The Witch of Painted Sorrows

Chapter 42

And so we come to end of the story. I survived that night, and so I will finish the tale.

Weeks had passed. My grandmother was living in the apartment on rue de la Chaise, I was living in Maison de la Lune. It was the end of May. Is there any more beautiful season in Paris than the spring? Julien and I were strolling by the Seine, on our way to celebrate a new commission he’d just received to build a hotel on Boulevard Raspail. As we passed a newspaper kiosk, something caught my lover’s attention.

“Look,” he said, pointing to the journal devoted to the arts: Chronique des Arts et de la Curiosité.

On the front page near the bottom was a headline:

CONTROVERSY AT THE SALON

BY ROGER MARX

Julien picked up the paper, threw some coins down on the vendor’s tray, and pointed to an illustration beside the headline. It was a drawing of my painting. Standing side by side, our shoulders touching, we read the article together.

Sleeping Cupid, painted by a heretofore unknown young artist from America who has been studying at the École des Beaux-Arts and atelier of Gustave Moreau, has raised temperatures and excited tempers at this year’s Salon. The provocative painting, which many call pornographic, has won a second prize in a jury headed by Monsieur Moreau himself, who defended his student’s painting by saying it was no more graphic or disturbing than a hundred paintings of nude women that are admitted to the Salon every year.

“Why is a man’s nudity more lewd than a woman’s? This is a mythological god, in love with his wife, executed in a marvelous style by an up-and-coming artist of whom we all expect great things. That the artist is a woman, and the academy’s first female student, just makes this prize all the more important.”

“There are laws over this kind of salacious art,” said Hector Previn, one of the judges who resigned in protest during the juried show. “Look at the lust on the sleeping god’s face. That’s not art. This painting is pornography.”

The painting went on to…

Julien had raced ahead of me, and I hadn’t caught up when he grabbed me by the hands.

“Darling, you have been awarded a second prize by the Salon.” He swung me around. “How marvelous.” And then he grabbed me and kissed me, lifting me up.

“You will be hailed as the finest woman painter in Paris. The first to attend the École. The bravest. The first to win a prize. Your paintings will be sold in galleries. All of Paris will want to buy one. In parlors and boudoirs your creations will hang on the walls, and people will marvel and ask, Who is this woman? Who is Sandrine Verlaine?”

I kissed him. Full on the lips, there on the Quai. I could smell the amber and honey and apple scent that was his alone. His arms were so strong. Was he as strong?

“No,” I said.

I was watching his clear, evergreen eyes now, watching to see how he was going to feel about what I had to tell him. For it was time to tell him. I had no excuse to wait any longer.

Julien loved me and I him. My confession would not, could not, change that. We were bound to each other in a deep and abiding way because of what we had gone through and what we were willing to go through for each other. Our appetites, our passions, our goals were in harmony, and we were solidly on the same path toward the future.

“No, mon cher Julien. They will not be asking about Sandrine Verlaine. They will be asking about me. The woman who signed that painting. The woman who painted it. La Lune.”