The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (19 page)

 

The next morning, Chasseloup paced back and forth, jacket smeared with paint, stub-bristled brushes clutched in his hand. Pieces of sailcloth, odd-shaped squares, tail ends of rolls, their corners peeling down, were tacked up over every surface, in various stages of
imprimatura;
some chalked with figures in green outline; still others, painted over to be started again. The green dress and its crinoline lay in their twin coffins.

“And where did you find
her
—the blonde girl with the rat's teeth?” I'd ended up sleeping in the studio upstairs; hungry and ruing the fate of the soup pot. “You tell me that you care for me—I make soup every night, wait for you to come home, go on sitting for you, not for a sou but for a promise—of what? For you to finish another—pack of lies on canvas for old men to sweat over—and then treat me as you please. Oh, God help me if I
ever
step up on this box again.”

He stared at me in rigid fury.

“Pack of lies, indeed. God help me if I ask you to.”

“Well, why not? It's worth it to you to finish. Rack up a second medal; Vollard will get you another fortune—”

“When you had your tantrum and threw the pot out the window—which, by the way, could have killed an innocent passerby—you left something behind.”

My hands went cold, then my feet and legs, and the tip of my nose. My hands moved instinctively to my belly. The damned
carte
from the indigo dress. We both stared at the flimsy square. Chasseloup holding it between his fingers like something putrid.

“It's not mine.”

He gave a sharp, short laugh. “A week ago Vollard told me a story I had the sheer vanity not to believe. He told me . . . because I told him of your condition. I wanted his advice. I had gone to my father, I was even thinking of—God help me—! I believed I had painted an—innocent girl. I refused to believe the picture could be compromised in—this way. Or that you could have been.”

This time, I was the one who crossed to the studio's windows and stared at the buttes. Stared a long time. Finally I said, “You left—for Croisset. Let me make your eggs and sew your buttons, and collect your brushes and carry your things to the train, and you waved goodbye without a word. You never paid me what you should have; never bothered to ask where I might stay, nor if I had the means. I was a little fool come in on a train from the provinces. It doesn't matter. It's not my name on that
carte
—”

“Do I even
know
your name?”

“I said it's not my name. I told you my name!”

“Yes, an empress and a rabble-rouser; maybe you got it from the papers.”

“It's not my name on the
carte.
” I stopped, and heard myself. “But it might as well be, Pierre.”

“Gustav told me that when you came back—
got out—
he even went so far as to pay off what he called your ‘debt.' What you owed to some Madame So-and-So—because he wanted me to paint you again.”

“He did that?”

“He said that otherwise you'd be hauled in by the Morals Brigade and unable to sit. So you hardly have a complaint against
him.
” Chasseloup's voice was hard again. “But I don't care for that arrangement. I reject it. Please leave. Go back to—wherever you came from. I don't wish to see you. And
if
it's true—that you didn't fall into this situation until after you sat for me—you could have done a thousand things before you went where you did.”

I stood white and mute. Responses circled, washed through my mind like water sucked down a cesspool. “I was cold,” I said finally. “I'd lost everything, and then I lost you.”

“Eugénie.” Chasseloup picked up some brushes, hands trembling; mopped his face with a paint-smeared rag. “Is this child mine?”

Some piece of me splintered, broke away.

“No, Pierre. No, it's not.”

Chasseloup turned away. “Then—please—go. Let me paint in peace.”

Color bled everywhere—on his flesh, on mine, on the green dress lying embalmed in its casket. On the floating white shawl I'd worn to the Closerie des Lilas; and on the pasteboard
carte,
in the dust where Chasseloup had dropped it. I picked up the thing before I went. It was the least I could do for her, whoever she was.

 

“You've really screwed the thing, haven't you?” Jolie rolled a cigarette and refilled our glasses, wide-mouthed jars from a shelf. The wine was slowing my racing thoughts. “Your Stephan was nothing but a
miché,
and this Chasseloup is a
bébé
.”

“I don't know what else I could have done.”

“I'm sure
that's
true . . .
Salut,
chouette.
Oh, don't look like that. It's not so bad as you think.” Jolie wore a faded velvet wrap over her shoulders; strands of hair were clinging to her skin. A sleek tangerine-and-cream cat dozed on the bed; she curled tighter when a draft rippled the ragged length of lace at the window.

“That's Clio, and the furniture is bought and paid for, from Albertine on the rue du Jardinet—”

“All of it's yours?”

“My friend Odette was stashing it for me. She's an old pal from when we both lived on Vertus—but she didn't live there long; she moved up in the world! The stove's in the hall, so there's no heat, and it's shared among nine of us. But it doesn't matter; this place is a palace.”

It occurred to me that just a short time ago, I would have exulted in this paradise—a tiny silk-festooned matchbox under the slope of the roof, over a café, with Jolie. In one corner was a narrow bed covered with a strip of purple cloth. In the center of the room was a rose-colored chaise, pocked with cigarette burns. A small table was marked with bottle rings, more burns, and streaks of black; a stack of tattered old books—a primer, a book of fairy tales—and the possibility of a decent supper: bread and grapes, cheese, a bit of
saucisson.
A bag of fish heads for Clio, dripping onto the floor. The cutlery was all silverplate, and mismatched, some of it heavy. Salt cellars and napkin rings.

“You know what?”

“What,
chouette
?”

“I'm at least half-glad to be here.”

Jolie had uncorked a bottle and looked at me, eyes half-closed. “All right. First things first. You still owe Jouffroy?”

“It's been paid.”

“I wondered. Otherwise they'd have caught up with you by now.” Jolie gathered the wrap around shoulders and stretched her long arms to the ceiling. She reached for the tobacco, rolled another cigarette. The cat stretched and yawned, jumped down and meowed, brushing against my skirts. She had green eyes as well. “Clio, do you want your fish? Not really a hunter, are you, my cat? She lets the mice run right under her nose.” Jolie hitched up her dress as she bent down to fill a saucer. Her legs were so long that her knees nearly came up to her shoulders. Her skin was like milk, her eyes like stones under water. “So—are you back in the game, going to register as an independent? You'd be good if you wanted to—the
muffes
know contraband when they see it.”

I looked down at the ripening fruit of my belly. “I was sick on those men, before, at Deux Soeurs. And now—like this—”

“Well . . . what, then?” She drained her glass and bit the end off a sausage.

“I have a little modeling job, for a sculptor.” She was a friend of Pierre's—Mademoiselle C—who was living off her inheritance and sculpting in a pocket courtyard studio on the Île Saint-Louis. She was intense, slate-eyed; her brow gathered like a storm; her hair a dark mess of ringlets pulled up in a chignon. She had a ferocious excitement; a vibrating tension that bounced off the old sand-colored walls. Mademoiselle C had no patience for conventional art.
You might as well visit the morgue as the sculpture rooms at the Palace of Industry during the Salons. White hands. White breasts. Drapery. Wings. White wings, on angels. Scrolls and busts. The same model, in the same pose; copy the academics, bloodless, bleached. They never work from life,
she'd said. Her gaze dipping and swimming over the curves and shadows of my swelling belly. “You fell from the heavens. How many
enceintes
could I get to model for me? I'll tell you, not one.”

“She'll need me for a while longer. Could I stay with you for a bit?” I remembered Jolie's lecture, that two
inscrits
could not share lodgings, although I didn't understand why not. “I know we have to be careful.”

“Mmmm. I'm glad you're here, anyway. It was lonely before.”

 

Jolie did not lounge under street lamps, kohl-eyed and spotted with rouge, but made herself into an indescribable sort of person. Her dresses had theatrical touches but were still demure. Plum-red silk rustled over colored petticoats and jet-buttoned boots. Her hat, veil-less, was trimmed in black velvet; her hair swept up and scented with men's cologne that she kept in small stoppered bottles. She carried a knife in a soft leather casing in her boot; never wore a shawl or a cloak in any weather or carried a handbag; yet she glittered like a soft, shimmering jewel. Before going out she poured two neat brandies into thin-stemmed glasses; drank one and then the other. If it was raining, she took a large black umbrella.

Down the stairs, Jolie greeted all the neighbors with a
Good afternoon, madame,
or
How are you today, monsieur?
She took soup to the old ones; sometimes brought in flowers or tobacco, laughing at her little bribes to old Madame Boudet, who, she said, would happily march down to the Préfecture herself, were it not for Jolie's bits of shopping. When she reached the street she tipped her nose up, as if to see how the wind blew, and when she came home, she hitched up her skirts and dumped out the contents of her pockets—dozens of them, sewn into her seams and a sash around her waist. She divided the money into piles: bills and coins in orderly stacks. Jolie had a circle of regulars, and the odd one out; she didn't seem to be partial to any one of them. On the rue Jacob, around the corner from Galopin Vins Fins et Ordinaires, was a room—I wasn't sure from whom it was rented. Jolie joked about the “poor Brigade boys,” by which she meant the gray coats of whom I'd been so afraid, and I assumed someone had to be paying them off.

 

When she rattled the key in the lock, Clio made a graceful leap off the chaise and abandoned my lap for the door. Jolie looked flushed and sparkling, vivid with her hair and her colors. She'd had a reading lesson with Louise; she always looked happier on those nights.

“So, what have you been doing all evening?” she asked.

“Writing.” My usual scatter of nibs and ink pots on the table.

“To that Chasseloup? He's your ticket, probably lonely and drinking himself to death. All along, he enjoys your services, makes a fortune off your face, and suddenly he's high and mighty?
And
you let him off the hook. Anyone would say he owes you.”

“No, they wouldn't, Jolie. No one would say it.”

Tears welled up and spilled over. The evenings were long, too long, with thoughts circling and jostling, contending like fighters in a ring. And also, my sittings with Mademoiselle C had taught me what I knew, but half-denied. My defiance, my careless-seeming courage was not, in fact, true acknowledgment of my situation, but partly an inability to accept it—and to plan for it. I had refused the ergot and the angel maker to defy Françoise; to cling to some vestige of the past. Now life was calling me from childishness to womanhood and I wanted to shirk, shrug it off. My divided Selves, somehow, had navigated my path thus far—and even now, I could not speak with a single unified voice.

Jolie came around the chaise and sat, lit a cigarette. Dumped Clio into my lap to stretch out her neck and start a rumbling purr, from deep in her creamy orange belly. A velvet sleeve brushed my cheek, a hint of men's cologne.

“Well,
I
say it.”

“I wasn't writing to Chasseloup.”

“What, then?”

“Just—a sort of diary. I feel like I've been—split down the middle, drawn and quartered and divided up until there's nothing left. Ever since I came here, really. And now—soon—this baby.”

La Maternité was the place poor women went when their time came. Peak-roofed, high-gabled, overgrown with shrubbery; I had even seen a young woman cross its wide, dark threshold. I took some comfort from its looming presence, its very existence a testimony to my situation. To read the papers, one would think only women with christening-cup collections gave birth, but La Maternité put the lie to that.

“I've been thinking about it. Remember my friend Victorine? She was turned away there and at Hôtel Dieu, and ended up having hers on the Pont Neuf. To get into the hospital you need two character witnesses, a certificate of morals, proof of residency—and
then
they do their best to kill you. The place is so filthy, even Françoise has given up on it.”

“Really?” I closed my eyes and Jolie rested her arm around my shoulders. My back ached, and I couldn't breathe. These days I could not sit, or stand, or lie down—could do nothing, it seemed, but wait to burst like a rotten melon—and I tasted salt again; it couldn't be helped.

“Come lie down, you are in a terrible state.” Jolie scooped Clio under one arm and took my hand. I sank the bulk of my poor body into her mattress while she unbuttoned the back of my dress. “You should be sleeping here. I'll take the chaise. No—really.” She put a drop of oil and cologne on her palms and began to rub my back, then the stretched, hot skin of my swollen belly, with her cool hands. The tears came like a flood, in great gulping sobs.

“When my brother, Henri, left to join the army, I felt as bad as you do. And not just any army—he was just a thief from the Paris slums but he wanted to join the Turcos and go to Africa, and he did. I never believed he'd go, but one morning he was gone, just as he'd said. He left, and then I had to learn to be strong. I thought I knew all the tricks, but I just had to learn them all again. Thought I'd die for sure. For a while I wanted to.”