The Vatard Sisters (16 page)
Désirée felt uncomfortable; ‘I know all that,’ she stammered, ‘I’ve been telling myself the same thing for the past hour; you’re right, but first I need to know if Papa would accept Auguste.’ ‘Ah, that’s another thing altogether,’ exclaimed Céline, a little taken aback by this consideration which she hadn’t foreseen, ‘but what’s most important now is to know if your lover has honourable intentions. I’ll take care of that.’ And Céline considered her plan of attack, hesitating between having it out with the young man straightaway and another idea that had come to her as she was putting out the lamp: to wait instead until the moment when Auguste, exasperated at only seeing her sister at rare intervals, would be desperate enough to submit to all her whims and caprices. ‘And since,’ she concluded to herself, ‘I’ve put my painter in his place, I can easily do the same with Auguste,’ and she went to sleep without even the shadow of a doubt that she was completely mistaken.
First of all, she hadn’t put Cyprien Tibaille in his place. The sin of this particular Don Juan was certainly not shyness, as she thought. When he’d first met her he was suffering from a certain indisposition, and so for both their sakes he was waiting until he was completely recovered before beginning his attack on her virtue.
He was, in fact, quite a philanderer, a lover of all the nuances of vice, as long as they were subtle and complex. He had made love, by the grace of God, to both actresses and scullery maids. Delicate and highly-strung, obsessed by those secret passions that overwhelm wearied constitutions, he’d reached a point where he fantasised only about sensual pleasures that were spiced up by a semblance of perversity or by ostentatious clothing. In art, he understood nothing but the modern. Caring little for ideas handed down from older periods, he asserted that a painter should only render that which he could know and see; however, since he knew and saw few women except whores, he only attempted to paint whores. In truth, he really only admired the vice of the aristocracy and the working class; as far as prostitution was concerned, the bourgeois attitude seemed particularly odious to him. He was infatuated by the look of common prostitutes, by their vulgar, provocative airs, by their gestures, which exposed slabs of bare flesh beneath loose jackets whenever they knocked back wine or smothered the drunken faces of their men with kisses. He was infatuated still more by the depravity of seductresses of a higher order: their heady perfumes, their tantalising make-up, and their wild eyes ravished him. His fantasy even ventured into the realm of the eccentric. He wanted to accentuate his pleasures against a backdrop of despair. He would have liked to have made love to a woman dressed exuberantly as a clown, beneath the jaundiced grey sky of a winter’s day, a sky about to let fall its snow, in a bedroom hung with Japanese fabrics, while some half-starved organ-grinder emptied his barrel-organ of the sad waltzes with which its belly was full. His art was very strongly marked by these tendencies. He would sketch with an astonishing speed the suggestive poses, the weary lassitude of whores on the game, and in his paintings, brushed with broad strokes, spattered with oil, slashed with strokes of pastel, often boldly outlined at first like an etching, then reworked on the canvas, he succeeded in producing watercolours, scarred by a furious hammering of colours, that suggested a furious intensity of life, that gave themselves up to or sprang from the rendering of unconventional impressions. He had been a student of Cabanel and Gérôme, but these two impotents had tried in vain to instil their clichéd formulas into him. He had immediately spat insults over their chaste nudes. He also made a brief port of call to the famous landscape painters of the day, who howled in protest when confronted by his theories. His landscapes of suburban life, of the run-down gardens along the Rue de la Chine, of the wasteland near Gobelins, of vice-ridden cafés, all his sickly, shabby locales, had made him a disgrace. Having gone so far as to declare one day that the pitiful spectacle of wallflowers withering in a pot seemed to him more interesting than the sunny laugh of roses blossoming in an open field, the doors of respectable studios were closed to him.
It goes without saying that Céline had understood nothing of the character of a man so supremely unbalanced. As for him, he took her at face value. She attracted him, even though there was no audacity or spice of mystery about her; but he needed a working-class girl for a painting, a strong-backed, solid girl, a girl who was up for it and who stirred your senses with every step she took. He was rightly contemptuous of those models who sprawled their freshly-washed nudity in every painter’s studio. The ‘Venus de Medici’ type, to use his expression, seemed stupid to him; he didn’t accept for a moment that one should represent, in a conventional pose, a woman sketched from the body parts of five or six others; in his opinion it was necessary to capture her, to paint her when she wasn’t expecting it, when, without any pompous or affected gestures, she was moping about gloomily or skipping with joy like a free animal, with no one watching her. Above all, it was the whore, young but worn out, her complexion already wasted by late nights, her breasts still supple but softening and beginning to sag, her face seductive and wicked, licentious and caked in make-up, that attracted him. Céline, in default of this seasoning of vice which he so relished, had an animatedness in her features and in her upper body that he found pleasing. She wasn’t very well built, being short and stocky like her sister, but that mattered little to him, his only idea was to create a work of art that was alive and true.
The flawless forms of so-called ‘paintings of the nude’, with their models lying sinuously on a sofa, or standing with one leg slightly bent, skin smooth, creamy, bulging at the front with round breasts tipped in pink, exasperated him. The ancients had succeeded in this better than anyone else ever would. But their footsteps were too well-trodden now, it was necessary to create new ones. As for him, he’d drawn women of flesh-and-blood, haggard like most of those who have had children or over-indulged in drink or sex; he’d depicted them with breasts sagging, eyes gleaming, mouth watering. But he didn’t care much for nudity, preferring the beautifully wicked posturing of Parisian working girls, devoting himself above all to painting these play-actresses of love in the places where they thronged: at the music hall of an evening, yawning in front of a beer; sitting at a café table on the look-out; in the streets on the game; laughing their heads off over some piece of nonsense; acting dozy so as not to scare away a shy client, or generous and affectionate in order to get more out of them; insulting one another and yelling, heads thrown back, out of jealousy or drunkenness.
The Salon jury was quick to refuse his canvases every year and the public ratified this judgement by not buying them. This didn’t bother him much, he went on squandering the three hundred francs he received as an allowance each month, wandering through the more out-of-the-way quarters of the city in pursuit of women with swaying, come-hither hips.
But he would have needed what he peevishly called ‘a nice, round sum’, in order to visit the higher class whores and paint them just as they were, in their silk-ceilinged boudoirs and in battle dresses that glazed their vulgarity with a veneer of charm. He’d never been able to realise this dream. Lacking the money, he’d been forced to paint only the leftovers of the meal, vice at knock-down prices.
The field was still broad, and he was cultivating it bit by bit. Then, the day after he’d taken possession of Céline, he had a stroke of luck: he discovered that when she was tired out and dozing on the sofa, she looked like a high class tart in a swoon. She became extraordinarily alluring, with her straw hair cascading over the cushion, her rump twisted, one leg up in the air, the other hanging down over the base of the sofa. So the next day he decided to put one of his projects into execution. He strolled through the Temple with its boutiques of secondhand clothes, and he bought a job lot of silk stockings. He returned home, very excited, and examined his purchases in the light. They were of all colours and all shades, some plain, some embroidered, and if they’d been new, some of these stockings would have been worth twenty to thirty francs a pair, others between thirty-five and sixty francs. Fifty centimes to have them cleaned at the laundry and he’d be all set. At that moment Céline arrived and began to squeal at the sight of this pile of merchandise. Cyprien was holding them out, turning them over, making their colours gleam in the flickering candlelight: dark indigos embroidered with blood-red, turquoises with grey stripes, crimson and yellow checks, corn-yellows, mauves, and blacks spotted with white; but there were two pairs that especially delighted him: one, of a superb lemon-yellow, the other of a burnt orange colour, perforated like lace at the ankle in order to let the whiteness of the wearer’s flesh show discreetly through.
Céline wanted to put them on straightaway. Cyprien had all the trouble in the world making her understand that they were dirty, that it was necessary to wait at least until they’d been washed; but then he himself couldn’t resist the pleasure of seeing their effect on her skin, so he helped her pull on the orange pair, which went up to the middle of her thighs. Céline was ecstatic. ‘Give me a pair,’ she cajoled. So with the dexterity of a magician who forces you to take one particular card from the deck, he made her choose a pair of pale blue ones with pearl grey stripes, which he’d found two of.
Two days later, Céline began to fall in love with Cyprien; as for him, he still didn’t feel any of those anxious pangs in the stomach when, the hour of their rendezvous having struck, she hadn’t turned up.
‘By heaven, I’ll say! Oh yes, my gals, I’m glad to be back. To put my feet in my slippers, to rediscover old pipes I haven’t smoked for so long, that’s what I call a joy. Down with their vinegary beer, eh, and long live wine! D’you know, I think I’m going to have another glass.’
And, all the while savouring this thirteen-sous-a-litre nectar, Vatard responded to his daughters’ questions: ‘Was Amiens fun? As a spell in the army! It’s like everywhere else, a few streets, a fortress, a big church with funny-looking statues, a stream full of dirty water, a few trees…they’ve got black clay pipes and new-fangled copper lighters to light them, gin so fiery you could make matchheads from it, and beer so bitter it was a tough job swallowing it, it was like being in an army camp, girls, a proper army camp. And on top of it all, your aunt wasn’t as ill as she was making out; a right old grouch, she wouldn’t get off my back, saying to me every time I turned around: “Oh come on, Vatard, you’re not going out again?” Ah! I can truly say I went through purgatory in that blasted city. I’m no more patriotic than the next man, and it’s not because I was born in Montrouge, but d’you know, it would take more than Amiens to beat all that…’ and he pointed his finger through the open window at the horizon of chimneys, roofs, and telegraph poles.
‘You putting on your titfer? Ah, yes, it’s that time…I’m not with it any more. Really, I’m shattered, I bought a second-class ticket to go down there as I was counting on bringing back some money. My eye! nothing, not a farthing! I had to come back third-class…and at night. Good God, there weren’t any headrests, my back’s in a right state. Oh well, since you’re leaving for the workshop, I’ll go and see Tabuche for a bit, I want to know if his abscess has come back and drink a glass to his health. So I’ll see you this evening; try not to get home too late, then we’ll have time for some fried brains in wine sauce; that’ll make up for those poncey little chops with their paper frills I had to eat at your aunt’s. Are you ready? You’re not forgetting anything? No? I’m closing the door.’ And he left his daughters at the bottom of the stairwell, puffing on his pipe, twirling his cane, stopping to chat with shopkeepers, who took great pleasure in listening to an account of his trip.
When the two sisters arrived at the workshop all the women were gathered around a little girl of four or five, a fair-haired kid, skinny and pale. That morning a woman had come and asked the supervisor if she could take the child on as an apprentice. The astonished supervisor had replied that a girl that young was incapable of doing any kind of work whatever. Then the woman had started to cry, saying that she was in dire straits, that her husband was dead, that in order to make a living she was forced to sell apples and medlars in the street, that the child wasn’t old enough to be left alone in the house but she’d never consent to sending her to a crêche or leaving her with babysitters; and with trembling hands she wiped her eyes and cheeks, and in a voice choked with sobs begged that they look after her little girl for her.
The child, seeing so many people around her, turned away and pouted, huge tears in her eyes; the supervisor, moved to pity, took her in her arms, put her on her knees, and, bouncing her up and down, began to sing: ‘Horsey, horsey, when you trot, you make a noise like prrrt, prrrt, prrrt!’ The little girl clapped her hands and shouted: ‘Again!’ And when the supervisor, out of breath, put her back down, she tugged at her cape, begging her to do horsey some more. The mother, with a wild look on her face, rushed over to her daughter, and hugged her and kissed her madly. The little girl began to cry again, so fat Eugénie started to dance around with her, and kissing her tiny hands she said, ‘With poor little hands like that, she won’t be able to work. Really, one wouldn’t dream of it, it would be a crime!’
Everyone nodded their heads in agreement. Finally, the supervisor, after having consulted the boss, who never opposed her on anything, told the mother that it was all right, that they would take care of the child, that she could bring her every morning and come and collect her in the evening. The poor woman murmured, ‘Pauline, say thank you to the ladies.’ But Pauline had taken fright and was hiding her head in her mother’s skirts. Then, while one of the women was placating her with a lump of sugar, the mother discreetly left, head bowed, stammering thank yous and gulping back her tears.
After ten minutes the little girl, who’d started to cry again, shouting ‘I want to see my mummy’, was wriggling around and laughing out loud. They had sat her on a table and everyone was giving her their leftovers from lunch, and she was greedily holding out her hands, babbling, ‘Yum yums, for Pauline?’ Her joy was complete when Désirée made her a doll from scraps of yellow paper, and she was soon fast friends with Puss-puss, who scratched like the very devil when it came to adults, but who retracted his claws and let himself be petted by children.
