A Soul of Steel (17 page)

She also had pointed out that since he had detected the King of Bohemia’s incognito entrance into England and made possible their flight (not to mention their marriage) in the nick of time, his talents were needed more at the bureaus than in the bistros.

I knew from my time as his typewriter-girl in the Inner Temple in London that Godfrey suffered from the barrister’s love of obscure and hard-to-ferret-out information. He was one of the few men in the world who would take such a humble quest as an opportunity for a romp through the official records.

He often claimed that entire novels by Dickens lay tacit in the entrails of the French bureaucracy, and he relished following these paths of paper to their unexpected endings.

So off he went, and thus Irene and I broached this legendary and shocking “mountain” unescorted. It is seldom the case that the higher one ascends in any landscape, the meaner become the dwellings, the shops and the populace, but such was the perverse way of things in Montmartre.

Our carriage climbed the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin and the Boulevard de Clichy, and the surrounding view degraded. Unkempt, longhaired men shambled alongside us in the streets. Women of a certain kind lounged in doorways, regarding us with bored, hostile eyes imbedded in lampblacked smudges. Articles of clothing seemed little more than discarded rags woven into some fanciful new application.

Modest two-, four- and six-story buildings offered little architectural detail save askew shutters hanging by one hinge. Although geraniums bloomed in the window boxes, slop stains drooled down stucco walls. The odors of onion soup and ownerless dogs overwhelmed any perfume the cheerful red blossoms could offer. Cries rang off the nearby walls— screaming children, caterwauling hawkers, even carousing habitués of the bistros, lurching about the streets in broad daylight.

The ubiquitous loaves of French bread thrust from the figures of passersby like umbrellas. He who was not carting about his bread—or wine—would bear a wrapped canvas under one arm. Few men wore hats. (I hesitate to describe them as “gentlemen.”) Their uncut, unkempt hair perhaps explained the omission.

“Here!” Irene commanded our coachman to a stop with vocal gusto.

She surveyed the daunting surroundings like a general overlooking a particularly well-situated battlefield. “We will walk from here and meet you in this square later.”

The driver drew our open landau under the shade of a queenly chestnut tree and dismounted to help us alight. I smiled to guess the impression we made upon Montmartre residents: Irene in her Worth gown, a Nile-green-and-tea-rose striped silk visiting dress with a rosette-edge hem and pointed Vandyke beards of Irish lace girding bodice and sleeves; I in my Le Bon Marché blue-and-cream lightweight wool gown with the broad sash of Republican red, also available in Empire green and cream, or rosewood and white. Even Paris department stores emphasized whimsy and extravagance.

Yet I spied some redemption in the surroundings. Above us windmills churned lazily in the breeze and cows grazed on green pastures. In some ways, Montmartre was still the picturesque village it had always been.

Irene eyed this bucolic scene. “A pity we do not have time for a picnic. Come, we must survey the neighborhood.”

I was relieved to see that the strolling crowds included shopkeepers’ wives and even members of the French aristocracy, whose delicacy of dress and manner contrasted with the boisterous common folk around us. Irene took my arm, whether for her protection or mine I cannot say.

“You see, Nell,” she confided, leaning close as if to exchange a girlish confidence, “your Mr. Stanhope would be quite unnoticeable here.”

“Indeed.” I would not give her the satisfaction of again protesting that “your.”

“And this is nothing,” Irene went on, “as compared to when the quarter throngs with merrymakers of an evening, and the cafés are alight and the
cancan
dancers perform their gymnastics.”

I eyed the tawdry café fronts. “Are these
cancan
dancers truly as scandalous as they say?”

“It depends upon who is doing the saying. However, I say—” Irene leaned inward to confide again “—that women so swathed in petticoats and ruffles as these can hardly manage all that yardage and be scandalous at the same time.”

“Still, they show their knickers,” I sniffed.

“And dingy ones they are, too, I hear. Odd that a washerwoman is the most famous of these
cancan
dancers.”

“A washerwoman! Where do you learn such things, Irene?”

She shrugged in a suspiciously Gallic way and stopped to unfurl her parasol. “One hears things.”

“Hmm.”
With Irene, such eavesdropping was likely to be done in person, if not always in her own guise. “I should be most disappointed to learn that you had been visiting these low cabarets.”

“Then I shall try my best not to disappoint you,” she promised.

Whether she meant that she would avoid such places, or merely avoid telling me that she had visited them, was not clear. Such matters never were with Irene.

To me, truth was as obvious as an ax; to Irene, truth was like the wood chips that splintered from the ax blade: it changed, depending on which piece of it you grasped at the moment.

“We must inspect the work of these Montmartre artists,” Irene suggested, pointing her parasol ferrule in the direction of a shabby café whose exterior walls were papered with ragged posters.

Under the café’s tattered red awnings sat even more tattered men surrounded by sketch pads and canvases. I liked their looks no more than I did the district’s.

“Why?”

“Because artists use their eyes. While we examine their wares we can cross-examine them. Surely Quentin’s Turkish trousers would have been worthy of note, if nothing else.”

I studied the baggy-trousered men shambling over the cobblestones. “I doubt it, among these clowns.”

“Still, we must begin somewhere. Humor me, darling Nell. I am trying to be logical.”

“I see very little of sense in such rude dabbles. These men must be mad. Nothing looks like anything at all in their paintings,” I grumbled as we approached the tables.

That they aspired to be artists of a sort was obvious. Their fingers were stained with oils, pastels, watercolor and charcoal. Many sketched passersby as they sat beside their unappetizing wares, which included tasteless depictions of young women casting their black-stocking-clad legs into the air against frothy clouds of petticoats.

Whether these articles of underwear were indeed dingy, or merely ill lit by the murky gaslight of the dance halls, was difficult to tell. In fact, I was extremely dubious that the human form could assume such outré positions.

“Their mastery of anatomy is pathetic,” I murmured to Irene as we strolled past a brotherhood of artists all engaged in depicting the same sordid subject matter. “Look! That poor sitting girl’s legs go in two different directions—not only an unladylike posture, but also utterly unlikely.”

“The position is called ‘the splits,’ Nell, and it is astounding what feats a devoted dancer may assume. I myself have been required to attempt unlikely—not to mention unladylike— positions during my performing career, though I am far from a dancer. Have you never seen a ballet?”

“My father frowned upon theatrical mummeries.”

“You must see one, then,” Irene declared, blithely dismissing my late father’s wishes. “The Paris ballet is not what it was—the blue ribbon in ballet now goes to St. Petersburg— but some small spark remains. We will attend the ballet at the new Paris Opera House as soon as we retire the mystery of Mr. Stanhope’s whereabouts.”

“I really would rather not find him, Irene! If he chose to withdraw he must have some reason.”

“Of course, but what?”

“That is his affair.”

“Not any longer. Now that we know about it, we are obliged to assist him. The benighted man has not lived in civil climes for nearly a decade.”

I examined the scene. “If he has been residing here, that certainly is true.”

At that moment one of the grubby artists took a large cigar from his lips, balanced it on the edge of his small round table and eyed Irene.

“Madame seeks a Paris scene to take back to England?” he asked.

She took the small canvas he extended in her gloves—lily-white today—and tilted it so the daylight should catch the blotches of blue, yellow and orange in their blurred glory, apparently a garden.

“I was looking for something colorful, in the way of street scenes,” she said. “With figures.”

The cigar was plucked up again, and the canvas rudely reclaimed. “See him, then.” The cigar jerked toward a fellow smoker among a farther grouping of artists. “I never paint human subjects. They only trivialize the truth.”

“I fear that I am always in search of such trivial truths,” Irene said. “My companion seeks a dear friend who has been lost to the spell of foreign climes. He is European, but dusky of skin and dresses in the eccentric manner of the East.”

“You have come to the proper quarter for the eccentric, Madame.” The painter spread his arms, displaying a coarse shirtfront decorated with food and wine. In my opinion, it offered more artistic promise than his miserable paintings. “Here wander poets, painters and scribblers of every sort among shopgirls, bakers and street-sweepers—and sometimes ladies and gentlemen in search of originality. How should one man stand out among so many?”

Irene replied with a most eloquent Gallic shrug and moved on.

“That painter is correct, no matter how personally repugnant,” I pointed out. “How can we find one man amid this mob?”

“Our search is not as random as it may appear.” Irene’s parasol tip indicated the windmill topping the hill ahead of us. “I found a matchbook in our guest’s pocket from the Moulin de la Galette, the most famous music hall in Montmartre, and wellspring of the scandalous
cancan.”

“You did not tell me!”

“Why? It was his affair,” she said, repeating my earlier answer with a mischievous smile. “I dared not tell you. No doubt you would have objected to the idol of your youth visiting a common French dance hall in order to eye dirty laundry, no matter how artistically presented.”

“A man,” said I slowly, “must have his amusements.”

Irene stopped abruptly, causing a swarthy urchin to careen into us. “A most tolerant sentiment, Nell.” She whirled to watch the rude child stumble away. “You still have your reticule?”

“Of course. I am no foolish country girl now. I have been wary of such pernicious little street thieves since our fortuitous meeting at the decade’s other end.” In demonstration I lifted my right forearm, from which dangled the green satin strings of my... missing reticule!

Irene was already plunging into the crowd, shouting “
Arrêtez, voleur!”
in a voice that would have awakened Napoleon in Les Invalides.
Stop, thief!
It was not sufficient, however, to halt a cutpurse.

Her parasol, raised like a lacy lance, beckoned from a swirl of figures. I scurried to join her, finding Irene at last amid a melee of Frenchmen with the very urchin we sought. The boy tried to eel away, but Irene thrust her parasol between his legs. He tripped, scrabbled under an artist’s table and at last collapsed under an avalanche of canvases.

“Ici,
Madame.”
The artist was the very one indicated earlier, a bearded dark-haired man with coarse features that well suited the cigar smoking noxiously in a small porcelain dish beside a bilious green glass of absinthe. He was dressed well enough: wide-brimmed straw hat, spotted tie, vest and even a coat despite the warm day. Nevertheless he cut a slightly sinister figure as he dredged up the lad, and my reticule.

“I doubt this rascal needs such a dainty accessory.” The vile man winked as he extended the article to Irene.

She promptly passed it to me.

“What to do with this rogue?” the man debated.

“Let him go,” Irene said.

I was about to make an uplifting comment on the quality of mercy when she added: “We have no time to waste on guttersnipes. We are after bigger quarry.”

“So I see,” the man replied, staring rather too long and too intently at Irene. “Madame is a formidable hunter. Pause a minute, and I will sketch you.”

She was already dusting off her abused parasol and righting her bonnet. “I have been sketched before,” she said, turning away.

“But, wait! I must capture this thing I see. You have an impressive face, Madame. It belongs on canvas.”

Irene paused, trapped by her vanity. Her vanity had nothing to do with her beauty, which she took for granted and thus forgot. No, the canny painter had snared her attention by ignoring her beauty, instead perceiving her unusual will and intelligence. The result was the same; his charcoal was scratching over the sketchpad even as hesitation gave Irene’s features a rare look of distraction.

As I bent to restore order among the tumbled canvases, I found what Irene sought, charcoal sketches and portraits whose paints had been watered down to transparent, ghostly slashing lines: an old woman with a face as fine as Spanish lace, an urchin as impudent as our thief, a vulgar blonde dancing girl: these played through my hands like the face cards from an ancient deck as I tidied the mess.

He had skill, the man with the face of a comic professor, but all of his subjects seemed to be wearing masks that were melting. I feared that his likeness of Irene would offer the same jaundiced distortions, a far cry from the pretty, facile pen-and-ink portraits of the newspapers.

This artist’s eye was utterly democratic, almost perverse: the faces of debauched aristocrats, haughty, top-hatted beggars, worn shopgirls and dissolute
cancan
dancers peered back from his small canvases. Then I uncovered one with a jolt of recognition! Quentin Stanhope, as we had first encountered him near Notre Dame—bearded, bone-deep desperate, sitting in some murky café with a glass of opalescent, poison-green liquor before him, a burnt-out cigar on a chipped plate and a small box of matches between his fingers.

I crouched there, staring at this seeming apparition from the attic of my mind. Ordinarily I was one to announce a discovery to the world; yet I was not often privileged to be the exclusive caretaker of anything, even knowledge.