The Witch of Painted Sorrows (33 page)

Chapter 40

They brought Julien back to Maison de la Lune with me in my carriage and summoned the doctor. As it turned out, he wasn’t fine. As it turned out, the butt of my father’s gun had deflected Benjamin’s first shot, but he used his second pistol to shoot Julien in the stomach before Julien shot him. No major organs appeared to have been damaged, but Julien was losing too much blood too quickly, and the doctor told me that he was afraid if he couldn’t stop the bleeding soon, Julien was not going to make it.

I was bruised, but none of my injuries were serious. I’d fallen on a rocky patch of earth. I’d cut my hand on a sharp stone. Hit my head on another. And a third had shattered one of the rosettes on the ruby necklace.

As I sat in the sickroom by Julien’s side, watching him losing all that blood, I knew it was time. He’d asked me to do this weeks ago. I hadn’t been strong enough then, I still wasn’t now, but I needed to show him how much I cared even if it was too late.

“Look, Julien, look.” I reached up and around the back for the clasp and found the Ouroboros waiting. The dragon allowed me to take his tail out of his mouth this time.

I took off the antique I’d been wearing for more than three months. Now it sat on my lap. I stared at the odd piece of jewelry that
had encircled the neck of so many of my ancestors, tethering them to La Lune. Connecting them to the witch who had done everything to love again.

The dragon’s ruby eyes flashed at me in the light. As if he were winking. I examined the rubies, all intact except for the one floret that had been damaged. How odd. I could see that the floret wasn’t a ruby at all but two halves of a crystal casket filled with some red substance. I examined the other flowers and found a slight indentation on the rim of each. All of them opened. Every crystal was filled with the same red-caked substance.

Suddenly I heard the words that Dujols had said to me, but heard them spoken in a whisper, by a woman in a dream, words mixed with tears.

Make of the blood, a stone. Make of a stone, a powder. Make of a powder, life everlasting. Save him, Sandrine, save him.

I tilted the necklace toward the light. The red-caked interior had no glitter and no gloss. I ran my finger over it. It was dry. Dry? Almost powdery. Almost like . . .

No, it wasn’t possible. But it did feel like solid pigment. Like a brick of watercolor that you drew your wet brush across to access.

I licked my finger and touched the cake, and it came away red. The same color of the unfinished lips of the women in the painting. Pigment this color was in the studio. Bottles and bottles of it. I’d seen it.

What kind of necklace was this? What kind of special precious paint did it contain?

La Lune didn’t speak to me with words, but her thoughts were inside my head. She knew the spells. She could save Julien.

“I have to do this,” I whispered to him. “I have to allow her in. Please forgive me.”

He shook his head. “No. Let me go. Let me go. Please, Sandrine. She’s evil. She’ll taint you.”

He was still talking, his voice weak and faint, when I left the room.

As I climbed the steps to the bell tower, I knew that I would never again attempt to pretend that La Lune was a figment of my imagination born out my depressed state over my father’s death . . . my reading that Oscar Wilde book at the wrong time . . . or my grandmother’s fear of a family curse.

La Lune was real, and I had known that for a long time even if I wasn’t always able to admit it. It was La Lune who had brought Julien to me—or me to Julien—and she could take him away just as easily. She might have already taken him away, just to prove to me that she could.

I opened the door to the ancient studio, put the necklace down on the table, and gathered the materials I needed: a knife, a bottle of linseed oil, my palette.

“Don’t make me do this,” I shouted to her. “There must be some other way to save him.”

I listened for her answer, but she was silent.

“He’s in love with me. That happened because of who
I
am. It had nothing to do with you.”

Still she did not answer.

“I won’t let you bully me. I am alive—you aren’t.” But in the end that didn’t matter.

As I scraped the cake from inside the necklace, the bells in the tower began to chime. Slowly. Marking the occasion. I felt La Lune’s excitement flowing through
my
blood in
my
veins. She was going to achieve what she wanted after all, despite all my best intentions. But what good would my resolve be if Julien died?

I wasn’t the one with the power to keep Julien alive. She was.

Even if it was wrong, even if it meant opening myself up to all the darkness in her soul, I had no choice but to do everything I could to try and save Julien.

When I had enough powder, I poured out the oil and blended the concoction, watching the pigment metamorphose into a mound of silken, sensuous, ruby paint. The exact color, I thought, of the lips of the women in the portraits. The lips that looked as if they had been kissed too often.

After I’d mixed up the paint, I chose a fine sable brush. The best one I had. Closing the door on the tolling bells, I climbed down the narrow staircase from the rue du Dragon tower and made my way back to the main part of the house.

Chapter 41

Palette and brush in hand, I stood on the main staircase and examined the portraits that had hung there for as long as the house had belonged to my family. I turned up all the gas lamps so the hallway was flooded with light. I dipped the sable tip into the vermilion paint.

How dare I touch one of these masterpieces? It was blasphemy. All around me, the house seemed to be waiting, almost holding its breath. This was no time to be hesitant. Julien was fading.

The portrait was only a two-dimensional painting. It had no value compared to a human life. What difference did it make to anyone if I finished one of these paintings after all this time? Who was there to object?

I lifted the brush to the portrait of Lunette Lumière, and as I did, I heard Dujols warning me that there was no way to know what La Lune would do to her host when finally given a firm foothold.

How much of me, if any, would survive?

I thought of my grandmother, whom I loved so very much. Who was going to be released from the sanatorium soon. Could I bring her back here if La Lune inhabited my body? And Julien? If I saved him this way, would he ever forgive me?

Did that matter? Even if he never spoke to me again, he would be somewhere on this earth, alive, and that would be enough. To know that his talent would thrive, that his heart would love, that he would
survive would be enough. And I— At least I would not spend the rest of my days feeling guilty that he had died defending my honor, which deserved no such sacrifice.

I touched the brush to the centuries-old canvas, and I painted in La Lune’s unfinished lips. Stroke by stroke, adding the silky paint to the full, petulant lips that had been waiting for this for so many hundreds of years. I was meticulous. I lifted the brush. Applied the dab of paint. Repeated the process. One dab and then another.

I saw I’d smeared paint on my middle finger, and the sight of it frightened me. Paint made out of blood. Blood that would bring the painting to life and bind her to the painter.

It had to be this way. From the moment I stepped into this house when I was fifteen and again this January, I was not strong enough to withstand La Lune any more than the women in these other portraits had been. I was at her mercy. A force more powerful than time.

I thought about my own journey.

Coming here. Meeting Julien. The beginning of loving him. Meeting Cousin Jacob and his death. Then my grandmother’s illness. My anger at seeing Charlotte singing at the opera. The fire. The horrible incident on the Eiffel Tower. Benjamin finding me in Paris and the terrible duel. All these events orchestrated by La Lune so Julien and I would both be free to be with each other. This was what she needed. To find a host who, unlike the other women in these portraits, was talented enough to paint, capable of love, and strong enough to withstand the witch’s presence. A woman who would allow La Lune to incubate and live out her needs, to be an artist, to love and be loved back. With Julien—or, if he walked away, with someone new.

My brushstrokes were so fine they were invisible, and as I painted, I saw the lips become fresh, red, living lips. When I finished, I stood there on the steps, holding the palette and the brush and listened as La Lune began to speak and give me the instructions that I needed to bring her to life so she could save Julien.

Chapter 42

And so we come to end of the story. I survived that night, and so I will finish the tale.

Weeks had passed. My grandmother was living in the apartment on rue de la Chaise, I was living in Maison de la Lune. It was the end of May. Is there any more beautiful season in Paris than the spring? Julien and I were strolling by the Seine, on our way to celebrate a new commission he’d just received to build a hotel on Boulevard Raspail. As we passed a newspaper kiosk, something caught my lover’s attention.

“Look,” he said, pointing to the journal devoted to the arts:
Chronique des Arts et de la Curiosité
.

On the front page near the bottom was a headline:

CONTROVERSY AT THE SALON

BY ROGER MARX

Julien picked up the paper, threw some coins down on the vendor’s tray, and pointed to an illustration beside the headline. It was a drawing of my painting. Standing side by side, our shoulders touching, we read the article together.

Sleeping Cupid,
painted by a heretofore unknown young artist from America who has been studying at the École des Beaux-Arts and atelier of Gustave Moreau, has raised temperatures and excited tempers at this year’s Salon. The provocative painting, which many call pornographic, has won a second prize in a jury headed by Monsieur Moreau himself, who defended his student’s painting by saying it was no more graphic or disturbing than a hundred paintings of nude women that are admitted to the Salon every year.

“Why is a man’s nudity more lewd than a woman’s? This is a mythological god, in love with his wife, executed in a marvelous style by an up-and-coming artist of whom we all expect great things. That the artist is a woman, and the academy’s first female student, just makes this prize all the more important.”

“There are laws over this kind of salacious art,” said Hector Previn, one of the judges who resigned in protest during the juried show. “Look at the lust on the sleeping god’s face. That’s not art. This painting is pornography.”

The painting went on to . . .

Julien had raced ahead of me, and I hadn’t caught up when he grabbed me by the hands.

“Darling, you have been awarded a second prize by the Salon.” He swung me around. “How marvelous.” And then he grabbed me and kissed me, lifting me up.

“You will be hailed as the finest woman painter in Paris. The first to attend the École. The bravest. The first to win a prize. Your paintings will be sold in galleries. All of Paris will want to buy one. In parlors and boudoirs your creations will hang on the walls, and people will marvel and ask,
Who is this woman? Who is Sandrine Verlaine?
”

I kissed him. Full on the lips, there on the Quai. I could smell the amber and honey and apple scent that was his alone. His arms were so strong. Was
he
as strong?

“No,” I said.

I was watching his clear, evergreen eyes now, watching to see how he was going to feel about what I had to tell him. For it was time to tell him. I had no excuse to wait any longer.

Julien loved me and I him. My confession would not, could not, change that. We were bound to each other in a deep and abiding way because of what we had gone through and what we were willing to go through for each other. Our appetites, our passions, our goals were in harmony, and we were solidly on the same path toward the future.

“No,
mon cher
Julien. They will not be asking about Sandrine Verlaine. They will be asking about
me
. The woman who signed that painting. The woman who painted it. La Lune.”

Author’s Note

As with most of my work, there is a lot of fact mixed in with this fictional tale.

Belle Époque Paris is painted as close to the truth as the story allowed. There was in fact a very strong occult moment in France during the time, and there is a large body of literature written about the sometimes frightening and wild cults, believers, and experimenters. The nightclubs all existed as I describe them, as did the streets, restaurants, cafés, sights, Dr. Blanche’s clinic in Passy, and all the stores, including the fabulous Sennelier art supply store, and the Librairie du Merveilleux, owned and run by Pierre Dujols. The École des Beaux-Arts is still one of the finest art and architecture schools in the world, and women were not allowed to attend until 1897—though in my novel I move that date forward three years. The painter Gustave Moreau was a teacher there in 1894, and Henri Matisse was one of his prize pupils. The art world and anecdotes about now famous painters and the École’s salon are all based on source materials. Last but not least, Jews, especially Kabalists, do hold exorcisms to banish dybbukim and various kinds of demons, and the ceremony portrayed in this novel follows the ancient laws.

I am especially indebted to my researcher, Alexis Clark, who saved me from hours of going down the wrong path and gave me insights and facts into the world of Belle Époque Paris and her artists, which allowed me to spend more time in my imagination than in the library and online.