I Always Loved You (7 page)

T
he day after Degas met Mary Cassatt, he made a visit to his oculist, Dr. Maurice Perrin, at 45 Rue Saint-Placide, and suffered the usual interminable delay before the doctor called him in from the waiting room. For days and days, the little black hole had floated in the center of his vision. He had talked to it, begged it to go away, then ignored it, thinking perhaps he was conjuring the thing from fear and that if he paid it no attention, it would disappear and give him back the clarity he needed. But at Mademoiselle Cassatt's, the hole had sometimes obscured her head. He had had to turn to look at her out of the corner of his eye.

The doctor took a seat and opened his notes. “Which eye, again?”

“My right. Don't you remember?” How many times had he told the man that his problem had begun long ago, even before he had turned twenty? It was the cold, he had told the doctor. When he had first moved out of his father's house, he'd rented an attic atelier that leaked rain and cold on the winter nights. And then six years ago, defending Paris on the artillery lines during the bone-chilling winter of the Prussian War, the incessant cold and wind had numbed his eyes. Surely the two together had damaged something?

“I have many patients, monsieur,” the doctor said.

“Light hurts my eyes too,” Degas said. “The light problem started in New Orleans.”

“Light and a black hole?”

Degas considered the possibility that the doctor might think he was crazy. Even to him, the affliction sounded contradictory. He suffered from dark, yet he could not tolerate light. And this beastly plague was such an inconstant caller. If he could only discern a pattern to its visits, he might discover the cause and find the solution, but the thing never announced itself or behaved in an orderly fashion. He didn't even know what to call it.
The black sun. The opposite of light. An eclipse of sight. The hole stole everything from him: time, sight, confidence. He might vanish into it, if the hole had its way.

On the wall above the doctor's head floated a diagram of an eye.

“Such an elegant invention, the eye,” Degas said.

“Not too elegant if it fails, is it?” the doctor said. Once, the doctor had held an eye in his palm, the cool jelly-like grape with its tangle of tissue and tentacles that communicated with the brain. The retina, the macula. What did all these layers do? Names certainly didn't help, not the painter, at least. The doctor could not impress the painter with anatomy alone. The painter wanted clear vision.

The doctor conducted an exam, first separating the painter's eyelids at the window, so that he could better peer at the conjunctiva. He dropped belladonna into each eye, lit a table lamp, and held his new ophthalmoscope before each eyeball, first evaluating whether or not the lenses had clouded and turned cataract, but they had not. He could see no other abnormality. The painter denied any foreign object having scraped or pierced his eyes at any time.

The doctor set the ophthalmoscope down and sighed.

“You can help me?” the painter asked.

“I have an idea,” the doctor said. He would not say he could help him because he was not certain that he could. He knew the painter was anxious, but he could not measure his affliction as he could the simple parameters of refraction or the functional abnormality of a cloudy lens. This was something else. This was something hiding inside the eye, or perhaps hiding deeper, in the mind. An absence of light at the center of his vision. This was what the painter always described. The doctor did not doubt him, but what he could not see and what the painter did see equaled frustration for both men. Some eyes were too mysterious to understand.

He prescribed glasses to wear in the daytime that might obscure the absence. Purple lenses to hide the black hole. The painter would try to believe that the glasses were working, and so he would not turn up again on the doctor's doorstep for several weeks at least. He could prescribe different color lenses for a long while before the artist caught on. Later, if the trick of the lenses did not work, the blindness might be something out of the doctor's control, but he hoped that would not be for a long while yet, and perhaps by then someone would come up with an answer for this odd complaint that yielded no anatomical clue.

After the appointment, Degas followed the doctor's directions to an ophthalmic shop on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré to have the glasses specially made, and when he returned a week later to retrieve them, he emerged terrified into the Paris noon drizzle, for the glasses turned the world purple, an unfair distortion given that he already had to
remember
hues, shades, tone. Recently, he had interrogated his colorist, Jérôme Ottoz, as to whether or not the man had changed his grinding or his composition, ashamed of his suspicion but alarmed at the way the very light had seemed to be shifting. Jérôme's small shop was on the Rue la Bruyère, just around the corner from Degas's old house on the Rue Blanche, in a little cubby of a shop with a glass door, but its proximity was not what Degas loved. He loved the purity of the colors, their absolute reliability. It frightened Degas that even this certainty might be pulled from underneath him. He implored Ottoz to remember that color was perennial, imperishable, and that to alter even the slightest tone was to violate the laws of physics.

The doctor claimed that light was a wave, but in New Orleans, where Degas had gone to visit his brother René the light had been a battering ram, an all-day assault that left his eyes feeling taut and naked.
He had
been able to paint, but only after weeks of contending with the flat gulf light. He always marveled that Monet and Renoir worked outdoors, in the uncontrollable elements, in the blistering wind,
en plein air
.

Degas adjusted the colored glasses, pinching them lower and then higher on his nose, searching for the black hole in the purpled light. The doctor had been entirely too happy about the eyeglasses. In fact, the man was entirely too happy about everything, in Degas's opinion, which was why he tried hard to keep from believing too much in the doctor's ability to help him. It was too much to believe that his eyes might be helped by curved and colored glass.

The Damoclean sword of blindness, for a man whose work was to see. All he knew was art. When he woke in the morning, his hands were already moving, as if his unconscious mind were dictating his work. If he'd been sculpting, they would be kneading wax; if painting, his right hand would be making brushstrokes of his dreams; if drawing, his head would be angling for the line. What would he do, if blind?

He stood on the corner, watching the altered world pass by, muted in a lavender hue. He waited a long while, until, at the center of his vision, the hole reemerged, now tinged a deep purple by the useless glass.

A
cross town, Mary Cassatt readied her studio. She had written her father a letter, explaining that she was going to stay in Paris and, understanding that she was flouting his wishes, wanted to inform him that she was also renouncing her allowance. She had saved some money, but only a little, and as soon as she posted the letter she could hardly suppress her terror. How would she support herself, an American woman in Paris, alone? She supposed she could paint plates, or teacups, or even lampshades for that little bric-a-brac shop in the Galerie d'Orléans in the Palais-Royal, which the souvenir-hunting Americans visited by the omnibus-ful, but she feared she would be paid only a pittance.

Nevertheless, she had made plans to visit the boutiques when a reprieve came in the form of Miss Mary Ellison. A friend, she was one of the contingent of American girls sent over from the States in the years after the Civil War to learn French, to absorb a sense of style, and to obtain that indefinable je ne sais quoi needed to become highly desirable and therefore marriageable. She lived at Madame Del Sarte's Pension for Young Ladies with Mary's other young friend, Louisine Elder, who also loved Degas's painting and had once managed, on her own, to buy one of his pastels. Mary still barely managed her envy. At tea with them last week, Mary had related her new circumstances, and within a day Miss Ellison had sent a telegram to her father explaining that Mary Cassatt was the only artist in Paris she wanted to paint the portrait her father wanted her to have done.

Now Mary laid out her walnut palette and knife, boar bristle brushes, and the new tubes of paint from her favorite shop, Maison Édouard, on Rue Clauzel. She'd been so excited by purchasing the new colors that she'd forgotten an appointment with Abigail Alcott for tea, and had had to send a note explaining her truancy.
I've fallen in love with color. Please forgive me, but the attraction was irresistible.
Abigail had readily forgiven her, and would forgive Mary anything, Mary believed, now that she had decided to stay in Paris.

But Mary had yet to experiment with the new colors, her first foray into the impressionist style, and she worried that Miss Ellison's father, who was paying the commission fee, might not like the surprise. She feared that the Ellisons might be expecting a dull Salon portrait, the kind she had vowed to never paint again, and touchy sitters—and their paying fathers—sometimes grew furious afterward and withheld payment. His reaction mattered. If he liked what she had done, he would recommend Mary to other Americans on their grand tours seeking a portrait to take back home as a souvenir. And if he didn't, she would be painting bric-a-brac.

Miss Ellison arrived in a high state of nervous excitement. It was something to do with the fiacre driver's accusation that she had misdirected him with her poor French and he was therefore due an extra fifty centimes. Mary seated the girl on her rose velvet couch, trying to calm her. On the wall she tacked the studies she'd made two days ago when Miss Ellison had sat for the preliminary drawings: the line of her neck, the shape of her eyes, the curve of her hands.

It occurred to Mary while she worked that she had not heard from Degas since he had come to see her three weeks ago, nor had she seen him passing on the street. She had come to believe she might have imagined his visit, his invitation to show with them, everything. She wondered whether it was possible that he could have forgotten his proposal. She didn't know enough about him to know whether or not he kept his promises. She hoped he did, because now there was no going back.

The sitting lasted only two hours, but when the chattering Miss Ellison left, Mary was exhausted. She studied the painting, walking away and returning again. She was not concerned with form. Form she had conquered in the early sketches, perfecting Miss Ellison's small shoulders and round, as yet innocent face. It was instead the color, more dazzling than she had ever applied, ultramarine and permanent rose painted directly from the tube, the colors so saturated and pure that their intensity was a deeply visceral surprise. Tears sprang to her eyes. Without help, without instruction, without anyone telling her how, she had achieved the beginning of something new.

Cleaning her brushes at the stand in the back of the building, Mary planned the next few days. How impatient she was to paint the lace of Miss Ellison's dress, how thrilled to attempt her articulated hand holding her embroidery hoop, how pleased to render a portrait she knew the Salon would undoubtedly reject.

Sunday Evening

My dear Mademoiselle Cassatt,

Would you do me the honor of accompanying me to the Manets' Thursday night soirée, where you will meet people far more interesting than I, if you can tolerate their idle chatter and nonsensical opinions about art? I think it is time you met a few of the brigands with whom you will be exhibiting; that should give you plenty of time to repent your decision to join us. There, you are warned.

Thursday, June 7? I will call for you at seven. They feed us there, but poorly. Dress as you would for an evening at the Opéra. Do you enjoy the Opéra? One of the many mysteries to unravel about you.

Yours,

Edgar Degas

The slightly flirtatious note arrived with the Monday morning post in the first week of June. Mary laid the letter on her writing desk. She'd been living permanently in Paris for three years now, and not once had she ever been invited to an “evening.” The French rarely invited Americans to their homes. That was why the American colony—the expatriates, the low-level diplomats, those in town doing the season—crafted their own social events, entirely separate from the French, excluding the occasional open-invitation balls at Versailles and the Presidential Palace. These, however, were off-limits to those who hadn't sufficient money for the required regalia of resplendent evening dress and diamond tiaras. Mary no longer followed the notices in
Galignani's Messenger
. The colony, on her rare early ventures into its jaws, had proved insular, a provincial small town in Paris rife with gossip and nonsense. Mary's evenings consisted of tea with other art students in their shared rooms, or an occasional night at the Opéra, obtained through a cultivated friendship with one of the ticket sellers, who provided her with a seat on the mezzanine for the price of the third-tier balcony.

In her reply, Mary did not want to mimic Degas's flirtatiousness, though formality somehow seemed wrong for the casual air of his invitation. In the end, she simply thanked him and said that she was looking forward to it, an understatement that amused Abigail Alcott very much.

“Looking forward to it? It's what you've been dying for,” Abigail laughed. Louisine Elder's family was visiting and had lent Louisine their suite at the luxurious Grand Hotel, on the Place de l'Opéra, frequented by Americans who loved that the entire hotel staff tolerated their poor French. Louisine had arranged for a belated birthday celebration for Mary: dinner served in her family's suite.

Abigail recovered herself and said, “He'll introduce you to everyone. I'm a prophet—didn't I say you ought to meet them?”

“Will you tell Monsieur Degas how much I admire him?” Louisine said.

“I'll probably be too terrified, to tell you the truth. What if I make a fool of myself?”

“You?” Mary Ellison said. “Never.”

“You are formidable. Remember that,” Abigail said. “At least I find you formidable.” She smiled and laid her hand on Mary's forearm. “Aren't you glad you stayed in Paris?”

After dinner, when she returned home, Mary studied the portrait of Miss Ellison, which was curing before she shipped it to the girl's father in Philadelphia. While not masterful, the portrait nonetheless glimmered with change, especially the heightened palette, which she was pleased to see was retaining its vividness in its finished state. In the past few weeks, the transformation she was making in her work had exhausted her. It was as if in trying to paint in the new way, she was rearranging even her muscles and bones. Her right shoulder had grown stiff because of the different way she was holding her brush. Her mind throbbed; she was learning and letting go at the same time, having to
unsee
everything.

On Thursday evening, Degas called for her promptly at seven, impeccably dressed in a tailcoat and top hat. She had worn her best dress, as Degas had instructed, a white silk with fringe dangling from the bustle that she hoped wouldn't be out of place at a house party. Degas helped her with her wrap, then went before her down the spiral stairway, remarking only on the unevenness of the stairs and his gratitude for the candle he carried to illuminate their way. They rode in a hired equipage to the neighborhood that skirted the Gare Saint Lazare, the new Place de l'Europe, with its surrounding streets named after foreign capitals. Tonight it was ablaze with gaslight, a bright contrast to their more humble neighborhood. He warned her to pay homage to Édouard's mother at some point in the evening because even though she hid herself in the corner, Madame Manet was the true host of the party.

When she stepped into the flat at 49 Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, it was only half past seven in the evening and already blue smoke was settling like an ocean fog in the close confines of a parlor populated mostly by men. Degas had led her astray. The few women were attired not for the Opéra but in less showy gowns of muted tones. Mary took off her wrap and handed it to the maid, who took it along with Degas's top hat, but not before conferring a smirking glance on the splendor of Mary's dress.

“Degas! Mother will be furious with you. How rude you are to bring a guest you haven't warned us about.” A man barreled toward them through a widening path of guests, a glass of champagne aloft in one hand. “And when she is so well dressed, too.”

“Édouard Manet, may I introduce Mademoiselle Cassatt? She is a painter. She is joining us next year for our exhibition, which, if you weren't such a bourgeois fool, you would do too. But of course you won't.” He turned to Mary. “Mademoiselle Cassatt, this is Monsieur Édouard Manet, fearless rebel of the art world and our host for the evening.”

“It is lovely to meet you, Mademoiselle Cassatt. It's a shame you are here with Monsieur Degas, but you are very welcome.” Manet's was a welcoming kind of handsome, all wrapped up in a reddish beard and snapping blue eyes and a gaze of such scrutiny that Mary nearly blushed.

“Thank you, Monsieur Manet,” Mary said, conscious of the covert glances cast their way. A quiet hum had replaced the cacophony that had greeted them; everyone had lowered their voices to eavesdrop on their conversation. “Monsieur Degas didn't tell me he had invited me illegally. I would be happy to leave, if that would suit you.”

Quiet titters filled the room.

Édouard laughed and said, “Only an American would suggest such an unhappy solution.”

Relieved that Édouard had understood her joke, she smiled, but there was only one way he could know she was American. “We Americans can't quite seem to get the French
e
's or
r
's properly out of our mouths. A fatal flaw, I fear.”

“I forgive you! Not the rest of your countrymen, but you, certainly. Come in and let me introduce you or at least force Monsieur Degas to do the honors now that he has exceeded the bounds of my hospitality.”

“Hush, Édouard, or you'll frighten Mademoiselle Cassatt,” Degas said. “She will think I have no manners.”

“You don't have any manners,” Manet said, placing the palm of his hand on the small of Mary's back and escorting her deeper into the parlor.

•   •   •

Across the room, Suzanne Manet was hiding behind the half-open door of the kitchen, observing the newly arrived Degas and his guest, a woman of severe posture, whose fashionable dress was cinched at the bustle by an enviable amount of fringe that shimmered in the candlelight. The dress came, to Suzanne's sharp eye, not from the house of Worth, but instead from one of the eagle-eyed but less expensive seamstresses of the Rue Volney, who did reconnaissance at Worth's elegant store at 7 Rue de la Paix, committing to memory the shapes of bodices and sleeves.

“This Mademoiselle Cassatt is very American, isn't she?” Suzanne said.

“She is overdressed,” Berthe Morisot said, self-consciously smoothing her pale blue dress, its worn beauty no prize next to the magnificence of the newcomer's. The two sisters-in-law stood with their heads inclined toward one another, inspecting the woman, agreeing that the blazing candelabras heightened the dark caverns under her cheekbones and emphasized the whites of her rather prominent eyes. They examined, too, the throng crowding the long, narrow room. Claude Monet, who was beginning to resemble a bear with his heavy muff of black beard, was eyeing Mademoiselle Cassatt suspiciously from a corner where he, Pissarro, Renoir, Caillebotte, and Berthe's husband, Eugène, were suffering an endless rant from Monsieur Zola, the writer and art critic. Monet was sometimes mistaken for Zola on the street and once had had to persuade a fervent fan that he was not the famous writer, an idiocy that had infuriated him. Renoir had already shifted his attention from the querulous Zola to Mademoiselle Cassatt, who was accepting a glass of champagne from the hovering Degas. Pissarro was demanding to know why Zola had devoted only two sentences to him in a recent review. Eugène, catching Berthe's eye, lifted his chin in invitation, but she made no motion to join him.

Madame Manet, Édouard's mother, was presiding over her party from an armchair, a glass of untouched champagne at her elbow. She wore black, as she always did, in perpetual mourning for her husband, dead more than twenty years. Gustave, the youngest of the three Manet brothers, was seated at his mother's side. His presence could usually mitigate the wide gulf between his two brothers, but he rarely made it to these Thursdays, as his interest in art paled in comparison to his interest in advancing as quickly as possible through the hierarchy of the French bureaucracy, a desire that entailed religious attendance at the Thursday evenings of an influential magistrate. Suzanne's younger brother, Léon Leenhoff, also kept Madame Manet company, but he appeared as bored as any young man might in the face of family obligation. Though it was rarely said outright, and never discussed in the Manets' home, everyone believed him to be Édouard's son, conceived more than a decade before their marriage, even though Édouard had spent the boy's entire life denying the rumor. It did not help dim suspicion that Édouard and Suzanne had raised him, nor that he looked just like Édouard, with the exception of the ruddy Dutch skin he shared with his “sister.” Neither Madame Manet nor Léon rose to greet any of the guests, though they eyed the door whenever it opened, turning now as the artist Zacharie Astruc and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé entered, sweeping off their capes in a dramatic entrance they hoped would be noticed.

In short, Berthe thought, the evening was proceeding as usual, with the exception of Degas's guest.

Suzanne agreed that Mademoiselle Cassatt was rather finely dressed for so pedestrian an occasion. Recently, the ravages of age had begun to settle in uneven mounds around Suzanne's belly, something she did not want to bring to Berthe's attention. This very morning she had been mistaken for a fishwife when her mother-in-law had sent her out to execute the errands the maid certainly should have done, a grievance Suzanne added to the long list she kept of her mother-in-law's serial cruelties. Despite her critical eye Suzanne didn't go in anymore for fine clothes, not like Degas's guest or Édouard, who tonight wore a finely cut dinner jacket perfectly tailored to his svelte frame. Shame was the current price of marrying a beautiful man too many years her junior. Well, only two years, but time had been crueler to her. How she envied her husband his stylish aplomb, his good looks, his still youthful face, though no amount of envy could ever diminish her affection. She had loved him since she had first taught him to put fingers to ivory. An indifferent piano student, he had found other, more delicious uses for his deft fingers, ones that Madame Manet never failed to punish her for.

Tonight Suzanne would play the piano as she always did, grateful that she had something to offer, because one could disappear in this group of gifted misfits, though she supposed since she helped to feed them she could say that she was at least saving them from starvation. Monsieur Renoir had practically disappeared before their eyes for several years, turning more gaunt with every passing day, and she'd heard that even now Claude Monet and his family were living on such extended credit that no one would lend him another centime. She knew why, of course. The fools gave up food to buy paint. Claude and Camille had had to move to the country so that they could feed their little son out of their garden, and Renoir was so poor he begged for money from all his friends, living with the Monets off and on for years. Everyone knew he was besotted with Camille, a transgression Claude somehow forgave, though lately it appeared that their friendship was cooling. Earlier, she'd overheard Claude whisper travel plans to Édouard that he didn't want mentioned to Renoir, who still had the look of the starveling about him, though perhaps it was his great height that gave that impression.

Having abandoned Zola's conversational circle, Renoir now occupied the blue chair in the darkest corner of the room, his long spider legs thrust before him, his narrow face and shock of red beard, clipped to a rectangle, lending him the appearance of a hunted scholar. Catching Suzanne's eye, he smiled in his benign way, no doubt making something beautiful in his mind of her face. Suzanne often wished that he would paint her. Degas had savaged her—as he savaged all women he painted—in that portrait Édouard had destroyed in a fit of spousal loyalty. She would ask Renoir if he would oblige her. Just once, she would like to look like the adored Camille, a plain woman if there ever was one, but who glowed in his canvases like a radiant flower. Of course, he loved her. That was why he made her look so beautiful, but she would ask Renoir anyway, hoping for the same treatment. And she would make Édouard pay him so the poor man could eat. It would be revenge for all those portraits of Berthe, her dark beauty smoldering off the canvas.

Suzanne said, “It is a beautiful dress. But taste doesn't make up for her face. Too thin at the chin, eyes too prominent, and the proportion of her cheek to her forehead is too steep. Édouard would never paint her.” Suzanne realized that she had paid Berthe a veiled compliment, but she was nothing if not resigned to the enviable truth that no woman could hold a candle to her sister-in-law.