Luncheon of the Boating Party (12 page)

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stung. Couldn’t she see that it wasn’t philandery? It was compulsion.

To adore what he painted. To do brilliant work not out of technique but out of desire, and to feel that desire, hot and full in his loins, not just his fingertips. He cared for each one in his own way because they had helped him to make beautiful paintings. But people were slippery in Montmartre, and he’d lost touch with them.

Too much of life was vanishing. Having the paintings helped him to remember, but when he was lucky the paintings were sold, and all that was left was fleeting sensation. He may have achieved the Impressionist ideal, to record sensation, but it always kept him hungry for more.

Climbing rue Lepic beyond the plaster quarries near the top of the Butte, they both stopped at the same instant. Building stones and gird-ers had been laid out for walls, a floor, and a roof over Moulin de la Galette, the dance hall under the windmills.

“Enclosed?” Auguste sputtered. “The whole place will be enclosed, not just the mill shed?”

“I suppose to stay open in winter. To compete with the cabarets on the boulevards,” Paul said.

Auguste shook his head. “People don’t care a bean if the place has a roof. They should leave it be, its innocent self. We can dance just fi ne on the bricks and stamped-down dirt. We like it. Everyone feels welcome, even children. Even dogs. People can come in their artisan’s smocks. It’s all right with me for the bourgeois to dress down and come up here to mingle with the people of Montmartre, but enclosing it turns it into something commercial. Not ours anymore. A spectacle for somebody else.”

“Would that they’d come to your benefit for Le Pouponnat,”

Paul said.

“Ha! What a jolly catastrophe that was,” Auguste said, remembering his grand project of an amateur vaudeville at le Moul’ to fund an orphan-age and
pouponnière,
a day nursery, for the illegitimate babes of Montmartre abandoned and dying in the streets. It wrenched him that the lives of the street waifs orphaned during the Prussian War were so wretched

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compared to the lives of the little darlings whose bourgeois fathers wanted them painted in their stylish frocks. The project was the one thing he did the summer he painted
Moulin
that his mother approved of, she who washed and fed every urchin who ever came to her door.

All his friends had taken part, composing songs, poems, skits, painting scenery and posters, practicing their dances and acts, and writing articles in the local journals. Margot worked side by side with him on everything. She hand-printed tickets and strung paper garlands tree to tree. All of Montmartre was giddy with anticipation. Front-rank seats went for ten francs, two francs in the rear, and fifty centimes to stand.

No one outside Montmartre came, and no Montmartrois could afford the ten-franc seats, but the rear seats and standing room were packed, and his idea of a nursery for foundlings had to wait until Madame Charpentier funded it herself later.

“It was one of my happiest times. That spirit Margot had with me that summer, that’s what I need now in my painting. The spirit of Montmartre. It will die if this place turns commercial.”

“This is going into my story, you know.”

“Fine! Tell them Pierre-Auguste Renoir who immortalized the

place without a roof is outraged!” He raised his fist high. “Infuriated!”

The yowl of a cat in heat tore through the air. He yowled back, feeling the same wild need as they trudged uphill on rue des Saules. If Angèle wasn’t there, he knew no other place to look. There wasn’t anyone else. The painting would be diminished from the start.

A person could pass by Cabaret des Assassins without noticing. It looked like any other cottage. In the dark they’d have to be careful not to miss it.

“Look for a donkey tied to a tree,” he told Paul. “The owner rents it to painters to carry their equipment down the backside plunge to the Maquis.”

“Any way to make a franc, I guess. Who would want to paint that rat-infested shantytown?”

Auguste had gone to look once and found the wasteland behind

Montmartre dotted with quarrymen’s cottages, scraggly kitchen gar-

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dens, and hovels of ragpickers and cutthroats. He never painted there.

The poverty tore at him too deeply.

“Raffaëlli, for one. Or any of the other Realists in love with misery.”

Out of an opened door spilled music and yellow light onto the small hillside vineyard. Above it, he could just make out the trees in the garden where he had painted Margot standing on the swing. He listened.

Canéla, a painter by day and a tenor by night, was singing the melan-choly song from Offenbach’s
La Vie Parisienne
about a man writing to a prostitute asking her to give his friend the same pleasure she had once given him. Just the kind of song Angèle would request. They ducked under the low doorframe.

There she was. Angèle, resting her bosoms on the table next to a man leaning toward her, his intentness almost palpable. Now, wouldn’t that be a sight to paint? In the light from the oil lamp, he saw the glint in her frolicsome blue-black eyes gobbling up the man with a hunger that her former struggles as a Maquis dweller had put in them. A
raconteuse
she was, captivating the man with a story. A few strands of her light auburn chignon had come undone in the ardor of her telling.

She turned to see who had come in.

“Well, if it isn’t the lanky bon vivant of rue Saint-Georges. What happened to you?”

It was embarrassing to explain. “Oh, I was in a duel, that’s all.” He thought he was being amusing until he caught Paul’s glare.

“Plumpy you down and let’s have a squint at you. Hm, your face got in the way of a right hook, looks like. You should have come to me. My own true love is a stand-in. Rapiers only. No pistols. He saved a baron from certain death once, and got paid handsomely.”

“I thought your true love was a police spy.”

“That too. And a forger and a snatcher.” She laughed a throaty, deep-voiced laugh. “He’s disappeared of late.” She lifted her shoulders.

“I suppose I was only fancy-sick about him after all.”

That’s the insouciance and spirit he wanted, but not just for his painting. He wanted to drink it in so his worries and regrets would be pushed away. He sat next to her and caught a whiff of the murky, animal scent of ambergris.

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“This is Antonio Maggiolo. An Italian to the bone,” she said as though she knew him well, which was her way with everyone. “He’s a journalist.”

Auguste glanced at Paul and then scrutinized the man. His tousled brown hair, slender neck, and tanned face, smooth except for wisps of a light brown beard at his chin, gave him the air of Ganymede, the beautiful youth of Greek legend carried off by Zeus. Truth to say, he
was
on the pretty side of handsome, with that angular jaw and narrow nose.

“A journalist,” Auguste said. “Everybody’s a journalist. Every week new journals. New critics. Anybody can call himself an art critic if he has two eyes and owns a pen. Soon the only new thing they’ll have to write about is each other.” He gestured to Paul. “Meet Paul Lhôte. He’s a journalist. You can write about him writing about you.”

Paul shook Antonio’s hand, pulled up a chair, and sat down.

“Antonio is interviewing me, and introducing me to grappa. Upsee down.” She tipped her head back and poured in the potent clear drink as if it were white wine. “Ah, that’ll drive away my toothache.” She licked her lips and introduced Auguste. “I’m going to pose nude for him someday.” She took obvious delight in saying this, tantalizing all of them in one fell swoop.

“So much the luckier man.” Maggiolo turned to Auguste. “Will she pose for Vice or Virtue, for a goddess or just for her beauty?”

“For Beauty,” Auguste said. He appreciated the man’s cleverness in contrasting academic art that needed a classical goddess as pretext for a nude with modern painting in which a nude could be merely a beautiful woman at the bath or in the boudoir or waiting for a client. “Angèle needs no trappings of Roman ruins or Mount Olympus to justify her.

She is what she is.” He touched her under her chin. “An embodiment of beauty.”

Angèle beamed flirtatiously and blew him a kiss.

“Are you an art critic?” Paul asked.

“Not at the moment. Just now, I’m a social observer. I’m writing a piece on the ladies of Montmartre for
Le Triboulet.
” With slender fi ngers, Maggiolo whipped out a card from a silver case in his breast pocket.

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“Ah, les Montmartroises. Are you going to include the singers

and dancers and circus performers?” Paul asked. “And the ladies of the evening?”

“Especially the ladies of the evening.”

“Then you can take your pick,” Paul said. “The fresh buds of girlhood newly arrived from the country or the trollops of the gutters. The Montmartroises are more Parisian than the Parisiennes.”

Maggiolo tipped his head curiously at Paul. “I can see I have much to research. I may send the results to a journal in Milano as well. I’m somewhat of a roving correspondent.”

“Where have you been roving lately?” Paul asked.

“The spas at Baden-Baden.”

“Been there,” Paul said.

“The casino di Locarno.”

“The casino of Lugano pays out higher.”

“The Wagner opera season at Bayreuth.”

“Ah, you’ve got me there,” Paul conceded.

“Antonio’s made of piles of money. He’s got brains too.” Angèle gave him a teasing glance. “And something else, I do believe.”

“Brain enough to hear stories of Paris from Montmartre’s most accomplished
raconteuse,
” Auguste said. “What were you telling him just now?”

“About my life,” she said blithely, wagging her head.

“Ah, then he must have charmed you more than I ever have, since I’ve never heard the tale.”

“Don’t let us stop you,” Paul said.

“I was telling how as a girl, being that I had no mother to speak of, I lived in an attic space in the Maquis and slept on hare skins. Oh, a regular ragtag was I, in the clutches of a flower broker from rue du Temple, what some call rue du Crime. Every day, just after dawn, the Beadle, as she was called, met me at the fl ower market on Île de la Cité, and if I was late, I’d get a smack on my cheek. She would hang an empty coin pouch around my neck and send me off with a bundle of roses in both arms to Pont Neuf where the jugglers perform, or to l’Opéra, or La

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Madeleine, and I couldn’t come back to her flat until I’d sold them all.

She would empty the pouch and give me a few sous, enough for bread and soup
.
If she thought I was hiding a coin, she’d strip me down to the skin to see if there were any between my cheeks.”

“I don’t believe it,” Maggiolo said.

“Why, aren’t you a white goose! Hang me if it isn’t true. Once, outside l’Opéra, I got shoved by the crowd, and fell into the street, and a carriage wheel rolled over the fl owers.
Là,
she beat the tick right out of me.

“Such things went on until I sprouted breasts.
Mon Dieu,
was I happy when those titties swelled, because I had a plan. I knew I could survive beatings aplenty, so I made up stories about being robbed by snatchers.

It broke my heart to do it, but I tore my dress to convince her I’d fought back. Time and again she walloped me, but I’d already emptied what I collected under a loose cobble in that stub of a street of women’s cribs off rue du Temple.

“Seeing as how I was so itchy to get out of her clutches, I put up with it only enough to go to Madame Hortense who rents dresses to
femmes
publiques,
me being in rags, you see, but now with a collection of coins.

I begged her to rent me one for just one hour. She took pity on me because I was plucky and scrubbed me down good before she let me so much as touch the fabric. ‘Why, your hair’s near to golden,’ she said.

‘Who would have thought? You bring this dress back with one stain of a man’s comings, and I’ll flay that beautiful face right off your cheekbones,’ she croaked. You can imagine, I felt like a queen in such a dress as was clean and respectable, which I guess showed on my face, because I only had to stand in the models’ market on place Pigalle for half an hour before I got picked up. I knew right then I wasn’t a throwaway, and I didn’t deserve to be beaten.”

Angèle swelled as though a prince had just given her a box of chocolate creams. “After that I moved up a notch and could buy from the used clothing stalls of the Marché du Temple.”

“Bravo!” Her spunk was one more reason why he wanted her in the painting. She was climbing out of penury just like he was. They shared the same hope, that security was just around the corner.

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With the perfect timing of a born actress, she slid forward her glass for more grappa, and quaffed it down. “Now my friends have come here—”

“For a particular reason,” Auguste said. “I have a painting in mind in which you could figure prominently, and your roving correspondent as well.”

As he explained, her sly eyes shot sparks to Antonio and then to him.

“You can bet your brushes we’ll be there.”

“Every Sunday for a while. Wear a blue boating dress, if you

have one.”

“I know blessed well where to get one. I’ll be traipsing through the Marché du Temple come nine in the morning.”

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Dans
l’Avenue Frochot

Sunday morning. Yes, it had to be. The roar of applause last night as she took her bow, the hot carriage ride with the shades drawn leaving the theater, the slick feel of the leather seat under her damp palms, the heat of his body underneath his frock coat, and his low voice breathing words in rhythm with the clop clop of hooves on cobbles—