The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (4 page)

“Rigault.” I supplied the name warily. “Who is Badinguet?”

“The lady's hotel has a curfew,” said Claude. But he slid a glass down the bar.

“ . . . Hotel?” Pierre Chasseloup looked at me for the first time. Heat rose in my cheeks.

“I have just arrived in Paris.”

The man tipped a finger of absinthe into my glass and set up the spoon for sugar. I poured again and watched the liquid turned from green to cloudy white. Its scent was heady, thick with field flowers and weeds; licorice and mint and something sweet. The taste of it was bitterer than its scent and the liquid trickled down my throat like hot wax, all the way down my hollow interior. In the mirror over the bar, I saw a pale girl with tumbling dark hair, head to head with a stranger, and my hand went to my brow. My own injury (now dressed with a tincture from the pharmacy, including some concealing powder for the bruise) was still tender and aching.

“Badinguet is the carpenter who lent his trousers in order that this pretension-to-a-name, Louis Napoleon, could escape from his English jail cell, convince the peasantry of his glorious identicalness to his imperial uncle, sneak into Paris, and steal France after the economy had collapsed. Thus. ‘Badinguet,' we say, to cut him back down to size. Are you here to model, Mademoiselle Rigault, did I see you on Monday on the rue Bonaparte? Your bones have an Italian proportion.”

“No.”

“Because I have to paint like a madman over the next few weeks.”

“With a broken arm?” I eyed the dingy bar-towel bandage.

“With or without, like a journalist who must have the story out in the morning, whether or not it is true.” He gave a short laugh. “So if you are not a model, are you a relation to that self-advertising brigand of the Left Bank cafés, Rigault? . . . No again? Names are portents. As for mine, the wolf is chasing me; and I must turn things around ere I perish in its teeth.”

“Sir, I think that I might—need some air.” The liquor was tightening around my head like a band of iron, blurring my vision. All of the silver and glass was catching sparks of hazy light, and I had to eat something or faint. Chasseloup slid his long body off the stool with a bouncing slide, as though his bones were made of India rubber, as perhaps they were, by then.

“Absinthe is best taken serially,” he said. “Let's go.” I glanced anxiously for Claude; the barman caught my eye and waved.

The street cobbles were wet, and the chill had seeped through to my skin by the time a cab pulled up, leaking a stream of gaseous heat from the brazier as the door swung open. Here it was, a ticket to Claude's
soupe
—or—what? Stephan's startled eyes rose before me.

“Climb in,” Chasseloup said. “I'll take you—where will I take you? For a nightcap at the Gare du Nord?” He stood next to me, waiting.

“Hey,” shouted the coachman, “that's my coal you're burning.” In the warmth of the cab's brazier that drifted into the night air, through the lingering scent of absinthe, the artist's arm smelled of linseed oil and pigment, like raw earth.
Her
scents. Maman's—Berthe's. Like a warning, of a known place I should not like to visit again. Beguiling, sirenlike, but dangerous and full of betrayal. His coat, a shabby soft leather, pressed lightly against my arm.

“I can pay you three francs a sitting.”

“No, I don't model.”

“My studio is on the Impasse de la Bouteille. Look, I will even give you the omnibus fare in advance.” He dug in his pocket. “No? Are you sure? And you really won't come with me to the Nord? . . . Go, then!” he said to the driver, and slammed the cab's door. “I can't afford the ride.” He rocked back on his heels and swayed: an exaggerated dance of movement, a comment on it all, a joke, a bow, a form melting into the darkness.

It was past seven. No clock needed to say so, as not a female soul lingered on the street save two, gaily dressed, passing through the Passage to the Tivoli Gardens on the arms of their beaux; a gaggle of echoing laughter. Starving now, absinthe-queasy, I risked my luck a second time, ducking back under the Trap's drape. Collected my
soupe
from Claude at the end of the bar, the barman winking in complicity as I ignored the other inquiring eyes. What a game of cat and mouse! But my stomach didn't know the difference.

 

Madame was sitting by the desk in an armchair, knitting by gas lamp, when I made my way back to the Tivoli, loitering wretchedly in the shadows like a thief, just past the
HôTEL
Lozenge, until I could follow someone in. Tonight it was a man in a greatcoat, and he skirted me as though I carried the plague. Madame cast an ominous, judging glance over her clicking needles, and I wondered if tomorrow morning might be my last at the Tivoli. My thoughts flew inexplicably to the clerk, and the pale girl . . . Madame clicked away as I slunk past her and upstairs. Like an old
tricoteuse
at the guillotine, plying her skein as the heads fell, counting stitches.
Counting.

I
S IT THE ONE
you've been waiting for?” the clerk said softly, with his lingering, sticky glance. The Tivoli's lobby smelled of mildew and ancient horsehair. I'd just come in from the icy wind, from spending a few sous on hot chestnuts, a bar of chocolate, more postage stamps. Then my heart began to pound. A sliver of white had appeared in number 12's pigeonhole behind the mahogany; thin as the edge of a new moon. At last!

He reached for the envelope with an elaborate gesture, held it down with his thumb a moment too long. Leaned over to peer at the postmark. “From the baronet, perhaps? Monsieur de Chaveignes? . . . Why, you think we don't do our research, mademoiselle? But we must protect our establishment.” I recalled Madame's scrutiny of Stephan's original document. The envelope now in my hand had a strange, foreign texture and many stamps.
Mlle. B—
the letters blurred. I passed it back across the desk.

“But this letter is not addressed to me at all! It's not mine.”

“Oh! Well, we do have so few mademoiselles here,” the clerk said, full of sly, barely veiled delight and—I grasped finally that my link with the outside world, to Stephan—to Stephan's return—depended on his ill intentions and the poisonous Madame. “My apologies, it is R—Rigault, isn't it? It's not for number 12 at all, but number 16. And you are vacating your room tomorrow, is that correct?”

I turned my back without answering.

 

According to the
Nouveau
Plan de Paris 1860,
Pierre Chasseloup's studio on the Impasse de la Bouteille did not lie across the Seine, near the cafés and artists' haunts, but past Les Halles and uphill. Traveling there, the heels of my boots sank into the gaps between the cobbles as I traipsed past looming advertisements for fabric and chocolate. Giant stockinged legs marched across walls; vests and jackets drawn in silhouette paraded along like the vestments of ghosts. One window displayed linens and bed coverings; another, crinolines. The Impasse de la Bouteille itself was a tiny alleyway in a seedy central district, a gate at its mouth . . .
NO. 53, HAT MAKER
. I touched my own head apparel, the element of my dress that marked me out from the crowd and conferred its whiff of the gentlewoman's armoire, the veil a shred of the social net that I was about to fall through, probably before the fashions changed.

“
Fill this from the pump, while you're down there!” The voice came from above, and down came a long cord with a key and a pail tied to the end of it. “Four
hundred
omnibuses have passed since I saw you last,” said the painter when I arrived, dizzy and breathless, face to face with him at the threshold of the studio, with half a bucket of water. His arm in a bar towel splashed with color.

“You counted them?”

He laughed, and heat rose in my cheeks.

“I'm sorry, monsieur. But I walk where I'm going.”

Behind him, the dull gray morning had turned pearly and glistening. A bird flew by, astonishingly, at eye level: the studio was made entirely of glass, a room built from windows, high above the city, looking like a great eye onto the heavens and rooftops; chimney pots exhaled smudges of smoke, and the thinnest branches of treetops made a filigree pattern against the sky. The February gloom filtered whitely through clouds; and something within me startled and awoke.

I stood dazzled by the light, numb and dizzy with hunger. To one side of the studio, a clothes rack sagged with silk bombazines, velvet-trimmed satin, dark suit coats; hats with plumes, crinolines, shawls striped and paisley; plain, short trousers and miniature petticoats. Despite its light, the studio was cold and my fingers and toes were numb. I blew on my fingertips. Chasseloup gestured to the screen.

“What do you want me to put on?”

“Nothing. Perhaps a drape.”

“But—”

“This is a photographer's studio. The faithful citizens of Paris come to rent someone else's Sunday best and have their portraits taken. I, however,
paint,
” Chasseloup said. “If you please, mademoiselle? It is this morning's light I am after.”

Behind the screen was a teetering clutch of objects—horn and violin, silk flowers, a plaster Venus, apothecary bottles, columns of Greek design. A few sketches, nude figures without heads, were crumpled in a corner. Gooseflesh stood out on my arms; their soft fluff prickled and stood up. I bit my lip and undid my skirt with stiff fingers. A film of grit covered the floor, dusting the soles of my feet; tears threatened. Just because I had undressed for one man did not mean I might do so for any comer, but perhaps, given the circumstances, given the fact that I had to earn something to wait for my protector where we had agreed—

A faint impatient rustling from across the studio. “I am an
artist,
mademoiselle, not a rapist. Are you coming?”

“One minute.” I grappled with a piece of drapery, hugging it around me.

“The cloth, please?”

“I—I have modeled only for my mother, and . . . sorry, I'm—”

“Ah, so you have modeled. Keep the drapery then, for now.”

He slung a chair on top of a wooden crate, took it down again, stared at the box from one corner of the room and then the other, rearranged panels against the windows, changing the angle of light. When I climbed onto the crate and stood as he indicated, the slats felt unsteady, like they might splinter and crack. After a few minutes my arms went numb and I began to count back from a hundred: ninety-nine . . . ninety-eight . . . ninety-seven . . . clenching my lip; fingers and toes going blue; blood stopped in the veins. All around was sky. My mind whitened.

 

How I had once loved the colors in Berthe's paint box: cinnabar, lapis, viridian, gold leaf. And her tools: pigment-grinding stones, a tiny mortar and pestle, and, fanned out in the box's lid, brushes two or three hairs wide, for painting miniatures. A small oval palette, and her high-keyed attention humming the air. Her art supplies had arrived in stamped packages from Paris, along with parcels of lacy underclothes.

Every two years, in the latest days of winter, when the earth had barely thawed and we planned our kitchen garden, Maman's paintings were ready to ship north, just like the crates of foie gras had been sent the previous autumn. She stayed up at night writing letters, streams of black ink ribboning across parchment; her hair falling from its pins. Sanded and ready for envelopes, the letters lay across the rough planks of our dining table, crisp emissaries ready for the long march. I was enlisted to read out the Salon regulations about measurements, mounts, crates, the date by which the paintings must arrive. It was a testing situation, the subject of much anxiety. The roads out of Tillac were barely more than potholed tracks, and a mule with a crate on its back would be challenged by unsettled weather, wolves, thieves, rain . . . And Berthe's connection to the capital of the art world was tenuous at best. Her ambition was encouraged by her teacher at Auch, who remembered (with the haziness of passing years) back to the past century, when any number of women had painted for the Paris Salon. And my father would have carried crates to the capital on his own back if he had thought it would make her happy.

Her paintings must, and would, be judged in Paris. The outcome mattered terribly to her, and thus to us all. And so we waited. Through the weeks, the months, the summer. Finally, Papa would rush across the square from the
mairie,
holding the envelope with the Paris stamps. From the time when I was very young, I learned that this event was the one to be dreaded. This, and afterward, when Berthe shut herself away and the house went dead between its walls.

When I was seven, I stood by her bed with the bleeding pan. Later, concocted broths and gruels, kept an eye on sharp things—goose quills and knives. Later, when the crate itself came back, battered and splintered, Papa carried it back across the square in his arms like it was a dead child.

And then, it all began again. New sketches; vows of improvement. The gathering of materials, trips to Auch to order supplies, furious days of painting; eventually the arrival of the envelope of regulations for the next Salon; the gilding and crating, the letter writing, the wait. Berthe's last crate had been packed with more than the usual care and contained paintings that my mother had been working on for a long time, always revising, making small amendments. The submission was a group of miniature family portraits on ivory, including my stern
grandpère
with his round glasses; my
grandmère
with a string of jet beads, each smaller than a poppy seed, at her throat; and a picture of our kitchen garden under past year's frost. I loved that piece: every withered leaf and fallen flower etched in fairy ice, while a clutch of tiny birds gathered in a corner to peck amid the seeds and berries.