Belle Epoque (34 page)

By the end of that week the repoussoirs had become famous; the clients, infamous. Many a rich family was forced to combat a damaging reputation by trying to distance themselves from their association with the agency and its services. Unfortunately for them, the journalist’s sources were detailed and extremely incriminating. I had provided Claude with a client roster containing names, addresses and even the details of
each customer’s physical preferences (all record of the Dubern family removed). The repoussoirs themselves have been sought for interviews, portraits and caricatures; many have even been offered new jobs by a host of different businesses hoping to cash in on their fame. The public sees them as heroic martyrs, trodden down by a morally bankrupt upper class.

Alongside that first article, an illustration was published above the caption
In Paris, is everything for sale
? It was made from the photograph I’d taken with such reluctance, using the last of the plates Isabelle had given me. She helped me develop the print I gave the newspaper. As the photographer, I was of course not in the picture, and I am happy to have been able to escape the attention of journalists and the public.

In this way, Isabelle’s reputation, and that of her family, remains intact. Only Isabelle, her mother and Madame Vary know the truth about my role in the Paris season that winter.

“Sorry I’m late.” I look up to see Isabelle out of breath and laden with a pile of books. She dumps them on the table. My coffee cup dances in its saucer. “You were right,” she says. “That bookshop has amazing titles.”

I fold my paper. “Do you want a coffee first?”

She shakes her head. “Let’s get this over with.”

I pick up the top half of the stack of books and Isabelle grabs the rest.

The Dubern carriage is waiting for us just around the corner, and the driver helps us with Isabelle’s purchases.

Once the carriage door is shut, Isabelle looks at me. “Are you ready to face her?”

“As ready as you are.” I smile.

I haven’t seen the Countess Dubern since the night before I was banished from the duke’s chateau. The carriage rolls along past the station toward the Right Bank.

“Is that today’s paper?” Isabelle asks.

“Yes—still front-page news. Listen.” I read the headline out loud to her.

D
URANDEAU
’
S
N
AME
I
S
M
UD
—
A
GENCY
S
HUTTERED AND
R
EPUTATION
R
UINED

She smiles. “You did it, then.”

I return her smile. “We all did it.”

We have the top down, and in the distance I can see a train winding its way out of Montparnasse station. The train I took to Paris last September soared through the French countryside, carried by winged horses, hidden in the swirls of steam outside my window. I watch as the train disappears into a tunnel. I’m never going back home.

When we arrive at the Duberns’ cream-colored house, Isabelle puts her books on a table in the entrance hall and we walk up the curving staircase toward her mother’s private sitting room. Again and again we have gone over what Isabelle will say.

The countess is taking afternoon tea and reading the fashion bulletins when we burst in. She freezes, a half-eaten chocolate in her mouth.

“L’Affaire Durandeau.”
Isabelle flings the paper on her mother’s chaise longue. “You do read the papers, don’t you, Mother?”

“How dare you bring that
person
into our home, Isabelle!” says the countess, propping herself up on the couch and putting down her box of chocolates.

Isabelle ignores her mother’s protest and continues, “It would be social suicide for the family name to be mixed up in such a scandal. There are journalists hounding everyone who worked at the agency. Isn’t that right, Maude?”

My pulse races as I nod.

Isabelle continues, “They’re ravenous for details of the privileged classes run amok.”

The countess folds her arms and flares her nostrils. She understands the power of her daughter’s position immediately. “What does she want for her silence?” She looks directly at Isabelle, as though I’m not here. “Money, jewels?”

Isabelle reflects on this for a moment, enjoying having the upper hand. “Maude wants nothing from you.” She throws her head back slightly as she gives her mother the ultimatum. “But I’m going to break off my engagement to Monsieur de Rochefort. You will have the announcement published in the society pages this week.”

The countess raises an eyebrow.

“And …,” Isabelle continues.

“And?” the countess repeats.

“Mother, you will be delighted to hear that I passed my
baccalauréat
and have applied to the Sorbonne. I require your support, financial and otherwise, upon my acceptance.”

The countess shakes her head. Her eyes narrow; her lips disappear into a tight frown.

“Well?” Isabelle asks. “Are we in agreement?”

Her mother shrugs, then holds her head up high, her nose in the air. “If you want to ruin your prospects and become a laughingstock, I suppose I am powerless to stop you.”

Isabelle and I exchange a look of triumph. Before we turn to leave, I fire the parting shot in as grave a tone as I can manage. I lack Isabelle’s air of defiance. She’s better at this than I.

“Countess, should you take any action to contradict our agreement, I won’t hesitate to sell my story of the inner workings of the Dubern marriage game to the journalist willing to pay most for it.”

The warning has the required effect. “Get out,” she snarls. “Both of you!”

We leave the room with smiles spreading across our faces. The queen has fallen.

I
N MY CHILDHOOD HOME, EVERY
commonplace item had a life and a personality of my invention. Some were friends—the kitchen table, the wooden stool, the fat kettle—and some were foes—the hat stand, tall and ominous, my parents’ wardrobe, with its sharp corners and dark wood.

I write a real letter to my father, the first communication he’s had from me since I left months ago. As I imagine him in the kitchen reading the letter, it is through the eyes of an adult that I take in these objects that make up the fabric of my childhood.

I review what I have written—just the essentials. I have a job at a photography studio. I am in good health and hope the same for him. There’s no point in sharing more than that with my father. A decent wage, a respectable position is all that he cares about, not my experiences or my new passion for photography.

I enclose a portion of the money I owe him, which I’ve
scraped together, as well as a photograph I took of a street scene in Paris—not a tourist attraction or a view, just people watching a street boy juggle. I don’t know that he’ll appreciate it. My mother would have. She would have enjoyed looking at the crowd’s expressions as they watched the balls fly high in the air; she would have wondered about each of the people and imagined something about their lives. She had that curiosity about the world.

It changes you, losing someone so important as a child. I had no mirror of love telling me I was beautiful or special and could achieve anything. After my mother died, that mirror was gone. And I lived without that echo of love and confidence until I found it, once more, in Paris.

In my mind I walk along the beach as I used to. My simple pleasures and secret places seem immature and quaint to my Paris eyes. For what I know is possible has stretched too far to be able to fit back into the little nook of home.

A
S THE ARISTOCRACY DOES, THE
bourgeoisie follow. People of means have left the heat of Paris for the ocean breeze or rolling hills of summer homes. But Paris isn’t empty, as thousands of tourists have descended upon it for the Exposition Universelle. Claude, like many Parisians, has fled to escape the crowds, as well as the heat, and he has lent Paul his elegant townhouse in the 7th arrondissement for the duration of the summer.

My job at the photography studio is part-time, for now. At first I just served the customers and rang up their purchases. But since the owner discovered I know more than counting change and wrapping packages, once in a while he has let me loose in his darkroom to process customers’ photographs, and he has begun to let me assist in the portrait sessions. Winning his trust is slow work, but I know I’m proving myself. Everything he shows me, I jot down in the notebook Isabelle gave me, and at night I reread my notes with a sense of delight and determination.

I visit Paul on my days off. I usually find him composing in Claude’s sitting room, where there is a piano and space enough for his pacing. His fragments of composition, bars of music repeated, interrupted, then changed, are the accompaniment to my own acts of creation.

My mornings at Claude’s are spent in the glass house and outside in the garden, where the light is brightest. After lunch, I develop my plates in the coal shed in complete darkness. Groping in the blackness seems an appropriate metaphor for the creative life. You are compelled to do this work but cannot know the end result; the truth of the moment you captured on the plate remains a mystery. You feel in the dark for the edge of the basin and the plate itself. I love this moment. The hope that I channel into each effort reaches its peak in those dark moments of mystery when the bow of the unseen connects with the taut string of my spine and sends a shiver the length of my back, not of fear, but of possibility. This time, I might have it. This time. This photograph.

I’ve been working on making prints of my former colleagues, each of them living a new life, which I have documented with a portrait. Marie-Josée and her sister opened a café with savings from the
Belles-Soeurs
interviews she did after the story broke. Marie-Josée is pleased as punch with the modest establishment and is already on first-name terms with the regulars. Paul helped Cécile get a position at the theater. She’s not acting, she’s selling programs, but with her force of character and lustful designs on the actors, I have a feeling she’ll go far. And Emilie, with Claude’s help, is working as a clerk at the newspaper.

In the afternoon, when the sun beats into the sitting room
and disturbs Paul at the piano, he joins me in the garden. He lies in the sun and I sit in the shade. Sometimes we talk about our projects; mostly we think, each of us lost in our creative endeavors.

Today the sun is golden; the air is heavy and sweet as we doze in the garden after lunch. I watch a sparrow peck at crumbs on the warm flagstones and feel a sense of total contentment. My mind can’t rest there long; it flits to the last photograph I took of Isabelle—standing in front of the science building of the Sorbonne. It was the day she received her letter of acceptance and was awarded a place, the only woman scholar in her year. I have one print and she has the other. In taking that photograph, I understood something I will never forget: how I wished to arrest all the beauty that came before me. Not the classical beauty of symmetry and exact proportions or the fancy of fashion, which is ever-changing with the seasons, but the beauty of a soul, that inner life that reveals itself so seldom, just for an instant, and only if you look closely and learn to see with an open heart.

Using the camera as my tool, I hope to find that elusive inner light in the subjects I photograph, both people and places, and to really see—see the truth and beauty of an instant. The fact that I myself am not considered beautiful is irrelevant. Or maybe it is necessary that I not be the object of flattery and homage. Because how would I have the capacity to observe and to see as an artist must, if I myself were to draw your eye? With photography, as with any art, you are given the gift of connection, when you can say to a stranger, “Look! I have something to tell you, I have something to say.”

Perhaps one day my photograph will be taken, my likeness painted or a word written about me by someone who can see into my soul and tell you something of it.

I look at Paul from the clarity of the shade. “We’re going to go see it today,” I tell him.