something as his broad back neared the door.

Miss Richardson hissed at her to shut up, as she hustled her in the direction of the changing corner. La Grecque shook her off and flounced toward the screen. Miss Richardson hurried after M. Bouguereau into the corridor. An excited, polyglot hubbub erupted in the room.

“Do things like this happen often?” Jeanette asked Emily.

“Of course not! Poor Amy.”

“Damn Antonielli!” cursed Amy, when she came back into the room. “Of all the masters to choose for such a performance. Damn, damn, damn.” Jeanette was taken aback by the force of her anger but found the swear words dashing. “I try to help her. I give her extra work—the whole day—because she
is
good, and what does she do? Makes it necessary to fire her on the spot and impossible ever to hire her again, that’s what. Oh, hell, now listen to her howl.” Strangled, frustrated sobbing came from behind the dressing screen. Miss Richardson’s eyes narrowed and her mouth set hard. “Well, it’s her job or mine, and I can tell you this, it isn’t going to be mine.”

“Why do they call Antonielli La Grecque if she is really Italian?” Jeanette asked Emily, later, as the classroom emptied.

“Because of her classic good looks and the way she wears her hair. She has posed for some of the best artists in Paris for their big mythological pictures. I suppose this will be my last picture of her,” added Emily, looking down at her unfinished drawing.

“At least it has a nice little anatomy lesson on it,” said Jeanette, wistfully. “Where can we study anatomy?”

“You could do what the Countess did,” said the woman on the other side of Emily as she gathered up her things.

“The Countess?” asked Jeanette.

“A star student in the class for the full nude,” said Emily. “Countess Marie Bashkirtseff.”

“Had you heard?” went on their neighbor. “She bought herself a skeleton and hired a medical student to tutor her! Dissects her own cadaver, they say.”

*   *   *

“It’s an idea,” said Jeanette later, recounting her day to Effie. “Not the cadaver, obviously, but the medical student as a tutor. Emily’s brother has a friend who might be willing to lend us a textbook or something. He even has a skeleton.” She sprawled back on their sofa. “Whew, I’m tired. Miss Richardson fixed on me as the rawest recruit to fill in as model for the afternoon—dressed, I promise! But, of course, nobody stayed. I had no idea how draining it could be to sit still for three hours.” She yawned. “What did you do after you dropped me off?”

“Well, I went to the reading room in the Galignani Library, and then I paid some calls. At the embassy first. You know, just a formality: I left both our cards. You may hear from General Noyes.” (The American ambassador was from Ohio.) “And I paid a visit to the McAll Mission, which a friend at the Children’s Aid Society suggested. Here, some pamphlets I picked up. And you remember that your mother and Cousin Maude both wanted us to call on Mrs. Renick?” An eagerness came into Effie’s voice.

“The one from Columbus that Mama knew, and her brother is a judge in Cincinnati; Papa knows him,” said Jeanette, dutifully remembering, while she flipped without interest through Effie’s religious tracts and booklets. “Mr. Renick did business with Uncle Matt.”

“More with Harold Vann’s father, I think. Marius Renick. He’s a banker.”

Jeanette closed her eyes and suppressed another yawn. She was not usually so completely bored by social rounds and family connections, but at the end of a long, exciting day in the studio, they seemed as far removed from anything that mattered as a Protestant missionary society did. Without opening her eyes, she tried to show halfhearted interest.

“Was Mrs. Renick at home when you called?”

“She was! And she’s the last word in elegance, in spite of being confined by a leg and a back brace. She was thrown by a horse in the Bois de Boulogne—”

“An elegant way to cripple yourself.”

“You sound like Adeline.”

“Don’t flatter me.”

“I wasn’t.”

Jeanette’s eyes widened at an unaccustomed acerbity in Effie’s voice. “You must have liked Mrs. Renick.”

“I did,” said Effie, accepting Jeanette’s conciliatory tone as apology enough. “She’s very gracious, and the house—no, I can’t do the house justice, nor Mrs. Renick either. You’ll just have to see them for yourself. Which you will, and your mother will be glad to hear it.” Effie grinned. “We have our first dinner invitation. She wants us to meet some visitors from the States, a family named Murer.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A Dinner Party on the Rue de Varenne

A
fter the Murers’ names were published in the
American Register
, which listed the Americans arriving in Paris each week, Sophie received a note from Mrs. Marius Renick, inviting her to call one afternoon at the Rue de Varenne. The families were acquainted. Cornelia Mattocks Renick was Edward’s age, the daughter of a newspaperman who had spent a few years in Cincinnati before starting up his own paper in Columbus. Cornelia and Edward had known each other in elementary school, and Sophie knew one of her sisters-in-law from club work. As for Marius Renick, Theodore had occasionally done business with his bank in the past and wanted to pay a visit to his office on the Rue Lafitte to introduce Carl to him.

“Why don’t you two go while Sophie pays her call,” suggested Edward. “Eddie and I can take in the zoo.”

“But you knew Cornelia Renick, didn’t you?” said Sophie.

“Only as children. And she invited you, not me.”

“Or if Carl is going to meet Mr. Renick, perhaps you should—”

“Why blight his chances by dragging along the sad uncle?” said Edward, more tensely.

“Go to the zoo, a good plan,” interposed Theodore. Edward’s constant self-deprecation irritated him.

It worked out well. Edward and Eddie came back in high spirits with tales of sociable kangaroos who boxed with zoo visitors and an ostrich that pulled a cart. Moreover, whether thanks to Sophie’s call or Theodore and Carl’s office visit, a card was delivered to the hotel a couple of days later, inviting them all to dinner. “There’s more than one kind of zoo,” Edward confided to Eddie, though in fact the idea of dinner at a private house in Paris appealed to his secret sense of himself. And he remembered liking Cornelia.

*   *   *

Marius Renick had begun his career in Ohio, but soon moved back East to work at his grandfather’s mercantile bank in New York. He had helped to expand the business greatly and had converted a comfortable living for himself into a considerable fortune by financing what he called back-fillers—local railroad spurs, reinsurance schemes, secondary reuse of industrial by-products. With the bank’s money, he was canny. With his own, he regularly took a flier, less for the thrill of quick gain than to keep his nerves keen to what was afoot and to scare his cousins; it made him sharper than his competitors. Sending him abroad to head up a new European branch of the bank temporarily resolved rivalries within the family, but everyone had expected him to return to make a bid for the bank presidency. And then he found the house on the Rue de Varenne.

“A seventeenth-century palace,” Cornelia delighted in telling people, “complete with an eighteenth-century duchess.”

The duchesse de Mabillon had indeed been born in the 1790s, in London, where her parents had fled during the Reign of Terror. She and the duke, whom she had married in exile, had not taken possession of the house, which was hers by inheritance, until after the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte. Then they unboarded the windows, evicted squatters, and weathered the vicissitudes of subsequent regimes while the house slid further and further into decline, the more so after the duke’s death, when their son preferred to expend what was left in the family coffers on an equally decrepit patrimonial château in the country and on horses. The duchess, who disliked both rural discomfort and her daughter-in-law, remained ensconced in urban decay on the Rue de Varenne until some accident or fate brought Marius Renick to her drawing room one day. A few months later, on the strength of a ninety-nine-year lease, she had withdrawn into one wing of the house and removed all her belongings to the attic.

Before installing their own furnishings, the Renicks had brought in plasterers, painters, paperers, regilders, and city water. Outside they had brickwork repointed, stucco reapplied, slate work repaired, and all the copper on the roof replaced. If the duchess avariciously marveled at seeing them spend so much on her property or raged that new American money found it so easy, she never betrayed more than ironic resignation. Years of penury and danger had taught her to draw strict boundaries and honor them. She never gave the Renicks’ servants orders, not even the gardeners; nor did she ever let any of the Renick household into her own quarters. Only as a way of keeping her eye on what her tenants were doing did she occasionally accept an invitation to tea; and once a year at Christmas, she condescended to include them in a gathering where the food was scanty and bad but the complaints epigrammatic.

“I’m absorbing her every snobbery to rebuff Newport at need,” claimed Cornelia.

The duchess, of course, would not be at the Renicks’ dinner for the Murers. Knowing that Americans loved to dine with even the most minor European nobility, Cornelia considered inviting a Norwegian count and his wife, a soprano, who both spoke tolerable English. It would help with the seating chart, but she decided that Theodore and Sophie would be even more pleased if they were able to bring their younger son—so awkward to travel with boys unless you had a tutor. If she placed herself at the hostess’s corner instead of at the head of the table and included children, she could work off the Monroes as well, another business obligation of Marius’s. Then with Edward Murer already on the list, to add funny Miss Pendergrast and Sarah Palmer’s daughter would require only one extra man—Hippolyte Grandcourt. There, he would do nicely, provided he wasn’t conducting that night. A bachelor of sixty, he had dined off stories of the musical world for forty years and for forty years had done well by himself and his hostesses. Luckily, he was available.

*   *   *

The Murers were the first to arrive. It was to be an early supper, not only for the children’s sake, but also to give the older guests time to put in a late appearance at the Opéra or go to a
café-chansant
if they wished. The Murers’ carriage, hired for the evening, turned around the circular drive and deposited them at the front door. For a moment, they caught a glimpse of a last brilliance in the treetops behind the house, but the shadowed daylight lingering over the round lawn and graveled driveway in front faded into dusk under the covered entry porch.

Sophie had tried to describe the place, but nothing prepared Edward for his sense of dislocation and wonderment when a footman admitted them to the house. Golden light swimming through windows at the far end of the entry hall gave the ducal magnificence of pale walls and elaborate gilt ornament an air of enchanted removal from the everyday world. Whenever he had read fiction or history, in order to visualize aristocratic European settings he had drawn unconsciously on wisps of boyhood memories, all of them bourgeois. From now on, his mental images would have to be drastically revised and enlarged.

The wide hallway led between doors, mirrors, and tall porcelain vases on gilt stands all the way to double doors opening onto a back terrace. Midway to their right rose a broad, curving staircase, lit by candles in tall torchières. At the top of the stairs, the butler waited outside the salon to announce them.

“Mr. and Mrs. Murer?” he asked, merely to confirm what he knew must be true. (Hastings, hired away from an English family who had mistakenly counted on family loyalty to outweigh the lure of salary, was the key to Cornelia’s success in running a perfect household.)

“Yes,” said Theodore, pleasantly, remembering not to use his customary
ja
. “Good evening.”

“Sir.”

Hastings ushered them into a large room, the long south wall of which was punctuated by French windows leading onto a wide balcony over the back terrace. Marius Renick stood near the door to receive his guests and conduct them to where, on a straight-backed Louis XIV sofa, Cornelia sat erect in her brace, a radiant presence in the dwindling natural light. Theodore bent over the hand she held out to him and, without hesitation, raised it to his lips. Sophie sat down where Cornelia patted the sofa beside her.

“Edward, my dear, if you weren’t looking so sleek, I would say we were a perfectly matched pair of old crocks,” she exclaimed, holding out her hand to him. “Wherever did you get that walking stick? If you say Cincinnati, I may have to consider reemigrating.”

“Good evening, Cornelia.” Edward squeezed her hand sympathetically before releasing it. “We were sorry to learn about your fall. The cane? No, not Cincinnati. I found it at a shop on the Rue Auber, next to the one where you sent Sophie to look for fans.”

“Isn’t that place a gem?” said Cornelia, turning to Sophie and unfolding a confection of embroidered ivory silk, lace, and feathers. “This came from it; I hope you discovered your heart’s desire.”

Cornelia set about charming Carl and laughing with young Eddie before sending the latter off to a corner of the drawing room with her own son for the boys to amuse themselves.

“Miss Pendergrast and Miss Palmer.”

“Oh, you gentlemen must help me,” said Cornelia, in an undertone.

Edward and Carl instantly faded back, but stood nearby at attention. Their duty was clear.

*   *   *

As soon as she saw Mrs. Renick, Jeanette was mortified. Adeline had warned her that fashion was shifting in Paris. Not a bustle was left; and with them had gone voluminous skirts, ribbons and bows, panniers and ruched trains caught up in the back. “Jeanette’s best dinner frock from Vassar should do for any entertainment likely to come her way,” Sarah Palmer had retorted. “Well, at least until she has had time to study what’s new,” said Adeline. Jeanette’s best meant a full-skirted, garnet-and-gray-striped silk with a ruffled hem. When they got it out with the Renicks’ dinner in mind, Effie had the idea of taking the skirt off the waistband and pleating it so that when it was resewn, all the garnet was overlaid with gray and the silhouette was slimmer. They had pinned an artificial rose at the waist to cover an unfortunate bunching. But the striped bodice and ruffle remained, and here and there garnet streaked the edges of pleats that hung wrong. How Jeanette wished now that she could have paid a dressmaker to make it over properly!

Mrs. Renick’s dress was smoothest Prussian-blue satin over a pale sky-blue satin underskirt, the kind that required hanging space in a huge closet and skillful ironing. A plunging neckline opened out from a V to peaked lapels in the paler blue; it was filled with ivory lace, which rose to frill a standing collar and frame the back of her head. Matching lace fell softly from her three-quarter-length sleeves. Tiny self-covered buttons down the front emphasized the dress’s symmetries and Mrs. Renick’s erectness in her brace. The overall effect was opulent and assured, a dress for neither afternoon calls nor the theater but precisely for a dinner at home. Jeanette felt gussied up, down at heels, and out of date all at the same time. It didn’t help that the handsome young man with the wavy blond hair standing to one side contrived to make wearing impeccable evening clothes look offhand.

“Miss Palmer is from Ohio,” said Cornelia to Sophie, when introductions were made. “Theodore may know her father. Judge Palmer is active in Republican politics.”

Both ladies had immediately perceived Jeanette’s discomfort and remembered what it felt like to be self-conscious at a party; both set about to be kind. From her presence in Mrs. Renick’s house and Jeanette’s own manners, Sophie was assured that she was someone suitable for Carl to know, if unlikely to attract him; and Cornelia thought she saw a spark of something interesting. Before there was time for conversation to encourage her, however, Hippolyte Grandcourt was announced.

*   *   *

Grandcourt was the professional master of the grand entrance. Just as everyone turned toward the door, his face lit up and he strode vigorously forward into the room. (“
Strode
,” Effie would always say afterward, “that’s the only word,
strode
.”)

“My dear Mme. Renick.” A flourish, a bow, a kiss of his hostess’s hand, and Grandcourt paused briefly to catch Cornelia’s eye before straightening up to sweep everyone into his gaze. “
Chers amis
, you must all hear this,” he said, in a mixture of French and French-accented English.

Grandcourt crossed the large room to the Renicks’ piano with the familiarity of long use. He adjusted the piano stool, flapped back the tails of his jacket, and sat down, half facing his audience. An arch of one eyebrow invited them to listen. His right hand hesitantly picked out a few notes, paused, then repeated them more strongly. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ‘The Beggar’s Polka’ by Jacques Offenbach!” He swung around to thump out the melody at a jaunty beat, with the left hand joining in for a full improvisation on the theme.

“This may be the only drawing room in Paris to hear it tonight, but on the street—!” He held up his long right forefinger for emphasis. “On the street, it is for sale by the very beggar of the title—
vraiment!
—in front of Offenbach’s own Théâtre Bouffes.” He threw back his head to show his profile as he laughed loudly at the joke, then looked around at them confidentially. His hands played on softly.

“We are walking the boulevards one night, the good Offenbach and I. A beggar approaches. Offenbach has no coin to give him; I reach in my pocket. ‘No, no,’ says he. On a scrap of paper with a pencil stub, he dashes off a few bars, adds a title to the top, and signs his name at the bottom. ‘Voilà,’ he says, handing it to the mendicant, ‘give this to a publisher in the morning and he will pay you two hundred francs.’ We walk on; he hums out his new little piece; we are both much amused; but the laugh, it is on the composer. This mendicant, this poor man in rags, he is no beggar,
mesdames et messieurs
—he is a modern man, an entrepreneur!”