The Witch of Painted Sorrows (9 page)

I remembered the letter she’d written to my parents after the tragedy with Leon that terrible spring. She’d used almost the same words.

“A family curse? That’s preposterous.”

She trained her fiery opal eyes on me; her gaze was intense. “No, no, it’s not,” my grandmother said.

I bit down on the bonbon so hard that my teeth pierced the inside of my cheek, and the taste of blood ruined the chocolate.

“Sandrine, quick.” Suddenly my grandmother was standing, shouting at me. “Turn this way, come with me, run.” As I stood, she grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the table just as I heard an ear-shattering crash.

Cold air poured in.

I looked back. We were a dozen feet away from our table, which was now covered in fragments of glass glittering in the candlelight. It was all over our plates. Our seats. We would have been showered by the sharp splinters if Grand-mère hadn’t pulled me away.

“Don’t stop,” she shouted.

A man—either a diner or a waiter—screamed: “It’s the anarchists!”

“It’s a bomb!” another man yelled.

My grandmother kept moving us farther away from the gaping, wounded window. In the pandemonium around us, people pushed over chairs and tables, breaking china and glass as they rushed to get out of the path of what they expected to come.

“It is all right, Messieurs, Mesdames,” the restaurant manager was shouting over the din. “All is fine. It was only a rock. Not a bomb. Not a bomb. Please, everyone. No reason to panic. Brandy for everyone. Take your seats. Please, everyone, please, there’s no reason to panic.”

The guests were becoming aware of what he was saying.

“Not a bomb.”

“A rock? Someone threw a rock?”

“Why?”

People gathered around the manager, peppering him with questions.

“Not a bomb. Just a rock with a note wrapped around it.” He held it up.

Beside me, my grandmother, who was holding my arm, leaned very close and whispered in my ear: “I was warning you just when it happened, wasn’t I? Telling you that we’re cursed. Just at that moment. You see? Just as I was about to tell you that love is what
she
wants and what you can never give her.”

But I wasn’t thinking about the curse. Wasn’t wondering who
she
was. My grandmother had grabbed me and told me to get up moments
before
the window smashed. How had she known what was about to happen?

Chapter 8

I didn’t dream of angry mobs or bombings or men destroying beautiful things. For the second night in a row, ever since I’d discovered the hidden studio in the bell tower at Maison de la Lune, I dreamed that I was a painter. I saw my canvases: dark and mysterious visions of winged creatures and women with bloodred lips and fiery auburn hair. And while I slept, I was happy—happier than I could ever remember being.

I woke the morning after the incident at Le Grand Véfour determined to do something about my dreams. After all, I was in Paris. The mecca of artists from all over the world. The home of Ingres, and David, Poussin, Millet, Georges de La Tour, and more. And now the very capital of impressionism and symbolism.

The finest art school was only blocks from our apartment. Of course I would take lessons. Just because I’d failed during my one try at school didn’t mean I couldn’t learn. Besides, now that the count was back in residence in Paris, my grandmother was too busy for us to spend every afternoon together. Certainly, I could occupy my time reading or visiting museums on my own . . . or I could try my hand at creating something.

When I went downstairs that morning, my grandmother was readying to leave—to visit her milliner, she said, and then meet the count for a shopping excursion.

“What will you do today?” she asked me with a little nervous catch in her throat. I knew she was worried about me.

I could have told her, but I held back. I wanted to find out what the requirements were to attend art school and then surprise her with how enterprising I was. While I was sure she’d be delighted that I had decided to do something with my time, I wasn’t sure she’d embrace my choice. My father had said she had many superstitions about women in our family; one was about them going into the arts. I’d never thought much about it before, but it made me even more hesitant to tell her my plans until they were a
fait accompli
.

I left shortly after she did. The day was cold, and carriages crowded the streets. People were moving more quickly than normal; horses snorted white breaths as they pulled their cabs. Heading north toward rue de Grenelle, I made a left onto rue Saint-Guillaume, a right onto rue Perronet, and then a left onto rue des Saints-Pères. The school was around the corner. I had made a mistake choosing this route. It took me right past my grandmother’s house.

As I looked, I saw her emerging through the Maison de la Lune porte cochère. With her was Monsieur Duplessi.

I prayed he wouldn’t notice me, or if he did, not let on that I’d visited the house, met her architect, disobeyed her wishes.

Once they were safely out of sight and headed in the opposite direction, toward Boulevard Saint-Germain, I proceeded to the river and my destination, the École des Beaux-Arts.

Leon had been attending the École, and I’d often accompanied him on his walks to school in the morning. It was a hallowed place to someone who revered art.

The imposing school took up much of the block, and for a moment I was overwhelmed with memories of being that fifteen-year-old girl, so impressed she knew a boy who was studying here.

Then the memories were replaced by intimidation. What made me think I was good enough to attend this institution? I had taken painting classes and shown talent, but not enough to attend the École des Beaux-Arts.

For hundreds of years, France’s most famous artists had studied here—Delacroix, Géricault, Fragonard—and the modern masters, too: Monet, Degas, Renoir, Moreau, and so many more. There was no more august art institution in the world. Two dreams for two consecutive nights, and suddenly I thought I belonged here?

But I did. I was certain of it.

A crowd clogged the large wrought-iron gates. All manner of men and women and even children were gathered. Marching up to a guard, I asked where I might go to talk to someone in admissions to the school. He regarded me with an odd glance but gave me directions.

Hurried and determined students—wearing smocks and coats, long hair, most with whiskers, carrying boxes of paints or rolls of architectural drawings—crisscrossed the courtyard beyond the gates. I walked among them, my heart beating fast. I was mesmerized by the activity and the architecture. Inside the building the floors were marble. Gleaming gilt columns held up the high ceiling. The walls were covered in paintings. Sculptures loomed. I imagined all the great artists who had stood here and gone through this very process.

After encountering some trouble following the directions, I eventually navigated the last long hallway, which smelled of tobacco and turpentine, and found the office I was searching for.

The clerk behind the desk, a dour-faced man with skin as gray as his hair and beard, asked if he could help me. I explained I wanted to apply.

“But this is not the correct office,” he said with a sigh as if he answered this question far too many times a day and had no time for it anymore.

“But I asked at the gate.”

“Why didn’t you stay at the gate with the others until it was time?”

“Others?”

“Didn’t you see the other models?”

I had, but what did they have to do with me?

“Ah, no,” I said. “I’m not here to apply for the position of model.
I wanted to find out about applying to the school. I want to study painting.”

He shook his head and looked at me with disdain. “We don’t accept students in the middle of the semester, but Mademoiselle, even if we did, women cannot study at the École.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand? It’s quite simple. We don’t have female students.”

At the Art Students League in New York City, men and women studied together. Was it really possible that here in Paris women could not attend the École? There were so many fine female painters in Paris—Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès. Did none of them attend classes here? Did none of them teach here?

He must have taken pity on me, for he gave me a half-smile and said, “There are many good painters who take female students at their ateliers. I can offer some names.” He glanced at my empty hands and frowned. “But of course, you cannot just appear and ask to join without a portfolio. You will need to show your work.”

It was a gray, chilly day, the clouds hung low over Paris, and I had nowhere to go. Restless, I walked by the Seine. Just being inside the school had intensified my desire to paint. I could still smell the turpentine and feel the energy of those students. I didn’t want to give up. I wanted to study there. I felt, as odd as it was, as if my future happiness depended on it. But what choice did I have? If I wanted to study, it would have to be privately. And I did want to study.

Even on that cold morning, walking by the river, I was already seeing the world around me differently, the way a painter would see it. Breaking the sky up into patches of colors, I noticed impressions of light and shadow. I examined the people who walked by as forms, and the negative shapes between them jumped out as spaces to be dealt with.

You will need to show your work.

But I had no work. I remembered that sad little watercolor I had tried to paint for my father when I was younger. That had been a pastime, not a passion. Now I felt the desire to stand in front of a canvas and explore the world through the stroke of a brush oozing color.

I did not go back to the apartment on rue de la Chaise but rather to Maison de la Lune. Maybe there were paints in the tower studio that I could use and try to do something good enough to get me admitted into one of those ateliers the clerk had told me about.

As I let the hand of fate drop on the outside of the door, I remembered that I had seen Monsieur Duplessi leave with my grandmother earlier. He wouldn’t be here. Disappointed, I was just turning to leave when I heard the door open behind me.

“Oh, hello,” he said.

I turned. He was smiling.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” he said, almost out of breath, clearly not in the slightest surprised that I had appeared without prearrangement.

“Why? What is it? What’s wrong?”

“We left the door to the tower studio unlocked, did we not?”

I nodded.

“I went back just a little while ago to take inventory, and it was locked again. But no one has been here but me.”

I’d followed him inside, and we were standing in the foyer.

“Are you chilled? I can make you some coffee. It’s about time for me to take a break.”

It was almost as if this was his house and I was the visitor. I said I would like some, and as we walked to the kitchen, I offered a suggestion: “Maybe my grandmother locked it. She comes in the morning to let you in, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, but she doesn’t usually go upstairs.”

I wondered if my grandmother had found out—or somehow sensed—that I’d been in the attic and had come earlier than Mon
sieur Duplessi specifically to relock the door. She had that uncanny skill—her
capacité
, my father had called it—to know things that had happened or would be happening without being told. Like in the restaurant when she’d told me to get up just before the rock had been thrown through the window.

When I’d asked my father more about her
capacité
, he’d laughed and said legend had it she had some witch’s blood in her and that must be how she could foretell the future.

But what if she knew I’d found the studio? What would she do? My grandmother seemed so determined not to tell me about La Lune—surely the studio was La Lune’s world.

“Did you tell her I’ve been here?” I asked.

“No, I honored your request, but still don’t understand why you’d want to keep it a secret.”

“Was she already here this morning when you arrived?” I asked.

“No, I was first, and was quite uncomfortable waiting in the rain, if you must know, so as soon as she did arrive, we went to the locksmith and had a key made for me. She said she finds it tedious to have to come just to let me in, and that I shouldn’t plan on seeing her until I’ve finished taking inventory and am having the plans drawn up.”

“Perhaps the key to the front door will work on the bell tower studio.”

He poured the hot water over the coffee grounds, and a marvelous aroma filled the kitchen.

“I doubt it. The front door is a double-acting pin tumbler lock, which was only invented about a hundred years ago. The lock on the tower door dates back at least a hundred years before that and is much simpler.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’m an architect and trained to notice details.”

When we were done with our coffee, I suggested we try the door with the key anyway. As we walked through the empty mansion, he
told me that he’d hoped I’d be back today even before he discovered the locked door.

“Why is that?”

He seemed surprised by my question, as if it were normal for him to hope I’d return. After a moment, he said, “I enjoyed your company. And I was worried about you. You seemed so upset yesterday when you left.”

“I was frightened.”

“Because of the dates on the paintings?”

“Yes, the dates were disturbing, but . . .” I couldn’t finish. How could I explain that what had scared me away were the feelings he’d stirred in me?

“Was it something I said?” He’d stopped just as we were about to ascend the main staircase and turned to me. “I hope I didn’t offend you in some manner.”

In the hours since I’d been here, I hadn’t quite been able to remember the shade of his eyes. They were more black than green, the color of evergreen trees in a thick forest. How would you mix up the right colors and hues on canvas to capture their gleam? I’d been wrong about the slant of his cheekbones, too. They were more exaggerated than I’d recalled. The hollows beneath them, deeper. The desire to paint him overwhelmed me. I understood neither its scope nor its persistence.

I shook my head. “No, it was nothing you said.”

Continuing up the grand staircase, we passed the gallery of family portraits.

“This is an odd collection of paintings, isn’t it?” Monsieur Duplessi asked.

“It’s funny how you can see something all the time and never ­really focus on it,” I said. “I’ve never spent much time looking at them. They were all courtesans. Did you know that? Is that why you think it’s an odd collection?”

We’d stopped and were examining them.

“No, not at all. It’s that, looking at the dates on the plaques, it’s clear they span centuries, but all of them seem to be painted by the same hand. I wonder if someone re-created older portraits. And how do you think they became damaged in the same way?” he asked.

“Damaged?”

He pointed to first one and then the next.

“I’d gotten so used to them, I forgot how they must look to someone seeing them anew.”

The damage was indeed curious. Each of the ladies’ lips were unfinished and pale, with bits of bare canvas showing through.

“When I was a little girl,” I told him, “I always thought it was because they’d been kissed too many times.”

He laughed, and his eyes became less black and more green. “How charming. You must have been quite a precocious little girl who got into all kinds of trouble.”