The Painted Girls (30 page)

1895

Marie

I
put my hand on Matilde’s brow, and her eyes blink open. “Maman,” she says, her lashes drifting closed. I blow a tiny puff of air into her face, and then she is awake. “It’s my name day tomorrow,” she says. “You remember about my slippers?” And so she has not forgotten, this child of eight, what I agreed to a month ago, that for her name day I would darn the toes of her ballet slippers, adding the stiffness that aids a girl in rising onto the tips of her toes. Madame Théodore had explained the trick to Matilde’s class, and Matilde said a dozen times afterward how it was the only gift that would do.

Geneviève, her older sister by eleven months, pushes herself up to sitting in their shared bed. Wiping sleep from her eyes, she says, “Don’t do it, Maman. Rats are meant to scuttle flat-footed.” And then those two sisters roll in the linens and pinch and laugh, nightdresses hiked to their thighs. “Up with the both of you,” I say. “Wash your faces and go downstairs for your chocolate.”

In the stairwell I breathe the odor of hot bread wafting up from the bakery and wonder how it is those two girls are not babies anymore. How did it happen so quick? Just the other day Geneviève said her mind was made up, that she would be a milliner. It was Antoinette who put the idea in her head, going on as she does about Geneviève’s talent for putting violet with yellow, this bit of ribbon with that bit of cord. Her comfort with needle and thread was Antoinette’s doing, too. Always when Geneviève goes missing, she can be found amid the frayed buttonholes and split-open seams Antoinette takes in for mending, also the scraps of lace and trim she snips from the heap piled in the ragman’s cart. It is an exchange. He gets a pair of trousers or a waistcoat from his collection stitched up well enough to pawn. Antoinette gets the adornments, and Geneviève, hour upon hour of twisting ribbon into bows, lace into rosettes. Matilde used to follow Geneviève across the rue de Douai and up the stairs to the lodging room where I passed my childhood, where Antoinette and Charlotte still live, now with a larder always stocked and the walls freshly whitewashed and proper beds behind a partition of heavy brocade. But Matilde did not like the finicky work, those bits of cord lost in her fingers, those bits of ribbon nudged and coaxed and slipped from her grip. No, she will dance, she says, like Tante Charlotte.

So many times we have watched from the fourth balcony, Matilde gripped, Geneviève growing restless, me never knowing when that lost life of dancing might sneak up, when I might find myself swallowing hard in the dark. It is not regret, exactly, more a lament for the dancing, those moments when I knew the world in all its joy and sorrow and love. And maybe, too, I miss the dream that once spurred me from bed to bakery to practice room, the dream that filled me to the brim with desire, that has been replaced by the quieter ambition of raising Matilde and Geneviève.

Charlotte has climbed the ranks of the ballet, from second quadrille to first and then on to coryphée and after that sujet. She is a favorite of the abonnés, with two love affairs put behind her, her heart broken twice. But now there is a set decorator, who does not give her a yellow bird in a gilt cage or send a seamstress around to measure her for a silk dress. He has honest, sorrowful eyes, though, and at Eastertime he blew the insides from an egg and painted it up with tiny chicks and Charlotte made a fuss and now there is a collection of painted eggs upon the mantelshelf. When Matilde goes across the street it is to stand at Papa’s sideboard making pliés and stretching her legs, to hear Charlotte say, “That’s it. Hold your neck long, like Taglioni, Matilde,” to appear no different from a child Monsieur Degas would take up his charcoal to sketch.

He moved from the rue Fontaine workshop to I do not know where, and I do not ask. I see him at the Opéra from time to time, and I duck around a pillar or put my attention on the knitting in my lap. Once, though, when Charlotte was appearing in the
Faust
divertissement and Matilde and Geneviève and I attended the debut, I saw him see me and then watched his eyes shift to the girls. I put them behind my back and waited for his gaze to return to me. “Monsieur Degas,” I said, but he did not say my name, and I wondered if he had forgotten it. “Fine girls,” he said, and I did not loosen the grip that kept them from his sight. Whether it was that rudeness or something he saw in my face, I do not know, but he knew that still I could feel the sting of the words printed in
Le Figaro, Le Temps, Le Courrier du soir
, and what he said next was, “I keep the statuette in my workshop. It seems I always will. My dealer suggests casting it in bronze. But it’s too much responsibility to leave behind anything in bronze.”

“Yes,” I said. “That substance is for eternity.”

M
aman does not know of Antoinette’s endeavors with needle and thread or of Charlotte’s triumph at the Opéra. She never met Matilde or Geneviève. She set out for the washhouse one morning but never did arrive according to Monsieur Guiot. “Was she assigned to the wringing machine?” Antoinette said, and he nodded, loosening his cravat. She had up and left us, disappearing in those dark days when Antoinette was mending for Monsieur Guiot without getting paid a single sou. She was, she said, fulfilling a pledge—to mend to perfection all she was asked, to allow him to inspect every stitch for three months. If she succeeded, only then would he waste a minute deciding whether to give her the work for good. I was not working, not at all. No. I was resting up—Antoinette’s words—even if every day the sun was out she made me climb the height of Montmartre and then back down. We had only Charlotte’s regular wage from the Opéra and the three francs extra she earned each night she danced upon the stage. Already Antoinette had given Monsieur LeBlanc the pouch of coins she brought with her from Saint-Lazare, this after extracting from him a steep discount for paying three months’ rent in advance. For meals we ate the broken orange Madeleines and scorched loaves Alphonse sent up to our door. Licking crumbs from her fingers, Antoinette would put on a cheery voice and say, “How many trays can a boy drop? That boy, his papa is going to wring his neck if he burns another loaf.”

The two of them—Antoinette and Alphonse—argued once. They were on the pavement, and I was setting out to climb Montmartre but still behind the door of our lodging house, listening to what I was not meant to hear. “Not yet,” Antoinette said. “She still isn’t herself.”

“I don’t know how long Papa will wait,” he said. “That girl we have doing the kneading rubs her back, stalling, the minute he turns away.”

“Well, you got to do this thing for Marie. You got to make your papa wait.” I put my shoulder against the door, but I did not push.

“And how do you suggest I accomplish that, Antoinette?”

“Pat that slothful girl on the rump from time to time. It’d make a girl work harder, thinking she stood a chance with the son of the owner. A few months of slaving and she saves herself a lifetime of drudgery.”

“I wasn’t patting Marie.”

“Marie don’t need patting. She was born working harder than an ox.”

I pushed the door open, and Alphonse took off his baker’s cap and wrung it in his hands. I felt my color rising, same as his, and I did not mention the kindness of the ruined loaves. I dipped my chin and spun away, striding off quicker than a rabbit escaping the stewing pot.

I am pretty sure I know the exact moment when Antoinette changed her mind about Alphonse telling me his father wanted me back at the bakery. She was mending at our little table, and I came in from climbing Montmartre and said how I had seen colors—oil leaked from the battered old lantern lying there—floating on the wet pavement. “I dipped my boot into the puddle and gave a little swirl. Those colors, how they were shining and drifting.” Antoinette set down her mending and put her hand on my cheek, and I saw joy well in her eyes.

I
knead at a little table pushed to the front window of the bakery, a spot where I can keep an eye on Matilde and Geneviève in the street. Alphonse, as he sometimes does, lingers, stroking my arm. His brawny baker’s hands are soft as velvet with their dusting of flour. I say to him, over my shoulder, that such silky hands feel like a trick, and he says back how he could never devote himself to a woman with fleshy arms. “All those hours in the practice room gone to waste,” I say, “all those hours learning to make my arms appear soft.” I feel him watching, wondering if this morning will turn into one where I miss the Opéra, those moments of being lifted up. But today I think of Matilde catching such a moment and basking in the golden glow. I push the heels of my hands into the dough, turning the ridge of muscle beneath his fingers to hard, so he will know I am not dwelling, lost.

Antoinette comes in for the croissants she collects each morning, one for herself and one for the girl she has taken on as apprentice. “And how is Agnès?” I say. Every day there is a story: How she claimed to be sixteen when that age was still more than two years away. How she stole a sewn-up bonnet that turned up in the window of a pawnbroker in the rue Fontaine. How she called Antoinette a cow for making her rework a sloppy hem and then hurled a spool of thread when Antoinette said back, “If you’re saying I keep you in milk and cheese, then it’s absolutely true.” In Agnès, Antoinette gained exactly what she asked for when she took on a second washhouse and the mending piled up. “I need an apprentice” is what she said to the Superioress at Saint-Lazare. “A girl who isn’t quite thundering through those pearly gates.”

Antoinette gives her head a little shake. “Yesterday she told me an account of being robbed on Saturday evening and asked me could I advance her a few sous.”

It is not a reason for a pair of eyes to gleam hopefulness, but just now it is what I see in Antoinette’s.

“Well,” she goes on, “I put my hands on her shoulders and said, ‘Now, Agnès, was the robbing before or after applying the scent clinging to your hair, before or after putting the new laces in your boots, before or after enjoying the red caramel still streaking your teeth?’ By the time I finished, her hands were in her lap and she was looking mournful as a wilted rose. I gathered up the ham from the larder, the onions and potatoes from the root bin and set them at her feet. ‘Don’t know why you’re lying,’ I said, ‘but I can see you are in need.’ And then she was bawling and saying about being a dunce and going out to the Chat Noir and waking up with nothing more than a thick tongue and a blaring head and a whole lot of sorrow about wasting what she worked so hard to earn.”

“There is such goodness in you, Antoinette,” I say. “In no time, you’ll have Agnès ripened up to an honest working girl.” A girl like herself, industrious as a bee, honest as a looking glass.

Antoinette sticks to the truth, always, now, even when it means saying to Charlotte that, no, her set decorator does not have a regal look or to Alphonse that she would not agree his meringues are the best she ever tried or to me that, yes, it is true Matilde does not match Geneviève in humility and then, after I sucked in my lip, “Christ, Marie. You know lying isn’t for me.” Sometimes there is a gap, before she says her wounding words, like she is arguing with herself about the supremacy of truth, and what I figured out is always when such a gap blooms, the asking was a mistake.

She swallows, laughs, and I do the same, because no one coming in for his morning loaf wants the awkwardness of finding the baker’s wife and her sister misty-eyed at the front of the shop. We take a moment—Antoinette and I—standing side by side, shoulders touching, and peering through the window into the rue de Douai. Matilde holds a feather, rose-colored and magnificent with long strands of the vane wafting in the breeze. She draws the feather over her cheek, along her neck, taking pleasure in the tickling. “One of yours?” I say to Antoinette.

“From an ostrich. Must’ve fell from a lady’s hat.”

Matilde tilts her head, the way she tends to when she is making up her mind. And then she is off, running like a dog is nipping at her heels. She stops, abrupt, a few steps short of Geneviève and holds out her find. She gives it the little nudge that makes Geneviève understand, and she reaches for the feather, those wispy tendrils of love offered by her sister as a gift.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to my agent, the brilliant Dorian Karchmar. I count the day she offered representation as the day I was hauled from the murk of the woods onto the lit path. I am immensely grateful to my editors—Sarah McGrath and Iris Tupholme—for their tremendous intelligence and diligence in shaping this book and finding its readership. A writer could not ask for more capable, dedicated allies.

A heartfelt thank-you to the following: Ania Szado, my first reader, for encouragement and thoughtful criticism; Sarah Cobb, for patience and skill in translating primary source material; Jack and Janine Cobb, for expertise in proofreading; my parents, Ruth Buchanan and Al Buchanan, for being guiding lights; Nancy Buchanan, for being my best friend in all the world; my boys, Jack, Charlie, and William Cobb, for making me laugh (and yes, cry) and love being a mother; my husband, Larry Cobb, for the gift of time to write and most of all, for love.

I am grateful for the generous assistance provided by David Baguley, author of
Émile Zola: L’Assommoir
; Douglas W. Druick, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of “Framing
The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen
” (
Degas and the Little Dancer
, Yale University Press, 1998, 77–96), his groundbreaking essay detailing the link between
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen
and Degas’s criminal portraits; Martine Kahane, author of “Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen—The Model” (
Degas Sculptures: Catalogue Raisonné of the Bronzes
, International Arts, 2002, 101–7), her seminal essay on the circumstances of the van Goethem sisters’ lives; Sylvie Jacq Mioche, History of Dance teacher at the Paris Opéra Ballet School; Pierre Vidal, director of the Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra.

Many books were important in researching this novel, particularly David Baguley,
Emile Zola: L’Assommoir
, Cambridge University Press, 1992; Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall,
Degas and the Dance
, Harry N. Abrams, 2002; Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge,
Degas
, Abradale, 1988; Ludovic Halévy,
The Cardinal Family
, George Barrie & Sons, 1897; Richard Kendall, Douglas W. Druick, and Arthur Beale,
Degas and the Little Dancer
, Yale University Press, 1998; Leo Kersley and Janet Sinclair,
A Dictionary of Ballet Terms
, Da Capo, 1979; Charles S. Moffett, Ruth Berson, Barbara Lee Williams, and Fronia E. Wissman,
The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886
, Richard Burton, 1986; Spire Pitou,
The Paris Opéra: An Encyclopedia of Operas, Ballets, Composers, and Performers,
Greenwood, 1990; Émile Zola,
L’Assommoir
, Orion Group, 1995.

The newspaper account “Criminal Man” that appears in this novel draws on a translation of the article “Fous ou Criminels?”
La Nature
(August 23, 1879), 186–87. The newspaper account “Concerning the New Painting Exhibited at the Gallery of Durand-Ruel” draws on the translation of Louis Emile Edmond Duranty’s 1876 essay “The New Painting,” which appears in
The New Painting, Impressionism, 1874–1886
, 38
–
47. The newspaper account “Degas and the Sixth Exposition of the Independent Artists” draws on Fronia E. Wissman’s essay “Realists Among the Impressionists,” which appears in
The New Painting, Impressionism, 1874–1886,
337–50. The critiques of
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen
draw on critiques presented in the aforementioned essay;
Degas
, pages 206–7; George Shackelford,
Degas: The Dancers
, W. W. Norton & Company, 1984, 69; and Charles W. Millard,
The Sculpture of Edgar Degas
, Princeton University Press, 1976, 28. The remaining newspaper accounts and excerpts of court transcripts draw on translations of articles that appeared in
Le Figaro
between March 1879 and August 1880. Text by Edgar Degas is from
Huit Sonnets d’Edgar Degas
and is used courtesy of Wittenborn Art Books, San Francisco, www.art-books.com. The translation is largely from
Degas
and is used with the permission of the estate of Andrew Forge.