The Witch of Painted Sorrows

Chapter 34

I returned to school a day later, bringing Moreau the paintings that he’d requested. He assessed them quickly and said he was satisfied that I’d painted them.

That was because I had.

These weren’t the paintings I’d showed him that first day but copies-close enough to the originals to look familiar, but at the same time done in my hand.

Did he know I’d tricked him?

Now, looking back, I think he did, for he assessed them in seconds and seemed relieved to move on and discuss that day’s work.

I watched Serge watching Moreau, his eyes narrowed, his lips pursed. Was he that frightened of my talent that he would sabotage me? More than ten thousand artists submitted paintings to the Salon. Thousands competed for a prize. What difference did one more make?

After class, I tried to visit my grandmother but was not allowed in by orders from the doctor. It seemed my visits impeded her improvement too greatly. I went home and spent the rest of the day and night and then the rest of the week miserable, missing Julien, confused as to what to do next, and trying to distract myself by working on my Sleeping Cupid.

On Wednesday of the following week, a package with a label from a jeweler on rue Royale awaited me when I came home from school. Opening the fine leather box, I found a single luminous pink pearl hanging from a ruby station necklace.

Sandrine- Are you ready to exchange her necklace for mine? I miss you. -Julien

I fingered the smooth pearl. I wanted him back. Wanted to be with him. Should I submit to seeing a doctor? Would Dr. Blanche even agree to help me?

I put the necklace away and went to Passy.

Sitting across the desk from Dr. Blanche, fully prepared to discuss La Lune with him, I found I couldn’t speak. Every time I started to explain what had brought me there, I began to cough. I felt as if La Lune was inside of me, tickling my throat and holding my lips closed. I wondered if they looked bloodless to him, like the lips of the women in the paintings.

They couldn’t speak to tell their stories either.

Embarrassed and frustrated, I croaked out a question about my grandmother. I told him I was unhappy at not being able to see her and wanted to know why he was keeping me away. And I was. I had never been so alone in my life. Maison de la Lune echoed with my footsteps, and I felt as empty as the house.

I left Passy dejected and returned to rue des Saints-Pères.

The painting of Julien became the only thing that mattered to me and, other than attending classes, my only interaction with the outside world. I worked almost nonstop preparing my submission for the École. I’d come to believe that if Sleeping Cupid was accepted, Julien would come to the opening and see the painting and accept me as I was. Both the dark and the light of me.

The morning of March 1, I awoke from nightmares with a feeling of dread. It was the day submissions were due for the 1894 Salon. After dressing, I went to the studio to prepare Sleeping Cupid for the walk to the École.

The bell tower was in shadows. Without any sun shining through the windows, an atmosphere of melancholy clung to the pillows and coverlet on the daybed. It seemed to be sitting in the chairs, adhering to the walls. The only light came from the portrait sitting on the easel in the middle of the space.

Julien Duplessi depicted as an adult male Cupid. Julien’s body, his face, but with an angel’s iridescent feather wings. An erotic otherworldly creature. Luminous and shining. Long torso, longer legs, and between them, the partially erect proof of his arousing dream.

A nude painted of lust, painted in lust. It was provocative, to be sure. Too much so? Moreau would be surprised. I had brought a sketch of Leda and the Swan to his atelier, and he’d approved that. But I knew she didn’t have the chance that Cupid did. More than ten thousand paintings would be submitted, and only three thousand would be chosen. Of those, only a handful would be anointed. To be one of them, a painting not only had to be superlative; it had to stand out.

The entrance to the school was crowded with throngs of painters all dropping off their paintings on this one day. I stood on line, not seeing any of my classmates until I made my way inside. A group of them had already been through the line and were watching the goings-on from the sidelines.

Gaston saw me first, came over and told me that after I was done they’d be at La Palette if I wanted to join them.

“All year leading up to one day,” he said, shaking his head. “We deserve to get good and drunk.”

He cocked his head toward my covered canvas. “Are you pleased with how Leda turned out?”

“I’m too nervous to know.”

“That’s how I felt, too,” he said. “May I see?”

Before I could refuse, he lifted up the cloth and after a moment emitted a long slow whistle. “Now, what’s this? Not the painting you’ve been working on.”

“No, I thought this would have more of a chance.”

I was too nervous to ask him what he thought of it. But I didn’t have to. He told me.

“Are you out of your mind?” Gaston asked.

“I’d say far more clever than mad.” Serge had come over to see my painting and eyed it with disdain. “Played a trick on all of us, didn’t you, Sandrine? Pretended you were doing something tame and cautious while all the while planning a shock like this.” He paused as he stepped back to examine it from a greater distance. Other students noticed what was going on and gathered round, all examining my submission, talking and whispering among themselves.

“It’s perverse and decadent. And they will reject it,” Serge predicted. “Women are not allowed to paint male nudes. Not one has ever been accepted. And being Moreau’s darling won’t make any difference. You wasted your chance.”

I thought I detected a smile.

“Unless the committee is in the mood to prove one century is ending and the future is upon us,” Gaston said hopefully.

Other students came and went, reacting with shock and scorn. Other than Gaston, no one had a kind work to say.

Had I made a mistake? Would the committee reject my painting without even judging it simply based on its subject matter? No matter, it was too late to do anything about it.

I’d reached the head of the line. Marching into the auditorium, painting in hand, I held my head up and tried to prepare myself for what was about to happen.

Monsieur Moreau and four other teachers sat at a long wooden table at the far end of the room. They appeared weary, which was not unexpected since they’d been looking at submissions since early that morning. Judging from the lines, they would work late into the night and probably have to return the next day.

“Mademoiselle Sandrine Verlaine,” I said for the benefit of the clerk who logged in each painting and gave it a number.

“Mademoiselle Sandrine Verlaine, one thousand five hundred and eighty,” he called out.

I shuddered involuntarily at the coincidence that the number I’d been assigned was the same as the year of La Lune’s birth.

I put the canvas on the easel facing the judges and pulled off the cloth.

There was a moment of silence, then an intake of breath, and then Monsieur Moreau spoke.

“A surprise indeed, but well done, Sandrine.” He had used my first name for the first time. “Very well done.” He smiled at me, and I could see that he was proud. “Brave and bold. Very well done.”

The other professors were not as forthcoming. One was frowning. Two had implacable faces that I couldn’t read.

“Thank you, Mademoiselle,” said the clerk who was recording all the entries, and I was dismissed. At least Moreau had been impressed.

Outside my classmates were waiting.

“How did it go?” Gaston asked.

“Moreau seemed pleased.”

“Now that you’ve committed your first brazen act of defiance, you must be ready for a drink,” Serge said.

And I was.

Six of us traipsed off to La Palette, where Gaston ordered a bottle of champagne and we drank to our luck.

It seemed the café was filled with nothing but art students that afternoon. Nervous, hopeful, excited, and depressed. Bottles came out full and quickly went back empty. Everyone had delivered his best, and now the wait began. The hours and days and weeks before we found out if we had been accepted loomed.

My thoughts were a jumble. I was exhausted. I’d slept so very little for the last two weeks. I’d been lonely without Julien, worried about my grandmother, and obsessed with my painting.

But there was another reason for my fatigue. I was carrying not only my own emotional burdens but also La Lune’s. Where did she end? Where did I begin? Again the smell of violets permeated the air; I felt waves of nausea rise in me.

As much as I missed Julien, so did this creature inside of me. As much as I wanted to paint something worthy of acceptance and worried about my ability, so did she. The double dose of emotions, aspirations, and expectations had exhausted and depleted me.

We had just finished our champagne when Heloise, Adele, and Stephanie, three models who posed for us in Maître Moreau’s class, arrived to celebrate our accomplishment. Gaston ordered another bottle, and after we toasted with that one, we moved on to our next stop, the popular Café du Bagne.

Themed bohemian cafés and cabarets were all the rage. Built around exotic concepts, they were much more than eating and drinking establishments; their very atmosphere was entertaining, and the stranger the environment, the more popular the venue.

One of the oldest, the Château d’If, had opened its faux-drawbridge door in the early 1880s. Designed to mimic the prison of the same name made famous by Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, it boasted cells and dungeons.

L’Abbaye de Thélème dressed its waitstaff as monks and nuns, and patrons could hide away in medieval confessionals to sip their absinthe in private.

When we arrived at the Café du Bagne, there were queues of Parisians waiting outside, but Serge knew one of the managers, and we trooped into the club en masse. Decorated to resemble a penitentiary eating hall, the café featured gray and somber walls covered with graffiti of the kind inmates would leave behind. The long wooden tables were etched with more of the same. The waiters, dressed as convicts, dragged papier-mâché balls and chains as they brought our drinks.

Serge and Gaston ordered absinthe, but I stayed with wine, not ready to succumb to the smoky depths the powerful liquor offered.

At about ten o’clock we all decided that we were hungry and went to Au Lapin Agile, where we gorged on onion soup with a thick crust of melted Gruyère cheese, spicy sausages, and crisp pommes frites.

Heloise and Stephanie and Adele were still with us, and somewhere along the way we had picked up two more models whose names I didn’t know. We were a group of eleven now. Noisy and boisterous and wanting the night to last forever.

It was there, for the third time since I’d arrived in Paris, that I thought I saw Benjamin. But this time it was certainly him. He’d arrived with two other men. One was absolutely William Lenox.

I’d been mistaken when I believed I’d spotted him on the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower, so I had assumed I’d been wrong about the man in the carriage on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, too. But I hadn’t been wrong. Benjamin was here and he was walking right toward me.