The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (45 page)

“Every time one of those goes off, I have some kind of nervous attack. My brains are rattling loose, my hands are always shaking. I can't hold a brush. That last shell probably hit the Sorbonne but it felt as though it was on top of us! I have been reading at the Sorbonne library when it is open. The damned Prussians aim for churches and hospitals and asylums—Christ, they may have to haul me off to one if they don't bomb it first.”

“Have some more tea. It is much better for you than black.”

“I may be dead by tomorrow morning. The painting is
my
legacy, and—”

“Chasseloup. Do you remember the story you once told me? About the artist, what was his name? With his sculpture of Mercury that he believed was his masterpiece—but he was on the street in the dead of winter and put his cloak around it so the clay would not crack, and it did survive—but he froze to death? What an idiot he was, you said! He could have lived to make another.”

“Ha! I will never paint another. Old Badinguet once said that his purpose was to ‘encourage the arts but discourage the artists.' That's how he wanted it, and it worked. Good God, before I met you I was cleaning rooms for half a loaf of bread and a slice of meat. Too humiliated to go to my father. I didn't want to paint you, you know. I already knew that I was beaten and Badinguet had won.”

“But you did paint it!”

Chasseloup sat back. He said slowly, “Do you want to know how it happened? At Croisset, I could not do any of the scenes I had planned. I was preoccupied and out of focus. My training had been to study a scene, memorize it—a flower, a tree, a scene from nature, even a face—and paint it exactly, from memory. I hadn't done that for a long time, but that is what took over. At first I thought it was a hallucination, or the effects of absinthe. I was possessed by recalling every detail, like a dream where I was living it again, your skin against mine, the curve of your lips, the way your hands fell when they took a natural position—the way you stood when you were tired on the box and trying so hard to be still, because I had some insane idea that if you just stayed absolutely still I could capture you. The way you opened the door so quietly when you brought up the soup bones for us—I sobbed my way through the painting because my stupid rules did not matter at all. It did not matter if you were still. It did not matter that you were not there. It mattered that you had cared for me, we had cared for each other, and I did not eat or drink or sleep until I had poured everything into the canvas and it wasn't even done by the time I had to bring it back to Paris to hang it. Even on the train I was seized with new details; I was delirious by then. But I knew that I had done something good at last.” He poured some more tea into his cup; his hand trembled. “Now, look at my hands. I will never lose this shake.”

“It is just the bombardment, Pierre. We are all sick with it.”

“That
Mercury
is at the Louvre. I crated it up.”

“Whenever they end this—the shells will stop falling and your hands will be steady again, you'll see. And time—it's another trick of the mind, holding on to the past. I've had to learn that. I am always learning it.”

“You'll see, the way they will end this war. Our so-called government will capitulate. They are already negotiating with the Prussians against Paris, which they can only see as the mob. That's why this has dragged on for so long. The National Defense will have the Prussian army occupy the city, and the working man won't stand for it. Belleville will rise up, the
levée en masse
at last—and we will have civil war. But the National Defense will have the Prussians to back them. They are all waiting us out. It's a travesty but it is the truth.”

“What do you think about the Commune?”

“I don't know. I don't support the standing government, but I don't trust these Communards either. They are—a jumble of ideas, a shifting sand, they are grandiose; hotheads—idealists—they pin their hopes on Blanqui like he is Christ himself. I've heard enough of all of this from Courbet, dearly though I love the man, and he saved my life. At least, so far.”

“So you want to escape in a balloon with your painting.”

“Do you ever offer a man a drink in this place?”

“Wine and nothing stronger for you.” I went to the sideboard and opened a bottle. Cahors red. Good for the blood.

“This—what is it, a sort of cake?—beats
pain de Ferry
by leagues. What did you say it is made of?”

I poured twice. Pierre wrapped his long fingers around the glass. Legs incongruously long in rough trousers amid my little rosewood furnishings. He smelled like a sick man, but I was used to that.

“It's a little piece of heaven here,” he said. “Eugénie, I am just looking at you now. If I still could, I would paint you at this very moment. You have become dimensional.”

“Stay as long as you like. Here, I will make a little fire. My scavenger just brought me a good quantity of tree bark and a few branches. I'll be back after I see to things downstairs . . . You know, it will start again soon, Chasseloup.”

When I got back he was sitting in front of the hearth, sketchpad in his hand, a piece of charcoal in the other. God knows where he found it.

“Are you feeling better? It's good to see you drawing,” I said gently.

Chasseloup dug into his pockets and extracted several folded and crushed bits of paper, furiously written over, with notes and crossings out.

“Do you know, I think that our creations are not much ours at all. That is, they are not really acts of genius and will by a single individual in the way we pretend they are. Imagine,” he said, turning his glass and staring at the ruby liquid. “A kind of rag shop of heaven, and angels like old
triqueurs
sorting through the rags and bones and burned flesh we have left behind. These rag-picking angels are busy harvesting the soul stuff, separating it from the dross, the gross material. There isn't enough to go around, because we are careless down here. We fling it around and dissipate it; we don't know what it is that we are made of. And I want to find it, I want to make it. And then—paint with it. Do I sound mad?” He trembled violently. I picked up his hand again. Knuckles red and raw, trembling, his long painter's fingers.

“Chasseloup, I think you've found it. Your painting was all— made of that.” And there it was, for the world to see. For me to see, if I opened my eyes. I turned to him and rested my head, just briefly, against his shoulder and did not get the sick odor; just the heart beneath it. But my eyes were blinded with tears, and I blinked in the cold, bright winter light. This siege made for strange thoughts, impossible conversations; the bombardment was a hallucination; it made us mad.

“You allowed the world to see it; the judges saw it; Maillard saw it. I saw the painting too, Pierre. I stood before it and was furious, at it, at you, at Maillard for owning it—and caring so little for me. But when I remember it now I feel differently. It's hard to describe—” She was half-turned, looking over her shoulder, her cloudy shawl. The hair, dark; her skin, pale. A hand. At rest. A hand. A loved hand. And the face, mirrored back to me . . .
We were green.
I reached out, took Chasseloup's hand in mine. He accepted it. He was no longer trembling.

Another searing whine, another explosion—this one, closer. Shatter of glass, somewhere near. Pierre said, “You know, what worries me is not that the bombs will come all the way here, but—”

Silence . . .
I heard it; I must still be breathing.

Pierre? Did you hear it? That one was close, wasn't it? Oh, your arm—don't worry—just a bit of glass, from the reverberation. I should have taped these windows; the glass is too brittle. I can bind it up. Just wait. Wait while I go down to the
ambulance
.
 .
.

 

How does the page on which one writes become neither the accuser, the accused, nor a justification, but a vessel—the place where all can be held; can putrify, distill, and fall apart? It is not by listing events as they are said, or even as they seem to have occurred. I do not understand how events die away, turn on themselves, one leading to the next—and when written, seem insufficient to tell the tale. I am afraid that mine is a hungry, careless pen, scraping across the page. And when I look back at what I have written, it is a fever dream, a half-gesture, the glance over the shoulder; a catalogue of surfaces.

The siege, the war. Its story is a thin gruel, like ersatz milk made of oil and albumen, invented by the Academy of Sciences when there was no natural milk in Paris. Not nourishing, not life giving. Just going on forever in lonely pieces. One could write oneself into a starvation of fragments. I do not know how to hold such suffering on a page. There was a siege; some lived through it and others did not. They say that shells did not reach past the Pont Notre Dame, but there was broken glass that night on the rue du Mail, a singing lance pirouetting off Chasseloup's arm, severing an artery, the profunda brachii, according to the surgeon, once I had located a surgeon. Once I realized that my own bindings of Pierre's wound were insufficient.

Chasseloup died in my arms that night. But at least—at least we spoke, after such long silence. Forgave each other, and just in time. What drew him to my door that day? There were small miracles, as always. Life-and-death miracles, even.

And one day when they ask for stories of the siege, they will ask only, “
Mon Dieu,
did you eat the rats?” Oh, we ate them. We all ate them.

Time passed, and the unknown protector was not coming.

—Mogador,
Memoirs

T
HE SIEGE HAD LASTED
three months; the bombardment three weeks. When the Paris gates opened at last and fresh winds blew in, we were surprised at the effects of our own stink—the wagoners and provisioners held handkerchiefs over their noses, coughed, and spat out the saturated odors of rum, horseflesh, and charred garbage; of a city's population living without laundry soap or hot water. Food carts barreled through the gates and we fell to our knees to look on such things as fresh-cut kindling, green cabbages, golden potatoes, rosy onions, and sacks of milled wheat. Fresh horse droppings on the cobbles were a source of wonder.

We had forgotten how to eat. Hungry, but unable to digest the goodness of food, we took bismuth with quince syrup to soothe our protesting, shrunken bellies. It sounded suspiciously like Bismarck but we took it anyway.

And we had lost this ill-conceived, badly fought, bellicose belch of a war; no quantity of leeks and carrots and flour could make up for that. Paris had suffered so thoroughly that we could hardly believe there would be no reprieve. On the walls was a war of proclamations and retorts.

 

HAS THE GOVERNMENT OF NATIONAL DEFENSE FULFILLED ITS MISSION?

FUTILE SORTIES, MURDEROUS AND INCONCLUSIVE BATTLES, REPEATED FAILURES.

THOSE WHO GOVERN HAVE LED US TO THE BRINK OF THE ABYSS.

YIELD TO THE PEOPLE! YIELD TO THE COMMUNE!

***

THE GOVERNMENT OF PARIS WILL NOT CAPITULATE

 

Adolphe Thiers, a wizened old goat born in the era of the first Bonaparte, replaced Trochu at the head of the government, and Léon Gambetta, Amélie's hero, decisively lost. Thiers stood for “peace at any price,” and the first mission of his new assembly was to set terms with the enemy.

Opposition papers called him the “Laughing Man” and printed political cartoons showing the voluptuous body of France, sacks of coins spilling around her; caricatures of Thiers sniggering while he severed France's limbs, the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. The Kaiser hauled these territories off as the urchins had lopped branches from the trees during the siege.

The Prussian army made a triumphal march through Paris, and all of the statues in the capital were shrouded in black. German soldiers lounged in the streets and gathered at the few cafés that would serve them, and they appeared very round, thick, and healthily pink like the pork sausages they munched while we wraiths looked on. We were told that they had relinquished their arms, but who was going to believe that? We had swallowed so many lies. And now we were sure we'd be shot in our beds, but not before the rent was paid.

What the government termed peace, others called capitulation—that was the word whispered or angrily hissed. But capitulate to whom?
Better Bismarck than Blanqui,
said the Thiers faction—which included Stephan, and Francisque, and La Tigre; Amélie held out firmly for Gambetta; Jolie and Henri were thick with the Commune in Belleville. There was no doubt that our governors had blundered, betrayed the trust of the population, and were poised to visit further calamities upon us. But if I stood with anyone it would have been Chasseloup, doubting all sides.

 

“Mademoiselle Eugénie, a guest for you,” called La Tigre from the landing. “A handsome one in a gunner's coat.” Taking the stairs two at a time, coat flaring behind him.

“Where is Jolie, is she all right?”

“She's up on the hill, practicing breech-loading and learning to wind up the
mitrailleuse.
Come for a ride.”

“There's not a spare horse in the capital!”

Henri laughed. (He was politer than I remembered.) And the man did have a horse, a fine, sleek animal. It was all I could do not to throw my arms around its head and press my cheek to its glossy neck. I climbed up sidesaddle in front of Henri while a tribe of urchins gawked as if they'd never seen such an animal.

The streets were eerie, quiet, and strange . . . Blindfolded windows, covered statues. Somber streets, doors locked and double-locked. Quiet gray skies over a march of Prussians, an array of giant cannon lining up at the place de la Concorde, wheels higher than a man's shoulder. German soldiers posed for photographs in front of monuments, or all in a line, wearing their pointed helmets. Photographers hunched under their cloaks, black-shrouded like the statues. The whistling and explosion of shells from outside the walls had stopped, but the city made a sorry sight, with trees felled, gardens bare. Here and there people gathered in small groups to stare at the enemy. Every so often, the horse's movement jostled me against Henri, and his clean chin grazed the top of my head.