The Witch of Painted Sorrows (14 page)

“Really? You want to paint
l’art épique
?”

I nodded.

“And not just to flatter me so I make this decision in your favor?” He laughed, and we all joined in, although my laugh was so nervous it sounded more like a squeak.

“Yes.” Even though I was making this up as I went, I was telling the truth. “My father and I were both fascinated with mythology, legends, and fantasies. The imagination, my father believed, was humanity’s most powerful force. Our ability, he said, to create is what makes us great.”

It was true. It was what he believed—even though, I thought, he didn’t himself create anything other than a larger fortune than he’d started out with.

“So you want to peruse symbolism?” Moreau asked.

“Soft lights and pretty women are best left to the impressionists,” I said with a stridency that surprised even me. “I am interested in the search for the eternal truths in our ancient stories.”

Had I gone too far? I wasn’t trying to flatter him. These answers came unbidden from some deep wellspring of intention inside of me. But now I was afraid he would think I was just being politic.

As if reading my thoughts, he said, “I should wonder at the authenticity of your comments, but I think I believe you. I sense a passion in you. An almost frightening passion.”

A chill passed through me.

Moreau looked from me to Girraud. “I think I can find room in my class.” He turned back to me. “We meet on Saturdays and Wednesdays.”

I sputtered out a thank-you that I repeated twice, but he brushed my gratitude off with a gesture. “When there are no classes, I expect you to visit the Louvre along with my other students and copy the Old Masters like Poussin, Raphael, Rembrandt, Titian, and Watteau. One must learn the techniques of others before one strikes out on his own. Don’t waste your time with the moderns in the Luxembourg. There’s time for that. Only when you know all the rules can you begin to break them and find your own style, and that is the goal. Not to turn into one of these boring copyists, but to become an artist with a vision. I’m not an easy teacher, Monsieur Verlaine. If you don’t prove yourself, I will ask you to leave . . . If you do, I will invite you to join
me at my studio on Sunday mornings where I offer more extensive critiques than I give in the atelier and to spend some afternoons painting alongside me.”

I thanked him. I was elated. I had been admitted to the finest art school in the world. I glanced over at Julien. He smiled back at me, clearly pleased that he had been able to help me.

“Excuse me,” I said, still imitating a man’s speech patterns and tone.

Girraud and Moreau both turned.

“I need to tell you both something, if you could spare just a few more minutes.”

I felt strange. Cold and warm at the same time. I smelled those faraway violets again, but this time they made me slightly nauseated.

“I need to explain who I am.” I was looking at Monsieur Moreau, but I could see Julien’s face, too, and I could read the apprehension there.

I was feeling the same fear he was. Part of me watched the scene from a distance, terrified, horrified. Another part of me wanted to laugh with delight at what I was about to do.

“I can’t attend the École like this,” I said as I reached up and pulled at the mustache, took off my hat, and shook out my hair. As I loosened the cravat, my fingers trembled.

“What are you doing?” Julien whispered as an appalled look contorted his face. “You are ruining the disguise.”

Julien had told me he and the admissions director were friends, having met when Julien attended the École, and that the director had proved himself a rebel who challenged the institution into readying itself for the upcoming new century. I was about to give him a chance to prove just how forward thinking he really was.

Both Moreau and Girraud watched in shock as I revealed myself to be a woman.

“
Mon Dieu
,” Moreau said, “I had no idea.”

Without shame, Monsieur Girraud examined my face. “I didn’t
know. I saw . . . but . . .” He was flustered and confused, trying to make sense of the optical illusion that appeared before him.

Monsieur Moreau put his hand up to his chin as he, too, peered at me. Despite his obvious shock, I detected a bit of delight in his eyes.

“We have a policy,” Girraud said finally, and then turned to Julien. “We have a policy,” he repeated.

“You
had
a policy,” I said in my normal voice. “It’s 1894, Monsieur Girraud. In America art schools accept women.”

Julien took up the challenge. “You always talk about the future, Girraud. Now is your chance to do something about it. Break with tradition.”

“I’ll fit in,” I said, imploring him. “I’ll keep my hair cut short, dress like this. I won’t be a distraction but just another student.”

“I could never allow such a thing,” the admissions officer said as he shook his head vehemently.

“Why not?” I asked.

“You can’t make a change like that without consulting the directors, the professors—there are so many people who I would need to discuss this with.” Vexed, he threw up his hands.

“Really?” Julien smiled at his friend. “Is there an actual written rule about female students? I understood it was just another archaic assumption. Why not do it, Girraud? You both looked at her work, and you accepted her.”

“Her work does indeed show promise and skill.” Girraud glanced over at Moreau for affirmation.

The painter nodded. “Mademoiselle Verlaine—” He looked at me. “Is it still Verlaine?”

I nodded. “It is.”

“Mademoiselle Verlaine exhibits a certain force and passion that is unusual in either a man or a woman,” Moreau finished.

“There’s no doubt you have talent, Mademoiselle Verlaine,” Girraud said. “But we have a policy. Most of our fine painters offer private classes. Even Moreau does sometimes. Perhaps you would consider—”

“I don’t want to take private lessons. I belong here,” I cut him off.

“But why?”

“I know how much easier it would be to accept convention and take private lessons, but it won’t be the same. This is the greatest art school in the world. Nothing else will do.”

Moreau glanced from my face to my clothes and back to my face. “As long as your presence doesn’t turn my class into a circus, I have no objection.” He turned to the director. “Girraud, it’s high time we joined the modern world. Let’s take this on.”

“But can we manage the attention the decision will get?” Girraud was shaking his head in worry.

“You and Moreau will be heroes,” I said. “You will make history.”

Girraud was thinking it through, and when I saw excitement replace the concern in his eyes, I knew that I, Sandrine Verlaine, would be the very first woman to attend the École des Beaux-Arts.

Chapter 12

Outside on the street, I took a deep breath. Beneath the heavy jacket my shirt was soaked in perspiration, and my portfolio felt extremely heavy in my hand. As I shifted it, Julien tried to take it from me, but I resisted.

“What excuse do I have to give it to you? I need to be able to carry my own weight now, literally.”

“How’s this for an excuse? You broke your wrist, remember? You don’t need to put extra weight on it.”

I smiled and conceded. It was a relief to hand it off.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To that café.”

He pointed to the corner of rue de Seine and rue Jacques-Callot at a canopied café appropriately named La Palette.

It was a short walk, and we found a table by the window. Everywhere I looked, the walls were covered with paintings and drawings of palettes. I even spotted some actual three-dimensional ones signed by the artists who’d used them.

“Students frequent this place. It’s inexpensive and convenient, and the owner is an artist himself,” Julien explained. “Sometimes if you’re low on money, he’ll trade you some food and drink for a palette. He thinks one day some of them will be priceless. And he’s probably right.”

The waiter arrived, and before I could order the coffee I so badly wanted, Julien ordered a bottle of their best champagne.

When I looked at him questioningly, he just smiled but didn’t say anything until the waiter arrived back with a bottle of Jarretière and two flutes.

“Messieurs, voilà,” the waiter said.

He’d thought I was a man. How much the eye is fooled and sees what it wants to see.

The waiter worked the neck until the cork escaped with a festive
pop
. He poured the golden sparkling wine almost to overflowing.

Once he was gone, Julien raised his glass to me. “I’ve never seen anyone quite like you,” he said. “You’re fabulous, Sandrine.”

I felt his words inside of me, and their pull was instantaneous and urgent. I bowed, hiding my flushed cheeks.

“A toast to the first woman ever admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts. Even if you are a bit of a hybrid.” He leaned back in his chair and peered at me. “You’re extraordinary. A woman without fear!”

“Oh, I’m afraid.” I laughed.

“Of what?”

“Of what is going to happen when I actually start to paint and I’m found out as a fraud.”

I was afraid of other things, too. I was thinking of my husband. While I may have succeeded in running away and hiding behind my grandmother’s name for now, my fear that Benjamin would eventually find me was always on a low simmer in the back of my mind. I knew him, and if he was intent on ferreting me out, he would. Benjamin never accepted failure. My father’s suicide was proof of that.

But it would not do to tell Julien any of those other fears now. Except for one. “And I’m a little afraid of you.”

He reached for my hand. Saw something out of the corner of his eye and retracted it. “Your dressing like this is going to take some getting used to. Those people over there clearly think you’re
a young man and I’m a lech. And even in Paris, that raises eyebrows.”

“Other than them thinking you are a lech, I think I like people mistaking me for a man. It’s very liberating to be sitting here and not have anyone paying attention to me, going out of their way for me. Treating me differently.”

Through the window, I saw students from the École walking down the street, carrying sketchpads and with knapsacks on their backs. Behind them was a couple in their twenties, strolling arm in arm. They appeared very attentive to each other, and I continued watching as they entered the café and sat down fairly close to us.

Their demeanor was so very different than ours, with the gentleman being so solicitous of his female companion, and she being so flirtatious, looking at him from under her eyelashes.

Julien and I were playing none of those games now. By taking off my female clothes, I’d altered how we spoke to and interacted with each other.

“I should like to meet your fiancée,” I said.

“You would? Why?”

“I’m curious what kind of woman you’ve chosen to marry.”

“Most women don’t come out and say things like that.”

“I know, but most women don’t steal family jewels to pawn so they can become libertines and attend the École des Beaux-Arts.”

“That’s true.”

“I want to see if she’s worthy of you.”

Julien blushed. I laughed.

“It won’t matter, though,” he said solemnly as an afterthought. “I’m engaged to her. There’s no turning back.”

“You make it sound like an obligation.”

“Isn’t marriage a series of obligations?”

“Mine was. But does it have to be? I know her father was your professor at the academy and took you into his firm and gave you a start, but does he demand you marry his daughter in payment?”

“No, there was no price. She had her choice of suitors. Charlotte Cingal is a brilliant opera singer, a star and my greatest supporter.” Julien picked up his champagne glass and drained it. “I have great affection for her.”

“My grandmother has great affection for her terrier, Mou-Mou.”

“How cruel and sarcastic you are without the encumbrances of lace and satin. I might prefer the more demure Sandrine to the outspoken one.”

“Really?”

“I’m not quite sure,” he said, more seriously than I liked.

“Well, I’ll finish my thought regardless. You have great passion, Julien, and so many dreams—”

“Yes, and I’m going to make them all come true.”

“With her father Monsieur Cingal’s help?”

“Of course. He is my mentor. Like a father to me.” Julien’s hand had moved to his watch fob, and I noticed he was fingering that heavy gold ring again. “What of it?” he asked.

I shrugged. “You aren’t marrying her family, you know. You are marrying her. You deserve a marriage of passion as well. Not one of obligation and convenience.”

“Said with such disdain. Did you and your husband have a different sort of marriage?”

“No, which is why I can speak this way. My marriage was disastrous.”

“But we are in France, not America. And Charlotte is marvelous. As for passion, how often does passion outlast the first year or two of marriage?”

“Why not strive to have one of the unions where it does?”

“You are romanticizing marriage. We don’t do that in my country. Romance is its own phenomenon. In France a husband and wife have more freedom inside a union than you do in America. There are not the same constrictions here. Not the same outrage over dalliances.”

“Dalliances? You think you’ll be satisfied by that?”

He poured more champagne. “When the time comes, why not? Most men are. Why do you think I’m any different?”

“In truth, I don’t know.”

After finishing the champagne, we walked down the street, turned left, and walked two blocks to 3 Quai Voltaire. The green-and-gold sign on the front of the building read simply:
Sennelier
.

Julien opened the door, and I walked into a swirl of colors and smells. Men in white smocks waited on customers, showing them pencils, pigments, brushes, pastels, watercolors, and choices of paper. I swung slowly around in a circle, taking in the world that had just been revealed to me.

My fingers itched to buy the supplies I needed and to take them back to the house and begin experimenting.

“Monsieur Sennelier, this is Mademoiselle Verlaine. She’s going to be studying at the École with Monsieur Moreau.”

Like the admissions director’s, Sennelier’s stare told me he’d thought I was a young man and was surprised to discover my true gender.

“Welcome to my shop, Mademoiselle. We supply Monsieur Moreau and many of his students . . . but did you say the École?” He looked at Julien, who nodded.

“Well, this is something indeed. How amazing! Congratulations, Mademoiselle. This is surely going to be news. I’d be honored to sell you whatever you need.”

“I’ve recently arrived in Paris, and all my supplies were lost in transit, so I need to be totally outfitted.”

“But of course,” the color merchant said. “A full complement then. Will you be making your own paints, or would you like to buy my special extra-fine oil paints in tubes?”

“Tubes, please.”

“Very well,” he said. “You’re in good company. Messieurs Monet,
Matisse, and Gauguin prefer them also. I have been working with them for years now, creating variations on colors to accommodate their work. Are you interested in impressionism?”

“To admire, yes, but I’m more of a symbolist,” I said.

“This way please.”

As I followed Monsieur Sennelier through his store, I felt my father’s spirit with me. Though I wasn’t sure he’d approve of my method to getting into the École, I was sure he would be excited by the idea of my attending. We’d spent many afternoons at museums and galleries, inspecting and discussing the work of current-day painters, and now I was on my way to becoming one.

Monsieur Sennelier was waiting. “Mademoiselle? Brushes?”

He led me to an area of shelves filled with a vast and varied assortment of brushes.

I had anticipated my choices would be difficult as I struggled with items I had little familiarity with. I’d learned little at school.

My father was interested in the concept of lives being recycled. Metempsychosis, a concept dating back to Pythagoras, was a popular topic among spiritual circles in New York, especially the Theosophical Society, which my father found interesting. We’d attended some lectures together and discussed the concepts at length. Walking home from one, my father, I recalled, had described me as an “old soul.”

He said that one day I’d find my way to creating something beautiful and meaningful because my soul would demand it of me.

I had never understood what he meant. But perhaps I was going to find out.

Sennelier was waiting. “Mademoiselle?”

Nervously, I inspected my choices. There were at least fifty different sizes and shapes of brushes. How many was I supposed to choose? Which were basic and required? Did I want the longer or the shorter handles? I reached out and touched one and then another. Did I want bristle or sable? I read the names of the shapes: flats, filberts, brights, rounds. For one dizzying moment I thought that I
could not manage this charade. I even wondered what was propelling me. Why did it matter that I go to the École and learn to paint?

With a tentative hand I took a flat bristle brush with a long handle. Then a long-handled sable filbert. My hesitation was unexpectedly gone. My hand seemed to be moving of its own accord, knowing exactly what I needed.

After I’d chosen a dozen assorted brushes, I chose a palette knife with a smart, round wooden handle.

“Now for the paints,” Monsieur Sennelier said as he proudly showed me to another section of the store. “We use the most pure safflower oil and grind the pigments more finely than other merchants. You’ll find the distinctive texture more like satin than other brands.”

Here were at least one hundred tubes in a rainbow of color selections. Each was affixed with a simple label: a band of black with the block letters
SENNELIER
in white, then a thicker band of the color inside the tube both shown and spelled out, and a third band with the number and other information.

But instead of the panic I expected, there was only a thrill as I reached for the colors that would make up my palette. I chose the basics: titanium white, cadmium yellow, pale orange, red and green, along with quinacridone rose, dioxazine violet, and French ultramarine blue.

The tubes were cool to the touch, and shivers of excitement traveled up my fingers, up my arms. I put each one in the basket Sennelier provided. Using these slithery paints, I would create something magical. Dipping my brushes into the luscious oils, I would bring forth visions that were going to change my life and fulfill the covenant of my heritage.

In my mind, from some unknown place, came unbidden images in shadows. Secrets of light and dark, mysteries and puzzles waited for my brush.

“I’ll need these, too.” Unable to refrain, I added more of the exotic
colors and then more, as if each one held another promise: Chinese orange, cinnabar, cobalt green, Orient lake, Sennelier blue, and baryte green.

I could see the swirls on a palette, a wet brush making daubs on a canvas, images emerging in the penumbra. And strange images they were, all painted in my imagination as I stood in the store.

It was the last image from my father’s dream and mine. The scene reflected in the woman’s eyes: a dark stone cell, moisture glistening on the mossy rocks, a single crack of light illuminating a woman, woebegone, prostrate on the ground. I could hear her crying. In my mind, she looked up at me. Her face etched with terrible sadness. Her hand on the floor, one finger pointing to something she’d drawn in the grime. A symbol that I recognized—one of those I’d seen in the bookstore I’d gone to with Julien.

When I was in school, we’d done still lifes of flowers and fruit. My father collected masterpieces, favoring impressionism and evocative portraits done by the likes of John Singer Sargent and Whistler. Other than the one Moreau that he’d bought me, nothing he bought was symbolic, nothing as suggestive or evocative, as illustrative or iconographic, as my vision. Nothing like the paintings I suddenly knew I wanted to tackle: forgotten dreams, lost legends, mysterious messages. Was I being influenced by Dujols’s bookstore? Or by knowing I would be studying with Moreau, the greatest symbolist artist of the day? He was one of the reasons I’d wanted to study at the École, so that I could work with the one painter I believed could help me along the path I wanted to take. The strange thing was that I’d never had to mention him to Girraud. He’d chosen Moreau for me.