The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (14 page)

 

Salon Deux was glittering, a velvet-festooned, sparkling cave. Bronze figurines arched against drapery; gaslight flickered from wall sconces, and tapers gleamed on the chandelier. On occasional tables, in silver bowls, lay stacks of small white cards, embossed in black:
DEUX SOEURS. MAISON DE SOCIéTé. 24 RUE DU TEMPLE.
On this night, we were all mingled together; the doors between the two salons were open, linked by a corridor previously unknown to me, to make room for a larger party.

My feet in thin slippers slid over the plush, flowery carpet. Nathalie Jouffroy flitted through, cool in parrot green. Madame Trois, usually grayly severe, was tonight gleaming with sparkles like an old battleship lit for a coronation. Françoise was just behind her, an arrow in a dress the color of dried rose petals. She darted about, fixing bouquets, marshaling buckets of ice.

The women, my compatriots—the same hard-edged band who came and went, cursed and gossiped upstairs, ran their fingertips around the rim of the cake plate, and played cards—were silent and still as plaster, a living frieze of embroidered boots, tulle draped across bare shoulders, cascades of silky robes, eyes and lips composed like those in portraits. The madames and Françoise paced the room, making adjustments: a tuck here, the placement of a foot there, the drape of gauze against flesh, sunflower hair next to chocolate skin; a contrast of smiles and pouts. Émilie Trois had grown up in the theater; she knew what got the trousers walking through the door, the
quibuses
into seats. The curtain would rise, tonight, on perfection.

I felt feverish, submerged. I stared into the mirrors but did not find my own face: only a blur of pale skin against a pile of dark hair, a puff of aniline-dyed chiffon standing near the pointed dark leaves of a potted palm, where I had been placed under the acrid glimmer of a lamp.

Soon the drapes billowed and parted: heads ducked in, dark coats and ivory linen began to appear among the bright-colored gowns; mustaches and beards bent down to graze fair and dark heads, to brush rubied cheeks and lips. Champagne corks popped and all around was the fizz of bubbles; someone shoved a glass into my hand, this one filled with water colored with marrow. The din rose and the tempo picked up, and Jolie brushed past, or at least I thought she did, with a dark coat leaning toward her. When the tableau broke up I found my way to a sofa in the dimmest corner; suddenly exhausted. No one seemed to be watching, so I stretched full length upon it, rested my head on its arm, and closed my eyes.

 

“Mademoiselle! Are you with us?”
Shake, shake
—my arm shuttled to and fro by a dark arm, which was attached to an evening coat. Eventually a smooth-trimmed beard came into focus. “What spiteful fairy has cast her spell here? Why, I'd swear it is she, Pierre Chasseloup's mysterious model. The girl from nowhere, who knows no one—”

A familiar beard.

“Champagne?” he said, to someone I could not see. “Of course, champagne!” Then, “I have been turning over every cobble in Paris looking for you. That poor fool Chasseloup is beside himself.”

Gustav Vollard looked around and settled himself next to me on the divan, crossing his legs and tipping back his glass. Leaning in. “So, tell me everything. The last I knew you were staying in a fleabag near the Tivoli Gardens.”

A
T THE CLOSE OF
business—that is, dawn—my compatriots, still rouged and dressed in salon wear, tore into brioches, poured coffee, and gossiped. Breakfast was the only meal during which speaking at the table was allowed. The party had been a success: a well-known actor had attended; an acclaimed poet had stood on a tabletop and in the small hours delivered his epic based on the first Napoleon. The Russians had shouted him down and scattered pocketfuls of louis, setting off an orgy of coin tossing that ended only when someone began to set fire to franc notes. At six, a fleet of cabs still waited on the rue du Temple. Françoise was setting about organizing gentlemen's breakfasts; this at the hour usually reserved for digging stray coins from the folds of the sofas in Salon Trois. I had missed most of it. Sometime after seeing Vollard, I noticed Bette off to the side, refilling glasses. Desperate by then, I begged her to allow me upstairs. “It's the ergot,” I muttered, figuring she knew everything. “Tell Françoise.”

Alone, then, in the attic sleeping quarters while everyone worked the party below, I sat by the stove, poking at the ashes. The rows of cubbyholes for our pallets gaped emptily behind sagging curtains; double-decked like some evil coop, our tiny bolt holes overhanging the large central room. Mingled odors of scorched linen, tobacco, burned hair, perfume, and soap lingered from the earlier toilette. A love novel, its spine broken and stripped of its covers, lay open on the card table where one of the Mignons had been reading it. The girls liked this one. Passed it hand to hand.

On another slant-legged table, someone's embroidery had been left behind: twists of red and yellow and blue silk dangled from a wooden hoop. From the stove doors hung curling irons, and on the grill, scattered pieces of burned cork. For once darkness reigned behind the bolted venetians, not that it made any difference what time of day it was. Skitter of mice in the walls.

 

To Vollard I had poured out a raw and disordered tale. I didn't know what to emphasize or suppress, and the man's attention kept straying to the phantasmagoria swirling around the room.

“What? Since
when?
” he kept asking—when
exactly
had I wound up at the Préfecture de Police? Become
inscrit,
as though turned into an object? “
After
you modeled for Chasseloup? You mean, sitting for that poor sufferer was all that kept bed, board, and virtue intact at the Hôtel Tivoli?” He laughed. I could see that he thought I'd told a mouthful of lies. What were we, anyway, but liars and cheats, wallet stealers, heart eaters, mendicants, and fakes? From what I'd gleaned, most of the girls did slip and slide around when they'd hit the Register; or, “outside,” dropped the matter entirely, as convenience suited. My story ended with the requisite sooty tears pouring down slabs of rouge, a scene that would have made a more gallant knight than this one glance over his shoulder, and I sobbed in shame at my own stupidity.

Even so, I came to my senses and begged. He'd paid my way once, at the Tivoli when Chasseloup required my modeling services—would he help me again, settle up what I supposedly owed to the
maison
—set me at liberty ? Vollard shifted uncomfortably, looking for the champagne girl. Muttered something about certainly not wanting to upset Nathalie—and at any rate, he had other news.

“So, our Chasseloup went away and painted like a lunatic—entirely in character, of course. On the last day he ran all the way to the Palace of Industry with three paintings on his head. Pushed through the crowd, with all of the rest of that horde who ply their brushes until the last minute and then rush the doors. But there you have it. He was accepted. And do you know it was not his damned plate of trout that carried the day?
An Unknown Girl
won third place! I gave a party; you would have come if either of us had seen a hair of your head. So wipe your nose and have a drink . . . our friend will have to be revived with salts if he hears about
this.
Quite the prude, for all of his artistic airs. Not a bone of his father in him . . . Or perhaps I shan't tell him at all!” He winked. One of the champagne maids finally circled back; she looked at me twice, and I knew that Françoise would be in this corner next. Vollard took two glasses.

“Don't give me that!” I said, and began to cry all over again. “It shall cost me I don't know what. We girls are drinking colored water.”

“If you ask me, he
should
marry a girl who will scrape his palettes and cook his onions. But Papa doesn't want to pay for his paint boxes forever.” Gustav drained his glass and stood. “
Salut,
then, my dear. Be brave.” His back, dark and slim in coattails, retreated into the sea of color, into the bird wings of tulle and the fizz of drinks.

 

That I did not explode or disintegrate, after all of the evening's events, was my first astonishment. I had slept through the first breakfast bell and trickle of real daylight that filtered in through a high, tiny window. The attic quarters, usually a din of chatter and shrieks, were quiet; Lucette's place next to me on the pallet empty.

I swung a leg over the side and examined my thighs and calves; then each arm—cautious at first; afraid of what I might find—visible blackenings, blots, signs of decay; I touched gingerly for sensitive places. Some evidence of my body's further dissipation in the Josephine Room. (Though others wallowed in every known voluptuous act, I had absorbed the notion that anything resembling my own desire, respite, or pleasure was likely a punishable transgression.) But my arms and calves and breasts were exactly as they had always been; my belly gently rounded, flesh clear and white and supple as wax. My eyes, if anything, looked clearer in the glass, and for the first time in weeks I did not have to take hold of a slop pail and retch.

The second bell rang, distantly. Resting in the hollow where my pallet mate had been were four oranges, thick-fleshed and bright in a cracked kitchen bowl. A flush traveled from my knees and calves all the way to my fingertips as I touched one's dimpled rind, then split it with a fingernail, inhaled its bright, cool, astringent release . . . Have you ever been in prison, and smelled an orange? I pulled off a section, held it for a moment between my teeth. Then bit into the membrane, releasing its small flood of flowery juice, bright as the Spanish sun.

Before I went downstairs, I stashed the emptied ergot bottle under another pallet, not mine. Its contents had gone into a potted palm that was probably now not long for Salon Deux.

 

At the breakfast table I did not join the clamor and babble but instead read the newspapers that were tossed amid crumbs and coffee slops; Madame Jouffroy had decided the girls must be more up-to-date on current events, so Françoise had permission to place a selection of current broadsheets to the side of the breakfast room. (I have never looked at one since without remembering reading them on those bleary, ragged-edged mornings.) Devouring the words of those who enjoyed daylight and self-sovereignty; who wrote of daily affairs with careless privilege.

Apparently, it was spring outside.

 

I read:

 

The horse show has now departed from Paris's palace-for-showing-and-selling on the Champs-Élysées. Before the horses (who have left an equine odor behind them) were swine, sheep, and poultry; insects behind glass; flowers, cheeses, and
cartes de visite.
Now, to our drafty industrial palace stampede the artists at last. The paintings alone number in thousands, filling the walls to thirty feet. The organizing principle is that of the alphabet, a choice notable for its lack of originality. Yet all of Paris—not to mention tourists in droves—set up their ladders and peer through opera glasses to see. If you lack time and patience for such a display, and really intend only to admire the contours, the various shapes and sizes of Italian beauties, do not this year omit the demurely titled third-place winner,
An Unknown Girl,
by first-time exhibitor Pierre Chasseloup. —
Le Petit Parisien

The peculiarity of
An Unknown Girl,
and possibly its appeal to viewers—although the present opinion demurs—lies not in the blunt discursion on our present-day crisis of art. (At the left of the canvas, a trio of
cartes de visite
on a drying line reference the photographer's atelier; to the right of the figure stands the broken urn of Greek classicism.) It is the figure itself that arrests the eye: a woman of contemporary France, without question; her dress modern, though ambiguously so—M. Chasseloup is no avid chronicler of a lady's boudoir, and he has not indulged in an excess of fabric. The sitter appears to us not as the peasant of Courbet, nor the genteel sitter of Fantin-Latour, of whom there is more than a whiff in these brush strokes; in fact, the viewer does not know if she arises from town or province; educated or illiterate, if she is daughter, sister,
grisette,
or Madonna. Yet, as the murmurs and mutters in the crowd surrounding this piece attest, one is drawn back again and again to her particularity. The head and shoulders, so bravely confronting us, speak to us not as a portrait, but an evocation of our era: one in which our hearts ache with nostalgia, while all necks crane toward the future—possibly thence to be broken . . . One might even say Chasseloup has captured for us an innocence on the spinode of loss. —
Le Charivari

This writer lies at the feet (though they are distressingly unseen) of
An Unknown Girl,
and makes his quarrel only with the judges, who have awarded this phenomenon of the Salon only a grudging third. First, we must have the identity of this
Unknown;
it is she who has wrung the hearts of this spring's Salon. —
Paris Illustré

In the famous words of Couture (
Romans in the Decadence of the Empire,
1847),
“Personality is the scourge of our time.
” Chasseloup's model has defeated him; biography has trumped art, and we are in all the more danger for it. —
Félix Duport, “The Mosquito,” Figaro

It is an overtly social work. The dress of
An Unknown Girl,
pearl-colored and shadowed in absinthe, makes bilious reference to a social plague of our day. But does a painting say more when it moralizes at us? Only one thing is certain about M. Chasseloup's
Unknown Girl,
that is, that everyone is, for some reason, talking about it. —
La Gazette