I Always Loved You (3 page)

“Paris is shining,” she whispered.

It was then that
he
spoke, in a voice as familiar as her own.
Paint what
you
see
, he whispered.
Paint what
you
love.

Degas's voice, imagined or real, echoed in the splendor of the Paris night. It followed her up the street, away from the Boulevard Haussmann, shimmering now with carriage lanterns and streetlamps, toward the less glimmering butte of Montmartre, where she had made her home among artists, still hoping to become a true one herself.

T
he Paris Salon, the great celebration of spring, of art, of taste, always opened in May and always knotted traffic on the Champs-Élysées into a fist. The perpetual congestion of the City of Light drove its denizens and visitors alike insane, but this morning it seemed to Mary that the throng of carriages, wagons, carts, horses, and pedestrians converging on the Palais de l'Industrie was far worse than she had ever seen. She surveyed the clogged arterial from the seat of her hired fiacre and folded the letter she'd been reading into her reticule.

You desire too much or not enough. I don't know which it is, but this stubbornness of yours is unseemly. Enough, my dear. Time to come home. Come back to Philadelphia and find yourself a husband before it is too late. You can paint here, with much less trouble, far more economically than you can in Paris.

It was a mistake to reread her father's letter, and yet she had done it anyway. The missive had been waiting for her last night when she returned home from the impressionist exhibition. Though it did contain a drab sentence or two of solace, she wished now that she had left the letter behind. It bothered her that he had somehow divined the confusion she found herself in now. Last night she had risen twice from bed to write her father, only put down the pen and climb back into bed without writing a word. Now she touched her purse, the letter folded inside. How to explain to him what she wanted when she could barely decide herself?

The driver could not make headway, and soon stopped in the middle of the street. Over his objections, she gathered her slim skirts and launched herself into the stalled traffic, ducking between the restless horses and polished equipages, taking care to guard the plumage on her hat, thinking that she wouldn't mind the unseemly scramble so much if she actually wanted to be here.

Up and down the avenue, others, too, were leaving their carriages mid-street, having given up hope of a more elegant debarkation at the doors of the palais. A disk of yellow sun glinted in the soft blue sky, a reprieve from yesterday's gloomy rain, and in celebration fashionable Paris was showing off its regalia; Mary felt underdressed in her simple white blouse and blue skirt. Every where nattily attired men in top hats were guiding women draped in spring silk of Naples yellow and vermillion through the crush of conveyances, pausing to untangle ensnared feathers and ribbons from the leather harnesses. Their finery sparkled against the dull bitumen and the ocher dresses of the less well-off, for all of Paris attended the Salon, including laundresses, waiters, liverymen, and hod carriers, who saved centimes all year. Art was the business of Paris, and nothing else in the city attracted this mass of humanity, unless you looked to the recent past and the Communards, twenty thousand of them huddled behind the tombs of the Père Lachaise Cemetery awaiting slaughter after the country's failed and bloody civil war. It seemed impossible to Mary now that the upheaval had occurred a mere six years ago, though just who had wreaked more havoc on this city would ever remain in question: the Communards and their barricades; the invading Prussians, who had preceded them by eight short months; or Baron von Haussmann with his army of shovels, who had first destroyed Paris before reshaping the city to Napoléon III's grand vision. But Mary couldn't say who had most damaged the city; she supposed she wasn't Parisian enough yet to understand the wounded city's heart.

And according to the Salon jury, she wasn't Parisian enough in the way that mattered the most.

Banishing the self-pity from her mind, Mary stepped onto the overcrowded sidewalk in front of the palais, a stone edifice that rose in imposing splendor from the glorious park grounds, a majestic court compared to the modest apartment building on the Rue le Peletier where the impressionists had just mounted their exhibition. Here, the line to purchase Salon tickets stretched fifty people long at least. No doubt Abigail was already inside, awaiting Mary's arrival. She had offered to wait for Mary and admit her free as her guest, one of the perquisites of being an exhibitor, but Mary had not wanted to draw attention to herself. At the ticket window, she paid the one-franc admittance fee and another for the thick catalog. She had to stop herself from searching out the
C'
s, where this year she would not find
Cassatt
,
Mary
, and the title of a painting into which she had poured all her hopes. Instead, she pushed through the iron doors and climbed the endless rise of polished marble that made up the grand staircase. The building she had visited in shame to collect her rejected paintings just the week before now echoed with shouts and laughter. Artwork in the Salon was arranged alphabetically, in makeshift rooms of temporary walls erected for the exhibition. Mary entered the exuberant throng and made her way to the “A” room, where Abigail stood in a circle of admirers.

“It looks all right, doesn't it? I shouldn't be embarrassed?” Abigail asked Mary after she greeted her, pointing out her picture, hung on the line amid a wealth of canvases that covered the entire wall from floor to ceiling. It was a huge honor to be featured at eye level; it meant that the jury thought the work merited the most advantageous placement. Mary thought Abigail's painting—the rendering of a bowl of fruit, an exquisitely shaped pitcher, and a faithfully reproduced bottle of olive oil—strong, if a bit simple. Though Mary would have been proud if it had been hers, she didn't much care for still lifes. With no emotion to evoke, no difficult hands to reproduce, no flesh to render, they offered little challenge other than light and form.

“Congratulations, Abigail. You should be well pleased with yourself.”

A dozen well-wishers crowded around Abigail, and Mary kissed her on the cheek and left her to the ample affections of her admiring friends.

It was now little more than an hour after opening, and the crowd in the palais had swelled by the thousands. People bottlenecked the doorways, then surged into the rooms, sometimes stumbling in the press of humanity, tripping over trains, and catching petticoats in heels. Once safely inside a room, everyone was reluctant to return to the fray. After craning their necks to see the pictures that had been skied out of sight—paintings placed so high it seemed they had been hung in the clouds—the visitors milled about, closing in on pictures they liked and refusing to budge, making the traffic inside the palais as impenetrable as it was outside. Mary assiduously avoided the “C” room but otherwise let the crowd carry her along, taking in the artwork in desultory spurts and starts. There was so much to see—two thousand paintings alone—that they all began to blur, and she hadn't yet reached the statuary or architectural displays that dominated the other wing of the palais. By the time she reached the “M” room, her feet were sore and her spirits low. Someone abandoned a seat on a lone
causeuse
in the center of the room, and she sank onto its edge, contemplating her escape route and hoping that she would see no one she knew.

•   •   •

Edgar Degas stood in a flood of sunlight streaming through the glass ceiling. The harsh light was washing out every nuance of the exhibited paintings, only one of Degas's many reasons for despising the Salon. The jury's selections covered every inch of the high-ceilinged rooms and would, Degas was certain, have been suspended from the ceiling had painters not complained. Most of the artwork relegated to the rafters was invisible anyway, and artists were breaking down at every turn. Here and there clusters of consoling friends surrounded the afflicted, seeking to keep them from committing suicide on the spot. Their disappointment was a pitiful sight. Years before, Degas had written a letter to the director of the École des Beaux Arts, the state-sponsored school under whose purview the Salon lived, suggesting that rather than covering every inch of free wall, the canvases ought to be hung in rows of two at proper intervals so that each could be appreciated on its own merits, but his suggestion had gone unanswered and unheeded, as his uninvited suggestions usually did.

But Degas would not miss the Salon for anything, not only to discover what Corot and Daumier were up to, but also to fete his beleaguered friend Édouard Manet, who was pacing at his side, anxious about his painting's reception. His
Portrait of M. Faure, in the Role of Hamlet
, was good, though not nearly as good as his
Nana
, the other painting he had submitted, which the jury had spurned. Henriette Hauser had modeled for that one. She was a well-known courtesan, whom Émile Zola was also glorifying in a book about her life. In the painting, Manet had included a man at the edge of the canvas observing her toilette. This had seemed to bother the jury, who also did not like the daring Zola, or the infamous Flaubert, for that matter, whose
Madame Bovary
had thrilled all of Paris twenty years before.

“Who is that woman?” Degas said.

“Which woman? Henriette?”

“No, the woman over there, on the
causeuse
, the one who looks as if she is going to murder someone the second she gets a chance.”

“Half the women in Paris look like that at any given moment. My Suzanne threatens me daily,” Manet said.

“And with good cause, you bastard. If you can't keep your hands off Méry Laurent or your sister-in-law, I might murder you myself.”

“Berthe is here?” Manet asked, rising to his tiptoes to search the crowd.

“I don't know. I am not your social secretary, nor do I keep track of your women.”

“You injure me, Degas. Berthe and I are dear friends, admirers of one another's work. Besides, all that was long ago. She is married to Eugène now and my brother is my beloved friend. Not that I admit to anything. Ever.”

Degas snorted. “Of course not.” But he would not tease further. He loved Édouard and besides, Édouard was handsome; the man couldn't help it if women found him irresistible. Degas had yet to meet the woman who did not melt after a mere glance at his friend's rugged blond
tête
. On the street, women openly turned and stared at Manet's passing figure, which was more confident, dashing, and marvelous than Degas's unimpressively round-shouldered and thoroughly unstriking one, though he had long ago given up jealousy; he had moved past that and had voluntarily and officially entered the realm of resigned admirer, for Manet charmed everyone from hack drivers to ballet dancers, and though Édouard frequently cavorted merely out of sport, he, unlike Degas, truly loved people. The tendency mystified.

“No,” Degas said. “I meant the elegant woman over there, the one who wears her clothing as if she were the Empress Eugénie herself, come back from England to dazzle us with her finery and impeccable taste. And mind you, leave her alone. I spotted her first.” Appreciation spilled from him, and though the woman's eyes were too close together and the shape of her nose was wrong, he admired its misbegotten residence on a face with such magnificent cheekbones. Those were positively architectural.

“News, news, Monsieur Degas is taken with a woman. No doubt you will seduce and then discard her. I don't know why you even try anymore; I don't know a woman in Paris who doesn't despise you for your impotent flirtations. This one will throw you out,” Édouard said, but he scoured the crowd for the newest object of Degas's regard while simultaneously catching the glances of half a dozen beautiful ladies and fielding enthusiastic assaults from two flirtatious fans. He didn't like being bested by Degas, especially when it came to women, and it disgruntled him now to have to stand by as Degas planned to exert his rather particular form of charm on a woman he might have been interested in, forgetting, again, that Suzanne, his wife, had thrown the breadboard at him that morning for mentioning a gorgeous laundress he had spied toting a basket of clean laundry down the Rue de Rivoli.

“You are too generous,” Degas said, but pulled at his wide necktie, ever puzzled by the convoluted twists of Parisian gossip and its ability to confound truth. What had women been whispering about him now? Were his peculiarly focused attentions such an affront to their unstated wishes that they exaggerated? He didn't know, and didn't like the exposure. Gossip, so often his sword, may have turned against him. But he could not keep his eyes off the woman, even in the crowded room, where the plethora of beribboned hats perched on absurd piles of curls were enough obstacle even without the press of the hyperventilating masses going gaga over Édouard's latest triumph. In
Nana
there was story, suggestion, rebellion, and in this portrait, knighted by the jury, there was merely . . . what?
Taste.
Which was the worst insult Degas could think of. No, the mystery woman was not beautiful. He didn't even think she thought herself beautiful, but her strict self-possession appealed for its singularity alone, as if she cared what no one else thought of her. And her posture,
dear God
. It was as if she fancied herself a Grecian statue, all cool marble and elegance.

Suddenly, the woman rose and just as quickly disappeared into the crush, and not even Degas's sudden wail of frustration could produce her.

“Pity,” Édouard mocked.

“Oh, shut up.”

“You can hunt for her on the streets.”

“She is not the streetwalking type.”

“Then she should be of little interest to you. A woman who doesn't take off her clothes on command? Who won't let you paint her juicy bits? Why would you even care?”

Degas turned away. He had already spent too much time with Édouard today , whose persistence in exhibiting at the Salon when Degas and the others had long ago refused to participate in the yearly hypocritical disgorgement verged on disloyalty. That Manet remained his friend despite this betrayal was in part due to the aforementioned charm, but also the man's talent, which to this day overwhelmed Degas, even though he told everyone that Manet was so mannered that he never thought of making a brushstroke without thinking of the masters. Yet Manet's work broke rules even while retaining something of the old elegance, a combination so seductive that no one, not even he, could refuse, though he would never inform Manet of his deep regard.