The Witch of Painted Sorrows

Chapter 33

I was examining the canvas I had painted the night before. I’d just decided that yes, once finished, this would be my entry to the Salon. I was thinking about what improvements I needed to make when Julien awoke.

I called for the maid to bring us café au lait, and as I sat with him on the bed and ate flaky croissants and drank the scalding coffee, I thought everything was all right. He was studying the painting.

“It seems almost impossible for you to have learned so much so quickly and become so proficient.”

“It seems so to me, too.”

He continued to study the painting.

“You didn’t paint it, did you?”

“What are you suggesting? Someone snuck into the bedroom last night and painted you?” I laughed.

“Isn’t that what you believe?”

“What do you mean?”

“I think you believe you are becoming someone else. Taking on a role. Being unduly influenced by a myth. I spoke to Dujols. He came to see me during the week, to pay his respects.”

“What does that have to do with this?”

“He told me you had gone back to see him and what you talked about. They are a dangerous group, Sandrine. They know how to stimulate people’s thoughts. There are rumors of black masses and witches’ covens and-”

“I still don’t understand what this has to do with me and the painting.”

“Dujols told me about the legend… about La Lune spending eternity searching for a woman to… What did he call it? Oh yes, a woman she can merge with so that she can relive her thwarted love affair and make it turn out all right this time.”

I nodded.

“I reminded him that I’m a rationalist. An atheist. I don’t believe in a god above or a devil below. But he told me there was a way I could prove it. He said La Lune would need to be physically tethered to you in some way for her to incubate. And that no one but you could loosen her grip.”

His eyes moved to my ruby necklace. I put my hands up and hid it from his gaze.

“Is that why you tried to take this off last night?”

He’d failed, though. Did that mean he believed in La Lune now? Would he accept her? Or would he run from me if he thought me possessed? I held my breath, waiting to hear what he was going to say next.

“But you fought me. You wouldn’t let me remove it. Why?”

I let out a breath. So he didn’t believe what Dujols had told him.

“You were hurting me. I pushed you away.”

Julien threw back the sheets. He was naked underneath but didn’t seem to care. He stood, walked over to the window, looked out for a moment, and then turned back to me.

“I love you, Sandrine. All your passions and your aspirations. But you are becoming invested in this myth. You believe this ancestor of yours is helping you with your painting. It’s very understandable. You arrived in Paris aggrieved over your father’s death and your unstable marriage. You were ripe to be influenced. But now it’s time to detach yourself from the fantasy.”

I didn’t know what to say. He’d told me he loved me. But at the same time it sounded as if his affection came with demands.

“You believe that you’re communing with a ghost, don’t you?”

“I’m not certain.”

“I do not believe in ghosts. Or witches. Or demons,” he said.

“I never did either.”

“Before.”

“Before,” I echoed.

“I can’t accept that you are haunted and that there is a force pushing you to do things you wouldn’t ordinarily do. That would mean that I wasn’t in love with you but with your demon. That the things about you that make you special are not you but rather attributes of some spirit who has given you these abilities, and at the same time caused havoc around you.”

I reached up and touched the necklace around my neck.

Make of the blood, a stone…

What was I supposed to do? All the things Julien was saying he loved about me were her gifts to me. Would he really care for that woman who had come to Paris? She was untalented. Timid. Frigid. But if I didn’t exorcise La Lune, would he stay with me?

“You are who you are. You have talent. It was there all along, but being in Paris triggered it. Yes, it seemed to spring forth miraculously, but it didn’t. It couldn’t. You’ve been working night and day, learning more and more. Your progress is your accomplishment. It’s not some supernatural power changing you.”

“What are you saying?”

“I can help you, but you have to be willing to let go of this fantasy.”

“It’s not a fantasy.”

“There are doctors.”

I shook my head. “I’m not ill.”

But he was looking at me as if I was.

In desperation I offered the only solution I could think of. “I can work with Dujols and the others. There must be methods they can teach me to control-” I was about to say her. Instead I said: “-control what is happening.”

“Dujols is part of the problem. He’s filling your head with this nonsense.” Julien was angry.

“It’s not nonsense. People have died. Things have happened we can’t explain. You are right that I need help, but help from people who understand this for what it is.”

“It is irrational,” he said.

“It is as old as the Bible,” I responded.

“It is fearmongering and mythology.”

I went to him and put my hands in his. He lifted my hands to his cheeks and kept them there for a minute. He was so tender with me that it hurt my heart.

“Let me take you to Dr. Blanche,” he said softly.

I pulled my hand away. “You think I’m crazy?”

“I told you, I think you need help.”

“I can’t go back to the way I was.”

“There is nothing wrong with the way you were. You are the way you were. This is you. The other thing is only in your mind.”

I felt La Lune there with me, trying to help. After all, she had a stake in this, too. She had done so much to get Julien and me to this point. My grandmother was in an asylum. Cousin Jacob and Charlotte were dead.

For the first time since I’d come to Paris, I wished I were not there. Not faced with this untenable conundrum: accept Julien’s help, banish La Lune, and become someone he might not love, or fight him, hold on to La Lune, and lose myself.

I smelled violets, and the scent nauseated me. Her anger swirled around me, crimson, purple, and stinking of flowers and sulfur.

I was on the verge of losing the very thing she wanted, but the only sure way to keep it was to let her go.

“Please, Sandrine, please let me take you to see Dr. Blanche.”

“To be locked up like my grandmother? I said no. I am not mad!”

He let go of my hands, turned from me, and dressed without saying another word.

Before he left, he stood at the door for a moment and gave me the saddest smile I’d ever seen. “When you are ready to be rational and let me help you find a doctor, you know where to find me.”

And then he walked out of my bedroom, leaving me alone with the glorious painting of him and a ghost who was, at that moment, as lost as I was.