Paris Kiss (2 page)

Chapter 2

Paris

June 1884

It was my first summer in Paris. Camille and I were in our studio and I remember the model kept fidgeting.

Camille waved her sculpting tool at her. ‘Marie-Thérèse!
Tu m'embêtes!
What is wrong with you? Do you need to take a piss?'

The model pouted but resumed her pose and Camille bent her head once more to the clay. She could always become absorbed in her work in an instant, while it took me a while to get going. I started sorting through my materials and changed the position of the rotating table.

Camille sighed loudly. ‘Jessie! You're like a dog circling its basket.'

I tied my hair back with a strip of cloth and unwrapped the batch of clay. My hands rested on the cool, wet mass and I looked at Camille. I'd known her for only a few weeks but already we were firm friends. I'd never met anyone like her before. I studied the shape of her head, how she scowled as her fingers dabbed and smudged the clay and, ignoring the model, began to work until I had the outline of her head. I grew excited as the sculpture came to life between my hands and Camille's features emerged from the rough clay. It was the best work I had ever done – the likeness was good, the proportions exact. Hours passed as we became absorbed in our work, the only sounds the ticking of a clock and the rustling of our skirts as we moved around the tables.

I needed a finer sculpting tool and moved to the corner of the room to find one. I heard the curtain that kept the dust from the marble cutting room out of the clay studio being pulled back. I turned round and saw a man about my father's age. He was short but had a powerful barrel chest and a commanding air. His hair was cut brutally short,
en brosse
, in the military style, but he wore his beard wild and long. His suit was dusty and his waistcoat was daubed with clay. He carried an ebony walking stick topped with silver, which he planted in front of his feet like a theatre impresario. I was standing in the shadows and he seemed unaware of my presence. He was staring at Camille and held out hands in grey kid gloves, like a supplicant, towards her.

‘Camille,
ma chère
…'

Camille started, as if woken from a dream. She nodded a warning towards me – so slightly I would have missed it if I hadn't been watching her carefully – and he dropped his hands as I stepped out of the shadows.

‘Monsieur Rodin,' Camille said loudly. ‘Allow me to present your new pupil, Jessie Lipscomb.'

So this was the great Rodin, the reason I had come to Paris. I had almost given up hope of meeting him as the days wore on and no tutor appeared. I studied him closely. Few of the general public had heard of Rodin in those days, but his name was touted in art circles as a powerful sculptor who broke all the rules. Alphonse Legros, my tutor in London, had impressed on me that Rodin, his former pupil, was an extraordinary genius.

‘Auguste will free you from the English
politesse
that binds your work like a corset,' Legros had told me.

He had a direct way of speaking but fortunately was more restrained when I took my father to meet him so he could persuade him to let me go to Paris on my own to study with Rodin. Papa had been against the scheme at first; he'd heard the usual stories of women ruined by disreputable artists and, like everyone, he'd read
Trilby
and seen
La Bohème.
But Legros assured him I would be well looked after at the home of one of Rodin's most promising pupils, Camille Claudel, and that her family was respectable, from the
haute bourgeoisie
. When my father looked sceptical, Legros appealed to his parental pride.

‘She has outgrown the women's classes here at South Kensington with their ridiculous restrictions on modelling from life. Your daughter
is suffocating here, Monsieur Lipscomb,' Legros said. ‘She is an artist; she needs to breathe, to be taught by the best of the best. She needs to go to Paris or she will be desperately unhappy.'

That clinched it: Papa could never bear to see me, his cherished only child, sad.

‘If you really want to go, Jessie, you may,' Papa had said, laughing as I flung myself into his arms. ‘Your mother will be furious with me, but she'll come round. We both know you're a sensible girl.'

A few months later I was stepping off a train at Gare du Nord and into my new life in Paris.

Legros had called Rodin a man of passion and I could see at once that he was one of those men who draw women like moths to a lamp: the air in the studio crackled with the energy that radiated from him. On the other side of the room, like a cat craving attention, the model tossed her hair and arched her back so that her nipples, now hard as pebbles, pointed at the ceiling. I noticed Rodin's eyes slide towards them.

Camille snapped her head round and barked at the pouting Marie-Thérèse. ‘Time's up! Go on, get your clothes on and get out. Do you think I'm made of money?'

The model smiled lazily and strolled past Rodin, not bothering to cover up her buttocks, which rolled luxuriously as she walked. She trailed a dirty peignoir behind her, and cast him a last smouldering look before slipping behind the screen. Camille muttered what sounded like
Salope!
and turned back to Rodin and me.

‘
Maître
,' I said. And oh, the thrill of using that word! ‘I'm so pleased you could take me on as your pupil.'

Rodin inclined his head over my hand and dropped it in the French manner I still find slightly disconcerting – at once intimate and dismissive. He smoothed his beard and studied me. His eyes were the startling blue of glaciated ice but when he took off his thick glasses to clean them, he blinked like a mole coming out of the ground.

‘Mademoiselle Lipscomb, it will be my pleasure to teach you. Alphonse wrote to me and had nothing but the highest praise for your talents.' He smiled and I basked in the sunlit warmth of his attention. Rodin rubbed his hands together – oddly, he had not taken off his gloves – and walked over to my table. ‘Let me have a look at your work. This head is yours?'

I was filled with alarm. ‘I have only just started it,
Maître
.'

‘Good. I like to catch a piece early, before it takes the wrong direction.' He circled the table, examining the figure from all angles. He stopped and closed his eyes. Like a blind man, he placed his hands gently on the clay face and felt its contours, as if he were caressing a lover. I felt like a houseguest who has stepped into the wrong bedroom. I glanced at Camille and saw she was transfixed, her mouth parted and a flush on her cheek. Rodin dropped his hands and stepped back, breaking the spell. He leaned on his stick for a moment as if considering his response, and I held my breath while I waited.

Rodin banged his stick on the wooden floor and I jumped as the crack sounded around the room.

‘While the piece is technically proficient…'

I steeled myself for the codicil.

‘…it is dead.'

I gasped as if winded and thought for a moment I was going to be sick.

Rodin circled the bust, which I had been so proud of only a few moments earlier and could now see was the work of a fraud, and pointed at it with his stick. ‘I may as well be looking at a photograph of Mademoiselle Claudel.'

He said
photograph
as if it were an insult. The technology was in its infancy then and many artists feared it would make our profession redundant. I decided not to tell my tutor that my young man William had been showing me how to use his camera and how I'd started experimenting with reflections and lighting.

Rodin was in full swing now. ‘You have, it is true, caught Camille's likeness, but in doing so you have killed her, just as if you had stuck a pin through her heart. She is like a butterfly in a glass case – beautiful but dead.'

He pounded the floor again with his stick and I flinched at every ricochet.

‘Where is her energy?'
Bang!

‘Where is her spirit?'
Bang!

‘An artist stands naked before the world. What do you feel when you look at your friend? Admiration? Jealousy? Desire? Hatred? I see nothing in this piece – only technique, which I do not decry, but it does not make you stand out. Mademoiselle Lipscomb, you must sculpt from your gut as well as your head. Then, and only then, will you become a true artist.'

Rodin was right, of course, I know that now, but his comments rained down on me like burning embers from Mount Vesuvius. I wasn't used to being eviscerated in this way. My tutors at South Kensington had always been effusive about my work, said it was like that of a man – the highest praise a woman artist could hope for in those days. Now my shame burned all the brighter in front of Camille, who stood silently at my side. I glanced at her. Was that a shadow of a smirk? I clenched my fists so my nails dug into my palms and told myself this was why I was here – to learn. My dismay must have shown in my face and Rodin softened his tone. He laid his hand lightly on my shoulder and, to my horror, tears pricked my eyes; I tried desperately to blink them back.

Rodin ran his hand down my arm and squeezed it. ‘I would not say this if I did not think you had real talent – why would I waste my breath? You are one of the few who has the potential to make it in this cruel game. Legros was right!'

The clouds parted. I smiled through my tears. ‘
Merci, mon maître.
'

He smiled and patted my shoulder. ‘Now, watch carefully and I will show you how to improve this mannequin and turn it into a real, living, breathing person with fire in her belly.'

He whipped off his gloves to reveal calloused labourer's hands scored with burns and I wondered if that was why he kept them covered, through shame. Most sculptors I knew were proud of their marked hands, but then few had clawed their way up from the back streets, as Rodin had. Soon I was too busy watching the great Rodin at work to care whether he wore gloves or fur mittens. In a few deft moves he smudged my careful refinements, pinching the cheeks to make them fuller and more childlike, smearing the lips so they seemed about to talk, always, always keeping the surface rough so you were never in any doubt that although this was a creature of clay, as he said, it was a living, breathing creature.

Camille came to life before our eyes and the real Camille gasped beside me and reached for my hand as we watched our
maître
create a masterpiece in a matter of minutes. It was true what they said: Rodin was a genius, the greatest sculptor since Michelangelo.

He wiped his hands down the front of his waistcoat, careless of the grey smears he left behind. ‘Now, Mademoiselle Claudel, it's your turn.'

I remember thinking fleetingly that he had called her Camille when he had come into the studio, but now he was using her title and the formal ‘vous'. The thought slipped away as I waited to see what he would say about Camille's work. In the weeks I had been sharing a studio with her it was already clear she was a far more talented artist than I could ever hope to be. Rodin, I was certain, would have nothing but praise for her tender sculpture of a young girl in her first flush of innocence – a quality she had spotted in Marie-Thérèse despite the model's brash ways. I waited glumly for Rodin's praise; it would make my humiliation all the keener.

Camille, her hands clasped behind her back and her features set in concentration, stepped aside to allow Rodin a better view. He peered through his spectacles at the figure from all angles, running his hands over the young girl's flanks like a farmer at a horse market. He stepped back and I heard Camille's breathing quicken. Rodin shook his head and raised his stick and brought it down with a sickening squelch through the soft clay. I heard myself cry out as he lashed out again and again with the stick and turned the delicate sculpture into pulp. The violence of his action stunned me into silence and I waited, my mouth still covered and my eyes wide, for Camille to explode. I was already familiar with her temper and sure she would not stand for this. But she appeared unmoved.

‘You are right,
Maître
, the leg was awkward, the pose stiff and contrived.' I was amazed by her even tone. ‘Thank you.' Camille began to salvage what was left with movements as quick and confident as Rodin's, smoothing away the savage rips in the clay. Rodin watched, his eyes never leaving her hands. I watched too as the sculpture took on the shape of a young girl awakening to desire, pulsating with longing, her back arched like a cat, an eagerness in outstretched arms that made you want to turn away to spare her shame. None of us turned round when the model called out that she was leaving.

‘And don't think I'll come back to work in this madhouse in a hurry,' she said. ‘Destroying a perfectly good sculpture! I sat for hours getting cramp in my arse – and for what? Nothing! You're all lunatics!' The door slammed behind her.

The windows were a blaze of copper from the setting sun when Rodin put his hand over Camille's. ‘Stop! She is perfect now. Never overwork your piece, always leave some life in the clay.'

And he tipped his hat and left.

Camille and I stood looking at each other in the silence he left behind. Then we both grinned and I grasped her hands and swung her round.

‘Rodin says I have talent!'

Camille laughed and pushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. ‘Of course you have talent, Jessie Lipscomb from Peterborough. Do you think I would let any old riff-raff share my studio? Come on, let's celebrate.'

She sat down with an ‘
ouf!
' on one of the rickety chairs we'd grouped around an old tea chest we'd covered with a silk shawl. I fetched the coffee pot from the stove and a bottle of brandy Camille had stolen from her mother's kitchen. Once we were sipping our laced coffee, Camille pulled a silver case from her pocket and lit Turkish cigarettes for both of us. It had taken me a while, but I'd soon got the hang of smoking by copying Camille.