Luncheon of the Boating Party (10 page)

And if he broke his credo the second time, it might crumble to bits. He could not risk that.

Inès, the orange cat, rubbed up against his leg and interrupted his deliberations. He went back into the drawing room and looked at Gustave’s self-portrait showing him at work in this very room, with a man sitting on the flowered sofa, legs crossed, reading, and above the painted sofa hung his own
Bal au Moulin de la Galette.
It always gave him a start, his painting within Gustave’s painting, a tribute to their mutual regard. Now he could return the recognition and give Gustave a favorable position in the foreground of his new painting.

He made his way between potted plants and enormous bouquets,

walking around Gustave’s pointer dog, Mame, asleep on the Oriental carpet, past a replica of Houdon’s sculpture of a lanky male nude. On the balcony he found Gustave painting in his cream-colored artisan’s blouse, blue cotton cap, and linen shoes. Amusing. This son of a textile magnate who had supplied the French army, this self-effacing son who had inherited a fortune, dressing like a common laborer, while laborers who used to wear their workmen’s clothes with pride even on Sundays now pretend they’re gentlemen in ready-mades.

They were two painters, though opposites in a way, highborn and low, but occasions allowed or required them to dress in the clothes of their unnatural selves. Two selves for both of them. What devilishness of nature to toss such ambiguities of identity at them.

Two men posed looking down on boulevard Haussmann. Auguste

nodded to one of them, Marcellin Desboutin, an engraver who frequented the Café Nouvelle-Athènes, a writer of verse tragedies. What an impossible thing to sell. No wonder he was also working as a model.

He slouched back against the building in a bowler hat with his hands stuffed in his casual jacket pockets. Auguste didn’t know the top-hatted gentleman posing in black frock coat leaning forward on the railing.

Now, there’s a difference between us, Auguste thought. I would have a man
and a woman
on this balcony.

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Gustave turned toward him. “Ah, Auguste.” He told the men they

could take a break and ring for a
café
in the dining room. By the fl uid way the two models glided across the drawing room, Auguste could tell they’d been here often, and not just as models. He envied Gustave always being able to paint out of love, and doing his best work because of it, painting after painting.

“How very democratic of you,” Auguste said. “
Grand bourgeois
with
petit bourgeois,
yet together in a private space. People are going to wonder.”

“Some
flâneurs
will know. Those snide observers strolling the boulevards and picking apart society in the weekly journals.” He dipped his brush in turpentine and cleaned it with a rag. “The morals brigade will skewer me.”

“You’re courageous.”

“Only by proxy.”

Auguste studied the plunging perspective on the unfi nished canvas, and the difference in size of the figures as a way to give the illusion of depth on the balcony. He came inside to look at Gustave’s overpowering painting of a Paris street on a rainy day. Same achievement of perspective. And again on
Pont de l’Europe
displaying Gustave himself as a wealthy
fl âneur
glancing toward a laborer leaning on the bridge railing, with his dog connecting them.

“Your unusual perspectives draw a person right in. There aren’t any boundaries between the scene and where I’m standing. You eclipse us all in inventiveness.”

“Zola called it my ‘curious artistic personality.’ ” Gustave stepped over Mame and sat on the sofa. Instantly Inès curled up on his lap.

“Zola be hanged. You know who you are. Me, on some days I’m

sorry I wasn’t Ingres. Other days I’m sorry I’m not Monet. You make Impressionism and academic painting work together, modern subjects but conservative brushwork. You thumb your nose at the critics.”

“So could you, you know.” Gustave rubbed the cat under her chin.

“Easy for you to say. You who can tell the Salon jury to suck eggs and you’ll still eat at Café Riche and spread out in ten rooms without ever having to sell a square meter of canvas for your rent.”

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“Eight rooms.” Gustave offered him a cigarette and lit it for him. “I thought you were staying at Louveciennes for the summer.”

“I was, until I read Zola’s review.”

“He’s a two-headed bull,” Gustave declared. “Next year he’ll say the opposite of what he says this year. He said my
Floor Scrapers
was too tight. Too tidy. Too . . . too . . . too. He called me anti-artistic, said I paint with pedestrian exactitude. Later he said I’m courageous. Don’t pay him any attention.”

“You don’t mean that. When other critics read Zola, they’ll repeat his opinion like lemmings and will predict the failure of Impressionism too.”

Gustave scowled. “And then the group won’t hold.”

“So I want to make him eat his words. For all our sakes. And I have a subject that can make him do that. The terrace of Maison Fournaise.”

“Finally! Bravo!”

Auguste traced the pattern of the brocade on the arm of his chair.

“Not that I’m ready, mind you.”

“We’re never as ready as we’d like to be. Time forces our hand.”

“But this one has to be my
chef-d’oeuvre.
My sales are slipping. I have to get out of a rut. Will you help me stretch the canvas?” He held up his cast. “I’ll get this off soon, but I have to start Sunday.”

“You’ve been working on sketches with your left hand?”

“No time for sketches. I have to finish it by the regatta in September to catch the best light.” He could see practical concerns swimming in Gustave’s eyes.

“How big?”

“The same as
Moulin de la Galette.
”

“A Salon painting, then, that size?”

“Don’t think it gives me any pleasure to be hung between Mary

Magdalene and some togas.”

Gustave looked troubled. “If it’s for the Salon, that’ll deplete our ranks again. Degas is as stubborn as an ox about his prohibition. Of course, you have every right to submit where you want.”

Auguste saw agitation tighten his mouth. “What’s the matter?”

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“Degas and I had it out.”

“You too?”

“I told him a person’s work should be the only criterion for exhibiting with us, regardless of whether he showed in the Salon that year, and that he’s a zealot to think otherwise. He was once my mentor, yet I called him that.”

“Mutual exclusiveness is his sacred principle.”

“But that will crack us down the middle!” Gustave snapped. “He

can’t see that it’s a matter of fi nancial need. He called me an obstinate turncoat.”

“Ha! You have to admit—the first is true.”

“He’s determined to replace you and Monet and Sisley with his cronies. Raffaëlli, Zandomeneghi, Lepic, Legros, and others. They’re rank amateurs, though Forain has possibilities.”

“And Pissarro?” Auguste asked.

“Pissarro has no use for Degas because Edgar’s an anti-Semite. It’s Degas’ haughty attitude that infuriates me. He said to me, ‘You mean to say you let Monet and Renoir in your house?’ He’s gone sour. He bears the whole world a grudge. He doesn’t deliver on his promises either.

God knows we only have a certain number of years to work, and he’s wasting them. Squandering his talent.”

“You can’t shoulder the fate of our whole group, Gustave.”

“But what’s to become of us? I get so miserable thinking about it that I get a pain right here.” He touched his chest. “If Bazille were here, he’d keep us together.”

“If Bazille were here, it would still be the same,” Auguste said.

“You’re wrong. Frédéric would be smart enough to maneuver De-

gas into a corner and skewer him, and then he’d be forced to concede.”

“Frédéric was a brilliant painter,” Auguste said.

“Do you remember his painting of two nude fishermen with a net?”

Gustave asked. “Classical male nudes, but not gods, just fi shermen in the woods.”

“Of course.”

“It had such a profound effect on me I’ll never forget it. It plugged

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the academy right between the eyes. I could kick myself for not buying it when they rejected it.” A tremolo threaded Gustave’s voice.

“Don’t regret what’s past. You’ve done what you could. You still are.”

“But if we’re not careful, we’re going to lose something precious.”

That was it, of course. Not just the staunch camaraderie that had supported them for a dozen years, but the force of their combined work.

If they split, they’d be viewed as individual crackpots, not the harbin-gers of a bold new art. That possibility gnawed at him when he considered abandoning the Impressionist stroke, but that was too much to say to Gustave at the moment.

“You’d think it would be unbreakable by now,” Auguste said, “but it’s more fragile than ever. And if I desert our next show—”

“If you don’t show with us, you have a good reason. Claude too. I really don’t think he will. I had to hunt down his canvases and frame them myself for this year’s show, and it’s not going to be any easier next year. He gets discouraged in a way that scares me.”

“
You
get discouraged in a way that scares
me,
” Auguste said.

“It’s not for me that I’m grumbling. I know I’m second-rate. That doesn’t bother me. It’s for you and the others who’ve been together from the start. We can’t allow it to fall apart.”

Gustave rubbed Mame with his foot. “But I have a plan, and when it’s carried out, you’ll be in the Louvre,” he said in a low voice.

Auguste howled with sardonic laughter. “You’re dreaming.”

Gustave gave him a steely look. “I’ve written out my will. I’m leaving my entire collection to the Musées Nationaux, with the stipulation that it will be displayed in the Musée du Luxembourg’s contemporary galleries for twenty years, and then moved to the Louvre. You’re going to arrange it.”

“Ha! Assuming I haven’t starved first.” Auguste chortled, but the seriousness on Gustave’s face made him stop. In the last few years, Gustave’s parents and his younger brother had died. He’d hardly touched a brush all last year. “What does this mean, making out a will at your age?”

Gustave lowered his voice. “I just don’t feel my generation of the family can expect a long life.”

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“Nonsense. You’re younger than I am.”

“Will you or will you not be my executor?”

“Only if you stretch my canvas.”

“Tomorrow. At Maison Fournaise,” Gustave said. “You can’t take a thing that size on the train already stretched.”

“You’re right. But there’s one more thing. You’re in the painting.”

Gustave sputtered out a breath.

“A painting of the pleasure of a Sunday afternoon on the Seine. A boating party. See? You belong there.”

“Which me? Dressed as . . . ?

“A
canotier,
of course.”

Gustave grinned at that.

Auguste patted his shoulder. “Buck up and get back to work now.

Come to my studio when you can tomorrow. I need help getting my easel there.”

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C h a p t e r S i x

Looking for

Mademoiselle Angèle

In his studio Auguste had scraped and sanded his palette and was rubbing linseed oil into it when Paul Lhôte knocked twice and came in, his custom around fi ve o’clock.

He jerked to his feet. “You didn’t tell anyone else I’m here, did you?”

“No. I didn’t see anyone. What’s the matter?”

“I just don’t want to talk about the painting to anyone not in it.” He slipped out of his mules and put on street shoes. “Let’s go.”

It was the green hour at the Café Nouvelle-Athènes, and the anise fragrance of absinthe permeated the room. Glasses of the beautiful green liqueur decorated many of the tables. They ordered mutton ragout for two francs twenty each, and a bock. The beer was thirty centimes.

“Has Angèle been in?” Auguste asked the waiter.

“If she’s the model with the raspy laugh, no.”

“A model for your new painting?” Paul asked. “Can’t you go to

her fl at?”

“I don’t know where she lives these days. Neither does she half the time, street-bred as she is.”

“Then why don’t you just go to the model market?” Paul motioned with his thumb toward the gravel
rond point
in the middle of place Pigalle where hopeful young laundresses, dressmakers’ apprentices, and
grisettes
in gray muslin dresses living off students in the Latin quarter lined up around the circular fountain, hoping to be picked by painters looking them over.

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“That cattle auction? It’s where academicians choose their Venuses.

Nobody I want would be there.”

“Models hang around Le Rat Mort in the mornings.”

“Trash. I don’t want some chippy I don’t even know and don’t care about. Imagine, two months saddled with some Jezebel. I do have some standards. No cowface with dirty armpits is going to inspire me.”

“Why are you so set on Angèle?”

Because she’s the only one who could take the place of Margot, he thought.

“Because I only want to paint women I love, or imagine I could love.”

“That leaves a wide field, then, doesn’t it?”

“I never experience anything joyfully unless I can touch it. Even with commissioned portraits, if I don’t feel something for the woman, it comes out stiff and lifeless. I can touch Angèle all I want.”

“Hm.”

“She revels in it. I need her
joie de vivre.
She’s entertaining. She’ll loosen up the group so they’ll enjoy each other right away. They need a reason to keep coming back every Sunday. Nobody else can do that like she can. Angèle is Angèle.”