The Witch of Painted Sorrows (18 page)

Chapter 17

I was still thinking about my grandmother’s behavior and my own, which was so unlike me and which I admit I felt both sad and guilty about, when I arrived at the Louvre to paint with Maître Moreau and a dozen of his students.

“I’m impressed by your technique,” Moreau said when he came up behind me. “You said it was a teacher in New York who gave you such a good grounding in Renaissance practices?”

“Yes,” I said, hoping he would not ask me for a name.

“At what school did you say?”

“At the Art Students League.”

Of course I had never studied there, but as I offered up the lie, I was seeing my teacher. He stood over my shoulder, just out of sight, advising me on how to mix rich pigment with pure oil to get the right transparency in the glaze I was using so as I built the layers, they would create the impression of depth.

He was not handsome but compelling. His nose appeared broken, a scar ran through his right eyebrow separating it, his red lips were too full and almost mean, and his eyes were dark and hooded. He spoke French, but with an Italian accent.

I could see his face so clearly. He was so familiar to me. Who was he? And then I knew. Of course. It was the man in the portraits in the
bell tower. The portraits painted by LL. I was imagining
I
had been taught by Cherubino. That
I
had been taught by La Lune’s teacher.

When the class ended, I packed up my canvas and paints and returned to the house on rue des Saints-Pères, hoping that Julien would be there waiting for me. I hadn’t seen him, other than when I’d shadowed him, since he’d returned from Nancy.

He wasn’t at the house, but he’d been there and left a note saying that he’d returned to Paris and would meet me the next day since Moreau didn’t teach on Fridays.

Without Julien there, I might as well go back to my grandmother’s apartment for dinner. I began to undress in order to change back into my gown. The air in the studio was always chilly if no fire was lit, and I wasn’t going to bother to start one. I could maneuver by the light of the candles and then leave.

I removed my jacket, shirt, pants, pantaloons, and stockings. The cold air was refreshing. I stood there naked for a moment but for the rubies around my neck, shimmering in the candlelight.

Suddenly I wanted to paint.

I opened the hidden cabinet, where I’d found La Lune’s and Cherubino’s drawings, and began to pull out the fabulous fabrics that I had discovered there. I stepped into a long skirt of pearl lace that only partially concealed my naked legs and the V of darkness where they met. The tiny silk vest embroidered with dragons I slipped on came to just beneath my breasts and left my cleavage and part of each nipple exposed. Slippers of silver shot through with ruby threads and gold combs studded with rubies completed the costume.

I stood back and examined my reflection. Since coming to Paris, I had adopted the costume of a male art student. Now I appeared a half-naked siren, a seductress.

I grabbed a canvas from the stack by the wall, one that had been stretched and primed but never painted on, placed it on the easel, opened my box of paints, and prepared my palette.

Ready, I looked from mirror to canvas, mirror to palette. I dipped
my brush in burnt ochre, thinned it with some oil so it was translucent, and began.

With broad strokes, I sketched out her figure, standing, staring out at the viewer. Me, and yet someone else, too. I’d never looked like this. Never been a wanton, sexual creature. Never been a woman so determined. With sure strokes, even though I didn’t have a model, I roughed out the man behind her. With his arms around her, locked in a sexual embrace. While she stood watching me, it seemed, he was taking her from behind.

Despite the cold studio I began to grow warm as I felt his hands on my breasts and his thighs against the back of mine and his fingers on my nipples. His voice burned in my ear as he whispered urgent words of lovemaking.

On and on I painted, all the while shuddering as he moved behind me, his hardness asserting itself, determined to find its home.

He sighed. I moaned.

On and on I painted as he grew larger and larger inside me. He slipped out as the brush dipped in the vermilion. As the brush slid across the canvas, he slid back inside. He thrust with every brushstroke . . . again and again . . . He moved and the brush moved . . . until with a great shudder I felt all the colors on the canvas explode inside me, and I dropped the brush and the palette and sent splatters of paint in a dozen directions.

When my breathing returned to normal, I examined what I’d created in the white-hot heat.

I had thought as I worked that I was painting Julien and myself, but the people in the painting were not us. I had been La Lune painting herself and her lover, Cherubino.

Without taking off her clothes or jewels, I sat on the daybed, staring at the canvas, trying to make some sense of what was happening to me.

I woke up to bright sunshine shining through the openings in the roof of the bell tower. The room, which should have been cold without a fire burning all night, was warm. It only took me a moment more to comprehend that, along with the paints and turpentine and linseed oil, I smelled coffee. And then I understood I was not alone.

Julien was sitting in a chair by the table, drinking a cup of coffee and nibbling a croissant while staring at the portrait I had painted in my heated frenzy.

As I stretched and fully came awake, I remembered I’d never gone home the night before. What had my grandmother thought? Did I care? She had slapped me and thrown water at me. Did I even have to go back? I could just move in here, into this bell tower. Keep selling jewels at the pawnshop until I ran out and then move on to selling the antiques. There was enough silver and china and artwork to last years.

“Good morning, Sandrine.” Julien’s luxe voice and penetrating eyes made my skin tingle. “You look quite fetching.”

I glanced down. I’d forgotten how naked I was with my see-through lace skirt and tiny vest. Trying to be demure, I covered myself with my shawl, got up, and visited the small lavatory inside the tower. I would have preferred to go into the main part of the house for the convenience of the modern plumbing, but it was a long walk in the cold, and if La Lune had been able to live like this for years, certainly I could manage one morning.

When I returned to Julien, he was inspecting the still-wet painting.

“Did you do this yesterday?”

“Last night.”

“All night?”

“Until very late, yes. I don’t actually know what time I finished.”

“It’s marvelous. And brave.” He turned to me now. “Thinking of you painting it makes me want to—” He broke off, took two steps to where I was standing. He pulled me toward him and kissed me full on the lips.

I had read enough books to know what to call it, but I’d never experienced a swoon before. I truly did not think I was going to be able to remain on my feet. I became that kiss. Became its emotion, its sensation. Everything around me disappeared: the tower room, the painting. There was only the wave of euphoria and the weakness that made me hold on to Julien all the tighter.

Pulling him with me onto the daybed, I undressed him, unashamed in my desire to see him naked. To feel him. There on the rumpled blanket, I took him with a hungry mouth and active hands. And he watched me in wonder until he succumbed to my ministrations, and together we went into the dark purple and red and magenta and orange world of colors and scents and feelings that was inside my mind and behind my eyes and deep in my womb where the explosions caused ripples that left me breathless and panting.

And then I heard it, that faint chiming I’d heard before when we’d made love, the hum of those glorious, ancient bells.

After we had recovered, we set to putting the room back in order, and I told him what had happened with my grandmother and the fight we’d had.

Julien was planning to remain at La Lune that day; he had work to do in the main part of the house. I wanted to stay with him, but he encouraged me to go home to my grandmother’s and make peace with her.

“She’s a strong, stubborn woman, but she’ll get used to the idea of you becoming a painter. Why wouldn’t she? She’s worked her whole life. Surely she will understand your desire for your own kind of independence. She can’t be that superstitious. I’ve met her.”

“I know, but she becomes irrational when it comes to La Lune and me painting, or even me staying here in Paris.”

After folding up the clothes I’d worn the night before into neat piles of fabrics, I opened the cabinet to put everything back where I’d found it. Rays of sunlight coming through the oblong windows
illuminated the interior, and I noticed that one of the panels was a slightly different color wood.

Reaching out, I touched it. It wobbled.

“Julien, come look. There’s something here.”

Beside me, he peered into the semidarkness.

“It’s empty.”

“There.” I put his hand on the edge of the hidden panel—­surprised I’d been so bold to take his hand. And then I laughed at myself. I had taken so much more in the bed only minutes ago.

“Do you think it might be a hidden compartment?” I asked.

He knocked on it, and we heard a hollow echo. “It appears to be one.”

“Do you know how it opens? You’re an architect. You must know things like that.”

He laughed. “I must? Well, let’s see . . .”

Julien pressed on one corner and then the next. Nothing happened. But well-versed in secrets and how to reveal them, he tried another way, and then another. Finally he pressed the panel in the right combination, and it sprang open.

“I can’t see much—this goes fairly deep,” he said.

I lit a candle, brought it over, and he thrust it inside the cabinet.

We both peered in.

“There’s something in there, isn’t there?” I said.

Using both hands, Julien reached inside and then, struggling, pulled out a well-wrapped and very large package.

The burgundy silk wrapping appeared expensive, ancient, and musty. It gave off the same odor I’d smelled the first time we’d visited the tower: a lush fragrance that combined ancient air, frankincense, cedar, myrrh, and roses.

Gingerly I pulled the fabric away to reveal a thick book, bound in creamy brown leather. There was no writing on the back cover, so I turned it around to see if there was anything on the front.

Where there had been a title, only tiny fragments of gold were
left, as if someone had traced the word’s outline with a finger over and over. Nothing was legible any longer.

I opened it to the frontispiece and found the page had been ripped out, and only a ragged edge of it was left near the spine.

What remained was the part of a name, two Roman numerals, and the words
Paris, France
.

The first two complete pages contained three columns of small medieval type in what appeared to be archaic French, for some of the words were foreign to me. There was foxing on the edges, and the thick paper had a landscape to it, little hills and valleys, the way very old manuscripts do.

As I turned to the next set of pages, more of the same mystical, spicy fragrance escaped, almost drugging me. The heady scent added to the mystery of what this ancient volume might be.

“Look,” Julien said, pointing to the margin, where tiny handwriting filled the white spaces. Inky scratches faded to a pale brown.

I bent lower and tried to read the inscriptions, but the words were too faint and too small.

“We’ll need a magnifier,” he said.

“There must be one downstairs.”

“If not, I can bring one tomorrow from my office.” He turned the page. And I gasped.

Painted over the writing was an illustration of a woman drowning in a pond. The expression on her face was sheer terror. In the margins onlookers watched with horror, except for one creature jumping into the air, wild with enjoyment, his brilliant verdant-green eyes shining with delight. Horns broke thought his reddish-brown hair, and he sported a long tail.

Next to the drawing was another notation in the same minute handwriting and same pale ochre ink, but this one was slightly more legible. I read it out loud.

“ ‘To call upon a ghost, stand in the front of a tomb and call out loud the names of the angels of the first camp, holding in your hand
a glass bowl of pure honey mixed with the oil of almond and say: I command you, O Spirit, Ram-bearer dweller of the graves, who sleeps upon the bones of the dead . . .’ ”

Beside me, Julien Duplessi did not take even one breath until I stopped.

“What kind of book is this?” I asked.

“Have you ever heard of a grimoire?” He answered with another question and with what I thought was a touch of dread in his voice.

Chapter 18

From the back of the carriage, it seemed my grandmother and I had left France and traveled to some other country. Haussmann’s remolding of Paris had not extended to the ghetto in the Marais. The cobble streets were narrow, the buildings ancient. Signs in Hebrew identified the various shops. The setting sun glinted off mezuzahs nailed to door frames as if the houses were all catching fire.

Beside me, my grandmother seemed restless, no doubt due to the words we’d exchanged when I’d returned home earlier that afternoon. If she had noticed that I’d not slept in the apartment, she didn’t refer to it, but she did sniff the air when I came in. Her nose wrinkled as if she smelled cow dung. She told me I stunk of oil paints and requested I bathe since I was to accompany her to dinner at her cousin the rabbi’s house.

“It would be appropriate to wear your new bottle-green satin gown,” she’d said. One of the dresses Grand-mère’s dressmaker had created for me, it was fancier than my clothes from New York, with its black bows and black lace edging. The accompanying small hat, in the new style so many Parisian women were wearing that season, sported two tiny bunches of velvet grapes, one in green, the other dark purple.

Was she telling me which dress to put on to ensure I didn’t wear
my art student’s costume? I didn’t argue—it didn’t matter. I’d been too preoccupied with what Julien and I had found to care. Looking back, I think that must have been why I even agreed to accompany her. The discovery of the book in the tower had shocked me. Disturbed me. And confused me.

A grimoire, Julien had explained, was a book of spells. He’d designed a special cabinet for them in Dujols’s shop. And knowing that finding one would exacerbate my interest in the strange occurrences happening around me, he wasn’t pleased with the discovery.

The grimoire I’d found was handwritten in the margins of a printed book by an entirely different author.

Some of the grimoires Dujols owned, Julien explained, contained remedies for various ailments, charms for manipulating nature and man, rituals for making pacts with the devil, incantations for summoning good or evil—or, like the spell I’d been able to read in the book in the tower, for summoning a ghost.

Dressing up that evening had actually been a pleasant diversion. Luxuriating in a bath of steaming perfumed water, I’d soaped my arms, my legs, my torso, my breasts . . . running my hands over my body, touching all the places Julien had touched and made toll like the bells.

Amazing, how his fingers had the power to inflame me so profoundly. When I touched myself, it took more work and concentration to induce the same feelings. But they did eventually rise to the surface. In this new life I was leading, painting and passion seemed to be going hand in hand. And what a feeling of power they gave me. I was finally becoming the woman who my father had always seemed to believe was inside. I even imagined that he had, in some subtle way, been grooming me for this very life by including me on all the excursions we took together, all the books that he gave me to read.

“My job is to protect you, and I will do that till my dying day. But I am not sure that protecting you will allow you to reach your fullest potential,”
he’d once told me.

And he was right. I knew I was finally reaching that potential. Knew, too, that he would be proud when I joined the ranks of women painters like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot and my canvases sold in galleries alongside theirs.

But I wouldn’t be painting boring mothers whose breasts were full of milk or sniveling children in their pink and pretty clothes. I would be illuminating mysterious and difficult tales from history. Of murder and mayhem, of jealousy and revenge and pain. Spinning stories from pigment so I could warn man of the darkness that hides in every shadow, crack, and corner and that must be respected.

Where were these thoughts coming from? Even there in the bath as they occurred to me, they excited me and my fingers itched to leave, to go back to the bell tower and paint, paint, paint.

“We’ve arrived,” my grandmother said as the carriage pulled up in front of a tall, skinny house sandwiched in between a temple on one side and a Judaic store on the other. Its window was filled with books, cloths, and religious objects, the setting sun’s reflection turning the silver candlesticks, menorahs, and goblets to burning embers.

“I thought Jacob’s home was next to his synagogue on rue Buffault? Where are we?”

“The funeral was held at that shul there because this one could never fit all the mourners. But here on the rue des Rosiers is where the rabbis in your family have lived and served for over two hundred years.”

“Rabbis and courtesans.” I laughed. “What an auspicious heritage. Throw in some murderers, and we’d have a perfect novel.”

“Show some respect,” my grandmother admonished. “And don’t arch your eyebrows when I say something.”

“You usually have a better sense of humor,” I said.

She ignored me and got out of the carriage.

Inside the house Cousin Jacob’s wife, Sophia, greeted us warmly, and she and my grandmother chatted as she ushered us into the parlor.

“I’ll tell Jacob that you are here. He’s in his office, studying. Always studying,” she said, and left to get him.

The modest parlor was tidy but overflowing with books: piled on the floor, sitting on chairs, stacked on occasional tables. From where I sat, I could glimpse into the dining room, which was similarly crowded. Clearly my cousin’s studies had taken over not just his time but also their living quarters. His wife’s attempts with vases of flowers and velvet cushions only went so far in keeping the house looking like a home.

“Eva, Sandrine, welcome,” Cousin Jacob said as he entered the room with open arms. First he went to my grandmother and kissed both her cheeks, and then he embraced me.

“Sit, sit.” He gestured to where we’d been seated. “I’m so pleased to have you both here.”

I sat back down on a different spot and felt something shift beneath me. The horsehair couch was lumpy. The velvet was slightly worn, too. With Jacob came the unpleasant odor of cheap tobacco. My sense of smell was more attenuated lately, and it wasn’t always enjoyable to experience the nuances in the air. I suspected it had been brought about because of the oil paints. Or perhaps the turpentine was making me more sensitive.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, I felt trapped. My cousin’s face, which before I had thought kindly, now looked sinister. His eyes were too small. His grin too miserly.

Under Moreau’s influence, I had become deft at studying people’s faces and seeing what was unique and intriguing in each one.

“Look deeply at everyone and everything if you want to find the magic and mystique of life, the life you want to commit to canvas,”
Moreau had said to me that very week.

Looking at Jacob Richter, I saw a threat.

“Would you like some wine, Eva?” he asked.

My grandmother said she would. He asked me, and I said yes also.

At the sideboard, he filled up three glasses from a decanter.

After handing us our wine, he toasted. “
L’chaim
,” he said, and held up his glass. The gas lamp’s glow caught in the crystal cuts, sparkling with what seemed to be abandon. As if the goblet delighted in being so wicked here in the house of a man of God. The thought made me smile.

“What is it, Sandrine?” my grandmother asked. “Something amusing?”

I shook my head and sipped my wine. It was a fine Bordeaux, and I took several sips in a row. A few minutes passed in idle chitchat about various members of the family, and then we were joined by another man, whom Jacob introduced as Emanuel Zeller, his assistant rabbi.

Zeller took my grandmother’s hand, bent over it, and then did the same to me. His lips were warm, and when he looked up at me, I noticed how light green his eyes were. I had three thoughts ­simultaneously—that he was quite attractive, that I should like to see him naked, and that I should leave the Richter household immediately. Just stand up and walk out and away from this street and this section of Paris and never come back.

I forced myself to make conversation to chase away my overwhelming desire to run.

“Are you from Paris?” I asked Rabbi Zeller.

“Not originally, no, from Lyon,” he said. “But I’ve been here working with Rabbi Richter for ten years now.”

“And you came to Paris with your wife?” I leaned toward him. “Or do you not yet have a wife?”

From the corner of my eye, I saw my grandmother frown. Why? I was simply making small talk and being friendly.

“I do have a wife, but I met her here. We’ve only recently been
married.” The rabbi smiled.

“How do you find Paris as a newlywed? Isn’t it a bit too tempting?”

Cousin Jacob interrupted. “Excuse me.” He cleared his throat. “I think now would be an appropriate moment to show you both something.” He nodded to my grandmother and myself. “Don’t you think, Rabbi Zeller?”

“I do,” the younger man said.

Jacob stood and gestured to the parlor door. “This way.”

We followed him out of the room and down a hallway filled with bookshelves. The musty smell nauseated me. At the end we went through a door and down a flight of whitewashed stone steps. At the bottom, cold air accosted us as we entered what appeared to be a storage cellar crowded with stacked crates and trunks. On the other side of the room was yet one more door. This one oddly ornate for being underground in a storeroom.

“Here we are,” Cousin Jacob said as he opened it.

I stepped into a beautiful, pale aqua and turquoise tiled chamber lit by what seemed to be hundreds of candelabras. The ceiling and floor were covered by mosaics in a rainbow of underwater hues. In the center, a square pool of water glinted in the low lights. The air was warmer, damp, and perfumed with incense.

A mosaic mural decorated the walls. Depicting an oasis in the desert, it featured swaying palm and date trees.

Framing the top edge were Hebraic letters.

Not having been taught the language, I didn’t attempt to read them. But impossibly, I knew what they said.

Blessed are You, God, Majestic Spirit of the Universe,
Who makes us holy by embracing us in living waters.

“Where exactly are we?” I asked.

“In the basement of our temple,” Cousin Jacob explained as he lit more of the candelabras. “This is the sacred mikvah, a holy and ancient part of our faith where we purify and cleanse ourselves. When a person immerses herself fully in this sacred water, she is on the path to rectifying blemishes to the soul.”

I walked around the pool. I noticed a small hole about the size of a lemon on one wall, and on the opposite was what looked like a removable cover. The candlelight reflected off the surface, sparkling like diamonds. It all seemed familiar except I didn’t have any memory of seeing anything like this before.

Had my father shown me a similar room in an ancient temple we’d visited on our travels? In Venice when we’d gone to see the Jewish Quarter?

“Sandrine,” Cousin Jacob said, interrupting my reverie, “we—your grandmother, Rabbi Zeller and I—want to help you.”

Something
was
amiss. I should have fled before when it was possible. There was danger down here for me.