The Witch of Painted Sorrows

Chapter 19

The night that Cousin Jacob died lasted longer than any I could remember.

My grandmother and I had returned by carriage to the apartment on rue des Saints-Pères. We did not talk in the ride. Grand-mère wept quietly, steadily.

I kept rubbing my wrists, which were red and raw from where the rabbis had tried to hold me. The pain kept me centered there in the carriage; I could focus on it because I could not process what had happened.

A man, a holy man, my blood relation, had just had a heart attack and died. He had died in front of me while he was trying to help me. Could anything be more terrible to witness? To be part of? And yet somewhere inside of me, it was also a relief. How could that be?

I felt terrible for my grandmother’s loss and at the same time was furious with her. I didn’t understand the conflicting feelings within myself and didn’t know how to reconcile them.

As soon as we entered the apartment, she went to the salon, poured herself a large glass of cognac, and took a long sip. I’d followed her, and she turned to me then.

“Do you know what you did?” she asked in a shaking voice.

“I didn’t do anything. I couldn’t have.” I didn’t feel as sure as I sounded. Had I somehow been responsible in some way?

“You fought him. What is inside of you fought him.”

“You sound crazy,” I said. “There is nothing inside of me.” Even to me, my voice did not sound certain.

She shook her head, as if refusing to believe what she was hearing, and in a quivering voice told me to be ready by ten in the morning, that I would be attending services with her. And then she told me to go to my room.

In the Jewish religion, we don’t wait to bury our dead. The funeral is the day after the death unless that day is the Sabbath. The tragedy at the mikvah had occurred on a Thursday, so the funeral of Rabbi Jacob Richter would take place the next morning.

I didn’t want to go back to the cemetery. I was scared of what I would see. I was apprehensive of how my grandmother would treat me. I didn’t want to miss a day of painting, but my grandmother was distraught, and I didn’t want to upset her even more. I cared about her and was worried for her. She was paler and more fragile than I had ever seen her. There was no way I could get out of attending services without causing a scene, and for Grand-mère’s sake I decided to just do what she’d asked.

On Friday morning, dressed and ready in a black dress and small black hat, I waited for my grandmother in the front parlor.

When she came in, she looked me over appraisingly. Like me she wore black, a lace-and-taffeta effort that revealed less of her ample bosom than usual, as was appropriate for the occasion. It was, in fact, the same dress she’d worn to the funeral we’d attended only two weeks before.

“I think you should wear your other black hat. The larger one with the veil. And keep the veil down,” Grand-mère said.

“I prefer this.”

She shook her head. “Sandrine, it’s too provocative. You look like a flirt.”

“You would know.”

She retreated a bit, as if stung by a blow. “Please change the hat, and also please take off that necklace you insist on wearing all the time. It’s not appropriate.”

My hand went to my throat to touch the ruby flower garland. I liked how it felt enclosing my neck, and I didn’t want to take it off. And yet part of me wanted to please her. I knew she was highly distressed, and I loved her.

“I think this hat is fine.”

She reached out, grabbed the hat, and pulled it off my head. The comb holding it down scratched my scalp. While I rubbed the scraped spot, my grandmother ripped my hat apart, threw it on the floor, and stomped on it till it was a misshapen mess.

“Now,” she said, “please put on the larger hat with the veil.”

Upstairs in my bedroom, I opened the armoire and pulled out the more sedate hat that my grandmother had requested I wear. Then, looking in the mirror, I attended to the damage she’d done to my hair. I could still feel the tenderness of my scalp when my brush touched it.

I had just lifted the netted and plumed confection to my head when, in the mirror, I saw my grandmother at the door.

“What is it?” I turned just in time to watch her slam the door shut. And before I could take a step, I heard the key turn in the lock.

“Grand-mère?” Running to the door, I tried the knob even though I guessed that it wouldn’t turn. “What are you doing? Let me out,” I shouted through the wooden door that separated us.

“I don’t think it’s wise for you to come with me after all. I am going to the funeral and then am going to meet with Zeller and the other rabbis about what to do next. The exorcism failed, but we can’t give up. You aren’t capable of protecting yourself, so I need to protect you. Sandrine, you are all I have left of your father. Even though he thought he was performing the ceremony according to strict Hebrew law, perhaps Cousin Jacob failed to follow some aspect of the procedure. We have to repeat it. I have to find the right men to try again.”

“There is nothing to exorcise. You are wrong about me.” I pounded on the door, my rage growing with every strike. “You can’t keep me locked up like some child!”

“Not like a child, Sandrine. Children are not inherently evil. But the spirit that is possessing you is and always has been.”

I heard her skirts rustling as she walked away from the door, leaving me locked in my bedroom.

Rushing to the window, I unlatched it, grasped the frame, and yanked the window open. I would jump. Then I looked down. I couldn’t. We were too high. Shouting for help was pointless, too. My room faced the inner courtyard, and the only people who could hear me were the maid and the cook inside our apartment. But perhaps… Was it possible? Would my voice carry?

“I need help,” I shouted. “I am being held against my will!” My voice echoed off of our own four walls. Even if someone on the street heard my cries, they wouldn’t have any clue where they emanated from.

I ran to my locked door and hollered for the housekeeper till my voice was hoarse. She never came. Of course she wouldn’t. My grandmother had obviously given her instructions to stay away from my room. And besides, Grand-mère had most probably taken the key.

I collapsed onto my bed. Trapped like an animal. And why? I had not done anything. Cousin Jacob had been sick. That he chose that moment to succumb to his illness was no more my fault than the appearance of the stars at night.

For about a half hour I lay atop the coverlet and felt sorry for myself and fury at my grandmother. I would not be jailed like this. I would take revenge. When she returned, I would leave her, and she’d be sorry. She herself had said I was all that was left. Her only immediate family.

I wouldn’t have to bother with a hotel or finding any other place to live. I’d move into the bell tower. I’d get Julien to block it off when he turned the rest of the Maison de la Lune into a museum. He could build me a secret entrance. No one would ever discover me there. Or perhaps I could entice or convince him to break off his engagement and we could live there together. Charlotte and Julien had been affianced before he met me, before he knew that someone could touch his soul. Surely he could not marry her now that we had met.

I was growing bored sitting in the simple room, concocting fantasies about the future.

There was nothing to watch out the windows, and the room offered little distraction. Oh, it was lovely enough, with pale yellow curtains that puddled on the mustard-and-lavender rug and even paler yellow walls trimmed with lavender molding. There were half a dozen prints of various purple flowers framed in gold and hanging on the walls.

Unlike the opulent and fantastical rooms in La Lune, this bedroom was certainly not decorated by my grandmother, but rather by whomever she was renting from. Grand-mère’s style was nowhere to be seen.

I already had read the one book in the room, the one I’d brought from home, The Picture of Dorian Gray. There were dozens of novels downstairs in the library, but they were out of my reach now. I picked up the Oscar Wilde novel and started to reread it:

The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

After three chapters, I couldn’t keep reading. My father’s annotations were like little stabs, and I closed the slim volume. I tried to sleep but was too worked up.

I needed to do something or I might go mad. That’s when I thought of my paints. I pulled the box out from under the bed. Just touching the fine wooden case that I’d bought from Sennelier began to soothe me.

Opening it, I caressed the brushes. Moreau had drummed it into us that we must be rigorous in cleaning our supplies. He said if we showed them respect they would be more willing to do our bidding. My brushes were pristine. My tubes of color were squeezed only from the bottom up. My palette was wiped clean every night.

The siren call of the brushes and the paints was undeniable. I longed for the state of bliss that always settled on me as I swirled the silken colors into one another and dabbed them on the canvas.

I knew I would be fine if I could just paint the hours away, but I had no canvas with me. I looked around the room. Was there anything I could use? No, nothing.

Except…

I undressed, since I was used to painting either in my masculine garb in public or wearing nothing but my shift over my naked body when I was in the bell tower. Corsets and stays and petticoats hampered my movements.

Stripped down, I threw on my silk robe, not even bothering to fasten it. Next I removed all the prints from the walls so that I had large, empty surfaces. Then I prepared my palette. Holding it in my right hand, I picked up a brush in my left.

With so much space, my mind was as unencumbered as my body, and I began to paint. I wasn’t conscious of making up the story I painted. Rather the story seemed to be whispering to me, begging me to give it life. To commit it to form and figure, color and shadow.

The mural told a saga worthy of an opera, but it was not written by some Italian master. It was a drama worthy of being enacted on the stage but was not a play penned by Molière. No, this was the true and actual story of the making of La Lune. The tale of how my ancestor came to be who she was.

In the first panel, she was a young courtesan entertaining a string of lovers. Lounging on an opulent scarlet velvet daybed, she looked not at the men awaiting her attention but out at me with a challenging expression. We shared fiery reddish-brown hair and almond-shaped topaz eyes. Her mouth was more petulant than mine, and her full lips a darker cranberry.

Like a ripe piece of fruit, she looked ready for the picking.

Outside the door to her bedroom were three older men dressed in bejeweled silks and satins and a fourth, a younger man, dressed in simpler clothes.

In the next four scenes, each man presented her with a gift: the first, six strands of fat pearls; the next, an overflowing casket of gold chains; and the third, an ebony box brimming with diamonds, one having fallen at her feet, glinting in the candlelight.

In the last scene in this sequence the younger man knelt at her feet, holding out a bunch of paintbrushes, like flowers. Her hand was reaching out, about to accept his offering.

This was the man she had chosen. On his jacket was the clue to his identity: a pair of intertwined Cs embroidered in gold on brown velvet. This was Cherubino Cellini, the great Italian painter whose work hung in museums all over the world, who had met La Lune and asked her to be his muse.

Everything about his face and body and the way he carried himself was sensual. I remembered the feelings I had as I painted his coarse black curls and his bony nose and the scars on his face and hands, and I felt surges of desire that made me want to put down my brushes and touch myself.

I fought the urges and continued painting instead, illustrating the tale of the young woman who accepted Cherubino Cellini, not because he was the wealthiest of those who came to call but because he offered her the one thing the others could not: Access to the world that she wished to belong to. The world forbidden to women. The world of artists.

Cherubino was in Paris on a commission from King Henry to paint a series of frescoes in the Louvre, and in his search for a model for his Virgin of the Rocks, he visited La Lune. All through art history, prostitutes had modeled for artists and wound up as Virgins and saints. La Lune was not the first and would not be the last woman to pose as the mother of Christ. But she was one of the most provocative.

Initially it was a business arrangement between La Lune and Cherubino. She modeled for him, and he paid her by teaching her to draw. He started with simple things. A wooden cube. An egg. It was difficult because she was impatient and not a good student.

He was falling in love with his paintings of her, and she was falling in love with learning to sketch, but they were not yet lovers.

Once the king saw the first fresco featuring La Lune, he insisted on meeting her and found her so fetching, he took her as his paramour. For her ministrations he bestowed so many gifts on her that she didn’t have to take other men to her bed. Not then or for the rest of her life.

In addition to all the jewels he bestowed on her, the king gave La Lune a plot of land that sat between rue des Saints-Pères and rue du Dragon. Once a church had occupied the spot, but now there was a fine house in only slight disrepair that was connected to an abandoned bell tower. She hired an architect to help her restore what would become Maison de la Lune.

Cherubino painted La Lune more than twenty times for the king during the next year, and for every sitting, she received a drawing lesson. That was all.

And then came the day that changed their relationship, when Cherubino walked in on La Lune, who was in her bed, servicing the king.

Cherubino’s jealousy was a wild and living force. It took him by surprise and left him defenseless. Soon his paintings of her showed her in suggestive poses. No longer a Madonna or saint, she was now a seductress. Cherubino left one out to dry, and that night the king discovered the erotic painting and, without asking, took it for himself.

When Cherubino found out, he went mad. Screaming and shouting, he demanded that La Lune ask for it back. It was not hers to give away. When she refused, saying she could never ask that of the king, Cherubino stormed out of her rooms and didn’t return for days.

After a week without him coming around, La Lune was bereft. Her education was incomplete. She hadn’t mastered spatial relationships. She didn’t understand perspective. She needed him back.

So La Lune told the king that Cherubino had been approached by the duke of Milan to paint her for his palace and that Cherubino was considering leaving the French court.

It was a lie, of course. But she needed to do something to force the king into action. She’d correctly guessed that the idea of her face and her body gracing some other royal chamber would disturb him.

The next day Cherubino returned, saying that the king had commissioned a second set of paintings, but only if La Lune was the model. So relieved that he’d returned, La Lune threw her arms around him and kissed him.

Until they touched that first time, neither of them had known they desired each other. La Lune believed she only craved art lessons. Cherubino believed he only wanted a muse.

In a fever, I painted them that afternoon consummating their affair. In one panel La Lune lay under Cherubino’s body as he thrust into her and she received him with delight. In another she hovered above him, her breasts grazing his cheeks. I painted him kissing the lips on her face and those between her legs. I painted her wanton expression. The sweat on his forehead. The single bright drop of blood on her lower lip from when she bit herself as she exploded with him inside of her. In my mural were sexual positions I had never known about-never experienced with my husband, nor with Julien.

In my delirium, I not only saw the lovers; I heard what they said, too. Cherubino promised that these embraces were for her alone and that these intimacies would bind them together forever.

Her poses for his private paintings became more lewd. He positioned her with her legs spread and her hand touching her nether parts. He painted her bathed in sweat and writhing with passion. When she saw how provocative the paintings were, how much of her soul he’d captured, she made him promise never to show them to anyone.

“No one will ever see them,” he swore. “They are for our own gallery. Just for our pleasure,” he told her. “To commemorate for all time the wonder of us.”

And it was wondrous. La Lune had taken men to her bed in exchange for payment since she was fourteen years old. She had been well schooled in the art of pleasuring. She knew how to be a lover, a confidante, a model to painters, a muse to poets and writers, and, when necessary, a mother. But she had never craved a man. Never been moved by one.

“I don’t just want to know how to draw…” she told him one night as they lay in bed, smelling each other’s sweat as their skin cooled.

“What do you want?” he asked as he stroked her hair.

She raised up her face and mouthed the words against the pink shell of his ear.

“To learn to paint,” she whispered.

“If I teach you, it has to be in secret. Here. Under the stars. With only the bells to know.”

“Won’t I need a model?”

“I will be your model.” He laughed.

Over and over she painted him, laughing with delight as she began to manage his likeness. He would stand behind her and correct her. Sometimes even taking her hand, putting his fingers on hers so she would feel the fluidity of the line, so she could sense how sensuous a movement painting a body should be.

Sometimes when her lover slept, La Lune sketched him, trying to capture the expression on his face while he dreamed. Painting each other was an extension of their lovemaking. They caressed each other all over again with brushes and sensuous oils.

Then came the scene of Cherubino opening a letter with a royal seal. Emperor Rudolf had invited him to Prague, to bring La Lune and create a royal gallery of secret erotic paintings. Gold coins came with the letter, along with a promise of more awaiting them.

It was almost as if the lie La Lune had made up for the king had come true.

“But how did he know about your erotic paintings?” La Lune asked.

“I sent him one as a gift.”

“Why would you do that?”

“He is well-known to collect paintings of a suggestive nature. The more explicit and varied, the better. He pays far more for them than your king is paying for my murals.”

La Lune hurled her paints at her lover, shouting that he had promised he would never show those paintings to anyone. That he had given her his word.

“So many men have seen you, what does one more matter?” he asked.

She slapped him for insulting her and not understanding, and then collapsed weeping, realizing she had done the unthinkable. Broken the golden rule that her mother had taught her, that her mother before her had taught her: Never fall in love. Do not become vulnerable.

“No man has ever seen me as you have seen me. With emotion on my face!” I was shouting the words. I was feeling the sting of the slap on my fingers. And when Cherubino bent to whisper to her and apologize and cajole her, I felt his lips on my lips, and I felt myself forgive him for what he had done to my ancestor more than three hundred years before.