The Painted Girls (19 page)
Authors: Cathy Marie Buchanan
Émile don’t scratch or shift in his seat or move his eyes from the carving as the judges leave the courtroom to decide the sentencing, as the noise of the gallery rises up, as it quiets with those sweating, red-faced judges filing back into the court. The only sign of life is the ripple of a swallow in his throat when the presiding judge says, “The court condemns Émile Abadie and Pierre Gille to death by guillotine.”
Yesterday, with Émile saying, “All is not lost,” I waited for a bit of brightness, and when it did not come, I said, “What is it I should be hoping for, Émile?”
“Forced labor,” he said. “Forced labor in New Caledonia.”
The first thought leapt into my mind was that knowing him to be alive and well in a place called New Caledonia would be worse to bear than a separation enforced by the guillotine, and it made me ashamed. I only wanted him here, with me, those moments of happiness—his smile coming when I appeared; his hands so gentle upon my cheeks; his body wrapping my own, hanging on with a fierceness that said he was never letting go. Those other moments, too, when, hands buried in suds, my mind drifted to the evening, to him, the possibilities. “New Caledonia?”
He tilted his chair back onto its hind legs, making wider the gap between me and him. “Monsieur Danet is writing something to stir up public sympathy. I don’t know what, but he wanted every detail of my sorry life.”
I looked up from my hands. The idea of President Grévy showing clemency did nothing to lighten the air, nothing to bestow the ease that was upon the face of Émile.
Émile Abadie, condemned to death for murdering the Montreuil tavern owner, has written his memoirs while awaiting the guillotine. Here, without further delay, is the moving preface of his “The Story of a Man Condemned to Death”:
This story was written by a poor prisoner, who begs the reader not to judge his style too harshly. It was written as well as I could manage with my meager skills and in the hope that it would serve to prevent others from taking the wrong path.
He continues, telling us that at the age of twelve, shortly after his first Communion, he left the hearth of his mother’s home with the shadow of his stepfather’s boot imprinted upon his skin. He found work as an apprentice engraver but never stayed more than a few months with any one employer. An urchin kicked about the streets of Paris, he found shelter wherever he could.
From age sixteen, girls took over his life and became his undoing:
Girls, love, nights of decadence made me forget the healthier parts of life. I needed money to enjoy myself, to live the high life. If, all of a sudden, work dried up for one reason or another, I didn’t want to abandon pleasure. I feared losing the sweetheart who counted on gifts of barley sugar and meals of mussels in parsley sauce.
He had relations with many women and names a half dozen. One of the sweethearts was the woman Bazengeaud.
He met Pierre Gille at the Ambigu Theater, where each was an extra in Zola’s naturalist play
L’Assommoir.
Gille invited Abadie to share his clandestine living quarters in his father’s storage shed. Fed and lodged, Abadie was, in his own words, the happiest of men. But then, after a run of more than a year,
L’Assommoir
closed, and the pair found themselves out of work.
They committed petty thefts to survive and plotted out the crimes that would keep them in clover. One of these was blackmailing the woman Bazengeaud. The memoir continues, with Abadie laying out the details of the blackmailing going awry, but the story he tells ends differently from the one he told in the Court of Assizes. Here, he does not leave the Montreuil tavern after enjoying a cognac, but rather he and Pierre Gille rob the tavern and in a moment of panic, slit the throat of the woman.
The poor woman was in my arms and I had my hand over her mouth. Gille stabbed her in the stomach and again in the chest. I let her go, grabbed the knife and went after her, cutting her throat. In the end she lay on the ground, looking up, in a pool of her own blood, and I was overcome by the horror of what we had done.
After the recounting, Abadie pays tribute to his mother, waxing eloquent in his regret of his savagery toward her.
One day, hungover and drunk on absinthe, I wielded a knife on my poor and good mother. I didn’t strike, it is true, but I raised my hand against what is most sacred to me in the world. Poor mother, who so loved me, who did everything for me, who denied herself to feed me. Believe it, I repent and ask that she forgive me.
In the bitter setting of a prison, Abadie concludes his memoir, soothing himself, daring to hope.
I await the day I am awoken to be walked to the guillotine or to be told that my stay of execution has been granted. All I hope for is life, a chance to show my jury that it is more important to judge the heart of a man than a moment of panic. It has reformed me, as hard as I may have been, when at night in my prison cell, I see the good woman Bazengeaud rise before me.
The guillotine. Is that where this story will close? Will it be the end of me, one who so deeply regrets having led a criminal life, a horrible life?
I have quoted Abadie as much as I can and, in the analysis, used his own words and expressions. In cases like these, no rhetoric from a journalist can replace a cry from the heart.
M
onsieur Lefebvre is very rich and sometimes he is mean but usually he is kind. Always, he is generous. And every now and then, he is a man I do not know.
“You’ll undress,” he says.
And I say “All right,” because it is what I have said twenty times in the past months.
I put down my satchel and step toward the screen in the corner of the apartment that he calls his artist’s workshop, even if draperies with tassels block the light and three sofas and nine chairs, all tufted and ornate, one with gilded arms shaped like swans, take up the space where Monsieur Degas would have placed a sturdy table holding a jumble of brushes and palette knives.
I stand naked and waiting while he pours water from a kettle into a zinc tub, like an oversize pie plate. “You’ll bathe today,” he says.
I place one arm across my breast and the other around my waist.
“Come now, Marie. Surely you’ve seen Monsieur Degas’s bathers?”
Last week, as I turned toward the screen, he said, “I’ll watch you undress,” and when I paused he said, “You attended the exposition of the independent artists? You told me you did?”
“Yes.”
“You saw it, then, Monsieur Degas’s monotype, a woman slipping a dress over her head?
Toilette
he calls it.”
I nodded, and he waited, and then I began loosening the drawstring of my blouse. He smiled and took up the spot behind the single easel in the apartment. In less than an hour I was leaving, and same as each Tuesday, he put a twenty-franc note upon my palm, almost twice the amount I was once paid for a week’s labor at the bakery, more than three times what Monsieur Degas counted out for four hours of modeling.
I
t was my fault, more or less, what happened that day back in June when I passed the examination elevating me to the quadrille, vomiting as I had onto the floor of Monsieur Lefebvre’s carriage, the cuff of his pressed pants, his polished shoes. It is what I remember but only in scraps—flashes of spattered black leather, spattered black wool, foul black floor. I vomited, and Monsieur Lefebvre hollered to the driver, snatched away my pretty glass with its pattern of garland and wreaths and hollered again. The carriage stopped, the door opened, and I was sent flying, Monsieur Lefebvre’s foot on my backside—I am pretty sure—into the brightness of the day outside. Then I was on my hands and knees, spewing onto packed dirt. He called me a wretch—I know that—and told the driver, Louis, to leave me there, at the side of the road. “But, Monsieur Lefebvre, we are just arrived at the Bois de Boulogne,” said Louis, “and she is in no state to find her way home?”
“Now.”
After Monsieur Lefebvre was settled on the groom’s seat at the back of the carriage—he would not suffer the stink of traveling inside—Louis, on the way to his bench up front, said in a low voice, “Now, you stay put. I’m coming back.”
Once they were off, I crawled from packed dirt to struggling grass to the shadow of the woods bordering the road. Would Monsieur Lefebvre tell Monsieur Vaucorbeil? Monsieur Mérante? Monsieur Pluque? Would my name be posted with the others joining the quadrille in the morning? Gut heaving, I hardly cared.
I rolled onto my back and looked up into the heaving, spinning, cloudless sky; the heaving, spinning canopy of green. I remember being struck by the beauty of the leaves, the sun shining through, turning them to a pale yellow green. Stretching my neck, I looked deep into the woods, to the black places where there were—I was sure—wild boars snorting and pawing the dirt. The newspapers made a habit of saying how dangers lurked in every corner of a Paris gone to pot in the ten years since the Emperor Napoleon III got our country beat. The rot was spreading, they said, turning the youth of Paris into thieves and murderers. They pointed to Émile Abadie and Pierre Gille as proof. I did walk quickly on the pavements, particularly in the evening, glancing over my shoulder from time to time. But the fear was nothing compared to the terror that put my eyes skittering about the woods with each rustle, each snap. My heart stopped at the noise of a leaping red squirrel kicking up leaves. Never before had I seen a woods, a place so full of shadows and shifting darkness, blackness in the broad light of day.
My head ached. My tongue was thick. I would have licked a dewy leaf, lapped up a puddle, but there were none. At one point, I started wondering whether the memory of Louis saying he would come back was even real. With evening coming on, it would be easy to change his mind. I got up and walked a hundred feet down the road, following the direction of the retreating carriage. But a way off, the road forked and so I sat down, thinking of nightfall and crying into my skirt.
Then Monsieur Lefebvre’s carriage was back, and Louis said for me to climb up front. Once my backside was upon the bench beside him, he swatted the rumps of the horses, and we set off but heading away from Paris. “There is a fountain up ahead,” he said, and then after a pause, “I’ve got two daughters of my own, and you needn’t be afraid.”
At the fountain, instead of collecting water in my hands, I pressed my cheek flat against the stone, allowing the water from the spigot to wash over my face and into my mouth. I stayed like that a long time, getting cleansed, even when my thirst and the dried-up vomit on my chin were gone.
Then Louis said we were heading to the lake so the horses could have a drink. “This heat,” he said, wiping a handkerchief across the back of his neck. Many times I looked out over the Seine and saw the silver moon twinkling on the lapping river, but I never before saw a lake. Still, I only wanted to go home, to put my cheek upon my mattress, to gather the wrinkled linens and bury my head underneath. It is something I regret, now, the way I hardly looked—the tiny islands, the rowboats, the mossy rocks with greenery clinging to the crevices in between. There was a waterfall connecting the upper and lower parts of the lake, falling like a veil, the prettiest sight in all my life, and yet I shut my eyes and held my throbbing head in my hands.
On the way home he asked about the Opéra, and I told him about the examination, about sixteen fouettés en tournant at the end. “Monsieur Lefebvre told me I was moving up to the quadrille,” I said. “Don’t know about that anymore.”
“He isn’t one for holding grudges.” He gave a crooked smile. “He has me driving like the dickens to get to the Opéra gate in time.”
I saw a scene, then, with Monsieur Lefebvre leaning forward, sliding open the little window in the carriage wall, and calling out, “Faster! Onward! We’ll miss her!” and Louis rolling his eyes that once again Monsieur Lefebvre told himself he was not going to the Opéra gate, not today, not at all, and put off leaving until it was close to too late.
I knew, then, always he would see his way to giving me a second chance. Same as before the retching onto pressed trousers, with the sixteen fouettés en tournant came spread-open wings, a lowly scuttling rat raised up to a swan. It was in that moment, half a year ago, when I knew already I was his protégé.
O
nce Monsieur Lefebvre finishes emptying the kettle into the zinc tub, he moves to behind the easel, and I step ankle-deep into water hot enough to sting.
“Wet yourself,” he says.
I crouch, pick up the sponge he put beside the tub with a cake of soap and a pitcher of water with steam rising above. I pass the sponge through the water, squeeze it over my shoulder and feel warm rivulets running down my back. Monsieur Lefebvre lifts his arm, preparing to draw. With the smallest of glances, I see the concentration on his face, and the ache between my shoulder blades lets up. Daylight, like always, chases away the blackness of night, the wide-awake hours of knowing Monsieur Lefebvre and I are playing at something that is not drawing, something that an easel and charcoal lets the both of us pretend is nothing at all.
I come to the apartment on Tuesdays before heading to the Opéra for the quadrille’s afternoon class and the rehearsing that comes afterward. There is never a maid nor a wife nor the son he once told me showed a scientist’s mind with his fondness for dissecting frogs and mice. I asked once where everyone was, and Monsieur Lefebvre said, “I gave the maid the day off and Madame Lefebvre prefers our other apartment, in the Avenue des Ternes, and Antoine attends the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.”
Still crouched with my belly tight against my thighs, I again squeeze the sponge over my shoulder. “Shall I warm up the water, Marie?”
There are two fireplaces, one at each end of the room. Flames fill the mouth of the closest, and in the other a large kettle, with steam spilling from its spout, dangles from a hook above a bed of glowing coals. “Might just be the warmest bath I ever had.” Even Monsieur Degas, who has nowhere near the same wealth, would never stoop to hauling a kettle himself. He would call Sabine to warm up the tub.
“Perhaps you might stand a little straighter? You’re all knees, crouching like that.”
I had grown used to modeling naked for Monsieur Degas, but now with Monsieur Lefebvre’s strange ways and my own body altering by the week, there is a new wariness. The hair that was gauzy between my legs, beneath my arms, has thickened to a mat. Bones no longer jut from my hips, not with the meat the modeling for Monsieur Lefebvre allows. The small mounds of my breast have swelled, like an apricot cut in half one day and then a yellow plum the next. It meant the fastening hooks of my practice bodice pulled too tight and tore three little holes where before there were none. I said to Monsieur Lefebvre how with the bodice I felt I could hardly open up my ribs to breathe, and a day later, I was being measured by a seamstress after class, and a week after that, I was wearing a new one with a layer of ruched tarlatan adding to my new fullness across the front and a neckline trimmed with lace. Such prettiness, for practicing! In my satchel were two more bodices, one with a low, scooping back and the smallest of pink rosebuds upon each shoulder, and the other with such ruffles that I feared Monsieur Pluque scolding me. I wore it anyway and saw him eyeing me once. He said not a word, though, and I figured out that he knew such a bodice could only be a gift from an abonné, from Monsieur Lefebvre.
I
straighten my knees to standing, arms hanging at my sides, dripping sponge clenched in one hand.
“Wash yourself,” he says. “You’re bathing. I’m not even here.”
I pass the sponge over each arm, both legs. I keep up the bending and straightening, the soaking of the sponge, the washing of my shoulders, my neck, until the water grows cool and my skin is like gooseflesh. “Enough,” he finally says.
I have not held a single pose, which proves he does not know the first thing about how to draw. He takes a towel from the top of the sideboard and whirls his finger through the air, telling me to turn. “I’ll dry your back,” he says, and because he expects it, I shuffle my feet in a slow circle, stopping only when I face away from him. He is gentle, taking his time, and I can tell he is very close by the heat rolling off him, by the sound of his breath heavy in my ear. Then he moves low, upon one knee, and the towel passes over half of my backside, travels down one leg. Its roughness is upon the other cheek and then still and there is what feels like two fingers, prodding, through the towel, at the softest of spots between my legs. I snap to rigid, faster than a thought, just like the other time Marie the First had me flinching from his finger on my spine, and he pulls away.
He nudges the towel against my hanging hand, and, taking it, I scuttle from the tub, slopping water onto the carpet with its pattern of laurels and vines. It is the kind of mistake that in a wink switches him from kindly to mean, but today he only flops down into the swan-armed chair and puts his face in his hands.
Behind the screen, I drop the towel, tug on my drawers; my stockings, not bothering to pull them up past my knees; my skirt; my blouse. My boots, I leave undone.
“Take your money from the middle drawer in the sideboard,” he says. “Take thirty francs.”
Without truly glancing toward him, though I can see, from the corner of my eye, the black outline of him still slumped in the chair, I open the middle drawer to find it heaped with coins, some bronze, mostly gold. There are stacks of notes—tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds. I put my hand upon the tens, peel back three notes, but I let one settle back onto the pile. “I’m taking twenty,” I say, and he looks up, an old man. “All right,” he says. “All right.”
What I know is I have to tell Antoinette. But how to get to two prodding fingers when I have not said about never holding a pose or the maid who is not there or the draperies blocking the light. All of it seems like the whining of a child. And already she is gloomy and grumpy and pacing the plank floor of our lodging room, wringing her hands on account of that boy. With two ten-franc notes inside my pocket, I open the door and close it quietly behind my back and then stand in the vestibule, a steadying hand on the cool marble of the wall.
